The Celestial City E-Book

Diego Marani

• Herausgeber: Dedalus Europe
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 299

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A young man plunges into student life, in flight from an overbearing father, in search of an identity of his own making. He is like everyone else in his quest for a future he cannot yet understand. His experiences, often comic, always innocently human, are an exploration of the concept of boundaries. But in choosing to study in Trieste, a city of many-layered histories and ethnicities, a city of brilliant sunshine and ferocious gales, he finds that life, and love, throw him more questions than answers. It is a tale of Everyman, but more than that: in the hands of Diego Marani, author of the celebrated New Finnish Grammar, this wry and affecting novel leads the reader on a nostalgic and thought-provoking journey made wholly individual by its evocation of place – the celestial city of Trieste. 'I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, one can fall in love with them and never forget them.'

Leseprobe

Dedalus Europe

General Editor: Timothy Lane

THE CELESTIAL CITY

This work has been translated with the contribution of the Centre for Books and Reading of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited

24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

[email protected]

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 22 9

ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 53 3

Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors 15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248 [email protected]    www.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd 58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W. 2080 [email protected]    www.peribo.com.au

First published by Dedalus in 2024

The Celestial City copyright © Diego Marani 2021 Published by arrangement with The Italian Literary Agency

Translation copyright © Graham Anderson 2024

The right of Diego Marani to be identified as the author & Graham Anderson as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

THE AUTHOR

Diego Marani was born in Tresigallo in 1959. He studied at Trieste University and worked in Brussels for the European Union until 2021. He was the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris until April 2023.

He has published twelve books in Italian, including the highly acclaimed trilogy New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus 2011), The Last of the Vostyachs (Dedalus 2012) and The Interpreter (Dedalus 2016) which have found worldwide success. God’s Dog, a very different detective novel was published by Dedalus in 2014. His collection of short stories in Europanto, a language which he invented, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus.

THE TRANSLATOR

Graham Anderson was born in London. After reading French and Italian at Cambridge, he worked on the book pages of City Limits and reviewed fiction for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph.

His translations for Dedalus from Italian are Grazia Deledda’s short story collections The Queen of Darkness and The Christmas Present, and her novel Marianna Sirca. Forthcoming in 2024 is Diego Marani’s The Celestial City.

His own short fiction has won or been shortlisted for three literary prizes. He is married and lives in Oxfordshire.

The facts and characters in this novel are purely imaginary. Any references to real events or persons, or similarities of names, are therefore entirely coincidental.

CONTENTS

A Tale of Two Cities

The San Nicolò Sports Club

The Barbarians

Vesna

Jasna

Tržaška Kreditna Banka

The Agency

The Celestial City

13456791112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207

TO THE SAN NICOLÒ SPORTS CLUB

Trieste has an awkward charm. If you will, it is like a rough and ravenous youth with blue eyes and over-sized hands too big to offer a flower; like a love filled with jealousy.

U. Saba

(Umberto Poli: Italian poet and novelist. Born Trieste 1883, died 1957. Took the pen name Saba in 1910.)

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

I arrived in Trieste for the first time one brilliant morning in October. After a long journey through the dull and misty plains, the train had suddenly emerged from the fog and below us had appeared the sea. It gleamed, motionless, criss-crossed in the distance by the smoky outlines of a few ships. The overhanging cliff of the railway cutting turned red under a covering of autumnal foliage, which spread in thick woods as soon as the rocky crags opened up to reveal the plateau. In the narrower parts, the train whistled to announce itself and the rattling of the carriages grew in intensity. The limpid sky lent the countryside sharper contours and from one curve to the next an ever-changing prospect of the approaching city presented itself to us. The only person still in the compartment besides myself was an elderly gentleman of anxious countenance who had spent the whole stretch from the station at Mestre, where he had boarded, looking impatiently out of the window. He was wearing a crumpled suit of old-fashioned cut, grey, like the broad-lapelled overcoat which he had never removed. When the first houses began to slide past the windows, he hauled his large suitcase from the rack and made his way towards the exit. I followed him, swinging my rucksack on to my shoulder. Only then did I notice that he was weeping. He occasionally hid his face, but he could not prevent himself from staring out at the city that was opening out below us, street by street. His eyes glistened with emotion as they took in the scene. Soon the other passengers waiting to alight noticed it as well, and they all looked away. The sight of a man weeping is disturbing. It does not elicit compassion, as do the tears of a woman or a child. It seems an indulgence, a weakness. Rather than console him, one wants to punish him.

