Crickets (real ones) were making a great racket outside, and I went into the courtyard to listen to them. I looked at the sky, hoping to discover familiar figures. Constellations, just constellations from an astronomy atlas. I recognized the Great Bear, but as one of those things I had always heard about. I had come this far to learn that the encyclopedias were right. Return to the interiorem bominem and you will find Larousse.
I said to myself: Yambo, your memory is made of paper. Not of neurons, but of pages. Maybe someday someone will invent an electronic contraption allowing people to travel by computer among all the pages ever written, from the beginning of the world till today, and to pass from one to another with the touch of a finger, without knowing any longer where or who they are, and then everyone will be like you.
Still awaiting my miserys company, I went to bed.
I had just dozed off when I heard a voice calling me. It invited me to the window with a rasping, insistent pssst pssst. Who could be calling me from outside, hanging from the shutters? I flung them open and saw a whitish shadow flee into the night. It was, as Amalia explained to me the next morning, a barn owclass="underline" when houses are empty these creatures like to take up residence in attics or gutters, Im not sure which, but as soon as they detect the presence of humans, they move elsewhere. Too bad. Because that barn owl fleeing into the night caused me to feel again what I had described to Paola as a mysterious flame. That barn owl, or one of its kind, must have belonged to me, must have woken me on other nights and on other nights fled into the dark, a clumsy, pea-witted ghost. Pea-witted? I could not have learned that word from the encyclopedias either. It must have come from within, or from before.
My sleep was full of restless dreams, and at a certain point I woke up with a sharp pain in my chest. The first thing I thought was heart attack-they say they start like that-but then I got up without thinking and went to look in the medicine bag that Paola had given me, and took a Maalox. Maalox, so gastritis. You have an attack of gastritis when you eat something you should not. In reality I had simply eaten too much: Paola had told me to practice self-control, and when she was around had watched me like a hawk, but now it was time I learned to watch myself. Amalia would be of no help, since in the peasant tradition eating a lot is always healthy-what is unhealthy is when there is nothing to eat.
There was so much I still had to learn.
6. Il Nuovissimo Melzi
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I went down into the village. The hike back was a strain, but it was a lovely walk, and invigorating. Good thing I brought a few cartons of Gitanes with me, because here they carry only Marlboro Lights. Country people.
I told Amalia about the barn owl. She was not amused when I said I had taken it for a ghost. She looked serious: "Barn owls, no, good critters that never hurt a body. But over yonder," and she gestured toward the slopes of the Langhe hills, "yonder theyve still got hellcats. Whats a hellcat? Im almost afraid to say, and you should know, seems like my poor old pa was always telling you some story or other about them. Dont worry, they dont come up here, they stick to scaring ignorant farmers, not gentlemen who just might know the right word to send them running off. Hellcats are wicked women who traipse around at night. And if its foggy or stormy, all the better, then theyre happy as clams."
That was all she would say, but she had mentioned the fog, so I asked her if we got much of it here.
"Much of it? Jesus and Mary, too much. Some days I cant see the edge of the driveway from my door-but what am I saying, I cant even see the front of the house from here, and if someones home at night you can just make out the light ever so faint coming from the window, but like it was just a candle. And even when the fog doesnt quite reach us, you should see the sight toward the hills. Maybe you cant see a thing for a ways, and then something pokes up-a peak, a little church-and then just white again after. Like somebody down there had knocked over the milk pail. If youre still around come September, you can bet youll see it yourself, because in these parts, except for June to August, its always foggy. Down in the village theres Salvatore, a fellow from Naples who fetched up here twenty years ago looking for work, you know how bad things are down south, and hes still not used to the fog, says that down there the weathers nice even for Epiphany. You wouldnt believe how many times he got lost in them fields and almost fell into the torrent and folks had to go find him in the dark with flashlights. Well, his kind might be decent folk, I cant say, but theyre not like us."
I recited silently to myself:
And I looked toward the valley: it was gone, utterly vanished! A vast flat sea remained, gray, without waves or beaches; all was one. And here and there I noticed, when I strained, the alien clamoring of small, wild voices: birds that had lost their way in that vain land. And high above, the skeletons of beeches as if suspended in the sky, and dreams of ruins and the hermits hidden reaches.
But for now, the ruins and hermitages I was seeking, if they existed, were right there in broad daylight, yet no less invisible, for the fog was within me. Or perhaps I should be looking for them in the shadows? The moment had come. I had to enter the central wing.
When I told Amalia that I wanted to go alone, she shook her head and gave me the keys. There were a lot of rooms, it seemed, and Amalia kept them all locked, because you never knew when there might be a neer-do-well about. She gave me a bunch of keys, large and small, some of them rusty, telling me that she knew them all by heart, and if I really wanted to go on my own I would just have to try each key in each door. As if to say, "Serves you right, youre just as headstrong now as when you were little."
Amalia must have been up there in the early morning. The shutters, which had been closed the day before, were now partly open, just enough to let light into the corridors and rooms so you could see where you were going. Despite the fact that Amalia came from time to time to air the place out, there was a musty smell. It was not bad, it simply seemed to have been exuded by the antique furniture, the ceiling beams, the white fabric draped over the armchairs (shouldnt Lenin have been sitting there?).
Never mind the adventure, the trying and retrying of the keys, that made me feel like the head jailer at Alcatraz. The stairway led up into a room, a sort of well-furnished antechamber, with those Lenin chairs and some horrible landscapes, oils in the style of the nineteenth century, nicely framed on the walls. I had yet to get a sense of my grandfathers tastes, but Paola had described him as a curious collector: he could not have loved those daubs. They must have been in the family, then, maybe the painting exercises of some great-grandparent. That said, in the penumbra of that room they were barely noticeable-dark blotches on the walls-and maybe it was right that they were there.
That room led at one end onto the faades only balcony and at the other into the midpoint of a long hallway, wide and shadowy, that ran along the back of the house, its walls almost completely covered in old color prints. Turning right, one encountered pieces from the Imagerie dpinal that depicted historical events: "Bombardement dAlexandrie," "Sige et bombardement de Paris par les Prussiens," "Les grandes journes de la Rvolution Franaise," "Prise de Pkin par les Allies." And others were Spanish: a series of little monstrous creatures called "Los Orrelis," a "Coleccin de monos filarmnicos," a "Mundo al revs," and two of those allegorical stairways, one for men and another for women, that depict the various stages of life-the cradle and babies with leading strings on the first step; then, step by step, the approach to adulthood, which is represented by beautiful, radiant figures atop an Olympic podium; from there, the slow descent of increasingly elderly figures, who by the bottom step are reduced, as the Sphinx described, to three-legged creatures, two wobbly sticks and a cane, with an image of Death awaiting them.