The door, heavy and high, resisted me, and I had to lean my weight into it to push it open. At my back I heard a flapping step, and saw in the sunstruck, bevelled glass panel of the door in front of me the reflection of a grinning face looming at my shoulder. It was the red-haired fellow, the one who had been watching me while I drank my coffee. I turned to confront him, and the door on its stiff spring swung back and struck me on the shoulder, and would have sent me pitching headlong among the tables and the chairs and the legs of the waiters if Carrot Head had not grasped me by the elbow – the one I had bruised on the bathroom shelf, naturally – and held me upright. He had a large, round, high-coloured face, with a sprinkling of ginger bristles on cheeks and chin that glittered in the sunlight falling through the glass. That awful blazer was far too big for him, as were his trousers, and he wore a pair of incongruous, once-white plimsolls with soiled laces and thick rubber soles. He nodded and leered, saying something in what seemed to be dialect. I shook off with difficulty that insistent and insinuating hand, and took a step forward and let go of the door, hoping it would bash my pursuer in the face, but he avoided it nimbly and followed me into the street, still keeping up his incomprehensible patter. The only word of it I could make out sounded like signore, which was repeated over and over, with puzzling emphasis, while Carrot Head nodded vehemently and pointed to his own face. I turned away from him and set off along the lofty corridor of the arcade as fast as my bad leg and the uneven paving flags would allow, keeping my gaze fixed furiously ahead. Still Carrot Head would not let me go, but trotted eagerly beside me, burbling away, and leaning down and round and up to push his face in front of mine. And so we went along, by the stone archways, through alternating intensities of shadow and sunlight, glanced at by quizzical passers-by, until, at an intersection, beside a second-hand bookstall, I halted suddenly and took a step sideways and lifted high my stick in a hand white and shaking, and Carrot Head at last fell back, pursing his lips and shaking his head with a sorrowful smile and holding up placatingly a pair of empty palms.
Out of the shadows into the long piazza I stepped, and paused to stand a moment, breathing hard, waiting for my anger and disquiet to abate, still wondering what the fellow could have wanted of me. With a cold eye I took in what the guidebooks would call the panorama: the wedding-cake façades, the bronze horseman unsheathing his sword, the famed twin churches down at the far end of the square, all bathed in a honeyed, sunlit haze. I find this city no more attractive or interesting than any other I have known. Customs, legends, tales of colourful characters and events, such stuff leaves me cold; the picturesque in particular I find revolting. I do not care what battles Emanuele Filiberto won or lost, or where Cavour liked to eat his dinner. History is a hotchpotch of anecdotes, neither true nor false, and what does it matter where it is supposed to have taken place? How I used to despise those novelists whose paltry fictions it was my misfortune in the early years of my career to be forced to foist upon my students, I mean those northern worshippers of the sun-drenched south, the self-styled pagans – frauds and remittance men all – whose scenes were set on thyme-scented islands, or in pine-shaded hilltop villages, or in that steamy seaport in a disregarded corner of the Mediterranean, where the hero and his sloe-eyed mistress shared their parting dinner in a little restaurant up a side street from the harbour where the tourists never ventured, the anchovies and the bitter olives and the rough local wine, and the restaurant-keeper's wife humming something plangent, and the street arabs wheedling, and the three-legged dog gnawing a knuckle of bone, and the old poet at the next table coughing his life out over a last absinthe. As if place meant something; as if being somewhere vivid and exotic ensured an automatic intensification of living. No: give me an anonymous patch of ground, with asphalt, and an oily bonfire smouldering, and vague factories in the distance, some rank, exhausted nonplace where I can feel safe, where I can feel at home, if I am ever to feel at home, anywhere.
