At noon the piazza della Vita earns its name. The women, their shopping done, have all gone home to prepare the midday meal. The men take over. Crowds of them were assembled there when I reached the center. Shopkeepers, clerks, loafers, youths, men of business, all talking, gossiping, some merely standing still and staring. It was the custom, it had always been like this. A passing stranger might have thought them members of some organization about to take over the city. He would have been wrong. These men were the city. This was Ruffano.
I bought a paper and leaned against one of the pillars of the colonnade. I searched the pages for the Roman news, and found half a dozen lines about the murder in the via Sicilia.
“The identity of the woman murdered two days ago in the via Sicilia has not yet been discovered. It is believed that she came from the provinces. A lorry driver has stated that he gave a lift to a woman answering to her description after leaving Terni. The police are pursuing their inquiries.”
We had passed through Terni yesterday, before turning right to Spoleto. Traveling south from Ruffano to Rome a wanderer, a vagrant, would be glad to seize the chance of a lorry ride for the remaining distance. Doubtless the lorry driver had come forward and identified the body, but in any case the description of the dead woman would by this time have been circulated to every city in the country, so that the police could check with their list of missing persons. What, though, if the dead woman was not upon the list? What if, filled with a sudden wanderlust, she had simply left her home? I could not remember if Marta possessed relatives. Surely not. Surely she had devoted herself to my parents after Aldo had been born, and had remained with us ever after. She never talked of brothers, sisters… Her devotion, her whole life, had been given to us.
I put the paper down and stared about me. No faces that I knew, not even among the old. Hardly surprising, when I had left Ruffano aged eleven. The day we drove away, my mother and I, in the staff car with the Commandant, Marta had been at Mass. She always went to Mass each morning. Knowing her custom, my mother had timed our exit deliberately.
“I’ll leave a note for Marta,” she said, “and she can follow later, with all our things. There’s no time to bother with them now. The Commandant has to leave immediately.”
I did not understand what it was all about. Military persons were always coming and going. The war was apparently over, yet there seemed to be more soldiers than ever before. Germans, not ours. It was beyond me.
“Where are we going with the Commandant?” I asked my mother.
She was evasive. “What does it matter?” she answered impatiently. “Anywhere, as long as it’s out of Ruffano. He’ll take care of us.”
I felt certain Marta would be dismayed when she returned from Mass. She might not want to go. She hated the Commandant. “You are sure Marta will follow?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
And so to leaning out of the staff car, saluting, watching the passing country, thinking of Marta less often each day, being fobbed off in the months to follow with more lies, more evasions. And then forgetting, finally forgetting. Until two days ago…
I crossed the piazza to the church of San Cipriano. It was shut. Of course it was shut. All churches closed at noon. As a courier it was part of my job to reconcile the tourists to this fact. I must bide my time as they did until the afternoon.
Then, suddenly, I saw a man I recognized. He was standing in the piazza, arguing with a group of cronies, a cross-eyed fellow with a long lean face, hardly altered in old age from what he had been at forty-five. He was a cobbler in the via Rossini, and he used to repair our shoes. His sister Maria had been our cook over a period, and a friend of Marta’s. This fellow, and his sister if she lived, would surely have kept in touch with her. The question was, how could I approach him without giving myself away? I lit another cigarette and kept my eye on him.
Presently, the argument finished, he moved away. Not up the via Rossini but to the left out of the piazza, threading along the via dei Martiri, and so across it to a narrow street beyond. Feeling like a detective out of a police novel, I followed him. Progress was slow, for he paused now and again to exchange a word with an acquaintance, and I, more furtive than ever, was obliged to stoop to tie a shoelace, or stare about me as if a tourist and lost. I could have done with the Turtmanns’ cameras to save my face.
He ambled on, and at the further end of the narrow street turned left again. When I caught up with him he was near enough to touch, standing at the top of the steep steps beside the small oratorio of Ognissanti. The steps descend abruptly, almost vertically, to the via dei Martiri below. He stood aside for me to pass.
“Excuse me, signore,” he said.
“Pardon me, signore,” I countered, “I was simply following my nose, a stranger in Ruffano.”
His gaze, cross-eyed, had always been disconcerting. I did not know now whether he looked at me or not.
“The steps of Ognissanti,” he said, pointing, “the oratorio of Ognissanti.”
“Yes,” I said, “so I see.”
