The Flight of the Falcon, Page 2

  The telephone buzzed once more. Not my call to Perugia, but one of the barbarians. A woman again, naturally. The husbands never bother me.

  “Mr. Fabbio?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Guess what. It’s a boy!”

  I did a double-think. Barbarians give you their life history the first evening in Genoa. Which of them was it that was expecting her first grandchild, back in Denver, Colorado? Mrs. Hiram Bloom.

  “Congratulations, Mrs. Bloom. This calls for a special celebration.”

  “I know it. I’m so excited I don’t know what I’m doing.” The scream of delight nearly broke my eardrum. “Now, I want just you, and one or two of the others, to meet Mr. Bloom and myself in the bar before dinner, to drink the little boy’s health. Shall we say seven-fifteen?”

  It would cut down my free time to half an hour, and that call from Perugia hadn’t yet come through. Nothing to be done. Courtesy first and foremost.

  “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Bloom. I’ll be there. All well with your daughter-in-law?”

  “She’s fine. Just fine.”

  I hung up before she could read me out the cable. Time for a shave, anyway, and with luck a shower.

  You have to be wary about accepting invitations from clients. A birthday or a wedding anniversary is legitimate, or the arrival of a grandchild. Nothing much else, or it tends to make bad blood and you are halfway to ruining your tour. Besides, where drinking is concerned a courier has to watch his intake. Whatever happens to his party, he must remain sober. So must the driver. This is not always easy.

  I dealt with the Perugia call while still dripping from the shower, and after struggling into a clean shirt went downstairs to inspect the arrangements made for us in the restaurant. Two long tables in the middle of the room, each seating twenty-five, and in the center of either table, dwarfing the flowers, the bunched flags of both nations, the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. This never fails to please—the clients feel that it gives tone to the proceedings.

  A word with the headwaiter, promising him to have my party seated by seven-thirty sharp. They liked us to have our main course finished and the dessert served before the other diners wandered in to their tables. It was important for us, too. We worked to a tight schedule, and were due to take off for our tour of “Rome by Night” at nine o’clock.

  A final check on time, and then the short celebration drink in the bar. There were only a handful of them gathered to toast baby Bloom, but you could hear them from the entrance hall, where the excluded beef hung about in twos and threes, aloof, disdainful, their faces buried in the English newspapers. The extrovert barbarian roar had turned the Anglo-Saxons dumb.

  Mrs. Bloom glided towards me, a frigate in full sail. “Now, Mr. Fabbio, you’ll not refuse champagne?”

  “Half a glass, Mrs. Bloom. Just to wish long life to your grandson.”

  There was something touching in her happiness. Generosity exuded from her person. She placed her arm through mine and drew me forward into the group. How kind they were, dear God, how kind… Epitomizing, in their all-embracing warmth, the barbarian hunger for love. I drew back, suffocated, then, ashamed of myself, let the wave engulf me. Back in Genoa I had many tributes from Mrs. Bloom’s compatriots. Christmas cards by the score, letters, greetings. Did I remember the trip two years ago? When would I visit them in the States? They often thought of me. They had named their youngest son Armino. The sincerity of those messages shamed me. I never answered them.

  “I hate to break this up, Mrs. Bloom. But it’s just on seven-thirty.”

  “What you say goes, Mr. Fabbio. You’re the boss.”

  The two nations mingled in the entrance hall, halting momentarily as they greeted new acquaintances, the women appraising each other’s dresses. Then through to the restaurant drifted my fifty head of cattle, lowing, murmuring, myself the stockman in the rear. There were cries of pleasure at the sight of the flags. For a moment I feared a burst into national song, “The Star-spangled Banner,” “God Save the Queen”—it had happened before—but I caught the headwaiter’s eye and we managed to seat them before patriotism could do its worst. Then to my own small table in the corner. One lone male barbarian, middle-aged, swimmy-eyed, had placed himself at the corner of one of the long tables, from where he could watch me. I had him taped. I knew his kind. He would get no encouragement from the courier, but we might have trouble with him in Naples.

