life: a lion roared soundlessly, and soundlessly the pyramid shattered into a myriad little pieces tumbling down slowly in a crystal cascade. They were soundless and weightless, these images and words of times gone by, flaring up briefly and instantly going out, each of them its own empty enigma. The Tyrolese missionary Giuseppe Ohrwalder was reported from Khartoum to have been missing for several weeks at Omdurman in the Sudan. According to telegrams from Danzig, a Colonnello Stern of the 6th Field Artillery Regiment had been arrested there on suspicion of spying: stories with neither beginning nor end, I reflected, which ought to be looked into more closely. 1913 was a peculiar year. The times were changing, and the spark was racing along the fuse like an adder through the grass. Everywhere there were great effusions of feeling. The people were trying out a new role. The sacred and righteous wrath of the nation was invoked. The accounts in the Veronese newspapers of the first festival in the anfiteatro romano sought to surpass each other in their enthusiasm. According to one of my notes, an article in the Fedele was entitled Apoteosi dei titani, in Gothic type. It concluded with the assurance that this headline was no hollow assertion, since the arena was a titanic example of Roman architecture and Giuseppe Verdi the Titan of the melopoea italiana. The true Titan of all art and beauty, however, the writer proclaimed with a final flourish, was il popolo nostro, and all the rest were nothing but pygmies. For a long time my eyes remained fixed on the six letters of the word pigmei, the announcement of a destruction that had already taken place. It was as if I could hear the voice of the people, as it welled up, the violent inflection in the syllables: pig-me-i, pig-me-i, pig-me-i. The shouting roared within my ear, in reality doubtless the drumming of my own blood, amplified and distorted by my imagination. At all events, it seemed to prompt no response in the librarian. Calmly he sat bent over his work, filling the lines he had ruled with an even hand. The manner in which he paused at the end of every line suggested that he was writing a list. And plainly he had every detail he needed for the composition of this visibly lengthening register in his head, for he continued his writing without ever referring to any source. Our eyes met on one occasion when he had completed another page and looked up from his work as he reached for the tin that contained the blotting sand. That gesture, which was so out of time, seemed so wholly right at that moment, and so meaningful, that, reassured, I was able to continue my trail through the papers, and as I went on reading and turning the pages, well into the afternoon, I happened on one thing or another that might well be worth retelling some time, such as the report headed ucciso SUL BANCO ANATOMIco, which began with the truly novelistic words: Ieri sera nella cella mortuaria de cimitero di Nogara, and which dealt with the murder of a carabiniere named Muzio. The story, which did not lack gruesome details, remained in my memory not least because in one of the tomes I was going through I found an old postcard showing the Cimitero di Staglieno in Genoa. I pocketed the picture and subsequently examined every square inch of it through a magnifying glass. The pale light over the dark hills, the viaduct which appears to lead out of the picture and into a tunnel, the deep shadows near it, the numerous tombs in the shapes of towers or pagodas to the right, the cypress grove, the perspective alignment of the walls, the black field in the foreground, and the white villa at the left end of the main colonnaded walk, all of this, particularly the white villa, seemed so familiar to me that I could easily have found my way around that site blindfolded. In the latter part of the
afternoon I walked along the Adige, beneath the trees of the riverside promenade, to the Castelvecchio. A sandy-coloured dog with a black mark like a patch over its left eye, that appeared like all stray dogs to run at an angle to the direction it was moving in, had attached itself to me outside the duomo, and now kept a steady distance ahead of me. If I paused to gaze down at the river, it paused as well and looked pensively at the flowing water. If I continued on my way, it too went on. But when I crossed the Corso Cavour by the Castelvecchio, it remained on the curb, and when I turned in the middle of the Corso to see where it was I narrowly escaped being run over. Once I was on the other side I wondered whether I should carry straight on