“Is he a relative of yours?”
Spino shook his head.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. Perhaps his name is Carlito.”
Harpo looked at Spino suspiciously, as if expecting a trick, or afraid he was being made fun of. Was he mad? The people were wearing fifties-style clothes, it was an old photograph. The boy must be a man now, for God’s sake.
“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about,” Spino said. “He’s got a dark beard now. His hair is darker too, not as light as in the photo, but his face still has something boyish about it. He’s been in my freezer for a few days. The people who knew him are keeping quiet, nothing, not even an anonymous phone call, as if he’d never existed. They’re wiping out his past.”
Harpo was looking around rather uneasily. A couple at a nearby table was watching them with interest. “Don’t speak so loud,” he said. “No need to disturb the customers.”
“Listen Harpo,” Spino said, “if a person doesn’t have the courage to go beyond appearances, he’ll never understand, will he? All his life he’ll just be forced to keep playing the game without understanding why.”
Harpo called a waiter and ordered a drink. “But who’s he to you?” he asked softly. “You don’t know him, he doesn’t mean anything to you.” He was speaking in a whisper, uneasy, his hands moving nervously.
“And you?” Spino said. “Who are you to yourself? Do you realize that if you wanted to find that out one day you’d have to look for yourself all over the place, reconstruct yourself, rummage in old drawers, get hold of evidence from other people, clues scattered here and there and lost? You’d be completely in the dark, you’d have to feel your way.”
Harpo lowered his voice even further and told him to try an address, though he wasn’t certain. His face told Spino that in giving him that address the favor had been repaid in full.
16
It’s called “Egle’s.” It’s an old pie-house, or that’s what he’s heard people call it. The walls are covered in white tiles and behind a zinc-topped counter Signora Egle bustles about a small wood-fired oven serving cakes and pies. Spino sits at one of the little marble tables and a grey-aproned waitress with the haggard look of a cloistered nun comes with a cloth to wipe up the crumbs the last customer left. He orders a chickpea pie and then, as instructed, lays a copy of the Gazzetta Ufficiale on the table in full view. He begins to check out the other customers and speculate as to who they are. At the table next to his are two middle-aged blonde women chattering in low voices, occasionally exploding in shrill laughter. They look well-heeled and are wearing gauche, expensive clothes. They could be two retired whores who’ve invested their earnings well and now run a shop, or some business related to their previous profession, but dignified now by this façade of respectability. Sitting in a corner is a young lout bundled up in a thick jacket and engrossed in a magazine from the cover of which a fat orange-clad guru wags a warning finger at the plate of pie in front of him. Then there’s a spry-looking old man, hair dyed a black that takes on a reddish tint about the temples, as cheap dyes often do. He has a gaudy tie and brown-and-white shoes with patterns of tiny holes. Wheeler-dealer, pimp, widower in the grip of a mad desire for adventure? Could be anything. Finally there’s a lanky man leaning against the counter. He’s chatting to Signora Egle and smiling, showing off an enormous gap in his upper teeth. He has a horsey profile and greased-back hair, a jacket that doesn’t manage to cover his bony wrists, jeans. Signora Egle seems determined not to concede something the lanky character is insisting on. Then, with an expression of surrender, she moves to one end of the counter and puts a record on a decrepit phonograph that looked as if it were purely decorative. The record is a 78 and rumbles; there are a couple of bursts from a band and then a falsetto voice starts up, distorted by the scratches the disc carries in its grooves. Incredibly, it’s Il tango delle capinere, sung by Rabagliati. The lanky character sends a nod of complicity in the direction of the waitress and she, unresisting but sullen, lets herself be led in a long-stepping tango that immediately captures the attention of the clientele. The girl leans a cheek on the chest of her beau, which is as far as her height allows her to reach, but she’s having all kinds of trouble keeping up with his powerful strides as he leads her aggressively about the room. They finish with a supple casqué and everybody claps. Even Spino joins in, then opens his paper, pushing his plate away, and pretends to be absorbed in the Gazzetta Ufficiale.
