20

I did not want to be alone. I sought out Jacopo, who was about to leave for his own quarters across the double entrance. “May I come with you?” I asked him diffidently.

He looked surprised, then pleased, and waved me on. “By all means, Signor Beo,” he said. “I’m cleaning the silver. Come and keep me company.”

We passed through to his domain. He led me to his own kitchen—kitchen and living room in one, the window facing the via dei Sogni. It was cheerful, snug, a canary in its cage singing to the strains of a transistor radio which Jacopo, out of possible deference to me, switched off. The walls were covered with pictures of aircraft, torn from the pages of magazines and framed. Pieces of silver, knives and forks and spoons, dishes and jugs, stood on the center of the kitchen table in various stages of his cleaning process, some covered with a pink paste, others already polished.

I recognized most of them. I picked up a small round porringer and smiled. “That’s mine,” I said, “it was a christening present. Marta never would let me use it. She said it was too good.”

“The Capitano keeps it for sugar,” said Jacopo, “he always uses it with his morning coffee. His own is too big.”

He showed me a larger bowl that he had not yet cleaned.

“I remember that too,” I told Jacopo. “It stood in the dining room, and my mother put flowers in it.”

Both bowls, Aldo’s and mine, were inscribed with our initials, A.D.

“The Capitano is very particular about all the family things,” said Jacopo. “If any of the china gets broken, which isn’t often, he is very upset, or if anything is lost. He will throw away nothing that belongs to the old days, and to his father.”

I put the porringer back. Jacopo took it from me and began to clean it.

“It’s strange,” I said, “that he should be like that, and respect tradition.”

“Strange?” repeated Jacopo, astonished. “I assure you it is not, Signor Beo. He’s been that way as long as I’ve known him.”

“Perhaps,” I answered, “but he was a rebel as a boy.”

“Ah, boys,” shrugged Jacopo, “we are all of us different when we are boys. The Capitano will be forty in November.”

“Yes,” I said.

The canary started singing again. The song was artless, happy.

“I’m concerned about my brother, Jacopo,” I said.

“No need,” answered Jacopo shortly. “The Capitano always knows what he’s about.”

I picked up a leather and began polishing my own small porringer. “Has he not changed at all during the past years?” I asked.

Jacopo considered, frowning a little, as he warmed to his task. “He’s more thoughtful, perhaps,” he said, after a moment. “He has his moods, as I have mine. It doesn’t do to disturb him when he’s alone across the way, thinking.”

“What does he think about?”

“If I knew that,” replied Jacopo, “I wouldn’t be here in my kitchen polishing the silver. I’d be like him, a member of the Arts Council, telling other people what to do.”

I laughed and let it go. Jacopo had a certain rugged wisdom.

“We suit each other very well, the Capitano and I,” he said. “We understand one another. I have never pried into his concerns, as Marta did.”

“Marta?” I asked, surprised.

“It wasn’t just the drinking, Signor Beo. She became possessive through the years. Her age, no doubt. She wanted to know everything. What the Capitano was doing, where he was going, who were his friends, what were his intentions. Oh yes, that, and a lot else besides. I told your brother, ‘If I ever become like that, fire me immediately, I’ll know the reason why.’ He promised to do so. But he needn’t worry. I shan’t.”

My porringer was clean. My initials shone with brilliance. Jacopo handed me Aldo’s porringer and I started to polish that in turn.

“What happened finally?” I asked. “Did he turn her out of the house?”

“It was last November,” said Jacopo, “just after his birthday. He had a small celebration for some of the students from the university, and one lady to act as hostess, Signora Butali.” He paused a moment, then added, thinking perhaps to explain something that might seem surprising, even shocking, “Professor Butali was at a conference in Padua at the time. And no doubt it would seem to the signora that, as the guests were all students at her husband’s university, there would be nothing improper about her acting as hostess to them. Marta cooked the dinner and I served. The evening was a great success. The students brought their guitars and there was singing, and later the Capitano took the signora home. Marta had been drinking and she wouldn’t go to bed—she insisted on staying up until he returned. What happened I don’t know, but there was some violent discussion between them, and next morning she packed her things and left and went to live with the Ghigis.”

“And Aldo?” I asked.

