HIS NAME, IN ITSELF, will mean close to nothing nowadays to people caught up in very different business from our own, but we’ll give it regardless: Giovanni Bergesio. You’ll find no shortage of Bergesios in Turin, but I doubt that’s the reason his identity has gone unremembered. It’s simply the fate of all the names that have ever opened long lists of the dead, from natural disasters, from floods, from cholera outbreaks, from plagues . . .
Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and that we hoped was not true; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane.
So wrote Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year. Who those two Frenchmen were who died in 1664, we don’t know; it doesn’t interest us to know and we won’t quarrel with the English author for not being more specific. It’s hard indeed to place epidemics by full right into the category of “historic events,” as one does with wars. Whoever dies first in a war often enough has his name etched in history, and the same for anyone who has the rotten luck to die last, in the instant when hostility ceases. So what draws us to Bergesio, then, if the “Twenty Days of Turin” were neither a war nor a revolution, but, as it’s claimed, “a phenomenon of collective psychosis”—with much of that definition implying an epidemic?
The newspapers had written about him on July the third, ten years ago, with much foresight, we needn’t say, regarding the things that would follow. It was added that several members of his family were still alive and that it was possible to talk to at least one of them.
The dwelling where I now interviewed her was the same place where the victim had lived, and this aided our task of moving backward. The house can be found on Corso Castelfidardo, almost at the corner of Corso Vittorio, two places where the fury of those days was most unleashed. There to welcome me was Bergesio’s sister, fiftyish and unmarried, with a ceremonious lilt to her voice. She’d scarcely heard the reason for my visit before dashing to fling open every room and every crevice of the house, all to make it understood: “The scene is exactly like the last time he saw it, before heading out that night!” Maybe our museums are as carefully tended as that apartment was. There was a smothering overload of objects, of knickknacks, nineteenth-century paintings, stuffed birds . . . A hothouse of relics that would soon be covered in dust and cobwebs if tireless hands didn’t do their best to clean them nonstop. And Bergesio’s sister was the only one in the house to generate that superhuman effort!
Just as she seemed ready to cast the most light on the past, with a flash in her eyes, she made me sit. I was struck by the fixity of her smile, the tautness of her neck ligaments, whenever she answered questions. She must have held beauty in her youth, a somewhat stiff beauty typical of certain English governesses, with a few features nonetheless that made her shape local beyond doubt. I surmised, after some broad questioning, that her life’s philosophy led her to gaze with strong sympathy toward those esoteric groups who regard the “Twenty Days of Turin” as part of a providential design, a dire warning signal from on high addressed to humanity. She too, like the Millenarists, was a vegetarian. In the earliest days of her youth she’d already managed to pluck, from the living voice of the old Guru Krishnamurti, words she could no longer forget: “The truth can be understood only by an impartial mind, capable of detachment and serene judgment, pure . . .” And she continued to quote, for my benefit, selected phrases from the venerable sage. She seemed to prefer one word above all the others: spirituality. She uttered it often, and each time it came out of her mouth—naturally, to lament the shortcomings of modern man!—it resounded across the room like a faithful musket shot. Never did such a gentle mist of saliva cleanse my face as during those declarations of faith in the spirit! I tried to ask her if she’d happened to attend the “Library” a few times back in the day, but she blushed so much that I thought it was sensible to give that topic a miss.
Our spiritual, mature signorina seemed to strike up an elusive resistance when my questioning fell on her brother’s last days. She preferred to skim over his adult life. In its place, she lingered on the happy times of his childhood, a childhood lived out with his family in a fervent communion of playtime. “When he died, Giovanni was thirty-five and not very satisfied with his line of work,” she said suddenly in a hushed voice, tightening her lips and turning away her head. I had no time to get a foothold before she continued, forcefully, staring me in the eye, “Giovanni loved trees and flowers and nature! He had always loved them, since he was a boy!” It was like an injunction to believe whatever she was saying. I was starting to get used to the abrupt changes in her voice: sweet tones, almost velvety, when she drifted off into memories of the good old days, and an aggressive huskiness as she set out to impart me with several of her profoundest convictions. I still had a chance to get closer to the heart of the matter with a cautious encircling maneuver. I began to talk about myself, about my positively unexciting work. I told her I was working at a firm, that I loved playing the recorder and I’d written some books on municipal historiography. And then, little by little, I began to bring in the topic of insomnia.
