Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [156]
“My God, I wouldn’t want you a cripple,” Lorenza said.
“Maybe today I’d be happier,” Belbo said.
But the fact was that even in this case he hadn’t chosen. He had let his uncle pull him away.
About an hour later, he was again distracted. “Then Adeline Canepa came upstairs. He said we’d all be safer in the cellar. He and my uncle hadn’t spoken for years, as I told you. But in this tragic moment, Adeline Canepa had become a human being again, and Uncle even shook his hand. So we spent an hour in the darkness among the barrels, with the smell of countless vintages, which made your head swim a little, not to mention the shooting outside. Then the gunfire died down, became muffled. We realized one side was retreating, but we didn’t know which, until, from a window above our heads, which overlooked a little path, we heard a voice, in dialect: ‘Monssu, i’e d’la repubblica bele si?’ “
“What does that mean?” Lorenza asked.
“Roughly: Sir, would you be so kind as to inform me if there are still any sustainers of the Italian Social Republic in these parts? Republic, at that time, was a bad word. The voice was a partisan’s, asking a passerby or someone at a window, and that meant the Fascists had gone. It was growing dark. After a little while both Papa and Grandmother arrived, and told of their adventures. Mama and Aunt prepared something to eat, while Uncle and Adelino Canepa ceremoniously stopped speaking to each other again. For the rest of the evening we heard shooting in the distance, toward the hills. The partisans were after the fugitives. We had won.”
Lorenza kissed Belbo on the head, and he wrinkled his nose. He knew he had won, though with some help from the Fascists. In reality it had been like watching a movie. For a moment, risking the ricocheting bullet, he had entered the action on the screen, but only for a moment, on the run, as in Hellzapoppin, Where the reels get mixed up and an Indian on horseback rides into a ballroom and asks which way did they go. Somebody says, “That way,” and the Indian gallops off into another story.
56
He began playing his shining trumpet with such power that the whole mountain rang.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 1, p. 4
We had reached the chapter on the wonders of hydraulic pipes, and a sixteenth-century engraving from the Spiritalia of Heron depicted a kind of altar with a steam-driven apparatus that played a trumpet.
I brought Belbo back to his reminiscing. “How did it go, then, the story of that Don Tycho Brahe, or whatever his name was—the man who taught you to play the trumpet?”
“Don Tico. I never found out if Tico was a nickname or his last name. I’ve never gone back to the parish hall. The first time I went there, it was by chance: Mass, catechism, all sorts of games, and if you won, he gave you a little holy card of Blessed Domenico Savio, that adolescent with the wrinkled canvas pants, always hanging on to Don Bosco in the statues, his eyes raised to heaven, not listening to the other boys, who are telling dirty jokes. I learned that Don Tico had formed a band, boys between ten and fourteen. The little ones played toy clarinets, fifes, soprano sax, and the bigger ones carried the tubas and the bass drum. They had uniforms, khaki tunics and blue trousers, and visored caps. A dream, and I wanted to be part of it. Don Tico said he needed a bombardon.”
He gave us a superior look, and said, as if repeating familiar information: “A bombardon is a kind of tuba, a bass horn in E flat. It’s the stupidest instrument in the whole band. Most of the time it just goes oompah-oompah-oompah, or