Verdigris E-Book

Michele Mari

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 286

Beschreibung

A lonely little boy's unlikely friendship with his grandparents' grizzled old groundskeeper leads him down the rabbit hole from a life lived solely in books to a wonderful and terrifying hell of long-buried secrets, shadowy partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, bloodthirsty slugs, and the unquiet dead.

Leseprobe

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First published in English in 2024 by And Other StoriesSheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © 2007 and 2018 Giulio Einaudi editore S.p.A., TorinoOriginally published in Italian as Verderame in 2007Translation copyright © 2024 Brian Robert MooreTranslator’s afterword copyright © 2024 Brian Robert Moore

All rights reserved. The rights of Michele Mari to be identified as the author of this work and of Brian Robert Moore to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505905eBook ISBN: 9781913505912

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Gesche Ipsen; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Series Cover Design: Elisa von Randow, Alles Blau Studio, Brazil, after a concept by And Other Stories;

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and that the translation of this book was partially funded by the support of a grant from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, which is supported by Arts Council England. This work has been translated with the contribution of the Italian Ministry of Culture’ Centre for Books and Reading (CEPELL).

Verdigris

Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more. All its glittering viscosity was left in its wake, for the split instead revealed a dry and compact surface, whose purplish-brown hue made it resemble the sliced end of a miniature bresaola. So, the animal needed to rid itself continuously of its slimy shame in order to maintain an inner purity, and fruit of this noble punishment was the metamorphosis of that foul ejection into splendidly iridescent shards.

Corrugated with parallel and regular grooves, its integument had a reddish color reminiscent of a bolete, a characteristic that distinguished the mollusk in question as a red slug, or rather, a French slug: stubbier and lighter than the local variety, with a silhouette closer to a whale’s than to a serpent’s, and with shorter horns less given to protrusion.

“Blech!” exclaimed the churl, spitting on the tiny cadaver but missing it by a few centimeters. Then he pulled back the spade and slid its blade between two fingers, as if to clean it of a slime that existed only in his mind. “Frensh slug!”—and once again there exploded forth a clot of saliva that, like the preceding gob, no benediction could have transformed into mother-of-pearl. “Cripes, be a nasty slug!” And finally he walked away.

I, too, walked away, only to come back a few hours later to witness the work of the ants, which, having completely covered the two stumps of the slug, sucked out its lifeblood, reducing the remains to a bundle of mummified fibers. I liked to think of those tiny creatures as the crew of the Pequod engaged in carving a cetacean, and from this thought took shape the irresistible image of a mammoth white slug riddled with scars, the slug of vengeance…

Too bad that my country fellow had nothing of Captain Ahab about him. Rather, he was characterized by a kind of formlessness, both in his corpulence, perennially enveloped in the same bluish coverall, and in his face, which was complicated by a scar running from the lashes of his left eye to his lip, by a vast birthmark colored the purplish tint of wine sediment, and by his many warts, whose protuberance was counterbalanced by the chasmic concavity of his smallpox ulcers. Markedly wrecked was his nose, knobby and spongelike as though due to a cirrhotic liver, and covered by a network of little dark veins. Unpleasantly teary were his eyes, with lids almost glued together by resin, apparently from chronic pinkeye: a phenomenon that, at the very least, granted him a pensive and concentrated air, like someone gazing with his mind’s eye at metaphysical distances.

In my head, I called him the verdigris man, because of all his tasks—which included the tending of the vegetable garden and trees, the minimal upkeep of the house, the cutting of the grass, and the farming of chickens and rabbits—for a young boy, the preparing and the spraying of verdigris was the most enchanting. I would see him break up clumps of solid verdigris in a metal bin, and each one of those fragments held the sinister seduction of the colored chalks that proved fatal for Mimì, the “silly girl” from the nursery rhyme. Awful punishments awaited, were I to lay but a finger on one of those fragments; and yet, seeing as he handled them with his bare hands, drawing from them a turquoise that not only tinted his skin but settled permanently under his fingernails, the possibilities were twofold: either the verdigris was not all that dangerous, or he truly was a monster. And it was to this second hypothesis that I ever confidently clung.

