by André Aciman
Disconcerted, reluctant, he’d followed her. The hand pulling him on was thick and hard and seemed greasy—the hand of someone who works in the kitchen scouring pots and pans with pumice. Yet, no differently from when as a youth he’d visited brothels—and Ulderico never stopped making fun of him for what he called his “silliness”—on this occasion too more than any physical repugnance he felt hindered by fear, the fear of venereal disease. Without a condom, he could pick up the clap or even syphilis. If only he’d felt some desire to do what he was about to do! But anyway how would it be possible at a quarter to eight in the morning and with nothing in his stomach except a sip of coffee? For good or ill, he ought to get rid of her. Two hundred, three hundred lire should do the trick. He wasn’t prepared to shell out any more than that.
Next thing they were in the room, she under the covers, he standing before the window from which could be seen, in the dusky light that pierced the racing clouds, the same things as from the bathroom, the chicken run with the hens, the sports field with its two battered goals facing each other, and so on, with the flat endless countryside all around the village as a backdrop.
Better you don’t keep insisting—he was telling her without turning to look at her. He hadn’t come to Codigoro to stay there but to go on to the valleys to hunt. It was eight o’clock. Even if he left immediately, he’d arrive almost three hours late at Volano where he’d arranged to meet someone who’d be taking him to Lungari di Rottogrande. So could he stay any longer? Clearly not.
Wouldn’t you like me at least to try kissing it?”
How annoying! What a bore! All the same he turned and moved away from the window and unbuttoning his trousers drew close to her so his belly was at the level of the headboard.
“What would you be kissing? Can’t you see how small it’s got?”
“You’re really in a bad way,” she then murmured without touching him again, only looking at what he too was observing. “There’s nothing there at all.”
5.
HE AWOKE with a start, at first not realizing where he was. Although, even before he had stretched out his hand behind his head for the light cord, he was becoming minimally aware of his surroundings. So he’d been asleep. Asleep and dreaming. And the wake-up call? How come no one had bothered? It seemed as though hours had passed since he fell asleep. Perhaps it was already two or three in the morning.
Having switched on the light, he turned on his side to reach for his watch on the shelf of the bedside cupboard and glanced at it. Five forty-five. He rapidly understood, while at the same time registering a sudden wave of anxiety, that he’d only slept for around an hour. Tomorrow was far, far away. Between now and then gaped the immense almost unbridgeable gulf of an entire night, one of the longest nights of the year.
After ten minutes or so he went down the stairs into the ever stronger reek of rancid food.
Down in the entrance Bellagamba, as ever behind the reception desk, was trying to fix a small radio. The sports news was on, the soccer scores. He came closer. Leaning over the apparatus, noisy with static, the old Fascist seemed unaware of his presence. He could see well enough that he’d arrived at the least opportune moment. But on the other hand he had to get going right now. And before leaving, he had to pay for his meal and the use of the room.
No chance. However much he insisted, the other man would have nothing of it. Evidently—he said, his voice raised over the noise of the radio—evidently Signor Avvocato is joking. That would be a fine thing! After all the game he’d given him. So please it would be doing him a favor not to talk any more about money. Otherwise he’d be forced to return all the game or else draw up a proper account. And then it would be clear which of them was the one in debt.
He turned off the radio.
“More to the point, did you sleep well?” he enquired.
“Not badly.”
“But only briefly! For how long? An hour and a half at most. You said you wanted to be called at six. I’d have preferred to leave you undisturbed for longer . . .”
He smiled with a sly air.
“I was even thinking of ringing your wife,” he went on. “Just so that with this fog she shouldn’t be worried.”
He beat his forehead with his closed fist.
“Now I think of it. Someone telephoned from the house of the engineer Cavaglieri, and said that when you woke up would you be so kind as to call?”
He narrowed his eyes, and asked:
“Isn’t he your cousin, the engineer?”
“But who was it on the telephone?” he asked without replying, and without managing to control his voice. “The engineer himself?”
