7

I brushed past the group of students who were hovering, chatting, before No. 24, via San Michele, the Pasquale brother and sister among them, and went straight upstairs to my room. I sat down on the bed, staring in front of me. It was an illusion, of course, a trick of the light. Unconscious association with our home. Aldo had been shot down in flames in ’43, my mother had received the telegram. I remembered it coming, and when it arrived she stared down at the envelope—for it must contain bad news of some kind—and then she went into the kitchen and called Marta, and they stayed in there together, the door closed.

Children have an instinct for knowing when news is bad. I sat on the stair and waited. Presently my mother came out again. She was not crying; she had the bruised, stunned look that adults wear when deeply moved or shocked. She said, “Aldo’s dead. Killed flying. The Allies shot him down,” and went upstairs to her room. I crept into the kitchen and Marta was sitting there, her hands in her lap. Unlike my mother she was not mute in her grief; the tears were flowing freely down her cheeks, and she held out her arms. I burst into tears instantly and ran to her, and the pair of us rocked together, crying, mourning our dead.

“My little Beato,” she said, “my lamb, my Beato. You loved him so, you loved your brother.”

“It isn’t true,” I kept saying between sobs, “it isn’t true. They can’t kill Aldo. Nobody can kill Aldo.”

“Yes, it is true,” she said, holding me close, “he has gone as he would have wished. He had to fly, he had to fall. Aldo, your Aldo.”

Memory is merciful. There came a blank in time after that first day, and I had no further feeling. The weeks must have passed, and I must have gone daily to school with my companions, and worn a mourning armband, and have said to them, even with pride, “Yes, my brother’s dead. Shot down in flames,” as though to go thus added to his glory. I played. I ran up and down the stairs. It was around then that I kicked the ball into the tree. Incidents, isolated at the time, merged into others of wider implication: the surrender, the Armistice, which I did not understand, the arrival in Ruffano of the Germans, and the Commandant. Life, as I had known it, had come to an end.

Now, sitting on the bed in the Pensione Silvani, I lived those first moments once again, and told myself that he whom I had just seen was indeed a living person, but wrongly identified with a man long dead. This was hallucination. This was what had happened to the disciples when they looked, as they thought, upon their Lord, the risen Christ…

There was a sudden knocking on the door. Startled, I called out, “Who’s there?” I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps the phantom stranger. My shout was taken for permission to enter the room. The door opened and the Pasquale brother and sister stood there, their faces concerned.

“Excuse us,” said the girl, Caterina, “but you looked so ill when you came in just now. We wondered if anything was wrong.”

I sat up on the bed. Made the supreme effort to appear at ease.

“It’s nothing,” I said, “absolutely nothing. I walked rather fast, that’s all.”

My poor reply was met by silence. I could see curiosity struggle with courtesy in their expressions.

“Why did you walk so fast?” asked Paolo.

I thought his question odd. It was as if he guessed… but how could he guess? I was a stranger. We were all strangers.

“I happened to do so,” I said. “I made a tour round the ducal palace and the neighboring streets and so back here. It turned out to be further than I had thought.”

They exchanged glances. Again, it was as though they guessed, they knew.

“Don’t think we want to pry,” said Paolo, “but were you by any chance followed?”

“Followed?” I echoed. “Why… no. Who would follow me?”

I felt as if I were on the defensive. What could these children know about the past, about my home? What could they know of my dead brother Aldo?

“It’s like this,” said Caterina, and she spoke softly, shutting the door. “People do get followed, from time to time, if they prowl round the palace at night. There are all sorts of rumors. It never happens if you go in a group. Only to individuals.”

I remembered then the running boy. The figure at the top of the steps. The softly closing door.

“It could have been,” I said, half to myself and half to them, “it could have been that I was followed.”

“Why, what happened?” asked Caterina quickly.

I told them about the boy and his headlong, breathless flight. I told them about the shadowed figure and the withdrawal inside the palace door. I did not tell them about my return down the via dei Sogni, and how I stood outside my home. Once more they looked at each other, nodding.

“That’s it,” said Paolo decisively, “they were out.”

“Who?” I asked.

