The Heron

by Giorgio Bassani

  But, in the meantime, she’d changed the subject. She was asking him about Nives, whom, she said, she hadn’t seen for at least twenty years, and the fault was mainly hers, of course it was, since, lazybones that she was, she’d never wanted to set foot in Ferrara. She asked him about his girl. She asked him how they’d got through the war years, the worst ones, and if it was true – Rico had told her of it – that towards the end of the war they’d had to escape abroad. And he, while replying to each of these questions, began to wonder why she was keeping him so long on the telephone. And Ulderico? Why wasn’t he speaking, except by proxy? Why not pass the phone to him? If they were going to meet anyway, why not just get on with it! Why not put a lid on all the chatter!

  Together with these thoughts, he could sense other, very different ones insinuating themselves into his mind. He recalled that, not ten minutes earlier – on the basis of what? – when speaking on the phone that morning to the ancient maid and the young boy, he had imagined what he’d find at the Cavaglieri household – that is, all the family gathered around, the tea and the ciambella cake and the big dinner table flooded with light, and after it was cleared away, the game of tombola or rummy in which he’d participate just to hold out until it was bedtime, and so on. But might he not be mistaken? he wondered. Wasn’t he fooling himself? Although it would certainly be appealing to play the old misanthropic uncle whom his nephews and nieces would desperately try to cheer up and console with waves of affection and happiness, the sad fact was that this would never be anything other than a role, and a role, besides, that he would find impossible to play.

  ‘And how’s Ulderico?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, Rico’s fine –’ exclaimed Cesarina, with a laugh. ‘As are the children, thank God …’ It’s only that Rico, bored of waiting and waiting, had got tired of staying there doing nothing and at a certain point had gone out – but he’d be back by eight o’clock at the latest. Now, not even the children were home. As she’d felt like she needed a brief lie-down and instead the kids had begun in their usual fashion to kick a football around in the living room – crash, bang – making a terrible racket, at around five she’d sent them off to the flicks with Giuseppina, the wizened old help, to be rid of them all. They wouldn’t be back before seven-thirty or eight.’

  ‘And … where was he going?’

  ‘Who? Rico?’ and she laughed again. ‘Beats me,’ she added in dialect, ‘perhaps he’s off to see his mistress.’

  She was joking, he assumed. That, at least, was how it seemed.

  ‘Fine thing that would be,’ he said, forcing himself to play along, but in the meantime his throat felt constricted. ‘And where does he keep his mistress? Here in Codigoro?’

  ‘Good heavens, no way,’ replied the other, suddenly serious.

  ‘Perhaps he’d just gone for a stroll, poor Rico,’ she added. ‘Or even ended up somewhere playing billiards or cards … Only five minutes ago he’d rung from some bar to check if by any chance you’d called and to ask where the children were. And that almost certainly meant that he’d be going to wait for them at the cinema exit to take them off to church afterwards.’

  She emitted one of her strange, sighing whines – a little longer and more marked than usual.

  ‘But where,’ she went on, ‘where are you calling from?’

  ‘I’m in the square at Fetman’s.’

  ‘Just below the house then!’ she exclaimed. ‘Have you checked carefully that Rico isn’t there?’

  He hadn’t had time to look around. But if he had been there, the barman, given the sort he was, would certainly have let him know.

  ‘I don’t think he can be here,’ he replied.

  ‘If that’s so,’ Cesarina said energetically, ‘why not come round right away? Go on, please, and I’ll get up and make you a nice cup of tea.’

  Before he could answer, she began to explain where the house was and how to find it. It was very close to the square, she said, and more or less a hundred metres away from Caffè Fetman, and more specifically in that big ten-storey building which was on the corner of Via della Resistenza. But he should take care. To reach the inner courtyard and the lift, he should enter from the square, since there wasn’t even a proper door for 7 Via della Resistenza from the street. The eighth floor, internal apartment number 17, and 18 too. Ring the bell from down below and she’d let him in.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s great. I’ll come right now.’