“You wish to visit the oratorio, signore?” he asked. “My neighbor has the key.”
“Another time,” I said. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“No trouble at all,” he said. “She is sure to be at home. Later on, in the season, she opens the oratorio at regular hours. At the moment it isn’t worth her while.”
Before I could prevent him he had called up at the window of the small house adjoining the chapel. It opened, and an elderly woman thrust out her head.
“What is it, Signor Ghigi?” she called.
Ghigi, that was it. That was the name above the cobbler’s shop. Our cook had been Maria Ghigi.
“A visitor to see the oratorio,” he called, then waited for her descent. The window slammed. I felt myself unwelcome.
“I’m sorry to make myself a nuisance,” I said.
“At your service, signore,” he said.
The cross-eyes were surely searching me. I turned my head. In a moment or two the door opened and the woman emerged, fumbling for her keys. She opened the door of the oratorio and motioned to me to pass. I stared about me, feigning interest. The attraction of the oratorio is a group of martyred saints, modeled in wax. I remembered having been brought here as a child, and being reproved by the attendant for trying to touch the models.
“Very fine,” I observed to the couple watching me.
“It is unique,” said the cobbler, and then, as if in afterthought, “did the signore say he is a stranger to Ruffano?”
“Yes,” I said, “I come from Turin.” Instinct made me give my stepfather’s city, where my mother had died.
“Ah, Turin,” he said, as though disappointed, and added, “You have nothing like this in Turin.”
“We have the shroud,” I told him, “the shroud that wrapped the Savior. The marks of the sacred body are upon it still.”
“I did not know that,” he replied, rebuked.
We were all silent. The woman jangled her keys. I felt the cobbler’s cross-eyes upon me, and grew restless.
“Thank you,” I said to both. “I have seen enough.”
I gave the woman two hundred lire, which she stowed away in her voluminous skirt, shook hands with the cobbler, and thanked him for his courtesy. Then I walked down the steps of Ognissanti, guessing they were staring after me. It was possible that I had reminded him of something, someone, yet there was nothing to connect me, a man from Turin, with a lad of ten.
I retraced my steps to the piazza della Vita and found a small restaurant in the via San Cipriano, a few yards from the church. I had lunch and smoked a cigarette, my head still empty of plans. The restaurant must have been popular—it was new since my time—for it filled rapidly and customers were obliged to share tables. Instinctive wariness made me bring out my newspaper and prop it against the carafe of wine in front of me.
Somebody said, “Excuse me, is this place free?”
I raised my eyes. “By all means, signorina,” I said, making room, jarred by the sudden interruption to my thoughts.
“I believe I saw you in the ducal palace this morning,” she said.
I stared, then swiftly begged her pardon. I recognized the woman lecturer who had been in charge of the crowd of students.
“You tried to escape us,” she said. “I can’t say I blame you.”
She smiled, and the smile was pleasing, though her mouth was too large. Her hair was parted in the center and drawn smoothly back, her age a possible thirty-two. She had a large mole close to her left eye. Some men find these marks attractive, enhancing sexual charm. To each his own taste…
“I did not try to escape you,” I said, “only your audience.”
After mixing so much with nationalities other than my own, especially Americans and Anglo-Saxons, and being always in a subservient position, I had lost touch with the women of my own country, who demand flirtation as a common courtesy.
“If you had wanted to know about the pictures in the palace,” she said, “you could have joined us.”
“I am not a student,” I said, “and I dislike to be one of many.”
“A private guide would be more to your choice, perhaps,” she murmured. Gallantry, I saw, would be the order for the remainder of the meal. When I tired of it, I could always look at my watch and make the excuse of time.
“The choice of most men,” I said. “Haven’t you found it so?”
She smiled, a conspiratorial smile, and gave her order to the waiter. “You are probably right,” she said, “but as a lecturer on the staff of the university I have a job to do. I must make myself agreeable to both boys and girls, and endeavor to put facts into their reluctant heads.”
“Is that a hard task?”
“With the majority of them, yes,” she answered.
Her hands were small. I like small hands in women. She wore no ring.
“What are your duties?” I asked.
“I’m attached to the Faculty of Arts,” she said. “I lecture two or three times a week in class to the second- and third-year students, and escort the first-year batch to the palace, as I did this morning, and to other places of importance. It’s quite interesting. I’ve been here two years now.” The waiter served her, and after eating in silence for a few moments she glanced at me and smiled. “And you?” she asked. “Are you on a visit here? You don’t look like a tourist.”
