‘Cook, my cook, in the castle do they sleep?’

‘Anatrella, my dear, I don’t hear a peep.’

‘Cook, my cook, you must not slack,

One more day and I’ll never come back.’

And what were the royal kitchens if they weren’t our kitchen, with the deep dark pantry and the great red-brick oven into which Fernanda was just at that moment placing a timbale of maccheroni, and into which a little while later, her hands and feet bound, the nasty Queen Mother would be tossed? As I read, beneath our kitchen windows, the zinnia bed and the spirea shrub were replaced with flowing water. It was so real to me that to this day when I return for a moment to that long-gone kitchen, the zinnias and the bridal-wreath spirea under the windows still appear so out of place, as if I were seeing them suddenly sprout up in the middle of a Venetian canal. And during those summer mornings kissed by a liquid sun, a stitching-together of Riccardo’s shears clicking among the boxwoods, of puppy paws pattering on the gravel, of the turtle doves’ gilded cooing from the Cedar of Lebanon, a voice would call to me from a French door that suddenly opened, causing me to jump like a gun, explode in my own skin, the golden skin that was my book. And having fallen to the ground, it lay there like the skin of the Serpent King when the spell is broken – and now the hatch in the middle of the lawn leading to lakes and subterranean islands and the moat beneath the kitchen windows – now the hatch and the kitchen were suddenly brutally severed from the book, robbed of their coat of arms, their secret noble weapons.

At the time, I began to think that any incredible thing could befall my relatives while living their undeniable double lives. My thinking on the matter was such that soon, the entire house, already mysterious in and of itself, became twice as full of enigmas. Small things, such as the prohibition on speaking at the dinner table – above all, in the presence of my uncle, my mother’s silent, handsome brother around whom the whole house gravitated as if circulating around a black sun – shrouded our hours and encounters with a magic veil of restriction. Above the white oval of the table, during the summer evenings when the French doors were open on to the garden, the silence assumed its true value, which was the hoarding of power. And when my uncle, often exhausted from the many surgeries he had performed throughout the day, fell into a light reverie that no one dared disturb, and his beautiful hand, his pinky finger sporting a golden serpent ring with a tiny emerald eye, rested distractedly on the Baccarat bowl, another finger tracing the bowl’s rim and making a high-pitched sound similar to the groaning of a trapped spirit, the sweet atmosphere of the room transformed into a cavern in which a wizard, the Wizard of Latemar, for example, was lifting his lantern to the faces of prisoners in order to indicate if they had been pardoned or condemned. In reality, this was something that my uncle did every day and many times a day, the impenetrable implications of which only I, in those silences consumed by the crystal’s whine and refined by the glint of the serpentine ring, could predict. On the table, the glint from other rings resonated: the four pearls forming a kind of lunar bee on my mother’s ring finger, and the braided gold of my father’s ring that shone in the long sunsets as he silently tapped his pencil on the wide pages of music covered in the black marks of another language, more silent and impenetrable still.