  ‘D’you mean it? Then I’ll put the water on for the tea. Be sure to come.’

  ‘See you soon.’

  He hung up, and left the cabin.

  He made his way through the crowd, looking around carefully. No, it wasn’t likely he’d miss Ulderico, tall as he was – more than six foot if his memory served him. Of course, he could have stowed himself away in some back room to play billiards or cards.

  ‘Have you seen Signor Cavaglieri, the engineer?’ he asked the barman as soon as he stopped in front of him.

  ‘No, not today.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He turned round and went towards the door.

  ‘Signor!’

  Startled, he stopped and turned.

  From behind the counter, through the smoke and the steam from the espresso machine, the barman was staring at him.

  ‘The telephone token,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget about the token and the Fernet.’

  IV

  * * *

  1

  When he was outside again – strange, the fog had almost completely cleared – the first thing his eyes fell on was the snout of his Aprilia. To see it from the pavement, a little at a tilt and with the windscreen completely dark, it seemed to him even more ancient: a kind of rusty and useless wreck. ‘Go to hell!’ he muttered to himself shrugging his shoulders. His head was once again spinning. It was that shot of Fernet. He should have drunk it slowly and not, as he’d done, knocked it back in one gulp.

  He stepped off the pavement and approached the car.

  After having locked the right-hand-side door, he raised his eyes to look about. From over the car’s curved roof the I.N.A. building thrust itself up skyward higher than ever, massive and weighty. She’d said a hundred metres? Perhaps because the air was almost entirely fresh and clear the apartment block seemed much nearer. Through many of the small shutterless windows which dotted the façade in alternately projecting rows, half of them overlooking the square, half the Via della Resistenza, he could clearly make out the interiors of the apartments, with people coming and going from room to room, men in shirt-sleeves, women, children. Starting from the ground floor, he counted up to the eighth. There, on the floor that was third from the top, no light could be seen. This meant that the master bedroom looked out on the inner courtyard. Or else that Cesarina had already left the room and switched off the light to go into the kitchen.

  He walked round the car and towards the block.

  He thought about Cesarina. He couldn’t remember what type of person she was when she was a girl and Ulderico had begun following her around. From her voice, though, he thought he had a good idea of the kind of woman he would be dealing with in a very short while. He’d worked that out right from the start. He only needed to hear her drawn-out, whiny ‘Ye-es’ down the receiver. She must be large, fat and placid, quite the opposite of Nives. One of those good-looking women around forty, who always perturbed him so much that even now, at his age, every time he met one of them on the street he pretended, even to himself, not to have noticed her, not to have even seen her.

  He went over their telephone call, and what she had said, together with the fact that she was alone in the house, gave him the evermore clear-cut feeling of facing something decisive and unavoidable, like a kind of fork in the road. Then the more he thought back over her whole way of behaving towards him, apparently so candid and friendly, the more ambiguous it seemed to him. The tu she used with him, for example! But everything else as well, such as her point-blank introduction of the intima
cies of their family life – her and Ulderico on Sundays lazing about till late in their big conjugal bed as the children did in theirs – and especially that rustle of bedclothes which had insinuated itself into his ears at a certain point, and other things too, were all equally revealing of her real intentions. And finally, what need had she to let him know, even if it were a joke, that Ulderico had gone out to visit his mistress? Clearly, with this, she had wanted to repeat herself once more, so he should understand properly and have the idea firmly planted in his head that she was alone in the house, quite alone, and that her husband and her kids wouldn’t be back for at least a couple of hours. So there was no danger. He could come up without any worry. There was enough time, more than enough! Besides, the apartment had two doors, 17 and 18. Should the need arise she could let him out, unobserved, by the tradesman’s exit.

  Having arrived at the foot of the block, he stepped on to the pavement, then went under the arches at ground-floor level. His heart was beating fast and his breathing felt constricted. To calm himself down, he went towards the windows of the agricultural machinery emporium and leaned towards the roll-up security grille. In the midst of other machines of smaller dimensions, he recognized through the security grille, through the thick glass pane, a large American tractor, a Caterpillar. In the dim light of the shop he could just discern that it was painted yellow. It was an enormous dark mass. Something shapeless and blind, destitute of any function.

