The San Sebastian Chronicles, Part XI
A chimerical castelletto — Nanetta — Eleven Jesuses & other conversings in a matriarchal vivarium — Pilgrimage preparations
My mother’s home, the seat of my childhood, was a terrific chimera of architecture, though if it was that it was also august and exquisite in its own way. Composed of two parts, a dark, Gothic keep faced the end of the long road to the place, signalling in no uncertain terms that one’s journey had come to an end. To emphasize this, the curtilage was bordered by a craggy stone wall complete with large, squealing iron gates at the road’s end and a now-derelict pikeman’s bastille before that. To the right of the ancient, mossy manse as you faced the structure, and attached to it by a narrow hall lined with some splendid stained glass, was a half-timbered, steep-roofed home of a more modern vintage, having been built only about forty-five years before, by my mother’s father in the winter of his life. Complete with flower boxes on the windows, the newer wing was a pleasant enough abode, but its cheery visage was marred by the cold, stony tumor attached to it. In all, the complex was not unlike a happy, variegated and fecund little mushroom, sprung from and still attached to a horrible, gray, desiccated dung pile: In a cold, unflinching look, one could admire and even wonder at how something so horrible could give rise to something so hale and handsome; but on a longer, more emotional inspection, one couldn’t help but want to rescue the mushroom from its putrescent progenitor and repair with it away to somewhere clean and bright.
Continued from…
This was a feeling not unlike what I had felt some years before when I had briefly courted a young girl from a nearby village. After having spent some time with her, I felt more than a little affection for her, but could see quite clearly we would not have a happy life together. Nonetheless, in brief visits with her and her family, it was apparent to me that her father was a colossal cowshit. Rude, dismissive, and insulting to his wife, daughter, and two younger sons. It was clear that her home was not a happy one. Yet she still had a glimmer of hope and light and beauty in her personality, so tender were her years that her father’s incessant churlishness had not yet snuffed out those sublime attributes from her inmost. And so I had for some time continued to call on this girl from a nearby village, torn between the shame of leading her on and the hope that if I just spent another afternoon with her, Cupid might shoot us both in the ass with some of his erotic arrows and I could then in good faith rescue this poor girl (Nanetta was her name), marrying her and thereupon effectuating her escape from the mean and nasty nest that improbably nursed such a bright and jubilant soul.
Then, of course, I confronted the amusing irony that in this past wishful fantasy I would have brought my newlywed Nanetta to live in the very structure that had birthed the metaphor in my mind (i.e., that of of pruning the pretty half-timbered mushroom house of my contingent estate from the dreary stonekeep pile of expellant from which it had sprung) that had caused me to bittersweetly recall young Nanetta and her dismal family in the first instance.
In the end, I had told Nanetta that I would not be calling on her again. I had arranged the timing of that news carefully so that her father would not be home at the time. It would fall on some other gentleman to deliver young Nanetta from her sad circumstance. I recalled riding my safety bicycle home after having broken the news to Nanetta and being nearly inconsolable. I remained in a mental wrestling match with myself for days thereafter, alternately convincing myself that I was in love with Nanetta and surely was to blame for consigning her to her sure fate as the spinster daughter destined to while away her life caring for her nasty, unloving, spiteful father; and then, moments later, reassuring myself that I had done the right thing, for if I was not certain that I and Nanetta would have got on together then to marry her would have been a fraud and even a worse fate for her, the two of us living together in a loveless arrangement of only the most shallow affection undertaken out of an inchoate sense of duty on the part of dutiful me… and a duty to whom?
Ultimately, I had come to peace with my decision, standing upon the bulwark that there would surely and soon be another suitor for Nanetta, pretty and joyful as she was, and that this man would extricate her from her oppressive erstwhile estate before the light went out in her. And if not, I had reasoned, I had heard that in recent years, single young women were living on their own in Lucho, Barnatz, and other larger cities, some even moving to Milan, Venice, and even Paris, Rome, or London! There, I’d heard that they lived with relatives or in women’s hotels and boarding houses and earned their own living working in the women’s jobs in all manner of industries. Some even made their own fortunes in art, writing, fashion, and other such pursuits. In fact, San Sebastian was probably an ideal place for a young, modern woman to strike out on her own, free as it was from the Italians’ overcompensating machismo and schizophrenic male chauvinism (e.g., worshipping Holy Mary and their mothers while scoffing at the idea that their wives should read or ride a horse, let alone earn their own living). I’d never heard what had ultimately happened to Nanetta, my brief courting of her being nearly six years before, but I hoped she had escaped her circumstances. She’d seemed bright and strong enough to do so, although in retrospect, I had begun to think I hadn’t known her all that well after all.
