JК
The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana :: Эко Умберто
Страница: 76 из 286The dates are there (the Melzi , like the oracle of Delphi, neither reveals nor conceals; it indicates), Robert died when she was only thirty-seven,with forty more years ahead of her. What should a beautiful, distinguished pianist have done at that age? Clara belongs to history as a widow, and the Melzi was recording that. But how had I come to learn Clara’s story? Perhaps the Melzi had piqued my curiosity about that "widow." How many words do I know because I learned them there? Why do I know even now, with adamantine certainty, and in spite of the tempest in my brain, that the capital of Madagascar is Antananarivo? It was in that book that I had encountered terms that tasted like magic words: avolate, baccivorous, benzoin, cacodoxy, cerastes, cribble, dogmatics, glaver, grangerism, inadequation, lordkin, mulct, pasigraphy, postern, pulicious, sparble, speight, vespillo, Adrastus, Allobroges, Assur-Bani-Pal, Dongola, Kafiristan, Philopator, Richerus…
I leafed through the atlases: some were quite old, from before the First World War, when Germany still had African colonies, marked in bluish gray. I must have looked through a lot of atlases in my life-had I not just sold an Ortelius? But some of these exotic names had a familiar ring, as if I needed to start from these maps in order to recover others. What was it that linked my childhood to German West Africa, to the Dutch West Indies, and above all to Zanzibar? In any case, it was undeniable that there in Solara every word gave rise to another. Would I be able to climb back up that chain to the final word? What would it be? "I"?
I had gone back to my room. I felt absolutely sure about one thing. The Campanini Carboni did not include the word "shit." How do you say that in Latin? What did Nero shout when, hanging a painting, he smashed his thumb with the hammer? Qualis artifex pereo ? When I was a boy, those must have been serious questions, and official culture offered no answers. In such cases one turned to nonscholastic dictionaries, I imagined. And indeed the Melzi records shit , shite , shitten , shitty… Then like a flash I heard a voice: "The dictionary at my house says that a pitana is a woman who sells by herself." Someone, a schoolmate, had flushed out from some other dictionary something not found even in the Melzi ; he pronounced the forbidden word in a kind of semidialect (the dialect form was pütan’na ), and I must have long been fascinated by that phrase "sells by herself.
I leafed through the atlases: some were quite old, from before the First World War, when Germany still had African colonies, marked in bluish gray. I must have looked through a lot of atlases in my life-had I not just sold an Ortelius? But some of these exotic names had a familiar ring, as if I needed to start from these maps in order to recover others. What was it that linked my childhood to German West Africa, to the Dutch West Indies, and above all to Zanzibar? In any case, it was undeniable that there in Solara every word gave rise to another. Would I be able to climb back up that chain to the final word? What would it be? "I"?
I had gone back to my room. I felt absolutely sure about one thing. The Campanini Carboni did not include the word "shit." How do you say that in Latin? What did Nero shout when, hanging a painting, he smashed his thumb with the hammer? Qualis artifex pereo ? When I was a boy, those must have been serious questions, and official culture offered no answers. In such cases one turned to nonscholastic dictionaries, I imagined. And indeed the Melzi records shit , shite , shitten , shitty… Then like a flash I heard a voice: "The dictionary at my house says that a pitana is a woman who sells by herself." Someone, a schoolmate, had flushed out from some other dictionary something not found even in the Melzi ; he pronounced the forbidden word in a kind of semidialect (the dialect form was pütan’na ), and I must have long been fascinated by that phrase "sells by herself.