Spino says he appreciates that, but with a bit of effort could he remember something, that is, find the invoice . . . an old accounts register maybe? Poerio thinks about it. He has taken a flap of the jacket between forefinger and thumb and strokes the fabric thoughtfully. One thing he is sure of, he made it in the sixties, absolutely no doubt about that, it was part of a small roll of cloth, he remembers it perfectly, a remnant that cost him next to nothing because it was a warehouse leftover and the supplier wanted to get rid of it. Poerio now seems a little suspicious, he’s not sure what Spino wants of him. “Are you from the police?” he asks. All of a sudden he’s turned wary, obviously he’s afraid of saying something that might harm him.
Spino tries to reassure him somehow: no, he says, he really does want a suit, there’s nothing to worry about, on the contrary, he’d like to put down a deposit right away; and then he mumbles a strange explanation. It’s pretty contrived and Poerio doesn’t seem at all convinced. Still, he says he’s willing to help, as far as he can. He does still have his little file of past customers, although many must be dead. To be honest he closed the shop eight years back, he laid off his apprentices and retired. There was no reason for keeping the business going anymore.
“Well then, let’s see . . . let’s see,” he whispers, leafing mechanically through blocks of receipts. “This one is ’59, but there are a few orders from 1960 as well . . .” He reads them carefully, holding the blocks a few inches from his nose. He’s taken his glasses off and his eyes are childlike. “This is it, I think,” he announces with a certain satisfaction. “‘Jacket in real tweed.’ Yes, it must be this one.” He pauses a moment. “‘Guglielmo Faldini, Accountant, Tirrenica, Via della Dogana 15 (red).’” He lifts his eyes from the receipt and puts his glasses back on. He says that actually now he’s thought about it he doesn’t feel up to making a suit. His eyesight’s so bad he can’t even thread a needle. And then he wouldn’t be able to make the kind of suits people are wearing these days.
12
He finds Faldini, the accountant, in a dusty office where, on a glass door leading to a dark corridor, a frosted sign says: “Tirrenica Import-Export.” The window offers a view of harbor derricks, a sheet-iron warehouse and a tugboat pitching in an oily sea. Faldini has the face of someone who has spent his entire life addressing letters to distant countries while looking out across a landscape of derricks and containers. Under a sheet of glass, his desk is a patchwork of postcards. Behind him a brightly-colored calendar extols the delights of vacations in Greece. He has a placid look about him, big watery eyes, grey hair cut short and bristling in an old-fashioned style. He is truly amazed to see his jacket again. He lost it so many years ago. No, he couldn’t say how many. Well, twenty maybe.
“You really lost it?”
Faldini toys with a pencil on his desk. The tug has moved through the frame of the window leaving light blue patches on the water. It’s hard to say. He doesn’t know. Or rather, he thinks not, let’s say that it disappeared, so far as he can recall. From the harbor, in the distance, comes the sound of a siren. The accountant considers his visitor with a certain curiosity. Obviously he’s asking himself, what on earth’s this business of my old jacket, who is this man, what’s he after? And Spino finds it so difficult to be convincing, and then he’s not really trying. Faldini watches him with his placid expression. Of course, on the accounts book he keeps open in front of him there are numbers that tell of dream cities like Samarkand, where people maybe have a different way of being people. Spino feels he must tell him the truth, or something like the truth. So then, this is the truth, this is how things stand. Does he understand, this Faldini, the accountant? Perhaps. Or rather he senses it somehow, the same way he must sense his sedentary man’s dreams. But it doesn’t matter, yes, he remembers. It was in ’59, or maybe ’60. He always hung the jacket there, where he hangs the jacket he has now. On that coathanger behind the door. The office was exactly as it is now, identical. He makes a vague gesture in the air. In his memory the only thing different is himself, a young Faldini, a young accountant, who would never go to Samarkand. And there was a workman, a sort of porter that is. He often came into the office, did a bit of everything. He did it because he needed the work, but in the past, if Faldini remembers rightly, he’d had a clerical position at the Customs. He doesn’t know why he’d lost that job. He’d had some personal catastrophe, he doesn’t know what. He was a reserved, polite person, ill perhaps, he wasn’t cut out for being a porter. His name was Fortunato, sometimes names are really ironic, but everyone called him Cordoba. He can’t remember his surname. They called him Cordoba because he’d been out in Argentina, or some other Latin American country, yes, his wife had died in Argentina and he had come back to Italy with his son, a little boy. He always talked about his little boy, on the rare occasions when he did talk. He had no relatives here and he’d put him in a boarding school. That is, it wasn’t a proper boarding school, it was a lodging house run by an old maid who kept a few children, a sort of private school, but on a small scale, where it was he wouldn’t know, he has a vague impression it was near Santo Stefano, the church, perhaps. The boy was called Carlito. Cordoba was always talking about Carlito.
