After he complained to her of extreme tiredness, Carola let Fleurissoire sleep that night in spite of the interest he had stirred in her and the heart-melting tenderness she had felt when he had admitted his almost total lack of experience in matters of love – sleep, that is, as much as the unbearable itching he was suffering from so many bites all over his body – flea bites and mosquito bites – would let him.
‘You mustn’t scratch like that, lovey!’ she told him next morning. ‘You’ll only make them worse. Look how inflamed that one is!’ and she touched the pimple on his chin.
As he was getting ready to leave, she said, ‘Here! Keep these to remind you of me,’ and fastened onto her ‘pilgrim’s’ cuffs the whimsical agate cufflinks that Lafcadio had given her and Protos had objected to.
Amédée promised to be back that evening, or the following morning at the latest.
‘You swear to me that he won’t come to any harm?’ Carola repeated a moment later to Protos, who, already dressed, had arrived through the secret door. Having made himself late by waiting until Fleurissoire had already left before he appeared, he had to hail a cab and have himself driven to the station.
In his new disguise, wearing a jerkin, brown breeches and sandals laced over the top of blue socks, with his short pipe in his mouth and his weathered hat with its narrow, flat brim, he unquestionably looked almost nothing like a priest and much more the perfect outlaw from Abruzzi. Fleurissoire, pacing up and down on the station platform, took a moment to recognise him when he saw him arrive, a finger on his lips like St Peter Martyr, and then pass him without showing any sign that he had seen him and vanish into a carriage at the front of the train. But a moment later he reappeared at the door and, looking in Amédée’s direction and half closing one eye, he surreptitiously waved to him to make his way over.
As Amédée was about to board the train, he whispered to him, ‘Be so kind as to make sure that there’s no one next door.’
There was no one, and their compartment was the last one in the carriage.
‘I was following you at a distance,’ Protos said. ‘I didn’t want to come any nearer for fear that we might be noticed together.’
‘How did I not manage to see you?’ Fleurissoire said. ‘I looked behind me dozens of times to make sure that I wasn’t being followed. Your conversation yesterday threw me into such a state of alarm! I see spies everywhere.’
‘So it seems, all too clearly. Do you think it’s natural to turn round every twenty paces?’
‘What? Do you mean to say I look—’
‘Suspicious. Sadly, yes. Let’s spell it out: suspicious. The most compromising look there is.’
‘And even then I couldn’t spot that you were following me! … On the other hand, since we talked, every passerby I meet has something shifty about their appearance. I get anxious when they look at me, and I become convinced that the ones who don’t look at me are pretending not to see me. I hadn’t realised until today how rarely people’s presence on the streets can be justified. There can’t be more than four in every dozen whose occupation is obvious. You have made me think seriously about the world around me, I must say! You know, for a soul as naturally trusting as mine used to be, suspicion does not come easily. This is an apprenticeship for me …’
‘Hah! You’ll get used to it in no time. You’ll see how it becomes a habit after a while. Sadly it’s one I have been forced to acquire … The most important thing is to maintain a cheerful exterior. Now, a word of advice: if you’re worried that you may be followed, don’t turn round. Just drop your stick or your umbrella, depending on the weather, on the ground – or your handkerchief – and as you pick it up, with your head down, look between your legs at what’s happening behind you, in a natural way. I suggest you practise that. But tell me, how do you think I look in this outfit? I’m worried that the priest may be showing through here and there.’
‘You’ve no need to worry,’ Fleurissoire said honestly. ‘No one apart from me, I’m certain, would recognise you for what you are.’ Studying him sympathetically, his head slightly to one side, he added, ‘Obviously I can see through your disguise, when I look carefully, to something elusive beneath it that marks you as a man of the cloth, and behind the joviality of your tone there is the anguish that torments us both, but what wonderful self-control you must have to let so little of it show! As for me, I’ve got a long way to go, I can see. Your advice—’
‘What odd cufflinks you’re wearing,’ Protos interrupted, amused to see Carola’s present from Lafcadio on Fleurissoire’s wrists.
‘They were a gift,’ Fleurissoire said, reddening.
The day was sweltering. Protos glanced out of the window.
‘Monte Cassino,’ he said. ‘Do you see the famous monastery up there?’
‘Yes, I see it,’ Fleurissoire said distractedly.
‘I see you’re not very sensitive to landscapes.’
‘I am, I am,’ Fleurissoire protested, ‘I am sensitive. But how do you expect me to take an interest in landscapes, so long as my anxieties are still with me? It was the same in Rome with all the sights. I didn’t see a thing – I couldn’t bring myself to look at anything.’
‘How I understand you!’ Protos said. ‘It’s been like that for me. I told you, while I’ve been in Rome I’ve spent all my time shuttling back and forth between the Vatican and the Castel Sant’Angelo.’
‘That’s a pity. But at least you knew Rome already.’
