by André Aciman
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 the square, he’d be safe and sound.
Turning right, he soon reached the town center, 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-story building of the I.N.A.§ there in front of him, where Ulderico and his family lived, nor from the other houses in the vicinity, large and small. Everything was shut. 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 toward the center of the square—in fact it was an old setter—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 Elòceo 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 meters from his car, he came to the corner of the ex-Fascist Headquarter’s facade and the adjoining street. He narrowed his eyes and scanned the street. He wasn’t mistaken. Even the Bosco Elòceo 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 behavior was different from that of Ulderico who, for his part, when they had offered him the card in 1932, had pocketed it straight off. 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 two rifles left in evidence on the backseat of the car—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 inn 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 fully 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 behavior of Bellagamba’s 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 la
mp 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 limewashed plaster hung ten or twelve keys. In the semi-dark he could make out nothing else. But that was enough. That desk and those keys were enough to make him aware how little the present inn, 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 weighing scale 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 toward 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 gone all 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, the usual hemp, the usual beetroots and therefore, Communism or no Communism, destined soon enough 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 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 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 see 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.
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 honorable guest rather than to the “water closet” of the ground floor. It was indeed as he’d said. The straw-colored door sported an enamelled metal plate three-quarter 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 color 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 onto 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 window sill, a meter 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 on 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 at random some other sheets, the provenance of none of which he could establish, but not all of them had been cut from the same newspaper or from the same day. RIGHT TO STRIKE 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 soccer field stretch out in a vertical perspective, with the islanded goal posts 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 handmade 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 facade of the Trade Union Hall between the now lit-up windows of the two cafes and in the middle, as though on 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, farther 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, farther still, much farther 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?