“Did Giovanni suffer from insomnia at that time, too?” I asked her. She denied it. She denied it flat-out. Her brother never suffered from insomnia one bit! No, there was never a time when he failed to be well rested! She put too much emphasis on that story, and I gathered that she was lying. But I gathered too that she would rather die than admit to the contrary. Her declared love for nature, for flowers, her veneration of her brother’s childhood; they all betrayed a stubborn desire to see “the beauty of things” at any cost.
And it wasn’t hard for me to picture her manners a decade earlier, when the nightly city came alive with sleepwalking presences. I could imagine her “putting up a fight,” the tendons of her neck pinched tight in agony, her spasms as she grappled in a deadlock with the impossibility of sleep. The categorical imperative of “spirituality” erected to prohibit herself from poking her nose out the door—to avert the shame of associating with other women who stooped to walking outside in their skimpy nightclothes. A victory was attained at the cost of a hermetic seal against the outside world; and the past, which was now fossilized, triumphed. Maybe she even resembled her brother somehow. I tried asking her, and she admitted it. Yes, she took after him in her love for the fine arts, especially painting. She went to get me some of his late tempera works out of a drawer: paperboard scenes of woods, of gardens, of farms, of a rustic landscape under a mild sky spotted with frayed cloudlets—nothing that would expose an outlook less than optimistic about the world. I learned that Bergesio had been employed at a bank.
“He didn’t write much? Didn’t leave a diary?” I asked. But the suspicion that my questions were edging once more toward the topic of the Library made her even more red-faced than before. I asked again if he’d said anything to her in the last days of his life—asked if they’d been on good terms. Now a tiny speck of truth came to the surface. Toward the end his behavior had become withdrawn, his sister confessed. It was all simple fatigue, of course, because he slept too little! No, one shouldn’t confuse his sleeplessness with that insomnia—the one all the newspapers kept mentioning! Giovanni was different from other people. He lost sleep because he wanted to live in the country, to be a farmer, to paint . . .
“This was his real world here!” she exclaimed, flapping his tempera sketches.
“And that was why he couldn’t sleep,” she added to bolster the point. Her head gave a series of insistent nods almost as fast as a woodpecker. The mention of insomnia had left barely enough rapport between us to continue the conversation. On her cheeks I spotted the glimmer of two little teardrops: she sniffed her nose and quickly wiped them away. I had to be ready to jump on this moment of weakness.
“How he must have suffered, signorina, in those final days!” I urged, taking her hand. She turned away yet again, her head started to lurch back and forth and more tears sprang from her eyes.
“Giovanni hadn’t slept for a week and he couldn’t take any more. He had a weaker character than mine,” she said, her tone of voice suddenly normal. “He said he felt very tired but could never quite fall asleep . . . He spoke of a very deep lake . . . Instead of stones at the bottom of this lake, there were bas-reliefs.”
“Was the lake dried out?”
“Yes, it was a dry lake. That image was fixed in his mind: a lake with a very deep bottom. He said that even if the water came back, he wouldn’t be able to fully immerse himself . . . There wasn’t enough water . . . He felt that the bottom of his lake had suddenly been raised, as if someone, from below, had pushed it up . . . And that there was no real difference between the depth of the lake and anything else, not the city, not the asphalt, not this house . . .” Her accent turned dramatic mentioning the house. She wiped her eyes again and continued. “He couldn’t fall asleep because he couldn’t sink into the lake, and this even made him furious. He kicked the furniture! The chairs! And he used to be such a gentle person . . . Then eventually he calmed down, at least he seemed to calm down . . . ”
I watched her spring up and pace across the room to and fro, clasping her hands in torment.
“But you still slept, signorina?” I insinuated.
“Yes, I slept, but I woke up often in the night and heard him in the next room fidgeting. His whole situation felt so . . . regrettable . . . Yes, it really did tear my heart! Sleeping pills couldn’t help him; they couldn’t lower the bottom of his lake. There was nothing that could lower it . . . I remember him talking about space, about room . . . He wanted room! He said that within him there was no room left, no more space to move, to turn around. He said something horrible as well: ‘Even if I wanted to kill myself, I wouldn’t find the space to die!’ ”
“And then he went out that night.”
“He left because he hoped that the streets, the squares, the avenues would restore something within him that had vanished . . . He thought that looking at the sky, the heavens . . .”
She began to sob. I had to wait for her to calm down before asking about those bas-reliefs she had mentioned.
