Planus (9 page)

Is this the Wheel of Things to which Man is tied, sowing Evil, according to the old lama who taught Kim, this wheel whose ruts are the streets of the big cities, full of evil seeds ?

'Before the photographer owned it, the Virgil paddock belonged to the Dautoma family, ironmongers who never came there,' Pasquale related, 'and before them to the Barons of Menichelli, rich bankers who came occasionally in a carriage drawn by white mules, just like the Pope's, and who, on the pretext of picnicking there, celebrated their Jewish Easter, or some nonsense of their religion. That was when my father was a little boy. But when I was little, Grandpa told us that in the time of his father the tomb was used as a hunting-lodge where my ancestor and the neighbours would hide and shoot birds in the migratory seasons, spring and autumn. They also spread nets for, in those days, there was quail there. The close of Virgil was already abandoned and belonged to no One, or so it was thought, but my grandfather's grandfather warned the young people that it still belonged to the Marquis, whose name I have forgotten, a great prelate who might appear at any time from Rome, and then they would all suffer for it, for he was an evil man, worse than that, a sorcerer: in fact, the prelate did come back one day, and he settled in the house in the paddock. Just a minute, young 'un, his name's on the tip of my tongue . . . Terra . . . Terra . . . Marquis of Terranova . . . Terrasecca . . . rossa . . . puzzosa, no, that's not it, but never mind, the name has nothing to do with it. The important thing is that the prelate did not return alone, he brought his son with him, a bad character, Nordic-looking, and Grandpa's grandfather said categorically that the Monsignore had had him by some German girl. He was a blond, square-cut young man, like so many of the foreign painters who come here and prowl about and whom we poor folk believe to be gentle and clever, because they're artists and have blue eyes, but sooner or later they turn out to be brutes, bad-tempered and ungrateful in spite of all the little courtesies one has offered them. They're barbarians. What's more, they don't fancy girls, they're always after little boys, so you beware of them, Beppino, and you, young 'un. They're ogres. The young Marquis was nicknamed II Domatore, and that tells you a lot about his character. He was even more wicked than his father, and, like his progenitor, he was a sorcerer, but of a kind that is not very common around here, as you will see. No sooner had he installed himself in the enclosure than the Marquis summoned all the men from the local farms and had them horse-whipped for violating Virgil's Tomb. They often talk about it still in my family. II Domatore himself carried out the sentence on young and old alike, by God! And may God and all his saints, who have nothing else to do, protect the soul of my ancestor, that worthy old man who toiled and sweated all his life !'

And Pasquale took off his Calabrian felt hat and crossed himself.

Every Sunday I had more and more stories to tell Beppino, as I was now in open warfare with the boys on la Salita, who had soon marked me out on my wall. They bombarded me with cabbage- stalks, rotten tomatoes and all sorts of filth, the girls being the most eager and hurling stones at me, while I retaliated with pieces of broken glass that I wrenched out of the top of the old wall and with marbles shot from a catapult, aiming carefully, especially at the girls, and when I winged one of them they would run squealing to round up the boys, and then the boys would make an assault on the wall and I would repulse them with my wooden sword, until, succumbing to their superior numbers, I retreated to some high perch which was inaccessible to them. If any of the little street- arabs managed to get into the garden, they were chased out by Benjamin, brandishing his rake or his besom, or else they were caught at the gate by Ernest, who kicked their backsides for them. It was thrilling. One day a little girl was found in the rose-garden, brazenly picking the flowers to make a crown for herself. She was taken to my mother, who offered her a cup of hot chocolate, some cake and sweets, and then I conducted her back to the postern gate, where she kissed me on the mouth to tease me, and thumbed her nose at Lily, who had followed us to make sure the gate was firmly closed behind her. On returning to the house I learned that the little trollop had stolen six teaspoons and, that night, I was sent to bed without any supper. But Beppino did not approve of my behaviour: 'You're wrong to get into the black books of the local kids,' he said, 'when you come out on the rounds with us one morning, they'll recognize you and goodness knows
what
they might do to you!'

'Are you scared, Beppino? I'll go out armed. My catapult, a knife, my father's revolver. . . .'

