The Heron

by Giorgio Bassani

  2

  From how the young man was dressed – visored cap, a sheepskin-lined military jacket, rubber waders up to his groin, but most of all from the questioning insistence of his gaze he worked out at once who it was before him. It was Ulderico’s man, Gavino – it couldn’t be anyone else.

  He raised his arm in a lively wave.

  ‘Good day!’ he shouted out.

  The young man gave a slight bow. A somewhat stiff bow like a soldier’s.

  ‘I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,’ he said calmly.

  ‘I’m very late, I know,’ he replied.

  He lowered his head.

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I haven’t been here in the valleys for at least fifteen years,’ he added, with an attempt at a laugh, ‘and so, you know how it is, one loses all track of time. I do apologize.’

  ‘Don’t give it a thought.’

  He’d said ‘Don’t give it a thought’. Now he gave the faintest of smiles. Did he think him capable of not paying him for his services?

  That would have been absurd: absurd from every point of view. He put his hand on his wallet, determined to fish out the five one-hundred-lire notes on the spot which, according to the going rates, he owed him. But the other man was quick to stop him. Certainly not, he said with a slight gesture of annoyance. They had plenty of time to sort out the fee. They could get to that ‘afterwards’. Right now, it would be much better if they concentrated on getting to the hide. The wind had changed direction, he went on in his calm, precise, almost accentless Italian, lifting his blue eyes to scan the sky. And if they hurried, there was still the chance they’d shoot something.

  He’s right, he thought. No doubt about it.

  ‘I forgot to bring along something to eat,’ he objected, nevertheless. ‘I wouldn’t want to get hungry. Would it be all right,’ he asked, nodding towards the shack, ‘if I had them make me a sandwich?’

  ‘As you wish,’ Gavino replied. And he stepped aside to let him pass.

  Inside, the shack was much bigger than he’d expected.

  It consisted of a single room – deep, narrow and in semi-darkness. Along the side walls were widely spaced, cramped windows like embrasures. To the right was a lit fire, and seated motionless in front of it were three old men. Ahead, parallel to the facing wall, was a sales counter divided into two parts: one reserved for tobacco, the other for food. And behind this, on the side of the former, her long raven hair haloed by the scarce light from one of the small windows, the gaunt, pallid, bloodless face of a woman. He stopped just over the threshold and, with half-closed eyes, breathed in the odour that pervaded the locale – a mixture of freshly sawn wood and cheap foodstuffs – without Gavino showing the slightest impatience. The half-dark; the dry warmth; those three customers, there, with their glasses in their hands, their decrepit faces on which the flames incised deep wrinkles as though they were sculptures; the head of the woman behind the counter; the smell of the sawmill, of ham and food in oil and so on: it seemed to him exactly as though he’d ended up in a refuge high in the mountains. What bliss if only he could find some way of staying there! he said to himself, now unable to resist that disheartened feeling he’d begun to grapple with on first catching sight of Gavino. How right and quick he’d been to guess the sheer comfort he’d feel once he’d got inside the shack!

  A little later, re-emerging into the air, the light gave him a fortifying, reanimating shock. The baked red of the big Tuffanelli house shone vividly, joyfully: it looked like someone had just finished polishing it. The stretches of water that lay in the Valle Nuova, when he paused for a moment at the peak of the bridge to look at them, astonished him with their extraordinary intensity of blue. They shone blue, not only in the distance, where the hard cold wind flecked them here and there with foam, but also near the bank, there, where half-hidden rivulets between foreshore and foreshore twisted their way as near as two or three hundred metres from where some houses stood.

  Yet later still, in the car, going along that sandpit of a road, made ever narrower by the water flowing from the Tufanelli house to Lungari di Rottagrande, new motives for unhappiness and regret began to encroach on him.

