The Experience of Pain Page 3

  It then flitted about more or less everywhere on the roof, this moth of ruin, and then played the acrobat and the somnambulist along the ridge of the roof and the gutter, from which it brimmed over into the cellar, through the good offices of a drainpipe from the same gutter, bringing it back to life then like a snake, wrapped around the copper cord of the small lightning conductor, which instead had the task of liquidating it deep down, the fool. And in that new delirium of resurrection it gave everything to the metal fence of the chicken run behind the Maria Giuseppina residence (imagine the chickens!), to which metal it was all too simple to direct it ipso facto on to the spiked gate dividing the two properties of the two neighbours, namely Giuseppina and Antonietta: which in turn sent it in no time at all into the toilet that was undergoing repair, being blocked, in Antonietta’s garage, from where, no one knew how, it moved at once on to Enrichetta, and leapt with both feet over Giuseppina, in the middle. There, with a formidable shot, and preceded by the destruction of a grand piano, it dived into the maid’s dry bathtub. This time it disappeared for ever into the mysterious nullity of the earth’s potential. – Various expert reports made it possible gradually to piece together this catastrophic ‘itinéraire’, with later adjustments, in a compendium of official documentation. At the beginning, that is. Later, it was the experts themselves who muddied the waters, or shuffled the cards, to such an extent as to make every possible route unthinkable. The builder at Villa Enrichetta, with the good sense of a local villager, advanced his own theory, though highly plausible: that the retreat of the great yellow thing, as he called it, was caused by the fact of having found the lavatory pipe blocked, so that it couldn’t make use of the passage necessary for so much lightning. But the electrophysicists would hear of no such thing, and came out with differential equations: which they supplemented with further documentation, to what joy on the part of Caballero Bertoloni can only be imagined.

  At the same time, in the myth and folklore of Serruchón, the idea gradually developed that the pianoforte was a highly dangerous instrument, to be hoisted out into the garden the very instant that any storm came into sight.

  Caballero Bertoloni’s misfortune would still have been bearable if, as the expert reports were being prepared and the first attempt made at arbitration, matters had not been complicated, dashing all hope of reconciliation, by a second thunderbolt that fell upon the three villas, now united by the celestial ‘lubido’; precisely two years after the bathtub discharge, in June 1933. Having called Pastrufazio’s most bespectacled electro-technical engineers for the umpteenth report, they arrived in locum one glorious morning in mid-August, with every sort of boxed instrument, and highly fragile ohmmeters and portable Wheatstone bridges: but that day, at Terepáttola, the funeral was being celebrated of Carlos Caçoncellos, the great epic poet of Maradagàl who had died two days before, plunging the literary world into consternation, and epic poets in particular. So the engineers, in the empty villa, without even the caretaker, could do nothing. The Grand Old Man had rented the villa for several years, where he used to spend most of the summer assisted by the faithful Giuseppina, training roses and amaranths, and tomatoes, on the ‘parterre’ to the west of the terrace; but refusing to look after the chicken house: a banality, in his view, unworthy of the Bard of Santa Rosa: and their cock-a-doodles would certainly have disturbed him while he was honing his heroic dodecasyllables and certain iambic tetrameters, still more difficult than the first. Except that the servant, inside that rusty and fulgurated fence, had secretly raised several melancholy and flea-ridden chickens, which then turned out, in practice, to be completely inedible.

  Carlos Caçoncellos, as everyone knows, was the poet of the Reconquista and the Battle of Santa Rosa (14 May 1817 – a Sunday), who sang their exploits in the Maradagàl libertador cycle. The whole nineteenth-century Maradagàl epic is inspired by the figure and the name of the libertador, General Juan Muceno Pastrufacio, the victor at Santa Rosa, terror of the ‘gringos’, scourge of the Indios, rebuilder of the city that bears his name; glorified in such splendid verses as ‘El Belgrano’ and ‘El Moreno del Maradagàl’, though in other poems he has been compared to George Washington, Tamburlaine, Garibaldi and Mazeppa.