“I’m a courier,” I said. “I look after tourists, as you look after students.”
She grimaced. “Have you your charges with you in Ruffano?”
“No. I wished the last godspeed this morning.”
“And now?”
“You might say I’m open to offers.”
She said nothing for a moment. She was busy eating. Then she pushed aside her plate and turned to her salad.
“What sort of offers?” she asked.
“You make them. I’ll tell you,” I answered.
She looked at me in speculation. “What are your languages?”
“English, German and French. But I’ve never given a lecture in my life,” I told her.
“I didn’t suppose you had. Any degree?”
“Degree in modern languages, Turin.”
“Why, then, a courier?”
“One sees the country. The tips are good.”
I ordered more coffee for myself. The conversation did not commit me.
“So you’re on vacation?” she said.
“Self-imposed. I’ve not been sacked. I just wanted a few weeks off from my regular work. As I told you, I’m open to offers.”
She had finished her salad. I offered her a cigarette, which she took.
“I might be able to help you,” she said. “They’re temporarily understaffed in the university library. Half our stuff is still housed in a room in the palace. Later it will be moved into new quarters between the university and the students’ hostel, but our fine new building won’t be opened until after Easter. For the time being chaos reigns. The librarian, a good friend of mine, could do with extra help. And with a degree in modern languages…” She left her sentence unfinished, but her gesture implied that the rest was easy.
“It sounds interesting,” I said.
“I don’t know about the pay,” she said quickly. “It wouldn’t be much. And the job is only temporary, as I said, but that might suit you.”
“It might indeed.”
She summoned the waiter in her turn for coffee, brought out a card from her bag and gave it to me. I glanced at it and read the words, “Carla Raspa, 5, via San Michele, Ruffano.”
I handed mine in return. “Armino Fabbio, Sunshine Tours, Turin.”
She raised ironic eyebrows and put it in her bag. “Sunshine Tours,” she murmured, “I could do with one. Ruffano can be very dead after working hours.” She drank her coffee, watching me as she did so. “Think it over. I must leave you—I have a lecture at three. I’ll be in the library myself after four, and if you want to take this up I can introduce you to the librarian, Giuseppe Fossi. He’ll do anything for me. Eats out of my hand.”
The look in her eye suggested that he did more than that. Gallantly I returned the look. For courtesy’s sake we were conspirators.
“You have your credentials on you?” she asked as she rose from the table.
I patted my breast pocket. “I carry them everywhere,” I said.
“Fine. Good-bye for now.”
“Good-bye, signorina. And thank you.”
She disappeared through the restaurant entrance to the street. I glanced at the card once more. Carla Raspa. The name suited her. Hard as nails, with a soft center, like a Neapolitan ice. I pitied the librarian Giuseppe Fossi. It might be my answer, though, for the next two or three weeks. Not her—the job. Possibly the one went with the other, but I should have to take care of that when the moment came.
I paid the bill and went out into the street, carrying my grip, feeling like a snail with the world upon his back. I crossed the street and tried the door of San Cipriano once again. This time it was open. I pushed my way inside and went into the chancel.
The smell brought back the past, as it had done at the ducal palace. Here the memory, though less intense, was more somber, muted, connected with Sundays, feast days, the necessity of silence, and an inner restlessness that mirrored my longing to be outside. I did not connect the church of San Cipriano with devout feelings or with prayer, only with an intense awareness of being small and hemmed in by adults, with impersonal priestly intoning, the puff of incense, the touch of Aldo’s hand, a desire to urinate.
The church was empty, save for a sacristan who seemed to be busy with candles at the high altar, and I made my way up the nave on the left-hand side, tiptoeing as if by instinct, and so up the single step to the chapel. Hollow sounds came from the high altar in the church, as the sacristan went about his business. I looked for a light in the chapel and switched it on. The light fell upon the altarpiece. Small wonder I had been frightened as a child at that figure in his shroud, the wrappings from the face hanging in streamers, the eyes of terror staring out upon his Lord. I realized now that the painting was no masterpiece. Executed in the days when tortured expression and exaggerated form had been the vogue, the risen Lazarus, to my maturer eyes, now seemed grotesque. Yet the bowed figure of the supplicating Mary in the foreground was still Marta, still the humped woman on the steps of the church in Rome.