“You’re new to Ruffano, you wouldn’t know,” said Caterina. “It’s a secret society within the university. We none of us know who the members are. They could be Arts, Education, C and E, Law, or a mixture of them all, but it’s part of the oath they take, never to split on one another.”

I handed them cigarettes. Already I was feeling more at ease. The past receded, and I was back in the world of university pranks.

“Don’t smile,” said Paolo. “It isn’t amusing. We thought as you did, at first, that it was just ragging. It isn’t so. Students have been hurt, and not only students but kids from the town. Seized and blindfolded… and, so rumor has it, even tortured. But nobody knows, that’s the point. The victims don’t tell. Something will slip out days later, a student will say he’s sick, not turn up at lectures, and then the rumor spreads, they’ve got at him.”

Brother and sister sat down on the bed on either side of me, their faces serious, yet eager. I felt it a compliment that they trusted me.

“Can’t the authorities do something?” I asked. “Surely it’s up to the university to stamp it out?”

“They can’t,” said Caterina. “You don’t understand the power of these people. It’s not like an ordinary society within the university, with its members known. This thing is secret. And it’s evil too.”

“For all we know,” broke in Paolo, “it may include professors as well as students. And although all of us C and E students feel it’s directed against us, we can’t be sure—we have heard there are members of our own group acting as spies for the society.”

“So you see,” said Caterina, “that’s why we were worried, when you came in. I said to Paolo—it’s them.”

I patted each upon the shoulder and got up from the bed. “No,” I said, “if they were out, they weren’t after me.” I crossed to the window and opened the shutters. The car had gone from No. 5. “Sometimes,” I said, addressing both brother and sister, “one can suffer from hallucinations. I’ve done so myself. You think you see something which is, frankly, out of this world, and then, later, it has an ordinary explanation. Your society may exist, it obviously does, but its importance could have been worked up in your minds, so that it appears more threatening than it is.”

“Exactly,” said Paolo, also rising to his feet. “That’s what all the scoffers say. But it isn’t so. You wait and see. Come on, Caterina.”

His sister shrugged, and followed her brother to the door. “I know it sounds foolish,” she said to me, “like a trick to scare children. But I’m sure of one thing. I would never walk about Ruffano by night without at least half a dozen others. It’s all right round here, and in the piazza della Vita. Not up the hill, not by the palace.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I accept the warning.”

I finished my cigarette, undressed, and went to bed. The tale of the “secret society” had proved an antidote to shock. Common sense told me that the encounter on the steps, the withdrawal of the figure to the open door of the ducal palace, had stimulated imagination already tensed because of the past, and when I came to my old home the natural consequence of this was to conjure, out of darkness into light, a living Aldo. The experience was, I now believed, the second of two. The first had been to confuse the murdered woman in the via Sicilia in Rome with Marta. No proof, hallucination. The second experience, the vision of my brother. Appeased, and in a strange way self-absolved, I fell asleep.

When I awoke in the morning, clearheaded, hungry, full of energy for the day ahead, I told myself that it was time to kill all phantoms, and put a final end to the shadows that had haunted me. I would search out the cross-eyed cobbler and ask him if Marta lived. I would even boldly ring the bell of my old home in the via dei Sogni and ask the Rector’s lady, Signora Butali, the identity of her late-night caller. This last would, in all probability, produce a well-deserved rebuff, a complaint to the university Registrar, and an end to my temporary job. No matter if it did. My ghosts would then be truly laid, and I at liberty.

My young friends the Pasquales and the other students had dispersed to their various lectures before I left the house at a quarter to nine and walked up the via Rossini to the ducal palace. Ruffano wore her shining morning face, and the noise and bustle of the day were all about me. No shadowy figures now to lurk in doorways and scare the passersby. I wondered how much truth there was in the students’ story, whether the half of it was not a myth born of mass hysteria. Rumor, like infection, spreads rapidly.

I checked in at the palace library as the Duomo struck the hour, and so beat my superior by about three minutes. Giuseppe Fossi looked, I thought, subdued, and it could be that his activities of the preceding night had, in more ways than one, deflated him. He wished me and the others a brief good morning, and I was put at once to sorting and separating those volumes written in German and belonging to the university which had, by error, become mixed up with the palace possessions. The task, because it was so different from checking itineraries and figures, absorbed me, particularly so as one work in four volumes called The History of the Dukes of Ruffano, written in the early part of the nineteenth century by a German scholar, was, according to Giuseppe Fossi, extremely rare.

