The Flight of the Falcon Read online

  I poured out the last of the wine from my carafe, and as I did so, like an echo to my thoughts, a little, white-haired old man came limping from behind the screen, bearing an illustrated magazine which he took to the Turtmanns’ table. He pointed with pride to the leading feature, an article on Ruffano, and to a photograph of himself, the proprietor, Signor Longhi. He left the supplement with the Turtmanns and limped back to my corner.

  “Good evening, signore,” he said. “I hope everything has been to your satisfaction?”

  He had a nervous tremor in his left hand, and this he tried to hide by placing the hand behind his back. It was, I supposed, an ailment of old age; the eager, bright-eyed Signor Longhi was no more. I thanked him for his trouble, and he bowed and disappeared behind the screen, his eyes sweeping over me without recognition. I could not expect otherwise. Why should anyone connect the insignificant courier of today with Signor Donati’s youngest of long ago—“Il Beato” whom adults patted on the head? We were all forgotten, we had all passed on…

  Dinner finished, and the Turtmanns escorted to their room, I fetched my coat, opened the front door of the Hotel dei Duchi, and went out into the piazza. Silence, white and still, enveloped me. There were footsteps in the snow, at first clear and firmly printed, the tracks of an individual which soon lost themselves against a drift and vanished. The biting air penetrated my lightweight overcoat. Winter’s invasion of spring had caught me, like any other tourist, ill-prepared.

  I looked to right and left, forgetting, after more than twenty years, how the main street divided into two on either side of the piazza, each branch to run, almost perpendicular it seemed, to its own summit. I struck left, hazarding a guess, past the great bulk of San Cipriano which loomed at me out of the snow, and immediately knew I was at fault, for the street ran broad and steep, and would emerge eventually on the northwestern hill in front of the statue of Duke Carlo. Carlo the Good, the younger brother of mad Claudio, who in his reign of forty years, loved and respected, rebuilt his palace and his city and made Ruffano famous. I turned back to the piazza and struck south up the narrow twisting street to where it opened, suddenly, into the piazza Maggiore, and there, in all its majesty, stood the ducal palace of my boyhood, of my dreams, the rose-pink walls touched by the falling snow.

  Idiot tears pricked my eyes—I, the courier, moved like any tourist by a picture-postcard print—and I moved forward, still in a dream, and touched the walls I knew. Here was the entrance door to the quadrangle within, used by my father the Superintendent and ourselves, Aldo and I, but never by the visiting crowds. There were the steps on which I used to jump, and here, beyond, the massive façade of the Duomo, rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Icicles had formed on the fountain in the piazza, hanging like crystals from the lips of the bronze cherubs. I used to drink at this fountain, inspired by a tale of Aldo’s that it held all purity and many secrets in its clear waters; if there were secrets, I learned none of them. I lifted my head to the palace roof and saw brooding there, above the entrance door, the great bronze figure of the Falcon, emblem of the Malebranche, the ducal family, his head snowcapped, his giant wings outspread. Then I turned from the palace and walked on, uphill, past the university, and turned left into the via dei Sogni, the Street of Dreams. No one stirred, not even a prowling cat. Now it was my footprints only that marked the fallen snow, and when I came to the high walls that enclosed my father’s house, with the single tree crowning the small garden, a cold wind like a knife cut across the narrow street, so that the snow, still featherlight, drifted in front of me.

  Once more I had the strange impression that I was a ghost returned, or not even a ghost, some disembodied spirit of long ago, and that there, in the darkened house, Aldo and I lay sleeping. We used to share a room, until he was promoted to one of his own. Not a chink of light showed tonight from the fastened shutters. I wondered who lived there now, if indeed the house was inhabited at all. Somehow it seemed to me forlorn, reproachful. And the garden wall I always thought so high had shrunk. I crept away like a furtive alley cat, down past the church of San Martino, and took the shortcut of the San Martino steps, descending abruptly to the piazza della Vita once again. I had not, on my reconnaissance, encountered a single soul.

