The Twenty Days of Turin Page 13

  I didn’t like this mise en scène one bit. I stepped inside the aircraft without responding to their compliments.

  A female voice wished us a safe and happy journey on behalf of the captain and his crew; we were scheduled to land in Venice within roughly half an hour. Soon after that, the plane took off. I realized that there were no stewardesses moving through the aisles; nobody was going past to hand out the scented towelettes. The cockpit was closed off. The “safe and happy journey” announcement had been a recording. I’d never enjoyed air travel, and the neglect for the passengers shown by the aircrew had left me a little uneasy. Even so, the amount of anxiety my economy-class companions were displaying seemed excessive to me. They avoided speaking to each other or even looking at their fellow travelers. Instead, they clung to the armrests of their seats, keeping their mouths firmly shut or biting their lower lips. Not one of them had a newspaper open. If any of these people knew each other—by blood, by friendship, by marriage—then I should’ve seen at least a few of them holding hands: some glimpse of mutual consolation. But even a young couple, who could’ve been on their honeymoon, did nothing to ease one another’s anxiety. Everybody kept to themselves, sitting alone in their fears. Yet the plane was flying quickly and evenly over a bank of clouds; the muffled whine of the engines was unbroken by turbulence; the regularity of the voyage couldn’t have given rise to such dread. The aircraft tilted slightly on my side to correct its course, then returned immediately to its level position.

  A shame the clouds prevented me from enjoying the scenery below. In the absence of any other diversions (I hadn’t bought a newspaper) I gave myself over to drowsiness: well justified, considering how I’d spent the night. I fell into a deep sleep, free of dreams.

  When I reopened my eyes, I saw that the plane was still in the air; it hadn’t begun the landing preparations . . . I found this strange because I had a feeling I’d been sleeping for quite a while. I looked through the window and saw the sea below me, then another cloud bank, a rather large one, and then a flat, sandy landscape with no signs of habitation. The passengers didn’t seem astonished by what was happening and carried on staring into space. Their eyes were a bit goggly, but I would say it was less a look of fear than of capitulation. I tried asking my neighbor for an explanation, but he shrugged without saying a word. Now the plane was descending. Certainly the overhead signs were lighting up: FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT—NO SMOKING . . . But did anyone fasten their belt? Was anyone smoking? Indeed, if I remembered properly, nobody had bothered with these precautions even during takeoff; I was the only one who’d observed them . . . As the plane’s altitude dropped, the sandy expanse revealed itself to be a desert of bumpy dunes. I thought we were making an emergency landing and assumed the fetal position in my seat; but since the other passengers kept leaning against their backrests, and since I didn’t want to be the only one crouching at that moment—or make my fear obvious—I went back to peering out the window. I could clearly see an airstrip now, and on it, the outline of another plane. A group of people huddled together beside the aircraft, and standing apart from them, in wondrous solitude, was an unmoving figure of exceptional height.

  About twenty meters away from it there stood a second statue, equally motionless.

  The plane landed and came to rest at the far edge of the ­runway—the extreme opposite of where the other DC-10 was settled. The usual voice recording invited us to disembark. When my feet touched the ground, I was stricken by a dreadful heat wave: there wasn’t a puff of cool air in this desert! Without being ordered by anyone, my fellow travelers arranged themselves in pairs, and with an unsteady, shuffling gait, like a bunch of slaves on a chain, they set off in the same direction . . . I lined up with them too, no longer oppressed by the heat, but by a sense of inevitability that prevented me from breaking away from the “straight-and-narrow path” . . . I held my recorder in my hands and remembered the smiles of the security officers at Caselle Airport. There were no airports here! The only building was a wooden shack where some uniformed men sat under a canopy with their legs crossed, watching the scene impartially . . . Just as we arrived some few meters away from a being wearing a gray mantle, who stood with his back turned to us on a pedestal, the air became charged with a frightening tension . . . A dark force was draining me from within . . . The other giant figure stood twenty paces away; he went and plucked someone out from the group beside him, grabbed him by the hocks and, spinning the human like a club, he let out a terrible scream . . . His rival turned toward us. I saw his senile face, the face of a biblical prophet, his hair and long beard corroded by a pervasive blight. He stared through eyes devoid of pupils as if scanning the abysses of the past . . . Out of instinct, I put my recorder against my lips, and for what little I knew, I began to play it. From the depths of blackest despair, perhaps I’d manage to dig out a sound capable of soothing these powers. I was clutching at my last straw.