“The bas-reliefs? Oh, I can’t remember well . . . He said that they were badly worn out . . . He seemed to recognize images of himself as a child and the faces of our mother and father . . . But then he wasn’t quite sure: they were too weather-beaten, too eroded . . .” She gave a long pause, sighing. “I had no idea what would happen later outside, why I didn’t try to hold him back when I saw him get dressed and make for the door. My place is here, in this house!” She said it proudly, with the tone of a vestal virgin.
“And what happened after that?”
“After? I don’t know. I wasn’t standing by the window to track him . . . He must have gone towards Corso Stati Uniti. I guess so, because they found him there the next day, next to a tree . . . I didn’t have the courage to go and identify him. Our uncle went and recognized him from a medallion around his neck. I really can’t understand what happened to him that night.” She sat down, gawking at me with moist, curious eyes, as if awaiting a response.
“I think I might know,” I ventured to say.
She tightened her corset, brought herself close enough for our knees to touch and seized me by the hand.
“If you know, why don’t you tell me?” she said.
“I know he left around two in the morning, dressed to the nines, because his family upbringing would never have allowed him to head out in pajamas, as it occurs to numerous others . . . ” She nodded eagerly. “And once he was outside, he came to Corso Castelfidardo, where he certainly found more people—other insomniacs like him. I don’t believe that your brother tried speaking to anyone. He wouldn’t have known what to say. No one spoke during that time.”
“I know. He was a rather solitary person.”
“He was obsessed by the dried-up lake, the bas-reliefs. He felt like he was being crushed by those images of stone and he was looking all around, searching for space. He was looking at houses, at treetops, at the stars . . .”
“Poor Giovanni!”
“Perhaps, watching the houses and the movement of the leaves, he tried to stir his imagination—who knows?—in an effort to loosen the grip of whatever was crushing him inside . . . That’s when he reached the flower bed where he found the monument.”
“The monument to Vincenzo Vela?”
“Indeed, yes. He must have stopped for a moment to look at it, unsure whether to proceed where the road curves or turn around into Corso Stati Uniti . . . His nose probably caught a strange vinegary smell, which at that time was fouling the air . . .”
“It’s true, sometimes it came all the way here, even through the windows!”
“But it’s likely he didn’t notice: the vinegar smell had become an almost natural occurrence, especially for anyone living in the city center. Perhaps he took a walk around the monument. Has he ever talked about that monument? “
“No, but, well, yes! He mentioned it to me one day, half joking. It was to make me understand how his memory was starting to betray him because of insomnia. ‘Alda,’ he told me, ‘do you want to know something funny? I could swear the statues of Vincenzo Vela and Napoleon Bonaparte had swapped places. It isn’t Vela with his back turned on us, is it?’ No, I answered him, I’m sure it’s always been Napoleon’s back, or rather, the back of his armchair. He shrugged his shoulders and gave a sad smile. ‘Must be,’ he said.”
“In that case, it’s likely that his torment was heightened looking at the monument. The gray figure of the sculptor and the white form of the dying Napoleon were very different from his bas-reliefs lying at the floor of a lake. They were sculpted in the round, and seemed almost alive by comparison. Prey to an inner anguish which had now reached its pinnacle, your brother made his way along Corso Stati Uniti. There must have been people on the street moving here and there, some crossing the road diagonally, others passing in straight lines. A few popped out from between parked cars, yawning and staggering: I can recall those nightly scenes well because I’d been there myself. There was something floating around, something ghostly. Your brother blended in with the rabble. Then, all of a sudden, I think he must have stopped.”
“Next to the tree?”
“I couldn’t say for sure, but certainly he stopped. His whole body must’ve stiffened. It might be that, hearing a noise behind him, the sound of footsteps, he still had the verve to turn around and see who was coming for him. But even if he saw, I don’t think he was astonished. None of those people were startled by what was going on. It was a natural occurrence, like insomnia, like the vinegar smell. And then the horrible thing arrived which slaughtered him, as we both know: grabbing him by the backs of his heels and slamming him hard against the trunk of a conker tree. Whoever witnessed the murder made certain they didn’t see anything. Was it fear? Indifference? And behind that silence, signorina, who’s hiding the mystery of the ‘Twenty Days’? It’s for this that we find ourselves here, to discuss it, to try to understand—”
“Understand?” she shouted, shaking her head. “How could we—poor mortals—fathom the Lord’s inscrutable designs! We have sinned too much in pride, sinned with our hearts, with our senses, forgetting that spirituality . . .”
She took away her hands and smiled at me softly. I sensed that she pitied me—pitied that I was still searching for truth with the limited means of the mind, when the way to reach it was so very different!