ARS No.4 year 2003

(two chapters from a new novel)

1.
That beautiful house by the river, a white painted two-story under a roof of tile, with a second-floor porch and carved wooden staircase which led to the upper room containing a sofa on which people used to sit and chat, and which was still called Ahmed's Porch, even though it had long since been entered into the deed books under my Uncle Blago's name. Old Dr. Kesler, a prominent and welcome guest in our home, made some sort of guarantee to grandfather for buying that house, and at the time he said, "By buying Ahmed's place, you also buy the illnesses which have settled there and remain as an inheritance". If my grandfather hesitated, his son Blago did not. He was the second of two children, a year younger than my father, and the first family member with a higher education and a doctor's degree. He knew that he would not live in that house but that its sale, if ever needed, would always bring in a nice sum and a handsome profit. He was already a secondary school pupil when he got the house. As soon as he signed the deed, he snapped at Dr. Kesler and his predictions about the illnesses staying in it as an inheritance. "A house is material, and illness is a misfortune," he said.
Blago studied medicine in Rome; it was there he discovered literature and a renowned doctor from the 17th century, Gjuro Baglivi from Dubrovnik, and adopted him as a relative on his mother's side. The distinguished Dr. Baglivi was indeed from Dubrovnik by background, from the Armen family, Vuković on his mother's side, and since he was left without parents at an early age, he was officially adopted by the renowned doctor Pier Angelo Baglivi and his wife Margarita d'Amato from Lecce.

Receiving his education in Rome, Uncle Blago bragged and boasted about his aristocratic descent and coat of arms. To support his nonsensical story he found a great grandmother of the Vuković family who was in no way an aristocrat, but a married woman from a respectable Montenegrin family. My uncle described his birthplace as a hot mineral springs, a haven for the gentlefolk of Dubrovnik, he placed it nearer to the town than it really was, he lied even to himself about the beauty of that cozy nook as if it were as beautiful as the famed Epidaurus. He was fabricating it all, the poor wretch, and he began to believe his own fabrications. He boasted that his hometown was right on the very Dalmatian coastline, and so doing he moved himself entirely away from the real, small Turkish town. He married a woman from a prominent Roman family of doctors, took his wife's last name, Capparoni, and kept his own name Blago as the last remaining link to his real background.

However, my uncle was not the only liar from the areas of the Dubrovnik hinterland. Almost every learned, schooled, educated and talented person from my region invented his own Dubrovnik background, and most of them had never even seen the sea. The renowned Serbian poet Jovan Dučić, who came from somewhere around Trebinje, falsely introduced himself in Belgrade among the diplomatic corps as a count from Dubrovnik; he charmed the ladies with his posh manners, and he seduced an underage girl in Switzerland by whispering the poems of Dubrovnik in her ear. Seeing him with his suitcases at the Belgrade railway station, A.G. Matoš splashed him in the face with, "My most excellent young poet, my good sir, since you have the cheek to depend so heavily on Dubrovnik, why didn't you at least submit yourself as one of the masses or poor folk? No, rather straight off you come from the Pucić family, or the Kabogs. Or, you believe, since it's a lie anyway, it might as well be a pompous one!" That lyric and clever critic, devilishly sarcastic, Mr. Matoš, once wrote of the famous sculptor Meštrović, "Although he is not from Dubrovnik, even he 'venetianizes' himself." Thus, many wanted to capitalize on the fame of Dubrovnik, even those from the backwaters, and therefore even more so those who came from near the town. I am not justifying my uncle and his lies, but many other, even greater, minds could not resist that temptation.

I myself did not reach Dubrovnik before the age of eleven, even though all the merchandise for my father's store came in through the port of Gruž, and so we had impressions and traces of Dubrovnik all around, shipping documents and seals on the bags of coffee, sugar, rice and salt. I described the sea to my aunts and cousins, but with anxiety and fear. After my descriptions, no one harbored the wish any longer to travel down the small railway to experience any of the mystical things I handed down to them. I always spoke of the sea quietly, as if it were a living being listening to me and hovering over my words. I told my aunts at times that the sea was like a frantic beast, huffing and steaming, and then going mad and beginning to beat upon the cliffs, climbing up to grab something and grind it in its whirlpools. I told them that it is voracious, that into its bowels disappeared small islands, churches, ships, the docks from which people traveled, and even small towns. Whoever stops and for the first time stares at that great rocking body, they always think that they have already been in that place and seen all that. My aunts were thrilled by my stories. "Lord, how he conjures it all up, and how we believe him." Uneducated and common people came to listen to me. There was always someone around to say, "Look over there, he's telling stories about the sea. Run over and listen!"

2.
Mischievous chance was often my fellow traveler; it scheduled unusual meetings from time to time, sometimes such meetings that still today I doubt whether they were real or supernatural. That bit of mischief has been the cause of a lot of hesitation by those of us who have so often gotten tangled up in strange events. Perhaps in this chapter there is something of those hesitations.

Once I traveled to Dubrovnik in my own car and stayed at the Excelsior Hotel. I always felt good there because of the host, the director of the hotel-a kind and noble gentleman who knew how to make everyone feel welcome. I was also on cordial terms with the personnel, and with some of them I was even close. Whenever I would take or return my room key, I would stop at the reception desk and chat, most often about unusual phenomena, and all of them had some such event that they wanted to share with me. At the time I believed that all of them wanted to get into one of my stories, and I was expected to remember the events I was told and to narrate them back at a later time.

