Antonio Tabucchi

The Edge of the Horizon

“Having been” belongs in some way to

a “third kind,” radically heterogeneous to both

being and non-being.

— VLADIMIR JANKELEVITCH

1

To open the drawers you have to turn the handle and press down. This disconnects the spring, the mechanism is set off with a slight metallic click, and the ball bearings automatically begin to slide. The drawers are stacked at a slight angle and run out of their own accord on small rails. First you see the feet, then the stomach, then the chest, then the head of the corpse. Sometimes, when an autopsy hasn’t been performed, you have to help the mechanism by pulling the drawer with your hands, since some of the corpses will have bloated stomachs which press against the drawer above and so get stuck. The corpses which have been autopsied on the other hand are dry, as though drained, with a sort of zip fastener along their stomachs and their innards stuffed with sawdust. They make you think of big dolls, oversized puppets from a show whose run has ended, tossed away in a store for old bric-a-brac. And in a way this is life’s storehouse. Before their final disappearance, the discarded products of the scene find a last home here while waiting for suitable classification, since the causes of their deaths cannot be left in doubt. That’s why they are lying here, and he looks after them and watches over them. He manages the anteroom that leads to the definitive disappearance of their visible image; he records their entry and their departure; he classifies them; he numbers them; sometimes he photographs them; he fills in the file-card that will allow them to vanish from the world of the senses; he hands out their final ticket. He is their last companion, and something more, like a posthumous guardian, impassive and objective.

Then is the distance that separates the living from the dead, he sometimes wonders, really so great? He’s unable to answer his own question. In any event cohabitation, if we can call it that, helps to reduce that distance. The corpses have to have a little card attached to their big toes with a registration number, but he’s sure that, in the remote way in which they are present, they detest being classified with a number as if they were objects. Because of this, when he thinks about them himself he gives them jokey nicknames, some entirely random, others suggested by a vague likeness to, or circumstance in common with, some character in an old film: Mae West, Professor Unrat, Marcelino Pan y Vino. Pablito Calvo, for example, is the exact double of Marcelino: round face, knobbly knees, a short shiny black fringe. Thirteen years old, Pablito was working illegally when he fell off some scaffolding. The father can’t be found, the mother lives in Sardinia and can’t come. They’ll be sending him back to her tomorrow.

Of the original hospital, only the temporary reception ward and the morgue are still here in this old part of town, otherwise referred to as the historic center. For a long time now this area has been considered a site for study and restoration. But the years go by, local governments alternate, vested interests change and the part to be restored grows more and more decrepit. And then the city encroaches menacingly from other areas, drawing the attention of the experts elsewhere, to suburbs where the “productive” population is ever more densely settled, where huge dormitories have been built. It’s the buildings in these areas that demand the time of the municipal engineers. Sometimes the hillside will slip, as if it wanted to shrug off those ugly encrustations — and urgent measures are introduced, special funds made available. Then there are roads to be built, sewers and gas pipes to be linked up, schools, nurseries, clinics. Here in the center, on the other hand, the agony is diffuse, a slow leprosy that has invaded walls and houses whose decay is stealthy and irreversible, like a pending death sentence. Here live pensioners, prostitutes, street vendors, fishmongers, unemployed young layabouts, grocers with ancient, damp, dark shops that smell of spices and dried cod, above whose doors one can barely make out faded signs announcing: “Wines — Colonial Products — Tobaccos.” The garbage men rarely come by; even they disdain the leavings of this second-class humanity. In the evening syringes glitter in the narrow streets, there are plastic bags, and sometimes the shapeless mass of a rat dead in a corner where a phosphorescent poster put up by the Pest Control Department warns you not to touch the verdigris-colored bait scattered on the ground.

Sara has frequently said she’d like to come and pick him up on those evenings his shift finishes at ten, but he has always forbidden her. Not so much for fear of the people; in the evening the narrow street is home for three quiet prostitutes who have watchful pimps at first-floor windows. No, what worries him most are the bands of rats that roam around aggressively in the evening. Sara has no idea how big they are; he’s sure she would be terrified; she can’t imagine what they’re like. True, the city abounds in rats, but this area has its own special breed. Spino has a theory, but he’s never told anyone, least of all Sara. He thinks it’s the morgue that attracts them.

2

Saturday evenings they usually go to the Magic Lantern. It’s a film club at the top of Vico dei Carbonari in a small courtyard that looks like some corner of a country village and reminds you of farmhouses, patches of countryside, times past. From up here you can see the harbor, the open sea, the tangle of tiny streets in the old Jewish ghetto, the pinkish bell tower of a church hemmed in between walls and houses, invisible from other parts of the city, unsuspected. You have to climb a brick stairway worn by long use, a long shiny iron bar serving as a handrail, twisting along a pitted wall invaded by tufts of caper plants obscuring faded graffiti. You can still read: “Long live Coppi” and “The exploiters’ law shall not pass.” Things from years gone by. On summer nights, after the film, they wind up their evening in a small café at the end of the narrow street where two blocks of granite with a chain between them mark off a little terrace complete with pergola and surrounded by a shaky wall. There are four small tables with green iron legs and marble tops where the circles of wine and coffee the stone has absorbed and made its own trace out hieroglyphics, little patterns to interpret, the archaeology of a recent past of other customers, other evenings, drinking bouts perhaps, late nights with card games and singing.

Beneath them the untidy geometry of the city falls sheer away together with the lights of villages along the bay, the world. Sara has a mint granita that they still make here using a primitive little gadget. With a grater fitted inside a small aluminum box, it scrapes the fragments of ice together compact and soft as snow. The proprietor is a fat man with bags under his eyes and a lazy walk. He wears a white apron that emphasizes his paunch, he smiles, he pronounces his always miserable weather predictions: “Tomorrow it’ll get colder, the wind is from the east” or “This haze’ll bring rain.” He prides himself on knowing the winds and weather; he was a seaman when he was younger; he worked on a steamship on the Americas route.

Even when it’s hot Sara draws in her legs and covers her shoulders with a shawl, since the night air gives her pains in her joints. She looks towards the sea, a brooding mass that might be the night itself were it not for the stationary lights of the ships waiting to come into harbor. “How nice it would be to get away,” she says, “wouldn’t it?” Sara has been saying how nice it would be to get away for ten years now, and he answers her that one day maybe, sooner or later, they ought to do it. By tacit agreement their exchanges on this subject have never gone beyond these two ritual phrases: yet all the same he knows that Sara dreams of their impossible departure. He knows because it isn’t difficult for him to get close to her dreams. There’s an ocean liner in her fantasies, with a deckchair under cover and a plaid blanket to protect her from the sea breeze, and some men in white trousers at the end of the deck are playing a game the English play. It takes twenty days to get to South America, but to which city isn’t specified: Mar del Plata, Montevideo, Salvador de Bahia, it doesn’t matter: South America is small in the space of a dream. It’s a film with Myrna Loy that Sara liked a lot: the evenings are stylish, there’s dancing on board, the deck is lit up by garlands of lights and the band plays “What a Night, What a Moon, What a Girl” or some tango from the thirties, like “Por una cabeza.” She’s wearing an evening dress with a white scarf, she lets the dashing captain flirt with her and waits for her partner to leave the infirmary and come and dance with her. Because, of course, as well as being her partner, Spino is also the ship’s doctor.

If Sara’s dream is not exactly that, then it’s certainly something very like it. The evening they saw Southern Waters she looked so wistful; she hugged his arm tight, and while she was eating her granita went back to the old chestnut of his unfinished degree. These days even the line that he is too old doesn’t deter her. Won’t she accept, he says, once and for all, that at his age you don’t feel like going back to school any more? And then the exam registration booklet, the bureaucracy, his old college friends who would be his examiners now. It would be intolerable. But it’s no good, she doesn’t give up: life is long, she says, longer maybe than one expects, and you don’t have the right to throw it away. At which he prefers to look off into the distance, doesn’t answer, falls silent to let the matter drop and to avoid it leading to another argument that’s connected to his not getting his degree. It’s a subject that distresses him: he understands well enough how she feels about it, but what can he do? Of course at their age this life as secret lovers is a somewhat inconvenient eccentricity, but it’s so difficult to break with old habits, to pass suddenly into married life. And then, the idea of becoming the father of that evasive eighteen-year-old with his absurd way of speaking and indolent, slovenly manner terrifies him. Sometimes he sees the boy walk by on his way back from school and thinks: I would be your father, your substitute father.

No, this is definitely not something he wants to talk about. But Sara doesn’t want to talk about it either; she wants him to want to. So like him she doesn’t mention it; instead she talks about films. The Magic Lantern has been holding two retrospectives dedicated to Myrna Loy and Humphrey Bogart; they even showed Strictly Confidential: there’s more than enough for them to chew over here. Did he notice the scarves Myrna Loy was wearing? Of course he did, for heaven’s sake, they’re so flashy; but Bogart’s foulards as well, always so fluffy and with those polka dots, truly unbearable… sometimes it seems like wafts of cologne and Brylcreem are coming off the screen. Sara laughs quietly, with that delicate way of catching her breath she has. But why don’t they have a retrospective for Virginia Mayo, too? That Bogart treated her like a dog, the bastard. She has a special soft spot for Virginia Mayo, who died in a motel room, destroyed by alcohol, because he’d dropped her. But, by the way, that ship in the harbor, doesn’t it look like a liner? It has too many lights, she thinks, to be a cargo ship. He isn’t sure, hmm, no, he wouldn’t know. Though perhaps, no, they don’t have ocean liners anymore these days, they’re all in the breakers’ yards, just a few left for cruises. People travel by plane these days, who would cross the Atlantic in a liner? She says: “Right, you’re right,” but he senses from her tone that she doesn’t agree, is merely resigned. Meanwhile the proprietor of the café moves around with a cloth in his hand, wiping the empty tables. It’s a silent message: if they would be so kind as to call it a day he could close down and get off to bed, he’s been on his feet since eight this morning and the years weigh heavier than his paunch. Then the breeze has got a bit cool; the night is oppressively silent and humid; you can feel a film of brine on the arms of the chairs; perhaps they really had better go. Sara agrees it would be better. Her eyes are bright, he never knows whether this is emotion or merely tiredness. “I’d like you to sleep with me tonight,” she tells him. Spino says he’d like to as well. But tomorrow is his day off, she’ll come to his place in the morning and they’ll be together until evening. He’ll prepare a quick snack to eat in the kitchen and they can spend the whole afternoon in bed. She whispers what a shame it is they met so late in life, when everything was already settled; she’s sure she would have been happy with him. Perhaps he’s thinking the same thing, but to cheer her up he tells her no, it’s one thing being lovers and quite another being married, the daily routine is love’s worst enemy, it grinds it down.

