When I reached the bus station I realized that I only had two thousand lire in my pocketbook. I was to have gone to the Registrar’s office at the university that morning to receive my salary, but owing to my visit to Signora Butali, and because of hiding in Carla Raspa’s apartment, I had never gone. I remembered too that I owed Signora Silvani for my lodging. Perhaps Aldo would have thought of that.
A car to Ruffano would cost more than two thousand lire. I inquired at the bus depot and was told that the last bus for Ruffano had left at half-past three. One was about to leave for Pesaro along the coast, and since Pesaro was some ten kilometers nearer to my destination than Fano I boarded it at once. As the road traversed the canal I looked right, towards the port, and thought of the partisan Marco and his mate Franco working on the engine, waiting for me to join them. When I did not turn up they would go into the town and look for me, inquire in the bars and cafés. Then Marco would telephone Aldo and tell him that I had vanished.
I looked out of the window, trying to make plans. If Aldo had killed Marta he had done so, not because she threatened to betray his possible liaison with Signora Butali, but because she intended to expose the secret of his birth. The Director of the Arts Council was not Donati’s son but a foundling, the least of Ruffano’s citizens, and this to Aldo meant unendurable humility and shame. What I wanted to do was to tell Aldo that I understood. That I did not care. That he was as much my brother now as always, that everything of mine was his. As a boy he had cherished and tormented me in turn, as a man he did so still. But I knew now what I had never known before, that he was vulnerable. Because of this, at long last, we should meet on equal terms.
The twelve kilometers to Pesaro were soon covered. I got down from the bus and studied the timetable to Ruffano. There was a bus at half-past five. I had just an hour to wait. I began to wander down the street, full of pedestrians, many of them tourists as aimless as myself, staring in shopwindows or bound for the attractions of the beach beyond the town. Prolonged hooting sounded in my ear, two vespas swerved close to the pavement beside me and a girl’s voice called, “Armino!” There were whistles and shouts. I turned, and there were Caterina and Paolo Pasquale on a vespa, she riding pillion, and behind them the two students Gino and Mario from the Silvani pensione.
“Caught you,” called Caterina. “You can’t escape. We know all about you, and how you sneaked upstairs and fetched your things, and went off without paying Signora Silvani what you owed her.”
They all four dismounted and surrounded me. Passersby turned to stare.
“Listen,” I said, “I can explain…”
“You’d better explain,” interrupted Paolo. “You can’t treat the Silvanis that way; we won’t allow it. Hand over the money now, or we’ll turn you in to the police.”
“I haven’t got the money,” I said. “I’ve got less than two thousand lire on me.”
We were blocking the route. Someone in a passing car shouted at the students. Paolo jerked his head at Caterina.
“Follow us to the café Rossini,” he said. “Armino shall ride behind me on the vespa. We’ll get some sense out of him there. Gino and Mario, follow along behind; see he doesn’t try any tricks.”
There was nothing for it but to do as he said. To have argued further would have meant more trouble. Shrugging, I climbed behind him on the vespa and we shot off in the midst of the traffic to the piazza del Popolo, coming to a stop beside the colonnade beneath Pesaro’s ducal palace. Here both vespas were parked, and with Paolo leading the way, and Gino and Mario on either side of me, I was marched to a small café-bar a few yards off. We went in, and Paolo pointed to a table near the window.
“This will do,” he said. “Caterina will join us directly.”
He ordered beer for all, including me, and when the waiter had disappeared he turned and faced me, his arms folded on the table.
“Now then,” he asked, “what have you got to say?”
“I’m wanted by the police,” I said. “I had to run.”
The three students exchanged glances. “That’s what Signora Silvani thought,” Gino burst in. “Someone was inquiring for you this morning, but he didn’t say why. He looked like a police agent in plain clothes.”
“I know,” I said, “I spotted him. That’s why I ran. That’s why I didn’t pick up what was due to me from the Registrar’s office, and why I couldn’t pay Signora Silvani. If you were in my shoes you’d have done the same.”
The three of them stared at me. The waiter arrived with our drinks, set them down and went away.
“What have you done?” asked Paolo.
“Nothing,” I replied, “but the evidence is strong against me. In point of fact I believe I’m taking the rap for somebody else. If that’s the case, I’ll go on doing so. The other fellow happens to be my brother.”
Caterina arrived, disheveled and out of breath. She dragged forward a chair and sat between Paolo and me.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Paolo explained briefly. Caterina looked at me in turn.
