It is then that you think not of Gutenberg but of Shakespeares first folio. It would bring a few billion less, but it is well known only to collectors, so it would be easier either to keep it or to sell it. The first folio of Shakespeare. Every bibliophiles number two dream.
How much was Sibilla asking for it? I was dumbstruck: a million, as if it were any old book. Was it possible that she did not know what she had in her hands? And when had it come into the studio, and why had she not said anything? Ill fire her, Ill fire her, I murmured furiously.
I called her to ask if she realized what item 85 in the catalogue was. She sounded taken aback: it was seventeenth-century, not much to look at, indeed she was quite pleased to have already sold it, right after she sent me the proofs, for only twenty thousand lire less than the asking price, so now she was taking it out of the catalogue since it was not even the sort of thing you would leave in and mark SOLD, just to show what good pieces you had. I was about to tear into her, when she burst out laughing and told me I should watch my blood pressure.
It was a joke. She had inserted that entry to see if I was reading the proofs carefully, and if my scholarly memory was still in good shape. She laughed impishly, proud of her hoax-which among other things echoed certain celebrated pranks we fanatics like to play, and certain catalogues have themselves become collectible precisely because they offered impossible or nonexistent books and even experts had been fooled.
"Such a practical joker," I finally said, but by now I was lying down. "Youll pay for that. But the rest of the entries are perfect, no need for me to send them back, I dont have any corrections. Lets go forward, thanks."
I relaxed: people do not realize it, but to somebody like me, in the state I am in, even an innocent joke could bring on the big one.
By the time I finished speaking with Sibilla, the sky had turned the color of a bruise: another storm was coming, a real one this time. With the light as it was, I was relieved of the obligation or the temptation to go into the chapel. But the attic would still be lit by the dormers, and I could spend at least an hour browsing there.
I was rewarded with another box, unlabeled, thrown together by my aunt and uncle, full of illustrated magazines. I brought the box downstairs and began leafing through them casually, as one does in a dentists office.
I looked at the pictures in some of the movie magazines, lots of actor photos. There were of course Italian films, these, too, utterly and openly schizophrenic: on one hand, propaganda flicks such as The Siege of Alcazar and Luciano Sena, Pilot; on the other, films with gentlemen in tuxedos, dissipated women in snow-white bed jackets, and luxurious decor, such as white telephones beside voluptuous beds-at a time when, I imagine, all phones were still black and attached to walls.
But there were also photos from foreign films, and I felt a few slight twinges of flame on seeing the sensual face of Zarah Leander, or of Kristina Sderbaum from Goldene Stadt.
Last, many stills from American movies-Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing like dragonflies, the John Wayne of Stagecoach. In the meantime I had reactivated what I thought of by now as my radio, hypocritically ignoring the gramophone that made it sing, and I had picked out some records whose titles resonated with me. My God, Fred Astaire was dancing with and kissing Ginger Rogers, but in the same years Pippo Barzizza and his orchestra were playing melodies I knew, because they were a part of everyones musical education. It was jazz, no matter how Italianized; the record called "Serenit" was an adaptation of "Mood Indigo," another one that had been pirated as "Con stile" was "In the Mood," and "Tristezze di San Luigi" (Luigi IX or Luigi Gonzaga?) was "St. Louis Blues." None had lyrics, except for the ham-fisted ones of "Tristezze di San Luigi," so as not to give away their very un-Aryan origins.
In short, between jazz, John Wayne, and the chapel comics, my childhood had been spent learning that I was supposed to curse the English and defend myself against the evil Negroes who wanted to defile the Venus de Milo, and at the same time I was lapping up messages from the other side of the ocean.
From the bottom of the box, I plucked a packet of letters and postcards addressed to my grandfather. I wavered for a moment, because it seemed sacrilegious to pry into his personal secrets. Then I told myself that my grandfather was, after all, the recipient, not the author, of those writings, that the authors were others, to whom I owed no consideration.
I read through those missives not expecting to learn anything of significance, and yet I did: in replying to my grandfather, those people, probably friends whom he trusted, made references to things he had written to them, and a more accurate portrait of my grandfather emerged. I began to understand what he had thought, what kind of friends he had spent time with or cultivated prudently from a distance.
But it was only after having seen the little bottle that I was able to reconstruct my grandfathers political "physiognomy." It took me a while, because the account Amalia gave me had to be handled with care, but my grandfathers ideas had come through clearly in some of the letters, and some writers had made allusions to his past. Finally, one correspondent, to whom my grandfather, in 1943, had recounted the final chapter of the oil story, congratulated him on his feat.
So. I was leaning against the windows, with the desk in front of me and the bookshelves behind it. Only then did I notice, atop the bookcase directly across from me, a little bottle, roughly ten centimeters in height, an old medicine or perfume flacon, made of dark glass.
Curious, I climbed up on a chair to reach it. The top was screwed tight and still bore the red traces of ancient sealing wax. I peered into it and shook it, but it no longer seemed to contain anything. I opened it, with some difficulty, and inside I glimpsed little spots of some dark substance. What little odor it still released from within was decidedly unpleasant, like some putrid thing that had dried up decades ago.
I called Amalia. Did she know anything about it? Amalia lifted her eyes and her arms toward the heavens and began to laugh. "Ah, the castor oil, so it was still up there!"
"Castor oil? A purgative, I think"
"Of course it was, and sometimes they gave it to you younguns too, just a teaspoon, to make you move your bowels when something had got stuck in your little bellies. And two teaspoons of sugar right after, to kill the taste. But they gave your dear grandfather a mite more than that, at least three times whats in this little bottle here!"