The proprietor of the café is already lowering his shutters and mumbles goodnight under his breath.

3

They brought him in in the middle of the night. The ambulance arrived quietly, its headlights dimmed, and Spino immediately thought: something horrific has happened. He had the impression he’d been asleep and yet he picked up the sound of the ambulance’s motor perfectly clearly, heard it turn into the narrow street too calmly, as if there were nothing more that could be done, and he sensed how death arrives slowly, how that is death’s real pace, unhurried and inexorable.

At this time of night the city is asleep, this city which never rests during the day. The noise of the traffic dies down, just every now and then the lonely roar of a truck from along the coast road. Through the empty expanses of night-time silence comes the hum of the steelworks that stands guard over the town to the west, like some ghostly sentinel with lunar lighting. The doors of the ambulance echoed wearily in the courtyard, then he heard the sliding door open and felt he was picking up that smell the night’s chill leaves in people’s clothes, not unlike the sour, slightly unpleasant smell some rooms have when they’ve been slept in. There were four policemen, their faces ashen, four boys with dark hair and the movements of sleepwalkers. They said nothing. A fifth had stayed outside and stammered something in the dark that Spino couldn’t catch. At which the four went out, moving as though they didn’t really know what they were doing. He had the impression of witnessing a graceful, funereal ballet whose choreography he couldn’t understand.

Then they came in again with a corpse on a stretcher. Everything was done in silence. They shifted the corpse from the stretcher and Spino laid it out on the stainless-steel slab. He opened the stiffened hands, tied the jaws tight with a bandage. He didn’t ask anything, because everything was only too clear, and what did the mere mechanics of the facts matter? He recorded the time of arrival in the register and pushed the bell that rang on the first floor to get the doctor on duty to come and certify death. The four boys sat down on the enameled bench and smoked. They seemed shipwrecked. Then the doctor came down and started to talk and write. He looked at the fifth boy, who was wounded and was moaning softly. Spino telephoned the New Hospital and told them to prepare the operating theater for an urgent case, then immediately arranged for the boy to be sent there. “We haven’t even got any instruments here,” he said. “We’re just a morgue now.”

The doctor went out by the back stairs and someone, one of the boys, sobbed and murmured: “Mother,” pushing his hands into his eyes, as if to erase a scene that had been etched there. At which Spino felt an oppressive tiredness, as though the tiredness of everything around him were bearing down on his shoulders. He went outside and sensed that even the courtyard was tired, and the walls of this old hospital were tired, the windows too, and the city, and everything. He looked up and had the impression that even the stars were tired, and he wished there were some escape from this universal tiredness, some kind of postponement or forgetting.

4

He walked all morning by the harbor. He got as far as the Customs and the cargo docks. There was an ugly ship with “Liberia” written on the poop, unloading bags and boxes. A black man leaning against the guard-rail watching the unloading procedure waved to him and he waved back. Then a thick bank of low cloud rose from the sea and only moments later had reached the shore, wrapping itself round the lighthouse and the derricks, which dissolved in fog. The harbor grew dark and the iron structures shiny. He crossed the Piazza delle Vettovaglie and went to the elevator cars that go up to the hills beyond the bastion of apartment blocks framing the city. There was no one on the cars now, they fill up in the late afternoon when people come home from work. The operator is a little old man with a smoke-dark suit and a wooden hand. On his lapel he wears a disabled veteran’s ribbon. He’s extremely efficient at using his one good hand to operate the levers and that strange iron ring that looks like the controls of a tram. Alongside the windows of the cabin, which in this first stretch of the journey runs on rails like a funicular, blank walls of houses march by, interrupted by small dark openings inhabited by cats, gates leading through to courtyards where you can glimpse a little washbowl, a rusty bicycle, geraniums and basil planted in tuna cans. Then all at once the walls open up: it’s as if the car had burst through the roofs and was headed straight for the sky. For a moment you feel you’re hanging in the void, the traction cables slide silently; the harbor and the buildings fall away rapidly below; you almost have the impression that the lifting movement will never stop; the law of gravity seems an absurdity and the town a toy it’s a relief to be leaving behind you.

You stop at the edge of a meager garden with a shelter. It’s like a railway station in the mountains, there’s even a wooden seat cut from a tree trunk. If you didn’t turn to look at the sea you could think you were in Switzerland or on the hills above some German lake. From here there’s a path that leads away to a Hungarian trattoria. That’s its name, “Hungary,” and inside there’s a handsome old woman and her irritable husband. The customers speak a hesitant Italian and argue amongst themselves in Hungarian. Heaven knows why they insist on keeping this poor shack open. Every time Spino goes the place is deserted; the old woman is solicitous and calls him Captain: it’s ridiculous, she has always called him Captain.

He sat down at a table near the window; it’s incredible how at this height the sound of the ships’ sirens is clearer than down below. He ordered lunch and then a coffee that the woman always prepares Turkish style, serving it up in huge blue porcelain cups that belong perhaps to her Hungarian youth.

After the meal he rested a while, his eyes open, head on his hands, but noticing nothing, exactly as if he were sleeping. He sat there listening to time slipping slowly by; the cuckoo in the clock over the kitchen door popped out and cuckooed five times. The old woman arrived and brought him a teapot wrapped in a felt cloth. He sipped tea for a long time. The old man was playing solitaire at the next table and every now and then looked up at him, screwing his eyes into a smile as he indicated the cards that wouldn’t come out. He invited Spino to join him and they played a game of briscola, both concentrating on the cards as if they were the most important thing in the world, as if upon them depended the outcome of some event which remained obscure, but which they both sensed was superior to the reality of their own presence here. Dusk fell pale blue and the old woman turned on the lights behind the counter, their two parchment lampshades spotted with fly droppings and supported by two stuffed squirrels, somewhat absurd in a trattoria that looks out over a seaport.

So then he telephoned Corrado, but he wasn’t in the editorial office. They managed to track him down in Typesetting. He seemed rather excited. “But where have you been?” he shouted, to make himself heard over the noise of the machines, “I’ve been trying to get you all day.” Spino told him he was in the Hungary; if Corrado wanted to come and meet him there he’d be happy to see him. He was on his own. Corrado told him he couldn’t, and his tone seemed brusque, perhaps annoyed. He explained that they were about to start printing the paper and the crime page read like a boring official communiqué, the nasty story the whole city would be reading about tomorrow. He’d been trying to reconstruct what had happened all day without managing to put together a decent article. The reporter he’d sent out to the scene had come back with a garbled version. Nobody knew anything and asking at the police station was worse than trying to see in the dark. If only he’d been able to find Spino a bit earlier he could have asked him for a couple of details. He’d heard he’d been on duty. “They didn’t even want to tell me his name,” he finished, huffily. “All I know is that he had false papers.”

Spino said nothing and Corrado calmed down. From the receiver Spino heard the noise of the machines working rhythmically with a liquid sound, like waves. “You come here,” Corrado began again, suddenly disarming, “Please,” and Spino seemed to see the childish expression Corrado’s face has when he’s upset.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry, Corrado, but this evening I really can’t. I’ll call you back tomorrow maybe, or the day after.”

“Okay,” Corrado said, “I wouldn’t have time to change the piece now anyway. All I need is his name. You didn’t hear anything, last night? Do you remember if someone mentioned a name?”

Spino looked out the window. Night had fallen and a waterfall of lights was spilling down the hillside, cars driving into town. He thought for a moment about the previous night, remembering nothing. Odd, the only image that came to mind was a stagecoach in an old film; it shot out from the right-hand side of the screen, growing enormous as it came into close-up, as if heading straight for him, where as a child he sat watching its approach in the front row of the Aurora cinema. There was a masked rider galloping after it. Then the guard tucked his rifle into his shoulder and the screen exploded with a crashing shot as Spino covered his eyes.

“Call him The Kid,” he said.

5

The article in the Gazzetta del Mare was unsigned, a brief note on the front page leading the reader to the Local News section, where the story took up two columns: a modest space on an inside page. To compensate, there was a photograph of the dead man. It’s the photo the police took, Corrado managed to get them to give it to him, and anyhow, if they want to find out who the man is, it suits the police to have it published. Under the photo they’ve put the caption: “Gunman Without a Name.”

He opened the paper on the table, pushing aside the breakfast things, while Sara began to tidy up the other rooms. “See?” she shouted from the kitchen, “Seems nobody knows him. But the article can’t be by Corrado, it isn’t even signed.”

Spino knows it’s not by Corrado. The facts were dug up by a young and very enterprising reporter who a few months ago caused pandemonium when he wrote about corruption on the docks. Spino sticks to the main story, skipping the opening paragraph about the fight against crime, full of clichés.

“A tragic gun battle took place last night in the working-class Arsenale district in an apartment on the top floor of an old block in Via Casedipinte. Acting on a tip-off from a source which police are keeping strictly secret, five men of the Police Special Corps raided the apartment shortly after midnight. At the warning, ‘Open up! Police!’ an unspecified number of persons in the apartment fired repeatedly through the door, seriously wounding one policeman, Antonino Di Nola, 26, who has been stationed in our city for only two months. Di Nola later underwent what was described as delicate surgery. After the shooting, the gunmen barricaded themselves in a small room leading off from the entrance hall before escaping from a window across the rooftops. But before fleeing (and this perhaps is the most obscure part of the whole incident) they shot one of their own gang. The man was raced to the Old Hospital but was dead on arrival. His identity is unknown. It appears he was carrying false documents. Between twenty and twenty-five years old, brown beard, blue eyes, slim, average height, to all intents and purposes the dead man was a stranger to local inhabitants, despite having lived in the area for about a year. He went under the name of Carlo Noboldi and claimed to be a student, although inquiries made at university offices have revealed that he was not enrolled. Shopkeepers in the area say he was courteous and polite and always paid his bills on time. The apartment, which has two rooms and a loft, belongs to a religious order which took Noboldi in last year when he claimed he had just returned from abroad and was out of money. The Prior of the Order, to which Noboldi was paying a nominal rent, declined to make any statement to journalists. This new murder, which once again sees our city as the stage for violent crime, will intensify the fears of a population already deeply disturbed by recent events.”

Sara has now come up behind him and, leaning over his shoulder, starts to read the paper, her head beside his. She passes a hand through his hair, a gesture of understanding and tenderness. For a moment, engrossed, they stare at the photograph of the unidentified man. Then she lets slip a remark that leaves him shaken: “Grow a beard and lose twenty years and it could be you.”

He doesn’t reply, as if this observation were of no importance.

