The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana [La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana - en]

The names of the cities were once again words that called to mind other words.

By the look of it, the radio dated from the thirties. Radios must have been quite expensive at that time, and no doubt it entered the family only at a certain point, as a status symbol.

I wanted to figure out what people did with radios during the thirties and forties. I called Gianni again.

The first thing he said was that I should pay him by the job, since I was using him like a diver to bring submerged amphorae up to the surface. But then he added, with some emotion in his voice, "Ah, the radio� We didn�t get one until around 1938. They were expensive; my father was an office worker, but unlike yours he worked for a small company and didn�t make much. Your family went on vacation in the summer, and we stayed in the city, visited the public gardens in the evenings to enjoy the cool air, and had gelato once a week. My father was not a talkative man. That day he came home, sat down at the table, ate dinner in silence, and afterward took out a bag of pastries. Why, it isn�t Sunday? my mother asked. And he: Just because, I felt like it. We ate the pastries and then, scratching his head, he said: Mara, apparently things have been going well the past few months, and today the boss gave me a thousand lire. My mother nearly had a stroke, she brought her hands up to her mouth and screamed: Oh Francesco, now we can buy a radio! Just like that. A popular song of the time was called �If I Could Make a Thousand Lire a Month.� It was the song of a humble office worker who dreamed of making a thousand lire a month, so he could buy lots of things for his pretty young wife. A thousand lire must have been the equivalent of a good month�s salary, maybe it was more than my father made, and in any case it was like a Christmas bonus no one was expecting. That�s how the radio came into our house. Let me think-it was a Phonola. Once a week there was the Martini and Rossi opera concert, on some other day there was a play. Ah, Tallinn and Riga, I wish they were still on the radio I�ve got now-it just has numbers� And then during the war the only heated room was the kitchen, so we moved the radio there, and in the evenings, with the volume turned way down, otherwise they�d have thrown us in jail, we�d listen to Radio London. Shut up in our house with the windows covered with light blue paper, the kind sugar came in, for the blackout. And the songs! When you come back, I�ll sing them all to you if you want, even the Fascist anthems. You know, I�m not a nostalgic man, but now and then I get the urge to hear those Fascist anthems; they remind me how it felt to be sitting by the radio in the evening� What did the ad say? Radio, the voice that enchants."

I asked him to stop. True, I was the one who had prompted him, but now he was polluting my tabula rasa with his memories. I needed to relive those evenings by myself. Things would have been different for me: he had a Phonola, and I had a Telefunken, and besides, maybe he tuned in to Riga and I to Tallinn. But could we really pick up Tallinn, and did we then listen to people speaking Estonian?

I went downstairs to eat and, in spite of Gratarolo, to drink, but only to forget. I of all people. But I had to forget the upheavals of the past week, had to bring on the desire to sleep in the afternoon shadows, stretched out in bed with The Tigers of Mompracem, which may once have kept me awake into the small hours, but which the past two evenings had proved blessedly soporific.

But between a forkful for myself and a scrap for Mat�, I had a simple but enlightening thought: the radio transmits whatever is on the airwaves now, but the gramophone allows you to hear what was on the records of the past. They are the frozen words of Pantagruel. To feel what it was like to listen to the radio fifty years ago, I needed records.

"Records?" Amalia muttered. "Keep your mind on your food, why don�t you, instead of records, or this good stuff will go down wrong and turn toxic and then you�ll need a doctor! Records, records, records� Jumping Jehoshaphat, they�re not in the attic at all! When your aunt and uncle put everything away, I helped, and� hang on here� I thought to myself that them records in the study, if I was to carry them all up to the attic I�d drop them and they�d go to pieces on the stairs. And so I put them� I put them� I�m sorry, you know it�s not that my memory doesn�t work anymore, which at my age I could be forgiven that, but it�s been more than fifty years, and it�s not like I�ve been sitting here all that time thinking about them records. But that�s it, what a noggin! I bet I stuck them in the settle outside your dear grandfather�s study!"

I skipped the fruit and went upstairs to find the settle. I had paid little attention to it in the course of my first visit, but I opened it and there they were, one on top of the other, all of them good old 78s in their protective sleeves. Amalia had set them down in no particular order, and there were all kinds of things. I spent half an hour transporting them onto the desk in the study, then began to put them in some kind of order on the shelves. My grandfather must have been a lover of good music: Mozart was there, and Beethoven, opera arias (even a Caruso), and a lot of Chopin, but also a fair share of popular songs.