by Marco Vichi
He awoke with a start, feeling something touch his arm … and from the breath he felt on his face he realised it was the dog.
‘Blisk … You’re going to give me a heart attack …’
He turned on the light and saw that it was barely seven o’clock. He’d slept well and felt rested. If the weather was nice, he would do well to take advantage of it. It was Monday, the day for walking in the woods, as Ennio always said. Few hunters and no little families in search of adventure. He got up and went into the bathroom, the dog following behind. Looking out the window, he saw a clear sky.
‘Today I’m taking you to the forest.’
He got dressed, put on his walking boots and went downstairs to make coffee. There was a pleasant smell of ash in the air. He readied his backpack, putting in some cheese rinds for the dog and a bowl for him to drink from.
When he went out to water the garden, he realised that it had rained during the night and so there was no need. The artichokes were looking good, even though they seemed not to have grown much. The pots where he’d planted the hot peppers still looked like the desert, but the tomato seedlings had finally sprung … It almost didn’t seem possible.
Continuing his inspection, he tore out a couple of sage plantings that were already rotting. After the toil of farming, he could allow himself a walk. He put Prince Blisk in the Volkswagen and set off up the trail. He felt he needed to put his thoughts in some kind of order, and lately it was only in the woods that he found the serenity necessary to quiet reflection.
‘When we start climbing, you’d better not expect me to carry you in my arms …’ he said to the dog, who was lying in the back seat, taking up the whole space. Who knew whether the animal was capable of anything other than sleeping and eating …
They came to La Panca. The white bear got out of the car and started looking around and sniffing the air, then began jumping around as if he’d stuck his muzzle in a puddle of cold water. He ran up the hill, tail wagging, as though forgetting his indolence of the past few days. Bordelli clambered up after him, panting heavily, steam coming out of his mouth. After some twenty minutes of this, drenched in sweat, he got to the top of the hill, where the trail became relatively flat. All around him the expanse of naked, black chestnut trunks reminded him of a war cemetery.
Blisk kept scampering ahead of him, every so often smelling something and charging off through the trees, disappearing at the top of a hill or at the bottom of a steep slope.
Bordelli advanced slowly, with measured steps, contemplating his next move in the chess game he was playing: Beccaroni’s suicide. He had to proceed calmly. He would have only one chance; he couldn’t afford to fail. It was the only way for justice to be served. Then it would be the turn of monsignor, the most dangerous of all … Assuming all went smoothly …
He passed under the great boughs of the oak of the mass hanging, scattering the ghosts of war, and soon came to the ancient abbey. As on every other occasion, he thought he would like to live there. He imagined moving about those rooms, walking down the corridors, sitting in the cloister, reading … Who knew what sort of atmosphere one breathed behind those walls … Sooner or later he would have to work up the nerve to knock on their door and ask whether he could visit.
At the triple fork of the Cappella dei Boschi, he took the path for Pian d’Albero, which by now he knew better than his own garden. Meanwhile he kept thinking … Settling accounts with the butcher had been easy, but matters were now getting much more complicated. Was it merely a stupid and dangerous delusion to think he was being guided by fate? He’d never believed in destiny, after all. But now …
Blisk appeared on the path, happy as a puppy, but then dashed back down the slope, vanishing behind a big clump of brambles. At once Bordelli heard the devilish grunt of a boar, then the dog barking, then silence again.
‘Blisk! … Bliiisk! …’ he shouted, standing at the edge of the path. He called again, but the dog didn’t come. Perhaps he’d gone off in pursuit of the boar …
Bordelli resumed walking, listening to the sounds of the wood and thinking still of Beccaroni. He had no choice but to take his dare all the way, trusting only in his instincts. He would not go and reconnoitre the lawyer’s house, he would not study the man’s routine … He wouldn’t do anything … He merely had to choose the day … But maybe it was madness … Or just bloody stupid … But he felt like taking the risk … Anyway, all the precautions in the world wouldn’t necessarily prevent things from taking a bad turn. He wondered again whether it was destiny or chance that ruled the world …
The white bear appeared out of nowhere and came towards him panting, tongue dripping. Bordelli realised the dog had a small red spot on his chest, searched through his fur and found that it was nothing serious. Perhaps the boar had charged him and grazed him with a tusk.
