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Sebastiano Vassalli. Un infinito numero: Virgilio e Mecenate nel paese dei Rasna. Turin. Einaudi. 1999- 254 pages. L.30,000. ISBN 88-0614745-5.
In a beautiful autumn day in the Po Valley of northern Italy amid the sound of threshing machines in the rice paddies and noisy jets overhead en route to Milan's Malpensa Airport, the writer met a man about fifty years of age, with a gray beard and balding. "Time," Timodeo said, "is full of our stories and does not know what to do with them. We who are characters in those stories always end up by lingering over some detail and we lose sight of the overall picture."
He sat down on a bench, raising his toga in order not to step on it, and it was then that the writer noticed how he was dressed, including the gold bracelet on his left wrist which represented a serpent swallowing itself. Speaking in Latin, he pointed toward a group of the writer's characters, male and female, who were strolling among the trees, conversing in an animated way, and said: "Look at them closely. From here they seem to be exchanging some sort of news, but if one listens closely one realizes that each character is merely reciting a role, his or her role, and keeps repeating it." Feeling a little put out by this stranger and his ready criticism, the writer thought, "Who does he think he is? Isn't he here in my garden for the same reason as all the others?" So, he finally said to him, "If you have a story to tell, tell it, but please spare me these comments."
He smiled, and after a short silence replied: "There are stories that remain suspended in time because the characters know only a small part of the story and because no one succeeds in seeing it as a whole. Incredible as it seems, that's the way it is. Even my good friend Virgil, in the final months of his life, realized that he had passed close...