“There is a dispute between the Arts Council and ourselves as to its ownership,” he told me. “Better put the books aside for the time being and not pack them with the rest. I shall have to check with the Rector.”

I decided to stack the volumes carefully on a shelf by themselves. The leaves stuck together when I opened them. I doubt if they had ever been read. The Archbishop of Ruffano, who must have possessed them before the Risorgimento, either spoke no German or was too shocked by their contents to turn the pages.

“Claudio Malebranche, first Duke of Ruffano, was known as the Falcon,” I read. “His brief life is shrouded in mystery, for contemporary authorities do not enable us to pronounce with certainty on the enormous vices wherewith tradition and innuendo have blackened his memory. A youth of outstanding promise, he became intoxicated by good fortune, and casting off his early discipline he surrounded himself by a small band of dissolute disciples, and dismayed the good citizens of Ruffano by licentious outrages and revolting cruelties. No one could walk by night for fear of the Falcon’s sudden descent into the city, when, aided by his followers, he would seize and ravage…”

“Signor Fabbio, a hand with these entries, if you please.” My superior’s voice, a little tired, a little testy, summoned me from the fascinating disclosures promised by the German scholar. “If you want to read the books in the library,” he said, “you must do so in your own time, not in ours.”

I apologized. He brushed the matter aside, and we concentrated upon the ledgers. Either the signorina’s cooking, or her demands, had proved excessive. I ignored the byplay of Toni, who, behind our superior’s back, cradled his head upon his hands in mock exhaustion, but I was not surprised when Giuseppe Fossi, shortly before noon, pronounced himself unwell.

“I must have eaten something last night,” he said, “that disagreed with me. I shall have to go home and lie down. I’ll return later in the afternoon if I feel better. In the meantime, I should be extremely obliged if you would carry on.”

He left hurriedly, his handkerchief to his mouth. Signorina Catti remarked that it was well known that Signor Fossi suffered from his stomach. Also he was overworked. He never spared himself. Once again the irrepressible Toni gestured, once again I ignored the pantomime, this time more obvious, of an athlete at play. The telephone rang, and being closest to it I answered. A woman’s voice, soft and pleasing, asked for Signor Fossi.

“I’m sorry,” I replied, “Signor Fossi is not here. Can I help you?”

She asked how long he would be absent, and I said I was not sure. He had felt unwell, and had gone home. The inquirer was not Carla Raspa—the voice was pitched too low.

“Who am I speaking to?” came next.

“Armino Fabbio, temporary assistant to Signor Fossi,” I replied. “May I ask who it is inquiring after him?”

“Signora Butali,” she answered. “I have a message for him from the Rector about some books.”

My interest quickened. The Rector’s lady in person, speaking from my home. My courier’s well-trained courtesy took over.

“If there is anything I can do, signora, you have only to ask,” I said smoothly. “Signor Fossi left the library in the charge of Signorina Catti and myself. Would you perhaps entrust your message to me?”

There was a moment’s hesitation before she replied. “The Rector is in hospital in Rome, as you know,” she said, “and during a conversation on the telephone I had with him this morning he asked me to request Signor Fossi for the loan of some rather valuable books about which there is a trifling dispute between the university and the Arts Council. He would like to examine the books himself, with Signor Fossi’s approval, and I could take them with me to Rome on my next visit.”

“Of course, signora,” I said. “I am quite certain Signor Fossi would raise no objection. What books are they?”

“The History of the Dukes of Ruffano, in German,” she answered.

The secretary was making signs to me. I explained, my hand over the mouthpiece, that I was speaking to the Rector’s lady. Her sour disapproval vanished. She rushed forward and snatched the receiver from me.

“Good morning, signora,” she exclaimed, her voice all sugar. “I had no idea you were back from Rome. How is the Rector?” She smiled and nodded, hushing me to silence. “Naturally anything the Rector asks for he shall be given,” she continued. “I will see that the books are delivered to you at the house today. Either I, or one of our assistants, will hand them to you personally.”

