Signor Dido

by Alberto Savinio

  What more do those standing behind the compartment window and those waiting on the platform have to say to each other? Nothing. There is now too great a difference between them. More conscious of their own situation, more respectful of modesty, they will even avoid looking at each other.

  The train leaves: all at once the situation is clarified. What matter if those of us in the same compartment don’t know each other? Something unites us that is more profound than kinship itself: we are all passengers on Charon’s ferry.

  It is thus with the eye of an associate that I look at the traveler sitting across from me.

  Can I have sympathy for this man of wood? this man on hinges? Certainly not. But what matter? The bonds that unite us, though unnoticeable to ourselves, are even stronger than love.

  Brother!

  My traveling companion is wearing a new suit. The jacket is perfect. The crease of the trousers is irreproachable. The shoes are new. New is the overcoat, which, before sitting down, the man folded carefully and laid on the luggage rack like a dear corpse. New is the shirt and ironed to perfection. New is the tie and masterfully knotted. New are the pigskin gloves.

  Too new.

  All at once, the reason for this rigid care in dressing is revealed to me.

  My traveling companion, who knows when, who knows how, has lost his compactness, just as Peter Schlemihl, in his time, lost his shadow.2 He is a man of sand. If not for the hard sheath of his clothes, he would pour out all over the floor of the car.

  Nervous quivers run through him. Undressed, he would spray in all directions.

  He will sleep dressed, like a fish boiled in a poacher.

  Or maybe he doesn’t sleep.

  He holds an open book in the candelabra of his hands: Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard.3

  The title of a yellow book.

  We cross a river in a clatter of scrap iron. My traveling companion turns to look. I see him in profile. A deep scar is carved on his right temple.

  I understand.

  A passage from the Menippus comes back to my mind:4

  “Having come to the marsh, we barely managed to pass over, as Charon’s bark was already full. Some with broken legs, some with split skulls, some with other limbs pierced.”

  Le crime de Sylvestre Bonnard is not a yellow book, and yet it was as a yellow book that I read it, in one breath, between midnight and dawn, in that far-off 1912, the year I met Apollinaire.

  How sad memories are!

  Behind the station of Pompeii, an enormous and squalid building: asylum for the children of prisoners.

  In the dining car, the two places in front of me are empty.

  A tiny woman arrives with brief little steps, when we’ve already come to the “main course.” Her skirt at knee level, her legs swathed in white woolen knee stockings. She looks like a chorus girl from the Elisir d’amore.5 She bows to me before sitting down.

  “Spaghetti? Never. Meat? No again . . . An omelette: nothing else. And a glass of seltzer water: quickly!”

  She fishes about in the bottom of a sort of little strongbox that she carries with her. With a thief’s hand she takes out I don’t know what kind of pill. She thinks I haven’t seen her and pops it into her mouth. After it she sends the seltzer water.

  A young girl joins the chorus girl on the seat next to her. Coarse skin. Not a trace of makeup. Yet from this innocent surface oozes I don’t know what nastiness.

  The chorus girl has a Chinese mask for a face. And she gradually goes off into delirium. Rivulets of sweat run down the furrows of her wrinkles.

  She says as if singing:

  “Shut me away in a convent . . . To see no one anymore . . . To think nothing anymore . . .”

  “Just like you!” replies the young girl. “Just like you who wanted to found a convent of nudists!”

  And she laughs with a laugh that turns one to ice.

  Behind my back, the other half of the car is filled with a team of footballers. They are northerners and are going to play in the south.

  In this storm of voices, I don’t manage to fish out any sense.

  It is barely four hours since we left, and our train is already a train of phantoms.

  I go back to the compartment.

  We’re passing through Lucania.

  This young man sitting here by the door is a law student. He said so himself to the gentleman sitting across from him. He is heading for Messina and will have to travel until seven in the evening.

  En voyage sans livres, à la guerre sans musique . . .6

  The young law student has brought no books with him, not even newspapers. Only the train schedule. An enormous, complete schedule.

