The Twenty Days of Turin Read online

  “That much I understood from reading the book itself.”

  There was a long silence. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tell Segre something, or if he was supposed to tell me something. I heard him clear his throat.

  “Do you know Mr. Paolo Giuffrida?” he asked me suddenly.

  “No? Who is he?”

  “He lives up in the hills. If you’re still planning to work on the book, it might be a good idea to get in touch with him. He’s an art critic, though he spends his free time dabbling in parapsychology, in the occult. But you can rest easy; he hasn’t lost the plot, not like some of the chaps you see . . . I mean that he’s a serious person. He’s got some tape recordings that are well worth giving a listen to. Would it interest you to meet him?”

  “Well, yes, but how should I go about it?”

  “I’ll give you his number and ring him myself in a quarter of an hour. That way, your call won’t be unexpected . . . Now I have to leave you because one of my clients is here.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Attorney Segre. It’s very kind of you to remember me.”

  “This isn’t a question of kindness. I’ve always had a soft spot for historical events. I thought it was only fair to give you some information that might be of use.”

  “Thank you regardless!”

  “Ah, well . . . Good evening.”

  “Good evening to you too!”

  It’s always a tense thing, the gratitude you feel for people who, even with the best intentions, leave you standing at a crossroads. To one side of me, I had the gentle lure of the recorder, promising a life of peace and contentment. To the other, I had the name and phone number of a stranger: a beacon pointing in the dark, to a possible landing site nesting all the threats of the unknown.

  Naturally, when a quarter of an hour had passed, I rang Paolo Giuffrida. He knew enough about me already that he didn’t ask any questions and suggested I meet him later that night. Very carefully, he explained everything I had to do to find his home in a maze of narrow streets and paths. The house was located in a secluded part of the Turin hills; unlike the other owners of villas and cottages, my host seemed to avoid every precautionary measure that had become de rigeur in that neighborhood. His only safeguard against outside threats was the presence of a dog, which appeared immediately, barking at the gate of his little garden.

  Paolo Giuffrida was a bony, pint-sized man of uncertain age, with a long face and a powerful set of teeth that made me think of a horse’s head transplanted onto the body of a jockey. He sounded a bit snobbish, rolling out his r’s. Softly, he held his hand out to me at the entrance of the house, all the while stroking the dog, whose deep growls made me a little nervous. It was a young wolf dog with a coat of blond fur and answered to the name Gauguin: a docile animal, by all appearances, who immediately began to rub his muzzle against my trousers and sniff at my shoes.

  The house, garden and furnishings all seemed to provide the requisite living space where a man of Giuffrida’s proportions could live at ease without wasting a move. This was the calculated habitat of a “person of taste,” receptive to modernity but tempered by coquettish links to the past: beanbag seats in blazing colors, African masks, sculptures of what appeared to be snout-beetles, ­cutting-edge radio equipment and instrument panels, all flawlessly coexisting with Napoleonic furniture, a Cignaroli landscape, a statue of Diana the Huntress positioned in the garden, Pre-Raphaelite etchings . . .

  Caught in the middle of that erudite collection of past and present, I could only greet my host with an absentminded, “Good evening,” as I gawked helplessly at the scene around me. All of this must have seemed quite natural to Giuffrida. Before getting on to the crucial issues, he made a series of smiles at me and the dog in equal measure. He’d glance back at the garden swaddled in darkness, giving distracted gestures that might’ve delayed our entry into the house for God knows how long. It was Gauguin who thought to break the deadlock, rising up and leaning his front paws against me from behind. “Get away, Gauguin! Attaboy!” his master ordered, and the dog obediently went and huddled in a corner. By Giuffrida’s own design, the ground floor of the cottage consisted of a single room. Alongside the visual niceties, there were plenty of things to hear and smell: the aroma of Indian joss sticks, a thin-spread and barely audible harpsichord music in which I recognized the notes of Handel’s “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” If my host was—as Segre had claimed—someone who engaged himself in parapsychology and the occult, then he kept those interests very well disguised. Nothing in the immediate environment seemed to betray inclinations outside the mainstream culture. When at last I found myself submerged in a beanbag, with Giuffrida lying on the moquette in front of me, the sense of physical comfort that swept over me was so total that I wondered in earnest if I’d come to the wrong address. I’d always thought that stiff, angular chains and rooms bathed in twilight were essential ingredients in the beckoning of phantom presences and otherworldly voices.

