Standing motionless before the closed door, touching the latch without lowering it, he wondered if he might still manage to slope off unnoticed.
His mother and his wife had said goodbye to him the previous evening, when, soon after dinner, he’d left them in the dining-room to knit away in silence in front of the smoking coals of the fireplace. It was true: the previous evening he hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Rory, his baby girl, since he’d come home from the Unione club at nine and by nine Rory would already have been asleep for a good hour. Yet now was certainly not the time to hesitate. If giving Rory a kiss meant he’d have to face an additional series of goodbyes from Nives, who occupied the double bedroom next to his own, opposite the baby’s room (his mother’s bedroom looked out at the front: far enough away and safely isolated, by the grace of God!), then, no thanks, he would willingly do without that kiss.
He opened the door slowly.
As soon as he was outside he switched on the light, turned to shut the door, then made a few tentative steps across the linoleum of the corridor. Although he was wearing short American military boots without nails in their soles, nevertheless, he put down his feet with extreme care. His usual weight was about eighty kilograms. But today, swathed as he was in his hunting clothes, and laden with the weight of two rifles, the Browning and his old Three Rings Krupp, today, without a doubt, he must have weighed another twenty kilos. The merest creak provoked by his hundred kilos from the parquet beneath the lino, and Nives, who had always been a light sleeper, would in all likelihood wake up and call him.
‘Ssh!’ was his instinctive reply.
Who knows how, but Nives had managed to hear him. ‘What a pain!’ he grumbled. If he didn’t immediately enter her room, she’d be sure to start yelling for him.
He poked his head into the utterly dark room.
‘Ssh! What’s wrong? Wait a second.’
It irked him to have to enter his wife’s bedroom with the rifles, the cartridge belt round his belly, and all his gear: the five-shot rifle in its conspicuous bag of écru leather, especially, which, despite every declared programme of tight economy, he had bought only last September at Gualandi’s, the foremost gunsmith in Bologna. Slowly then, taking pains with every movement, he offloaded the Browning, hanging it from its strap on the window-handle there at his side. He was about to do the same with the double-barrelled shotgun; but there’d be no harm showing that gun to Nives, he reflected. She had seen it in his hands even as far back as their time in Codigoro, when she was only his mistress, so that, most likely, she would hardly notice it now. It could also serve to avoid a scene of any kind – an intention of that sort wasn’t out of the question: she was more than capable of starting a quarrel at such a moment – by making it clear to her he was just about to leave, and hadn’t a minute to spare for a chat or anything else.
He entered the room.
Nives was switching on the bedside-table lamp. With his right-hand thumb hooked between the gun’s leather strap and the bristly tweed of his jacket, he moved towards the centre of the room. And so, approaching the double bed of carved pinkish wood, where he, the only son, had been conceived, and where from 1939 on he had slept so rarely with his wife, for the second time that morning he felt himself pervaded by a strange sense of absurdity. Once again, it was as if between himself and the things he saw around him a thin transparent layer of glass had been interposed. Everything, there, on the other side, and he, on this side, looking at them one by one in a state of wonder.
Nives yawned. She lazily lifted her naked arm and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. Half-buried beneath the waxy, fat flesh of her upturned hand, the little gold wedding ring was almost invisible.
‘What time is it?’
‘Twenty minutes to five,’ he replied, staring her in the face. ‘I have to get going.’
‘Christ almighty – it’ll be so cold! Is it really cold?’
‘No, not very. I think it’ll rain.’
‘Don’t forget to take your raincoat, ’Dgardo!’
‘I’ve already put it in the car.’
‘And the wellington boots?’
‘Likewise.’
While they spoke they were observing each other: he with his hands on the bedstead, she stretched out, as always, on her side, the right-hand side of the bed. But what they said to each other was of no importance. It served, for her too, only to buy time. In the meantime she too was scrutinizing, studying, weighing things up.
‘I really have no idea why anyone would want to go hunting in winter,’ Nives continued. ‘Especially between Christmas and New Year! See if you don’t come home with pneumonia!’
‘Why should that be? All I need to do is keep well wrapped up.’
‘Have you at least put on the woollen suit?’
‘Yes. Mamma took care to put it out on the clothes-horse.’
He hadn’t planned to say that, he could swear to it. All the same, Nives grimaced.
‘Since Mamma Erminia always wants to plan ahead for you –’ she said, giving a series of curt nods of her head, which was full of curlers – ‘it wouldn’t be polite of me to get in her way.’
Luckily, she quickly changed her tone.
‘How can anyone do that?’ she continued, ‘Staying out, soaked through, for five or six hours without a break? Good Lord, you could keep in mind that you’re no longer a spring chicken! Just thinking about it, I get goosebumps. Brrrr.’
She laughed, narrowing her eyes. And he, at the end of the bed, while curiously observing their shape and every detail of that face, felt a sense of stupefaction growing within him. He was well aware how it could have come about that this little countrywoman aged between thirty and forty, with her small grey inexpressive eyes, her short, hooked nose like the beak of a raptor, and with that small mouth and its thin, almost invisible upper lip and fat prominent lower lip, had become his wife. Oh, how well he understood that! Yet, at the same time, watching her play the role of a lady from the most select urban society, who had never once set foot in the countryside, least of all that of the Bassa region, he couldn’t believe it was true. Nives. That Nives. What was she called again, her surname? Ah yes: Pimpinati. Nives Pimpinati.
‘What time will you be back this evening?’
‘I’m not sure. After five.’
‘Are you going to visit your cousin as well?’
