He went out by the same side door he had come in by. And almost immediately, having taken a few steps in the dark down the evil-smelling little alley running alongside the church, he found himself once again in the square, beside the sacristy.
Once more he came to a halt.
Gradually widening like a chalice or a funnel, the square spread itself before him in all its enormity. To the right, nearby, the shadowy mass of the local Fascists’ ex-headquarters. To the left, no less tall but set further back, the I.N.A. building, with its dozens of brightly lit windows. In the background, at what suddenly seemed to him a vast distance, so even the thought of crossing it on foot filled him with fatigue, with unbounded boredom, three points of light shone out: two of an equally dull yellow from the cafes opposite each other, the Fetman and the Moccia, and one of a shop window which he had only just noticed, adjacent and to the right of the low central block of the Trade Union hall, and ablaze with the same bright white light of an industrial establishment in full swing as that which flooded the square from the I.N.A. building. There was no fog. During the last half hour the air had instead become crystal clear, so that it allowed him to see every detail not only of the monument to the Fallen in the middle of the square, but also, behind that, the minuscule bedbug-like carapace of the Aprilia’s roof. He sniffed the air. The smell of urine and incense lingered in his nostrils. Mingling with these, and the usual smell of the valleys, was a new odour: of burning, of roasted chestnuts. He looked around in search of the humble iron brazier replete with charcoal which must have been nearby, but without success. Who knows where it was.
He walked slowly, letting his legs carry him towards the centre of the square, while the surrounding space and everything within it, the monument to the Fallen, the Fascist ex-headquarters, the I.N.A. building, gradually assumed a different, a transformed aspect. Even the Aprilia was changing its appearance. No longer the shell it had seemed just before. One could see the double back-window with its trapezoid frame. And, within a moment or two, it would be possible to read, white on a black background, the numbers on the Ferrara licence plate.
He headed towards Caffè Fetman. However, having covered three-quarters of the distance, and noticing a group of customers leaving the premises, who then stopped to chat in front of the entrance – four of them, all wearing cloaks, who seemed to be paying attention to the Aprilia, and discussing it – so as not to have to get into the car beneath their gaze, he preferred to move to the right, towards the brightly lit window beside the Trade Union hall. Some time before, he’d figured out what it was – the taxidermist’s workshop which Bellagamba had mentioned. It didn’t matter. Without now feeling the least bit repelled by the idea, he allowed his legs to lead him, one step after another, to a yard or so from the big glass window.
He stopped there, fascinated.
Hunting rifles, belts full of cartridges, fishing rods, nets, lark mirrors, decoys for the valley, gumboots, woollen fabrics as well as fustian and velvet, and of course the stuffed animals, mainly birds, but there was also a fox, a marten, some squirrels, the odd tortoise: full to the brim, with things strewn in what only seemed to be disorder, the window shone before him like a small, sunny, self-sufficient universe, parallel but unreachable. He was well aware that the pane of glass between him and the interior was what rendered it so. And since the pane of glass, so spotlessly clean it seemed invisible, reflected a part of his own image – barely a shadow, it was true, but still annoying – in order to be completely rid of this faint residual shadow and to pretend the glass itself wasn’t there, he drew even closer, almost touching the window with his forehead, so that he sensed a coldness colder than the evening air.
Beyond the windowpane, silence, absolute immobility, peace.
He observed, one by one, the stuffed animals, all of them resplendent in their death, more alive than when they lived.
The fox, for example, which occupied the middle of the window display horizontally, between a pair of matching gumboots standing upright, and a half-opened Browning rifle, was twisting its snout to the side, gnashing its teeth as if in the act of turning it had ended up there in that instant; and its yellow eyes, full of hatred, its bright white teeth, its flaming red maw, its thick and luminous russet-blond fur, its bushy overgrown tail, all gleamed with an overbearing, almost insolent health, preserved by a magic spell from any assault, both now and in the future. Even the squirrels, placed where you’d least expect to find them – there was one whose neat little head, and nothing more, peeked out of a fine leather game bag – although motionless, they still managed to express all the sly grace, the gleeful agility of their nature, like that of Walt Disney’s dwarves, but with something more, something extra, perhaps related to their being there, safe, and for ever, separate, behind the thick glass. In the violent, convergent light of the lamps their black beady eyes shone joyously, feverishly, devilishly, with knowingness and irony.
It was towards the birds, however, that his gaze kept on returning.
The ducks, at least a dozen of them in a compact group, were squashed into the fore-stage of the little theatre, so close it seemed he could have touched them, and calm at last and without fear, no longer forced to keep to the heights, suspended on their short trembling wings in the still, treacherous air. The birds of prey, by contrast, with the exception of an eagle owl perched in a central and dominant coign, were further off, in a long row, on the shelf of a kind of partition which formed the back and sides of the window display. Reading the brass labels at the foot of the fake ebony pedestals on which each of these birds was posed upright, he recognized, one by one, a kestrel, a buzzard, a peregrine, an osprey, a sparrowhawk … These birds were also vivid, and shone as if polished with a vitality which ran no risk of decay, but most of all they had become far more lovely than they’d been when they were breathing and blood ran fast in their veins – he alone, perhaps, he thought, was in a position truly to understand the perfection of their final, imperishable beauty, to fully appreciate it.
At one point, the better to see the green on a mallard’s feathers, he had to draw back a fraction. Immediately, reflected in the pane, he once again saw the shape of his own face.
He then tried to look at himself as he had that same morning in the bathroom mirror. And while he was rediscovering, beneath his fur cap, the same features he awoke to every day – the receded hairline, the three horizontal furrows across his brow, the long, fleshy nose, the heavy, tired-looking eyelids, the soft, almost womanish lips, the dint in his chin, the cheeks blurred with stubble – but still such as to appear veiled, distant, as though just a few hours had been enough to sprinkle the dust of years and years over them, he felt a secret thought slowly forming within him, as yet confused but still rich with mysterious promise, a thought that would free him, and save him.