‘You did all right …’ he said, patting his big head. Blisk resumed his running about, but didn’t stray as far as before. He seemed a little tired.
When they got to Pian d’Albero, it was a little past eleven o’clock. Too early to eat. He forged on down the trail, and about midday they came to the little cemetery at Ponte agli Stolli, which he’d never been inside. Pushing open the rusty gate, he began strolling through the crosses, reading the inscriptions on the tombstones: Adalgisa Cencioni, 4 October 1845 – 7 December 1923 … He was thirteen and a half when she died … Costante Baciocchi, 22 February 1862 – 24 July 1922 … Here was one who knew nothing about the March on Rome …15 Norina Macelloni, 7 November 1912 – 28 February 1919 … Not even seven years, poor thing … She’d almost certainly died of the Spanish flu.
At one o’clock, he stopped and sat down on a rock to eat, along the trail that led to Celle. The dog gnawed at the cheese rinds, lying in front of Bordelli. The sun was giving its all, managing to warm the air a little.
After eating his apple, he searched his pocket for a one-hundred-lira piece, just to prod fate one more time. Before flipping it in the air, he established the terms of the wager: heads meant he would take care of Beccaroni on Tuesday, 21 March, the first day of spring; tails meant he would do it one day earlier, on Monday. The coin fluttered in the air and fell into his hand … Tails …
He’d just finished eating his lunch, watching the last minutes of the midday news broadcast on the National channel as the dog dozed on the floor. The telephone rang and as he went to pick up, he tried as usual to guess who it might be …
‘Hello?’
‘Inspector, this is Ortensia …’
‘Hello, signora.’ She was the last person he was expecting to hear from.
‘I’m sorry to bother you …’
‘Not at all, what can I do for you?’
‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d discovered anything new … About Orlando, I mean …’ she said in a hurried whisper.
‘I’ve ended my investigation, and I’ve concluded that Orlando took his own life,’ Bordelli lied, as he’d done with the contessa.
‘Oh … I’m not sure what I was hoping for … I don’t even want to think he did it because of me … But if Orlando had been murdered, I would never have forgiven myself for not having fully believed him … and not having been able to protect him …’
‘There’s nothing anybody could have done, believe me.’
‘I confess I keep wondering whether Orlando had another woman, or even more than one … It makes me feel silly, but I can’t help it …’ said Ortensia, embarrassed by her own frankness.
Bordelli felt a shudder along his arms, remembering the last words in Orlando’s notebook. He thought perhaps he should give Ortensia some true sorrow to cry over, by repeating the last two romantic lines her former lover had dedicated to her the very evening he died … Love, in your eyes my own time/ becomes no time in God’s eternity …
After a long, tomb-like silence, Ortensia could no longer suppress a sob, then whimpered something incomprehensible, but clearly the inspector’s words had lifted a weight from her heart. S
he muttered thanks and ended the phone call with a rather dramatic ‘Farewell’.
Bordelli stood there for a few seconds with the receiver in his hand, imagining the terrible grief that would torment the poor woman that evening … He wasn’t making light of her. Memory was a matter in perpetual motion, and transforming the past was always a painful affair. It forced you to level whole mountain chains and rebuild them with the stone of awareness. What would happen to him if he were to discover that the famous Mariella, with whom he’d fallen in love as a boy, to no avail, believing her to be inaccessible, had all along been madly in love with that surly boy who never stopped looking at her? Or if he found out that Anna, or Rosalba, or Matilde, had cheated on him? Or if he discovered that Eleonora …
‘What do you think, Blisk?’
