19

He found the message in his mail box on returning home: a note written in capital letters indicating a time and place.

He put it in his pocket and climbed the stairs of his old block. As he entered his apartment the bell tower of San Donato began to strike six. He ran to the door leading out to the terrace and threw it open, wanting the sound to come right into the apartment and fill it. He took off his tie and flopped down on an armchair, putting his feet up on the coffee table. From this position all he could see was the outline of the bell tower, the slate of a roof and then a stretch of the horizon. He found a white sheet of paper and wrote in large capitals: “Weep? What’s Hecuba to him?”

He placed the paper next to the note and thought of the connection between them. He was tempted to phone Corrado and tell him: “Corrado, you remember this line? I’ve understood exactly what it means.” He looked at the phone but didn’t move. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to explain. Perhaps he would put it in a letter to Sara, but without offering long explanations, just write it as now he had intuitively understood it, and as she too would understand, that the player who was weeping (but who was he?) saw, albeit in another shape and in another fashion, himself in Hecuba. He thought of the power things have to come back to us and of how much of ourselves we see in others. And like a wave sweeping across him, warm and overwhelming, he remembered a deathbed and a promise made and never kept. And now that promise demanded fulfillment, it was obvious, and found in him and in this quest a kind of accomplishment, a different kind, an apparently incongruous kind, but one which in fact followed an implacable logic, as of some unknown geometry, something one might intuit but could never pin down in a rational order or in an explanation. And he thought that things do follow an order and that nothing happens by chance, that chance in fact is just this: our incapacity to grasp the true connections between things. And he sensed the vulgarity and the arrogance with which we bring together the objects that surround us. He looked about him and thought, what was the connection between the jug on the chest of drawers and the window? They weren’t related in any way, they were foreign to each other; they seemed plausible to him only because one day, many years ago, he had bought that jug and put it on the chest of drawers near the window. The only connection between the two objects was his eyes looking at them. Yet something, something more than this must have led his hand to buy that jug. And that forgotten, hurried gesture was the real connection; everything lay in the gesture, the world and life, and a universe.

And once again he thought of that young man, and now he saw the scene clearly. It had happened like this, he knew it. He saw him come out of his hiding-place and deliberately put himself in the path of the bullets, seeking out the exact position that would bring him his death. He saw him advance down the corridor with calculated determination, as if following the geometry of a particular trajectory so as to accomplish an expiation or achieve a simple connection between events. That was what Carlo Nobodi had done, who as a child had been called Carlito. He had established a connection. Through him things had found a way of tracing their pattern.

So he took the paper where he’d written the question about Hecuba and pegged it out on the washing line on the terrace, then came back in, sat in the same position as before, and looked at it. The paper fluttered like a flag in the stiff breeze. It was a bright, rustling stain against the falling night. He just watched it for a long time, establishing again a connection between that piece of paper flapping in the dusk and the edge of the horizon that was ever so slowly dissolving away into darkness. He got up slowly, overcome by a great tiredness. But it was a calm, peaceful tiredness that led him by the hand towards his bed as if he were a boy again.

And that night he had a dream. It was a dream he hadn’t had for years, too many years. It was a childish dream and he felt light and innocent; and dreaming, he had the curious awareness of having rediscovered this dream, and this heightened his innocence, like a liberation.