The Flight of the Falcon

by Daphne Du Maurier

  Looking back, I saw the students break from the streets into the piazza, burst from windows, doors, pour onto the square and cover it in a sudden movement like a massive tidal wave. But instead of the roar of anger I expected, the volleys of stones, the clash of steel, the outburst of pent-up hatred as the opposing factions met and mingled, they started swarming up the hill behind us, shouting, cheering, waving, and they were calling as they ran, “Donati… Donati… viva Donati…”

  Now as we mounted the southern hill, up the via Rossini, our painted chariot lurching, trembling behind the galloping horses, the students spilled out of the buildings on either side to join their fellows. The screaming stopped, and the terror too, and the violence that came from all of them was the violence of excitement, of acclaim. All the city shouted, and there was no other sound but this, the roar “Donati… Donati…” Aldo yelled into my ear “Are they fighting yet?” and I yelled back at him, “They’re not going to fight; they’re coming after us. Don’t you hear them calling you?”

  Intent upon the horses he only smiled, and now as the street narrowed and became steeper yet the leaders, feeling the upward strain, strove to mount the hill before losing impetus, before the steeply rising street, curving to the right, defeated their attempt to master gravity.

  “Arri! Arri!” yelled Aldo, and the cry, spurring the leaders to greater effort, with the thunder of the six abreast behind them, brought them in sight of the piazza Maggiore before the ducal palace and gallantly, superbly, they breasted the last incline. As they faltered, staggered, the students waiting beyond the fountain ran towards them, seizing their bridles. Our curving fan of six abreast, bearing us with them, dared the final slope, and sobbing, with heaving flanks, they felt the check of rein at last, and trembled to a halt where the piazza broadened before the palace doors.

  Still the multitudinous cries rang out, and as I stared about me, dizzy, one hand still clutching the chariot rail, I saw that the windows of the ducal palace were black with faces too, as were the houses opposite. People were standing on the steps of the Duomo, they were clinging to the fountain, and now the mass of students who had followed us up the hill from the piazza della Vita came swarming into the square. In a moment we should be surrounded, overwhelmed, but the armed students waiting by the palace doors formed an immediate circle round us, while each of the eighteen horses had a student on either side to hold his bridle. The cavalcade, ourselves among it, was now protected by a single cordon bearing swords, each student dressed as Aldo was, in doublet and hose, and I recognized his friends, Cesare, Giorgio, Federico, Domenico, Sergio, and others of his bodyguard. The picture that they made, the splash of color beside the painted chariot and the eighteen horses, still panting, heaving, from their victorious course, checked the body of emerging students as they advanced, shouting and yelling, onto the square. Once again the cry went up, “Donati… viva Donati…,” echoed from the palace windows, from the houses opposite, from the Duomo steps. I looked at Aldo. He had the reins still in his hands and he was gazing down at the eighteen horses, unmindful of the cheers. Then he turned to me.

  “We’ve done it,” he said. “We’ve done it…” and he started laughing, he threw back his head and laughed, the laughter taken up with cheers by the waiting crowds of students and Ruffanesi. Then he unshackled me from the chains binding me to the chariot front, unshackled himself as well, and shouted to the students beyond the cordon, “Here is the Falcon! Here is your Duke!”

  I saw nothing but waving arms and tossing heads, and the shouting never ceased but grew ever louder. The students guarding the chariot shouted too, and I stood there bewildered, helpless, a foolish figure in my golden wig and saffron robe, acknowledging the cheers that were not meant for me.

  Something hit me on the cheek and fell upon the chariot floor. It was not the stone that I expected but a flower, and the girl who threw the flower was Caterina.

  “Armino,” she cried, “Armino!” her enormous eyes wide with laughter, and I saw that my saffron robe had come adrift, showing the jade shirt beneath and the black jeans, and wave upon wave of laughter, happy, friendly, rippled above the cheers.

  I said to Aldo, “It’s not me they want, it’s you,” but he did not answer, and looking behind me I saw that he had leapt from the chariot, and, diving under the surrounding cordon, was racing to the side door of the ducal palace. I cried to Giorgio, “Stop him… stop him…” but Giorgio, laughing, shook his head.