  ¡Sobre ese mismo – caballo hasta el Domingo

  Vuelva Usted! dando – nos el grito de guerra:

  Como allá cuando – despavorido esta tierra

  Dejó, en la sangre, – y volvió espalda el gringo.

  All of this when the day came, Sunday, 14 May 1817, on the Santa Rosa plain: where Nepomuceno Pastrufazio defeated the ‘ancient’ conquistadors and, immediately before, the hordes of Indios in full rebellion: whether against him or against the others is not clear.

  The Bertoloni family, in dire straits after the Bard’s death, didn’t know how to make ends meet. They had an urgent need to earn a little money from the ribs of the sprawling and contaminated Giuseppina, enough to pay the taxes, expert witnesses, lawyers, mortgage interest … and carry out the most urgent repairs.

  In dire straits and distressed, poor wretched folk, such were the problems they had sown around them, and such were the clouds that had gathered around that Serruchón treasure of theirs.

  For, on the one hand, public idolatry for the Deceased (whom it was said had written two hundred thousand dodecasyllables and twenty-three iambic tetrameters) prevented them in no uncertain terms from ‘removing even just a pin’ from the various rooms of Villa Giuseppina: to be left as he the Deceased had left them before being moved to the San José Clinic at Terepáttola: though in the meantime his slippers, a rubber rectal syringe and his toothbrush had mysteriously vanished before even the first thirty days of mourning were over: certainly – or at least supposedly – stolen by some admirer and fanatical souvenir collector. For which the newspapers de izquierda immediately put the blame on the ‘bourgeois idleness of the proprietors’ and their ‘mercantile obtuseness when it came to the highest spiritual values’.

  The republican newspapers, on the other hand, were already heading a campaign for Giuseppina to become a shrine to the Poet, and to his memory; and for all his relics to be gathered there, including his fishing-line and, most important of all, his manuscripts, around fifty volumes of which had been published; but the majority lay unpublished in the various publishing houses of Maradagàl, which had difficulty, they say (and have difficulty even today), finding any opportunity on the book market, despite the high cultural level of Maradagalese society. Some even argued that Villa Giuseppina should be declared a national monument, with no further ado, subject to legal expropriation at state expense: and should be maintained by the state. But the state was already overwhelmed by monuments, ancient and modern, and it had no peace from the archaeological society for pre-Columbian studies, which was acquiring for it as many as twelve to fifteen monoliths a week, and tombs of Inca kings, and were greeted by the moustaches of the Ministry of Education with the same joy as foundlings would be greeted at an impecunious orphanage.

  And so the law for the restoration of the toothbrush to its pristine splendour, with plaque and Gregorian engraving – in dignitatem pristinam redactus, anno domini, etc. – threatened to remain just a project. In the meantime, the tax collector, who was otherwise a very decent person, and a man with a truly incisive pen, was not to be trifled with.

  To worsen what was already an extremely complicated situation for Caballero Bertoloni and his wife (who both suffered from heart conditions, and were in the hands of doctors, engineers, accountants and lawyers), a third flash of lightning fell ‘unexpectedly’ on the villa, unexpected also for the way it happened, namely helped this time by the lightning conductors; and, at the same time, a strange rumour spread around all the estates and villas from Lukones to Prado, and to Iglesia, and as far as Terepáttola and Novokomi (and this really was the final blow for the hapless couple), that at night, they said, Villa Giuseppina was haunted: by mysterious luminescences, ghosts, they said, or spirits of the dead, nocturnal wings, spectra
l shadows: some people claimed instead that it was just one spectre, a huge figure of the Grand Old Man, and the same every time, especially on moonless nights; and on Tuesdays and Fridays. At midnight, the owl gave its dark and ominous hoot three times, and a bluish, senile form would suddenly appear. The horrible sunken cheeks were evidence of a sepulchral abode, as were the two sets of teeth that revealed themselves from time to time through parched lips, tightly closed, to decline all consent, and the long, shiny beard, and the white, shapeless chlamys, like a shroud; and the head and the hair haloed with an incorporeal horror: all conspired to bathe the tenebrous abandonment of the place in a leaden hue of inexpiable presence.