  But what a whore she is – he resumed telling himself. What an out-and-out whore!

  Living for years and years with a woman of that type, it was no wonder that Ulderico, who held priests no less than rabbis in total scorn, had been reduced to ending his Sundays in church and receiving the benediction. By and by, who knows what a doddery old man, what a wreck, a woman like that would have made him. In a short space of time she’d furnished him with six children. But now, having sucked him dry, she was evidently busy cuckolding him at full-tilt in front of the whole town, it mattered not a whit with whom: with the barman of Caffè Fetman, the barman and perhaps the owner too, perhaps with Bellagamba, or even – why not? – with that very Gavino Aleotti, who occasionally worked for her husband, and no holds barred. Large, fat and placid. And most of all a whore. What was so wrong with that? she was perhaps thinking as she awaited his arrival. If a worker like Gavino Aleotti figured in her list of men, young and robust as he undoubtedly was, but nevertheless working class, why shouldn’t she enrol her husband’s cousin from Ferrara as well? The Ferrara cousin was no longer very young, but he was certainly quite as upper class as Rico, if not more so. And then, leaving aside their being related, hadn’t the two of them been great pals, not to say inseparable, when they were young, to the extent that up till the moment she became Rico’s lover, the mistress he kept, they’d been in the habit of visiting girls together, even of sharing them?

  7 Via della Resistenza had a door of modest proportions located at the very far end of the block, there where the arches finished and the usual row of impoverished houses began. He saw it right away, as soon as he’d turned the corner. It had been the small vertical rectangle with the names of the occupants, fixed to the right-hand-door jamb and faintly lit from within, which made him recognize the door from afar.

  Picking up his pace, he walked in that direction. He felt exactly like when, as a boy, he’d just taken his high-school exams and, for the first time, accompanied by Ulderico, he’d crossed the threshold of a brothel; he couldn’t recall whether in Bologna or Padua. Or when, on those days around the August holiday, he and Ulderico had gone by car to climb in the mountains; and, having arrived at the foot of Mount Pala or Mount Tofana, there was nothing to be done but steel himself, overcome the nausea which inevitably, at that moment, gripped his stomach, and, after being roped together, he had had to follow the others towards a fate which no earthly power could have impelled him, apart from the will of those who were dragging him after them.

  He approached the entrance. He bent to inspect the list of surnames. He read CAVAGLIERI, ULDERICO, ENGINEER.

  While he was close to the faint reddish light, he glanced at his watch – it was six-thirty – and calculated that the time at his disposal was quite enough to do the needful, and told himself it was true, during those long-ago Sundays when he and Ulderico went out hunting, they had always ended up first with a big meal and then by going to bed with some local girl, a seamstress, a factory or farm-worker; someone, in short, who was willing, whom he could carry off to La Montina himself, if need be – who could be paid off somehow, and perhaps after having already been passed between the cousins or between their friends, would usually, in the end, be dumped. Suddenly aware that his eyes were on the little hand of his watch, on the sedate, familiar, round, gold-framed face of his Vacheron-Constantin, he realized he was in a state of delirium. He’d been raving, he’d no idea for how long. From that morning, from the moment he had awoken, and then for the entire day, he’d been in this state of delirium. And still now. Codigoro. Those arches … With a sudden lucidity, he asked himself who he was, dressed for hunting, with his fur hat on his head, at that precise moment, under those arches, who on earth was he?

  He took off a glove. He touched the button of the bell, not to ring it, but merely to touch it, to feel its texture. Then he stood upright. He walked out from under the arches and, keeping close to the house walls, took the left-hand-side pavement on the opposite side of the square towards the river port.

  2

  It was seven o’clock, approximately.