There was nothing at all strange about her asking a question like that. It was no secret that after almost ten years he had finally decided to re-establish contact with Ulderico – only by telephone, it’s true, and with the excuse of asking if he happened to be able to suggest someone to take him by boat through the valley marshes, but the ice had thus been broken. And yet the question must have seemed to her in some way risky and indiscreet. She feigned indifference, but he knew her – though who knows what was going on inside her head now. Poor Ulderico. She was probably still unable to forgive him for doing everything in his power to persuade him not to marry her …
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It’s possible.’
‘And where will you go to eat?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps in Caneviè … or maybe even in Codigoro, at the Bosco Elìceo restaurant. It’s not as if there’s a great deal of choice.’
Nives wrinkled her nose.
‘So you’ll go to that nice Fascist Bellagamba?’ she exclaimed. ‘To that thug of a tupìn? fn1 Sorry, but rather than go there you’d do much better eating at our house in the country. You could get Benazzi’s wife to make you something, a pastasciutta, a cut of meat … At the end of the day,’ she went on, with a harder look in her eyes, and speaking now as if the whole thing concerned her, directly, personally, as though it concerned her more than it did him, ‘at the end of the day the house at La Montina is still ours, if I’m not mistaken!’
What on earth was Nives getting at?
She smiled, tightening her lips.
‘Well, it’s up to you,’ she continued. ‘But you know what I’m thinking? It would be a pleasure to go there, to La Montina, once in a while, perhaps even to be taken there by someone. That’s something I might enjoy! You may think everything’s fine. But the effort to be polite, not to ruffle anyone’s feelings, ends up, little by little, with them taking possession of it all, of the land. And nothing will stand in their way, just see if I’m wrong!’
This meant one of two things: either she didn’t know what had happened to him last April at La Montina, and in that case by them – when she pronounced it, he noticed, her upper lip took on the shape of a circumflex – she meant to refer in general to the thousands of Pimpinatis, Benazzis, Callegaris, Callegarinis, Patrignanis, Tagliatis, etcetera who were in political ‘agitation’ in the whole Bassa region of the Ferrara countryside from the city gates to the sea, always after more and more from the landowners. Or she did know, and so was inviting him to speak about it, to open up, to confide in her.
This latter prospect suddenly filled him with a kind of fear. Confide in Nives! And tell her what, exactly?
‘Listen to what Prearo told me yesterday evening,’ Nives continued. ‘He told me that …’
‘It’s not because of that,’ he interrupted her. ‘It’s so as not to have to drive another ten kilometres as well. And then, if it rains, there’s the risk of getting stuck in the mud.’
He moved back brusquely from the bed, and turned his back.
‘If you start back later than five o’clock –’ Nives shouted out behind him – ‘beware of the fog!’
He turned slightly, lifting a hand to stop her making a fuss.
‘Fine, yes, I understand.’
Although she was sleeping alone, she was well organized. On the bedside table, apart from an image of the Virgin Mary, Help of Christians, to whom the main church in Codigoro, the one in the square, was dedicated, she had also arranged the miniature radio, the basket with her sewing things, the photographs of her parents and a stack of papers. Why did they still live together? he wondered, as he left the room. Why didn’t they finally separate?
He paused in the corridor, in front of the Browning, once more unsure of what to do. He checked the time on his Vacheron-Constantin wristwatch – another keepsake from Switzerland. It said four fifty-eight. Late, he was late – he said to himself. Still … Suddenly deciding not to shoulder his second rifle, he drew a torch from his jacket pocket and walked towards the door of his daughter’s bedroom.
He turned off the corridor light, lit the torch, lowered the latch, and very slowly entered the room. To separate, yes! – he thought, advancing on tiptoe amid the faint smell of talc, school exercise books, chalk dust and floor wax which always wafted between those walls. To separate – it took nothing to say the words. But, in practice, how would they manage to accomplish such a thing? How much would it cost in lawyers’ fees? Not a little, that was for sure. And in that case, how would it be possible for him, the landowner of nothing, to gather together the needful? ‘At the end of the day, La Montina is still ours, if I’m not mistaken,’ Nives had said just a moment ago, laying the stress on ‘ours’ and ‘mistaken’. Truly, she couldn’t have found a turn of phrase that was more effective in reminding him how things actually stood.
But aside from that, what about Rory?
Having drawn up to her little bed, he halted. Almost holding his breath as he felt his heartbeat throbbing darkly in his throat, he directed the beam of light first at the tiny Christmas tree placed in a pot at the bedside, and then at the small body stretched out under the fluffy pink angora-wool blanket – beginning with the slight swelling of her feet and ascending as far as her shoulders and the lower part of her cheek. And while he stood contemplating Rory, astonished as ever at how beautiful, how lively, how strong she was (her face perhaps somewhat resembled his own, especially the eyes, which, however, were bigger than his – they were huge! – and in the shape of the lips) he was suddenly overwhelmed by an inexpressible anxiety, by a sense of inconsolable desolation. He did not know why. It was as though, silently and without warning, it had leapt upon him. As though he had been attacked by a wild beast.
He leaned down to brush his lips against the little girl’s forehead, retraced his steps across the room, and went out a third time into the corridor. He turned on the light switch and looked at the time. It was five minutes past five. He went back to pick up the rifle hanging on the window-handle, slung it over his left shoulder, and went on his way. And soon after, with the sensation of falling into a well, slowly, and without any sign of haste, he descended the dark spiral staircase which led down to the entrance.