He’s wearing a swimsuit this time, and there’s not so much as a mosquito bite on his chest.
“Come on, Ottavio, shall we start the day with a little freestyle? Two laps around the island, and I’ll give you a half-lap headstart.”
Ottavio begs off with the excuse that lakewater gives him a rash and stays in to think. So he thinks and wanders around the villa. He rummages through the drawers and the armoires and looks under the carpets, in search of Uncle Lamberto’s secret medicine. He even wanders into the music room, where he hears a dulcet voice emerge from the tail of the concert grand piano:
“Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto …”
Ottavio doesn’t believe in ghosts or talking pianos, so he inspects the instrument and finally discovers a hidden device emitting a tiny voice that tirelessly repeats:
“Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto …”
What has happened is this: the baron, before leaving the villa, pushed the button to make sure that work was proceeding vigorously in the loft as per terms of contract, but forgot to turn it off again. The speaker went on performing its task.
“Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto …”
“Very interesting,” says the young investigator under his breath, “if slightly monotonous. Let’s see where this wire leads us.”
He walks and he walks, and both the wire and the nephew wind up in the attic. There he sees a pretty young woman with red hair and green eyes (with one eye on a comic book) who is reciting, in a clear, distinct voice:
“Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto …”
“Young lady, my name is Ottavio, not Lamberto,” says Ottavio.
“Funny guy,” replies young Armando, as he walks in. “Step aside and let me work. Delfina, it’s my shift now.”
Delfina stands up and stretches her arms. Armando takes her place and begins:
“Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto …”
“Signorina,” says Ottavio, following the young woman into the next room, “why are you called Delfina?”
“My father was a great and powerful king, the king of France. He was a very noble old gentleman, and he wore a wig woven with gold thread. In France, the firstborn son of the king is called the Dauphin.”
“And why is that?”
“Because the king of France is also the king of all the dolphins. When the midwife realized that that the newborn was a girl, not a boy, everyone said: ‘Oh how angry the king will be, how angry the king of France will be.’ In fact, however, my father was delighted and chose to name me Delfina. An excellent decision. And in fact, by virtue of my name, I have always been a first-rate swimmer and diver.”
“I don’t believe a word you’ve said, however charming your delivery.”
“And you were right not to believe me. In fact, I’m not the daughter of the king of France, but of a poor fisherman. One night he sailed out to fish on the Indian Ocean. When he reached open water, he noticed that a dolphin was following in his wake with determination. My father had a crust of bread in his pocket, which he had meant to live on for a great many days and an equal number of nights. He tore the bread in half and offered one of the pieces to the dolphin. It just so happened that the dolphin was no dolphin but the king of England, transformed into a dolphin by a wicked witch and condemned to wander the seven seas until a fisherman should offer to share his last crust of bread with him. The dolphin ate the bread, turned back into the king of England, climbed into my father’s boat, asked him to ferry him to shore, and from there to the station, where he caught a train to go kill the witch.”
“And how did he reward your father?”
“With a beautiful memory. When I came into the world, I was named Delfina in honor of that king of England.”
“That’s another very nice fairytale. But now I’d like you to tell me the truth. Why do you sit there repeating the name of my uncle Lamberto?”
“We don’t know why.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve both lost your minds!”
“All six of us, if we have lost our minds, because there are six of us. It’s our job. They pay us to do it. Plus board, lodging, and all the hard candy we can eat.”
“Strange job.”
“There are stranger jobs than this. I once met a man who worked for thirty years counting other people’s money.”
“He must have been a bank teller. How long have you been doing this work?”
“Eight or nine months.”
“I understand.”
“Then you’re very clever, because I don’t understand a thing. I took the job because the pay was better than other jobs. But to tell the truth, I’m getting tired of it. I have a feeling it’s damaging my health. The other five are also starting to experience minor aches and pains, cramps and sore muscles here and there, nausea in the morning, the occasional dizziness.”
“That must be because you’re shut up inside all day and night.”
“Perhaps. Well, see you later.”
“What do you mean? Where are you going?”
“I’m going to bed. I got up early to start my shift, you know.”
Ottavio wishes he could detain her and find out more. As he walks back out through the first room, he notices that young Armando is drawing in a graph-paper notebook. He’s not drawing, he’s painting. He’s not painting, he’s just coloring every other square black. As he does this, he repeats in a professional voice:
“Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto …”
“Here,” Ottavio muses, “as our forefathers would say, something fishy is going on. And here, unless I miss my guess, is where I’ll find Uncle Lamberto’s secret.”
As he walks downstairs, he bumps into Anselmo the butler.
“Where have you been, Master Ottavio?”
“Up on the roof, to admire the view.”
The butler says nothing, but decides that he would be well advised to keep an eye on young Master Ottavio from now on.
“Is there a boat I could borrow? I need to run a little errand in the town of Orta.”
“In the marina you’ll find three rowboats, three sailboats, and three powerboats.”
