I KEPT UP MY CORRESPONDENCE with the stranger, but it’s probably useless for me to linger on the content of our letters. All I can say is that I made an attempt to pick out my mystery pen pal—a nocturnal ambush, close to the spot where I’d deposited one of my envelopes. I was left waiting well after midnight but, perhaps because of the rain or for some other reason, I saw no trace of him. That didn’t prevent another of his letters from reaching my home, this time sent by regular mail.
To interrupt our exchange of letters—at least from my end—came a series of small incidents that I took note of walking around the city. I’ll try to explain as broadly as I can. Indeed, it took me quite some time myself to grasp that these events had, so to speak, an abnormal character. Who would pay attention to an individual who stops for a moment at a public wastebasket—one bin out of the many standing around—to throw in an advert or a leaflet? Or a man or woman who bends down to pick something off the ground, just like a hobo gleaning a used cigarette? It would take the trained eye of a film director to notice such things. And even then, why would they do it? To shoot a documentary about urban life? How much of it would be worth recording?
If I came to realize an unnatural side to the whole affair, I owe it entirely to my mail-drop intrigue with the stranger. His words had left my eyes rather sensitive to everything involving dross or waste . . . And so it struck me that not everyone was using those bins to get rid of wastepaper they didn’t need; some of them were putting their hands inside to take things out, then hiding whatever they’d taken deep in their pockets. Even the people who bent down on the pavement seemed to have a very special interest in the paper refuse: they weren’t just grabbing coins, lost stamps, packs of smokes that might’ve still had a cigarette inside—at least not all of them were.
Hence I too started rummaging around in those receptacles, collecting balls of scrunched-up paper seeded throughout the streets.
For the first few days, I didn’t land on anything remarkable. But one morning—as I traveled to work on foot, for a change—I found something in my hands that put me on the alert. It was a small notebook, the kind you can buy at a tobacconist’s, with rather messy binding and greasy sheets of squared paper filled top to bottom with minuscule handwriting. There was a date on each page and the last page had a name and address. I started reading it, and at once I could tell what it was. I’d found a diary! A diary very similar to the ones that were donated ten years before to the now-defunct Library! Similar by general kinship . . . Its content went well beyond the typical confessions of before: here, we had signs of a dreadful aggravation! I shoved it back into the bin I’d taken it from, then, at the cost of being penalized for turning up late for work, I stopped and kept my eye on the opposite sidewalk. It didn’t leave me disappointed. After an hour or so—during which many citizens had surrendered their litter to the bins out of pure civic duty—I saw a person approaching the container with something voracious in his stare. He was a man just about my age, a still-respectable period of his life. He could well have been a fellow tenant at the house I lived in. But the way he plunged his hands into the bin, how he wormed around inside it, and the gleam of perverse joy that appeared in his eyes as soon as he had extracted a notebook, made for very telling signs. He gave it a greedy look and pocketed it, then walked away in haste, keeping close to the walls.
I’m not going to pause, then, to enlarge on the reasons why I cut short my correspondence with the stranger. The vision of that solitary passerby had unsettled me all the way to my marrow. I realized, what’s more, that I wasn’t the only one studying the sidewalk: at the opposite corner of the same block, I noticed two other people who’d also found it extremely riveting to follow that sequence of events. Except that, while I was horrified, they seemed pleased with the outcome. They jotted down observations on a little notepad, exchanged wily glances every so often and gave knowing smiles. Both of them were young, refined-looking people that any respectable family would be delighted to invite over for dinner. They wore dark suits like those fellows I saw in front of Gran Madre de Dio. They made me think of the kids ten years earlier who’d been set loose to canvass for the Library at people’s doorsteps; only there was no contagious enthusiasm in these youngsters, just a cold determination to achieve a goal that was unclear to me . . . Shortly afterward they were approached by a third figure—somewhat older, with chunky, black-rimmed glasses—and left the notepad in his hands. He nodded at the pair, who departed in different directions. When I set off for work again, I had to call on all of my willpower not to look behind me: if I’d noticed someone following me at that moment, I wouldn’t have had the wits for simple arithmetic, let alone my day job!
At work, I was summoned by the company director, who upbraided me for being late too many times. I promised to be more punctual. He gave me a letter that had reached him, and said that the envelope, addressed to me, had come inside another envelope bearing his own name. He couldn’t explain to me why it had happened; still, I swore I’d warn my friends that my boss didn’t fancy being viewed as my postman. On their behalf, I felt the need to apologize. I pocketed the envelope and went to my cubicle.
