But whose turn was it to take action?
XIII
LIFE AT THE VILLA resumed its old rhythm. We always ate at the same hour, served by Lenin. Domenico worked in the garden and his daughter, Martina, stayed in the kitchen.
I slept as usual in the bishop’s bedroom, Orimbelli in the little room on the top floor and Matilde in the room adjacent to that of poor Signora Cleofe, now closed.
At night, between sleeping and waking, I’d listen out to catch any sound or hushed voice that might alert me to Orimbelli’s inevitable movements, but I never heard anything. Nights in my room were peaceful and silent, and the only thing I heard was the gnawing of woodworm in the wardrobe, where the red vestments of the dead Monsignor Alemanno Berlusconi had hung for twenty years.
The Tinca, which I’d fetched from the port of Luino, rocked in the dock in the spot where Signora Cleofe had been found. I’d tried a couple of times to say good-bye and go off in my boat. But Orimbelli and Matilde seemed so frightened by the idea of being alone in the villa that I’d ended up staying. Every now and again, I went to Intra or stayed in my boat, intent on some little job. I spent most of my time reading in a large study I’d discovered on the top floor, close to the little room Orimbelli occupied. Among all the books on physics and mathematics, which the frontispieces proclaimed had belonged to the engineer, Angelo Berlusconi, were some saints’ lives that must have belonged to the bishop, and hundreds of old books that helped me to pass the hours of those long days between September and the end of October, while the inquest into Signora Cleofe’s death was proceeding.
More than once after tea, which was always served under the copper beech between five and five-thirty, Orimbelli set down his empty cup and invited me to take a stroll through the grounds, as if he had something important to tell me. I always took the bait, sure that he wanted to confess his secret to me, and I followed him willingly to the end of the path behind the oleas. Below us, the shore had grown wider with the autumnal drought, and gentle waves broke soundlessly over the greenish stones of the lake bed. Surrounded by the scent of the olea fragrans and partially hidden among the leaves, Orimbelli would look around suspiciously before asking me:
“In your opinion, what would one need to spend in order to modernize this villa? I don’t mean structurally, just functionally—perhaps the bathrooms, the boiler, the kitchen …”
I always answered him with random figures, aware that his question was a ruse and his aim to determine whether my voice or behavior revealed any change of opinion toward him.
Other times he’d ask me, in the same sly manner, what I thought of the public prosecutor, but he’d preempt my response with phrases like “What a magistrate! What objectivity! And what finesse!”
“Old-fashioned magistrates,” I’d reply. “Philosophers, rather than judges or investigators.”
The time I gave him that answer, he launched in and went on talking for half an hour. “Definitely,” he agreed. “Philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists should be magistrates, and not investigators! Just think: the criminologist Lombroso, the great Lombroso, whom I’ve always considered a master, discovered, when he studied the skull of the brigand Vilella, that in place of the occipital ridge the outlaw had a depression as one finds in gorillas or chimpanzees. That’s biological fatalism for you! Man does good or ill according to how he’s formed. Those with primitive characteristics also have animalistic responses. If I had an occipital depression, for example … But feel it! Feel just here: Is there a depression? No, right? There’s a ridge. And what a ridge!”
When I’d touched the back of his head to satisfy him, he asked me if it might not establish a line of defense. If I didn’t think, to put it bluntly, that he could be passed off as crazy, if necessary—or that he might not actually be crazy. But when he heard that the documents had been archived and the whole sad case could be considered closed, he became the most normal man in the world.
I renewed my efforts to leave, but it was impossible. Orimbelli seemed terrified at the idea of being left alone with Matilde.
“You must stay,” he told me. “At least until we’re married. What would people say, and the staff, too, if we stayed on our own in the villa? You can consider the bishop’s bedroom your own.”
One night a storm broke out, the last of the year, accompanied by thunder, lightning and blasts of wind. We seemed to be in the middle of one of those blitzes of a few years before.