  He slips his forefinger between the leaves every now and then and reads the page he opens to.

  It is his Bible.

  Calabria.

  Names unknown to my itineraries: Sapri, Capo Bonifati, Cetraro, Fuscaldo . . .

  The train passes through these villages, but remains a stranger to them.

  To put it better: it violates them.

  Twilight.

  A house every now and then. And all of them as if wounded.

  Smoke above the roofs. They’re cooking supper.

  The smoke doesn’t come from a chimney pot: it’s the whole roof that smokes.

  So, in the twilights of Ithaca, the roof smoked above the house of Ulysses.

  After crossing the Strait—a little celebration—the train stops in the station of Messina.

  It is night. One by one I have lost my companions on Charon’s train. The last to get off was the student whose Bible is the train schedule.

  I’m alone in the compartment. Through the open window . . .

  What station are we in? Winter, here in the south, is an unsuitable season.

  Through the open window, a loud, long smacking of kisses reaches me. Relations are meeting relations on the platform.

  The kiss of relations is quite different from the kiss of lovers. It is the symbol of a kiss more than anything. It is like the kiss a general gives to a soldier, after the medal for valor.

  But not here in the south. Here even the kiss between parents and children, even the kiss between brother and brother, even the kiss between relation and relation is a full, substantial kiss.

  A kiss, they think here, would lose its meaning if it were not the effective transmission of that ànemos, that breath, which has given its name to anima, the soul.

  Charon’s train starts on its way again, for me, its last passenger.

  The Night Watchman

  I ARRIVE AT NIGHT. I FIND G. V. WAITING for me at the station. The automobile snakes its way up a rocky road. On reaching the summit, we go through an archway and stop in a courtyard surrounded by high walls.

  Beyond the front door, I find myself in a long and dimly lit corridor. Choir stalls are lined up along the walls. Is it a hotel I’ve come to, or a convent?

  At the end of the corridor, more corridors: one to the left, the other to the right.

  I nod towards the corridor to the left:

  “This way?”

  A certain apprehension has seeped into my question. I realize it from G. V.’s reassuring tone.

  “No, the other.”

  We take the one to the right.

  Who was that figure up there?

  At the end of the corridor to the left, at the head of a grand staircase, I had glimpsed a figure dressed half in black and half in white, upright and perfectly immobile, left hand raised in an oratorical gesture, pallid face framed in extremely black hair and an equally black beard.

  A man or a statue?

  I don’t dare ask G. V.

  And again corridor after corridor.

  At last G. V. opens a door.

  “Your room.”

  The door, dark and massive, closes behind me.

  A dense silence surrounds me, encloses me on all sides: the supreme privilege of luxury hotels.

  So here I am in famous Taormina.

  An
d if in the act of paying the bill any astonishment should make itself seen, it is with full rights that the accounting expert will be able to say to you: “Yes, but between our clients and the world we interpose an ineffable mattress.”

  And that figure up there, at the head of the grand staircase?

  Between nine and midnight, nothing noteworthy. I put myself in order, went to dinner in the dining room, stopped to speak with “the others.”

  At midnight I was back in my room.

  I peeked out the door several times: now a distant noise, now a shadow at the end of the corridor . . .

  When I finally set out for the grand stairway, it was one o’clock.

  I didn’t worry about walking softly: the thick carpets deadened all sound.

  The fault of carpets: you don’t hear footsteps approaching.

  We ran into each other at the turning of a corridor.

  “Sorry!”

  “Sorry!”

  The brim of his hat covered his eyes. The collar of his overcoat half hid his face. And the hotel was overheated.

  I noticed despite these “precautions” that he had a beard.

  It cost me quite an effort not to turn around.

  The voice hit me in the back:

  “Are you a guest at the hotel?”

  “Yes, I arrived this evening. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing . . . I’m the night watchman.”