‘I haven’t been back for thirty years! Thirty years since I saw my beloved Trieste…’ he murmured in a broken voice, wringing and rubbing his hands. They were the calloused and scarred hands, the stubby fingers of a working man. Stepping down on to the platform, he plunged into the station crowds, leaving a trail of sadness in the joyous light of this arrival, which was for me, on the contrary, akin to a landfall, a dizzying new start. That scene remained impressed on my memory and still today, after so much time, I recall it with a shudder. That man’s eyes spoke of the terrible cruelty of fate, the regret for a life already spent, of which this morning sunshine was the final glimmer. I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, and one can fall in love with them too and never forget them.

I arrived in Trieste drunk on schoolboy irredentism, learnt from school books in the radiant days of May which had preceded my final exams, and excited by a school trip to Redipuglia and an infatuation with D’Annunzio. To deepen my knowledge, I had spent time with Saba’s Canzoniere and Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno, then a biography of Franz Joseph, which I had hardly begun to read, three of papa’s books, dated and signed in pencil on the title page, as he liked to do. But of the real Trieste and its tragedies I knew nothing. My high-school history book stopped at 25th April 1945, with a photograph of the Hiroshima bomb on the last page. Thus, alighting among the dark palazzi and the fatal shores, in the red light of that late autumn, I felt that I had come to add my own contribution, by my patriotic presence, to the restoration of the heroic city to the motherland. The first contact promptly confused me. I had asked a passer-by the way to the university.

‘Ciò mulo, te son taliàn? Te ga de ciòr la coriera in via del Coroneo!’ the man answered brusquely. And it was that question, asking me if I was Italian, which surprised me. Wasn’t he Italian himself, then? Weren’t we in the “redeemed’‘ territories, won with so much sacrifice of blood from the Austrians? And why answer me in dialect if he had sensed I came from somewhere else? And then — although I understood I had to take the bus at via del Coroneo — why that appellation, that ‘mulo’, that ‘ass’, which struck me in that moment as offensive? I was not yet acquainted with the character of this city, as peevish as an old woman whom age has turned irritable, nor the resentment in which it lived its enclosed life, wanting recompense and vengeance for the evils it has suffered, for the outrage of a betrayal about which I as yet knew nothing. And indeed it seemed to be populated entirely by old people. They swarmed the streets, hopping on buses like locusts, scornful, sulky, spiteful. They grabbed for the door handles, planted themselves on the seats, pushing aside anyone in their way and especially young people like us. They hated us, they never missed an opportunity to annoy us, to bully us, as if we were a scourge which had fallen on them and against which they had to defend themselves with all their strength. This was a vigorous and tenacious flock of elders; in no way were they frail little old souls in need of assistance to cross the road; a different race of old people entirely, who seemed to become more robust the more they aged until they progressed so far into time that God forgot to strike them down. Old age in Trieste seemed to be contagious, an epidemic which spread unstoppably through the city, covering with wrinkles anyone who arrived, infecting them with an instant fever of regret and resentment.

I was struck by the bursts of military music ringing out through the streets and squares, where suddenly a march would be heard and a company of veterans in tattered old uniforms would troop by, nostalgically remembering even their defeats, provided they were safely in the past. This was the thing: Trieste seemed to worship the past, whatever it might have been. An undefined time whose breath, in the snapping of the flags in the wind, could still be felt; and the whole city would then strain its ears to capture every note and wallow in longing for that past. The present, all the more alive and slippery in comparison, impetuous, precipitous, produced in the city an impulse to reject it from which ensued also the recognition that all things pass and only in passing become definite, if not acceptable, comprehensible.

In my city on the plains everything even remotely military lay hidden and unseen by the population. A decaying barracks with peeling plaster and brushwood climbing the fencing on which was hung the pretentious yellow notice declaring no entry beyond a boundary made of collapsing wire netting and rusty barbed wire. The few flags raised above the modest buildings drooped on their pennants, heavy with humidity and discoloured by the summer heat. If anything, they were an incitement to retreat, to desertion. Meanwhile, all around, an unrestrainable present hummed and swarmed, impatient, curious, swelling like a summer storm and drawing everything towards entirely different expectations. A sense of time constantly renewing itself brushed aside a shapeless and unravelling past that was remembered solely to be avoided, whatever it had been.

