“Kiss me, today you and I were united in matrimony. I am Venus, and you have given me the ring of love.”
The first time he told the story, the girl seemed to fall asleep. There was a breeze from the garden at the end of the patio. There were no visible changes, at night she dragged herself into her room and curled up in the darkness with her normal clucking. The next day, at the same time, her father sat her in the same place and told her another version of the story. The first important variation had appeared about twenty years later, in a German compilation from the mid-twelfth century titled Kaiserchronik. In this version, the statue on whose finger the young man places the ring is not Venus, but the Virgin Mary. When he tries to unite with his bride, the Mother of God comes between the couple to chastise him, which incites a mystical passion in the young man. After leaving his wife, the young man becomes a priest and devotes the rest of his life to the service of Our Lady. An anonymous twelfth-century painting depicts the Virgin Mary with a ring on her left ring finger and an enigmatic smile on her lips.
Every day, in the early evening, the father would tell her the same story in its multiple variations. The clucking girl was an anti-Scheherazade, she heard the story of the ring told a thousand and one times at night by her father. Within a year the girl is already smiling, because she knows how the story ends. Sometimes she looks down at her hands and moves her fingers, as if she were the statue. She looks up at the garden and, for the first time, gives her version of the events in a soft whisper. “Mouvo looked at the night. Where his face had been another appeared, Kenya’s. Again the strange laugh. All of a sudden Mouvo was in a corner of the house and Kenya in the garden and the sensorial circles of the ring were very sad,” she said. From that point on, with the repertory of words she had learned and with the circular structure of the story, she began to build a language, an uninterrupted series of phrases that allowed her to communicate with her father. In the following months she was the one who told the story, every evening, in the hall facing the patio in the back of the house. She reached a point where she was able to tell, word for word, the version by Henry James — perhaps because his story, “The Last of the Valerii,” was the last in the series. (The action has shifted to Rome in the time of the Risorgimento, where a young woman, who has inherited a fortune, in one of those typically Jamesian moves, marries an Italian noble from a distinguished, but impoverished, lineage. One afternoon, a group of laborers working at a dig in the gardens of the villa discover a statue of Juno. Signor Conte begins to feel a strange fascination with that masterpiece from the best period of Greek sculpture. He moves the statue to an abandoned greenhouse and hides it mistrustfully from anyone’s view. In the days that follow, he transfers a large part of the passion he feels for his beautiful wife to the marble statue, and spends more and more of his time in the glass structure. At the end, the Contessa, in order to free her husband from the spell, tears the ring off of the goddess’s ring finger and buries it at the far end of the gardens. Her life becomes happy once again.) A gentle drizzle was falling in the patio and the father was rocking in his chair. That afternoon the girl left the story for the first time, she left the closed circle of the story like someone walking through a door, and asked her father to buy her a gold ring (
anello). There she was, singing softly, clucking, a sad music machine. She was sixteen years old, a pale dreamer, like a Greek statue. As steadfast as an angel.