The Flight of the Falcon

  The female clerk, some fifty odd, peered at me dourly through her spectacles as Giuseppe Fossi bustled off, bidding us all good night. Then she continued to make notes, her sour expression unchanged, and the younger of the two clerks—I had already heard him addressed as Toni—moved across the room to help me.

  “He’ll lose some weight this evening,” he murmured.

  “With the lady who went out earlier?”

  “They say she’s tireless. I’ve never tried my luck.”

  Signorina Gatti called him sharply to remove some books from the desk in front of her. I hid my face in an enormous ledger. The hour ticked by. At seven precisely I approached her desk and, after obtaining her grudging admission that there was nothing more I could do, made my way towards the Registrar’s office. The young clerk, Toni, followed me, and we walked through the silent quadrangle towards the outer entrance.

  I paused by the great stairway leading to the ducal apartments on the first floor. The lights were on, and I could hear the sound of voices.

  “What’s happening above? Don’t they close at four o’clock out of season?”

  “To the public, yes,” said Toni, “but the Director of the Arts Council comes and goes as he pleases. Besides, he’s particularly involved just now with all the arrangements for the Festival.”

  There was an attendant on duty by the side door. We bade him good night and went out into the piazza Maggiore.

  “The Festival?” I inquired.

  “Why, yes, don’t you know about it? It’s our great day. Inaugurated by the Rector, Professor Butali, really to put the university on the map, but now the whole of Ruffano takes a pride in it and the people flock in from miles around. The students give a fine display. Last year the performance took place here in the ducal palace.” He walked to a vespa leaning against the wall and wound a scarf about his throat. “Got a date?” he asked. “If you haven’t, my Didi will fix you up. She works in ceramics, down in the town, but she knows a lot of the C and E students, and their girls are a lively bunch.”

  “C and E?”

  “Commerce and Economics. It only started three years ago, but soon it’ll outnumber the other Faculties. The C and E students mostly live in the town, or come in by day, hence the fun! They aren’t stuck away in the students’ hostels like the rest.”

  He grinned, and started up his machine. I shouted above the din that I had to go to the Registrar and sign in, as well as find somewhere to sleep. He waved his hand, and was off. I watched him swerve away, feeling about a hundred. Anyone over thirty appears a dotard to the young.

  I walked up to the university building. There was a door on the left marked “Registrar, Private,” and beside it a sliding window panel, with a clerk on duty behind it.

  “The name is Fabbio,” I said, pushing through my credentials. “The librarian, Signor Fossi, told me to call.”

  “Yes, yes…”

  He seemed to know about me, and scribbled something in a book. He handed me out a pass and a form to sign. Also a list of addresses.

  “You ought to be able to find a room from one of these,” he said. “They make a special price for us.”

  I thanked him and turned to go, but paused a moment. “By the way,” I asked, “can you tell me who lives at No. 8, via dei Sogni?”

  “No. 8?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” I said, “the house with the high wall, and the single tree in the small garden.”

  “That is the Rector’s house,” he said, staring, “Professor Butali. But he’s away sick. He’s in hospital in Rome.”

  “I knew that,” I said, “but I had not realized that he lives in the via dei Sogni.”

  “Oh, yes,” he replied. “The Rector and Signora Butali have been there for some years.”

  “Who plays the piano there?”

  “The signora. She teaches music. But I doubt if she is at home. She’s been in Rome with the Rector during the past weeks.”

  “I thought I heard music,” I said, “when I passed the house this afternoon.”

  “She must be back, then,” he answered. “I wouldn’t necessarily know.”

  I wished him good evening and left. So… My home was honored by being the residence of the Rector himself. In old days the head of the university had lived next door to the students’ hostel. There had obviously been many changes, as the fellow selling postcards and flags had told me, and what with the boys and girls studying Commerce and Economics, many of them coming in by day, my quiet city of Ruffano would soon begin to rival Perugia or Turin.