Which is to say that it was a city from which I was in flight. A spirit of restlessness had driven me to steer clear of studies that could be burdened by my father’s supervision, which meant risking a move far from home. Papa had scrutinised with some puzzlement the certificate which confirmed my successful hurdling of the exam for admission to the School of Translating and Interpreting, which had just that year become a university faculty. He was searching it for evidence of fraud or deceit. He found none and had to give his consent. I freed myself from a city lacking the ennoblement of any marble, always dirty and muddy, which bore the traces of papa in every corner, his memories, his activities. A city which I always saw as divided in two, light and shade, with which I could find no way to align myself. I was not enraptured by its noisy outpourings, its enthusiasms, its ideological cavalcades whose dust took days and days to settle and veiled everything in falsehood. A city that I felt to be lapped by waves of tedium like a high tide, constantly sparing it but infiltrating it a little more each time, so suitable for papa and to me instead so hostile, a stage on which I could only come to be like him, as I had always done in any case, with great tenacity: not at all out of ambition to take his place, even though that would have been a bold claim, no, but driven merely by the cowardly hope that people might sometimes confuse me with him. I was eager to imitate him or presumably I felt that there was no other way open to me. Of what I had been, up to then, nothing was my own. Every choice I made was his choice, or made in order to fulfil his wishes, not in any way because papa exercised some form of imposition on me but because it was I, the better to resemble him, to have his good will, who conformed to his wishes, which, without the need of any formal expression on his part, emanated from him like an irresistible aura. To leave for Trieste was my gesture of insubordination, my act of desertion. And papa never forgave me for it. He never understood what studies I had followed, and later, what work I did. He never wanted to know. Perhaps he never abandoned the hope that he could draw me back to him and make me a copy of himself, obliterating my identity. Or perhaps he was not even conscious of such things, and if he was trying to cast his shadow over me it was to protect me better from the world’s traps and snares, from my pretensions to be able to manage without him. But deep down not even my act of flight was enough to take possession of my own destiny. For even from a distance I continued to seek his approval or at least his forgiveness.

Papa and I spoke through books. And through books we argued. Throughout his entire life he never stopped giving me books that suited his own taste and whose pages I turned, frustrated, and then left on the desk, as if that was what we had agreed. And with each volume, he was the one to feel upset, for once again I was rejecting him and did not back him up in the choices he made for me. The shelves in the attic are still filled with those books, and among the considerable numbers from our library which have been thrown away or given to charity, those are the ones, curiously enough, which we have never succeeded in getting rid of, neither he nor I. There they remain, covered in dust, a reminder of our many failures to understand each other.

Some years before his death, one summer evening, as dusk was falling, Papa summoned me to his study, bade me sit down and went to take his place on the other side of the desk, as when I was a child and he was about to issue a reprimand. He let the silence deepen between us, and as he used to do, sighed before he spoke.

‘You must make me a promise…’ In the gloom I could not see his face clearly but the voice, the voice was the one he used for special occasions.

‘Whatever you wish, papa…’ I managed to say, swallowing with difficulty.

‘If ever I fall ill with senile dementia, if ever I become one of those imbecilic old men who are burdens to themselves and no longer know who they are, you must see to it that I die…’ It was not a father’s entreaty to a son, it was a despot’s injunction to his hired assassin.

‘I will do whatever you wish, papa…’

‘I do not wish to suffer the humiliation, I do not wish others to witness the destruction of my mind.’

‘No, I will not allow you to be reduced in such a way…’

‘I want your promise…’

‘I promise…’

A flight of swallows passed above us in the sky, screeching. The trees of the avenue were dropping their leaves, scorched by the sun, while the smoky eastern horizon subsided into a tranquil pallor. We both stood up and made our way through the weighty shadows of the tight-packed bookcases towards the dinner table where my impatient mother was calling us.