I switched off the light and left the chapel. Two nights ago, dreaming, I had been a child still, imagination vivid. Now there was disenchantment; the risen Lazarus had lost his power.
As I turned into the nave the sacristan came pattering down to meet me. A sudden thought came to me. “Excuse me,” I said, “are the baptismal records kept here in the church?”
“Yes, signore,” he answered, “the records are in the sacristy. They go back a number of years, to approximately the beginning of the century. Earlier than that, they are kept in the presbytery.”
“Would it be possible for me to look up an entry for the year 1933?”
He hesitated a moment, murmuring something about the priest in charge of the records not being available. I slipped a note into his hand and told him I was passing through Ruffano, unlikely to return, and wished to consult a baptismal entry for a relative. He protested no more, and led the way into the sacristy.
I hovered while he searched for the book. The odor of sanctity was all about me. Stoles and surplices hung from hooks. The faint scent of incense mingled with floor polish pervaded all. The sacristan approached me with a book.
“We have the entries here from 1931 to 1935,” he said. “If your relative was baptized in San Cipriano, his name should be here.”
I took the book and opened it. It was like turning back the pages into the past. How many of my contemporaries must be here, children born and baptized in Ruffano, now adult, scattered, or perhaps living in the city still, shopkeepers, clerks, yet in this book only a few days old…
I turned to July the 13th, the day of my birth. Here was my baptism, on a Sunday two weeks later. “Armino. Son of Aldo Donati and Francesca Rossi. Godparents, Aldo Donati, brother, Federico Ponenti, Edda Ponenti.” I had forgotten that Aldo, not then nine years old, had been my sponsor. He had written his name in a round, childish hand, that yet already had more character to it than the uniform scrawl of the second cousins who shared the responsibility. They had lived, if I remembered rightly, at Ancona. Now it all came back. The first communion. Aldo’s eyes upon me, hinting eternal punishment should I, through fear or clumsiness, let fall the Host out of my open mouth.
“Have you found the entry?” asked the sacristan.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, it’s there.”
I shut the book and gave it into his hands. He took it, and replaced it in the cupboard among a row of similar volumes.
“Wait,” I said. “Have you the entries for the ’twenties too?”
“The ’twenties, signore? Which year?”
“Let me see. It would be 1925, I suppose.”
He took out another volume. “Here is ’21 to ’25.”
I took the book and turned to November. November the 17th. The date had always held significance for me because it was Aldo’s birthday. Even in Genoa, on autumn mornings, when I looked at the office calendar, the number 17 under the month of November was somehow dedicated.
Curious… Aldo must have been a sickly infant, for here he was, baptized within a day of his birth. “Aldo. Son of Aldo Donati and Francesca Rossi.” No mention of godparents.
I turned the page, and to my surprise the entry was repeated a few days later. “Aldo. Son of Aldo Donati and Francesca Rossi. Godparents, Aldo Donati, father, Luigi Speca, Francesca Rossi.”
Who was Luigi Speca? I had never heard of him. Nor, I felt sure, had Aldo. And why the double entry?
“Tell me,” I said to the sacristan, “have you ever heard of an infant being baptized twice?”
He shook his head. “No, signore. Though if the child was ailing, and the parents feared it might die, it is just conceivable that it might be baptized on the day of birth and the ceremony repeated later, when the child was stronger. Has the signore finished with the book?”
“Yes,” I said. “Take it.”
I watched him replace the book among its fellows in the cupboard, and turn the key. Then I came out into the sunlight, crossed the piazza della Vita and walked up the via Rossini. It was strange that Aldo should have been baptized twice. It was the sort of story, had we known it, that he would have turned to good advantage. “I was doubly blessed,” I could imagine him telling me.
Marta would have known about the baptism… So thinking, I was reminded of the cross-eyed cobbler, and I looked about me for his shop, situated, to the best of my recollection, halfway up, on the left-hand side. There it was… But larger, smartened, and with rows of shoes to sell. No longer shoes with tickets and upturned soles, advertising repairs. A different name, too, above the door. My cross-eyed Ghigi of the morning must have retired, to live beside the oratorio. He was the only likely link with Marta, or his sister if she lived, and short of admitting my identity I did not see how I could approach him.
