I explained. “I mean the future development of all the possibilities I can see in you.”
“Please explain a bit better.”
“I meant that during ten years of passivity, and with a temperament like yours, a late developer’s, you’ve built up an alarming strength. I think I’ve seen the first sign of it in the way you’ve grasped your freedom. Anything is possible for you now. Orimbelli has only been the spark that lit the fire.”
“Maybe,” she admitted with an ambiguous smile. “But go on. Continue with my horoscope.”
“I’m saying that you needed someone to awaken you, to reveal you to yourself. But now that you’ve scented the wind, you’ll make your own way, by yourself. Which road you’ll take, I can’t say. But I’m talking about a life that’s full in body and in spirit, one that a woman like you can endeavor to enjoy.” I was grasping for words just to get her talking, and far from having a specific point. But I felt a need to calm my apprehension.
She remained thoughtful. Then, still not looking at me, she said, “Maybe you’re right. But I’ve begun badly. I’ve been unlucky. And you are partly to blame.”
I showed my surprise, but she wouldn’t let me talk. She went on. “Yes! When I grabbed your flying invitation to come with you on the boat, when I pretended to be enthusiastic about the idea of going around the lake, how could you have failed to understand? Why did you go off as soon as we arrived at Polidora, and leave me in my brother-in-law’s hands? Had you arranged it beforehand? Is that how you sell a woman?”
She turned to look at me and repeated: “Is that how?”
“I haven’t sold anything,” I replied. “I knew there was an understanding between you.”
“What understanding!”
“Wasn’t there? He told me himself, in my room, the night before you came aboard.”
“There was no understanding between us and there has never been anything between him and me. But when you left us alone to go and pick up your girlfriend, I realized I’d been cruelly tricked and that I had to submit to it. I felt like a slave whose master has brought her home from the market.”
And that makes three, I said to myself. I had to acknowledge that Orimbelli had always been more adept at taking my prey off me. Beginning with Charlotte and then with Milena, he’d managed to snatch the tastiest morsel right out from under my nose. The one it was worth running around after for an entire summer—or the whole of one’s life.
Having let it all out, Matilde went back to her pointless threading of the rings on the sail cover, and I realized, watching her, that she must be the one I’d got stuck on without knowing it. From the time I’d started searching, as a boy, for the other part of myself, the part that continually eluded me, I’d followed it in vain during my early youth, then in the breaks during the war and my periods of internment in Switzerland.
She was the one. But I hadn’t been able to spot the anxiety on her face, or the near-desperate look she’d thrown my way when I’d uttered that fatal phrase at table only a few days before: Why don’t you try it yourself?
I hadn’t understood, and I hadn’t dared to understand, just as all the other times. And that’s how, by being too considerate, I lost the best in life. Orimbelli had understood everything right away. He’d muscled in and made the hit like a pro. Like Aimone Cat, he was all about timing. In fact, he’d say, whenever he talked about the war in Africa, his colonel and former general had had the ability to intuit the enemy’s moves and to preempt them, sometimes with a forced march, sometimes with an immediate retreat.
Meanwhile, since we hadn’t arrived at the restaurant, Orimbelli must have become suspicious. Although we hadn’t noticed, he’d appeared on the pier above us in time to hear the word “market.”
I looked up and saw him.
“What market are you talking about?” he asked with a fake smile.
“Matilde was asking me about the Luino market, where we’re going tomorrow. It’s a big market, a sort of fair,” I replied.
“And Landina?” Orimbelli realized she wasn’t there.
Matilde suddenly turned round. “She went to sort out her hair, but she’ll be back soon.”
And in fact Landina arrived ten minutes later. We all went to supper at the Gabella under a pergola of cherry laurels, between the lake and a game of bowls.
The next day we actually did go to the Luino market. We wandered around stalls selling chiefly camouflage cloth, uniforms and assorted provisions from the American army, which had recently liberated Italy from the Germans.