Before I got started on another day of form-filling, I decided to read the letter. It was the stranger. I sensed he would be sending me letters through the director from now on—and, of course, explaining his motives for doing so at painstaking length. He brought me news of a personal nature: the filth had reached the sixth story; two more floors now and it would be touching him. He’d have to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest. However, he hadn’t ruled out being able to live to the age of ninety. In fact, he had begun to consider the possibility of surviving on human excrement—and that, while the tenants on the ninth floor (very old, but as eternal as the whole Administration) were uncorking champagne bottles and munching caviar! The fact didn’t seem quite as unfair to him now as it had once been: it was rather in harmony with the laws of Creation. He hastened to write this. Within two weeks’ time, it would be physically impossible to continue our correspondence. This time, however, I didn’t reply to him. Leaving the office—and perhaps I shouldn’t have done this—I threw the stranger’s letter into the wastepaper bin where I’d found the notebook, adding another “addressee” to the mix. Maybe somebody plucked it out and took my place as pen pal. I didn’t stay to keep watch; there were already “others” around quite happy to shoulder that task.
In the middle of the night, I was woken with a start by a terrifying blow against my front door; I struggled to fall asleep again—was this how the insomnia began?—and the terror I felt at the blow echoing in the stairwell mingled with my anger at the surprise awakening. I wanted to run downstairs in my pajamas to teach a lesson to whoever had disturbed my rest, but I stayed tucked in. There was too much violence in the impact; it couldn’t have been produced by a human fist, not unless it came equipped with a hammer—but not even that! If anything, it had to be a mace, like the ones medieval warriors used. My fear kept me from even looking out the window. I had the suspicion that this was just what the “mace-bearer” was waiting for: to see my head stick out so he could strike me on the forehead with another blow. I took three sleeping pills and decided to leave off examining any damage to the door until daybreak.
But early in the morning—before my alarm was timed to ring—the phone set out to inflict another shock to my already insecure sleep. This, however, wasn’t another mute caller; it was Segre the attorney, and he was panting heavily. He apologized for waking me so early in the morning but a dreadful thing had happened that he’d only discovered now. The newspapers hadn’t even mentioned it in the obituary columns . . . The event dated back to a few days ago. He felt obliged to warn me as soon as he’d gotten the impression that we were both in danger. Perhaps we’d do well if we could get together soon, preferably that evening. Paolo Giuffrida had been murdered! He’d been found dead in his garden, strangled, as if someone had placed two thumbs on his windpipe and throttled him. Gauguin was left for two days, trembling and howling against an iron railing, until a dogcatcher came and put him down with a strychnine shot. Segre had no doubt that they’d stolen Giuffrida’s cassette of “voices”; as for the physical perpetrator of the killing, he preferred not to give me his ideas over the phone. Hiding behind the crime, Segre believed, there must have been something even more worrying . . .
I took a moment to get dressed and jump in the car. Not caring again whether I was late for work, I drove up the hill to reach Giuffrida’s home. I wanted to check what had happened with my own eyes. I didn’t manage to see very much, however: the house was cordoned off by police, who asked me what reasons I had just for trying to get near the gate. I said that I was a friend of the victim and that I’d only recently learned of his death; I asked when the funeral was set to be held. “No funeral!” an officer shot back. I took a glance at the garden through the railing: everything looked calm and ordinary. If the authorities were searching the house, they were doing it discreetly; the front door was closed. I saw the statue of Diana the Huntress, still there, secure on her pedestal; there were no signs of footsteps around her; no ground had been disturbed. Tidy flower beds, tidy pebbles: everything seemed like it was recently raked. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the police I would’ve sworn that Giuffrida was still alive and that Segre the attorney had invented the news . . . Failing to worm anything out from the surroundings, I left soon enough. That evening, toward nine o’clock, I met Segre in Piazza Castello.
He wore a pale leather jacket, dark brown velvet trousers, a blue shirt and a flamboyant print necktie in perfect balance with the rest. Remembering his phone call, I’d expected to see him arrive looking ragged like me, and I felt a bit ashamed for letting myself be carried away by emotion at the cost of decorum. He almost appeared to be smiling; when he invited me to come with him into a typical piazza restaurant, where patrons sat exposed to the street through a glass window, I asked him if it mightn’t be better to go somewhere more private for our dinner. He replied that it made no difference. Someone who truly wanted to shadow us would find a way—even if we chatted underground in one of the sapper tunnels Pietro Micca dug at the Siege of Turin!
