Free UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY by Umberto Eco Page A

am a fervent Catholic and profess the highest respect for any man of the cloth, but a Jesuit is surely always a Jesuit — he says one thing and does another, does one thing and says another — and Barruel behaved no differently."
    My grandfather chuckled, spluttering spit through his few remaining teeth, amused by that sulfurous impertinence of his. "So there it is, my dear Simonino. I am old, it is not for me to be the lone voice in the wilderness. If they didn't want to listen to me, they will answer for it before God Almighty, but I pass the flame of witness on to you young people, now that those most damnable Jews are becoming increasingly powerful and our cowardly sovereign Carlo Alberto is proving ever more indulgent toward them. But he will be overthrown by their conspiracy."
    "Are they also plotting here in Turin?" I asked.
    My grandfather looked around him, as if someone were listening to his words, while the shadows of dusk darkened the room. "Here and everywhere else," he said. "They are an accursed race, and their Talmud says — as anyone who can read it will confirm — that the Jews must curse the Christians three times a day and ask God that they be exterminated and destroyed, and if one of them meets a Christian on a precipice he must push him over. You know why you are called Simonino? I wanted your parents to baptize you in memory of Saint Simonino, a child martyr who, back in the fifteenth century near Trent, was kidnapped by Jews, who killed him and chopped him up to use his blood in their rituals."

     
    "If you don't behave yourself and go straight to sleep, the horrible Mordechai will come visit you tonight." That is how my grandfather threatens me. And it's hard to get to sleep in my small attic room, straining my ear each time the old house creaks, almost hearing the terrible old man's footsteps on the wooden staircase, coming to get me, to drag me offto his infernal den, to feed me unleavened bread made with the blood of infant martyrs. Confusing this with other stories I hear from Mamma Teresa, the old servant who had been my father's wet nurse and still shuffles about the house, I imagine Mordechai dribbling lubriciously, muttering, "Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a Christian boy."
     

     
    I am almost fourteen, and several times I've been tempted to go into the ghetto, which now oozes out beyond its old confines, since many restrictions are to be removed in Piedmont. Perhaps I'll come across a few Jews while I wander almost to the frontier of that forbidden world, but I've heard it said that many have abandoned their centuries-old ways. "They disguise themselves," my grandfather says, "they disguise themselves, pass us in the street without us even realizing." While wandering its limits, I meet a girl with black hair who crosses piazza Carlina each morning carrying a basket covered with a cloth to a nearby shop. Fiery gaze, velvet eyes, dark complexion . . . Impossible that she's a Jewess, that those men my grandfather has described, with rapacious features and venomous eyes, could produce women like her. And yet she can only have come from the ghetto.
    This is the first time I have looked at a woman other than Mamma Teresa. I go back and forth each morning and my heart begins to pound as soon as I see her in the distance. On those mornings when I do not see her, I wander around the square as if I'm trying to find an escape route, and I reject each one of them, and I'm still there when my grandfather expects me back home, sitting furious at the table, nibbling crumbs of bread.
    One morning I dare to stop the girl and, eyes lowered, ask her if I can help carry her basket. She replies haughtily, in dialect, that she can manage perfectly well by herself. But she doesn't call me
monssü
, but
gagnu
, boy. I've stopped looking out for her. I haven't seen her since. I've been humiliated by a daughter of Zion. Is it perhaps because I'm fat? This, in fact, marks the beginning of my war against the