He looked at his watch, trying to hurry himself up, to find the necessary energy to get to his feet. Useless. A vast inertia, stronger than any exertion of his will, held him to the woven wicker seat in the Manzolis’ kitchen, as though he were tied down. Oh, if only, despite everything, he could just stay there, in the warmth of the caretakers’ flat, hidden from his family and from everyone else until the evening! He would have given anything for that.
He raised his eyes to Imelda.
‘But why on earth,’ he asked, ‘would your son-in-law not want to work?’
Shrugging her thin shoulders, Imelda replied that she didn’t know. ‘Beats me,’ she said in dialect. She knew only one thing – she went on – that her son-in-law stayed in bed all day and if she, Irma, ever tried to reproach him, ‘to tell him off’, that Communist delinquent was quite prepared to give her a clout.
It was true. That was guaranteed by Romeo’s face, suffused with a barely contained rancour, and even more so by her face, with its eyes that spoke of fated, perhaps even willing, victimhood.
Bewildered, he made as if to get up.
‘If he doesn’t work,’ he tried to object, ‘perhaps it’s because he can’t find any.’
Romeo intervened.
‘Not a chance!’ he said in dialect, lowering his head. ‘Doing nothing’s the only thing he’d dream of doing.’
‘But then why –’ he persisted, turning to the question of Irma once again – ‘don’t you get her, your daughter, to come back to live with you?’
The woman sighed. She’d suggested that to her umpteen times she said. But Irma was stubborn as a mule. She didn’t want her mother even to talk of it.
‘She’s in love,’ she summed it up, twisting her thin lips into a grimace full of scorn.
Certainly she was in love, as he had anyway already understood. And now even the Manzolis’ kitchen had become uninhabitable – this too, a place one had to vacate. And quickly.
In the silence that followed Imelda’s final words – while only the muffled grumbling of the Aprilia’s motor idling at the gate reached him through the walls – he looked at his watch once again. Five fifty-two.
‘Well, I’d best get moving,’ he announced.
He grasped the edge of the table with both hands, stood up, and made his way out. And to Imelda, who scurried after him begging him to do something for Irma – if he were to speak to her son-in-law, she said, perhaps that ‘scoundrel’ would finally make up his mind to turn over a new leaf – he replied with a ‘We’ll see’, which he, more than anyone, knew meant nothing at all.
Go and speak to a fellow like that? he thought to himself while he went through the door and walked towards the car. Speak to him? Imagining the talk he would have with the young electrician with his cadaverous face, he felt invaded by a kind of disgust. A disgust mingled with fear.
He got into his car. He turned on the headlights. Finally, he replied with a wave to Romeo’s deferential salute as he slowly negotiated the reverse manoeuvre which brought him out on to the street, and there, halted at the edge of the pavement, looked back at the caretaker, who was standing in silence with the faint light from the doorway at his back, as he shifted into first and drove away.
4
All he wanted now was to be there in Codigoro.
For a good part of the journey, from the Prospettiva Arch right up to the outskirts of Codigoro, he had driven with his eyes fixed only on the road. The ferryman would be waiting at Volano, so he had to hurry. But besides that, only after Codigoro, after Pomposa, when he saw in the uncertain light of dawn the low, deserted landscape broken by stretches of apparently stagnant water – which were actually in flux, joined as they were to the open sea – only then did he begin to relax, to breathe easily.
And yet, just at the outskirts of Codigoro, a hundred metres before turning on to the smoothly asphalted ring road, an acute spasm of pain at the level of his belt, heralded a moment earlier by a faint heart tremor, forced him to bend forwards over the steering wheel.
‘Just as well that we’re here,’ he grumbled, glancing up through the windscreen at the two looming chimneys, the one of the Eridania sugar factory and the other of the water pump of the Land Reclamation Company.
He was well attuned to his own habits. He could hold off for a maximum of ten minutes. Would that be enough?
He made use of the first, rare, municipal street-lights, madly swinging above the rough cobbles of the country road, to look at his watch. Six forty. At that time the two cafes on the square would already have drawn up their blinds. Best, then, to give up his plan to drive on to Volano and stop at Codigoro instead. If he could get as far as the square, he’d be safe and sound.
Turning right, he soon reached the town centre, and drove into the square. No lights at all – he immediately noticed, annoyed, and yet, absurdly, with a sense of relief – neither from the two cafes, the one opposite the other, nor from the ten-storey building of the I.N.A.fn1, there in front, where Ulderico and his family lived, nor from the other houses in the vicinity, large and small. Everything was closed up. All dark, with not a soul to be seen.
He parked his car on the left, beside the big, Novecento ex-Fascist headquarters, now become a Carabinieri barracks. He switched off the headlights, then the motor, got out and calmly locked the car door. Codigoro. Codigoro’s main square. It had been some ten years since he’d been there at such an early hour. And yet he couldn’t recall ever seeing it so deserted. What had happened to make it so? Was it because of – he grinned – ‘the Communist terror’? Or simply Christmas time?
