THE FOLLOWING MORNING, A Sunday, a friend I hadn’t seen for ten years cropped up at my front door. I gave an “Oh!” of wonderment when I found him at the threshold, just as I’d remembered him: the same rosy complexion on his slightly childlike face, the same superfine blond hair, the same waggish blue eyes always seeking some occasion to sparkle with a well-timed joke. And this was an occasion indeed! He’d asked for it, coming to visit me like a meteorite, without a note of warning, which perfectly suited his harlequin ways. He was, after all, a Venetian who spent half his life thinking up funny stories just to tell other people and measuring how long it took for variations to reach his ears.
Eugenio Ballarin—so my friend was called—made his living as a flautist with the Teatro La Fenice symphony orchestra. Thanks to him, I’d learned the musical basics that allowed me to become an amateur recorder player—which, as yet, I remain. Ballarin had already passed two days in Turin. But as for whoever phoned me the night before, he denied any involvement. That would’ve taken all the fun out of his surprise visit: Didn’t I understand?
His singsong Venetian accent couldn’t have come at a better time. I loved listening to him describe how he’d spent his last two days in the city: a jumble of details involving our own Teatro Regio, where he was scheduled to perform solo next season, along with some spicy comments about a songstress he’d become acquainted with. “Why—oh, why—don’t you ever come to Venice?” he asked me as we sat in my study. I told him that I fully planned to make a visit once I’d resolved some minor business here in Turin. My friend pulled faces. He didn’t believe me: I’d aired the idea of abandoning my city too many times already. If I hadn’t been successful ten years earlier, when I’d tried to hightail it out of fear, then there was no chance of managing now. I was anchored here until my death! I think I turned pale when I heard his merciless judgment. Perhaps Ballarin noticed, because he broke away from that subject and suggested that we go out for lunch to Maddalena Hill.
The hill—with its enormous statue of the winged Goddess of Victory holding a beacon that pivots nightly in eternal memory of our fallen soldiers—wasn’t the best destination for someone, like me, who dearly wanted a few hours to forget things. Below, a vast and dreary urban area engulfed the flatland, and from the clearing where my friend and I had climbed it looked like a giant womb anxious to reabsorb me; it didn’t move, but you felt its immobility was a ruse. I preferred to leave that devious panorama and set off with Ballarin along the trails of the neighboring Memorial Park.
As we strolled through the woodland, Ballarin kept on stopping to read the names of casualties from the Great War, engraved on bronze plates and fastened to poles struck into the ground. Whenever he came to a plaque that announced an untimely death, he’d say “Poareto!”—“Poor chap!”—in Venetian, shake his head and aim rich profanities at General Cadorna’s memory. It was hard to escape the parallels between this kind of involvement and the “attentiveness” preached by the Millenarists. I wondered how they would behave in a place like this: Bergesio’s sister, those long-haired youths, the hoary old patriarch who’d accompanied them. I kept those questions to myself, since the gap that divided me from my friend had grown too wide for me to fill it by recounting my latest experiences. I liked it better when he was talking, telling me things that had happened in his native Venice.
He told me a story that had me laughing with relish. This was going back a while, to 1947, during a contemporary music festival. The big-name composers of that era were Petrassi, Dallapiccola, Ghedini . . . It was after the end of a concert, when the audience had left the auditorium and the musicians were all heading to the nearest eating house to fill up. But Ghedini didn’t want to rub shoulders with Dallapiccola, since there was constant bad blood between the two of them, so he went his own way. Some instrumentalists saw him wandering through the dark streets, with his head shaven like someone in a Greek tragedy, and followed after him. All of a sudden the quiet Venetian night was broken by a lewd barracks song. Hearing the barbarous cacophony behind him, Ghedini quickened his pace. A pair of those musicians, disheveled for the occasion, ran faster until they’d overtaken him. Then they began to sing at the top of their lungs! At this point, Ghedini tried to slip away, but he didn’t have time to vanish in an alley before another sound appeared behind him. TARATÌTTA-TARA-TÀAAA-RÀ! He nearly had a fit; it was the theme for his Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello, which had been played at the festival the night before. Ghedini thought he was dreaming. In the meantime, as the musicians behind him kept singing their barracks song in increasingly drunken voices, the ones in front bellowed: “Long live the generation of ’29, the generation of iron!” And just then it resurfaced: TARATÌTTA-TARA-TÀAAA-RÀ! Now Ghedini was struck with vertigo. They had managed to slip in his Piano Trio so well that it sounded like a refrain . . .