“It upset him very much,” admitted Jacopo. “He took the car and went off alone for about five days. He said he went to the sea. When he came back he told me briefly that he didn’t want to discuss Marta or what had happened, and that was that. He continued to keep her, though—he paid for her board and lodging, the Ghigis told me. Marta never told them what had happened either. Even when she was drinking, and that was most of the time after she left here, she told them nothing. She did not as much as mention the Capitano’s name. But you know, Signor Beo, it was jealousy, nothing more nor less than common jealousy. That’s women for you.” He whistled up at the canary, who, swaying on its perch, feathers rumpled, was nearly bursting its small heart in song. “They’re all the same,” he said, “whether they’re women of quality like the signora or peasants like Marta. They try to squeeze a man dry. They come between a man and his work.”

I held Aldo’s porringer to the light. Through the scrolled initials my own face was reflected back at me. I wondered what they were discussing at 8, via dei Sogni, and whether, when the Heads of the Departments left, the Rector would speak to my brother alone, and if he would mention, deliberately or casually, the anonymous telephone calls.

Then suddenly I knew. The woman who had made the anonymous telephone calls had been Marta. That was why Marta had gone to Rome, Marta, dismissed by Aldo after the birthday dinner in November, had pondered and brooded during the ensuing weeks and months, had guessed perhaps that when Professor Butali fell ill in Rome after Christmas Aldo had grown closer to the signora, seen her more often, perhaps become her lover. Marta, her love and loyalty spurned, her mind disintegrating through drink and despair, had sought revenge upon Aldo by betraying him to the Rector.

I put down the silver porringer and went and stood by the window under the canary’s cage. The calls had ceased now for more than a week, the Rector had told me. They had ceased for one good reason: the caller was dead. Now, for the first time in the ten days since it had happened, I was glad that she was dead. The Marta who had died was not the Marta I remembered. Alcohol, like poison, had turned her warm blood sour. Her last act, like that of a sick animal, had been to bite her master’s hand, and in taking that final journey she had found death waiting for her at the end of it.

In a sense, it was retribution. The slanderer had been silenced, the serpent had died in its own venom… Why did I suddenly remember the crazy maxims of the Falcon, quoted by the German scholar in his lives of the Dukes of Ruffano? “The proud shall be stripped… the haughty violated… the slanderer silenced, the serpent die in its own venom…”

The canary’s song finished in one last passionate trill. I looked up at it. The small throat quivered and was still.

“Jacopo,” I said slowly, “when was my brother last in Rome?”

Jacopo was setting the silver he had cleaned and polished upon a tray to take it across the way to Aldo’s house.

“In Rome, Signor Beo?” he replied. “Let me see, it was the Sunday before last—it will be two weeks this coming Sunday, Palm Sunday. He went to Rome on the Friday to consult some manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nazionale, and then he drove back to Ruffano through the Tuesday night. He likes to drive through the night. He was here for breakfast on Wednesday morning.”

Jacopo went through into Aldo’s house, carrying the tray, leaving the doors open. I sat down on one of his kitchen chairs, staring in front of me. Aldo could have killed Marta. Aldo could have driven past the church even as the touring coach had done and recognized the humped figure lying inside the porch. He could have got out of the car and gone to speak to her. She could have told him then, drunk and in despair, what she had been trying to do. He could have killed her. I remembered the knife that had slipped so suddenly from his sleeve last night at the ducal palace when he cut the bonds that bound Marelli’s hands. Aldo could have carried the knife in Rome. Aldo could have murdered Marta.

I heard footsteps passing the window outside the kitchen. They paused by the double entrance, then turned in at Jacopo’s door. A young voice said, “Armino?”

It was the student Cesare. He was wearing my light overcoat and hat and carried my suitcase.

“I’ve brought your things from the via San Michele,” he said. “Giorgio and Domenico kept Signora Silvani engaged in the sitting room, pestering her for a contribution for the university funds. She did not know that I went upstairs and packed for you. I was there less than five minutes. I’ve come to take you out of Ruffano.”

I looked at him dully. His words were meaningless. Why should I have to leave Ruffano now? My thoughts of the last few minutes had left me numb.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “those are Aldo’s orders. He arranged everything this morning. If we could have found you we should have got you away sooner.”

“I thought,” I said, “I was supposed to play the Falcon in the Festival?”

“Not now,” he answered. “I’m to drive you to Fano and put you on board a fishing-boat. It’s all been fixed. Aldo gave no reason.”

My brother had worked quickly. Whether he had taken his decision last night when we parted so abruptly, or later, I could not tell, nor apparently did Cesare know. Perhaps it did not matter. Perhaps nothing mattered. Except that Aldo wanted to be rid of me.

