Notions of duty were unfashionable in the years after the war, and with good reason. Nevertheless, I convinced myself that duty kept me in Bologna. Marcel had wired to say that our series of articles had been received with enthusiasm. He offered me another week to observe the amnesiac before I even asked.
For several days I managed to disappear into my work, interviewing the women in black who came to see Fairbanks, writing up their deluded hopes. I sent Marcel a profile of Marisa Donati, our kind host in La Morra. Her son, I wrote, had gone missing during the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo. Marisa had been in the family chapel, lighting a candle for him when the wick and flame flew off as if shot by a rifle. A nub of white wax lay at her feet, the flame still flickering in the half-dark of the church. She heard droplets, as if from snowmelt in the mountains. She scooped the flame into her palm, and still it burned. She knew then that her son was wounded, but alive.
Later I changed the battle from the Fifth to the Sixth, for reasons of sibilance. In truth, Marisa Donati’s only son was twelve years old. He juggled pickle jars to entertain the guests. I felt more than entitled to my cynicism.
* * *
I saw Sarah crossing the hospital courtyard, but we never spoke. I did not see Paul for the next several days. The key to Room #9 dangled in the hutch behind the desk, but the clerk informed me that he had not checked out.
I might have begun to lose my sanity, but somehow Bianchi found time to walk the hospital grounds, to drink caffè correttos with me in Piazza Maggiore. From under the big umbrellas we watched pigeons scatter across the bricks and teenage revolutionaries shake their fists. We watched squads of Blackshirts march into the square—as they did most afternoons—goose-stepping and drilling in formation. The tight salutes and solemn turns seemed harmless, even ridiculous.
“Do not be fooled,” Bianchi said. “The theater is in the cities. The violence is in the countryside.”
He tried to explain the real violence, the riot in that very square the previous year when the socialists had swept the City Council elections and the Fascists opened fire on the inauguration with revolvers and homemade bombs. He explained that a Fascist leader had been killed in the fight, and described the reprisals at Workers’ Clubs in the countryside, communists dragged behind trucks while Blackshirts urinated on them from the roadside. Kangaroo trials and quick stabbings, while the police looked on impassively.
Needless to say, all I really wanted to discuss was Sarah, which Bianchi was not able to do. Though he was willing to describe what generally happened in such a case.
An identification had been made. How would the case proceed? The attending doctor would offer the claimant an opportunity to prove her identification. What did that mean? It meant the doctor would ask the claimant to present keepsakes, photographs, letters. It meant the doctor would look for hints of recognition, of agitation, shades of attention or inattention relative to the patient’s typical state. Then he would write to the war office for—hypothetically, let’s say, Lee Hagen’s—military records, moles, scars, the date he went missing, to put against all that was known about Fairbanks. He might, in time, ask for a handwriting sample, even though Fairbanks had yet to write.
It was up to the attending doctor then—hypothetically, let’s say, Bianchi himself—to decide if there was enough evidence to put the claimant’s case forward in court. An especially complicated matter, as the very facts of the case determined its jurisdiction.
What a vision this all was: Sarah’s eyes pleading with Fairbanks’s, her mouth trembling as his tremored. Bianchi impassively jotting it all down. What did the doctor know of her now that I didn’t? I was afraid to imagine. Already I had every story she had ever told me about Lee to cast with Fairbanks’s face. Fairbanks touching her elbow in just such a way in the Tuileries. A teenage Fairbanks dressed as the Pauper in purple tights, his shaking hand offering her a Linzer heart. Fairbanks with his trembling mouth at her mouth in a banker’s apartment in the 2nd arrondissement. His trembling tongue on her tongue in a banker’s bed, her left arm flung back behind her head, as she always flung it back during sex.
How was it possible to feel jealous of a man with half his mind—most of his mind—gone? Yet there were times—when the light came through the shutter slats and I recalled the shape of her body on the bed; the violet of her perfume, now nowhere in the room—when I would have traded places with Fairbanks.
* * *
On Sunday, I hoped Bianchi would be at the café with the opera singer, but I didn’t expect to be able to find it again on my own. Likely, he didn’t expect me to either. Certainly his face suggested as much when I came in, but he welcomed me over. His hair was uncombed, a slick of beer shaped like the Baltic Sea spilled on the table.
“Tell me about America,” he said. “Do you think I’d be happy in America?”
“Some people seem to be,” I said.
“But could I be a doctor there? I would not slice meat or sell fruit.”
“You’re a doctor here,” I said.
“For now, yes. But if the Fascists come to power, my career will be finished. And then there’s my brother. I wonder if we could do better in America.”
“I don’t know how popular communists are in America.”
“But you have no Mussolini yet, do you? Perhaps I could be a doctor still?”
“You must know more about that than I do.”
“I do. There is very little hope, in fact. The truth is, Tom, I know if I emigrate my brother will go with me. And I know that he may die if we do not emigrate. But I have worked hard to be a doctor here. I cannot go somewhere else. I don’t want to. Unless I was famous . . . and then . . . Have you been writing? Have you been filing your stories? How have they been received?”
I had my opening, and I only realized later that he must have planned it for me. “Perhaps you can help me with all of that. How has Fairbanks reacted?” I asked.
He waved his hand and finished his glass before answering in a low voice. “Fairbanks is a negativist, in psychological terms. If you want, he reacts adversely to almost any kind of stimulus. He doesn’t want to be found. He is terrified of being identified, of being asked to remember.”
“Why?”
“Why? Perhaps because he is smarter than the rest of us. But this is not what you really want to know.”
“Not entirely,” I said.
“Oh, I’ll tell you. Why not? He’s had no response to Signora Hagen. No response under hypnosis. No interest in her gifts.”
“French chocolates. The sports pages from a Boston newspaper. Novels by Mark Twain.”
Where had these items come from? She couldn’t have bought them in Bologna. She must have carried them wherever she went. Had her suitcase in Verdun been packed with Tom Sawyer and the Globe? On the off chance?
“What does she say?” I asked.
“She holds his hand and whispers.”
“And what else?”
“She weeps. Sometimes with frustration, I fear. She sings to him. She sings well. She feeds him chocolates. He eats the chocolates. But that means very little.”
“But what does she say, to you?” His eyes met mine again, and he wiped the foam from his lip.
“She is undeterred.” Bianchi rubbed his hand over his face. And just then, to our mutual relief, the barman began his aria.
* * *
When I returned to the hotel that night, Paul was just rising from one of the shabby chairs in the lobby, crushing a cigarette. We shook hands.
“It’s quite late,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I’ve been waiting for you. Have you been in town?”
“Not for a few days. Just up to Cortina. I was there some years ago.”
“Happy memories?”
“Hardly. But that doesn’t matter.”
“And what does?”
“That tomorrow, if you’re free, I’d like to take you and Mrs. Hagen to dinner.”