Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  “I understand this is touchy? but, as it turns out I have some business to transact with your father and I left his address back in Toncontín of all places on earth. Jonathan gave me the address, I’m going to have to telephone him, won’t be able to see him this time through.”

  “Jonathan’s explained to you that—”

  “I know all about it, no, not a word from me, not in my best interests in any case, Jonathan had mentioned you a few weeks ago and well, turns out our paths crossed just right, etcetera and thus there you have it. Don’t worry about it, I’ll get the address from another friend, but meantime here this is Hannah Burden’s. I would love to talk, Jonathan is such a fine field man down there, you all ought to be proud of him, and good luck,” Krieger had turned away, taking several deliberately tardy steps, and was rewarded for his patience when Henry caught up with him to name the river town where Mr. Berkeley could be found. “I’m obliged,” he said, softening his gratitude with as thick a Cajun accent as he could muster.

  Hannah Burden, who had never known a man named Ingram, understood Franz Wrynn’s having had a role in this generous gathering, and when Maddie described features pale as someone who had emerged from months in a ship’s hold, the slender nose, corn-colored hair, khaki suit wrinkled and the perfectly knotted red silk tie, she knew that—like a chilly puff of air blown off the hearth in the middle of summer, maybe carrying a feather from the one dead hatchling in the chimney nest—Krieger had just brushed past.

  That evening she showed them what the cartons in the loft contained, and began the long story, how they had come to stand there in these large dark rooms. Later, after Hannah had retired, Maddie asked Henry was he happy. And Henry, standing outside the ruckled siding of the shack in which Hannah lived, said he was.

  Matteo Lupi stood there now, in the same place. He knew so little. Time to visit the viejo. The cigarette the man Hammond had given him, with a shrug and a grunt following, burned at his lips and in his lungs. He tossed it away, aware how awkward the gesture would have looked on the big screen, fingers flung open and the palm turned up. That wasn’t the way you did it. You filliped it, palm down, from the middle finger, with a subtle flick of the wrist, and kept the fingers close and tight, if you wanted to do it properly. No, he knew so little.

  He would resolve, then, to observe quietly. Absolutely. Res ipsa loquitur, whereby in law as in the mercenary jungle, the thing must speak for itself, came to mind. It came in the form of his father’s subtle courtroom voice, for it was one of his father’s favorite legal Latinisms.

  His father—even here, today, Friday, the memory of his voice payed out a wave of sickness over him. Not dread or fear, for his father made it a habit never to punish him physically whenever as a boy he had done something wrong; but a kind of sickening, sinking disgust just at the tone of that voice, its perfect diction, the smugness it betrayed as it moved—repetitious and in its own good time—to its point. It was unshakable. But what matter? Gabriele Lupi (Gabriele not in honor of the annunciating angel but the poet D’Annunzio, an acquaintance of his grandfather, who was likewise Pescara-born) was gone. Mal di fegato, Lupi mused. A rotten liver, all that sherry, and two lungs black from chain-puffed cigarettes. And in his courtroom periwig and robe he had seemed unassailable.

  Lupi grinned and his eyes were reflected, distorted, in the mirror. Behind, he could see Olid. Later he would ask Hannah where the bath was. It would be good to wash the old man. It would be good for that matter to wash himself, and his eyes flashed back into his own image. Heavy lids and long, benign lashes contributed further to this appearance of sleeplessness. His eyes were such a deep brown their pupils almost vanished, the contrast of raisins to pumpernickel in a dense loaf. How could he still be hungry after Hannah had just fed him? He ran his finger over the fine thin bridge that trailed off his forehead and extended down into an aristocratic nose. The straight edge was interrupted by a bump, put there by the well-aimed blow of a French billyclub in spring 1968. High cheekbones were pronounced—Olid, in this, was an ancient ancestor—where they rested under rough skin kept always in restless activity by muscles strung beneath. His lips, nervous, delicate, were the most obvious legacy of his father—conveyers by their very form and manner of a sense of urgency. They now moved.

  He said to himself, “Okay, great.”