  I walked back downhill past the ducal palace and stood for a moment under the street lamp to study my list of addresses. Via Rossini, via dell’8 Settembre, via Lambetta… no, too close to the students. Via San Cipriano… perhaps. Via San Michele… I smiled. Wasn’t that where Signorina Carla Raspa had her niche? I took out her card. Her address was No. 5; the address given me at the Registrar’s office was 24. It was worth looking at. I picked up my grip once more and walked down to the piazza della Vita.

  It must have been the snow of the preceding night that had driven the world indoors. This evening it was cold, but the stars glittered, the piazza was full, and unlike the midday session, when from long custom the middle-aged males took over, youth predominated. Girls, chattering and with arms interlocked, paraded before the colonnade, while the boys, hands in pockets, laughing, whistling, some of them straddling vespas, hung about in groups. The cinema, beneath the colonnade, was due to start. The lurid poster gave promise of passion under Caribbean skies. Across the way the Hotel dei Duchi looked forlorn and out of date.

  I crossed the piazza, ignoring the glance of a little red-haired beauty—Commerce and Economics, I wondered?—and, turning right, found myself in the via San Michele. I looked for number 5. Discreet enough, with a small car parked outside. Guiseppe Fossi’s? There were chinks of light coming from the shutters on the first floor. Ah, well… Good luck to him. I continued down the street, looking for No. 24. It was on the opposite side, but from the windows one would have a fair view of No. 5. Seized with sudden amusement, coupled with schoolboy malice, I decided to inspect the house. The door was open. Light flooded the hallway. I looked at the name on the list… Signora Silvani. I walked in and looked about me. It was clean, newly decorated, and an enticing smell of fégato alla salvia came from a hidden kitchen. Someone ran down the stairs, calling over her shoulder to the floor above. It was a girl of about twenty, with small elfin features and enormous eyes.

  “Are you looking for Signora Silvani?” she asked. “She’s in the kitchen—I’ll tell her.”

  “No, wait a moment.” I liked the atmosphere, I liked the girl. She might tell me what I wanted to know. “They gave me this address at the university,” I said. “I’m a temporary assistant at the library, and I want a room for a week or two. Anything going?”

  “There’s one vacant on the top floor,” she answered, “but it may be booked. You’ll have to ask Signora Silvani. I’m only a student.”

  “Commerce and Economics?” I asked.

  “Why yes, how did you know?”

  “I’m told they enroll the best-looking girls.”

  She laughed, and arrived in the hall beside me. It is always a gratification to me when a girl is smaller than myself. This one could have been a child.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “At least we’re alive, and let the others know it. Isn’t that true, Paolo?” A boy, equally handsome, had followed her down the stairs. “This is my brother,” she said. “We’re both C and E students. We come from San Marino.”

  I held out my hand to each of them. “Armino Fabbio,” I said, “from Turin, though I work in Genoa usually.”

  They answered in one breath, “Caterina and Paolo Pasquale.”

  “Look,” I said, “would you advise me to try for a room here?”

  “Certainly,” answered the boy. “It’s clean, comfortable, she feeds you well,” he jerked his head towards the kitchen, “and sh
e doesn’t bother you about time. We come and go as we like.”

  “We’re an easy crowd,” said the girl. “Whoever wants to work can work. Whoever wants to play can play. Paolo and I do a bit of both. Yes, you try for that room.”

  Her smile was comradely, inviting. So was his. Without waiting for my answer she went off down the hallway, calling for the signora. The door of the kitchen opened and Signora Silvani emerged. She was a broad, middle-aged woman with a high bosom and enormous hips, good-looking in an engaging, friendly way.

  “You want a room?” she said. “Come and look at it.”

  She pushed past the boy Paolo and myself and began to climb the stairs.

  “You see?” laughed Caterina. “It’s all so simple. Well, I hope you take it. Paolo and I are off to the cinema. Be seeing you.”

