But that rendezvous up in the Abbey, in her aunt the nun’s little parlor—what was that about? And why were those seven nuns, instead of worrying about her being injured, talking to me as if obsessed about the visit of some Monsignor I didn’t know?
I got an explanation for this mystery as well.
She knew that Monsignor Partanna, Bishop of Richieri, was coming that morning to pay a visit to the elderly sisters of the Great Abbey, as he did each month. For those old nuns, that visit was something of a foretaste of heavenly bliss, so the chance of it being spoiled by that accident was their main concern. She’d asked me to come to the Abbey because she wanted me to speak with the bishop immediately, that very morning.
“Me, talk to the bishop? Why?”
To do something about the plot they were hatching against me before it was too late.
They actually wanted to stop me by declaring that I wasn’t of sound mind. Dida had informed her that they’d already collected and organized all the evidence—from Firbo, from Quantorzo, from her father, from Dida herself—to demonstrate my glaring mental deterioration. Plenty of people were ready to testify to it, even that Turolla guy I’d defended against Firbo and all the rest of the clerks at the bank. Even Marco di Dio, to whom I’d given a house.
“But he’ll lose it,” I couldn’t help but point out to Anna Rosa. “If I’m declared mentally incompetent, the contract donating the house will be declared null and void.”
Anna Rosa burst out laughing in my face at my naiveté. They must have promised Marco di Dio that he wouldn’t lose the house if he did as they asked and testified against me. Besides, he could, in all good conscience, testify.
Unsettled, I looked at Anna Rosa who was laughing. She noticed and began exclaiming: “Oh, yes! Insanity! It’s all insane! Just insane!”
Except that she enjoyed all this—she approved of it, even more so if I really meant to go all the way and dissolve the bank and drive away a woman who’d never been on my side.
“Dida?”
“You don’t believe it?”
“She’s against me now, yes.”
“No, always! Always!”
And she told me that for some time she’s been trying to get my wife to understand that I wasn’t the idiot she thought I was, and during their long arguments, she, Anna Rosa, had taken great pains to hold in check the irritation caused by that woman’s obstinacy in insisting on seeing foolishness in so many of my words and deeds where none actually existed, or even seeing evil intent there, the way only a deliberately hostile mind could possibly see.
I was stunned. All of Anna Rosa’s revelations had suddenly painted a picture of a Dida totally different from my own, and yet, one so equally real that I felt—then more than ever—the full horror of my discovery. A Dida who spoke of me in a way I absolutely never would have imagined she could speak, an enemy of my very flesh. To have all my memories of our shared intimacy so shamefully uprooted and betrayed, that to recognize them I needed to spitefully rise above the ridicule that I hadn’t sensed before and redress a shame that earlier, in private, didn’t seem necessary to feel. It felt like she had treacherously gained my confidence and induced me to strip down, laying myself bare, only to fling the door open, exposing me to the derision of anyone who wanted to come in and see me totally naked and defenseless. And opinions about my family and judgments about my most natural habits, which I never would’ve expected from her. In short, a different Dida—a Dida who truly was my enemy.
And yet, I’m positively certain she wasn’t pretending with her Gengè. With him, she was exactly what she was capable of being—perfectly complete and sincere. But outside the life she could share with him, she became a different woman, the woman it suited her to be, or the one she enjoyed being, or the one she truly felt she was, for Anna Rosa.
But why was I so surprised? Couldn’t I just let her keep her Gengè intact, just the way she’d created him, and still be someone else on my own account?
That’s how it was for me, like everyone else.
I shouldn’t have revealed the secret of my discovery to Anna Rosa. She herself tempted me, by everything she’d told me, so out of the blue, about my wife. And I never would’ve imagined that the revelation would’ve disturbed her so profoundly as it did, to the point of driving her to do something as crazy as she did.
But first I want to talk about my visit with the Monsignor, the visit she’d so urgently encouraged, like it was something that simply couldn’t be put off another moment.
