The Flight of the Falcon Read online

  The look in her eye suggested that he did more than that. Gallantly I returned the look. For courtesy’s sake we were conspirators.

  “You have your credentials on you?” she asked as she rose from the table.

  I patted my breast pocket. “I carry them everywhere,” I said.

  “Fine. Good-bye for now.”

  “Good-bye, signorina. And thank you.”

  She disappeared through the restaurant entrance to the street. I glanced at the card once more. Carla Raspa. The name suited her. Hard as nails, with a soft center, like a Neapolitan ice. I pitied the librarian Giuseppe Fossi. It might be my answer, though, for the next two or three weeks. Not her—the job. Possibly the one went with the other, but I should have to take care of that when the moment came.

  I paid the bill and went out into the street, carrying my grip, feeling like a snail with the world upon his back. I crossed the street and tried the door of San Cipriano once again. This time it was open. I pushed my way inside and went into the chancel.

  The smell brought back the past, as it had done at the ducal palace. Here the memory, though less intense, was more somber, muted, connected with Sundays, feast days, the necessity of silence, and an inner restlessness that mirrored my longing to be outside. I did not connect the church of San Cipriano with devout feelings or with prayer, only with an intense awareness of being small and hemmed in by adults, with impersonal priestly intoning, the puff of incense, the touch of Aldo’s hand, a desire to urinate.

  The church was empty, save for a sacristan who seemed to be busy with candles at the high altar, and I made my way up the nave on the left-hand side, tiptoeing as if by instinct, and so up the single step to the chapel. Hollow sounds came from the high altar in the church, as the sacristan went about his business. I looked for a light in the chapel and switched it on. The light fell upon the altarpiece. Small wonder I had been frightened as a child at that figure in his shroud, the wrappings from the face hanging in streamers, the eyes of terror staring out upon his Lord. I realized now that the painting was no masterpiece. Executed in the days when tortured expression and exaggerated form had been the vogue, the risen Lazarus, to my maturer eyes, now seemed grotesque. Yet the bowed figure of the supplicating Mary in the foreground was still Marta, still the humped woman on the steps of the church in Rome.

  I switched off the light and left the chapel. Two nights ago, dreaming, I had been a child still, imagination vivid. Now there was disenchantment; the risen Lazarus had lost his power.

  As I turned into the nave the sacristan came pattering down to meet me. A sudden thought came to me. “Excuse me,” I said, “are the baptismal records kept here in the church?”

  “Yes, signore,” he answered, “the records are in the sacristy. They go back a number of years, to approximately the beginning of the century. Earlier than that, they are kept in the presbytery.”

  “Would it be possible for me to look up an entry for the year 1933?”

  He hesitated a moment, murmuring something about the priest in charge of the records not being available. I slipped a note into his hand and told him I was passing through Ruffano, unlikely to return, and wished to consult a baptismal entry for a relative. He protested no more, and led the way into the sacristy.

  I hovered while he searched for the book. The odor of sanctity was all about me. Stoles and surplices hung from hooks. The faint scent of incense mingled with floor polish pervaded all. The sacristan approached me with a book.

  “We have the entries here from 1931 to 1935,” he said. “If your relative was baptized in San Cipriano, his name should be here.”

  I took the book and opened it. It was like turning back the pages into the past. How many of my contemporaries must be here, children born and baptized in Ruffano, now adult, scattered, or perhaps living in the city still, shopkeepers, clerks, yet in this book only a few days old…

  I turned to July the 13th, the day of my birth. Here was my baptism, on a Sunday two weeks later. “Armino. Son of Aldo Donati and Francesca Rossi. Godparents, Aldo Donati, brother, Federico Ponenti, Edda Ponenti.” I had forgotten that Aldo, not then nine years old, had been my sponsor. He had written his name in a round, childish hand, that yet already had more character to it than the uniform scrawl of the second cousins who shared the responsibility. They had lived, if I remembered rightly, at Ancona. Now it all came back. The first communion. Aldo’s eyes upon me, hinting eternal punishment should I, through fear or clumsiness, let fall the Host out of my open mouth.

