by Umberto Eco
"I don’t know, it came to me. But tell me about her. What was her name?"
"Lila, Lila Saba."
Nice name. I let it melt in my mouth like honey. "Lila. Nice. And so, how did it happen?"
"In the third year of high school, we were still pimply boys in knickerbockers. The girls our age, sixteen or so, were already women, and they wouldn’t even look at us. They would rather flirt with the college students who came to wait for them by the gate. You saw her once and were smitten. A Dante and Beatrice kind of thing, and I’m not just saying that, because that was the year they made us study La Vita Nuova and clear cool sweet waters, and those were the only things you learned by heart, because they were about you. In short, you were thunderstruck. You spent a week walking around in a daze with a lump in your throat, not touching food, to the point where your parents thought you were ill. Then you wanted to find out what her name was, but you didn’t dare ask around for fear that everyone would notice how you felt. Fortunately Ninetta Foppa was in your class, a nice, squirrel-faced girl who lived near you, and you had played together since you were kids. So when you ran into her on the stairs, after chatting about other things, you asked her the name of the girl you had seen her with the day before. Then at least you knew her name."
"Then what?"
"I’m telling you, you turned into a zombie. And since you were quite religious at that time, you went to see your spiritual director, Don Renato, one of those priests who rode around on a moped wearing a beret, who everyone said was broad-minded. He even allowed you to read the books in the Index, since it was important to exercise one’s critical faculties. I wouldn’t have had the guts to go tell something like that to a priest, but you just had to tell someone. You know, you were like that guy in the joke who gets shipwrecked on a desert island, alone with the most beautiful and famous actress in the world, and the inevitable happens, but the guy still isn’t happy and can’t be content until he persuades her to dress up as a man and to draw on a mustache with charred cork, and then he takes her by the arm and says, ‘Gustavo, you’ll never guess who I laid’…"
"Don’t be vulgar, this is a serious matter for me. What did Don Renato say?"
"What do you expect a priest to say, even a broad-minded one? That your feeling was noble and beautiful and natural, but that you shouldn’t spoil it by transforming it into a physical relationship, because it was important to remain pure until marriage, and therefore you should keep it secret in the depths of your heart."
"And me?"
"And you, like a pea-brain, you kept it secret in the depths of your heart. In my opinion, it was partly because you had an insane fear of approaching her. But the depths of your heart weren’t enough, so you came and told me everything, and I even had to be your accomplice."
"Why, if I never approached her?"
"The situation was that you lived right behind the school. When you got out all you had to do was turn the corner and you were home. The girls, one of the principal’s rules, were let out after the boys. So there was no way you could ever see her, unless you planted yourself like dumb-ass in front of the high school steps. Basically, both us and the girls had to cross the grounds, which let out into a square, Largo Minghetti, and from there we all went our separate ways. She lived right on Largo Minghetti. So you would come out, pretend to accompany me to the edge of the grounds, all the while waiting for the girls to come out, then you would go back and pass her as she was coming down the stairs with her friends. You would pass her, look at her, and that’s it. Every damn day."
"And I was satisfied."