Because he loved me, that creature, and to be loved by a monster is the best possible protection from the horrific world. Sure, he besmirched himself with heinous acts such as the killing of slugs or the skinning of rabbits, whose gory pelts he hung on tree branches without any concern for my tender age; but I was intelligent enough to understand that, to a monster, some concessions must be made. My grandfather tried to confound me, rationalizing the slaughter of mollusks with the necessity of preserving the lettuce, and the sacrificing of rabbits with the deliciousness of my grandmother’s stews. But I knew that these were excuses, that the monster killed with pomp and pleasure, and that this alone counted, the barbarous satisfaction he obtained as executioner. Besides, to qualify him as a monster would have sufficed those disgusting gobs of spit, for which my grandfather’s specious dialectic could find no justification.

And then, was there any knowing when he had been born, or where? What he had done before he started working for us? If he had relatives? Had anyone ever entered his home, if a home it was, that unknown space on the other side of a little door of grayish wood? Had anyone ever seen him dressed in anything other than that coverall, the same one throughout the decades? Could anyone say they had ever seen him go grocery shopping, or have goods delivered? And what did he eat? He drank a lot, evidently, but was there a single person in the whole town who could attest to a bottle going through that little door? And, finally, I needed a monster, and this was the deciding factor. Moreover, did he not handle that terrible poison unscathed?

Once broken up in water, the verdigris formed a dense paste, similar to the one confectioners used to twist about at old-time fairs as though fighting with a python. It had to remain in this state for a few days to “breathe,” a verb that said all too much about the life of that thing. To this end, the bin was left dangerously open: I would go again and again into the woodshed to check on that mysterious respiratory activity, and as I contemplated the wondrous turquoise, I tried not to lean over it for fear of toxic exhalations, a fear validated by the little dead insects that bespeckled the color in continually increasing numbers.

When the time came, the man poured the paste into a large gritstone tub, whose presence meant the woodshed was occasionally called the laundry, with a transitivity that, while baffling for outsiders, signified for me the place’s metamorphic and magical nature. Having added a good deal of water into the tub, he “mashed” it, meaning he stirred it with a long stick until the liquid became uniform. “Ye see, Michelín, be like mashin’ p’lenta,” he said; then he spat into the tub and, machinelike, continued to stir. Was it only a habit, or did that spit contain the necessary enzymes for the operation’s success, like one of those secret ingredients on which every talented chef builds his fame? I never found out. Having obtained the desired result, his actions became incredibly quick: he needed to fill the tank before the mixture in the tub could “be breakin’”—that is, just as people mistakenly say in reference to mayonnaise, before the ingredients could separate. Then, after one final and more vigorous rotation of the stick, the artificer took a large copper tank and submerged it until full; he then closed the tank, securing the lid with two levers, and dried and wiped it with two different cloths so that the verdigris, as he had explained to me, wouldn’t ruin the copper’s shine; raising it high in the air, he shook it like the monstrous cocktail shaker of an even more monstrous barman, after which he attached two leather belts for shoulder straps and, like a backpack from the First World War, effectively stuck it to his backside. Thus laden, he hopped two or three times to better position it; then, removing with alacrity a cap screwed onto the lid, he twisted into the top of the tank the nut of a rubber tube, which had a long metallic tip on the opposite end—it, too, made of copper and identical in shape to a pastry syringe, but for the ringlike handle farther down, which recalled the one on a Winchester. At this point, I had already taken a few steps back, because I knew what was about to happen next: with the tube’s syringe pointed into the air, the officiant pulled the ring toward him, causing the verdigris to spurt outward, first reluctantly and in oversized drops, then, at last, as a robust spray. Unrepeatable oaths came from the mouth of that ogre until the spurt was to his liking: whereupon, with all that copper on his back reminding me of the deep-sea divers of the Nautilus, he turned toward me and pretended to spray me, making a “psssss” sound, but a second after that he had already forgotten about me and was fully absorbed in his task.