  He drew his right hand from the pocket of his overcoat and touched the brim of his hat.

  “Good night.”

  The black beard, the resemblance . . .

  “One word!”

  The man turned around.

  “Aren’t you hot in that overcoat? It’s very hot in here.”

  “I also have to go out to the garden, to take a turn around the hotel.”

  Again he made as if to leave.

  “Good night.”

  Could I let him go away? Take my suspicions with him?

  “Tell me . . . Are there many guests?”

  “Let’s see . . . Three English people . . .1 You’ll have seen them in the dining room.”

  Indeed. While I was eating, three people were sitting a short distance from me: a woman and two men.

  “She, they say, is a poetess.”

  I had examined her for a long time from my table. Extremely old, despite the chemical and above all the psychic treatment with which she sought to fend off, as too banal, the accounting of time.

  The effort this lady makes, I had thought, is a problem of style.

  Extremely old and extremely tall, and monumentally pyramidal.

  I had admired her even more when she got up from the table and, slowly, abstractly, went diagonally across the dining room.

  At the top of that enormous bell which moved with no apparent mechanism, the pear-shaped head culminated in a yellowish little cone, under which two silvery discs rounded: the eyes presumably and the contour of their sockets.

  There followed a man who, for his part, had white eyes and purple cheeks: an extremely tall gentleman, flaxen and ageless, his body bent forward by an obvious ankylopoietic spondyloarthritis.

  “Yes,” the night watchman confirmed. “Her brother and a poet himself.”

  Third came a man who was younger but of the same stature, a sort of summary of the first two, and perhaps for that reason devoid of any vital substance of his own.

  “Their secretary,” the night watchman completed. “They live in a castle near London. But it’s cold there now and they’ve come to Taormina . . . Hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That music . . . It’s an American economist. He was a minister under Roosevelt. Now he’s here on his honeymoon.”

  I stood listening: in the end I made out a very distant sizzle of guitars and mandolins.

  “He wants to have a little orchestra outside his room playing Neapolitan songs for him. Sometimes he keeps them all night . . . You understand, when you’ve got the money . . .”

  “In that case, I’d pay them not to play . . . Is that all your guests?”

  “There’s also an old Danish gentleman, but I don’t know who he might be . . . The season really begins later, in January, and goes till the end of April.”

  The night watchman’s gaze withdrew into itself and sank into memories.

  “The season . . . Who knows if the real season will ever come back again? . . . This is a sacred place. No one has the privilege of enjoying sacred places today . . . These three English people? Creatures outside time. Looking at them, you understand the present politics of England . . . This economist is also outside time, though he’s not English but American. An old man, and he goes on a honeymoon . . . And this surrounding himself with Neapolitan songs . . . Posthumous revenge on Mussolini . . . And he probably doesn’t notice it himself . . . The last season in this divine place, in the whole geography of divine places, was in the time of the Kaiser. Guglielmone came up here once:2 he discovered Taormina. That dangerous madman made a discovery every once in a while: now the yellow peril, now Ruggero Leoncavallo, now Taormina . . . Guglielmone started the First World War, which, among so many dead, also brought death to the season of the divine places . . . No, I don’t impute to that poor imbecile the direct responsibility for this death. I mention Guglielmone as one marks a date. Those who, by a not so rare privilege, truly succeeded in overcoming the obligation to work, came up here to live a white life, as the gods once lived on Olympus. Not any more. Now even those who succeed in overcoming the obligation to work remain equally immersed in movement, which seizes, overturns, overthrows, transforms, and do not live a limpid life, a white life, but a life choked with mud. Movement is tragedy. Happiness is to feel no movement anymore and to forget it . . . To forget life . . . Will the season ever come back again to these divine places? . . . Who knows . . . And even if it comes back, the divine places will no longer be here, will no longer be these . . . Tragedy accelerates man’s industry. Gripped by tragedy, men will construct such mechanisms as can take them far from our planet . . . The future divine places will perhaps be on the planet Mars . . .”