  “It’s part of the plan,” he said, “it’s all in the book. He’s going to show himself to the crowds in the Piazza del Mercato from the palace.”

  I tore off my robe and the wig, and flung them down, and leapt out of the chariot after Aldo. The laughter and the cheers pursued me—I heard them as I ran. I shook off the restraining hand of Domenico, who tried to stop me, and ran through the side door, along the passage and across the quadrangle in chase of Aldo. I heard him race up the stairs to the gallery above, and I went after him. He burst through the great door to the throne room, and he was laughing as he ran. I was close upon his heels but he slammed the door, and when I opened it he had fled through the throne room to the Room of the Cherubs and beyond.

  “Aldo…” I shouted, “Aldo…”

  There was no one there. The Room of the Cherubs was empty. So was the Duke’s bedroom, and the dressing room, and the small temple beneath the right-hand tower. Hearing voices I went to the balcony between the towers, and Signora Butali was there, with the Rector, both of them staring at the Piazza del Mercato far below. They turned in astonishment as I burst upon them, staring at me blankly, the signora in sudden fear.

  “What is it, what’s happened?” she asked. “We heard them cheering in the city. Is it all over?”

  “How can it be over?” said the Rector. “Donati told us himself the finale followed the chariot flight. We’ve seen nothing yet.”

  He seemed perplexed, disappointed, cheated of the magnificence he had not witnessed. I went from the balcony through the study to the audience room. It was empty, like the others. Then, as I called Aldo once again, Carla Raspa came through from the gallery beyond. She put out her hands to me, laughing,

  “I saw you from the window,” she said. “It was wonderful, superb. I watched you both driving behind the horses onto the piazza Maggiore. Where has he gone?”

  There were no guardians here today, no guides. The portrait of the gentlewoman stood on its easel unattended, the tapestry was in its place upon the wall. I ran across the room and jerked it back, revealing the closed door. I opened it, and putting one hand before the other on the narrow twisting steps began to climb. As I climbed I shouted, “Aldo!” The sickness and the vertigo I had suffered as a child enveloped me. I could not see, I could only feel the twisting spiral of the steps above. Up, up, forever up, with bursting heart and retching belly, and the creeping dust of years on my fumbling hands. I heard myself sobbing as I crawled, and the tower was forever out of reach, like the pit below. Time was suspended, reason with it. There was nothing left within me but the urge to climb, and sliding, stumbling, I swung between heaven and hell. Then, raising my head, I felt the air upon it, and the door above was open to the balustrade. Once more I shouted “Aldo!” opening my eyes for the first time since I had begun to crawl the twisting stair. The patch of sky, brilliant with the sun, distorted vision. I thought I saw the spread wings of a bird, its body darkening the open door, and crawling blindly on, dizzy with nausea, I gripped the topmost stair and peered about me, recognizing nothing.

  The door was half the size of the one I dimly recollected from childhood days, and the narrow ledge beyond it, in the open, was not the balustrade we used to climb. The shape was not rounded but octagonal. Suddenly I understood. I had climbed beyond the balustrade. This was the smaller parapet beneath the minaret. The pinnacle rose above me to the sky.

  I felt his hands upon me. He dragged me from the stairway to the ledge.

  “Lie still,” said Aldo. “The ledge reaches betwee
n hip and thigh, no more. If you look down, you’ll fall.”

  It seemed to me that the turret rocked. Perhaps it was the sky. My hands fastened upon his. Mine were slippery with sweat, but his were cold.

  “How did you find the way?” he asked.

  “The door,” I said, “the hidden door behind the tapestry. I remembered.”

  The eyes, astonished, searching, turned to laughter. “You win,” he said. “I reckoned without that. Poor Beato…”

  Then frowning, steadying me with his arm, he said, “You’d have done better to go with Marco on the boat. That’s why I sent you to him. This isn’t your battle. I realized that on Wednesday night.”