“Definitely not. I don’t think it was his wife either.”
It must have been the housemaid, he thought, the old woman who’d answered this morning.
He stretched his hand out over the desk.
“Goodbye,” he said. “It’s time I left. And thanks.”
“If you’d like,” Bellagamba replied, shaking the hand he’d proffered with evident reluctance, “you can even call from here.”
So saying, he extracted the telephone from under the desk.
“No, but thanks all the same,” he said, shaking his head with an attempt at a smile.
He covered the back of the other’s hand with the palm of his left hand and then, turning his back, made for the exit.
As soon as he was outside, however, he found himself of two minds as to whether to go by foot to Cafe Fetman or to take the car instead. He quickly decided on the latter. A brief walk could only do him good, he told himself, crossing the street, what with that grey, coated tongue he’d recently observed in the bathroom mirror. But it was also the case that if he walked he would then have to return and so perhaps bump into Bellagamba again. He could imagine the scene. He reentering the square, and there, waiting for him and appearing on cue behind the steamed-up glass of the entrance to Bosco Elòceo, the bony face of Bellagamba, carried away with his usual mania of spying, nosing about and digging things up. . .
Once he’d started up the car, backed out and begun moving at a walking pace toward the square—the fog still so thick it stopped him shifting even into second gear—he felt himself completely invigorated. Just as well. If the Cavaglieri family hadn’t got in touch, he doubted he’d ever have had the will to phone them. Without anything else as an excuse to stay in Codigoro, all that would have been left would be to set off on his way back to Ferrara. And by now he’d already be en route, threading his way through the dense fog, always in first gear, with his eyes narrowed, for mile after mile.
He was imagining the Cavaglieri house: warm, brightly lit, and with the six girls and boys, from the oldest to the youngest, making a noisy ring around their already middle-aged mother and father, and yet somehow still youthful, still going strong. He couldn’t work out why the prospect of dropping into the midst of all that inevitable din and confusion should attract rather than repel him, should so surprisingly fill him with hope and desire. Who knows, he embroidered the scene, perhaps later, after the cup of tea and the homemade ciambella cake and the glass of sweet Albana to be slowly sipped with the cake, they would all have pressed him to stay for supper and then, later still, at the end of the meal and the games of tombola that would follow, to stay the night as well, among the whole family, like an old bachelor uncle who’d become curmudgeonly and taciturn from being so long alone, in an improvised bed—perhaps in the bedroom of the youngest—Tonino or was it Tanino?—or in that of the next youngest, Andrea, the one he’d spoken to on the phone at such length and with whom therefore things would be easier, much easier than with any of the other children, to chat in the dark till his eyelids grew heavy. Perhaps indeed it would all fall out like that, he told himself. He really hoped so.
He entered the square obliquely, and to guide him through the fog he never lost sight of the small dark pinnacle of the monument for the Fallen and, only just visible, the enormous I.N.A. building with its facade full of win
dows without shutters from which issued a vivid white light, more that of a city than a small town, and finally arrived right in front of the Cafe Fetman. He was by now so eager to phone that, having switched off the engine and got out of the car he forgot to lock the door, as was his habit. He realized this only later when, stepping up onto the sidewalk he was about to enter the cafe. He turned round and glanced at the Aprilia. No, he decided, it wasn’t worth the trouble. To phone and so on wouldn’t take him more than a couple of minutes at most. And in that time, given how deserted the whole place was—the town’s inhabitants were all imprisoned in their houses and the others, the visitors, had already left, were already far down the road that would take them home—no one would dream of stealing anything.
He entered.
The smoke, the steam, the noisy crowd (many of the Bosco Elòceo customers had relocated there to argue about the scores and league tables on display on a wall) and the sardonic grin with which the same grimy forty-year-old he’d encountered this morning behind the counter—all this in other circumstances would have provoked in him his usual feeling of recoil compounded with a disgust at any physical contact, an annoyance at the din, and a fear of any unpleasant encounters. But in his present state of mind he paid no heed to any of that. He asked for a telephone token. He ordered a Fernet amaro. And meaning to drink it after his phone call, he moved decisively toward the telephone booth at the end of the big room.
