The sweet friend must have been familiar with the house, because she was already on the threshold of the study, and without even looking at us, in the gathering shadows of the day at its end, she proceeded confidently to Agliè, patted his cheek, and said: “Simon, you’re not going to make me wait outside, are you?” It was Lorenza Pellegrini.
Agliè moved aside slightly, kissed her hand, and said, gesturing at us: “My sweet Sophia, you know you are always welcome, as you illuminate every house you enter. I was merely saying good-bye to these guests.”
Lorenza turned, saw us, and made a cheerful wave of greeting—I don’t believe I ever saw her discomposed or embarrassed. “Oh, how nice,” she said; “you also know my friend! Hello, Jacopo.”
Belbo turned pale. We said good-bye. Agliè expressed pleasure that we knew each other.
“I consider our mutual acquaintance to be one of the most genuine creatures I ever had the good fortune to know. In her freshness she incarnates—allow an old man of learning this fancy—the Sophia, exiled on this earth. But, my sweet Sophia, I haven’t had time to let you know: the promised evening has been postponed for a few weeks. I’m so sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lorenza said. “I’ll wait. Are you going to the bar?” she asked us—or, rather, commanded us. “Good. I’ll stay here for a half hour or so. Simon’s giving me one of his elixirs. You should try them. But he says they’re only for the elect. Then I’ll join you.”
Agliè smiled with the air of an indulgent uncle; he had her take a seat, then accompanied us to the door.
Out in the street again, we headed for Pilade’s, in my car. Belbo was silent. We didn’t talk all the way there. But at the bar, the spell had to be broken.
“I hope I haven’t delivered you into the hands of a lunatic,” I said.
“No,” Belbo said. “The man is keen, subtle. It’s just that he lives in a world different from ours.” Then he added grimly: “Or almost.”
The Traditio Templi postulates, independently, the tradition of a templar knighthood, a spiritual knighthood of initiates…
—Henry Corbin, Temple et contemplation, Paris, Flammarion, 1980
“I believe I’ve got your Agliè figured out, Casaubon,” Diotallevi said, having ordered a sparkling white wine from Pilade, making all of us fear for his moral health. “He’s a scholar, curious about the secret sciences, suspicious of dilettantes, of those who learn by ear. Yet, as we ourselves learned today, by our eavesdropping, he may scorn them but he listens to them, he may criticize them but he doesn’t dissociate himself from them.”
“Signor or Count or Margrave Agliè, or whatever the hell he is, said something very revealing today,” Belbo added. “He used the expression ‘spiritual knighthood.’ He feels joined to them by a bond of spiritual knighthood. I think I understand him.”
“Joined, in what sense?” we asked.
Belbo was now on his third martini (whiskey in the evening, he claimed, because it was calming and induced reverie; martinis in the afternoon, because they stimulated and fortified). He began talking about his childhood in ***, as he had already done once with me.
“It was between 1943 and 1945, that is, the period of transition from Fascism to democracy and then to the dictatorship of the Salo republic, with the partisan war going on in the mountains. At the beginning of this story I was eleven, and staying in my uncle Carlo’s house. My family normally lived in the city, but in 1943 the air raids were increasing and my mother had decided to evacuate.
“Uncle Carlo and Aunt Caterina lived in ***. Uncle Carlo came from a farming family and had inherited the *** house, with some land, which was cultivated by a tenant farmer named Adelino Canepa. The tenant planted, harvested the grain, made the wine, and gave half of everything to the owner. A tense situation, obviously: the tenant considered himself exploited, and so did the owner, who received only half the produce of his land. The landowners hated the tenants and the tenants hated the landowners. But in Uncle Carlo’s case they lived side by side.
“In 1914 Uncle Carlo had enlisted in the Alpine troops.
A bluff Piedmontese, all duty and Fatherland, he became a lieutenant, then a captain. One day, in a battle on the Carso, he found himself beside an idiot soldier who let a grenade explode in his hands—why else call them hand grenades? Uncle Carlo was about to be thrown into a common grave when an orderly realized he was still alive.
