The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [54]
Ariosto she tossed out with a laugh. Under “B” she had a difficult job with Bandella, Berni, Boccaccio, and Boiardo, and she was forced to sit down on the edge of the terrace to rest.
On the lawn in front of her feet lay the library Ulrik Hindersten had spent decades of labor collecting. At the very top lay Middlemore’s English translation of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Laura picked it up and skimmed through it absently. Her father’s notes and underlinings indicated that he had scrutinized it alongside the original from 1860 in order to find errors and weaknesses.
She tossed it back onto the pile, stretched forward, and took up another that turned out to be a dissertation published in Zürich in the mid forties: Cicero und der Humanismus. Untersuchungen über Petrarca und Erasmus.
She remembered that one, as she did Mills’s The Secret of Petrarch and de Nolhac’s Petrarch and the Ancient World, which she also glimpsed in the heap of books. These, and many others, Laura had read in the eighties.
In June of 1987 Laura and Ulrik Hindersten had traveled to Italy. Laura was nineteen years old and had just graduated from secondary school. Her father had received a grant to write an extended research article on Petrarch’s epistolary exchange with Cola de Reinzó. It was intended that the text be included in a monograph published in honor of a professor in Lund who was to retire the following year.
Her father bit the sour apple—the professor was in reality one of his enemies—and set off on a two-month trip to Italy.
The first part of the trip they rented an old house outside of Florence. It sat up on a hill, surrounded by a neglected garden, and the city could be seen in the distance through a blue haze. Laura stayed on the upper floor.
Her father disappeared early every morning, sat in the archives, met with colleagues and old friends, while Laura read and took walks in the surrounding area. Laura liked the house and the little village and June was a pleasant time for walks. But she became depressed and sensed the reason why. June was a critical month. It was June 23—six years earlier— that Laura’s mother had died.
Her father didn’t notice her grief. Quite the opposite, he became more and more enthusiastic the longer they stayed in Tuscany. He repressed all thoughts of the Lund professor, started speaking only in Italian, and again brought up the idea of moving to Italy for good.
One day Laura decided to put him up against the wall. Why had he and her mother not been happy together? Her father put his teacup down on the rough-hewn wooden table, let his head droop with a despondent expression as if Laura had deliberately insulted him. It was an expression she knew well, from when he talked about his department.
“She didn’t fight,” he said finally.
She could tell he had chosen his words with care.
“Fight for what?”
“Pius II once said that a servant could rise to be king.”
Laura stared at him. She didn’t recognize the quotation, she didn’t know what context it came from, but she knew this was a strategy on her father’s part. He used the words in order to conceal the real conditions, or as a way to start a dialogue she did not want to have.
Her father loved to converse in dialectical play, in a labyrinth where nothing could be taken for granted, where all words turned out to be double-edged, carrying multiple meanings. It was an art he had mastered to the fullest extent.
“I am your daughter. I need simple, normal words,” Laura said and tried to catch his eye without success.
“Words can be simple but when they are used in combination they necessarily become—”
“I need true words!”
“I wanted to protect you from everything unpleasant,” he said with unusual mildness. “Your mother did not have this ability.”
“You are no better than Petrarch,” Laura said. “He went on about the pure and the divine but would fuck anyone given the chance.”
Ulrik Hindersten was taken aback by his daughter’s words. He had never heard her speak