They entered a haberdashery under the portico of the Sisters of Charity of the Immaculate Conception. Having dipped her hand into a cardboard box, she began picking colours. ‘This ribbon,’ she said, showing the pseudo-Polish woman a pink ribbon, ‘has such a delicate, tender colour.’ Everything that passed through her hands appeared inimitable to her – or at least she managed to give it enough importance to make it inimitable. ‘I would just pin one to my dress, and go around dressed up like a gypsy: with bows, ribbons and flowers everywhere.’
‘If you come next week,’ the shopkeeper said, ‘I’ll have some new stock in – and,’ she added, leaning over the counter, ‘very refined stuff at that!’
‘Really?’ Mrs Boncompagni asked, slipping two spools and a ribbon into her purse.
The boulevard was crowded owing to the ritualistic pre-prandial walk. Mrs Boncompagni observed the interminable and joyful procession with curiosity, as though she’s released all those people from cardboard boxes. The electric lights severed the sun’s severe stream of light during sunset, as if a long series of candles had been lit.
‘When will you learn to run errands calmly?’ she asked her friend, ‘New things scare you like thunder and lightning!’
Antonio, absent-minded, walked behind the two ladies, carrying his school-bag. A hoarse klaxon beeped at them aggressively as they crossed a tiny street.
‘The presence of objects brings us comfort,’ Mrs Boncompagni said, taking the pseudo-Polish woman by the arm, ‘their variety serves to distract us. Fashion is my private theatre, a goddess who is a sister to dreams.’
‘Mrs Boncompagni,’ the dressmaker exclaimed, on seeing her walk back in. Her shop occupied two window-spaces under that portico, not far from the Piazza Ammiraglio Cagni. ‘What a miracle…’
Mrs Boncompagni smiled – the shopkeepers’ punctual exaggerations brought these quotidian scenes to vivid life, like festive music. Yet it was useless to try and encourage Elena to participate – the present was hopelessly inert, and the theatre was the exclusive prerogative of the past. This was why she still hadn’t gotten married, despite being close to forty! She wasn’t pretty, with that wan, pallid skin, and those features (which didn’t leave a lasting impression on anyone), despite her being both delicate and sensible. ‘She could make a man happy,’ Mrs Boncompagni would say, ‘if only they found an appropriate place to meet, between the past and the present, between great models and quotidian banality.’
Centuries experienced as intensely as her own personal vicissitudes had made Elena’s gaze weary, like that of the old.
‘You know,’ she said, in order to soften her friend’s discomfort in the face of the shopkeepers’ verbal excesses (the dressmaker had disappeared in the back of the store), ‘Antonio came running in yesterday, and he slammed the door so loudly that Attilio, the orderly, and Margherita and I ran over to see what had happened. Just in time to catch Antonio’s triumphal cry as he returned from his walk with you in the municipal garden. A royal bill to settle with history, fabulous sums! My dear Elena, my beautiful princess – that boy loves you dearly and it makes me happy.’
Mrs Boncompagni selected a black hat. She looked at her friend in the mirror. ‘I won’t have Antonio looking to the party secretary, or the prefect or the Podestà as role models,’ she whispered to the pseudo-Polish woman.
Standing under the hat’s brim, the two ladies appeared to have entered an imaginary scene. The dressmaker’s movements and those of the store clerk constituted a kind of counterpoint, a director’s ingenious trick to force the spectator’s attention to focus on those two heads. ‘Tell him all about the Polish King, my dear, so that Fascism will strike him as utterly odious: How a Balilla or a Piccola Italianaxvi can contribute to the victory of the Axis powers!’
The dressmaker emptied all the white tissue paper out of a purple hat. ‘This is the secret: novelty.’
Mrs Boncompagni forgot her disdain and the problems of Antonio’s education.
She devoted herself to her sitting room’s decoration with tender care: ‘Did you notice that I lowered the wall mirror a little?’ she asked her friend. Everything had been moved, meekly: a wall mirror had been heightened or lowered, the carpets laid out lengthwise or crosswise, and the round coffee table had been moved from the right to the left. ‘Today, the teacher gave them a lesson on Julius Caesar, a pompous and useless icon. Antonio was bored. I want to read Shakespeare to him. He must see Caesar through the eyes of Brutus, or Mark Anthony, and not Mussolini’s, or those of his teacher.’
