Bellagamba wished him ‘buon appetito’, and before the man had turned on his heels he had already started in on the antipasto. He was famished – what an appetite! It felt like he’d never had such an appetite in his whole life.
He filled his mouth with the sweet and sour pulp of crustaceans and swallowed, then washed it down with gulps of wine and stuffed himself with bread. Very quickly, however, he felt disgusted – with the food and with himself. What good was it all? he wondered. With his head lowered, in his corner, in that heat, in that stink, in that greasy and promiscuous half-darkness, to be chewing away, swallowing, sucking, swilling. As his stomach swelled his sense of disgust increased.
Worse than ever – that, unfortunately, was how things were.
Once again, there was nothing that didn’t grate and jostle and hurt him. Between one mouthful and the next, he had only to lift his head, to let his eyes rove around the dining-room, and, each time he did so, whether his gaze fell on that long table entirely composed of hunters that when he’d entered he’d spotted Bellagamba attending to – he’d gone back to them and had immediately begun talking, arguing, bawling confusedly, laughing – or else if he exchanged glances with another customer, it didn’t matter which, but especially with a woman of about thirty, dark-haired, pale, stout, heavily made-up, who was sitting at a table not far from his own, without doubt a prostitute: her mouth declared it to him, the way she smoked, her nails, her dark, unduly respectable trouser suit, her fur coat arranged with care, as if on a coat-hanger over the back of the chair beside her, the large handbag placed in plain view beside the ashtray crammed full of butts, and her eyes, mainly her eyes, black, opaque, a bit like an animal’s, which roved untiringly in search of clients to take upstairs (of course with the connivance of the owner, of Signor Gino) to one of the hotel rooms – each time, he was overwhelmed by a sense of envy very like that which had tormented him all morning in the hide, when he hadn’t managed to find the strength to fire off a single shot, despite the double-barrelled shotgun he’d been toting in his hands. How careless and happy they were, all these others! he kept repeating to himself, lowering his head to his plate once more. How clever they were to be able to enjoy life! His food, it was clear, was of a different kind, irremediably different from that of normal people who, once they’ve eaten and drunk, think of nothing else but digesting it all. Throwing himself at the food and drink would do him little good. When, after the antipasto, he had guzzled the rest of it as well, the turbot, the gorgonzola, the orange, the coffee, he would slump back into his glum ruminations about the usual things, both old and new. He felt them waiting in ambush for him, ready to leap on him, as before and as always, and all of them together.
Wherever he was, Bellagamba didn’t lose sight of him for a second, that he was sure of. The birds, he thought. Why hadn’t he immediately asked Bellagamba to take them? Perhaps the disquiet that continued to torment him was down to that and only that.
He raised his hand and signalled.
Passing swiftly between the tables, the other man came towards him.
‘Is everything fine?’ he asked with a worried air, nodding at the plate.
He swallowed and dried his lips with the napkin.
‘Perfect,’ he replied.
He didn’t know where to begin.
‘Listen,’ he finally said. ‘My car boot is full of game. Would you like to have it?’
He saw that Bellagamba was smiling. It was obvious. The man thought he was proposing a deal, a business arrangement. Or perhaps a kind of small exchange in kind: some game for a lunch, and later, a bed.
‘It’s a gift,’ he added. ‘Let’s be clear about that.’
He downed the whole glass of wine in one swig and again wiped his mouth.
‘With all the ducks and coots,’ he went on, ‘I think there might be more than forty birds. Among them all there should even be … even be a heron.’
‘Heavens!’ exclaimed Bellagamba. ‘A heron. How did you manage to shoot that? It’ll be one of the white ones, I’m guessing.’
‘No. A red one.’
He said this. And suddenly, in the dusky light, after the shots had been fired, as if the large, earthy and confused face that was leaning down in front of him from the other side of the table had been whisked away, he once again saw the dog with the heron in her mouth. Utterly bled dry – the dog had reached it among the tobacco-coloured plants of the shoreline to his right when it was already dead – how much could it have weighed? Little more than its feathers did, so hardly anything at all …
He blinked.
‘What a shame!’ Bellagamba said, his lips twisted in a grimace of disappointment. ‘The white ones are bigger, more beautiful, and look far better when they’re stuffed … But the red ones are lovely big birds as well. Would you like me to organize that, to have it all sorted for your next visit? Here in the square –’ and saying this he lifted his arm to point to the square outside, shrouded in shadow and fog – ‘here in the square we have a shop where they do these things very well,’ adding, in dialect, ‘a sight better than you’d find in the city, if you ask me. If you’d like we can go over there later and take a look. Today, it’s a holiday, but they keep the window lit up, even on Sundays.’
He shook his head emphatically.
‘Heavens, no.’
He must have assumed an expression of disgust – of all the disgust he always felt oppressed by at the mere thought of a taxidermist’s workshop – God, what a ghastly stink there’d be, a mixture of a poulterer’s, a chemist’s, a lavatory and a morgue … On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he was obliged to explain himself. Better cut things short. Let Bellagamba stand there gawping at him for as long as he liked.
