by Marco Vichi
Along the pavement he saw mostly young people, and so there was no lack of pretty girls, who seemed to have been created for the express purpose of tormenting him. On the streets, luxury cars and utility vehicles mingled with motorbikes and bicycles. The traffic seemed to be increasing yearly.
Eyeing the display windows of the few renovated shops he couldn’t help but remember the first time he’d seen Eleonora, on a rainy morning a few days before the flood … Beautiful as the moon, raven-black hair, in her stockinged feet, as she was rearranging the clothing in a shop window in Via Pacinotti …
He slipped into a bar in Borgo San Lorenzo for a coffee. The market was winding up and carters were pulling their wares along the streets, making a great deal of noise. A woman with excessively blond hair and a fake mole over her lip came in. Bordelli cast her a quick glance, trying to guess how old she might be, and she immediately came over.
‘Feeling lonely, handsome?’ she asked with a fiendish smile.
‘I like being alone …’ Bordelli replied. The barman smiled.
‘The usual glass of white, Fedora?’
‘Thank you, Nanni – you, at least, are nice,’ she said, sneering. Bordelli ignored the woman’s insulted glare, paid for his coffee, and left.
He’d left the Beetle in Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, but when he reached the end of Via Sant’ Egidio, he turned on to Via Verdi. He’d decided to pass by San Niccolò and pay a call on Don Baldesi, a parish priest. He’d met him at the time of the flood, when shovelling mud in hopes of getting closer to Eleonora, who lived in the neighbourhood. Don Baldesi had worked like a dog without ever losing his good humour, even occasionally telling jokes about priests or the Pope.
The statue of Dante in the middle of Piazza Santa Croce looked as if it had just emerged from the muck. Bordelli smiled, thinking the big-nosed old poet could hardly have expected otherwise from a city like Florence. He continued on to Via de’ Benci, and while crossing the bridge looked out over the muddy Arno, which flowed swift and serene.
He arrived in San Niccolò, where on 4 November the water had reached a height of twenty feet. On the church’s smooth façade, the thick black band that had marked half the city stood out even more conspicuously than elsewhere. The main portal was wide open, and Bordelli stuck his head inside. The church was empty. The benches had all been burnt in the days immediately following the flood and hadn’t been replaced yet. The stench of mud and heating oil was still perceptible in the air.
He went out on to the parvis and rang the bell outside a small door in the corner. After an endless wait the sacristan, a very thin man with a trembling head, opened the door. Bordelli remembered seeing him wandering about the quarter in the days after the flood.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Is Don Baldesi at home? … In church, I mean?’
‘Who shall I say wants him?’
‘Inspector Bordelli …’
He used the title only so that the priest would remember him, but in truth he himself had never really got used to being no longer in service.
‘I’ll let him know,’ said the sacristan, who closed the door behind him.
Bordelli waited outside the church. After several minutes had passed, he was thinking of leaving when the door opened.
‘Please come in,’ said the trembling man. Bordelli followed him down a damp corridor that smelled of mildew and then up a staircase. They came to a large room with bookshelves full of ancient tomes and an immense desk covered with papers.
‘Don Baldesi is on his way,’ the sacristan muttered, and vanished behind a door, coughing. Bordelli started strolling about the room, thinking of the cigarette he would smoke when driving home. From the window one could see a courtyard full of children playing …
Hearing the door open, he turned round.
‘Inspector! What a pleasure! …’
Don Baldesi approached and shook his hand, wearing his eternally ironic smile, the sort of smile one didn’t often see on a priest’s face.
‘I was in the area and decided I’d …’
‘You were right to do so. How are you? Everything all right?’
‘I wouldn’t go that far … And how are you?’
‘Don’t ask – in fact, it’s better if we change the subject … Would you like a cup of tea?’ Without waiting for an answer, Don Baldesi poked his head outside the door.
‘Artimio, could you please make us some tea?’ he called loudly, and a sort of grunt could be heard in the distance.