through the Via Roma to the Piazza Bra, where I was meeting Salvatore Altamura, or should instead make the short detour through the Via San Silvestro and the Via dei Mutilati. All at once the dog, which had kept its eyes on me from the other side of the Corso, was gone, and so I turned down the Via Roma. I took my time, drifting along with the tide of people in the street, going into this shop and that and at length found myself opposite the Pizzeria Verona, from which I had fled headlong that November evening seven years before. The lettering over Carlo Cadavero's restaurant was still the same, but the entrance was boarded up, and the blinds on the upper floors were drawn, much as I had expected, as I realised in that instant. The image that had lodged in my mind when I fled Verona, and which had recurred time after time, with extreme clarity, before I was at last able to forget it, now presented itself to me again, strangely distorted - two men in black silver-buttoned tunics, who were carrying out from a rear courtyard a bier on which lay, under a floral-patterned drape, what was plainly the body of a human being. Whether this dark apparition was superimposed on reality for a mere moment or for much longer, I could not have said when my senses returned to the daylight and the people, quite unconcerned, passing the pizzeria, which had evidently been shut for some time. When I asked the photographer in the shop next door why the business had closed down, he was unwilling to say anything, nor could I persuade him to photograph the front of the building for me. To my questions and requests he merely responded by shaking his head, as if he did not understand me or was unable to speak. As I was turning to leave, imagining this deaf mute photographer at work in his dark room, I heard him utter a screed of savage curses behind my back, curses which seemed directed less at myself than at some incident which had happened in the restaurant next door. Out on the pavement I wandered irresolutely to and fro before at length I approached a passer-by who seemed suitable for my purpose, a young tourist who came from the Erlangen area, and asked him to take a photograph of the pizzeria for me, which he did, after some hesitation and after I had given him a ten mark note to cover the cost of sending the picture to England in due course. When,
however, I added an urgent request to photograph the flock of pigeons that had just flown from the piazza into the Via Roma, and had settled on the balcony rail and the roof of the building, the young Erlanger, who, as I now thought, might have been on honeymoon, was not prepared to oblige me a second time, probably, I suspected, because his newly-wed bride, who had been eyeing me the whole time with a distrusting and even hostile air and had not budged from his side even when he was taking the picture, was plucking impatiently at his sleeve.
When I arrived at the piazza, Salvatore was already sitting reading outside the bar with the green awning, his glasses pushed up onto his forehead and holding the book so close to his face that it was quite impossible to believe he could decipher anything at all. Taking care not to disturb him, I sat down. The book he was reading had a pink dust jacket bearing the portrait of a woman, in dark colours. Below the portrait, in lieu of a title, were the numbers ipi2+i. A waiter came to the table. He was wearing a long green apron. I ordered a double Fernet on the rocks. Salvatore had meanwhile laid his book aside and restored his glasses to their proper place. He explained apologetically that in the early evening when he had at last escaped the pressures of the daily round he would always turn to a book, even if he had left his reading glasses in the office, as he had today. Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane. He was sorry he had not noticed me right away, he said, but being short-sighted and also absorbed in Sciascias story had
