The Heron

by Giorgio Bassani

  Nives yawned. She lazily lifted her naked arm and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. Half-buried beneath the waxy, fat flesh of her upturned hand, the little gold wedding ring was almost invisible.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Twenty minutes to five,’ he replied, staring her in the face. ‘I have to get going.’

  ‘Christ almighty – it’ll be so cold! Is it really cold?’

  ‘No, not very. I think it’ll rain.’

  ‘Don’t forget to take your raincoat, ’Dgardo!’

  ‘I’ve already put it in the car.’

  ‘And the wellington boots?’

  ‘Likewise.’

  While they spoke they were observing each other: he with his hands on the bedstead, she stretched out, as always, on her side, the right-hand side of the bed. But what they said to each other was of no importance. It served, for her too, only to buy time. In the meantime she too was scrutinizing, studying, weighing things up.

  ‘I really have no idea why anyone would want to go hunting in winter,’ Nives continued. ‘Especially between Christmas and New Year! See if you don’t come home with pneumonia!’

  ‘Why should that be? All I need to do is keep well wrapped up.’

  ‘Have you at least put on the woollen suit?’

  ‘Yes. Mamma took care to put it out on the clothes-horse.’

  He hadn’t planned to say that, he could swear to it. All the same, Nives grimaced.

  ‘Since Mamma Erminia always wants to plan ahead for you –’ she said, giving a series of curt nods of her head, which was full of curlers – ‘it wouldn’t be polite of me to get in her way.’

  Luckily, she quickly changed her tone.

  ‘How can anyone do that?’ she continued, ‘Staying out, soaked through, for five or six hours without a break? Good Lord, you could keep in mind that you’re no longer a spring chicken! Just thinking about it, I get goosebumps. Brrrr.’

  She laughed, narrowing her eyes. And he, at the end of the bed, while curiously observing their shape and every detail of that face, felt a sense of stupefaction growing within him. He was well aware how it could have come about that this little countrywoman aged between thirty and forty, with her small grey inexpressive eyes, her short, hooked nose like the beak of a raptor, and with that small mouth and its thin, almost invisible upper lip and fat prominent lower lip, had become his wife. Oh, how well he understood that! Yet, at the same time, watching her play the role of a lady from the most select urban society, who had never once set foot in the countryside, least of all that of the Bassa region, he couldn’t believe it was true. Nives. That Nives. What was she called again, her surname? Ah yes: Pimpinati. Nives Pimpinati.

  ‘What time will you be back this evening?’

  ‘I’m not sure. After five.’

  ‘Are you going to visit your cousin as well?’

  There was nothing at all strange about her asking a question like that. It was no secret that after almost ten years he had finally decided to re-establish contact with Ulderico – only by telephone, it’s true, and with the excuse of asking if he happened to be able to suggest someone to take him by boat through the valley marshes, but the ice had thus been broken. And yet the question must have seemed to her in some way risky and indiscreet. She feigned indifference, but he knew her – though who knows what was going on inside her head now. Poor Ulderico. She was probably still unable to forgive him for doing everything in his power to persuade him not to marry her …

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘And where will you go to eat?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps in Caneviè … or maybe even in Codigoro, at the Bosco Elìceo restaurant. It’s not as if there’s a great deal of choice.’

  Nives wrinkled her nose.

  ‘So you’ll go to that nice Fascist Bellagamba?’ she exclaimed. ‘To that thug of a tupìn? fn1 Sorry, but rather than go there you’d do much better eating at our house in the country. You could get Benazzi’s wife to make you something, a pastasciutta, a cut of meat … At the end of the day,’ she went on, with a harder look in her eyes, and speaking now as if the whole thing concerned her, directly, personally, as though it concerned her more than it did him, ‘at the end of the day the house at La Montina is still ours, if I’m not mistaken!’

  What on earth was Nives getting at?

