Keller undid his greatcoat, which he had kept buttoned until now despite the stifling heat in the pigsty. Beneath it, he was wearing a canvas bag over his shoulder. A hunter’s haversack. He unfastened the buckles and took out a plastic bag. It was stuffed full and looked as if it must weigh a good few kilos.
He asked Marlene to hold it. “Little Lissy is spoilt,” he said. “She’s a real princess, doesn’t like the same food as the others.”
From one of the shelves, he took a bowl the size of a basin. Marlene stared in disbelief. The bowl wasn’t made of steel, but of silver. Simon rubbed it with a cloth until it shone in the light of the oil lamp. Then he took the bag from her hands and emptied its contents – a repulsive-looking gloop – into the bowl and carefully stirred it until it became a homogenous mash that reminded Marlene of slightly runny polenta. Finally he rinsed his hands in the pigs’ drinking trough, dried them on his greatcoat and slapped himself on the thigh. Only then did Marlene speak.
“Lissy?” she said. She had instinctively dropped her voice.
“Like the Emperor’s princess,” Keller said cheerfully.
“Sissi?”
“Lissy,” he corrected her as he approached the iron grille with the bowl in his hand. “We say Lissy, not Sissi.”
Marlene had never thought about it, not even when she had seen the film. Yet the Bau’r was right. Sissi was Romy Schneider, all made-up and captured on celluloid. Maybe at the Habsburg court, the real princess, the one who was assassinated, was also called that. But here, in South Tyrol, they spoke dialect. And in dialect, the diminutive “Sissi” was mangled into “Lissy.”
“Lissy,” Marlene repeated.
Keller put the bowl on the ground, took from his canvas bag a steel glove, the kind used by butchers to avoid hurting themselves, and put it on. He opened and closed his fist. Satisfied, he loosened the top button of his shirt, the only piece of white in his clothing, and took from around his neck a thin chain with a key at the end. He inserted it in the lock of the little door and opened it.
The door opened with a squeak (Nibble, nibble, little mouse! Who is nibbling at my house?) that set Marlene’s teeth on edge.
Keller put the bowl with the slop inside the grille and closed the door again. The key disappeared under the shirt, the glove into the haversack and the haversack under the greatcoat.
But he had not finished yet.
From a pocket in his waistcoat, where a gentleman would have kept his watch, he took out a little bell and rang it. The sound was a twin to the jingling that had interrupted their conversation. Keller began to murmur, “Sweet Lissy, little Lissy . . .”
Suddenly, the darkness turned liquid. Marlene felt weak. She staggered backwards until she brushed against the pen with the males, but they did not react. They were silent, their snouts pointed in the direction of the metal grille.
Marlene coughed, but in vain.
“Sweet Lissy . . .”
The light from the oil lamp could no longer hold back the darkness, which spread across the walls, causing them to sway as if they were the curtains in front of a stage.
“. . . Little Lissy.”
The stench of pig became unbearable. Marlene felt trapped. She had to get out of there. She needed air.
“Sweet . . .”
She needed Keller to stop saying those words and ringing that little bell.
“. . . Lissy.”
Feeling dizzy, Marlene leaned all her weight against the pen. If she hadn’t, she would have fallen to the ground.
Keller noticed. He stopped ringing the little bell and looked at her, alarmed.
The walls stopped undulating. The darkness withdrew.
“Are you alright, city girl?”
Marlene swallowed a couple of times. “I’m afraid . . . I’m not feeling well.”
Keller stood up. “I’d have liked you to meet Lissy, but it’ll have to be another time. My princess is shy. She doesn’t like strangers. Let’s go. She won’t eat if we stay.”
Marlene did not need to be asked twice. She clambered up the stairs to the door and threw it open.
The Wehen. The cold. Air.
She turned and saw Keller with the buckets in his right hand.
That was when Marlene’s imagination ran wild.
Once again, the fairy tale overwhelmed reality.
She heard the soft, gentle jingling from the darkness at the far end of the sty. From behind the metal grille.
Keller extinguished the oil lamp. The sizzling of the flame as it went out became a white space between a tick and a tock and Marlene’s imagination transformed reality into something else. It lasted for a second, maybe two. At that moment, she saw something stirring.
In the darkness.
Tick . . .
A fleeting vision out of the corner of her eye, with her mind all over the place from the heat and the stench, as the darkness guillotined the pigsty. It was like during the accident. Marlene’s eyesight grew sharper and she saw (or imagined) every detail.
Lissy.
Black on black. Muzzle more than a metre from the ground. A four-hundred-kilo mass. Powerful loins quivering like bellows. A small tuft of white bristles between the ears. Two blades of pale skin that joined the eyes and the twisted tusks glistening with saliva. A rough grunt through sharp teeth.
And eyes.
Intelligent eyes.
As if Lissy knew. As if she could see through Marlene, all her lies, all her memories, her soul stripped bare.
. . . Tock.
The darkness. The cold. The blizzard.
Reality.
Running while lashed by the Wehen, the staircase with the rickety banister, the warmth of the Stube, Keller talking cheerfully as he warmed one large pot of water on the stove after another until he’d filled the bathtub.
A little leftover coffee to warm her bones.
Keller saying goodbye.
Carnation-scented soap.