“I believe him,” she said, after a moment. “We’ve known him for a week. He’s not the sort to run without good reason. Is it something to do with the tourist agency where you worked before coming to Ruffano?”
“Yes,” I said. Which in a backhanded way was true.
Mario, who had remained silent up to now, leaned forward. “Why Pesaro?” he asked. “With only two thousand lire. How do you plan to get away from here?”
They were no longer truculent or mistrustful. Gino handed me a cigarette. I looked at them, and thought how they were of the same generation as Cesare, Giorgio and Domenico. They were all young. They were all untried. However much they differed in their outlook, in their aims, fundamentally they were all eager for adventure and for life.
I said, “I’ve had time to think, the past few hours. I realize now it was a mistake to leave Ruffano. I want to go back. I was going to take the bus at half-past five.”
They watched me silently, drinking their beer. I think they were puzzled.
“Why go back?” asked Paolo. “Won’t the police get you?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But I’m no longer afraid. Don’t ask me why.”
They did not laugh or mock. They treated my admission seriously, just as Cesare or Domenico would have done.
“This isn’t a thing that I can discuss with you in detail,” I told them, “but my brother is in Ruffano, using another name. What’s happened between us, if he’s done what I think he’s done, is because of family pride. I’ve got to straighten it out. I’ve got to talk to him.”
This they understood. They pressed no questions. A live interest showed in all four faces. Caterina, impulsive, touched my arm.
“That makes sense,” she said, “at any rate to me. If I was suspected of something I believed Paolo had done, even though I might take the blame for it I should want to know his reason. There must be honesty between people tied by blood. Paolo and I are twins. Perhaps that makes us closer.”
“It’s not just ties of family,” said Gino, “it’s ties of friendship too. I might take the blame for something Mario did, but first I should have to know why.”
“Is that how you feel about your brother?” asked Caterina.
“Yes,” I said, “it is.”
They drank their beer and then Paolo said, “We’ll see Signora Silvani gets her money. That’s a small point now. The immediate thing is to get you to Ruffano, and at the same time dodge the police. We’ll help you. But we’ve got to make a plan.”
Their generosity moved me. Why did they have faith in me? There was no reason for it. Any more than there had been reason for Carla Raspa to let me hide in her apartment. I might have been a murderer, yet she believed in me. I could be a common swindler, yet the students trusted me.
“But of course,” said Caterina suddenly, “the Festival. We just disguise Armino as one of us in the insurrection, and I defy any police agent to pick him out from among two thousand others.”
“Disguise him how?” asked Gino. “You know Donati told our crowd to turn up just as we are.”
“That’s it,” said Caterina, “in shirts, jeans, sweaters, anything. Look at Armino. That city suit, that shirt, those shoes. He even dresses like a courier! Give him a different haircut, and a colored shirt inside a pair of jeans, and he won’t even recognize himself.”
“Caterina’s right,” said Paolo. “Let’s take him to the nearest barber and get him crew-cut. Then we’ll find him something to wear in the marketplace. We’ll share the cost all round. All right, Armino, keep your two thousand lire; you may need them.”
I became a lay figure in their hands. We left the café, Paolo paying for the drinks, and I was taken to a barber who transformed me from what I had hitherto believed myself to be, an elegant representative of Sunshine Tours, Genoa, into an undistinguished backstreet hipster. This transformation became even more pronounced when they escorted me later to a cut-price store, and there, behind a row of bargain goods, I divested myself of my one good suit—the other was in the suitcase on board the “Garibaldi”—and donned a pair of black jeans, with a leather belt, a jade green shirt, an ersatz leather jerkin and a pair of sneakers. My own clothes were put in a parcel and handed to Caterina, who told me they were terrible, and she would do her best to lose them. They stood me in front of a mirror in the store, and—I suppose it was chiefly the haircut—I doubted if even Aldo would recognize me. I might have been an immigrant just landed on American shores, a semi-barbarian already, with only the flick-knife missing.
“You look terrific,” said Caterina, squeezing my hand, “much better than before.”
“You have style now,” said Gino. “Before you had nothing.”
Their admiration both baffled and discouraged me. If the object I now was pleased their aesthetic taste, what point in common had we? Or were they merely being kind?
“We’ll live it up a little longer yet,” said Paolo. “No need to return to Ruffano before dark. Caterina shall catch a later bus, and Armino ride with me. We’ll escort the bus on our motorbikes. Let’s go and see if the Sports Palace is open. Caterina, you meet us there.”