  She smiled, tightening her lips.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ she continued. ‘But you know what I’m thinking? It would be a pleasure to go there, to La Montina, once in a while, perhaps even to be taken there by someone. That’s something I might enjoy! You may think everything’s fine. But the effort to be polite, not to ruffle anyone’s feelings, ends up, little by little, with them taking possession of it all, of the land. And nothing will stand in their way, just see if I’m wrong!’

  This meant one of two things: either she didn’t know what had happened to him last April at La Montina, and in that case by them – when she pronounced it, he noticed, her upper lip took on the shape of a circumflex – she meant to refer in general to the thousands of Pimpinatis, Benazzis, Callegaris, Callegarinis, Patrignanis, Tagliatis, etcetera who were in political ‘agitation’ in the whole Bassa region of the Ferrara countryside from the city gates to the sea, always after more and more from the landowners. Or she did know, and so was inviting him to speak about it, to open up, to confide in her.

  This latter prospect suddenly filled him with a kind of fear. Confide in Nives! And tell her what, exactly?

  ‘Listen to what Prearo told me yesterday evening,’ Nives continued. ‘He told me that …’

  ‘It’s not because of that,’ he interrupted her. ‘It’s so as not to have to drive another ten kilometres as well. And then, if it rains, there’s the risk of getting stuck in the mud.’

  He moved back brusquely from the bed, and turned his back.

  ‘If you start back later than five o’clock –’ Nives shouted out behind him – ‘beware of the fog!’

  He turned slightly, lifting a hand to stop her making a fuss.

  ‘Fine, yes, I understand.’

  Although she was sleeping alone, she was well organized. On the bedside table, apart from an image of the Virgin Mary, Help of Christians, to whom the main church in Codigoro, the one in the square, was dedicated, she had also arranged the miniature radio, the basket with her sewing things, the photographs of her parents and a stack of papers. Why did they still live together? he wondered, as he left the room. Why didn’t they finally separate?

  He paused in the corridor, in front of the Browning, once more unsure of what to do. He checked the time on his Vacheron-Constantin wristwatch – another keepsake from Switzerland. It said four fifty-eight. Late, he was late – he said to himself. Still … Suddenly deciding not to shoulder his second rifle, he drew a torch from his jacket pocket and walked towards the door of his daughter’s bedroom.

  He turned off the corridor light, lit the torch, lowered the latch, and very slowly entered the room. To separate, yes! – he thought, advancing on tiptoe amid the faint smell of talc, school exercise books, chalk dust and floor wax which always wafted between those walls. To separate – it took nothing to say the words. But, in practice, how would they manage to accomplish such a thing? How much would it cost in lawyers’ fees? Not a little, that was for sure. And in that case, how would it be possible for him, the landowner of nothing, to gather together the needful? ‘At the end of the day, La Montina is still ours, if I’m not mistaken,’ Nives had said just a moment ago, laying the stress on ‘ours’ and ‘mistaken’. Truly, she couldn’t have found a turn of phrase that was more effective in reminding him how things actually stood.

  But aside from that, what about Rory?

  Having drawn up to her little bed, he halted. Almost holding his breath as he felt his heartbeat throbbing darkly in his throat, he directed the beam of light first at the tiny Christmas tree placed in a pot at the bedside, and then at the small b
ody stretched out under the fluffy pink angora-wool blanket – beginning with the slight swelling of her feet and ascending as far as her shoulders and the lower part of her cheek. And while he stood contemplating Rory, astonished as ever at how beautiful, how lively, how strong she was (her face perhaps somewhat resembled his own, especially the eyes, which, however, were bigger than his – they were huge! – and in the shape of the lips) he was suddenly overwhelmed by an inexpressible anxiety, by a sense of inconsolable desolation. He did not know why. It was as though, silently and without warning, it had leapt upon him. As though he had been attacked by a wild beast.

  He leaned down to brush his lips against the little girl’s forehead, retraced his steps across the room, and went out a third time into the corridor. He turned on the light switch and looked at the time. It was five minutes past five. He went back to pick up the rifle hanging on the window-handle, slung it over his left shoulder, and went on his way. And soon after, with the sensation of falling into a well, slowly, and without any sign of haste, he descended the dark spiral staircase which led down to the entrance.