This circle of thoughts, running from the sock-and-buskin-ity of my family home, to the memory of my long-running dilemma regarding the rescue dear young Nanetta, to the irony of returning with her thence to the selfsame Orthrus of my ancestral villa, spun around in my head as I strolled up the gravel drive to my mother’s home. Finally, the pathway turned, the trees parted and I could see it. The chimerical edifice lay a few hundred longsteps ahead of me, set in by wooded acclivities on three sides, all before a towering tapestry of deep violet sawteeth of limestone precipices and massifs dotted with the late spring snow and silhouetted by yellow beams of the setting sun behind. I was home. But what the hell was going on?
*****
At first I couldn’t make out what was wrong with my mother’s house, but as I approached, first walking quickly then jogging then bounding, I could begin to make out the source of the disharmony. To wit, there were dozens of trucks and wagons parked in the cul-de-sac before the gate. Mules grazed in the lawn. Men in uniform scurried about the whole of the premises. And a great, multi-directional antenna apparatus sprouted from the lawn, with two more on the roof of each of the main structures, giving the keep the look of a towering, stone-and-timber “lovebug,” a seemingly two-headed insect endemic to warmer climes in the Americas and of which I’d once seen a sample at the natural history museum in Torino. In this instance, the specimen’s heady ends were both turned as if to inspect me, a prospective visitor to its innards, in a way not unlike how I imagined a man might look at a certain doctor before a procedure first experienced in middle age when one’s urine can be expelled only fitfully.
As I approached, a festooned and pantalooned member of the Halberdiers, Carcano slung across his back, stepped out from the pikeman’s hut, which had been cleaned up and opened for business.
The soldier held up a hand, “Halt, please. What is your business?”
Thankfully he was still in uniform or, I thought, he might’ve been shot on sight. “This is my house,” I exclaimed.
“What do you mean? This is the brigade headquarters.”
“What brigade?”
“A secret brigade.”
“Well, that may be, although it is news to me, but it is also my house.”
“What is your name?”
“Hauptsergente Charlemagne Gustafo Mant, and this is my house!” I pointed to a window. “That is my bed chamber, just there.” I pointed to another. “And that is my study.”
“Hauptsergente, that there where you point is a Captain’s office, and that other is where enemy messages are decoded…or, I should say, it is a records room… used for various purposes by this brigade, which is secret in its name, nature, and duties.”
“That may be true now, though I am flabbergasted that it may be the case, but at any rate it was my house and I do intend to stay here tonight. Further, when I left here last I had personal possessions in my house, which, by law I know cannot be removed even in the exigencies of war except with due order and by proper process and a right writ, which I demand to see evidence of if I am not allowed to pass.” I crossed my arms.
The halberdieri pondered for a moment, weighing the risk and the trouble of it. “How shall I know this is your house?”
I inhaled through my nose. “Is there an old woman in there?”
The soldier stood for a tick, as if trying to determine whether he could answer without divulging a state secret. “Yes. I have seen an old woman in there.”
“She is my mother, and this is her house. Take me to her at once.”
*****
It had taken many more minutes’ wrangling before an Oberleutnant was summoned to escort me into the heart of the home’s stonier, ivy-ridden, more gargoyley wing. My escort and I wound through a maze of corridors until we came upon a large room I knew well enough, the back wall of which was largely comprised of leaded windows looking out into a dark wood behind the house. In the middle of this room was a carpeted dais, upon which was the usual furniture of a salon. Upon a settee in that arrangement was my mother, a plump but active woman of about sixty-eight, who was reading a communist newspaper, Il Lavoratore. To guard against the cold drafts endemic to the nearly ruined sixteenth-century chateau in which we were, the furniture on the dais and my mother upon the settee were all ensconced in a glass box, about fourteen feet on a side and ten feet tall. An iron pipe emerged from under the dais, running thence into a side wall next to a fireplace, transferring heat therefrom into my mother’s vivarium. A glass door was closed on one side of the dais, facing onto a landing from which two or three steps ran down to the granite floor of the encapsulating hall where I stood. All in all, one might easily imagine that the whole setting sat aside a plaque inscribed ‘Lady of the San Sebastian Landed Gentry, c. 1580–1912 A.D.’ in the “Humans” section of a Brobdingnagian zoo.
