Grand Duke: How are the workers?
Bertoldo: Unrefined.
Grand Duke: And their fare?
Bertoldo: Plain, but hearty.
Grand Duke: And the province?
Bertoldo: Fertile and sunny.
Grand Duke: And the populace?
Bertoldo: Welcoming.
Grand Duke: And the view?
Bertoldo: Superb.
Grand Duke: And the outskirts?
Bertoldo: Enchanting.
Grand Duke: And the villa?
Bertoldo: Stately.
The Grand Duke laughed, and calling for all his courtiers to gather around him, ordered the Storming of the Bastille (1789) and the Battle of Montaperti (1260), upon completion of which the courtiers all returned to their places, leaving the Grand Duke and the peasant to resume their conversation
At one and the same time that dialogue mocked the language of poets, of newspapers, and of official rhetoric. If I was a clever lad, I would no longer have been able, after those dialogues, to write compositions such as the one of March 1942. I was ready for the unbreakable glass.
These were only hypotheses. Who knows how many other things happened to me between the heroic composition and the disillusioned chronicle. Again I decided to suspend my research and reading. I went into town: I had finished my Gitanes by then and had to make do with Marlboro Lights-better that way: I would smoke less, since I do not like them. I went back to the pharmacist to get my blood pressure checked. The conversation with Paola must have relaxed me- it was around 140. Getting better.
Back at the house, I had a craving for an apple, and I entered the lower rooms of the central wing. Strolling among the fruits and vegetables, I noticed that some of the large rooms on the ground floor were being used for storage and that in the back of one room were stacks of deck chairs. I carried one into the yard. I sat down facing the panorama, skimmed the newspapers, realized I was barely interested in the present, turned the chair around, and began looking at the front of the house and the hills behind it. I asked myself what I was looking for, what I wanted, would it not be enough to sit here looking at that hill that is so beautiful, as that novel said, what was it called? To raise three pavilions, Lord, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah, and loaf without a past and without a future. Perhaps that is what paradise is like.
But the diabolical power of paper got the better of me. After a while I began daydreaming about the house, imagining myself as the hero of a My Childrens Library story, standing before the Castle of Ferlac or Ferralba, looking for the crypt or the granary in which the forgotten parchment must lie. You press the center of the sculpted rose on a coat of arms, the walls open, and a spiral staircase appears
I could see the dormer windows on the roof, and below them the second-floor windows of my grandfathers wing, all now open to illuminate my wanderings. Without being aware of it I was counting them. In the middle was the balcony, and to the left of it three windows: the dining room, my grandparents bedroom, my parents bedroom. To the right, the kitchen, the bathroom, and Adas room. Symmetrical. I could not see, on the far left, the windows of my grandfathers study or of my little room, because they were at the end of the hall, past the point where the faade meets the left wing, and their windows face the side of the house.
I was gripped by an uneasy feeling, as if my sense of symmetry had been disturbed. On the far left, the hall ends with my room and my grandfathers study, but on the right it ends just after Adas room. So the hall is shorter on the right than on the left.
Amalia was walking by, and I asked her to describe the windows of her wing. "Thats easy," she said. "On the ground floor thats where we eat, and that little window would be the bathroom, your dear grandfather had it put in special for those of us who didnt care to use the bushes like the rest of the farmers, goodness knows. As for the others, them two windows you see there belong to the storage room where we keep all the tools and such, and theres the entrance to it on the side. On the second floor, theres my window, and then the other two are my poor parents bedroom and their dining room, I leave them like they used to be and never open them out of respect."
"So the last window is their dining room, and that room ends where your wing meets my grandfathers wing," I said. "It sure does," Amalia confirmed. "The rest is part of the owners wing."
It all sounded so natural that I did not ask her anything more. But I walked around to the right side of the house, near the threshing floor and the henhouse. I could immediately see the rear window of Amalias kitchen, then the wide, ramshackle door I had passed some days ago that led into the farm-equipment storage room I had already visited. Entering it now, I realized it was too long: it extended beyond the point where the right wing met the central wing; in other words, the storage room continued beneath the last part of my grandfathers wing, all the way to the back wall that faced the vineyard, as was clear from a little window that offered a glimpse of the foot of the hill.
Nothing extraordinary, I told myself, but what is there on the second floor above that extension, if Amalias rooms end where the two wings meet? In other words, what up there corresponds to the area of the left wing occupied by my grandfathers study and my little room?
I returned to the threshing floor and looked up. There were three windows in that space, just as there were on the opposite side (two in my grandfathers study and one in my room), but the shutters of all three were closed. Above them, the regular dormer windows of the attic, which, as I already knew, ran without interruption around the entire house.
I called Amalia, who was busying herself in the garden, and asked her what was behind those three windows. Not a thing, she said, as if that were the most natural answer in the world. What do you mean not a thing? If there are windows, there must be something behind them, and it isnt Adas room; her window faces onto the courtyard. Amalia tried to cut me off: "That was your dear grandfathers affairs, I dont know a thing."
"Amalia, dont treat me as if I were stupid. How do you get in there?
"You dont, theres nothing to get to anymore. The hellcats took it all away by now."
"I told you not to treat me as if I were stupid. You have to be able to get up there either through one of your rooms or some other goddamn way!"
"Dont curse, please, the only thing God has damned is the devil. What do you want me to say, your good grandfather made me swear never to breathe a word about that business, and I will not break an oath or else the devil really will carry me off."
"But what did you swear, and when?"
"I swore that same evening, when later that night the Black Brigades came and your dear grandfather said to me and my mother, Swear that you dont know a thing and havent seen a thing, and in fact I wont actually let you see what were fixing to do, me and Masulu- who was my poor father-because if the Black Brigades come and put your feet to the fire you wont be able to help yourselves and youll say something, so its better if you dont know a thing, because they are a nasty bunch and can make a person talk even after theyve cut his tongue out."
"Amalia, if the Black Brigades were still around, this must have been more than forty years ago. My grandfather and Masulu are both dead, the men in the Black Brigades are probably all dead, the oath you swore no longer holds!"