  Perhaps it would be best to make the most of the fog having almost dispersed, he thought, and instead of wandering around Codigoro staring at the paving stones to return to the square, ring that poor woman Cesarina again to make his excuses, get into the car and, done with it all, set off back to the city. Nevertheless, each time such a scheme occurred to him, he dismissed it at once. So ought he to stay? With what end in view? Before the extreme loss of blood had clouded its eyes, the heron must have felt something similar to him: closed in on every side, without the slightest possibility of escape. With this difference, though, to his disadvantage: that he was fit, quite unimpaired, without having shed a drop of blood, and the dog … well, given the possibility one would go for him, he would have no other option but to face it, with his eyes wide open.

  He walked hurriedly, having now reached the end of Via della Resistenza, determined not to turn his gaze towards the freight ships and barges lined up, as they were this morning, along the shore of the river port. But as soon as he became aware of the presence beside him of those motionless, mouse-coloured shapes, so motionless as to seem as if rather than floating they were stuck in the muddy bed of the river, he couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and observe them.

  Innumerable times as a boy he’d seen boats lined up this way in the canal ports of Cesanatico, of Cervia, of Porto Corsini – in the happy, interminable holidays that they went on back then, before the war and immediately after. And yet from these low broad boats, which instead of being crowned with big, bright, gaudy-coloured sails, had light rigging, transparent as gauze, like lazy wisps of fog, snagged on their grim skeletal masts – from these no sense of joy, of life, or of liberty could be retrieved. From the deck of a barge anchored far from the quay, almost at the centre of the surrounding, mirroring water, two people were moving about, a man and a woman. The man, if his eyes weren’t deceiving him, was a corpulent old guy with white hair and a black Fascist-style pullover; the woman, blonde and very young, wearing a fustian jacket and tight-fitting trousers like blue jeans. They were shouting and gesticulating and running around the cabin whose small window disclosed a faint light, as of a lantern. Their sharp but distant cries, like those of the birds of the valleys, the clacking of their clogs on the decking, their grotesque shadows, enlarged by the yellowish light from the hold … Unable as he was to draw closer, he felt as though he was the spectator at the edge of a vast square of a puppet show being performed for himself alone.
It was all pointless. The old man, the villain, would in the end manage to grab hold of the beautiful girl he was chasing, there was no doubt about it. What then? Even if, having clasped and immobilized her, he had stuck a dagger in her trembling throat, what would have happened that was so serious? You only had to observe life’s events from a certain distance to conclude that all they amounted to was what they were; in other words, nothing, or almost nothing.

  Having passed the diagonal street which to the left led on to the cemetery and to the right to the iron bridge which became the old country road that went on to Migliaro, Migliorino and from there, the fork in the road which led to either Ferrara or Lagosanto and Comacchio, he found himself close to a solitary building. He stopped for a second time. Strange that, over so many years, he’d never paid it much attention. It was a large ancient manor house with a Venetian air, of the kind which was relatively common just on the other side of the River Po, in the lower Polesine district. With its fine, two-storeyed façade which overlooked the canal, therefore south-facing, and with ample space in front to plant trees, this would certainly, he thought, be a fine place for him to buy and live in! He crossed the street to observe the house more closely. But when he realized the decrepit state it had fallen into – the main door replaced by clumsily nailed boards, the windows without panes or shutters, the roof half-stove in – from below through a first-floor window you could even see a patch of sky – he quickly dropped the idea. Disheartened, he imagined the interior, the desolation of empty rooms, fat sewer rats scurrying over the wrecked flooring, the black mouth of the big smashed fireplace on the first floor from which on stormy days terrible gusts of wind would wreak havoc from one end to the other of the big reception room, the splinters of wood – pieces flaked off the rotten shutters, off the doors that would have fallen from their hinges many years before – scattered nearly everywhere, and the dust, the cobwebs, the reek, the darkness. No. To resurrect a carcass like that would need too much strength of every kind. Perhaps not even Ulderico could have managed, the Ulderico of fifteen years ago when, still young, he had suddenly decided to leave everything behind, get married to an undistinguished woman – the nearest to hand, convert, set up house and family in the depths of the Bassa, and effectively disappear.