Awakened by the racket, it occurred to me that the Tinca was only secured in the dock by two thin cords between small poles. They might have loosened and untied themselves, or slipped off during the past few days. It wouldn’t be the first time bad weather had sucked at a boat poorly secured in the dock and then smashed it against the shore.
I put on my trousers, tiptoed out of the room and went down to the ground floor, finding the steps by the light that kept flashing through the skylight over the stairway.
The Tinca was rocking peacefully, caressed by the undertow. I made sure the cords were fast and went back upstairs.
When I got to the first floor, I passed by poor Signora Cleofe’s bedroom and Matilde’s on my way back to my own, which was on the other side at the end of the corridor. I’d come to the foot of the stair that led to the mansard when a flash of lightning, aimed directly at the villa, vividly illuminated the corridor and the first flight of stairs in front of me. I saw Orimbelli sitting on the top stair, his legs crossed like an Egyptian scribe’s. His eyes met mine and shone for a moment like a scribe’s glass eyes before everything went dark again.
My hand was already on the handle and I went into my room, shutting the door behind me. I lay down the bed and wondered if Orimbelli were on his way to or from Matilde’s room. I looked at the clock: it was three. He slept little at night, at least to judge by his appearance in the morning; he never woke before ten. Of course he went to visit Matilde. Then perhaps he’d sit for hours on the top stair surveying the corridor, in order to see whether I’d sneak into the room of his slave.
More than once, I sought Matilde’s feet under the table, but in vain. She seemed to have forgotten our former touching and brushing against each other. I wondered why she no longer considered it appropriate, and whether the idea that she was morally complicit in Signora Cleofe’s suicide had returned her to the lifestyle of the previous ten years, or maybe convinced her to join forces with Orimbelli. It was no longer possible to speak to her or to take up the conversation where we’d left off. Surrounded morning and evening by the two servant women, she was preoccupied with the successful running of the house, and I could never find her alone or with nothing to do. Orimbelli moved continually between one room and the next, popping up around every corner like a restless shadow. We met up only at table and at teatime and spoke of trifling household matters—about Domenico, who was becoming increasingly deaf, plants, flowers and everything else that seemed to us completely devoid of any reference to what had happened or its consequences.
•
I seemed to have become co-owner of the villa, the heir of poor Signora Cleofe. It was understood that I could come and go as I pleased, order the servants around, choose wines I liked from the cellar and make use of the small harbor and the dock, where I’d decided to leave the boat for the whole of the winter season.
At the end of November, Orimbelli and Matilde let it be known that they’d be married in Milan in a few days. They’d got used to each other on the Tinca, and it seemed to have brought them together sufficiently to face married life. Matilde had not expected it so soon, but it must have seemed inevitable when the results of the inquest into Signora Cleofe’s death became public.
The wedding was to be celebrated without guests or publicity beyond the banns in Oggebbio and Milan. But the news quickly spread, and it became known that the Puricelli cousins had condemned it. To be precise, they let even the most distant relatives know that they were “condemning it.” Cavallini spread the news in Oggebbio.
On
the morning of the wedding, the four of us left for Milan together in a taxi from Intra: the bride and groom sat in the back with Landina, and I sat in front with the driver, as was right and proper. But at Fondo Toce, or rather, before we’d gone very far, Landina began to feel carsick and asked if she could change places with me. I went behind to take her place beside the bride, and found myself in contact with Matilde, our thighs and shoulders touching; the car was rather small. Orimbelli seemed indifferent. By then, he’d got where he wanted to be and was no longer pointlessly jealous or afraid.
I tried to pick up some message other than heat from Matilde’s body: the pulsing of a tendon, a muscular contraction, some barely perceptible friction from her leg. But there was nothing by the time we reached the entrance to the motorway beyond Sesto Calende. When we got as far as Gallarate, her entire body moved, but only to stretch, and she became still again immediately afterward.