  3

  At the doorway it was very cold: a damp, insidious cold which could really have been that of a well, of an underground cellar. In sudden gusts, through the street door, which Romeo for some reason had left wide open, the wind made the little blackened-ironwork lamp sway perilously where it hung from the coffers of the dark ceiling.

  The caretaker was standing still down there, at the threshold, intently staring out towards the invisible façade of the house across the way. What was he doing looking out there? With his slightly hunched shoulders like those of a worker on strike, stubbornly turned away, he not only seemed unaware of his presence, but also to have forgotten that before leaving he still needed to have his coffee, and besides that, always, especially in winter, the motor was meant to be warmed up slowly, without any hurry.

  The melancholy, familiar, faithful shape of his dark-blue Lancia Aprilia waited outside the door with its fenders pointed towards the gate that opened on to the courtyard and that had remained half-shut. He went round the car, placed the rifles on the chest stood up against the wall opposite the staircase, retraced his steps, opened the car’s right-hand-side door and sat behind the steering wheel. While he fumbled with the starting key – the motor seemed loath to start up; doubtless, due to the cold, but also, due to the battery, as ancient as the rest of the vehicle – he didn’t detach his gaze from the motionless shape of Romeo reflected in the rear-view mirror. For the almost thirty years he’d helped with these early-morning departures for the country, never, he said to himself, had he behaved like this. Was he, perhaps, now, for the first time, suddenly irritated to have had to get up before dawn and on a Sunday too? Was that what he wanted to convey? Given the times, everything was possible. However it was, here was another novelty, and not in the least a pleasant one.

  After a series of coughs, the motor finally came to life. With an effort, thanks to the cartridge belt wound round his waist, he leaned forwards to find the choke under the dashboard. When he sat back up again he was surprised to find himself face to face with Romeo. He was standing there beside the car door, slightly stooping, looking down at him from under his heavy, tortoise-like eyelids.

  ‘Will you be wanting your coffee?’ he asked slowly in dialect.

  He knew the caretaker’s character inside out – brusque, sometimes surly, but still affectionate, and unfailingly faithful. And so – as he told himself, and his breast expanded with relief – not only did Romeo not harbour the least rancour towards him, but, on the contrary, from the vague hint of jokiness hovering around his prominent cheekbones, one could guess that he was content, privately delighted and gratified to see him after so many years once again going off on a duck shoot.

  He got out of the car.

  ‘Is it ready?’

  Romeo nodded. Then, pointing with his chin towards the two rifles, he asked if he should pack them in the boot.

  ‘If you give us the keys,’ he said in dialect, ‘I’ll put everything in.’

  ‘No, it’s not necessary,’ he replied, trying to maintain the usual tone, between benevolent and self-composed, which typified their relations. ‘It’s better if you put them on the back seat. And this as well, if you don’t mind.’

  He took off the cartridge belt and laid it on the caretaker’s outstretched arm, after which he went with rapid steps towards the lit-up entrance of the Manzolis’ home.

  The apartment where they lived comprised three interconnecting rooms, one after the other. On one side the kitchen, which overlooked the courtyard; on the opposite side the bedroom, with its window on to Via Mentana; in between, a huge room which, since their daughter Irma had gone to live with her husband, the two old folk had piled up with rows of polished furniture, but which in practice they never occupied. As always happened (since that event last April in Montina), and now, once again, stepping into the caretakers’ flat – and especially into their kitchen, which was so pretty and neat, so well lit and above all so well heated by the glowing plates of the cheap stove – suddenly lifted his morale. That was it – he exclaimed to himself once again – here he felt at ease, truly and completely, as if at home! The Manzolis were utterly dependable!

  He sat at the table and began to take slow sips of boiling coffee from the bowl without a handle that was kept for his use – his own mastèla dal caffè, his coffee bucket – as Romeo called it in dialect. Meanwhile, Imelda, her sharp features hidden behind the black kerchief of a local peasant woman, moved busily about.

