As the latch was not lowered, at a certain point he wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to open the door himself. Unfortunately, he hadn’t left the key in the lock. If he had, he could have locked himself in without standing there getting into such a state.
He opened the door and, seeing no one there, stepped out into the half-darkness of the corridor. He looked right towards the landing, then left towards the end of the corridor. No one, not a soul. How was that possible? There was no doubt, he had heard the sound of footsteps. He was quite sure he hadn’t imagined it. Perhaps it had been an employee, perhaps the cleaning woman? On a Sunday afternoon? Why not? It wasn’t that strange once he thought about it.
In the meantime, he left the door half-closed and made his way along the corridor as far as the landing. He leaned on the banister, and looked down into the dark abyss of the stairwell. From the ground floor, along with a faint gleam of light, came a vague hum of stoves, of tables being shifted, of footsteps, of faraway voices. It was evident – he told himself, yawning – that they were clearing the dining-room and getting it ready for the evening.
He went back into his room and locked the door. After which, hurriedly undressing, he slipped back into bed. He had kept on his woollen underclothes. But no sooner had he drawn the covers up to his nose than he was shaken with an extended shivering. The sheets were cold and damp, especially at the bottom of the bed around his feet. Still, nothing like as bad as before. Without anything clinging tight about his waist, he felt infinitely better. Even his stomach seemed far less heavy.
He stretched out an arm to switch off the light, turned on his right side and yawned till tears came to his eyes. And almost immediately, with the sudden permission of his whole being, he was aware that his mind had misted over, that he was falling asleep and dreaming.
He dreamed he was once again on the stairs of the Bosco Elìceo, once again climbing up them, step by step, intending to reach the second floor. What he was going to do up there was not clear. He was simply ascending, effortlessly, with a mysterious lightness, even. He shook his head. A moment before, down below, Bellagamba, winking, had offered to have him carried up on a stretcher by a pair of sturdy youths he’d recruited as waiters from the neighbouring countryside – he happened to have a stretcher in the entrance made of rough hemp exactly like those used in Ferrara’s Sant’Anna Hospital to bear the very ill from one ward to another – as though he were weak in the legs or had a heart ailment or something worse. But the opposite was the case. Agile, calm, he went up the stairs as though borne along by a favourable wind, as though he had wings. It was neither night-time nor was it early morning. Through the porthole fitted above the first set of stairs, the sky appeared as a deep, sunlit blue. It was two or three o’clock on a lovely late-spring afternoon in May or June. The time, just after lunch.
The hotel was full of people. Although there wasn’t a living soul on the stairs, outside every facing pair of rooms along the two first-floor corridors, in perfect order, some lit by the oblique rays of the sun, one could see two pairs of shoes, one male, the other female. Heavens, how many shoes! But it wasn’t surprising. Even without having spotted all those shoes, it was clear that the ground-floor restaurant was a cover for what was happening up here on the first as well as the second floor. Each room of the hotel, rented out by the hour, hid a couple. They came by car from everywhere, even from as far away as Milan. They talked, they chatted, they whispered, shut two by two into their cramped rooms, each with its wretched porcelain basin, brand new, but already chipped, with its metal bidet, with its wobbly, straw-coloured plywood furniture, with its miserable, skewed bedside rugs and its wan central light. Enough just to lend an ear to perceive the buzz, the hum, part-beehive, part-industrial plant, that secretly ran through the entire establishment from wall to wall and floor to floor.
But at his back, the sound of a dropped, metallic object ringing out on a stair startled him and made him turn abruptly. On the landing below, that of the first floor, was the same dark-suited woman who from the moment he’d entered the dining-room till a couple of minutes ago when he’d left it, had never stopped looking at him. In slippers and a dressing-gown that tightened round her thighs as she crouched to pick up the key that had slipped from her hand, she was staring at him with the same insistence, turning her face three-quarters way round towards him. She was no longer as made-up as before, in fact she was without make-up. She was smiling and staring at him, now far younger-looking, much more like a girl. At last she stood up, the key in her hand. And without detaching her eyes from his, she stuck her tongue out and began to lick her upper lip.
