At the doorway it was very cold: a damp, insidious cold which could really have been that of a well, of an underground cellar. In sudden gusts, through the street door, which Romeo for some reason had left wide open, the wind made the little blackened-ironwork lamp sway perilously where it hung from the coffers of the dark ceiling.
The caretaker was standing still down there, at the threshold, intently staring out towards the invisible façade of the house across the way. What was he doing looking out there? With his slightly hunched shoulders like those of a worker on strike, stubbornly turned away, he not only seemed unaware of his presence, but also to have forgotten that before leaving he still needed to have his coffee, and besides that, always, especially in winter, the motor was meant to be warmed up slowly, without any hurry.
The melancholy, familiar, faithful shape of his dark-blue Lancia Aprilia waited outside the door with its fenders pointed towards the gate that opened on to the courtyard and that had remained half-shut. He went round the car, placed the rifles on the chest stood up against the wall opposite the staircase, retraced his steps, opened the car’s right-hand-side door and sat behind the steering wheel. While he fumbled with the starting key – the motor seemed loath to start up; doubtless, due to the cold, but also, due to the battery, as ancient as the rest of the vehicle – he didn’t detach his gaze from the motionless shape of Romeo reflected in the rear-view mirror. For the almost thirty years he’d helped with these early-morning departures for the country, never, he said to himself, had he behaved like this. Was he, perhaps, now, for the first time, suddenly irritated to have had to get up before dawn and on a Sunday too? Was that what he wanted to convey? Given the times, everything was possible. However it was, here was another novelty, and not in the least a pleasant one.
After a series of coughs, the motor finally came to life. With an effort, thanks to the cartridge belt wound round his waist, he leaned forwards to find the choke under the dashboard. When he sat back up again he was surprised to find himself face to face with Romeo. He was standing there beside the car door, slightly stooping, looking down at him from under his heavy, tortoise-like eyelids.
‘Will you be wanting your coffee?’ he asked slowly in dialect.
He knew the caretaker’s character inside out – brusque, sometimes surly, but still affectionate, and unfailingly faithful. And so – as he told himself, and his breast expanded with relief – not only did Romeo not harbour the least rancour towards him, but, on the contrary, from the vague hint of jokiness hovering around his prominent cheekbones, one could guess that he was content, privately delighted and gratified to see him after so many years once again going off on a duck shoot.
He got out of the car.
‘Is it ready?’
Romeo nodded. Then, pointing with his chin towards the two rifles, he asked if he should pack them in the boot.
‘If you give us the keys,’ he said in dialect, ‘I’ll put everything in.’
‘No, it’s not necessary,’ he replied, trying to maintain the usual tone, between benevolent and self-composed, which typified their relations. ‘It’s better if you put them on the back seat. And this as well, if you don’t mind.’
He took off the cartridge belt and laid it on the caretaker’s outstretched arm, after which he went with rapid steps towards the lit-up entrance of the Manzolis’ home.
The apartment where they lived comprised three interconnecting rooms, one after the other. On one side the kitchen, which overlooked the courtyard; on the opposite side the bedroom, with its window on to Via Mentana; in between, a huge room which, since their daughter Irma had gone to live with her husband, the two old folk had piled up with rows of polished furniture, but which in practice they never occupied. As always happened (since that event last April in Montina), and now, once again, stepping into the caretakers’ flat – and especially into their kitchen, which was so pretty and neat, so well lit and above all so well heated by the glowing plates of the cheap stove – suddenly lifted his morale. That was it – he exclaimed to himself once again – here he felt at ease, truly and completely, as if at home! The Manzolis were utterly dependable!
He sat at the table and began to take slow sips of boiling coffee from the bowl without a handle that was kept for his use – his own mastèla dal caffè, his coffee bucket – as Romeo called it in dialect. Meanwhile, Imelda, her sharp features hidden behind the black kerchief of a local peasant woman, moved busily about.
He stared at her over the curved rim of the cup, intently following her every move.
Neither she nor Romeo could stand Nives. More or less openly, they showed their disapproval of everything to do with her, and extended their disapproval to include Prearo, the accountant, as well as the cook, Elsa, and even Rory – in short, every new person or thing that had made an appearance at no. 2 Via Mentana since 1938. Whenever they spoke to him about her, they never used her name. Unfailingly they called her ‘your Signora’, the only true ladies of the house being ‘Signora Erminia’, and Lilla, the three-year-old poodle who was his mother’s tender companion, and was even allowed in her bed, her only true child to cuddle and spoil in every possible way. They had nothing in the least bit good to say about Nives, ever. He only needed to enter their house for a moment and one or other of them would start up their usual litany of complaints.
Recently, for example, they had begun to refer to Nives’ habit, when he was away from home, of not using the entry-phone. For their slightest need, both she and Elsa preferred to lean out of the window, and shout down to them, to yell so loud that the like of it was never heard, not even in the big apartments of Via Mortara … And now – he wondered, lowering his eyes, as if by doing so it would be easier to draw on the infinite reserves of patience he needed to have at his disposal – what further offence committed by his wife would he have to hear about? Imelda was certainly brooding about something.
He raised his eyelids again.
‘What’s wrong?’