  They were still cheering and shouting in the piazza Maggiore by the entrance to the ducal palace, and now the cry had been taken up from the piazza del Mercato below the towers. Lying against Aldo I could see nothing but the sky. The shouting, coming from beneath us, rose on every side. The students must be swarming downhill from the Maggiore to the Mercato some hundreds of feet lower, beyond the Porta del Sangue and the city wall.

  “There’s been no battle,” I said. “You miscalculated. Your firebrand speeches were just wasted effort. Hark at those cheers.”

  “That’s what I meant,” he said. “It could have gone the other way. If we and the horses had crashed, if we had failed, they’d have been murdering each other now, each faction screaming sabotage. It was a gamble.”

  I stared at him, uncomprehending. “You did it deliberately?” I asked. “You roused them to that pitch of frenzy, dicing with hundreds of lives, your own as well, on the incredibly long odds that Claudio’s feat might temporarily unite them?”

  He looked at me and smiled. “Not so temporary,” he said. “You’ll see. They’ve smelled blood, that’s what they wanted. And the city too. Everyone who watched us ride today participated. It’s the first and last lesson someone directing any spectacle has to learn: make your audience one.”

  Still holding me, he brought me closer to the narrow balustrade, and clutching his arm I stared down to the piazza del Mercato below the city walls. The great marketplace was black with people, so were the converging streets, and immediately beneath us, on the sloping palace precincts, massed groups of students stood, their heads upturned.

  “If by the remotest chance,” he said, “my second exploit fails, I’ve left everything to you. It’s yours by right. I made my will on Wednesday night after you gave me that letter, and had it witnessed by Livia Butali and her husband. The will says that we are brothers—my vanity forbade me to admit otherwise.”

  The cry “Donati” came now from the piazza del Mercato, as the students from above the palace went to swell those in the crowds below. They must have seen us move on our narrow ledge, beneath the minaret, for the cries grew louder, and the cheers, and all the heads were tilted to the sky.

  “You were right to suspect my determination not to lose face,” said Aldo, “but wrong to accuse me of silencing the slanderer. The thief in Rome confessed. He stole and also murdered. The Commissioner telephoned to tell me late last night. The police weren’t after you—they simply wanted to find out whether you knew more than you had told them.”

  “You didn’t kill Marta?” I stammered, astonished and ashamed.

  “Yes, I killed her,” he said, “but not with a knife—the knife was merciful. I killed her by despising her, by being too proud to accept the fact I was her son. Wouldn’t you say that counts as murder?”

  Aldo was Marta’s son. Then it all swung into focus. The pieces fitted. The foundling boy, with his mother to care for him as nurse, came to live under my parents’ roof. The foundling took the place of the boy they had lost. The mother stayed, devoting herself to Aldo, then to me. She kept her secret until that birthday evening in November, when on a sudden lonely, drunken impulse, she revealed the truth.

  “Well,” repeated Aldo, “it was murder, wasn’t it?”

  I thought no more of his relationship to Marta, but of my own mother who had died of cancer in Turin. When she had scribbled me a line from hospital. I had not answered.

  “Yes,” I said, “it was murder. But we’re both guilty, and for the same cause.”

  Together we looked down at the cheering crowds. The cry “Donati… viva Donati!” was for neither of us; it was for a legendary figure which the university students and the Ruffanesi had created in their minds, born of all men’s desire to worship something greater than themselves.

  “The flight’s over,” I said. “Tell them it’s finished.”

  “It isn’t finished,” he said. “The true flight’s yet to come. Tested in the hills, just like the chariot drive.”

  He propped me against the ledge, and groping his way round the narrow balustrade reached down into the parapet for something long and slender, silver-colored, made up of a million feathers that as he touched them shivered in the wind. The feathers were sewn upon silk, the silk of a parachute, and beneath the material were fiber struts, interwoven and interlaced. Cords hung from the center, forming a harness. Aldo lifted them up, standing the whole contrivance on the parapet floor, and he unfolded them, and I saw that they were wings.

  “No deception,” said Aldo. “We’ve been working on these all winter. When I say we, I mean my ex-partisan friends who fly glider ’planes today. These wings are designed to a specific formula, identical with the real wings of a falcon. We tried them out in the hills, just as we did the horses, and I can promise you they frighten me far less.”

