He shook his head emphatically.
‘Heavens, no.’
He must have assumed an expression of disgust – of all the disgust he always felt oppressed by at the mere thought of a taxidermist’s workshop – God, what a ghastly stink there’d be, a mixture of a poulterer’s, a chemist’s, a lavatory and a morgue … On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he was obliged to explain himself. Better cut things short. Let Bellagamba stand there gawping at him for as long as he liked.
He fished the car keys out of his pocket and pushed them across the table towards him.
‘Take them,’ he said. ‘You know my car. I’ve parked it out there in front.’
The other stretched out his hand. Halfway there, however, it came to a halt.
‘Talking of which,’ he said, lowering his voice, his round, catlike eyes aglint, ‘have you thought any more about it?’
‘About what?’
‘You know … the car!’
He took a seat facing him.
He continued in dialect, with an uncertain smile, full of embarrassed shyness: ‘Might we come to an arrangement, sgnór avucàt?’
Now it was his turn not to understand.
But then he suddenly remembered their brief discussion that morning, a little before he’d left. And while he listened to everything Bellagamba was telling him, specifically that day by day, without a van, managing the restaurant and hotel was becoming more and more difficult – the bike and sidecar he owned, a Harley Davidson swapped for some tobacco at an A.R.A.R. camp,fn1 which, because of its big engine size, consumed almost more petrol than a Balilla, he could imagine how inadequate that was! – while he listened and kept on eating and drinking as well, increasingly, he was overwhelmed by a sense of futility. Bellagamba spared no efforts in persuading him to sell the Aprilia, expatiating minutely on all the uses he could put it to. These days – he was saying – it’s not enough to wait for some passing hunter to deliver wild game; if, that is, someone does stop by, that’s all well and good, if not, you just have to keep on hoping. To meet the ever-increasing demand of his clientele, it made sense for him to acquire it directly from the ‘heavyweights’ of the hunting world, such as Commendatore Ceresa and his associates, who’d be likely to bring down a hundred, a hundred and fifty kilos of game at a time. There was no other way to do it – you needed to be there in person in the valleys, at the ‘source’, at around one o’clock in the afternoon, to buy in bulk and then be off. The same thing for fresh fish straight out of the water, which, if you hadn’t the chance of leaving Codigoro really early in the morning, when it’s still dark, so as to arrive at Goro, or Gorino, or Porto Tolle, or Pila, or even as far away as Chioggia, just when the fishing vessels came to the shore, and chiefly to be there on four wheels, that was the only way to do it, if you didn’t want to come back with only a few kilos of fish. The man kept on talking, explaining, gesticulating. And he, meanwhile, his head ever heavier, could find nothing to argue with. He understood Bellagamba, he understood him and could see how sound his arguments were. The car, of course he needed it. No question about that. Instead of selling him it, it would almost be better to give it to him. With all the birds in the boot as well.
After a while he shook himself. He looked around. His gaze alighted on the table of hunters, down there, in the smoke. So far away, it was as though the whole vast Valle Nuova lay between him and them.
‘Who are those people?’ he asked.
‘It’s the man I mentioned, Commendatore Ceresa, and his friends,’ Bellagamba replied contritely.
‘They are gentlemen from Milan –’ he went on – ‘more or less all of them working in industry. Since last year, as an association, they have rented a stretch of the valley from Pomposa to Vaccoline, quite close to Romea, from the Land Reclamation Offices. They usually arrive by car on Saturday evening. They dine here at mine but then prefer to sleep at the splendid deluxe “lodge” constructed entirely out of wood that they have had put up in a jiffy, within spitting distance of the water. Today, though, they’re about to leave, and should be back in their homes around nine this evening, that’s of course if the big fog on the Via Emilia doesn’t stop them.’
‘They’re folk who fork out big-time, that’s for sure,’ he concluded in dialect. ‘Would you like me to introduce you? When I come back, I could easily do so.’
