A Castle in Romagna Read online

  ALSO BY IGOR ŠTIKS

  The Judgment of Richard Richter

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2000 by Igor Štiks; 2007 by Igor Štiks and Fraktura

  Translation copyright © 2005 by Tomislav Kuzmanović and Russell Scott Valentino

  Republished by AmazonCrossing in 2018

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Originally published as Dvorac u Romagni by Durieux in Croatia in 2000. Republished by Fraktura in Croatia in 2007. Translated from Croatian by Tomislav Kuzmanović and Russell Scott Valentino.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503901087

  ISBN-10: 1503901084

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For M.

  CONTENTS

  1

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  2

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  3

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  4

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  5

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH

  6

  CHAPTER THE SIXTH

  7

  CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

  8

  CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

  9

  CHAPTER THE NINTH

  10

  CHAPTER THE TENTH

  THE FINAL CHAPTER

  THE LAST CHAPTER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  1

  As one comes down the old road from Rimini, near Cesena, the forest oaks form a pleasant, secure umbrella against the scorching heat. After some six meandering miles, at the top of a hill that the road cuts through, one catches a glimpse of Castello Mardi. Its roof shines in the afternoon sun, and it seems as though the building has fused at a slant with the gentle surroundings.

  Come nearer and it offers the chance to examine renowned frescoes and study all the beauty of early Renaissance architectural skill. One may also descend the 213 steps that lead to the dungeon in which Enzo Strecci, that giant of Renaissance literature, spent days of hardship awaiting his death. He was the main reason I’d decided to visit Mardi Castle.

  There were three of us, two girls and I, on a beautiful summer day, which was reflected in the red faces of the breathless friar-caretakers of the castle and its garden. They directed us—“a destra, a destra”—toward the tourist portion of the edifice. Along the way to where a friar sold the tickets and offered select information about the history of the castle, we could occasionally feel a slight draft and smell the damp coming through the dungeon bars at the bottom of the wall. I could almost see a sword or mace or hear a voice from the cellar, as if Strecci himself were still protesting his innocence.

  The first thing I noticed about the friar, with whom it turned out I was to stay until evening, was his unruly hair with its luxuriant curls, hanging like bunches of grapes all about his round face. He met us with the tickets in his outstretched hands and a prepared smile of warm welcome. There followed a lecture on the most interesting curiosities of the castle and then—because, as he put it, one has to make a living—he requested five thousand lire for the free tour. While he was putting the money into a box, he asked kindly, probably in order to break the silence, “Da dove venite, ragazze?” (Where are you girls from?)

  Marianne said, “La Francia.” Irène said the same, and he turned to me and asked, “E tu, bambino?” (And you, child?)

  “Sono bosniaco” (I’m a Bosnian), I said reservedly, which made the friar break into loud laughter and blurt out, looking me straight in the eye, “Bosnia?” and then, setting his arms as if holding a rifle, “Poof, poof, bang, bang . . . Bosnia, capisci. Poof, poof.”

  I stood before him, utterly bewildered, unable to think of any words in Italian that might serve as a response. “Capisci? Bang, bang,” he said again, still laughing, but this time without redoing his little performance in front of my puzzled eyes (the invisible rifle had disappeared from his hands), waiting for a reaction to his all-too-obvious joke: it was the summer of 1995.

  “We should get going,” said the girls, who were ready for the tour and anxious to part with the unpleasant old man as soon as possible.

  “The guy’s nuts,” I told them, looking at the stiff grimace on his face, upon which he answered with yet another surprise: “Maybe nuts but safe at least, eh?” he said in my language. “Just like yourself. Ha ha . . . What do you say to that, Bosnian?”

  “I’d better listen to the girls,” I said. Suddenly he grabbed my hand and changed his tone. Once again he was the pleasant friar selling tickets, maybe even more pleasant because of the language shared by only the two of us in the room (and, it would seem, the general vicinity).

  “Just a joke, eh? Capisci? No harm intended. It’s been a long time since I saw anybody from home. At least up close.”

  That was the first time I wondered how old he might be. Only after he had mentioned time and suggested proof of his age, putting his hand on mine long enough for its surface to remind me of a layer of cream cut through with barely visible veins, only then did I look at him more carefully. Later I understood that he was over sixty-five.

  There was a brief moment of silence, and you could hear the girls in the next room, admiring the accomplishments of Renaissance wall painting and slowly moving away down the halls. I would catch up with them only after Castello Mardi had already sunk into darkness.

  “I’m an exile, an esulo, like you,” he went on, without letting me interrupt.

  I tried to explain that I was in a hurry. He let go of my hand and said, “I wouldn’t want you to be angry. It was just a joke. You’re not mad, are you? It must make you happy that I speak so well. Before you is living proof that the language of one’s early days is not easily forgotten, let alone the whole world that only that language—or, better said, only the mixture of my two languages—can describe. Those voices, those faces, those island aromas, they don’t grow old, you know. No more terra nostra. Good-bye. Never again, mai più, back home. Bang, bang, like I said. ‘See you when we free you,’ as they used to put it, right?”

