“Oh, it was nothing. After crawling to my uncle’s part of the house, I stubbornly insisted on standing up in the corridor. The window was at the end, we were on the upper floor, nobody could hit me, I argued. I felt like a captain standing erect in the center of the battle while the bullets whistle around him. Uncle Carlo became angry, roughly pulled me into the room; I almost started crying because the fun was over, and at that moment we heard three shots, glass shattering, and a kind of ricochet, as if someone were bouncing a tennis ball in the corridor. A bullet had come through the window, glanced off a water pipe, and buried itself in the floor at the very spot where I had been standing. If I had stayed there, I would have been wounded. Maybe.”
“My God, I wouldn’t want you a cripple,” Lorenza said.
“Maybe today I’d be happier,” Belbo said.
But the fact was that even in this case he hadn’t chosen. He had let his uncle pull him away.
About an hour later, he was again distracted. “Then Adelino Canepa came upstairs. He said we’d all be safer in the cellar. He and my uncle hadn’t spoken for years, as I told you. But in this tragic moment, Adelino Canepa had become a human being again, and Uncle even shook his hand.
So we spent an hour in the darkness among the barrels, with the smell of countless vintages, which made your head swim a little, not to mention the shooting outside. Then the gunfire died down, became muffled. We realized one side was retreating, but we didn’t know which, until, from a window above our heads, which overlooked a little path, we heard a voice, in dialect: ‘Monssu, i’è d’la repubblica bele si?’”
“What does that mean?” Lorenza asked.
“Roughly: Sir, would you be so kind as to inform me if there are still any sustainers of the Italian Social Republic in these parts? Republic, at that time, was a bad word. The voice was a partisan’s, asking a passerby or someone at a window, and that meant the Fascists had gone.
It was growing dark. After a little while both Papa and Grandmother arrived, and told of their adventures. Mama and Aunt prepared something to eat, while Uncle and Adelino Canepa ceremoniously stopped speaking to each other again. For the rest of the evening we heard shooting in the distance, toward the hills. The partisans were after the fugitives. We had won.”
Lorenza kissed Belbo on the head, and he wrinkled his nose. He knew he had won, though with some help from the Fascists. In reality it had been like watching a movie. For a moment, risking the ricocheting bullet, he had entered the action on the screen, but only for a moment, on the run, as in Hellzapoppin, where the reels get mixed up and an Indian on horseback rides into a ballroom and asks which way did they go. Somebody says, “That way,” and the Indian gallops off into another story.
He began playing his shining trumpet with such power that the whole mountain rang.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 1, p. 4
We had reached the chapter on the wonders of hydraulic pipes, and a sixteenth-century engraving from the Spiritalia of Heron depicted a kind of altar with a steam-driven apparatus that played a trumpet.
I brought Belbo back to his reminiscing. “How did it go, then, the story of that Don Tycho Brahe, or whatever his name was—the man who taught you to play the trumpet?”
“Don Tico. I never found out if Tico was a nickname or his last name. I’ve never gone back to the parish hall. The first time I went there, it was by chance: Mass, catechism, all sorts of games, and if you won, he gave you a little holy card of Blessed Domenico Savio, that adolescent with the wrinkled canvas pants, always hanging on to Don Bosco in the statues, his eyes raised to heaven, not listening to the other boys, who are telling dirty jokes.
I learned that Don Tico had formed a band, boys between ten and fourteen. The little ones played toy clarinets, fifes, soprano sax, and the bigger ones carried the tubas and the bass drum. They had uniforms, khaki tunics and blue trousers, and visored caps. A dream, and I wanted to be part of it. Don Tico said he needed a bombardon.”
He gave us a superior look, and said, as if repeating familiar information: “A bombardon is a kind of tuba, a bass horn in E flat. It’s the stupidest instrument in the whole band. Most of the time it just goes oompah-oompah-oompah, or—when the beat changes—pa-pah, pa-pah, pa-pah. It’s easy to learn, though. Belonging to the brass family, it works more or less like the trumpet. The trumpet demands more breath, and you need an embouchure—you know, that kind of callus on the upper lip, like Louis Armstrong…. Then you get a clear, clean sound, and you don’t hear the blowing. The important thing is not to puff out your cheeks: that only happens in movies, cartoons, or New Orleans brothels.”
“What about the trumpet?”
“The trumpet I learned on my own, during those summer afternoons when there was nobody at the parish hall, and I would hide in the seats of the little theater…. But I studied the trumpet for erotic reasons. You see that little villa over there, a kilometer from the hall? That’s where Cecilia lived, the daughter of the Salesians’ great patroness. So every time the band performed, on holy days of obligation, after the procession, in the yard of the parish hall, and especially in the theater before performances of the amateur dramatic society, Cecilia and her mama were always in the front row, in the place of honor, next to the provost of the cathedral.
In the theater the band would begin with a march that was called ‘A Good Start.’ It opened with trumpets, the trumpets in B flat, gold and silver, carefully polished for the occasion. The trumpets stood up, played by themselves. Then they sat down, and the band began. Playing the trumpet was the only way for me to attract Cecilia’s attention.”
“The only way?” Lorenza asked, moved.
“There was no other way. First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girl thirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is a snot-nose kid. Besides, she loved an alto sax, a certain Papi, a mangy horror, he seemed to me, but she only had eyes for him, as he bleated lasciviously, because the saxophone, when it isn’t Ornette Coleman’s and it’s part of a band—and played by the horrendous Papi—is a goatish, guttural instrument, with the voice of, say, a fashion model who’s taken to drink and turning tricks….”
“What do you know about models who turn tricks?”
“Anyway, Cecilia didn’t even know I existed. Of course, in the evening, when I struggled up the hill to fetch the milk from a farm above us, I invented splendid stories in which she was kidnapped by the Black Brigades and I rushed to save her as the bullets whistled around my head and went chack-chack as they hit the sheaves of wheat.
I revealed to her what she couldn’t have known: that in my secret identity I headed the Resistance in the whole Monferrato region, and she confessed to me that this was what she had always hoped, and at that point I would feel a guilty flood of honey in my veins—I swear, not even my foreskin got wet; it was something else, something much more awesome and grand—and on coming home, I would go and confess….I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she’s always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.
In short, if I were switched to the trumpet, Cecilia would be unable to ignore me: on my feet, gleaming, while the saxophone sits miserably on his chair. The trumpet is warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious; it sounds the charge. The saxophone plays so that young punks in the slums, their hair slicked down with brilliantine, can dance cheek to cheek with sweating girls. I studied the trumpet like a madman, then went to Don Tico and said: Listen to this. And I was Oscar Levant when he had his first tryout on Broadway with Gene Kelly. Don Tico said: You’re a trumpet, all right, but…”
“How dramatic this is,” Lorenza said. “Go on. Don’t keep us on pins and needles.”
“But I had to find somebody to take my place on the bombardon. Work out something, Don Tico said. So I worked out something. Now I must tell you, dear children, that in those days there lived in *** a couple of wretches, classmates of mine, though they were two years older than I, and this fact tells you something about their mental ability. These two brutes were named Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo. Asterisk: Historical fact.”
“What?” Lorenza asked.
I explained, smugly: “When Salgari, in his adventure stories, includes a true event, or something he thinks is true—let’s say that, after Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull eats General Custer’s heart—he always puts an asterisk and a footnote that says: Historical fact.”
“Yes, and it’s a historical fact that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo really had those names, but