Meanwhile the boy with the guru on his magazine gets up dreamily and pays his bill. Going out he doesn’t deign to give anyone in the room a single glance, as if he had too much on his mind. The two big blonde women are repairing their make-up and two cigarettes with traces of lipstick on the filters burn in their ashtray. They leave chuckling, but no one shows any special interest in Spino, nor in the paper he’s reading. He raises his eyes from the paper and his gaze meets that of the spry old man. There follows a long and intense exchange of glances and Spino feels a light coating of sweat on the palms of his hands. He folds his paper and puts his pack of cigarettes on top, waiting for the first move. Perhaps he should do something, he thinks, but he’s not sure what. Meanwhile the girl has finished clearing the tables and has started spreading damp sawdust on the floor, sweeping it along the tiles with a broom taller than herself. Signora Egle is going through the day’s takings behind the counter. The room is quiet now, the air thick with breath, with cigarettes, with burnt wood. Then the spry little old man smiles: it’s a trite, mechanical smile, accompanied by the slightest jerk of the head and then another gesture that tells all. Spino sees the misunderstanding he’s been encouraging, immediately turns red with embarrassment, then senses, rising within him, a blind anger and intolerance towards this place, towards his own stupidity. He makes a sign to the girl and asks for his bill. She approaches wearily, drying her hands on her apron. She adds up his bill on a paper napkin; her hands are red and swollen with a coating of sawdust sticking to their backs, they might be two chops sprinkled with breadcrumbs. Then, giving him an insolent look, she mutters in a toneless voice: “You’re losing your hair. Reading after eating makes you lose your hair.” Spino looks at her astonished, as though not believing his ears. It can’t be her, he thinks, it can’t be. And he almost has to hold himself back from attacking this little monster who goes on giving him her arrogant stare. But she, still in that detached, professional tone, is telling him about a herbalist who sells things for hair, on Vico Spazzavento.
17
Vico Spazzavento—Windswept Lane—is the perfect name for this blind alley squeezed between walls covered with scars. The wind forms a whirling eddy right where a blade of sunshine, slipping into the narrow street between flapping washing seen high above against a corridor of sky, lights up a little heap of swirling detritus. A wreath of dry flowers, newspapers, a nylon stocking.
The shop is in a basement with a swing door. It looks like a coal cellar, and in fact on the floor there are some sacks of coal, although the sign on the doorpost says: “spices, paints.” On the counter is a pile of newspapers used to wrap up goods sold. A little old man dozing on a small wicker-covered chair near the coal got to his feet. Spino was first to say hello. The old man mumbled a good evening. He propped himself up against the counter with a lazy and seemingly absent expression.
“Someone told me you sold hair lotions here,” Spino said.
The old man answered knowledgeably. He leant over the counter a little to look at Spino’s hair, listed various products with curious names: Zolfex, Catramina. Then some plants and roots: sage, nettle, rhubarb, red cedar. He thinks red cedar is what he needs, that’s his guess at first glance, though one ought to do some tests on the hair.
Spino answered that maybe red cedar would be okay, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know what properties red cedar has.
The old man looked at him doubtfully. He had metal-framed glasses and a two-day growth of beard. He didn’
t say anything. Spino tried not to let his nerves get the better of him. Calmly, he explained that he hadn’t checked out his hair type, it was just brittle. In any case, he doesn’t want a commercial product, he wants a special lotion. He stressed the word special, something that only the shopkeeper knows the formula for. He has come on the advice of people he trusts. It’s strange they haven’t mentioned it to him.
The old man pushed aside a curtain, said to wait and disappeared. For a second Spino caught a glimpse of a poky little room with a gas-ring and a light bulb switched on, but he didn’t see anybody. The old man started to speak, a few yards from Spino, in a whisper. A woman’s voice answered, perhaps an old woman. Then they fell silent. Then they began to speak again, their voices very low. It was impossible to catch what they were saying. Then came a squeak as of a drawer being opened, and finally silence again.
