Another job that is not to be dismissed lightly is that of compiling questionnaires, usually during the summer season, for popular weekly magazines. «Between a bottle of Epsom salts and one of twenty-year-old cognac, which would you choose? Would you rather spend your vacation with an eighty-year-old leper or with Demi Moore? Do you prefer being sprinkled with ferocious red ants or sharing a sleeping compartment with Claudia Schiffer? If you have answered ‘1’ to all the above questions, then you are inventive, original, brilliant, but sexually a bit frigid. If all your answers are ‘2’, then you’re a rascal.»
In the Medicine and Health supplement of a leading daily I came upon a questionnaire about sunbathing, which allowed you to choose among three answers for every question, A, B, and C. The A answers are interesting: «If you expose your skin to the sun, how red does it get? A: Intensely. How often do you suffer from sunburn? A: Every time I go out in the sun. How would you describe your skin forty-eight hours after the erythema? A: Still red. Solution: if you have answered A to most questions, your skin is very sensitive and you are subject to painful sunburn.» I am thinking of a questionnaire that would ask: «Have you often fallen out of a window? If yes, have you suffered multiple fractures? After each fall, have you been certified as permanently disabled? If your answers are A, either you’re pretty stupid or your aural labyrinth is in bad shape. Don’t look out the window when the usual jokester yells up from below urging you to come down and join him.»
1991
The Miracle of San Baudolino
Barbarians
Dante does not treat my native Alessandria with great tenderness in his De vulgari eloquentia, where, in recording the dialects of the Italian peninsula, he declares that the «hirsute» sounds emitted by our people are surely not an Italian dialect and implies they are barely acceptable as a language. All right, so we’re barbarians. But this, too, is a vocation.
We are not Italians (Latins), nor are we Celts. We are the descendants of Ligurian tribes, tough and hairy, and in 1856 Carlo Avalle, beginning his history of Piedmont, recalled what Virgil said of those pre-Roman Italic peoples in Book IX of the Aeneid:
And what sort of people did you think to find here?
Those perfumed Atridae or the double-talking Ulysses?
You have come upon a people harsh from birth.
Our children, barely-born; are cast into the icy rivers,
whose waves toughen them first,
then through mountain and forests
the youth go day and night…
Et cetera. Avalle says further that these barbarians «were thin and undistinguished of person, having soft skin, small eyes, sparse hair, gaze filled with pride, harsh and loud voice: thus, at first sight, they did not give an accurate indication of their exceptional strength….»
One woman, it is said, was «seized by the pangs of birth while she was at work. Giving no sign, she went and hid behind a thorn bush. Having given birth there, she covered the infant with leaves, and returned to her tasks, and so no one noticed. But when the babe began to cry, the mother’s secret was revealed. Yet, deaf to the urgings of friends and companions, she did not cease working until the master obliged her to, after giving her her wage. This episode inspired the saying, often repeated by historians, that among the Ligurians the women had the strength of men, and the men, the strength of wild beasts.» This was written by Diodorus Siculus.
On the Field of Marengo
The hero of Alessandria is named Gagliaudo. In the year 1168, Alessandria exists and yet it doesn’t; that is to say, it doesn’t exist under that name. It is a collection of hamlets, perhaps, a fortified settlement or castle. In the area live some peasants and perhaps some of those mercatanti (merchants) who, as Carducci was to say later, will appear to the German feudal lords as unacceptable adversaries, who «only yesterday girded their paunches with knightly steel.» The Italian communes join forces against Barbarossa, forming the Lombard League; and they decide to build a new city at the confluence of the Tanaro and the Bormida, to block the advance of the invader.
The people of those scattered hamlets accept the proposal, probably because they can see a number of advantages. They seem only to be concerned with their private interests, but when Barbarossa arrives, they stand fast, and Barbarossa is stopped. It is 1174, Barbarossa is pressing at the gates, Alessandria is starving, and then (the legend goes) the wily Gagliaudo appears, a peasant who might be a relative of Schwejk.