Left alone, he finished eating the remains of the antipasto, then stood up. His face was flushed and hotter than ever. He had to wash it.
Swaying a bit, he passed in front of the woman in the trouser suit and, having crossed the dining-room, went to shut himself in the toilets next to the kitchen.
Besides being cramped and incredibly foul-smelling, and still populous with old flies that had survived the summer, the room was far from comfortable. A small semi-circular basin of chipped porcelain, with a greenish, soaked and dirty terrycloth hand towel hung on a hook on the wall next to it. On the floor was the hole of a Turkish toilet, filthy and half-blocked with newspaper. Hardly any light. No mirror. Not even a trace of soap.
He turned on the tap of running water and washed his face as best he could. He dried himself with his handkerchief. Finally, though in no great need, he turned in the opposite direction to urinate.
He succeeded only after a while. When was it – the last time he’d gone? he wondered. And just as he asked himself this, and recalled the last time had been hardly an hour ago, on the Lungari, when, so as not to be seen by Gavino he had chosen to conceal himself behind the opened car door, it wasn’t so much the thin colourless stream of his own urine that he was staring at, but rather, with a curiosity, surprise and bitterness he’d never felt before, at the member from which the stream issued. ‘Huh!’ he exclaimed with a grin. Grey, wretched, a mere nothing, with that sign of his circumcision, so familiar and yet so absurd … In the end, it was nothing but an object, a pure and simple object like so many others.
3
‘Here’s the key,’ Bellagamba said. ‘It’s number twenty-four on the second floor. I’m sorry you’ll have to climb so many stairs. But up there, you’ll have every comfort and there’s a bath too.’
They were waiting in the entrance, facing each other as they had been that morning, Bellagamba seated behind the reception desk, the lower part of his face, his square jaw and sagging cheeks in the circle of the lamp’s yellowish light, and he standing, with his arms laden with his jacket, pullover, fur cap, gloves. Yet they weren’t alone. He heard people continually passing behind his back, the last customers on their way out. From the corner of his eye he saw them, a few at a time, reach the door that gave on to the street, then disappear, hunched and well-wrapped shades, into the fog and the darkness.
He rubbed his thumb between the other thumb and forefinger.
Busy replying to the fragmentary goodbyes of the customers leaving, Bellagamba suddenly seemed to him inattentive, distracted. Until a moment before, he’d been giving him his full attention, insisting in every possible way that he should accept the offer to go to an upstairs room to take a ‘nap’. Now, by contrast … But it was clear that he didn’t know how to divide his attention. He would very much have liked to accompany him upstairs personally, as he kept repeating, if only he, Signor Avvocato, would be a little patient, in five minutes, at most, he would certainly be able to do so.
‘Don’t worry,’ he’d replied at a certain point, wearily shaking himself out of the torpor into which he’d fallen. ‘Let it be.’
‘Are you sure you know where your room is?’
‘Of course.’
‘Number twenty-four, second floor, the left-hand corridor, third door on the right.’
‘Good.’
‘And at what time would you like to be called?’
As usual, the other man was observing him with the air of someone with a particular motive who pretends there isn’t one. He was fairly drunk, true, but still alert enough to notice that.
‘Now it’s four o’clock,’ he continued. ‘Should
we say at six?’
He tried to concentrate. If he were to wake up at six, when would he manage to leave? And then when would he get home by? Wasn’t there the risk of …? Once again, his mind grew muddled. Better give up any attempt to reason. Better just move and flake out on a bed straightaway. Try to get some sleep.
Without replying, he passed the side of the desk and moved towards the stairs.
‘Have a good sleep!’ Bellagamba shouted after him, adding in dialect ‘and be careful not to take a header down the stairs, for God’s sake!’
