The Cruel Stars of the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

father? She pinched herself, experienced pain, cried, and felt her cheek grow wet with tears, but did that prove her existence?
    She started to think he only saw her as Petrarch’s Laura, a shadow from the past, without human qualities. No daughter to love, but a reborn literary figure. Even so she continued to live, here and now, getting up in the morning, leaving the house, walking to school, walking home, growing up.
    When she had her first period she immediately told her father. Her first feeling was one of shyness, perhaps shame, but suddenly she simply said it: “Father, I have to buy sanitary pads.” It was as if an unknown voice spoke through her mouth.
    He put down his knife and fork and looked at her with an expression that was difficult to interpret. Laura imagined he felt offended. She rarely used the word Father. He wanted her to call him by his first name.
    After a pause he resumed eating. She understood that his worldview had received a blow. He didn’t like it, she saw that.
    Who will carry on after me?” he would sometimes exclaim, with that combination of pride and desperation that became more strongly reinforced in him over the years.
    His contribution to research was incontestable. Or perhaps it was closer to the truth to say that those who may have had reason to question his earlier work saw no reason to do so now, thirty-five years after the dissertation. At one time he had been important, but now he was marginalized and excluded from the debate.
    He himself contributed to this in large part. Like a boxer who relies more on raw strength and intensity than technique and calculation, he slugged his way through the academic world. At first he was successful, in part due to his renowned ability to tire out his opponents with masses of data, many times dished out in long, apparently incoherent tirades. But as time went by he became labeled a fossil who had become stuck in outmoded ideas.
    But there were still those who allowed themselves to be seduced by his words, above all when he recited some of the more emotional sonnets. He did so with such feeling and in such perfect Italian that the words by their own power appeared to hover in their own rarefied space with no room for questions, objections.
    Was he a genius? Or simply an overeducated lunatic? Or both?
    He was never promoted to full professor.
    “I am consistently overlooked,” he said. “In Florence and Paris they realize my greatness but in this backwater one rewards mediocrity. Here inbred careerists from the land of Lilliput take the high seat, while the giants are forced to jostle just to get inside the door.”
    He dug through his stacks of paper, extracted letters from colleagues all over the world, waved them excitedly in the air, and shoved them under her nose.
    “Here, here are the witnesses who shoot down the claims of the feebleminded.”
    He raised his voice, came up close to her, and forced her to study the letter, struck the signature with his index finger, and told her that the author of the letter was one of the world’s greatest authorities on the poetry of the Italian Renaissance.
    “He is a scholar, mark my words. Scholarship, not loose assumptions or flabby opinion.”
    His raised his voice a notch. Suddenly he could drop his arms, turn inward, retreat to his room. Once, after an outburst of this kind, she had followed him, had stood in the doorway to his room and watched him from behind. He had dropped the letter and it had fluttered to the floor and slid halfway under the bed.
    Laura had also seen other sides of her father, sides that were only rarely revealed in public. His love of the words themselves. He could become intoxicated by a single phrase, a few tentative letters on a page, as if only hesitantly entrusted to the page, a spontaneous expression of the author’s inner life. Sometimes it was quite moving, if a little tiring, when her father called her to him and read something to her, a couple of verses, parts