It wasn’t cold and, here at least, there was hardly any wind. Strange, even his stomach was no longer bothering him. A dog left the shadows of the entrance at the base of the I.N.A. building, a setter, to guess from its stride. He saw it move into clear view towards the centre of the square – it was an old setter, in fact – and come to a halt at the statue for the Fallen of the First World War. It sniffed studiously at the figure’s boot and urinated on it, then, at the same trot, disappeared down an alley to the left. And if he should try calling round at Bellagamba’s, he wondered, once again alone. True, it might be that not even the Bosco Elìceo would be open. At worst, though, given that it was also a hotel – he had never slept there himself but he’d often heard it said that there were bedrooms upstairs – he could always ring the bell.
He opened the boot and took out a grey, Russian-style Astrakhan cap, an old schmutter that had served him since he was a youngster both for hunting in the valleys and for skiing in the mountains. He put it on. Then, some twenty metres from his car, he came to the corner of the ex-Fascist headquarters’ façade and the adjoining street. He narrowed his eyes and scanned the street. He wasn’t mistaken. Even the Bosco Elìceo was shut. So he really would have to use the bell. As there was no doubt about it, a stop was called for. He had no choice.
Regardless of this, when he came up to the lowered blinds, with the neon sign sizzling above his head, the sudden prospect of finding himself in a face-to-face conversation with Bellagamba, who might very well be the one who opened the door, was enough to hold him back.
He remembered Bellagamba in ’38, in ’39, in his Corporal’s militia uniform – he was called Gino, if he wasn’t mistaken, Gino Bellagamba – with his fez tilted back on his shaved neck and with the black tassel swinging halfway down his bullish back. He remembered his gritty aspect in those days, his air of a country bully-boy reinstated into active service because of the requirements of the time, his almost perpetual presence in the square in front of the Fascist headquarters, the threatening and scornful looks that he’d had to put up with as a ‘Jew’, as an ‘apolitical’ and as a landowner, every time that, returning to Codigoro en route to La Montina, he’d had the misfortune to come within range … No. To find himself in front of that ugly mug, with whom, apart from all the rest of it, he’d never exchanged a single word in his whole life, to have to ask him for what he would have to, permission to use
the toilet, all this would be far from pleasant, that was for sure. If only he had got there a little later, he would almost have preferred to turn on his heels and go and ring the doorbell at the Cavaglieris’ house.
But what could he expect to find there? Besides, why go to all that bother? He had always got out of accepting the Fascist membership card, not because he was especially anti, if truth be told, but just from that unsociable side of his character – and in this respect his behaviour was different from that of Ulderico, who, for his part, when they had offered him the card in 1932, had pocketed it straightaway. But, when all was said and done, were the Fascists before 1943 that much worse than the Communists of today? And the present trade union councils, enforcers of policies to the detriment of those who owned land, were they really any worse than the Fascist headquarters or the local Fascist groups of those days? As regards Bellagamba, perhaps it was true, as Nives claimed, that after the Badoglio period he had joined up with the forces at Salò. Very likely. In any case, if even the Communists, who were the absolute masters in Codigoro today, left him alone to make a good living, why should he, of all people, kick up a fuss about him? Besides, it was well known that Nives had it in for her townsfolk. She never missed a chance.
While he stood there, uneasy about the fate of the two rifles left in evidence on the back seat of the car as well – perhaps it would be better to turn back at once and hide them in the boot along with the cartridge belt – he seemed to hear noises filtering out from inside the locale. They were murmurs, sighs, tremors, creaks – as though made by someone effortfully shifting furniture about.
He waited a while in silence, then knocked with his knuckles on the corrugated-iron sheet.
He was assailed by a voice that was violent, irate and, at the same time, frightened.
‘Who is it?’
‘A friend,’ he answered quietly.
‘A friend who?’
He hesitated. He heard heavy steps from inside approaching, then coming to a halt.
‘Limentani,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Li-men-ta-ni,’ he repeated without raising his voice, suddenly marvelling at his own surname, at the way the syllables of his own name resounded in the open air.
With a single tug, the blinds were completely raised.
It was indeed him, Bellagamba – he saw – even bigger, fatter and more bullish than before, with his chest under the leather jacket shaped like a woman’s. And seized once more with his old repugnance, he was on the point of turning his back and leaving. Perhaps he was still in time.
But he was too late. Bellagamba, who was already opening his blue eyes wide, had recognized him.
‘What a treat!’ he was saying under his breath.
He smiled gleefully, showing the small compact teeth of a boxer.
‘You’ve no idea what a fright you gave me, Signor Avvocato,’ he went on, still in a whisper, and then as he moved aside he winked at him conspiratorially. ‘Come in, please. It’s cold out there. Do come in!’
He would have expected anything but such a cordial, such a talkative, welcome – strange how Bellagamba too, like that William, the husband of Irma Manzoli, spoke an unusually fluent, easy, refined Italian. He would almost have preferred a rougher, more hostile reception, so that he could assume the role of the courteous and absent-minded gentleman. What did this conspiratorial behaviour of Bellagamba mean? Once he was taken into the man’s den, was he planning to force him, in his presence, to mourn the loss of the golden times of the Fascist era, or even those of the Salò Republic? Bellagamba, like everyone else at Codigoro, must have known every detail of what had happened to him last April in La Montina. But if he was now expecting to hear complaints and confidences from him, he was greatly mistaken. He held no grudge against anyone in the world and against Bellagamba least of all. And yet, let’s be clear, neither did he have any personal ties to him.