The dog opened one eye without moving and looked at him with what seemed to be compassion. Bordelli shook his head and went and made coffee. He drank it standing up, wanting to go out, into town, to be among people. Ortensia’s phone call had made him melancholy.
‘Hey, bear, coming with me?’
Blisk didn’t move, not even when Bordelli called him again from the doorway.
‘As you wish.’
He let the dog stay, and locked the door behind him. Getting into the Beetle, he drove up the rock-strewn path and lit his first cigarette of the day. The sky was a flat grey slate, and a light drizzle fell on the deserted fields.
He drove slowly, blowing his smoke towards the open vent. At the top of the uphill dirt path, he saw a Fiat 500 parked at the side of the road, just outside a nearly concealed shrine between the cypresses that contained a terracotta statuette of the Madonna. Passing by it, he noticed, through the trees, right in front of the shrine, an attractive young woman looking up at the sky, hands joined in prayer and in a position of supplication. Was she praying for help with an exam? For her infirm grandmother? Or was it only a matter of the heart?
‘At any rate, I hope the Blessed Virgin answers your prayers,’ he said aloud, in a scratchy voice.
Damned cigarettes. Maybe it really was time to put an end to the stupid habit. It would certainly please Piras, who hated smoke as much as old maids hated married women. After three long drags, he threw the butt out the window and made a major decision. From that moment forward, he would try to smoke only five a day, abstaining in the morning and not smoking his first until mid-afternoon … Word of honour of a San Marco Battalion commander.
When he got into town he parked in the San Frediano quarter, where he’d lived for almost twenty years. It hadn’t rained in Florence, and the clouds seemed to be dispersing. Walking through the narrow streets he stopped every so often to say hello to the shopkeepers and craftsmen who’d managed to reopen their shops after their visit from the Arno, and all of them asked what had become of him …
I’ve moved to the country, he replied to them all, and they all reacted the same way …
‘I can’t believe it …’
‘I’d go to jail first …’
‘Why go and live up the world’s arse?’
‘Have you been to see a doctor, Inspector?’
‘I’m not an inspector any more …’
He found himself outside the bar in Piazza Tasso, where Ennio often went to play billiards. He went in and said hello to Fosco, a colossus who had spent more time at the Murate prison than at home.
‘Somethin’ to drink, Inspector?’
‘No, thanks … Seen Ennio around?’
‘He normally shows up late in the afternoon, Inspector. For a few rounds of pool.’
‘I’ll come by again later, Fosco … And, by the way, I’m not an inspector any more …’
‘Then I guess there’s a cure for everything,’ said the colossus, with a sneer that in his own mind must have passed for a smile.
‘Not for bollock-brains, Fosco. You take those with you to the grave,’ said Bordelli, waving goodbye and going out.
He crossed the Arno and walked to the posh part of downtown, where the gloomy stone palazzi seemed to absorb the sunlight. The cars and motorbikes rolled through the streets, trailing clouds of bitter smoke behing them. Smartly dressed women, out of the corner of their eyes, checked the effects of their charm on the men passing by …
Ever since he’d moved to the country, coming into Florence for a stroll had become almost pleasant. The inner-city confusion was merely a break from routine. His big bed amid the rustic silence remained ever present in his thoughts … An empty bed, warmed only by memories … All that was missing was a contorted little poem on solitude, written late at night by a dying fire …
He walked the streets for a good while, turning round to look at haughty ladies and miniskirted girls alike, and in the end he sat down at Gilli’s for a coffee. It might well have been the first time in his life he’d gone into the pricey establishment, but by now he felt like a tourist in the city of his birth.
Through the picture window he distractedly watched the people passing by in unsightly Piazza della Repubblica, which was born of the demolition of one of the poorest, most ancient quarters of Florence. Men sporting ties and carrying briefcases, ladies on their way to spend their husbands’ money with the seriousness of ambassadors, young men following pretty girls, mothers holding toddlers’ hands, tourists with their noses in the air and wearing a fortune in shoes … In a hundred years, all that remained of all the people passing by at that moment would be a pile of bones … Same for the children, and even the pretty girls, who added colour to the world …
‘Franco!’
