"When" Gian Mario Andrico | ||
When, one winter evening in 1992 (about thirty years ago), I gathered from the voice of Countess Sofia Salvadego the voice evidence of an ancient story, told in the hundred rooms of Padernello castle, I was fascinated by the narrative charm of the mysterious story, by the symbolism evoked and evocative of the delicate figure of the White Lady, and by the deplorable defect of human beings: a complete waste of memory, even of themselves!
There was no trace left of Bianca and her story in Padernello.
Actually that evening Sofia Salvadego spent very few words, quoting what had been recounted from time immemorial within the walls of the castle, it was useful - said the Countess - to contain the exuberance of young people (this is one of the social functions of the legend). She recounted that the Martinengo family first, and the Salvadego heirs later, when new and young voices rose up in the manor against the established rules of conventions and tradition evoked as a warning and threat the reappearance, in "flesh and bone", of the ghost, holy because wise, of a thirteen-year-old girl who drowned in the waters below the Visconti donjon built there in the fourteenth century. The White Lady (so called because of her name: Bianca Maria Martinengo) died not of violent death, but chasing a luminous magic: the call of a thousand fireflies in July.
The message inside Bianca's Soul, seemed to me, as I remember, both irresistible and useful propitiatory of a less sad future for Padernello.
A becoming in tune with the High Spirit of the Pale Child: of sure redemption, of rebirth, but in the name of respect, harmony and knowledge.
"Knowledge protects" that is all the Wise Man will have written on her tomb...
"Many years have passed. The full dream of yesterday is gone forever..." (this is written in the book La Vera storia della Dama Bianca - Gian Mario Andrico, 1993), overwhelmed by the illogical logic that man puts into action when he becomes homo faber. What a pity such and such aridity!
We mean to say that that winged dream has been transformed. It has become, if possible, more beautiful, purer, but only for me, betrayed by everyone, no one excluded.
To all those who in recent years, perhaps after two hours presentation of the castle and the facts that passed through it over the centuries, including the a.m. legend of the White Lady, ask me the usual, iterated and banal question: "Did you ever see her?", I answer that I ignore if I ever believed she existed. Looking for her was enough to me.
And I add that legends change, like the unfinished works of the great Masters, when "certain figures" are no longer, in the morning, where you created them in the evening.
This happened to me, lucky among men: I started telling the story of the White Lady to have one thing yet I received another.
Motella, november 2019 - Gian Mario Andrico