"Oh no you weren’t. Then you began to get up to all kinds of mischief. You got involved with charity drives so the principal would let you go from class to class selling tickets of some kind, and in her class you would somehow contrive to spend an extra half-minute at her desk, perhaps trying to find the right change. You managed to bring on a toothache, because your parents’ dentist was also on Largo Minghetti and his windows faced the balcony of her house. You would complain of terrible pains, and the dentist wouldn’t know what else to do, so just to be safe he’d start drilling. You got yourself drilled a bunch of times for nothing, but you would arrive a half-hour early so you could stay in the waiting room and peep out the window at her balcony. Of course, did she ever come out-not once. One evening it was snowing and a group of us went to the cinema, also on Largo Minghetti, and you started a snowball fight and started screaming like a wild man, we thought you were drunk. You were hoping she would hear the ruckus and come to the window, and just think what a fine figure you’d have cut. Some old hag came to the window instead, shouted that she was calling the police. And then, your stroke of genius. You organized the revue, the extravaganza, the high school’s big show. You risked failing your exams that year because you were thinking of nothing but the revue, the script, the musical numbers, the stage design. And finally the great occasion: three shows so that the entire school, families included, could come to the main hall and see the greatest show on earth. She came two nights in a row. The pièce de résistance was Signora Marini. Signora Marini was the natural sciences teacher, skinny as a rail, flat as a board, kept her hair in a bun and always wore big tortoiseshell glasses and a black smock. You were as skinny as she was, and it was easy for you to dress up as her. In profile, you were her spitting image. As soon as you walked out on stage, they started clapping like Caruso never heard. Now, during class Signora Marini was always taking cough drops out of her handbag and she’d slide them from one cheek to the other for half an hour. When you opened your handbag, you pretended to put a lozenge in your mouth and then you stuck your tongue in your cheek, well, let me tell you, it brought the house down, a single roar that lasted a good five minutes. With a flick of your tongue you had hundreds of people in spasms. You had become a star. But it was clear that what excited you was that she was there and had seen you."
"Didn’t I think at that point that I could make a move?"
"Sure, and your promise to Don Renato?"
"So except when I was selling her tickets, I never spoke to her?"
"A few times. For instance, they used to take the whole school to Asti to see Alfieri’s tragedies, the matinee was just for us, and four of us managed to commandeer a box. You looked for her in the other boxes and in the orchestra, and you saw that she had ended up in overflow seating in the back, where she couldn’t see anything. So during the intermission you contrived to cross her path, said hi, asked her if she liked the play, and when she lamented that she couldn’t see very well, you told her that we had a lovely box with one seat still empty, if she wanted to join us. She did, and she watched the remaining acts leaning forward, while you sat behind her on one of those little sofas. You couldn’t see the stage anymore, but you stared at the back of her neck for two hours. Almost an orgasm."
"And then?"
"And then she thanked you and rejoined her friends. You had been nice and she was thanking you. As I said, they were already women, they didn’t give a crap about us."
"Even though I had been the star of the big show at school?"
"Right, and do you think women fell in love with Jerry Lewis? They thought he was clever, and that’s it."
Okay, Gianni was telling me the banal story of a high school romance. But it was in telling me the rest of the story that he helped me understand something. I had spent my third year of high school in a state of delirium. Then summer vacation came, and I suffered like a dog because I did not know where she was. When she returned in the fall, I continued my silent rituals of adoration (and meanwhile, as I now knew and Gianni did not, I continued to write my poems). It was like being with her day by day, and by night, too, I would guess.
But in the middle of our second year Lila Saba vanished. She left the school and, as I later learned from Ninetta Foppa, the city too, with her whole family. It was a murky affair, even Ninetta knew little about it, just scraps of gossip. Her father was in some trouble, fraudulent bankruptcy or something. He had lef
t everything in the lawyers’ hands, and while waiting for things to get straightened out had taken a job overseas-and things never got straightened out, because the family never came back.
No one knew where they had fetched up, some said Argentina, some Brazil. South America, in a period when for us Lugano was the ultima Thule. Gianni made an effort: it seemed that Lila’s best friend was a certain Sandrina, but this Sandrina, out of loyalty, was not talking. We were sure she was in correspondence with Lila, but she was a tomb-and after all, who were we that she should tell us anything.
I spent the year and a half before graduation constantly on edge- and sad-I was a mess. I thought only about Lila Saba, and where she might be.