  He stood there laughing at me. “On my last flight I was airborne for ten minutes,” he said, “on the western slopes of Monte Cappello. I tell you, Beo, there’s nothing to it. The mechanism can’t fail. The only thing that can fail is the human element. And after what I’ve just achieved that isn’t likely.”

  He was no longer white and tense as he had been before the race. The smile on his face was joyous, no grimace. He raised one hand in salutation to the cheering crowds below.

  “The landing may be ungainly, not the flight,” he said. “I aim to clear the piazza itself, and strike the softer ground where the valley slopes. The parachute behind the wings will open when I release the cords, and become my brake. They told me, when I did it in the hills, that the actual drop looked like a crumpled kite. But you never know. I might soar further this time.”

  His confidence was arrogant, supreme. He looked out to the distant hills and smiled.

  “Aldo, don’t go,” I said. “It’s madness. Suicide.”

  He was not listening. He did not care. His faith was a fanatic’s faith, proved through centuries to bring believers to destruction. Like Claudio before him, he could only die.

  Standing on the ledge he began to strap the harness about his waist, buckle the bindings to his shoulders, step into the slots which would enclose his feet. He put both arms into the fiber webbing beneath the wings, raising them aloft. Spread-eagled thus, he appeared to me helpless, even grotesque. He would never free himself from the lashings that encompassed him. The fiber, black beneath the silver, looked like nails.

  The crowd, three hundred feet or more below us in the piazza del Mercato, became suddenly silent. The massed heads, upturned, no longer cried “Donati!” They watched and waited while the figure, self-imprisoned, stood motionless on the parapet edge, outlined against the sky.

  I crawled closer and put my arms about him, clasping his legs. “No,” I said, “no…”

  I must have shouted, for my voice came back to me in echo, mocking me, and traveling downwards was caught by the crowd immediately beneath, so breeding fear. A sigh arose, swelling to protestation and alarm.

  “Listen to them,” I cried. “They don’t want it. They’re afraid. You’ve proved yourself once. Why in the name of God again?”

  He looked down at me and smiled. “Because that’s it,” he said. “Once is never enough. That’s what they have to learn. You, Cesare, all those waiting students, all Ruffano—once is no good. You must always risk a second time, a
third, a fourth, no matter what it is you want to achieve. Get out of my way!”

  He thrust backwards with his foot and sent me sprawling against the door. I slumped sideways, striking the step with my chest, and, momentarily winded, knelt there an instant, gasping for breath, my eyes closed. When I opened them again he was standing with the wings spread poised for flight. He no longer looked grotesque, but beautiful. As he launched himself into the air the wind current filled the lining of the wings and they bellied out, then tautened, like the sudden jerking of a child’s toy. His body was horizontal between the wings, his arms and feet within the slots were part of the structure. Buoyant, effortless, he soared above the crowd, drifting with the wind as he had foretold. The feathers, silver in the sunlight, turned to gold. Gliding south, he would touch down in the valley beyond the marketplace.

  I watched for him to pull the rip cord of the braking parachute, as he had described. He did not do so. Instead, he must have kicked his body free, letting the apparatus which he had helped to build drift on without him. He threw himself clear, spreading his arms wide like the wings he had discarded, then, bringing them to his side, he plummeted to earth and fell, his body, small and fragile, a black streak against the sky.

  EXTRACT FROM “THE WEEKLY COURIER” RUFFANO

  Professor Aldo Donati, Director of the Arts Council and a leading citizen of our beloved city, who lost his life in a tragic accident on the day of the Festival, will be mourned, not only by his surviving brother and his friends, but by every student within the university, by his colleagues and associates, and by all the inhabitants of the Ruffano he loved so well. The eldest son of Aldo Donati, who for many years was Superintendent of the Ducal Palace, he was born and educated in the city. During the war he served in the Air Force and won his pilot’s wings. Shot down in 1943 he managed to escape, and during the German Occupation he formed a group of irregulars in the mountains and fought among his fellow partisans until the Liberation.