Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [154]
“This place has ghosts, I hope,” Lorenza said.
“It does now. In Uncle Carlo’s day, no; it was lots of fun then. Georgic. That’s why I come. It’s wonderful working at night while the dogs bark in the valley.”
He showed us the rooms where we would be sleeping: mine, Diotallevi’s, Lorenza’s. Lorenza looked at her room, touched the old bed and its great white counterpane, sniffed the sheets, said it was like being in one of her grandmother’s stories, because everything smelled of lavender. Belbo said it wasn’t lavender, it was mildew. Lorenza said it didn’t matter, and then, leaning against the wall, her hips thrust forward as if she were at the pinball machine, she asked, “Am I sleeping here by myself?”
Belbo looked away, then at us, then away again. He made as if to leave and said: “We’ll talk about it later. In any case, if you want it, you have a refuge all your own.” Diotallevi and I moved off, but we heard Lorenza ask Belbo if he was ashamed of her. He said that if he hadn’t offered her the room, she would have asked him where she was supposed to sleep. “I made the first move, so you have a choice,” he said. “The wily Turk,” she said. “In that case, I’ll sleep here in my darling little room.” “Sleep where you want,” Belbo said, irritated. “But the others are here to work. Let’s go out on the terrace.”
So we set to work on the broad terrace, where a pergola stood, supplied with cold drinks and plenty of coffee. Alcohol forbidden till evening.
From the terrace we could see the Bricco, and below it a large plain building with a yard and a soccer field—all inhabited by multicolored little figures, children, it seemed to me. “It’s the Salesian parish hall,” Belbo explained. “That’s where Don Tico taught me to play. In the band.”
I remembered the trumpet Belbo had denied himself after the dream. I asked: “Trumpet or clarinet?”
He had a moment’s panic. “How did you...Ah, yes, I told you about the dream, the trumpet. Don Tico taught Tie the trumpet, but in the band I played the bombardon.”
“What’s a bombardon?”
“Oh, that’s all kid stuff. Back to work now.”
But as we worked, I noticed that he often glanced at that hall. I had the impression that he talked about other things as an excuse to look at it. For example, he would interrupt our discussion and say:
“Just down there was some of the heaviest shooting at the end of the war. Here in *** there was a kind of tacit agreement between the Fascists and the partisans. Two years in a row the partisans came down from the hills in spring and occupied the town, and the Fascists kept their distance and didn’t make trouble. The Fascists weren’t from around here; the partisans were all local boys. In the event of a fight, they could move easily; they knew every cornfield and the woods and hedgerows. The Fascists mostly stayed holed up in the town and ventured out only for raids. In winter it was harder for the partisans to stay down in the plain: there was no place to hide, and in the snow they could be seen from a distance and picked off by a machine gun even a kilometer away. So they climbed up into the higher hills. There, too, they knew the passes, the caves, the shelters. The Fascists returned to control the plain. But that spring we were- on the eve of liberation, the Fascists were still here, and they were dubious about going back to the city, sensing that the final blow would be delivered there, as it in fact was, around April 25. I believe there was communication between the Fascists and the partisans. The latter held off, wanting to avoid a clash, sure that something would happen soon. At night Radio London gave more and more reassuring news, the special messages for the Franchi brigade became more frequent: Tomorrow it will rain again; Uncle Pietro has brought the bread—that sort of thing. Maybe you heard them, Diotallevi...Anyway, there must have been a misunderstanding, because the partisans came down and the Fascists hadn’t left.
“One day my sister