As the Goggi household were all out at that time of day, except for the maid with whom she had no great intimacy, Ghitta went down to the porter’s lodge; here terror suddenly overcame her. Panting, she clung to the portress’s shoulders, stammering, “Oh, God, in the attic . . . in the attic,” but could get no farther. The portress, seeing her so upset, made her sit down on a small couch and, imagining that whatever had happened must necessitate some action on her part, unplugged her electric iron, sat down by Ghitta, gave her a series of encouraging little taps on the hand and asked, “Come on now, what’s happened?”
At last, drawing a deep breath, Ghitta managed a partial explanation: “In the attic, with all the rubbish . . . there’s a sort of animal . . . a monster, in fact . . . a monster . . . ,” and she burst, definitively, into tears.
Just at that moment a van driver came in to ask for the doors to be opened, as he had goods to bring in. The portress, nodding apology, left Ghitta alone. Yet this sudden recall to the basic realities of life relieved her; now that her first terror was over, she began to face the doubt that she must have imagined it all. A little closer reasoning, in fact, should have been sufficient. “What sort of animal could it have been? A huge misshapen reptile? In an attic? And of a kind that had never been seen anywhere else to boot? Or perhaps it was a secret”—this was her next suspicion—a secret known only to a small group of scientists who were keeping it hidden, generation after generation, so as not to give offense to mankind in general? Or was she herself simply ignorant in not having any conception of certain disgusting potentialities of the animal kingdom?
At this point the portress, a genial creature, reappeared: “Oh, my poor dear. So you saw a monster in the attic? A mouse, of course, what else?”
“It’s still there. It wasn’t moving,” said Ghitta. The portress’s condescending manner had something of the pity and disdain that all married women tend to have for spinsters. And although Ghitta was still young and fresh-looking, the portress had a vague feeling that she was partly withered by her virginity and was becoming rather hysterical.
“Well, we’ll go and see as soon as my husband comes in—I can’t leave the lodge empty.”
“Oh, no—I certainly shan’t go up there again,” said Ghitta, managing a feeble smile.
This was why, later on, the portress’s husband, Enrico, a carpenter by trade, went up to the attic alone, with a flashlight because it was dark by then and absolutely convinced that Ghitta had been seeing things. And indeed, when he opened the door of the junk room and shone his flashlight around, he saw nothing unusual. All there was in the corner where the governess had seen the monster was a big tarpaulin bag, dark brown in color, containing various bits of fishing tackle belonging to a tenant who had fished a lot a few years earlier but was now an invalid. He touched it, shook it—no sign of movement. Inside there was probably a dismounted rod, keeping it rigid, and a net or cover or something, which made it soft. Not in the least surprised to find no monster, Enrico bolted the door and went downstairs.
“Your monster was an old bag,” he reported to Ghitta, as soon as he was back in the lodge. She colored violently. “A tarpaulin bag. With fishing tackle in it.”
“But I touched it. It moved.”
“Brilliant,” he exclaimed, amused. “It moved because you touched it. Goodness knows what you were thinking of at the time!”
“What do you mean, ‘thinking of’? I had a most awful fright.”
“Well, I took a good look,” said the porter, laughing heartily. “Are you satisfied now?”
Yes, Ghitta was satisfied and went upstairs, while the couple glanced meaningfully at one another. So it had been an ordinary optical illusion. Nevertheless, the porter’s repeated assurances could not dispel the shock just like that. Ghitta was absorbed by the problem for the whole evening, nagged by a desire to go up there and see for herself. It might perhaps have done her good to tell the whole story to the Goggi family. But since she had sole care of the three children, she thought it better to keep quiet: What if their mother were to decide that she, Ghitta, was the victim of hallucinations, hysterical?
Furthermore, for the simple reason that she didn’t want to exaggerate the importance of the whole story, she didn’t even ask the portress to be discreet. So that soon the whole house knew and laughed about it, and the various maids found it an excuse to call her “the monster girl”; even Signora