“Very well,” I said, “I’m ready.”

I stood up, and he gave me my coat and hat. I followed him out of the kitchen. Jacopo came through to the double entrance carrying the empty tray. He nodded when he saw Cesare, and said good day.

“I have to leave, Jacopo,” I told him. “I’ve had my orders.”

His face remained inscrutable. “We shall miss you, Signor Beo,” he said.

I shook hands with him, and he disappeared back into his own domain. The Alfa-Romeo was parked outside. Cesare opened the door and threw my suitcase into the back. I climbed into the passenger seat, and drove out of the city and on to the Fano road.

I was quitting, for the second time in twenty years, my birthplace and my home. Not, as then, waving an enemy flag, but still a fugitive, flying from a crime I had not committed, acting, perhaps—God knows—as my brother’s surrogate. Hence my banishment, hence the flight to Fano. I was laying a false trail, away from Ruffano, away from Aldo.

I watched the road ahead, Ruffano behind us now forever, hidden by the encircling hills, and the brown earth to the left, stubbled with the fast-growing shoots of corn, was saffron-colored like the Falcon’s robe. The road turned and twisted, and later the river ran to keep us company, soon to empty itself, blue-green and limpid, onto the Adriatic shores, already burning under the April sun. The nearer we drew to Fano the more despairing I became, the more angry, the more lost.

“Cesare,” I said, “why do you follow Aldo? What makes you believe in him?”

“We have no one else we can follow,” said Cesare, “Giorgio, Romano, Domenico, and the rest. He speaks in a language we understand. Nobody ever has before. We were orphans, and he found us.”

“How did he find you?”

“By inquiries, through his old comrades who were partisans. Then he arranged for grants for us with the university Council. There are others who have graduated and left—they owe everything to him.”

My brother had done this for me. He had done it because he thought me dead. Now, knowing that I lived, he was sending me away.

“But if he has worked all these years for the university and for students like yourselves who can’t afford the fees,” I persisted, “why does he want to destroy it now, setting one group of students against another, staging these elaborate hoaxes, the last of which ended in Marelli’s death?”

“Do you call them hoaxes?” asked Cesare. “We don’t. Nor would Rizzio and Elia. They’ve learned humility. As for Marelli, he died because he ran. Didn’t the priests teach you as a child? He that seeks to save his life shall lose it?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but that’s different.”

“Is it?” said Cesare. “We don’t think so. Nor does Aldo.”

We were approaching the outskirts of Fano, the houses bleak and impersonal like biscuit tins splayed out upon the landscape. I was filled with a terrible despair.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“To the port,” he answered, “to a fisherman, an ex-partisan called Marco. You’re to go on board his boat and he’ll land you, in a day or so, further up the coast, perhaps at Venice. You don’t have to think of anything. He’ll wait for further instructions from Aldo.”

Depending, I supposed, on what transpired with the police, and whether or not the trail was lost. Whether an absent courier, Armino Fabbio, had disappeared without a trace, successfully.

The rounded bay lay blue and still and the great beach, white like an inverted oyster-shell, was already dotted with the black figures of early tourists. Line upon line of bathing-sheds were being painted for the season. Easter was only another week away. The soft air stank of the humid sea. To the right lay the canal.

“Here we are,” said Cesare.

He had drawn up before a café in the via Squero at the canal’s edge, near where the fishing-boats were moored. A man in faded jeans, his skin burned black by sea and sun, was sitting at a table smoking a cigarette, a drink in front of him. At sight of the Alfa-Romeo he sprang to his feet and came over to us. Cesare and I got out and Cesare handed me my suitcase and my hat and coat.

“This is Armino,” he said. “The Capitano sends his regards.” The fisherman Marco put out a great hand and shook mine. “You are very welcome,” he said. “I shall be pleased to have you on board my boat. Let me take your case and your coat. We will embark very shortly. I was only waiting for you and for my engineer. In the meantime, have a drink.”

Never, not even as a child, had I felt more completely in the hands of a fate that was not mine to command. I was like a package dumped upon a quayside before being swung by a crane into a ship’s hold. I think Cesare pitied me.

“You’ll be all right,” he said, “once you’re at sea. Have you a message to send Aldo?”

What message could I send beyond what he must already know—that what I was doing now I did for him?