  I let myself in at the hotel and went up to my room, undressed, and so to bed. A hundred images raced through my mind, crossing and recrossing like routes converging on an autostrada. Some memorable, some dim. The present intermingled with the past, my father’s face became confused with Aldo’s, the very uniforms they had worn when I had seen them last. The uniform which had graced Aldo at nineteen, with the pilot’s wings, merged into those of my mother’s lovers—the German Commandant, the American Brigadier in Frankfurt with whom we lived for two years. Even the headwaiter at the Splendido, a passing acquaintance glimpsed a dozen times and never thought of, turned into the bank manager my mother eventually married, my stepfather Enrico Fabbio of Turin, who gave me an education and a name. Too many faces, too many passing strangers, too many hotel bedrooms, hired apartments; none of them mine, nothing I called home. Life an unending journey with no end, flight without purpose…

  A shrill bell ringing in the corridor awakened me, and when I turned on my light I saw that it was morning, eight o’clock. I flung back my shutters. The snow had ceased and the sun was shining. Below me in the piazza della Vita people were going about their business. Shops had opened up, the assistants were sweeping away the snow; the familiar long-forgotten pattern of morning in Ruffano had taken on its accustomed shape. The sharp clean smell of the piazza came to my nostrils, the smell I remembered. A woman shook a mat out of a window. A group of men, standing beneath me, argued. A dog, with tail erect, chased a streaking cat, narrowly missed by a swerving car. More traffic than of old, or was it that in war only the military moved? I had no recollection of police on point duty, but one of them stood there now with arm outstretched, directing the cars across the piazza to the via Rossini and the ducal palace. The young were everywhere, on vespas or on foot, all southward bound, up the hill, and it came to me, with surprise, that the small university of my childhood must have expanded and that the ducal palace, once Ruffano’s pride, perhaps no longer reigned supreme.

  I turned from the window, dressed, and went along to the dining room for coffee, thinking to spare the flustered maid an errand. Signor Longhi brought me a tray himself, setting the coffee on the table with trembling hands.

  “My apologies, signore,” said the old man. “We are short-staffed, and are having alterations to the kitchen before the season opens.”

  I had been aware since waking of thuds and knocking, the voices of workmen calling to one another, the smell of paint, of mortar.

  “Have you owned the hotel long?” I asked him.

  “Ah yes,” he answered, with some of the eagerness I remembered, “over thirty years, with a break during the Occupation. We had a staff headquarters here for a time. My wife and I went to Ancona. The Hotel dei Duchi was patronized by many well-known people in old days, writers, politicians. I can show you…”

  He limped towards a bookcase in the far corner, opened it and removed a visitors’ book, which he carried back to my table as tenderly as he would a newborn infant. It opened automatically at a certain page.

  “The English Minister, Stanley Baldwin, honored us once,” he said, pointing to the signature. “He stayed one night, was sorry not to stay more. The American film star Gary Cooper—there, on the next page. He was to have made a film here, but nothing came of it.”

  He turned the pages proudly for my inspection, ’36, ’37, ’38, ’39, ’40, the years of my childhood, and an impulse rose in me to say, “And Signor Donati, the Superintendent at the palace, you remember him, and the signora? You remember Aldo at fifteen? Do you remember Beo, the small Beato, so small for his age that they took him for four, not seven? Well, here he is. Still small, still insignificant.”

  I controlled the impulse and went on drinking coffee. Signor Longh
i continued to turn the pages of his visitors’ book—omitting, I noticed, the years of shame—and so on to the fifties and the sixties, with no more ministers, no more film stars, the pages filled with the names of a hundred tourists, English, American, German, Swiss, the passing clientele who came and went, the kind I took under my wing on Sunshine Tours.

  A rasping voice summoned him from behind the screen, and he limped away to do his wife’s bidding. Furtively, my eye on the screen, I turned to ’44, and there it was, bold, with a flourish, the signature of the Commandant, and the months when he made the hotel his staff headquarters. The remaining page was a blank. The Longhis had departed to Ancona… I snapped the book to and carried it to the bookcase. That was the place for mementos of the past. The Commandant, with his arrogant step, his bullying voice that swiftly, all too swiftly, thickened to sickly sentiment, he was better under lock and key. But for him and his symbolic presence—a conqueror conquered, a feather in her cap—my mother and I, with my father dead in a prison camp and Aldo shot down in flames, might have gone to Ancona with the Longhis. There had been talk of it. And then? Fruitless speculation. She would have picked another lover on the coast and wandered anyway, trailing her “Beato” with her.