  But soon enough we arrived at our main topic. Giuffrida restated briefly what he knew about me and the book I planned to write, and explained to me that his “extraprofessional interests” should not be confused with certain pseudosciences of an esoteric nature—spirit-channeling, mesmerism, attempts at telepathic contact with aliens and so forth. All of those pursuits were standard fare for the Archaeopteryx Club, that white collar coven of man-Fridays, bored office rats and petty lawyers aching for mystical nostalgia; a few hours of well-applied eroticism and their itch would be scratched. Giuffrida, on the other hand—in the spare time when the art galleries allowed him a few moments’ ­cease-fire—had the hobby of tape-recording “acoustic manifestations,” sounds whose sources couldn’t be identified. His activity was entirely neutral and unbiased, and didn’t require gifts beyond the human norm. In short, and to avoid misunderstanding, he was not the psychic heir to the fabulous Gustavo Rol!

  “Perhaps your experiments have something in common with those ‘voices of the deceased’ recordings from back in the day—the ones by Jürgenson and Konstantin Raudive?” I asked, fascinated.

  “Yes . . . But with the difference that—in face of certain phenomena—Jürgenson, Raudive and their whole school are firmly perched on a spiritualist position, while I’m a bit more hesitant to drag the afterlife into all of this. If anything, I lean more towards Hans Bender’s hypothesis that what we call ‘apparitions’ aren’t ghosts but the unconscious mind venting itself . . . I imagine that the attorney Segre has spoken about some of my recordings that could address the topic you’re dealing with.”

  “Yes, he mentioned that over the phone—in a rather fuzzy way.”

  “Fuzzy?” asked a surprised Giuffrida. “Well, then I’ll have to clarify some matters before you listen to anything. The tape I’ve set aside for you contains sounds of an entirely different nature from what Raudive picked up. Let’s be clear on this. It has nothing to do with any ‘voices from the hereafter,’ which anyone can tape at any time: even now, if you and I were to make the effort. The voices I’ve captured—which I’ve managed to keep well nigh unaltered by virtue of a tape preservation device patented by me—go back ten years ago; their like has never reappeared since then. It’s a unique document. Indeed, I’d politely ask you to keep your mouth zipped about this, since I haven’t ruled out that there are people who might come and seize it if they knew it existed.”

  I gave Giuffrida my most fervent assurance.

  “Please, I was not joking! I’m asking you to keep this absolutely confidential!” I wasn’t sure if there was real fear behind Giuffrida’s entreaties, or if it was a histrionic stunt to give the recording a touch of mystery. I watched him get up and thrust his hand into a shelf to remove an egg-shaped object. Then I saw him glance around suspiciously, opening the door to take a look at the garden and closing it again with two turns of the key. When he returned to me, his face was agitated and constantly twitching. He inserted the object into an apparatus hidden behind a curtain, and b
efore he hit “Play,” he lingered on some technical explanations: the “voices” I was going to hear hadn’t been captured by the tape recorder itself but by a two-way radio transceiver. He’d picked them up one night by accident, before they even revealed themselves as voices. At that point, they were simply noises—strange noises that immediately filled him with curiosity. This event dated back to April of ten years ago. He thought at first that it was a backyard hoax by some radio hams. But the persistence of the noises, night after night, and their gradual transformation into lucid words—albeit in an utterly bizarre timbre—before they finally swelled into “acoustic manifestations,” which were astonishing to say the least, left him persuaded that the phenomenon was authentic.

  Giuffrida decided not to say any more and to leave me to my own opinions. We could swap thoughts afterward. He pushed a button and explained, as the tape began running, that the egg-shaped cassette contained audio collected across an entire month. It would take us at least two days to listen to all of it, so, for my benefit, he would only select some essential parts.

