Baravino was an unemployed man who had recently joined the police. Thus he had recently become aware of a secret that existed in the depths of that apparently calm and industrious city: behind the concrete walls that lined the streets, in secluded enclosures, in dark cellars, a forest of shiny, threatening weapons lay warily like the quills of a porcupine. Machine-gun deposits were mentioned, and underground repositories of bullets; there was someone, it was said, who in a room behind a walled-up door kept an entire cannon. Like traces of metals that indicate a nearby mining region, in the houses of the city pistols were found sewed inside mattresses, guns nailed under floors. Agent Baravino felt uneasy amid his people; every manhole, every scrap heap seemed to him to hold obscure threats; he often thought of the hidden cannon and he imagined it in the parlor where he had gone once as a child, in the house where his mother cleaned: one of those rooms that remain closed for years and years. He saw the cannon amid faded velvet sofas decorated with lace, its muddy wheels on the carpet and the gun mount touching the chandelier, so big it filled the room and scraped the varnish on the piano.
One night the police made a foray into the workers’ neighborhoods and surrounded an entire building. It was a large, decrepit-looking structure, as if supporting such a crowd of humanity had deformed the floors and the walls, reducing the latter to a callused, encrusted, porous old skin.
The courtyard was cluttered with garbage cans, and rusty, twisted iron railings ran along the balconies that circled it on every floor; and on these railings, and on ropes stretching from one to another, hung clothes and rags, and along the balconies were French doors with boards instead of glass, pierced by the black stove pipes, and at the end of the balconies were the toilet sheds, stacked one above the other like a flaking tower, one floor then the next, spaced out by the little windows of the mezzanine floors, rackety with sewing machines and steamy with soup, up to the top, to the attic grates, the crooked eaves, the dilapidated dormer windows, open like ovens.
A labyrinth of worn stairs traversed the body of the old building from the cellar to the roof, like black veins with innumerable branches, and, scattered as if randomly, the doors to the mezzanines and the crowded apartments opened off the stairs. The agents went up, unable to modify the grim sound of their own steps, and sought to decipher the names marked on the doors, going around and around in single file on those echoing balconies, while children and untidy women peeked out.
Baravino was in the middle, indistinguishable from the others under the automaton’s helmet that cast a crude shadow over his cloudy blue eyes; but in his heart he was confused and distressed. Some of their enemies, he had been told, enemies of them, the police, and of respectable people, were hiding in that house. With dismay Agent Baravino looked into the rooms through half-closed doors: in any wardrobe, behind any doorpost, terrible weapons could be concealed; why did every tenant, every woman look at them with a mixture of pain and anxiety? If one of them was the enemy, why couldn’t they all be? Behind the stair walls garbage thrown down into the chutes fell with a thud; couldn’t that be the weapons they were hastily getting rid of?
They entered a low room where a family was having dinner around a table with a red checked cloth. The children were yelling. Only the smallest, who was eating on his father’s knees, looked at them silently, with black, hostile eyes. “Orders to search the house,” said the sergeant, coming to attention and causing the colored ribbons on his chest to jump. “Madonna! Us poor folk! Us honest all our lives!” said an old woman, hands on her heart. The father, in his undershirt, had a broad clear face, with patches where the beard was hard to shave; he was feeding the child with a spoon. First he gave them a sidelong glance, perhaps ironic; then he shrugged his shoulders and attended to the child.
The room was full of policemen who couldn’t move. The sergeant gave useless orders and got in the way rather than directing. Apprehensively Baravino observed every piece of furniture, every cupboard. All right, that man in the undershirt was the enemy, and certainly if up until that moment he hadn’t been, he was the enemy now, irrevocably, seeing his drawers overturned and the pictures of Madonnas and dead relatives pulled off the walls. And, all right, if he was their enemy, his house was full of traps: every dresser drawer could contain machine guns taken apart in an orderly way; if he opened the cupboard doors, bayonets fixed to guns could be pointing at his chest; perhaps ribbons of gilded bullets dangled under the jackets hanging on the hangers; every pot, every pan harbored a prudent hand grenade.
Baravino moved his long, thin arms clumsily. A drawer clattered: knives? No: silverware. A schoolbag thumped: bombs? Books. The bedroom was so crammed you couldn’t get through it: two double beds, three cots, two straw mattresses lying on the floor. And at the other end of the room, sitting in a crib, was a child with a toothache who began to cry. The agent wanted to open a passageway between those beds to reassure himself; but if it was guarding an arsenal in disguise, if the barrel of a mortar was hidden under every bed?
After all that, Baravino didn’t search anywhere. He tried to open a door: it resisted. Maybe the cannon! He imagined it in the parlor of that house in his town, with a vase of artificial roses sticking out of the barrel, lace trimming on the shields, and china figurines placed innocently on the mounts. The door suddenly yielded: it wasn’t a parlor but a storeroom, full of broken straw-seated chairs and boxes. All dynamite? There! On the floor Baravino saw the marks of two wheels; something with wheels had been dragged out of the room along a narrow corridor. Baravino followed the trail. It was the grandfather, rolling the wheelchair as fast as he could. Why was that old man running away? Maybe the blanket over his legs was hiding a hatchet! I pass by and with one blow the old man splits my head in two! Instead, he was going to the toilet. What was the secret there? Baravino ran along the balcony, but the door of the toilet opened and a little girl with a red ribbon came out with a cat in her arms.
Baravino thought he should make friends with the children and ask them questions. He held out a hand to pet the cat. “Nice kitty,” he said. The cat jumped in his direction; it was a thin gray cat, with short fur, all sinews. It gnashed its teeth and leaped like a dog. “Nice kitty.” Baravino tried to pet it, as if the problem for him lay entirely in befriending the cat. But the cat dodged him and fled, every so often spinning around with malevolent glances.
Baravino bounded along the gallery, chasing it. “Kitty, nice kitty,” he said. He entered a room where two girls were working, bent over sewing machines. On the floor were piles of scraps. “Weapons?” asked the agent, and scattered the material with his foot, ending up hobbled and draped in pink and purple. The girls laughed.
He went through a passage and up a flight of stairs; sometimes the cat seemed to be waiting for him, then when he got closer it leaped up, paws parallel and rigid. He went out onto another balcony: it was obstructed by a bicycle with its tires in the air; a man in overalls was looking for a hole in a tire, submerging it in a basin of water. The cat was already on the other side. “Excuse me,” said the agent. “There it is,” said the man, and invited him to look: from the tire in the water rose countless little bubbles. “May I?” Had everything been prepared to bar the way, or toss him over the railing?
He went on. In one room there was only a cot and a bare-chested young man lying on his back, smoking, with one hand under his curly head. Suspicious look. “Excuse me, have you seen a cat?” It was a good pretext for searching under the bed. Baravino stretched out a hand and got a peck. A chicken hopped out, being raised there secretly, in spite of city ordinances. The bare-chested young man hadn’t batted an eyelid; he went on smoking, lying in bed.
Crossing a landing, the agent found himself in the workshop of a hatmaker wearing spectacles. “Search . . . order . . .” said Baravino, and a pile of hats—trilbys, straw hats, top hats—fell and scattered on the floor. The cat jumped out from behind a curtain, played for a moment with the hats, and ran away. Baravino no longer knew if he was mad at tha
t cat or if he just wanted to be its friend.
In the middle of a kitchen an old man in a mailman’s cap with his pants rolled up was bathing his feet. As soon as he saw the agent he gestured, sneering, toward another room. Baravino looked in. “Help,” cried a nearly naked fat woman. Baravino, modest, said, “Excuse me.” The mailman sneered, hands on his knees. Baravino went back through the kitchen and onto the balcony.
The balcony was decorated with laundry hung out to dry. The agent walked along blind white corridors, in a maze of sheets; now and then the cat appeared, creeping under a hem, and disappeared, flattening itself under another. Suddenly Baravino was gripped by the fear that he was lost; maybe he had been cut off, his fellow soldiers had cleared out of the building, and he was the prisoner of that justly insulted people, prisoner of those hanging sheets. He found an opening at the end and managed to look over a low wall. Below, the well of the courtyard opened up as lights went on around the balconies. And along the railings, and up and down the stairs, Baravino saw, he didn’t know whether with relief or anxiety, policemen swarming, and he heard the orders, the cries of fear, the protests.
The cat had sat down on the wall beside him and was swishing its tail, looking down with an air of indifference. But when he moved it jumped off and disappeared up a narrow stairway that led to a garret. The agent followed: he was no longer afraid. The garret was almost empty; outside the moon was beginning to glow above the black houses. Baravino had taken off his helmet; his face was human again, the thin face of a fair-haired kid.
“Not another step,” said a voice. “You’re in range of my gun.”
A girl was squatting on the sill of the big window, wearing silk stockings and no shoes, long hair falling on her shoulders, her face made up, and in a cold voice was laboriously reading in the last light of evening a newspaper made up of drawings with a few sentences in block letters.
“Gun?” said Baravino, and grabbed her wrist as if to open the fist. As soon as she moved her arm the sweater opened over her chest, and the cat, curled into a ball, leaped out into the air toward him, Agent Baravino, gnashing its teeth. But now the agent understood that it was a game.
The cat fled to the roof, and Baravino, looking out at the low railing, contemplated it as it ran free and confident over the tiles.
“And Mary saw near her bed,” the girl continued reading, “the baronet in evening clothes with the gun pointed.”
The lights in the solitary, towerlike workers’ blocks were lit. Agent Baravino saw the enormous city below him: geometric steel constructions rose within the factory precincts, branches of clouds passed over the chimney stacks as they crossed the sky.
“Do you want my pearls, Sir Henry?” that constricted voice read painstakingly, obstinate. “No, I want you, Mary.”
As the wind rose Baravino saw before him that intricate expanse of concrete and steel; from a thousand hiding places the porcupine raised its quills. He was alone in enemy territory now.
“I have wealth and elegance, I live in a luxurious palace, I have servants and jewels, what more can I ask of life?” continued the girl, whose black hair fell over the page, decorated with sinuous women and brightly smiling men.
Baravino heard the trill of whistles and the roar of engines: the police were leaving the building. He would have liked to flee under the chains of clouds in the sky, bury his gun in a deep hole in the ground.
Who Put the Mine in the Sea?
At the villa of Pomponio, the financier, the guests were having coffee on the veranda. There was General Amalasunta, who was explaining the third world war with cups and spoons, while Signora Pomponio was saying “Frightful!” and smiling, like the cold-blooded woman she was.
Only Signora Amalasunta could allow herself to act distressed, since her husband was so bold that he immediately wanted total war on four fronts. “Let’s hope it doesn’t last too long . . .” she said.
But Strabonio, the journalist, was skeptical. “Yes, yes, all expected,” he said. “Remember, Excellency, that article of mine, last year . . .”
“Yes, yes.” Pomponio nodded; he remembered because Strabonio had written the article after a conversation with him.
“Nevertheless one mustn’t rule out . . .” said the Honorable Uccellini, the deputy, who had been unable to explain clearly the peacemaking mission of the papacy before, during, and after the inevitable conflict.
“But of course, of course, Honorable . . .” said the others in a conciliatory tone. The deputy’s wife was Pomponio’s lover and they didn’t want to upset him too much.
The sea was visible in the gaps in the striped awning, rubbing against the beach like a calm, indifferent cat, arching its back in the breeze.
A servant entered and asked if they wanted some shellfish. An old man had come by, he said, with a basket of sea urchins and limpets. The discussion moved from the danger of war to the danger of typhus; the general cited incidents in Africa, Strabonio cited incidents in literature, the Honorable agreed with everyone. Pomponio, who was something of an expert, said they should bring in the old man with the goods and he would choose.
The old man was called Bacì Degli Scogli, Bacì from the Rocks; he made a fuss with the servant because he didn’t want him to touch the baskets. There were two baskets, decrepit and moldy: one he held against his side, and as soon as he came in he dropped it on the floor; the other, which he carried on one shoulder, was evidently very heavy, making him lopsided, and he put it down carefully. A piece of burlap was tied on over the top.
Bacì’s head was covered by a white down, with no distinction between hair and beard. The small amount of exposed skin was red, as if for years the sun had been unable to tan it but only to boil and flay it; and his eyes were bloodshot, as if even the mucus had been transformed into salt. He had a short body, like a boy’s, with gnarled limbs that emerged from the holes in the old tunic, worn next to the skin, without even a shirt. His shoes he must have fished out of the sea, they were so shapeless, mismatched, shriveled. And from his person rose a strong odor of rotten seaweed. The ladies said, “How quaint.”
Bacì Degli Scogli, having uncovered the light basket, was displaying the sea urchins, piled up in a tangle of shiny black spines. With his wrinkled hands, covered with black dots where the spines had dug in, he handled the sea urchins as if they were rabbits he was picking up by the ears, and turned them over to show off the soft red pulp. Under the sea urchins was a layer of burlap and under that were the limpets, their flat bodies striped yellow and brown under the bearded, lichened shells.
Pomponio examined and sniffed. “They don’t come out of the drains in your area, right?”
Bacì smiled into his beard. “Eh, no, I’m out on the headland, you here have drains, where you swim . . .”
The guests changed the subject. They bought some sea urchins, some limpets, and charged Bacì to provide more in the coming days. In fact, they all gave him their visiting cards, so that he could make the round of their villas.
“And what do you have in that other basket?” they asked.
“Eh”—the old man winked—“a large beast. A beast I’m not selling.”
“What will you do with it, then? Eat it?”
“Eat it! It’s an iron beast . . . I have to find its owner, to give it back. Let him get rid of it, am I right?”
The others didn’t understand.
“You know,” he explained, “I separate the stuff that the sea carries ashore. In one place tin cans, in the other shoes, bones in yet another. And here comes this thing. Where do I put it? I see it moving along in the sea, half underwater and half on top, green with seaweed and rusty. Why they put these things in the sea I don’t understand. Would you like to find them under your bed? Or in a closet? I grabbed it and now I’m looking for who it is that put it there and I’ll tell him, You keep it, do me a favor!”
And as he spoke he cautiously approached the basket, untied the burlap cover, and exposed a large, monstrous iron object.
The ladies didn’t understand at first, but cried out when General Amalasunta exclaimed, “A mine!” Signora Pomponio fainted.
There was a great confusion, some rushing to give the lady air, some reassuring: “Of course it’s harmless, so many years like that, drifting . . .” Someone said, “It should be taken away, the old man should be arrested.” But meanwhile the old man had disappeared, with the terrible basket.
The master of the house called the servants: “Did you see him? Where did he go?” No one could guarantee that he had left. “Search the house: open the closets, the drawers, empty the cellar!”
“Every man for himself,” shouted Amalasunta, suddenly turning pale. “This house is in danger, everyone get out!”
“Why my house?” Pomponio protested. “And yours, General, think of yours!”
“I have to go and watch over my house . . .” said Strabonio, who had remembered certain articles he’d written, then and now.
“Pietro!” cried Signora Pomponio, who had revived, throwing herself on her husband’s neck.
“Pierino!” cried Signora Uccellini, also throwing herself on Pomponio’s neck and colliding with the legitimate consort.
“Luisa!” the Honorable Uccellini observed. “Let’s go home.”
“You surely don’t believe that your house is safer?” they said to him. “Given the politics of your party, you’re in more danger than we are!”
Uccellini had a flash of genius. “Let’s call the police!”
* * *
The police stormed through the coastal city, looking for the old man with the mine. The villas of the financier Pomponio, General Amalasunta, the journalist Strabonio, and the Honorable Uccellini and others as well were guarded by armed sentries, and mine disposal units from the Engineers inspected them from cellar to attic. The diners at Villa Pomponio prepared to camp out that night.
Meanwhile a smuggler named Grimpante, who thanks to his friendships always managed to know everything, had started off on his own to track down Bacì Degli Scogli. Grimpante was a big man in a white canvas sailor’s cap; the shady affairs that took place on land and sea all passed through his hands. It was easy for Grimpante, making the rounds of some taverns in the neighborhood of the Case Vecchie, the Old Houses, to run into Bacì, who emerged drunk with the mysterious basket on his shoulder.
Last Comes the Raven Page 21