He fished the car keys out of his pocket and pushed them across the table towards him.
‘Take them,’ he said. ‘You know my car. I’ve parked it out there in front.’
The other stretched out his hand. Halfway there, however, it came to a halt.
‘Talking of which,’ he said, lowering his voice, his round, catlike eyes aglint, ‘have you thought any more about it?’
‘About what?’
‘You know … the car!’
He took a seat facing him.
He continued in dialect, with an uncertain smile, full of embarrassed shyness: ‘Might we come to an arrangement, sgnór avucàt?’
Now it was his turn not to understand.
But then he suddenly remembered their brief discussion that morning, a little before he’d left. And while he listened to everything Bellagamba was telling him, specifically that day by day, without a van, managing the restaurant and hotel was becoming more and more difficult – the bike and sidecar he owned, a Harley Davidson swapped for some tobacco at an A.R.A.R. camp,fn1 which, because of its big engine size, consumed almost more petrol than a Balilla, he could imagine how inadequate that was! – while he listened and kept on eating and drinking as well, increasingly, he was overwhelmed by a sense of futility. Bellagamba spared no efforts in persuading him to sell the Aprilia, expatiating minutely on all the uses he could put it to. These days – he was saying – it’s not enough to wait for some passing hunter to deliver wild game; if, that is, someone does stop by, that’s all well and good, if not, you just have to keep on hoping. To meet the ever-increasing demand of his clientele, it made sense for him to acquire it directly from the ‘heavyweights’ of the hunting world, such as Commendatore Ceresa and his associates, who’d be likely to bring down a hundred, a hundred and fifty kilos of game at a time. There was no other way to do it – you needed to be there in person in the valleys, at the ‘source’, at around one o’clock in the afternoon, to buy in bulk and then be off. The same thing for fresh fish straight out of the water, which, if you hadn’t the chance of leaving Codigoro really early in the morning, when it’s still dark, so as to arrive at Goro, or Gorino, or Porto Tolle, or Pila, or even as far away as Chioggia, just when the fishing vessels came to the shore, and chiefly to be there on four wheels, that was the only way to do it, if you didn’t want to come back with only a few kilos of fish. The man kept on talking, explaining, gesticulating. And he, meanwhile, his head ever heavier, could find nothing to argue with. He understood Bellagamba, he understood him and could see how sound his arguments were. The car, of course he needed it. No question about that. Instead of selling him it, it would almost be better to give it to him. With all the birds in the boot as well.
After a while he shook himself. He looked around. His gaze alighted on the table of hunters, down there, in the smoke. So far away, it was as though the whole vast Valle Nuova lay between him and them.
‘Who are those people?’ he asked.
‘It’s the man I mentioned, Commendatore Ceresa, and his friends,’ Bellagamba replied contritely.
‘They are gentlemen from Milan –’ he went on – ‘more or less all of them working in industry. Since last year, as an association, they have rented a stretch of the valley from Pomposa to Vaccoline, quite close to Romea, from the Land Reclamation Offices. They usually arrive by car on Saturday evening. They dine here at mine but then prefer to sleep at the splendid deluxe “lodge” constructed entirely out of wood that they have had put up in a jiffy, within spitting distance of the water. Today, though, they’re about to leave, and should be back in their homes around nine this evening, that’s of course if the big fog on the Via Emilia doesn’t stop them.’
‘They’re folk who fork out big-time, that’s for sure,’ he concluded in dialect. ‘Would you like me to introduce you? When I come back, I could easily do so.’
Left alone, he finished eating the remains of the antipasto, then stood up. His face was flushed and hotter than ever. He had to wash it.
Swaying a bit, he passed in front of the woman in the trouser suit and, having crossed the dining-room, went to shut himself in the toilets next to the kitchen.
Besides being cramped and incredibly foul-smelling, and still populous with old flies that had survived the summer, the room was far from comfortable. A small semi-circular basin of chipped porcelain, with a greenish, soaked and dirty terrycloth hand towel hung on a hook on the wall next to it. On the floor was the hole of a Turkish toilet, filthy and half-blocked with newspaper. Hardly any light. No mirror. Not even a trace of soap.
He turned on the tap of running water and washed his face as best he could. He dried himself with his handkerchief. Finally, though in no great need, he turned in the opposite direction to urinate.
He succeeded only after a while. When was it – the last time he’d gone? he wondered. And just as he asked himself this, and recalled the last time had been hardly an hour ago, on the Lungari, when, so as not to be seen by Gavino he had chosen to conceal himself behind the opened car door, it wasn’t so much the thin colourless stream of his own urine that he was staring at, but rather, with a curiosity, surprise and bitterness he’d never felt before, at the member from which the stream issued. ‘Huh!’ he exclaimed with a grin. Grey, wretched, a mere nothing, with that sign of his circumcision, so familiar and yet so absurd … In the end, it was nothing but an object, a pure and simple object like so many others.