Two hours later, the entire vineyard was spotted with turquoise splotches, so thick and concentrated as to tint at times an entire leaf or a half-bunch of grapes. “An’ another verd’gris done, so,” grumbled my man as he reentered the woodshed-laundry to wash off his instrument and empty the tub, which retained on its surface a turquoise incrustation I felt it was a crime to remove, but which was, nonetheless, routinely eliminated with a metal spatula and yet more water.

The verdigris! For years, I was convinced that this wondrous name was the natural sum of the grayish copper of the tank and the green of the vineyard; instead, it related only to the copper itself, due to the color it assumes when oxidized or, as I would discover as an adult, when it becomes copper acetate.

Looking at the verdigris-spotted vineyard, I was one day seized by a burning question: how was it possible that the man’s coverall—onto which I had just seen droplets trickle down off the leaves with my own two eyes—had not become over time a composition of stains, rays, galaxies of that same color? Dirt and rabbit blood, yes; rust, motor grease too, lime, plaster; but not verdigris. Of course, verdigris is applied twice a year, whereas he had to tend to the garden, the animals, and the house every day: and yet… and yet at the very least he must have had more than one coverall, something that my mind simply couldn’t accept, since it implied an embarrassing level of frivolity for a being such as him: multiple coveralls, yet all of them identical, just like the shoes of those English lords who have twelve pairs made at a time… And who washed away the verdigris? Did he do it himself, or did some woman in the town?

The answer, as cruel destiny would have it, came not long after, as though the sorrowful facts that merged therein had been conjured by my own questioning.

It was the beginning of August, when the soon-to-ripen grapes required their second coating of verdigris. As usual, my grandparents were shut up in some part of the house. The gate opens, and I see him: he should be cutting across the lawn toward the woodshed, but instead he goes the long way around, hugging the wall behind the fir trees. However, when he comes out into the open in front of the hayloft, he can no longer hide—hide, I mean, the extraordinary novelty of his beige-khaki coverall, that chromatic point which is more precisely hazelnut, and which I’ve never heard described by grandmothers and aunts as anything other than “a nice noisette.” Dressed in that way, he looks like an English soldier, and with that tank on his back he’d make a perfect mine clearer. But soon he realizes I’m there and he turns around.

“Michelín?”

“That’s me.”

“Nothin’ doin’, Michelín.”

“Why?”

“Now I make the verd’gris, righ’?”

“Yes.”

“Then I spray it on ’em grapes, righ’?”

“Right.”

“Righ’ a blast’d thing!”

“Why?”

“Am I t’ be sprayin’ the verd’gris, an’ meself all colored shite?”

“Really, it looks like a nice noisette to me…”

“Noisette me arse! Sure I spray the verd’gris, I do, but ’en? When I be gettin’ home?”

He then explains to me: for two days, he has been desperately looking for his blue coveralls but he can’t remember where he put them. And yet his home is small, you couldn’t hide something in it if you tried… He therefore doesn’t know what to think… Actually, he knows all too well and is terrified at the thought, for it is something that, sooner or later, befell all his ancestors like a curse.

“Michelín, I’m losin’ me mem’ry, so.”

Coupled with a tear welling up in one of his half-closed eyes, this sentence leaves me dumbstruck. He, meanwhile, doesn’t give me time to respond and steals out of view, into the woodshed. For the first time, I don’t follow him, leaving him to prepare the verdigris on his own.

Ancestors… So that man wasn’t simply a natural product of nature, an unwitting drop in the ocean of living matter: instead, he knew an age-old story in which he played a part, his vision of the world not stopping at direct experiences but extending in depth and perspective… On one hand, this idea vexed me, because a monster with a family tree was ridiculous; on the other, it captivated me, because it granted an opportunity to dwell on the concept of hereditary maladies, a very dear concept to me, it being at the intersection of the themes of degeneration, affliction, and curses. Each son more monstrous than his father, but more monstrous than them all was the earliest forefather, capable of infecting all the generations to come… A story biblical and gothic at the same time, Darwinian and Lombrosian: I could say as much even at my young age, since gothic novels had been my very first bread and butter, I had read the Bible as well as On the Origin of Species, and, in terms of Lombroso, my father had sufficiently educated me the time I mustered the courage to ask him why, whenever he met someone he considered an imbecile (in other words, ninety-nine percent of the human race), he’d walk away from the encounter muttering that name, the sound of which brought to my mind the image of a lumbering troll. I had even read Of Mice and Men, immediately bestowing on Lennie the appearance of my rabbit farmer, and you could say that this completed the picture.