  After a long minute of scratchy silence, I became aware of a faint chiseling sound, a deep, rhythmic pitter-patter, close to the sound a workman might produce trying to engrave something onto a rock. It was joined by other chiseling noises, until everything formed a remote but hectic soundscape, like an underground mining operation, accompanied by wheezing and something that resembled a heart pulsating under a stethoscope. As the sound of magma slowly increased and thickened, Gauguin, who up to that moment had stayed in his corner, raised his muzzle and cocked his ears: a strangled groan came out of his throat. His master came over babbling tender phrases and coaxed him to sit back down, yet the dog continued to make dismal growls and bare his teeth.

  “I hope he doesn’t start barking right now,” said Giuffrida. “He’s never liked these noises very much.”

  The tape went back to an empty rustle; after a brief pause, a shallow crumbling noise took over, and beyond that I could just make out a hushed medley of voices. Every now and then a single voice would stick out from the choir, a metallic-sounding voice that seemed to express a clear desire to push its way through, to overtake the others stuck in their common effort. You sensed a rattling of boulders, like before a landslide; and soon a raucous cry burst forth while the pitter-patter chisel sounds grew furious. A second cry followed the first; then a third scream butted in; and each one of them oozed a sinister tone of triumph. It sounded like a messy geyser erupting, only the jets of steam rushing up from freshly opened craters were weirdly modulated murmurs, where a long “UUUUH” fell into a grating noise as if it were scratching the ground to gather stones and render them into a harsh “RRRRH,” into a “CCCCH” pelting like a heavy rainstorm, into an exhausting “NNNNH”: material stumbling blocks that allowed themselves to assimilate, it seemed, only after a distressing struggle. In between those rocky phonemes you could hear the faint hissing of an S, a dense smacking of labial consonants, and the thrashing rage of sounds that hadn’t yet managed to escape from the deep. Gauguin scourged the air with his tail; his hair turned frizzy. At the first sign that he was going to bark, Giuffrida stopped the tape. He flung me an appraising glance as if hoping to gather my impressions, but since I was quiet and my poker face was impenetrable, he pressed “Play” again. What I’d just heard, he informed me, was the second phase of recordings, a remarkable in-between period spanning a week before the noises actually transformed themselves into words.

  I noticed, as the tape’s rustling resumed, that Giuffrida had bunged up his ears with his thumbs; I couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind that gesture. I also noticed that the twitching of his face had intensified and that he was viewing the dog with obvious apprehension, though he didn’t neglect to study me too, as if he expected some kind of reaction from me as I listened.

  Right then, a sullen gurgle appeared without warning, a low agitation in gluggy waters, coming from a whirlpool. It began as a modest sucking noise, then, little by little, it spiraled into a ravenous, far-reaching withdrawal, as if hundreds of mouths were dipping into a monstrous water hole determined to tap it dry, as if a thousand-year-old thirst had finally found a wellspring where it could drink its fill. I was grabbed by a sickness that came from nowhere; it felt like those parched lips were inside me, siphoning away my lymph to slake their need. The malaise passed as quickly as it came, but now I too couldn’t avoid clogging up my ears with my thumbs. Giuffrida noticed my problem and, with a prophetic smile, he stopped the tape a second time.

  “All of this brings back memories, doesn’t it?” he told me.

  The suggestion was obvious and I found it redundant to answer him. The memory of Bergesio and his dried-up lake was still fresh in my mind. And in the time of mass insomnia, I too had suffered from a secret interior dryness, even though sleep had never completely forsaken me. Back then, I’d attributed my discomfort to the condition of my nerves worn out by an unpleasant day job, refusing to believe in the intervention of an external power: but now, hearing those whirlpools, my suspicion of having been at least partly the victim of a mysterious osmosis was making solid sense. Through which hidden pores did the slurry seep out into those lapping mouths? I looked at Giuffrida; he was pale. The wolf dog arose and paced around the room with his tail between his legs, whimpering. “Even he’s a little bit depressed,” said my host. “He’s only five years old and he wasn’t even born at the time of those recordings, but he’s a sensitive animal and can’t help but feel involved when he senses we’re too close to danger.”

