The doctor went out by the back stairs and someone, one of the boys, sobbed and murmured: “Mother,” pushing his hands into his eyes, as if to erase a scene that had been etched there. At which Spino felt an oppressive tiredness, as though the tiredness of everything around him were bearing down on his shoulders. He went outside and sensed that even the courtyard was tired, and the walls of this old hospital were tired, the windows too, and the city, and everything. He looked up and had the impression that even the stars were tired, and he wished there were some escape from this universal tiredness, some kind of postponement or forgetting.
4
He walked all morning by the harbor. He got as far as the Customs and the cargo docks. There was an ugly ship with “Liberia” written on the poop, unloading bags and boxes. A black man leaning against the guard-rail watching the unloading procedure waved to him and he waved back. Then a thick bank of low cloud rose from the sea and only moments later had reached the shore, wrapping itself round the lighthouse and the derricks, which dissolved in fog. The harbor grew dark and the iron structures shiny. He crossed the Piazza delle Vettovaglie and went to the elevator cars that go up to the hills beyond the bastion of apartment blocks framing the city. There was no one on the cars now, they fill up in the late afternoon when people come home from work. The operator is a little old man with a smoke-dark suit and a wooden hand. On his lapel he wears a disabled veteran’s ribbon. He’s extremely efficient at using his one good hand to operate the levers and that strange iron ring that looks like the controls of a tram. Alongside the windows of the cabin, which in this first stretch of the journey runs on rails like a funicular, blank walls of houses march by, interrupted by small dark openings inhabited by cats, gates leading through to courtyards where you can glimpse a little washbowl, a rusty bicycle, geraniums and basil planted in tuna cans. Then all at once the walls open up: it’s as if the car had burst through the roofs and was headed straight for the sky. For a moment you feel you’re hanging in the void, the traction cables slide silently; the harbor and the buildings fall away rapidly below; you almost have the impression that the lifting movement will never stop; the law of gravity seems an absurdity and the town a toy it’s a relief to be leaving behind you.
You stop at the edge of a meager garden with a shelter. It’s like a railway station in the mountains, there’s even a wooden seat cut from a tree trunk. If you didn’t turn to look at the sea you could think you were in Switzerland or on the hills above some German lake. From here there’s a path that leads away to a Hungarian trattoria. That’s its name, “Hungary,” and inside there’s a handsome old woman and her irritable husband. The customers speak a hesitant Italian and argue amongst themselves in Hungarian. Heaven knows why they insist on keeping this poor shack open. Every time Spino goes the place is deserted; the old woman is solicitous and calls him Captain: it’s ridiculous, she has always called him Captain.
He sat down at a table near the window; it’s incredible how at this height the sound of the ships’ sirens is clearer than down below. He ordered lunch and then a coffee that the woman always prepares Turkish style, serving it up in huge blue porcelain cups that belong perhaps to her Hungarian youth.
After the meal he rested a while, his eyes open, head on his hands, but noticing nothing, exactly as if he were sleeping. He sat there listening to time slipping slowly by; the cuckoo in the clock over the kitchen door popped out and cuckooed five times. The old woman arrived and brought him a teapot wrapped in a felt cloth. He sipped tea for a long time. The old man was playing solitaire at the next table and every now and then looked up at him, screwing his eyes into a smile as he indicated the cards that wouldn’t come out. He invited Spino to join him and they played a game of briscola, both concentrating on the cards as if they were the most important thing in the world, as if upon them depended the outcome of some event which remained obscure, but which they both sensed was superior to the reality of their own presence here. Dusk fell pale blue and the old woman turned on the lights behind the counter, their two parchment lampshades spotted with fly droppings and supported by two stuffed squirrels, somewhat absurd in a trattoria that looks out over a seaport.
So then he telephoned Corrado, but he wasn’t in the editorial office. They managed to track him down in Typesetting. He seemed rather excited. “But where have you been?” he shouted, to make himself heard over the noise of the machines, “I’ve been trying to get you all day.” Spino told him he was in the Hungary; if Corrado wanted to come and meet him there he’d be happy to see him. He was on his own. Corrado told him he couldn’t, and his tone seemed brusque, perhaps annoyed. He explained that they were about to start printing the paper and the crime page read like a boring official communiqué, the nasty story the whole city would be reading about tomorrow. He’d been trying to reconstruct what had happened all day without managing to put together a decent article. The reporter he’d sent out to the scene had come back with a garbled version. Nobody knew anything and asking at the police station was worse than trying to see in the dark. If only he’d been able to find Spino a bit earlier he could have asked him for a couple of details. He’d heard he’d been on duty. “They didn’t even want to tell me his name,” he finished, huffily. “All I know is that he had false papers.”
Spino said nothing and Corrado calmed down. From the receiver Spino heard the noise of the machines working rhythmically with a liquid sound, like waves. “You come here,” Corrado began again, suddenly disarming, “Please,” and Spino seemed to see the childish expression Corrado’s face has when he’s upset.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry, Corrado, but this evening I really can’t. I’ll call you back tomorrow maybe, or the day after.”
“Okay,” Corrado said, “I wouldn’t have time to change the piece now anyway. All I need is his name. You didn’t hear anything, last night? Do you remember if someone mentioned a name?”
Spino looked out the window. Night had fallen and a waterfall of lights was spilling down the hillside, cars driving into town. He thought for a moment about the previous night, remembering nothing. Odd, the only image that came to mind was a stagecoach in an old film; it shot out from the right-hand side of the screen, growing enormous as it came into close-up, as if heading straight for him, where as a child he sat watching its approach in the front row of the Aurora cinema. There was a masked rider galloping after it. Then the guard tucked his rifle into his shoulder and the screen exploded with a crashing shot as Spino covered his eyes.
“Call him The Kid,” he said.
5
The article in the Gazzetta del Mare was unsigned, a brief note on the front page leading the reader to the Local News section, where the story took up two columns: a modest space on an inside page. To compensate, there was a photograph of the dead man. It’s the photo the police took, Corrado managed to get them to give it to him, and anyhow, if they want to find out who the man is, it suits the police to have it published. Under the photo they’ve put the caption: “Gunman Without a Name.”
He opened the paper on the table, pushing aside the breakfast things, while Sara began to tidy up the other rooms. “See?” she shouted from the kitchen, “Seems nobody knows him. But the article can’t be by Corrado, it isn’t even signed.”
Spino knows it’s not by Corrado. The facts were dug up by a young and very enterprising reporter who a few months ago caused pandemonium when he wrote about corruption on the docks. Spino sticks to the main story, skipping the opening paragraph about the fight against crime, full of clichés.