5 ~ The God Inside and the God Outside
Back when I would take my wife’s dog Bibì out for her walk, Richieri’s churches were my cross to bear. Bibì was determined to go in, no matter what.
When I scolded her, she’d sit on her butt, raise one of her front paws and shake it, sneezing, then, with one ear up and one ear down, she’d sit there staring at me as if in disbelief, wondering how it could possibly be that a cute little doggie like her wasn’t allowed to go into a church. No one was around!
“No one? What do you mean, no one, Bibì?” I’d say to her. “There’s the most respectable of all human sentiments in there. You can’t comprehend these things, because you’re lucky enough to be a little dog and not a person. People, you see? They need to build a house even for their feelings. It’s not good enough having them inside, keeping their feelings in their hearts—they also want to see them out there, to touch them, and so they build a house for them.”
Up to then, it had always been sufficient for me to have my feelings about God inside me, my own way. Out of respect for the feelings of others, I’d always kept Bibì from entering churches. But I didn’t go in either. I kept my feelings inside and tried to follow them standing on my own two feet, instead of kneeling in a house that others had built for them.
That sore spot that had felt wounded in me when my wife had laughed, hearing me say that I no longer wanted the people of Richieri to think of me as a loan shark, was God, without a doubt—God inside me who’d felt wounded, God inside me who could no longer tolerate having the people of Richieri consider me a filthy, greedy loan shark.
But if I went to explain that to Quantorzo or Firbo and the other partners in the bank, it would only give them one more thing to prove my insanity.
Instead, what I needed was for the God inside, this God in me that would seem crazy to everyone at this point, to proceed as contritely as he possibly could to visit and request aid and protection from the supremely wise God outside, the one with the house and the unfailingly loyal and zealous servants and all his powers, skillfully and magnificently deployed throughout the world to ensure he was loved and feared.
There was no chance that Firbo or Quantorzo would dare try to call this God crazy.
6 ~ An Inconvenient Bishop
At any rate, I went to the bishop’s palace to see Monsignor Partanna.
The word around Richieri was that powerful prelates in Rome wanted him as bishop, and pulled strings behind the scenes to get him elected. The fact is, that despite heading the diocese for several years, he still hadn’t managed to ingratiate himself or gain anyone’s trust.
In Richieri they were accustomed to the pomp, the cordial, upbeat style, and the abundant munificence of his predecessor, the late His Excellency the Monsignor Vivaldi, and so everyone’s heart sank the first time they saw the skeletal figure of this new bishop walking down from the palace, wrapped in his heavy cloak, his two assistants by his side.
A bishop walking?
Given that the bishop’s palace was perched like a somber fortress above the city, the bishops had always descended in a fine two-horse carriage dressed with red crests and plumes.
During his ordination ceremony however, Monsignor Partanna declared that “bishop” is a job title, not an honorific. Then he proceeded to discharge the servants, cook, coachman, and stable boys, discontinued use of the carriage, and ushered in the most stringent cost-saving measures, despite the fact that the diocese of Richieri was am
ong the richest in Italy. Unlike his predecessor who quite neglected pastoral visits in the diocese, Partanna scrupulously observed them, following the required canonical schedule, overcoming onerous difficulties presented by the poor roads and lack of means of transportation, using rented carriages or even donkeys or mules.
Anna Rosa had also told me that all the nuns of the city’s convents, except for the already decrepit ones at the Great Abbey, hated him for the cruel regulations he enacted against them immediately upon taking office. For example, they could no longer prepare or sell sweets or rosolio liqueurs—those fine honey and marzipan sweets decorated and wrapped in silver cords and those delicious liqueurs with a hint of anise and cinnamon! And no more embroidering, not even altar cloth and holy vestments, only knitting. Finally, they could no longer have a personal confessor, but were all to make use of the communal Father, without distinction. He’d also laid out more onerous rules for the priests of all the churches, basically demanding the most rigid observance of every duty by every ecclesiastic of the church.