My expenses in such a luxurious hotel were covered by a film producer; we were preparing a serious and ambitious film project. I arrived a week before the director and his young assistant. I had convinced the producer that I needed to rummage through the archives at the Historical Museum, that I needed a few days to do so without the other members of the team so that I could do my work in peace and prepare part of the material for the script. Of course, this was a lie, but the producer agreed with me and opened up an all expenses account for me. Actually I had set up a rendezvous with the erotic and wanton Andrea Music who came down from Trieste. I loved that girl, I nicknamed her livewire - she was so sensual, so lusty, imaginative and insatiable-born to promiscuity. She was doing Slavic studies in Belgrade, her mother was of Slavic blood, from Donja Furlanija. We had several amazing adventures in Serbia, including an orgy with the priests in the monastery of Žiča. That orgy is not suitable for the telling.

And while we were hugging and necking in the lobby or at the bar, snuffling each other and with those lascivious nasal grunts announcing our departure to the room, guests began arriving at the hotel, mostly older gentlemen and a smaller number of women, with their hair neatly done. "Must be a bridge competition," said Andrea. But we soon found out from the bartender that a scientific meeting was being held at the hotel on the theme "Alternative Medicine: Pro et Contra". This "invasion of the gray-headed", as the receptionists deemed the participants of the symposium, lasted until evening at the same tempo as the planes arrived at the airport. We spent several hours on one of the terraces, it was comfortable and warm even though late fall was already closing on the threshold of early winter. Later we sat on barstools at the bar and watched the tumult in the lobby, looking at the variety of people, and then we tried to guess about their lives and temperaments from their clothes, walk and posture. "The one nervously chewing his pipe," Andrea would say, "has been a cuckold his whole life. His wife was unfaithful, she cheated on him with his friends." We thus strung together many events and destinies, and then I added the element of my own family history and told Andrea that I had a premonition that everything was working out for an encounter with my uncle whom I had never seen, and that he would appear at this symposium and was certain to talk of Baglivi and his methods of healing with music and the dance of the tarantula against poisonous spider bites. We lay in wait for a man who might be about seventy-six years-old, olive skinned, with a Roman nose and looking like my father. Whenever we came across such a gentleman, we would say my uncle's name out loud. This amused us greatly; we acted like fools and laughed heartily, although our summons brought about no results.

In the evening we went to the tavern, we wanted to eat, but all the tables were full. It is a lovely tavern in an old stone house, separate from the hotel. We wished to spend the whole evening there, so we stood at the entrance watching the guests and hoping that someone would leave, but it was futile, they were all elderly gentlemen with no real needs other than to sit and enjoy their food. We saw them licking their lips and toasting each other in various languages. The rather refined maitre d', an acquaintance of mine, approached us and told us that he did not believe that anyone would be leaving very soon, recommending that we try the hotel restaurant. We ignored his recommendation, we did not want to go back, and so we kept standing at the door. Then we heard a voice, someone shouted a little louder than is customary, and then we saw a gentleman at a table in one corner, beckoning for us to come over. He was there with a colleague; they were still eating, from time to time taking a sip of red wine. Both of them had white napkins tucked under their chins. They were probably peers, over seventy years of age. The maitre d' accompanied us to the table. The gentleman said in Italian, "If it suits you, there are two free places here". We sat down after effusively bowing and smiling politely. Andrea muttered a few kind words; they took all of that in as something completely natural.

On the table, between the two of them, almost on the edge, there was a rather thick book. It intrigued me, that book: I was certain that it was Opera omnia by Gjuro Baglivi. I was quite tempted to turn the book over and look at the front cover, but reaching for someone else's things would be impolite and uncivil. For an instant I caught the attention of the gentleman who had waved us over; he looked at me for a moment, but out of curiosity, as if he had remembered something or seen me somewhere before. I imagined that this was my uncle looking at me from the darkness of the past, through the eyes of a medium, because I had already given up on the crazy idea that my uncle might show up now, at a symposium on alternative medicine, and that it was actually me who had been predestined for that meeting. Indeed, sixty years had passed since he had left, and he had never so much as gotten in touch with anyone, and almost nothing about him had been heard, except for a few varying and unreliable stories, of which I had clung to only the one that I liked. Even if I were to meet him, there was no longer anyone I could tell the joyful news to; the whole family, both immediate and more distant, had died off. Among the younger members there was no one who even knew that such a relation and such a destiny existed in our family.

After the meal, the two colleagues remained at the table, just long enough to drink the rest of the wine from their glasses. Finally, we said our polite goodbyes; Andrea offered a few more words of gratitude. I did not manage to see which book it was on the table. We also left the tavern soon after; supper was delicious: oysters from the grill and fine baked gilthead. We drank a bottle of wine; both of us were a bit tipsy.

In this chapter, if there are any sort of coincidences, if something from different worlds came into contact, if mischievous chance attempted to manipulate things or make its highness seem attractive, in order to make us believe that we are just pawns in the game of chance, then it is quite useful for all creatures, not just narrators, to emphasize at the beginnings of their stories that mischievous chance is often our fellow traveler and that at times schedules unusual meetings and makes us hesitant, or that it blurs for us the thin line between the real and the supernatural. With such a caution I began this chapter.

And yet, in the end I did partake in a bit of madness. I asked the lovely woman at the reception desk to allow me to see the guest book. I was searching for a single name. But among the guests I did not come across the name Blago Capparoni, if my uncle was ever called by that name.

Translated by: Randall A. Major

 ARS No.4 year 2003