The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

debate, written by one who had cast himself, unwillingly, in the role of
Avocatus Diaboli
.
    It was a thoroughly satisfactory outcome. Only the Librarian had appeared to regret how things had turned out.
    ‘Poor Herr Unterholzer seems to have lost his new drive,’ he commented to von Igelfeld. ‘I wonder why?’
    ‘No idea,’ began von Igelfeld, but then corrected himself.
Truth
Always
. ‘At least I think I know, but these matters are confidential and I’m very sorry but I simply cannot tell you.’

THE BONES OF FATHER CHRISTMAS
    ITALY BECKONED, AND THIS WAS a call which Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld always found very difficult to resist. He felt at home in Italy, especially in Siena, where he had once spent several idyllic months in the Istituto di Filologia Comparata. That was at the very time at which he was putting the finishing touches to his great work, and indeed many of the streets of that noble town were inextricably linked in his mind with insights he experienced during that creative period of his life. It had been walking along the Banco di Sopra, for example, that he had realised why it was that in Brazilian Portuguese there was a persistent desire to replace the imperative tense with the present indicative. Was it not linked with the tendency to confuse
tu
and
voce,
since the singular of the indicative had the same form as the imperative singular
at least for the second person?
It was: there could be no other explanation. And had he not rushed back to the Istituto, oblivious to the bemused stares of passers-by? Had he not stumbled briefly on the stairs as he mentally composed the paragraph which would encapsulate this insight, a stumble which had caused the prying concierge to whisper to his friend in the newsagent next door, ‘That German professor, the tall one, came back from lunch yesterday
drunk!
Yes, I saw it with my own eyes. Fell downstairs, at least two flights, head over heels.’
    And then there was the idea which had come to him one morning while he took a walk past the Monte di Paschi bank and had seen the bill-poster slapping a notice on the wall. The poster had been one of those announcements that the Italians like to put on walls; the death of a local baker’s mother.
E morta!
the poster had proclaimed in heavy, Bodoni type, and below that, simply,
Mama!
Von Igelfeld had stopped and read the still gluey text. How remarkable that private pain could be so publicly shared, which meant, of course, its dilution. For we are all members of one another, are we not, and the baker’s loss was the loss, in a tiny way, of all those fellow citizens who might know him only slightly, but who would have read his cry of sorrow. And like Proust’s tiny madeleine cakes dipped into tea, the sight of one of these posters could evoke in von Igelfeld’s mind the moment when, after passing on from that melancholy sign, he had suddenly realised how the system of regular vocalic alternations had developed in the verb
poder
.
    But Siena was more for him than those heady days of composition; he cherished, too, a great affection for the Sienese hills. He liked to go to the hills in spring, when the air was laden with the scent of wild flowers. His good friend, Professor Roberto Guerini, was always pleased to entertain him on his small wine estate outside Montalcino, where von Igelfeld had become well-known to the proprietors of surrounding estates and was much in demand at dinner parties in the region. One of these dinner parties was still talked about in Italy. That was the occasion when the current proprietor of the neighbouring estate, the Conte Vittorio Fantozzi, known locally as
il Grasso
(the fat one), had conducted a lengthy dinner-table conversation with von Igelfeld in which both participants spoke old Tuscan dialects now almost completely lost to all but a small band of linguistic enthusiasts. In recognition of his guest’s skill, the count had bottled a wine which he named after the