A phone rings in a nearby room. Faldini is brought up short, coming back to the present. He casts a worried glance towards the door and then to his accounts books. The morning is flying by say his eyes now, eyes in which Spino also catches an intimation of constraint and embarrassment. Well then, one last thing and he’ll be off. If he’d just like to take a look at this photograph. This man sitting under the porch here, could it be Cordoba? Does he recognize him? And the boy? The accountant holds the photo delicately between thumb and forefinger. He holds it at arm’s length, he’s farsighted. No, he says, it’s not Cordoba, although, odd, it does look very like him, maybe it’s his brother, though he doesn’t know if Cordoba had a brother. As for the boy, he never saw Carlito.
Faldini is toying nervously with his pencil now. He seems distracted. Yes, well, he wouldn’t like to have been misunderstood, you know, belongings, they’re always so slippery, these belongings of ours, they move about, they even get the better of your memory. How could he not have remembered? In any case, now he remembers perfectly. He gave that jacket to Cordoba. He gave it to him as a present one day. Cordoba was always badly dressed, and he was a decent person.
13
“They say I’m mad because I live alone with all these cats, but what do I care? You haven’t come about the gate have you? The front gate. I had to have it repainted because a city van scraped it right across trying to turn round. It happened a while ago, you should know better than me, shouldn’t you? Anyway, of course I remember Carlito. But I’m not sure if he’s the boy in your photograph. You see, the boy in the photo looks too blond to be him, but then you never can tell. The Carlito I had here was a cheerful boy. He loved all the little creatures you find in the earth: beetles, ants, fireflies, green-and-yellow caterpillars, the ones with the sticking-out eyes and the furry bits. . . .”
The cat curled up in her lap shakes itself and with a jump bounds away. She gets up too. She still has some photographs, she never throws anything away, she likes to keep things. From a drawer she takes out some little boxes, ribbons, rosary beads, a mother-of-pearl album. She invites him to look through the album with her. Two pairs of eyes are better than one. There are yellowing photographs of surly men leaning on fake cardboard parapets with the name of the photographer stamped under their feet; and then an infantryman with an unhappy expression, this with a dedication written at an angle; then a view of Vittorio Veneto in 1918, an old woman sitting on a wicker armchair, a view of Florence with carriages in the streets, a church, a family portrait taken from too far away, a girl with white cheeks and hands pressed together, memento of a first communion. There are some empty pages, a dog with melancholy eyes, a house with wisteria and shutters under which a feminine hand has written, scent of a summer. On the last page a group of children h
ave been arranged in pyramid shape in a little courtyard. The ones in front are crouching, then there’s a row standing, and finally another higher row—perhaps the photographer had them climb on a bench. He counts them. There are twenty-four. On their right, standing and with her hands held together, is Signorina Elvira as she was then, although she really hasn’t changed that much. The children have been arranged too far from the lens for their faces to be recognized with any confidence. The only one who might in some way resemble the face he is looking for is a little blond boy in the front row. His body has the same posture, chin propped up on one hand with the elbow resting on his knee. But definite identification is impossible.
And does Signorina Elvira remember the boy’s father? No, not the father. All she knows is that he was dead, the mother too, all the boy had was an uncle. But is he sure he was called Carlito? She seems to remember Carlino. Anyhow, it’s not important. He was a cheerful boy. He loved the little creatures you find in the earth: beetles, ants, fireflies, green-and-yellow caterpillars . . .
And so here he is again wandering about in search of nothing. The walls of these narrow streets seem to promise a reward he never manages to arrive at, as if they formed the board of a game of snakes and ladders, full of dead ends and trapdoors, on which he goes up and down, round and round, hoping that sooner or later the dice will take him to a square that will give the whole thing meaning. And meanwhile over there is the sea. He looks at it. Across its surface pass the shapes of ships, a few seagulls, clouds.
14
There are days when the jealous beauty of this city seems to unveil itself. On clear days, for example, windy days, when the breeze that announces the arrival of the south-westerly sweeps along the streets slapping like a taut sail. Then the houses and bell towers take on a brightness that is too real, the outlines too sharp; like a photograph with fierce contrasts, light and shade collide aggressively without blending together, forming a black-and-white check of splashes of shadow and dazzling light, of alleyways and small squares.
Once, if he had nothing else to do, he used to choose days like this to wander round the old dock area, and now, following the dead-end sidings the wagons use along the quay, heading back to town, he finds himself thinking of those days. He could catch the bus that goes to town through the tunnels of the beltway, but instead he chooses to walk across the docks, following the twists and turns of the wharves. He feels he wants to dawdle slowly through this grim landscape of railway lines that reminds him of his childhood, of diving from the landing stage with the tires along its sides, of those poor summers, the memory of which has remained etched inside him like a scar.