  “Have you found the entry?” asked the sacristan.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, it’s there.”

  I shut the book and gave it into his hands. He took it, and replaced it in the cupboard among a row of similar volumes.

  “Wait,” I said. “Have you the entries for the ’twenties too?”

  “The ’twenties, signore? Which year?”

  “Let me see. It would be 1925, I suppose.”

  He took out another volume. “Here is ’21 to ’25.”

  I took the book and turned to November. November the 17th. The date had always held significance for me because it was Aldo’s birthday. Even in Genoa, on autumn mornings, when I looked at the office calendar, the number 17 under the month of November was somehow dedicated.

  Curious… Aldo must have been a sickly infant, for here he was, baptized within a day of his birth. “Aldo. Son of Aldo Donati and Francesca Rossi.” No mention of godparents.

  I turned the page, and to my surprise the entry was repeated a few days later. “Aldo. Son of Aldo Donati and Francesca Rossi. Godparents, Aldo Donati, father, Luigi Speca, Francesca Rossi.”

  Who was Luigi Speca? I had never heard of him. Nor, I felt sure, had Aldo. And why the double entry?

  “Tell me,” I said to the sacristan, “have you ever heard of an infant being baptized twice?”

  He shook his head. “No, signore. Though if the child was ailing, and the parents feared it might die, it is just conceivable that it might be baptized on the day of birth and the ceremony repeated later, when the child was stronger. Has the signore finished with the book?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Take it.”

  I watched him replace the book among its fellows in the cupboard, and turn the key. Then I came out into the sunlight, crossed the piazza della Vita and walked up the via Rossini. It was strange that Aldo should have been baptized twice. It was the sort of story, had we known it, that he would have turned to good advantage. “I was doubly blessed,” I could imagine him telling me.

  Marta would have known about the baptism… So thinking, I was reminded of the cross-eyed cobbler, and I looked about me for his shop, situated, to the best of my recollection, halfway up, on the left-hand side. There it was… But larger, smartened, and with rows of shoes to sell. No longer shoes with tickets and upturned soles, advertising repairs. A different name, too, above the door. My cross-eyed Ghigi of the morning must have retired, to live beside the oratorio. He was the only likely link with Marta, or his sister if she lived, and short of admitting my identity I did not see how I could approach him.

  The same held good for the Longhis, at the hotel dei Duchi. It would be so easy to go back, to say, “I meant to tell you last night. I am the younger son of Aldo Donati. You remember my father, the Superintendent at the ducal palace?” Even the flabby face of the signora would have creased into a smile, the first shock over. And then, “You remember Marta? What happened to Marta?”

  It was no good. It would not work. Anyone returning from the past, as I was doing, must remain anonymous. Otherwise it meant useless involvement. Alone, in secret, I could unravel the threads of the past, but not with identity known.

  I passed the ducal palace once again and then turned left, coming, after a moment, into the via dei Sogni. I wanted to look at my old home by day. The snow had melted, as it had done elsewhere in Ruffano, and the sun must have filled the house all morning, for behind the tree I could see the windows of the first floor, opene
d. This had been my parents’ bedroom, in early days a sort of sanctum in my eyes, but later shunned.

  Someone was playing the piano. There had never been a piano in our time. The player had the touch of a professional. A torrent of sound rippled from the keys. It was something I knew, heard probably on the radio, or more likely still from the music rooms in the university at Turin when I used to hurry past to lectures. My lips framed a silent echo to the sound as it rose and fell, half gay, half sad, a timeless melody. Debussy. Yes, Debussy. The well-worn “Arabesque,” but with a master touch.

  I stood beneath the wall and listened. The music ebbed and flowed, changed mood and entered the more solemn phrases, and then again that first lighthearted ripple, higher, ever higher, confident and gay, but at last with a descending scale, dissolving, vanishing. It seemed to say: All over, nevermore. The innocence of youth, the joy of childhood, leaping from bed to welcome a new day… all gone, the fervor spent. The repetition of the phrase was only a reminder, an echo of what had been. So swift to go, impossible to hold.