They both sat down. While awaiting the tea, they started reminiscing about the unending days they’d spent shovelling, the mountains of detritus piled up outside the shops … And the panini with prosciutto, which had never tasted so good as they did during those days.
The sacristan entered holding in both hands a tray that tinkled dangerously. He set it down on the table and went out without saying a word. Bordelli was distractedly studying the steam rising from the pot …
‘Have you by any chance seen that dark-haired girl who used to live just across the square? I think her name was Elena or something similar …’ he said, as though speaking of something of little importance.
‘Eleonora …’ said Don Baldesi, smiling, though his eyes had flashed dramatically for a split second.
‘Ah, yes … Eleonora.’
‘She came to see me just before Christmas.’
‘Oh, really? And how was she?’ Bordelli asked, trying to remain calm. Hearing someone talk about Eleonora upset him more than he would have imagined.
‘She’s a lovely girl,’ the priest said vaguely.
‘I’ve never doubted it …’
‘Perhaps a bit too young for you.’
‘What’s that? No … Look, I …’
‘But it’s also true that love has no limits,’ said Don Baldesi, pouring tea into the cups.
Bordelli looked the priest in the eye. ‘You don’t miss anything, do you?’
‘Not the obvious things.’
‘I haven’t seen her since mid-November,’ Bordelli muttered sadly.
Don Baldesi said nothing, only gazing at him with an air of understanding. Bordelli couldn’t make up his mind. He didn’t know whether he should keep asking after her or drop the subject. In the end he overcame his embarrassment.
‘I just want to know if she’s all right … She had a terrible experience, and—’
‘She has a strong character,’ Don Baldesi interrupted him, giving him to understand that he was aware of what the girl had been through. He had no way of knowing, of course, that the rapists had been sent by a minister of God, a monsignor of the Episcopal Curia, and Bordelli thought that, sooner or later, he might even tell him … But not before carrying out destiny’s plan to the end. While sipping his tea, he imagined himself confessing to Don Baldesi that he’d murdered the butcher. What would happen? Would he grant him absolution, knowing he hadn’t repented? Would he advise him to turn himself in?
‘Well, if you happen to see her again, tell her that I … No, I’m sorry … Don’t tell her anything …’
‘If the seed is right, the plant will grow,’ said Don Baldesi, tender as a child. Bordelli almost felt like kissing his forehead. He drank his tea and set down the cup.
‘I don’t want to take up any more of your time …’ he said, standing up. The priest saw him to the door, and before Bordelli stepped out, he took him by the arm.
‘Have you heard the one about the prostitute who goes to see the Pope?’
He opened his eyes wide after a long, restless half-sleep, realising that outside his window a great flock of small birds were twittering madly. He got slowly out of bed, rubbing his eyes. He went to open the window and look out. It was a beautiful sunny day. Hundreds of small birds were swirling round the tops of the cypresses, darting in and out of their dense boughs. Spring was advancing in fits and starts.
‘That’s enough!’ he shouted, waving his arms. Silence fell, as the swarm of birds fluttered round the trees … S
econds later, however, the crazy creatures went right back where they’d been and started shrieking louder than before. Bordelli shook his head and smiled. He left the windows open and went down into the kitchen to make coffee, thinking that the silence of the countryside was only a figment of one’s imagination.
His head was still full of the tortuous delirium of Notes from the Underground. Reading that book forced him to look inside himself … It was strange … In the final analysis he didn’t think he was much like the protagonist, and yet the mean, sick man was talking about him just the same, compelling him to gain a deeper knowledge of himself …
He drank his coffee standing up and then went to get dressed. It was time to get serious about the garden. Just outside the door he found, as usual, a loaf of bread and La Nazione. He laid the small bag on the table and drove off in the Beetle.
