My head reels.
5. Simonino the Carbonaro
Night of the 27th of March 1897
Excuse me, Captain Simonini, if I intrude upon your diary, which I couldn’t avoid reading. But it’s through no wish of mine that I awoke this morning in your bed. You will have realized that I am (or at least believe myself to be) Abbé Dalla Piccola.
I awoke in a bed that is not my own, in a strange apartment, with no trace of my cassock or my wig. Only a false beard beside the bed. A false beard?
The same thing happened to me a few days ago when I awoke with no idea who I was. But that occurred in my own place, whereas this morning I was in someone else’s. My eyes felt rheumy. My tongue hurt, as if I had bitten it.
Standing by a window, I realized the apartment overlooks impasse Maubert, right on the corner of rue Maître-Albert, where I live.
I began to search the rooms, which seem to be occupied by a layman, obviously the wearer of a false beard, and therefore (if you’ll allow me) a man of dubious morals. I went into an office, furnished with a certain ostentation. At the far end, behind a curtain, I found a small door and entered a corridor. It seemed like the backstage of a theater, full of costumes and wigs. A few days ago, I found a cassock there. But this time I was going in the opposite direction, toward my lodgings.
On my table I found a series of notes that, judging from your reconstructions, I must have written on the 22nd of March when, like this morning, I awoke with no memory. And what, I asked myself, is the meaning of the last note I made that day, referring to Auteuil and Diana. Who is Diana?
It is curious. You suspect we are the same person. You remember a great deal about your life and yet I remember very little about mine. On the other hand, as your diary shows, you know nothing about me, while I am beginning to realize I remember other things, by no means few of them, about what happened to you and—as chance would have it—exactly those things you seem unable to recall. If I can remember so many things about you, should I then say I am you?
Perhaps not. Perhaps we are different people who, for some mysterious reason, are involved in a sort of shared life. I am, after all, a clergyman, and perhaps you’ve told me what I know under the seal of confession. Or have I taken the place of Doctor Froïde and, without your knowing it, extracted from deep within what you were trying to keep buried?
Whatever the case, it is my priestly duty to remind you of what happened after your grandfather’s death—may God have granted his soul the peace of the just. Rest assured that if you were to die right now, the Lord would not grant you such peace, since you haven’t, it seems, behaved justly toward your fellow men, and perhaps that is why your memory refuses to recall matters that do you no honor.
Dalla Piccola left, in fact, only a scant number of notes for Simonini, written in a minuscule hand quite different from his own; but those short comments seemed to act as props for Simonini, on which to hang a series of images and words that suddenly flooded back. The Narrator will now attempt to summarize them, or rather to carry out the proper amplification, so this game of cues and responses becomes more coherent, and in order not to burden the Reader with the sanctimonious tone the abbé employed, in his account, to censure the past errors of his alter ego with excessive unction.
Simone was not, it seems, unduly upset by the abolition of the Discalced Carmelites, nor indeed by the death of his grandfather. Perhaps he felt some affection toward him, but after a childhood and adolescence spent shut up in a household that appeared to have been designed to stifle him, in which his grandfather as well as his black-habited tutors had always inspired mistrust, bitterness and resentment toward the world, young Simonino had become increasingly incapable of nourishing feelings other than morbid self-love, which had gradually assumed the calm serenity of a philosophical conviction.
After dealing with the funeral, attended by the ecclesiastical hierarchy and leading members of the Piedmont nobility close to the ancien régime, he went to see a certain Rebaudengo, the old family notary, who read out the will in which his grandfather left him all his estate. However, the notary informed him (and he seemed to take pleasure in doing so) that due to the many mortgages the old man had signed and the various bad investments he had made, none of his assets remained, not even the house with all its contents, which would have to go as soon as possible to the creditors, who had been holding back until then, out of respect for that esteemed gentleman, but would have no such qualms with the grandson.
«My dear Avvocato Simonini,» said the notary, «these may just be the ways of modern times, which are not as they were, but sometimes even the sons of respectable families are obliged to seek work. Should you feel inclined, sir, toward such a humiliating choice, I can offer you a position in my office, where a young man with some legal knowledge would be useful. And let it be clear that I cannot fully remunerate you to the measure of your intelligence, but the little I could give you should enable you to find other lodgings and live with modest dignity.»
Simone suspected the notary of appropriating much of the wealth his grandfather had believed lost in unwise investments, but he had no proof, and in any event he had to survive. By working for the notary, he told himself, he would one day be able to settle the score by reappropriating what he was sure the man had wrongly taken.
And so he adapted to living in two rooms in via Barbaroux, skimped on visits to the taverns where his companions met, and began to work for the miserly, authoritarian, mistrustful Notaio Rebaudengo, who immediately stopped addressing him as «Avvocato» and «sir,» and referred to him simply as Simonini, to make it clear who was master. After several years working as a scrivener (as they used to call it), he became legally qualified. He realized, as he gradually gained the cautious trust of his master, that his main business did not consist so much of what a notary normally does, such as proving wills, gifts, property transactions and other contracts, but rather of testifying gifts, transactions, wills and contracts that had never taken place. In other words, Notaio Rebaudengo drafted false documents for substantial sums of money, imitating where necessary the handwriting of others and providing witnesses whom he recruited in the neighboring taverns.
«Let it be clear, my boy,» Rebaudengo explained, all formality now gone. «What I produce are not forgeries but new copies of genuine documents that have been lost or, by simple oversight, have never been produced, and that could and should have been produced. It would be forgery if I were to draw up a certificate of baptism from which it appeared—forgive the example—that you were the son of a prostitute, born near Odalengo Piccolo,» and he chuckled with amusement at such a shameful idea. «I would never dream of committing such a crime because I am an honorable man. But if you had an enemy, so to speak, who sought to get hold of your inheritance, and you knew he was definitely not the child of your mother or your father but of a whore from Odalengo Piccolo, and that he had conveniently lost his certificate of baptism in order to obtain your inheritance, and if you were to ask me to produce that missing certificate in order to confound that rogue, I would assist, so to speak, the truth by proving what we know to be true, and I would have no remorse.»
«Let it be clear, my boy,» Rebaudengo explained, all formality now gone. «What I produce are not forgeries but new copies of genuine documents that have been lost or, by simple oversight, have never been produced, and that could and should have been produced.»
«Yes, but how would you know the true parentage of this person?»
«You would have told me yourself! You know the facts perfectly well.»
«And you would trust me?»
«I always trust my clients, because I serve only honorable people.»
«But if by chance the client had lied to you?»
«Then it is he who has sinned, not me. If I had to start worrying whether the client might be lying, I would no longer be in this profession, which is based on trust.»
Simone was not entirely convinced that Rebaudengo’s profession would have been regarded by others as honest, but from the moment of his initiation into the secrets of the office, he became party to the forgeries, quickly overtaking his master and discovering that he himself had remarkable handwriting skills.
The notary, almost by way of apology for what he had said—or perhaps having identified his assistant’s weak point—occasionally invited Simonino to such lavish restaurants as Il Cambio (frequented by Cavour himself), initiating him into the mysteries of finanziera, a symphony of cockscombs, sweetbreads, brains and veal testicles, fillet of beef, ceps, half a glass of Marsala wine, flour, salt, olive