  The dog, first of all; Gavino’s female dog. Youthful and exuberant – a cross between an Italian pointer and a setter, medium-sized, brick-red – there was no hope that she’d stay quiet for a single moment. Gavino switched between talking to her soothingly in dialect, while caressing her mud-spattered flanks, or pulling her down beneath his legs, shouting at her, even hitting her. All to no effect. Even when it seemed as though she’d given up making a fuss, only sticking her head up like a seal between her master’s boots every now and then, the car was still just as full of her, of her obsessive boisterousness, of her life. Leaving aside the smell she gave off, she kept on whining, trembling and fidgeting. Should he stop the car, let her out on her own, to let off steam and chase behind? Not worth even considering, Gavino said at a certain point. In the state of excitement she was in, it was a fair bet she’d dive into the water – with the likelihood that just when they needed her, she’d be nowhere near.

  Then there was Gavino – Aleotti Gavino, as he himself had found occasion to specify. Or rather, there were the thoughts that his presence in such close vicinity prompted.

  As they went on their way, he gradually found out more about him: that he was from Codigoro, that he had a wife and a baby boy, that from 1944 until the Liberation he had been a ‘fighting partisan’, and that leaving aside the minor assistance he gave to hunters under commission to the Land Reclamation Company between November and February, for the rest of the year he alternated work as a farm labourer and as a ‘construction’ worker. Not much, in the end, when the main question remained untouched, that being whether or not he was a Communist – courteous, patient, reserved in speech: from his behaviour he could well be one. On this topic he was able to determine nothing at all.

  All the same this wasn’t what most disturbed him – it was his physical presence, even more than the dog’s. It was odd. But the calm way in which he felt him occupy the space at his side made him nervous, oppressed him. He observed his right hand, resting a little above his knee on the olive-green rubber of his waders. It was a big, dark hand; that of a worker more than a sportsman, with slightly damaged nails and covered in tufts of reddish hair. And every time he looked at that hand, with increasing unease and annoyance, it reminded him of Ulderico. Could he have been his natural son, born before his marriage? he began suddenly wondering, adding to the evidence of the hand, his stature, his pale-blue eyes, their similarly small heads, and especially the calm and the self-confidence of every gesture that they both displayed. Why not? To wait for some hours practically without moving, and then not say a thing! His adherence to such an undertaking which was frankly a bit exaggerated, could also be accounted for by this theory.

  He glanced at the man’s hand, and rapidly scanned his thin, sun-tanned face with its compact, pointed profile. The wind had changed direction, he noted at the same time. And yet he, like Bellagamba earlier, seemed to find him at the very least an eccentric for presuming that there’d be something to shoot at so late in the day. It was true that, unlike Bellagamba, Aleotti Gavino hardly spoke at all. Yet wasn’t that vague air of mockery that hovered round his prominent cheekbones perhaps just as eloquent and depressing as any speech? And while he was thinking about all this, he blamed himself for being the one to insist that he joined him in the car. What a blunder that was! Had he let him drive his motorbike – before deciding to take up the offer, Gavino had entrusted it to the care of the Tuffanelli house with considerable reluctance – later on, he could have dismissed and been rid of him. Now they were bound together. With cords of steel.

  For some time the road, narrowed to a path, had been running along a very slender strip of land, straight as far as the eye could see, and flanked on both sides by open stretches of the lagoon. ‘Here it is, we must have arrived,’ he said to himself, recognizing th
e place; and suddenly, to the right, he saw the stern of the punt appear between two stumps of tamarisk bushes.

  He slowed down. He steered the car to the right and parked it so that other vehicles, should any appear, could pass. He switched off the motor, applied the handbrake and put the gears into reverse. Finally he opened the door and stepped out into the open air. As Gavino, still wrangling with the dog, gave no sign of moving, he made his way towards the craft alone.

  He reached it and touched it with his foot. Painted in dark colours, sloped like a gondola but with a flat bottom, it was exactly like those pre-war boats. Likewise, the floating decoys – metal cut-outs, painted wooden waterfowl and so on – piled up there towards the half-submerged prow seemed more or less the usual kind: many-coloured, as they used to be, as they always are …

  He lifted his head.

