Valerio Manfredi - The Ancient Curse

‘Did you see anything else?’

Signora Pina fell silent for a moment, then spoke up again. ‘Nothing. I didn’t see a thing. The house went pitch dark afterwards and as silent as a grave.’

‘I see. Thank you, Signora Pina. Be sure to keep me informed if it happens again.’

‘You can count on it, Doctor. Nothing escapes me from here.’

Fabrizio lowered his head and sighed. He was lost in thought for a few long moments, then he shook himself and went back to work.

He scanned the sequence image by image, passage by passage, until he had the entire inscription saved on his computer. He opened a program in which he could divide the screen into three parts and inserted the Etruscan version on the right and the Latin version on the left, leaving the centre open for his translation. He plugged in his laptop alongside, turned it on and connected it to the largest, most complete Latin dictionary that existed on the planet, the Thesaurus Academiae Internationalis Linguae Latinae, as well as to the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and the Testimonia Linguae Etruscae. He took the phone off the hook, turned off his mobile phone and focused on the task at hand.

He worked for hours and hours with no interruption and without even getting up. He sipped at a glass of water, as he was accustomed to doing when he was dealing with a particularly thorny intellectual challenge. On the wall in front of him was a blow-up of the lad of Volterra, which seemed to fill the empty kitchen with its melancholy aura. He didn’t stop until he was utterly exhausted, at nearly two a.m. He got up to stretch his stiff limbs and contemplated the screen with satisfaction. The central column was slowly filling up with Italian words, nursed along by the Etruscan and Latin texts. Word after word, the past was coming alive, one scrap at a time. He sat down again and went back to work. There were still a number of gaps, some longer than others, empty spaces that interrupted the flow, and as his frustration grew, so did his excitement. But he was feeling utterly drained and fatigue was setting in.

He got up, took an amphetamine and put on a Mahler symphony to buoy up his emotions, which were taking off every which way. The hours passed as the text was pieced together, taken apart and reassembled in an uninterrupted series of interpretative hypotheses. Streams of data filled the laptop’s plasma screen: word lists, tense sequences, exemplifications, hundreds of alphabetical symbols representing all the possible variants. In Latin, in Greek, in Etruscan. Fabrizio paused only to watch the sun rising over the forested hills that loomed to the east with their curving, undulating shapes. Then, forgetting how early it was, he called Aldo Prada, his linguist friend, to consult with him about all the doubts that had emerged in his long night’s work.

‘I’m so sorry!’ said Fabrizio when he realized he’d woken his colleague up. ‘I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘What are you doing?’ asked Prada, immediately intrigued and not at all sleepy.

‘I’m… trying to read an inscription.’

‘Unpublished, right? Where did you find it?’

The telephone call was turning into an uncomfortable interrogation.

‘It’s not the inscription from Volterra, is it? Isn’t that where you said you were going? I’ve heard about it, although no one has any details. I was talking to Sonia the other day and-’

‘Aldo, what I need is your help, not your questions. This thing I’m working on is important and urgent but I’m afraid I can’t explain.’

‘You’ll name me in the publication, though, right? Or we can publish it together. What do you say? You are going to publish it, right?’

‘No. I’m not going to publish it. It isn’t mine to publish.’

‘Ah,’ sighed his colleague in a tone both disappointed and suspicious.

‘Listen,’ said Fabrizio impatiently. ‘We’ve always been friends, haven’t we? That’s why I thought of you. If you think you can help me, say so, otherwise forget it. I’ll stumble through it on my own, as I have been doing.’

‘Don’t get angry. I was just curious… It’s not every day you hear about an unpublished inscription. Let’s start from scratch. If you’re calling me, it must mean you’re stuck – that is, the expressions you’re trying to translate are not in established sources.’

‘That’s it. You’re the only person who can help me right now. I’ll be eternally grateful and, as soon as this thing is over, I’ll tell you the whole story. I promise you that I’m not doing anything illegal. I’m just dead tired right now and I’m not connecting. If you don’t help me, I’m afraid I won’t work my way out of this. But if you can’t, that’s all right. I’ll survive, you know.’

‘All right, I get it. You don’t want to tell me anything, even though I’m an old friend. OK, don’t worry about it. Tell me what the problem is. Although without seeing what we’re talking about, I don’t know-’

‘Is your computer on? I’ll send the parts I’m having trouble with and give you a few minutes to look at them. Then I’ll call you back and we can go through them together. All right?’

‘Sure. Send it right away, then.’

Fabrizio sent the file, waited nearly an hour and then called back.

‘Got it!’ said Prada.

‘Well? What do you think?’

‘Good God! This stuff is incredible.’

‘It is.’

A few moments of silence, then his friend’s voice rang out: ‘Know something? You’re pretty close. It’s only that you haven’t considered…’

What?’

‘Several variations in the formulation of diphthongs in the archaic form of the genitive, and a morpheme which I would classify as an apax because-’

Aldo, please. I have no time for theory. Just correct whatever is wrong with my fucking translation before I faint or have a heart attack because I’m so exhausted I can’t think straight any more. Is that clear?’

‘Clear as can be. Hold on, though, yeah, I think I’m right about that, there’s a diphthong formulation here that…’

Fabrizio let him run on because he knew that Aldo Prada’s mind was the most powerful machine in the world as far as phonetic and morphologic processing was concerned. If he couldn’t manage it, no one could. Even Balestra must have had a lot of problems, if he’d been holed up in his office so long without ever appealing to anyone for assistance or collaboration.

‘Give me a couple of hours,’ Prada said suddenly. ‘You’ve taken me by surprise here. I don’t want to make a mistake. No one’s ever seen a bilingual text before. What’s strange is that the Etruscan is so clear and the Latin is so fuzzy. It looks more like spots than letters. But better than nothing, that’s for sure. Good heavens, I can only imagine the clamour this will create when it’s announced. If only I knew a little more about the context…’

‘Don’t even think about it. I can’t tell you where it was found. You’ll have to manage with what you have. Do it as a favour to me. You won’t be sorry, I promise you.’

‘OK. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve finished.’

Fabrizio closed the shutters and lay down on the couch to try to recover some lucidity. He was light-headed with hunger. The strain of working through the night, along with the pill he’d swallowed, made him feel wide awake but sluggish. He felt like he was moving in slow motion, and his muscles were cramping up, along with his stomach. The sounds of early morning wafted in from outside: the rumble of cars on the regional road and the chirping of sparrows. The roosters saluted the dim light of another dreary day from farmhouses scattered around the countryside.