The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [12]
He himself contributed to this in large part. Like a boxer who relies more on raw strength and intensity than technique and calculation, he slugged his way through the academic world. At first he was successful, in part due to his renowned ability to tire out his opponents with masses of data, many times dished out in long, apparently incoherent tirades. But as time went by he became labeled a fossil who had become stuck in outmoded ideas.
But there were still those who allowed themselves to be seduced by his words, above all when he recited some of the more emotional sonnets. He did so with such feeling and in such perfect Italian that the words by their own power appeared to hover in their own rarefied space with no room for questions, objections.
Was he a genius? Or simply an overeducated lunatic? Or both?
He was never promoted to full professor.
“I am consistently overlooked,” he said. “In Florence and Paris they realize my greatness but in this backwater one rewards mediocrity. Here inbred careerists from the land of Lilliput take the high seat, while the giants are forced to jostle just to get inside the door.”
He dug through his stacks of paper, extracted letters from colleagues all over the world, waved them excitedly in the air, and shoved them under her nose.
“Here, here are the witnesses who shoot down the claims of the feebleminded.”
He raised his voice, came up close to her, and forced her to study the letter, struck the signature with his index finger, and told her that the author of the letter was one of the world’s greatest authorities on the poetry of the Italian Renaissance.
“He is a scholar, mark my words. Scholarship, not loose assumptions or flabby opinion.”
His raised his voice a notch. Suddenly he could drop his arms, turn inward, retreat to his room. Once, after an outburst of this kind, she had followed him, had stood in the doorway to his room and watched him from behind. He had dropped the letter and it had fluttered to the floor and slid halfway under the bed.
Laura had also seen other sides of her father, sides that were only rarely revealed in public. His love of the words themselves. He could become intoxicated by a single phrase, a few tentative letters on a page, as if only hesitantly entrusted to the page, a spontaneous expression of the author’s inner life. Sometimes it was quite moving, if a little tiring, when her father called her to him and read something to her, a couple of verses, parts of a sonnet, almost trembling, with his glasses perched on his nose. Often they were about love:
Tempo non mi parea da far riparo
contra colpi d’Amor: però m’andai
secur, senza sospetto; onde i miei guai
nel commune dolor s’incominciaro.
“Isn’t it beautiful? So vivid, so expressive,” he would always exclaim after he had let the words sink in. Laura was not expected to say anything, simply listen. Her father needed an audience. Someone who did not talk back, did not engage in sparring about the text. Someone who simply listened, enraptured. Listened to the words that intoxicated, that carried one away, transformed and gave life meaning.
“The sonnet is superior!” he could suddenly shout and then burst into laughter when he saw her expression of surprise and—sometimes—fear.
If only he had laughed more. That was what Alice, her mother, had said, that her father took life too seriously. He was an expert in the language of love but incapable of romance or tenderness, imprisoned in an environment where the beautiful words did not carry any weight.
Laura had noticed the tension between laughter and silence early on. Sometimes her mother would sing but she always stopped when her father approached. It was as if it was inappropriate to display joy over something as trivial as fair weather, the scent of the roses from the garden, or that a movement could be an expression of a joy in living and not simply a means to