At eight o’clock there was a knock on my door, and before I could answer Paolo burst in, closely followed by Caterina.
“I’m sorry,” he said, seeing I was in the midst of shaving, “but we want to know if you’re coming with us. The whole of C and E are cutting lectures, and we’re going to demonstrate outside the house of Professor Elia.”
“What about?” I asked.
“You know. We saw you,” broke in Caterina. “You were in a car, with the Raspa woman. We saw you leave the hotel and drive up to the piazza del Duca Carlo. You were in the thick of it.”
“That’s right,” chimed in Gino, whose head appeared over Caterina’s, “and later we saw the same car parked by the municipal gardens. You must have seen what happened. You were much nearer than any of us.”
I laid down my razor and reached for a towel. “I saw nothing,” I said, “except a crowd of professors around the statue. There was a lot of movement and excited talk, and then they carried someone or something, away. Perhaps it was a bomb.”
“A bomb!” everyone shouted.
“That’s the best yet,” said Caterina, “and do you know, he could be right. They could have tied Elia to a bomb timed to explode within a certain number of minutes.”
“Well, what happened to it?”
“What sort of bomb?”
“The point is, was he wounded or cut about? No one will tell us.”
The passionate discussion that must have been going on half the night promised resumption once again, and in my bedroom.
“Look here,” I said, “clear out, the lot of you. Go and demonstrate if you want to. I’m not a student. I’m an employee.”
“A spy?” suggested Gino. “You haven’t been here a week, and look what’s happened!”
The laughter from the rest was not spontaneous. It held an element of doubt. Caterina turned impatiently, pushing the others from the room.
“Ah, leave him alone,” she said. “What’s the use? He doesn’t care.” Then, to give me a final chance, she said to me over her shoulder. “The idea is to demonstrate in a body outside Professor Elia’s house and get him to appear. If we’re satisfied he’s all right, and unhurt, that’s good enough, we’ll turn up for the morning sessions.”
A few minutes later I heard them leave the house. The inevitable splutter of vespas followed, belonging, I thought, to Gino and Gerardo. I stood by the window and watched them disappear down the street. Then I looked across at the first floor of No. 5. The shutters were thrown back, the windows open. Carla Raspa had begun her day.
Signor Silvani was finishing breakfast when I descended for coffee, and he immediately asked me if I knew anything of the events of the night before. I told him I had been near the piazza del Duca Carlo and had seen the crowd.
“We only know what our young people here told us,” he said, “but I don’t like the sound of it. We’ve had ragging before, you get it in every university, but this sounds vicious. Is it true they tarred and feathered Professor Elia?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see.”
“I shall hear the truth at the prefettura,” he said. “If anything serious was done last night, it will mean drafting extra police into Ruffano for the next few days. It’s chaotic enough anyway on Festival day, without adding demonstrations to all our problems.”
I looked about for a morning paper, but saw none. Perhaps it was in the kitchen, or had not arrived. I finished my coffee and walked up to the piazza della Vita to buy one. Unrest stirred in the air. The piazza was crowded with morning shoppers, and with the inevitable group of workless individuals who, idle not from choice but from necessity, came to the city center to stand and stare. Students were everywhere, arguing, loquacious, most of them streaming out of the piazza up the northern hill to the piazza del Duca Carlo. Rumor, floating from one hill to the other, and then converging from all corners to the piazza della Vita, emerged in the small space like smoke from a steaming cauldron.
There was a Communist plot to blow up the university… There was a Fascist plot to take over the municipality… Guests at the dinner-party at the Hotel Panorama had been poisoned… The private residences of the Heads of Departments had been burgled… A maniac from Rome, having murdered one of Ruffano’s inhabitants, poor Marta Zampini, in the capital, was now loose in Ruffano itself, and had made an attempt on the life of Professor Elia…
I bought a paper. There was nothing in it about last night’s event, and only a brief statement about the murder. The police still held the thief in Rome pending further inquiries elsewhere. Elsewhere. Did this mean Ruffano?