“I’ll take a powerboat,” Ottavio declares. “If you fail to give an engine plenty of exercise, it’s liable to rust.”
“Words of wisdom,” says Anselmo, approvingly.
Ottavio speeds across the arm of the lake that separates the island of San Giulio from the town of Orta. He sets out to find a doctor, arranges for a visit, and tells him he has trouble sleeping.
“Have you tried counting sheep?”
“I count one million every night, but I still can’t get to sleep.”
“Have you tried reciting Giosué Carducci’s Piemonte?”
“With disastrous results: the effort involved in remembering one verse after the other only keeps me awake.”
“Try memorizing I Promessi Sposi.”
“Wouldn’t it be more straightforward to just take a good sleeping pill?”
“Excellent idea,” the doctor exclaims. “That hadn’t occurred to me. Let me write you a prescription. What’s your name?”
“Giovanni Pascoli.”
“How odd! There was a poet with that name.”
“That was my grandfather. Poor Grandpa Giovannino.”
Ottavio, in any case, has given the doctor a false name. He plans to slip sleeping pills into the dinners of all six people in the attic.
The early bird, as we know, catches the worm, but if it’s asleep it can neither peck for worms nor repeat “Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto” into a microphone.
Here is Ottavio’s reasoning: “Let’s see what happens if we silence them. If what I think I’ve figured out is true, at the very least, Uncle Lamberto will come down with pneumonia. After that, one thing leads to another …” He goes on with his thinking, young thinker that he is: “If Delfina wasn’t one of them, I could just poison all six at once and blame it on rotten food. But I like that girl, she’s too pretty to die young. Why, I’d even be happy to marry her. But
this is no time for matrimonial musings: the first thing to do is to secure the inheritance.”
And so, in his mind, one plan spills over into the other. With a pocketful of sleeping pills, he heads for the lakeshore, boards the powerboat, and pulls slowly away from the dock. So slowly that he is overtaken by a boatful of Dutch tourists on an educational excursion. They’re going to the island to visit the famous basilica of the saint. Conveying them across the water is Duilio the ferryman, whom everyone calls Charon to show that they’ve read the classics.
The tourists shout something to him in Dutch, laughing merrily. Ottavio takes no offense. Especially because a few minutes later, the boat, having bumped briefly against the wharfside on the island, pulls away as if the dock were uncomfortably hot and comes back toward him. Charon is rowing harder than ever and as they pass, he too shouts out something.
“What did you say?”
“You can’t dock on the island. There are bandits.”
“What bandits?”
“You go right ahead if you’re interested in learning more about them, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Before reaching the dock, Ottavio passes a small fleet of watercraft abandoning the island. On the first boat are six nuns, six unfortunate holy sisters. On the second, third, and fourth boats are several captains of industry with their families. On the fifth boat is a solitary old man with his dog. They all live on the island: the holy sisters all year round, the rest of them only when the weather is nice.
“What’s happening?”
“Turn back! The bandits will never let you land! As you can see, they kicked us off the island.”
Among the fugitives, Ottavio sees neither his Uncle Lamberto, Anselmo, nor the people in the attic …
“I’m going to take a look,” Ottavio decides. And he turns the prow of his powerboat toward the marina. Waiting to greet him is a citizen wearing a mask who displays a submachine gun and says:
“Welcome to the island, sir, we’ve been expecting you. Please moor your boat. As of today, all regattas are canceled.”
“What’s happened,” Ottavio asks, “has war been declared?”
“The island has been occupied, sir. You however are permitted to dock, because you are a member of the family. You will be given further instructions in due time.”
Ottavio complies. Can you really argue with a submachine gun?
THE ENTIRE ISLAND OF SAN GIULIO LOOKS as if it were carefully crafted by hand, like a construction toy. Meter by meter, century after century, taking over one from another, men and other men have shaped the island with their work, their efforts overlapping over the years. There are patches of green, but nature has nothing to do with it: these are the gardens of the villas. There is no rock in sight, only stone, brick, sheets of glass, pillars, and roofs. The whole island is as tightly assembled as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. At night, the different shades of color vanish, the silhouettes melt together, and the island comes to resemble a monument carved from a single block of black stone, standing guard over the somber water. Here and there, a shaft of light shoots out from an invisible window, like a rope stretched out to keep the island anchored to the mainland.
Along the Orta lakefront, people count the lights.
“The lights are on in Baron Lamberto’s villa.”
“Of course, he’s the only one left.”
The reports that bandits have occupied the island have lured thousands of people down to the lakeshore. There are the inhabitants of the town of Orta, emerging from the narrow age-old lanes, from the venerable aristocratic palazzi, or venturing down from the steep mountainsides. There are tourists, who leave their dinners to grow cold on the tables of the hotels. Notable by their absence are the refugees from the island, who have tucked themselves into bed to get over their fright.
At the center of attention are the Dutch tourists and the ferryman Duilio, who were the first to raise the alarm. But the Dutch tourists only speak Dutch and no one can understand a word they are saying. It falls to Charon to answer questions.
