How I Lost the War Read online

  I’ve made the most of it, I swear, the most of the least, I agree, but still the most I possibly could. I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say I could hardly be expected to be a modern man. “You’re a nineteenth-century man!” That was what my girlfriends threw at me when they left me (even when I left them). I can well believe it. And that was fine by me. By rights, I should be a fourteenth-century man, or, worse still, a thirteenth-century man. I’m an avant-garde traditionalist, a progressive conservative, a fashionable reactionary. Well, when you come down to it, it could have been worse.

  What I still can’t understand is what was going through my great-grandfather Terenzio’s head when he decided that even if it ruined him he would build a castle. It was he who started the whole thing, who derailed the train of time. And when he had the illusion that he had stopped that train by erecting his castle against the will of history, he of all the passengers was perhaps the most ill at ease. Because a house doesn’t belong to the person who builds it but to those who come after him and live in it for generations. Despite the fact that it had been Terenzio who had wanted this house, wanted it with a feverish determination that consumed him and at the same time kept him alive.

  Masons, carpenters and artisans came from all over to build the castle, stonecutters from Rapolano, painters from Siena, decorators from Orvieto, architects from Rome, gardeners from Florence. They worked for years. Twenty, thirty. Maybe more. They worked until the money was all gone and my great-grandfather had squandered all his immense fortune. Even the most impatient creditors had to contain their impatience, out of their old respect—or fear, if you like—for our family and for that proud, strong man who whipped his peasants. And they were all paid, down to the last penny. Until the accounts were settled and the money was gone. The last of the artisans was paid with the last of the cash, and all that was left was an empty bank account and a completed castle. Only then did my great-grandfather Terenzio, who had been dead since Fede had died, feel really free to die. You can judge the result for yourselves. I’m certainly not going to quarrel with it. Architecture is a fact. Or rather, it’s an object. And you can’t quarrel with objects. They either exist or they don’t. They’re there or they’re not. The castle is there, for all to see.

  Yes, it’s there, but it wasn’t always there … That’s what many people say, with a wicked little smile. It’s a sensitive, if ultimately futile, question. And it’s kept more than one person awake at night, well, me at least.

  Because none of the villagers—the peasants, the artisans, the shopkeepers, the professionals, the small landowners, even my close, or comparatively close, relatives—have ever come to terms with the castle. I’ve thought about that a lot, and have worked out some quite complex theories—too complex, probably, because when you get down to it, it’s actually quite simple.

  Envy.

  Pure envy.

  Of the commonest kind.

  In fact if you go to my village and pay attention to what people say, the first thing you’ll hear is:

  “The castle’s an imitation.”

  “I’m sorry?’

  “The castle. It isn’t a genuine medieval building. It’s an imitation.”

  “Oh … ”

  “Late nineteenth century … ”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  If tourists or strangers arrive, buttonhole some solitary villager who doesn’t really want to chat, and have the misfortune to ask him, “Excuse me, is it possible to visit the castle?” the answer will come—“It’s an imitation.”

  If they could, I swear, they’d even have put it on the sign at the entrance to the village:

  582 metres above sea level

  (THE CASTLE IS AN IMITATION)

  So how come that, in all the guides, in all those glossy tourist brochures that are full of mistakes, on every lousy postcard, it’s the slender, imposing outline of the tower that dominates? A TV crew comes to shoot one of those travel features that are really only liked by people who have never been to the places they talk about, and, get this, the feature always begins and ends with the tower. They hold a conference, and what do they stick on the cover of the report of proceedings? The castle.

  It’s odd that all this hatred of the castle should become sublimated in the triumph of its iconography. Because, despite the postcards, that’s what it was—hatred. Whenever I was called up to the front of the class, my schoolmistresses would tend to rub it in. “Monuments of note in our village include an early Christian church of great antiquity, the seventeenth-century palace of the Archpriest, visited by Grand Duke Leopoldo in person, a small chapel with a saddle roof known as the Chapel of the Conception, attributed to Niccolò Circignani, known as Il Pomarancio, and next to the high altar the tomb of Beato Pietro who, according to tradition, died there of cold in February 1638 (so says the latest edition of the guide to the village, revised and corrected by God knows who, though I’d love to know). Also of interest is a finely crafted font dating from 1596, and a neo-Gothic castle of no historical or artistic significance, which is … ”

  “Cremona, tell me, what is your castle?”

  “An imitation, miss!”

  “Good. Go back to your seat.”

  My classmates at the least sign of an argument during a football game, my classmates’ mothers as they made me jam sandwiches as a snack, my classmates’ friends taking advantage of those rare moments when my mother stepped away from me, leaving me unprotected in the world—in short, everyone, as soon as they had an opportunity, made sure to inform me that the castle in which I lived was an imitation. And to think that I did all I could to downplay it as much as possible. The number of times I heard that fatal question addressed to me by an eager tourist—“Excuse me, whose castle is that?” and I, flying high, very high, a superhero in the clear skies of modesty ever since I was little, would lower my eyes and reply, “ … It’s private.” “But who does it belong to?” the insatiable tourist would insist. “A local family … ” And I would launch my bike at breakneck speed down the slope.