  The music ceased before the closing bars. I could hear the telephone. Whoever played must have gone to answer it. The window was closed, then all was still.

  The telephone used to stand in the hall, and if my mother was upstairs she had to run to answer it, arriving breathless. I wondered if the player did the same. I looked up at the tree that shrouded the small garden like a canopy. Somewhere in the branches should be a rubber ball that I had much prized, kicked aloft one day in an idle mood and never recovered. I wondered if it lay there still, and with the wonder came resentment, a strange antagonism to the present owner of my home. Theirs the right to wander through the rooms, open and shut the windows, answer the telephone. I was just a stranger, staring at the wall.

  The playing was resumed. This time a Chopin Prelude, mournful, passionate. The pianist’s mood had changed with the telephone call, nerves were unleashed to somber melancholy. And none of it my business.

  I went on walking up the via dei Sogni, and so out into the via dell’8 Settembre, in front of the university. It was like walking into another age. The young were everywhere, pouring out of lecture rooms, laughing, talking, getting onto vespas. The old building which had always been known as the House of Studies boasted new wings, the windows glowing not only with fresh paint but with vitality. There were new buildings too across the way, and yet another in construction—the new library, possibly—topping the hill. This university was not the crumbling, rather faded seat of learning I remembered from childhood days. Austerity was banished. The young, with all their fine contempt for dusty ways, had taken over. Transistor radios blared.

  I stood, clutching my grip, a wanderer between two worlds. The one the via dei Sogni of my past, with all its memories, but no longer mine; and this other, active, noisy, equally indifferent. The dead should not return. Lazarus was right to feel foreboding. Caught, as he must have been, betwixt past and present, he evaded both in horror, seeking the anonymity of the tomb—but in vain.

  “Hullo,” said a voice in my ear, “have you made up your mind?”

  I turned, and saw Carla Raspa. She looked cool, confident and self-possessed. No doubts for her.

  “Yes, signorina. Thank you for your trouble. But I have decided to leave Ruffano.” This was my intention, but the words were left unsaid. A youth, straddling a vespa, swerved past us, laughing. He had a small flag fixed to his machine which fluttered in the breeze, just as, years back, the staff car of my mother’s Commandant carried his hated emblem. The student’s flag was tourist junk, perhaps, bought for a few hundred lire in the piazza Maggiore, but it had for design the Malebranche Falcon and so was, to my nostalgic eye, a symbol.

  Adopting my habitual mask of courier, of courtier, I bowed to the signorina, sweeping her from head to foot in a caressing glance that she knew, and I knew, meant precisely nothing.

  “I was on my way to the ducal palace,” I told her. “If you are free, perhaps we could go together?”

  I had reached the point of no return.

  6

  The university library was housed on the ground floor of the ducal palace, in what had been the banqueting hall of long ago. It had been used for manuscripts and documents when my father was Superintendent, and I gathered was so still, on shelves separate from those temporarily loaned to the university. My new acquaintance led the way, with all the assurance of someone on home ground, while I followed, assuming a stranger’s ignorance.

  The room was vast, larger even than I remembered, with the musty smell inseparable from books, many of which were stacked high upon the floor. A certain confusion prevailed. One clerk knelt upon the floor, inserting printed slips into some of the volumes. A second was halfway up a ladder, busy among the higher shelves. A third, a harassed female, was taking notes, dictated by the individual whom I gathered, correctly, to be the librarian, Giuseppe Fossi. He was short, stout, with an olive-green complexion and the wandering, bulging eye I associate with clandestine appointments. He hurried forward at the sight of my companion, leaving his minion in mid-note.

  “I’ve found you an assistant, Giuseppe,” said Carl Raspa. “Signor Fabbio has a degree in modern languages, and would be grateful for temporary work.”

  The bulging eye of Giuseppe Fossi appraised me with some hostility—was I perhaps a rival?—then, stalling for time, he turned back to the object of his admiration.

  “Signor Fabbio is a friend of yours?”