  Things weren’t so great. He ought to get busy. This dead time was the worst kind of torture. It couldn’t hurt to help with the animals downstairs. That would put him more at ease. Also, it might make Hannah see he was, as she, more of a country child lost in the city circuits, and relatively—no, more than relatively: clearly, absolutely, utterly—in over his head. No, he wasn’t in over his head. There was the old man to take care of. There might be something to be learned from the experience. He was in America, after all. He’d hated it from the outside for so long, perhaps he’d best examine the matter more closely now that he happened to be on the inside. He would offer to milk a cow. He left Olid and made his way back into the front room of the bunkhouse to find Hannah.

  The television was turned on again, and the man Henry sat in front of it bathed in malevolent color.

  “Doncha get into that hamburger rut,

  Tendermoist’ll liven up most any cut,

  Pork, veal, beaver, beef bourguignon?

  Tendermoist’ll give those blahs a whole new tone—”

  Lupi regarded the screen, where a slab of meat (a bit blue) was being smothered under a tide of a viscous brown substance. A knife speared this piece of meat once, twice, two clean angles, a fork deftly found the heart of the portion, the questioning face of a man good-humoredly skeptical over the flesh he was invited by his wife to partake of, then came the bite, a fine manly chomp, the consequent satisfaction, beaming as he chews, beaming as he lifts a stout squarish bottle and kisses the proffered cheek of the wife … but, wondered Lupi, had he really heard the word beaver?

  He was wary of Henry, who’d been studying him all the while, and suddenly realized he couldn’t offer to help with the cows because he had never milked one before, had never so much as looked one in the eye. And he certainly had not studied that oddity, the udder, which they carried along with them between their back legs. So much for the country child.

  “Hello,” he said.

  Henry watched him, his face betraying a kindly curiosity.

  “You know you shouldn’t sit so close to that box. Causes cancer. Cancer in the eyes?” gesturing, thinking maybe the Negro couldn’t get a grip on what he was saying because of his accent?

  Henry stood to face him.

  “I,” Lupi decided not to pursue it (reconsidering, now thinking, He ought to pick me up—and don’t think he couldn’t—and throw me off the roof) and retreated to the smaller room, confused by the demeanor of Henry’s face as he had begun to leave although he might have lingered, might have felt gratified or certainly less perturbed to see that Henry moved his chair back away from the screen.

  Olid was awake, humming the song they’d sung, the women, back in that valley, a few days ago. When he saw Lupi he sang a couple more notes and stopped. Lupi sat at the end of the bed, wishing he were tired enough to sleep, or more exactly that he wasn’t so tired that he’d become too tired to sleep. Don’t stop singing. It’s nice, that song, it’s like an aria, pagan aria, he told the old man, in Latin. What is it? the song.

  “Sardavaal,” complained the other.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.”

  They had begun to view things differently from an early date. By the time Matteo celebrated his twentieth birthday each had agreed never to speak to the other again. Yet Matteo had—despite all effort to the contrary—learned certain lessons well from his lawyer father. The laws held within the chambers of civil men were, he discovered, eminently applicable out in the “jungle.” His father moved easily in the small upper echelon of Florentine society (a parochial crowd, the boy always sensed)—Matteo couldn’t recall a time when dinner wasn’t served by a but
ler with white gloves. From adolescence, however, it became clear that son would apply those lessons learned by the example father set, those insights into law, government, human nature, to the destruction, point by point and brick by brick (or so he thought), of just that society which engendered and championed them to its own benefit and fixed continuance (to use the law’s language, and he knew it by rote).

  Lupi became a fledgling radical, disgusted by the politics (—siete soltanto piccolo borghesi, of the petite bourgeoisie) of his family. He chose to display his newfound political conscience in a particularly dramatic manner. The American consul from Turin was passing the night at the Lupi villa on his way to Rome for a meeting with the ambassador. A strapping Texan, boisterous, graying, loose-cheeked heir of an oil fortune and armadillo farms, a neighbor of the architect of the Great Society (whence his sinecure), chinless and with a runt wife, was seated at Gabriele Battista’s right addressing himself to a plate of gnocchi while talking amiably with assembled local dignitaries. The discussion at the head of the table was about prospects of effecting a quick end to the war by detonating a hydrogen bomb over the center of Hanoi. This was a theme popular with the rustic consul, and his wife strained to follow, although the conversation was in English, since neither she nor the consul had as yet managed to learn Italian.