At the table, I consulted the menu very carefully, lingering especially on the wines, and after Segre had agreed with me on a light wine from the Cinque Terre region that seemed first-rate, he gave a nod to the waiter. He made some choices from the menu that I didn’t object to, then came to our main topic. His opinion was that I had to leave the city. It didn’t matter where I went; the important thing was that I didn’t stay in Turin, at least not for the time being. The problem wasn’t as serious for him: he would leave for England the following day; he had a busy work schedule that would keep him away for quite some time, and being a man of the law, he could always watch his own back—even now. I mentioned Venice to him . . . Yes, he knew someone in Venice who could point me toward a job. If I needed some money to quietly leave town, he was happy to lend it without a due date for the repayment . . . In the end, he felt a little bit responsible for my fate: he was the one who’d sent me to Giuffrida; if I hadn’t gone to listen to the tape with the “voices,” my situation would be quite different, and maybe, who knew, Giuffrida might still be alive.
“And why on earth is that?” I asked, fearful.
“Because Giuffrida and I were the only ones who knew about the ‘voices’; when they realized that we’d introduced a third party—and many were already aware of your research—they began to sense the danger that the knowledge would spread, and there’s someone who absolutely cannot allow you to publicize it.
“And who is that ‘someone’? The regional authorities? The mayor?”
“Mayor Bonfante is one of the most honest and decent people I know. It’s not the forces that he represents which you should be worried about . . . It’s something very different, with a history that goes quite a ways back . . .”
I filled my glass up to the brim.
“Have you sensed anything odd these past few days?” I asked him.
I told Segre everything that had happened to me, starting from my encounter with Sister Clotilde.
“I see . . . The envelopes from your mystery pen pal, the people picking manuscripts up off the streets, those polished-looking young men with their walkie-talkies in front of the statue at Gran Madre de Dio, the loud blow struck against your door last night . . . A business which we believed was over and done with is coming back into motion, and with a coldness, a clarity, which would have been unthinkable in the time of the Twenty Days . . . Perhaps even the letters you’d gotten from that stranger were part of the design.”
“In what sense?”
“I think they might’ve been a lure, an attempt to snare your subconscious mind and reduce it to passivity. Whoever wrote them knew his addressee very well, weaknesses and all . . . Too many things about us are already on record . . . They wanted to pry open a chink in your armor and use your determination to their own advantage . . . With you, they only got midway, but who knows how many more gullible people have fallen into their trap? . . . They even tried to do it with me.”
“If that’s the case,” I postulated, “then we shouldn’t have any reason to fear for our lives . . . The trap hasn’t sprung; our energy is still there, for the most part.”
Segre looked at me, smiling at my naïveté.
“If they haven’t taken the vim out of you,” he said, “it’s because, in some way or another, you put up resistance . . . And the hidden power that’s being marshaled is not amused by people who resist. In the era of the Library, the followers of that power sought above all to splinter our will, to push us all the way to rock-bottom. The results went far beyond their expectations and many of them must have remained astonished; but certain events, once they’re called forth, even unconsciously, might be irreversible. Or maybe those powers are reviving because they’ve come across the nourishment they need once again: you can always find people willing to offer it. The murderers from the Twenty Days no longer seem like the absolute protagonists under the new situation; they’re only pawns, by the looks of it. It seems like mysterious fellowships have been formed . . . A violence that’s less tumultuous, more selective and purposeful, but no less dangerous for that reason . . .”
I felt Segre was coming to a very delicate point; I wanted to ask him why these instruments of death and their allies or instigators couldn’t in the end be fought, exposed to public opinion . . .
“I don’t think we can establish any trail of concrete evidence joining those murderers with whomever—at least to our appearance—happens to command them. The evil is too deep-rooted, yet also too widely sown, entangling people, objects and objectives . . . The physical executors of its crimes are entities much too far beyond suspicion, since one cannot even mention them without feeling reason crumbling. Absolute evil couldn’t have taken a more unassailable form . . .” Segre eyed me severely. “I fear today that if the two of us were bold enough to come clean about our speculations, we’d have a hard time managing to express ourselves except in deep allusions. Even the foreign papers, ten years ago, never went far enough to call them by name: they digressed in describing the massacres, they wrapped them up with words, but who dared to ever say what they really were? That duty far exceeds our simple capabilities . . . So I wonder if you might dare to tell me, right now, as plainly as you can: Who are the murderers?”