  “Are you ready?”

  I turned my head. Herr Turtmann and his wife were standing in the doorway, overcoated, booted, strung about with their camera impedimenta.

  “At your service, Herr Turtmann.”

  It was their intention to see the ducal palace and then drive out of Ruffano and pursue their tour north. I helped them stack the luggage and Herr Turtmann gave me the money to pay the bill. Signora Longhi counted the notes, returned the change and yawned. If my mother had not died of cancer of the womb in ’56 she would have looked like Rosa Longhi. Her figure too had spread. Her hair was dyed also. Whether from disillusion or because of her illness, she used to scold my stepfather Enrico Fabbio in much the rasping way that the padrona here scolded her lame husband.

  “Do you have much competition in Ruffano?” I asked, folding Herr Turtmann’s bill.

  “The Hotel Panorama,” she answered shrugging. “Built three years ago. Everything modern. On the other hill, near the piazza del Duca Carlo. How can we hope to keep going in this dump? My husband is old. I’m tired. The place is beyond us.”

  Her epitaph spoken, she slumped behind the desk. I went out to join the Turtmanns in the car, another slice of childhood written off.

  We left the piazza della Vita and drove up the narrow via Rossini to park outside the ducal palace. Morning had brought reality to my dream world of the preceding night. Other cars were stationed between our destination and the Duomo, pedestrians came and went, vespas roared past us to the university beyond.

  At the entrance, a uniformed attendant leaned from a boxed-in office. “Do you want a guide?” he called.

  I shook my head. “I know where I am,” I said.

  Our footsteps echoed on the stone floor. I led the way through to the quadrangle, once more a ghost, a wanderer in time. This was where I used to shout, my voice reverberating to the arched colonnade.

  “Aldo? Aldo? Wait for me!”

  Back would come the answering echo. “I’m here. Follow me…”

  I followed now, up the grand staircase to the gallery above, while in every niche and vault stood the Malebranche falcon and the letters “C.M.” for the two dukes, Claudio and Carlo. The Turtmanns stumped after me. We paused a moment in the gallery for them to draw breath, and the bench was there, the bench on which Marta used to sit and do her knitting, while I ran backwards and forwards along the gallery in front of her, or sometimes, greatly daring—if Aldo was not there to pounce upon me—traveled the whole circuit, pausing now and again to stare through the great windows that looked down upon the quadrangle below.

  “Well?” said Herr Turtmann, staring at me. I withdrew my eyes from the gallery, with its empty bench, and turned right, into the throne room. Oh, God… that musty, sullen smell, redolent of ages past, of ancient feuds, of dukes and duchesses long dead, of courtiers, pages… The smell of vaulted ceilings, ocher walls, the heavy, dusty scent of tapestry. The dead were with me as I walked the familiar room. Not only the specters of the history I had learned, the mad Duke Claudio, the beloved Carlo, the gracious duchess and her retinue of ladies; my own dead were beside me too. My father, gracious as a duke himself, showing the palace to visiting historians from Rome or Florence; Marta, shushing if I raised my voice, coaxing me out of earshot of the distinguished guests; Aldo, above all Aldo. Advancing on tiptoe, his finger to his lips.

  “He’s waiting!”

  “Who’s waiting?”

  “The Falcon… To seize you in his claws, and carry you off.”

  A babble of sound came from behind me. A party of young people, students doubtless, escorted by a woman lecturer, noised their way into the throne room with us, filling the whole place with their presence. Even the Turtmanns were disturbed. I beckoned them on to the reception rooms beyond. A uniformed guide, stifling his yawn, approached my clients, scenting the prospect of largesse. He had a smattering of English, and took my Tedeschi for barbarians.

  “Note-a the ceiling,” he said, “the ceiling very fine. Restored by Tolomeo.”