  They left the house together, chatting and laughing, and I followed Signora Silvani up the stairs.

  We reached the top floor and she threw open the door of a room, the windows of which looked out on the street below. She switched on the light and I crossed the room to throw back the shutters. I like to know where I am, what I can see. I looked up the street, and saw the small car still parked before No. 5. Then I glanced round the room. It was not large, but it had the essentials.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “Good. Make yourself at home. Board is optional. Give warning in the morning if you want to eat out, but I’m not particular if you forget. We’re serving dinner now, if you want a meal tonight.”

  The casual greeting, the informal atmosphere with no questions asked, this suited me exactly. I unpacked my small grip, washed, shaved, and went downstairs. Voices led me to the dining room. Signora Silvani had already installed herself at the head of the table, and was ladling out the soup. There were four others present, a middle-aged man whom she immediately presented as her husband, as ample and well-fed as herself, and three students, all of them male, harmless in appearance, none of them as striking as young Paolo.

  “Our new boarder, Signor Fabbio,” called my hostess, “and these are Gino, Mario and Gerardo. Sit down, now, and make yourself at home.”

  “No formality, please,” I said. “My name is Armino. It is not so very long ago that I was studying for my own degree in Turin.”

  “Arts?”

  “Foreign languages. Do I look like Arts?”

  There was an immediate chorus of “Yes” at this, and general laughter, while Gino, next to me, explained that it was a joke of the household—anyone new was immediately accused of being Arts.

  “Well, I’m a courier in the tourist business usually,” I told them, “but being temporarily attached to the university library I suppose I come under Arts?”

  There was a universal shout of disapproval, all of it good-natured.

  “Take no notice of them,” smiled my host. “Just because these lads study Commerce and Economics they think they own Ruffano.”

  “But we do, signore,” protested one of them—Gerardo, I think it was. “We’re the new lifeblood of the university. None of the others count.”

  “So you say,” said Signora Silvani as she served my soup, “but I’ve heard differently. The Arts students, and most of the others too, for that matter, look upon your lot as a pack of hooligans.”

  She winked at me mischievously as another howl greeted her remark, and the whole table plunged into university politics, all of it over my head. I ate, and was amused. This was a Ruffano I had never known.

  Gino, my neighbor, explained to me that the new Faculty of Commerce and Economics was already a thriving concern. Because of the additional fees which the students brought in the university had more money to spend than ever before in its long history—hence the additions to the various buildings, and the new library.

  “They couldn’t have afforded any of it but for us,” he said passionately, “and then the rival Faculties, the Education saps, and the Arts, look down their noses and treat us like dirt, or try to do so. But we’ve nearly outnumbered them already, and in another year we’ll flood them out.”

  “I tell you,” said Mario, “one of these days it will come to a fight and I know who’ll win.”

  My friend Toni in the library had called the C and E students a lively crowd. He was certainly right.

  “You know what it is,” observed Signor Silvani, when the students were arguing among themselves, “these lads have never known war. They have to let off steam. Inter-Faculty rivalry is one way of doing it.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “but doesn’t it suggest a want of tact among the professors?”

  He shook his head. “The Rector is a fine man,” he said. “There is no one more respected in Ruffano than Professor Butali. But you know he’s sick.”

  “Yes, they told me so at the library.”

  “They say he nearly died, but he’s on the mend. Signora Butali, too, is a very gracious lady. Highly respected, both of them. This silly rivalry has grown much worse while he’s been away—once he’s back it will soon be squashed, I can tell you. I agree with you, though. I blame much of it on the older professors, or so the chat goes where I work, at the prefettura. The Head of the Department of Education, Professor Rizzio, and his sister, who is in charge of the hostel for women students—they’re both narrow and set in their ways, and perhaps naturally resentful of the Head of C and E, Professor Elia, who is what we call a thruster—rather too sure of himself, he comes from Milan.”

