The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana   ::   Эко Умберто

I’ll help you, and you’ll recover a little at a time. God, if I think about it, you might have not woken up at all. These doctors have been excellent, they got to you in time. My love, can I welcome you back? You act as if you’re meeting me for the first time. Fine, if I were to meet you now, for the first time, I’d marry you just the same. Okay?"

"You’re very sweet. I need you. You’re the only one who can tell me about the last thirty years."

"Thirty-five. We met in college, in Turin. You were about to graduate and I was the lost freshman, roaming the halls of Palazzo Campana. I asked you where a certain classroom was, and you hooked me immediately, you seduced a defenseless high-school girl. Then one thing and another-I was too young, you went off to spend three years abroad. Afterward, we got together-as a trial, we said, but I ended up getting pregnant, and you married me because you were a gentleman. No, sorry, also because we loved each other, we really did, and because you liked the idea of becoming a father. Don’t worry, Papà, I’ll help you remember everything, you’ll see."

"Unless this is all a conspiracy, and my name is really Jimmy Picklock and I’m a burglar, and everything you and Gratarolo are telling me is a pack of lies, maybe, for instance, you’re secret agents, and you need to supply me with a false identity in order to send me out to spy on the other side of the Berlin Wall, The Ipcress File , and…"

"The Berlin Wall isn’t there anymore. They tore it down, and the Soviet empire is falling to pieces…"

"Christ, you turn your back for a second and look what they get up to. Okay, I’m kidding, I trust you. What are stracchini?"

"Huh? Stracchino is a kind of soft cheese, but that’s what it’s called in Piedmont, here in Milan it’s called crescenza. What makes you bring up stracchini?"

"It was when I was squeezing the toothpaste tube. Hang on. There was a painter named Broglio, who couldn’t make a living off of his paintings, but he didn’t want to work because he said he had a nervous condition. It seemed to be an excuse to get his sister to support him. Eventually his friends found him a job with a company that made or sold cheeses. He was walking past a big pile of stracchini, each one wrapped in a packet of semitransparent wax paper, and because of his condition, or so he said, he couldn’t resist the temptation: he took them one by one and whack , he smashed them, making the cheese shoot out of the package. He destroyed a hundred or so stracchini before he was fired. All because of his condition. Apparently smacking stracchini, or as he said, sgnaché i strachèn , was a turn-on. My God, Paola, this must be a childhood memory! Didn’t I lose all memory of my past experiences?"

Paola started laughing: "I’m sorry, I remember now. You’re right, it is something you heard about as a kid. But you told that story often-it became part of your repertoire, so to speak. You were always making your dinner companions laugh with the story of the painter and his stracchini, and they in turn told others. You’re not remembering your own experience, unfortunately-it’s just a story you’ve told on numerous occasions and that for you has, how shall I say?, entered the public domain, like the story of Little Red Riding Hood."

"You’re already proving indispensable to me. I’m happy to have you as my wife. I thank you for existing, Paola."

"Good Lord, just a month ago you would have called that expression soap-opera schmaltz…"

"You’ll have to forgive me. I can’t seem to say anything that comes from the heart. I don’t have feelings, I only have memorable sayings."

"Poor dear."

"That sounds like a stock phrase, too."

"Bastard."

This Paola really loves me.

I had a peaceful night-who knows what Gratarolo put in my veins. I woke gradually, and my eyes must still have been closed, because I heard Paola whispering, so as not to wake me: "But couldn’t it be psychogenic amnesia?"

"We can’t rule that out," Gratarolo replied. "There may always be unfathomable tensions at the root of these incidents. But you saw his file, the lesions are real."

I opened my eyes and said good morning. Two young women and three children were also present. I had never seen them before, but I guessed who they were. It was terrible, because a wife is one thing, but daughters, my God, they are blood of your blood, and grandchildren too. The eyes of those two young women were shining with happiness, and the kids wanted to get up on the bed. They took me by the hand and said Hi, Grandpa. And nothing. It was not even fog, it was more like apathy. Or is it ataraxia? Like watching animals at the zoo-they could have been little monkeys or giraffes. Of course I smiled and said kind words, but inside I was empty. I suddenly thought of the word sgurato , but I did not know what it meant. I asked Paola. It is a Piedmontese word that means when you wash a pot thoroughly and then scrub it out with that metal wool stuff, so that it looks new again, as shiny and clean as can be. That was it, I felt thoroughly sgurato. Gratarolo, Paola, and the girls were cramming a thousand details of my life into my head, but they were like dry beans: when you moved the pot, they slid around in there but stayed raw, not soaking up any broth or cream-nothing to titillate the taste buds, nothing you would care to taste again. I was listening to things that happened to me as though they had happened to someone else.

I stroked the children and could smell their odor, without being able to define it except to say that it was tender. All that came to mind was there are perfumes as fresh as a child’s flesh.