“What were they like, what were they like?”
“Who?”
“Why, the bandits, of course.”
“They had masks over their faces.”
“Black masks?”
“Black, dark blue, I don’t know. I was keeping an eye on their weapons.”
“Rifles or submachine guns?”
“Rifles, submachine guns, and revolvers, too. And I even saw two of them setting up a small-bore cannon.”
“How could you tell it was a small-bore cannon?”
“Well, I’m sure I can tell the difference between a small-bore cannon and a polenta pot.”
“Are you sure you can tell one from a half-liter of red wine?”
Duilio turns his back on this impudent questioner to answer a more courteous gentleman, who asks:
“Were there lots of them?”
“Lots and lots.”
“How many, would you say, more or less?”
“More than twenty and less than thirty.”
“Did they speak Italian?”
“Sure. Otherwise, how could I have understood them when they told me that no one could get off the boat and that I had to head back to shore? They spoke Italian.”
“Did they speak it well?”
“Well, I’m no schoolteacher, to give them grades.”
“Oh, that’s rich. Charon: I grade the bandits. B plus, C minus.”
“But not even schoolteachers give grades nowadays.”
“No, what I mean is, maybe they had an accent, you know, like Milanese, Sicilian, English, German …”
“Banditesque …” a humorist breaks in.
Duilio has already described what happened twenty times. Everybody that heard his description has in turn repeated the story twenty times to people who haven’t heard it yet, but there’s always someone else who just got there a minute ago and wants to hear the whole story from the beginning, so that they can repeat it for the others who will show up later on.
The Dutch tourists go on speaking in Dutch, and all around them is a crowd of people, nodding their heads vigorously, even though they don’t understand a word. At a certain point, one fellow turns to a big Dutchman, whom the others address as “Professor,” and asks: “Do you speak English?”
The professor brightens at this question and starts speaking in English, but the fellow who asked the question in the first place takes fright and runs away. Some of the other Dutchmen try saying a few words in German, or in French, and they find citizens of Orta who have worked in Germany, or France, and speak those languages. And so communication is finally established and the tourists are in seventh heaven.
“There was one of them who gave orders in a low voice,” Duilio reports, and all around him others repeat, for those who weren’t paying attention or were too far away: “One of them was giving orders in a low voice.”
That detail seems very important. Maybe that was the leader. Or maybe not. There is plenty to talk over.
Suddenly, a woman changes the topic of discussion by wondering out loud:
“Who knows why they decided to occupy the island of San Giulio, is what I’d like to know.”
At first, the only responses are incoherent mutterings, like:
“Yeah.”
“Go figure.”
“Who can say?”
“Hmmm.”
Then conjectures begin to surface.
“If you ask me, it’s all for the publicity.”
“But publicity for what?”
“I don’t know: toothpaste.”
“What does toothpaste have to do with any of this? It’s the middle of summer.”
“What are you saying? Don’t they advertise ice cream during the winter?”
“Advertisement is the soul of commerce.”
“You don’t think they’re trying to sell the island?”
“This must be one of the mayor’s ideas.”
“I have
nothing to do with this,” shouts the mayor, who overheard. “I would have nothing to do with this sort of buffoonery.”
“So you think this is buffoonery? Where have you ever seen a buffoon with a cannon?”
“Come on! Cannons …”
“That’s what Charon said.”
“Charon said small-bore cannons.”
“Maybe it’s an advertisement for Canon cameras.”
“If you ask me,” states a tall, elegant woman, and everybody listens to her willingly because she has such beautiful eyes, “it might just be a trick by Baron Lamberto to undermine tourism on the island.”
“Sure, maybe he doesn’t like the sound of Dr. Scholl’s clogs.”
“Maybe he’s bothered by the smell of Dutch cheese.”
Laughter.
“Excuse me, Signora. Baron Lamberto is ninety-four years old and absolutely riddled with illnesses. Hard of hearing as he is, even cannon fire wouldn’t bother him. And to be perfectly frank, he’s never caused any trouble.”
“A pleasure to have him as a neighbor.”
“And his butler too, the one with the umbrella.”
“Two excellent neighbors.”
“I mean, they do seem to like their mysteries. All the invisible staff they brought with them …”
“That’s right, they have at least six people working for them, and we’ve never seen one of them on their day off.”
“Always up in the attic, I’ve heard.”
“Look, even now, the lights are on in the attic.”
Everyone turns to look in the same direction.
“To come back to the bandits,” says a Milanese who is staying at the best hotel, “some time ago I heard about a group of abstract painters in Omegna, Verbania, and Domodossola who have issued a manifesto against picture postcards, demanding that all picture postcards be destroyed and threatening to take action.”
“What would they do? Attack the tobacconists’?”
“Build postcard bonfires in the main square?”
“The gentleman means they might have occupied the island as a bargaining chip with the Italian nation: either the government destroys every picture postcard on the Italian peninsula, islands included, or else …”
Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto Page 3