Further assurances followed, with an added explanation that Signor Fossi was, as usual, overworked. More smiles. More nods. Then, apparently thanked and dismissed, she replaced the receiver.

Quickly I said, “I’ll deliver the books to Signora Butali this afternoon.”

Signorina Catti stared, her sourness returned. “There is no need to go yourself,” she said. “If you will wrap the books for me I can take them. It won’t be out of my way, and the signora knows me.”

“Signor Fossi gave me instructions,” I said, “not to let these books out of my sight. Also, I am more easily spared from the library than you.”

Furious, but acknowledging defeat, she returned to her desk. A falsetto cough from the high ladder told me that Toni had been listening. I smiled, and went on with my work. Entry had been secured to my home in the via dei Sogni. For the moment this was all that mattered.

I did not return to the pensione for lunch. I found a small restaurant in the via Rossini which, though filled with students, sufficed for my hasty meal. I went back to the library while the other assistants were still lunching, and packed up the books for the Rector’s lady. It intrigued me that the very volumes that had caught my fancy should be those demanded by the Rector from his sickbed. There was no time to linger over the life history of the Falcon. This I regretted. His madness I remembered, and his death. The intervening details had been glossed over by my father. Certainly they were not mentioned in the Ruffano guidebooks, nor in the printed pamphlets issued to tourists in the ducal palace.

“… The excesses were of so singular a nature that only the Devil could have inspired them. When accusations were made against him by the outraged citizens of Ruffano, Duke Claudio retaliated by declaring that he had been divinely appointed to mete out to his subjects the punishment they deserved. The proud would be stripped, the haughty violated, the slanderer silenced, the viper die in his own venom. The scales of heavenly justice would thus be balanced.”

And so on for several pages. The picture of “The Temptation” in the ducal bedchamber above the library took on new meaning for me.

“Duke Claudio was undoubtedly insane. Excuses were thus made for him, after his appalling death, by the good and gentle brother who succeeded him, the great Duke Carlo. No such consideration can be afforded to the Falcon’s followers. This small band of debauchees did not believe themselves to hold divine appointment. Their mission was to sully and destroy. So great was the hatred and fear which they inspired among the populace of Ruffano that when the final massacre took place, and the Falcon and his band were slaughtered, it is said that the corridors and state rooms of the ducal palace ran with blood, and that atrocities, impossible to name, were committed upon the fallen victims.”

These pages would certainly while away the Rector’s hours of leisure in a hospital bed.

I packed the books and left the library as soon as the second assistant returned from lunch. Then I set forth for the via dei Sogni. My excitement increased as I approached the garden wall. No hovering in the shadows today. I was going home. As I drew near I could hear, as yesterday, the sound of piano playing. It was a Chopin Impromptu. The notes rang out, up and down the scale, with almost savage intensity. It was like an argument, passionate and fierce, that would brook no interference but must sweep everything before it, then rippled, suddenly, to melting protestation. No music for a sickbed. But, of course, the Rector was some hundred and fifty miles away in Rome.

I put my hand on the garden door and entered. Nothing had changed. The single tree dominated the small enclosure as it had always done, though the grass was closer trimmed than in our day. I walked the short flagged pathway to the door and rang the bell. The music ceased. A sense of schoolboy panic came upon me. I nearly dropped the books before the door and fled. I heard, as I had heard a hundred, a thousand times before, footsteps descending the stairs. The door opened.

“Signora Butali?”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me for disturbing you, signora. I have brought you the books you asked for from the palace library.”

There is a picture in the audience room of the ducal palace known officially as the “Portrait of a Gentlewoman,” though my father called her the Silent One. The face is grave, withdrawn, the dark eyes look out upon the man who painted her with indifference, some say disapproval. Aldo had it otherwise. I remember him arguing with my father that the Silent One had hidden fires, and that the mouth, supposedly so pursed, deceived the watcher. Signora Butali might have posed for that same gentlewoman. Her beauty was of the sixteenth century, not ours.

“Was it you I spoke to on the telephone?” she asked, and, taking the answer for granted, added, “It’s good of you to come so soon.”