Then, Gianni said, I seemed to forget about it completely when I went off to college; between my freshman year and the time I finished my degree I had two girlfriends, and after that I met Paola. Lila should have remained a nice adolescent memory, the sort everyone has. Instead, I had looked for her the rest of my life. I even thought of going to South America, hoping to meet her on the streets of, who knows, Tierra del Fuego or Pernambuco. In a moment of weakness I had confessed to Gianni that in every woman I had an affair with I was always looking for Lila’s face. I wanted to see her again at least once before I died, no matter how she had turned out. You would spoil your memories, Gianni would say. That did not matter, I was unable to leave that account unsettled.
"You spent your life looking for Lila Saba. I used to say it was just an excuse to meet other women. I didn’t take you very seriously. I realized it was serious only in April."
"What happened in April?"
"Yambo, that’s what I don’t want to tell you, because that’s what I told you a few days before your incident. I’m not saying there was any direct connection, but just to be on the safe side let’s drop it, besides, I don’t think it’s a big deal…"
"No, now you have to tell me everything, otherwise my blood pressure will go up. Spit it out."
"Well, I went back home at the beginning of April, to take flowers to the cemetery, as I sometimes do, and because I felt a little nostalgic for our old city. Nothing has changed since we left it, so it makes me feel young to go back. While there I ran into Sandrina, like us she’s pushing sixty, but she hasn’t really changed much. We went for a coffee and talked about the old days. We talked and talked, and I asked her about Lila Saba. Didn’t you know, she said-and how the hell could I have known?-didn’t you know Lila died right after we graduated? Don’t ask how or why, she said, I sent letters to her in Brazil, and her mother sent them back and told me what had happened, imagine, the poor thing, dead at eighteen. And that was it. Basically, even for Sandrina it was ancient history."
For forty years I had been all worked up over a ghost. I had made a clean break with my past at the beginning of college; of all my memories, hers was the only one I had been unable to put behind me, and without knowing it I had been spinning my wheels in a tomb. How poetic. And excruciating.
"But what was Lila Saba like?" I asked, persisting. "At least tell me what she was like."
"What do you want me to say? She was pretty, I liked her, too, and when I’d tell you that you’d act all proud, the way a man gets when someone tells him what a pretty wife he has. She had blond hair almost down to her waist, a face somewhere between angelic and devilish, and when she laughed you could see her two front teeth…"
"There must be some photograph of her around, our class photos!"
"Yambo, the high school, our old high school, burned down in the sixties, walls, desks, files, and all. There’s a new one now, it’s hideous."
"Her friends, Sandrina, someone must have photos…"
"Could be, I’ll check if you want, though I’m not really sure how to go about asking. Beyond that, what can you do? Not even Sandrina after nearly fifty years remembers what city she moved to, said it had some weird name, wasn’t one of the famous ones like Rio-you want to lick your finger and go through every Brazilian phone book looking for Sabas? You might find a thousand. Or maybe the father changed his name when they fled. And say you go there, who will you find? Her parents must be dead, too, by now, or else addlebrained, as they would no doubt be past ninety. You’re going to say, Excuse me I was just passing by and I’d like to see a photo of your daughter Lila?"
"Why not?"
"Come on, why keep chasing after these fantasies? Let the dead bury their dead. You don’t even know what cemetery her headstone’s in. And besides, her name wasn’t even Lila."
"What was her name?"
"Oops, I should have shut up. Sandrina mentioned it to me in April, and I told you right away because it was such an odd coincidence, but I immediately saw that the news hit you harder than it should have. Much too hard, if I may say, because it truly is only a coincidence. But fine, I’ll spit this out too. Lila was a nickname for Sibilla."
A profile I had seen in a French magazine when I was a child, a face I encountered on the school stairs as a boy, and then other faces that perhaps all had some common thread, Paola, Vanna, the pretty Dutchwoman, and so on, all the way to Sibilla, the living one, who is getting married soon, and so I will lose her too. A relay race across the years, a quest for something that had ceased to exist even before I had stopped writing my poems.
I recited:
I am alone, leaning in the fog
against an avenue’s trunk…
And nothing in my heart
except your memory,
pallid and colossal
and lost in the cold lights and far away
from every place among the trees.