  He didn’t wait for my answer. “I haven’t run into anyone from there for a long time, a really long time. Forgive me. Have a cigarette. I wouldn’t want to part with yet another Slav this way. You’re not angry? Are we okay?”

  In the hope of getting rid of him for good, I said it hadn’t even crossed my mind, I was just a little unpleasantly surprised, I didn’t want to talk about it, I was on vacation, I was in the company of two girls who didn’t like to wait and who I’d lose sight of if I didn’t go after them right this minute. Besides, I had paid for the ticket and was impatient to see where the renowned Enzo Strecci had spent his last days.

  As if this was the one thing he was waiting for, the friar cried, “Enzo Strecci, yes. Yes. Enzo the Great. You won’t believe it if I tell you that he was like you and me. Believe me, just like you and me.”

  He uttered every syllable of the last phrase as if it were part of a plot, opening his eyes wide to emphasize our newfound closeness.

  “Really?” I said in disbelief.

  “Yes, really!” he went on. “I sometimes think that’s the on
ly reason I’m still here. As if all my life I’ve been executing other people’s wills and keeping the memory of someone else’s history . . . but who will remember our stories? Do you ever ask yourself that, Bosniaco? . . . ‘Let what has come upon me be remembered,’ as Enzo says somewhere in his book of poetry, if I remember correctly.”

  I nodded. The friar smiled. As if our shared knowledge of Strecci’s poetry made us rare members of a cult almost no one followed anymore.

  “And do you know what befell him, here, under this very roof?”

  As I write about it today, I think it was just then that I tried for the last time to remedy the tiny misstep on my intended journey into the Renaissance. But I didn’t get far. It’s a point of personal consolation to me that I stayed with the friar that whole afternoon. And in the end, that is what made this story possible.

  I said again I needed to go, but just as I had taken a few steps in the direction of where the girls had disappeared, he began to speak, his face to the window. I looked at his bent round back and decided to stay and listen briefly to what he had to say. And that was how it began, when he stretched out his hand and said, “Come here. Look. That way there, up the hill, that’s the path on which Enzo Strecci, the handsome Lombardian, came to this place. Come, take a look at that path, and now imagine . . .”

  I couldn’t leave him after that.

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  It is said that he appeared on that road several months after the death of the last heir of the Sforza family, in the autumn of 1535, after the Spanish line of the insatiable Habsburgs had taken Milano and Lombardy. The influential nobleman Strecci had sent his son to his wife’s homeland, which is how Enzo ended up approaching the castle that morning, carrying a letter for Francesco Mardi. In it Mardi’s good friend Federico Strecci asked that, during those confusing times, which needed no lengthy description, he might look after Enzo, who he believed, so the letter stated, could put his poetic skills to better use in this new environment by shortening the rainy afternoons and assuaging the boredom of Mardi’s ladies than by disturbing the new masters’ peace, an activity at which, it seemed, the young man had shown aptitude these last months.

  And so, when the twenty-five-year-old youth stepped toward the brass doors of Mardi Castle, he had a smile on his face that neither the guards nor the long wait before the master’s door could wipe clean. For it was the kind of smile that gave one the false impression that the future into which one was headed, oblivious of potential danger, could erase the memory of recent peril. And he did not have to wait long to confirm his impression, to see that the feeling did not lie, and that good fortune—although it could be said that fortune had played an important role in his making it out of Milano in one piece—had at last caressed his brown hair. Just before noon, the lady of the house passed through the chamber where he awaited his reception.

  Now then, if you know the story of Strecci’s fate, you won’t find it difficult to recognize the beautiful Catarina in it, Mardi’s young wife, who at that moment strode by, accompanied by her dear friend and chambermaid Maria. We can only imagine—though some of it is reported by the investigator into the later mess, the bishop’s examiner Fra Giovanni, who for several hours questioned the chambermaid in connection with this unpleasant affair—that Enzo quickly got to his feet, that Catarina passed without even noticing him, and that he watched her walk until the moment when that little serpent Maria stopped before his handsome face to make her presence known.

  “Does the gentleman have no eyes?” said the sweet lamb, upon which Enzo turned and, confused by the sight before him, blurted out the honest, reckless words, “Forgive me, miss. I hadn’t noticed you.”

  Maria quickly followed her mistress without replying, and Enzo collapsed onto a bench—as much from being tired as from being made breathless—and fell into a fateful reverie.

  There you have it. That was the whole thing, you could say—nothing special, an opportunity, a few words preached to the winds, so to speak. But that’s the way the affair began: the seed of love, whether you believe in it or not, had taken root in the hearts of the two people, while the third did not even suspect, and the fourth was preparing to do a good deed. And while you’re still thinking that your fate is written in the stars, forget it, pal. Someone has already begun spinning the thread to fool you, as it usually happens, through a favorable horoscope prediction.