6

On the sliding door Pasquale had left a note: “Back Soon.” Pasquale always goes and has his morning coffee around eleven. Instead of waiting in the courtyard, Spino decided to go and join him; after all he knew where to find him. The sun was bright, the streets were pleasant. He went out of the hospital and down a dark side street that led into a small square where there was a café with a terrace and tables set out. Pasquale was sitting at a table reading the paper. Spino must have frightened him, because when he came up from behind and spoke to him, Pasquale started slightly. With a look of resignation he folded his paper and left some money on the table. They walked calmly, as if out for a stroll. Then Pasquale said it was a sad story, to which Spino replied, “Right,” and Pasquale said: “I want to be buried in my own village. That’s where I want them to put me, beneath the mountains.”

A bus went by and the noise drowned out their last words. They crossed a patch of garden where people had worn a footpath between flowerbeds defended by “Keep Off” signs. Spino said he wasn’t going to the morgue, he just wanted to know if anybody had shown up, a relative, someone who knew the man. Pasquale shook his head with an expression of disgust and said: “What a world.” Spino asked him not to leave the morgue if he could possibly avoid it, and Pasquale replied that if the relatives did come forward, the first place they’d go would be to the police, they certainly wouldn’t come to the hospital. They parted at the crossroad where the path through the gardens plunges between the houses of the old city center, and Spino set off to catch the number 37.

Corrado wasn’t in the office, as Spino had feared. He had guessed his friend would want to go in person to try and find out more. Obviously the facts his reporter had picked up hadn’t satisfied him. He hung around in the editorial office for a while, saying hello to people he knew, but no one paid much attention to him. There was an atmosphere of impatience and nervous tension, and Spino imagined that this death with its burden of tragedy was weighing down on the room, making the men feel feverish and vulnerable. Then somebody came through a door waving a piece of paper and shouting that the tanks had crossed the frontiers, and he named a city in Asia, some improbable place. And shortly afterwards another journalist working at a teleprinter went over to a colleague and told him that the agreements had been signed, and he mentioned another distant foreign city, something plausible perhaps out there in Africa, but as unlikely-sounding here as the first. And Spino realized that the dead man he was thinking of meant nothing to anybody; it was one small death in the huge belly of the world, an insignificant corpse with no name and no history, a waste fragment of the architecture of things, a scrap-end. And while he was taking this in, the noise in that modern room full of machines suddenly stopped, as if his understanding had turned a switch reducing voices and gestures to silence. And in this silence he had the sensation of moving like a fish caught in a net; his body made a sudden involuntary jerk and his hand knocked an empty coffee cup off a table. The sound of the cup breaking on the floor started up the noise in the room again. He apologized to the owner of the cup, who smiled as if to say it didn’t matter, and Spino left.

7

“Still No Name for the Victim of Via Casedipinte.” It’s the headline of an article by Corrado. His initials are at the bottom. It’s a resigned, tired piece, full of clichés: the police search, all leads meticulously followed up, the inquiry at a dead end.

Spino noticed the involuntary irony: a dead end. He reflects that one person is definitely dead and no one knows who he is, so much so that they can’t even legally declare him dead. There’s just the corpse of a young man with a thick beard and a sharp nose. Spino starts to use his imagination. He was dead on arrival at the hospital, but perhaps in the ambulance he mumbled something: cursed, begged, mentioned a name. Perhaps he called for his mother, as is only natural, or for a wife, or child. He could have children. He is married. There’s a ring on his finger, given, of course, that it is his ring. But of course it’s his. No one wears somebody else’s ring.

But no, says Corrado in his article. He didn’t say anything while he was being driven to the hospital, he was in a coma, to all intents and purposes already dead. The policemen involved in the shoot-out said so.

Spino found a pen and underlined the parts he thought most interesting.

“His photograph has been sent to every police station in Italy, but there appears to be no trace of him in police files…. It is believed that if he had been a member of an underground organization, his comrades would have made some kind of announcement by now…. As things stand at the moment the police cannot be sure that the young man was a terrorist…. What’s more, according to informed sources, the tip-off given to the police could be part of an underworld or perhaps mafia vendetta…. The identity-card found on the murdered man belongs to Mr. I. F. of Turin, who lost it two years ago and reported the loss in the usual fashion…. And lastly there is the curious detail of the name on the door. Written on a plastic strip, the kind of thing anyone can print out themselves with a Dyno machine, it says: Carlo Nobodi (not ‘Noboldi’ as we mistakenly reported yesterday). The name is obviously false, perhaps a significant adaptation of the English word ‘nobody’.”

Suddenly he thought of the ring. He telephoned the morgue and Pasquale’s voice answered.

“Has he still got his ring on?”

“Who is it? Can I help you?”

“It’s Spino. I want to know if he’s still got his ring on.”

“What ring? What are you talking about?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Spino. “I’ll be right over.”

“Nobody shown up?” Spino asks him.

Pasquale shakes his head and lifts his eyes to the ceiling with a resigned expression, as if to say that the corpse will have to stay where it is. The clothes are in the locker, the forensic people have left them there because they didn’t consider them important. They didn’t even bother to search through them carefully, otherwise they’d have found a photograph in his breast pocket. Pasquale points to it, he’s put it under the glass top on the desk. It’s a snapshot from a contact sheet, about as big as a postage stamp. It must be an old photo, in any event he ought to hand it over to the policeman on duty, it’s compulsory. But the policeman’s not there at the moment. He was there half the morning and then they called him out for something urgent. He’s a young guy who does patrolwork as well.

Spino had expected to have trouble with the ring, but, as it happens, it slips off easily. The hands aren’t swollen and then the ring seems too big for the finger. On the inside, as he was hoping, there’s a name and a date: “Pietro, 12.4.1939.” Pasquale is surprised out of his sleepiness and comes over to take a look. Chewing a toffee, he mutters something incomprehensible. Spino shows him the ring and he looks at his friend inquisitively.

“But what are you after?” Pasquale says in a whisper. “Why are you so bothered about finding out who he is?”

8

They got on the bus in Piazza del Parlasolo, under the bell tower. The clock said eight o’clock, and, it being Sunday, the square was quiet, deserted almost, the three buses lined up in a row, their engines ticking over, each with a card on its windshield announcing a destination. The clock struck eight and the driver promptly folded up his paper, pressed a button to close the automatic doors and slipped into gear. They went to sit up front, on the driver’s side, Sara by the window. On the seat at the back was a group of Boy Scouts, halfway down the aisle an elderly couple in Sunday best, then themselves.

Sara had brought sandwiches and on her knees held a guidebook to Romanesque churches in the area. The book was in color and its cover featured a stone ceiling rose. The bus drove along the almost deserted sea front. The traffic lights hadn’t been switched on yet and the driver slowed down at every intersection. After the flower market they took a wide road that climbed rapidly in long curves. In just a few minutes they were halfway up the hillside, already out of town, running along beside an old ruined aqueduct. Another moment and it was open country with thickets of trees and vegetable gardens planted on terraces; olive, acacia and mimosa trees seemed on the point of flowering despite the season. Below, they looked down to the sea and the coast, both pale blue and veiled in a light mist which didn’t penetrate the city itself.

Sara closed her eyes and perhaps slept a little. Spino’s eyes were also half-closed as he let himself be lulled by the motion of the bus. The Boy Scouts got off a stop before the village by a roadside Madonna. Then the bus crossed the village and turned round in the square, stopping in a yellow rectangle painted on the flagstones. Before starting their climb they had coffee in a cafe on the square. The little woman behind the counter watched them with a curiosity they satisfied by asking for directions to the sanctuary. She spoke in a harsh, rather primitive dialect, showing bad teeth. They gathered she was suggesting they eat in a trattoria that belonged to her daughter where the cooking was good and the prices reasonable.

They decided instead to climb up the path marked in their guidebook. The book promised a steep but picturesque walk with dramatic views across the bay and the countryside inland. All of a sudden the bell tower rose pink and white amongst the holm oaks. Sara took Spino by the hand, pulling him along, like two children coming out of school.

The churchyard is paved with stone flags, grass growing in the cracks between, while a low brick wall runs along the edge of a sheer drop to the other side. From up here the horizon stretches away from one bay to the next and the sea breeze blows in with a sharp tang. On the facade, near the door, an inscription explains how in the year of grace MCCCXXV the Madonna now in the sanctuary was carried in procession down to the sea, where she vanquished the terrible plague then afflicting the valley, after which the people chose the Madonna as patron saint of the bay. The first stone of the convent annex was laid on June 12th MCCCXXV and the inscription preserves the memory of that day. Sara read aloud from her guidebook, insisting that Spino pay attention.

The sun was hot. To eat their sandwiches they stretched out on a patch of grass at the end of the churchyard where an iron cross on a stone pedestal commemorates a solemn visit paid by the Bishop in 1918, in gratitude, it says, for the end of the war, and for Victory. They ate slowly and calmly, enjoying the pleasure of being there, and when the sun began to slip behind the promontory, leaving a hazy light along the coast, they went into the church by a side door near the apse where a fresco shows a knight on a white horse crossing a landscape dominated by a native allegorical representation with a background of spring celebrations and festivals to the left and fires and hangings to the right. Then they went along the aisles, looking at the votive paintings hung on the walls. Most of them are seascapes: shipwrecks, miraculous visions saving mariners from storms, windjammers with their rigging devastated by lightning finding the right route thanks to the intercession of the Madonna. The Holy Mother is always shown between flashing clouds, her head covered by an azure veil as in popular iconography, her right hand reaching through the sky to make a gesture of protection toward the wave-tossed boats. Rough handwriting has traced out phrases of devotion across the paint.

Then the bell rang out and the Prior came in from the vestry to celebrate afternoon Mass. They sat to one side, near the confession-box, reading the inscriptions on the stone slabs on the walls. Afterwards, they found the Prior in the vestry as he was taking off his vestments and he led them through to his study next to the now empty cells of the convent beyond the refectory. Perhaps he mistook them for a mature married couple wanting advice, who knows, or for two inquisitive tourists. He invited them to sit on a small couch in a bare room: there was a dark table, a small organ, a bookcase with glass doors. On the table, with a chestnut leaf to mark his place, was a book about destiny and the tarot. Then Spino said he had come about a man who had died, and the priest immediately understood and asked if they were relatives or friends of the man. Neither, he said. The first time he’d seen him he was already dead, and now he was being kept in a refrigerator, like a fish, but he ought to be given a proper burial. The priest nodded in agreement, since from his point of view he imagined he was hearing and perhaps warming to a version of his own compassion as a man of faith in the words of another. But what could he say? Yes, he had known the boy, but not in the sense of knowing his name, place of birth and so on. He had always believed he was named Carlo and perhaps he really was. All he could say about him was that he was a nice boy, he loved his studies, he had said he was poor, and the Order had helped him. He didn’t know for certain if he was really born in Argentina, that was what he had said, and the Prior had never doubted it, and why should he have? In the two months he had stayed in the monastery he had read a great deal and they had talked a great deal. Then he had moved to town so as to be able to study and the Order had continued to help him by offering the modest charity of a low rent. He was sorry he had gone, he was a boy with a sharp, clear mind.

