The Knight And Death; And One Way Or Another, page 3
‘So you were right,’ said the Chief. What he paid in wounded pride, he believed he was repaid in generosity: the generosity of a superior who gives way to his deputy.
‘Yes, but this is not the point. The point is that the Children of Eighty-nine are being born now: of mythomania, of boredom, maybe of a vocation for conspiracy and criminal activity, but they did not exist a moment before the radio, television and the newspapers carried stories about them. The calculation of the people who murdered Sandoz, or who had him murdered, has created them. They calculated that at the very least they would confuse us, and that at best some fool would answer the call and proclaim himself one of the Children of Eighty-nine.’
‘You’ve lost me. I cannot follow you in this work of fiction.’
‘I understand. Anyway, even if you did agree with me, we would still be out on our own.’
A period of civic mourning and an official State funeral had been decreed for Sandoz, for who would now have had the audacity to lay to rest in a more humble tomb that victim of political criminality, of anti-democratic fanaticism and terrorist madness?
‘I am glad to hear you acknowledge it: there would be no more than two of us, always assuming that your novel had the slightest element of credibility for me.’
‘Just to continue with the novel … we are facing a problem, a dilemma: were the Children of Eighty-nine created to murder Sandoz, or was Sandoz murdered to create the Children of Eighty-nine?’
‘I’ll leave it to you to solve that one. As far as I am concerned, and as far as this office is concerned, I proceed on the basis of established fact. Sandoz received menacing phone calls from the Children of Eighty-nine; Sandoz was murdered; the Children of Eighty-nine have claimed responsibility. Our job is to find them and bring them, as they say, to justice.’
‘The Children of Eighty-nine.’
‘The Children of Eighty-nine, precisely. And look; as regards that dilemma of yours, I could even, in an abstract way, as a game, as a purely literary concern, go along with the first of your two extremes: that the Children of Eighty-nine were born to dispatch Sandoz more conveniently and make our task in getting to the guilty party or parties more difficult, or even downright impossible. As to the second possibility, the one about Sandoz being murdered so as to give birth to the Children of Eighty-nine, I’ll leave that one to you. And have fun with it.’
‘For over half a century, in all branches of the police, we have had to swallow so many toads that I believe we have earned the right to a little fun. Apart from the many I have personally swallowed in nearly thirty years with this division.’
‘One toad more, one toad the less … What can I say? If you really see this business shaping up as yet another toad to swallow, get ready to swallow it.’
5
He was disobeying, being disobedient. In a little sitting-room in the De Matis house, with the lady herself at his side. She had sat down beside him, perhaps because curiosity had overcome her to the point that she instinctively imagined that physical proximity would create the best conditions for shared confidences.
‘The moment the porter told me that a police officer wanted to speak to me, I understood: I have no doubt that you want to know about the cards that Sandoz and Aurispa exchanged three evenings ago.’
She had an intelligent face, and beautiful eyes which seemed to flicker with an amused, ironic light. Anything but unattractive. Aurispa had said that a glance at her was enough to make anyone aware that the desire to have her at your side could never be more than a game, a fiction, but that remark only revealed that he had the decidedly unsubtle view of female beauty of a purchaser whose only ambition was not to be short changed. She was thin but not displeasingly so; she could be said to be slight, and her movements and gestures were light and almost fluttery.
‘I have to say at the outset that I am indeed a police officer, but I came to you in a private capacity and in total secrecy.’
‘Tell me the truth, do you suspect him?’
‘Do we suspect whom?’
‘Him, Aurispa.’ The amused, ironic light seemed to have spread out, adding a splendour to the eyes of indefinable blue, of indefinable violet.
‘No, he is not a suspect.’
‘It would give me enormous pleasure to know that at least the shadow of suspicion had fallen on him.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, enormous satisfaction. And I still hope it will happen: there are so many murky matters in which he has a hand.’
‘Why would it give you such satisfaction?’
‘I could say to you: for the sake of justice, but it would not be the whole truth. Basically it is because I do not like him, I find him repulsive. He is such a cold man and he seems to exist only in profile, as though on a coin, on various coins.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘No, nothing … or rather, something, but something so vague that you cannot put your finger on it. But then, I always allow myself to be guided by vague, indefinite impressions, and I am never wrong, believe me … but I see you won’t be giving anything away. So let’s see how good I am at making out what’s behind your questions.’
Intelligent, very intelligent, thought the Deputy, and the reflection gave him a feeling of near panic. To gain time, to purify the questions of the suspicions which Signora De Matis was prepared to detect in them, he said: ‘They are not really questions, the things I want to put to you.’
‘Out with them, then,’ said Signora De Matis, even more amused.
‘I am engaged on an unremarkable, straightforward reconstruction of the last hours of Signor Sandoz. It is the sort of thing we are obliged to do even in those cases, like the present one, when we are convinced beforehand that it serves no useful purpose.’
‘Unremarkable, straightforward … serving no useful purpose.’ The Signora’s voice echoed his. She played her part in the game with ironic comprehension and indulgence, but also with barely restrained laughter. ‘So what is the question?’
