Here were two villains ready for anything; why not the bombardon? So I decided to seduce them. I sang the praises of the band uniform, I took them to public performances, I held out hopes of amatory triumphs with the Daughters of Mary…. They fell for it. I spent my days in the theater with a long stick, as I had seen in illustrated pamphlets about missionaries; I rapped them on the knuckles when they missed a note. The bombardon has only three keys, but it’s the embouchure that matters, as I said. I won’t bore you any further, my little listeners.
The day came, after long sleepless afternoons, when I could introduce to Don Tico two bombardons—I won’t say perfect, but at least acceptable. Don Tico was convinced; he put them in uniform and moved me to the trumpet. Within the space of a week, for the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, for the opening of the theatrical season with They Had to See Paris, there before the curtain, in the presence of the authorities, I was standing to play the opening bars of ‘Good Start.’”
“Oh, joyous moment,” Lorenza said, making a face of tender jealousy. “And Cecilia?”
“She wasn’t there. Maybe she was sick. I don’t know. But she wasn’t there.”
He raised his eyes and surveyed the audience, and at that moment he was bard—or jester. He calculated the pause. “Two days later, Don Tico sent for me and told me that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo had ruined the evening. They wouldn’t keep time, their minds wandered when they weren’t playing, they joked and never came in at the right place. ‘The bombardon,’ Don Tico said to me, ‘is the backbone of the band, its rhythmic conscience, its soul.
The band, it is a flock; the instruments are the sheep, the bandmaster the shepherd, but the bombardon is the faithful snarling dog that keeps the flock together. The bandmaster looks first to the bombardon, for if the bombardon follows him, the sheep will follow. Jacopo, my boy, I must ask of you a great sacrifice: to go back to the bombardon. You have a good sense of rhythm, you will keep those other two in time for me. I promise, as soon as they can play on their own, I’ll let you play the trumpet.’ I owed everything to Don Tico.
I said yes. And on the next holy day the trumpets rose to their feet and played the opening of ‘Good Start’ in front of Cecilia, once more in the first row. But I was in the darkness, a bombardon among bombardons. As for those two wretches, they never were able to play on their own, and I never went back to the trumpet. The war ended, I returned to the city, abandoned music, the brass family, and never even learned Cecilia’s last name.”
“Poor boy,” Lorenza said, hugging him from behind. “But you still have me.”
“I thought you liked saxophones,” Belbo said. Then he turned and kissed her hand. “But, to work,” he said, serious again. “We’re here to create a story of the future, not a remembrance of things past.”
That evening, the lifting of the ban on alcohol was much celebrated. Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines—only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented. At midnight, after a full day, we all decided it was time to experience what it was like sleeping in the hills.
On my bed the sheets were even damper than they had been in the afternoon.
Jacopo had insisted that we use a “priest”: an oval frame that kept the covers raised and had a place for a little brazier with embers—he wanted to make sure we tasted all the pleasures of rural life. But when dampness is inherent, a bedwarmer encourages it: you feel welcome warmth, but the sheets remain humid. Oh, well. I lit a lamp, the kind with a fringed shade, where the mayflies flutter until they die, as the poet says, and I tried to make myself sleepy by reading the newspaper.
For an hour or two I heard footsteps in the corridor, an opening and closing of doors, and the last closing was a violent slam. Lorenza Pellegrini putting Belbo’s nerves to the test.
I was half-asleep when I heard a scratching at the door, my door. I couldn’t tell whether it was an animal or not (I had seen neither dogs nor cats in the house), but I had the impression that it was an invitation, a request, a trap. Maybe Lorenza was doing it because she knew Belbo was spying on her. Maybe not. Until then, I had considered Lorenza Belbo’s property—at least as far as I was concerned—and besides, now that I was living with Lia, other women didn’t interest me.
The sly glances, often conspiratorial, that Lorenza gave me in the office or in a bar when she was teasing Belbo, as if seeking an ally or a witness, were part—I had always thought—of the game she played. Without a doubt, Lorenza had a talent for looking at any man as if challenging his sexual capacity. But it was a curious challenge, as if she were saying: “I want you, but only to show how afraid you really are….” That night, however, hearing her fingernails scrape my door, I felt something different. It was desire: I desired Lorenza.
I stuck my head under the pillow and thought of Lia. I want to have a child with Lia, I said to myself. And I’ll make him (or her) learn the trumpet as soon as he (or she) has enough breath.
On every third tree a lantern had been hung, and a splendid virgin, also dressed in blue, lighted them with a marvelous torch, and I lingered, longer than necessary, to admire the sight, which was of an ineffable beauty.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 2, p. 21
Toward noon Lorenza joined us on the terrace, smiling, and announced that she had found a terrific train that stopped at *** at twelve-thirty, and with only one change she could get back to Milan in the afternoon. Would we drive her, she asked, to the station?
Belbo continued leafing through some notes. “I thought Agliè was expecting you, too,” he said. “In fact, it seemed to me he organized the whole expedition just for you.”
“That’s his problem,” Lorenza said. “Who’s driving me?”
Belbo stood up and said to us, “It’ll only take a moment; I’ll be right back. Then we can stay here another couple of hours. Lorenza, you had a bag?”
I don’t know if they said anything to each other during the trip to the station. Belbo was back in about twenty minutes and resumed working without referring to the incident.
At two o’clock we found a comfortable restaurant in the market square, and the choosing of food and wine gave Belbo further opportunity to recall his childhood. But he spoke as if he were quoting from someone else’s biography. He had lost the narrative felicity of the day before. In midafternoon we set off to join Agliè and Garamond.
Belbo drove southwest, and the landscape changed gradually, kilometer by kilometer. The hills of ***, even in late autumn, were gentle, domestic, but as we went on, the horizons became more vast, at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages; we glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darién, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these discoveries. We climbed in third gear toward great expanses and the outline of mountains, which at the end of the plateau was already fading into a wintry haze.
Though we were already in the mountains, it seemed to be a plain modulated by dunes. As if the hand of a clumsy demiurge had compressed heights that seemed to him excessive, transforming them into a lumpy dough that extended all the way to the sea or—who knows?—to the slopes of harsher and more determined chains.
We reached the specified village and met Agliè and Garamond, as arranged, at the café in the main square. If Agliè was displeased to hear that Lorenza wasn’t coming, he gave no indication of it. “Our exquisite friend does not wish to take part, in the presence of others, in the mysteries that define her. A singular modesty, which I appreciate,” he said. And that was all.
We continued, Garamond’s Mercedes in the lead and Belbo’s Renault behind, until, as the sunlight was dying, we came within sight of a strange yellow edifice on a hill, a kind of eighteenth-century castle, from which extended terraces with flowers and trees, flourishing despite the season.
As we reached the foot of the hill, we found ourselves in an open space where many cars were parked. “We stop here,” Agliè said, “and continue on foot.”
Dusk was now becoming night. The path up was illuminated for us by a host of torches that burned along the slope.
It’s odd, but of everything that happened, from that moment until
