The Edge of the Horizon, Page 2

  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.

  “A tragic gun battle took place last night in the working-class Arsenale district in an apartment on the top floor of an old block in Via Casedipinte. Acting on a tip-off from a source which police are keeping strictly secret, five men of the Police Special Corps raided the apartment shortly after midnight. At the warning, ‘Open up! Police!’ an unspecified number of persons in the apartment fired repeatedly through the door, seriously wounding one policeman, Antonino Di Nola, 26, who has been stationed in our city for only two months. Di Nola later underwent what was described as delicate surgery. After the shooting, the gunmen barricaded themselves in a small room leading off from the entrance hall before escaping from a window across the rooftops. But before fleeing (and this perhaps is the most obscure part of the whole incident) they shot one of their own gang. The man was raced to the Old Hospital but was dead on arrival. His identity is unknown. It appears he was carrying false documents. Between twenty and twenty-five years old, brown beard, blue eyes, slim, average height, to all intents and purposes the dead man was a stranger to local inhabitants, despite having lived in the area for about a year. He went under the name of Carlo Noboldi and claimed to be a student, although inquiries made at university offices have revealed that he was not enrolled. Shopkeepers in the area say he was courteous and polite and always paid his bills on time. The apartment, which has two rooms and a loft, belongs to a religious order which took Noboldi in last year when he claimed he had just returned from abroad and was out of money. The Prior of the Order, to which Noboldi was paying a nominal rent, declined to make any statement to journalists. This new murder, which once again sees our city as the stage for violent crime, will intensify the fears of a population already deeply disturbed by recent events.”

  Sara has now come up behind him and, leaning over his shoulder, starts to read the paper, her head beside his. She passes a hand through his hair, a gesture of understanding and tenderness. For a moment, engrossed, they stare at the photograph of the unidentified man. Then she lets slip a remark that leaves him shaken: “Grow a beard and lose twenty years and it could be you.”

  He doesn’t reply, as if this observation were of no importance.

  6

  On the sliding door Pasquale had left a note: “Back Soon.” Pasquale always goes and has his morning coffee around eleven. Instead of waiting in the courtyard, Spino decided to go and join him; after all he knew where to find him. The sun was bright, the streets were pleasant. He went out of the hospital and down a dark side street that led into a small square where there was a café with a terrace and tables set out. Pasquale was sitting at a table reading the paper. Spino must have frightened him, because when he
came up from behind and spoke to him, Pasquale started slightly. With a look of resignation he folded his paper and left some money on the table. They walked calmly, as if out for a stroll. Then Pasquale said it was a sad story, to which Spino replied, “Right,” and Pasquale said: “I want to be buried in my own village. That’s where I want them to put me, beneath the mountains.”

  A bus went by and the noise drowned out their last words. They crossed a patch of garden where people had worn a footpath between flowerbeds defended by “Keep Off” signs. Spino said he wasn’t going to the morgue, he just wanted to know if anybody had shown up, a relative, someone who knew the man. Pasquale shook his head with an expression of disgust and said: “What a world.” Spino asked him not to leave the morgue if he could possibly avoid it, and Pasquale replied that if the relatives did come forward, the first place they’d go would be to the police, they certainly wouldn’t come to the hospital. They parted at the crossroad where the path through the gardens plunges between the houses of the old city center, and Spino set off to catch the number 37.

  Corrado wasn’t in the office, as Spino had feared. He had guessed his friend would want to go in person to try and find out more. Obviously the facts his reporter had picked up hadn’t satisfied him. He hung around in the editorial office for a while, saying hello to people he knew, but no one paid much attention to him. There was an atmosphere of impatience and nervous tension, and Spino imagined that this death with its burden of tragedy was weighing down on the room, making the men feel feverish and vulnerable. Then somebody came through a door waving a piece of paper and shouting that the tanks had crossed the frontiers, and he named a city in Asia, some improbable place. And shortly afterwards another journalist working at a teleprinter went over to a colleague and told him that the agreements had been signed, and he mentioned another distant foreign city, something plausible perhaps out there in Africa, but as unlikely-sounding here as the first. And Spino realized that the dead man he was thinking of meant nothing to anybody; it was one small death in the huge belly of the world, an insignificant corpse with no name and no history, a waste fragment of the architecture of things, a scrap-end. And while he was taking this in, the noise in that modern room full of machines suddenly stopped, as if his understanding had turned a switch reducing voices and gestures to silence. And in this silence he had the sensation of moving like a fish caught in a net; his body made a sudden involuntary jerk and his hand knocked an empty coffee cup off a table. The sound of the cup breaking on the floor started up the noise in the room again. He apologized to the owner of the cup, who smiled as if to say it didn’t matter, and Spino left.

  7

  “Still No Name for the Victim of Via Casedipinte.” It’s the headline of an article by Corrado. His initials are at the bottom. It’s a resigned, tired piece, full of clichés: the police search, all leads meticulously followed up, the inquiry at a dead end.

  Spino noticed the involuntary irony: a dead end. He reflects that one person is definitely dead and no one knows who he is, so much so that they can’t even legally declare him dead. There’s just the corpse of a young man with a thick beard and a sharp nose. Spino starts to use his imagination. He was dead on arrival at the hospital, but perhaps in the ambulance he mumbled something: cursed, begged, mentioned a name. Perhaps he called for his mother, as is only natural, or for a wife, or child. He could have children. He is married. There’s a ring on his finger, given, of course, that it is his ring. But of course it’s his. No one wears somebody else’s ring.