  The Prophet was drawing near. Very shortly, the duel would commence . . .

  —October 1976

  APPENDIX I

  THE DEATH AT MISSOLONGHI

  A short story by Giorgio De Maria

  Translated by Ramon Glazov

  What follows is a private account by the Bishop Gualtiero Griffi of ­Venice, written in the December of 1879 and addressed to Cardinal Roberto Brancaleoni of Bologna, concerning an alleged episode in the life of Lord Byron:

  I can see, Your Eminence, that your diocese is beset by many cares. How well I recognize the situation! I myself scarcely know where to turn anymore! But on this take my word: the backsliding of Venetian souls in my own bishopric has been truly dire! The Austrians in charge are doing everything within their purview, but for all their efforts, they are still far from omnipotent. We ought to have a duty constable and a priest standing watch over every home, but you, at least, should understand that this is beyond our earthly capabilities.

  And the people, meanwhile, take advantage of this. Everywhere, their lechery finds niches which are rarely interfered with. Wherever you look, there are patriots and radicals springing up like toadstools. That bane of the spirit known as “Romanticism” has infected a good part of our populace, bringing all its sad consequences. Their hearts are unruly, they have abandoned all human decency and—woe to report—they are very, very familiar with wickedness.

  You have provided me, Your Eminence, with a truly valuable piece of news in describing how that shameful goat-footed poet came to dwell in your city and how the authorities brought this to your attention. Heaven would have wanted them to apprehend him and stop, at once and forever, the harm he has caused to unguarded minds! But I don’t hold very high hopes of that happening. He is an Englishman, and the Austrians are unfailingly reluctant when it comes to laying a finger on one of those islanders. But what’s more, our man is a lord, and for him this truly accidental fact serves as a form of insurance. As if highborn ancestors could keep a man from nursing the spirit of a crook and a tavernlout! Your Eminence, have you read the things written about him in the London periodicals? He is said to be—and I quote—“a wretch whose organs, blunted by the habits and excesses of the most monstrous debauchery, can no longer find any means of excitement or stimulation except in the images of terror, suffering and destruction with which a crime-stained soul furnishes him only too easily”! Nothing, it seems to me, could lay him bare better than that. I thought much the same thing when I chanced to read some of his writings, which I tore to pieces at once before consigning them to the precious efforts of my fireplace . . . With that gesture, I felt almost as if I could stop his verses from selling like hotcakes and hamper the buyers from corrupting themselves in mind and body! (All the same, it would do well to acquaint certain constables in your native Bologna with that verdict from London: reading it will perhaps remove many of their qualms about the matter.)

  Still on the subject of that Englishman, have you heard what they’ve been saying about him in certain circles for quite some time now? I don’t know h
ow much of it is real or fabricated, but it seems positive to me that the story fits his character like a glove. You, having frequented the salons of Contessa Albizzi a few times in the past, would be the better one to judge if the gossip vented there is worth considering. I spoke about it to the Marquis of Zandonai during the last Feast of Precept when he came to visit me in the sacristy at the end of Mass. It truly is regrettable, Your Eminence, that your visits to Venice always have to be official ones and that you and I have never had the chance to wander around the city incognito for a while! I could introduce you to so many neighborhoods, to so many . . . people of interest. I’m not alluding to the Marquis of Zandonai, whom you already know, nor even to the palazzi which you used to frequent, but people rather much less visible, who could easily slip your notice if you’re not “well up” on Venetian matters. You’ve already been here, I take it, and seen our “little streets”? And you also know the odor that permeates them, that singular smell! If corruption itself ever had a smell, that for sure would be it! Of course, the place is far from a pageant of sanitation, but how I wish we were dealing purely with material foulness!