He looked them in the eyes, insistently, as priests will sometimes. “Why do you want to know about him?” he asked.

“Because he is dead and I’m alive,” Spino said.

He wasn’t sure why he’d answered like that. He felt it was the only plausible answer, since, truth to tell, there was no other reason. So then the priest clasped his hands together on the table, and, stretching out his arms, his white cassock slipped back to show his wrists, which were also white, and his fingers fidgeted a little with each other.

“He wrote to me,” said the priest. “I’ll show you the letter.” He opened a drawer and took out a blue envelope with a postcard inside showing a view of the city that Spino sees every day. The priest handed it to him and he read the few lines written there in a large, rather childish hand. Then Spino asked if anyone else had seen it, and the priest shook his head smiling, as if to say that no one had bothered to come and talk to him. “I couldn’t be of much use to the police,” he said, “and then it’s too much of an effort to climb up here.”

They exchanged a few casual remarks about the beauty of the place and the history of the church. Sara embarked on a pleasant conversation with the priest about the frescoes, Spino restricting himself to listening to their authoritative remarks as they spoke easily about the Knight, the Angel, Death, and the Hanged Man, until he remarked that it was odd but they sounded like tarot figures, and he pointed to the book on the table. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d like it, Father,” he added, “it being about life’s strange coincidences.”

The priest smiled and looked at him indulgently. “God alone knows all the coincidences of this existence, but we alone must choose our own set of coincidences from all those possible,” he said, “we alone.” And so saying he pushed the book towards Spino.

So then, for fun, Spino took the book and opened it at random without looking. He said: “Page forty-six,” and with a solemn voice, as if pretending to be a fortune teller, read aloud the first paragraph. They laughed out of politeness, as one does after an amusing remark, and it was clear that this laughter also marked the end of their conversation. So they said goodbye and the priest showed them out. The sky was growing dark and they hurried down the path, having heard the horn of the bus in the village square announcing its imminent departure.

Sara flopped on her seat with a sigh of satisfaction and tidied her hair slyly. “We should go on vacation,” she said. “We need a vacation.” He nodded without saying anything and leaned his head back on the headrest. The driver turned off the interior lights and the bus sped out of the village and along the hillside. Spino closed his eyes and thought of destiny, of the sentence he had read from that book, of life’s infinite coincidences. And when he opened them again the bus was already driving through the pitch dark and Sara had gone to sleep with her head on his shoulder.

9

Seeing him holed away behind his desk with that childish frown he sometimes wore when he had too much to do, Spino thought how Corrado always loved to play the part of the cynical newspaper editor, a type they’d seen together in the movies so many times. Spino had arrived ready to tell his friend about his Sunday outing. The morning’s newspaper, as always on Mondays, was almost exclusively given over to soccer and contained no news of any importance. He would have liked to have told Corrado that Sara was perhaps about to set off for a short vacation, and if he wanted to take him on free of charge as a private investigator, here was an occasion not to be missed.

But when Corrado said: “Another,” holding up two fingers, Spino’s good humor suddenly evaporated and he sat down without the courage to speak, waiting.

“The policeman died last night,” Corrado said, and he made a gesture with his hand, a cutting gesture, as if to say “that’s it” or “end of story.” There was a long silence and Corrado began to leaf through the pages of a file as if there was nothing more to say about the matter. Then he took off his glasses and said calmly: “The funeral will be held tomorrow; the corpse is laid out in a mortuary room at the police barracks; the wire services have already released the text of the official telegrams of condolence.” He put the file back on a shelf and fed a piece of paper into his typewriter. “I’ve got to write it up,” he said. “I’m doing it myself because I don’t want any trouble, just straightforward news, no speculation, no fancy stuff.”

He made as if to start writing, but Spino put a hand on the machine. “Listen, Corrado,” he said, “yesterday I spoke to a priest who knew him, I saw a letter. He was a sensitive person, maybe this business isn’t as simple as it seems.”

Corrado jumped to his feet, went to the door of his little glass office and closed it. “Oh, he was sensitive, was he?” he exclaimed, turning red. Spino didn’t answer. He shook his head in a sign of denial, as if not understanding. So then Corrado said to listen very carefully, because there were only two possible explanations. First: that when the police arrived the dead man was already dead. In fact The Kid died by the door to the apartment. Now, the gun that killed both him and the policeman, from which six shots were fired, was found on the kitchen balcony at the end of a short passage. So obviously it wasn’t suicide since a dead man couldn’t possibly run back the whole length of the passage and go out on the balcony to leave the gun there. Second explanation: the gun, with somebody holding it, was on the balcony, waiting. The Kid knew this, or didn’t know, impossible to be sure. At a certain point the police knock on the door and The Kid calmly goes to open it. And at that moment the gun pokes in from the night and fires repeatedly both on The Kid and on the police. So then, who was the dead man? Unknowing bait? Or aware that he was bait? A poor fool? Someone who wasn’t involved at all? An inconvenient witness? Or something else again? All hypotheses were possible. Was it terrorism? Perhaps. But it could equally well have been something else: vendettas, fraud, something secret, blackmail, who knows. Perhaps The Kid was the key to everything, but he might also have been just a sacrificial victim, or someone who stumbled into an encounter with destiny. Only one thing Corrado was sure of: that it was best to forget the whole business.

“But you can’t let people die in a vacuum,” Spino said. “It’s as if they’d died twice over.”

Corrado got up and took his friend by the arm, pulling him gently to the door. He made an impatient gesture, pointing to the clock on the wall. “What do you think you’re going to find out?” he said, pushing him outside.

10

“Indian summer, St. Martin’s Day, winter can’t be far away.” Somebody used to say that to him when he was a boy, and in vain Spino struggled to remember who it was. He thought about it on a station platform swept by cold gusts of wind, waving as the train bellied out into the curve. He also thought that a lot could happen in three days. And in his mind a childish voice was laughing, saying: “Three little orphans! Three little orphans!” It was a piercing, malignant voice, but one he couldn’t recognize, recovered from some distant past when memory had stored away the emotion but not the event that produced it. Leaving the station he turned to look at the lighted clockface on the façade and said to himself: Tomorrow is another day.

Sara had gone on vacation. Her school had organized a three-day trip to Lake Maggiore and Spino encouraged her to go. He asked her to send him some postcards from Duino and she smiled with complicity. If they had had some time they would have talked about it; once they talked a lot about Rilke; and now he would have liked to talk about a poem that takes as its subject a photograph of the poet’s father, something he’s been repeating to himself by heart all day.

At home he set up his instruments in the kitchen where there was more space to work than in the cubby-hole he normally used as his darkroom. In the afternoon he had picked up a supply of reagent and bought a plastic bowl in the gardening department of a big store. He arranged the paper on the dining table, setting the stand on the enlarger at maximum. He got a frame of light thirty centimeters by forty and inserted the negative of the contact photo which he’d had rephotographed in a lab where he knew he could trust people.

He printed the whole photograph, leaving the enlarger on a few seconds more than necessary since the contact shot was overexposed. In the bowl of reagent the outline appeared to be struggling to emerge, as if a distant reality, past now, irrevocable, were reluctant to be resurrected, were resisting the profanation of curious, foreign eyes, this awakening in a context to which it didn’t belong. That family group, he sensed, was refusing to come back and exhibit itself in this theater of images he’d set up, refusing to satisfy the curiosity of a stranger in a strange place and in a time no longer its own. He realized too that he was evoking ghosts, trying to extort from them, through the ignoble stratagem of chemistry, a forced complicity, an ambiguous compromise that they had unknowingly underwritten with an unguarded pose delivered up to a photographer of long ago. Oh, the questionable virtue of the snapshot! They’re smiling. And that smile is for him now, even if they don’t like it. The intimacy of an unrepeatable instant of their lives is his now, stretched out across the years, always identical to itself, visible an infinite number of times, hung dripping on a string that crosses his kitchen. A scratch that the process has enlarged out of all proportion slashes diagonally across their bodies and their surroundings. Is it a chance fingernail scratch, the inevitable wear and tear things get, perhaps the scratch of a piece of metal (keys, watch, a lighter), something those faces have shared a pocket or drawer with? Or was it done intentionally, the work of a hand that wanted to destroy that past? But that past, like it or not, is part of another present now, offers itself up, despite itself, for interpretation. It shows the veranda of a modest suburban house, stone steps, a scrubby climbing plant with pale bell-shaped flowers twisting round the architrave. It must be summer. The light seems dazzling and the people photographed are wearing summer clothes. The man’s face has a surprised and at the same time lethargic expression. He’s wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and is sitting behind a small marble table. In front of him on the table is a glass jug with a folded newspaper propped against it. Obviously he was reading when the unexpected photographer said something to get him to look up. The mother is coming out of the door, she only just gets into the frame and doesn’t even realize. She has a short apron with a flower pattern, her face is thin. She’s still young, but her youth seems over. The two children are sitting on a step, but apart, strangers to each other. The girl has pigtails bleached by the sun, glasses with plastic frames, clogs. In her lap she holds a rag doll. The boy is wearing sandals and shorts. He’s got his elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands. His face is round, his hair has a few glossy curls, his knees are dirty. Sticking out of his pocket is the fork of a slingshot. He’s looking straight ahead, but his eyes are lost beyond the lens, as if he were watching some apparition in the air, some event of which the other people in the photograph are unaware. He’s looking slightly upwards too, the pupils betray the fact, no doubt about it. Perhaps he’s looking at a cloud, at the top of a tree. In the right-hand corner, where the space opens into a stone-flagged lane over which the roof of the veranda is tracing a staircase of shadow, you can just see the curled-up body of a dog. Not interested in the animal, the photographer has caught it in the frame by accident, but left out its head. It’s a small dog with mottled black fur, something like a fox terrier, but definitely a mongrel.

