Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [157]
“What about the trumpet?”
“The trumpet I learned on my own, during those summer afternoons when there was nobody at the parish hall, and I would hide in the seats of the little theater...But I studied the trumpet for erotic reasons. You see that little villa over there, a kilometer from the hall? That’s where Cecilia lived, the daughter of the Salesians’ great patroness. So every time the band performed, on holy days of obligation, after the procession, in the yard of the parish hall, and especially in the theater before performances of the amateur dramatic society, Cecilia and her mama were always in the front row, in the place of honor, next to the provost of the cathedral. In the theater the band would begin with a march that was called ‘A Good Start.’ It opened with trumpets, the trumpets in B flat, gold and silver, carefully polished for the occasion. The trumpets stood up, played by themselves. Then they sat down, and the band began. Playing the trumpet was the only way for me to attract Cecilia’s attention.”
“The only way?” Lorenza asked, moved.
“There was no other way. First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girl thirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is a snot-nose kid. Besides, she loved an alto sax, a certain Papi, a mangy horror, he seemed to me, but she only had eyes for him, as he bleated lasciviously, because the saxophone, when it isn’t Ornette Coleman’s and it’s part of a band—and played by the horrendous Papi—is a goatish, guttural instrument, with the voice of, say, a fashion model who’s taken to drink and turning tricks...”
“What do you know about models who turn tricks?”
“Anyway, Cecilia didn’t even know I existed. Of course, in the evening, when I struggled up the hill to fetch the milk from a farm above us, I invented splendid stories in which she was kidnapped by the Black Brigades and I rushed to save her as the ! bullets whistled around my head and went chack-chack as they hit the sheaves of wheat. I revealed to her what she couldn’t have known: that in my secret identity I headed the Resistance in the j whole Monferrato region, and she confessed to me that this was j what she had always hoped, and at that point I would feel a j guilty flood of honey in my veins—I swear, not even my foreskin got wet; it was something else, something much more awesome and grand—and on coming home, I would go and confess...I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she ! hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she’s always i dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetua- ‘ tion of the vile species. In short, if I were switched to the trumpet, Cecilia would be unable to ignore me: on my feet, gleaming, while the saxophone sits miserably on his chair. The trumpet is warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious; it sounds the charge. The saxophone plays so that young punks in the slums, their hair slicked down with brilliantine, can dance cheek to cheek with sweating girls. I studied the trumpet like a madman, then went to Don Tico and said: Listen to this. And I was Oscar Levant when he had his first tryout on Broadway with Gene Kelly. Don Tico said: You’re a trumpet, all right, but...
“How dramatic this is,” Lorenza said. “Go on. Don’t keep us on pins and needles.”
“But I had to find somebody to take my place on the bombardon. Work out something, Don Tico said. So I worked out something. Now I must tell you, dear children, that in those days there lived in ***, a couple of wretches, classmates of mine, though they were