Having come to a stop in the middle of the sitting room, she leaned against a mahogany Liberty console, and as though she’d just approached a rostrum, she began to proclaim the following lines, while the pseudo-Polish woman, doubling up as the Roman public, sipped from the cup of tea Margherita had offered her:
‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious… But it’s impossible,’xvii the orator exclaimed, having grown angry. Antonio had, like a latecomer to the theatre, furtively snuck into the room and was now sitting on a satin armchair. Who knew that filth had clung to the boy’s shorts throughout the day’s adventures, and now he was sitting on satin? The boy’s mother grabbed him by the ear and held the prisoner in custody.
‘I hate your sitting room!’ Antonio shouted, exasperatedly, ‘I hate it, I hate it!’
He then proceeded to swear, convulsively, that he was going to cut up the satin chair with a razor blade, shoot at the canvases and the chandeliers.
Antonio only needed the pseudo-Polish woman’s presence to convince himself that everything the others said was debatable and ultimately of secondary importance – or so his mother believed. Elena’s past was a voyage he intended to undertake in order to bring back startling discoveries. Uncovering the stories of the Polish King was like discovering the New Indies, or rather his New Indies, a new way to embrace the world. The pseudo-Polish woman had also imprudently spoken to him of a suicidal Countess: from that day on, Antonio shadowed her every step, sort of like descending into the netherworld, a dangerous path for a ten year old boy.
The one responsible for saddling Elena Guastalla with that nickname had been Lieutenant Colonel Boncompagni; Elena hailed from very aristocratic stock, even though many of the links in the chain that bound her to the old Polish King were, according to the easy-going Boncompagni’s judgement, rather vague.’
‘Exaggerations, all exaggerations…’ he would say whenever his wife reminded him of her friend’s illustrious ancestry.
Antonio loved the solemn and profound shadow Elena cast; in fact, Elena’s past became the basis of his apprenticeship, where, as Mrs Boncompagni was fond of saying, he would learn to make sense of life. This explained his bizarre behaviour on occasion, as the present proved too insignificant for him.
The Boncompagni family was assembled in the sitting room, on the ground floor. The radio was on. The mother held a piece of embroidery in her hand. ‘Antonio, lower the volume, daddy is reading.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ the Lieutenant Colonel said, raising his eyes from his newspaper, ‘you really do look after everyone.’
The ostentatiousness of petit bourgeois courtesy was one of the Lieutenant Colonel’s pastimes. Making an equally ostentatious display of loyalty to the Duce was another. ‘One must play the game,’ he used to say.
Mrs Boncompagni sighed. ‘Isn’t it time to go to bed, Antonio?’
The boy peevishly stood up and ran off to his bedroom, on the first floor. His mother followed him, waited until he had undressed, tucked him under his covers, and switched off the light. The teacher had said that he was apathetic at school. ‘I think,’ she had petulantly added, ‘that his indifference will gravely hinder his development.’
The remark had left her indignant: did that woman wish to write the novel of Antonio’s life? Was this what they called educating?
‘It’s useless for us to try and weig
h in on his education by trying to interest him in Tarzan’s adventures, Balilla gatherings or Meccano toys,’ she said, entering her bedroom. They inhabited the west wing of the villa, which had two turrets on either side and was ugly, isolated and intimate.
‘Meaning,’ the Lieutenant Colonel replied with a bow, ‘that I should no longer take an interest in his education.’
He didn’t seem that surprised by the sudden way she’d begun the evening’s conversation.
‘Instead of enriching those boys’ lives, that teacher just flattens it with her explanations. But what does it matter,’ she exclaimed, irritated, ‘if Antonio knows that London is the capital of Great Britain? The multitude of people in possession of that same fact is so stupid and suffocating and…’
‘Darling, aren’t you in favour of universal suffrage?’