  The day before yesterday, I fancied taking the pleasure of delving into this urban maze where, here and there, I could gather the information which would allow me a clear vision of the strange story that has spread thinly round. It would indeed be worth your while if I digressed to tell you about several meetings I held, with people we’ve already spoken about at length, in our nostalgia for the informants of the Mouth of Truth—but that may have to wait for another time. I should also especially update you on certain scoundrels—known vulgarly as “gnaghe,” or “meowers”—who prowl around in cat masks disguised as women and spout obscenities which shock everyone around them. And what’s particularly outrageous is they’re tolerated: you don’t see them merely in the piazza, but in the Procuratie, in the taverns and disorderly houses, at dances and celebrations, and it’s said that their real craft is in sodomy. Foreigners attest that not even in Geneva, in a nation of Calvinists and Lutherans, is there anything like the scandal these gnaghe have caused, and that it would be best to arrest or forbid these masqueraders who practice rough trade, departing from the natural use of the woman which befits them. It was to one of those precise neighborhoods, where bordellos and gambling dens are plentiful, where I went two days ago to pause among people and listen to whatever came out of their mouths.

  You must have heard of a certain Venetian neighborhood called Frezzeria, which is quite well visited, not only as a place of unmentionable pastimes, but also as the spot where citizens gather to flog merchandise. It’s lost some of its energy in recent decades as trade with the Orient has waned, but there are—as always—a few exotic objects to be found, which form the perfect lure for those tourists who yearn to primp their stately wives with some bauble from Syria or Lebanon, all so that their better halves can imagine they’ve really landed in one of those distant countries. It was there, in that same neighborhood, that the poet arrived three years ago—that poet who now flourishes in the shadow of your cathedral and stands poised to sow your diocese with the weeds that have already sprung up so rampantly here. For the first several months—before he and his seraglio of vultures and carrion crows withdrew under the roof of the ­Palazzo Mocenigo—the building where he lodged was a two-story dwelling, marred by centuries of wear and tear and by the neglect of its current proprietors. It’s true that many things inside have been changed lately; you can see it especially in the upholstery and furnishings, both of which have gotten strangely refined, but, deferring such questions for now, the two proprietors are not personalities who seem much inclined toward cleanliness or decorum. The lady of the house herself is a woman of twenty-five, rather well heeled, who answers to the name of Marianna. She is rumored to have had many lovers, several of whom were even of the very basest extraction. Her husband, by contrast, is a man quite long in his years, tested harshly by life, with a past behind him filled with disappointments great and small which now envelop his existence like a swarm of reckless gnats. You would only need to look at his face to understand the burden on his memory to hold them all and to assign each one its proper weight and measure.

  It would be worth your while, Your Eminence, to spare me a moment to describe this character, since everything that’s recounted appears to have its origins with him.

  You need to know that before the arrival of the Englishman—the one who made the Saints turn pale with his catalogue of incests and adulteries perpetrated across Europe!—his future host kept a shop at the ground level of the house. I emphasize the word before, since today he doesn’t seem to gain much through that enterprise: not, I’d judge, from the piles of clutter and dust which grow denser each day along the shelves of his shop. It’s astounding even that he hasn’t decided to close down the shop, but indeed to leave it open night and day, practically inviting any passing thieves to plunder it wholesale. Now you should be asking how this man could earn his livelihood, put food on the table for himself and his wife and find the ducats to beautify his house with hanging tapestries and that extortionate furniture. If the matter wasn’t an enigma to me as well, then in all likelihood I wouldn’t dwell in narrating these anecdotes which Prudence—first among the supreme cardinal virtues—would bid me to reject without delay as the fruit of lies and superstition.

