The Heron

by Giorgio Bassani

  Here, too, were the same empty corridors in semi-darkness, the same closed doors. Slightly to the right of the stairwell he recognized the door he was seeking at once. A little earlier Bellagamba had been explicit. ‘You’ll see it’s even written on it,’ he had specified, with every precaution, as though hoping to cut a good figure, directing him to the only toilet in the hotel he considered befitting such an honourable guest, rather than to the ‘water closet’ of the ground floor. It was indeed as he’d said. The straw-coloured door sported an enamelled metal plate three-quarters of the way up on which could be read BATHROOM. It seemed to him like a miniature road sign. The kind that were usual before the First World War, but were now rarer than white flies. The colour of the elongated, upright capital letters was the same blackish-blue as the thin border.

  He went in.

  Even before he had turned on the light, he noticed that the bathroom did indeed contain a bath. Apart from the lavatory, the room had a rectangular cast-iron tub, a basin with a mirror above it and a bidet with two taps.

  The lavatory was on the other side of the bath, next to the window. He approached it and examined the seat of blondish wood which had retained some flecks of white paint. He lifted it with his foot. Taking off his jacket and cap, which he hung on the window catch, he unbuttoned his trousers and the two pairs of underpants, lowered them and sat down directly on to the freezing porcelain.

  But nothing. Once again nothing. His bowels showed no inclination to empty themselves. Regardless of every effort, he felt that not even now would he succeed, and if he did, any result would be infinitesimal.

  On the low windowsill, a metre or so from his forearm, there was some newspaper – a small pile of square sheets all cut to the same measure that a dark, porous sea pebble kept orderly and secure. He stretched out his hand and drew out from under the stone the first sheet on the pile. It must have come from a newspaper published some months earlier, he thought, reckoning by the yellow hue of the paper – perhaps an old number of the Giornale dell’Emilia. SPERI IN NEW YORK declared a caption in big letters. And so – he tried to remember – when was it that De Gasperi had gone to America to discuss things with Truman and Marshall? In April? May? Or earlier? That visit must have been before then! The Communists had been dismissed from the government after the crisis last May. And the crisis, the last of a series, had broken out – this he remembered exactly – when De Gasperi had already been back in Italy for a good while. So was it in January then? Or February?

  He picked up some other sheets at random, none of which he could establish the provenance of, but not all of them had been cut from the same newspaper or even on the same day. RIGHT TO STRIK – ELEGATION OF THE COAS declared another headline in even bigger letters than the previous one. And another: ENNI and TOGLIATTI – ATTACK THE GOVERNM. And yet another: EDDING OF JEWISH BLOOD IN TODAY’S POLAND.

  He tried to read a passage of the two-column article that followed.

  It was a report from Cracow. If the reporter was to be believed, in Poland under the Communists in 1949 the persecution of the Jews was proceeding no less bloodily and cruelly than under Gauleiter Frank, Hitler’s trusted henchman in Polish affairs. Was that possible? The tone of the article seemed to him excessively strident. The writer was surely exaggerating. And yet there must be some truth in it. Heavens – he grinned – surely, it couldn’t all be nonsense!

