It was seven o’clock, approximately.
Perhaps it would be best to make the most of the fog having almost dispersed, he thought, and instead of wandering around Codigoro staring at the paving stones to return to the square, ring that poor woman Cesarina again to make his excuses, get into the car and, done with it all, set off back to the city. Nevertheless, each time such a scheme occurred to him, he dismissed it at once. So ought he to stay? With what end in view? Before the extreme loss of blood had clouded its eyes, the heron must have felt something similar to him: closed in on every side, without the slightest possibility of escape. With this difference, though, to his disadvantage: that he was fit, quite unimpaired, without having shed a drop of blood, and the dog … well, given the possibility one would go for him, he would have no other option but to face it, with his eyes wide open.
He walked hurriedly, having now reached the end of Via della Resistenza, determined not to turn his gaze towards the freight ships and barges lined up, as they were this morning, along the shore of the river port. But as soon as he became aware of the presence beside him of those motionless, mouse-coloured shapes, so motionless as to seem as if rather than floating they were stuck in the muddy bed of the river, he couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and observe them.
Innumerable times as a boy he’d seen boats lined up this way in the canal ports of Cesanatico, of Cervia, of Porto Corsini – in the happy, interminable holidays that they went on back then, before the war and immediately after. And yet from these low broad boats, which instead of being crowned with big, bright, gaudy-coloured sails, had light rigging, transparent as gauze, like lazy wisps of fog, snagged on their grim skeletal masts – from these no sense of joy, of life, or of liberty could be retrieved. From the deck of a barge anchored far from the quay, almost at the centre of the surrounding, mirroring water, two people were moving about, a man and a woman. The man, if his eyes weren’t deceiving him, was a corpulent old guy with white hair and a black Fascist-style pullover; the woman, blonde and very young, wearing a fustian jacket and tight-fitting trousers like blue jeans. They were shouting and gesticulating and running around the cabin whose small window disclosed a faint light, as of a lantern. Their sharp but distant cries, like those of the birds of the valleys, the clacking of their clogs on the decking, their grotesque shadows, enlarged by the yellowish light from the hold … Unable as he was to draw closer, he felt as though he was the spectator at the edge of a vast square of a puppet show being performed for himself alone. It was all pointless. The old man, the villain, would in the end manage to grab hold of the beautiful girl he was chasing, there was no doubt about it. What then? Even if, having clasped and immobilized her, he had stuck a dagger in her trembling throat, what would have happened that was so serious? You only had to observe life’s events from a certain distance to conclude that all they amounted to was what they were; in other words, nothing, or almost nothing.
Having passed the diagonal street which to the left led on to the cemetery and to the right to the iron bridge which became the old country road that went on to Migliaro, Migliorino and from there, the fork in the road which led to either Ferrara or Lagosanto and Comacchio, he found himself close to a solitary building. He stopped for a second time. Strange that, over so many years, he’d never paid it much attention. It was a large ancient manor house with a Venetian air, of the kind which was relatively common just on the other side of the River Po, in the lower Polesine district. With its fine, two-storeyed façade which overlooked the canal, therefore south-facing, and with ample space in front to plant trees, this would certainly, he thought, be a fine place for him to buy and live in! He crossed the street to observe the house more closely. But when he realized the decrepit state it had fallen into – the main door replaced by clumsily nailed boards, the windows without panes or shutters, the roof half-stove in – from below through a first-floor window you could even see a patch of sky – he quickly dropped the idea. Disheartened, he imagined the interior, the desolation of empty rooms, fat sewer rats scurrying over the wrecked flooring, the black mouth of the big smashed fireplace on the first floor from which on stormy days terrible gusts of wind would wreak havoc from one end to the other of the big reception room, the splinters of wood – pieces flaked off the rotten shutters, off the doors that would have fallen from their hinges many years before – scattered nearly everywhere, and the dust, the cobwebs, the reek, the darkness. No. To resurrect a carcass like that would need too much strength of every kind. Perhaps not even Ulderico could have managed, the Ulderico of fifteen years ago when, still young, he had suddenly decided to leave everything behind, get married to an undistinguished woman – the nearest to hand, convert, set up house and family in the depths of the Bassa, and effectively disappear.
