Signor Poerio has a warm smile and glasses with thick lenses that make his eyes small and distant. He seems protected by an indestructible candor; it must be his age, his sense of already being a part of the past. The glass door opens on a largish room decorated in an old pink color with narrow windows and a pattern of vine leaves painted along the ceiling moulding. The furniture is basic to the room’s function: a nineteenth-century sofa, a stool with a Viennese wicker seat, a tailor’s workbench in one corner. And then there are the mannequins, a few busts upright on poles left standing here and there about the room in no particular order. And for a moment Spino imagines that they are Poerio’s old customers, presences from the past who’ve transformed themselves into wooden mannequins for old time’s sake. Among them are some which do look like real people, with pink plaster faces that have turned almost brown and small white peelings on their cheekbones or noses. They are men with square jaws and short sideburns, plaster hairstyles imitating the Brylcreem look, thin lips and rather languid eyes. Poerio shows Spino some catalogues to help him choose a model. They must be catalogues from the sixties. The trousers are narrow and the jacket lapels long and pointed. He pauses a moment over one of the less ridiculous, more discreet models, then arranges the dead man’s jacket on a mannequin and has the tailor look at it. If he could make him one like this, what does he reckon? Poerio considers, he’s puzzled, twists his mouth wrily. “It’s a sports jacket,” he says doubtfully, “I don’t know if it would be right for the kind of suit you’re after.” Spino agrees. Still, the old jacket has such a perfect cut that it wouldn’t look out of place as a regular suit either. He shows the tailor the name tag inside, sewn onto the pocket. Poerio has no trouble recognizing it. It’s his tag, though straight off he can’t remember anything about the jacket. It’s an old jacket, he has put together so many jackets in his time….
Spino says he appreciates that, but with a bit of effort could he remember something, that is, find the invoice… an old accounts register maybe? Poerio thinks about it. He has taken a flap of the jacket between forefinger and thumb and strokes the fabric thoughtfully. One thing he is sure of, he made it in the sixties, absolutely no doubt about that, it was part of a small roll of cloth, he remembers it perfectly, a remnant that cost him next to nothing because it was a warehouse leftover and the supplier wanted to get rid of it. Poerio now seems a little suspicious, he’s not sure what Spino wants of him. “Are you from the police?” he asks. All of a sudden he’s turned wary, obviously he’s afraid of saying something that might harm him.
Spino tries to reassure him somehow: no, he says, he really does want a suit, there’s nothing to worry about, on the contrary, he’d like to put down a deposit right away; and then he mumbles a strange explanation. It’s pretty contrived and Poerio doesn’t seem at all convinced. Still, he says he’s willing to help, as far as he can. He does still have his little file of past customers, although many must be dead. To be honest he closed the shop eight years back, he laid off his apprentices and retired. There was no reason for keeping the business going anymore.
“Well then, let’s see… let’s see,” he whispers, leafing mechanically through blocks of receipts. “This one is ’59, but there are a few orders from 1960 as well…” He reads them carefully, holding the blocks a few inches from his nose. He’s taken his glasses off and his eyes are childlike. “This is it, I think,” he announces with a certain satisfaction. “‘Jacket in real tweed.’ Yes, it must be this one.” He pauses a moment. “‘Guglielmo Faldini, Accountant, Tirrenica, Via della Dogana 15 (red).’” He lifts his eyes from the receipt and puts his glasses back on. He says that actually now he’s thought about it he doesn’t feel up to making a suit. His eyesight’s so bad he can’t even thread a needle. And then he wouldn’t be able to make the kind of suits people are wearing these days.
12
He finds Faldini, the accountant, in a dusty office where, on a glass door leading to a dark corridor, a frosted sign says: “Tirrenica Import-Export.” The window offers a view of harbor derricks, a sheet-iron warehouse and a tugboat pitching in an oily sea. Faldini has the face of someone who has spent his entire life addressing letters to distant countries while looking out across a landscape of derricks and containers. Under a sheet of glass, his desk is a patchwork of postcards. Behind him a brightly-colored calendar extols the delights of vacations in Greece. He has a placid look about him, big watery eyes, grey hair cut short and bristling in an old-fashioned style. He is truly amazed to see his jacket again. He lost it so many years ago. No, he couldn’t say how many. Well, twenty maybe.
“You really lost it?”
Faldini toys with a pencil on his desk. The tug has moved through the frame of the window leaving light blue patches on the water. It’s hard to say. He doesn’t know. Or rather, he thinks not, let’s say that it disappeared, so far as he can recall. From the harbor, in the distance, comes the sound of a siren. The accountant considers his visitor with a certain curiosity. Obviously he’s asking himself, what on earth’s this business of my old jacket, who is this man, what’s he after? And Spino finds it so difficult to be convincing, and then he’s not really trying. Faldini watches him with his placid expression. Of course, on the accounts book he keeps open in front of him there are numbers that tell of dream cities like Samarkand, where people maybe have a different way of being people. Spino feels he must tell him the truth, or something like the truth. So then, this is the truth, this is how things stand. Does he understand, this Faldini, the accountant? Perhaps. Or rather he senses it somehow, the same way he must sense his sedentary man’s dreams. But it doesn’t matter, yes, he remembers. It was in ’59, or maybe ’60. He always hung the jacket there, where he hangs the jacket he has now. On that coathanger behind the door. The office was exactly as it is now, identical. He makes a vague gesture in the air. In his memory the only thing different is himself, a young Faldini, a young accountant, who would never go to Samarkand. And there was a workman, a sort of porter that is. He often came into the office, did a bit of everything. He did it because he needed the work, but in the past, if Faldini remembers rightly, he’d had a clerical position at the Customs. He doesn’t know why he’d lost that job. He’d had some personal catastrophe, he doesn’t know what. He was a reserved, polite person, ill perhaps, he wasn’t cut out for being a porter. His name was Fortunato, sometimes names are really ironic, but everyone called him Cordoba. He can’t remember his surname. They called him Cordoba because he’d been out in Argentina, or some other Latin American country, yes, his wife had died in Argentina and he had come back to Italy with his son, a little boy. He always talked about his little boy, on the rare occasions when he did talk. He had no relatives here and he’d put him in a boarding school. That is, it wasn’t a proper boarding school, it was a lodging house run by an old maid who kept a few children, a sort of private school, but on a small scale, where it was he wouldn’t know, he has a vague impression it was near Santo Stefano, the church, perhaps. The boy was called Carlito. Cordoba was always talking about Carlito.