  From the chicken house, where it suddenly appeared in its terrifying immobility, and before the excited call of the noctule bat and its funereal echo had died away, the spectre moved without a step, almost melting through the metal fence, to complete the circuit of the building: and having returned there, into the chicken house, it paused long inside that galvanized wire fence, cursing with a broad and yet terrible gesture those few beings of tiny stature: which were however not there, and nowhere to be seen. Then, passing through barred entrances as though they were mist, charged with horror and saturated with silence, he began to wander the house from cellar to attic, though touching not a thing nor saying a word: except that he paused for hours before the washbasin, amplifying or diminishing its own luminous intensity (like a thermionic light bulb), and staring continually at the soap dishes, the soap dishes!

  In a pose full of majesty and vexation.

  ‘That’s all we needed!’ exclaimed old Bertoloni when they told him about those apparitions in the villa, describing moreover the figure, precisely how it turned up in the chicken house, at midnight, at the ominous and invisible call of the owl. He, Bertoloni, was an immigrant from Lombardy who had made his money with an ironmongery shop, and yet was now on the point of going completely bust.

  So that, having banished all idea of profit, instead he pondered a more modest solution, which would at least be of temporary worth, and for luck and against double bad luck, to break that accumulation of absurdity that was mounting up on the underlying absurdity of the villa. And instead of the villa, he thought of renting out the caretaker’s lodge, as this was also vacant; ‘at least that!’, which was of course a decent little villa in its own right, five rooms, cellar, attic, electric lighting, water well, its own septic tank, perfectly habitable for a respectable family, e.g. an official in the government, customs or land registry or civil engineers, or in the battle for grain, it was all the same to him.

  In this he was helped not only by a direct intercession from Heaven, which never failed at the right moment to rain down in his support, as has been seen, but also by the three following circumstances. First: that the caretaker’s lodge was quite a few steps away from the villa and was automatically excluded from the peregrinations of the phantom; which, given the distance, and the softness of its feet, had had to ignore it. It stood on the main Prado road, with a group of other houses and small villas, themselves looking rather like caretaker’s lodges, and a small, attractive hostería with its sign of the branch over the table, from where (from the kitchen, that is) a fine aroma of stewed meat was enough, each evening at around seven, to chase off any fancy notions, of whatever kind: and Bertoloni, however old and myocardial, immediately recognized this. Second: the military doctor, Colonel Di Pascuale, with a ‘c’ – to whom he had managed to rent it – had already by that time, namely in 1934, married off all his sons and daughters: and kept just a ‘señora’ with him, a maid one metre twenty tall (with two underripe half-melons at washbasin height): and a young grandson or a granddaughter, in rotation but no more than one at a time, along with a certain stock of underpants for both sexes. Third: the same Di Pascuale, having grown up in a positivist atmosphere in the Maradagàl of Presidente Uguirre, of Carlos Venturini, of Luis Coñara, of José Barriento and so forth, but above all at the Facultad Médica at Pastrufazio, and having become all the more sceptical by the practice of his profession, as you will have occasion to read, had very little belief – this is true, alas – in the Madonna, but even less in ghosts. About the flashes of lightning he said only: ‘cu’ wotta brainer’, or: ‘cu’ wotta stinker’, according to his mood: in the first case with a shrug of the shoulders, in the other with an expression of stubborn satisfaction, almost as though he were planning revenge at the first opportunity. He saw that the rent was very reasonable, brought down at the same time by the ghost and by the glory of the Bard, by the democratic and republican press: and of course by the lightning: and he signed the contract straight away. His señora agreed.