  Hardly surprising then, in fact quite understandable, if I had grown up with a complex about this ‘imitation castle’, a taint I carried with me until I was sixteen or seventeen when, after diligent searching in a dusty, authoritative history book, I read the following—“The castle is of Lombard origin, and there is evidence that it dates from as far back as the year 1000.” 1000. One thousand. No more, no less. I can’t tell you the relief!

  What my great-grandfather had done was a kind of superfetation, in other words, he had built his neo-Gothic castle on a pre-existing complex. A castle for which there is evidence that it dates from as far back as the year 1000.

  But the definitive confirmation of the castle’s authenticity, which helped to dispel any lingering doubts, liberating me for ever from the agonising complex from which I suffered, came a few years later. When my grandfather Vanni, a versatile athlete once legendary as a diver, aviator and sailor, found himself assailed by an incurable disease which transformed him overnight from a decathlete into an old man too weak and proud to drag his tired bones up and down the hundreds of stairs in the castle. The connection between the unacceptable discovery of the disease and the reassuring discovery of the castle’s authenticity may be a tenuous one, but it does exist. Because in a very real, tragic sense, it was my grandfather’s illness which revealed to me the truth about the castle’s origins. No longer able to face the stairs, Vanni, after a meticulous and considered comparison of estimates, finally plumped for a lift. Obviously, the lift would have to be inside the tower. The tower is empty apart from a narrow spiral staircase that climbs all the way to the top until you feel dizzy. Once, on a wild and stormy night, a violent bolt of lightning had struck the top of the structure, gone zigzagging down the stairs and ended its run in the cellar, with a fearful crash that had shut off the current and brought down the bottom of the staircase.

  It was from there, at the bottom, where t
he bolt of lightning had crashed to the ground, that they would have to start in order to install the lift. And it was also there, at the bottom, that confirmation of the castle’s authenticity would come. The company hired for the job arrived, carried out a survey and, after a few days, set to work. The first thing they would have to do would be to drill through the walls of the cellars. These were wonderful spaces with barrel vaults, cool in summer and warm in winter, rooms that for hundreds of years had seethed with the fumes of wine and guarded the acrid odour of cheese left to dry in walnut leaves and the heavy smell of hams hanging from the ceiling. The same cellars that contained enormous oak barrels so big that, during the war, when there was a Fascist raid, people hid in them five at a time, the same cellars where they gave Decio, the cellarman—and there are witnesses—fifty-six glasses of wine one after the other, and he didn’t collapse but walked out on his own two legs, staggering perhaps, but on his own two legs all the same.

  Now that agriculture was dead, weeded out by European Community aid, which paid people not to grow crops, now that the vines had shrivelled and the barrels were empty, the cellars had become little more than a storehouse for various pieces of junk accumulated by men in their daily hustle and bustle. The drill they brought in, however, met with an unexpected obstacle. The wall that had to be breached simply couldn’t be breached. It was solid rock reinforced with mortar, and must have been a couple of metres thick. What it was, in fact, was the buttress of the tower. Those medieval architects really knew what they were doing. The drill snorted and hissed, but all to no avail. Finally, after some heart-rending groans, it became blunted and they had to stop the engine twice because they were afraid it would burn up with the effort. “Look, how can you possibly make a hole in this wall?” the worker said, switching off the drill. It’s as hard as Verano stone. It must be at least a thousand years old.” A thousand years old. One thousand. How sweet that number sounded.

  And besides, I was in possession of a secret, one that Grandpa Vanni revealed to me before he died. As far as I remember, it was one of the last times, perhaps even the very last now I come to think about it, when he was still up and about before taking to his bed once and for all and giving in to his illness. I was wandering through the cellars looking for the pump, because my bicycle tyres were flat. All at once, I thought I made out my grandfather’s thin, austere figure in the shadows. He was standing in silence in a dark corner, like an animal sensing death.

  “Oh, it’s you, Grandpa, you gave me a fright … What are you doing here?”

  “I know everything about this house, the layout of the rooms, the weight of the doors, the movements of the handles, the squeak of the hinges, the position of the light switches, the numbers of the steps, the edges of the furniture, the borders of the carpets, the frames of the paintings. If I went blind I’d be able to move around the house without anyone’s help. You too, as the only male heir, ought to know this house as well as I do.”

  “But I do know it, Grandpa … ”

  “No, you don’t. Come with me.”

  Grandpa took me by the hand and limped ahead of me until we reached a large barrel, in front of which he stopped as if in front of an altar. Groaning a little he shifted the heavy lid, which resisted at first then yielded to reveal the dark inside of the barrel.

  “Come on, don’t be afraid.”

