Balthasar's Odyssey (52 page)

But he'd scarcely finished reassuring the child when there was another thunderbolt, this time even nearer. Now the crash was simultaneous with the lightning, and several of us cried out.

Before we'd got over our fright, a strange thing happened. We'd been sitting round the hearth, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, a tongue of flame shot out of the fireplace and started advancing across the floor. We were all sat silent, trembling, terrified, and Orietina, who was sitting close to me but up till then hadn't looked at or spoken to me, suddenly clutched my arm so tightly that I could feel her nails sinking in.

In a whisper so loud that everyone could hear it, she hissed:

“It's the Day of Judgement! They weren't lying to me! It's the Day of Judgement! May the Lord have pity on us!”

Then she fell on her knees and took a rosary out of her pocket, signing to us to do the same. Her three daughters and the maids who were there started muttering prayers. As for me, I couldn't take my eyes off the tongue of flame, which by now having reached a sheepskin that happened to be lying there, took hold and set it alight. I was shaking in every limb, I admit, and in the confusion of the moment it struck me that I ought to rush up and get
The Hundredth Name
from my room.

In a few strides I was on the stairs, but then I heard Gregorio shouting:

“Baldassare, where are you going? Come and help me!”

He'd stood up, grabbed a large jug of water, and started to pour its contents over the burning sheepskin. The fire died down a bit, but didn't quite go out, so he began to stamp on it, leaping about in a sort of dance that in other circumstances would have made us all laugh till we cried.

I ran back and joined in, and we both went on jumping on the tongue of flame every time it revived, as if we were trying to crush a column of scorpions.

Meanwhile some of the others got over their terror, and first a young maidservant, then the gardener, then Giacominetta ran and fetched various receptacles filled with water, which they proceeded to pour over anything that was still burning or glowing or smoking.

The upheaval lasted only a few minutes, but it was around midnight, so it seems to me the “Year of the Beast” must have ended with that farce.

Soon Dame Orietina, now the only one left kneeling, rose to her feet and declared it was time we all went to bed.

As I went up, I collected a candlestick which I put down on the table in my room so that I could write the above lines.

Superstition dies hard. I shall stay up until the sun rises, to write down the new date.

It's now the 1st of January of the year one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven.

The so-called “Year of the Beast” has ended, yet the sun is rising over my own city of Genoa, which gave me birth a thousand years ago, then forty years ago, and now again today.

Ever since dawn I have been overflowing with happiness. I feel like looking at the sun and talking to it like Francis of Assisi. We ought to rejoice every time it begins to give us light again, but now men are ashamed to talk to it.

So, neither it nor the other heavenly bodies have gone out. I couldn't see them last night because the sky was cloudy. Tomorrow, or the next night, I shall be able to see them, and I shan't need to count them. They are there, the heavens haven't been extinguished, the cities haven't been destroyed — Genoa, London, Moscow and Naples are all still there. We still have to go on living on earth day after day, with all our mortal woes. With plague and fever, with war and shipwreck, with our loves and our wounds. No divine cataclysm, no august flood will come to drown our fears and treacheries.

It may be that Heaven only reflects our own promises. Nothing either better or worse. It may be that Heaven lives only in terms of our own promises.

The Hundredth Name
lies there beside me, and still it sometimes troubles me. I wanted it, I found it, I got it back again, but though I opened it it has remained closed to me. Perhaps I wasn't really worthy of it. Perhaps I was too afraid of finding out what it conceals. But maybe it hadn't anything to hide.

I shan't open it again. Tomorrow I shall leave it discreetly on a shelf in some bookshop, so that one day, years hence, other hands may take it up and other eyes look avidly into it, eyes which may by then be able to read it.

In pursuit of this book I have crossed the world over land and sea, but if I were to sum up my peregrinations as the year 1666 is left behind, I'd say I've only gone a roundabout way from Gibelet to Genoa.

It's midday by the bells of the nearby church, and I shall now put down my pen for the last time, shut my notebook, put my writing things away, and open myself and the window wide to the sunshine and sounds of Genoa.