She put out her hand for the books, but I was looking past her to the hall. The four walls were the same, but that was all. The alien shapes of chairs, not ours, and a tall mirror seemed to alter the perspective. My father, fond of reproductions of his favorite pictures at the palace, used to display them in abundance, doubtless a dated fashion, but because of this we came to know them well. Today there was but one picture hanging in the hall, and that contemporary—glazed fruit, too large, splurging beside a sheet of music. The staircase wall leading to the floor above, white in our time, was now dove gray. These things I perceived in a single flash, and with it came unreasoning resentment that anyone should dare to walk into our home and so despoil it to suit their taste, disturbing, as it were, the layer of habit underneath. Had the walls and ceilings that knew us no feeling in the matter? Must they stay dumb?

“Excuse me, signora,” I said, “I did not come only at your request, but because I felt myself drawn to the house. I passed here yesterday and heard the piano. Being fond of music I stayed to listen. At that time I did not even know that this was the Rector’s house—they told me later at the library. When you asked for the books this morning…”

Like the gentlewoman in the portrait, the mouth remained unsmiling, but the eyes softened. “You decided that this was your chance,” she interrupted.

“Frankly, yes,” I said.

I put the books into her hands. Once again my eyes traveled up the stairs. The last time I descended them I was running. My mother was calling from the garden, holding her traveling case, which she handed to the Commandant’s orderly. The staff car was waiting in the via dei Sogni.

“Do you play yourself?” asked the signora.

“No. No, I never had the gift. But yesterday… yesterday you were playing, I believe, the ‘Arabesque’ of Debussy, which God knows can be heard often enough from any radio station, but somehow it sounded different. It brought back memories of childhood and old forgotten things, why, I can’t say… nobody played the piano in our family.”

She looked at me gravely, as though considering a prospective pupil, and then she said, “If you can spare the time, come upstairs to the music room and I’ll play the ‘Arabesque’ for you.”

“Spare the time?” I repeated. “It doesn’t concern me whether I can spare the time or not. Can you?”

Once again the eyes softened. Even the mouth relaxed. “I would not invite you in if I could not,” she answered. “It’s early anyway. I don’t expect my next pupil until three.”

She closed the door, and leaving the books on a chair in the hall led the way upstairs, and so directly into my mother’s bedroom. This was transformed. I recognized nothing. It was just as well, because as I entered I expected to see the tumbled double bed with all the sheets overturned, as they had been on the day we left, the wardrobe with its doors opened and the shelves awry, discarded clothes, unwanted by my mother, left to hang, tissue paper on the floor, the breakfast-tray with the cold dregs of coffee.

“I love this room,” said the signora. “I find it peaceful. As soon as we came here I told my husband, ‘This is where I shall have the piano.’ ”

The walls were green. The chairs, stiff-backed, were padded in some striped material. The floor had a high polish. Another contemporary picture hung upon the wall, this time of monstrous sunflowers. The signora wandered to the piano, which stood on the exact site of my mother’s double bed.

“Smoke if you wish,” she said. “It doesn’t worry me. Now, the ‘Arabesque.’ ”

I went and stood by the window, looking down through the branches of the tree to the garden below. The tree had spread. The branches stretched like wings, and nearly touched the walls. The ball, if it was still there, was deeply hidden.

The ripple of the music started, the rapture and the pathos and the pain. The hot July sun baked the flagstone path, and the orderly’s feet rang out as he marched backwards and forwards for the luggage. Marta was at Mass in San Donato. “Hurry… hurry…” called my mother, “the Commandant won’t wait.” I had to find the snapshot of Aldo. Aldo, before he was shot down. Aldo in his uniform, wearing his pilot’s wings.

“Come without it. Marta can send it on.”

“No. I have it. It will go in my pocket.”

And so running down the stairs. And so also the signora, higher, higher up the scale, and down, repeating the phrase, once more, again, carelessly, gaily. There was nothing emotional in an “Arabesque.” Unless, like the listener, you were a courier, a charioteer, on and on and endlessly on, flying from the present to the past.

She said, “I was playing Chopin when you rang the bell.”

It could be that we get the death we deserve. That my mother, with her cancerous womb, paid for the doubtful pleasure of that double bed, and that the Commandant, yes, and my father too, surfeited with what they had once had, doomed themselves to ultimate starvation, the one in a Russian, the other in an Allied prison camp. But why the knife for Marta?