There’s something that disturbs him in this peaceful shot of nameless people, something that seems to be escaping his interpretation, a hidden signal, an apparently insignificant element which nevertheless he senses is crucial. Then he moves in closer, his attention caught by a detail. Through the glass of the jug, distorted by the water, the letters on the folded newspaper the man has before him spell Sur. Realizing he’s getting excited, he says to himself: Argentina, we’re in Argentina. Why am I getting excited? What’s Argentina got to do with it? But now he knows what the boy’s eyes are staring at. Behind the photographer, immersed in the foliage, is a pink and white country villa. The boy is staring at a window where the shutters are closed, because that shutter could slowly open just a crack, and then….

And then what? Why is he dreaming up this story? What is this his imagination is inventing and trying to palm off as memory? But just then, not inventing, but really hearing it in his mind, a child’s voice distinctly calls: “Biscuit! Biscuit!” Biscuit is the name of a dog, it can’t be otherwise.

11

When you reach the top of Via della Salita Vecchia the town thins out into the hinterland, settles down into a dull plain that the ramparts of the hills would never have led you to suspect. Here the lava-flow of cement hasn’t arrived yet and buildings put up in the twenties — the ones the bombs spared — are still standing: small villas built in a fanciful, petit-bourgeois Deco which, over the years, time’s patina has managed one way or another to ennoble; and then more modest houses, surrounded by walls and vegetable patches, with a few tufts of yellow reeds near the fences, as though this were already the country. The main road is lined by two rows of identical two-story terraced houses with outside brick staircases and tiny windows. They were put up under Fascism. This area was planned as a residential suburb for the clerical staffs of municipal boards, the bureaucrats, members of the less important professions. What the place has preserved of that period and world is the formality, the sadness. Yet there is something charming in the landscape: there’s a small square with a fountain, some flowerbeds, a few rusty swings, a bench where two old ladies with their shopping bags are chatting. And this meager, inert charm makes the place feel almost unreal: likewise improbable, perhaps non-existent, is the thing he is looking for. F. Poerio, Tailor, Via Cadorna 15. That’s what the telephone directory says. The dead man’s jacket is an old tweed with leather patches on the elbows. It could be ten years old, maybe fifteen. It’s too insignificant a clue to lead to anything. And then who knows whether it’s the same tailor. Perhaps there are other Poerios working as tailors in other cities in Italy.

And meanwhile he walks along Via R. Cadorna, a narrow avenue lined with lime trees. The houses here are small, detached, two-story villas preserving vestiges of the wealth of a bygone age. Many of them could do with a fresh coat of paint on walls and shutters, their scanty gardens show signs of neglect and washing has been hung out to dry from some of the windows. Number fifteen is a house with a wrought-iron fence which has been taken over by wild ivies. The entrance is sheltered by a little porch, likewise wrought-iron and of vaguely oriental design. A glass nameplate says: Poerio, Tailor. The letters, once gold, are sandy now and spotted with little stains, like an old mirror.

Signor Poerio has a warm smile and glasses with thick lenses that make his eyes small and distant. He seems protected by an indestructible candor; it must be his age, his sense of already being a part of the past. The glass door opens on a largish room decorated in an old pink color with narrow windows and a pattern of vine leaves painted along the ceiling moulding. The furniture is basic to the room’s function: a nineteenth-century sofa, a stool with a Viennese wicker seat, a tailor’s workbench in one corner. And then there are the mannequins, a few busts upright on poles left standing here and there about the room in no particular order. And for a moment Spino imagines that they are Poerio’s old customers, presences from the past who’ve transformed themselves into wooden mannequins for old time’s sake. Among them are some which do look like real people, with pink plaster faces that have turned almost brown and small white peelings on their cheekbones or noses. They are men with square jaws and short sideburns, plaster hairstyles imitating the Brylcreem look, thin lips and rather languid eyes. Poerio shows Spino some catalogues to help him choose a model. They must be catalogues from the sixties. The trousers are narrow and the jacket lapels long and pointed. He pauses a moment over one of the less ridiculous, more discreet models, then arranges the dead man’s jacket on a mannequin and has the tailor look at it. If he could make him one like this, what does he reckon? Poerio considers, he’s puzzled, twists his mouth wrily. “It’s a sports jacket,” he says doubtfully, “I don’t know if it would be right for the kind of suit you’re after.” Spino agrees. Still, the old jacket has such a perfect cut that it wouldn’t look out of place as a regular suit either. He shows the tailor the name tag inside, sewn onto the pocket. Poerio has no trouble recognizing it. It’s his tag, though straight off he can’t remember anything about the jacket. It’s an old jacket, he has put together so many jackets in his time….

Spino says he appreciates that, but with a bit of effort could he remember something, that is, find the invoice… an old accounts register maybe? Poerio thinks about it. He has taken a flap of the jacket between forefinger and thumb and strokes the fabric thoughtfully. One thing he is sure of, he made it in the sixties, absolutely no doubt about that, it was part of a small roll of cloth, he remembers it perfectly, a remnant that cost him next to nothing because it was a warehouse leftover and the supplier wanted to get rid of it. Poerio now seems a little suspicious, he’s not sure what Spino wants of him. “Are you from the police?” he asks. All of a sudden he’s turned wary, obviously he’s afraid of saying something that might harm him.

Spino tries to reassure him somehow: no, he says, he really does want a suit, there’s nothing to worry about, on the contrary, he’d like to put down a deposit right away; and then he mumbles a strange explanation. It’s pretty contrived and Poerio doesn’t seem at all convinced. Still, he says he’s willing to help, as far as he can. He does still have his little file of past customers, although many must be dead. To be honest he closed the shop eight years back, he laid off his apprentices and retired. There was no reason for keeping the business going anymore.

“Well then, let’s see… let’s see,” he whispers, leafing mechanically through blocks of receipts. “This one is ’59, but there are a few orders from 1960 as well…” He reads them carefully, holding the blocks a few inches from his nose. He’s taken his glasses off and his eyes are childlike. “This is it, I think,” he announces with a certain satisfaction. “‘Jacket in real tweed.’ Yes, it must be this one.” He pauses a moment. “‘Guglielmo Faldini, Accountant, Tirrenica, Via della Dogana 15 (red).’” He lifts his eyes from the receipt and puts his glasses back on. He says that actually now he’s thought about it he doesn’t feel up to making a suit. His eyesight’s so bad he can’t even thread a needle. And then he wouldn’t be able to make the kind of suits people are wearing these days.

12

He finds Faldini, the accountant, in a dusty office where, on a glass door leading to a dark corridor, a frosted sign says: “Tirrenica Import-Export.” The window offers a view of harbor derricks, a sheet-iron warehouse and a tugboat pitching in an oily sea. Faldini has the face of someone who has spent his entire life addressing letters to distant countries while looking out across a landscape of derricks and containers. Under a sheet of glass, his desk is a patchwork of postcards. Behind him a brightly-colored calendar extols the delights of vacations in Greece. He has a placid look about him, big watery eyes, grey hair cut short and bristling in an old-fashioned style. He is truly amazed to see his jacket again. He lost it so many years ago. No, he couldn’t say how many. Well, twenty maybe.

“You really lost it?”

Faldini toys with a pencil on his desk. The tug has moved through the frame of the window leaving light blue patches on the water. It’s hard to say. He doesn’t know. Or rather, he thinks not, let’s say that it disappeared, so far as he can recall. From the harbor, in the distance, comes the sound of a siren. The accountant considers his visitor with a certain curiosity. Obviously he’s asking himself, what on earth’s this business of my old jacket, who is this man, what’s he after? And Spino finds it so difficult to be convincing, and then he’s not really trying. Faldini watches him with his placid expression. Of course, on the accounts book he keeps open in front of him there are numbers that tell of dream cities like Samarkand, where people maybe have a different way of being people. Spino feels he must tell him the truth, or something like the truth. So then, this is the truth, this is how things stand. Does he understand, this Faldini, the accountant? Perhaps. Or rather he senses it somehow, the same way he must sense his sedentary man’s dreams. But it doesn’t matter, yes, he remembers. It was in ’59, or maybe ’60. He always hung the jacket there, where he hangs the jacket he has now. On that coathanger behind the door. The office was exactly as it is now, identical. He makes a vague gesture in the air. In his memory the only thing different is himself, a young Faldini, a young accountant, who would never go to Samarkand. And there was a workman, a sort of porter that is. He often came into the office, did a bit of everything. He did it because he needed the work, but in the past, if Faldini remembers rightly, he’d had a clerical position at the Customs. He doesn’t know why he’d lost that job. He’d had some personal catastrophe, he doesn’t know what. He was a reserved, polite person, ill perhaps, he wasn’t cut out for being a porter. His name was Fortunato, sometimes names are really ironic, but everyone called him Cordoba. He can’t remember his surname. They called him Cordoba because he’d been out in Argentina, or some other Latin American country, yes, his wife had died in Argentina and he had come back to Italy with his son, a little boy. He always talked about his little boy, on the rare occasions when he did talk. He had no relatives here and he’d put him in a boarding school. That is, it wasn’t a proper boarding school, it was a lodging house run by an old maid who kept a few children, a sort of private school, but on a small scale, where it was he wouldn’t know, he has a vague impression it was near Santo Stefano, the church, perhaps. The boy was called Carlito. Cordoba was always talking about Carlito.

A phone rings in a nearby room. Faldini is brought up short, coming back to the present. He casts a worried glance towards the door and then to his accounts books. The morning is flying by say his eyes now, eyes in which Spino also catches an intimation of constraint and embarrassment. Well then, one last thing and he’ll be off. If he’d just like to take a look at this photograph. This man sitting under the porch here, could it be Cordoba? Does he recognize him? And the boy? The accountant holds the photo delicately between thumb and forefinger. He holds it at arm’s length, he’s farsighted. No, he says, it’s not Cordoba, although, odd, it does look very like him, maybe it’s his brother, though he doesn’t know if Cordoba had a brother. As for the boy, he never saw Carlito.

Faldini is toying nervously with his pencil now. He seems distracted. Yes, well, he wouldn’t like to have been misunderstood, you know, belongings, they’re always so slippery, these belongings of ours, they move about, they even get the better of your memory. How could he not have remembered? In any case, now he remembers perfectly. He gave that jacket to Cordoba. He gave it to him as a present one day. Cordoba was always badly dressed, and he was a decent person.

13

“They say I’m mad because I live alone with all these cats, but what do I care? You haven’t come about the gate have you? The front gate. I had to have it repainted because a city van scraped it right across trying to turn round. It happened a while ago, you should know better than me, shouldn’t you? Anyway, of course I remember Carlito. But I’m not sure if he’s the boy in your photograph. You see, the boy in the photo looks too blond to be him, but then you never can tell. The Carlito I had here was a cheerful boy. He loved all the little creatures you find in the earth: beetles, ants, fireflies, green-and-yellow caterpillars, the ones with the sticking-out eyes and the furry bits….”