  He raised his head, and to distract himself, looked out of the window. Dark but clear, it was now full daylight. No mist, no fog. Under the window, adjacent to the earthen courtyard where Bellagamba kept his hens, he saw a wretched, overgrown football pitch stretch out in a vertical perspective, with the islanded goalposts at either end. Even from a distance, he seemed able to perceive all their grey, frail, woodwormy decrepitude. Beyond the sports field, more or less the whole village – its dark roof-tiles, so different from the roof-tiles of Ferrara (thicker, more irregular, as though they had been hand-made one by one) and yet seen together, so similar, so obviously of the same breed. And out there, the square, the Church of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice on one side, on the other the red façade of the Trade Union hall between the now lit-up windows of the two cafes, and in the middle, as though in the same line of vision, much higher than the roofs of the modest little houses that flanked them, the two massive structures of the ex-Fascist HQ and the I.N.A. building facing each other. And then, further out, the curve of the river port, hidden by the two banks, but easily surmised from the looming masts of the big cargo ships at the end of the docks. And finally, further still, much further away, along the asphalted ribbon of the main road to Ferrara, high against the row of frozen poplars this side of the Volano stretch of the River Po, the northern edge of La Montina, the thin, smoke-darkened chimneys of the Eridania sugar refinery and, lower down, the single chimney of the Land Reclamation Company’s water pump … Like a land surveyor deprived of his essential equipment, he tried to measure the distances and proportions by eye. How far off, in a straight line – he wondered, but casually, without any real attempt to deduce it – was the square by the river port? And that group of chimneys, down there to the right, how far was it from them to the half-ruined, brown, Gallo watchtower, tiny in the midst of the bare fields of La Montina, just slightly more visible than the farmhands’ dwellings scattered at wide intervals around the property?

  However hard he tried, he couldn’t see the little villa – sold at the time of the Racial Laws – where he had installed Nives in 1930 and of which, for years, he had been the owner. No, that he couldn’t make out. Isolated, at that time, on the southern reaches of the village, today it was impossible to distinguish it from the countless other houses put up in that area since, and all of them more or less of the same type. But that didn’t matter. How many hundreds of metres separated that quarter, the most modern part of Codigoro, from the central square? And the ash-coloured statue of the infantryman, which, atop the monument for the Fallen in the main square, was throwing himself into the attack waving the torn and bullet-riddled regimental flag, was it bigger or smaller than life-size?

  The direction of his thoughts changed again.

  He now thought about Ulderico, his cousin and friend, his great friend, the inseparable companion of the first two-thirds of his life at least, who, for something like fifteen years, after having rented out the building in Via Montebello, Ferrara, to the Land Reclamation Company, had come to live in Codigoro, within walking distance of his estates, not even in a lovely villa surrounded by a park, but in a nondescript apartment, big, comfortable, but nondescript, right in the centre of the town. And thinking of Ulderico, and of himself, and of their lives, so similar and so different, he decided that sometime late that afternoon, if he didn’t feel too tired and had a brace of wild fowl to bring as a gift – with the dark and the mist the chance of being spotted and of having an unpleasant encounter in the street was almost zero – he would certainly go and pay a visit to the Cavaglieris: Ulderico, his wife, Cesarina, and all their kids. It was true that he hadn’t visited them once, neither before the war, nor during, nor, for that matter, in these last three years following his return from Switzerland, and that he hadn’t set eyes on even one of their six children – six! But after the two telephone calls he and Ulderico had exchanged last week, after all his cousin’s unstinting kindnesses to him, not least of which had been not to appear in the least surprised to hear his voice after so long, what point would there be on either of their parts to persist in not seeing each other? How strange life is! He remembered the huge scandal of 1932, within the family and beyond, when Ulderico had decided, point-blank, to marry, in church, the trouser-maker of Codigoro, with whom for ages he had he had been carrying on a more or less public relationship – what the hell kind of surname did she have? – and, on top of that, on the very day of their marriage, to get himself baptized. And he remembered, still thinking about Ulderico, the insistence, the unexpected and unbearable interference, the absurd doggedness with which, ironically, his
cousin had tried to make him give up on the idea of marrying, in his turn, his own mistress, Nives …

  No, no – he came to a conclusion. To continue not seeing each other, to persist in maintaining a distance as if they had something to fear from one another, would be utterly meaningless.

  6

  Later, when he had come down again, Bellagamba was not to be found. What a trial it would have been to have to take his leave of the militia’s ex-corporal, what a pain. All he wanted to do now was to be off, to distance himself from Codigoro as quickly as possible.

  But no sooner had he left and come to the square than he saw Bellagamba himself standing on the edge of the same pavement, from which he once used to cast inquisitorial and threatening looks at everyone, townsfolk and outsiders alike. Standing beside the old Aprilia, with a foot resting on one of the front tyres, he had the air of an expert weighing up the condition of the fore-carriage. He realized that it wouldn’t be possible to dodge him and that he’d have to put up with wasting even more time.