So, his hereditary malady was of an amnestic nature, and its discovery, or at least its confession, was linked to his unlocatable blue coveralls. Who could say how many other signs had already appeared to him before he decided to take that leap. Yes, a true leap, because sharing that secret with a young boy was, for that strong-limbed man, clearly tantamount to making a cry for help—no, more: to putting his life in that boy’s hands. I told myself that if he had turned to me, he must truly be alone, although I was also flattered by the idea that he had intuited in me the most fraternal and congenial spirit in the whole town. Was I not perhaps a connoisseur of monsters, willing with every fiber of my being to make friends with them, to understand them, to love them?

The day after that conversation, he appeared once again in his blue coverall: apparently his amnesia hadn’t lasted long. I ran over to congratulate him, but before I even reached him I realized how mistaken I was. He was paler than I had ever seen him, and against that pallor the purple of his birthmark and his web of veins stood out with graphic mercilessness. Most importantly, he didn’t spit right after coming through the gate, a ritual that for years had obligated me to exit at a slant in order to avoid the patch of contaminated grass.

“Michelín,” he said, with the voice of a man on the brink of tears.

“Yes?”

“Michelín—meself, wha’s the name on me?”

I did not want to believe that his malady could have galloped at such a pace.

“Me name, blast it, wha’ the blazes ’m I called?”

“Felice.”

“Felís… me?”

“Yes, Felice.”

“Fancy tha’, an’ I thinkin’ me name were Danilo…”

“And why Danilo, exactly?”

“Oh ’cause o’ ’em posters all o’er, Danilo Goretti an’ his ban’, t’nigh’ at Bress de Béder an’ the morra at Germignaga.”

That near-chameleonlike passivity immediately gave me an idea. We needed to find something—something concrete and objective—that could remind him, when necessary, of a forgotten word or idea. Felice, felicity… but felicity was complex and abstract (if it existed at all). We needed something more obvious and immediate, something that would spark an automatic association through sound too, a play on words… Here, my experience as a boredom-fueled solver of old, yellowed crossword puzzles came to my aid with the most fitting item in the dictionary and in the entire vegetable kingdom: fleece. The “fleece flower,” just one example of the ineradicable knotweed species that plagued horticulturists like my monster more than anything. And so, without really thinking about what I was doing, I ran behind the larch, where there was an enormous quantity of knotweed, picked a stem, and brought it to him.

“Stick this to your wall next to your bed, so that when you wake up and you’ve forgotten your name, you can look at it and be reminded: it’s exactly how you say your own name, if you just remove the ‘e.’”

“A ‘e’…”

“Yes. Fleece, Felís!”

“T’ guess this ’ere dirty weed be any use ye’d be wantin’ a sorc’ress…”

“So you pretend that the fleece is your sorceress. You ask her a question and she’ll answer you. She’ll answer only you. Only for you does her message carry any meaning.”

“A somethin’ jus’ for me, ye says?”

“Exactly, for you and you alone.”

“Cripes—fleeces!”

“In exchange, though, you have to promise me that you’ll stop killing slugs.”

“But they’re Frensh, ’em rott’n buggers o’ slugs.”

“I know, but they’re innocent little creatures all the same.”

“Inn’cent me arse, an’ all the lettuce they’re after eatin’!”

“Lettuce won’t help you, but the fleece will.”