A bishop like that isn’t convenient for everyone who wanted to put their feelings for God on display out in the world by building him a house, and by making it grander and more ostentatious to match how urgent their need for heavenly forgiveness was. But for me, he was the best I could hope for. His predecessor, His Excellency the Monsignor Vivaldi, universally well-liked and unfailingly affable, undoubtedly would’ve sought out some way to straighten everything out, simultaneously saving the bank and easing my conscience, satisfying not only me, but Firbo and Quantorzo and everyone else as well.
At the moment, I felt like I could no longer straighten things out, not with myself or anyone else.
7 ~ A Meeting with the Monsignor
Monsignor Partanna received me in the grand hall of the old chancellery of the Bishop’s Palace.
Its odor still lingers in my nostrils, the scent of that hall with its bleak frescoed ceiling so thick with dust you could barely make out a thing. The high, yellow-plastered walls cluttered with old portraits of prelates, likewise grimy with dust, and some moldy as well, hanging here and there with no rhyme or reason, above faded and worm-eaten cabinets and bookcases.
At the far end of the room, two large windows looked out with infinite sadness to an empty, veiled sky, their panes incessantly rattling from the wind which had suddenly whipped up—Richieri’s awful wind that provoked anxiety in every household.
At times it seemed those panes were about to give way to the howling fury of that so-called libeccio wind. My entire meeting with the Monsignor was punctuated by sinister whistling, sharp and vehement, along with long, dismal wailing, frequently distracting me from the Monsignor’s words and making me regret, with a vague dismay unlike any I’d ever felt before, the emptiness of time and life.
I remember that from one of those huge windows, the balcony of an old house across the way was visible. A man suddenly appeared on that balcony. He must have bolted from bed with the crazy notion of experiencing the rapture of flight.
Standing there exposed to the furious wind, his blanket was fluttering around his gaunt body, so bony it was disgusting to look at. It was a red, woolen blanket, draped over his shoulders, held in place by his arms which were stretched out like a cross. And he was laughing, laughing with a sheen of tears in his feverish eyes, as his long reddish locks of hair flew about, like lapping flames.
That apparition so captivated me that I eventually couldn’t help but point it out to the Monsignor, interrupting a very serious sermon on scruples of conscience that he’d been going on about for a while, obviously gratified by his own eloquence. The Monsignor barely turned to look, and with one of those smiles that can perfectly take the place of a sigh, he said:
“Oh, yes. The poor lunatic who lives there.”
His tone was so indifferent, as if he’d long ago become accustomed to seeing him, that I was tempted to shake him up then and there by saying:
“No, actually, the lunatic isn’t over there. He’s right here, Monsignor. I’m the lunatic who wants to fly.” I restrained myself and didn’t say it. In fact, mimicking his air of indifference, I asked: “Isn’t there a danger he’ll jump of the balcony?”
“No, he’s been like that for a number of years,” the Monsignor replied. “Harmless, utterly harmless.”
Spontaneously, without really meaning to, I blurted out: “Like me.”
The Monsignor couldn’t help but give a start. But I instantly displayed such a calm, smiling face that he relaxed again right away. I hastened to explain that I meant I was likewise harmless in the minds of Mr. Firbo and Mr. Quantorzo, my father-in-law and my wife, and basically, everyone who was wanting to have me declared incompetent.
Reassured, the Monsignor resumed his discourse about scruples of conscience, which he felt was the most appropriate in my case, and at any rate, the only one he could assert with the authority and prestige of his spiritual power against the schemes and plots of those enemies of mine.
Could I make him understand that my case wasn’t exactly a case of conscience as he imagined? If I took a shot at making him understand, I’d suddenly become a lunatic in his eyes as well.
