The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana   ::   Эко Умберто

After the radio has given the impression of falling silent until the next day, we hear a heartfelt voice come through, singing:

You’ll come back

To m e …

It’s written in the stars , you see ,

you’ll come back.

You’ll come back ,

it’s a fact

that I am strong because I do

believe in you.

I had just listened to that song again at Solara, but there it was a love song: You’ll come back to me / because you are my heart’s one dream , / its only dream. / You’ll come back , / because I / without all your languid kisses / won’t survive. So the song I had heard all those evenings had been a wartime version, which to the hearts of many must have sounded like a promise, or an appeal to someone far away who in that moment might have been freezing in the steppes or facing a firing squad. Who was airing that song at that time of night? A nostalgic employee, before closing down the broadcast booth, or someone obeying an order from a higher-up? We did not know, but that voice carried us to the threshold of sleep.

It is nearly eleven, I close my stamp album, it is bedtime. Mamma has prepared the brick, an actual brick, by placing it in the oven until it is too hot to touch, then wrapping it in woolen cloths and slipping it under the covers, where it warms the entire bed. It feels good to rest your feet on it, especially as it relieves the itching of chilblains, which in those years (cold, vitamin deficiencies, hormonal tempests) made all our fingers and toes swell up, and sometimes turned into agonizing, suppurating sores.

A hound is baying from some farm in the valley.

Gragnola and I talked about everything. I would tell him about the books I was reading, and he would discuss them passionately: "Verne," he would say, "is better than Salgari, because he’s scientific. Cyrus Smith manufacturing nitroglycerin is more real than that Sandokan tearing his chest with his fingernails just because he’s fallen for some bitchy little fifteen-year-old."

"You don’t like Sandokan?" I asked.

"He seemed a little fascist to me."

I once told him I had read Heart by De Amicis, and he told me to throw it away because De Amicis was a fascist. "Didn’t you notice," he said, "how they’re all against old Franti, who comes from a poor family, and yet they fall over each other trying to please that fascist teacher.