The minutes passed slowly. Not a sound came from beyond the curtain now, as if the two had gone out by another door to leave him waiting there like an idiot. Spino coughed loudly, he made a noise with a chair, at which the old man reappeared at the curtain with a look of reproach. “Be patient,” he said, “another few minutes.”
He came out round the counter and went to close and bolt the swing door that opened onto the street. He moved somewhat cautiously, looked at his customer, lit a small cigar, and returned to the back room. The voices began to whisper again, more urgently than before. The shop was almost dark. The daylight coming in through the small barred window had grown dimmer. The sacks of coal along the walls looked like human bodies abandoned in sleep. Spino couldn’t help thinking that the dead man might also have come to this shop once and like him have waited in the half-dark; perhaps the old man knew him well, knew who he was, his reasons, his motives.
Finally the little man came back all smiles. In his hand he had a small brown bottle of the kind they use in pharmacies to sell iodine. He wrapped it up carefully in a sheet of newspaper and pushed it across the counter without a word. Spino looked at it now, paused, smiled perhaps. “Hope you’re not making a mistake,” he said. “It’s important.”
The old man released the bolt on the door, went back to sit on his seat and started on the accounts he had previously broken off. He made a show of pretending not to have heard. “Off you go now,” he said. “The instructions are on the label.”
Spino slipped the little bottle into his pocket and left. When he said goodbye, the old man answered that he had put some sage in the lotion too, to give it some fragrance. And Spino had the impression he was still smiling. There was no one on Vico Spazzavento. He felt as though time hadn’t passed, as though everything had happened too quickly, like some event that took place long ago and is revisited in the memory in a flash.
18
He asked the caretaker if he knew of a monument with an angel and an owl. The caretaker looked at the visitor and pretended to concentrate, though it was perfectly obvious he was disoriented. All the same, so as not to seem ignorant, he said it must be in the Western Gallery, and in revenge flaunted a knowledge that hadn’t been asked for. “It must be one of the first graves,” he said. “During the Romantic period the owl was in fashion.” Then, as Spino was walking away in the direction indicated by his outstretched arm, the caretaker reminded him that the cemetery closed at five and that he’d better be careful not to get locked inside. “There’s always someone gets left in, you know,” he added, as if to tone down the bluntness of his warning.
Spino nodded to show he had understood and set off along the asphalt avenue that cuts across the central squares. The cemetery was all but deserted, perhaps because it was late and the weather was unpleasantly windy. A few little old women dressed in black were busy in the squares tidying the graves. It’s strange how one can spend one’s life in a city without getting to know one of its most famous sites. Spino had never set foot in this cemetery described in all the tourist guides. He thought that to get to know a cemetery maybe you had to have your own dead there, and his dead were not in this place, nor in any other, and now that he was at last visiting the cemetery it was because he had acquired one of the dead who was not his own and was not buried here and to whom he was not even connected by any memories of a common past.
