Читать книгу A Rebel In Love - Cristiano Parafioriti - Страница 8

To remove the paper without compromising the writing underneath, I thought of a particular technique. I heated some water in a small pan, and, with a brush stolen from my niece, I moistened the surface of the leaflet.

The paper was similar in size to those cards attached to wedding favours. Despite my evident clumsiness in all things that involve good craftsmanship, I carefully managed to re-move the addition.

Once I removed the delicate piece of paper, I immediately proceeded to blow-dry the uncovered surface, still very wet, with a hairdryer so as not to melt the ink and undo all the work done – sometimes YouTube tutorials come in handy. And this is what emerged:

Sicut prediximus et nunc iterum dico: Si quis vobis evangelizaverit praeter id, quod accepistis, anathema sit.⁵

I did not fall into the trap of believing that it was just the clerical pseudo-dread of a cloistered nun. I strongly felt a connection, a common thread which, first through Calogero Bau and then through Bastiano Montagna, had led me to that tome.

I transcribed the sentence as it was on Google. It may have been a trivial, cheap, and unscholarly method, but in the end, the search engine did its job in full. The Latin inscription was a verse from Letter of Paul to the Galatians, the same epistle held in the second part of that tome. The similarity between the words Galatians and Galàti immediately jumped out at me.

What was that sentence then? A revelation? A warning? A clue?

Today I would merely call it a gateway. The hidden and arcane entrance to a story that, even today, I do not feel like defining “tragic” because that would be trivial, nor “romantic” because that would not be exhaustive.

Following that inscription, I then opened the tome to the Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Galatians. But to my great surprise, the pages of the epistle were missing, completely removed. In place of the Pauline epistle, a manuscript booklet had been carefully and meticulously placed.

In its original form, this booklet was supposed to be slightly big. However, the Poor Clare nun reduced its size by carefully cutting the margins to camouflage it better within Tome X so that they would fit perfectly into the new book, transforming it into a sort of book within a book.

Only by carefully looking at the back of the tome, could you discern the different colours of the first original part and the subsequent addition. But I had no merit in this discovery, since only by luck I drop my eyes on that book which, placed randomly among the others, revealed that small, different detail. That tome of the Bible concealed within it a handwritten diary.

In the following days, the reading and analysis of what I had discovered utterly captivated me. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the events that unfolded before my eyes, and, at the same time, I began to frantically search for evidence, proofs, and writings that would give me further knowledge of the facts reported in that diary. I went several times to the State Archives of Palermo, to the Regional Library, to the Episcopal Curia; at some point, I was forced to rent a room at the Panormos B&B, a few steps from the Politeama Theatre.

It was from there that, every morning, I looked for some news, some clue, grasping onto the little historical information in the diary. With only a few days left before my return to Lombardy, I never got a break. I quickly set up a vast research network through my contacts in the field of old books and post-Risorgimento Sicilian history.

Rachele Borghese could not take much more of me. She was the young owner of Le pagine d'incanto, in Chiaramonte Gulfi, an antique book shop of which I was and still am an affectionate customer and which on many occasions had supplied me with rare and curious texts on Sicilian history.

I shyly confess that I stressed poor Rachele at all hours of the day and, in some cases, even at night to get news about possible bibliographic discoveries on the subject. I aroused – I imagine – the wrath and antipathy of the young husband to whom I promised to give a copy of this text as a present, together with a bottle of new olive oil from my land, an apology for my pressing demands.

I entrusted the IT investigation instead to my brotherly friend Salvo Lecce, who spent many nights in Milan on online archives, regional OPACs, and inter-library services searching for data or texts that might be helpful to me. The nightmare was back. I took again a path bristling with brambles and nettles, but this time it was not the rage of a wild sow that was chasing me but the thirst for truth.

I only hoped that I would not slip again because I knew perfectly well how treacherous the ground of history was.