He had removed his shirt and was now in his undershirt. He still looked svelte and elegant despite his forty years. He had started to put on a belly, but it was a kind of addition that didn’t impair his figure. He had regular features and he wore his hair in a lateral parting.
‘Antonio is restless,’ Mrs Boncompagni said, ‘he can mysteriously intuit that our vision of the world does not include him entirely, but rather maims and saddens him, asks him to make fatal sacrifices. Expelled, is what I call a man denied the protection of the law,xviii Kleist warned, he who never came to terms with anything.’
Evening conversation was a mandatory rite.
‘Why are you saying all this?’
‘When Antonio will grow into himself, he will become an outlaw. I’ve always had a serene relationship with reality. But the light of Antonio’s life is different, and a mother is rarely wrong when it comes to her intuitions and premonitions.’
‘Whereas I think you want to make Antonio into your doppelgänger and thus use him in a dialectic manner, a task I failed you in. When all is said and done, what you’re doing to him is very selfish: you task Antonio with living out the difficulties and hardships you’ve barely experienced thanks to the excellent, serene education your own family gave you.’
The Lieutenant Colonel had always loved parroting people, imitating with admiration and irony. On occasion, Mussolini himself would become the object of his pantomime, or, at other times, like in this instance, he would mimic his wife. He never expressed what he was really thinking, or rather the only way he could express it was to reflect what the other had said in his own manner, examining their turns of phrase, their tone. It was a constant, playful parody. Maybe he simply had nothing to say, like a mirror lacks any image or colour of its own on its reflective surface.
‘Elena hasn’t found her footing in society, and her independence – which is the subject of so much of your irony – immediately captured Antonio’s imagination.’
‘All this is very ingenious, darling, very ingenious indeed…’ the Lieutenant Colonel said, ‘When all’s said and done, you’re the little boy. I think you’ll wind up turning him into a writer, this is what I think the Polish woman’s throne alludes to. My Lord, why have you inflicted this new punishment on me?’
The Lieutenant Colonel lingered self-contentedly in front of the mirror. He loved to admire his own body, it was a way, he said, to plant his feet firmly on earth again – and looking at his body he felt that it was restless to receive his orders, loyal as a dog, he added sarcastically, and as imperious as a demon, he added yet again, feeling happy. Whenever one of his comrades mocked him over his vanity, he would gravely reply that sports were nothing but a rather ingenious and completely hypocritical variation of his so-called vanity, since it involved the pleasure of looking after one’s body while out under the sun.
‘Whenever you speak,’ he said, ‘I always feel as though you’ve got a tail, your movements are so sublime and theatrical. At other times, what can I say – I experience a maddening desire for lightness. Now the idea of having not one but two such creatures moving around with their tails in this house frightens me to the core.’
‘For that matter, the boy already has a very long tail. The Polish King, the suicidal Countess, the officer who died at the battle of Auerstedt,xix these are all keys, links in this golden chain.’
‘But you’re the one who laughs at her, calling her a dancing bear and a talking dog!’
The Lieutenant Colonel was irked. He put on his pyjamas.
‘He’s very proud of her, and very jealous, too,’ his wife pointed out, ‘Elena is his most prized possession: he torments her like a prisoner, but she’s a hostage of the highest value. Today he came back from their walk and very excitedly told me the pseudo-Polish woman’s secrets. He was acting so spasmodic as he described it to me, that it scared me.’
‘It didn’t scare you, darling,’ the Lieutenant Colonel corrected her, ‘in fact, you enjoyed it.’ He opened the bathroom door.
‘You’ll only bring him to the brink of despair…’ the Lieutenant Colonel exclaimed, coming back into the bedroom, refreshed by the shower. His movements were exaggerated, it was his way of stretching before bed. The excited confusion of his movements brought his utterances into sharp relief. ‘You’re wearing him out. Mind you, I don’t want to concern myself with the boy’s education, believing I would simply be wasting my efforts, and I wouldn’t be more likely to succeed than his teacher. Yet when one suffers from grandeur, when the tail is ostentatious, when every gesture becomes a ritual or symbol: life is curtailed until it’s as brief as a libretto. One must pay up by the end of the third – at most, fifth – act!’