At about eight o’clock the previous evening he’d called Paris and spoken to Neri Bargioni Tozzi, but as Gianfranco had predicted, nothing new had come of it. The only one left was Ortensia, and who knew whether she …
When he got to town he pulled up to the pavement and asked a small, wrinkled woman where the farmer’s cooperative was.
‘It’s up there, opposite Manni’s bakery.’
‘I’m sorry, but where’s Manni’s bakery?’
‘Do you know Troia?’
‘Who?’
‘The smith, no?’
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t been living here long,’ Bordelli said patiently.
‘Well, you go up that way and turn right, on to the street that leads to the Desco. You’ll find it a little past that.’
‘Thank you …’
Bordelli sighed and headed off, combing the little streets around the piazza until he found a glass door with the words FARMERS’ COOPERATIVE on it. Parked along the pavement were a pair of Fiat Giardinetta station wagons and a 500, and there was even a tired-looking horse hitched to a cart.
He left the car a short way up the street and went into the cooperative, which was a vast room full of tools, with great balls of manure and some chickens in cages. Only ten kilometres away lay Florence with its fancy cafés and elegant women, its students full of lust for life, its craftsmen bent over their worktables, the poor struggling to get by, the posh automobiles, the motorbikes, bicycles, thieves, whores … A faraway world, frenetic and noisy …
The guy running the cooperative was fat and placid and didn’t talk much. After attending to a pair of peasants he turned and looked at the strange customer who seemed to have entered the store by accident.
‘Can I help you with something?’
‘I’m trying to make a vegetable garden,’ said Bordelli, making the fat man smile.
He ended up buying four balls of soil, two rolls of screen fencing, some metal wire, a few wooden stakes, a watering can, a garden spade, and a small bag of hot pepper seeds. All he needed now were tomato seeds and some young artichoke shoots. He filled the boot and put the fencing on the back seat. The Beetle was packed as full as a truck.
At the brickworks in Via della Fonte he bought three large terracotta vases as heavy as boulders and managed to arrange them on the passenger seat. On his way home he pulled up outside a farmhouse. He got out of the car and called in a loud voice. Moments later an old woman with piercing eyes and wearing an oversized black overcoat appeared. The woman cupped her hands round her mouth, yelled something and walked away, muttering that she had to ‘mind the little rabbits’. A few mintues later a hunched old man with a wrinkled face and a patched cap appeared.
‘Did you want oil or wine?’
‘Actually I was looking for pollina … Could you sell me a little?’ asked Bordelli.
‘Sell? You don’t sell shit, man … Got a bucket with you?’
‘No, unfortunately …’ That was what he’d forgotten to buy.
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you … And you can’t really carry it in your pocket …’ said the old man. But then he went and fetched a rusty old pail and filled it a third of the way with that nectar of the gods.
‘Here you go …’
‘Would you also happen to have some tomato seeds? I’ve just moved to the area and don’t know where to find them.’
‘I can give you some, but if you’ve never grown ’em before it won’t be easy.’
‘I have a friend who’s giving me a hand.’
‘I can’t give you very many …’
The man gave him a handful free of charge, wrapped in a sheet of yellow paper. Bordelli thanked him for his kindness, and asked him whether he knew anyone who might be interested in tending a hundred or so olive trees, adding that they’d been neglected for a number of years.
‘I’ll be happy with a little oil for myself, and whoever tends the grove can have the rest,’ he said by way of conclusion.
The peasant thought about this for a moment. ‘You know who you could ask? Tonio … He’s got some olives he tends for the owner.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘In that house down there, where you see those cypresses … But I have to go now … Take care of yourself …’ said the old man, who then headed towards his field, arms dangling. Bordelli got back in his car and opened the windows because of the stink rising up from the pail of pollina.
He went and looked for Tonio at once, and found him chopping wood bare chested. He was a strapping man of about sixty with a long beard and fingers as big as carrots. Tonio brought him into the kitchen, a big, dark, shabby room where modernity had made its entry in the most unfortunate of ways: the traditional madia had been replaced by a blue Formica cupboard. The furniture sellers were always swindling the peasants, selling them mass-produced horrors and offering to throw away their old furniture, which they would then restore and sell dearly to Milanese commendatori. Peasants had always been known for being suspicious, but they’d fallen into that net like overripe pears …
‘How many trees’ve you got?’
