6
The inner happiness he felt gave a spring to his tired legs, poise and precision to his every gesture, and calm to the beating of his heart. It was truly a treasure he was guarding within. Huge, inexhaustible, yes, and yet something to be kept secret all the same, hidden from everyone in the world. His whole joy, his whole peace derived from the certainty that he was its sole possessor.
His mother’s bedroom was the last, the furthest-away room in the apartment, repurposed from a small reception room which, in the time of his grandfather Eliseo, and his grandmother Vittoria, had served exclusively for billiards. But after he had walked through the vast and chilly darkness of the second of the ex-drawing-rooms, filled with dim presences without form, there he was at the door, lowering the latch, and opening it a crack.
‘May I?’ he asked as usual.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ he heard exclaiming in reply the familiar, querulous, wavering voice.
He entered, shut the door and, in the unexpected warmth, walked to the bed, which was positioned at the far side of the room, then stretched out his hand to stroke Lilla, who, having delivered her ritual little harmless yelp, had immediately curled up again at her mistress’s side, level with her hip. He behaved as he ever did, repeating the same acts, the same motions and preparing to say and to hear the exact same habitual phrases.
But for once he felt happy, and his mother caught his mood from the start.
Instead of beginning with her usual complaints, mainly directed at Nives, she lay there contemplating him with a satisfied air and in silence.
‘How handsome you are,’ she said at last.
‘Me handsome?’ he parried. ‘You’re joking.’
‘But you are. Let your mother be the judge! You should go hunting more often. Get out in the sunshine and the wind, breathe a bit of fresh air now and then as you used to and I’m sure it would do you a world of good. See what a fine colour you have.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he replied, bowing his head. ‘I really ought to.’
‘Good boy,’ she said, with a smile. ‘I saw it straightaway, you know, as soon as you came in, that your whole face looked different. But how come,’ she went on, still smiling and speaking in lowered tones, ‘you didn’t want anything to eat, not even a little bowl of soup? It was very good.’
‘I’m sure it was. But the truth is, I ate very late today, so I wasn’t hungry.’
‘What a shame. Your wife wanted to make the meatloaf herself, and I have to admit that now she’s really learned how to, and so that was delicious as well … and where did you go to eat?’
He told her where.
‘Who knows what gruesome stuff you’ll have had to swallow,’ she exclaimed, with a grimace of disgust. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t make you ill. But did the underwear at least keep you warm and dry enough?’
While he replied that the woollen underwear had indeed proved fortuitous, and placidly told her what he’d eaten at lunch, he was observing her closely. In bed, with two linen-covered pillows propping her up, with that graceful, loosely knitted, blue woollen shawl which covered her shoulders and breast, all so clean, the soft, cotton-wool-like hair a fraction whiter than the frail parchment of her face, she too looked beautiful. Perfect.
‘You’re looking beautiful yourself,’ he said. ‘My compliments.’
She burst out laughing. Childishly flattered, she arched back against the pillows, joined together her little, knotty hands covered with veins, and shut her eyes. How old was she? he wondered. She must be around eighty, almost double his own age. All the same her arteriosclerosis was helping to turn her into a child again – even more of a child than Rory was.
When she opened her eyes again, she wanted to know how the hunt had gone.
‘I guess you won’t have shot anything,’ she said.
She had assumed a disheartened and at the same time anxious air, as if all she wanted was to be proved wrong. Why not make her happy? She looked as though she needed to hear a fairy tale, and he was willing to tell her one. More than willing.
He replied that she was mistaken, he’d brought down more than forty ducks and coots. Only rather than carry them all back home, he’d preferred to give them away. He’d given them all to Ulderico.
She was slow to catch his meaning.
‘Ulderico who?’ she asked.
He tilted his head towards Via Montebello, then added in a lowered tone: ‘Cavaglieri?’
She nodded.
He waited for her to emerge from her bewilderment and reorganize her memory. Yes, him, he confirmed. As they’d recently exchanged a couple of phone calls, and he’d always been so kind, and as he was passing through Codigoro, he’d decided to pay him a visit.
Now she was on the alert, as though she’d shed twenty years.
‘At his home?’ she whispered.
‘Yes, at his home.’
‘And where is his home? In the countryside?’
‘No, in the town itself. Right on the main square.’
‘Did you see his wife as well?’
‘His wife and his children too.’
‘His children! How many does he have?’
He showed her with his fingers.
‘Six!’ his mother exclaimed, clapping her hands. ‘Good heavens above, what a clan!’