I sat down in a chair and stared at Signora Butali. Her piano playing brought her to life, color had come into her too pale face. Here, I supposed, she found release, and was able to forget her sick husband. I studied her dispassionately. My own age, or a few years older. Thirty-five to thirty-six. The age for regret, for sudden love, for drama. The age for opening the door to callers after ten.

The music was interrupted, as yesterday, by the shrill summons of the telephone. She rose from the piano and went to answer it, excusing herself with a glance. I noticed that it was in this room now and that she did not have to run downstairs, as my mother had done.

“Yes,” she said, down the mouthpiece, “yes, I have them.”

Something told me that she was referring to the books. The Rector must be anxious. He also, I surmised, asked his wife if she were alone, for she replied, in the voice one uses when others are present, “No, no, not just now. Call me later.” She replaced the receiver rather quickly.

Following my train of thought, and foolishly, I asked her if the Rector was better. She looked confused, then instantly recovered.

“Ah, yes,” she said, “very much better. I had many things to see to here at home, otherwise I should never have left Rome.”

Did she think I was accusing her of neglect? Perhaps. In any event, I suspected that the brief telephone call, just ended, had not come from Rome.

The spell was broken, and she made no move back to the piano. I had stood up when the telephone rang. Now I glanced at my watch.

“You’ve been very kind, signora,” I said. “You’ve given me much pleasure. Now I must not take up any more of your valuable time.”

“Nor I yours,” she answered. “You must come again. What did you say your name was?”

“Fabbio,” I told her, “Armino Fabbio. I’m working at the library on a temporary basis.”

“I feel sure they are very glad to have you,” she said. “I hope Signor Fossi will soon recover. Please give my regards to him, and to Signorina Catti.

Already she was walking to the door. The telephone call had destroyed all magic. I followed her out to the landing. She must use for bedroom the room that we reserved for the occasional guest. It looked southeast beyond the via dei Sogni to the precincts of the old monastic buildings, used now as the city hospital. My room had lain beyond.

“Thank you again, signora,” I said.

The smile she gave me was gracious but mechanical.

“It’s nothing,” she answered. “I like to play to anyone who is fond of music.”

I followed her downstairs. When we reached the hall she picked up the books, the action suggesting that she would take them back upstairs with her after I had gone.

“You will find them interesting,” I observed. “That is, if you can read German.”

“I don’t,” she said, leaving it at that.

There was no further excuse for delay. I was a stranger, she had had enough of me. The house, my house, was equally indifferent. I smiled, bowed over her outstretched hand, and left. The door closed. I walked down the flagged path to the garden gate, and so into the street. An old, bent woman walking in the distance, the vanishing skirts of a priest, a dog sniffing at the wall, even the bright day, all of these belonged to the present time, to the Ruffano that was not mine.

They say, in English, that you should kill two birds with one stone. I might as well lay my second ghost hard upon the first. Instead of returning immediately to the ducal palace and the library, I walked downhill towards the oratorio of Ognissanti. The cross-eyed cobbler must be braved in his own domain. Before I reached the corner of the street I saw that a small crowd had collected there. People were leaning out of windows, among them the dour guardian of the oratorio. A car was drawn up short of the steps. A police car. A man and a woman were being bundled inside it. I drew back and waited for it to turn and pass. My view of the car and of the couple within became blocked by the chattering crowd in front of me. The crowd broke up, still talking, gesturing. I turned to one of them nearby, a round-eyed woman carrying a crying child.

“Were they arresting someone?” I asked.

She turned to me eagerly, desirous, like all women in a crowd, of imparting information to a passerby.

“It’s Signor Ghigi and his sister,” she said. “No, they are not being arrested, mercifully for them, but the police have come for them all the same, to identify a body. They say it’s the body of that woman murdered in Rome, it was in the newspapers, and it may be the body of the Ghigis’ lodger, that’s what they say, a woman who had been lodging with them for some months. She used to drink, and she disappeared days ago, saying nothing to either of them, and now they wonder, the police wonder, everybody in the quarter is wondering, can it be the same, can it be poor Marta Zampini?”

She was still talking, the child was still crying, as I turned away and walked back along the street, my heart pounding.