  Approaching, he observed him. There was something almost unrecognizable about him. Over a high-necked, iron-grey sweater like a cyclist’s, he wore a dark, double-breasted coat and, on his head, a soft hat with a lowered rim of the same tone. Completely inoffensive, and even as camouflaged and out-of-place as he, too, felt himself to be, Bellagamba looked quite like Mussolini in his last years, when the Germans took him away in a Storch single-engine aircraft from his Gran Sasso refuge …

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘This yours?’ the other asked, in dialect, barely giving him a glance, signalling towards the car.

  He nodded. He came up beside him and looked out in front of him him. It was eight o’clock. The square was filling up. And while Bellagamba spoke to him about the Aprilia, fulsomely praising the ‘brand and model’ and, it seemed, offering to buy it off him – he’d been looking for a car of this type for some time, he said, robust, as well as cheap to run, and preferably one that had had few owners, better still, just one, to customize it into a small van, given the growing demands of the restaurant – he couldn’t take his eyes off the throng, which, gathering in groups, grew ever bigger, minute by minute, there in front of the low red-brick building of the Trade Union hall opposite. Others, women, girls, mainly very young girls, were being continually swallowed up by the big, dark, central entrance to the Church of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, set alone in a space behind and to the left, at the end of the churchyard which was vast as a private square of its own. No one showed any sign of noticing the two of them. Everyone seemed busy with other concerns. With what, though? he wondered, feeling reassured, but at the same time strangely unhappy, disappointed. From the top of the belltower which rose slender and pointed at the rear of the church, so tall that on some days of fine weather, coming from Ferrara, one could begin to make it out at least twenty kilometres away, the solemn tones of the great bell were ceaselessly calling the people to Mass.

  The bell was tolling. Some moments before, Bellagamba had stopped talking.

  Now it was his turn.

  ‘OK. I’ll think about it,’ he murmured, his gaze still fixed on the belltower. ‘Perhaps we can discuss it later today.’

  ‘You’ll be coming for lunch?’

  A little earlier, at the entrance of Bosco Elìceo, where he had left Bellagamba, there was seated a fellow of about seventy, thin, with a grey mop of hair, the pallid, gaunt face of a malaria victim, wearing a filthy, worn-out striped jacket. Not in the least fazed to see him descending from the upper floors, he had informed him at once that ‘Signor Gino’ had left less than a quarter of an hour before, but without saying where he was going or when he’d return. ‘Well, would you say goodbye to him for me?’ he said to the old man as he made his way out. ‘Give him my thanks, and tell him I may be coming back for lunch.’

  For lunch? he now thought. He had indeed spoken of lunch. But what if instead, abandoning all his plans, he were to return immediately to the city?

  In any case, he didn’t reply. He shifted his gaze from the belfry immediately below the very tall spire, and looked up at the sky. There were no longer any swollen, swift, low-altitude clouds coursing over the village roofs but a uniform grey, compact mantle. And if he really were to return home?

  He turned to Bellagamba.

  The latter smiled at him with his usual ambiguous, sly and vaguely sleepy expression.

  ‘And would you care for a coffee?’ he heard him propose in dialect.

  He was being treated, he thought, with the same intimate, circumspect patience as Romeo employed. But in neither case was it to make fun of him, or with any obscure intent to provoke him, to test him out. Quite the reverse. If he hadn’t misjudged it, he was only trying to reassure him, to make it clear that there was quite simply no need to keep on being disturbed by what were no more than shadows. To suggest to him, as a friend, not to have any unnecessary qualms, worries or fears.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Over there. At Fetman’s.’

  With his big chin propped up by the high collar of his sweater, he nodded towards the cafe on the left side of the square.

  ‘They serve much better coffee there than at Moccia’s,’ he went on, signalling once again with his chin, towards the right at the square’s other cafe. ‘And also,’ he added, with a wink, ‘at this time of the day, I can assure you that you’ll not encounter any unpleasant faces at Fetman’s.’ Then he added in dialect, ‘On that, I give you my word.’