He walked away, but at the first crossing took a left, once more entering the thick of the inhabited zone.
He walked down one street after another – dismal little roads flanked by the small one-storey houses of the town’s oldest district. He met no one. From the gaps in the closed shutters filtered the pinkish light of impoverished families. All he heard was the odd scrap of sound from radios.
At crossings he lifted his eyes to read the street signs. He knew it: just after the Liberation almost all of the street names had been changed. Narrow alleys had been dedicated to no-lesser figures than Carlo Marx, Federico Engels and Giuseppe Stalin, to Antonio Gramsci and to Clelia Trotti – the famous elementary school teacher and socialist who died of consumption during the winter of 1944 here at Codigoro’s local jail – to E. Curiel and so on. The pre-war ceramic signs had not been taken down, but simply covered over with plaster. And on the layer of plaster they had hand-written the new names, with a brush dipped in black paint. Reading them was not an easy task. Time and bad weather were already erasing them. He spelled out: LO MAR, ANTON GRAMSCI, E. CURIEL, USEPPE TALIN, C E IA ROTTI. He filled in the blanks of the missing letters. And didn’t walk on until he’d succeeded in doing so.
In Via Antonio Labriola, which must have been just behind the square, he was stopped in his tracks by two discreetly lit ground-floor windows. He drew close to the nearest one, and standing a little to one side, looked inside through the glass.
In front of him was a low-ceilinged, medium-sized, rectangular room – clearly some kind of eating house. The walls hung with pots and copper pans, the sooty fireplace, the two tables each occupied by four card-players who wore hats or berets and had a glass of red wine inches from their elbows left him in no doubt about that. But why was it that those eight players, so silent and motionless, although they resembled in every way the customers in the Bosco Elìceo and Caffè Fetman, seen here, closed in this room behind the pane of glass, should look so strange and out of reach?
He focused his attention on the four who sat at the nearest table. All of them were between thirty and forty; at least three of them looked like labourers. The one to the right, thin, bony, seen in profile with his cheeks dark with stubble and a hooked nose, might have been a bricklayer. The one in front, in the middle, with a big face and snub nose, with his black beret at an angle and his oil-stained hands, a mechanic. The third, to the left, crouched in the wickerwork chair, hunchbacked in his cyclist’s sweater, might also have been a bricklayer, or perhaps a farm-worker, one of those who tends the animals The fourth, by contrast, broad-shouldered, chunky, thick-necked, with a brown Homburg at a rakish angle, was not a workman, that was for sure, but perhaps an employee of the Land Reclamation Company or of the Eridania, or a small landowner. There wasn’t a spare seat in the room. Everyone and everything fulfilled a precise function. He felt as though he were standing before a framed painting. Impossible to enter into. There was no place and no space not taken.
What should he do? Where should he go?
He lifted his arm and exposed his watch face to the light. Ten past seven.
He pushed himself back with his chest from the window, and spotted the dark form of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice’s apse and its belltower sited across the end of the alleyway. There it was. In church he’d surely find a pew to rest on. He could sit apart, in a corner, so as not to be seen, should Ulderico and his children arrive. Crossing the threshold would be the only moment he’d run any risk. But was it at all likely that he’d meet the Cavaglieris as he was entering? In any case, it was worth being careful.
He would never have guessed the church’s interior was so vast. With a single nave and its unadorned rough-cast walls, and its floor almost entirely filled by two rows of pews divided by an aisle which led to the main altar, it made him think of a cinema, an empty out-of-hours cinema where nothing was showing. There was hardly a soul. Only the priest and a novice down there by the altar, busy preparing something, and four or five old women hunched here and there in the pews.