He began to wander about among the graves, distractedly reading the stones of the recently dead. Then his curiosity drew him towards the steps of the ugly neoclassical temple which houses the urns of some of the great men of the Risorgimento and along the pediment on which a Latin inscription establishes an incongruous connection between God and country. He crossed a section in the eastern part of the cemetery where bizarrely ornamented graves, all spires and pinnacles, loom alongside ugly little neo-gothic palaces. And he could hardly help but notice how at a certain period all the titled dead of the city had been concentrated in this area: nobles, senators of the realm, admirals, bishops; and then families for whom the nobility of wealth had stood in for the rarer nobility of blood: shipbuilders, merchants, the first industrialists. From the pronaos of the temple one can make out the original geometry of the cemetery which later developments were to change considerably. But the concept it expressed has remained unchanged: to the South and East, the aristocracy; to the North and West, the monumental tombs of the bourgeois business class; in the central squares, in the ground, the common people. Then there are a few areas for floating categories, for those who don’t belong; he noticed a portico beside the steps of the temple entirely given over to philanthropists: benefactors, men of science, intellectuals of various levels. It’s curious how nineteenth-century Italy faithfully reproduced in its choreography of death the class divisions that operated in life. He lit a cigarette and sat down at the top of the steps, immersed in his thoughts. Battleship Potemkin came to mind, as it does every time he sees an enormous, white flight of steps. And then a film about the Fascist period that he had liked for its sets. For a moment he had the impression that he too was in a scene in a film and that a director, from a low angle, behind an invisible movie camera, was filming his sitting there thinking. He looked at his watch and reassured himself it was only quarter past four. So then, he still had fifteen minutes before the appointment. He set off along the Western Gallery, stopping to look at the monuments and read the inscriptions. He stood a long time in front of the statue of the hazelnut seller, studying her carefully. Her face was modeled with a realism that showed no mercy in reproducing the features of a plebeian physiognomy. It was obvious that the old woman had posed for the sculpture in her Sunday best: the lace bodice peeps out from under a working woman’s shawl, a smart skirt covers the heavy pleats of another skirt, her feet are in slippers. With the hazelnuts she sold her whole life at street corners strung in loops over her arms, she stands to have the statue sculpted, this statue that now, life-size, looks out at the visitor with pride. A little further on an inscription on a bas-relief clumsily representing the throne of the Ludovisi informs him that Matilde Giappichelli Romanengo, a virtuous and kindly woman, having scarcely passed her thirtieth year, left husband and daughters Lucrezia and Federiga distraught. The deceased passed away on the second day of September 1886, and the two daughters, who dutifully hold the sheet from which their mother Matilde is flying to heaven, also support an inscription alongside which says: “Dear Mummy, what shall we offer you if not prayers and flowers?”
He walked slowly along the gallery until he found the grave with the angel and the owl. He noticed that a solitary seagull, blown along perhaps by the southwest wind, was hovering over the squares as if intending to land. On days like this when the southwesterly blows hard it’s not unusual to see seagulls even in those parts of the city furthest from the coast. They flock in, following the rubbish-strewn canal, then wander away from the water looking for food. It was exactly half past four. Spino sat on the low wall of the gallery, his back to the tomb, and lit another cigarette. There was no one under the porticos along the gallery and the old women in the middle of the squares had thinned out. Over to the other sid
e of the squares, in a corner near the cypresses, he noticed a man who seemed deep in contemplation near a cross, and started to watch him. The minutes passed slowly but the man made no move. Then he got up quickly and set off towards the small square by the exit. Spino looked around, but could see no one. His watch indicated that it was a quarter to five, and he realized that no one would be coming now to keep this strange appointment. Or perhaps no one was supposed to come, they had simply wanted to know if he would, and now someone he couldn’t see was watching him perhaps, was checking that he really was willing. It was a kind of test they had set him.
The seagull touched down lightly just a few yards away and began to walk awkwardly between the graves, quietly curious, like a pet. Spino felt in his pocket and threw it a sweet which the bird immediately swallowed, shaking its head from side to side and fluffing out its feathers in satisfaction. Then it took off for a moment, not much more than a hop, to come to rest on the shoulder of a little First World War soldier, from where it looked at him calmly. “Who are you?” Spino asked him softly. “Who sent you? You were spying on me at the docks too. What do you want?”
It was two minutes to five. Spino got up quickly and his brusque movement frightened the seagull, which took off obliquely to glide away over the other square near the steps. Before leaving, Spino glanced at the tomb with the angel and the owl and read the inscription which, in the suspense of waiting, he had overlooked. Only then did it come to him that someone had merely wanted him to read that inscription, this was what the appointment amounted to, this was the message. Under a foreign name, on a bas-relief scroll, was a Greek motto, and beside it the translation: Man’s body dies; virtue does not die.
The Edge of the Horizon Page 5
