Dan Vittorio Segre - Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew

I WAS probably less than five years old when my father fired a shot at my head. He was cleaning his pistol, a Smith & Wesson 7.65, when it went offnobody knew how.

My father was sitting at the same desk at which I am writing these lines, a massive oak table, well fitted for the huge ledgers in which he carefully entered, in his clear handwriting slightly slanted to the right, the daily expenses, purchases of animals and seeds, income from the sales of wine and grain, the taxes he paid, as well as the small sums he put in the neck pouch of Bizir, his massive Saint Bernard dog trained to fetch his cigars from the tobacconist. In the village everyone knew the hairy, good-tempered dog of the village mayor. If the tobacconist was not prompt enough in giving Bizir the correct packet, it was only to make him growl for the admiration of the villagers. On the oak table, now mine and still unburdenedas beforeby modern gadgets such as a telephone, transistor radio, typewriter, or calculating machine, I keep my fathers photograph. Bizir is standing on his hind legs, his forepaws on my fathers shoulders. The picture is fading and still smells of tobacco like the desk drawers full of aging possessions: pipes, spring tape-measures, erasers, rusty compasses, penholders, a dry inkwellthings I no longer use but carefully preserve as remnants of the vanished world of my family.

On the day I was shot, in the sixth year of the Fascist revolution, I would certainly have been killed had my father held his pistol at a slightly lower angle. I had crawled into his study, placed myself in front of the huge desk without his noticing me, and suddenly stood up at the very moment when the pistol went off. The bullet grazed my head, burnedso I was told time and againa lock of my then-blond hair, and penetrated an Empire-style armoire behind me.

This was one of those pieces of furniture with a front panel opening into a desk, which was known incorrectly in the family as a serre-papier. I still occasionally see this type of desk-cum-drawers in the windows of antique shops, converted into bars with places for bottles and glasses. My wife, who is convinced that furniture, like flowers, has a dignity of its own, is furious whenever she sees one of these aberrations. She regards them as a perversion of nature. I do not share this belief with her, yet I am convinced that this particular serre-papier possessed a personality of its own. I wonder how it would have perceived my funeral after having witnessed my death.

There would be a small, white coffin at the center of my fathers library, transformed for the occasion into a funeral parlor. The rabbi would arrive from Turin with a hexagonal black ceremonial hat on his head, standing just in front of the Sisters of Saint Vincentwho nursed in the village hospitalwith their wide, starched caps, rosaries in their hands, praying for the salvation of my soul. I would be carried to the cemetery in a hearse drawn by two, or perhaps even four, horses with white plumes on their heads and embroidered caparisons as in Paolo Ucellos pictures. A lot of people would be weeping around my bier. Our faithful maid, Annetta, would be there in her black uniform and white cap; Cecilia, the cook, with the special chocolates she made for my mothers Thursday tea parties; Vigiu, the coachman, with a top hat adorned by a pheasants feather; the two collies, the huge cat, my tin soldiers, and, naturally, the entire family crying around me.

Their sorrow did not affect me. Even apart from dreams of this kind, I have always asked myself what it really means to share someone elses sorrow. The cases in which people genuinely empathize with other peoples feelings are few. After all, an ingrown toenail hurts one more than the death of a thousand Chinese, and we live in a world where we share our deep grief or our great joy with distant people through cabled messages, which cost less if transmitted by a coded number. Nobody ever seems to learn from the suffering of others; rarely from his own. Only in the look of confidence and love of a dog, or of fear in a wounded animal is it possible to catch a fleeting instant of the pain of the world.