  In walked Matteo, aged fifteen. He heaved half a bucket of pig’s blood over the Texan, dropped the tin pail and raced out of the room before anyone seated at the long, candlelit table had recovered enough sense to scream. The carabinieri searched three nights and two days before cornering him up in the dank nave of the San Alessandro above the public gardens in Fiesole. Tired, hungry, but mutely defiant, he was taken home. A request was passed down to the editors of local newspapers; thus the disruption at the Lupi’s dinner never surfaced. The farmer who leased several acres from the Lupis, to keep chickens and other small livestock, was quietly paid triple its value for the pig whose throat the boy had slit. Having delivered Matteo into his father’s custody, the police assumed matters would cease there.

  At the Liceo Scientifico his presence had become burdensome to his professors—the notable exception was his philosophy teacher, in thick tinted glasses, who loaned Matteo Mao’s red book and urged him to make a closer reading of Il Principe. He did reread Machiavelli, though all of it was forgotten now, and organized Le Volpi, a dissident underground society which would empty more clotted maroon-brown blood into file cabinets and on porches of churches and offices. Matteo had graduated, precipitous, from family and classmates whose response to social injustices, to issues from imperialism to apartheid, was anything less than rigorous and committed and, if it came down to it, violent opposition. He learned how to fashion Molotov cocktails, and owned a doctor’s bag of stiff black leather in which he could discreetly transport them. By the time he turned nineteen he could make a pipe bomb eyes closed—it was, after all, he told himself, much easier than memorizing the names of all of Dante’s damned in hell.

  Time passed, allegiances fluctuated. Friends who had stood with him on the lines, arms locked as they marched, friends who had taken tear gas together and made serious bonds of conscience, who had become friends out there in the street, pitted against antiriot police, seemed to disappear, a few at first, and then nearly all of them. Le Volpi disbanded and its founder became vagabond. He worked in a bookshop in Milan, reading novels in its ill-lit, cavernous interior. He lasted as a clerk in a Parisian tabac for the better part of an afternoon before being fired. A job waiting tables at a tourist bar in Rome with a view of the Vittorio Emanuele, which resembled, he pointed out to his customers, a massive, hideous wedding cake, lasted for some months before he quit in disgust. There was nowhere for him to go but back underground. The attraction was slight but was nevertheless more potent than any other. Nothing else seemed to interest him. He made a telephone call and was soon enough on a train, plagued only by the polar distance he felt between his own errant apathy and the fervor and bright anger he detected in the voice of that old acquaintance he had reached in Siena. The tour which followed through underground flophouse laboratories and slum arsenals in the cities up and down Italy became analogous to the way in which his mind had begun to function. What had begun in ideology metamorphosed into a simple job, earning him enough to keep moving from apartment to apartment, city to city. The girlfriends (each of whom attenuated before the image of Nini) had begun to get married, or get jobs, move away. He had to keep working simply to stay alive in the underground. The looseness of his associations gave rise to two unhappy developments. First, among the tiny networks of the truly committed he began to make fast enemies for his own lack of a stable politic. Second—and it was this, like a disease that worsened day by day until it had spread and assumed predominance—because Lupi was now resigned to a life on the move, and one in which his identity must be a chameleon’s, he found he was obliged to take whatever jobs came his way no matter what they were or who was behind them. He moved through depression from morning to morning.

  Rarely did he chauffeur kidnap victims. Usually he would tap telephones, steal documents or destroy them, place anonymous calls (a threat, a demand, a declaration) or shadow people: photograph them, tape them. He would manufacture bombs and timers if he had to. He was considered by those who knew of him quite expendable in the service of whatever presently required his expertise.