The same held good for the Longhis, at the hotel dei Duchi. It would be so easy to go back, to say, “I meant to tell you last night. I am the younger son of Aldo Donati. You remember my father, the Superintendent at the ducal palace?” Even the flabby face of the signora would have creased into a smile, the first shock over. And then, “You remember Marta? What happened to Marta?”
It was no good. It would not work. Anyone returning from the past, as I was doing, must remain anonymous. Otherwise it meant useless involvement. Alone, in secret, I could unravel the threads of the past, but not with identity known.
I passed the ducal palace once again and then turned left, coming, after a moment, into the via dei Sogni. I wanted to look at my old home by day. The snow had melted, as it had done elsewhere in Ruffano, and the sun must have filled the house all morning, for behind the tree I could see the windows of the first floor, opened. This had been my parents’ bedroom, in early days a sort of sanctum in my eyes, but later shunned.
Someone was playing the piano. There had never been a piano in our time. The player had the touch of a professional. A torrent of sound rippled from the keys. It was something I knew, heard probably on the radio, or more likely still from the music rooms in the university at Turin when I used to hurry past to lectures. My lips framed a silent echo to the sound as it rose and fell, half gay, half sad, a timeless melody. Debussy. Yes, Debussy. The well-worn “Arabesque,” but with a master touch.
I stood beneath the wall and listened. The music ebbed and flowed, changed mood and entered the more solemn phrases, and then again that first lighthearted ripple, higher, ever higher, confident and gay, but at last with a descending scale, dissolving, vanishing. It seemed to say: All over, nevermore. The innocence of youth, the joy of childhood, leaping from bed to welcome a new day… all gone, the fervor spent. The repetition of the phrase was only a reminder, an echo of what had been. So swift to go, impossible to hold.
The music ceased before the closing bars. I could hear the telephone. Whoever played must have gone to answer it. The window was closed, then all was still.
The telephone used to stand in the hall, and if my mother was upstairs she had to run to answer it, arriving breathless. I wondered if the player did the same. I looked up at the tree that shrouded the small garden like a canopy. Somewhere in the branches should be a rubber ball that I had much prized, kicked aloft one day in an idle mood and never recovered. I wondered if it lay there still, and with the wonder came resentment, a strange antagonism to the present owner of my home. Theirs the right to wander through the rooms, open and shut the windows, answer the telephone. I was just a stranger, staring at the wall.
The playing was resumed. This time a Chopin Prelude, mournful, passionate. The pianist’s mood had changed with the telephone call, nerves were unleashed to somber melancholy. And none of it my business.
I went on walking up the via dei Sogni, and so out into the via dell’8 Settembre, in front of the university. It was like walking into another age. The young were everywhere, pouring out of lecture rooms, laughing, talking, getting onto vespas. The old building which had always been known as the House of Studies boasted new wings, the windows glowing not only with fresh paint but with vitality. There were new buildings too across the way, and yet another in construction—the new library, possibly—topping the hill. This university was not the crumbling, rather faded seat of learning I remembered from childhood days. Austerity was banished. The young, with all their fine contempt for dusty ways, had taken over. Transistor radios blared.
I stood, clutching my grip, a wanderer between two worlds. The one the via dei Sogni of my past, with all its memories, but no longer mine; and this other, active, noisy, equally indifferent. The dead should not return. Lazarus was right to feel foreboding. Caught, as he must have been, betwixt past and present, he evaded both in horror, seeking the anonymity of the tomb—but in vain.
“Hullo,” said a voice in my ear, “have you made up your mind?”
I turned, and saw Carla Raspa. She looked cool, confident and self-possessed. No doubts for her.
“Yes, signorina. Thank you for your trouble. But I have decided to leave Ruffano.” This was my intention, but the words were left unsaid. A youth, straddling a vespa, swerved past us, laughing. He had a small flag fixed to his machine which fluttered in the breeze, just as, years back, the staff car of my mother’s Commandant carried his hated emblem. The student’s flag was tourist junk, perhaps, bought for a few hundred lire in the piazza Maggiore, but it had for design the Malebranche Falcon and so was, to my nostalgic eye, a symbol.
Adopting my habitual mask of courier, of courtier, I bowed to the signorina, sweeping her from head to foot in a caressing glance that she knew, and I knew, meant precisely nothing.
“I was on my way to the ducal palace,” I told her. “If you are free, perhaps we could go together?”
I had reached the point of no return.