There was a sudden movement in the crowd from the direction of the via dei Martiri. People fell back on either side to allow the passage of a priest and acolyte, and behind them four men bearing a coffin covered with a pall. In the rear came the mourners, a man with cross-eyes and a woman, heavily veiled, upon his arm. They made their way across the piazza to the church of San Cipriano. The gaping crowd closed in upon them. I followed, as in a dream, and stood within the precincts of the church in the midst of staring townsfolk, who participated out of curiosity. I listened for the opening words: “Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.” Then I turned, and left the church.
As I pushed through the door I saw a man standing near the table where they sold candles. He was watching the crowd, and his eyes fell upon me. I thought I recognized him, and, from the momentary question in his eye, that he knew me too. It was one of the police agents who had been in the room taking notes when the English tourists made their statement at the police station in Rome. Today he wore plain clothes.
I ran down the steps and plunged into the piazza della Vita. Then darted along the via del Teatro and climbed the long ascending slope under the walls of the ducal palace. Instinct had made me run. Instinct had told me to take this devious way. If the agent had recognized me as the courier in Rome who had volunteered the statement about the murdered woman, he would remember that this same courier had been en route for Naples with his touring party, and he would ask himself, what was the courier doing in Ruffano? A word on the telephone to Sunshine Tours, a quick check-up with either the Rome or the Genoa office, would tell the agent that Armino Fabbio had asked to be released from the Naples tour and had gone north with a Herr Turtmann and his wife. Little doubt that further news would be elicited that the courier had deserted Herr Turtmann in Ruffano, and nothing had been heard of him since.
I looked about me. The agent could not have followed me. Or, if he had, I had thrown him off. Strollers, shopper, students, were walking past the piazza Maggiore on their lawful business. I went into the Duomo by the side entrance, crossed the chancel and emerged at the further side, immediately opposite the ducal palace. In a moment I was inside the walls, and crossing the quadrangle to the library. It was only then, as I paused a moment to recover my breath, that I realized I had acted in foolish panic. It might not have been the police agent. If it had, there was no reason to suppose he had recognized me. My action, in fact, had been a classic example of the behavior of a guilty man. I stood mopping my forehead, and at that moment the library doors opened and Toni and the other assistant staggered forth, bearing a crate of books.
“Hullo! Who’s been chasing you?” asked Toni.
The question was apt. Stung by his inquiry, I thrust my handkerchief into my pocket.
“No one,” I said. “I got held up in the town.”
“What’s happening, then? Have they gone on strike? Are they demonstrating?” they asked simultaneously.
I was so preoccupied with my own endeavors in eluding the possible police agent that I was slow to seize their meaning.
“On strike? Who?” I said.
Toni raised despairing eyes to heaven. “Do you live in this world?” he inquired. “Don’t you know that all Ruffano is in a ferment because of what happened last night in the piazza del Duca Carlo?”
“They say the Communists got hold of Professor Elia,” said his companion, “and tried to bash his head in. Fossi’s given orders to shift everything we can from here to the new building in case an attempt is made to set fire to the ducal palace.”
They staggered off along the quadrangle with the crate. I went into the library to find chaos. Books were piled high upon the floor, and Giuseppe Fossi, with Signorina Catti at his side, was lumping volume after volume pell-mell into another groaning crate. He raised his perspiring face at sight of me and burst into a torrent of reproaches. Then, sending the secretary off to the other end of the library with a pile of books, he whispered in my ear, “You have heard what they did to Professor Elia?”
“No,” I replied.
“Emasculated!” he hissed. “I had it firsthand from one of the guests at last night’s dinner. They say the doctors were with him throughout the night to save his life. There may be other victims.”
“Signor Fossi,” I began, “I’m sure nothing of the sort…”
He frowned me to silence, jerking his head towards the secretary. “They’ll stop at nothing, nothing,” he said. “Anyone in a position of authority may be threatened.”
I murmured something about police protection.
