The first word he taught them to write was: dog. The second: peace. They had to write it ten times a day, in cursive and in printing, and recite it before they went to sleep and right after they woke up. When they came into the classroom, instead of ‘Good morning, Master,’ and before they went home, instead of ‘Goodbye, Master’.
The third, the fourth and the fifth words were: their own name, journey and horse. After that followed: Utrecht, canals, flowers, mountains, Switzerland, birds, Germany, master, ancestor, the Netherlands and the verb to be in the present and the past perfect. The verbs to have and to want don’t need to be taught, he said, because like ill weeds in the garden they will grow on their own.
In October he taught them to read the timetable of the buses and to distinguish breeds of dogs; in November the lunar cycle and how to tie their own shoelaces. In December the names of trees and to decide whether they would be people who combed or unkempt people, a decision for the rest of their lives, so that they would never have to think about it anymore. Next, a song by the Beatles, the difference between a rainy day and a downpour, and the numbers up to one hundred. To add and subtract them. Because there is not a soul who doesn’t know how to rub along in life, he said, when he knows the breeds of dogs, the direction of the wind, a good song and the numbers up to one hundred.
‘Put your coats on,’ he told them.
‘But Master, it’s raining outside!’
Lined up in twos he took them to the kennels.
‘Tell me Luigi, what’s in that dog?’
‘In that one, Master, there is a bit of a setter, a German shepherd and a keeshond.’
Or they would walk along the river Serio, through the woods from where they could see the houses of the village.
‘Those clouds in the distance, Penelope, what are they?’
‘Those are cumulonimbus clouds, Master.’
‘And what do they mean?’
‘That there is a great thunderstorm on its way.’
At one o’clock they would return to school, soaked by the rain or red-faced by the sun.
‘There’s the Pied Piper with his rats!’ the people at the pub laughed when they saw them pass by. ‘There’s the wandering Utrecht, with his wanderers,’ they said. But he and the children waved their hands in greeting: ‘Peace,’ they said.
The subjects of the second year were reading, geography and composition.
For two hours each day in class Master Utrecht read aloud the story of his ancestor, Conte Annibale Maffei di Boglio, Grand Master of Artillery in Piedmont, who wrote two volumes about his journey to Utrecht in 1712, as a plenipotentiary of Victor Amedeus II, on the occasion of the signing of the famous Treaty. The Master had bought the precious book at an auctioneer’s in Geneva and had translated it himself from French into Italian.
The children loved to hear how Conte Annibale Maffei had crossed the Alps with the other fiduciaries of the king, about the inns, about the landscape and the German customs, until their arrival in the Dutch Republic and their stay in Utrecht for over a year in a splendid accommodation not far from the Cathedral tower. The pupils’ imagination was stirred while they listened to descriptions of the celebrations and the performances the city organised to entertain the diplomats who had arrived from the whole of Europe with a large retinue of servants, hairdressers, stable hands, wives, mistresses, children, house stewards and lady-companions.
‘What kind of person was this Conte Annibale Maffei? Young or old?’ would one of the pupils ask sooner or later.
Then the Master would show them the portrait of his ancestor, which had been painted in the early eighteenth century by an anonymous Piedmontese painter of the French school. A canvas he had purchased from a private collection, for an amount that equalled several years of his salary.
At the end of the year, Master Utrecht would have his pupils write a composition titled: ‘The thing that struck me most in the story of Conte Annibale Maffei, ancestor of our Master’.
One of those compositions was found by officer Bram van der Drift in the inside pocket of the Master’s jacket. It was signed: Pietro Gusmini, class II A, year 2004.
Composition: ‘Our Master had an ancestor called Conte Annibale Maffei, Grand Master of Artillery in Piedmont, which means so much as that he would tell those that aimed the canons where to shoot and when. Conte Annibale Maffei, ancestor of our Master, who I am very fond of and I enjoy doing things with, made a journey to Utrecht, that is Holland, where he was awaited, sitting around a table, by the kings of Europe who had been fighting a war for many many years and were planning to finish it, but nobody wanted to say “It was my fault.” Also my mum and dad had a lot of fights because neither of them wanted to say “It was my fault,” but then they went to the spychologist of married people, that is different from the one for crazy people, and the spychologist said “You have to learn to say ‘It was my fault!’ And now give me two hundred euros and go home.”