  But no, says Corrado in his article. He didn’t say anything while he was being driven to the hospital, he was in a coma, to all intents and purposes already dead. The policemen involved in the shoot-out said so.

  Spino found a pen and underlined the parts he thought most interesting.

  “His photograph has been sent to every police station in Italy, but there appears to be no trace of him in police files…. It is believed that if he had been a member of an underground organization, his comrades would have made some kind of announcement by now…. As things stand at the moment the police cannot be sure that the young man was a terrorist…. What’s more, according to informed sources, the tip-off given to the police could be part of an underworld or perhaps mafia vendetta…. The identity-card found on the murdered man belongs to Mr. I. F. of Turin, who lost it two years ago and reported the loss in the usual fashion…. And lastly there is the curious detail of the name on the door. Written on a plastic strip, the kind of thing anyone can print out themselves with a Dyno machine, it says: Carlo Nobodi (not ‘Noboldi’ as we mistakenly reported yesterday). The name is obviously false, perhaps a significant adaptation of the English word ‘nobody’.”

  Suddenly he thought of the ring. He telephoned the morgue and Pasquale’s voice answered.

  “Has he still got his ring on?”

  “Who is it? Can I help you?”

  “It’s Spino. I want to know if he’s still got his ring on.”

  “What ring? What are you talking about?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Spino. “I’ll be right over.”

  “Nobody shown up?” Spino asks him.

  Pasquale shakes his head and lifts his eyes to the ceiling with a resigned expression, as if to say that the corpse will have to stay where it is. The clothes are in the locker, the forensic people have left them there because they didn’t consider them important. They didn’t even bother to search through them carefully, otherwise they’d have found a photograph in his breast pocket. Pasquale points to it, he’s put it under the glass top on the desk. It’s a snapshot from a contact sheet, about as big as a postage stamp. It must be an old photo, in any event he ought to hand it over to the policeman on duty, it’s compulsory. But the policeman’s not there at the moment. He was there half the morning and then they called him out for something urgent. He’s a young guy who does patrolwork as well.

  Spino had expected to have trouble with the ring, but, as it happens, it slips off easily. The hands aren’t swollen and then the ring seems too big for the finger. On the inside, as he was hoping, there’s a name and a date: “Pietro, 12.4.1939.” Pasquale is surprised out of his sleepiness and comes over to take a look. Chewing a toffee, he mutters something incomprehensible. Spino shows him the ring and he looks at his friend inquisitively.

  “But what are you after?” Pasquale says in a whisper. “Why are you so bothered about finding out who he is?”

  8

  They got on the bus in Piazza del Parlasolo, under the bell tower. The clock said eight o’clock, and, it being Sunday, the square was quiet, deserted almost, the three buses lined up in a row, their engines ticking over, each with a card on its windshield announcing a destination. The clock struck eight and the driver promptly folded up his paper, pressed a button to close the automatic doors and slipped into gear. They went to sit up front, on the driver’s side, Sara by the window. On the seat at the back was a group of Boy Scouts, halfway down the aisle an elderly couple in Sunday best, then themselves.

  Sara had brought sandwiches and on her knees held a guidebook to Romanesque churches in the area. The book was in color and its cover featured a stone ceiling rose. The bus drove along the almost deserted sea front. The traffic lights hadn’t been switched on yet and the driver slowed down at every intersection. After the flower market they took a wide road that climbed rapidly in long curves. In just a few minutes they were halfway up the hillside, already out of town, running along beside an old ruined aqueduct. Another moment and it was open country with thickets of trees and vegetable gardens planted on terraces; olive, acacia and mimosa trees seemed on the point of flowering despite the season. Below, they looked down to the sea and the coast, both pale blue and veiled in a light mist which didn’t penetrate the city itself.

  Sara closed her eyes and perhaps slept a little. Spino’s eyes were also half-closed as he let himself be lulled by the motion of the bus. The Boy Scouts got off a stop before the village by a roadside Mado
nna. Then the bus crossed the village and turned round in the square, stopping in a yellow rectangle painted on the flagstones. Before starting their climb they had coffee in a cafe on the square. The little woman behind the counter watched them with a curiosity they satisfied by asking for directions to the sanctuary. She spoke in a harsh, rather primitive dialect, showing bad teeth. They gathered she was suggesting they eat in a trattoria that belonged to her daughter where the cooking was good and the prices reasonable.

  They decided instead to climb up the path marked in their guidebook. The book promised a steep but picturesque walk with dramatic views across the bay and the countryside inland. All of a sudden the bell tower rose pink and white amongst the holm oaks. Sara took Spino by the hand, pulling him along, like two children coming out of school.

  The churchyard is paved with stone flags, grass growing in the cracks between, while a low brick wall runs along the edge of a sheer drop to the other side. From up here the horizon stretches away from one bay to the next and the sea breeze blows in with a sharp tang. On the facade, near the door, an inscription explains how in the year of grace MCCCXXV the Madonna now in the sanctuary was carried in procession down to the sea, where she vanquished the terrible plague then afflicting the valley, after which the people chose the Madonna as patron saint of the bay. The first stone of the convent annex was laid on June 12th MCCCXXV and the inscription preserves the memory of that day. Sara read aloud from her guidebook, insisting that Spino pay attention.