He started to climb the stairs, his right hand gripping the rail. His jacket, pullover and so on, bundled up beneath his left arm and heavy as lead, his stomach crammed with food and wine – so full and swollen that he ought to have let out his trousers by two or three notches – every step cost him an immense effort. As he went up, he stared at the feeble, dusty lamp that hung high up on the ceiling of the first landing and told himself that, No, he’d never be able to drag himself all the way up to the second floor. It seemed impossible, an exertion way beyond any strength he had. The porthole window, a little below the light source of the lamp, was completely blind. A black disc, extinguished and opaque.
He reached the landing, turned to the right, broached the second staircase, set foot on the mezzanine landing, and began climbing again. At last, completely out of breath, with his heart beating madly within his thoracic cage and his head more giddy than ever, he found himself before the second-floor bathroom door. So he was there, motionless, still gasping, his gaze once more drawn to the small dark vertical letters of the enamelled sign on which was written BATHROOM, but he was numb, empty of all thought. Around him there was absolute silence. Even Bellagamba’s voice, that loud baying that, every now and then, rose upstairs from the depths to vex his ears, had gone silent. All he could hear was his own panting, the beating of his heart and the throbbing at his temples.
As soon as he was in his room, stretched out on the bed – recovered now from his breathlessness – he immediately tried to fall asleep. He ought to have undressed, or at least to have taken off his shoes and turned off the light. But no matter. If he’d had the patience to stay there with his eyes closed for a few minutes, forcing himself not to move and, above all, not to think about anything, there was not the least doubt that with all he’d drunk he would most certainly have fallen asleep.
And yet there was no way – he couldn’t keep still. He had turned on to his right side, then on to his left, then again he had turned, to lie on his back, and soon after he knew he’d start all over again. How odd: before he’d been stumbling every which way and now, instead, lying down, he felt as though threaded with faint, repeated electric shocks. Shifting, restless, alert, even his eyeballs seem to be hurting. In the cavity of their orbs it seemed as though two small beasts had made their dens, so swollen with blood as to be on the verge of bursting and yet still avid to swallow more, two greedy little monsters as ready to tense and pounce as the fleeting swarms of those sparks, the glinting commas of light, that were closing in on them from all sides.
Not thinking was likewise impossible. It was like a ribbon that was unspooling of its own accord, an unstoppable, monotonous, sequential reel of images. There was Bellagamba, for example. Against the dark screen of his quivering eyelids, or against the no-less-dark screen of thick shadows in which, if he opened his eyes, his gaze became submerged, there he was with his leathery face always thrust forwards, continually twisted up into unpredictable grimaces, winks, wrinklings of the forehead, odd twitches of his eyebrows, his nose, his lips, his tongue. Then immediately afterwards, other faces – the face of Nives, framed by her pillow; that of his mother, with the eternal black velvet ribbon hanging loosely around her neck; then Gavino’s face out of the Aprilia’s side window; and even those of the hunters from Milan, one after another, Commendatore Ceresa and his companions, about whom Bellagamba had been so loquacious: industrialists, the big shots, the sharks with the luxury chalet not far from Romea. It was obviously money – he told himself with bitterness, feeling once again offended by certain, very costly articles of hunting equipment that group would be supplied with (which, as it happened, he hadn’t even seen), buckskin jackets, pigskin or chamois gloves, multi-coloured sweaters of Norwegian wool or cashmere, strange, distinctive footwear. But, even more than that, the way they’d heaped their stuff on top of an extra five or six chairs, the way they spoke to each other or turned to Bellagamba (he standing by respectfully, their host and servant), and yet kept him at a distance – it was money, cash, that conferred such assurance, such good health and made the one who possessed more than a certain quantity of it appear as if of a different race, stronger, more full of life, more attractive, more likeable! Money, cash, dosh: in the vicinity of those who had it, everything, but everything – Fascism, Nazism, Communism, religion, family quarrels or affections, agricultural disputes, bank loans and so on and so forth – everything else all at once became of no concern or importance.