And with this sentence uttered in bad faith, I obtained immunity for all those iridescently slimy gastropods. I obtained it for a week, until one morning, at my grandmother’s request, I went into the garden to pick some chicory. Everywhere, amid the heads of lettuce, languished the halved cadavers of red slugs. Two days earlier there had been a long storm, due to which the little creatures must have come out into the open in droves. But why that mass slaughter? Why so much fury, after our agreement? Some of them had been struck by the spade right where they were, so that along with their bodies, the heads of lettuce on which they crawled had likewise been chopped in two; others displayed imprecise wounds, as though, in his rage, Felice had lost his flawless aim.

I waited for him to show himself, quivering with indignation, but when he did appear he was more indignant than I.

“Bugger off ta hell wi’ yer fleeces!” he said, and he kept on walking toward the woodshed, without adding another word.

“But you promised! The slugs!” I shouted, as I ran after him.

“Ay, a promise… an’ ’f I were forgettin’ abou’ tha’ promise, me lad? Can be forgettin’ ev’rythin’, don’ ye know?” and he guffawed, showing his seven blackened teeth. So, he was even going to make a joke of it!

“You didn’t forget. You promised and you remembered!” I insisted.

“Ay, but tha’ stinkin’ weed were makin’ a cod outa me.”

“Why? You forgot your name again?”

“Know me name, don’ need a plant for tha’! ’Twere the jacks I weren’t findin’ no!”

“The jacks?”

“Woke th’ other day havin’ to take a piss, but a piss the like o’… An’ like I says, am not knowin’ where’s the jacks! Go lookin’ ev’rywhere, an’ I seein’ yer fleece there ’tached to the wall an’ sayin’ help me, an’ takin’ ’way the ‘e’ an’ grabbin’ ’t off the wall an’ puttin’ it back like, but o’ the jacks not a peep out ’f it, an’ I searshin’ an’ searshin’ till I piss meself—blast’d feckin’ filt’!”

“But your toilet isn’t inside, you’ve got your outhouse! How have you managed since?”

He squinted his eyes, smiling with a knowing air: “Went on yeez’s lawn so—piss an’ shite!” and he laughed once more.

“Felice, try to understand: the fleece was for your name; for the bathroom you’ll need something else.”

“Oh blazes, an’ if t’morra I forgeh where the knife be I’m needin’ another whassit for me knife?”

“That’s right, for each thing its own helper.”

I didn’t know, with those words, what road I was setting out on.

The following period inflicted a frightening acceleration in the development of Felice’s malady. Soon enough, not a day would go by without the addition of another mental gap: it was as though the world was, little by little, growing smaller around him, losing pieces of itself, pieces that were things, that were words, places, memories. Sometimes he knew what was being referred to but simply couldn’t remember its name: in this way, lettuce became tender salad, endive bitter salad, and chicory even more bitter salad. Sometimes he managed to hold on to the name but only as a meaningless utterance, and he would ask me what a spade was, or what the meaning was of that “blast it” which was continually forming in his mouth. Other times he retained both thing and word but, as with his toilet, no longer knew how to locate it. In terms of his memories, they were surely disappearing at a devastating rate, because for every erasure that he noticed there must have been many others that, by the very virtue of the memory having vanished, left no sign and inspired no suspicion. Poor Felice! I thought of him as the opposite of Condillac’s statue, as he went from complete individual (albeit a monstrous one) to mere simulacrum of a man, his speech deteriorating just as quickly as his mind. It was clear that the course of his illness was irreversible; but I could help him to make do, and to keep the symptoms hidden from others, above all from my grandfather, who would not have thought twice before firing him as pitilessly as a landowner in a Dickens novel. He, for that matter, clung to me with so much trust that I could not shirk my responsibility—and besides, has there ever been anything more irresistible than a monster who asks you for help?