He makes the richest men in the city give him what little wheat they can manage to collect, he gorges his cow Rosina on it, and leads her outside the walls to graze. Naturally, Barbarossa’s men capture her, disembowel her, and are stunned to find her so stuffed with grain. And Gagliaudo, an expert in playing dumb, tells Barbarossa that in the city there is so much wheat that they have to use it to feed the livestock. Let’s go back for a moment to Carducci: picture his army of romantics who weep at night, the bishop of Spires who dreams of the beautiful towers of his cathedral, the paladin Count of the blond locks who now despairs of ever seeing his Thecla again, all of them depressed and oppressed by the thought of having «to die at the hand of mercatanti. …» Then the German army strikes its tents and goes off.
This is how the legend goes. In reality, the siege was bloodier. It seems that the communal militia of my city performed well on the battlefield, but the city prefers to celebrate as its hero this sly and unbloody peasant, a bit short on military talent, but guided by one radiant certitude: that everyone else was a bit more stupid than he.
Po Valley Epiphanies
I know I am beginning these memoirs in a very Alessandrian spirit, but I would be unable to think up a presentation more—how shall I put it?—monumental. Actually, in describing a «flat» city like Alessandria, I believe the monumental approach is mistaken; I prefer to proceed along more subdued lines. I will tell about some epiphanies. The epiphany (I quote Joyce) is like a «sudden spiritual manifestation…» either in «the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself.» A dialogue, a city clock emerging from the evening fog, a whiff of rotting cabbage, something insignificant that suddenly becomes important: these were the epiphanies Joyce recorded in his foggy Dublin. And Alessandria resembles Dublin more than it does Constantinople.
It was a spring morning in 1943. The decision had been made: we were definitely going to abandon the city. Moreover, the splendid plan was to take refuge at Nizza Monferrato, where we would surely avoid the air raids. (A few months later, however, caught in crossfire between Fascists and partisans, I would learn to jump into ditches to duck the Sten guns’ fire.) Now it was early morning, and we were heading for the station, the whole family, in a hired carriage. At the point where Corso Cento Cannoni opens towards the Valfré barracks, the broad space deserted at this early hour, I thought I glimpsed, in the distance, Rossini, my elementary school classmate, and I called to him in a loud voice. It was someone else. My father was irritated. He said that, as usual, I never stopped to think, and one doesn’t go around shouting «Verdini» like a lunatic.
I corrected him, saying the name was Rossini, and he said that, Verdini or Bianchini, it was all the same. A few months later, when Alessandria was subjected to its first bombing, I learned that Rossini had died beneath the rubble with his mother.
Epiphanies should not be explained, but in the above recollection there are at least three of them. First, I was scolded for having succumbed to excessive enthusiasm. Second, I had thoughtlessly uttered a name. In Alessandria, every year they put on Gelindo, a pastoral Christmas story. The story takes place in Bethlehem, but the shepherds speak and debate in Alessandrian dialect. Only the Roman centurions, St. Joseph, and the Magi speak standard Italian (and in so doing seem highly comical).
Now Medoro, one of Gelindo’s servants, encounters the Magi and imprudently tells them the name of his master. When Gelindo finds out, he flies into a rage and scolds Medoro roundly. You don’t tell your own name to just anyone and you don’t thoughtlessly call somebody else by name, out in the open, where everyone can hear. An Alessandrian may talk with you for a whole day without once calling you by name, not even when he greets you. You say «Ciao» or, on separating, «Arrive-derci,» never «Arrivederci, Giuseppe.»
The third epiphany is more ambiguous. In my memory I can still see that urban space, too broad, like a jacket handed down from father to son, where that little human form stood out, too distant from our carriage: an ambiguous meeting with a friend I was never to see again. In the flat and excessive spaces of Alessandria you become lost. When the city is really deserted, early in the morning, at night, or on