The marriage was performed in a side chapel of the Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio, Orimbelli’s natal parish, and witnessed by Landina and by me. The priest believed in neither conversation nor advice and confined himself to handing the groom a small red book after the ceremony, a sort of passport stating that Temistocle Mario Orimbelli and Matilde Clelia Scrosati were legally married from that day forward.
“For the hotels,” the priest explained. In those days illegitimate couples weren’t admitted to hotels, or were forced to take separate rooms.
As soon as we were out of the church, Orimbelli ordered the driver to take us to the cathedral square, where he asked him to park. He crossed the piazza with us and went down the alley next to the Albergo Diurno Cobianchi, as if he wanted to take us for a bath or some other service. But then he turned to the right, toward the entrance of a restaurant that was fairly renowned at the time—the Tantalo—where we ate the wedding lunch as if it were any other meal.
I came to believe that the name of this restaurant, where I’d eaten so many times before the war, had purposely appeared before me like a trick of fate. Had Orimbelli not inflicted on me, for months and months, a tantalizing agony?
On the return journey, the last leg of which was made in the dark, the problem of contact came up again. Matilde kept close to me, but under the pretext of necessity, and without indicating that she found the slightest difference between my leg or anyone else’s.
Two days after the wedding, the couple left on a trip they wanted Landina and me to take with them. They went to a hotel in Sorrento, where they’d booked a room with a seaview toward Capri. Orimbelli must have felt at home in Sorrento and Capri since he’d lived in Naples for four or five years. He promised, if I went with them, to show me some interesting things: to take me to Pompeii, for example, where he had an archeologist friend who would show us everything that had been found in the Lupanar, the old brothels. But Landina couldn’t get away, and I didn’t want to go by myself.
When they came back, autumn’s display was over. The trees in the lakeside gardens were bare, but the evergreens stood out cleaner and darker above the pale shades of the mimosas, already nearly in flower.
Informed by a telegram, I was at the villa when they returned. I decided to stay with them until after Christmas, which by then was just around the corner. Landina came to spend a few days, and she often stayed over with me, sharing the bishop’s bed, a small double.
•
Winter on the lake is very mild, especially on the Piedmont side, which stays green throughout the year. But evening falls suddenly, and in those years, there wasn’t much to do apart from shut oneself up in the house in front of a fire to read, talk, sip vintage spirits or simply watch the fire. Anyone who’s passed even a single winter in a villa on the lake knows just how much peace and how much boredom can be distilled into a single day. The spectacle of the water, which turns from steel blue to the color of lead under the winter rains; the snow appearing on the mountains; sunrise and sunset during good weather; the boats’ toing-and-froing; the reliably windy days; the flowering of the chrysanthemums, mimosas, camellias and finally, azaleas—all these things signal the season’s passing. From behind windows, and amid old furniture from the period when the villas were built, the few who remain living in them see the passing of time in a way that’s impossible in the city, or in apartment houses.
That’s how I spent the winter months that year, with Orimbelli and Matilde, and also in the melancholy company of a shadow we couldn’t escape. Toward March, when the winds began, it seemed to take advantage of every gust to insinuate itself into its old domain.
“I heard it last night,” Martina once whispered in my ear as she served me my caffè e latte. “It was sighing behind the dock. Poor signora! I can’t believe she killed herself.”
Other times it was Domenico. After looking around, he’d sidle up to me in the park and tell me he’d seen her early that morning, behind the steamy glass of the greenhouse.
It seemed the only ones who didn’t see or hear her were the married couple. Whenever they returned to the villa after a couple of days away, I found them increasingly weary of their union, one as disillusioned as the other. Orimbelli would often put his arm through mine and draw me deep into the grounds, behind the olea bushes, on the rotunda facing the lake.
