Luisa had not yet decided what to do with the various documents—letters, his or those of his relatives or acquaintances, scattered notes, journals dating back to adolescence or to the final months, sometimes loose sheets with only a few words scribbled on them in an illegible handwriting that she was just beginning to decipher and which would have to be recopied to make them accessible to visitors, some displayed in glass showcases, others viewed on a digital screen. It was easier with objects—cannons, tanks, javelins—their mere grim, rusty presence was eloquent testimony to the existence (and most often the end of the existence) of those who had handled, used that flamethrower or that machine gun, slept in the passenger compartment of the armored vehicle or stuck his head out of its turret, often his last act. Reminders, chroniclers of the lives and deaths—though he would not have used the word death—associated with the plane shot down in flight, with the rifle fired or dropped. It was perhaps the easiest aspect of her job; choosing the piece or pieces for each gallery, deciding which to display materially and which—since, given their number, there was not enough space for all of them physically—to project on monitors with a single click. Easy, just press a key, but design a world in which that key is a good Aladdin’s lamp . . . then write captions, reconstruct the events of the man who had flown the plane or pointed the gun.
But how to organize those documents, the disconnected notes, the letters or fragments of letters . . . for example, the letter personally addressed to her by a relative of his, a cousin Ines, living in Udine. “He always recorded everything, all he did was take notes; it’s the only thing he did in his whole life . . . The last time I saw him, four days before he died, he came to see me in Udine. At lunch, every so often he would pull a big bundle of loose pages and some notebooks out of his satchel, as if to make sure he still had them, then put everything back in the bag. Half an hour after he’d left to go back to Trieste, he reappeared, agitated, and began searching all over the place, under the table, on the nightstand beside the bed where he had taken a little nap. He had forgotten the satchel, he couldn’t rest until he’d found it; by constantly opening and closing it so fretfully, he had moved it here and there and it had ended up under the couch. It’s important, he said, it’s very important . . . of course, everything is important, the smallest detail . . . the details, the particulars, the . . . He was almost talking to himself and left in a hurry . . . Afterward I never saw him again because four days later . . .”