This is beautiful because it is not mine. A colossal but pallid memory. Among all the treasures of Solara, not a single photo of Lila Saba. Gianni can call her face to mind as if it were yesterday and I-the only one with the right-cannot.
14. The Hotel of the Three Roses
____________________
Does anything remain for me to do in Solara? It is now clear that the most important episode of my adolescence played out elsewhere, in the city in the late forties, and in Brazil. Some of those places (the house I grew up in, the high school) no longer exist, and the more distant places, where Lila spent the last years of her brief life, may not, either. The last documents that Solara was able to offer me were my poems, which have given me a glimpse of Lila without letting me see her face. Again I find a wall of fog before me.
That was what I thought this morning. I felt I had one foot already out the door, but I wanted to say a last good-bye to the attic. I was convinced there was nothing more for me to find up there, but I was spurred on by an impossible desire to find some final trace.
I went back over those now familiar spaces: here the toys, there the armoires full of books… I noticed that, between the two armoires, one unopened box remained. More novels, including a few classics by Conrad and Zola, along with popular fiction like the adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel by the Baroness Orczy…
There was also an Italian detective novel from the thirties, The Hotel of the Three Roses, by Augusto de Angelis. Once again I had found a book that was telling my story:
Rain fell in long strands, which in the glare of headlights looked like silver. The pervasive, smoky fog stuck its needles in your face. The infinite theory of umbrellas flowed in waves over the sidewalks. Cars in the middle of the road, a few carriages, brimming trams. By six in the evening it was pitch dark, in those early days of December in Milan.
Three women were hurrying along, jerkily, as if in gusts, cutting as best they could through the ranks of pedestrians. All three were dressed in black, in prewar fashion, with little hats of mesh and beads…
And the three were so similar one to the other that, had it not been for the differently colored ribbons-mauve, violet, black-knotted under their chins, passersby would have thought they were hallucinating, certain they were seeing the same person three times over. They turned onto Via Ponte Vetero from Via dell’Orso, and when they came to the end of the
brightly lit sidewalk, all three leapt into the darkness of Piazza del Carmine…
The man, who was following them but seemed reluctant to catch up to them, stopped when they had crossed the piazza, and remained standing in front of the church façade, in the rain…
He looked annoyed. He stared at the small black entryway… He waited, still staring at the small entry to the church. Every so often some black shadow crossed the piazza and disappeared through the doors. The fog thickened. A half-hour passed and more. The man seemed resigned… He had leaned his umbrella against the wall, so it would dry, and he rubbed his hands with a slow, rhythmic motion that accompanied an interior monologue…
He took Via Mercato out of Piazza del Carmine, and then Via Pontaccio, and when he found himself before a large glass-paned door, beyond which appeared an enormous, brightly lit lobby, he opened it and went in. On the glass panes it said in large letters: HOTEL OF THE THREE ROSES…
That was me: in the pervasive fog I had glimpsed three women, Lila, Paola, and Sibilla, who in the haze appeared indistinguishable, and who had suddenly disappeared into the darkness. Pointless to look for them now, especially as the mist was thickening. The solution lay elsewhere, perhaps. Better to turn onto Via Pontaccio, enter the brightly lit lobby of a hotel (but would the lobby not open onto the scene of the crime?). Where was the Hotel of the Three Roses? Everywhere, for me. A rose by any other name.
At the bottom of the box was a layer of newspapers, and beneath the newspapers, two much older tomes, in large format. One was a Bible with Doré engravings, but in such poor condition as to be little more than fodder for street vendors. The other had a binding that was no more than a hundred years old, in half leather, the spine blank and worn, the marbled boards faded. As soon as I opened it, I was fairly sure it was a seventeenth-century volume.
The typesetting and the two columns of text put me on full alert, and I raced at once to the title page: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, amp; Tragedies. Portrait of Shakespeare, printed by Isaac Iaggard…