My mother dropped the paper upon seeing the hubbub of our entry.
“Is that you, Charl?”
“It is, mother.”
Convinced I was not an intruder, the Oberleutnant took his leave. I clak-snicked across the granite and stepped into the diorama, closing the thin glass door carefully behind me.
“Come here, dear.” I went over and gave my mother a short but affectionate hug, and a peck on the cheek as she remained seated.
I then arranged myself on a curule next to a small table with an ashtray. I lit my pipe as quickly as possible.
“Thank you for coming dear.”
“Mother, what is going on? They can’t take your house! That sort of commandeering has long been prohibited even in wartime.”
“Oh, they haven’t commandeered anything. I’ve rented it to the army. Most of it anyway.” She leaned about eight inches toward me, though we were seated about ten feet apart, and lowered her voice about half a decibel as if to tell me a most unimportant secret. “It’s for the intelligence brigade,” she winked, “Very cloak and dagger stuff, but at any rate…”
“But why?”
“Because I need the money, Charlemagne. I’ve borrowed from your uncle Ernhardt and your uncle Laurento, and I just need the income, what with the new taxes.”
She was quite the communist! One who could never stop complaining about taxes. If pressed she would say she only complained because the funds went to an archaic capitalo-feudal government in Lucho.
“Mother, won’t you just sell the house? Or at least part of the land? You live here by yourself and it’s worth a hundred thousand koroni if it’s worth one. You could live in luxury for the rest of your life and pay all your debts into the bargain.”
“Charlemagne, this house has been in the family for as long as anyone can remember. I won’t be the one to give it up.”
“Not the Mant family,” I said, for the house had come from her mother’s side. As far as I knew, my father hadn’t brought much into the marriage though he’d taken a lot out of it; yet, to be fair, he had made some goodly sums during it as well, albeit through means as to which inquiry was best left out of the room.
“My mother’s family. What is the difference? Plus, Charl, you can’t understand but the lengths I had to go to to buy out your uncles’ interests. This is all I have left! Plus it will all be yours someday.”
Not after the probation of the estate, I said to myself.
“Yes, mutszche, I understand. So be it. You could travel the world! But fine, if you’d rather stay here in your crystal salon it’s your business.”
“Charl, you know how drafty it is in here.”
“Why don’t you live in the new house then! It’s tight as a drum.”
“Too modern. I grew up in these halls and I’ll die here. You can go enjoy the dollhouse.”
“But where? I’m told there’s a captain officing in my bedroom!” I then lowered my voice and spoke through my teeth, “And what of my studio?”
“What?”
I rasped as loudly as I could and still have it considered a whisper, “My studio! Those things are irreplaceable!”
“Oh it’s fine. Locked tight. They have taken most of the new house, however. I gathered your personal effects myself and moved them into the north bedroom here in the old house. You can stay there. I left your statuettes though. Too fragile to move. So splendid.”
“The studio is locked tight though?”
“Yes. Barred, dead-bolted, and padlocked. I have the key on my person at all times.”
“Good. Yes, well that’s fine. So long as no one in the army’s intelligence brigade knows how to pick a lock…”
Tsk.
“Here,” she said as she held out the key.
I stood and took it from her. “Why did you write for me to come anyway?” I asked.
“To tell you I’d rented the house to the army of course.”
“I wish I’d had notice, mother. I’d have liked to come get my things myself. I have to go through them now.”
“I wish I could have given more notice, but when a general knocks at one’s door with a bag of money, one has to make some quick decisions. Why ever do you have to go through your things anyway?”
I then regaled my mother with the story of Nuzzo’s and Gabler’s embarrassing escapade, my role in it, my confession with the gravel-gargling cleric, and my penance.
As to the story of the penance, I remarked in conclusion, “And just to get in a final riposte, at the end of the confession, after he’d pronounced the penance, I claimed to be having a crisis of faith. I claimed to the priest to be struggling with the question — and I sometimes do, so it was no lie — of why, if God had wanted to save the souls of all the world, would he have sent his Son down to a provincial dust-swallow in Galilee and then relied on twelve bickering apostles to spread the Gospel on donkey back? And the priest said — do you know what he said? — he said, ‘Well, He had to go somewhere.’ He had to go somewhere!