In the meantime he’d entered with the impression, intensified also by the strong stench of fried fish which took him by the throat as soon as he crossed the threshold, of venturing into a cave, into the den of a wild animal. He took off his fur cap and looked around. He found himself in a medium-sized hallway, immersed in an almost complete darkness. On the opposite side from the entrance, on top of a small isolated desk, a table lamp capped with a lampshade of green silk spilled a faint yellowish glow.
He quickly realized that the desk was nothing other than a brand-new hotel reception desk. Behind it, on numbered hooks fixed in a double row to a wall of lime-washed plaster, hung ten or twelve keys. In the semi-dark he could make out nothing else. But that was enough. The desk and those keys were enough to make him aware how little the present locale, transformed by the ex-Corporal of the militia into a hotel and restaurant, shared with the unpretentious country eating-house as he remembered it from years ago.
Bellagamba had remained behind him. He heard him muttering, swearing between his teeth at the blinds that refused to shut again. Every now and then he advised him to take care. On the floor there was a half-torn-open package with something heavy inside – a steelyard which had arrived the evening before by post from Milan. He might trip up and do himself an injury.
At last Bellagamba drew closer, and as he brushed past, wafting the smell of his armpits, he lightly bumped against his shoulder. He made his way towards the desk and turned a switch mounted beside the keys. Finally, in the vague blaze of a fat neon tube that ran crossways along the ceiling they sat facing each other: he occupying a small leather armchair and Bellagamba there behind the desk, his wide jaw divided in two by the yellow light of the table lamp.
With an even stronger sense than before of being outside the world, he didn’t know how to begin. It wasn’t even thinkable to ask for something to eat. He felt his stomach was clenched like a fist.
Bellagamba came to his aid.
‘But what,’ he enquired in an insinuating tone, suddenly switching to dialect and narrowing his bright, watery eyes, ‘but what, pardon me, brings you here? Have you maybe come to Codigoro to hunt?’
Given the way he was dressed, the question was essentially superfluous. But the way it had been posed in that insinuating yet at the same time humble tone – very much that with which a farmworker on his own lands might have addressed him before 1938 – was enough to reassure him of his basic safety.
He nodded.
Yes, he then said. He’d come here exactly for that – to fire off a few shots.
He lifted the hem of his sleeve and glanced at his wristwatch.
Though would he be in time to do that? he wondered and all at once really doubted it. He was too late. He should have reached Volano some time ago – at a quarter past six. While now it was already past seven.
At last he made up his mind.
He got to his feet and looked around.
‘Would you mind me using your toilet for a moment?’ he asked.
5
The staircase was in front of him, straight and steep.
He went up slowly, step by step, holding on to the smooth wooden banister and staring up at the landing, watching it gradually draw near. Up there, the sky appeared through a kind of open round window in the opposite wall. The sky was dark, crossed by rapid swollen clouds. Dawn was breaking.
Once he had set foot on the landing, he stopped for a moment to get his breath back. To the left and to the right, two short, ill-lit corridors led away. All the doors to the rooms were shut. On the floor outside one of them, the last on the right-hand corridor, a solitary pair of man’s shoes had been set out.
Bellagamba had really put the boat out, he thought, looking at those shoes. He’d spared no expense. But why be surprised at that? There was a fair amount of cash in circulation, more than a fair amount. For everyone. The only ones to be denied, always excluded from the tide of bank loans, were those few old-style agricultural landowners who still existed, and remained attached tooth and nail, some for one reason, some for another, to the usual corn, th
e usual hemp, the usual beetroots, and therefore, Communism or no Communism, destined in the near future to disappear, to be swept away. Fair enough, it’s true – someone else in his place would have paid heed to Nives and Prearo, the accountant, who for quite a while hadn’t missed a chance to make him understand that enough was enough, it was time to quit, and once and for all he should decide to be rid of the old traditional crops which had become disastrously unproductive, and turn his estate, as so many others had, into an exclusively fruit-growing enterprise. Someone else in his shoes, not caring a jot for the Communist threats, would have presented himself one fine day at La Montina with a goodly escort of Carabinieri and have sacked the lot of them, starting with that equivocating overseer Benazzi and ending up with the last of the hired hands and cowherds. Someone other than him. Because it wouldn’t be him. He agreed with the banks, the Agricultural Bank of Ferrara included, who were ready to give financial support to anyone at all, even to a Bellagamba, but not to certain ‘hangovers from the past’, a phrase which could be read in even the most official newspapers, such as the Giornale dell’Emilia. It was enough for him to think of himself as a farmer to immediately renounce any such project and to view himself as a relic.
In the meantime, he had climbed a second staircase. Broken by a small, mezzanine landing, this one was less arduous than the one before. He began climbing a third, which was once again steep. At last, without once detaching his gaze from another port window, identical to the first, he reached the summit of the top floor.
The Heron Page 3
