Back in my room I went over to the window and looked pensively outside. My son was sleeping behind me, I could hear him breathing regularly in his travel cot, and I went soundlessly over to watch him sleep. He was lying on his back, his little eyes closed and his hands limp, and I watched tenderly as he slept, even somewhat surprised I must say, he slept more than anyone I knew. He woke up a little after eleven o’clock in a soft, almost imperceptible fit of hiccups and tears that grew louder bit by bit, becoming clipped and furious as he tried to straighten up in bed with his head and hands pressed against the finely stitched fabric of the little Centre Georges Pompidou. I took him in my arms and held him high in the air, just the way he liked it to judge from his sudden silence and blissful, toothless smile, before putting him down softly on my bed and getting him dressed to go out, slipping on his big anorak and little shoes. I waited until he was in the stroller before I put on his balaclava (it was always a bit of a bullfight). We didn’t run into anyone when I dropped off my key at the front desk, and I picked up his stroller and carried it down the front steps. The stroller was brand new, very light and very practical, and I was really rather proud of it, having bought it just a few days before I left home. It had a chrome-plated metal frame and pale green plastic trimmings, with very solid rubber wheels. The color of the seat was perhaps not as uniform as I’d have liked, because when I bought things for my son I generally looked for the greatest simplicity, preferring simple materials and plain fabric, whereas this was many shades of gray and splashed with a whole nebula of jungle animals, tigers and elephants, even if they were really rather little and quite discreet I must say, blending in pretty well with the rest of the thing. In any event it was very easy to maneuver, even if there was only one handle — the other had broken off the day I arrived and was still in my pocket, together with a wheel clip that had come off two days ago. The road rose slightly and the wheels squeaked (that was new). I stopped for a moment on the shoulder and bent down to see what was wrong, but not finding anything that could explain the squeaking sound I started walking again. Probably wear and tear, who knows. I walked calmly along the side of the road, my son holding his head high as if I’d put him on the lookout at the head of our convoy, a task he carried out with the utmost seriousness, his eye sweeping the terrain under his balaclava — just one eye, because his hood had slipped down and more or less covered the other — watching for anything that moved in front of him, be it nothing more than a dead leaf carried by the wind, whose peregrinations he followed attentively from the asphalt where it had commenced its flight to its final destination on the roadside where it was caught by a clump of wet grass.
A fine sliver of sunlight had found its way between the clouds, and we finally passed the battered little sign indicating we were leaving Sasuelo. Right beside the sign on the side of the road was the municipal dump, consisting of a simple wire container on the side of the road. The cover was open and hung down one side, and the cage was overflowing with cardboard boxes and more or less well tied garbage bags. Some of them, fastened elegantly with little pink ribbons, had been particularly fawned over before being discarded, while others were wide open, sometimes even ripped, whose contents — open food cans, potato peels, shards of broken glass, fish bones, and chicken carcasses — were spilled all over the ground. The rain had soaked everything, and most of the cardboard boxes were drenched and had burst in places, finally splitting altogether under the weight of the garbage. A foul odor hung in the air and only let up a hundred yards farther on, when the sea air finally regained the upper hand. I continued along the cliff and, as I approached the Biaggis’ house — because I was now starting to get close to the Biaggis’ house — I started to feel a sort of apprehension at the thought of being surprised so close to their property. However it seemed no one was following us, and the road was now lined on both sides by a dense grove of trees. Soon the wall of the property appeared between the pines, a large wall of irregular stones almost entirely covered by a coat of dried ivy, and I walked alongside it for a couple of yards. The first thing I saw when I stopped in front of the gate was that the old gray Mercedes was gone. It had still been there the night before, however, so someone must have driven off in it this morning, and everything pointed to that person being Biaggi. Because even if Biaggi was staying at the hotel, I thought, even if Biaggi had moved into the hotel a couple of days before I arrived, nothing would stop him from coming and going in the village as he pleased or from using his car from time to time. He could even go home every day if he liked, and stay there for a couple of hours without opening the shutters, sure that no one would suspect he was there. So in fact he could alternate between two separate locations in the village, his home and his room at the hotel, and it occurred to me then that he must certainly have gone from his house to the hotel several times since I’d arrived, meaning that each time he wasn’t at the hotel he’d no doubt been at home.
The timid ray of sunlight that had succeeded in piercing through the clouds had disappeared by now and the sky was once more low and heavy over the villa, which was enveloped in a thick gray blanket of mist. All of the shutters were closed and the garden was deserted behind the gate, silent and abandoned. Great quantities of dead leaves were scattered all over the grounds, some yellow and still dry, others ruddy and wet, limp and soaked with water, while still others floated on the puddles in the gravel driveway. This was the first time I’d seen the Biaggis’ villa in full daylight since I’d arrived, and it looked very different than how I remembered it from a previous visit, all sunny under a limpid blue sky that had poked through the high branches of the pines and palms. The grass had been dry the last time I was there, mowed short and scorched by the sun, and classical music had wafted from the large, permanently open bay window on the ground floor that led out onto the terrace. Inside the house the depths of the living room had been fresh and welcoming, with the bookshelves barely visible along the walls, while outside a white sun umbrella had shaded the terrace marked by splashes of color from the swimsuits and towels drying on the seatbacks in the sun.
Now the villa was closed and silent, stretching out in the mist behind the wall of the property, and I stood in front of the gate, apparently alone on the road with my son beside me in his stroller. I’d taken out the three letters to Biaggi that I still had in my possession, and looking at them I saw that the brief dunking the night before had done them practically no damage at all. Fine, they looked like they’d gotten a bit wet, the paper was slightly crinkled and puffy in places and the ink had run somewhat on the envelopes, but they were still perfectly presentable, it seemed to me, at least presentable enough to be put back into the Biaggis’ mailbox without anyone suspecting they hadn’t been there since the mailman had delivered them, and, just as I was about to let them go — because I now wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible — my hand froze and I sensed that passing shiver of dread I always felt before dropping letters into a mailbox, the second when I read the letter over in my mind, going over all the turns of phrase and mentally checking this or that word, suddenly wondering if I’ve spelled it correctly, or even questioning what I’d written, and, while my hand still had the option of pulling back, while only a few inches separated the letters from the box and all of these vague sensations blended inside me, it was at this moment that I let them go — my hand completed its movement and I let the three letters drop into the slot.