“I could have gone on, believe me. I left it at that because I was at my wit’s end and didn’t want to lose my temper entirely. He had to go somewhere?! Why could God not have had eleven Sons? A Trinidecimity then? If begotten not made, why not eleven hundred, appearing all over the globe? Would it not have been more effective to make disciples of all the nations of the world with Jesus and ten divine brethren of His preaching and being killed and rising from the dead in Japan and Siam and Arabia and the Andes of the ancient Nazcas and India and the Malay and the Congo, rather than relying on your Bartholomews and your Jude Thaddeuses and your Simons of the world off trying to convince those peoples second-hand of such a thing as the Resurrection and getting harried and martyred and never getting farther than a few hundred miles from Judea most of them!? And then later having to rely on stern Dominicans and goofy Jesuits to sell the world on Christ hundreds of years later while that same world watches the denizens of Christendom conquer and brutally subjugate the selfsame subjects of their proselytizing in the name of money and power while never failing for good measure to also kill their own Christian brethren by their thousands in neverending internecine warfare of every abominable description, from sword to cannon to rifle to machine-gun to mustard gas?! I used to stump those old Jesuits in school with that one I’ll tell you… Not to mention the Oriental Schism, the Avignon Papacy, and the Protestant Revolt! I could go on of course. Not that many religions can claim a much better record, or at least could claim a much better record if they had had the technology and geo-historical luck that Christianity has had at its temporal disposal. All of which could perhaps have been avoided with ten more Jesuses, if not eleven hundred…”
“I don’t know why you keep at it,” said my mother, sipping on her tea. (I should mention that at some point in our conversation, a young private had brought in tea and sandwiches for us both, no doubt part of the rent bargain my mother had struck with the general’s quartermaster.)
“Keep with what?”
“With Christianity. With the Catholic Church in particular. Nowadays, science can explain everything, from how the shape of one’s skull influences one’s personality, to how one’s propensity to certain diseases is manifested in the shape of the cheekbones — just ask Mister Galton — not to mention electricity and how ouija boards communicate with the dead. Why would a man need religion anymore? Why do you bother?”
I leaned back and sighed. I sometimes wondered myself. After a moment, I shrugged. “Perhaps it has been in the family for generations and I won’t be the one to give it up?”
She sighed herself. “Well, so be it.”
“All that to say, I have to pack for my journey to San Romedio. That is why I have to go through my things. I need rough boots, a walking stick, a tent, socks, flares, rope-saws, a felt hat, and all manner of alpine outfittery.”
These were things no Sebastiano was without in his closet.
“Well I think it is all just preposterous, this whole commission. It’s dangerous! Can’t you just say a few extra prayers?”
“No. I’ve made inquiries, believe me, but no. Do not be harried by worry; I’ll be well equipped, mother. Desotto is joining me and we’ll be outfitted with the best mountaineering gear.”
“I’m not worried. Well, not of the journey itself — it’s scarcely more than a walk up the stairs! — ’tis any journey in times such as this. It is wartime. And the smuggling in the mountains is notorious. And I’ve heard of bears, not to mention dwarves…”
“Mother, there are no dwarves! My God…”
“Fine, no dwarves. But, well, there’s the crime as well.”
“What crime?”
“Well, I was reading the paper just the other day — ”
“Il Lavoratore? Agitating propaganda, that volume.”
“No. If you must know I was reading Lo Strombettare.”
“San Michel or Lucho?”
“San Michel, of course.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“And you know what I read? Do you remember young Nanetta, your erstwhile belle?”
“Yes, in fact,” I all but stammered, “I was just thinking of her on the journey here.”
“Well, I hope you weren’t reconsidering, for her father is dead and she is missing.”
“My goodness. You don’t say.”
I snapped my head back. In moments such as this I sometimes doubted the existence of coincidences, though there were mathematicians I’d read of in journals and reviews who said everything is a coincidence and that rare and unexplainable occurrences happen every day, just not often to any one person, such that if we could all sit in a room and tell all the strangest most unexplainable things that had happen to each of us, we would then understand how common uncommon things were. We might even get bored of them.