“Police?” he almost screamed. “Useless! They’ll be looking after the senior members of the staff. The backbone of the university, the men who do all the work, will have to fend for themselves.”
Attempts to calm him were wasted. Green with fatigue after his sleepless night, he sat on one of the empty crates and watched me pack the books into another. I wondered which of us was the greater coward—he, who had turned to jelly through false rumor, or myself, because of the encounter in San Cipriano.
We did not break for lunch. Toni brought us sandwiches and coffee from the university canteen. The news was reassuring. The C and E students had called off the strike and attended the late morning sessions. Professor Elia had admitted a deputation to his house and received them in his dressing gown. He had assured them that all was well. He had not been hurt. He refused to make any other comment, but implored the students, for his sake, to attend their lectures as usual. They must not think of taking revenge upon other students in the university.
“The lads agreed,” murmured Toni in my ear, “just to keep him quiet. But it’s not blown over. They’re seething, every one of them.”
Giuseppe Fossi left during the afternoon to attend a meeting of the university Council called for three o’clock, and I went up with Toni to the new building to help supervise the unpacking of the crates at that end.
It was as well for Giuseppe Fossi’s reputation that I did so. The books had been stowed into the boxes with a total disregard for order, which meant double work not only for ourselves but for the clerks in the new library. I put Toni in charge of the van (in action again with a new windscreen), and stayed myself in the new library directing operations. One of the clerks, more thorough than the rest, soon had every volume dusted, sorted, and put in its allotted place in the bookshelves, while I busied myself with the catalogue.
The blowing and shaking of the dust by the energetic clerk brought various items to light which, after consultation with me, he disposed of in the wastepaper bin. Faded flowers, loose nameplates, forgotten letters, bills. It was almost time to knock off, and still no sign of Giuseppe Fossi, when the clerk brought me another letter to dispose of.
“Found this in a book of poems,” he said, “but as it’s signed by the Director of Arts, Professor Donati, perhaps it shouldn’t be thrown away?”
He handed me the letter. I glanced at the signature. Aldo Donati. It was not my brother’s handwriting, but my father’s. “All right,” I said, “I’ll take care of it.”
As the clerk went back to his sorting I called, “Where did you say you found the letter?”
“In a collected edition of Leopardi,” he replied, “belonging to someone called Luigi Speca. Or that at least was the name on the bookplate.”
The letter was brief. The heading at the top of the page said 8, via dei Sogni, Ruffano. The date, November 30th, 1925. The faded black ink, the gray writing-paper, and my father’s handwriting moved me strangely. The letter must have lain between the pages of Leopardi’s poems for nearly forty years.
“Dear Speca,
“All is well. We are remarkably proud of our young fellow. He is putting on weight fast and has a terrific appetite. He also promises to be extremely handsome! My wife and I can never thank you enough for your great kindness, sympathy and friendship in our moment of trouble, now happily behind us. We both of us look to the future with confidence. Please drop in on us and see the boy when you can spare the time.
“Your sincere friend,
“Aldo Donati.
“PS.—Marta proves to be not only a devoted nurse but an excellent cook. She sends her respects.”
I read the letter three times, then put it in my pocket. The handwriting might be faded, but the message was as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. I could hear my father’s voice, strong and clear, full of pride in his young son, now apparently restored to health after a dangerous illness. The baptismal entry was now plain. Luigi Speca must have been the doctor who attended him, a predecessor of our Doctor Mauri. Even the postscript about Marta was somehow poignant. She had entered our parents’ service at this time and remained faithful to the end. The end… I had seen this morning in the church of San Cipriano. Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine.
The doors of the new library opened and Giuseppe Fossi entered, followed by Toni looking sullen. My superior had lost his haunted look, he was assured once more, and rubbing his hands briskly.