I reflected many times on how I would have murdered papa. For a while I got my doctor to prescribe me some psychotropic drugs which I kept in reserve for him. I had read that they left no trace in the blood. But their use-by date passed without his showing the slightest sign of senile dementia. Meanwhile, however, it did not stop him from turning over in his mind the thought of death. As with everything else, he wanted to understand it, to find it laid out in the pages of one of his books and pin it down there, control it. And he dragged me into this manic exercise along with other impetuous ideas, new pretexts to make me his disciple, as if being his son was not enough. One summer he insisted on getting me to help him build a little house in the trees. I found myself planing planks of wood and lashing railings up in the branches of a poplar in the garden of our house. As he had done with the books he gave me, he tried to pass the treehouse off as something I wanted, a plaything for my sons. But my sons were already adolescents. They wanted motorbikes, not treehouses. It was for himself that papa wanted to build one, to make it his airy refuge. He would go up there to read in the heat of the afternoon and after dinner he retreated to this lofty perch to think. When I went home, the first thing I did was to take advantage of his withdrawal to the treetop to reconnoitre his study, examining the bookcases and desk to see what he had been reading. Feeling duty-bound to be constantly vigilant, I watched him closely, put under the microscope his every gesture, every word, scanning them for signs of incipient dementia. Some of his replies to my remarks, some of his outbursts of impatience over trivial matters made me believe I saw them. But then I was overtaken by another anxiety. Could papa be feigning dementia to put me to the test, to see if I would keep my promise and would indeed be capable of raising my hand against him? I ended up spying on him. I followed him, I dogged his footsteps on his walks, at table I would suddenly look him deep in the eyes and he would look away as if frightened. Then these alarms also faded. The promise still loomed over our heads like a distant cloud, a stone in the shoe of our mutual indifference which neither of us wished to mention again.

In his war against modernity, papa has always refused to use a credit card, but he was attracted by the wonderful world of Amazon, where books can be bought with a click. In addition he read English and thus the offers and suggestions that leapt to his gaze when he surfed the internet were limitless. So he asked me to acquire books for him, following his prescriptions. He would forward me a title and I would have the book sent to him. I thought it a fine way to talk to him from a distance. Along with the book I would send him a note with a witty comment, a quotation, a cue for future conversations. But the books father ordered from me were never innocent. They revealed his thinking. And they obliged me to follow it. Once more they were messages directed at me, threats, promises, outbursts of invective, fits of pique. He soon began to ask me for books on suicide, on assisted death, on euthanasia. I could not refuse, but I ordered them for him with reluctance. It seemed as if I was inciting him to cultivate unhealthy thoughts. So, in the hope of correcting their drift, I had other books sent to him as well, more mundane, novels or books on down-to-earth subjects, though doing my best to choose topics that interested him. I wanted to distract him from those dreadful ideas and force him back into the real world by awakening him to fresh fields for his curiosity. I would have been willing to build a new treehouse, I would have been ready to join him in the undertaking. If I found the thought of murdering him intolerable, it disturbed me even more to imagine his suicide. I ransacked his medicine chest for dangerous drugs, I looked, with a shiver of terror, for all the places in the house where he might have been able to hang himself, and assailed by nightmares, I occasionally woke up in the night with the vision of him dangling somewhere. All in all, killing one’s father is more forgivable than allowing him to kill himself by his own hand.

But the books I sent him on my own initiative to turn his thoughts away from suicide he took as an affront. He took it as a sign of the lack of consideration I gave to the matter upper-most in his mind at that moment. A disloyal gesture, a hostile incursion into the deepest areas of his soul. And so, whenever I returned home I found on my bedside table all the books that had been intended to divert him from his dark thoughts.

‘I imagine you ordered these for yourself…’ he would tell me with feigned innocence.

When death came to papa it was without recourse to guides on how to commit suicide, but now, in his library, there is a shelf full of those volumes: Death and Dying, Death as a Symbolic Exchange, Euthanasia, The Enigma of Suicide, Final Exit (the last two both in English), A History of Death in the West, Suicide: A User’s Guide (this one in French). I would like to throw them away, but I can’t do it. What holds me back is a form of reverence for his investigations, the feeling that it would be doing him a wrong. But also the prurient curiosity of leaving the question of his suicide in suspense. Now that the possibility has disappeared, I enjoy shuddering at the thought of it. Would he really have done it? And would I really have helped him to die? How far would the two of us have been capable of going? Papa’s library is the receptacle of all the things he thought. It is all still there, and entering it, if only to read the titles of his books, I seem to hear him speaking. Those bookcases have tracked the movements of his soul along life’s road, they are a kind of seismograph which I still consult today, up to the point where the needle has stopped.