I looked off beyond the glass of mother’s vivarium and beyond the glass of the back window. There, the forest was awash in the deepest charcoals, grays, and purples, retaining only the barest of reflected and refracted light on its highest leaves as it was overcome with not only the consequences of the setting sun in the west but with the merging miasma of the inky shadows cast down from the limestone leviathans towering thousands of feet above the weald. It would soon be totally dark and that would be a relief from the creeping and most despondent dusk that enveloped the forest around the house in these hours. It was difficult to imagine that those woods and all the woods and cragged peaks around weren’t full of demons and creatures of the most foul and vicious variety. And as that darkness lurched further out from and into the forest at the same time, and into the very room in which I found myself, and the crystalline cube within it, I imagined a spiritual darkness enveloping sweet Nanetta from the daily beratings and meanness of her father. And as with my mother’s vivarium and darkness, the glass walls of all ourselves were utterly and innately incapable of stopping the march of a foe as determined and intangible as sadness at the malignancy of the world and some within it.
“What was wrong with her?” my mother asked, rousting me from my limbo.
“I hope nothing but I pray something. I must say, her father was a nasty man and most oppressive to her. I hope he didn’t break her spirit or drive her to insanity or otherwise cause her to do anything rash.”
“No, I mean what was wrong with her? She seemed like a fine girl, and you could have disowned her father. I think they have a mill. Not that that’s reason to marry someone, but while you shouldn’t marry for money, it doesn’t hurt to spend your time around rich women until you fall in love.”
(You see what I mean when I say she was quite the communist! Of course, she would say that so long as we are in the criminal world of the capitalists and their bourgeoisie lapdogs, we must obtain as much of that world’s power as we can: all the more to use in its overthrow! So you couldn’t win that battle. If communists prevailed, I supposed she thought she would get a ribbon and a straw hovel with a view from the commissariat as a reward for her donation. Pardon the digression…)
With that I stood up. “Yes, I suppose I should have fallen in love with her. I will make a note to do that next time. That’s very sad about her father. He was a coarse and foul soul but I wish him rest. And I dearly hope the best for her, though I fear the worst. I imagine it is quite the scandal in Pinzanne, her village.”
“Oh, indeed, I should think.”
“Unless you need anything, mother, I believe I shall help myself to a drink and retire.”
“No dinner? We have a fine, full mess set up for the officers in the main hall. You could join at no cost. It bargained for my meals as part of the rent and those of any guests as well.”
“Not tonight, mother.”
“Very well.”
And with that, I kissed her goodnight. With some directions from her to refresh my memory of the schematics of the place I headed toward my new billet, no doubt some wet, dank old cave at the end of a wetter, danker corridor on the second floor of our lovely above-ground dungeon. By some miracle, electric lighting had been installed in this dreary castelletto at some point in my childhood, at great expense no doubt, so there was some light. But it was not enough to completely forestall the gloomy thoughts in my mind that night. Thoughts of Nanetta brutally murdering her father with a pickaxe or pushing him into a well or putting poison and ground glass into his cream of asparagus soup or cyanide into his Strega. Even though I was somewhat pleased that she might have run off to find happiness with someone or some career, I knew it was more likely she was hiding in a hay barn scared and alone, watching for the Gendarmeria or some men from the Company of Ununiformed Militia (often derisively but often rightly referred to as the Company of Uninformed Militia), or, more grimly, hanging by the neck from a larch bough or laying in a broken pile at the bottom of a sharp crag, a victim of remorse, guilt, and fear, or, possibly, of rage and relief.
And so it was with heavy mind that I stopped into a small alcove just off the corridor leading to an antechamber of the dining hall, which served as a butler’s bar for the dining and nearby drawing rooms, in order to pour myself a large amaro and whiskey. As I emerged from the bar, drink in hand, I was annoyed by having to in my own home excuse myself around two fat-headed privates who appeared to be escorting some bookish looking lieutenants of one order or another.
“Pardon us, Hauptsergente,” one soldier burped as he led his cohort and the two junior officers down the hall past me. I transferred my drink to my left hand as I stood aside and quickly saluted the lieutenants.
In the dim glow of the sparse, hot-tungsten bulbery of the hall, I could only barely make out the faces of the two lower-ranking men. I can only say that they appeared to me to be the anthropomorphisation of the condition of my mind that evening. (And a pince-nez was a strange piece of optical habiliment to see these days, I recall having noted.)
“Sirs,” I nodded. They did not reply.
I suppose they think they own the place, I thought as I marched down the hall toward my slumber.
Continued…