  Cora Nini, he would write from Venice, in hiding: My sweetest girl, what I do now, how I have got from those days of you and me together to these days, I just cannot say, I cannot piece it together for myself in reverse so improbable even impossible a road it has been. It’s all twisted, and I too, I sense I am all twisted. I miss you. Do you understand that? I’m not happy. I’d rather not miss you. You see, I know that you think badly of me, you simply have to. But don’t think that I have changed so much from the man you remember because I haven’t, except that the foundation maybe of beliefs on which I built this life seems to be something weaker than originally I thought it had been. I would come anywhere you want, wherever you told me to meet you, to talk, even for an hour in a restaurant for lunch, not that I would know what to say. Once something is started it seems it never stops. If you’ve gotten married I wouldn’t want to get in your way. Just to talk. We can’t get back to where we began, but there is always some way to move forward. Isn’t that so? Whether your parents will forward this to you I don’t know, wherever you are now, I hope they will, but wherever you are and whomever you are with I send you my love and all my hopes.

  Christmas 1974 had him at the wheel of a stolen Peugeot, racing across the bleak, snow-dusted hills near Siena, the bound and gagged body of the retired ambassador to Cyprus bouncing heavily in the trunk. Dottore Milo need not have remained tied up and the scarf gag served no effective purpose, as the man had been dead for several hours already.

  It was early afternoon. Lupi had been driving all night. Important things happen in cars, he thought—people are made, people born, people die. The kidnapping (important, considering their prey) had taken place in Calabria, and the former ambassador was to be delivered to an address in Bologna. Lupi had no thoughts regarding what it was Le Brigate Rosse, perpetrators of the crime, intended to do with poor Milo, whether he would be put up for ransom, tortured (teeth were sometimes pulled, an ear removed, vintage bayonets run up anuses), made to confess secrets against the state in a kangaroo trial, or be butchered and left at the end of a blind alley with a note—Tutto il potere al popolo armato, niente resterà impunitol All will be punished, no stone shall remain unturned, all power to the people, the power which will reside only with those people who arm themselves for the struggle—pinned to the chest. He couldn’t think about it. His contact with the man had been confined to an unhappy registration of dull, muffled thuddings six or seven feet behind his head as the automobile tore around an icy curve.

  When the car was first placed in his custody, he was given a map marking the route he was supposed to take up the peninsula
, but Lupi, after following its directions through the provinces of Campania and Lazio, had decided around midnight to bear ahead through Tuscany rather than veer east into Umbria as he was instructed. It was not that he mistrusted the contact man from whom he had received the map and keys to the car (who could as easily have delivered a copy of the map into the hands of the police and obtained the objective of shocking a certain segment of the Italian government—Lupi tried always to understand his personal expendability in these matters), but the roads through Tuscany would save time.

  Dilapidated trellises, rusty wires attached to rows of poles, litter the winter-fallow fields, running in loose parallels over the white asymmetric land. Vineyards; frayed traces of blue smoke out over the sparse chill. A magpie, maimed possibly, limps ahead on the shoulder. Up ahead a sluggish bus halts to deposit a woman with chartreuse boots in a town that immediately falls astride the car and as quickly becomes a rectangular fragment reflected in the mirror. A crow whips, dives through the frost out before the hood, lifting on its wide wings just in time not to be blown into an explosion of tattered feathers. And he thinks, Crows may eat magpies.

  Lupi imagines he can hear Milo coughing, or is it laughing? It occurs to him that no one would be the wiser if he stopped and offered his captive something to eat, or drink. It must be very cold back there, he thinks. It is, after all, Christmas morning.

  He comes up with the idea of dropping in on his parents. He has not contacted them for four years. By driving through Tuscany, and on through Florence to Bologna, rather than following the Adriatic coast as the map proposed, he would have a few extra hours. He has no idea why he would want to pursue this idea, nor is he sure his parents will even allow him in their house. He’s not sure of much of anything, is he? Not sure whether his grandmothers are alive. Whether the family is together for the holiday. What has become of his younger sister. Perhaps he might find out about Nini, whether she ever married Claudio, and if not, where she is and if she completed her degree in medicine, where is she practicing, is she a mother, is she happy, would she ever be willing to think of him in a special way again?