Umberto Eco - The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

I phoned Paola, bewildered, and explained my anxieties, and she laughed.

"Yambo, for me those are just blurred memories. I have an image of a few nights in an air-raid shelter, someone waking me up suddenly and taking me downstairs, I must have been four. But excuse me, let me play the psychologist: a child can live in different worlds, just as our little ones do; they figure out how to turn on the TV and they watch the news, then they listen to fairy tales and page through picture books of green monsters with kind eyes and talking wolves. Sandro is always going on about dinosaurs, which he saw in some cartoon, but he doesn’t expect to meet one on the street corner. I read him Cinderella at bedtime, and then he gets out of bed at ten o’clock, and without his parents noticing peeks at the television from the doorway and sees a marine kill ten gooks with a single machine-gun burst. Children are much more balanced than we are, they can tell the difference between fairy tale and reality just fine; they keep one foot here and one there but never get them confused, with the exception of a few sick children who see Superman fly, then attach a towel to their shoulders and throw themselves out the window. But those are clinical cases, and it’s nearly always the parents’ fault. You weren’t a clinical case, and you managed perfectly well between Sandokan and your schoolbooks."

"Sure, but which one did I think was imaginary? The world of Sandokan or that of Il Duce sweet-talking the Sons of the She-Wolf? I told you about that composition, right? At ten, did I really want to fight like a wild beast and die for immortal Italy? I’m talking ten years old, and I don’t doubt that there was censorship at the time, but the bombs were already raining down on us, and in 1942 our soldiers in Russia were dropping like flies."

"But Yambo, when Carla and Nicoletta were little, and even recently with the grandkids, you used to say that children are manipulative bastards. You should remember this, it happened just a few weeks ago: Gianni came over to our place when the little ones were there too, and Sandro said to him: ‘I’m so happy when you come see us, Uncle Gianni.’ ‘You see how much they love me,’ Gianni said. And you: ‘Gianni, children are manipulative bastards. This one knows that you always bring him chewing gum. That’s all.’ Children are manipulative bastards. And you used to be. All you wanted was to get a good grade, and you wrote what the teacher liked."

"You’re oversimplifying. It’s one thing to be a manipulative bastard when it comes to Uncle Gianni, it’s another when it comes to Immortal Italy. And besides, why in that case was I a master of skepticism less than a year later, writing that story of the unbreakable glass as an allegory of a pointless world-because that’s what I wanted to say, I can feel it."

"Simply because you had changed teachers. A new teacher can liberate the critical spirit that another might not have allowed you to develop. And besides, at that age, nine months is a century."

Something must have happened in those nine months. I understood that when I went back to my grandfather’s study. Browsing at random as I drank a coffee, I pulled from the magazine pile a humorous weekly from the late thirties, Il Bertoldo. It was a 1937 issue, but I must have read it later than that, because at that time I would not have been able to appreciate those filiform drawings and that twisted sense of humor. But now I was reading a dialogue (one appeared each week in the little opening column on the left of the front page) that may well have caught my attention during those nine months of profound transformation:

Bertoldo walked past all those gentlemen of the retinue and went at once to sit beside the Grand Duke Windbag , who , gentle in nature and fond of wit , began in that spirit to question him pleasantly.

Grand Duke: Good day , Bertoldo. How was the crusade?

Bertoldo: Noble.

Grand Duke: And the task?

Bertoldo: Lofty.

Grand Duke: And the impulse?

Bertoldo: Generous.

Grand Duke: And the surge of human solidarity?

Bertoldo: Moving.

Grand Duke: And the example?

Bertoldo: Enlightening.

Grand Duke: And the initiative?

Bertoldo: Courageous.

Grand Duke: And the offer?

Bertoldo: Spontaneous.

Grand Duke: And the gesture?

Bertoldo: Exquisite.

The Grand Duke laughed , and calling for all the Gentlemen of the Court to gather around him , ordered the Revolt of the Wool Carders ( 1378 ), upon completion of which the courtiers all returned to their places , leaving the Grand Duke and the peasant to resume their conversation.

Grand Duke: How are the workers?

Bertoldo: Unrefined.

Grand Duke: And their fare?

Bertoldo: Plain , but hearty.

Grand Duke: And the province?

Bertoldo: Fertile and sunny.

Grand Duke: And the populace?

Bertoldo: Welcoming.

Grand Duke: And the view?

Bertoldo: Superb.

Grand Duke: And the outskirts?

Bertoldo: Enchanting.

Grand Duke: And the villa?

Bertoldo: Stately.

The Grand Duke laughed , and calling for all his courtiers to gather around him , ordered the Storming of the Bastille ( 1789 ) and the Battle of Montaperti ( 1260 ), upon completion of which the courtiers all returned to their places , leaving the Grand Duke and the peasant to resume their conversation…

At one and the same time that dialogue mocked the language of poets, of newspapers, and of official rhetoric. If I was a clever lad, I would no longer have been able, after those dialogues, to write compositions such as the one of March 1942. I was ready for the unbreakable glass.

These were only hypotheses. Who knows how many other things happened to me between the heroic composition and the disillusioned chronicle. Again I decided to suspend my research and reading. I went into town: I had finished my Gitanes by then and had to make do with Marlboro Lights-better that way: I would smoke less, since I do not like them. I went back to the pharmacist to get my blood pressure checked. The conversation with Paola must have relaxed me- it was around 140. Getting better.

Back at the house, I had a craving for an apple, and I entered the lower rooms of the central wing. Strolling among the fruits and vegetables, I noticed that some of the large rooms on the ground floor were being used for storage and that in the back of one room were stacks of deck chairs. I carried one into the yard. I sat down facing the panorama, skimmed the newspapers, realized I was barely interested in the present, turned the chair around, and began looking at the front of the house and the hills behind it. I asked myself what I was looking for, what I wanted, would it not be enough to sit here looking at that hill that is so beautiful, as that novel said, what was it called? To raise three pavilions, Lord, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah, and loaf without a past and without a future. Perhaps that is what paradise is like.

But the diabolical power of paper got the better of me. After a while I began daydreaming about the house, imagining myself as the hero of a My Children’s Library story, standing before the Castle of Ferlac or Ferralba, looking for the crypt or the granary in which the forgotten parchment must lie. You press the center of the sculpted rose on a coat of arms, the walls open, and a spiral staircase appears…