  During his first month at the villa he had already won over the doctor’s sympathy by avoiding unfair competition and not charging reduced rates for examining his neighbours, namely the raucous and cousiniferous families stuffed four to a room in the small houses around the caretaker’s villa. Only once was he conscious of it, when called urgently to Villa Antonietta, for Señorito Pepito, who had broken his leg playing tennis: and he arrived (with his lungs aflame) and the doctor had also arrived in the meantime, he too called out, by telephone, and equipped with the necessary: and both could deal with the injury together. It was on that occasion that they became acquainted and, in dealing with the leg, ‘they learned to respect each other’. From then on, they cultivated their small garden of friendship and mutual deference, accompanied by the fact that the obliging doctor, whenever the colonel’s wife asked, undertook to fetch tinned peas for her from Prado or Iglesia: the most delicious and indispensable of legumes in Serruchón. When the rumours about Pedro’s identity began to take the form of a scandal, the good doctor had ample opportunity to amuse the colonel’s wife with it, and she, after a while, with her husband, who at first paid little attention to the story, occupied as he was with the arduous task of managing, once and for all!, if not to digest, at least to direct those gunshot pellets of peas towards the exit; peas that had been accompanied as far as the colon by a guarniko stew fit for the Borgias. (This is a kind of humped Maradagàl bullock, delicious, but with no horns, halfway between a calf and a camel. Cut into cubes, with a ‘cuchillo’, and with a little ginger and red pepper, it makes an excellent dish …) But the doctor was not one to give up: and the following day, still turning it over in his mind like a sage mulling over the mysteries of the World, he neatly reiterated the information and finished it off with Palumbo’s personal details and distinguishing marks: and then, following the thread of that name, the colonel fished out from the labyrinth of his mind a whole pitiful story from after the war, in other words from a few years before: which had kept him on his toes for two whole months, in his office at the Second Review Commission at the Central Military Hospital in Pastrufazio. ‘Palumbo? … Palumbo? …’, he asked, his lower lip jutting out, as it often did when he was reminiscing. But of course, Palumbo! Yes! He remembered him very well! … Palumbo. Gaetano! Born in 1900, wounded at Hill 131, tall, well-built … and the whole endless ordeal of the compensation procedure … That is … yes … they had compensated him …

  ‘Compensated!’ he repeated, moving his head up and down as if to focus more clearly on the case. These were the days, towards the end of August, after the cloth trader had been through, when everyone at Lukones came to hear the story about the name and the pension and to extend their vocabularies with the two adjectives ‘penetrating’ and ‘lacerating’. Even Giuseppe, the peon at Villa Pirobutirro, who hung around the Hostería del Alegre Corazón, even Don Giuseppe, the good parish priest, and the carters who went to Prado. José Inrumador, Fernando el Gordo, Mingo Ruiz, Carlos La Torre, Miguel Chico, Batta, Carmelo De Peppe; and the ninety-year-old Indio Huitzilopótli named Pablo or Repeppe; and even the women, the girls, Peppa, Beppa, Pina, Carmencita, Murmuradora, Bulladora, Mariposa … The doctor, already informed about the ‘asunto’ from the general gossip of the people, so that he could tell the colonel’s wife about it, and the colonel himself, obtain
ed those extra details and medical particulars from his colleague and superior officer, which from there onward made him lord and master of the day’s news, in triumphant advantage by four or five lengths over the general gossip of the people. So much so that, during those days, he no longer seemed himself.

  He left his thermometer at home: and on another occasion his precious stethoscope. Once, tapping his finger, he made one man repeat, ‘Thirty-three,’ ‘Thirty-three,’ ‘Thirty-three,’ when all the poor man needed was to take oil. The renewed disinterest with which he heard the story each time, from each person who served it up to him again, for him then to throw back, like nothing, those three or four dry words, as a man of science who knows his business, and expresses himself in impeccable terms, swaying his head in an act of respectful diagnosis as an economist might do with the moribund law of Ricardo; all that unapparent but extremely excited curiosity, and the eucharistic ardour with which the latest news was spread, had indeed been the reason why, at the time, he had gone two extra days without shaving: which was a Thursday and Sunday liturgy, but now six days had passed, in this circumstance (plus the first day, which doesn’t count), and yet was more and more formidable, and ominous; and of anxious inclination. He therefore arrived at a ten-day beard, an event not infrequent, for that matter, in his personal history, mirroring an extremely busy life devoted entirely to the good, or rather to the sickness, of his fellow men.