  As the two locales in the square at Codigoro had been from time immemorial the designated meeting places not only for the various political factions but also for all the dealers of the region, he had always avoided frequenting them – both out of instinct and from principle. Fetman’s – what a name for a bar! Before the war it had a completely different kind of name … He’d not set foot in there even once. And yet why not? Even now, in ’47, with the Reds in full spate, to go in at such an early hour the chance of coming up against some ugly, hostile mug would have been roughly the same as before, in other words, pretty slim. And then if, having taken his coffee, he really should decide to return to Ferrara – in which case he’d have to give up the idea of paying a late-afternoon visit to the Cavaglieris – what more convenient spot could there be than that for him to telephone Ulderico from? If he wanted to simply greet him and nothing more, holding out the possibility of another trip to Codigoro in the near future, especially to see him, then he would have to do it soon, before he left.

  ‘Why not?’ he replied. ‘Let’s go.’

  They crossed the square side by side like two old friends – with the constant impression in his mind that everyone was ignoring them, and, exactly as happens between friends, without exchanging a single word.

  They then stood at the bar waiting to be served. During the wait – at Fetman’s there was hardly anyone; a few anonymous, taciturn regulars seated at small tables at the end of the big rectangular room that looked more like a garage than a cafe; a smoky atmosphere impregnated with the smells of espressos, grappa, Tuscan cigars; he could feel his cheeks gradually becoming warm – his attention was once again directed to the I.N.A. building. Staring at it through the misted-up windowpanes, the construction seemed to him like a vague kind of grey-pink outcrop, like something threatening and impervious. It really was an impressive edifice – he thought to himself – as impressive as it was disproportionate. This explained why the street of which it formed the corner and over which it loomed with its ten floors, looked so straitened, wretched and dark. He scanned its ground floor. No visible entrance. In the semi-darkness that still lingered under the arches in front of it were aligned, one after the other, the three windows of the agricultural machinery salesroom which he had glancingly noticed a moment before while crossing the square. And so, he wondered, how would you enter to reach the floors above? Perhaps at the back? He should remember to ask Ulderico about that when he called him.

  In the meantime, Bellagamba had resumed
his chatter.

  He was offering him advice. Confidential but respectful – speaking in rather subdued tones as well, evidently because a bartender was nearby – Bellagamba had begun to find fault with his plan to push on to Volano. What would be the point of that? – he was saying. Apart from the uncertain weather, it didn’t seem to him at all likely that he’d arrive and settle himself in the hide before ten o’clock, however fast he went. And there’d be no serious hunters out there that Sunday, as could be seen from the fact that last night only a single person had taken one of his rooms and gone out, and he wasn’t even a hunter at all but someone from Reggio, a salesman for barbers’ razors, and if he, Signor Avvocato, were to go, what would he have to shoot at, at ten in the morning? It was pointless. To arrive at the hide so late, you always risk going home empty-handed or worse – out of frustration, you’d start taking pot-shots at a seagull, of which unfortunately there was never any shortage.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like me to get a nice bed ready for you instead?’he added, his voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Just say the word, and I’ll go straight to the hotel and get things ready.’

  Bellagamba had turned to look at him. He had the habit of winking, but this time his face was all red as if he were offering him something exotic, if not forbidden. But he was right – he couldn’t help acknowledging. There was no denying it. As for the bed, though, not a chance. Far better to get back in his car, and off to Ferrara. It would always be a handy option, in the afternoon, at five-thirty, after a nap: an outing to the Unione club to while away the time with a game of bridge until supper time.

  ‘No thanks,’ he replied. ‘It’s kind of you, but it wouldn’t be convenient.’

  He took out his handkerchief and dried his mouth.

  ‘Excuse me – I have to make a telephone call,’ he said, raising his face towards the bartender.

  ‘To Ferrara?’

  ‘No. Here in Codigoro.’