“All in order? Everything sorted?” he demanded. “What are those crates doing there? Ah, I see, all empty. Good.” He cleared his throat, drew himself up, and bustled to the desk I had just quitted. “There will be no further trouble tonight,” he announced. “The university Council has ordered a nine o’clock curfew for all the students. Any of them seen on the streets after that time will be reported and automatically expelled. This applies equally to employees on the university staff who may live in lodgings. Instead of expulsion they will lose their jobs.” He looked pointedly at Toni, the other assistants and myself. “Special passes for those engaged on essential business can be obtained from the Registrar on application,” he added, “and it will be easy enough for the authorities to check up, should they be abused. In any event, it will hurt nobody to spend an evening withindoors. Naturally, the regulations will be relaxed tomorrow, the eve of the Festival.”
I understood the reason for Toni’s despondency. No encounter with his girlfriend in the piazza della Vita, or a trip round the via delle Mura on the vespa.
“What about the cinema?” asked Toni sullenly.
“The cinema by all means,” answered Giuseppe Fossi, “provided you are back home by nine o’clock.”
Toni shrugged, and muttering under his breath lifted one of the empty crates to bear it back to the van. Should I say anything to my superior about Aldo’s invitation to the meeting at the ducal palace? I waited for the other assistants to move out of earshot, and then approached him.
“Professor Donati was good enough to give me a pass this evening for the ducal palace,” I said. “There is to be a meeting to discuss the Festival.”
He looked surprised. “Then that is the responsibility of Professor Donati,” he replied. “As Director of the Arts Council of Ruffano he will be well aware of tonight’s regulations. If he chooses to issue invitations to comparative strangers to the community it is his own affair.”
He turned his back on me, obviously grudging the supposed honor done to me. I felt for the disk my brother had given me. It was safe in my pocket, alongside the forty-year-old letter from my father to Luigi Speca. I looked forward to showing this to Aldo. Meanwhile, I supposed that I too must obtain the late pass from the Registrar if I wanted to go to the ducal palace. It would not matter to my brother if I turned up or not, but my own curiosity was strong.
We closed down at the new building at seven o’clock and I walked across to the Registrar’s office, which was already besieged by students applying for late passes. Most of them, accompanied by anxious relatives, had made plans for dinner which were now threatened with cancellation. The pre-celebration of the Festival would go by the board if the passes were not forthcoming, and the relatives would be left to languish in their lodgings and hotels. “It is completely childish,” was the comment of one angry father. “My son is in his fourth year, and the authorities take it into their heads to treat him as an infant.”
The patient clerk repeated for the second time that these were the orders of the university Council. The students had brought it upon themselves by disorderly behavior.
The disgusted parent snorted in contempt. “Disorderly behavior?” he said. “A little healthy fun! Haven’t we all done the same in our time?”
He looked about him for approval, finding it. The parents and relatives queuing for passes were unanimous in blaming the authorities for being some twenty-five years behind the times.
“Take your son to dinner, signore,” said the harassed clerk, “but have him back at the students’ hostel by nine o’clock. Or in his lodgings, if he is quartered in the town. You will have all the opportunity you require for celebrations tomorrow and the day after.”
One by one they turned away rejected, followed by their disgruntled and protesting young. I put my head in at the window of the Registrar with small hope of success.
“The name is Fabbio,” I said, “Armino Fabbio. I’m an assistant at the library, and have an invitation from Professor Donati for a meeting at the ducal palace this evening at nine o’clock.”
To my surprise, instead of instantly rejecting me the clerk consulted a list at his side.
“Armino Fabbio,” he said. “That’s quite in order. We have your name on the list.” He handed me a slip of paper. “Signed by the Director of the Arts Council himself.” The clerk even had the courtesy to smile.
I took the slip and edged out of the queue before the parent behind me had time to protest. Next problem, where to eat? I had no intention of pushing my way into the already crowded restaurants in the town—what few there were—or of joining the Silvani dining-table. I decided to try my luck at the university canteen. Here there was standing room only, but I did not mind. A bowl of soup and a plate of salami, a pleasant contrast to the octopus of the night before, soon took the edge off appetite. The mass of students were so busy eating and declaiming at the same time against the detested curfew that I passed unnoticed, or at any rate was taken for granted as a lesser member of the university staff.