‘And his wife –’ she continued, after a pause, again in a stifled voice, wrinkling her forehead with the effort to remember – ‘what’s his wife like? Did you speak to her?’
‘I certainly did. I phoned and went round. They offered me a nice cup of tea … they even wanted me to stay for dinner.’
He saw her shake her head, give an ample sigh, then throw herself back against the pillows once more. Her eyes, always a bit too damp, had filled with tears. What was she thinking about? What had got into her? For the love of God, let it not be any sadness.
To distract her, he told her about the children. The two girls were almost grown up now. Of the four boys, all likeable, good-looking lads, three of them had started playing football in the hallway while he was there.
‘What a hullaballoo that must have been!’ his mother said with a laugh, still in tears.
‘It was, rather.’
‘And what are they called, those little ones?’
‘I’m not sure. Clementina, Tonino … or Tanino, I didn’t catch all the names. There’s also one called Andrea.’
Here they were interrupted by Lilla who, suddenly springing up, began to bark. She had extraordinary hearing, as he’d noticed on other occasions. It was enough, say, for a lorry to pass down Via Giovecca and she would leap up in protest like a jack-in-a-box.
‘Be good!’ his mother told her off. ‘Down, you stupid thing, and go to sleep!’
When she was sure the dog had gone back to her slumbers, she seemed, all of a sudden, to have forgotten everything they’d been speaking of till then.
She started talking, as usual, without a pause, about Lilla being so clever, that if one fine day she should start to say ‘Mamma’ no one who knew her would be in the least bit surprised; about Nives, fine woman, with a good head on her shoulders, an untiring worker, salt of the earth, but sometimes she could be a bit brusque, how shall we say, a bit too coarse; about Prearo, the accountant, who was saying, just this evening, at supper, that things were settling down in the political world, and that was perfectly borne out by the sense of great calmness she felt around her, the same, it seemed to her, as she’d felt in the time she had spent at that convent in Florence when the Germans were here; about Rory, poor little mite, who just today had hidden a little Christmas wish under her napkin, so well written it was, both in terms of handwriting and clear expression, and so affectionate; about a pipe for the drinking water which was leaking more every day, and how he really ought to chase Romeo so he finally attended to it; about a phone call she had received, at five o’clock, from her friend Carmen Scutellari, one of the Scutellaris of Via Terranuova, a call that had ended with their mutual promise t
o meet up in the next few days … It was a continuous flow of murmured words, a kind of chirping which ended, after at least twenty minutes, with an umpteenth sigh and a ‘Hmm!’ which was happy and satisfied.
For her, too, everything would reach the right conclusion, he thought, as he began to get to his feet. For the little that was left of her life, things would always turn out well. Regardless.
He leant down to kiss her on the forehead.
‘Bye,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Yes, my dear. Goodnight to you as well.’
He turned his back on her, crossed the room and reached the door.
With his hand on the latch, he turned to look at her. Surrounded by everything that was most her own and most dear to her – the little adoring dog almost touching her, then the family photographs, the heraldic arms of the House of Savoy on parchment in a silver frame, the many-coloured phials of medicine, the leather spectacles case, the tiny golden parallelepiped of her Zenith alarm clock, the books on one bookcase, the last few years’ issues of Vie d’Italia on another, the Giornale dell’Emilia open on the green damask quilt, level with the little bundle of black fur that was Lilla, and so on and on – she gave him a warm smile. White, down there, wrapped in her cocoon of light.
‘Goodnight,’ he repeated.
‘Goodnight, my dear Edgardo.’
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published as L’airone in 1968
This translation published in Penguin Classics 2018
Text copyright © Giorgio Bassani, 1968
Translation copyright © Jamie McKendrick, 2018
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
Cover photograph © Tony Vaccaro/akg-images
ISBN: 978-0-141-93896-7
CHAPTER 1
fn1 sgnór avucàt: Ferrarese dialect for signor avvocato, the respectful title given to a lawyer.
fn2 Alcide De Gasperi (1881–1953) was the founder of the Christian Democracy Party and prime minister of Italy from 1945 to 1953.
CHAPTER 2
fn1 tupìn: Ferrarese dialect for ‘mouse’, but here, because of the colour of the uniforms they wore, referring to a member of the local Fascist squads.
CHAPTER 4
fn1 I.N.A.: The Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni, a large Italian insurance company.
CHAPTER 2
fn1 A.R.A.R. camp: This was the Azienda rilievo alienazione residuati, an organization set up at the end of the Second World War for the sale of goods that had been confiscated from the enemy or abandoned by the Allies.
The Heron Page 14