The cat curled up in her lap shakes itself and with a jump bounds away. She gets up too. She still has some photographs, she never throws anything away, she likes to keep things. From a drawer she takes out some little boxes, ribbons, rosary beads, a mother-of-pearl album. She invites him to look through the album with her. Two pairs of eyes are better than one. There are yellowing photographs of surly men leaning on fake cardboard parapets with the name of the photographer stamped under their feet; and then an infantryman with an unhappy expression, this with a dedication written at an angle; then a view of Vittorio Veneto in 1918, an old woman sitting on a wicker armchair, a view of Florence with carriages in the streets, a church, a family portrait taken from too far away, a girl with white cheeks and hands pressed together, memento of a first communion. There are some empty pages, a dog with melancholy eyes, a house with wisteria and shutters under which a feminine hand has written, scent of a summer. On the last page a group of children have been arranged in pyramid shape in a little courtyard. The ones in front are crouching, then there’s a row standing, and finally another higher row — perhaps the photographer had them climb on a bench. He counts them. There are twenty-four. On their right, standing and with her hands held together, is Signorina Elvira as she was then, although she really hasn’t changed that much. The children have been arranged too far from the lens for their faces to be recognized with any confidence. The only one who might in some way resemble the face he is looking for is a little blond boy in the front row. His body has the same posture, chin propped up on one hand with the elbow resting on his knee. But definite identification is impossible.

And does Signorina Elvira remember the boy’s father? No, not the father. All she knows is that he was dead, the mother too, all the boy had was an uncle. But is he sure he was called Carlito? She seems to remember Carlino. Anyhow, it’s not important. He was a cheerful boy. He loved the little creatures you find in the earth: beetles, ants, fireflies, green-and-yellow caterpillars…

And so here he is again wandering about in search of nothing. The walls of these narrow streets seem to promise a reward he never manages to arrive at, as if they formed the board of a game of snakes and ladders, full of dead ends and trapdoors, on which he goes up and down, round and round, hoping that sooner or later the dice will take him to a square that will give the whole thing meaning. And meanwhile over there is the sea. He looks at it. Across its surface pass the shapes of ships, a few seagulls, clouds.

14

There are days when the jealous beauty of this city seems to unveil itself. On clear days, for example, windy days, when the breeze that announces the arrival of the south-westerly sweeps along the streets slapping like a taut sail. Then the houses and bell towers take on a brightness that is too real, the outlines too sharp; like a photograph with fierce contrasts, light and shade collide aggressively without blending together, forming a black-and-white check of splashes of shadow and dazzling light, of alleyways and small squares.

Once, if he had nothing else to do, he used to choose days like this to wander round the old dock area, and now, following the dead-end sidings the wagons use along the quay, heading back to town, he finds himself thinking of those days. He could catch the bus that goes to town through the tunnels of the beltway, but instead he chooses to walk across the docks, following the twists and turns of the wharves. He feels he wants to dawdle slowly through this grim landscape of railway lines that reminds him of his childhood, of diving from the landing stage with the tires along its sides, of those poor summers, the memory of which has remained etched inside him like a scar.

In the disused shipyard, where once they repaired steamships, he sees the hulk of a Swedish vessel lying on its side. It’s called the Ulla. Strangely, the yellow letters of the name somehow escaped the fire that devastated the boat leaving enormous brown stains on the paint. And he has the impression that this old monster on the brink of extinction has always been there in that corner of the dock. A little further on he found a battered phone booth. He thought of phoning Corrado to put him in the picture. Anyway it was only right to let him know, since to a certain extent he owed the meeting to his friend.

“Corrado,” he said, “it’s me. I managed to speak to him.”

“But where are you? Why did you disappear like that?”

“I didn’t disappear at all. I’m at the docks. Don’t worry.”

“Sara was after you. She left you a message here at the paper. She says they’re extending their vacation for three days, they’re going to Switzerland.”

A seagull, which had been wheeling about for some time, landed on the arm of a water pump right next to the phone booth and stood there quietly watching him while at the same time hunting through its feathers with its beak.

“There’s a seagull next to me, it’s right here next to the phone booth, it’s as if it knew me.”

“What are you talking about?… Listen, where did you find him, what did he tell you?”

“I can’t explain now. There’s a seagull here with its ears pricked, it must be a spy.”

“Don’t play the fool. Where are you, where did you find him?”

“I told you, I’m at the docks. We met at the Boat Club. There are boats for rent and we went out for a trip.”

Corrado’s voice dropped, perhaps someone had come into the office. “Don’t trust him,” he said. “Don’t trust him an inch.”

“It’s not a question of trusting or not. He gave me a tip and I’m going to try it out. He didn’t know anything about the business. But there’s someone who maybe does know something and he told me who.”

“Who?”

“I told you I can’t tell you, I don’t want to speak on the phone.”

“There’s no one here who can hear you. You can speak on my phone. Tell me who.”

“Come on, you don’t imagine he went and gave me name and surname, do you? He’s very smart. He just gave me an idea.”

“So then give me an idea.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“So how come you understood?”

“Because it’s someone I happened to know years back. A musician.”

“Where does he play?”

“Corrado, please, I can’t tell you anything.”

“In any event I don’t like it, and you’re too naive, understand? It’s quicksand. Anywhere you put your feet you risk sinking in.”

“Sorry Corrado, have to say goodbye, it’s getting late. And then this seagull is getting annoyed, he wants to make a call, he’s waving his beak at me furiously.”

“Come straight here, I’ll wait for you at the paper. I won’t go home, just so I can see you.”

“What about tomorrow, okay? I’m tired now, and I’ve got something to do this evening.”

“Promise me you won’t trust anyone.”

“Okay, talk to you tomorrow.”

“Hang on a second, I heard something that might interest you. The coroner has arranged for the burial, the case has been dropped.”

15

Twenty years ago the Tropical was a small nightclub with a shady atmosphere catering to American sailors. Now it’s called the Louisiana and it’s a piano bar with couches and table lamps. On the drinks list, on a green velvet noticeboard near the main door, it says: Piano player — Peppe Harpo.

Peppe Harpo is Giuseppe Antonio Arpetti, born in Sestri Levante in 1929, struck off the register of doctors in 1962 for his over-lavish prescription of addictive drugs. In his university days he played the piano at little parties. He was quite talented and could do perfect imitations of Erroll Garner. After the drug scandal he took to playing at the Tropical. He played mambos and pop songs through evenings thick with smoke, five hundred lire a drink. The emergency exit, behind the curtains, opened onto a stairwell where, above another door, a neon sign said: Pensione — Zimmer — Rooms. Then at a certain point he disappeared for six or seven years, to America, people said. When he reappeared it was with small round eyeglasses and a greying mustache. He had become Peppe Harpo, the jazz pianist. And with his return the Tropical became the Louisiana. Some said he had bought the place, that he’d made money playing in bands in America. That he had made money no one found strange. He seemed capable of it. That he had made money banging on the piano left many unconvinced.

Spino sat down at a table to one side and ordered a gin and tonic. Harpo was playing “In a Little Spanish Town,” and Spino supposed his entry had passed unobserved, but then when his drink came there was no bill with it. He sat on his own for a long time, slowly sipping his gin and listening to old tunes. Then towards eleven Harpo took a break and a tape of dance music replaced the piano. Spino had the impression, as Harpo came towards him through the tables, that his face wore an expression at once remorseful and resolute, as if he were thinking: ask me anything, but not that, I can’t tell you that. He knows, a voice inside him whispered, Harpo knows. For a second Spino thought of putting the photo of The Kid as a child down on the table and then saying nothing, just smiling with the sly expression of one who knows what he knows. Instead he said straightforwardly that perhaps the time had come for Harpo to return him that favor. He was sorry if that was putting it bluntly. The favor, that is, of helping him find somebody, as he had once helped Harpo. A look of what seemed like genuine amazement crossed Harpo’s face. He waited without saying anything. So Spino pulled out the group photograph. “Him,” he said, pointing at the boy.

“Is he a relative of yours?”

Spino shook his head.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. Perhaps his name is Carlito.”

Harpo looked at Spino suspiciously, as if expecting a trick, or afraid he was being made fun of. Was he mad? The people were wearing fifties-style clothes, it was an old photograph. The boy must be a man now, for God’s sake.

“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about,” Spino said. “He’s got a dark beard now. His hair is darker too, not as light as in the photo, but his face still has something boyish about it. He’s been in my freezer for a few days. The people who knew him are keeping quiet, nothing, not even an anonymous phone call, as if he’d never existed. They’re wiping out his past.”

Harpo was looking around rather uneasily. A couple at a nearby table was watching them with interest. “Don’t speak so loud,” he said. “No need to disturb the customers.”

“Listen Harpo,” Spino said, “if a person doesn’t have the courage to go beyond appearances, he’ll never understand, will he? All his life he’ll just be forced to keep playing the game without understanding why.”

Harpo called a waiter and ordered a drink. “But who’s he to you?” he asked softly. “You don’t know him, he doesn’t mean anything to you.” He was speaking in a whisper, uneasy, his hands moving nervously.

“And you?” Spino said. “Who are you to yourself? Do you realize that if you wanted to find that out one day you’d have to look for yourself all over the place, reconstruct yourself, rummage in old drawers, get hold of evidence from other people, clues scattered here and there and lost? You’d be completely in the dark, you’d have to feel your way.”

Harpo lowered his voice even further and told him to try an address, though he wasn’t certain. His face told Spino that in giving him that address the favor had been repaid in full.