  A night watchman who reasons like a modern-day Spengler, an appearance that reminds me more and more of . . .

  “There’s something I’m curious about: this evening, arriving at the hotel, I glimpsed an upright, immobile figure at the head of a grand staircase. Is it a man or a statue?”

  The night watchman looked fixedly at me and began to smile.

  “How could it be a man? . . . It’s a statue. The statue of a saint, a reminder that this is an ex-convent.”

  We said good night.

  I stood behind the door to my room, keeping watch.

  I went out again and down the corridors.

  At the head of the grand staircase I found neither man nor statue: no one at all.

  No Brakes

  IT IS NOON AND SIGNOR DIDO IS STILL in bed. Twelve chimes have rung out from the clock on the writing desk. Twelve golden chimes. This clock, which is a windup clock, Signor Dido calls “the pendulum.” Signor Dido’s mother also called it “the pendulum”: the grand baroness, who returned fifteen years ago, with her vulture’s eyes and her eagle’s hands, to the Unity of All. Ancient errors rooted in the history of families. Errors which, at bottom, contain a profound rightness, a profound truth. How extirpate them now? And why extirpate them? Twelve golden chimes. The Pendulum. The Grand Baroness is no more. Signor Dido himself is old. And the golden voice of the Pendulum is as pure and flawless as ever. It will still be ringing when Signor Dido . . .

  Professore Elvio, Signor Dido’s attendant physician and personal friend, is sitting kitty-corner to Signor Dido’s bedside. Signora Dido is sitting on the edge of the bed, her back englobed around an ample radius.

  The position of a wife.

  In bed, man is in an inferior position. Signor Dido is now in an inferior position, not only because he is in bed, but also because Signora Dido is weighing down the covers, as if squeezing him in a sack.r />
  Signor Dido is unhappy.

  He is unhappy because he is in bed; he is unhappy because Signora Dido is weighing down the covers, as if squeezing him in a sack; he is unhappy because Professore Elvio, his attendant physician and personal friend, is scrutinizing him through lenses rimmed with steel the way an examiner scrutinizes an ill-prepared student.

  Why, when noon has struck, is Signor Dido still in bed?

  The day before, in the late afternoon, Signor Dido attended the opening of a painter friend of his. At nine, a cold supper was prepared in the home of some friends of the painter, who have a villa outside Rome. It was raining; Signor Dido did not know the way.

  In Signor Dido’s automobile, Signora Dido placed herself in the back seat: to Signor Dido’s right sat a woman who knew the way and had offered to act as guide. Wrapped in gray fur, she was a source of fascination.

  They had to get to the Via Portuense, pass in front of the Forlanini, take the road to Fiumicino, and turn right onto a road called dell’Affogalàsino.

  The night was dark; Rome and its periphery were dimly lit.

  Signor Dido was just driving onto the Ponte dell’Industria. He stepped on the brake pedal, but his foot stepped on the accelerator at the same time. The motor gave a great roar.

  Signor Dido was surprised: surprised and worried.

  However, he said with a facetious look: “I’m becoming acromegalic. I’m growing feet like Primo Carnera:1 when I step on the brakes, I step on the accelerator at the same time.” And Signor Dido went off into half-lyrical, half-humorous variations on the theme of acromegalism, because the source of fascination who was sitting beside him on the narrow seat, that opalescent profile, that warmth, that perfume, stimulated his fantasy.

  Signor Dido passed in front of the lights of the Forlanini, reached by ever more squint-eyed streets the road to Fiumicino, turned right onto dell’Affogalàsino, passed through a gate, climbed up the steep and deserted road of a park.

  The cold supper was faithful to the model of cold suppers. Signor Dido ate standing up, in the midst of other standing eaters, holding the plate under his chin like a barber’s basin, taking care not to be bumped, swallowing whole slices of roast beef at the risk of choking himself, because that equilibrist’s position did not allow him the use of a knife.