It was that morning, not long before the sun went up, that I discovered the dead cat in the harbor. At first, from a distance, I’d taken the black form floating between the boats for a plastic bag, or perhaps an old blanket rolled up in a ball, and, intrigued by this object on the surface of the water, I’d gotten up and gone over to the edge of the pier. The body was floating in the feeble light less than ten feet from the jetty, its ears and part of its back just above the waterline. The way it was floating it was impossible to see its face, and it was only when the current caused its body to pivot slightly that I saw it had a fish head in its mouth, from which a broken bit of fishing line protruded a couple of inches. And it was precisely this piece of line that made me think later in the evening — at the time I’d just looked at it without giving it too much thought — that the cat had been murdered.
How else to explain the fragment of fishing line in its mouth? How could such a tough and resistant bit of line be cut by the animal itself? And how, supposing it had indeed managed to cut the line, to explain the presence of a trolling line just a few feet from the side of the pier when it should have been out at sea anywhere from thirty to sixty feet underwater? Why, above all, was the end of the line cut so cleanly, as if with a knife, if it’s not because once the cat had been caught in the trap that Biaggi had set the night before — because Biaggi was in the village, I was now sure of it — he had slowly wound in the line as the cat struggled in the water with the fishhook in its mouth, reeling it up to the dock like a large fish, slackening when he felt too much resistance and quickly winding in each time the cat stopped struggling for a moment, and that, picking it up out of the water while it was still alive and struggling with all its might, he’d cut the line cleanly with a little knife and let the cat fall back into the water with a brutal splash that gradually subsided as the few last wavelets perished against its flanks?
In fact the first idea I’d had that morning when I discovered the dead cat in the port was that the decomposed fish head hanging from its mouth was all that remained of a bit of trolling-line bait that had floated back into the water near the jetty, and that the cat had accidentally fallen in while trying to get hold of it. At first glance, in fact, nothing pointed to it not being an accident, and if several things started troubling me afterward, nothing had struck me outright at the time. I’d never seen the cat before, or perhaps once, although there were probably no witnesses. It had been prowling around the port at nightfall and had run off as soon as I’d tried to approach it. That was the previous evening, when I was alone on the jetty, lying with my head over the water and locked in combat with a crab that had taken refuge in a crevice of the wall. I had a piece of cloth in my hand to protect my fingers from its claws, and in the other I was holding a little knife I’d found not far off on the jetty, and was pressing the flat side of the blade against the crab’s shell to try and dislodge it. This had been going on for some time and I would certainly have won out if I hadn’t been distracted by the sound of furtive steps beside me causing me to raise my head, the little knife clutched in my right hand. The cat was staring at me intently, barely ten feet away, its luminescent green eyes sparkling in the night.
That evening — I’d been in Sasuelo for four days now and still hadn’t made up my mind to go see the Biaggis — I went down to dinner in the hotel dining room after putting my son to bed. The owner served in the evening and his wife stayed in the kitchen, sometimes popping her head in the door to see what was happening in the dining room. There were just three or four guests staying in the hotel, perhaps there were others but I’d hardly seen a soul because my son kept very regular hours. In general I fed him in my room after having set him up on the bed with a bib around his neck, and, as his little eyes avidly took in the contents of the plate, I fed him spoonfuls of nondescript puree from little prepared jars I had reheated in the kitchen. The first time I’d come down with my jars the owner’s wife had given me what I have to say was a rather cold welcome (all the more so as I’d brought down a bit of dirty laundry, two or three of my son’s footed pajamas), but she’d gotten used to it by now, each day adding something of her own to my son’s meal, a freshly thawed filet of fish for example, or a wrinkled old apple that she cut up into harmonious quarters and placed delicately on the side of the plate. My son was now asleep, he’d slept through the night ever since we’d arrived in Sasuelo, and I lingered in the television lounge that evening after dinner. The television had been off for a long time and I was the only one in the room. I smoked a cigarette on the little sofa looking out the window from time to time onto the deserted terrace that stretched out in the night. I still had the four letters I’d taken from the Biaggis’ mailbox and I wondered what I should do with them, because I could resolve neither to open them nor to destroy them — at the very most to destroy the one announcing my arrival in Sasuelo. Because I no longer wanted anyone to know that I was there.
All of the lights were off in the hotel when I left the lounge to go back to my room, and I noticed as I walked down the hall on the ground floor that the door to the owners’ room was open. The light was on and I stopped for a moment to take a quick look inside. It was a very simple little room, silent and deserted, looking out onto the road. The curtains had been drawn and a pair of stockings hung over the back of a chair. From where I was I could just see that the large oak bed was still made up and a carefully folded negligee lay on the pillow. There was no one in the room, and I assumed the owners must have been getting ready for bed in the little washroom down the hall. I met no one on my way upstairs, and was just about to enter my room when I noticed a little stairway at the end of the hall that had escaped my attention until then. I didn’t know if there were any more rooms on the top floor but it seemed to me I could hear a noise coming from above, like the very muffled sound of a typewriter or perhaps a bird outside the hotel, a woodpecker tapping away in the night at the trunk of a tree. I climbed a few steps and peered up to see what was above, an attic perhaps or more rooms, but all of the lights were out and I couldn’t hear a thing so I didn’t insist and went back to my room.
I’d opened the window wide in my room and stood looking out at the road that wound through the darkness toward the edge of the village. Nothing moved anywhere, and I stayed there at the window slowly breathing in the fresh night air perfumed with the scent of moist herbs. The port wasn’t visible from my window but I could hear the lapping of the sea close at hand, whose feeble murmur blended with the silence and gradually eased my senses and my mind. My son was asleep behind me, I could hear his regular breathing from the travel cot. I didn’t think about a thing, simply breathing in the fresh air of the night and looking up at the very dark sky stretching out in front of me with several long black clouds sliding slowly across the halo of the moon. Finally I closed the shutters and went to lie down on the bed, where I remained for a long time with my eyes open in the darkness, unable to fall asleep.