Umberto Eco - The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

I could see the dormer windows on the roof, and below them the second-floor windows of my grandfather’s wing, all now open to illuminate my wanderings. Without being aware of it I was counting them. In the middle was the balcony, and to the left of it three windows: the dining room, my grandparents’ bedroom, my parents’ bedroom. To the right, the kitchen, the bathroom, and Ada’s room. Symmetrical. I could not see, on the far left, the windows of my grandfather’s study or of my little room, because they were at the end of the hall, past the point where the façade meets the left wing, and their windows face the side of the house.

I was gripped by an uneasy feeling, as if my sense of symmetry had been disturbed. On the far left, the hall ends with my room and my grandfather’s study, but on the right it ends just after Ada’s room. So the hall is shorter on the right than on the left.

Amalia was walking by, and I asked her to describe the windows of her wing. "That’s easy," she said. "On the ground floor that’s where we eat, and that little window would be the bathroom, your dear grandfather had it put in special for those of us who didn’t care to use the bushes like the rest of the farmers, goodness knows. As for the others, them two windows you see there belong to the storage room where we keep all the tools and such, and there’s the entrance to it on the side. On the second floor, there’s my window, and then the other two are my poor parents’ bedroom and their dining room, I leave them like they used to be and never open them out of respect."

"So the last window is their dining room, and that room ends where your wing meets my grandfather’s wing," I said. "It sure does," Amalia confirmed. "The rest is part of the owner’s wing."

It all sounded so natural that I did not ask her anything more. But I walked around to the right side of the house, near the threshing floor and the henhouse. I could immediately see the rear window of Amalia’s kitchen, then the wide, ramshackle door I had passed some days ago that led into the farm-equipment storage room I had already visited. Entering it now, I realized it was too long: it extended beyond the point where the right wing met the central wing; in other words, the storage room continued beneath the last part of my grandfather’s wing, all the way to the back wall that faced the vineyard, as was clear from a little window that offered a glimpse of the foot of the hill.

Nothing extraordinary, I told myself, but what is there on the second floor above that extension, if Amalia’s rooms end where the two wings meet? In other words, what up there corresponds to the area of the left wing occupied by my grandfather’s study and my little room?

I returned to the threshing floor and looked up. There were three windows in that space, just as there were on the opposite side (two in my grandfather’s study and one in my room), but the shutters of all three were closed. Above them, the regular dormer windows of the attic, which, as I already knew, ran without interruption around the entire house.

I called Amalia, who was busying herself in the garden, and asked her what was behind those three windows. Not a thing, she said, as if that were the most natural answer in the world. What do you mean not a thing? If there are windows, there must be something behind them, and it isn’t Ada’s room; her window faces onto the courtyard. Amalia tried to cut me off: "That was your dear grandfather’s affairs, I don’t know a thing."

"Amalia, don’t treat me as if I were stupid. How do you get in there?

"You don’t, there’s nothing to get to anymore. The hellcats took it all away by now."

"I told you not to treat me as if I were stupid. You have to be able to get up there either through one of your rooms or some other goddamn way!"

"Don’t curse, please, the only thing God has damned is the devil. What do you want me to say, your good grandfather made me swear never to breathe a word about that business, and I will not break an oath or else the devil really will carry me off."

"But what did you swear, and when?"

"I swore that same evening, when later that night the Black Brigades came and your dear grandfather said to me and my mother, Swear that you don’t know a thing and haven’t seen a thing, and in fact I won’t actually let you see what we’re fixing to do, me and Masulu- who was my poor father-because if the Black Brigades come and put your feet to the fire you won’t be able to help yourselves and you’ll say something, so it’s better if you don’t know a thing, because they are a nasty bunch and can make a person talk even after they’ve cut his tongue out."

"Amalia, if the Black Brigades were still around, this must have been more than forty years ago. My grandfather and Masulu are both dead, the men in the Black Brigades are probably all dead, the oath you swore no longer holds!"

"Your dear grandfather and my poor father are long dead it’s true, it’s always the best that go first, but I don’t know about those others because they’re a wretched sort that never dies."

"Amalia, the Black Brigades are gone, the war ended back then, nobody will put your feet to the fire."

"If you say so then for me it’s gospel, but Pautasso was in the Black Brigades, and I sure remember him, reckon he was less than twenty at the time, and he’s still around these parts, lives in Corseglio and once a month comes to Solara for his business, he started a brick factory in Corseglio and made a mint, and there’s still people in this town who never forgot what he done and when they see him coming they go the other way. Maybe he can’t put a body’s feet to the fire anymore, but an oath is an oath and not even the parish priest can help that."

"So even though I’m still sick, and my wife believes that you are helping me get better, you won’t tell me this thing, even if not knowing it may harm me."

"May the Lord strike me down if I would harm a hair on your head, Signorino Yambo, but an oath is an oath, am I right?"

"Amalia, whose grandson am I?"

"Your dear grandfather’s, like the word says."

"And I am my grandfather’s universal heir, the owner of everything you see here. Okay? And if you don’t tell me how to get up there, it’s as if you’re stealing what’s mine."

"May the Lord gobble me up this very second if I ever tried to steal a thing of yours, why I never heard such nonsense, I’ve spent all my born days killing myself to keep this house pretty as a picture for you!"

"And furthermore, since I am my grandfather’s heir, and it’s as if everything I’m saying now were being said by him, I solemnly release you from your oath. Okay?"

I had put forth three persuasive arguments: my health, my property rights, and my direct descent, with all the privileges of primogeniture. Unable to resist, Amalia yielded. Does Signorino Yambo carry more weight than the priest and the Black Brigades, or not?

Amalia led me up to the second floor of the central wing, then to the right, past Ada’s room, toward the armoire that smells of camphor where the hall ends. She asked me to help her move the armoire, at least a little, and showed me that behind it was a walled-up doorway. At one time that had been the entrance to the chapel, because when that great-uncle who left everything to my grandfather still lived here, he kept a working chapel in the house, not large, but big enough to hear mass on Sundays with his family, and the priest would come from the village. When the house was taken over by my grandfather, who though fond of his Nativity scene was not a churchgoer, the chapel was abandoned. The benches were taken out and placed here and there in the large downstairs rooms, and since the chapel was empty I had asked my grandfather to allow me to drag a few bookcases down from the attic, to use for my things-and I often hid out there and did God knows what. Indeed, when the parish priest learned of the arrangement, he asked if he could take away at least the consecrated altar stones, to avoid sacrilege, and my grandfather also let him take a statue of the Madonna, the ampullae, the paten, and the tabernacle.