  I summoned my courage and went in after him. At the bottom was a passage, a narrow tunnel, not too low, carved out of the buttress of calcareous rock on which the castle—and, with it, the whole village—was supported. The walls were covered with mould and the floor was sticky. The tunnel sloped sharply downwards. Despite his aching bones, Grandpa advanced without any hesitation. I saw him take something out of his pocket, and a moment later a blue-grey flash lit up our surroundings. He was holding a match with one hand and with the other was shielding the flame from the slight draught that rose from the depths of the tunnel. I followed him, gripping the ribs of his corduroy trousers. All at once, Grandpa came to a halt. The match went out. The darkness echoed with a liquid sound, the kind of sound you might hear in the womb. We were like two strange foetuses waiting to be born.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “What is it?”

  He lit another match, and what I saw in the bluish flash left me speechless. Beneath us was a pit filled with water. From the walls, which were damp with condensation, drops were falling with a dull, regular drip-drip.

  “We’re under the well in the village square,” Grandpa said. “When the castle was under siege, this was how they supplied themselves with water without leaving the castle walls.”

  I didn’t say anything. There are times when there’s nothing to say.

  I don’t know how long we stood there in silence, listening to the drops hammering the surface of the water. Then we went back up again.

  So I had the proof. It would have been odd, to say the least, if my grandfather Terenzio—I call him grandfather but, as I said before, he was actually my great-grandfather—had, out of some philological scruple, made those neoclassical architects at the end of the nineteenth century build a tunnel leading from the castle’s cellars to a spot underneath the village well in order to supply himself with water when the castle was under siege. Under siege from whom? Oh, of course, those Bolshevik peasants on the first of May. No, joking aside, an anti-siege tunnel would have been a bit of an exaggeration even for a bastion of anti-communism like Grandpa Terenzio.

  Oh, if only I could have shown that secret passage to Signora Cannoli, my schoolteacher.

  “Excuse me, miss, what is our castle?”

  “An imitation, Cremona, an imitation.”

  “Like hell it is, miss.”

  That’s what I would have said.

  As little boys

  AS LITTLE BOYS they had scampered about the thousand rooms, chasing each other like puppies, and the end point of these infinite pursuits was always the castle kitchens. Warmth, smoke, cooking smells, the clatter of dishes, the shouting and bustle of women, the cooks watching like vestals over the pots on that eternal fire. The kitchens were the still centre of the castle, the engine room of the great ship on whose decks the lives of dozens of people played themselves out.

  As quick as a draught, the twins would rush into the kitchen and slip in between the aprons of the women, who reproached the little masters without much conviction. When the heat and excitement of the chase had died down, Fede and Vanni would seek, indeed demand, the attention of Beppina, Lidia, Adelaide and the others. Beppina had seen them grow since they were babes in arms, and Lidia had even suckled one of them—Signora Clarissa, their mother, had not expected nature to give her twins, nor perhaps had nature expected her to give birth to twins, given that the breasts of the pale Florentine lady who had brought them into the world contained only enough milk for one. That must have been the milk—Vanni was to think much later, one summer afternoon when he was out riding and the scent of broom had assailed his nostrils, reminding him of that grim June—that had given his twin that uninhibited character of his, adding to his veins those promiscuous lower-class traits which fascinated and disturbed him at the same time, so different from the composure and austerity of the rest of the family. Was there something evasive in the profile of Fede’s heart? Something hostile to himself and his family, buried somewhere deep in his consciousness? But no, it was only a vague, unmotivated hostility, and he felt a touch of affectionate jealousy towards his fanciful, unapproachable twin. There was no reason to think badly of him. And yet …

  Vanni remembered once waking with a start in the middle of the night, perhaps from a bad dream. He had looked at the room with the eyes of a stranger, finding it difficult to recognise the outlines of things, the way it is when it’s foggy. In the confusion of that awakening, his half-closed eyes had searched for the comfort of his brother’s presence. But the bed was unmade. And Fede wasn’t in it. Vanni felt a pang. A sudden, inexplicable pang. He felt abandoned, as if his brother had
left him for ever. And he almost cursed himself for having woken too late. Now the anguish of his dream, of which he could not remember a single thing, was as nothing compared with that of the awakening. He tried to tell himself that perhaps Fede had gone to the bathroom, perhaps he did not feel well, or perhaps he’d simply felt a sudden hunger and had gone down to the kitchen to find some bread and ham. But the thought did not reassure him. He went back under the covers and made an effort to get to sleep again, but to no avail. It was already dawn when Fede came back, breathing heavily. Vanni did not turn round and pretended to be asleep. He heard the heavy boots falling to the floor, and even seemed to feel the relief of those feet finally set free. Then the metallic clatter of the belt buckle falling onto the terracotta tiles and the muffled noise of the body slipping under the blankets.

  The following morning, at breakfast, Vanni paid little attention to what his mother was saying, but instead tried to catch some sign that might betray Fede and his vagabond night—a drooping eyelid, a yawn, tired eyes, some clue as to his nocturnal escapade. But there was nothing. Fede looked fine, in fact he seemed rested, had a good appetite, asked for second helpings of everything, minded his own business, and only contributed to the conversation at the right time—in other words, only if asked, because their father was not at all the kind of person who appreciated children interrupting adults when they were talking. At a certain point, Bettina cautiously approached Sor Terenzio, who was sitting solemnly at the head of the table, wiping his grey moustaches with his napkin, and murmured to him: