The church resounds; a cloud of dust rises and two or three spiders scuttle away terrified; I hurry across from the apse, leaping over the wooden railings, first I chase the spiders away along the dusty table top, using the actual book, then I open the book and begin to read.
In this way, I have gradually acquired a taste for a certain kind of reading matter. Don Eligio says that my book should be modelled on the ones he has dug out in the library, that is, have the same flavour. I shrug my shoulders and reply that it is not my sort of work and I have other interests.
All sweaty and dusty, don Eligio climbs down the ladder and comes to take a breath of air in the little garden which he has managed to create here behind the apse, surrounded by a protective fence of stakes and poles.
“Well my dear Reverend,” I say, seated on the low wall, my chin resting on the knob of my walking-stick, while he attends to his lettuces. “I don’t think these are times for writing books, not even as a joke. As regards literature, like everything else, as usual I blame Copernicus.”
“Now now, what’s Copernicus got to do with it?” exclaims don Eligio, straightening up, his face flushed beneath his broad-brimmed, straw hat.
“He does come into it, don Eligio, because when the earth didn’t go round …”
“Get away with you! It’s always gone round!”
“That’s not true. Man didn’t know about it, and so it was as if it didn’t go round. As far as lots of people are concerned, even now it doesn’t go round. I mentioned it the other day to an old farmer, and do you know what he replied? That it was a good excuse for drunks. In any case, even you must admit that Josuah stopped the sun. But enough of this, I say that in the days when the earth didn’t go round, and men looked so good in their Greek or Roman togas, felt so much at ease and were so sure of their own dignity, then perhaps they might have accepted a careful narrative, full of superfluous detail. Isn’t it true, as you yourself told me, that we read in Quintilian that history was created for the telling, not to be proven?”
“I don’t deny it,” replies don Eligio, “but it is equally true that there have never been such detailed books written, indeed such scrupulously minutely precise books, as since, to use your words, the earth began to go round the sun.”
“Ah, right! ‘The Count rose at 8.30 precisely …. the Countess put on a lilac gown, richly decorated with lace at the throat …. Teresina was dying of hunger …. Lucretia suffered for love ….’ Good God! What do I care? Are we or are we not on an invisible spinning-top, whipped by a thread of sunlight, on a grain of crazed sand which turns and turns without ever knowing why, without ever reaching a destination, as if it enjoyed turning like that, to make us feel a little colder or warmer, and make us die (often feeling that we have merely carried out a series of meaningless gestures) after fifty or sixty turns? Copernicus, Copernicus, my dear don Eligio, was the ruin of mankind, quite irremediably. By now we have all gradually adapted to the new idea of our own infinite puniness, to considering ourselves less than nothing in the universe, in spite of all our discoveries and inventions. What value then, can you expect any detail to have, not only regarding our individual problems but even regarding general calamities? They are just accounts of the lives of worms, they are. Did you read about that little disaster in the West Indies? It was nothing. The earth, poor thing, tired of revolving aimlessly as that Polish cleric decreed, made a small gesture of defiance, and puffed out a bit of fire through one of her many mouths. Heaven knows what inspired that kind of bile. Perhaps men’s stupidity: men have never been as boring as they are now. Enough of this. So many thousand toasted worms, and we just carry on. What more is there to say?”
Don Eligo Pellegrinotto nevertheless points out that however hard and ruthlessly we try to tear up and destroy the illusions that provident nature has created for our own good, we are not successful, because, luckily, man’s attention is easily diverted.
This is true. On certain dates set aside in the year, our local council fails to light the streetlamps and often, if the night is cloudy, we are left in the dark. This means that even nowadays we are inclined to believe that the moon’s only reason for hanging in the sky is to give us light by night, just as the sun does by day, and the stars are there in order to offer us a glorious spectacle. Of course. And we often forget, willingly too, that we are only tiny atoms and we respect and admire one another, or else we are quite capable of coming to blows over a small piece of land or of suffering over problems which would seem truly insignificant, if we were genuinely aware of what we really are.
I will therefore take advantage of this useful tendency to enjoy distraction, as well as the strangeness of my particular case, and I will describe myself and my life, but as briefly as possible, giving only the details I think strictly necessary.
Some of them, certainly, will not be very flattering; but at present I find myself in such extraordinary circumstances that I feel I can consider myself beyond normal existence, and therefore without obligation or scruples of any kind. Here then is my story.
I spoke too soon when I said at the beginning that I knew my father. I never really knew him. I was four and a half when he died.
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