I did not know how truly I spoke, for, in fact, there was a victim, not one of those dirty little brats, my enemies, against whom I was ready to defend myself, but a leper with a hole in the middle of his face, who terrified me and who became the first man I ever killed, insidiously, a few days before I left for Sicily . . . another heavy secret which, like my love for Elena, haunted me for years, and which has been transformed in the course of time into a strange and horrified attraction towards lepers, an attraction which overwhelmed me and led me to seek their company, a quarter of a century later, in Brazil, where these pariahs pullulate in the interior — the lion- muzzled, the faceless, the club-footed, the ambidextrous with suppurating stumps, cases of elephantiasis, whole tribes of men covered in sores, without toes or fingers, their extremities reduced to a lobster-claw, whole clans whose skin is shredding off their bodies in flakes as big as handkerchiefs, who spit and belch, walk on their hunkers, hop like toads, drag themselves along like slugs, leaving a trail of spittle behind them; men whose eyes swim with pus from their fistulae, cauliflower ears, their fingers (when they have any) dangling at the end of long threads which sometimes break off (and their fingers remain behind them on the path, looking like pale turds), a fiery tattoo of varicose ulcers, an,d all this decay living with unbelievable women, muffled up in sticky bandages and stained napkins, still more horrifying than the men, dropping pancakes of dung, their breasts cracked and split, their bellies gnawed, their buttocks devoured by the Black Plague, and all this rotten flesh procreating, eating, drinking, singing and dancing, in the hills of Pira-Pora, their sanctuary, where they make a pilgrimage once a year, led by a monk sitting side-saddle on an ass's foal, a palm branch in his hand, the King of the Lepers (that year it was a Belgian monk), to whom all the virgins captured along the way are brought, to be ravished by him on a red carpet, in the hopes of a cure, and in sight of all his fanatical followers who believe in the miracle, acclaim him, chant, pray, howl, fall into trances, dance, clap their hands, shake their hips, burst out with infernal cries, lay hold of one another, roll on the ground, fornicate, hiccup, foam at the mouth and vent their spleen beneath the tropical sun, then eat, guzzle, carouse and besot themselves. I had left civilization behind me and found myself mingling with them.

'Carminella will bear witness,' said Pasquale. 'It was the night of Good Friday, all night long we heard the sobs and moans of that accursed Barbary organ, and its long, crazy, piping sounds. Carminella didn't get a wink of sleep, she spent the whole night in terror, kneeling on the bedroom floor, telling her rosary, trembling like a leaf, and reciting prayers for the repose of the souls of sinners.'

'And you think it was II Domatore who was turning the handle?' I asked.

'It was him!'

'But how is that possible, Pasquale, if the young Marquis died long ago?' I persisted.

'Ah, but he isn't dead, I've seen him,' Pasquale replied gravely, 'Let me explain.. . .'

It seems that Monsignore needed some ducats and was trying to manufacture artificial gold, and that's why, as soon as they were settled in, the house in the paddock started to buzz like a devils' kitchen and was lit up all night. But the son, II Domatore, had something quite different in mind, he was searching for the secret of long life, and if he was to be seen poking the fire in the kitchen at night, it was more than just coal he was stirring up, for out of the fire came the cries and long-drawn-out groans of children, and the fiend tried to cover up these cries by playing the hurdy- gurdy, on and on, never stopping until break of day. In fact, soon after the gentlemen came to live in the enclosure, local children began to disappear mysteriously, both boys and girls, and the rumour spread through the terrorized villages that II Domatore was in secret league with a monk from the monastery (at the back, the paddock of Virgil gave on to the bottom of the garden of the Carthusian monastery of San-Martino), for they were often surprised