  “But ten years have come and gone now,” I answered, hesitating, “and so the danger . . . should be gone too by now.”

  “It might still be here, endemic, latent . . . Of course, it suits us to believe that it’s all in the past, but it would be brainless to give ourselves over to optimism. No one has ever ventured to make a detailed study of these facts; we prefer to smother them in a conspiracy of silence, denying the evidence too—fancy that! Now, in trying to lift the veil of omertà, there’s a risk of colliding not only with those who are materially responsible for what happened, but those who consciously or unconsciously contributed to their outbreak of violence. It’s not for nothing that, excluding myself, only you and Segre are aware of this cassette’s existence.”

  “And the words? When do they appear?” I asked, feigning an interest that couldn’t hide my nervousness.

  “Now, listen. We should be clear on this: unlike those alleged ‘voices’ Raudive recorded, which typically expressed themselves in many different tongues and with bizarrely mangled words, the ‘entities’ I’ve captured on tape speak in Italian. That ought to be a sign that we were the ones who spawned these things; that it was our social—and I’ll risk saying it, urban—environment that gave rise to them. If, one day or another, they appear in a different part of the world, then maybe we’ll finally know . . . It would all depend on the habits and customs that govern public life in those hypothetical countries.”

  Quickly, Giuffrida wound the tape back and forth before stopping it at the part we were interested in, then let it run for a third time.

  The voices didn’t hesitate to make themselves heard. They spoke ponderously, as if every syllable were a dreadful burden to bear. When they fell silent, it sounded like a bag full of rubble had dropped. But you never heard them taking a single breath: the suggestion of fatigue came from the weight of the language. I couldn’t even understand the meaning of the sentences, which evaded every rule of accent and punctuation: the pauses were a fixed occurrence, arising from the struggle to haul the words, and each pause was closed off with suction.

  “I didn’t believe they were really speaking,” said Giuffrida. “In my view they were thought waves, telepathic messages my apparatus had managed to pick up at random. Up to a certain point, anyone who came across those entities wouldn’t have noticed anything; he would’ve found the usual radio noise. Only at the end, before the messages stopped and gave way to other happenin
gs, was there a genuine—and peculiar—acoustic occurrence which the human ear could detect. If you have a little patience, you’ll hear it as well.”

  I pricked up my ears. Now and then, within that strained pageant of voices, I could detect a number of syllables that colluded to form words. And so I could piece together the word “TREE-TRUNK” and then the word “WA-ALL” . . . As I focused harder, I noticed that each noun was preempted by the phrase “I-SPY” . . . You’d hear things like “I-SPY-A-TREE-TRUNK,” or “I-SPY-A-WALL.” They were pure and simple observations, as if, at the pinnacle of their rock-tunneling, their fluid drainage, these entities had gotten to the surface only to find what was right in front of their eyes and describe it in brief jottings. Then one voice, more sullen than the others, completed the sentence, “I-SPY-A-PATH-BE-TWEEN-THE-HOU-SES.” And another voice, equally monotonous, answered, “I-SPY-A-WAY-THROUGH-THE-BUSH-ES.” Gradually, the exchanges of information became more flexible. The muck that was slurped up at every pause seemed to act as a lubricant. But the conversation was still short on adjectives. These were nothing more than rigid descriptions of anything that happened to fall in their field of view. And it was a blinkered view, an immovable view, which the viewer didn’t seem capable of escaping. Yet, in the repetitiveness of the observations (they announced the presence of a doorway no less than six times) there was a mounting stress that gave each new sentence a rabid impetus. Little by little, the ferocity shown by those entities as they rose to the surface was changing into bitterness—a bitterness caused by the inability to reach even broader horizons. It struck me, however, that not all of these creatures suffered equally in their state of optical imprisonment. One of them had just reported seeing an open sky and hills in front of him, and in his description, less cursory than the others, there was an air of smugness. I deduced that the mood that drove those voices was subject to impulses that weren’t alien to human nature. Indeed, after that last message, there came a sort of snarling silence, during which I could only hear a feeble voice that said, as if mulling things over: “WELL-I-CAN-SEE-ON-LY-A-SIN-GLE-COL-LUMN.”