‘As I said, it is hardly a question at all … I take it you are aware that the two of them were engaged in a … shall we say romantic game, at your expense. Aurispa regretted not having you at his side and pretended he was in the grips of uncontrollable jealousy because Sandoz twice in as many days had had the good fortune of a place beside you.’
‘It had occurred more than twice. I could never understand why at those infernal official or society dinners they nearly always put me alongside that Sandoz – he used to bore me to death. Not only that, that little game of theirs, which you call romantic, bored me to distraction, or rather enraged me. It was as if they said to each other: Poor thing, she’s so old, so unattractive that we really should give her at least this satisfaction. I do not need anyone to tell me that I am not pretty, and I am well aware that I am getting on in life, but that does not seem to me a sufficient reason why those two brainless creatures should dedicate a whole evening to letting me know it.’
‘No, not at all, you mustn’t think that,’ said the Deputy, conscious of his own hypocrisy, because he had learned from Aurispa that things stood exactly as she had understood.
‘Please, don’t you start romantic games with me.’
‘It is not a romantic game. You … forgive me, it is the first time I have met you and I do not imagine we will have the opportunity to meet again; you are so radiant …’ The word came to him unbidden, as though he had fallen in love on the instant. The pain pressed in on him more and more sharply, as though to make him aware of the other, the only love now available to him.
‘Radiant. Very gracious of you. I will remember that. There are not many joyful things left to one at this point in life. You know I am almost fifty … but let’s get back to the question, shall we?’
‘Yes, the President sent the card over to Sandoz; written on it were the words …’
‘I’ll kill you.’
‘Did Sandoz write his reply on the same card?’
‘No, he stuck Aurispa’s card in his pocket, after giving it to me to read, with the delight, so it seemed to me, of a autograph hunter who has finally managed to secure a much desired specimen. He scribbled out his answer on his own place-marker, which was there in front of him, clasped onto a kind of iris which was too silvery to be genuine silver.’
‘And what did he write on his card?’
‘The odd thing was that he did not let me read it, and I had not sufficient curiosity to peer over his shoulder while he was writing. He simply bored me, as did that stupid game of theirs …’
‘Do you remember who Aurispa was sitting beside? I imagine he would have been seated between two women.’
‘Yes, between two women: Signora Zorni and Signora Siragusa. But since Signora Zorni was seated on his right – you know who I mean; pretty enough, even if, to my mind, a bit empty-headed, but with just the right degree of empty-headedness to transform a pretty woman into a ravishingly beautiful one in the eyes of most men – he lavished more attention on her than on the other.’
‘You saw the card arrive at its destination?’
‘Not exactly: I watched Sandoz look over at Aurispa with great attention, with a sense of anxiety … I had the impression he was studying the impact with much more interest than their futile little game warranted … then I saw him smile. I turned to look at Aurispa, and he was smiling as well: but both wore a smile that was, how shall I put it? … strained, sour … That exchange of smiles between them made a deep impression on me: that’s why, when Sandoz was murdered a few hours later, I asked if you in the police had suspicions regarding Aurispa.’
‘No, we don’t have any.’
‘Then you should. Maybe it goes back to the first time I heard the word, and maybe it is just childish, but I still associate the police with the idea of polish … you know what I mean … cleanliness … is there cleanliness in the police?’
‘As far as there can be.’
‘And as far as can be, there ought to be suspicions regarding Aurispa, but there is very little to be done, isn’t that so?’
‘Not a great deal.’
‘If you tell me there is not a great deal to be done, I think it can be deduced that there is nothing to be done. The thing is that you appear to suffer over that.’
‘I suffer over so many things now.’
‘I would really love to know why you joined the police.’
‘From time to time I ask myself the same question, but I have never managed to give myself a precise answer. Sometimes I unearth a dignified, high-minded reply, that soars upwards like a tenor’s chest notes: more frequently the replies are more humdrum … the necessities of life, chance, laziness …’
‘You are Sicilian, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but from the cold side of Sicily: from a tiny village in the interior, among the mountains, where the snow lies for long periods in the winter. A Sicily which never figures in anyone’s imagination. I have never again in all my life felt such intense cold as I did in that village.’
‘I remember that cold Sicily as well. Usually we went in summer, but some times there were additional trips at Christmas. My mother was Sicilian, and her parents never left that village; they never ever moved from that great house of theirs which was cool in summer but bitterly cold in the winter months. They died there and my mother died there too, before them. I never went back. I receive a letter after every All Souls’ day from one of my relatives telling me about his visit to the graves, about the flowers and candles he brings along to decorate them. It is almost a reproach to me, because, emotionally and sentimentally, the fact that my mother wanted to go back there to die ought to count for something. I am afraid the truth is that even this choice of my mother’s, if I think about it, causes me some dismay. It is simply not possible to love a place or a people to that extent, especially when it was a place where you suffered so much, and a people with whom you do not have anything at all in common. My mother experienced only pain from her life there, and finally rebelled and fled, and yet she felt a love for it which went beyond the tomb … And do you want to know why the thought of that gives me such a sense of dismay? Because every so often I bewilder myself by feeling an echo of the same love, of the same memory, of the same choice … but perhaps it is only an expression of that remorse my relative is so anxious to make me feel.’