  The wind whistled between the weeping willows and the tamarisks on the shore, bent the thin, grey, plumed reeds that covered some of the small islets facing him. It was cold, much colder than it was in Volano. But when he put on his gumboots and a second pullover under his big Montgomery jacket, which, along with the camouflage raincoat he’d had the forethought to pack in the boot of his car the day before, then he’d be fine, and would have nothing to fear from the temperature.

  He thought he heard shots from a long way away. He leaned forwards. Yes, they were shots. From hunting rifles. They were fired from close by to one another, at regular intervals and continuously.

  ‘Have you heard how they’re shooting?’ he said, turning towards Gavino, who in the meantime had also got out of the car.

  The young man merely nodded. He’d already unleashed the dog who, having run off some fifty metres, paused motionless at the edge of the shore, tensely staring at who knows what in the direction of the open water. He had put down the two rifles and the packet with the sandwiches and fizzy drink a few steps further on.

  ‘We’ll need to get out the other stuff from the boot as well,’ he added. ‘Take the keys.’

  And he turned back towards the valley, trying to establish exactly where the noise of the guns was coming from. He strained his hearing to the limit, narrowing his eyes. Was it possible they were shooting in the vicinity of Romea? So far inland?

  3

  He’d already taken his place in the hide.

  He sat crouched up on the small, uncomfortable stool at the back, and was following Gavino’s movements some thirty metres in front of him. The Browning and the Krupp were leaning in front just about within reach, and everything immediately outside the hide was occluded by its upper edge – all except the punt which was almost entirely visible – and at the centre of the space framed by the two rifles’ parallel and upright barrels, down there, with the water reaching his thighs, Gavino could be seen bending over his decoy marsh birds like a puppeteer in his theatre. Nothing else was visible.

  He lowered his eyes and glanced at the hands of his watch.

  It was even later than Bellagamba had predicted – he grimaced to himself: a quarter past ten. But what did it matter to him whether it was early or late? Having slumped back into the exact same state of mind when he’d woken up a few hours before, for now, he restricted himself to looking out and to listening to the muted whines of the dog tied to one of the oarlocks of the boat, the isolated cries of some passing bird, the usual popping tattoo of shots that started off again in the other part of the valley along towards Romea. That was enough for him, and to spare.

  He slowly gazed around him.

  Considerably reduced in comparison to how it looked at the time when he used to visit with Ulderico – at this rate, in another fifteen years, the Land Reclamation Company’s pumps would have drained away all the water that yet remained – the Valle Nuova wore a different complexion. It was far from easy to take one’s bearings. Where exactly in the lagoon, for example, was the little islet of a few square metres which housed the hide in which he was hunkering down?

  To the right, on the same side as the driveable Pomposa–Volano track, on top of a low embankment, and therefore clearly distinguishable – calculating by sight, he’d have reckoned a couple of kilometres away – a long flat foreshore stretched out, covered with a thick, dwarfish, tobacco-coloured vegetation, like the mane of an old workhorse. On the opposite side, against the sun, was a second island, of the same kind and the same size as that of the hide, and the same distance off from the foreshore, about a hundred metres, but no more, and beyond it was the just-emergent line of the Lungari di Rottagrande, about two kilometres away as well, with the little, shining, beetle-backed form of the Aprilia right in the middle. Finally, in front of him, at no less distance, lay dry land crowded with poplars. Good. The hide was in the central part of the valley, then, at an equidistant point between the shores …

  The wait extended. If he had been seated a bit more comfortably – he thought – and not like this, as if squatting on the lavatory, perhaps he might have managed to doze off. But, in recompense, he could sort out something to eat. He had arranged it earlier. And all the better, at least for that.

  He fumbled down below, next to the two boxes of cartridges, for the wrapped-up sandwiches and the fizzy drink. He put them on his knees and took off his gloves. After which, having opened the wrapping, he fished out a sandwich, but just that. Only later would he take out the small bottle.