The general intention, so I gathered, both ears alert, was to make up for this evening’s treatment by painting the town red on the Thursday and the Friday nights. All hell would be let loose.
“They can’t stop us!”
“We can’t all be expelled.”
“I’ve got my degree anyway, so shit to the lot of them.”
One of the big-mouthed students was standing at the far end of the counter with his back to me. This was lucky, because it was the fellow who had wanted to douse me in the fountain on the Monday afternoon.
“I’m just not standing for it,” he said. “My father can pull strings, and if there’s any trouble he’ll get some of these professors on the university Council sacked. I’m twenty-one, and they can’t treat me like a child of ten. I shall ignore the curfew and stay on the streets until midnight if I feel like it. Anyway, the curfew isn’t intended for the C and E students. It’s for all these little teachers who study Latin and Greek and go bye-byes at the students’ hostel.”
He looked about him, hoping for trouble. I had caught his eye on Monday and had no desire to catch it again. I slipped out of the canteen and made my way downhill to the ducal palace. The piazza Maggiore already wore an air of festival. Although it was barely dusk the palace was floodlit, and the Duomo too. The rose walls of the first had an incandescent quality, and the great windows of the eastern façade, luminous and marble white, came suddenly alive. The palace was no longer a museum, a gallery hung with tapestries and pictures round which the tourist would prowl his indifferent way, but a living entity. Thus the linkboys saw it five hundred years ago, under moonlight and with flares and torches. Horses’ hooves rang on the cobbled stones, mingling with the clink of spurs. Harnesses jingled as saddles and trappings were removed, grooms and servants scattered, and through the great carved portico walked or rode the returning scion of the Malebranche, his gloved left hand upon his sword.
Tonight the students, with some twenty minutes or so still to spare before curfew, strolled up and down, arm in arm with visiting relatives. A group by the fountain began to whistle and call at two girls who pattered by, feigning the inevitable disdain. Somewhere a vespa spluttered, somewhere there was a shout of raucous laughter. I went to the side entrance and pressed the bell, feeling like a wanderer between two worlds. Behind me lay the present, slick, proficient, uniform, the young the same the globe over, mass-produced like eggs; and before me stood the past, that sinister and unknown world of poison and rapine, of power and beauty, luxury and filth, when a painting could be carried through the streets and worshipped by the rich and by the rabble alike; when God was feared; when men and women sickened of the plague and died like dogs.
The door was opened, not by the night-guardian, but by a boy dressed as a page. He asked for my pass. I handed him the disk Aldo had given me and he took it, saying nothing, and lifting the flare from the stand beside him preceded me across the quadrangle. There were no lights. I had not thought how dark the palace would be without electricity. I had seen the torch-lit apartments above on Saturday, but here below, and on the stairs, the normal lighting had been switched on. Not so tonight. As we mounted the great stairs the torchlight turned our shadows into giants. The page who climbed before me, in his belted doublet and hose, did not seem to be in fancy dress. I was the interloper. The gallery surrounding the quadrangle was black as pitch. One single flare, stuck in a bracket, cast a baleful stream of light upon the door of the throne room. The page knocked twice upon it. We were admitted.
The throne room was empty, lighted in similar fashion to the gallery outside, with two flares set in brackets, and we went across it to the Room of the Cherubs at the further end, where the session had been held on Saturday. This too was empty, and lit by torches. The doors leading to the Duke’s bedroom, and to the audience room, were shut. The page knocked twice upon the door of the first. It was opened by a young man whose face I recognized as one of those guitarists who had made so merry upon the stage at the theater on Monday. I recognized nothing else. He wore a jerkin of bottle green, the sleeves slashed with purple, and his hose were black. On his heart he wore the emblem of a falcon’s head.
“Is it Armino Donati?” he asked.
My second name, unused for at least seventeen years, surprised me.