‘A hundred or so.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
A firm handshake and the deal was done. Tonio would look after the olive grove, the out-of-pocket expenses would all be charged to Bordelli, and in exchange he would get forty per cent of the oil. The simplest contract in history.
‘We’ll have to start the trees all over. I’ll come by in late April to cut them back. I can’t make it any sooner.’
‘From now on, it’s you who decides.’
‘You won’t see any oil for two or three years, and it won’t be much.’
‘‘That’s all right, I can wait.’
‘I know that farm. When there’s no rain the ground is like stone, and when it rains it turns into quicksand.’
‘I’ve noticed … Listen, you wouldn’t also happen to have any artichoke shoots? I’m willing to pay.’
‘No, sorry. I’ve already used them all myself.’
‘Thanks just the same.’
They said goodbye, and Bordelli continued with his errands, having resolved the question of the olive trees. He went to a few other farms begging for alms. When he got home he had a wooden crate with some twenty artichoke shoots in it and a few clumps of sage.
He got down to work in the sunlight, trying to recall Ennio’s instructions. He wanted to do things right. The first thing he did was fence off the garden, sweating more than he did when hoeing. He even managed to make a sort of little gate, by nailing some wooden boards together and using metal wire to close it. The results were acceptable. Five years of war hadn’t been entirely useless. He put a bit of soil in the artichoke holes and then inserted the shoots. He scattered the tomato seeds in the patch of earth that he and Ennio had prepared, and then covered them up, spreading some soil over them with his hand. Following his own instincts, he planted the clumps of sage here and there, imagining the great bushes they would grow into. With the remaining soil he filled the vases and planted the chilli peppers. All that was left to do was to water all these small holes. He filled the watering can and le
t the water rain down into the holes, around the plants and in the vases. When he thought he’d finished his work for the day, he remembered there was still one thing left to do. He filled the pail of chicken droppings with water, stirred it with a stick, and set this down in a corner of the garden. Now he really was done, at least for that day. He was tired and sweaty, but content. He imagined the little roots beginning to move underground, the seeds awakening after a long sleep … Nature was already on the move, a perfect chemical mechanism on which every religion had tried to impose a meaning.
He was shocked to find that it was past two o’clock. Hungry as a wolf, he went into the house and washed his hands quite thoroughly, taking a long time to get the dirt out from under his fingernails. He put some water to boil for pasta and went upstairs to take a nice hot shower.
When he put the penne in the boiling pot, the afternoon news reports were already long over, so he didn’t bother to turn on the telly. As he was setting the table, the telephone rang … To his great surprise, it was Ortensia.
At four o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday, he parked at the end of Via Martelli outside the Bar Motta, which the Florentines continued to call Il Bottegone. Stepping out of his Beetle, he cast a glance up at the Palazzo della Curia, imagining Monsignor Sercambi seated at his desk, with his piously bald head and his little gold-framed glasses resting on his nose. Fate would catch up to him, too, sooner or later …
He pushed open the door to the bar, where some soft music enveloped customers conversing amid little clouds of smoke. He looked around for a woman of about thirty-five and saw one sitting in the opposite corner of the room, beside an older woman. They were both staring at him anxiously, and he realised that the younger one was Ortensia. He approached their table and gave a slight bow. Ortensia shyly returned the greeting and hastened to introduce her mother, a common-looking woman dressed up as if she were rich, who held out a hand covered with brightly gleaming rings. Bordelli mimed the gesture of kissing her hand and sat down opposite the two women. Ortensia was blonde and pretty, slightly faded, with two sparkling, frightened fawn-eyes. A young boy dressed like a waiter appeared.