cut him off almost completely from what was going on around him. The story Sciascia was telling, he continued, as it were returning to the real world, was a fascinating synopsis of the years immediately before the First World War. At the centre of the narrative, which was more like an essay in form, was one Maria Oggioni nata Tiepolo, wife of a Capitano Ferrucio Oggioni, who on the 8th of November, 1912, shot her husband's batman, a bersagliere by the name of Quintilio Polimanti, in self-defence according to her own statement. At the time the newspapers naturally made a meal of the story, and the trial, which gripped the nation's imagination for weeks - since after all the accused was of the famous Venetian painter's family, as the press tirelessly repeated - this trial, which kept the entire nation on the edge of its seat, finally revealed no more than a truth familiar to everyone: that the law is not equal for all, and justice not just. Since Polimanti was no longer able to speak for himself, Signora Oggioni, whom everyone was soon calling Contessa Tiepolo, found it easy to win over the judges with that enigmatic smile of hers, a smile that promptly reminded journalists of the Mona Lisa's, as one can imagine, the more so since in 1913 La Gioconda was also in the headlines, having been discovered under the bed of a Florentine workman who had liberated her from her exile in the Louvre two years before and returned her to her native country. It is curious to observe, added Salvatore, how in that year everything was moving towards a single point, at which something would have to happen, whatever the cost. But you, he went on, were interested in a quite different story. And that story, to tell you the end of it first, has now almost reached its conclusion. The trial has been held. The verdict was thirty years. The appeal is due to be heard in Venice in the autumn. I do not think we can expect any new developments. Recently on the phone you said that you were more or less familiar with the story up to the autumn of 1980. The series of ghastly crimes continued after that time. That same autumn in Vicenza, a prostitute by the name of Maria Alice Beretta was killed with a hammer and an axe. Six months later, Luca Martinotti, a grammar school pupil from Verona, succumbed to injuries sustained when an Austrian casemate on the banks of the Etsch, used as a shelter by drug addicts, was torched. In July 1982, two monks, Mario Lovato and Giovanni Pigato, both of advanced years, on their customary walk of an evening round the quiet streets near their monastery, had their skulls smashed in with a heavy-duty hammer. After that killing, a Milan news agency received a letter from the Organizzazione Ludwig, which had already claimed responsibility for the crimes in the autumn of 1980, as you know. If I remember correctly, in the second letter the group claimed that their purpose in life was to destroy those who had betrayed God. In February, the body of a priest, Armando Bison, was found in the Trentino. He lay bludgeoned in his own blood, and a crucifix had been driven into the back of his neck. A further letter proclaimed that the power of Ludwig knew no bounds. In mid-May of the same year, a cinema in Milan, which showed pornographic films, went up in flames. Six men died. Their last picture show bore the title Lyla, profumo di femmina. The group claimed responsibility for what they described as a blazing pyre of pricks. In early 1984, on the day after Epiphany, a further arson attack, which also remained unsolved, was made on a discotheque near Munich's main station. It was not until two weeks later that Furlan and
Abel were apprehended. Wearing clowns' costumes, they were carrying open petrol canisters in perforated sports bags through the Melamare disco at Castiglione delle Stiviere, not far from the southern shore of Lake Garda, where that evening four hundred young people had come together for the carnival. It was only by a hair's breadth that the two escaped being lynched by the crowd on the spot. So much for the principal points of the story. Apart from providing irrefutable evidence, the investigation produced nothing that might have made it possible to comprehend a series of crimes extending over almost seven years. Nor did the psychiatric reports afford any real insight into the inner world of the two young men. Both were from highly respected families. Furlan's father is a well-known specialist in burn injuries, and consultant in the plastic surgery department at the hospital here. Abel's father is a retired lawyer, from Germany, who was head of the Verona branch of a Dusseldorf insurance company for years. Both sons went to the Girolamo Fracastro grammar school. Both were highly intelligent. After the school-leaving examinations, Abel went on to study maths and Furlan chemistry. Beyond that, there is little to be said. I think they were like brothers to each other and had no idea how to free themselves from their innocence. I once saw Abel, who was an outstanding guitar player, on a television programme. I think it was in the mid-1970s. He would have been fifteen or sixteen then. And I remember that his whole appearance and his wonderful playing affected me deeply.