He turned the light switch. Forgetting to close the door, he dialled the number 12.
Almost immediately a woman’s voice answered:
“Yes.”
6.
IT WAS Cesarina, Ulderico’s wife, herself.
Addressing him quite naturally with the informal tu, not merely as though they had known each other for years, forever, but as if they had just been speaking a few hours ago, she immediately reproached him with affectionate familiarity for having waited so long to call them. Good heavens, she was saying, instead of going to Bellagamba’s to eat and to have a sleep there as well—lucky that after lunch they’d had the idea of ringing—but why, for heavens’ sake, hadn’t it crossed his mind to come straight round to their place? Rico would have been more than happy. And the children as well . . .
She had a warm, low, drawling voice, slightly querulous, and an accent exactly like Nives’s. And although the tu she’d addressed him with had initially rather disconcerted him, soon enough he found it appropriate. When, shortly, they’d meet again everything would go smoothly and it would save them both a great deal of embarrassment.
“Just a moment,” he said.
He turned to close the phone booth door.
“It was past three o’clock,” he added. “And I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Disturb us!” exclaimed Cesarina. “For goodness sake, you shouldn’t say that even as a joke. On Sundays and now on a holiday it was always like Sunday, all of them got up very late so they’d usually never sit down to lunch before two or a quarter past two. But apart from that, what difference would it make to set an extra place? If the table were set for nine—or ten actually including the part-time maid—it could just as well be for eleven. And it would take nothing to prepare a bed for him for an after-lunch snooze!”
“Thank you,” he replied. “Next time I’ll feel free to drop in.”
“Good. That’s quite right. And the hunting,” she went on, “how did it go? Did you shoot anything? Soon as Rico heard you’d come here he put his head out of the window and said that with this weather he reckoned you’d get nothing. But that was just envy,” she added laughing. “Anyway it seemed to me that the weather changed soon after that.”
Since closing the phone booth door he could hear her much better. She joined her phrases together with a slight whine like a hungry cat, half nasal, half throaty. And she seemed so close now that at one point he thought he could even hear the faint rustling of a sheet. Could she be in bed? The speed with which she’d picked up the phone favored this notion. It wouldn’t be so outlandish that even in Codigoro a telephone extension might be fixed up to the bedside. The phone at Bosco Elòceo must also have had that sort of extension.
“Yes, the weather changed,” he confirmed. “We took down some forty birds in all.”
He had to receive her breathless exclamations, her congratulations not, it seemed to him, without a certain air of having seen through him, as if Gavino, who might well have just called before him, had already given a very specific account of what had actually happened. On the other hand—he told himself, again registering the secret gnawing of anxiety but not yet willing to submit to it, to fall back into it—he could hardly act any differently. Gavino or no Gavino, he wouldn’t want to seem the type to return from the valleys empty-handed. Even at the cost of going back to Bellagamba’s to pick up a brace of ducks to bring as a gift—and God knows what that would cost him for countless reasons!—he wasn’t in the least inclined to cut that kind of figure.
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 toward 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 aged maid and the young boy, he had imagined 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 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—Cesarina had exclaimed 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 at the latest by eight o’clock. Now not even the children were home. As she’d felt like she needed a brief lie-down and the kids instead had begun in their usual fashion to kick a ball 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’s just gone for a stroll, poor Rico,” she added. “Or even ended up somewhere playing billiards or cards . . .” Only five minutes ago he rang from some bar to check if by any chance you’d called and to ask where the children were. And that almost certainly means that he’ll be going to wait
for them at the cinema exit to take them off to church afterward.”
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 by any chance 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 meters from Cafe Fetman, and more specifically in that big ten-floor 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 from the street, for 7, Via della Resistenza there wasn’t even a proper door. The eighth floor, internal apartment no. 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 phone booth.
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 backroom 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 toward the door.
