If Sara’s dream is not exactly that, then it’s certainly something very like it. The evening they saw Southern Waters she looked so wistful; she hugged his arm tight, and while she was eating her granita went back to the old chestnut of his unfinished degree. These days even the line that he is too old doesn’t deter her. Won’t she accept, he says, once and for all, that at his age you don’t feel like going back to school any more? And then the exam registration booklet, the bureaucracy, his old college friends who would be his examiners now. It would be intolerable. But it’s no good, she doesn’t give up: life is long, she says, longer maybe than one expects, and you don’t have the right to throw it away. At which he prefers to look off into the distance, doesn’t answer, falls silent to let the matter drop and to avoid it leading to another argument that’s connected to his not getting his degree. It’s a subject that distresses him: he understands well enough how she feels about it, but what can he do? Of course at their age this life as secret lovers is a somewhat inconvenient eccentricity, but it’s so difficult to break with old habits, to pass suddenly into married life. And then, the idea of becoming the father of that evasive eighteen-year-old with his absurd way of speaking and indolent, slovenly manner terrifies him. Sometimes he sees the boy walk by on his way back from school and thinks: I would be your father, your substitute father.
No, this is definitely not something he wants to talk about. But Sara doesn’t want to talk about it either; she wants him to want to. So like him she doesn’t mention it; instead she talks about films. The Magic Lantern has been holding two retrospectives dedicated to Myrna Loy and Humphrey Bogart; they even showed Strictly Confidentiaclass="underline" there’s more than enough for them to chew over here. Did he notice the scarves Myrna Loy was wearing? Of course he did, for heaven’s sake, they’re so flashy; but Bogart’s foulards as well, always so fluffy and with those polka dots, truly unbearable… sometimes it seems like wafts of cologne and Brylcreem are coming off the screen. Sara laughs quietly, with that delicate way of catching her breath she has. But why don’t they have a retrospective for Virginia Mayo, too? That Bogart treated her like a dog, the bastard. She has a special soft spot for Virginia Mayo, who died in a motel room, destroyed by alcohol, because he’d dropped her. But, by the way, that ship in the harbor, doesn’t it look like a liner? It has too many lights, she thinks, to be a cargo ship. He isn’t sure, hmm, no, he wouldn’t know. Though perhaps, no, they don’t have ocean liners anymore these days, they’re all in the breakers’ yards, just a few left for cruises. People travel by plane these days, who would cross the Atlantic in a liner? She says: “Right, you’re right,” but he senses from her tone that she doesn’t agree, is merely resigned. Meanwhile the proprietor of the café moves around with a cloth in his hand, wiping the empty tables. It’s a silent message: if they would be so kind as to call it a day he could close down and get off to bed, he’s been on his feet since eight this morning and the years weigh heavier than his paunch. Then the breeze has got a bit cool; the night is oppressively silent and humid; you can feel a film of brine on the arms of the chairs; perhaps they really had better go. Sara agrees it would be better. Her eyes are bright, he never knows whether this is emotion or merely tiredness. “I’d like you to sleep with me tonight,” she tells him. Spino says he’d like to as well. But tomorrow is his day off, she’ll come to his place in the morning and they’ll be together until evening. He’ll prepare a quick snack to eat in the kitchen and they can spend the whole afternoon in bed. She whispers what a shame it is they met so late in life, when everything was already settled; she’s sure she would have been happy with him. Perhaps he’s thinking the same thing, but to cheer her up he tells her no, it’s one thing being lovers and quite another being married, the daily routine is love’s worst enemy, it grinds it down.
The proprietor of the café is already lowering his shutters and mumbles goodnight under his breath.
3
They brought him in in the middle of the night. The ambulance arrived quietly, its headlights dimmed, and Spino immediately thought: something horrific has happened. He had the impression he’d been asleep and yet he picked up the sound of the ambulance’s motor perfectly clearly, heard it turn into the narrow street too calmly, as if there were nothing more that could be done, and he sensed how death arrives slowly, how that is death’s real pace, unhurried and inexorable.
At this time of night the city is asleep, this city which never rests during the day. The noise of the traffic dies down, just every now and then the lonely roar of a truck from along the coast road. Through the empty expanses of night-time silence comes the hum of the steelworks that stands guard over the town to the west, like some ghostly sentinel with lunar lighting. The doors of the ambulance echoed wearily in the courtyard, then he heard the sliding door open and felt he was picking up that smell the night’s chill leaves in people’s clothes, not unlike the sour, slightly unpleasant smell some rooms have when they’ve been slept in. There were four policemen, their faces ashen, four boys with dark hair and the movements of sleepwalkers. They said nothing. A fifth had stayed outside and stammered something in the dark that Spino couldn’t catch. At which the four went out, moving as though they didn’t really know what they were doing. He had the impression of witnessing a graceful, funereal ballet whose choreography he couldn’t understand.
Then they came in again with a corpse on a stretcher. Everything was done in silence. They shifted the corpse from the stretcher and Spino laid it out on the stainless-steel slab. He opened the stiffened hands, tied the jaws tight with a bandage. He didn’t ask anything, because everything was only too clear, and what did the mere mechanics of the facts matter? He recorded the time of arrival in the register and pushed the bell that rang on the first floor to get the doctor on duty to come and certify death. The four boys sat down on the enameled bench and smoked. They seemed shipwrecked. Then the doctor came down and started to talk and write. He looked at the fifth boy, who was wounded and was moaning softly. Spino telephoned the New Hospital and told them to prepare the operating theater for an urgent case, then immediately arranged for the boy to be sent there. “We haven’t even got any instruments here,” he said. “We’re just a morgue now.”