  He sunk his teeth into the sandwich and bit off a piece. But he’d already completely lost his appetite, and, besides that, he was put off by the fact that the bread – which in the semi-darkness of the shack he hadn’t realized – was of that French kind, bread that now, it was apparent, had started to make its way into the countryside as well. And then what was that stuff the woman in the hut had filled the bread with? Mortadella? It was greasy, undeniably greasy, yuck. But with a coarse texture. And the taste had something rancid about it that made him recall the years of ’42 and ’43, and ration books, the time during which he’d tried equally laboriously and willingly to play the role of husband, that of the good husband – effectively the worst years of his life.

  Gavino had finished his preparations.

  ‘Just as well,’ he muttered.

  He swallowed with difficulty. And while he continued to eat his lunch off his knees, groping in the greaseproof paper with his fingers, having given up his first idea to throw away the rest of the sandwich, he watched Gavino return to the hide and didn’t take his eyes off him.

  He strode forward, swinging his long legs and raising his eyes towards the sky every now and then. And gradually, as he approached, he seemed to him, when seen from below, taller than he actually was, taller with every step. The dog had suddenly stopped her whining. He couldn’t see her, but imagined her still as a statue, waiting for her owner’s commands.

  Now he was standing over him.

  ‘How many have gone by,’ he said. ‘Did you see?’

  He was joking – he thought. But no, he was serious, although in a way that looked like it was costing him some effort.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen a thing,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been having something to eat.’

  The other nodded at the Browning.

  ‘There’s a fair bit of wind and others will be flying past. But with that gun there you’ll be able to bring down as many as you please.’

  He noticed the pack on his knees.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked.

  ‘Not that good.’

  Perhaps, he added, it was because he wasn’t as yet that hungry. But the mortadella wasn’t of the best. And he didn’t care much for French bread, never had.

  He smiled, or thought he smiled, and then offered him the packet.

  ‘Would you like some?’ he said. ‘Do help yourself.’

  He was amazed that he accepted without being pressed any further. He didn’t even say thank you. Having slipped the packet into his jacket pocket, he bent over to set down the now empty decoy case and, most likely, to stroke the dog. Had he offended him? He’d offered him some
leftovers. And stale ones, to boot.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve already taken a bite,’ he said.

  ‘Please! Don’t give it a thought.’

  ‘Why don’t you take one of the rifles?’ he proposed.

  ‘A rifle?’ Gavino exclaimed.

  He had slowly drawn himself up to his full height, and turned to stare at him.

  ‘To do what?’

  It was happening again just as it had at Volano, beside the Tuffanelli house when, without anticipating he would soon regret it, he had insisted he leave the motorbike there and join him in the car.

  Why would he not want to take a rifle? he wondered. From that nearby islet – he pointed to it as he spoke – he could shoot at all the birds that he, on his side, had missed, and for the fifteen years he hadn’t been in the valleys, who could guess how many that would amount to!

  But Gavino stood firm and wouldn’t be persuaded.

  It wasn’t as if, let’s be clear – he replied smiling and shaking his head – it wasn’t as if the idea of shooting didn’t appeal to him. Rather the reverse. But each to his own job. His job these days was only to accompany gentlemen to the site – he used the words ‘these days’ and ‘gentlemen’, nodding at the same time in the direction of Romea – and then, when the hunt was over, to go around in his boat to gather the dead and the wounded.

  Yet he finally consented.

  ‘Well, all right then,’ he said. ‘As you please.’

  4

  He grasped the Browning by its strap, lifted it up and began trying it out for balance.

  He treated it with the skill and cool negligence of someone who’d had a great deal of experience with guns, but at the same time with a kind of diffidence, a veiled displeasure. What was he thinking? Perhaps of how much it would have cost. That must be it.

  ‘Fine rifle,’ he said after a while, making a wry face. ‘You’ll have bought it in Ferrara, I guess?’