PREVIEW:

Second Chapter

I had been living up here in Vallorgana for ten years now, alone, in my ancestors’ house, spending the best part of my days engrossed in the kinds of occupations which a fairly substantial estate always requires, an estate whose management, at any rate, never had to be especially prudent or frugal on my part. As a matter of fact, through no merit of my own, I have more than sufficient resources at my disposal, resources which have cascaded into my hands thanks to the extraordinary riches accrued by my ancestors over the centuries. On the now far-off day when I first entered this cold, deserted abode with the determination to stay, I took it upon myself to study the fresco in a downstairs hall depicting the Cimamonte coat of arms, Cimamonte being the elevated name of my lineage. I reckoned that there was something irremissibly jarring between the fury of the rampant griffin represented on the escutcheon – the very same fury by which my ancestors had become what they had been – and my own condition of a stray survivor. And no less jarring than the predatory fury of the griffin were the mantled helm and, atop, the crest of a double-headed eagle.

This eagled crest is indeed a source of prime prestige, a title of indisputable nobility of which my ancestors have been able to boast ever since the day when they received Emperor Sigismund’s benevolence. This is all narrated in an authentic patent passed down the generations by my line which recites that, on 21 May 1412, in the city of Buda, the “rex Romanorum” Sigismund of Hungary conferred the title of count upon my ancestor “Iohannes Antonius Cimamontius” in exchange for services, the nature of which is not further qualified, rendered in Bohemia to the sovereign himself by that most remote Cimamonte. And so, thanks to Sigismund’s patent, my ancestors could bear the title of count. But the people of Vallorgana do not call me “The Count”, a title which, at a push, could even be deemed appropriate if one were to follow the letter of Sigismund’s by now most redundant patent.

Instead, just like Nelso, everyone here in the village prefers to call me “The Duke”, thus bestowing upon me a title inaccurate in every way. The merit of such superior investiture, if it can indeed be called so, is with my grandfather Ausilio Cimamonte. He was a man of extraordinary gentility who, during his stays at the house here in Vallorgana, had been in the habit of carrying on with the bearing and demands of a grand prince. He spoke to the villagers with the same ceremony he might use with his peers in the city of Berua. He managed the estate surrounding the house with feudal severity. He disallowed the tenants

any kind of familiarity when addressing him. He kept ancient rituals and meaningless ceremonials alive with a pertinacity already anachronistic in his time.

At any rate, with age, my grandfather Ausilio had become eccentric and garrulous. He took to wearing mismatched shoes as an affectation. He started frequenting the osterias, and there he played games of briscola and scopa with the villagers. Local wisdom has it that he also grew impertinent with young women. On the anniversary of our family’s elevation to the title of count, he came up with the custom of wearing an exceedingly archaic three-piece court suit, which I still have and which experts have assured me is typical of late-baroque fashion. Thus, every year on 21 May, my grandfather would spend that most sacrosanct memorial day of his attired in precisely that manner: breeches, long coat, and embroidered waistcoat.

Given my grandfather Ausilio’s princely eccentricity, the people of Vallorgana had decided that the title of count was no longer sufficient as it did not do justice to his grand nobility. If marquis was too little and prince perhaps too much, duke seemed just right. An so it came to be that my grandfather Ausilio became known to the villagers as “The Duke”.

Such mockery had become possible only because the world of my grandfather was slowly facing extinction, and of course it was kept most secret. However, the moniker spread by word of mouth throughout the yards of Vallorgana, in the osterias, and amongst our tenants, and eventually reached, God only knows how, my grandfather’s ear. Upon hearing it, he severed all his relations with the villagers and further still wrote to the Curia invoking certain articles of canon law which gave him licence to relinquish his right of patronage over the altar of San Pietro in the church, thus cancelling at a stroke his yearly donation to the parish itself.

When my grandfather had died, his only son, my father Achille, would set foot in Vallorgana once or twice a year, if that, for a quick, uninterested inspection of the house. The truth is that my father never cared in the least about being a Cimamonte. The investments and the income from the estate were more than enough for him to lead a most respectable life in the city of Berua and to support my mother’s research liberally. On her part, my mother, whose name was Anna Brunner, was an Austrian bourgeois who, both by character and philosophy, was not particularly concerned with the affectations of nobility and had no interest whatsoever in the Cimamontes. All she ever cared about were her own velleities as an ethnographer, certain African tribes about which she even wrote something, and long study trips in Kenya.

Fifteen years ago, my father and mother both boarded that plane which later came crashing down in Kenya. As the last of the Cimamontes in the direct male line, I found myself in the position of becoming, aged not even twenty-five, the master of a more than sizeable inheritance and the lord of a line close to drying up. I was young, I did not know how to find my bearings, and so, as is often the case with the indecisive, I resolved to test my mettle by forcing myself to make a clean break. Firstly, I chose to get rid of Palazzo Cimamonte, our city residence in Berua. I sold that magnificent, sumptuous, enormous yet oppressing and ungovernable abode for an extraordinary sum. My only scruple was to keep a small pied-a-terre in it.

Then, I carried out the rest of my plan: I left Berua and settled up here, at the foot of the Mountain, in my ancestors’ house, which had been completely uninhabited for over thirty years. I deemed it the ideal place to remain as if in suspension and slowly let myself fall in with the many everyday occupations required by the land and the house itself.

I had no other plan than to wake up every morning and do what needed doing, day after day. I got my estate back in hand. I cut down the scrub which had grown around the courtyard. I tried, though with no exceptional results, to return a certain vineyard of my ancestors’ to fruitfulness. I found someone to mow my meadows. As is natural, I invested the necessary sums into the upkeep of the house, adapting it to my needs as much as possible.

After some early, legitimate suspicions, the villagers did not rebuff me, perhaps also because I immediately got into the habit of asking them how to do this task, what was the best season to carry out that job, and so on. In short, I was trying to learn something from everyone. When one day, perhaps a year after my arrival, someone remarked that my hands were now all scratched-up and my nails hardened, I finally felt like I belonged here. It was then that the villagers – having read me, I suppose, as an odd type of decayed but affable nobleman – revived the title once chosen for my grandfather Ausilio, and I became The Duke.

But, in Vallorgana, a nickname is both an attestation of citizenship and the ironic precis of the opinion which the community itself has formed of the individual. And when, as was my case, the nickname is the same as an ancestor’s, the implication is also that the community does not forget and that one cannot escape one’s past.

So, by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage. A decline which, after all, was most evident, and by virtue of which they could finally enjoy the sight of a Cimamonte with no servants and no tenants and with scratched-up hands and hardened nails.

In any case, I did not care what the village said or thought about me. I was certain that I was already living out the best fate I could possibly desire. Nothing important ever happened during the course my days. Nothing complex ever perplexed my gaze. No exception to my routine. No decision blocking my way. I lived in the best condition to which a man of my nature could aspire – the perfect, ideal condition. But now, on an afternoon like any other, Nelso Tabiona had come to rap on my windowpane to tell me that, up in the Mountain, in my woods, I had been had.