Verdigris by Michele Mari

Author:Michele Mari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Italy;Italian;countryside;gothic;partisans;fascism;boyhood;monsters;occult;autobiographical;memory;alzheimers;aging;growing up;loss;sixties;1960;1969;summer;summertime;ghosts;slugs;skeletons;doubles;doppelgangers
Publisher: And Other Stories
Published: 2023-10-11T11:01:12+00:00

My grandfather was a Republican; not in the anti-monarchical or anti-Francoist sense of the term, but simply because he voted for Ugo La Malfa’s party. My grandmother, alas, was a Christian Democrat, but, like half the people who voted for that party, politics didn’t matter to her: only the crucifix mattered. Excluding, therefore, my grandmother from all possible dialogue, I was left with my grandfather, whose moderate secularism allowed me to hope for a sufficiently credible assessment of characters such as the Kropoffs, who, for my grandmother, were naturally only fine people who had been oppressed by the horrible Communists. The interview with my grandfather was, nonetheless, a disappointment. Not only did he not wish to speak his mind on the question of the general exodus of Russian nobles, but even in terms of the Kropoffs he remained extremely elusive. Two or three meetings, he maintained, weren’t enough to form an opinion, in part because the conversations had revolved exclusively around economic questions; and the last meeting, as I already knew, didn’t even take place, because when he arrived the Kropoffs had already moved out. I asked if he’d seen any family members other than the two old folks: no, he had not; besides a woman who must have worked by the hour, and not counting Felice, there hadn’t been anyone else. There hadn’t been anyone else, or he hadn’t seen anyone else? He seemed to pretend not to recognize the difference. I then asked if Nicolai Kropoff had mentioned a son: he didn’t remember. In the meantime, he was looking at me like a teacher of esotericism glaring at his young disciple for some unforgivable error. That look made me feel like putting up a fight. He had La Malfa? Well, I had two dead Kennedys plus the most likable pope of all time, so he could decide for himself whether such a face-off was in his best interest. I confronted him head-on, asserting that the Russians’ sudden flight from Nasca was very suspicious.

“I’d like to see what you’d do, with Stalin’s henchmen on your heels.”

I recognized the game he was playing: dignify those lazy idlers by turning them into martyrs. But from the little that excellent books and excellent teachers had already taught me at my young age, I knew that Stalin was interested in axing people like Trotsky, while he let ex-czarists do whatever the hell they pleased. In fact, in my automatic antipathy for the Kropoffs, I had almost convinced myself that they themselves were Stalin’s spies, and that their flight was due to a suspicion that they had been found out by some genuine, anti-Stalinist Communists.

A new element, in any event, had now come to light: the Kropoffs didn’t have servants. It wasn’t hard to understand poor Felice’s delusion that they had taken him in to be a member of the family who would help around the house… Especially since they say that Russians are some of the most hospitable people in the world… Whereas

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.