Suddenly he saw before him the face of the woman in the dark trouser suit whom he’d noticed down in the dining-room – her big pallid face, that of an ex-farmworker, probably from the neighbourhood, her large lustreless eyes which seemed focussed on nothing, her fat, fleshy lips, caked with lipstick. Before they’d parted Bellagamba had yelled merrily ‘Sleep well!’ But, on reflection, what did Bellagamba have to be so merry about? He was joshing him of course, the way someone does who has too much need of you and of your protection, especially in the case of someone who’s drunk. Yet mightn’t it be that Bellagamba was trying in his own way, as a proficient pimp, to indicate that he should relax and not concern himself, because the whore, who’d cost no more than a thousand lire, with whom he’d seen his guest exchanging glances throughout lunch, was a thing that he, Gino Bellagamba, could easily procure for him and could send upstairs to his room without delay? That was it for sure. That was what Bellagamba had been promising, now he understood, with all his winking, with all his continuous, perpetual half-saying and not saying!
He heard footsteps in the corridor. He searched gropingly behind his head for the light switch, and finding it, pressed the button. It was bound to be her – he said to himself, sitting up on the bed – it could only be her. After having announced herself with all that slapping of slipper soles, in a moment she’d be knocking on the door. Or else, opening the door no further than was needed, she’d slip straight inside.
He put his feet on the floor and, slowly, doing up his trousers, he walked towards the door. His heart had begun to beat madly again. He was sure he was right. A question of seconds, and then … the latch would be lowered, the door would begin to edge open, slowly, cautiously, inexorably, and then suddenly he would find that strange creature before him, face to face. And so? How would he react at that point? From the time when, as boys, they’d frequented brothels together, Ulderico had always been very curt and brisk with prostitutes. Not vulgar or brutal, of course. Minimum chat and down to the act. While he, on the contrary – apart from the fact that for something like eight years after getting married, the idea of going with a prostitute hadn’t even entered his mind – had always been shy, insecure, solicitous and, on every occasion, needing an interminable preamble before he got round to the infamous act …
From the depths of the room the tall mirror of the straw-coloured wardrobe reflected an image of himself standing beside the door: a remote and sketchy image, as though about to dissolve. So how should he behave? he asked himself in confusion. Give her something and send her away? Why not? Later, it was true, he would have to see her with Bellagamba, put up with a new series of more or less sly hints of one type or another. Important, though, not to hesitate. Let her come in, keep her there talking for a short while, and finally be rid of her, pressing two or three hundred lire into her hand. He saw no other way out of a situation like this.
4
As the latch was not lowered, at a certain point he wondered whether it wouldn’t be better
to open the door himself. Unfortunately, he hadn’t left the key in the lock. If he had, he could have locked himself in without standing there getting into such a state.
He opened the door and, seeing no one there, stepped out into the half-darkness of the corridor. He looked right towards the landing, then left towards the end of the corridor. No one, not a soul. How was that possible? There was no doubt, he had heard the sound of footsteps. He was quite sure he hadn’t imagined it. Perhaps it had been an employee, perhaps the cleaning woman? On a Sunday afternoon? Why not? It wasn’t that strange once he thought about it.
In the meantime, he left the door half-closed and made his way along the corridor as far as the landing. He leaned on the banister, and looked down into the dark abyss of the stairwell. From the ground floor, along with a faint gleam of light, came a vague hum of stoves, of tables being shifted, of footsteps, of faraway voices. It was evident – he told himself, yawning – that they were clearing the dining-room and getting it ready for the evening.
He went back into his room and locked the door. After which, hurriedly undressing, he slipped back into bed. He had kept on his woollen underclothes. But no sooner had he drawn the covers up to his nose than he was shaken with an extended shivering. The sheets were cold and damp, especially at the bottom of the bed around his feet. Still, nothing like as bad as before. Without anything clinging tight about his waist, he felt infinitely better. Even his stomach seemed far less heavy.
He stretched out an arm to switch off the light, turned on his right side and yawned till tears came to his eyes. And almost immediately, with the sudden permission of his whole being, he was aware that his mind had misted over, that he was falling asleep and dreaming.
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