suffering flickered an illusive smile of cynicism. Statues of women, bending with the agony of despair, aroused the libido with sumptuous bodies, unfurled hair, hypocritically bare breasts. The larger compositions, formed of several figures, created the impression of a double meaning, as if the sculptor had intentionally chosen risqué themes, for the boundary between lofty suffering and lewdness was ambiguous.
The least amount of doubt, however, was awakened by the inscriptions – those celebrated Foscara stanzas whose solemn cadences were admired by all lovers of poetry. These verses, when read backwards from bottom to top, were a scandalous, completely cynical denial of what was proclaimed in the opposite direction. They were rank paeans of honour for Satan and his obscene affairs, hymns of blasphemy against God and the saints, immoral songs of falernian wine and street harlots.
Such, in reality, was supposed to have been the cemetery. No wonder that the dead didn’t want to lie there, that they raised an ominous revolt, demanding of the living the removal of the sacrilegious monuments.
Because of Gryf’s findings, it was decided that the cemetery had to undergo a radical change. In the course of a few weeks all the suspect monuments and statues were shattered, the tombstones dug up and broken, and labourers carried off the pieces beyond the city. In their place, wealthy families put up new statues, while the poor stuck simple crosses on their family graves. The parish priest conducted obsequies in the cemetery chapel for three nights, ending with a great purification service.
And so, after the execution of all these acts, the dead stopped haunting the city, and the cemetery became soothed, plunging into the quiet reverie of previous years.
Then various stories began to circulate about what had happened, and slowly a legend developed in connection with the gravedigger, Giovanni Tossati, now nicknamed John Hyena.
Contributing considerably to these stories was the death of one of the gravedigger’s helpers soon after the reconstruction of the cemetery. This person made a most interesting statement on his deathbed, which suddenly clarified Tossati’s disappearance and spared the authorities a fruitless search for the supposedly fugitive criminal.
This confession, travelling from mouth to mouth, was spread widely about the region and, coloured with the exuberant imagination of the populace, with time entered into the circle of those gloomy tales which, stemming from nowhere, unreel their black thread on the spinning wheel of All Souls’ Day evenings and frighten the children.
Giovanni Tossati had turned up at Foscara approximately twenty years earlier. Shabbily dressed, almost in rags, he immediately provoked suspicion, and the council even wanted to expel him from the city. Soon, though, he managed to gain the confidence of the inhabitants and the authorities, to whom he presented himself as an impoverished stonemason and sculptor of monuments. Given a trial examination, he demonstrated excellent skills and a seasoned hand in his craft. So, not only was he allowed to stay, but, owing to his oddly persistent pleas, he was appointed gravedigger of the main cemetery. From then on his job was to create monuments and bury the dead. He maintained that, for him, the simultaneous fulfilment of these two duties was an inseparable whole, that the rites for the dead were interwoven tightly with sepulchral art, and that he wouldn’t be able to erect a monument to a deceased person if he couldn’t bury him with his own hands. That’s why later, even though his fame spread widely, he never accepted any of the more profitable positions offered from other regions; he immortalized the memory of the dead exclusively at his cemetery.
At first this eccentricity gave cause for jokes and derision, but in time people got used to the whims of the artist-gravedigger, as the works emerging from under his chisel soon earned praise
The least amount of doubt, however, was awakened by the inscriptions – those celebrated Foscara stanzas whose solemn cadences were admired by all lovers of poetry. These verses, when read backwards from bottom to top, were a scandalous, completely cynical denial of what was proclaimed in the opposite direction. They were rank paeans of honour for Satan and his obscene affairs, hymns of blasphemy against God and the saints, immoral songs of falernian wine and street harlots.
Such, in reality, was supposed to have been the cemetery. No wonder that the dead didn’t want to lie there, that they raised an ominous revolt, demanding of the living the removal of the sacrilegious monuments.
Because of Gryf’s findings, it was decided that the cemetery had to undergo a radical change. In the course of a few weeks all the suspect monuments and statues were shattered, the tombstones dug up and broken, and labourers carried off the pieces beyond the city. In their place, wealthy families put up new statues, while the poor stuck simple crosses on their family graves. The parish priest conducted obsequies in the cemetery chapel for three nights, ending with a great purification service.
And so, after the execution of all these acts, the dead stopped haunting the city, and the cemetery became soothed, plunging into the quiet reverie of previous years.
Then various stories began to circulate about what had happened, and slowly a legend developed in connection with the gravedigger, Giovanni Tossati, now nicknamed John Hyena.
Contributing considerably to these stories was the death of one of the gravedigger’s helpers soon after the reconstruction of the cemetery. This person made a most interesting statement on his deathbed, which suddenly clarified Tossati’s disappearance and spared the authorities a fruitless search for the supposedly fugitive criminal.
This confession, travelling from mouth to mouth, was spread widely about the region and, coloured with the exuberant imagination of the populace, with time entered into the circle of those gloomy tales which, stemming from nowhere, unreel their black thread on the spinning wheel of All Souls’ Day evenings and frighten the children.
Giovanni Tossati had turned up at Foscara approximately twenty years earlier. Shabbily dressed, almost in rags, he immediately provoked suspicion, and the council even wanted to expel him from the city. Soon, though, he managed to gain the confidence of the inhabitants and the authorities, to whom he presented himself as an impoverished stonemason and sculptor of monuments. Given a trial examination, he demonstrated excellent skills and a seasoned hand in his craft. So, not only was he allowed to stay, but, owing to his oddly persistent pleas, he was appointed gravedigger of the main cemetery. From then on his job was to create monuments and bury the dead. He maintained that, for him, the simultaneous fulfilment of these two duties was an inseparable whole, that the rites for the dead were interwoven tightly with sepulchral art, and that he wouldn’t be able to erect a monument to a deceased person if he couldn’t bury him with his own hands. That’s why later, even though his fame spread widely, he never accepted any of the more profitable positions offered from other regions; he immortalized the memory of the dead exclusively at his cemetery.
At first this eccentricity gave cause for jokes and derision, but in time people got used to the whims of the artist-gravedigger, as the works emerging from under his chisel soon earned praise
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