My parents went along fine until last summer when they got divorced. I am living with my mum, but my dad is the one who checks my homework because he is a teacher at a grammar school. When he looks into my notebooks he says: “Again that bullshit about Utrecht!”
He says the book of Conte Annibale Maffei isn’t a history book and that we should read things that are suitable for our age. But I like the book of Conte Annibale very much because it is full of adventures. I like it most of all when he tells of the meetings of the pluvipotentiaries of the kings who quarrelled because one said “I want Sicily,” and the other said “No way! If you want Sicily you have to give me a part of America.” And then a third one would say: “America no, we already promised it to that other one, at the most you can have half of Holland.” “But including the fleet?” “Yes, including the fleet.” “All right then.” “We have an agreement, let’s finish it for today, everyone come and have dinner at my place!” “I will bring the potatoes.” “No, I will bring the potatoes.” “You have taken Gibraltar and Minorca, so I will bring the potatoes. You can bring the wine.” “With the price of wine in Holland? Are you mad? If I have to bring the wine I want at least Newfoundland.” And they went on like that all evening, and after that they would usually dance or there were performances or card games. One night someone died falling into a canal because he drank too much. The only thing left was his wig that floated and they sent it to his wife saying that they hadn’t found the rest of her husband.
My dad says that I shouldn’t listen to these stories because you just make them up. He says that you have never been in Utrecht and that this Conte Annibale Maffei is perhaps not even your ancestor.
To me it doesn’t matter: I like the painting of your ancestor hanging in the classroom and when I’m grown-up I want to go and see if the people in Utrecht really use a boat to go shopping. Not that I don’t trust you, but it’s always better to see something with your own eyes.
I’m sorry that you will not be our Master anymore next year and that they only let you do the first and the second years because they say that after that the children need someone who prepares them, otherwise when we get to secondary school they will laugh at us with those stories of Conte Annibale Maffei. I trust you, Master Utrecht, and I don’t care if they make fun of you. When I’m grown-up, even though we were born in the mountains, I will become a sailor and I will call my ship Utrecht. Or perhaps a plumber, like my granddad. Because in our family we like water. This is my composition. Peace.’
One day the headmaster called the Master in his office and said that the parents had gathered signatures that obliged him to suspend him from work.
Master Utrecht removed the portrait of Conte Annibale Maffei from the classroom, took the drawings the children had made for him and went home. For a few days he felt dejected, like the blackbird when its nest has been swept away by the wind. He read a book on snails, the special offers of the supermarket and the timetable of the trains. Then The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers and eventually it was Gulliver’s Travels that cheered him up.
He was busy packing his bags when he heard someone calling ‘Master Utrecht! Master Utrecht!’ and when he opened the door he saw his pupils standing on his yard with their bicycles.
‘Could you read us the ending of the adventures of Conte Annibale Maffei, Grand Master of Artillery in Piedmont?’ asked Lucia.
For three days, sitting on the lawn behind his house, under the old lime tree, they read about how the kings had finally reached an agreement and about the celebrations that followed the signing of the peace. Then the children made a drawing of Conte Annibale Maffei who left in his carriage to return home, leaving the tower of Utrecht behind him.
‘I am leaving as well,’ said the Master.
‘Where will you go?’ asked Penelope.
‘The driver of the dairy factory will give me a ride to Switzerland, then we’ll see.’
‘But you will come back, right?’ asked Arturo.
‘Yes, I think I will come back.’
For three months he lived in Switzerland, in the mountains around Geneva, and for at least a year in Germany, perhaps in Frankfurt, for certain in Berlin and in Saarbrücken. From that period remains a poem he wrote on a napkin from a bar in Berlin and some verses he composed during a boat trip. A woman in Saarbrücken claims that she was his friend, but not his lover. That she met him for a few months, always in the same pub, always at six in the evening, and that she had long talks with him about dogs, clouds and international diplomacy.
At the end of 2007, the Master was certainly in Utrecht, where he lived for a year. At first he stayed in an affordable hotel near the station, but soon he moved to a cheaper hotel, before that too became too expensive for him. Those who met him however swear he never looked like a vagabond. He possessed two suits, plain-cut but distinguished, always clean, in which he presented himself every morning in a small bar on the square where he ordered breakfast, the only meal of his day.