“So now you know there are phenomena which can spook even a modernist composer! Make him lose his marbles! With God as my witness, that’s my true word as a Venetian!”
Over lunch, when we’d already gotten to the fruit course, Ballarin told me another story, which didn’t make me laugh quite so much.
“Do you know the baritone, Gi-aah-ni M-aahn-deli?” he asked me.
“You mean Gianni Mandelli?” I said, correcting his yawning Venetian vowels. “Yes, he’s quite a good singer.”
“A good singer, yes, but . . .” My friend puffed up his cheeks and held out his arms to show the circumference of the baritone’s chest. “A walking howitzer like him could never fill the part of Don Giovanni; he doesn’t have the trim of a seducer. You can’t take him seriously when he’s singing, ‘Là ci darem la mano,’ let alone the sight of him in a duel. Now picture him in front of the statue of the Commendatore under a beautiful full moon. Right then, the statue starts to talk—and his Don Giovanni, instead of shitting himself, invites it straight over for dinner. When you’ve got statues that can talk and move around, it’s no laughing matter! You’d need a will of iron not to lose your marbles! But directors don’t think about these things, so much so that they’ve signed on Mandelli at the Teatro La Fenice to sing in precisely that part.”
“So it was a disaster?”
“No, not a disaster, because the public doesn’t even notice the inconsistency, and more, he is a good singer. But I did have the satisfaction of creating a little experiment . . . Shall I tell you how it went?”
He made a long pause, taking his fork between two fingers like a conductor’s baton and motioning with it. Under his breath, he hummed one of the most climactic passages from Mozart’s opera.
“Now that we’re in a musical mood,” said Ballarin, “try to imagine Mandelli as Don Giovanni, returning at night to his servant Leporello, all alone, not long after his fabulous altercation with the Commendatore’s statue, onstage, if you understand.”
I closed my eyes. “I think I can imagine,” I said.
“Splendid! Now Mandelli is right there where you cross the piazzetta with the statue of Nicolò Tommaseo, the sculpture nicknamed ‘the Book-Shitter,’ and nearby there’s a circular pedestal and on that pedestal another statue of a man. There are so many of those statues in Venice that nobody notices them anymore!”
“But Mandelli would have noticed that, surely!” I interrupted, quickly becoming nervous.
“Ah, if only! He wasn’t onstage! Mandelli only notices statues that are onstage, and since there was no script telling him to notice them . . .”
“So what happened?”
“What happened was the statue suddenly gave a sound—prack!—like a great big fart. And Mandelli sprang around, only to see the statue fixed in its usual place. But still it went prack! The sound came straight from its arse: two times, three times, four times . . . And, my word! He turned white as a sheet with dread! His knees were quivering like he was the cowardly servant Leporello! At the fifth prack! he made a break for it like he’d seen the devil . . . And I was there, laughing my arse off on the pedestal with a terrible urge to chase after him. The next evening, around the final scene, I noticed he was a bit less festive and he even fell out of tune a couple of times before the Commander took his hand to drag him to hell.”
It was a shame Ballarin had to leave that day. His manner of speaking—slippery and full of understatement—was the perfect medicine for me. Being around him, I found myself strongly nostalgic for a certain “largesse of spirit” that perhaps only came to me with too much hesitation: I’m referring to music and my recorder hobby, neither of which managed to absorb me enough that I could use them as a haven, a happy place to flee to in times of need. And so I could never pull my mind away from the demons under the asphalt, from the thrill of a chancy investigation. Ballarin, on the other hand . . . when the situation got too knotty for him, he didn’t wait a moment to pack his bags and put his instrument in its case. That’s what I saw him do a decade earlier; something in the air gave him the chills, so he kissed Turin goodbye.
Around midafternoon, I saw him off at the train station. I burned the rest of my Sunday by going to the movies, then I had a quick meal at a buffet restaurant near the river and close to my house as well. At eight o’clock it was already dark; I walked beside the riverbank and gazed at the lights reflected across the water: they made me think of long, phosphorescent lizard tails dangling into an abyss.