  “A friend of a friend,” she answered promptly. “Signor Fabbio has been working in Genoa for a touring agency. I know the manager.”

  The lie was unexpected, but it served. The librarian turned back to me.

  “I certainly need help,” he admitted, “and anyone with languages, who could catalogue the foreign books, would be invaluable. You see for yourself the mess we are in.” He waved an apologetic gesture about the room, and went on, “I warn you, the remuneration is small, and I shall have to press a point with the university Registrar if I take you on.”

  I gestured a willingness to accept whatever was offered, and he looked from me to Carla Raspa. The response she gave him with her eyes was similar to that already given me in the restaurant in the via San Cipriano, but more compelling. Excitement filled him.

  “Well, now… I will see what I can do with the Registrar. It would naturally leave me freer if I had your help. As it is, the evenings…”

  The same conspiratorial glance passed between them. He turned to the telephone. I had understood what she meant when she told me that Ruffano could be dead by night; nevertheless, she must be easily pleased.

  We feigned deafness while Giuseppe Fossi carried on a rapid conversation on the telephone. The receiver clamped. “All fixed,” he said. “It’s the same throughout the university at the moment. Nobody has any time to spare for other people’s problems—we must all make our own decisions.”

  I expressed my thanks, with a certain wonder that even a temporary increase in staff could be such an easy matter to arrange.

  “The Rector is away sick,” explained Giuseppe Fossi. “Without him, authority is nonexistent. He is the university.”

  “Our beloved Rector,” murmured the signorina, and I thought I detected irony in her voice, “suffered a thrombosis, alas, after attending an assembly in Rome, and has been in hospital there ever since. We are all lost without him. He has been ill for weeks.”

  “Does nobody take over?” I asked.

  “Professor Rizzio, the Deputy-Rector,” she answered, shrugging, “who happens to be the Head of the Department of Education, and spends his time arguing with Professor Elia, the Head of the Department of Economics and Commerce.”

  The librarian expostulated reprovingly. “Come, Carla,” he said, “gossip, like smoking, is forbidden in the library. You should know better.” He patted her on the arm indulgently and looked at me, shaking his head. The head-shake suggested dissociation from her views, the pat on the arm possession. I smiled, remaining silent
.

  “I must leave you,” she said, and which of us she addressed remained in doubt. “I have another lecture at five.”

  She raised her hand to me, saying “Be seeing you,” and was on her way to the door. Signor Fossi hurried after her, calling, “One moment, Carla…” I waited for instructions, while one of the clerks glanced up at me and winked. After a murmured consultation with the signorina, Giuseppe Fossi returned and said briskly, “If you care to start work right away it will help us all.”

  I spent the next two hours learning my work under his direction. Special care had to be taken because certain of the volumes which were part of the university library had become mixed up with others which, belonging to the ducal palace proper, were in the care of the Arts Council of Ruffano.

  “Gross inefficiency,” said Signor Fossi. “It happened before my time. But there will be an end to these troubles when we have all our own stuff in the new university library. You have seen the building? It’s almost finished. All due to the Rector, Professor Butali. He has achieved wonders for the university”—he lowered his tone, with an eye on the clerk within earshot—“against much opposition. The usual thing, in a small center such as ours. There is rivalry among the Departments, and jealousy too between the university and the Arts Council. Some want one thing, some another. The Rector has the thankless task of keeping the peace between them all.”

  “Was that the reason for his heart attack?” I asked.

  “I would think so,” he said, and then, with a knowing look flickering an instant in his bulging eye, “he also has a beautiful wife. Signora Butali is several years younger than her husband.”

  I continued sorting books until, at a little after six, Giuseppe Fossi gave an exclamation and looked at his watch. “I have an appointment at seven,” he said. “Do you mind remaining here for another hour? And when you leave, will you please go to the Registrar’s office to sign in? They will, if you wish, give you a list of addresses where you can find lodgings—the university has first call on a number of rooms and small pensioni in the city. Signorina Gatti will assist you if there is anything else you wish to know.”