From Luino we went to the Cannero Castles, then to the Borromean Islands, passing offshore of Villa Cleofe.
I kept hoping for a chance to continue the conversation with Matilde that Orimbelli had interrupted. But I didn’t manage to exchange a single word with her. In the rare moments when she found herself alone with me, she looked for some reason or excuse to curtail my attempts.
X
WHEN IT SEEMED ADVISABLE to return to the villa, Orimbelli begged me to let Landina out at some nearby port. If his wife should see us as couples, two and two, she’d understand everything, he said.
Landina waited for us at a hotel in Luino while we turned up again at Oggebbio: the three of us, just as we’d left it.
Signora Cleofe didn’t even try to detain Matilde, who for her part thought only of getting away again. But just before supper, while her husband was still in his room and Matilde was helping Lenin to set the table in the dining room, she came into the drawing room where I was absorbed in my own thoughts, and said quietly to me, “I know what’s going on and I hope your intentions are serious. When you’ve finished your little tour of the lake, I trust your hearts will lead you in the right direction.” She went into the dining room, leaving me no time to respond.
I was lost for words. Signora Cleofe was convinced that I was getting along well with Matilde and could just decide to marry her. I wondered how long I could play along with this hoax. I decided to say a final good-bye to the Villa Cleofe and its inhabitants by the end of September. Perhaps, I told myself, I’d do well to put an end to this story right away. All I’d need to do would be invent some excuse, set sail for Luino tomorrow morning—alone—and never show up again.
I was sitting on my own in the drawing room with these new thoughts when Matilde came to tell me that dinner was ready. Wearing a dark, old dress, she looked just as she had the first time I’d seen her. She came over to my chair, put a hand on my shoulder and said with a sad smile, “Shall we go to the table?”
I got up right away and found myself face-to-face with her. She looked into my eyes, smiling bitterly. I decided to take advantage of the moment to test the situation. I stretched out my hand and caressed her face. Her lids began to close and she bent her head toward my hand, squeezing it between her cheek and her shoulder.
The gesture was enough to allow me a bit of hope. I’d have to play this game to the end; I’d started it, and it could reveal the path I’d always looked for. It might not lead to the marriage Signora Cleofe wanted, but take me down another, less straightforward and more difficult route. Such an undertaking would involve a clash with Orimbelli and result in altering the fate of more lives, above all mine, if it happened at a breaking point, as I thought it would. I knew by intuition rather than experience that in every game of hearts, there’s hidden drama; it’s set up and fed by the frivolous diversions and carefree intoxication of love. But it was no longer a game for me. It was a testing ground, a battle from which I expected to emerge as injured as I had to be in order to become a man at last, and to end an adolescence not even the war had managed to cast off.
That night in the bishop’s bedroom, I tossed for hours in the snare I felt myself caught in, with the result that I became only more entangled. I saw Matilde’s soft flesh yielding under the hands of Orimbelli at one hotel or another during warm nights on the lake: my flesh, which I’d unconsciously “sold” to a stranger, to that glutton, separating it, through a sorry erro
r, from the love that was meant for me.
The next morning, the 21st of September, we left for a week’s cruise. Around eight, Domenico and Lenin started helping Orimbelli load his bags onto the Tinca. Matilde was still in her room.
Just like real captains who board only when everything is ready for departure, I sat in the dining room with coffee and milk, butter and jam, waiting for Martina to bring me just-fried eggs and bacon from the kitchen for breakfast. She normally rose late, but Signora Cleofe was already stirring around the house. She saw me in the dining room and came to sit at table with an unusually kind demeanor. I realized that she wanted to speak to me, and she opened the conversation right away.
“I had a few words with Matilde yesterday evening,” she said, “but she’s rather impenetrable. I don’t wish to speak to Mario. May I know from you how things lie? I’m not curious; I’m worried. I want to calm down. Tell me: Do you have genuine intentions …”
“What can I say?” I replied. “I was thinking about it only last night, and seriously. But you’ll understand that some things—”
“Enough, enough,” she said. “I don’t need to hear more. If that’s how it is, only a question of time or discretion, very well. As long as the intention is there.”