  He stared at her over the curved rim of the cup, intently following her every move.

  Neither she nor Romeo could stand Nives. More or less openly, they showed their disapproval of everything to do with her, and extended their disapproval to include Prearo, the accountant, as well as the cook, Elsa, and even Rory – in short, every new person or thing that had made an appearance at no. 2 Via Mentana since 1938. Whenever they spoke to him about her, they never used her name. Unfailingly they called her ‘your Signora’, the only true ladies of the house being ‘Signora Erminia’, and Lilla, the three-year-old poodle who was his mother’s tender companion, and was even allowed in her bed, her only true child to cuddle and spoil in every possible way. They had nothing in the least bit good to say about Nives, ever. He only needed to enter their house for a moment and one or other of them would start up their usual litany of complaints.

  Recently, for example, they had begun to refer to Nives’ habit, when he was away from home, of not using the entry-phone. For their slightest need, both she and Elsa preferred to lean out of the window, and shout down to them, to yell so loud that the like of it was never heard, not even in the big apartments of Via Mortara … And now – he wondered, lowering his eyes, as if by doing so it would be easier to draw on the infinite reserves of patience he needed to have at his disposal – what further offence committed by his wife would he have to hear about? Imelda was certainly brooding about something.

  He raised his eyelids again.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Once again, he was mistaken. Imelda had reddened eyes, continually raising her handkerchief to her nose, but she wasn’t thinking about Nives at all. As soon as Romeo had come to the door, she began to inveigh against William, ‘that scrounging Commie William’ as she put it in dialect. Although he had all his electrician’s diplomas – she was loudly complaining – William refused to work, spent all his money at the brothel, so that they, poor and old as they were, had to carry him and his wife, both, on their shoulders.

  He turned towards Romeo.

  ‘Who is this William?’ he asked.

  ‘Irma’s husband,’ Romeo replied drily in dialect, bending his silver head under the light.

  For a moment he didn’t understand – as though, to protect his inner calm, his memory had stopped working.

  But then he quickly remembered.

  Of course – he reflected – the husband of Irma, their
daughter. How had he forgotten about him?

  He was a young man of about twenty-five – he recalled – scrawny, straw-blond, with a fluent patter, well mannered, someone who, up until recently, he’d often enough seen hanging about the entrance and the courtyard, and who had once not only offered to wash his car but, having done so, had refused any payment. A Communist? He could easily have been: it was enough to look at his thin, pale, avid face eaten up from within by who could guess what secret rage, enough to listen to his Italian that sounded like that of a radio announcer, so smooth and detached, it was true, but also so suspicious and unreliable. It was a source of wonder that Irma, such a meek girl, very refined and well brought up, raised by the nuns in the sewing school on Via Borgo di Sotto, and ready to blush all over if anyone so much as met her in the street or greeted her, let alone talked to her, should have let herself fall for a person like that.

  Now Irma was six months pregnant – Imelda was explaining to him. And so she, working from morning till night like a ‘skivvy’, then had to fork out for the extravagance of that good-for-nothing husband.

  He felt a growing unease, and yet he stayed there. He still couldn’t make up his mind to leave. He looked at the time: five thirty-five. On the telephone, Ulderico had been very precise about the time. The man he’d hired who was to ferry them from Lungari di Rottagrande to the hunting hide – a man called Gavino, if he’d heard correctly – would be waiting for them at Volano, in front of the big Tuffanelli house, from a quarter past six. It was now five thirty-five. He had to be there at a quarter past six. The meeting with Gavino wasn’t going to work. He’d be there at the earliest by six thirty, or even a quarter to seven. And that was without taking into account that, to the best of his recollection, from the Tuffanelli house to Lungari di Rottagrande they would have to travel around more than a third of the perimeter of Valle Nuova and so that would mean a good half hour to add on before they arrived. So if everything were to go smoothly, he’d be able to hunker down in the hide no earlier than a quarter past or half past seven when it was already fully light. And that was only if he didn’t hang around another minute and left at once.