Once again, he was mistaken. Imelda had reddened eyes, continually raising her handkerchief to her nose, but she wasn’t thinking about Nives at all. As soon as Romeo had come to the door, she began to inveigh against William, ‘that scrounging Commie William’ as she put it in dialect. Although he had all his electrician’s diplomas – she was loudly complaining – William refused to work, spent all his money at the brothel, so that they, poor and old as they were, had to carry him and his wife, both, on their shoulders.
He turned towards Romeo.
‘Who is this William?’ he asked.
‘Irma’s husband,’ Romeo replied drily in dialect, bending his silver head under the light.
For a moment he didn’t understand – as though, to protect his inner calm, his memory had stopped working.
But then he quickly remembered.
Of course – he reflected – the husband of Irma, their daughter. How had he forgotten about him?
He was a young man of about twenty-five – he recalled – scrawny, straw-blond, with a fluent patter, well mannered, someone who, up until recently, he’d often enough seen hanging about the entrance and the courtyard, and who had once not only offered to wash his car but, having done so, had refused any payment. A Communist? He could easily have been: it was enough to look at his thin, pale, avid face eaten up from within by who could guess what secret rage, enough to listen to his Italian that sounded like that of a radio announcer, so smooth and detached, it was true, but also so suspicious and unreliable. It was a source of wonder that Irma, such a meek girl, very refined and well brought up, raised by the nuns in the sewing school on Via Borgo di Sotto, and ready to blush all over if anyone so much as met her in the street or greeted her, let alone talked to her, should have let herself fall for a person like that.
Now Irma was six months pregnant – Imelda was explaining to him. And so she, working from morning till night like a ‘skivvy’, then had to fork out for the extravagance of that good-for-nothing husband.
He felt a growing unease, and yet he stayed there. He still couldn’t make up his mind to leave. He looked at the time: five thirty-five. On the telephone, Ulderico had been very precise about the time. The man he’d hired who was to ferry them from Lungari di Rottagrande to the hunting hide – a man called Gavino, if he’d heard correctly – would be waiting for them at Volano, in front of the big Tuffanelli house, from a quarter past six. It was now five thirty-five. He had to be there at a quarter past six. The meeting with Gavino wasn’t going to work. He’d be there at the earliest by six thirty, or even a quarter to seven. And that was without taking into account that, to the best of his recollection, from the Tuffanelli house to Lungari di Rottagrande they would have to travel around more than a third of the perimeter of Valle Nuova and so that would mean a good half hour to add on before they arrived. So if everything were to go smoothly, he’d be able to hunker down in the hide no earlier than a quarter past or half past seven when it was already fully light. And that was only if he didn’t hang around another minute and left at once.
He looked at his watch, trying to hurry himself up, to find the necessary energy to get to his feet. Useless. A vast inertia, stronger than any exertion of his will, held him to the woven wicker seat in the Manzolis’ kitchen, as though he were tied down. Oh, if only, despite everything, he could just stay there, in the warmth of the caretakers’ flat, hidden from his family and from everyone else until the evening! He would have given anything for that.
He raised his eyes to Imelda.
‘But why on earth,’ he asked, ‘would your son-in-law not want to work?’
Shrugging her thin shoulders, Imelda replied that she didn’t know. ‘Beats me,’ she said in dialect. She knew only one thing – she went on – that her son-in-law stayed in bed all day and if she, Irma, ever tried to reproach him, ‘to tell him off’, that Communist delinquent was quite prepared to give her a clout.
It was true. That was guaranteed by Romeo’s face, suffused with a barely contained rancour, and even more so by her face, with its eyes that spoke of fated, perhaps even willing, victimhood.
Bewildered, he made as if to get up.
‘If he doesn’t work,’ he tried to object, ‘perhaps it’s because he can’t find any.’
Romeo intervened.
‘Not a chance!’ he said in dialect, lowering his head. ‘Doing nothing’s the only thing he’d dream of doing.’
‘But then why –’ he persisted, turning to the question of Irma once again – ‘don’t you get her, your daughter, to come back to live with you?’
The woman sighed. She’d suggested that to her umpteen times she said. But Irma was stubborn as a mule. She didn’t want her mother even to talk of it.
‘She’s in love,’ she summed it up, twisting her thin lips into a grimace full of scorn.
Certainly she was in love, as he had anyway already understood. And now even the Manzolis’ kitchen had become uninhabitable – this too, a place one had to vacate. And quickly.
In the silence that followed Imelda’s final words – while only the muffled grumbling of the Aprilia’s motor idling at the gate reached him through the walls – he looked at his watch once again. Five fifty-two.
‘Well, I’d best get moving,’ he announced.
He grasped the edge of the table with both hands, stood up, and made his way out. And to Imelda, who scurried after him begging him to do something for Irma – if he were to speak to her son-in-law, she said, perhaps that ‘scoundrel’ would finally make up his mind to turn over a new leaf – he replied with a ‘We’ll see’, which he, more than anyone, knew meant nothing at all.
Go and speak to a fellow like that? he thought to himself while he went through the door and walked towards the car. Speak to him? Imagining the talk he would have with the young electrician with his cadaverous face, he felt invaded by a kind of disgust. A disgust mingled with fear.
He got into his car. He turned on the headlights. Finally, he replied with a wave to Romeo’s deferential salute as he slowly negotiated the reverse manoeuvre which brought him out on to the street, and there, halted at the edge of the pavement, looked back at the caretaker, who was standing in silence with the faint light from the doorway at his back, as he shifted into first and drove away.