When he got up from his table towards lunchtime, the Master usually took a walk in the old part of the city until late in the afternoon, come rain or shine. On the street he talked to all the children, communicating with them in a mysterious language, that the little ones however seemed to understand perfectly. No parent ever had to worry because the Master always appeared smiling, friendly-mannered and in excellent spirits. Neatly dressed, his beard shaven, his short black hair combed back and a leather briefcase under his arm, he looked like an old-time scholar or like a poet who conserved his adolescent soul and hopes.
Each Wednesday at four o’clock he sat down on the wooden benches of the Cathedral to attend the organ recital offered for free by the municipality. Regular visitors testify to how much he loved Mozart and Handel while he almost always slept when Bach was played. The greatest enthusiasm he showed during a concert for organ and panpipes, for which he fervently applauded yelling ‘Bravi! Bravi!’, something that remained impressed in the memory of all those present who were used to his humble, gentle and reserved ways.
In the year he spent in Utrecht he loved the cats of the city and the round pedalling of the Dutch: the cats because they were big-bodied and docile-charactered, a bit lazy, happy to be caressed, but independent in an unwild way. And the bicycles because he thought the soft, vigorous pedalling that belongs to the Dutch population was the trademark of their pragmatic, commonsensical and cordial nature.
In the time he lived in Utrecht he never spoke Dutch, he didn’t steal and he didn’t make love, except during the days he spent with Adelaide, that weren’t many but that still seemed to him his whole life.
Little is known about her, apart from the fact that she was originally from Surinam, that Adelaide was not her real name, that she dwelled in a room in the Wijde Begijnestraat and that in October her protector transferred her to Amsterdam, where she worked in a busy street in the centre.
‘Will you come and look me up?’ the woman asked the Master when he accompanied her to the station.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I will come.’
At the beginning of the second winter, the Master extended his walks to the district under construction called Leidsche Rijn. Every morning he could be found at the entrance of an elementary school in the neighbourhood, where he greeted the children calling them by their names, and was greeted by them. The rest of the day he spent at the building sites, chatting with the workers and accepting from them a sandwich, some fruit or a cup of tea. Everyone remembers him as a man of average height, thin, of healthy and well-groomed appearance. Quiet green eyes and long white hands like a pianist.
When a building supervisor heard of his death and the circumstances in which that took place, he said: `I know it is not done to compare a man to a flower, usually one does that with women, but he was like a flower and nothing else. One of those beautiful, but also very fragile flowers. And by that I don’t mean that there was something effeminate in him.’
Little Ilonka’s mother on the other hand recalls: ‘When I knew I was going to be late, I would ask him to wait for Ilonka outside the school, to take her to the park and stay with her until I arrived. I didn’t know the first thing about him, to be honest: where he slept, what kind of work he did or where he came from, but there was something profoundly good in him, something that didn’t belong to this world and that wouldn’t last, but as long as it was there, it seemed foolish not to make use of it. He never wanted anything in return for the time he spent with my daughter: one time I brought him a cake and another time a jumper, because winter was coming and I thought he might be cold. My daughter Ilonka still remembers a few words of Italian: cane, pace, Conte Annibale Maffei. Perhaps that was his name, I don’t know. I looked up the meaning of Conte on the Internet, and it means count. I never met a real count, but I can imagine they used to be like him.’
Towards the end of winter the Master disappeared and nobody saw him anymore, not at the recitals in the Cathedral, nor in front of the school, nor at the park of Lepelenburg where he sometimes spent the night.
Many months later, on 9 July 2008 to be exact, a young man with no permanent address warned the police about the presence of a corpse next to the motorway A12. The officer that took his testimony remembers that he seemed very agitated and nervous: `The thought that came to me at that moment was that he might have something to do with the death of that guy, but the subsequent investigation proved that was not the case. Most probably he had simply robbed the corpse of the few possessions it had, and later, taken by remorse, came to report its presence.’
The agents, accompanied by the young man, found the corpse under one of the piles of the motorway. The corpse weighed only 10 kilos, a sign that it must have been lying there for several months. The first hypothesis was that the man had been killed, but the analyses denied that. The man, who was found on an old mattress, had died in his sleep as a result of a cardiac arrest. He had no personal belongings nor documents on him, except for a piece of paper written in Italian, which they later found to be a pupil’s composition. With the help of that piece of paper they were able to determine that the body belonged to a forty-seven-year-old Italian elementary school teacher originating from a valley near Bergamo.