Once again I mounted behind Paolo, and for the next few hours I enjoyed the doubtful pleasure of a student’s holiday. We careered backwards and forwards by the beach, by the hotels, up and down the viale Trieste, sometimes racing in company with Gino and Mario, sometimes chasing tourist cars. We patronized the cafés with the loudest radios and the most crowded bars, ending up at a restaurant where we consumed bowlfuls of brodetto, the fish soup flavored with saffron, garlic and tomato that Marta used to make me as a child. Finally, when it was nearing nine, we took Caterina, still carrying my discarded clothes, to catch her bus, and escorting it on either side, much to the disgust and fury of both driver and conductor, we rode back to Ruffano. What fate awaited me no longer mattered. I had ceased to care, while standing on the beach at Fano some five hours before. I clung to Paolo’s belt, and like outriders to the bus we scorched and swerved over the intervening hills.
Ruffano, a celestial city, rose in front of us with a thousand winking lights, the floodlit Duomo and campanile seeming to shine with a white radiance between either summit. Here from the east the ducal palace was screened by other buildings, but the pale glow in the sky revealed its presence and that of the university beyond, while staring across the slopes directly facing us as we rode towards the encircling wall below would be the lights from my old home in the via dei Sogni, where the Butalis must now be dining.
From one of those windows, impossible to discern among its neighbors, Aldo and I had looked across the valley here as boys, feeling ourselves superior to those who lived in the farmsteads beneath, and as I remembered this, clinging tight to Paolo’s belt as we approached the porta Malebranche, I glanced up instinctively to the row of lights, uniform and straight, that came from the foundling hospital on the northern hill. There, in that cold building, forlorn, unclaimed, Aldo would have spent his childhood but for my father and for Luigi Speca. There, clad in a gray overall, with close-cropped head, he would have been a foundling boy, and matured, adult, he would have borne another name. I, the only son of my parents’ later years, would have been christened Aldo in his stead.
The thought was sobering, even chastening. I should have been different too. Instead of growing up in Aldo’s shadow, fearful, overawed, docile to his command, the whole course of my life must have been otherwise. We passed under the porta Malebranche and I knew I would not have it changed. He might not be my brother, he might not be my parents’ son, but from the beginning he had possessed me, body, heart and soul, and he possessed me still. He was my god, he was my devil too. Through all the years I had believed him dead my world had been empty, without meaning.
The bus ground to a halt inside the city gate. Paolo and I, with our companion vespa, shot away to the northern summit and the piazza del Duca Carlo. Here, the scene of Tuesday’s episode, Duke Carlo, floodlit as he had been then, gazed down benignly on the crowd beneath him. Students and Ruffanesi milled backwards and forwards across the piazza and around the gardens under the statue. The Honors graduates paraded wearing medallions strung on chains, as was the custom, so Paolo informed me, applauded and followed by strings of admiring fellow students. Extempore music filled the air—mouth organs, whistles and guitars. Proud parents watched and strolled with indulgent eyes. The inevitable collecting-boxes rattled. Crackers burst and dogs fled howling. Those who possessed cars drove slowly along the piazza, while the vespas, ours among them, roared and spluttered in an ever-widening circle.
“What did I tell you?” said Paolo as two carabinieri wandered sedately past us, immaculate in uniform. “Neither those fellows, nor a dozen others in plain clothes, would look at you. Tonight you’re one of us.”
The largest crowd of students had formed themselves into a group of some hundreds strong outside Professor Elia’s house, and were shouting and calling for him.
“Elia… Elia…” they chanted, and then, as for one brief moment he appeared and waved to them from the front door of his house, a burst of cheering came from the assembled students. Grouped behind him were his associates and members of his Department, and it seemed to me as he stood there, smiling and waving, that something of self-confidence and bravura had returned, yet not quite all. A momentary hesitation when, on the fringe of the crowd, an unseen student shouted “Where are your bathing briefs?” followed immediately by an explosive burst from a cracker and a gulf of involuntary laughter, suggested, as the professor gave a final wave and then withdrew, that the memory of Tuesday night was with him still.
“Who said that?” cried Gino angrily, turning, with many others, to the back of the crowd from where the disturbance came, and at once the murmur rose from all about us, “It’s an Arts man from the other hill. Get him, murder him…” In a moment all was confusion, heads turned, the crowd broke up, people began to run.
“A foretaste of what’s to come,” said Paolo in my ear. “Why worry about him now? We’ll get the lot tomorrow.”
Once more he set the vespa in motion, and Caterina, appearing suddenly from the midst of the crowd, dashed forward and climbed onto the narrow space between the handlebars.