I walked on. A stream of motor cars was flowing swiftly through the square, separating into two channels around the bronze horseman's plinth and meeting and mingling again in cacophonous disorder on the other side. The sun was being stealthily swallowed by a fat, barely moving cloud, putty-grey and burning silver all along its forward edge. A pigeon landed in front of me, descending in an awkward flurry on churning wings, like a rapid succession of violet-grey ink-blot tests. I turned again and struck away from the square, and walked through ever narrower, cobbled streets, until I came out at last unexpectedly into a wide avenue flanked on both sides with chestnut trees in flower. Here I could breathe more easily. As I passed under the first broad, high, cool canopy of leaves, it occurred to me to wonder when a tree would feel most like itself, when it would feel it had most fully achieved its true being. I mean, if it were sentient – and who is to know if we are the only conscious ones, or that our consciousness is the only kind there is? – at what stage of its yearly cycle would it say, now, now I am what I am, now at last I am in my total treeness. Would it be in spring's first greening, or the full-leafed glory of June, or autumn flame, or even the gnarled nakedness of winter? And to live that cycle of life within another cycle – the one from bud to bareness, the other, the longer one, from sapling to hollow stump – surely that would be confusing. Would the fall of its leaves feel like incipient death, each year? Would spring feel like rebirth? Thinking these thoughts, in that midday's green dusk, I heard, or felt, rather, a reverberant boom, as if in the distance a great sheet of pliant metal had been struck with a huge, soft hammer. Thunder? I did not think so. Some aeroplane noise? A cannon shot, perhaps, marking the midday hour? Whatever it was it disturbed me. I quickened my pace, veering off in the direction of the hotel.
Presently I realised that I had lost my way, and I had to stop at a street corner to consult the crumpled map the hotel clerk had given me. I was squinting up in search of a street name when I registered the girl, on the corner opposite, looking in my direction. She was tallish, fair, neither pretty nor plain; I would not have noticed her had she not seemed to be regarding me with a smile, knowing, not unfriendly, as if I were someone she had met long ago, in faintly discreditable circumstances. She stepped forward into the street, squeezing between two cars parked closely nose to tail. Was she coming to accost me? The prospect made my pulse quicken, and I did not know whether to wait for her or flee. Who were all these people, the flower seller, Carrot Head, now this girl, and what did they want with me? The lorry had already braked, its tyres locked and shrieking, when it struck her. I had the sense of her spinning on her toes, head thrown back and hair flying, fast and tensely graceful as a dancer. There was a cry, not hers. A burly, grey-haired man on the pavement behind her threw up one arm and said something loud and deprecating in a deep bass voice. Vehicles squawked and pulled aside to right and left as the lorry hurtled down the centre of the street for twenty yards and came at last to a slewed, smoking stop. The girl had fallen back and was draped against the side of one of the parked cars with her arms flung wide. There was blood in her hair, and a glistening, innocent-looking trickle of blood coming out of her left ear. The large man who had thrown up his arm was toiling toward her at a bow-legged run, but before he could reach her she slithered abruptly to the ground as if everything inside her had suddenly liquefied, and lay in a boneless heap. Now others were running forward, and people were scrambling out of their cars and craning to see what had happened. I turned about quickly and set off at a headlong lurch, not caring which direction I was going in, so long as it was away from there. People jostled me, pressing forward for a glimpse of the fallen girl, with vague, eager, self-forgetting frowns. I was in a sort of panic, gasping, the sweat running into my eyes, and there was a blazing pain deep in my groin. I did not know what I was fleeing from; not the girl's death, certainly, or not only that. A half-formed image came to my mind – from Bosch, was it, or Dante? – of an emaciated, gape-mouthed figure, stooped and naked, running with uplifted arms through a landscape of burning red earth, bearing another figure, its own double, lashed to it tightly back to back. At last I came to the quiet of a secluded small piazza, with cobbles and more strutting pigeons and a patch of dusty grass, all loured over by the baroque, blocky façade of a palace, the name of which I knew I should know but could not remember. Unable to go any further I flopped down on a bench of polished marble. There was no one else about. A noontide pall of lethargy had fallen on the city. That slow cloud now hid the sun, and the soft grey air and the silence calmed my seething nerves. The pain in my groin subsided.