When papa retired, because the break between the before and after was more clear-cut, he carried out a purge in his library. He threw away all his books on psychology, along with the many others which had accompanied the period of his great battles of ideas. Books I had never read but whose titles indicated a route, the main road, into papa’s head, and once again, the means, through understanding him, not to disappoint him. To see his bare shelves gradually filling with new volumes seemed to me to be a mutilation of his old self which wounded me as well. But it sometimes happened that I came across papa’s books in second-hand bookshops. The familiar titles put me on alert, I would open them with a swelling heart and recognise them by his name punctiliously written with his copying pencil on the title page, along with a note of the place and the date he had acquired them. Sometimes I was mentioned too in these notes and then it would seem to me even more of an insult to have thrown those books away. I would buy them back for him and secretly slip them on his shelves. But it was out of annoyance, it was not the giving of a present.

My life in Trieste began under his tutelage as well. He had not wanted me to go and live with the other students. He wanted to know I was in a rented room where, according to him, solitude would favour study and concentration, the two eternal verities of a man who had grown up in a seminary and who had fled it not because secular life attracted him but because the Church had deceived him with its too numerous worldly attachments. And I waved him off with a lump in my throat on the windy morning he left me in the apartment on via della Maiolica, where I had found lodgings with two refugees from Istria. He had come to Trieste with the camper van to bring my luggage and a few provisions. He had slept in my room and, under the influence of his priest’s mania for beginning each day at its literal starting point, had risen at dawn. He had dressed in silence, groped in the pitch dark to place a kiss on my forehead, and left. He called up to me again from the street and in the thunderous blasts of the north-east wind I had difficulty hearing his voice. He had forgotten his umbrella. I opened the window and threw it down to him, and as I closed it again I experienced all the solitude of this new beginning in the smell of apples coming from the cupboard where papa had left me a box, gathered from our orchard.

“Agenzia Amsterdam” said the notice by the doorbell of Signor Ugo Cotiga, my landlord. A short and self-effacing man who always wore a black beret and whose rental agreement had specified that I must not play the guitar, not bring anyone up to my room, not grow a beard and not return any later than eleven-thirty. All of which obligations I found myself able to comply with. Thus, for thirty thousand lire a month, I was granted the right to one of the apartment’s four rooms to let, the second along the corridor, and the use of a tiny kitchen. I learned later that the first room was let to the mysterious Signor Francesco who came here with his mistress in the afternoons and whom I therefore never met, the third to a worker from the Fincantieri shipbuilder’s yard with whom I shared the kitchenette. A sullen and touchy man with thick spectacles, their arms held together with adhesive tape, who roused in me a deep revulsion. There was something morbid, unhealthy, about him, perhaps a secret vice, and I suspected, he kept piles of pornographic magazines hidden in his room, which no one was ever allowed to enter, not even signora Lella, the bovine wife of signor Cotiga, who cleaned the rooms of the rest of us. Sometimes he and I met each other in the kitchen on the rare evenings when I had returned to the apartment for dinner. We tolerated each other in the narrow space, each cooking his own rations. I would prepare a pasta or a soup: he, evil-smelling giblets and other disgusting things with which he fouled the air, despite the window which wouldn’t close. He fried them in a pan which I took care not to use afterwards. I lingered in the kitchen for as little time as possible but all the same the stench of his tasty dishes clung to my clothes. Happily, there was no question of making conversation, for the brute cooked with a radio earpiece plugged into one ear, and if he spoke, spoke to himself, issuing a private commentary on the day’s news or the football results. The fourth room was unlet, and in vain — in response to signor Cotiga’s request — I put a notice on the faculty notice board. “To let: single room — use of kitchen — every convenience, in apartment close to centre — no southerners.” It was perhaps this discriminatory tailpiece, along with his knowledge of the Italian South, which prevented signor Cotiga from finding a tenant for the fourth room in his apartment. I subsequently discovered that the apartment was not his, but belonged to an insurance company who let it to him for a derisory sum. Each of the rooms was heated by a gas heater for which the tenant had to provide the bottle. The shared bathroom in the corridor was so vast that an icy chill prevailed, but fortunately the water in the boiler was always scalding hot and by lying immersed in a full tub I was able to warm myself up. In my room I retreated under the covers, listening in the dark to a tape of summery songs, a kaleidoscope of memories over which I pined, hovering as near as possible to the abyss of homesickness. A sub-clause of the rental contract which I had not taken seriously at first mentioned the provision of Sunday lunch. I was expecting a little plastic bag containing a tin of tuna, a bread roll and an orange, like the one provided by the university cafeteria, and instead, to my great surprise, from the very first Sunday I was invited into signora Lella’s kitchen for a splendid lunch based on rich Istrian dishes, from which I regularly emerged inebriated. Every time I reached the bottom of a glass filled to the brim with a black and sticky wine, believing myself, having despatched it, to be free at last, signor Cotiga would fill it again, with visible satisfaction. It was his brother’s wine, and came from family vineyards on the other side of the border. I thought that in inviting me to their table, and only me out of the three tenants, the Cotigas were seeking a little company. Perhaps I reminded them of their son Ivano, lost in battle. They kept a photograph with a number of sacred images on a small altar at the end of the corridor, a small candle burning beside it, which I risked blowing out every time I passed, when coming home in the evening, I had to open the glass door which they always closed after dinner. The Cotigas were fond of me and wanted to protect me from what they conceived as the city’s dangers, advising me not to stray into the Cavana district, a well-known hunting-ground for prostitutes, and above all recommending me to steer clear of the ski-parties, that noisy and ill-dressed horde that poured off the trains from Yugoslavia and infested the city on Saturday afternoons, especially the station district, to buy merchandise unavailable on their side of the border. Signor Cotiga described them to me as people without God and during the Sunday lunches, his speech affected by the wine, he would tell me about his house in Istria, from which he had been driven and which had fallen into the hands of those people, who did not know how to grow anything, who went about shoeless and who burned the furniture to keep warm.