He pointed a finger at me and began dinging his plate with a fork. And when I couldn’t respond, he said, “See now if I’m right or not? I too wouldn’t risk it . . . It would be too humiliating to admit the evidence, declaring that something emerged from nowhere at all to capitalize on our ‘power vacuum.’ I’m no scientist, but I think a biologist, a physicist, an expert in mineralogy—none of them would know enough to make a diagnosis of such phenomena, not without taking that ‘power vacuum’ into account.”
“And yet . . . the evidence was there . . . And it would still be there if . . . if we wanted to hold people to their responsibilities,” I said, now in the grip of despair, knowing well that I was mangling my words.
“The evidence! And you think anyone cares about the evidence? . . . Perhaps you’re alluding to the imprints on the flower beds, on the asphalt, to photographs that were taken and which nothing has been heard of since? To certain ludicrous nocturnal pursuits, carried out by the forces of justice, which ended as soon as the murderers returned, motionless, to the places they came from? There was no lack of evidence, that’s for sure! But if nothing came out of it, perhaps we should look elsewhere for the reasons why . . . Even Nature can become depraved if people relentlessly incite it to do so . . . And Nature must have had an interest, taking an unscrupulous glance at our history where it discovered the perfect setting it needed to try out some new experimental form of life. Those who are unmoving, those who are beyond suspicion—as far as they are inert and familiar—and yet soaked in blood from head to toe, have always found ideal living conditions and absolute safety in our country. Millions of mouths have always protected them, whether screaming their praises or staying firmly zipped. Understanding this, Nature may have decided to go one step further, which was impossible until now. Can you point to anything more permanent, anything harder to suspect, than those murderers?” added Segre with an ironic touch, topping up his glass and mine. “Or instead of answering, wouldn’t you rather drink up?”
I followed his second suggestion. The giddiness that the wine gave me sat well enough with my tablemate’s dizzy dialectic. I began to drink without restraint.
“But why . . . here, exactly . . . in Turin?”
“Bah . . . Who knows? Perhaps because we’re an isolated city, out of the international time stream, where certain experiments can be carried out without drawing too much attention . . . What do we know about what’s going on in remote planets, which our telescopes and probes can never dream of reaching? These ‘security concerns’ have prompted Nature to select Turin out of all cities!”
“So what do we do now?” I said, covering my face with my hands.
“Do you still want to write your book on the Twenty Days?” Segre asked enigmatically.
I shook my head.
“Right, then! There’s nothing left to do but get ourselves out of danger . . . Even if we’d never presume to sound the names of the killers, telling who it was who strangled poor Giuffrida, it’s likely others will still believe we’re able to do it. Their ‘security concerns,’ unfortunately, don’t play in our favor: the perverse scheme that’s unfolding is ready to do anything not to be hindered . . . As for the government authorities and the mayor, I fear they couldn’t be much help. Bonfante’s too much of a quibbler, and the establishment was always too cautious when it was necessary to intervene, before the evil outgrew measurement on a human scale . . . Our chances of recuperating, over time, have shrunk to but a small glimmer of hope . . . It’s very hard to rebuild anything when you haven’t yet severed the serpent’s head.”
Segre began to peer into his wine glass, like an oracle scrutinizing a crystal ball. “The future is very dark . . . Foul, small-minded deities have emerged from the heart of the rock . . . And beings of flesh and blood, like us, are celebrating this atrocious event . . . Promise me you’ll leave the city?”
“Yes, I’ll promise you that.”
“And to do it as fast as you can?”
I promised him that as well.
“Now we can try to finish our meal.”
I thanked him again for his offer to lend me money, but I had some savings and there’d be more from my severance pay. Segre gave me the address of a Venetian friend of his and said he’d write to him to pre-announce my arrival. Leaving the restaurant, he parted with a friendly, melancholy smile. When I arrived home, a bit shaky from too much wine, I examined my door. It hadn’t taken a bang from anyone’s mace . . . What I saw was the imprint of a hand!