Halfway up the side wall opposite the entrance he noticed a chapel, the only one: a half-dark niche containing nothing but a large black crucifix carved in wood. It was there he’d find a place for himself. Should it prove necessary, he’d withdraw to the back of the chapel. On tiptoes, he made his way there.
Once he was seated, he began to scrutinize the distant, incomprehensible activities of the priest and the novice scuttling between the main altar and the sacristy. He still felt far from at ease. Having taken off his cap, his head felt cold. Besides, the proximity of the crucifix, of that blackened, nailed corpse, disturbed and intimidated him.
He yawned. How many people could the church seat?
He began to count the pews. Starting with the first row and moving back, he counted up to forty. Each row of pews would easily accommodate some twenty people. Two times four is eight. So it would seat a congregation of eight hundred.
He yawned again. A good half of the pews, especially those towards the front, closest to the main altar, bore a miniature white sign above with the usual names – Callegari, Callegarini, Benazzi, Tagliati, Putinati, Pimpinati, Borgatti, Felletti, Mingozzi, Bottoni, etc. – more or less the same ones you’d find among the poorest workmen and labourers in the surrounding country. And the Cavaglieris? Did they, too, have their own church pew? It was almost worth the bother of going to check.
He realized he was stepping on something, and peered down. Some paper. It looked like a newspaper.
He leaned down, picked it up and straightened it out.
It wasn’t a newspaper, but some Catholic propaganda print-out. On the first page there was only a thickly inked woodcut. It showed a hand tightly squeezing some ripe olives. Its rough, knotty fingers with enormous nails were dripping with oil. Atop the image in spaced-out capital letters it read: TAKE NO THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW.
He opened the sheet and smoothed it out.
There was a great deal to read within. The font and point size kept on varying to keep the readers on their toes, and even the layout changed every now and then. Sometimes the lineation suddenly shifted to short lines centred and arranged in columns as if they were verses of a poem.
‘Have you ever closely observed a mole?’ he read, staring at the top of the sheet and narrowing his eyes to decipher the tiny italics of the first lines. ‘Its forepaws are like spades it uses to dig the earth before it, as you might with a spoon. It uses its back legs to push its body forwards. Its head is like a wedge, its nose like a pointed chisel, and both have been created so as not to be broken. Its tiny eyes are almost entirely hidden by its fur, and its outer ears likewise.
‘Do you think it made itself that way, adapting its body to a life underground? And why have other animals that live in a similar way adapted differently? Yes, because of God. But would a God so infinitely great concern himself with such insignificant creatures?
‘Don’t listen to the voice of atheistic materialism! But rather observe all that surrounds you with the good, clear eye of a child of God. Then you will agree with St Augustine who attests: “God takes care of every creature He has made as if it were the only one in the world, and of all as if each one were unique.”
‘There are, however, different kinds of care.
‘You take care of your shoes, of your hunting dog, of your parrot, of your potted geranium on the windowsill, of your radio, of your motorbike. And you say to your little girl “Careful not to fall!”, “This draught will give you a cold!”, “Are you hungry?”, “I run to see why she’s crying …” And you wrap her tightly in your arms to dry her tears.
‘In truth, of all His creatures, God has a very special care for Man, whom He loves with a father’s heart.
‘After having provided for your benefit the sun, fruits, stones to build your houses, leather and wool from animals to clothe you, grass and flowers to delight you, He bends down over you to hear the beating of your heart, to calm it with the utter certainty He gives your life.
‘He tells you: “Take no thought for food or raiment. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these …”
‘Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the fire, shall He not much more think of you! He always provides for your good, be assured, even when things do not turn out as you would have wanted.’
He had arrived at the bottom of the third page.
‘The parrot?’ he wondered. ‘What has the parrot to do with all this?’
He turned to the next page. Empty. There was nothing more to read.