“Tell him,” I said, “that before the proud were stripped and the haughty violated, the slanderer was silenced and the viper died in its own venom.”

The words meant nothing to Cesare. It was his comrade Federico who had translated the German history. The manuscripts my brother had consulted in Rome would have borne Duke Claudio’s maxims too.

“Good-bye,” he said, “and good luck.”

He climbed back into the car, and in a moment he had gone. The fisherman Marco was watching me with curiosity. He asked me what would I drink, and I told him a beer.

“So you’re the Capitano’s young brother?” he asked me. “You’re not a scrap like him.”

“Unfortunately,” I replied.

“He’s a fine man,” he went on. “We fought in the hills side by side, we escaped from the same enemy. Now, when he needs a change from all his activities, he gets in touch with me and comes to sea.” He smiled, and handed me a cigarette. “The sea blows away the dust,” he said, “and all the cares and troubles of city life. You’ll find it does the same to you. Your brother looked a sick man when he came here last November. Five days afloat—it was winter, mind you—and he had recovered.”

The attendant brought my beer. I raised the glass and wished my companion fortune.

“Was that after his birthday?” I asked.

“Birthday? He said nothing about a birthday. It was somewhere around the third week of the month. “I’ve had a shock, Marco,” he told me when he arrived. “Don’t ask me any questions. I’m with you to forget it.” Anyway, there was nothing wrong with him physically. He was as tough as in the old days, and worked like one of the crew. Something else had been worrying him, no doubt. Perhaps a woman.” He raised his glass in answer to my toast. “Good health to you,” he said, “and may you lose your troubles at sea also.”

I drank my beer and thought of what Marco had said. It was evident that Aldo had sought him out after the birthday dinner and the quarrel with Marta. She must have railed at him, drunk, as Jacopo said, and outraged, like all peasants who are deeply religious and bound by a moral code. She must have taxed him with starting an affair with a married woman, and that woman the Rector’s wife. The quarrel would have angered my brother, which was the reason he sent Marta from the house. But why did he talk of a shock?

Footsteps approached and another man stood before the table. Short and grizzled, he was burned even blacker by the sun than Marco.

“This is Franco,” said Marco, “my mate and engineer.”

Franco struck out a hand hairy as a monkey’s paw, and covered with grease.

“Two hours’ work still to do,” he said to his skipper. “I thought it best to warn you, as it means delay in sailing.”

Marco cursed and spat, then turned to me with a shrug of his shoulder.

“I promised your brother we would be at sea by noon,” he said. “That was when he telephoned early this morning. Next, it seemed, there was difficulty in finding you. And now our engine has to give trouble. We shall be lucky if we are away by five.” He stood up and pointed along the canal to where the vessels were moored. “See the blue boat there, with the yellow mast and the center dog-house?” he said. “That’s our craft, the ‘Garibaldi.’ Franco and I will take your case and coat aboard and you can follow us later, within the hour. Will that suit you, or would you prefer to come with us right away?”

“No,” I said, “no, I’ll stay here and finish my drink.”

They walked off along the side of the canal and I sat outside the café, watching until they had climbed aboard. My quarters for the next few days did not tempt me. Marco was right when he told me I did not look like my brother. I was a seasoned traveler on land, but not on water. As a courier I had disgraced myself by being seasick in the Bay of Naples before my clients. The flat oil swell of the Adriatic looked equally repellent.

I sat there, finishing my beer. It was the dead hour of the day. I wondered if the meeting in the via dei Sogni was over. Presently I got up and wandered aimlessly along the side of the canal, but instead of going directly to the boat turned left and strolled on to the beach. Already the sun-worshippers were stripped and lying with torsos naked to the sky. Children screamed and paddled at the water’s edge. The bathing-sheds, sticky with new paint, stood in rows, one behind the other, and in front of them, orange and brilliant red, the sun umbrellas spread canopies above the glaring sand. Despondency was heavy within me. I could not shake it off.

A group of children in gray uniforms with hair cropped short, escorted by a nun, came clumping down the beach towards the sea. They pointed to the water, their small faces alight with stupendous surprise, and turning to the nun ran to her, begging permission to take off their shoes. She gave it, her eyes kindly behind her gold-rimmed spectacles.

“Quietly now, children, quietly,” she said, and as she bent to gather together their shoes her skirts and wimple billowed about her like a balloon. The children, suddenly released and free, ran with uplifted arms towards the sea.

“They’re happy, anyway,” I said.