During the conversation the signora sat with one hand over the other on the table, trying to look into my eyes. She got up and went into the drawing room.
Half an hour later she was on the balcony waving us off as we set sail for Luino.
Landina was waiting on the dock, having seen us from the window of the Albergo Ancora when we were halfway across the lake. She got into the boat and was happy to hear that we’d be wandering around for a week, going from one port to another.
She knew it would be the last bit of freedom for her. In fact, the past few days had brought her a letter from the States announcing the imminent return of her husband from prison. She’d told me in great confidence the day before, asking me not to let Orimbelli or Matilde know a thing about it.
“If, after five years, I can manage to find some purpose in life with my husband, all the better. If not, I’ll stay on my own at my mother’s.”
Landina’s father had died in the First World War, and she’d married at twenty-three, in ’40. Six months later her husband was called back to the army. In May of ’43 he’d been captured by the Americans on the Brombaglia peninsula, east of Tunisia. He was taken as a prisoner to America, first to California and then to Hawaii, where he had to stay until the summer of ’46. But he was now in a hospital or sanitorium in Norfolk with pulmonary complications, and was expected to be discharged after Christmas. In January he’d embark on a Liberty ship direct to Livorno or Naples.
Orimbelli suggested that we take advantage of the tramontana to get to the Borromean Islands. We actually arrived just after midday, in time to lunch on the terrace of the Albergo Delfino just above the jetty at Isola Bella.
That afternoon we went from Isola Bella to Isola Pescatori, and toward evening we dropped anchor in the port of Pallanza, once more at Orimbelli’s suggestion. I guessed that my friend wanted to sleep with his Matilde in a good bed on land, and in fact he suggested it as we docked. I proposed the Hotel Beau Rivage, and said I’d sleep in the harbor with Landina; I was afraid we’d be cleaned out by thieves during the night. He was sure I was right, and he got off with Matilde and their bags, promising to come back later for supper with us at the Ristorante Milano, where we could keep an eye on the boat.
During supper, Orimbelli seemed brooding and preoccupied. When it was over, Landina and I walked the two of them to the lobby of the Beau Rivage, where I saw each of them take a key from the porter. Orimbelli hadn’t dared ask for a double room, though he surely expected to get into Matilde’s during the course of the night.
Landina and I stayed up late, sitting and chatting outside the Caffè Bolongaro. She’d been having second thoughts, even regrets, ever since she’d had news of her husband’s certain return.
She looked toward the lights of Stresa. “I waited for him for so long,” she said. “But last year when I met you, I sometimes couldn’t remember his face or even his voice. We lived together for such a short time. In one of his letters to me, he wrote that often he couldn’t summon up my appearance. It must happen to everyone during a long separation. But now that he’s returning, I remember him so well! I feel as if I can already see him, even if I discover that he’s changed, and find it hard to recognize him. In his last letter he says it’s time we have a baby. And to think he’d only have had to wait another six months and he’d have found me just as he left me … But I don’t regret a thing.”
“You’re right not to feel bad about it. Maybe Penelope did the same thing, not with one of the men who wanted to marry her but with someone we don’t know about, someone anonymous, who’d be sure to disappear when her husband returned or she decided to remarry. We can’t wait for anyone; no one is waiting for us. Each of us lives and loves however, wherever and whenever he can.”
This was empty talk. An attempt, for her as well as for me, to adjust to living in the world. Not so much the one that was emerging after the war, but the world as it always is—bitter and difficult for everyone, all the time.
Toward midnight, she went to the boat. “I’ll join you right away,” I said. “I’ll have a smoke and then come down, too.”
I wasn’t sleepy. I walked a little way to the mausoleum of General Cadorna and then returned to the port, walking below the plants, and headed for the boat. By chance, I glanced at the road and saw a yellow light from the lamp of a bicycle slashing ahead of it. It was one of those bikes we rode at the time, with the dynamo screwed on to the front fork and a little wheel inside the tire.