  While I ate I did the day’s accounts. This was my custom. I shut my ears to the sound of voices and the clatter of plates. If the accounts are not kept up to date you never get straight, and then there is hell to pay with head office. Bookkeeping did not bother me. I found it relaxing. And then, when the figures were totted up, the notebook put away, my plate removed, I could sit back, finish my wine and smoke a cigarette. This was the real time of reckoning—no longer of sums to be forwarded every day to Genoa, but of my own motives. How long would it continue? Why was I doing this? What urge drove me, like a stupefied charioteer, on my eternal, useless course?

  “We get paid for it, don’t we?” said Beppo. “We make good money.”

  Beppo had a wife and three children in Genoa. Milan—Florence—Rome—Naples—they were all the same to him. A job was a job. Three days off duty at the end of it, home, and bed. He was satisfied. No inner demon broke his rest or asked him questions.

  The babble of voices, topped by the barbarians, rose to a roar. My little flock was in full cry. Replete, at ease, their tongues loosened with whatever had filled their glasses, expectant of what the night would bring them—and what could it bring them but a bedding down beside their spouses after peering at buildings old, remote and alien to them, falsely lit for their enjoyment, glimpsed briefly through the windows, steamy with their breath, of a hired coach?—they spilled themselves, for a brief moment, of doubt and care. They were no longer individuals. They were one. They were escaping from all that bound and tied them—but to what?

  The waiter bent over me. “The coach is waiting,” he said. Ten minutes to nine. Time for them to fetch coats, hats, scarves, powder their faces and relieve themselves. It was not until I had counted the heads, as they climbed into the coach at one minute after nine, that I realized we mustered forty-eight. Two were missing. I checked with the driver—not Beppo, who was free to spend the evening as he pleased, but a man native to the city.

  “There were two signore in advance of the rest,” he told me. “They walked off together, down the street.”

  I glanced over my shoulder towards the via Veneto. The Hotel Splendido stands one street away, in comparative peace and quiet, but from the pavement one can see the bright lights and the gay shopwindows, and watch the traffic surge towards the Porta Pinciana. Here, for most women, is greater lure than the Colosseum we were bound for.

  “No,” said the driver, “they went that way.” He pointed left. Then, from around the block, into the via Sicilia, came the hurrying figures. I should have known it. The two retired schoolteachers from south London. Forever inquiring, forever critical, they were zealous for reform. It was this couple who had bade me stop the coach on the road to Siena because, they insisted, a man was ill-treating his oxen. It was this couple who, finding a stray cat in Florence, made me waste half an hour of our precious time seeking its home. A mother, admonishing her child in Perugia, had been in her turn admonished by the schoolteachers. Now, bridling and outraged, they clattered towards me.

  “Mr. Fabbio… Someone should do something. There’s a poor old woman, very ill, humped in the doorway of a church round the corner.”

  I contained myself with difficulty. The churches of Rome give sanctuary to all beggars, down-and-outs and drunks who care to sprawl upon their steps until such time as the police drive them away.

  “Don’t concern yourselves, ladies. This is quite usual. The police will see to her. Now hurry, please. The coach is waiting.”

  “But it’s absolutely scandalous… In England we…”

&
nbsp; I took both women firmly by the arm and propelled them towards the coach. “You are not in England, ladies, you are in Rome. In the city of the emperors oxen, cats, children and the aged receive their just reward. The old woman is lucky in that refuse is no longer fed to the lions.”

  The schoolteachers were still choking with indignation as the coach swept left, past the very church where the woman lay.

  “There, Mr. Fabbio, look… there!”

  Obedient, I nudged the driver. He slowed down, cooperative, to give me a better view. Those passengers who were seated on the right of the coach stared likewise. The streetlamp showed the figure in relief. I have had moments in my life, as has everyone, when something in memory clicks, when we are aware of a sensation of what the French call “déjà vu.” Somewhere, sometime, and God alone knew when, I had seen that bowed posture, the ample drapery spread, the arms folded, the head buried under the weight of shawls. But not in Rome. My vision lay elsewhere. The memory was childhood’s, blotted out by the years between. As we swept forward to the floodlights and the tourist illusion, one of the lovers on the backseat produced a mouth organ and broke into the strains of a song long stale to the driver and myself, but popular with barbarian and beef—“Arrivederci Roma.”