Thus, in a short span of time, his little hovel, where I had finally been admitted, became filled with memento-signs which, once he’d understood the general apparatus, he turned to for help, and almost always successfully. Almost always: because—and it was a real shame, too—every so often he would lose all recollection of the right pairing despite only a short time having elapsed, and would interrogate a sign that concerned something else entirely. And another curious phenomenon presented itself when, forgetting the sign’s preliminary function but not its meaning, he tended to substitute it directly for what it signified, investing it with all the meaning. As a result, he told me one day that he was called “the fleece man,” whereas another day he informed me, while running to his house, that he had to go “t’ ’em signs”—it took me a little while to understand that what he had in mind were the two black arrow signs that I had drawn, one inside his home and one outside on the railed-in walkway, to point him to the toilet.

Mix-ups of this sort were sooner or later going to arouse my grandfather’s suspicion. The first time was when Felice asked him if he needed to plant more milk: only three days prior, to help him remember the word for lettuce, I had suggested he think of “lactose,” adding that it was not an arbitrary association, since the word “lettuce” came precisely from the milky fluid that oozes out of it when you slice the head. I also remember being surprised on that occasion by how he intuited the vertiginous transitivity that would eventually undermine the foundations of the whole system: “Then unripe figs is la’tose, an’ the bress o’ lasses an’ she-goats an’ pussycats, but ye can’t be thinkin’ always o’ milk, blast it!”

“No, you know how it works by now: for each thing, one other thing… For example, if you’ve forgotten the word for breasts, think of chicken breasts…”

“Ay, an’ for pussycat, think o’ pussy!”

Here he was ready to let out a guffaw; but he stopped just after beginning to grin and, his facial muscles frozen, stood still with a rapt look in his eyes. Once again, he was about to surprise me.

“Or ’s it tha’ ’f I forgeh pussy, I’ve to be thinkin’ o’ pussycat?”

“One or the other, really… Like an alliance between two friends: when one is in need, the other helps.”

“Y’are a quick one, sure. An’ if I forgeh ’t all, pussycat an’ pussy, chicken bress an’ lasses’ bress, wha’ then?”

“Look… I think certain fundamental things are impossible to forget… milk, for example… or that… that other thing that you said…”

“But I’m on’y after forgettin’ me name! An’ tell me there were e’er a thing more ’portant than a fella’s own name!”

“That… that other thing. It seems pretty important to me too.”

“Lis’n ’ere lad, wha’ age’s ye?”

“Thirteen and a half.”

“An’ a’ thirteen t’ be talkin’ so? But d’ye ev’n know wha’ pussy be?”

“No, I mean yes, I’ve heard about it…”

“Ah! Me who knowed it ’s needin’ ye who hasn’t to ’member wha’ it be like!”

“Not what it’s like, because I wouldn’t know how to tell you that; just what it’s called. For that, the image of a pussycat might come in handy.”

“An’ if I were wantin’ to know wha’ ’twere like, insi’ an’ out?”

“Well, then you have to recover your memories, and remember the women you’ve been with, their names… You’re still able to do that, right?”

“Bah! Firs’ lass I made love wi’ were called Marisa…”

“And then?”

“’Member her arse on’y, such a big arse, like, an’ tha’ she was dark-haired. An’ no more.”

“And were there others?”

“Eh, others! Tree or four, wha’ d’ye think now?”

“But, so, what about the… pussy?”

“Oh, a gran’ thing, for ’em tha’ understan’s it… Me? Never understant nothin’.”

“But you must remember something.”

“Dunno… le’ me think… I were there wi’ me prick out… Eh, but can I be sayin’ the like an’ ye jus’ a wee ’un?”

“You can… you must!”

“Ach, fine! I were there, an’ Jen’vieve lyin’ there wi’ her legs op’n’d… her legs op’n’d…”

“And then?”

“An’ then nothin’! Don’t ’member a damn bleedin’ thing for chrissake!”

“So I guessed it, when I said the pussycat would come in handy…”

“Guessed it, guessed it—happy? An’ wha’ could a fella be doin’ wi’ pussy now, anyway… Meself’s too ould, an’ yerself, y’are too young.”

We spun around in sterile discussions such as this one, which had something academic to them. Could things have gone any differently, for that matter, between a young boy with no experience of life and a semiliterate old man? But there was his disease—no, his hereditary curse—and I realized the problem preoccupied him, almost enchanted him. So, at the risk of being a know-it-all, I had no choice but to continue with my maieutic maneuvers.