The God inside me who wanted the money back from the bank so that I’d no longer be called a usurious loan shark was a God hostile to all buildings. On the other hand, the God to whom I’d come seeking aid and protection was precisely the one who did the building. True, he’d lend a hand to get my money back, provided it would be used to build at least one house for another of the most respectable of human sentiments: charity, in other words.
At the close of our meeting, the Monsignor solemnly asked me if that wasn’t what I wanted.
I had to tell him that it was.
Then he rang an old, tarnished silver bell lacking sonority that had been very timidly sitting on the table. A young cleric appeared, blond and very pallid. The Monsignor told him to summon Don Antonio Sclepis, cathedral canon and director of the College of Oblates, who was waiting in the anteroom. He was exactly the man I needed.
I knew this priest more by reputation than personally. Once my father had sent me to take a letter up to him at the College of Oblates, which stands not far from the Bishop’s Palace, on the highest point of the city. It’s a vast, ancient, square-shaped building, gloomy and completely weather-beaten and time-worn on the outside, but inside, it’s all white, airy, and bright. Poor orphaned and illegitimate boys aged 6 to 19 from all over the province are taken in here and taught various crafts and trades. The discipline is so severe that when the poor Oblates sing matins or vespers to the accompaniment of the organ in the collegiate church, their prayers, heard from below, are as heartbreaking as the moaning of prisoners.
Judging from his appearance, it didn’t seem like Canon Sclepis possessed much power of authority and forceful energy. He was a tall, slender priest, almost diaphanous, as if all the air and light at the elevation where he lived had not only bleached him out but also rarefied him, giving his hands an almost transparent delicacy, while his eyelids were finer than onion skin above pale, almond-shaped eyes. Even his voice was tremulous and faded, and empty smiles formed on his long white lips, where little globs of drool often hung.
Once he’d entered and had been informed by the Monsignor about my scruples of conscience and my intentions, he began talking up a storm, acting as though we were old friends, slapping me on the shoulder, addressing me informally.
“Fine, fine, my son! An immense suffering. I’m quite pleased. Thank God for it. The pain shall be your salvation, my son. We have to be tough on the fools who don’t want to suffer. But you’ve been fortunate to have much to suffer about, considering your father, who, poor fellow, oh… did so much evil! It’ll be your cross to bear, the thought of your father. Your cross to bear! And let me handle the fight with Mr. Firbo and Mr. Quantorzo! They want to have you declared incompetent? I’ll deal with them, don’t worry!”
I left the Bishop’s Palace certain that I woul
d win out against those who wanted to declare me incompetent, but this certainty and its attendant obligations which I’d just agreed to with the bishop and with Sclepis, cast me into a boundless sea of uncertainty as to what was to become of me, now that I’d been stripped of everything and no longer had a position nor a family.
8 ~ Waiting
For the moment all I had left was Anna Rosa, who wanted me to keep her company during her convalescence.
She stayed in bed with her foot all bandaged up, vowing to never get up again if she was going to be left with a permanent limp as her doctors still feared.
The pallor and languor from her prolonged bedrest had infused her with new charm, different from before. The light in her eyes had grown more intense, almost gloomy. She said she couldn’t sleep. The scent of her own thick black hair, dry and slightly curly, suffocated her when it was loose and strewn all over her pillow in the morning. She would’ve gotten it cut, except that the thought of a hairdresser touching her head revolted her. One morning she asked if I might be able to cut it for her. She laughed at my embarrassment when I answered, then pulled the folded edge of the sheet up over her face and stayed like that for a long time, quiet, with her face hidden.
I imagined the curves of her mature, virgin body under the covers. I knew from Dida that Anna had already turned 25. Lying there like that, with her face covered, she surely must have thought that I’d have no choice but to notice the shape of her body under those covers. She was tempting me.
In the dim disorder of the little pinkish room, the silence seemed conscious of the empty wait for a life that the fleeting whims of that peculiar creature would never be able to give rise to or inhabit in any way.
One, No One & 100,000 Page 15
