«Unless this is all a conspiracy, and my name is really Jimmy Picklock and I’m a burglar, and everything you and Gratarolo are telling me is a pack of lies, maybe, for instance, you’re secret agents, and you need to supply me with a false identity in order to send me out to spy on the other side of the Berlin Wall, The Ipcress File, and…»
«The Berlin Wall isn’t there anymore. They tore it down, and the Soviet empire is falling to pieces…»
«Christ, you turn your back for a second and look what they get up to. Okay, I’m kidding, I trust you. What are stracchini?»
«Huh? Stracchino is a kind of soft cheese, but that’s what it’s called in Piedmont, here in Milan it’s called crescenza. What makes you bring up stracchini?»
«It was when I was squeezing the toothpaste tube. Hang on. There was a painter named Broglio, who couldn’t make a living off of his paintings, but he didn’t want to work because he said he had a nervous condition.
It seemed to be an excuse to get his sister to support him. Eventually his friends found him a job with a company that made or sold cheeses. He was walking past a big pile of stracchini, each one wrapped in a packet of semitransparent wax paper, and because of his condition, or so he said, he couldn’t resist the temptation: he took them one by one and whack, he smashed them, making the cheese shoot out of the package. He destroyed a hundred or so stracchini before he was fired. All because of his condition. Apparently smacking stracchini, or as he said, sgnaché i strachèn, was a turn-on. My God, Paola, this must be a childhood memory! Didn’t I lose all memory of my past experiences?»
Paola started laughing: «I’m sorry, I remember now. You’re right, it is something you heard about as a kid. But you told that story often-it became part of your repertoire, so to speak. You were always making your dinner companions laugh with the story of the painter and his stracchini, and they in turn told others. You’re not remembering your own experience, unfortunately-it’s just a story you’ve told on numerous occasions and that for you has, how shall I say?, entered the public domain, like the story of Little Red Riding Hood.»
«You’re already proving indispensable to me. I’m happy to have you as my wife. I thank you for existing, Paola.»
«Good Lord, just a month ago you would have called that expression soap-opera schmaltz…»
«You’ll have to forgive me. I can’t seem to say anything that comes from the heart. I don’t have feelings, I only have memorable sayings.»
«Poor dear.»
«That sounds like a stock phrase, too.»
«Bastard.»
This Paola really loves me.
I had a peaceful night-who knows what Gratarolo put in my veins. I woke gradually, and my eyes must still have been closed, because I heard Paola whispering, so as not to wake me: «But couldn’t it be psychogenic amnesia?»
«We can’t rule that out,» Gratarolo replied. «There may always be unfathomable tensions at the root of these incidents. But you saw his file, the lesions are real.»
I opened my eyes and said good morning. Two young women and three children were also present. I had never seen them before, but I guessed who they were. It was terrible, because a wife is one thing, but daughters, my God, they are blood of your blood, and grandchildren too. The eyes of those two young women were shining with happiness, and the kids wanted to get up on the bed. They took me by the hand and said Hi, Grandpa. And nothing. It was not even fog, it was more like apathy. Or is it ataraxia? Like watching animals at the zoo-they could have been little monkeys or giraffes. Of course I smiled and said kind words, but inside I was empty.
I suddenly thought of the word sgurato, but I did not know what it meant. I asked Paola. It is a Piedmontese word that means when you wash a pot thoroughly and then scrub it out with that metal wool stuff, so that it looks new again, as shiny and clean as can be. That was it, I felt thoroughly sgurato. Gratarolo, Paola, and the girls were cramming a thousand details of my life into my head, but they were like dry beans: when you moved the pot, they slid around in there but stayed raw, not soaking up any broth or creamnothing to titillate the taste buds, nothing you would care to taste again. I was listening to things that happened to me as though they had happened to someone else.
I stroked the children and could smell their odor, without being able to define it except to say that it was tender. All that came to mind was there are perfumes as fresh as a child’s flesh. And indeed my head was not empty, it was a maelstrom of memories that were not mine: the marchioness went out at five o’clock in the middle of the journey of our life, Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat the man of La Mancha, and that was when I saw the pendulum betwixt a smile and tear, on the branch of Lake Como where late the sweet birds sang, the snows of yesteryear softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves, messieurs les Anglais je me suis couché de bonne heure, though words cannot heal the women come and go, here we shall make Italy or a kiss is just a kiss, tu quoque alea, a man without qualities fights and runs away, brothers of Italy ask not what you can do for your country, the plow that makes the furrow will live to fight another day, I mean a Nose by any other name, Italy is made now the rest is commentary, mi espíritu se purifica en Paris con aguacero, don’t ask us for the word crazed with light, we’ll have our battle in the shade and suddenly it’s evening, around my heart three ladies’ arms I sing, oh Valentino Valentino wherefore art thou, happy families are all alike said the bridegroom to the bride, Guido I wish that mother died today, I recognized the trembling of man’s first disobedience, de la musique où marchent des colombes, go little book to where the lemons blossom, once upon a time there lived Achilles son of Peleus, and the earth was without form and too much with us, Licht mehr licht über alles, Contessa, what oh what is life? and Jill came tumbling after. Names, names, names: Angelo Dall’Oca Bianca, Lord Brummell, Pindar, Flaubert, Disraeli, Remigio Zena, Jurassic, Fattori, Straparola and the pleasant nights, de Pompadour, Smith and Wesson, Rosa Luxemburg, Zeno Cosini, Palma the Elder, Archaeopteryx, Ciceruacchio, Matthew Mark Luke John, Pinocchio, Justine, Maria Goretti,
Thaïs the whore with the shitty fingernails, Osteoporosis, Saint Honoré, Bactria Ecbatana Persepolis Susa Arbela, Alexander and the Gordian knot.
The encyclopedia was tumbling down on me, its pages loose, and I felt like waving my hands the way one does amid a swarm of bees. Meanwhile the children were calling me Grandpa, I knew I was supposed to love them more than myself, and yet I could not tell which was Giangio, which was Alessandro, which was Luca. I knew all about Alexander the Great, but nothing about Alessandro the tiny, the mine.
I said I was feeling weak and wanted to sleep. They left, and I cried. Tears are salty. So, I still had feelings. Yes, but made fresh daily. Whatever feelings I once had were no longer mine. I wondered whether I had ever been religious; it was clear, whatever the answer, that I had lost my soul.
The next morning, with Paola there, Gratarolo had me sit at a table where he showed me a series of little colored squares, lots of them. He would hand me one and ask me what color it was. A-tisket, a-tasket, a green and yellow basket… Was it red? Was it brown? Was it blue? No! Just a little yellow basket. The first five or six I recognized without any trouble: red, yellow, green, and so on. Naturally I said that A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles, je dirais quelque jour vos naissances latentes.
But I realized that the poet or whoever was lying. What does it mean to say A is black? Rather it was as if I were discovering colors for the first time: red was quite cheerful, fire red, but perhaps too strong. No, maybe yellow was stronger, like a light suddenly switched on and pointed at my eyes. Green made me feel peaceful. The difficulties arose with the other little squares. What’s this? Green, I said.
But Gratarolo pressed me: what type of green, how is it different from this one? Shrug. Paola explained that one was emerald green and the other was pea green. Emeralds are gems, I said, and peas are vegetables that you eat. They are round and they come in a long, lumpy pod. But I had never seen either emeralds or peas. Don’t worry, Gratarola said, in English they have more than three thousand terms for different colors, yet most people can name eight at best.
The average person can recognize the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet-though people already begin to have trouble with