  Soon after, the white-haired Mardi welcomed the youth and generously offered him chambers in the right wing of the castle. He ordered that water should be heated for the traveler, and wished him pleasurable days of repose following all the troubles from which he had luckily escaped through his flight and for which Mardi had a remedy—or at least so it seemed when, tapping Strecci’s shoulder to the rhythm of his words, he said, “I respect your father too much to deprive you of anything, my son. I believe you will find comfort and happiness, and perhaps a wife, in your mother’s homeland. During your stay, I will be glad to share all that I have with you, dear Enzo.”

  Strecci thanked him politely for this expression of sincere sympathy, and thought, still under the impression of his meeting with Catarina, that he had to admit there really was something to what the old man had said. Tempting fate (for he was a young man and, besides, was convinced that God himself would forgive a good joke), he wondered excitedly whether there was anything more natural than the fact that we love what our friends love, and then, generously, he added this to Mardi’s offer: If God is willing, and the hero’s luck holds, then she, too, my dear Mardi, will be shared between us.

  2

  At this point, where the story of Enzo Strecci begins for the reader, allow me to skip a few hours and alter the sequence of events of that afternoon for my story, skipping to the moment when the sun was barely visible from the window of the friar’s chamber, in order to make my account more successful and so that I might begin a second story and weave it into the first, for they are inextricably linked in my memory and, in any case, it’s perhaps the best kind of storytelling we have at hand.

  After a few sentences, having forgotten my initial anger and why and with whom I had come here, I was sitting in a chair, captured by his story. During the entire length of the story of Enzo Strecci’s fate, the friar would stand up, act out scenes, make speeches, imitate characters, express their thoughts and dreams, and convey the contents of letters and official documents. He was truly an omniscient narrator, a fact evident from the first part of this story.

  “Now that’s practically literature!” I cried when he had finished the story of Enzo. “You’ve made a novella out of his life!”

  “As I told you, young man,” answered the friar, “sometimes it seems to me it’s the only reason I’m here. Somehow, regardless of time and space, Strecci and I are connected. Someone once said that we listen to stories and read books only to know we’re not alone. I would add that the fact that we collect them, listen to them, or read them persistently all our lives speaks of our desire to surpass their uniqueness. Somewhere, stories come together, perhaps crossing or overlapping, but they are never the same. Neither life nor literature, my boy, is heraldic. It often happens, as I’m sure you know, that on one coat of arms, in the upper right corner, the same coat of arms is repeated. And in its upper right corner, it’s repeated again, just smaller this time, and so on to infinity. That’s never successful with people’s destinies. The only thing that remains is the interweaving, the coming together of fates, the knots that come out of it. I believe that every story has a relative, even if it’s reversed, which of course one must recognize.” The friar nodded as if to emphasize his words.

  “Besides knowing the fate of Enzo Strecci quite well, you speak our language so perfectly,” I said, praising him further, still under the impression of what he had told me.

  “I’m from the island of Rab, after all!” he exclaimed. “As far as I know, they speak Croatian well there,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

  “When did you leave
? Why?”

  “The summer of ’48, nearly fifty years ago. It was a rough time is why.”

  “Forty-eight? The time of the Information Bureau’s resolution? Tito’s break with Stalin?” I asked, making my interest clear to him.

  “That’s just it, young man.” The friar stood up from his chair and walked to the window.

  “Was that the reason?” I asked in anticipation, not realizing that my question would begin a new story, this time his own, in which variations were not allowed and humor would find little place.

  Outside, the woods had enveloped the sun, but the sultriness did not disappear with it. The friar turned, came back to his chair, sighed, and began speaking as one speaks about something precious—slowly, choosing his words with care, in the hope of being completely understood. The sky darkened still further, becoming in the end a mantle of shining stars, as his story unfolded.

  “It’s one of the reasons. But let me begin my story at its central point, at the moment when I was returning by boat from Trieste, a few days after the twenty-eighth of June, when the Resolution had been issued.”

  It was unspeakably hot the summer of ’48, a bit like this one. You couldn’t say where it was worse, above deck, wetting your head every once in a while, or below, where you couldn’t breathe. I was coming back from Trieste, as I said, where I’d gone a day after the Resolution with the intention of staying in Italy for good. My father had persuaded me to go, but I soon decided to go back to Rab. I leave it up to you to find the reasons for my return in my story. For now, I can only say I paid dearly for that decision.

  That unspeakably hot ’48, only a few Italian families were left on Rab, and it was clear, as things were going in those days, that soon there would be even fewer. My father liked to pride himself on his steadfastness, claiming that there was no force that could expel him from the land he had fought for. Until not long before then unassuming and—with our family at least—solidary, the neighbors threw rocks at our windows, avoided handshakes and greetings, and even sometimes shouted insults after us. But that year, we had already accepted such things as an inefficient and benign means of intimidation and pressure to leave. After father’s expulsion from the party in May 1946, which was based on his having helped some relatives who turned out to have several Fascists in their family, the security police became regular guests in our house. My father was hard hit by the betrayal of his comrades, with whom he had until just the day before shared the adversities of the war and the postwar year, putting the country, as they used to say, “on a new foundation.” He tried in vain to justify himself before the authorities, asking to be rehabilitated, until the very day they found him lying helpless on the veranda, his heart giving out.