Salvatore had come to the end of his account, and night had fallen. Crowds of festival-goers released from their tour buses were gathered outside the arena. The opera, said Salvatore, is not what it used to be. The audience no longer understand that they are part of the occasion. In the old days the carriages used to drive down the long wide road to the Porta Nuova in the evenings, out through the gateway, and westward under the trees along the glacis, skirting the city, till nightfall. .Then everyone turned back. Some drove to the churches for the "Ave Maria della Sera", some stopped here on the Bra and the gentlemen stepped up to the carriages to converse with the ladies, often till well into the dark. The days of stepping up to a carriage are over, and the days of the opera also. The festival is a travesty. That is why I cannot bring myself to go into the arena on an evening liKe this, despite the fact that opera, as you are aware, means a great deal to me. For more than thirty years, said Salvatore I have been working in this city, and not once have I seen a production in the arena. I sit out here on the Bra, where you cannot hear the music. Neither the orchestra nor the choir nor the soloists. Not a sound. I listen, as it were, to a soundless opera. La spettacolosa Aida, a fantastic night on the Nile, as a silent film from the days before the Great War. Did you know, Salvatore continued, that the sets and costumes for the Aida being performed in the arena today are exact replicas of those designed by Ettore Fagiuoli and Auguste Mariette for the inauguration of the festival in 1913? One might suppose no time had passed at all, though in fact history is now nearing its close. At times it really does seem to me as if the whole of society were still in the Cairo opera house to celebrate the inexorable advance of Progress. Christmas Eve, 1871. For the first time the strains of the Aida overture are heard. With every bar, the incline of the stalls becomes a fraction steeper. The first ship glides through the Suez Canal. On the bridge stands a motionless figure in the white uniform of an admiral, observing the desert through a telescope. You will see the forests again, is Amanoroso's promise. Did you also know that in Scipio's day it was still possible to travel from Egypt to Morocco under the shade of trees? The shade of trees! And now, fire breaks out in the opera house. A crackling conflagration. With a crash the seats in the stalls, together with all their occupants, vanish into the orchestra pit. Through the swathes of smoke beneath the ceiling an unfamiliar figure comes floating down. Di morte l'angelo a noi s'appressa. Già veggo il ciel discindersi. But I digress. With these words, Salvatore stood up. You know how I am, he said as he took his leave, when it is getting late. I for my part, however, remained on the piazza for a long time with that image of the descending angel before my eyes. It must have been after midnight, and
the waiter in the green apron had just made his last rounds, when I imagined I heard a horse's hooves on the cobbled square and the sound of carriage wheels; but the carriage itself did not materialise. Instead, there came to my mind pictures of an open-air performance of Aida that I had seen in Augsburg as a boy, accompanied by my mother, and of which hitherto I had not had the slightest recollection. The triumphal procession, consisting of a paltry contingent of horsemen and a few sorrow-worn camels and elephants on loan from Circus Krone, as I have recently discovered, passed before me several times, quite as if it had never been forgotten, and, much as it had then in my boyhood, lul
led me into a deep sleep from which - though to this day I cannot really explain how - I did not awake till the morning after, in my room at the Golden Dove.
By way of a postscript, I should perhaps add that in April 1924 the writer Franz Werfel visited his friend Franz Kafka
in Hajek's laryngological clinic in Vienna, bearing a bunch of roses and a copy of his newly published and universally acclaimed novel, with a personal dedication. The patient, who at this point weighed a mere 45 kilograms and was shortly to make his final journey to a private nursing home at Klosterneuburg, was probably no longer able to read the book, which may not have been the greatest loss he had to bear. That at least was my own feeling when I leafed
through this operatic tale a few months ago. For me, the only remarkable thing about it was the fact that the copy that had come into my hands, by a circuitous route, had in it the ex libris plate of one Dr Hermann Samson, who must have loved Aida so dearly that he had chosen the pyramids, monuments of death, as his insignia.
Dr K. Takes the Waters at Riva
On Saturday the 6th of September, 1913, Dr K., the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers' Insurance Company, is on his way to Vienna to attend a congress on rescue services and hygiene. Just as the fate of a man wounded on the battlefield depends upon the quality of the first dressing, he reads in a newspaper he has bought at the border-post of Gmünd, so too the first aid administered at everyday accidents is of the greatest importance for the casualty's recovery. Dr K. finds this statement almost as disquieting as the reference to the social events which will accompany the congress. Outside, Heiligenstadt already: an ominous, deserted station, the trains empty. Dr K. feels he has reached the end of the line and realises that he should have begged the Director on his knees to let him stay in Prague. But of course it is too late now.