ruling lines on one sheet of paper after another. Once he had prepared a batch, he looked up from the business in hand and enquired what it was I had come for. Having listened to my protracted explanation, he went to fetch what I wanted and before long I was sitting near one of the windows leafing through the folio volumes in which the Verona newspapers dating from August and September 1913 were bound. The edges were by now so brittle that the pages needed to be turned with much care. All manner of silent movie scenes began to be enacted before my eyes. In Via Alberto Mario I beheld divers gentlemen walking up and down and, at the very moment they supposed themselves unobserved, deftly side-stepping, with lightning alacrity, into the doorway of the building that housed the establishment of Dr Ringger, graduate of the medical schools of Paris and Vienna. Each of the many chambers within was
already occupied by an impeccably suited gentleman of the sort that continued to leap in from the street, while Dr Ringger, for his part, was to be seen in the great salon on the mezzanine floor perusing, in preparation for his surgery hours, a range of outsize pictorial reproductions of the inflorescences caused by diseases of the skin, spread out before him on a huge table like the multi-coloured ordnance maps at a war council of the general staff. And then I witnessed Dr Pesavento, whose practice was in the Via Stella, not far from the Biblioteca Civica, performing one of his painless
extractions. The pale countenance of the patient under Dr Pesavento did indeed seem perfectly relaxed, but her body twisted and turned in the dentist's chair as if she were undergoing the most agonising discomforts. There were revelations of a different kind, too, such as the pyramid of ten million bottles of Ferro-China table water (to reconstitute the blood), gleaming and glinting in the sun like a promise of eternal
life: a lion roared soundlessly, and soundlessly the pyramid shattered into a myriad little pieces tumbling down slowly in a crystal cascade. They were soundless and weightless, these images and words of times gone by, flaring up briefly and instantly going out, each of them its own empty enigma. The Tyrolese missionary Giuseppe Ohrwalder was reported from Khartoum to have been missing for several weeks at Omdurman in the Sudan. According to telegrams from Danzig, a Colonnello Stern of the 6th Field Artillery Regiment had been arrested there on suspicion of spying: stories with neither beginning nor end, I reflected, which ought to be looked into more closely. 1913 was a peculiar year. The times were changing, and the spark was racing along the fuse like an adder through the grass. Everywhere there were great effusions of feeling. The people were trying out a new role. The sacred and righteous wrath of the nation was invoked. The accounts in the Veronese newspapers of the first festival in the anfiteatro romano sought to surpass each other in their enthusiasm. According to one of my notes, an article in the Fedele was entitled Apoteosi dei titani , in Gothic type. It concluded with the assurance that this headline was no hollow assertion, since the arena was a titanic example of Roman architecture and Giuseppe Verdi the Titan of the melopoea italiana. The true Titan of all art and beauty, however, the writer proclaimed with a final flourish, was il popolo nostro , and all the rest were nothing but pygmies. For a long time my eyes remained fixed on the six letters of the word pigmei , the announcement of a destruction that had already taken place. It was as if I could hear the voice of the people, as it welled up, the violent inflection in the syllables: pig-me-i, pig-me-i, pig-me-i. The shouting roared within my ear, in reality doubtless the drumming of my own blood, amplified and distorted by my imagination. At all events, it seemed to prompt no response in the librarian. Calmly he sat bent over his work, filling the lines he had ruled
already occupied by an impeccably suited gentleman of the sort that continued to leap in from the street, while Dr Ringger, for his part, was to be seen in the great salon on the mezzanine floor perusing, in preparation for his surgery hours, a range of outsize pictorial reproductions of the inflorescences caused by diseases of the skin, spread out before him on a huge table like the multi-coloured ordnance maps at a war council of the general staff. And then I witnessed Dr Pesavento, whose practice was in the Via Stella, not far from the Biblioteca Civica, performing one of his painless
extractions. The pale countenance of the patient under Dr Pesavento did indeed seem perfectly relaxed, but her body twisted and turned in the dentist's chair as if she were undergoing the most agonising discomforts. There were revelations of a different kind, too, such as the pyramid of ten million bottles of Ferro-China table water (to reconstitute the blood), gleaming and glinting in the sun like a promise of eternal
life: a lion roared soundlessly, and soundlessly the pyramid shattered into a myriad little pieces tumbling down slowly in a crystal cascade. They were soundless and weightless, these images and words of times gone by, flaring up briefly and instantly going out, each of them its own empty enigma. The Tyrolese missionary Giuseppe Ohrwalder was reported from Khartoum to have been missing for several weeks at Omdurman in the Sudan. According to telegrams from Danzig, a Colonnello Stern of the 6th Field Artillery Regiment had been arrested there on suspicion of spying: stories with neither beginning nor end, I reflected, which ought to be looked into more closely. 1913 was a peculiar year. The times were changing, and the spark was racing along the fuse like an adder through the grass. Everywhere there were great effusions of feeling. The people were trying out a new role. The sacred and righteous wrath of the nation was invoked. The accounts in the Veronese newspapers of the first festival in the anfiteatro romano sought to surpass each other in their enthusiasm. According to one of my notes, an article in the Fedele was entitled Apoteosi dei titani , in Gothic type. It concluded with the assurance that this headline was no hollow assertion, since the arena was a titanic example of Roman architecture and Giuseppe Verdi the Titan of the melopoea italiana. The true Titan of all art and beauty, however, the writer proclaimed with a final flourish, was il popolo nostro , and all the rest were nothing but pygmies. For a long time my eyes remained fixed on the six letters of the word pigmei , the announcement of a destruction that had already taken place. It was as if I could hear the voice of the people, as it welled up, the violent inflection in the syllables: pig-me-i, pig-me-i, pig-me-i. The shouting roared within my ear, in reality doubtless the drumming of my own blood, amplified and distorted by my imagination. At all events, it seemed to prompt no response in the librarian. Calmly he sat bent over his work, filling the lines he had ruled
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