Nicola Gardini - Lost Words

“Very good, Luca,” she said approvingly, after a final look at the completed application. “Let me be clear about one thing: no school really does its job… School is a factory of lies. But a classical education is better than the others. At least you’ll learn a few words of ancient Greek. You’ll read Thucydides in his own language! Did I ever tell you about the opening of the Peloponnesian War ? Wait… now where did I put it?”

She browsed through the volumes on the top shelf and found what she was looking for. She read quietly, to herself, the opening lines of the work in the original, and then she translated it for me, along with other passages from the introduction.

“Beautiful,” I said, to gratify her.

She admitted that Thucydides was a very difficult author, and that she wasn’t sure if she had understood him herself, even after many re-readings. “A possession for all time…” she ruminated. And addressing me again: “I wonder whether it is right to expect things to last forever… Certainly, for love of the truth… Let me give you an example. In Moscow, in Red Square, the embalmed body of Lenin is on display. You know who he is, don’t you?… I was only able to observe it for a few moments because there was a long line of visitors and the guards refused to allow me enough time for serious contemplation. But those few moments were enough to impress on my memory the unmistakable color of his hair and beard, the yellow pallor of his skin… At that moment I didn’t think about his fame or historic importance — I thought, instead, about the durability of matter, about the physical survival of something that no longer has a direct relationship with the reality around it. Lenin belonged to the past, yet there he was, looking the same as he had when he was alive, as if the dead man before me were not really him but rather everything that had surrounded him when he was still alive. That’s what moved me: the solitude of the embalmed body. And what that solitude represented — a self-consciously transient universe that was determined to endure, and had chosen Lenin to represent that era to posterity. Lenin was a remnant, a relic, a trace… And the others? Where were his contemporaries? What was the purpose of preserving only one man’s body, of spurning the laws of death and becoming not just a contemporary of posterity, but surviving it?… And what of the mummy of Ramses II, at the Cairo Museum?… To think that after so many centuries he still bears the face of a despot… Are you following?… What is the truth?… Now it’s time for you to go…”

She was dismissing me earlier than usual. I walked the short distance from the chair to the door, reluctantly picking up my notebooks and the preregistration form. The Maestra held the door handle and added: “Tomorrow there’s no need for you to come, Luca. Maybe it would be better if we suspended our afternoon lessons for the time being. It won’t hurt you to study by yourself. By now you know what to do. I need my rest. Why the long face? Don’t tell me you’re offended?” She didn’t have a very cheerful expression, either. Speaking to me this way seemed to pain her. “Chin up… no one has died. Come on! Look at me…”

My heart stopped. All the bliss of the previous months evaporated in an instant. I cast a final glance around the room where I had spent the happiest hours of my life and then I shuffled outside with the first teardrops welling up in my eyes.

“Luca,” she called to me.

I didn’t listen. Why should I? She didn’t want me anymore.

*.

Huddled in a corner of the bedroom, I repeated to myself that the Maestra had abandoned me, that she was tired of me… I had been deceived. The Maestra had played with my feelings — I was just one of her experiments… The intercom rang. My mother, who was rinsing the vegetables in the sink, shouted at me, “Chino, answer it… it’s the Maestra… What else does she want? For Pete’s sake! You just left three minutes ago!”

She had to take the call herself. “Yes, thank you, Miss Lynd, that’ll be fine. Alright. We’ll keep your advice in mind.”

Hearing my mother enter the room, I stood up and went to the window, turning my back to her. “The Maestra wants us to stop calling you Chino at home. She says that your name is Luca, ‘ the child of luck ’… she must be losing her marbles, that one!..” My mother was shocked. So was I — shocked by the Maestra’s determination, until the end, to make sure I became the person I was meant to be. I said nothing. I stared out at the horizon. Any wisp of fog had cleared, and the rows of poplar trees were swaying in the breeze.

During supper I burst into tears.

“Would you mind telling me what’s come over you?” my mother asked. “Are you tired?… The Maestra is putting too much pressure on you! Enough of all that English now! You’ll learn it when you’re older! Just look what it’s doing to you… Come now, sweetheart, tell me what’s wrong? If something’s bothering you, you have to tell your mother. Did the Maestra do something to you?… Did you know,” she added, turning to my father, “that she called me on the intercom just to tell me that from now on we should start calling our son Luca instead of Chino? Who does she think she is? First she demands that we send him to the Lyceum. Now she expects us to give him another name… If she wanted a son so much, why didn’t she have one herself?”

“But she’s right,” my father said, “the boy’s name is Luca. Let’s try calling him that. Maybe then he’ll stop whining like such a sissy…” He noticed the steak still sitting on my plate, untouched. “Come on, eat!” he ordered me.

“Don’t insist!” my mother scolded him. “He’ll eat. Don’t insist or you’ll only make the situation worse.” She turned to me: “And you — tomorrow afternoon you stay home. Understood? You’re wearing yourself out… I’m not letting you go up there anymore! And if that woman sticks her nose into things that are none of her business, then I won’t send you to the Lyceum, either!”

I got up from the table and said that I was going to walk up and down the stairs to clear my head. I made it up to the fifth floor, counting every step. I headed toward the Maestra’s door and started crying again. I could see my reflection in the surface of the polished wood. I hoped the Maestra would hear my sobs, open the door, invite me in and console me, and at one point, yes, I thought I could feel her presence on the other side of the door — a slight sound. She must have noticed something, yes, now she was coming to open up for me… I was ready to fall to her feet, to beg her to keep me with her forever… but the door remained closed.

Still in tears, I went down one flight of stairs and looked out from the balcony next to the trash chute. The stench of garbage invaded my nostrils. A white car parked at the foot of the hill and turned its headlights off. In the courtyard the cat was clinging to the sycamore tree, assailed by two claimants. The swallows glided through the sky, catching insects. Paolini and Cavallo had just come through the gate. Riccardo was sitting with his legs crossed on the bench facing the fountain, and next to him was a blonde girl, partly concealed by the wisteria leaves. They were holding each other’s hands. I stood there scrutinizing them and, without realizing it, slowly calmed down. The last teardrops dried on my cheeks and turned cold. I was suddenly filled with a kind of serenity, a reassuring melancholy. In my mind’s eye I climbed an endless staircase that spiraled up to the stratosphere and I reached the highest floor of the tallest building in the world, like one of those amazing new skyscrapers in New York, the Twin Towers, that I had seen on television recently, and I leapt and let my body float down.