  I left him to it and slipped away. Ignoring the duchess’s apartments I headed for the Room of the Cherubs and the ducal bedchamber. They were empty. An attendant on a window seat slumbered in a far corner.

  Little was changed. Palaces, unlike people, withstand the years. Only the pictures had been moved, brought from their wartime sojourn in the cellars to be displayed now, so I grudgingly admitted, to greater advantage than in my father’s day. They were placed more correctly, where the light could play upon them. The Madonna and Child, my mother’s favorite, instead of hanging on the wall in comparative obscurity, stood upon an easel, alone in tranquil grandeur. The dull marble busts of a later age, which were in old days grouped about the room, had been removed. There was nothing now to detract from the Madonna. The attendant opened an eye. I went towards him.

  “Who is the Superintendent here?” I asked.

  “There is no Superintendent,” he replied. “The palace is under the supervision of the Arts Council of Ruffano—that is to say the ducal apartments, the pictures, tapestries, and the rooms above. The library on the ground floor is used by members of the university.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I passed on before he could point out to me the dancing cherubs on the chimneypiece. There was a time when I had names for every one of them. I entered the ducal bedchamber, searching instinctively for the picture on the wall, the “Temptation of Christ” of which Herr Turtmann had spoken to his frau. It was still there. No Arts Council could place this one on an easel.

  Unhappy Christ, or, as the artist with ingenious candor had painted him, unhappy Claudio… He stood in his saffron shift, one hand upon his hip, staring at nothing—unless it was at the rooftops of his visionary world, the world that might be his, should Temptation master him. The Devil, in the guise of friend and counselor, whispered his message. Behind him the rosy sky foretold a triumphant dawn. The city of Ruffano slept, ready to stir and wake and do his bidding.

  “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

  I had forgotten that his eyes were pallid like his golden hair, and that the hair itself, framing the pale face, resembled thorns.

  A wave of voices sounded in the rear. The Turtmanns and their persuasive guide, the students and the lecturer were hard upon me. I slipped through to the audience chamber, knowing that the pursuing babblers would not only dally before the picture I had left, but would turn aside to visit the ducal study, the ducal chapel. By slipping a few hundred lire into the guide’s hand the Turtmanns might even be permitted a glimpse of the spiral staircase leading to the tower above.

  Here in the audience chamber was the hidden entrance to the second tower. The spiral stairway of this one, though a replica of
the other, was never in my father’s day considered safe. Those tourists who were intrepid enough to brace their muscles and brave vertigo were conducted to the right-hand tower, through the ducal dressing room.

  I went to the wall and lifted the concealing tapestry. The doorway was still there, the key within the lock. I turned it, the door opened. Before me was the stair, curving ever upward to the tower above, below me the descent, three hundred steps or more, to the abyss below. How long was it, I wondered, since anyone had climbed this stair? Cobwebs smeared the little leaded window, and dead flies. The old fear, the old fascination gripped me. I put my hand upon the cold stone step, preparatory to climbing.

  “Who is there? It is forbidden to mount the stair!”

  I looked over my shoulder. The guide I had left sleeping in the Room of the Cherubs had followed and stood staring at me, his beady eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “What are you doing? How did you get there?” he asked.

  I felt the guilt of years. For such an act my father would have commanded bed, and bed without supper, unless it was smuggled up to me by Marta.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I chanced to look behind the tapestry and saw the door.”

  He waited for me to pass. Then he shut the door, turned the key and replaced the tapestry. I gave him five hundred lire. Mollified, he pointed to the room ahead. “Room of the Popes,” he said. “Round the wall are busts of twenty popes. All very interesting.”

  I thanked him, and passed on. The Room of the Popes had always lacked allure.

  I skirted the remaining rooms, the ceramics and the stone reliefs. In old days they had been good for hiding in, for the echo came more clearly. I walked down the great stairway once again, traversed the quadrangle and the entrance passage and went out into the street. I lit a cigarette and leaned against the columns of the Duomo, waiting for my clients. A postcard vendor approached me with his wares. I waved him away.