‘And Italy abandoned us… it left us to be massacred! But in Rome’s eyes we weren’t Italian, we never have been…’ he muttered, his old man’s mouth quivering. And he pulled his beret further down over his forehead, while signora Lella turned her brilliant eyes aside and set about tidying the kitchen. I had already seen these sinister figures of levantine appearance wandering along the Ponte Rosso canal with a Fiat 127 door across their shoulder or a drum of detergent on their heads. Behind them trailed wives and grandmothers, because they too loaded themselves up with whatever goods could be smuggled, pulling on, one over the other, the maximum number of pairs of jeans and concealing in their bosoms small cans of motor oil, packets of fertiliser, bottles of liquor. From their trains, which waited for several hours at the same platform in the station, there emanated an acrid smell, of damp tobacco and latrines which I can find in a few Balkan outskirts of the city even today.

In a further extension to the contract, the Cotigas invited me to watch television on Saturday evenings in their sitting room, which was simultaneously their bedroom. I went just once, and then never again, to watch Canzonissima, I seated in an armchair with threadbare upholstery and the two of them, as if buried beneath a shroud, from beneath the counterpane on the big double bed that occupied a large part of the room. A thinly veneered wooden wardrobe, a standard lamp that leaned backwards and a chest of drawers with a pock-marked mirror completed the furnishings. The black and white television on the ancient glass-topped trolley made me mourn the evenings spent watching the Monday film in the dining kitchen at home while my mother did the ironing and the dog slept beneath the table. On Sunday afternoons, after I had listened to signor Cotiga’s confused wartime memories, in order to walk off my drunkenness I would wander through the deserted city pursued by the babble of radios tuned in to the football and the roar of some car making the most of the empty avenue by trying to catch all the traffic lights at green.

In the mornings I got up early, went to lectures and then spent the day in the library, trying to return home as late as possible. The quarter where I had come to live, close to the city centre, was a place where several main roads met and was dominated by a confused open space where the out-of-town buses stopped, heaving with people by day and deserted at night. The solitary evenings in my room, the chill barely taken off it by the blue flame of the gas heater, filled me with sadness and homesickness. I cursed my urgent desire to rebel and regretted the paternal home, its reassuring prohibitions, the road that had already been marked out for me, awaited me, and which I had only to follow obediently to become the man papa desired, the best possible and not the experiment I was conducting in that foreign city, a fragile and insecure creature, at the mercy of mirages and illusions, in pursuit of a heroic life of which, however, my imagination could form no picture.

I sometimes bumped into signor Cotiga in the street, outside the covered market. I greeted him with great politeness but