in confabulation, and this Mendicant Friar, known as Sagoma because he went barefooted and, at each step, trod on the face of Jesus Christ which had been tattooed on his heels, was a twisted villain who had long been held in fear, and people believed that it was Father Sagoma who stole the children, throwing a hood over their faces and stringing them up like sausages, stuffing them under his robes, so that he looked pregnant, the swine! What could the poor tots do? We heard them yelling in that infernal kitchen. Roasting them over a slow fire was nothing. They must have exposed them to the blazing fire in the chimney, melted them, poured them into moulds, crushed them in grinders, minced them up, remodelled them, altered their faces, reduced their stature and their proportions, and heated them in the oven to make them mature into adults. When they were 'done' they took them out, and the little men had muscles and a beard on their chins, while the little women had hips, breasts, bellies and buttocks, and in fact one day someone saw a whole family of dwarfs on the terrace of the house, well-formed midgets, nicely dressed, who were curtseying and performing the movements of a minuet under the direction of II Domatore, who was turning the handle of his organ with one hand and brandishing his cane with the other, and the dwarfs were laughing, alas! But these results were not obtained right at the beginning, there were failures, whole vatfuls of foetuses, and the neighbours claim even today that the exuberant fecundity of the rambler rose, that has pushed the roof off and invaded the whole house, uprooting the flagstones and making the balcony crumble into the ravine, is due to the fact that the magician's abortions were tipped out at its roots, like swill. Naturally all this took time, they had to experiment with whole batches of samples so as to be able to select the most successful, and then, one fine night, the whole thing was dashed to the ground, not as a result of a cauldron exploding in that satanic kitchen, but because there was an earthquake ; that shook the whole region. You can still see traces of it in the cracked facades of more than one farmhouse around here.

'Look, it was Pino, my great-grandfather, who set this chimney upright again and reinforced it,' said Pasquale, showing me some irons hammered into the front of the farmhouse. 'He forged them himself. The chimney had toppled down.'

'And then, Pasquale?'

'Then the Virgil paddock became what it has remained, a cursed place.'

'But the old Marquis and his son, and the dwarfs, Pasquale?'

'The dwarfs? A good dozen of them were buried in the cemetery of the monastery, and there was quite a to-do before they could be

l>uried in holy ground; first, they had to be exorcized, and the authorities poked their noses in, wanting to know who they were. In the end they were interred anonymously, since nobody cared to claim them, especially not the parents who mourned a lost child and had lodged a complaint. II Domatore had disappeared without trace, and so had Father Sagoma, his cell was found empty and nobody could explain how he had vanished. As for the Monsignore, he's still alive. The old Marquis has a hole right in the middle of his face.'  /

pressed around you, thrusting their stinking sores right under you nose, and hanging on to your clothes, since this honourable fraternity had likewise sworn, out of self-respect, to levy a tithe on every passer-by, and anyone who succeeded in slipping through without payment was spat upon and cursed — in spite of all this la Salita was still the most direct route of access for residents of the Vomero who did not want to take the funicular, or had not ye" acquired the habit (the funicular was still a novelty then), or di not want to spend the money (it cost four sous and, at that time, you could ride about in a fiacre for hours for four sous, the only trouble being that there was no road up to the Vomero that was fit for carriages). Moreover, la Salita was an extremely flourishing market^ At the bottom there were excellent food-shops, at the top, market- gardeners with a display of fruit and vegetables; lower down, littles blocks of flats where the poor lived; above these and facing our house the gaudy cabins of two or three prostitutes and, a little lower, bars, dives, dance-halls, wine-shops, fish-and-chip shops, open-air kitchens, street-barbers and wig-makers, the narrow shop of the, specialist who sold garish shoes to all the local delinquents, and, , right beside it, the den of the 'banker' of the
rampa,
a Jew who lent money at high rates of interest on false gems, rhinestones, rolled-gold watches with artificial jewels, long coral necklaces and tortoise-shell combs, which were kept in a coffer, bristling with irons and secured; by a whole armoury of padlocks and chains, along with pawnshop,' pledges, lottery tickets and petty cash.

Towards the middle of la Salita, almost half-way down, one of the landings opened out to form a little square where there was a small chapel, with a statue of the Madonna in front of it, railed off from the street and its incessant traffic; here, huddled in old rags1 his eyes closed and his begging-bag in full view, an old man was permanently stationed, an old man who no longer looked like human being, for he was disfigured by a round, bluish-black hoi which had ravaged half his face. Seated in a circle round him were other old men, also emaciated, ragged and repulsive, who lavished attentions upon him, calling the old hags to bring him drink in feeding-bottle, coddling him like a new-born baby, wiping his fac holed by lupus as one wipes a baby's bottom, and all day long people came to consult him, men, women, all the thieves of the quarter, an young messengers would run off at the double, and rogues of eve- kind would return with sacks whose contents were parcelled out an vanished as if by magic, scarves, shawls, mantillas, underwear, umbrellas, boots, purses that tinkled when the old men shook them! watches that slipped from hand to hand like a bar of soap, gold watch-chains, necklaces that dangled for a moment from withered