Piranesi(27)

The first entry finished here, so next I turned to page 186, to the entry entitled: The disappearance of Maurizio Giussani.

In the summer of 1987 Laurence Arne-Sayles rented a farmhouse called the Casale del Pino, twenty kilometres from Perugia. His most favoured students (the inner circle) went with him: Ovenden, Bannerman, Hughes, Ketterley and D’Agostino.

Tensions had begun to appear within the group. Arne-Sayles had become highly sensitive to any remark or question that showed the speaker was insufficiently committed to his ‘great experiment’. Anyone who dared to question him was subjected to a savage raking-over of all their failings, personal and academic. Consequently most of the group maintained a diplomatic silence, but Stanley Ovenden, who had a sort of tone-deafness when it came to other people’s personalities, continued to express doubts about what they were doing. When Tali Hughes defended Ovenden to Arne-Sayles she also came in for a generous share of his spleen. The atmosphere at Casale del Pino became increasingly tense and, as a result, Ovenden and Hughes began spending more and more time away from the others. They became friendly with a young man, Maurizio Giussani, a philosophy student at the University of Perugia. This new friendship seems to have seriously alarmed Arne-Sayles.

On the evening of 26 July, Arne-Sayles invited Giussani and his fiancée, Elena Marietti, to a dinner party at Casale del Pino. During dinner Arne-Sayles talked about the other world (a place where architecture and oceans were muddled together) and how it was possible to get there. Elena Marietti thought that Arne-Sayles was talking metaphorically or else that he was describing some sort of Huxleyan psychedelic experience.

Marietti had to work the following day. (Like Giussani she was a postgrad student, but during the summer she worked as a paralegal in her father’s law firm in Perugia.) At about 11 o’clock she said goodnight and got into her car and drove home and went to bed. The others were still talking. The English party had promised that one of them would drive Giussani home.

Maurizio Giussani was never seen again. Arne-Sayles claimed that he had gone to bed shortly after Marietti left and knew nothing about what had happened. The others (Ovenden, Bannerman, Hughes, Ketterley, D’Agostino) said that Giussani had refused the offer of a lift and that he had begun to walk home a little after midnight. (The night was moonlit and warm; Giussani lived about 3 kilometres away.)

Ten years later when Arne-Sayles was convicted of kidnapping another young man, the Italian police reopened the case of the missing Giussani, however …

I stopped reading and stood up, breathing hard. I had a strong urge to fling the Journal away from me. The words on the page – (in my own writing!) – looked like words, but at the same time I knew they were meaningless. It was nonsense, gibberish! What meaning could words such as ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Perugia’ possibly have? None. There is nothing in the World that corresponds to them.

The Other was right after all. I had forgotten many things! Worse still, at the very point at which the Other has declared he will kill me if I become mad, I have discovered that I am mad already! Or, if not mad now, then certainly I have been mad in the past. I was mad when I wrote those entries!

I did not fling the Journal away. I dropped it on the Pavement and walked away. I wanted to put some physical distance between Myself and these evidences of my madness. The nonsense words – Perugia, Nottingham, university – echoed in my mind. I felt a great pressure there as if a whole host of half-formed ideas were about to break through into my consciousness, bringing with them more madness or else understanding.

I walked rapidly through several Halls, not knowing or caring where I went. Suddenly I saw in front of me the Statue of the Faun, the Statue that I love above all others. There was his calm, faintly smiling face; there was his forefinger gently pressed to his lips. In the past I have always thought he meant to warn me of something with that gesture: Be careful! But today it seemed to mean something quite different: Hush! Be comforted! I climbed up on to his Plinth and flung Myself into his Arms, wrapping my arm around his Neck, intertwining my fingers with his Fingers. Safe in his embrace, I wept for my lost Sanity. Great, heaving sobs rose up, almost painfully, from my chest.

Hush! he told me. Be comforted!

I resolve to take better care of Myself

ENTRY FOR THE NINTH DAY OF THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS

I left the Embrace of the Faun and wandered miserably through the House. I believed that I was mad – or that I had been mad – or else that I was becoming mad now. Whichever way it was, it was a terrifying prospect.

After a while I decided that this way of going on did no good at all.

I forced Myself to return to the Third Northern Hall where I ate a little fish and drank some water. Then I revisited all my favourite Statues: the Gorilla, the Young Boy playing the Cymbals, the Woman carrying a Beehive, the Elephant carrying a Castle, the Faun, the Two Kings playing Chess. Their Beauty soothed me and took me out of Myself; their noble expressions reminded me of all that is good in the World.

This morning I am able to reflect more calmly on what has happened.

I accept that I have been very ill in the past. I must have been ill when I wrote those entries in my Journal or else I would not have filled them with outlandish words such as ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Perugia’. (Even now, as I write the words, I begin to feel anxious again. A crowd of images stirs in my mind – strange, nightmarish, but at the same time oddly familiar. The word ‘Birmingham’, for example, brings with it a blare of noise, a flash of movement and colour and the fleeting image of towers and spires against a heavy grey sky. I try to catch hold of these impressions, to examine them further, but instantly they fade.)