After it had been established that there were no relatives or other people prepared to take care of the funeral, the body was buried on 17 July 2008 at Daelwijck cemetery, in the Overvecht district. The only persons present at the funeral were Ingmar Heytze and Ruben van Gogh, members of the association ‘Lonely Funerals’, an association of poets that was set up with the intention to accompany to the grave those who don’t have loved ones that are prepared to do so, by writing a poem in their memory. In this occasion the poet Ingmar Heytze was the author of the text that was read during the funeral. The last verses run as follows:
We let you go without large tales
or grand gestures, Stefano, we let
you go with your riddles and your strange ways,
we greet you timidly, as uncertain passers-by
through a sparingly lit tunnel by night –
rest tight.
Long note by the author
In the summer of 2010 I spent two months in the Netherlands, in Utrecht on invitation by citybooks Utrecht (an initiative of the Dutch-Flemish House deBuren ‘theNeigbors’) and in Amsterdam on invitation by the Literature Foundation. That was when I first heard of Stefano Maffeis.
While having a chat in the courtyard of the Archive of Utrecht, Bram Buijze, coordinator of the Treaty of Utrecht Foundation, told me that there was a Dutch Association of Poets that participated in funerals of people without family or friends, writing a poem for each of them. He was particularly struck by the verses written for an Italian who was found dead near the motorway in Utrecht, in the district of Leidsche Rijn of all places, which I had visited the day before for an article commissioned to me by a Dutch newspaper.
I can’t say why the destiny of this man struck me, perhaps because like me he was an Italian in a foreign country. I’m afraid I won’t know until my footsteps following his trail backwards will have lead me somewhere. Anyway, that same night, walking through the streets of Utrecht, beautiful and bristling with life, I decided I would try to find out more about him. My participation in the project of citybooks Utrecht meant that I had to write a text about the city and the peace treaty that was signed there in 1713. Could Stefano’s story perhaps serve as a starting point?
The next day I sought e-mail contact with Ruben van Gogh, whose address Bram had given me, and in my broken English I asked him for information about Stefano, about his death and about the text that was written for him. Ruben kindly responded right the same day and told me to contact Ingmar Heytze, the author of the poem in memory of Stefano. And that’s what I did.
While I was waiting for an answer, I came to the conclusion that there were two paths to follow: on the one hand to build a literary character inspired on Stefano, using the date, the circumstances and the place of his death as the only footholds in reality. On the other hand, to investigate into the real Stefano, into the reasons that had driven him to Utrecht and into his death.
Departing from the imminent tercentennial anniversary of the Peace of Utrecht and moving into the territory of pure fiction, I started to think up the figure of an elementary school teacher, a feathery, dreamy person, some sort of a male version of Amélie, with a fixation for a presumed ancestor who came to Utrecht in occasion of the famous treaty. To find some foundation for this completely invented starting point, I did some historic research into the Peace of 1713, into the delegations that were sent there and about their composition.
In the meantime I received a reaction from Ingmar Heytze, the poet who had written the verses for Stefano.
All he knew was that Stefano’s surname was Maffeis and that he was born on 3 August 1961 in Gazzaniga, a village in the Val Serio, about twenty kilometres from Bergamo. Furthermore he gave me some facts about the finding of the body and the burial, the same facts that you find quoted in the above text. However, nothing about his past or the reasons that brought him to Utrecht. After all, as Ingmar reminded me, it was quite usual that in the case of a ‘lonely funeral’ there was very little known about the life of the deceased.
Ingmar nevertheless added something that stirred my curiosity.
In January last, that is two years after the burial of Stefano Maffeis, he had received an anonymous e-mail message in which a person, perhaps a woman, thanked him for having remembered Stefano with these verses. It was an e-mail of only a few lines in which the sender claimed that Stefano was not a ‘vagabond’ but just a person who ‘sought what was best for him’ and regretted that they hadn’t been able to do enough to help him, even though they had been fond of him.
Who was this person who thanked Ingmar for his poem? A girlfriend? A companion from the street? One of his relatives? So Stefano Maffeis was not without friends. There was someone who had cared for him. But who? The mail had been written in Italian, but the fact that it was full of typing errors in the place of the accented letters seemed to indicate a Dutch keyboard, or at least not an Italian one.
