Back at the hotel I climbed the little chain-link gate that led onto the terrace and walked silently around the building to the sliding window, where I peered into the dining room with my body hidden in an angle of the wall. The lunch service had begun and I could see the owner trudging heavily back and forth between the tables. He couldn’t see me where I was standing, and as I watched him I realized I now felt a sort of apprehension as far as he was concerned, a vague fear of being in his presence. As I wasn’t particularly hungry I decided not to have lunch, and to take advantage of the owner’s being occupied to check out the two rooms on the third floor I hadn’t been able to enter that morning. Because I wanted to be sure that, as I thought, Biaggi really did have a room at the hotel.
There was no one at the front desk when I went in, and I hesitated for a moment in the dim bluish light, standing beside my son who’d gone to sleep in his stroller. The door to the dining room was open at the end of the hall and I could hear the sound of muffled voices, a vague murmur of conversation mixed with the occasional clatter of knives and forks. No one had heard me come in, and I slipped soundlessly behind the counter to take the key to my room before cautiously taking hold of the keys to rooms fourteen and fifteen, which were also hanging on the corkboard. I went quickly up to my room to put my son to bed, then left again immediately and took the little stairway up to the top floor. I could no longer hear any noise at all from the ground floor, and the silence grew more and more oppressive the further I climbed up the stairs. When I got up to the third floor I walked a couple of yards down the hall. Before slipping the key into the lock of room fourteen I turned around once more toward the stairway, scrutinizing the curved wall in the feeble light. I knew that someone could appear at the top of the stairs at any moment, even Biaggi, because Biaggi must have been outside at the time. Otherwise I didn’t see how Biaggi could have come back to the hotel before me without my seeing him, as I’d been on the road the whole time since I left his property. But now, I said to myself, now, Biaggi could come back to the hotel at any moment and head straight upstairs to his room — all the quicker no doubt when he saw that his key was missing from the reception area.
I turned the key in the lock and opened the door. The room was silent and deserted, and the daylight coming through the window infused the room in a feeble, rainy half-light. The bed was made up against the wall and there were neither clothes nor newspapers; apparently the room was unoccupied. I left and closed the door behind me. There still wasn’t the slightest sound in the corridor. I’d now gone over to the door of room fifteen, which was slightly lower and somewhat indented in the wall, and I had a hard time opening it as it resisted when I pushed. It was a tiny room with a sloped roof, permeated by the smell of cold tobacco. There was just one bed and a table against the wall. Apparently the room had been cleaned this morning, but it seemed that someone had come back in the meantime and sat for a moment on the bed, because the bedspread was crumpled and a small transparent, hexagonal ashtray lay on the floor beside it. There was a travel bag near the door, but what struck me the most was the camera and two lenses on the table. One of the lenses was very short, it could have been twenty-eight millimeters, and the other much longer, a very long zoom lens, two hundred millimeters maybe, protected by a cylindrical, padded leather case. Beside it, also made of leather, was a stiff rectangular bag that must also have contained photographic material, films and filters, other lenses perhaps.
Was it me Biaggi was photographing with this equipment, I wondered all of a sudden, was it me? With this long zoom lens with which you can take photographs of someone from far away without being detected? But why would Biaggi have photographed me in the village without my knowing? Or had he photographed me in the port, on the jetty in the port on one of the previous nights? But at night, I thought, even in the moonlight, because the night before the jetty had been bathed in moonlight, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, and even with very sensitive film pushed to the maximum, it must be impossible to identify anyone at all in the photo, which would be very dark, showing nothing more than a stormy night sky in the background, the extended, immobile clouds in the moon’s halo and a silhouette in a dark coat and tie far off on the shadowy outline of the jetty. I was still standing motionless in the doorway when I heard the almost imperceptible sound of tears coming from down below, the very soft sound of my son’s tears drifting up through the ceiling and floorboards.
I went quickly back downstairs where I could now hear the sound of my son’s crying more distinctly. I stood in the stairwell, both keys still in my hand, and had no idea what to do. Should I go straight back to my room to take care of my son, or should I first take the keys back to the reception desk? I took a quick look over the banister to assess the situation down below. Everything was perfectly still, and I started down. I hadn’t quite made it to the bottom when I once again heard the murmur of conversation coming from the dining room, from time to time a short fit of coughing and a chair scraping against the ground and, just as I was about to enter the reception area, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the owner’s silhouette in the hallway. He disappeared almost immediately into the dining room, and I wasted no time in slipping behind the counter and putting the keys back in their place. Then without waiting I went back up to my room to join my son. I opened the door and went straight over to him, knelt at the foot of his bed, and took him in my arms.
I stood at the window holding my son, softly stroking his head to soothe him. He’d put one of his hands on my shoulder and we looked outside as his tears subsided little by little. The weather was bleak, and the road was still glistening slightly from the rain. The lone donkey was seemingly at loose ends in the weed-covered lot across the way, scratching itself nonchalantly against the fence. Look at the donkey down there, I said softly to my son, placing a fingertip on the window and pointing at the animal. My son turned to me and smiled an unexpected and complicitous little smile, still flushed with tears. You see the donkey? I said, but in fact it was my finger he was looking at more than anything else, which he finally clenched softly in his small hand. And that’s how we stayed, my son and I, very tenderly for a moment at the window. Then I slowly closed the curtains and put my son back in his cot, because I’d decided to take a nap.
I lay down and remained with my eyes open in the half-light without sleeping. My son had fallen asleep as soon as I’d set him down and now breathed quietly in his cot, I could see his little body curled up on the mattress through the fine stitching of his bed. I couldn’t hear anything from outside, and each time I closed my eyes my thoughts came obsessively back to the cat’s body in the port, its whiskers like translucent gauze and its ears rising vertically above the waterline, turned sideways and floating heavily on the surface of the gray water, and soon another image — one I’d already seen — appeared to me gradually, the image of Biaggi watching me, and then I saw Biaggi’s body floating face up in the port, unmoving, and his arms spread wide, dressed in a sailor’s jacket and canvas pants that were slightly pulled up over his calves, his shoes and socks soaked with water. The tie around his neck was ripped and his head was twisted to one side, a bluish cheek slightly immersed in the water. The tie wasn’t fastened with a normal knot, but floated loosely around his shoulders like a scarf, and red marks appeared at the base of his neck, faint but unmistakable traces of strangulation, in all likelihood he’d been strangled with this tie. Biaggi had been strangled on one of the previous nights on the jetty with this tie by someone who’d met him there during the night, someone who’d approached him from behind under the moonlight that was identical every night, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, and who’d slipped his tie around Biaggi’s neck, his own tie which he hadn’t taken off and which was still tied around his collar, and which he’d pulled tight while Biaggi’s hands gripped his wrists to make him let go, but he hadn’t let go, he’d continued to pull in the long luminous beam of the lighthouse on Sasuelo Island that intermittently lit up his face as he tugged harder and harder on his tie, to the point of strangling himself as well to a certain extent, but he hadn’t let up and continued to pull with all his might until, almost simultaneously, the tie had broken leaving no more than a ripped clump of fabric around my collar, and Biaggi had relaxed his grip, falling onto the pier with the rest of my tie around his neck — a kick of the foot was all it took to topple his body into the bay.