  I thought, as I did justice to Signora Silvani’s excellent cooking, that to be in charge of a coach-load of tourists, all of them strangers, must be an easier matter than keeping the peace among a group of students like these. I had no recollection of such intensity of feeling at Turin.

  Dinner over, our small party dispersed, the students to the piazza della Vita while I excused myself from joining the Silvanis in their parlor for coffee and cigarettes. They were affable and kindly, but I had had enough chatter for the evening.

  I went up to my room to fetch my coat, and then left the house. The car had not moved from No. 5.

  The young people of Ruffano were still parading in the piazza della Vita, but with numbers thinned. Many must have gone into the cinema to watch the Caribbean film, and the rest had wandered home to their lodgings, or to convenient dark corners. I passed the hotel dei Duchi and walked down into the piazza del Mercato. High above me, on my left, loomed the western façade of the ducal palace, the twin towers thrusting to the sky. As a child I had always been in bed at this hour. I had never seen the towers so late at night, or understood their beauty and their grace. The silhouette might be that of some fantastic backdrop at a theater, revealed suddenly to an amazed audience when the curtains parted. Fragile, ethereal at first view, the true impact came later. These walls were real, forbidding, with all the ingenuity of a fortress, concealing the strength within. The twin turrets above their encircling balustrades pierced the darkness like sharpened blades. Beauty was paramount, menace lurked within.

  The via delle Mura surrounding the whole city of Ruffano stretched before me, curving gently, while immediately to my left were the steps leading up to the palace and to the city above. I decided to climb them. My foot was on the first step when I heard the sound of running. Someone was coming down the steps towards me, but in headlong flight. The descent was steep, and to run at speed was to court disaster.

  “Watch out,” I called, “you’ll fall.”

  The running figure emerged from the darkness, stumbled, and I put out an arm to break the fall. The runner was a lad, a student possibly, and as he struggled in my hold, trying to break away, his startled eyes stared up at me in terror.

  “No…” he said. “No… Let me go.”

  Surprised, I relaxed my grip. He ran from me, sobbing, down the last of the steps. The hollow ring of his clattering feet rose to me where I stood.

  Watchful, listening, I continued my climb. The steps were all in shadow, lighted only by one solitary lamp above. I saw a figure move back in
to the shadows.

  “Anyone there?” I called.

  There was no answer. I went warily, and when I reached the top paused and looked about me. The precincts of the ducal palace were to the right of me, the nearest of the twin towers darkly ominous. I noticed then that the small door close to the ever-barred portico between the towers was open. Someone was standing there. As I moved forward the figure vanished, the door was softly shut.

  I continued up the rise, past the silent, shrouded palace, until I came out into the alleyway leading to the Duomo and the piazza Maggiore. The sight of the frightened boy had been disturbing. He might have broken his neck. The open door, the motionless figure, were somehow sinister. I walked on across the piazza. Everything was still. I took the side street leading into the via dei Sogni as I had the night before, seized with the same desire to look at my old home.

  There was no one about. I stood for a moment under the wall staring up at the house. Light came from the chinks in the shutters of the room on the first floor, but I could hear no music. Then I heard footsteps coming down the street, following as it were in my wake, from the direction of the ducal palace. Some instinct made me hide myself behind an angle of the wall, and wait. The footsteps came on, purposeful and clear. No furtiveness about this pursuit, if pursuit it were.

  Behind me the somber bell of the campanile sounded ten, echoed a moment later by the other, more distant churches. The footsteps ceased. They had come to a halt by the door in the wall leading to the garden and to the house beyond. I leaned forward and saw the figure of a man. He looked up at the house as I had done, and then moved forward and turned the handle of the door. The Rector’s lady, like her predecessor in my home some twenty years before, perhaps sought consolation.

  As the man paused a moment, opening the door, the street lamp by the side of the wall shone fully upon his face. He passed through, and closed the door behind him. I stood motionless, drained of all energy, all feeling. The man was surely no stranger, but my brother Aldo.