‘… if you’re so insecure you need a label to hide behind, then by all means buy something by Giorgio or Gianni. I’ve got nothing against their stuff. It’s very pretty. But I’m not interested in merely embellishing a preconceived entity but effecting a radical transformation of…’
He looked into the kitchen, the dining room, the bathroom and his mother’s bedroom. The flat was empty.
‘… clothes for people who don’t want to look like someone else but to make themselves apparent, to create themselves freely and from zero, every instant of every day. People like me, who have nothing to hide, who are neither more nor less than what they seem to be…’
‘And who are you?’ Raffaella Carra demanded. ‘Who is Falco?’
‘What can I say? There’s no mystery about me! What you see is what you get. I am nothing but this perpetual potential to become what I am, this constant celebration of our freedom to exorcize the demons of time and place, or who and what, where and why, and escape towards a goal which is defined by our approach to it…’
As he reached to switch off the television, Zen saw the note in his mother’s spidery handwriting on top of the set.
Welcome back Aurelio — Lucrezia from downstairs asked if I could keep an eye on her two boys while she collects her brother and his wife from Belgium — they were supposed to arrive yesterday evening but the plane was delayed — I’ll be back in time for dinner — don’t turn TV off as I am recording the last episode of Twin Peaks — Rosella and I have a bet on who did it but I think she has been told by Gilberto’s brother in America where it was on last year Your loving mother
Zen put the note down with a sigh. They had had a video recorder for two years now, but his mother still refused to believe that it was possible to tape a television programme successfully without the set being switched on and the volume turned up.
‘… refuse to recognize deterministic limitations on my freedom to be whoever I choose. No one has the right to tell me who I am, to chain me to the Procrustean bed of so-called “objective reality”. All that counts is my fantasy, my genius, my flair, eternally fashioning and refashioning myself and the world around me…’
The voice vanished abruptly as Zen twisted the volume control. He took out his pen and scrawled a message at the bottom of his mother’s note to the effect that he had got back safely from Florence and would see her for dinner. For some reason he found his mother’s absence disturbing. It was good that she was out and about, of course, keeping herself busy. Nevertheless, there was something about the whole arrangement which jarred. He set the note down on top of the television, walked back down the hallway and opened the last door on the right.
The pent-up odours of the past broke over him like a wave: camphor and mildew, patent medicines and obsolete toiletries, stiffened leather, smoky fur, ghostly perfumes, the whiff of sea fog. He pushed his way through the piles of overflowing trunks, chests and boxes. Spiders and woodlice froze, then broke ranks and scattered in panic as the colossus approached. There it was, in the far corner, perched on a plinth of large cardboard boxes containing back-numbers of Famiglia Cristiana from the early fifties. The gaily painted wooden box had originally been stamped with the insignia of the State Railways and a warning about the detonators it had contained. Zen still lucidly recalled his wonder at the transformation wrought by his father’s paint-brush, which had magically turned this discarded relic into a toy box for little Aurelio.
Reaching over so far his stomach muscles protested, he pulled the box down and removed the lid. Then he sifted through the contents — clockwork train set, tin drum, lead soldiers and battleships — until he found the revolver which had been made specially for him by a machinist in the locomotive works at Mestre. The man had been an ardent Blackshirt, and although unfireable, the gun was an accurate replica of the 9mm Beretta he carried when he went out to raise hell with his fellow squadristi. Zen weighed it in his hand, tracing the words MUSSOLINI DUX incised in the solid barrel, remembering epic battles and cowboy show-downs in the back alleys of the Cannaregio. The pistol had been the envy of all his friends, but its connections with the leader whose adventurism had caused his father’s death perhaps explained Zen’s lifelong reluctance to carry a firearm, or even learn to use one.
He squeezed his way back out of the storeroom with a sigh of relief, as though emerging from a prison cell. The past was always present in the Zen family. Nothing was ever thrown away, and even the dead remained unburied. That man Falco talked a load of pretentious rubbish, of course, but it was easy to see the attractions of his shallow, consumerist credo. Fascism had perhaps offered similar raptures and consolations to the people of his father’s generation.
It was ten to seven when he left the house, the replica pistol concealed in his overcoat pocket. The streets were crowded with shoppers and people going home from work or out on the town, and when he emerged into the vacant expanses of St Peter’s Square it was like stepping into another city. The throng of pilgrims and their coaches had long since departed, and the only people to be seen were two Carabinieri on patrol. Zen climbed the shallow steps leading up to the facade of St Peter’s and passed in under the portico.
Apart from a party of tourists who were just leaving, the basilica seemed as deserted as the piazza outside. Zen walked down the nave to the baldacchino, then turned right into the north transept. Between each of the three chapels stood a curvaceous confessional of dully gleaming mahogany which reminded Zen of his mother’s wardrobe. There were six in all, but only one showed a light indicating the presence of a confessor. The gold inscription above the entrance read EX ORDINE FRATRVM MINORVM. For a moment Zen hesitated, feeling both ridiculous and slightly irreverent. Then, with a shrug, he approached the recess and knelt down.
It was at least three decades since he had been to confession, but as he felt the wooden step beneath his knees and looked at the grilled opening before his face, the years slipped away and he once again felt that anxious sense of generalized guilt, assuaged by the confidence of possessing a system for dealing with it. So strong were these sensations that he was on the point of intoning ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned’ when a voice from the other side of the grille recalled him to the realities of his present situation.
‘Can you hear me, dottore?’
Zen cleared his throat.
‘Only just.’
‘I prefer not to speak too loudly. Our enemies are everywhere.’
It was the man who had phoned him earlier at the Ministry.
‘You are probably wondering why you have been summoned at such short notice, and in this unusual fashion. I shall be frank. Many people think of the Curia as a monolith expressing a single, unified point of view. This is not surprising, since we spend a considerable amount of time and trouble cultivating just such an impression. Nevertheless, it is a fallacy. To take the present instance, considerable differences exist over the handling of the Ruspanti affair. There have been some heated exchanges. I represent a group who believe that the issues at stake here are too serious to be swept under the carpet. If our arguments had been rejected by the Holy Father, we should of course have submitted. We have in fact repeatedly urged that the matter be placed before him, but on each occasion we have been overruled. The decision to cover up the truth about the Ruspanti case has been taken by a small number of senior officials acting on their own initiative.’
Zen glanced at the grille, but the interior of the confessional was so dark that he could not make out anything of the speaker.
‘What have you been told about the Cabal?’ the man asked abruptly.
Zen cleared his throat.
‘That according to Ruspanti there was an inner group within the Order…’
‘Speak up, please! I’m rather hard of hearing.’