Our travellers continued to chat in this vein. At Caserta they got off the train and each went separately to buy some cold meat and something to drink.
‘We’ll do the same in Naples,’ Protos said. ‘When we get close to the cardinal’s villa we’ll split up, if you don’t mind. You’ll follow me at a distance, and as I shall need a little time, especially if he is not alone, to explain who you are and the object of your visit, you’ll give me a fifteen-minute head start before you knock at the door.’
‘I’ll make use of the time to have a shave. I was in too much of a rush this morning.’
A tram took them as far as Piazza Dante.
‘Here is where we’ll separate,’ Protos said. ‘It’s still some distance to the cardinal’s, but it will be better if we start now. Walk fifty paces behind me, and don’t watch me the whole time as if you were afraid of losing me. And don’t turn round either: you’ll only get yourself followed. Look cheerful.’
He walked on ahead. Fleurissoire followed with a half-lowered gaze. The narrow street sloped steeply upwards, and the sun blazed down. People sweated and were jostled by an ebullient crowd that bawled, gesticulated and sang, leaving Fleurissoire dazed and bewildered. Half-naked children danced around a barrel piano. A street barker had improvised a raffle for a tremendous plucked turkey on the spur of the moment, two centesimi a ticket, and he was hoisting it above the crowd. To add authenticity, Protos bought a ticket and vanished into the crowd. Prevented from moving forward, Fleurissoire thought for a moment that he had lost him for good, then saw him again, having made his way through the throng, skipping up the hill with the turkey under his arm.
Gradually the houses became more spaced out and lower, there were fewer people, and Protos slowed his pace. He stopped outside a barber’s window and, turning back to Fleurissoire, winked at him, then, twenty steps further on, stopping again in front of a small, low door, he rang the bell.
The barber’s shop front was not particularly attractive, but Father Cave had no doubt had his reasons for indicating it. For one thing, Fleurissoire would have had to retrace his steps some way to find another, which would probably turn out to be just as unappealing as this one. The door had been left open because of the sweltering heat. A coarse-weave cotton curtain kept the flies out and let air in. You had to lift it to enter, so he lifted it and went in.
The barber was certainly an expert at his work: having soaped Amédée’s chin, with the corner of a towel he carefully wiped the lather off the angry pimple his apprehensive customer had pointed out to him and exposed it to the light. What blessed drowsiness! What a delicious warm feeling of drifting away in this quiet little shop! Head back, almost horizontal in the barber’s leather chair, Amédée let himself go. Oh, to forget, even if it was just for a short while! Not to have to think about the pope, mosquitoes, Carola! To imagine himself back at Pau, next to Arnica, to imagine himself elsewhere, no longer to know exactly where he was … He closed his eyes, then, half reopening them, glimpsed, as if in a dream, on the wall opposite him a woman with her flowing hair emerging from the Bay of Naples and bearing from beneath its waves, together with a voluptuous sensation of coolness, a sparkling bottle of hair restorer. Below this poster were other bottles standing on a marble shelf next to a cosmetic stick, a powder puff, tweezers, a comb, a lancet, a pot of pomade, a crystal jar in which several leeches floated lazily, a second jar containing a single ribbon-like tapeworm, and finally a third, without a lid, that was half full of a gelatinous substance and on the clear side of which was pasted a label with the single word written in flamboyant capitals: ANTISEPTIC.
To perfect his work, the barber was spreading over Amédée’s newly shaved face another, creamier lather and, with the glinting edge of a second razor whose sharpness he tested on the palm of his other hand, adding the finishing touches. Amédée had forgotten his appointment now, had forgotten that he would have to leave the barber’s chair, was dropping off … Just then, a Sicilian entered the barber’s, his loud voice shattering the silence, and the barber, drawn into conversation, started shaving less attentively and, with a flowing stroke of his razor – tssp! – sliced off the head of the pimple.
Amédée yelped and was about to clasp his hand to the cut, where a large bead of blood had already welled.
‘Niente! Niente!’ the barber said, holding his arm and, still talking, rummaging in a drawer for a piece of yellowed cotton wool that he dipped into the ANTISEPTIC and pressed onto the spot.
Without caring now whether the passers-by turned to stare at him, where did Fleurissoire make for as he ran back down towards the city? For the first chemist’s he came to: here he is, showing his injury. The man of medicine smiles, a greenish-looking old man who does not seem very wholesome himself, and, taking a small circle of gauze out of a packet, passes it over his broad tongue and …
Dashing back out of the shop, Fleurissoire gagged with disgust, tore off the damp gauze and, squeezing his pimple between two fingers, made it bleed as much as he could. Then, with his handkerchief wetted with saliva, his own this time, he rubbed it thoroughly. He looked at his watch and, panicking, set off back up the road at a sprint, arriving at the cardinal’s door sweating, panting, bleeding and red in the face, a quarter of an hour late.