Before heading back to my house in Corso Casale, I stopped in front of the Gran Madre di Dio Church. A half-serious impulse had stricken me to follow the reprimands of Millenarianism and look at the building more thoroughly. At the fore of the neoclassical church stood a monument to Victor Emmanuel I: “King of Sardinia—returned to his people—the XX of May MDCCCXIV . . .” Guarding the church, from either side of its grand flight of steps, were two symmetrical rows of statues in white stone: two veiled women dressed in peplums with open books resting in their laps, each raising a chalice in her right hand, and at their flanks, two angels giving gestures of command. Having entered the church, I learned from a signboard that it was a work of the architect Ferdinando Bonsignore and inaugurated in 1831 before the royal audience of King Charles Albert. Under the shell of its dome there were niches where other statues stood, equidistant from each other: Saint Maurice by Angelo Brunelli, the Blessed Amadeus of Savoy by Caniglia, the Blessed Margaret of Savoy by Maccia. Looking at the life-sized features of the Blessed Margaret, a chalk-white nun with her eyes turned to the heavens, I thought back to Ballarin’s latest anecdote: Mandelli the baritone fleeing into the Venetian night, terrorized by an unbelievable noise. What would I do if the Blessed Margaret hit me with a prank like that? Judder with barely controlled laughter? I made the sign of the cross and walked away.
As I came close to my house, I got a dim feeling that I was being followed. Quick, delicate footsteps. I didn’t look over my shoulder because I found it silly to entertain certain suggestions. Already, I’d taken the key from my pocket and I was prepared to stick it in the door. And then my premonition became sharper. The gentle tiptoeing had stopped too. There was no mistaking it: someone was behind me! I turned around and saw a white figure facing me. I flinched as I noticed her extraordinary resemblance to Margaret of Savoy. No room for doubt here, this was a nun! The pallor of her face, nonetheless, seemed just human enough to calm me down a bit. I saw that she was smiling at me tenderly . . .
“I’m Sister Clotilde,” she said in a pleasant voice. “And you are Mr. [. . .]? Is that correct?”
I nodded my head.
“I’ve been searching for you all day and I’m sorry to keep you out here in the street, but I would really like to speak to you.”
“Speak to me?” I replied, sounding rather abrupt.
“Yes, to you! I am a sister at the Little House of Divine Providence. My fellow sisters have been begging me with such enthusiasm to find you and make a humble request . . . I saw that you were in our church a short while ago, and I might venture to believe that faith resides in your heart.”
I held my tongue for a moment, none too sure where this conversation was going.
“What you mean to say,” I suggested, “is that I have to change my life somehow? That there are certain vices, certain immoderate behaviors, that I have to give up?”
“No, no!” she said, her tone growing warmer. “It isn’t your private life that’s any cause for alarm! You’re a kind person, sir, a good person. We would only prefer it if you showed more discretion towards those who now rest in eternal sleep—if, out of respect for their memory, you withdrew from probing into whatever reasons certain poor souls have left this Vale of Tears. We feel your concern over the deceased may perhaps be a little more worldly than Christian . . . I think you understand what I’m trying to say.”
Nestled behind the sweetness of her voice I seemed to detect a somber threat.
“So in that case, I should stop wondering and seeking . . .”
“Never! Seek away! Wonder to your heart’s content! Who among us could call themselves a child of God if they didn’t ask questions, if they didn’t seek new insights? So long as those questions are turned towards our inner life, to the soul which He has lent us! But why should we worry about unfortunates who have passed on? What makes it our place to know which ailment or whose violent hand tore them away from us? If their eternal fate is truly important to us, the Holy Mother Church has supplied us with every tool we need to help them: the powers of intercession, offerings to their souls in Purgatory, prayers! Isn’t all of this enough?”
“For pity’s sake, Sister, I know that! My upbringing wasn’t short on religion!”
“What, then? If you, sir, are a Christian, if the waters of baptism didn’t rinse your forehead in vain, why do you insist on searching where human reason could never find anything but shadows? The mercy of God is great, and if there are certain mysteries we can’t pierce in this life, His Light will still be there in the next world to illuminate everything . . . Are you really so impatient that you can’t wait just a short while? Make a tiny renunciation?”
She angled her head. There was a fine-spun ruthlessness in her smile.
“If that’s all you ask of me . . .” I said, spreading out my arms.
“Why, what else could we possibly ask? What right do we have to interfere in your existence? The human suffering we break our backs over, night and day, is so measureless, so indescribable . . . It certainly wouldn’t be the fate of a sane, able-bodied gentleman like you that would urge our care! You seem pretty qualified already to look after yourself . . . Oh, but I have no words for how happy I feel now, being able to notify my sister-nuns that you’ve agreed to follow their small request!”
It didn’t appear as if she had anything more to say. She gave a faint bow, bent her knees and crossed herself. I watched her slink away as lithely as she’d arrived.
That night I found it hard to sleep.