“I’ve been loved too much,” he told me one day. “I don’t mean by my wife, poor thing—she hated me … Yet the hearts I’ve conquered! But now I’m wondering, my friend, where all this love has gone. Can it have vanished like a cloud? And the love I’ve given, has it dissipated as well? Because even in the most trivial situations, with Germaine or Wilma, or Signora Armida, I’ve always expressed a certain amount of love. For me, love is a fluid, a disbursement, an emanation issuing from my body. And yet there’s not a trace of it left in me.”
“When did you first notice yourself running dry?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure. In the last few days.”
“Have you tried going back to the first presentiments of this feeling? To look for the reason behind such a change? There must have been an event—I don’t know—an incident, a trauma, as the psychoanalysts …”
He interrupted. “I hope you’re not implying …”
“For God’s sake,” I reassured him, “I’m miles from implying anything.”
“Good,” he wrapped up. “Let’s not refer to that. We’ll not refer to it, ever. What happened, happened. I’ve simply allowed myself to let down my hair with you for a moment because I have no one else to speak to. But you misunderstood me. For that reason, we won’t speak of it further.”
So saying, he turned back toward the villa. I followed him meekly, and when he began discussing the weather and telling me he already felt spring in the air, I agreed with him.
“Yes,” he said, talking to himself, “spring’s on its way back, but not love. Because love is a mirage, a trick that lures us to the entrance of a splendid garden and then melts away and disappears, leaving us in the dark.”
XIV
IN APRIL, when the whole of the garden was ready to flower, an unexpected snowfall frosted the mountains right down to the shore. Such an April storm hadn’t been seen for forty years. Centuries-old trees fell down under the weight of the snow in all the gardens. A few kilometers away, in the villa that had belonged to Massimo d’Azeglio, a cedar of Lebanon split in two, and a moustache on the marble bust of the marchese even broke off on account of the sudden freeze, or perhaps a fallen branch.
In the grounds of the Villa Cleofe the most illustrious victim was the huge magnolia that rose on the side facing the road: an enormous tree, towering over the roof by several meters and almost completely hiding the house from view. The top, weighted down by snow, was bent and the trunk had collapsed at the level of the roof. The magnolia had the appearance of a giant with its head resting on its chest. The entire upper part had toppled over where it had broken above the lower branches. The wreckage did not constitute any danger, but with every gust of wind it began to groan at the breaking point, which was splin
tered and dismembered. Now and again throughout the day, more often in the silence of the night, one heard the plant’s sorrow, a heartbroken lament that came when the wind blew from the lake or the mountains.
On one of those nights, a little after the final disastrous winter snow, I was sitting at the fireplace in the dining room with the two Orimbellis and Landina. We’d dined well, almost happily, and for once, the habitual sulkiness of the married couple seemed to have given way to a better mood. The Brighenti couple had been to supper. The husband was an accountant and director of a bank, at least one branch and, as a lieutenant in East Africa during the war, he’d been Orimbelli’s army companion. At table, therefore, we’d had to listen to stories of war and colonial life, but it hadn’t bothered us, since Brighenti wasn’t a braggart and he told a good story.
“Do you remember that time we found a well after three days in the desert?” he asked his friend. “Everyone ran to drink, but Aimone Cat stood up in his stirrups and cried, ‘Animals first, then the men!’”
Orimbelli tried to change the subject, but Brighenti continued. “This fine fellow,” and he pointed at Orimbelli, “was the first to throw himself in the water. So Aimone Cat, up on his horse, thundered, ‘Captain, from now on we’ll consider you a camel!’ ”
The Brighentis left around eleven. They were going to stay in their own villa at Premeno, above Intra.
The silence that had fallen over us since the guests’ departure an hour earlier seemed to make us gloomier than on any previous evening. Temporarily transported to his days of glory, Orimbelli suddenly found himself before the fire with his own thoughts. No one could think of a thing to say, and the pressure to initiate conversation made the women tongue-tied, too.
In the silence we began to hear the moaning of the split magnolia. Every five minutes it whined like a soul in pain. Immediately afterward, the shutters creaked as if someone had passed through the air.
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