16

It’s called “Egle’s.” It’s an old pie-house, or that’s what he’s heard people call it. The walls are covered in white tiles and behind a zinc-topped counter Signora Egle bustles about a small wood-fired oven serving cakes and pies. Spino sits at one of the little marble tables and a grey-aproned waitress with the haggard look of a cloistered nun comes with a cloth to wipe up the crumbs the last customer left. He orders a chickpea pie and then, as instructed, lays a copy of the Gazzetta Ufficiale on the table in full view. He begins to check out the other customers and speculate as to who they are. At the table next to his are two middle-aged blonde women chattering in low voices, occasionally exploding in shrill laughter. They look well-heeled and are wearing gauche, expensive clothes. They could be two retired whores who’ve invested their earnings well and now run a shop, or some business related to their previous profession, but dignified now by this façade of respectability. Sitting in a corner is a young lout bundled up in a thick jacket and engrossed in a magazine from the cover of which a fat orange-clad guru wags a warning finger at the plate of pie in front of him. Then there’s a spry-looking old man, hair dyed a black that takes on a reddish tint about the temples, as cheap dyes often do. He has a gaudy tie and brown-and-white shoes with patterns of tiny holes. Wheeler-dealer, pimp, widower in the grip of a mad desire for adventure? Could be anything. Finally there’s a lanky man leaning against the counter. He’s chatting to Signora Egle and smiling, showing off an enormous gap in his upper teeth. He has a horsey profile and greased-back hair, a jacket that doesn’t manage to cover his bony wrists, jeans. Signora Egle seems determined not to concede something the lanky character is insisting on. Then, with an expression of surrender, she moves to one end of the counter and puts a record on a decrepit phonograph that looked as if it were purely decorative. The record is a 78 and rumbles; there are a couple of bursts from a band and then a falsetto voice starts up, distorted by the scratches the disc carries in its grooves. Incredibly, it’s Il tango delle capinere, sung by Rabagliati. The lanky character sends a nod of complicity in the direction of the waitress and she, unresisting but sullen, lets herself be led in a long-stepping tango that immediately captures the attention of the clientele. The girl leans a cheek on the chest of her beau, which is as far as her height allows her to reach, but she’s having all kinds of trouble keeping up with his powerful strides as he leads her aggressively about the room. They finish with a supple casqué and everybody claps. Even Spino joins in, then opens his paper, pushing his plate away, and pretends to be absorbed in the Gazzetta Ufficiale.

Meanwhile the boy with the guru on his magazine gets up dreamily and pays his bill. Going out he doesn’t deign to give anyone in the room a single glance, as if he had too much on his mind. The two big blonde women are repairing their make-up and two cigarettes with traces of lipstick on the filters burn in their ashtray. They leave chuckling, but no one shows any special interest in Spino, nor in the paper he’s reading. He raises his eyes from the paper and his gaze meets that of the spry old man. There follows a long and intense exchange of glances and Spino feels a light coating of sweat on the palms of his hands. He folds his paper and puts his pack of cigarettes on top, waiting for the first move. Perhaps he should do something, he thinks, but he’s not sure what. Meanwhile the girl has finished clearing the tables and has started spreading damp sawdust on the floor, sweeping it along the tiles with a broom taller than herself. Signora Egle is going through the day’s takings behind the counter. The room is quiet now, the air thick with breath, with cigarettes, with burnt wood. Then the spry little old man smiles: it’s a trite, mechanical smile, accompanied by the slightest jerk of the head and then another gesture that tells all. Spino sees the misunderstanding he’s been encouraging, immediately turns red with embarrassment, then senses, rising within him, a blind anger and intolerance towards this place, towards his own stupidity. He makes a sign to the girl and asks for his bill. She approaches wearily, drying her hands on her apron. She adds up his bill on a paper napkin; her hands are red and swollen with a coating of sawdust sticking to their backs, they might be two chops sprinkled with breadcrumbs. Then, giving him an insolent look, she mutters in a toneless voice: “You’re losing your hair. Reading after eating makes you lose your hair.” Spino looks at her astonished, as though not believing his ears. It can’t be her, he thinks, it can’t be. And he almost has to hold himself back from attacking this little monster who goes on giving him her arrogant stare. But she, still in that detached, professional tone, is telling him about a herbalist who sells things for hair, on Vico Spazzavento.

17

Vico Spazzavento — Windswept Lane — is the perfect name for this blind alley squeezed between walls covered with scars. The wind forms a whirling eddy right where a blade of sunshine, slipping into the narrow street between flapping washing seen high above against a corridor of sky, lights up a little heap of swirling detritus. A wreath of dry flowers, newspapers, a nylon stocking.

The shop is in a basement with a swing door. It looks like a coal cellar, and in fact on the floor there are some sacks of coal, although the sign on the doorpost says: “spices, paints.” On the counter is a pile of newspapers used to wrap up goods sold. A little old man dozing on a small wicker-covered chair near the coal got to his feet. Spino was first to say hello. The old man mumbled a good evening. He propped himself up against the counter with a lazy and seemingly absent expression.

“Someone told me you sold hair lotions here,” Spino said.

The old man answered knowledgeably. He leant over the counter a little to look at Spino’s hair, listed various products with curious names: Zolfex, Catramina. Then some plants and roots: sage, nettle, rhubarb, red cedar. He thinks red cedar is what he needs, that’s his guess at first glance, though one ought to do some tests on the hair.

Spino answered that maybe red cedar would be okay, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know what properties red cedar has.

The old man looked at him doubtfully. He had metal-framed glasses and a two-day growth of beard. He didn’t say anything. Spino tried not to let his nerves get the better of him. Calmly, he explained that he hadn’t checked out his hair type, it was just brittle. In any case, he doesn’t want a commercial product, he wants a special lotion. He stressed the word special, something that only the shopkeeper knows the formula for. He has come on the advice of people he trusts. It’s strange they haven’t mentioned it to him.

The old man pushed aside a curtain, said to wait and disappeared. For a second Spino caught a glimpse of a poky little room with a gas-ring and a light bulb switched on, but he didn’t see anybody. The old man started to speak, a few yards from Spino, in a whisper. A woman’s voice answered, perhaps an old woman. Then they fell silent. Then they began to speak again, their voices very low. It was impossible to catch what they were saying. Then came a squeak as of a drawer being opened, and finally silence again.

The minutes passed slowly. Not a sound came from beyond the curtain now, as if the two had gone out by another door to leave him waiting there like an idiot. Spino coughed loudly, he made a noise with a chair, at which the old man reappeared at the curtain with a look of reproach. “Be patient,” he said, “another few minutes.”

He came out round the counter and went to close and bolt the swing door that opened onto the street. He moved somewhat cautiously, looked at his customer, lit a small cigar, and returned to the back room. The voices began to whisper again, more urgently than before. The shop was almost dark. The daylight coming in through the small barred window had grown dimmer. The sacks of coal along the walls looked like human bodies abandoned in sleep. Spino couldn’t help thinking that the dead man might also have come to this shop once and like him have waited in the half-dark; perhaps the old man knew him well, knew who he was, his reasons, his motives.

Finally the little man came back all smiles. In his hand he had a small brown bottle of the kind they use in pharmacies to sell iodine. He wrapped it up carefully in a sheet of newspaper and pushed it across the counter without a word. Spino looked at it now, paused, smiled perhaps. “Hope you’re not making a mistake,” he said. “It’s important.”

The old man released the bolt on the door, went back to sit on his seat and started on the accounts he had previously broken off. He made a show of pretending not to have heard. “Off you go now,” he said. “The instructions are on the label.”

Spino slipped the little bottle into his pocket and left. When he said goodbye, the old man answered that he had put some sage in the lotion too, to give it some fragrance. And Spino had the impression he was still smiling. There was no one on Vico Spazzavento. He felt as though time hadn’t passed, as though everything had happened too quickly, like some event that took place long ago and is revisited in the memory in a flash.

18

He asked the caretaker if he knew of a monument with an angel and an owl. The caretaker looked at the visitor and pretended to concentrate, though it was perfectly obvious he was disoriented. All the same, so as not to seem ignorant, he said it must be in the Western Gallery, and in revenge flaunted a knowledge that hadn’t been asked for. “It must be one of the first graves,” he said. “During the Romantic period the owl was in fashion.” Then, as Spino was walking away in the direction indicated by his outstretched arm, the caretaker reminded him that the cemetery closed at five and that he’d better be careful not to get locked inside. “There’s always someone gets left in, you know,” he added, as if to tone down the bluntness of his warning.

Spino nodded to show he had understood and set off along the asphalt avenue that cuts across the central squares. The cemetery was all but deserted, perhaps because it was late and the weather was unpleasantly windy. A few little old women dressed in black were busy in the squares tidying the graves. It’s strange how one can spend one’s life in a city without getting to know one of its most famous sites. Spino had never set foot in this cemetery described in all the tourist guides. He thought that to get to know a cemetery maybe you had to have your own dead there, and his dead were not in this place, nor in any other, and now that he was at last visiting the cemetery it was because he had acquired one of the dead who was not his own and was not buried here and to whom he was not even connected by any memories of a common past.

He began to wander about among the graves, distractedly reading the stones of the recently dead. Then his curiosity drew him towards the steps of the ugly neoclassical temple which houses the urns of some of the great men of the Risorgimento and along the pediment on which a Latin inscription establishes an incongruous connection between God and country. He crossed a section in the eastern part of the cemetery where bizarrely ornamented graves, all spires and pinnacles, loom alongside ugly little neo-gothic palaces. And he could hardly help but notice how at a certain period all the titled dead of the city had been concentrated in this area: nobles, senators of the realm, admirals, bishops; and then families for whom the nobility of wealth had stood in for the rarer nobility of blood: shipbuilders, merchants, the first industrialists. From the pronaos of the temple one can make out the original geometry of the cemetery which later developments were to change considerably. But the concept it expressed has remained unchanged: to the South and East, the aristocracy; to the North and West, the monumental tombs of the bourgeois business class; in the central squares, in the ground, the common people. Then there are a few areas for floating categories, for those who don’t belong; he noticed a portico beside the steps of the temple entirely given over to philanthropists: benefactors, men of science, intellectuals of various levels. It’s curious how nineteenth-century Italy faithfully reproduced in its choreography of death the class divisions that operated in life. He lit a cigarette and sat down at the top of the steps, immersed in his thoughts. Battleship Potemkin came to mind, as it does every time he sees an enormous, white flight of steps. And then a film about the Fascist period that he had liked for its sets. For a moment he had the impression that he too was in a scene in a film and that a director, from a low angle, behind an invisible movie camera, was filming his sitting there thinking. He looked at his watch and reassured himself it was only quarter past four. So then, he still had fifteen minutes before the appointment. He set off along the Western Gallery, stopping to look at the monuments and read the inscriptions. He stood a long time in front of the statue of the hazelnut seller, studying her carefully. Her face was modeled with a realism that showed no mercy in reproducing the features of a plebeian physiognomy. It was obvious that the old woman had posed for the sculpture in her Sunday best: the lace bodice peeps out from under a working woman’s shawl, a smart skirt covers the heavy pleats of another skirt, her feet are in slippers. With the hazelnuts she sold her whole life at street corners strung in loops over her arms, she stands to have the statue sculpted, this statue that now, life-size, looks out at the visitor with pride. A little further on an inscription on a bas-relief clumsily representing the throne of the Ludovisi informs him that Matilde Giappichelli Romanengo, a virtuous and kindly woman, having scarcely passed her thirtieth year, left husband and daughters Lucrezia and Federiga distraught. The deceased passed away on the second day of September 1886, and the two daughters, who dutifully hold the sheet from which their mother Matilde is flying to heaven, also support an inscription alongside which says: “Dear Mummy, what shall we offer you if not prayers and flowers?”