That same evening I wrote to the address of the sender of the mail, very discreetly, because it was the only thread that gave me a chance to reach into Stefano’s past, and I didn’t intend to break it by being too obtrusive.
Meanwhile, the deadline of my story was drawing near and my historic research into the Peace of Utrecht became more profound. I wanted to find out whether the sovereigns involved in the Treaty had come to Utrecht personally, or whether they had sent their representatives. The first hypothesis seemed highly improbable to me, yet it wasn’t easy to find any information about the composition of the delegations, especially of that of Victor Amedeus II of Savoy, to which my protagonist’s imaginary ancestor should have belonged. Of course I might have found the information in an actual library or a historical archive, but for reasons of language and time pressure I couldn’t go there at that moment. Nevertheless it was while sifting out one of the numerous internet pages about the Peace of 1713 that I found what I was looking for, and my mouth fell open.
The essay contained the names of three envoys that Victor Amedeus II sent to Utrecht to act on behalf of Savoy. They were the marquis Solaro del Borgo, councillor Pietro Mellarede and Conte Annibale Maffei.
For my character inspired by Stefano Maffeis I had invented an imaginary ancestor who had come to Utrecht in 1712, and now I discovered that one of the three plenipotentiaries sent by the Duke of Savoy was actually a certain Conte Annibale Maffei! Of course Maffei and Maffeis were not exactly the same surname, but considering the fact that it is not a very widespread family name in Italy, the coincidence was striking, to say the least. From there I discovered the existence of a painting from that period which depicts Conte Annibale Maffei, and through that I found the coat of arms of his family, which coincidentally owned estates near my native village in Italy.
As you can see, many convergences brought me to the person, the story and the memory of Stefano Maffeis, and I felt the need to summarize them in this long note for two reasons.
The first is to clarify that the protagonist of the story that I wrote has nothing to do with the real Stefano Maffeis. As they say in these cases: ‘Any reference to facts or persons is purely coincidental’.
The second is that for someone like me, who lives from invented stories, it is very rare that they sink their teeth so tenaciously into an actual story. However, in this case it did happen, and I can’t really explain the reasons why except like I already did, by faithfully reproducing the facts and their surprising connection.
To this moment the e-mail I sent to the person who knew Stefano Maffeis did not receive an answer, but after my return in Italy I will continue my investigation, perhaps by going to Gazzaniga, where I reckon I will find someone who used to know Stefano and who will be prepared to talk to me about him.
Why all this?
Maybe because everything will disappear, my friends, and sooner or later all memories of the Peace of Utrecht, the sovereigns who signed it, Stefano and all of us will be lost. It is just a matter of time: like a ship that slowly sails away from the coast. Soon you won’t be able to distinguish its colour anymore, then its form and finally there will remain nothing more than a faraway, indistinct outline, before it disappears completely.
Stefano sailed away from the shore very fast, and nobody seems to have noticed him. Only Ingmar, with his poem, looked up at him, just before he disappeared. But I would like to have other things to remember him by, when, returning to Italy, I will drive my car along the motorway next to which he died. Because I hope that some day someone will do the same for me. Perhaps that is what we all hope. Even if in the end the ship will be too far away, for anyone’s eyes.
A personal word of thanks to Ingmar Heytze, Ruben van Gogh, Fleur van Koppen, Bram Buijze, Willem Bongers, Milou Honig, Tiziano Perez, John Delissen, Marina Warners of the Italian Library Bonardi, Manon Smits, Pieter van der Drift and Publishing House De Geus.
Link to BBC documentary Lonely Funeral:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/05/100513_gb_lonely_funeral.shtml
Translated by Manon Smits
Manon Smits (1967) studied English and Italian language and literature at the University of Nijmegen and at La Sapienza in Rome. In 1994 she translated her first novel, by Alessandro Baricco, and from then on decided she never wanted to translate anything but literature. By now she translated almost sixty novels from Italian (e.g. Alessandro Baricco, Melania Mazzucco, Silvia Avallone, Caterina Bonvicini) and from English (e.g. Henry James, Beryl Bainbridge, Elif Shafak). In June 2010 she took part in the international translation programme at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada to work on the translation of Emma Donoghue’s highly praised novel Room (Kamer), now on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize.
Read by Jonathan Berman