“Yes,” I said cautiously, “sometimes known as Armino Fabbio.”
“Here we prefer Donati,” he replied.
He jerked his head for me to enter. I did so and the door was closed, the attendant page remaining in the Room of the Cherubs. I looked about me. The Duke’s bedroom was half the size of the preceding room, and it was lighted, like the others, by flares in brackets, these flares placed on either side of the one great portrait on the wall to throw it into relief so that it dominated the room. It was the portrait of the “Temptation of Christ,” Christ bearing the likeness to Duke Claudio.
There were twelve men in the room, including the guitarist who had admitted me. They were all dressed as courtiers of the early sixteenth century, and wore the insignia of the Falcon. The scrutineers who had examined our passes on the Saturday were among them, and the two duelists, and others I had seen on the stage on Monday evening. I felt, and no doubt looked, an idiot in my modern garb, and to give myself assurance strolled over to the picture to examine it. No one took any notice of me. All were aware of my presence, but they chose, perhaps from delicacy, to ignore it.
The Christ Duke Claudio, lit by flares, stared out with greater power from his frame than he did by day. The crudity of the modeling did not show, and the rather awkward stance, the hand upon the girdle, the inelegant feet, were now subdued. The eyes, deep-lidded, distant, stared into a troubled future that might have seemed imminent to the painter’s mind, threatening his world, or else quiescent, not to erupt till centuries later. The tempter, Satan, was the same Christ in profile, suggesting, not a lack of models, but a rash attempt at truth. The portrait might have lost its power to terrify, but not to cause unease. I wondered that it had survived five centuries, to confound the vandals and to mock the Church. Today the tourist, with his eye upon his watch, the message missed, would pass it by unquestioning.
I felt a hand upon my shoulder. My brother stood behind me. He must have entered the room from the small dressing room and chapel beyond.
“What do you make of it?” he asked.
“You knew once,” I said. “I used to act him, as I acted Lazarus. But never willingly.”
“You might do so again,” he said.
He swung me round, showing me to his twelve companions. Like them, he was wearing the same period dress, but for the color. Like the tempter, he was all in black.
“Here is our Falcon,” he said. “He can play Duke Claudio at our Festival.”
The twelve men looked at me and smiled. One of them seized a saffron-colored robe that was lying on a stool near the chapel entrance and belted it around me. Another picked up a golden-curled wig and clapped it on my head. A third brought me a mirror. Time was no longer with me. Neither this time, nor the time of centuries past. I had gone back to childhood, to my bedroom in the via dei Sogni, and stood still to obey my brother’s commands. The men who surrounded me were his companions of the liceo long ago. As then, protesting that I did not want to play, I stammered now, in what I hoped were adult words, “Aldo, I’d rather not. I came here to watch the rest of you. Not to take part.”
“One and the same thing,” said Aldo. “We are all equally involved. I’m offering you a choice. The part of the Falcon, one short hour of glory and adventure in your life which will never come again; or to be turned loose tonight in the streets of Ruffano without a pass, when you will be picked up and, your identity established, given a grilling by the local police, who, so I was told earlier today, have been continually in touch with the police in Rome.”
None of the young faces crowded round me was hostile. They were friendly; they were also ruthless. They stood there, waiting for my answer.
“Here you are safe,” said Aldo, “whether with me or with them. All these twelve lads have sworn to defend you whatever happens. If you go out of the palace alone who knows what may happen to you?”
Somewhere, either in the city center, or parading in plain clothes up and down the via Rossini, or watching by the porta del Sangue or the porta Malebranche, could be my police agent from Rome, waiting to question me. Useless to tell myself that they could not prove me guilty. The question was—should I be able to establish my innocence? Both Aldo’s alternatives appalled me, but the second frightened me the more. The voice that came from me was not my adult voice, but sounded to my ears like the ghostly echo of a child of seven, who, wearing the blanket robes of Lazarus, was thrust into his living tomb.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked my brother.