In the disused shipyard, where once they repaired steamships, he sees the hulk of a Swedish vessel lying on its side. It’s called the Ulla. Strangely, the yellow letters of the name somehow escaped the fire that devastated the boat leaving enormous brown stains on the paint. And he has the impression that this old monster on the brink of extinction has always been there in that corner of the dock. A little further on he found a battered phone booth. He thought of phoning Corrado to put him in the picture. Anyway it was only right to let him know, since to a certain extent he owed the meeting to his friend.
“Corrado,” he said, “it’s me. I managed to speak to him.”
“But where are you? Why did you disappear like that?”
“I didn’t disappear at all. I’m at the docks. Don’t worry.”
“Sara was after you. She left you a message here at the paper. She says they’re extending their vacation for three days, they’re going to Switzerland.”
A seagull, which had been wheeling about for some time, landed on the arm of a water pump right next to the phone booth and stood there quietly watching him while at the same time hunting through its feathers with its beak.
“There’s a seagull next to me, it’s right here next to the phone booth, it’s as if it knew me.”
“What are you talking about? . . . Listen, where did you find him, what did he tell you?”
“I can’t explain now. There’s a seagull here with its ears pricked, it must be a spy.”
“Don’t play the fool. Where are you, where did you find him?”
“I told you, I’m at the docks. We met at the Boat Club. There are boats for rent and we went out for a trip.”
Corrado’s voice dropped, perhaps someone had come into the office. “Don’t trust him,” he said. “Don’t trust him an inch.”
“It’s not a question of trusting or not. He gave me a tip and I’m going to try it out. He didn’t know anything about the business. But there’s someone who maybe does know something and he told me who.”
“Who?”
“I told you I can’t tell you, I don’t want to speak on the phone.”
“There’s no one here who can hear you. You can speak on my phone. Tell me who.”
“Come on, you don’t imagine he went and gave me name and surname, do you? He’s very smart. He just gave me an idea.”
“So then give me an idea.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“So how come you understood?”
“Because it’s someone I happened to know years back. A musician.”
“Where does he play?”
“Corrado, please, I can’t tell you anything.”
“In any event I don’t like it, and you’re too naive, understand? It’s quicksand. Anywhere you put your feet you risk sinking in.”
“Sorry Corrado, have to say goodbye, it’s getting late. And then this seagull is getting annoyed, he wants to make a call, he’s waving his beak at me furiously.”
“Come straight here, I’ll wait for you at the paper. I won’t go home, just so I can see you.”
“What about tomorrow, okay? I’m tired now, and I’ve got something to do this evening.”
“Promise me you won’t trust anyone.”
“Okay, talk to you tomorrow.”
“Hang on a second, I heard something that might interest you. The coroner has arranged for the burial, the case has been dropped.”
15
Twenty years ago the Tropical was a small nightclub with a shady atmosphere catering to American sailors. Now it’s called the Louisiana and it’s a piano bar with couches and table lamps. On the drinks list, on a green velvet noticeboard near the main door, it says: Piano player—Peppe Harpo.
Peppe Harpo is Giuseppe Antonio Arpetti, born in Sestri Levante in 1929, struck off the register of doctors in 1962 for his over-lavish prescription of addictive drugs. In his university days he played the piano at little parties. He was quite talented and could do perfect imitations of Erroll Garner. After the drug scandal he took to playing at the Tropical. He played mambos and pop songs through evenings thick with smoke, five hundred lire a drink. The emergency exit, behind the curtains, opened onto a stairwell where, above another door, a neon sign said: Pensione—Zimmer—Rooms. Then at a certain point he disappeared for six or seven years, to America, people said. When he reappeared it was with small round eyeglasses and a greying mustache. He had become Peppe Harpo, the jazz pianist. And with his return the Tropical became the Louisiana. Some said he had bought the place, that he’d made money playing in bands in America. That he had made money no one found strange. He seemed capable of it. That he had made money banging on the piano left many unconvinced.
Spino sat down at a table to one side and ordered a gin and tonic. Harpo was playing “In a Little Spanish Town,” and Spino supposed his entry had passed unobserved, but then when his drink came there was no bill with it. He sat on his own for a long time, slowly sipping his gin and listening to old tunes. Then towards eleven Harpo took a break and a tape of dance music replaced the piano. Spino had the impression, as Harpo came towards him through the tables, that his face wore an expression at once remorseful and resolute, as if he were thinking: ask me anything, but not that, I can’t tell you that. He knows, a voice inside him whispered, Harpo knows. For a second Spino thought of putting the
photo of The Kid as a child down on the table and then saying nothing, just smiling with the sly expression of one who knows what he knows. Instead he said straightforwardly that perhaps the time had come for Harpo to return him that favor. He was sorry if that was putting it bluntly. The favor, that is, of helping him find somebody, as he had once helped Harpo. A look of what seemed like genuine amazement crossed Harpo’s face. He waited without saying anything. So Spino pulled out the group photograph. “Him,” he said, pointing at the boy.