I’d gone down for breakfast, and the owner didn’t even look in my direction when I came into the dining room. Leftovers still covered the tables, small half-finished packets of jam and butter lay on the plates, and here and there wrinkled napkins were rolled up into balls and abandoned on the tablecloths amid a scattering of crumbs. Four tables had been occupied, which intrigued me because it seemed to me that there hadn’t been so many guests on other days. Could it be that someone who didn’t normally eat breakfast in the dining room came down today for the first time? Could it be that Biaggi — because I immediately thought of Biaggi — had come down to have breakfast in the dining room this morning? But if it was Biaggi, I thought, why had he come down precisely today for the first time? Why, if he was at the hotel, didn’t he have his breakfast brought up to his room as he must have done on the other days? Was he now indifferent to whether or not I knew he was staying at the hotel, or had he realized I’d cottoned on and given up trying to hide altogether?
When the owner brought me my coffee, setting it on the table without a word, he lingered for a moment at the sliding window and looked out at the deserted terrace. It was drizzling, and a transparent plastic tarp had been thrown over the little rock wall that was being built a little farther off, its corners flapping in the wind from time to time. A couple of masons’ tools lay nearby in the mud, and water dripped slowly from the branches of the surrounding tamaris. The owner was still standing next to me, looking outside without paying the slightest attention to me. You didn’t sleep too well last night, right? he said without turning, as if he were talking to someone on the terrace, and suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. I didn’t respond, pouring my coffee instead, and he didn’t insist, nodding thoughtfully and clearing the tables onto the tray he’d brought my coffee over with. He moved off, loading the dirty cups onto the tray as he went along. I didn’t sleep well either, he finally said, and, clearing the tables all the while, he started telling me about the insomnia he’d been suffering from for some time now, which obliged him to read very late in his room before falling sleep. In fact he never went to sleep before two or three o’clock in the morning, he said, and he slept so lightly that the slightest noise in the hotel woke him up. He looked at me. Was he trying to tell me he knew perfectly well it wasn’t the first time I’d left the hotel in the middle of the night?
Because it wasn’t the first time I’d left the hotel during the night. Two nights earlier, in fact, I’d left the hotel and gone into the village. A short while before leaving I’d stood for a long time at my window listening to the murmur of the sea close at hand, which had eased my senses and my mind, but when I’d gone to bed I hadn’t been able to get to sleep, turning over and over in my mind the reasons for the initial reticence I’d felt on the first day at the thought of going to visit Biaggi. Finally I’d gone out to get a breath of air and clear my head, and I’d walked down to the port and onto the jetty. I was wearing a dark coat, I remember, a gray suit and plain tie, and it was perhaps this very image of me that Biaggi had seen that night as I walked out in the night on the stone wall of the jetty, a silhouette in a dark coat and tie walking slowly in the port under the moonlight which was identical every night, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, or perhaps he’d only seen me later, bending down over the cat’s body at the side of the dock, as the beam from the lighthouse lit up my face intermittently before plunging it once more into darkness.
After breakfast I went discreetly to the hotel reception, making sure no one saw me in the hall. The room was very dark when I went in. The bluish lights of an aquarium reflected onto the walls and floor, and several fish swam in silence amid miniature rocks and carrageen moss. A banged-up couch stood against one wall and a telephone and a couple of telephone books lay on the old wooden counter in the dull light. I slipped silently behind the counter and took a close look for a moment at the little keyboard hanging on the wall, seeing that while the keys to rooms fourteen and fifteen weren’t there, the key to room sixteen was hanging on a nail. I took it from the corkboard and hurried up to the top floor of the hotel.
I was now standing in front of room sixteen, holding the key I’d just taken from the reception, and I didn’t make a move, fully persuaded that it was Biaggi’s room, that this was the room he’d moved into when he came to stay at the hotel, and that it was here that he’d been working in complete isolation for several days now. He must have gone out, no doubt to take a walk around the village, because I couldn’t hear a sound behind the door, and I made up my mind to go in now that he was out. Softly I slid the key into the lock, and pushing open the door I was so convinced I was entering Biaggi’s room that I was sure I’d find a dark little nook under the attic with no more than a small wooden table against the wall with Biaggi’s typewriter on it, the black plastic cover overturned on the table, an ashtray and several sheets of paper on the desk. There was none of all that, judging from the rayon dressing gown on a hanger beside the washbasin the room was occupied by a woman. The wallpaper was similar in every respect to that in my room, just as dingy and damp, and the same grimy orange-beige color. The bed was unmade and the curtains were open, and a suitcase lay on the floor against the wall. Very elegant, the suitcase contrasted somewhat with the modesty of the room. It was made of soft, padded blue leather and had gold-colored locks, and a tiny key was attached by a wire to the handle. I closed the door and was about to go back downstairs when I heard someone walking along the hall down below, who almost immediately started up the little staircase. I stood there transfixed in the hallway, and the owner appeared in front of me at the top of the stairs, a little out of breath, holding a bucket and broom to clean the rooms. Was it you, I blurted out, who closed the sliding window in the dining room last night while I was out? He seemed not to understand the question, or at least not to make the connection between the window and the fact that I’d been outside the previous night, or maybe he was making other connections in his mind whose consequences I had no way of grasping, and after thinking about it while giving me a strange look, he finally said that yes, in fact he had gotten up in the night because he’d heard some noise in the hotel, and that, when he came into the dining room, he’d seen that a cat had taken advantage of the window’s being open to slip inside — a black cat that had run away as soon as he’d entered the room.
So it was the owner who’d closed the window the night before. Unless, I thought, without having really lied to me, he’d avoided telling the entire truth to cover up to a certain extent Biaggi’s presence at the hotel, and that last night when he went into the dining room he knew very well that Biaggi was still outside, simply because he’d heard him leave a short while earlier, and that, realizing that the sliding window was open in the dining room, he must have thought that it was Biaggi who’d left it open and so hadn’t touched it. And so it was Biaggi who, having preceded me into the hotel on his way back from the port, had closed the sliding window on me, not staying outside on the terrace as I’d thought, but simply coming back into the hotel where he had a room. Because, if Biaggi was staying at the hotel, I thought, if Biaggi had moved into the hotel a couple of days before my arrival with the intention of working there in complete isolation for a spell, he certainly must have asked the owner to tell no one he was there so that he could work in peace and quiet.