They took him to a field hospital, removed the eye that was hanging out of its socket, cut off one arm, and, according to Aunt Caterina, they also put a metal plate in his head, because he had lost some of his skull. In other words, a masterpiece of surgery on the one hand and a hero on the other.
Silver medal, cavalier of the Crown of Italy, and after the war a good steady job in public administration. Uncle Carlo ended up head of the tax office in ***, where, after inheriting the family property, he went to live in the ancestral home with Adelino Canepa and family.
“As head of the tax office, Uncle Carlo was a local bigwig, and as a mutilated veteran and cavalier of the Crown of Italy, he was naturally on the side of the government, which happened to be the Fascist dictatorship. Was Uncle Carlo a Fascist?
“In those days, Fascism had given veterans status, had rewarded them with decorations and promotions; so let’s say Uncle Carlo was moderately Fascist. Fascist enough to earn the hatred of Adelino Canepa, who was ardently anti-Fascist, for obvious reasons. Canepa had to go to Uncle Carlo every year to make his income declaration. He would arrive in the office with a bold expression of complicity, having tried to corrupt Aunt Caterina with a few dozen eggs.
And he would find himself up against Uncle Carlo, who, being a hero, was not only incorruptible, but also knew better than anyone how much Canepa had stolen from him in the course of the year, and who wouldn’t forgive him one cent.
Adelino Canepa, considering himself a victim of the dictatorship, began spreading slanderous rumors about Uncle Carlo. One lived on the ground floor, the other on the floor above; they met every morning and night, but no longer exchanged greetings. Communication was maintained through Aunt Caterina and, after our arrival, through my mother—to whom Adelino Canepa expressed much sympathy and understanding, since she was the sister-in-law of a monster.
My uncle, in his gray double-breasted suit and bowler, would come home every evening at six with his copy of La Stampa still to be read. He walked erect, like an Alpine soldier, his gray eye on the peak to be stormed. He passed by Adelino Canepa, who at that hour was enjoying the cool air on a bench in the garden, and it was as if my uncle did not see him. Then he would encounter Signora Canepa at the downstairs door and ceremoniously doff his hat. And so it went, every evening, year after year.”
It was eight o’clock; Lorenza wasn’t coming, as she had promised. Belbo was on his fifth martini.
“Then came 1943. One morning Uncle Carlo came into our room, waked me with a kiss, and said, ‘My boy, you want to hear the biggest news of the year? They’ve kicked out Mussolini.’ I never figured out whether or not Uncle Carlo suffered over it.
He was a citizen of total integrity and a servant of the state. If he did suffer, he said nothing about it, and he went on running the tax office for the Badoglio government. Then came September 8, and the area in which we lived fell under the control of the Fascists’ Social Republic, and Uncle Carlo again adjusted. He collected taxes for the Social Republic.
“Adelino Canepa, meanwhile, boasted of his contacts with the partisan groups forming in the mountains, and he promised vengeance, the making of examples. We kids didn’t yet know who the partisans were. There were great tales about them, but so far nobody had seen them.
There was talk about a Badoglian leader known as Mongo—a nickname, naturally, as was the custom then; many said he had taken it from Flash Gordon. Mongo was a former Carabinieri sergeant major who had lost a leg in the first fighting against the Fascists and the SS and now commanded all the brigades in the hills around ***.
“And then came the disaster: one day the partisans showed up in town. They had descended from the hills, they were running wild in the streets, still without uniforms, just blue kerchiefs, and firing rounds into the air to make their presence known. The news spread; all the people locked themselves in their houses.
It wasn’t yet clear what sort of men these partisans were. Aunt Caterina was only mildly concerned: after all, those partisans were friends of Adelino Canepa, or at least Adelino Canepa claimed to be a friend of theirs, so they wouldn’t do anything bad to Uncle, would they? They would.
We were informed that around eleven o’clock a squad of partisans with automatic rifles aimed had entered the tax office, arrested Uncle Carlo, and carried him off, destination unknown. Aunt Caterina lay down on her bed, and whitish foam began to dribble from her lips. She declared that Uncle Carlo would be killed. A blow with a rifle butt would be enough: with the metal plate