‘I don’t know if you have read that page of D. H. Lawrence’s on Verga’s novel Mastro Don Gesualdo. At one point he says: but Gesualdo is Sicilian, and it is here that the difficulty arises.’
‘The difficulty … Yes, perhaps that’s where my difficulty in living comes from.’ As if to change subject, very deliberately: ‘You read a lot, don’t you? I read very little, and now I find more enjoyment in re-reading: you discover things which were not there at the first reading … I mean, were not there for me … Do you know what I am re-reading? Dead Souls: packed full of things which were not there before; and who can tell how many other things I would find if I were to return to it twenty years from now? Enough of books. We were talking about the reasons which impelled you to join the police.’
‘Perhaps, since crime belongs to us, to get to know it a little better.’
‘Yes, it’s true: crime does belong to us: but there are some people who belong to crime.’
6
Signora Zorni. Unquestionably beautiful, to the point of bland perfection; with a garulousness to match that perfection; head in the clouds, abstracted, afloat in the most celestial and unattainable heavens of a stupidity which she knows is both celestial and unfathomable; as do the genuinely intelligent, but they, experiencing that stupidity as a seductive force, fear it. She never seemed quite to grasp any question put to her, but the overall sense of the enquiry must, in some fashion, have nested in some recess of her beautiful head, since a reply could eventually be put together, even if it entailed picking and choosing the pieces which fitted best from a pile of multi-coloured stones, like a mosaicist. An operation the Deputy carried out as he went along, and we will follow suit; if it is to the detriment of the portrait, it is perhaps to the betterment of the narrative.
Yes, she knew about the half-pitying, half-mocking game which the two of them played on Signora De Matis: the President had informed her. She had seen the President write the I’ll kill you, and had laughed at the idea, even if, she was anxious to add, she did not herself consider Signora De Matis as plain as many people thought: on the contrary, she was quite handsome, in her own way. And she had read Sandoz’s answering card.
‘Do you remember it?’
‘Of course I do; I am blessed with a good memory as well.’ That ‘as well’ spoke volumes for her confidence in her looks. ‘It was two lines of verse.’
‘Verse?’
‘Yes, there were two short sentences written as lines of poetry; they even rhymed. They seemed to come from a song, and I had a terrible urge to hum them.’ She began humming them for him, using the tune from a melancholic number in vogue several years earlier. ‘I have no doubt that you will try: But who’ll be victor, you or I?’
The Deputy felt a sense of exultation, but only said: ‘The President read the card aloud, or gave it to you to read …’
‘No, he didn’t give it to me; I read it while he was reading it himself. Then he slipped it into his pocket.’
‘Are you quite certain about that – that the President put it in his pocket?’
‘Absolutely so.’ At that moment, a look of concern appeared on her face. ‘Does he insist that he didn’t?’
‘Even if that were so, would you continue to be sure that he did?’ His words were intended purely to cause her a moment of anxiety, to upset that icy perfection, reminiscent of a newly excavated, totally intact statue.
‘He is a gentleman of such irreproachable ways that I would begin to entertain the tiniest doubt.’
‘You can continue to be certain: the President claimed that he put the thing in his pocket mechanically; only he then, equally mechanically, threw it away.’
The Signora gave a sigh of relief, the carefully cultivated image reabsorbing that moment of life. The Deputy thought that she did not really deserve to be called stupid, considering that, according to current hazy opinion, it’s not possible in Italy to brand anyone as stupid.
Leaving Signora Zorni’s house, he felt numbed. Drawing precise replies from a speech that resembled the Trevi Fountain – cascades, sprays, streams and torrents of running water – induced in him a feeling of tension, followed by weariness and numbness. His pain too was numb, less sharp but more dull and diffuse. Strange how physical pain, even when its source is stable and, unless deteriorating, unalterable, can still grow, diminish, change in intensity and quality according to opportunities and encounters.
He walked under the colonnades in the piazza, his mind occupied with that card, with those lines from the song; with Signora Zorni, young and lovely, with a body of lithe harmony: but how much more beautiful and desirable – in those flashes of desire which momentarily pierced his pain – was Signora De Matis, for all her fifty years.
He relished the colonnades, and enjoyed strolling at ease among them. In the island which had given him birth, there was no city which boasted colonnades such as these. Arches make the heavens more lovely, in the words of the poet. Do colonnades make cities more civil? It was not that he did not love the land where he was born, but all those invariably bitter and tragic events which day after day made the news there caused him a sort of resentment. Not having been back for years, he searched for it, behind mere occurrences, in his memory, in the emotion of something which no longer existed. An illusion, a mystification; as an emigrant, an exile.