“Their first visit to the sea,” answered the nun. “They all come from orphanages inland, and at Easter we have a camp for them here at Fano. There is another camp at Ancona.”

The children were knee deep in the water, shouting and splashing one another. “I shouldn’t let them do that,” said the nun, “but I ask myself, what does it matter? They have so little joy.”

One little fellow, having stubbed his toe, burst into tears and came running up the beach towards her. She took him in her arms and comforted him, found a plaster from within her ample robes and placed it on his toe, sending him back again to join the others.

“This is the part of the work I like best,” she confided, “bringing the children to the sea. The Sisters of the various organizations take it in turns. I have not far to come. I’m from Ruffano.”

The world was small. I thought of the bleak building near to the now resplendent Hotel Panorama.

“The foundling hospital,” I said. “I know it. I’m from Ruffano too, but long ago. I never went inside the hospital.”

“The building needs replanning,” she said, “and we may have to move. There is talk of building us new quarters at Ancona, where the former Superintendent of our hospital died.”

We stood together, watching the children splashing in the sea.

“Are they all orphans?” I asked, thinking of Cesare.

“Yes, all,” she said, “either orphaned, or left on the hospital doorsteps within a few hours of their birth. Sometimes the mother is too weak to move far, and we find her, and look after her and her baby. Then she goes to work, leaving the baby with us. Sometimes, but very rarely, it is possible to find a home where both are taken in.” She raised her hand, and waved to the children not to venture in too far. “That is the happiest answer,” she said, “both for the mother and the child. But there are not many people who will offer their home to a foundling these days. Occasionally a young married couple will have lost their first child at birth and come to us to seek another to replace it quickly, so bringing the child up as their own.” She turned to me, smiling once more behind her spectacles. “But that,” she said, “requires great confidence between the bereaved parents and the superintendent of the foundling hospital. The record remains a secret forever afterwards. It’s better for everyone concerned.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes, I suppose so.”

She took a whistle from some capacious pocket within her skirt and blew it twice. The children turned their heads and stared, then rushed from the water up the beach towards her, scampering like little dogs.

“You see?” she said, laughing. “I have them very well trained.”

I looked at my watch. I was well trained as well. It would soon be four. Perhaps I should go and find my way on board the “Garibaldi” and settle in.

“If you come from Ruffano too,” said the nun, “you should call in sometime and see the children there. Not these, of course, but those I look after at the foundling hospital.”

“Thank you,” I lied politely, “perhaps I will,” and then, more from courtesy than from curiosity, I said, “Will you move to the new orphanage at Ancona if they decide to build there?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “my life is with the children. Some fifty years ago I was a foundling too.”

A kind of pity seized me. The plain, contented face had known no other existence, no other world. She, and hundreds like her, had been dumped upon a doorstep to find mercy.

“At Ruffano?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but it was harder for us in those days. The rules were strict, the life was spartan. No seaside holidays for orphans then, despite the kindness of our Superintendent, Luigi Speca.”

The children had arrived and she gathered them round her in a semicircle and produced oranges and apples from a carrier bag.

“Luigi Speca?” I repeated.

“Yes,” she answered, “but he died many years ago, in 1929. He was buried in Ancona, as I told you.”

I said good-bye to her and thanked her. I don’t know what I thanked her for. Perhaps it was for illumination from God. Perhaps the shaft of sunlight that fell upon my face as I turned west and walked up the beach beyond the bathing-huts was like the blinding stroke that hit Saul upon the Damascus road. Suddenly I perceived. Suddenly I knew. My father’s letter and the double baptismal entry were made plain. Aldo had been a foundling too. Their son had died, Luigi Speca had given them Aldo. The secret, held for nearly forty years, had been betrayed by Marta last November. Aldo, proud of his lineage, proud of his heritage, proud of all he held most dear, had learned the truth and kept it to himself these past five months. It was Aldo who had been stripped and violated, Aldo who had lost face, not to the friends who did not know, but in his own eyes. The hoaxer had been hoaxed. He who had wanted to unmask hypocrisy had been himself unmasked.

I walked along the canal side in the opposite direction from the boat, and so into the town. My few belongings were on board the “Garibaldi,” but they meant nothing. I had only one thought in mind, and that was to go to Aldo. Somewhere in Fano there must be a train, a bus, that would take me back to Ruffano. Tomorrow was the Festival, and I had to be with Aldo when the Falcon fell.