Sara had gone on vacation. Her school had organized a three-day trip to Lake Maggiore and Spino encouraged her to go. He asked her to send him some postcards from Duino and she smiled with complicity. If they had had some time they would have talked about it; once they talked a lot about Rilke; and now he would have liked to talk about a poem that takes as its subject a photograph of the poet’s father, something he’s been repeating to himself by heart all day.
At home he set up his instruments in the kitchen where there was more space to work than in the cubby-hole he normally used as his darkroom. In the afternoon he had picked up a supply of reagent and bought a plastic bowl in the gardening department of a big store. He arranged the paper on the dining table, setting the stand on the enlarger at maximum. He got a frame of light thirty centimeters by forty and inserted the negative of the contact photo which he’d had rephotographed in a lab where he knew he could trust people.
He printed the whole photograph, leaving the enlarger on a few seconds more than necessary since the contact shot was overexposed. In the bowl of reagent the outline appeared to be struggling to emerge, as if a distant reality, past now, irrevocable, were reluctant to be resurrected, were resisting the profanation of curious, foreign eyes, this awakening in a context to which it didn’t belong. That family group, he sensed, was refusing to come back and exhibit itself in this theater of images he’d set up, refusing to satisfy the curiosity of a stranger in a strange place and in a time no longer its own. He realized too that he was evoking ghosts, trying to extort from them, through the ignoble stratagem of chemistry, a forced complicity, an ambiguous compromise that they had unknowingly underwritten with an unguarded pose delivered up to a photographer of long ago. Oh, the questionable virtue of the snapshot! They’re smiling. And that smile is for him now, even if they don’t like it. The intimacy of an unrepeatable instant of their lives is his now, stretched out across the years, always identical to itself, visible an infinite number of times, hung dripping on a string that crosses his kitchen. A scratch that the process has enlarged out of all proportion slashes diagonally across their bodies and their surroundings. Is it a chance fingernail scratch, the inevitable wear and tear things get, perhaps the scratch of a piece of metal (keys, watch, a lighter), something those faces have shared a pocket or drawer with? Or was it done intentionally, the work of a hand that wanted to destroy that past? But that past, like it or not, is part of another present now, offers itself up, despite itself, for interpretation. It shows the veranda of a modest suburban house, stone steps, a scrubby climbing plant with pale bell-shaped flowers twisting round the architrave. It must be summer. The light seems dazzling and the people photographed are wearing summer clothes. The man’s face has a surprised and at the same time lethargic expression. He’s wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, and is sitting behind a small marble table. In front of him on the table is a glass jug with a folded newspaper propped against it. Obviously he was reading when the unexpected photographer said something to get him to look up. The mother is coming out of the door, she only just gets into the frame and doesn’t even realize. She has a short apron with a flower pattern, her face is thin. She’s still young, but her youth seems over. The two children are sitting on a step, but apart, strangers to each other. The girl has pigtails bleached by the sun, glasses with plastic frames, clogs. In her lap she holds a rag doll. The boy is wearing sandals and shorts. He’s got his elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands. His face is round, his hair has a few glossy curls, his knees are dirty. Sticking out of his pocket is the fork of a slingshot. He’s looking straight ahead, but his eyes are lost beyond the lens, as if he were watching some apparition in the air, some event of which the other people in the photograph are unaware. He’s looking slightly upwards too, the pupils betray the fact, no doubt about it. Perhaps he’s looking at a cloud, at the top of a tree. In the right-hand corner, where the space opens into a stone-flagged lane over which the roof of the veranda is tracing a staircase of shadow, you can just see the curled-up body of a dog. Not interested in the animal, the photographer has caught it in the frame by accident, but left out its head. It’s a small dog with mottled black fur, something like a fox terrier, but definitely a mongrel.
There’s something that disturbs him in this peaceful shot of nameless people, something that seems to be escaping his interpretation, a hidden signal, an apparently insignificant element which nevertheless he senses is crucial. Then he moves in closer, his attention caught by a detail. Through the glass of the jug, distorted by the water, the letters on the folded newspaper the man has before him spell Sur. Realizing he’s getting excited, he says to himself: Argentina, we’re in Argentina. Why am I getting excited? What’s Argentina got to do with it? But now he knows what the boy’s eyes are staring at. Behind the photographer, immersed in the foliage, is a pink and white country villa. The boy is staring at a window where the shutters are closed, because that shutter could slowly open just a crack, and then….
And then what? Why is he dreaming up this story? What is this his imagination is inventing and trying to palm off as memory? But just then, not inventing, but really hearing it in his mind, a child’s voice distinctly calls: “Biscuit! Biscuit!” Biscuit is the name of a dog, it can’t be otherwise.
11
When you reach the top of Via della Salita Vecchia the town thins out into the hinterland, settles down into a dull plain that the ramparts of the hills would never have led you to suspect. Here the lava-flow of cement hasn’t arrived yet and buildings put up in the twenties — the ones the bombs spared — are still standing: small villas built in a fanciful, petit-bourgeois Deco which, over the years, time’s patina has managed one way or another to ennoble; and then more modest houses, surrounded by walls and vegetable patches, with a few tufts of yellow reeds near the fences, as though this were already the country. The main road is lined by two rows of identical two-story terraced houses with outside brick staircases and tiny windows. They were put up under Fascism. This area was planned as a residential suburb for the clerical staffs of municipal boards, the bureaucrats, members of the less important professions. What the place has preserved of that period and world is the formality, the sadness. Yet there is something charming in the landscape: there’s a small square with a fountain, some flowerbeds, a few rusty swings, a bench where two old ladies with their shopping bags are chatting. And this meager, inert charm makes the place feel almost unreaclass="underline" likewise improbable, perhaps non-existent, is the thing he is looking for. F. Poerio, Tailor, Via Cadorna 15. That’s what the telephone directory says. The dead man’s jacket is an old tweed with leather patches on the elbows. It could be ten years old, maybe fifteen. It’s too insignificant a clue to lead to anything. And then who knows whether it’s the same tailor. Perhaps there are other Poerios working as tailors in other cities in Italy.
And meanwhile he walks along Via R. Cadorna, a narrow avenue lined with lime trees. The houses here are small, detached, two-story villas preserving vestiges of the wealth of a bygone age. Many of them could do with a fresh coat of paint on walls and shutters, their scanty gardens show signs of neglect and washing has been hung out to dry from some of the windows. Number fifteen is a house with a wrought-iron fence which has been taken over by wild ivies. The entrance is sheltered by a little porch, likewise wrought-iron and of vaguely oriental design. A glass nameplate says: Poerio, Tailor. The letters, once gold, are sandy now and spotted with little stains, like an old mirror.