Another excerpt
More (see last post) from Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.Amalia had told me that one entered the attic from the left wing. I had imagined a spiral wooden staircase, but instead there were stone steps, quite comfortable and practical – otherwise, I later realized, how would they have been able to carry up all that stuff they stashed away?
As far as I knew, I had never seen the inside of an attic. Nor of a cellar, for that matter, but everyone knows what cellars are like: subterranean, dark, damp, always cool, and you have to bring a candle, or a torch. The gothic romance is rich in the subterranean, the monk Ambrosio wondering gloomily among crypts. Natural underground passageways, like Tom Sawyer's caverns. The mystery of darkness. All houses have cellars, but not all have attics, especially in cities, where they have penthouses. But is there really no literature of attics? And in that case what is Eight Days in an Attic? The title came to mind, if nothing else.
Even if you do not go through them all at once, you can tell that the attics of the Solara house extend over all three wings: you enter an area that stretches from the façade to the rear of the building, but then narrower passages open and bulkheads appear, wooden partitions that divide the spaces, routes defined by metal shelving units or old chests of drawers, the interchanges of an endless labyrinth. Having ventured down one of the corridors on the left, I turned once or twice more and found myself back in front of the entrance.
Immediate sensations: heat, above all, which is natural just beneath a roof. Then light: it comes in part from a series of dormer windows, which can be seen when you look at the front of the house, but which on the inside are largely obstructed by piles of junk, so that in some cases the sunlight barely filters through, reduced to yellow blades astir with an infinity of particles, revealing that the penumbra must also be crazed with a multitude of motes, spores, primordial atoms caught up in their Brownian skirmishes, primal bodies swarming in the void – who spoke of those, Lucretius? Sometimes those slants of light ricocheted off the glass panes of a dismantled buffet of a full-length mirror that from another angle had looked like merely another dull surface propped against the wall. And then the occasional daylight, darkened by decades of encrusted pluvial detritus but still able to make a pale zone of illumination on the floor.
Finally, the color: the attic's dominant color, imparted by the roof beams, by the crates piled here and there, by the remains of wobbly chests of drawers, is the color of carpentry, composed of many shades of brown, from the yellowish-brown of unfinished wood to the warmth of maple to the darker tones of old dressers, their finishes flaking off, to the ivory of old papers overflowing their boxes.
If a cellar prefigures the underworld, an attic promises a rather threadbare paradise, where the dead bodies appear in a pluverulent glow, a vegetal elixir that, in the absence of green, makes you feel you are in a parched tropical forest, an artificial canebreak where you are immersed in a tepid sauna.
I had thought cellars symbolized the welcome of the mother's womb, with their amniotic dampness, but this aerial womb made up for that with an almost medicinal heat. And in that luminous maze, where if you pushed aside a couple of roof tiles you would see the open sky, a complicit mustiness hung in the air, the odor of silence and calm.
After a while, however, I no longer noticed the heat, gripped as I was by the frenzy of discovery. Because my Clarabelle's treasure was certainly there, though it would take a lot of digging and I had no idea where to begin.
(Have to say that enchanting as the bit-by-bit encounter with the old house's forgotten places/spaces is for me, as it figures in the unfolding of this story, here in particular the scene comes over a little clumsy, choppy somehow. Is it partly a difficulty of translation? – can't help wondering. In any case, I suppose, it's a lot of impression to render fluidly in a few paragraphs.)
posted by paul bowman @ 2:43 PM
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