An attractive woman of about forty had sat down just opposite him. Dark, well dressed, fashionably short-haired, eyes black as coals. It took him a few seconds to recognise her.
‘Adele …’
‘I was just walking by and I saw you here … How are you?’
‘I can’t complain, and you?’
‘I’m fine, really … But how long has it been? How many years? You haven’t changed at all …’
‘Normally, it’s only men who tell those kinds of lies.’
‘Thanks a lot! Do you find me aged?’
‘I find you beautiful.’
‘Now I don’t believe you any more,’ said Adele, pleased with the compliment.
Bordelli tried to remember … When was it? In ’50? ’51? Adele was the daughter of a carpenter from San Frediano, and she was twenty years younger than him … Why was he always falling in love with women so young? He’d taken such a shine to her he couldn’t sleep, and when he saw her in the street, he would awkwardly try to get her to see that he … But she would slip away like an eel …
‘You’re even more beautiful than before,’ said Bordelli, suppressing the desire to take her hand. She truly was beautiful, with luminous eyes full of life.
She looked away for a moment, smiling in embarrassment.
‘Enough lies …’ she said. ‘Tell me about yourself … What have you been doing all these years? Did you get married? Do you have children?’
‘No, unfortunately. No children … Whereas I bet you did get married …’
‘Yes, unfortunately. I thought I’d found the great love of my life, but then after three children he ran off with a twenty-year-old slut … I’m sorry, I said a bad word …’
‘Unforgivable …’
‘At any rate, it’s water under the bridge. At least the bastard left me the house and slips me a lot of money for the kids,’ said Adele, smiling.
‘So he’s not such a monster …’
‘Of course not! I’d run away with a twenty-year-old, too!’ Adele said, laughing.
‘You could have stabbed me instead,’ said Bordelli, feigning offence. ‘That would have hurt less.’
She laughed.
‘Oh, go on …’
‘Women are cruel.’
He also laughed. Meanwhile he thought of the one time he’d succeeded in inviting Adele to dinner, taking her to a fine restaurant in Fiesole, a century ago. She’d lied to her paren
ts, making up some story about going to study at a girlfriend’s house. She let him woo her all evening, but managed to keep her distance. Nothing happened, not even a kiss. So why did he now feel as if he was looking at a former girlfriend?
‘So, are you with anyone now?’ Adele asked out of the blue.
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Sometimes it’s nice just to be alone …’
‘Can I invite you to dinner, one of these evenings?’ Bordelli asked, point blank, trying to smile to mask his desire to see her again.
‘Absolutely,’ she said, pleased.
‘What about your kids?’
‘I’ll leave them with my mother, which is where they are now. Every now and then I need to be alone … But I have to go now, unfortunately.’
She stood up, and Bordelli shot to his feet.
‘How will I find you?’
‘In the phone book … Goffredo Bini … That’s my husband’s name.’
‘What time of day can I call?’
‘Whenever you like, but you’ll be sure to find me at lunchtime.’
‘All right …’
‘Don’t keep me waiting,’ said Adele, without insinuation, and a moment later she vanished into a cloud of smoke.
Bordelli sat back down, feeling a little numb. He’d had a terrible crush on her, and seeing her again had the same effect as a punch in the face … Was she perhaps the woman who would …? He remembered the words of Amelia, Rosa’s fortune-teller friend who had read his tarot. After informing him of a forthcoming love affair with a beautiful, dark young woman – that was Eleonora – which would end quickly and badly, as indeed happened, she’d made a final prediction: In a few years … A beautiful woman, a foreigner … very rich … divorced … with two children … Could it be Adele? She didn’t really correspond in full with the prediction of the cards, though. She was beautiful, separated from her husband … But she had three children, was probably not very rich and, most of all, she wasn’t foreign. Maybe even the tarot got a few things wrong every now and then …