He walked slowly along the gallery until he found the grave with the angel and the owl. He noticed that a solitary seagull, blown along perhaps by the southwest wind, was hovering over the squares as if intending to land. On days like this when the southwesterly blows hard it’s not unusual to see seagulls even in those parts of the city furthest from the coast. They flock in, following the rubbish-strewn canal, then wander away from the water looking for food. It was exactly half past four. Spino sat on the low wall of the gallery, his back to the tomb, and lit another cigarette. There was no one under the porticos along the gallery and the old women in the middle of the squares had thinned out. Over to the other side of the squares, in a corner near the cypresses, he noticed a man who seemed deep in contemplation near a cross, and started to watch him. The minutes passed slowly but the man made no move. Then he got up quickly and set off towards the small square by the exit. Spino looked around, but could see no one. His watch indicated that it was a quarter to five, and he realized that no one would be coming now to keep this strange appointment. Or perhaps no one was supposed to come, they had simply wanted to know if he would, and now someone he couldn’t see was watching him perhaps, was checking that he really was willing. It was a kind of test they had set him.

The seagull touched down lightly just a few yards away and began to walk awkwardly between the graves, quietly curious, like a pet. Spino felt in his pocket and threw it a sweet which the bird immediately swallowed, shaking its head from side to side and fluffing out its feathers in satisfaction. Then it took off for a moment, not much more than a hop, to come to rest on the shoulder of a little First World War soldier, from where it looked at him calmly. “Who are you?” Spino asked him softly. “Who sent you? You were spying on me at the docks too. What do you want?”

It was two minutes to five. Spino got up quickly and his brusque movement frightened the seagull, which took off obliquely to glide away over the other square near the steps. Before leaving, Spino glanced at the tomb with the angel and the owl and read the inscription which, in the suspense of waiting, he had overlooked. Only then did it come to him that someone had merely wanted him to read that inscription, this was what the appointment amounted to, this was the message. Under a foreign name, on a bas-relief scroll, was a Greek motto, and beside it the translation: Man’s body dies; virtue does not die.

He began to run and the noise of his footsteps echoed high up under the vaults of the gallery. When he reached the exit the caretaker was sliding the gate along its rail and Spino bid him a hurried good night: “There’s a seagull still inside,” he said. “I think he’s planning to sleep there.” The man said nothing in reply. He took off his peaked cap and pushed back the hair on an almost bald scalp.

19

He found the message in his mail box on returning home: a note written in capital letters indicating a time and place.

He put it in his pocket and climbed the stairs of his old block. As he entered his apartment the bell tower of San Donato began to strike six. He ran to the door leading out to the terrace and threw it open, wanting the sound to come right into the apartment and fill it. He took off his tie and flopped down on an armchair, putting his feet up on the coffee table. From this position all he could see was the outline of the bell tower, the slate of a roof and then a stretch of the horizon. He found a white sheet of paper and wrote in large capitals: “Weep? What’s Hecuba to him?”

He placed the paper next to the note and thought of the connection between them. He was tempted to phone Corrado and tell him: “Corrado, you remember this line? I’ve understood exactly what it means.” He looked at the phone but didn’t move. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to explain. Perhaps he would put it in a letter to Sara, but without offering long explanations, just write it as now he had intuitively understood it, and as she too would understand, that the player who was weeping (but who was he?) saw, albeit in another shape and in another fashion, himself in Hecuba. He thought of the power things have to come back to us and of how much of ourselves we see in others. And like a wave sweeping across him, warm and overwhelming, he remembered a deathbed and a promise made and never kept. And now that promise demanded fulfillment, it was obvious, and found in him and in this quest a kind of accomplishment, a different kind, an apparently incongruous kind, but one which in fact followed an implacable logic, as of some unknown geometry, something one might intuit but could never pin down in a rational order or in an explanation. And he thought that things do follow an order and that nothing happens by chance, that chance in fact is just this: our incapacity to grasp the true connections between things. And he sensed the vulgarity and the arrogance with which we bring together the objects that surround us. He looked about him and thought, what was the connection between the jug on the chest of drawers and the window? They weren’t related in any way, they were foreign to each other; they seemed plausible to him only because one day, many years ago, he had bought that jug and put it on the chest of drawers near the window. The only connection between the two objects was his eyes looking at them. Yet something, something more than this must have led his hand to buy that jug. And that forgotten, hurried gesture was the real connection; everything lay in the gesture, the world and life, and a universe.

And once again he thought of that young man, and now he saw the scene clearly. It had happened like this, he knew it. He saw him come out of his hiding-place and deliberately put himself in the path of the bullets, seeking out the exact position that would bring him his death. He saw him advance down the corridor with calculated determination, as if following the geometry of a particular trajectory so as to accomplish an expiation or achieve a simple connection between events. That was what Carlo Nobodi had done, who as a child had been called Carlito. He had established a connection. Through him things had found a way of tracing their pattern.

So he took the paper where he’d written the question about Hecuba and pegged it out on the washing line on the terrace, then came back in, sat in the same position as before, and looked at it. The paper fluttered like a flag in the stiff breeze. It was a bright, rustling stain against the falling night. He just watched it for a long time, establishing again a connection between that piece of paper flapping in the dusk and the edge of the horizon that was ever so slowly dissolving away into darkness. He got up slowly, overcome by a great tiredness. But it was a calm, peaceful tiredness that led him by the hand towards his bed as if he were a boy again.

And that night he had a dream. It was a dream he hadn’t had for years, too many years. It was a childish dream and he felt light and innocent; and dreaming, he had the curious awareness of having rediscovered this dream, and this heightened his innocence, like a liberation.

20

He spent the day putting his books in order. It’s incredible how many newspapers and notes can accumulate in a house. He threw away whole stacks of them, cleaning up the couch and the corners where they had piled up over the years. Likewise out in the rubbish went all sorts of things from the bottoms of drawers, old stuff, the kind of bric-a-brac you can never see your way to throwing out, either from laziness or because of that indefinable sadness that objects connected with our past arouse. When he’d finished it was as if it were another apartment. How pleased Sara would be, poor thing, having put up with that indescribable mess for so long. In the evening he wrote her a letter and sealed it in an envelope he had already stamped, intending to mail it on his way to the appointment. Then he telephoned Corrado, but only got the answering machine. He had to hang up because straight off he found himself unable to leave the message the recorded voice was asking for. Then he prepared something and dialed again. “Hi, Corrado,” he said, “Spino here, I just wanted to say hello and tell you that I think of you with affection.” Hanging up, he was reminded of a day many years before when he had dialed the same number and said: “Corrado, it’s me again, you remember that day we went to see Picnic and fell in love with Kim Novak?” Only when he had put the receiver down did he realize that he’d said something ridiculous, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. Then he thought that maybe Corrado wouldn’t find it ridiculous, perhaps it would just seem strange hearing it on the answering machine.

At dinner time he made himself a snack with a can of salmon he’d had in the fridge heaven knows how long and some pineapple doused in port. When evening fell he turned on the radio without putting on the light and sat in the dark smoking and looking out of the window at the lights in the harbor. He let the time slip by. He enjoyed listening to the radio in the dark, it always gave him a sense of distance. Then the bell tower of San Donato struck eleven and he started. He washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen in candlelight because he couldn’t face the violence of the electric light. He left at half past eleven, locking the door and leaving the key under the flowerpot on the landing, where he always left it for Sara.

He mailed the letter in the box near the stand, took Vico dei Calafati and went down the steps as far as the road along the sea front. The trattorias by the harbor were closing; a little old man sunk up to his thighs in rubber boots was washing his fishmonger’s counter with a hose. He went down the Ripa Gallery as far as the harbor railway station, then crossed the road and walked on along the tramlines that have outlasted the asphalt there, keeping close to the safety fence between the two lines. A night watchman was heading in his direction on a moped and, passing by, wished him good night. He waited till he was some distance away, then slipped into the port area through a little turnstile next to the big gates of the Customs. There were still some lights on in the Customs building. He chose to cut across a small labyrinth of containers so as not to risk being seen. He walked along a wharf where a Revenue Department launch was tied up and found himself at the cargo docks. He went past the Old Wharf, cluttered with cotton bales, and stopped by the dry-docks. There was no trace of any human presence ahead of him now; the lights were all behind, the lamps of a ship moored to a wharf and two windows lit up in the harbor station. He walked on about five hundred meters, keeping the traffic-light hanging over the coast road to his right as a point of reference. Striking a match, he checked once again the route he was supposed to take, then screwed up the piece of paper and threw it in the water. He saw the dark outline of the warehouse under a skeleton of metal bridges. He sat down on an iron stairway at the water’s edge and lit a cigarette. The bell tower of San Donato struck midnight. He hung on a few minutes more, looking out at the dark sea and an uncertain light on the horizon. To reach the warehouse he had to circle round some enormous containers scattered quite randomly along the wharf. The yard was lit by yellow foglights which drew four shadows from his body, projected in diametrically opposed directions as if they wanted to flee from him at every step. He reached the back of the warehouse, going down the side where the dusty light of the lamps was weakest. On the handle of the door was a chain without a padlock and he slipped it out through the rings holding it. He eased open the door and a long strip of yellow light slid into the darkness inside, snapping at a right angle where it met a pile of crates. He coughed three times, keeping the coughs distinct and decisive, as he was supposed to, but there was no reply from inside the building. He stood immobile on the strip of light, coughed again, and again no one answered.

“It’s me,” he said softly, “I’ve come.”

He waited a moment, then repeated in a louder voice: “It’s me, I’ve come.” Only then did he suddenly feel absolutely certain that no one was there. Despite himself he began to laugh, first softly, then more loudly. He turned round and looked at the water a few meters away. Then stepped forward into the dark.

Author’s Note

This book owes much to a city, to a particularly cold winter and to a window. Writing it did not bring me an inordinate amount of levity. All the same I observed that the older one gets the more one tends to laugh on one’s own; and that seems to me a step forward towards a more composed and somehow self-sufficient sense of humor.

Spino is a name I invented myself and one I have grown fond of. Some may point out that it’s an abbreviation of Spinoza, a philosopher I won’t deny I love; but it signifies other things, too, of course. Spinoza, let me say in parenthesis, was a Sephardic Jew, and like many of his people carried the horizon with him in his eyes. The horizon, in fact, is a geometrical location, since it moves as we move. I would very much like to think that by some sorcery my character did manage to reach it, since he too had it in his eyes.

A.T.

Content

Antonio Tabucchi
The Edge of the Horizon

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Author’s Note