  It was sometime after midnight when we drew up at the Hotel Splendido once again. My troupe of fifty, yawning, stretching and I trust satisfied, rolled out of the coach one by one and passed through the swing-doors of the hotel. They had by this time as much individuality as machines mass-produced off an assembly line.

  I was dead, and longed above all things for bed. Instructions for the morning, last messages, thanks, good-night from all, and it was over. Oblivion for seven hours. The courier could pass out. When, as I thought, the lift doors had closed on the last of them, I sighed, and lit a cigarette. It was the best moment of the day. Then, from behind a pillar where he must have hovered unobserved, stalked the lone middle-aged barbarian. He swung from the hips, as they all do when they walk, in unconscious identification with their colored brethren.

  “How about a nightcap in my room?” he said.

  “Sorry,” I answered, curtly, “it’s against regulations.”

  “Ah, come off it,” he said, “it’s after hours.”

  He rolled forward, and with a half-glance over his shoulder slipped a note into my hand. “Room 244,” he murmured, and went.

  I turned through the swing-doors into the street. It had happened before, it would happen again; my rebuff and his consequent hostility would be a factor to be reckoned with throughout the tour. It must be borne. The courtesy I owed to my employers in Genoa forbade complaint. But I was not paid by Sunshine Tours to appease the lust or loneliness of clients.

  I walked to the end of the block and stood a moment, drinking the cold air. A car or two passed by and vanished. The traffic hummed behind me in the via Veneto, out of sight. I looked across to the church and the figure lay there still, immobile on the doorstep.

  I glanced down at the note in my hand. It was ten thousand lire. A hint, I supposed, of favors to come. I went across the street and bent over the sleeping woman. The furtive odor of stale wine, worn clothes, rose to my nostrils. I fumbled for the hidden hand under the enveloping shawls and put the note into it. Suddenly she stirred. She lifted her head. The features were aquiline and proud, the eyes, once large, were now sunken, and the straggling gray hair fell in strands to her shoulders. She must have traveled from some distance, for she had two baskets beside her containing bread and wine, and yet a further woolen shawl. Once again I was seized with that sense of recognition, that link with the past which could not be explained. Even the hand that, warm despite the cold air, held on to mine in gratitude awakened an involuntary, reluctant response. She stared at me. Her lips moved.

  I turned, I think I ran. Back to the Hotel Splendido. If she called to me—and I could have sworn she called—then I would not hear. She had the ten thousand lire, and would find food and shelter in the morning. She had nothing to do with me, nor I with her. The draped figure, suppliant, as though in mourning, was an illusion of my brain, and had no connection with a drunken peasant. At all costs I must sleep. Be fresh for the morning, the visit to St. Peter’s, the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, the Sant’Angelo…

  A courier, a charioteer, has no time. No time.

  2

  I awoke with a start. Had someone called Beo? I turned on the light, got out of bed, drank a glass of water, looked at my watch. It was 2 a.m. I fell back into bed, but the dream was with me still. The bare impersonal hotel bedroom, my clothes flung on the chair, the account book and the itinerary of the tour beside me on the table were part of a day-by-day existence belonging to another world, not the one into which my dreaming self had inadvertently stumbled. Beo… Il Beato, the blessed one. Childhood’s name, given me by my parents and by Marta, because, no doubt, I was an afterthought, a later addition to the family circle, there being eight years between my elder brother Aldo and myself.