He could only see the tip. But from the little of it that was visible he could guess that it was thick and short, bestial in its shape as much as in its colour, which was a wine-dark mauve. She was obviously local, perhaps a peasant – black and shining, even her eyes seemed like those of certain animals you find in the country, cows, for example, or horses – one of the many employed by Bellagamba as scullery maids, but really their main job was to entertain solitary and needy customers wanting company in the rooms upstairs. But what did she think she was doing showing him her tongue like that? he wondered as he went on up the stairs, still observing her. Did she think it would impress him? If so, she was mistaken. Seeing her make a show of her tongue like that did nothing but disgust him.
Now, without knowing how or why, he was leaving a bathroom on the second floor and once again she was standing there, waiting for him outside the door, this time adopting a pose, leaning with her back against the landing’s handrail with the dressing-gown gathered around her legs to show the thickness of her thighs.
She came towards him and, silently staring up at him, began to touch him. He, while letting her do so and taking in the smell of roast eel that wafted from her hair, told himself that she must work here, in the Bosco Elìceo, and not even as a waitress, but as a scullery maid. In a few moments, the bellowing voice of Bellagamba would sound from the depths of the stairs and order her back down to tend to the stoves or the dishes.
‘Give it a rest, will you?’ he tried to grumble at a certain point. ‘What d’you want from me?’
She continued touching him and smiled to disclose her big teeth with gaps between them.
‘Me? Nothing.’
‘Can’t you see I haven’t time? Let me get on – I’m already late.’
‘If you’d like,’ she insisted, her voice no more than a whisper, ‘if you’d like I’ll come to your room. What number is it?’
It was hard to tell from her accent where she was from. She hadn’t said vengo for ‘I’ll come’, but venghe. If not from Ferrara, perhaps from Emilia. But venghe? Perhaps she was a Southern Italian? Perhaps she’d been evacuated from Naples with her working-class family after the bombardment of 1942 and ended up working as a whore in a Codigoro hotel.
‘I don’t have a room. I’m just passing through.’
‘Well then, you can come to my room. It’s just upstairs, number twenty-four. I’m good at it, you know,’ and again she displayed her tongue. ‘You’ll see what a good time I’ll give you.’
Having said this, she took his hand and hurriedly, making her slippers slap against her naked calloused heels, began to pull him behind her towards the corridor on the right.
Disconcerted, reluctant, he’d followed her. The hand pulling him on was thick and hard and seemed greasy – the hand of someone who works in the kitchen scouring pots and pans with pumice. Yet, no differently from when as a youth he’d visited brothels – and Ulderico never stopped making fun of him for what he called his ‘silliness’ – on this occasion, too, more than any physical repugnance he felt hindered by fear, the fear of venereal disease. Without a condom, he could pick up the clap or even syphilis. If only he’d felt some desire to do what he was about to do! But anyway, how would it be possible at a quarter to eight in the morning and with nothing in his stomach except a sip of coffee? For good or ill, he ought to get rid of her. Two hundred, three hundred lire should do the trick. He wasn’t prepared to shell out any more than that.
Next thing, they were in the room, she under the covers, he standing before the window from which could be seen, in the dusky light that pierced the racing clouds, the same things as from the bathroom, the chicken run with the hens, the sports field with its two battered goals facing each other, and so on, with the flat endless countryside all around the village as a backdrop.
Better you don’t keep insisting – he was telling her, without turning to look at her. He hadn’t come to Codigoro to stay there, but to go on to the valleys to hunt. It was eight o’clock. Even if he left immediately, he’d arrive almost three hours late at Volano, where he’d arranged to meet someone who’d be taking him to Lungari di Rottagrande. So could he stay any longer? Clearly not.
‘Wouldn’t you like me at least to try kissing it?’
How annoying! What a bore! All the same he turned and moved away from the window and, unbuttoning his trousers, drew close to her so his belly was at the level of the headboard.
‘What would you be kissing? Can’t you see how small it’s got?’
‘You’re really in a bad way,’ she then murmured, without touching him again, only looking at what he too was observing. ‘There’s nothing there at all.’