  But, at least for now, I’ll keep to the details that are certain. I can say that the name of this man is Giuseppe and that he belongs to the Segati family, which was once renowned in our Most Serene Republic for its extensive trading with India and other territories in the Orient. However, the dynasty later fell into decline, to the point of having no assets save for that very homely curiosity shop where our Giuseppe—the last scion of his house—carried out an activity which, in truth, wasn’t very lucrative until a few months ago. Just one sign of the small esteem this man held compared to his spouse was the nickname she seemingly gave him in the first few days of their marriage. Women have a most subtle talent for pondering names that could mortally wound the men they hold in contempt, and she could not have thought of anything more merciless to inflict him with than a second Baptism, a second naming more inerasable than the first. It’s said she nicknamed him the “Straggler-Cat” for the way he used to maunder from room to room without a sound, as cats, in their muffled manner, have a habit of doing. You’ll know the grievous insult in this if you consider that Giuseppe, with his hefty figure and sagging features, has scarcely anything feline about him; at most, you can summon to mind the image of a very ancient cat who’s had too much of catching mice and, instead of nestling down in some distant corner as would be natural in such cases, drags his tired limbs around the house in an altogether vain attempt to hide his decrepitude. It’s enough, though, just for that man to come to the dinner table for all of his physical frailty to display itself: there’s no broth, no salad dish he’ll ingest without a grimace of pain etched on his lips. Nor does he have much appetite for table talk, except to ask about minor developments—who’ll sing in the role of Orfeo at the Teatro La Fenice, how this or that distant relative is faring—and often as not his young wife will abandon him to solitude, perhaps after serving him with a dry or hurtful answer.

  One day—after having asked her husband again and again why he was in the habit of leaving the house on certain nights of the year, and just as the Christmas holidays were drawing near—she didn’t hesitate to fall silent herself and follow after him as soon as she noticed him stepping past the threshold of his quarters. And when she saw him descend to the street level where the shop lies—then step outside, donning one of the masks citizens wear during ­Carnevale—she found herself so curious that she decided to shadow him in the laneways through which he advanced. Now, having observed him heading toward Giudecca, and entering a small chapel which was known to host assemblies of the most impudent characters in Venice, she robed herself the following evening in garments more appropriate for eavesdropping at close quarters. Over
her face she placed a gentleman’s baùtta mask and adopted the kind of disinterested strut that allows the occasional outsider to penetrate certain secret gatherings, including this very particular meeting where, amid the smell of incense and candles, prayers were raised to a divine Cupid surrounded by shepherds, and where the sound of panpipes sometimes drifted beside whispered devotions. And we can picture her surprise, as well, when she spied her husband getting up from his pew and kneeling before a pagan altar, where he raised his arms skyward—if one could call the blue fresco of that ceiling a sky—and, in the silence which had quickly overtaken the chapel, reciting melancholy verses.

  There is no poorer man in the world than one who faces the sudden airing of that secret which, for him, is the only receptacle where he can keep the flame of his vanity lit—so that he doesn’t start to resemble a pitiable shrub, winter-stricken by frost and blizzards. And there’s no woman of bad intent who doesn’t know how to make use of a cold blade which, by fate or by craft, she now has in her hand. Just as she was able to find the destination of his nocturnal walks, she also sniffed out where he hid the fruits of his Arcadian laments. There wasn’t a drawer in the house or in the shop she didn’t frantically rummage through, keen to unearth what her husband had hoped to hide from her feminine malice. And when, at last, a bundle of well-preserved parchment scrolls fell into her hands, few people in the district were unaware of what this occult activity said about a man whose domestic fate was well-known gossip; many began to treat him to a snicker as they passed by his shop, whose sign—in a hostile collusion of apathy and destiny—was a horn, to be exact, a large hunting horn painted in gold. He caught on to their mockery from behind his counter shrouded in twilight, and we too can visualize how green his face became at hearing his pagan elegies callously repeated by figures in the street. Nor was there a lack of pranksters who pinned to his door certain writings from Lombardy at the time, reproving those followers of Classicism who never tire of scratching around in the ashes of the Ancient World, who still fancy that the lost paintings of Parrhasius bear the truest promise of earthly beatitude . . . And their foolish illusion is properly savaged in those biting verses by the Lombard laureate Carlo Porta, whose Milanese pagan (or “Meneghin Classegh”) declares: