The sun was hot. To eat their sandwiches they stretched out on a patch of grass at the end of the churchyard where an iron cross on a stone pedestal commemorates a solemn visit paid by the Bishop in 1918, in gratitude, it says, for the end of the war, and for Victory. They ate slowly and calmly, enjoying the pleasure of being there, and when the sun began to slip behind the promontory, leaving a hazy light along the coast, they went into the church by a side door near the apse where a fresco shows a knight on a white horse crossing a landscape dominated by a native allegorical representation with a background of spring celebrations and festivals to the left and fires and hangings to the right. Then they went along the aisles, looking at the votive paintings hung on the walls. Most of them are seascapes: shipwrecks, miraculous visions saving mariners from storms, windjammers with their rigging devastated by lightning finding the right route thanks to the intercession of the Madonna. The Holy Mother is always shown between flashing clouds, her head covered by an azure veil as in popular iconography, her right hand reaching through the sky to make a gesture of protection toward the wave-tossed boats. Rough handwriting has traced out phrases of devotion across the paint.
Then the bell rang out and the Prior came in from the vestry to celebrate afternoon Mass. They sat to one side, near the confession-box, reading the inscriptions on the stone slabs on the walls. Afterwards, they found the Prior in the vestry as he was taking off his vestments and he led them through to his study next to the now empty cells of the convent beyond the refectory. Perhaps he mistook them for a mature married couple wanting advice, who knows, or for two inquisitive tourists. He invited them to sit on a small couch in a bare room: there was a dark table, a small organ, a bookcase with glass doors. On the table, with a chestnut leaf to mark his place, was a book about destiny and the tarot. Then Spino said he had come about a man who had died, and the priest immediately understood and asked if they were relatives or friends of the man. Neither, he said. The first time he’d seen him he was already dead, and now he was being kept in a refrigerator, like a fish, but he ought to be given a proper burial. The priest nodded in agreement, since from his point of view he imagined he was hearing and perhaps warming to a version of his own compassion as a man of faith in the words of another. But what could he say? Yes, he had known the boy, but not in the sense of knowing his name, place of birth and so on. He had always believed he was named Carlo and perhaps he really was. All he could say about him was that he was a nice boy, he loved his studies, he had said he was poor, and the Order had helped him. He didn’t know for certain if he was really born in Argentina, that was what he had said, and the Prior had never doubted it, and why should he have? In the two months he had stayed in the monastery he had read a great deal and they had talked a great deal. Then he had moved to town so as to be able to study and the Order had continued to help him by offering the modest charity of a low rent. He was sorry he had gone, he was a boy with a sharp, clear mind.
He looked them in the eyes, insistently, as priests will sometimes. “Why do you want to know about him?” he asked.
“Because he is dead and I’m alive,” Spino said.
He wasn’t sure why he’d answered like that. He felt it was the only plausible answer, since, truth to tell, there was no other reason. So then the priest clasped his hands together on the table, and, stretching out his arms, his white cassock slipped back to show his wrists, which were also white, and his fingers fidgeted a little with each other.
“He wrote to me,” said the priest. “I’ll show you the letter.” He opened a drawer and took out a blue envelope with a postcard inside showing a view of the city that Spino sees every day. The priest handed it to him and he read the few lines written there in a large, rather childish hand. Then Spino asked if anyone else had seen it, and the priest shook his head smiling, as if to say that no one had bothered to come and talk to him. “I couldn’t be of much use to the police,” he said, “and then it’s too much of an effort to climb up here.”
They exchanged a few casual remarks about the beauty of the place and the history of the church. Sara embarked on a pleasant conversation with the priest about the frescoes, Spino restricting himself to listening to their authoritative remarks as they spoke easily about the Knight, the Angel, Death, and the Hanged Man, until he remarked that it was odd but they sounded like tarot figures, and he pointed to the book on the table. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d like it, Father,” he added, “it being about life’s strange coincidences.”
The priest smiled and looked at him indulgently. “God alone knows all the coincidences of this existence, but we alone must choose our own set of coincidences from all those possible,” he said, “we alone.” And so saying he pushed the book towards Spino.
So then, for fun, Spino took the book and opened it at random without looking. He said: “Page forty-six,” and with a solemn voice, as if pretending to be a fortune teller, read aloud the first paragraph. They laughed out of politeness, as one does after an amusing remark, and it was clear that this laughter also marked the end of their conversation. So they said goodbye and the priest showed them out. The sky was growing dark and they hurried down the path, having heard the horn of the bus in the village square announcing its imminent departure.
Sara flopped on her seat with a sigh of satisfaction and tidied her hair slyly. “We should go on vacation,” she said. “We need a vacation.” He nodded without saying anything and leaned his head back on the headrest. The driver turned off the interior lights and the bus sped out of the village and along the hillside. Spino closed his eyes and thought of destiny, of the sentence he had read from that book, of life’s infinite coincidences. And when he opened them again the bus was already driving through the pitch dark and Sara had gone to sleep with her head on his shoulder.
9
Seeing him holed away behind his desk with that childish frown he sometimes wore when he had too much to do, Spino thought how Corrado always loved to play the part of the cynical newspaper editor, a type they’d seen together in the movies so many times. Spino had arrived ready to tell his friend about his Sunday outing. The morning’s newspaper, as always on Mondays, was almost exclusively given over to soccer and contained no news of any importance. He would have liked to have told Corrado that Sara was perhaps about to set off for a short vacation, and if he wanted to take him on free of charge as a private investigator, here was an occasion not to be missed.
But when Corrado said: “Another,” holding up two fingers, Spino’s good humor suddenly evaporated and he sat down without the courage to speak, waiting.
“The policeman died last night,” Corrado said, and he made a gesture with his hand, a cutting gesture, as if to say “that’s it” or “end of story.” There was a long silence and Corrado began to leaf through the pages of a file as if there was nothing more to say about the matter. Then he took off his glasses and said calmly: “The funeral will be held tomorrow; the corpse is laid out in a mortuary room at the police barracks; the wire services have already released the text of the official telegrams of condolence.” He put the file back on a shelf and fed a piece of paper into his typewriter. “I’ve got to write it up,” he said. “I’m doing it myself because I don’t want any trouble, just straightforward news, no speculation, no fancy stuff.”
He made as if to start writing, but Spino put a hand on the machine. “Listen, Corrado,” he said, “yesterday I spoke to a priest who knew him, I saw a letter. He was a sensitive person, maybe this business isn’t as simple as it seems.”
Corrado jumped to his feet, went to the door of his little glass office and closed it. “Oh, he was sensitive, was he?” he exclaimed, turning red. Spino didn’t answer. He shook his head in a sign of denial, as if not understanding. So then Corrado said to listen very carefully, because there were only two possible explanations. First: that when the police arrived the dead man was already dead. In fact The Kid died by the door to the apartment. Now, the gun that killed both him and the poli
ceman, from which six shots were fired, was found on the kitchen balcony at the end of a short passage. So obviously it wasn’t suicide since a dead man couldn’t possibly run back the whole length of the passage and go out on the balcony to leave the gun there. Second explanation: the gun, with somebody holding it, was on the balcony, waiting. The Kid knew this, or didn’t know, impossible to be sure. At a certain point the police knock on the door and The Kid calmly goes to open it. And at that moment the gun pokes in from the night and fires repeatedly both on The Kid and on the police. So then, who was the dead man? Unknowing bait? Or aware that he was bait? A poor fool? Someone who wasn’t involved at all? An inconvenient witness? Or something else again? All hypotheses were possible. Was it terrorism? Perhaps. But it could equally well have been something else: vendettas, fraud, something secret, blackmail, who knows. Perhaps The Kid was the key to everything, but he might also have been just a sacrificial victim, or someone who stumbled into an encounter with destiny. Only one thing Corrado was sure of: that it was best to forget the whole business.
“But you can’t let people die in a vacuum,” Spino said. “It’s as if they’d died twice over.”
Corrado got up and took his friend by the arm, pulling him gently to the door. He made an impatient gesture, pointing to the clock on the wall. “What do you think you’re going to find out?” he said, pushing him outside.
10
“Indian summer, St. Martin’s Day, winter can’t be far away.” Somebody used to say that to him when he was a boy, and in vain Spino struggled to remember who it was. He thought about it on a station platform swept by cold gusts of wind, waving as the train bellied out into the curve. He also thought that a lot could happen in three days. And in his mind a childish voice was laughing, saying: “Three little orphans! Three little orphans!” It was a piercing, malignant voice, but one he couldn’t recognize, recovered from some distant past when memory had stored away the emotion but not the event that produced it. Leaving the station he turned to look at the lighted clockface on the façade and said to himself: Tomorrow is another day.
Sara had gone on vacation. Her school had organized a three-day trip to Lake Maggiore and Spino encouraged her to go. He asked her to send him some postcards from Duino and she smiled with complicity. If they had had some time they would have talked about it; once they talked a lot about Rilke; and now he would have liked to talk about a poem that takes as its subject a photograph of the poet’s father, something he’s been repeating to himself by heart all day.
At home he set up his instruments in the kitchen where there was more space to work than in the cubby-hole he normally used as his darkroom. In the afternoon he had picked up a supply of reagent and bought a plastic bowl in the gardening department of a big store. He arranged the paper on the dining table, setting the stand on the enlarger at maximum. He got a frame of light thirty centimeters by forty and inserted the negative of the contact photo which he’d had rephotographed in a lab where he knew he could trust people.
He printed the whole photograph, leaving the enlarger on a few seconds more than necessary since the contact shot was overexposed. In the bowl of reagent the outline appeared to be struggling to emerge, as if a distant reality, past now, irrevocable, were reluctant to be resurrected, were resisting the profanation of curious, foreign eyes, this awakening in a context to which it didn’t belong. That family group, he sensed, was refusing to come back and exhibit itself in this theater of images he’d set up, refusing to satisfy the curiosity of a stranger in a strange place and in a time no longer its own. He realized too that he was evoking ghosts, trying to extort from them, through the ignoble stratagem of chemistry, a forced complicity, an ambiguous compromise that they had unknowingly underwritten with an unguarded pose delivered up to a photographer of long ago. Oh, the questionable virtue of the snapshot! They’re smiling. And that smile is for him now, even if they don’t like it. The intimacy of an unrepeatable instant of their lives is his now, stretched out across the years, always identical to itself, visible an infinite number of times, hung dripping on a string that crosses his kitchen. A scratch that the process has enlarged out of all proportion slashes diagonally across their bodies and their surroundings. Is it a chance fingernail scratch, the inevitable wear and tear things get, perhaps the scratch of a piece of metal (keys, watch, a lighter), something those faces have shared a pocket or drawer with? Or was it done intentionally, the work of a hand that wanted to destroy that past? But that past, like it or not, is part of another present now, offers itself up, despite itself, for interpretation. It shows the veranda of a modest suburban house, stone steps, a scrubby climbing plant with pale bell-shaped flowers twisting round the architrave. It must be summer. The light seems dazzling and the people photographed are wearing summer clothes. The man’s face has a surprised and at the same time lethargic expression. He’s wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and is sitting behind a small marble table. In front of him on the table is a glass jug with a folded newspaper propped against it. Obviously he was reading when the unexpected photographer said something to get him to look up. The mother is coming out of the door, she only just gets into the frame and doesn’t even realize. She has a short apron with a flower pattern, her face is thin. She’s still young, but her youth seems over. The two children are sitting on a step, but apart, strangers to each other. The girl has pigtails bleached by the sun, glasses with plastic frames, clogs. In her lap she holds a rag doll. The boy is wearing sandals and shorts. He’s got his elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands. His face is round, his hair has a few glossy curls, his knees are dirty. Sticking out of his pocket is the fork of a slingshot. He’s looking straight ahead, but his eyes are lost beyond the lens, as if he were watching some apparition in the air, some event of which the other people in the photograph are unaware. He’s looking slightly upwards too, the pupils betray the fact, no doubt about it. Perhaps he’s looking at a cloud, at the top of a tree. In the right-hand corner, where the space opens into a stone-flagged lane over which the roof of the veranda is tracing a staircase of shadow, you can just see the curled-up body of a dog. Not interested in the animal, the photographer has caught it in the frame by accident, but left out its head. It’s a small dog with mottled black fur, something like a fox terrier, but definitely a mongrel.
There’s something that disturbs him in this peaceful shot of nameless people, something that seems to be escaping his interpretation, a hidden signal, an apparently insignificant element which nevertheless he senses is crucial. Then he moves in closer, his attention caught by a detail. Through the glass of the jug, distorted by the water, the letters on the folded newspaper the man has before him spell Sur. Realizing he’s getting excited, he says to himself: Argentina, we’re in Argentina. Why am I getting excited? What’s Argentina got to do with it? But now he knows what the boy’s eyes are staring at. Behind the photographer, immersed in the foliage, is a pink and white country villa. The boy is staring at a window where the shutters are closed, because that shutter could slowly open just a crack, and then. . . .
And then what? Why is he dreaming up this story? What is this his imagination is inventing and trying to palm off as memory? But just then, not inventing, but really hearing it in his mind, a child’s voice distinctly calls: “Biscuit! Biscuit!” Biscuit is the name of a dog, it can’t be otherwise.
11
When you reach the top of Via della Salita Vecchia the town thins out into the hinterland, settles down into a dull plain that the ramparts of the hills would never have led you to suspect. Here the lava-flow of cement hasn’t arrived yet and buildings put up in the twenties—the ones the bombs spared—are still standing: small villas built in a fanciful, petit-bourgeois Deco which, over the years, time’s patina has managed one way or another to ennoble; and then more modest houses, surrounded by walls and vegetable patches, with a few tufts of yellow reeds near the fences, as though this were already the country. The main road is lined by two rows of identical tw
o-story terraced houses with outside brick staircases and tiny windows. They were put up under Fascism. This area was planned as a residential suburb for the clerical staffs of municipal boards, the bureaucrats, members of the less important professions. What the place has preserved of that period and world is the formality, the sadness. Yet there is something charming in the landscape: there’s a small square with a fountain, some flowerbeds, a few rusty swings, a bench where two old ladies with their shopping bags are chatting. And this meager, inert charm makes the place feel almost unreal: likewise improbable, perhaps non-existent, is the thing he is looking for. F. Poerio, Tailor, Via Cadorna 15. That’s what the telephone directory says. The dead man’s jacket is an old tweed with leather patches on the elbows. It could be ten years old, maybe fifteen. It’s too insignificant a clue to lead to anything. And then who knows whether it’s the same tailor. Perhaps there are other Poerios working as tailors in other cities in Italy.
And meanwhile he walks along Via R. Cadorna, a narrow avenue lined with lime trees. The houses here are small, detached, two-story villas preserving vestiges of the wealth of a bygone age. Many of them could do with a fresh coat of paint on walls and shutters, their scanty gardens show signs of neglect and washing has been hung out to dry from some of the windows. Number fifteen is a house with a wrought-iron fence which has been taken over by wild ivies. The entrance is sheltered by a little porch, likewise wrought-iron and of vaguely oriental design. A glass nameplate says: Poerio, Tailor. The letters, once gold, are sandy now and spotted with little stains, like an old mirror.
Signor Poerio has a warm smile and glasses with thick lenses that make his eyes small and distant. He seems protected by an indestructible candor; it must be his age, his sense of already being a part of the past. The glass door opens on a largish room decorated in an old pink color with narrow windows and a pattern of vine leaves painted along the ceiling moulding. The furniture is basic to the room’s function: a nineteenth-century sofa, a stool with a Viennese wicker seat, a tailor’s workbench in one corner. And then there are the mannequins, a few busts upright on poles left standing here and there about the room in no particular order. And for a moment Spino imagines that they are Poerio’s old customers, presences from the past who’ve transformed themselves into wooden mannequins for old time’s sake. Among them are some which do look like real people, with pink plaster faces that have turned almost brown and small white peelings on their cheekbones or noses. They are men with square jaws and short sideburns, plaster hairstyles imitating the Brylcreem look, thin lips and rather languid eyes. Poerio shows Spino some catalogues to help him choose a model. They must be catalogues from the sixties. The trousers are narrow and the jacket lapels long and pointed. He pauses a moment over one of the less ridiculous, more discreet models, then arranges the dead man’s jacket on a mannequin and has the tailor look at it. If he could make him one like this, what does he reckon? Poerio considers, he’s puzzled, twists his mouth wrily. “It’s a sports jacket,” he says doubtfully, “I don’t know if it would be right for the kind of suit you’re after.” Spino agrees. Still, the old jacket has such a perfect cut that it wouldn’t look out of place as a regular suit either. He shows the tailor the name tag inside, sewn onto the pocket. Poerio has no trouble recognizing it. It’s his tag, though straight off he can’t remember anything about the jacket. It’s an old jacket, he has put together so many jackets in his time. . . .
The Edge of the Horizon Page 3
