I’d gone back downstairs and sat down for a moment in the living room without taking off my coat. The windows in front of me were very black, and behind them the lowered metal blind didn’t let in the least bit of light. Around me in the darkness I could make out the silent contours of the furniture, the couch and the other armchairs, the bookshelves lining the walls. I sat there alone in the Biaggis’ villa and didn’t move, pricking up my ears at the slightest sounds from outside, the numerous nocturnal creaking sounds I thought I could hear coming from the garden, when I spied two little points of light shining in the darkness at the other end of the room, one red light and one green light glowing on the bottom shelf of the telephone table. Getting up and walking over to the table, I saw there was an answering machine set up in the villa. I crouched down for a moment in front of it and saw that apparently there were no messages, the tape was still wound back to the beginning. Cautiously I pressed one of the buttons with my finger and heard Biaggi’s voice resound in the utter silence. Biaggi’s voice rang out in front of me — Biaggi’s voice — vivid, close, and at the same time terribly distant. You have reached eight five three, one three four three. We’re not in right now but you can leave a message after the. I’d managed to stop the message and the house was once more engulfed in an absolute silence that was all the more disturbing as I didn’t move a muscle.
I’d finally left the house and was walking back to the hotel when I saw a black cat on the side of the road. It was close to the garbage dump, staring at me with its ears pricked, and lying at its feet was a long fish skeleton it had just pulled from a plastic bag. It was no more than five yards away, and I had the feeling it would run off if I made the slightest move in its direction. It didn’t flinch and was no doubt waiting for me to leave, staring at me in the night with deep green eyes that were finely speckled with yellow. But what troubled me the most was that it wasn’t the first time I’d seen that look, that it was a look I’d already seen, one night on the jetty down at the port. And the hotel owner must have seen the very same look the night before in the hotel dining room, because this must have been the cat he’d told me about that morning, the one that had entered the dining room through the sliding window and prowled around in the darkness, slipping stealthily between the tables, its luminescent green eyes shining in the dim light of the moon, before making off as soon as the owner came in.
I’d gone down to the port and was standing at the end of the jetty, my coat pulled tightly around me. I couldn’t hear a single sound in the port, just the murmur of the water close at hand and the sound of the waves breaking against the rocks, and I looked out at Sasuelo Island, far off and barely visible in the darkness. The lighthouse beam swung over the surface of the water, and I watched the long shaft of light thinking I’d never be able to get to sleep if I didn’t go to bed now. Already the night before the long, luminous beam of the lighthouse on Sasuelo Island had turned all night in my sleep with a throbbing regularity, sweeping away the darkness and then moving off before reappearing immediately under my eyes without leaving me the least respite. It was always the same dazzling cone of light that suddenly surged forth and grew quickly in the darkness before brutally blinding me for an instant, after which I waited in dread for the next time it came around, soon seeing nothing more than my own panic-stricken face on the edge of sleep, my eyes piercing the blackness, my pupils constantly dilating and contracting with each passage of the beam of light, I lay there staring in front of me, powerless and uneasy, wide-eyed in the night. Because in fact Biaggi was on Sasuelo Island. Dressed in a wet sailor’s jacket, Biaggi’s stiff, decomposing corpse was on Sasuelo Island at that moment. After floating for a while chest-up in the black water of the port, it must have been fished out and heaved on board a fishing boat that had left the harbor under the same moonlight as tonight, exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky. The boat had then putted slowly across to Sasuelo Island, and when it finally arrived at the rugged coastline it had docked gently at a small landing at the edge of the water, and Biaggi’s corpse had been unloaded onto the shore under the silvery moonlight, his bloated bluish face violently illuminated by the beam of the lighthouse whose high, silent outline rose up overhead in the night. Then, slowly, the body had been tugged along the little path leading up the rock face to the lighthouse. And there, in the utter darkness, it had been dumped on the ground below the automatic control instruments of the lighthouse that flickered on and off in the night, face up and arms spread wide, where it still lay.
It wasn’t yet midnight when I got back to the hotel, and walking down the hall I saw there was still a light on under the owners’ door. My son didn’t stir when I entered the room. He was sleeping peacefully in his travel cot, and I went slowly over to the window and pulled back the curtain. I stood at the window of my room in my dark coat and tie, looking out onto the road that led off in the night toward the Biaggis’ house. I could have telephoned the Biaggis right now if there’d been a phone in my room, I thought. The phone would have rung in the deserted living room of the villa, and after several seconds the answering machine would have switched on and I would have heard the sound of Biaggi’s voice in the receiver, Biaggi’s flat voice coming from far off in the night. You have reached eight five three, one three four three. We’re not in at the moment but you can leave a message after the — and I would have hung up without leaving a message.
It was a little after eight thirty when I went down to the port the next morning. The sky was very gray over the village, and several long black clouds drifted on the horizon over Sasuelo Island. The lighthouse had been out for several hours now, and I looked at its lofty silhouette standing out in the mist, wondering if anyone had been to Sasuelo Island in the last couple of days. Because even if there’d been no keeper on the island since the lighthouse was automated, it only stood to reason that maintenance visits were carried out from time to time and that someone tasked with keeping the lighthouse had to go over to the island on a regular basis. But what I couldn’t quite figure out was how often these visits took place. Was it every month, once a week, every two or three days? Because if it was that often, I said to myself, it was certain that someone must have been on the island in the last day or so. And then I started thinking that someone could have seen me leave the hotel on my way to the village that morning, someone who was still in the village and was watching me at this very moment.
I’d sat down on a stone block at the end of the jetty and was looking back at the square that stretched out on the other side of the port. It was empty and the wind blew steadily over the ground, swirling up whirlwinds of dust and old bits of paper. And it was then — as I was sitting all alone on the jetty and there was no one around — that I saw the old gray Mercedes enter the village. It had turned the corner at a very slow speed and was now driving slowly through the square. It seemed almost hesitant, and I thought for a moment that it would continue on its way, but it slowed down some more and stopped beside a bench near the telephone booth. I hadn’t made a move and could see an immobile figure in the car, but the distance was too great for me to distinguish who it could be. The car had parked facing the sea about thirty yards away, and the engine continued idling on the square while the silhouette inside seemed to be looking in my direction.