“Come on,” she said breathlessly, “it will take the three of us. Let’s see what’s doing on the other hill.”
We swerved out of the piazza del Duca Carlo, followed by Gino and Mario, and so on to the encircling road on the southwest side of Ruffano, beneath the city walls. Now the façade of the ducal palace shone in splendor, the twin towers paramount, and it was as if the whole edifice was suspended there between heaven and earth, carved out in silhouette against a canopy of stars. We roared down into the valley and up onto the southern hill, but as we topped the rise beneath the students’ hostel and the new university buildings we saw at once that the intermediate roads were blocked. A group of students was there, and not only in force but armed.
“What is it? Are the Arts crowd rehearsing?” shouted Gino as we caught the flash of steel. But they were running down the hill towards us, silently, not shouting, and as Gino braked with his foot and swerved a spear came hurtling through the air and struck the ground in front of us. “Come on at your risk!” a voice called. “My God,” cried Paolo, “that’s no rehearsal!” and braking, like Gino, he turned, before a second spear could follow the first.
We plunged back the way we had come, down into the valley beneath the city walls, braking to a halt on the further side, where we dismounted, staring at one another, while in the distance the floodlit ducal palace shone unheeding and serene. All four faces were white. Caterina was trembling, but with excitement, not with fear.
“Now we know,” said Gino, breathing quickly. “That’s what they have in store for us tomorrow.”
“We were warned,” said Paolo quietly. “Donati warned us at the theater on Monday night. It’s a question of striking first, that’s all. If we get their forward lines with stones and break them up we can rush them and fight close before they have time to launch those spears or use their swords.”
“All the same,” said Mario, “we ought to tell our leaders what we’ve seen. Aren’t they meeting tonight in the via dei Martiri?”
“Yes,” said Gino.
Paolo turned to me. “This may not be your fight, but you’re part of it now,” he said. “What about your brother? Is he connected with the university?”
“Indirectly,” I said.
“Then you had better warn him what he’ll be in for if he goes on the streets tomorrow.”
“I think he knows,” I answered.
Caterina stamped her foot impatiently. “Why waste time talking?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we spread the word round among all our crowd?” Her small face, passionate and white, looked suddenly distorted under her cloud of hair. “None of us should go to bed tonight,” she said. “We ought to bring the others out here into the countryside and dig for stones. We’ll never find stones inside the city. They should be jagged, this size,” she formed a circle with her hands, “and bound with rope, so that we can swing them with greater force.”
“Catte’s right,” said Gino. “Let’s get moving. First to the via dei Martiri to tell the leaders—they may want to issue new instructions. Come on, Mario.”
He swung himself onto his machine, Mario behind him, and took the road towards the porta dei Martiri.
Paolo looked at me. “Well,” he asked, “what now? Do you want us to take you to your brother?”
“No,” I said.
I had made up my mind. To return to the pensione would achieve nothing. Aldo might even hand me over to his students with orders to drive me straight to Fano again. Whereas tomorrow… Tomorrow the cortège of the Falcon would leave the piazza del Duca Carlo at ten a.m. What it would consist of I did not know. Nobody seemed to know. But Aldo would be with it, that I felt certain.
The night was warm. The leather jerkin bought at Pesaro was protection enough. I would spend the night in the open on one of the benches in the public gardens behind the piazza de Duca Carlo.
When I told Paolo this he shrugged his shoulders. “If that’s how you want it, we won’t prevent you,” he said, “but you’ll join us in the morning, remember. We shall be on the steps of San Cipriano. If you’re not in your place by nine you may be stopped. Here, take this.” He handed me a knife. “I’ll get another out of Gino,” he said. “After what we’ve seen tonight you’re going to need it.”
Caterina and I climbed once more onto his machine, and we scorched our way up the northern hill again. The crowds had thinned. Townsfolk and students, relatives and visiting tourists, were wending their way downhill to the city center. I should have the public gardens to myself.
“Don’t forget,” said Caterina, “to fill your pockets with stones. You’ll find plenty there, under the trees. And take your parcel. It will do as a pillow. We’ll look out for you tomorrow, and good luck.”
I watched them swerve down the hill and out of sight, and as they disappeared suddenly, without warning, the floodlights were extinguished everywhere. The statue of Duke Carlo became a shadow. The campanile by the Duomo struck eleven. The city churches followed, one by one. And when the last note sounded I stretched myself out on a bench in the gardens, the parcel as a pillow, and with folded arms stared up at the darkening sky.