‘We can’t seriously consider letting him become a balilla!’ Mrs Boncompagni exclaimed, dismayed.
‘The ancien régime is as responsible for fascism as are you romantics,’ the Lieutenant Colonel retorted, ‘fascism may well be protecting feudal interests, but its strengths lie rooted in romantic myths, and the degeneration of romanticism is an excellent mask for the safeguarding of feudal interests.’
‘You’re quite eloquent this evening, ’ Mrs Boncompagni said.
‘Antonio isn’t very interested in his parents, and as you put it, he rejects the order we embody, just like he rejects school; that’s something, especially for his age. Especially since he has also displayed a febrile fascination for certain facts, complete devotion to a royal spectre, he’s trying to find a new scale of values and he disdains the destiny of the balillas. Not bad, not bad: I see the complete makings for a total ruin. My only hope, darling, is that you’re wrong, that Antonio will suffer uselessly for some time and then it’ll all be over. In fact, one day he’ll leave the pseudo-Polish woman behind the way one shuts a book, he’ll take a few steps, and then having reached the other side of the garden, he’ll go and play football with boys his own age. It’ll be like it was in primitive societies, when the young man underwent the initiation rite and left female society to enter the world of men. Of course, we don’t live in a warrior society these days, when eight million bayonets are nothing but a muscular prompt to be deployed at will by the theatre directors of politics, thus the world of men is the world of sports.’
In order to better illustrate what he was saying, he opened and shut his arms in a sudden jerk, standing on the tip of his toes.
II
‘You have such a beautiful home!’ said the Baroness Sanjust of Teulada, the Podestà’s wife, once she’d stepped inside Mrs Boncompagni’s sitting room. She had brought her son along with her. ‘Go play with the lady’s son. And remember,’ she added menacingly with her finger, ‘behave!’
Antonio and the boy went out. The Baroness was visiting the Boncompagni house for the first time. The sitting room had been subjected to maniacal rearrangements for the occasion: it looked fake.
As soon as they had gone outside, Antonio grabbed his accomplice by the hand and dragged him to the bottom of the stairs. There was nothing to fear from Margherita and the orderly, who were busy in the kitchen.
Antonio pushed the boy past the door, and standing overbearingly close to him, as though wanting to ch
oke him, he laid out his plan. His guest was frightened. ‘Shut up!’ Antonio exclaimed, ‘You stay here. When my mom leaves to make the tea, I’ll whistle. You’ll flip the electric switch off. Careful: if you do it wrong you’ll burn your hand. This is how you do it. Got it? Now go!’ he exclaimed, holding the swinging door against his chest.
Margherita and the orderly were going back and forth between the kitchen and the buffet set up in the sitting room, which had been designed to resemble the imaginative geometric designs of carpets: here were some cakes shining like medallions, here were some tarts lined up in long rows. There was such an obvious ceremonial detachment in the manner those two carried one dish after another back and forth, while the ladies, sunk in their armchairs, lingered oblivious to it all, so much so that the Podestà’s wife made a graceful gesture of wonderment and asked: ‘Who’s all this for?’ The scene appeared to have been reduced to one of those delicate porcelain depictions popular in the eighteenth century.
The mother, the orderly and Margherita were busy in the kitchen, standing over boiling water as the steam passed from receptacle to receptacle. By the time Antonio barely whistled, more cautiously than a swallow, leading the other boy, broken into submission through fear, to pull the power. The house was cast into pitch black, as was the sitting room when Antonio burst into it, like an impetuous knight, the ladies imprisoned in their armchairs, completely at his mercy.
The spectacle that unfolded, after the orderly managed to find the oblivious little prince in his hiding place and switched the lights back on, was truly frightening. Meringues had been squashed, cakes vandalised, flowers trampled on. The ladies looked bewildered. When the sitting room had been plunged into the dark, neither of them had noticed the knight’s intrusion.
The mother commanded the orderly and the maid to clear the table. She additionally had the orderly go fetch some crackers and biscuits from the patisserie on Piazza Cagni.
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