  Beo… Beo… The cry rang in my ears as it had done in my dream, and I could not rid myself of the sense of oppression and fear. Sleeping, I had been a traveler in time, no longer a courier, and hand in hand with Aldo I stood in the side-chapel of the church of San Cipriano in Ruffano, staring above me at the altarpiece. The picture was of the Raising of Lazarus, and out of a gaping tomb came the figure of the dead man, still fearfully wrapped in his shroud—all save his face, from which the bindings had somehow fallen away, revealing staring, suddenly awakened eyes, that looked upon his Lord with terror. The Christ, in profile, summoned him with beckoning finger. Before the tomb, in supplication and distress, her arms bowed, her flowing garment spread, lay a woman, supposedly the Mary of Bethany who, often confused with Mary Magdalena, so adored her Master. But to my childish mind she resembled Marta. Marta, the nurse who fed and dressed me every day, who rode me upon her knee, who rocked me in her arms and called me Beo.

  This altarpiece haunted me at night, and Aldo knew it. On Sundays and feast days, when we accompanied our parents and Marta to church, and instead of going to the Duomo worshipped at the parish-church of San Cipriano, it so happened that we stood on the left of the nave, nearest to the chapel. Unconscious, like all parents, of the dread that possessed their child, they never looked to see that my brother, clasping my hand in his, urged me ever nearer to the wide-flung gates of the side-chapel, until I was compelled to lift my head and stare.

  “When we go home,” whispered Aldo, “I will dress you as Lazarus, and I shall be the Christ and summon you.”

  This was the worst of all. More full of terror even than the altarpiece itself. For Aldo, searching in the press where Marta kept the soiled linen before putting it to the wash, would drag out our father’s nightshirt, limp and crumpled, and drag it over my head. To my fastidious mind there was, in this, some touch of degradation; and to be wrapped in worn clothes belonging to an adult turned my small stomach sour. Nausea rose in me, but there was no time to rebel. I was thrust into the closet above the stairs, and the door shut. This, oddly enough, I did not mind. The closet was spacious, and on the slatted shelves lay the clean, fresh linen, lavender-sweet. Herein spelled safety. But not for long. The handle of the closet turned. The door softly opened. Aldo cried, “Lazarus, come forth!”

  So great was my dread, so disciplined to his commands my spirit, that I dared not disobey. I came forth, and the horror was that I did not know whether I should meet with the Christ or with the Devil, for according to Aldo’s ingenious theory the two were one, and also, in some manner which he never explained, interchangeable.

  Thus at times my brother, robed in a towel as Christ, bearing a walking stick for crook, beckoned me with a smile, fed me with sweets, put his arms about me, was kind and loving. But at others, wearing the dark shirt of the Fascist Youth organization to which he belonged and armed with a kitchen fork, he would represent Satan, and proceed to jab me with his weapon. I did not understand why Lazarus, the poor man raised from th
e dead, should so have earned the Devil’s hate, and why his friend, the Christ, should so basely have deserted him; but Aldo, never at a loss, informed me that the play between God and Satan was unending, they tossed for souls as men in the world, and in the cafés of Ruffano, threw at dice. It was not a comforting philosophy.

  Back in bed, in the Hotel Splendido, inhaling a cigarette, I wondered why I had been so suddenly transported to that nightmare world where Aldo was my king. It must have been that, as I drank the health of the small newborn barbarian, unconscious memory confounded him with myself, the timid Beato of a former world; and that, when I saw the woman lying on the church steps, the vision of the altarpiece in the San Cipriano chapel, with the Mary who loved both Lazarus and Christ prostrating herself in supplication before the open tomb, returned to me in undiminished force. Whatever the explanation, it was not welcome.

  After a while I fell asleep once more, only to plunge into further torment. The altarpiece became associated with another picture, this time in the ducal palace at Ruffano, where our father held the post of Superintendent, a much respected office. This portrait, on display in the duke’s bedchamber, and accounted a masterpiece by all lovers of art, had been painted in the early fifteenth century by a pupil of Piero della Francesca. It had for subject the Temptation, and showed Christ standing on the Temple pinnacle. The artist had composed the Temple to resemble one of the twin towers of the ducal palace, the most notable feature of the whole façade that reared itself in beauty above the city of Ruffano. Furthermore, the face of the Christ, gazing out from the portrait to the hills beyond, had been drawn by the daring artist in the likeness of Claudio, the mad duke, named the Falcon, who in a frenzy had thrown himself from the tower, believing, so the story ran, that he was the Son of God.