19
He found the message in his mail box on returning home: a note written in capital letters indicating a time and place.
He put it in his pocket and climbed the stairs of his old block. As he entered his apartment the bell tower of San Donato began to strike six. He ran to the door leading out to the terrace and threw it open, wanting the sound to come right into the apartment and fill it. He took off his tie and flopped down on an armchair, putting his feet up on the coffee table. From this position all he could see was the outline of the bell tower, the slate of a roof and then a stretch of the horizon. He found a white sheet of paper and wrote in large capitals: “Weep? What’s Hecuba to him?”
He placed the paper next to the note and thought of the connection between them. He was tempted to phone Corrado and tell him: “Corrado, you remember this line? I’ve understood exactly what it means.” He looked at the phone but didn’t move. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to explain. Perhaps he would put it in a letter to Sara, but without offering long explanations, just write it as now he had intuitively understood it, and as she too would understand, that the player who was weeping (but who was he?) saw, albeit in another shape and in another fashion, himself in Hecuba. He thought of the power things have to come back to us and of how much of ourselves we see in others. And like a wave sweeping across him, warm and overwhelming, he remembered a deathbed and a promise made and never kept. And now that promise demanded fulfillment, it was obvious, and found in him and in this quest a kind of accomplishment, a different kind, an apparently incongruous kind, but one which in fact followed an implacable logic, as of some unknown geometry, something one might intuit but could never pin down in a rational order or in an explanation. And he thought that things do follow an order and that nothing happens by chance, that chance in fact is just this: our incapacity to grasp the true connections between things. And he sensed the vulgarity and the arrogance with which we bring together the objects that surround us. He looked about him and thought, what was the connection between the jug on the chest of drawers and the window? They weren’t related in any way, they were foreign to each other; they seemed plausible to him only because one day, many years ago, he had bought that jug and put it on the chest of drawers near the window. The only connection between the two objects was his eyes looking at them. Yet something, something more than this must have led his hand to buy that jug. And that forgotten, hurried gesture was the real connection; everything lay in the gesture, the world and life, and a universe.
And once again he thought of that young man, and now he saw the scene clearly. It had happened like this, he knew it. He saw him come out of his hiding-place and deliberately put himself in the path of the bullets, seeking out the exact position that would bring him his death. He saw him advance down the corridor with calculated determination, as if following the geometry of a particular trajectory so as to accomplish an expiation or achieve a simple connection between events. That was what Carlo Nobodi had done, who as a child had been called Carlito. He had established a connection. Through him things had found a way of tracing their pattern.
So he took the paper where he’d written the question about Hecuba and pegged it out on the washing line on the terrace, then came back in, sat in the same position as before, and looked at it. The paper fluttered like a flag in the stiff breeze. It was a bright, rustling stain against the falling night. He just watched it for a long time, establishing again a connection between that piece of paper flapping in the dusk and the edge of the horizon that was ever so slowly dissolving away into darkness. He got up slowly, overcome by a great tiredness. But it was a calm, peaceful tiredness that led him by the hand towards his bed as if he were a boy again.
And that night he had a dream. It was a dream he hadn’t had for years, too many years. It was a childish dream and he felt light and innocent; and dreaming, he had the curious awareness of having rediscovered this dream, and this heightened his innocence, like a liberation.
20
He spent the day putting his books in order. It’s incredible how many newspapers and notes can accumulate in a house. He threw away whole stacks of them, cleaning up the couch and the corners where they had piled up over the years. Likewise out in the rubbish went all sorts of things from the bottoms of drawers, old stuff, the kind of bric-a-brac you can never see your way to throwing out, either from laziness or because of that indefinable sadness that objects connected with our past arouse. When he’d finished it was as if it were another apartment. How pleased Sara would be, poor thing, having put up with that indescribable mess for so long. In the evening he wrote her a letter and sealed it in an envelope he had already stamped, intending to mail it on his way to the appointment. Then he telephoned Corrado, but only got the answering machine. He had to hang up because straight off he found himself unable to leave the message the recorded voice was asking for. Then he prepared something and dialed again. “Hi, Corrado,” he said, “Spino here, I just wanted to say hello and tell you that I think of you with affection.” Hanging up, he was reminded of a day many years before when he had dialed the same number and said: “Corrado, it’s me again, you remember that day we went to see Picnic and fell in love with Kim Novak?” Only when he had put the receiver down did he realize that he’d said something ridiculous, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. Then he thought that maybe Corrado wouldn’t find it ridiculous, perhaps it would just seem strange hearing it on the answering machine.
At dinner time he made himself a snack with a can of salmon he’d had in the fridge heaven knows how long and some pineapple doused in port. When evening fell he turned on the radio without putting on the light and sat in the dark smoking and looking out of the window at the lights in the harbor. He let the time slip by. He enjoyed listening to the radio in the dark, it always gave him a sense of distance. Then the bell tower of San Donato struck eleven and he started. He washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen in candlelight because he couldn’t face the violence of the electric light. He left at half past eleven, locking the door and leaving the key under the flowerpot on the landing, where he always left it for Sara.
He mailed the letter in the box near the stand, took Vico dei Calafati and went down the steps as far as the road along the sea front. The trattorias by the harbor were closing; a little old man sunk up to his thighs in rubber boots was washing his fishmonger’s counter with a hose. He went down the Ripa Gallery as far as the harbor railway station, then crossed the road and walked on along the tramlines that have outlasted the asphalt there, keeping close to the safety fence between the two lines. A night watchman was heading in his direction on a moped and, passing by, wished him good night. He waited till he was some distance away, then slipped into the port area through a little turnstile next to the big gates of the Customs. There were still some lights on in the Customs building. He chose to cut across a small labyrinth of containers so as not to risk being seen. He walked along a wharf where a Revenue Department launch was tied up and found himself at the cargo docks. He went past the Old Wharf, cluttered with cotton bales, and stopped by the dry-docks. There was no trace of any human presence ahead of him now; the lights were all behind, the lamps of a ship moored to a wharf and two windows lit up in the harbor station. He walked on about five hundred meters, keeping the traffic-light hanging over the coast road to his right as a point of reference. Striking a match, he checked once again the route he was supposed to take, then screwed up the piece of paper and threw it in the water. He saw the dark outline of the warehouse under a skeleton of metal bridges. He sat down on an iron stairway at the water’s edge and lit a cigarette. The bell tower of San Donato struck midnight. He hung on a few minutes more, looking out at the dark sea and an uncertain light on the horizon. To reach the warehouse he had to circle round some enormous containers scattered quite randomly along the wharf. The yard was lit by yellow foglights which drew four shadows from his body, projected in diametrically opposed directions as if they wanted to flee from him at every step. He reached the back of the warehouse, going down the side where the dusty light of the lamps was weakest. On the handle of the door was a chain without a padlock and he slipped it out through the rings holding it. He eased open the door and a long strip of yellow light slid into the darkness inside, snapping at a right angle where it met a pile of crates. He coughed three times, keeping the coughs distinct and decisive, as he was supposed to, but there was no reply from inside the building. He stood immobile on the strip of light, coughed again, and again no one answered.