I drew back into the shadow of a magnolia. The bicycle came closer and slowed when it got to the little slope near the Ristorante Milano. By the light of the streetlamps, I thought I recognized the man pedalling as Orimbelli. Perhaps he was coming to the boat. But he passed by the harbor without turning, climbed the slope and set off in the direction of Intra.
Was it really him? And if so, where could he be going at this hour, already after midnight? Where had he found the bicycle?
I went to lie down on my couchette without saying anything to Landina. But I couldn’t fall asleep. I asked myself who the devil Orimbelli really was. At his house the day before, when I went to the bishop’s bedroom for the night, I’d found him hurriedly closing the chest—just like a thief— with his initials on it: T.M.O.
“Temistocle Mario Orimbelli.” I repeated it to myself, almost as if those three cabbalistic initials would serve as the key to unlocking the mystery of his life—if there really was a mystery to it, and not merely the tactlessness one sees in all good-for-nothings, which serves to furnish them with the choice cuts at all times and in all circumstances.
A month before, during a stopover at the Cannero Castles, he’d confided in me that his wife was sure he had a lover in Intra. And it couldn’t be the pharmacist’s wife, but someone else much younger. Probably the one he’d brought from Naples, as Cavallini implied.
Maybe he was on his way to see her on a bicycle lent him by the doorman, after spending a couple of hours with Matilde. He was certainly capable of that and more. That was supposing he actually was the cyclist I’d seen go by, and it wasn’t someone who vaguely resembled him.
XI
I WAS WOKEN BY THE BELL of Pallanza parish church sounding the hour for Mass. It was Sunday, in fact, and I’d slept till nine.
As soon as I popped my head out of the canvas, I saw Matilde and Orimbelli on the pier, their bags at their feet.
“I realized you were still sleeping and didn’t want to wake you,” he said.
With the bells pealing through the air, we left port and headed for Santa Caterina. I’d hardly slept and I felt tired. It promised to be a splendid day, and as the shore receded, we could see the little island of San Giovanni near land, with Castagnola point just beyond. Clusters of leaves,
already red or yellow, showed up against the dense foliage. Autumn was creeping around the lake that year like an unseen servant, silent and stealthy, but quick in his movements, as if it were his duty to change the backdrop scenery for the last act of a play.
During the crossing, I told Matilde the story of Beato Alberto Besozzi, who had become a hermit several centuries earlier on the sheer cliff in front of us, after surviving a shipwreck in the same waters we were sailing.
“Before the shipwreck, the Blessed Alberto was a merchant, or rather, a moneylender who did business in the villages around the lake. One day, his small boat capsized when a storm overcame him. He managed to swim to shore, just at the foot of the rocky wall.
“He was from Intra; he’d made money there, spent it, found women, had friends and enemies. He went back home, where perhaps he had a wife and children. But the shipwreck had opened his eyes. Enough, he must have said, I’ve no wish to struggle further. I’ll stay here and eat alborelle carp and salad. And in fact he never left the grotto in which he took refuge. The fishermen brought him fish, the peasants dropped vegetables over the cliff for him and no one disturbed him.
“From time to time,” I concluded, “I think about becoming a hermit myself … retiring in some remote place away from all these struggles. And more than anything, from the world’s disappointments.”
I wanted her to understand through indirect reference that I’d suffered a blow, and that my disillusionment was strong enough to make me want to spurn life.
In the small church, which rested on a limestone incline, Orimbelli, Matilde and I had to feel our way to the altar, it was so dark inside the sanctuary. I went over to turn on the switch and immediately a crystal coffin beneath the altar was illuminated. The body of the saint appeared, lying on a cushion of white silk, his hands and face browned and crisped by the centuries. He had on a golden cope, and his miter was askew.
I switched off the lights and the coffin, which was shaped like Orimbelli’s trunk, was dark again.
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