I started to assign him homework. Every evening, while he watered the garden, an activity that took more than an hour, I tested him. My questions concerned both things he had forgotten, for which I had supplied him with a like number of mental or material mementos, and random other things in order to gauge the progression of his illness. In terms of the first category, I quickly realized that material aids were far more fruitful than mental ones, so much so that I ended up giving him objects of very limited size that he could carry constantly on his person, in the capacious pockets of his coveralls. My tests thus took the form of a haphazard search through those pockets.

“So, what’s the name of this town?”

While holding the hose in his right hand and aiming the water at the lettuce, he dug with his left in side pockets and breast pockets stuffed with objects. He pulled out a little plastic elephant, considered it for a few seconds, but then put it back in its place, dug some more and pulled out a Panini card, looked at me as if awaiting some confirmation, but I shook my head, the player being Paride Tumburus; then he started to panic under the pressure and pulled out three or four objects at a time, while I, in my disapproval, didn’t even shake my head… In the end he found the right object: one of my Mercury toy cars, an American racing model with NASCAR written on the side, and… “Nasca!” he shouted, and in that shout converged his own origins and the future, that town in the Varesotto and the far-off land of opportunity. As for my own name, I had given him a plastic rooster, because when I was little he always used to sing me the song “San Michele Had a Rooster.” This expedient, however, risked disastrous consequences, because on the day he decided to kill our rooster, he went to my grandfather and announced that he had murdered me. “I done in Michelín,” he told him, his hands dripping with blood—since, generally speaking, women break the necks of chickens while men decapitate them—and luckily my grandfather had already become a bit deaf and absentminded due to his age, because otherwise I don’t know what might have happened.

In any event, unfortunate setbacks such as these emerged continuously. One day I saw him arrive looking puffed up, as though his clothes had been stuffed with straw or pumped full of compressed air, his pockets stretched to the point that they appeared a lighter blue than the rest of his coverall.

“What did you do?”

“Heehee… shhh… don’ go tellin’ nobody, but I be full o’ women,” and as he said this, onto the grass he emptied large tufts of what looked like cat fur, which he had crammed into his pockets like the pubic hair of so many odalisques; and—a fact that moved and disturbed me at the same time—in the middle of one of those tufts was my little plastic rooster, because “wi’ all ’em women, I were wantin’ me Michelín t’ ’ave some o’ the fun.”

Gripped by this fever, he tended to invest any given thing with other meanings, as if the world, which until recently had been shrinking all around him, had started to expand again: a medieval man in his symbolism, an ancient man in his pan-symbolism, he was growing before my very eyes, a living demonstration of how much greater nature is than history. I realized this when he came to inspect our roof, which since time immemorial had leaked whenever it rained. To reach the attic crawlspace, he had to go up two flights of stairs, and there was not a single thing, during our ascent, that did not speak to him of something else.

“The step,” he began, placing his boot on the first stone step, “be real useful, see, ’cause it tells ye t’ be takin’ another step after: else ye’d be rollin’ down the like ’f a sausage.”

“I suppose so…” I replied, feeling incredibly stupid.

On the wall along the first flight of stairs were hung prints depicting mythological subjects. Walking past them, without even looking, he stated, “Paintin’s is useful to the rich for to remin’ ’em they’re rich.” Struck by this observation halfway between Lukács and Adorno, I was soon called back downward by the combined similitude that followed: “Be the same for beards, ’cause in the mornin’ y’are needin’ somethin’ tha’ tells ye if y’are a fella or a lass.” Along the second flight were two other prints covered in water stains. “Sure the wet remin’s us wha’ we’s came for: the roof!” he exclaimed, quite satisfied with himself; but on the next landing he was left speechless in front of a drying rack that had been brought inside due to the bad weather. I motioned to him to keep going, but he blocked me with his arm: evidently he didn’t want to leave anything without its own special gloss. Actually, from his behavior it seemed that coming to our house that day was a kind of exam for him.