Giuseppe nodded in a dazed way. Clearly this, coming on top of the break-in and the appearance of the policemen, was just too much to deal with at this hour of the morning. He started to turn away, then paused.
'Maybe that colleague of yours would like it’
'Which colleague?'
'I don't recall the name. It was a long time ago, right after that terrible bomb business. He came by to pick up some papers from work you'd left in the apartment. When he handed me back the key, he said what a nice place It was.'
'You gave him the key?'
'Of course. He showed me his identification card. It was just like yours, dottт. Well, different photo and name, of course, but the real thing. And he said he worked with you, so I let him in. I mean, I knew you were in hospital, so you couldn't come yourself. That was all right, wasn't it?'
'Yes. Yes, of course. Good night, Giuseppe.'
'Good night, dottт.'
Zen went back inside, closing but not locking the door. What was the point?
'Don't look them in the eye, and never turn your back.'
This time the voice was in the air, not in his head. He could feel its vibrations, although he knew there was no one there. Then another voice, this one internal, added, 'They don't put the bottles in the box, they wrap the box around the bottles.'
He lit the knotted candles on the table and stood there in the gradually waxing light, staring at the chair in which his mother had always sat to watch banal television programmes which her addled mind had transmuted into richer, stranger material. Something was trying to tell him something, but what was it?
For the first time, it occurred to him to look at his watch. It was a little after three in the morning. After a momentary hesitation, he went back into his bedroom and found the shelf on which he kept his Pozzorario railway timetable, the front cover festooned with anachronistic advertisements for various hotels con tutti i conforti a prezzi modici. Not for the first time, he wondered if anyone ever selected a hotel on the basis of these rather desperate-sounding appeals, and if so who. The timetable itself was a year out of date, but Zen knew that the schedules of the night trains were virtually invariable. After a few minutes' search, he found an express from Reggio di Calabria to Milan that stopped at the station of Roma Tiburtina just after four o'clock. He repacked his bags, then called for a taxi. The dispatcher said that Taranto 64 would be there in about ten minutes.
Zen spent the interval wandering about the apartment, apart from his mother's room, which he did not enter, and wondering if there was anything he wanted to keep. Nothing, he concluded, with a surprising shiver of pleasure. He'd hire a company to haul everything away and dispose of it for whatever price they could get. He wasn't even going to think about it. It could all go.
A car drew up outside. Zen took a last look around the disturbingly notional space which had been his home for so many years and then, failing once again to be moved, picked up his bags, closed and locked the door and walked downstairs.
Fortunately the driver of Taranto 64 proved to be one of the few night cabbies in Rome who didn't want to share his life story, political views, family problems and forecast for next season's football championship with his fare. He just shut up and drove. There was almost no traffic, and they arrived at their destination in fifteen minutes. Zen over-tipped the soothingly reticent driver, walked inside the station and bought a first-class single ticket to Florence.
The platforms were deserted. By day, Tiburtina was a busy suburban station serving commuters and shoppers, but at this hour of the night it functioned purely as a stopping place to switch crews on long-haul trains without going into the terminus and having to change locomotives as well. Zen wandered into the bar and bought a cappuccino which he nursed until the clangour of a bell and then an incomprehensible announcement over the loudspeaker system warned of the imminent arrival of his train.
It consisted mainly of sleeping cars, and most of the seating carriages were empty. Zen could easily have had a first-class compartment to himself, but for various reasons he chose instead to share one with two other men. One was almost caricaturally Sicilian, the other less easy to place. Both had evidently been dozing, and went back to stertorous sleep as soon as the train started again. After a while, Zen joined them.
When he woke, they were in the Arno valley and dawn was just starting to break. No details were yet visible outside, but the rugged mass of the Apennines to the east showed black against the gradually lightening sky. It felt good to be out of Rome. He would never live there again if he could help it, he realized.
He disembarked in Florence at the transit station of Rifredi, and grabbed an espresso before the arrival of an early local train to the terminus at Santa Maria Novella. In the piazza outside, the blue buses that served the region were starting to gather. One of the drivers told him that there was a service to Versilia leaving at eight o'clock. That left about an hour to kill. He went across the street to the Lazzi office, bought a ticket and left his luggage behind the counter, then set off towards the Mercato Centrale.
Zen had used this huge covered public market – the largest in Europe, as the locals characteristically claimed – as an early-morning breakfast venue before, in the course of brief trips to or through the city on assignments he could no longer remember. It was a short and pleasant walk from the station through the twisty, narrow, empty streets, and like all markets it came to bustling life at an hour when the rest of the city was still brushing its teeth.
When Zen arrived, the stallholders were still putting the finishing touches to their displays of produce and their clients had not yet materialized, but the food stands were doing a brisk trade from the market workers who clustered around each one, squabbling good-naturedly among themselves, joking, gossiping, miming excessive emotions of every kind, and from time to time breaking off to nag the unflappable serving staff into getting a move on with their order. No dainty pastries and lukewarm milky coffee for these men. They had a hard morning's work ahead, lugging around sides of meat and whole hams and cheeses, and were tucking into crusty rolls stuffed with boiled tripe or beef, washed down with tumblers of Chianti sloshed from plastic-wrapped flasks.
Zen fought his way to the front just as another lump of beef emerged from the steaming cauldron set over a gas ring. He pointed to it, then to the wine, handed over some money and edged back out of the throng to let someone else have a turn. Eventually he found a spot at an angle of the market building where he could park his glass of wine on the railing, and proceeded to munch away. Reaching into his coat pocket for the bunch of tissues he had grabbed from the dispenser to wipe off his greasy lips, he felt a more substantial paper product. Extracting it, he read 'Borunn Sigurdardottir', and felt so happy not to be in Iceland that he went straight back to the stand and ordered another roll and another glass of wine.
How ridiculous it all was! Everything that had happened to him in the last few weeks seemed like a dream which makes perfect sense until you wake up and realize just how gullible you've been. That business on the coast and in the plane, the voices in his head and all the rest of it… It all amounted to nothing more than a flurry of coincidental nonsense, swirls of mental mud thrown up by the physical and mental ordeal that he had been through. But now it was over.
He finished his second roll and the rest of the wine and checked his watch. Just ten minutes left to catch the bus back to the coast. Perfect. He wondered if Gemma would still be at the beach. Or had he dreamed her too? In a few hours he would find out.
Outside the covered market, the street traders were now setting up their stalls laden with clothing, leather goods, CDs, tapes and videos. Zen walked through them, thinking only of catching his bus, until his eye was caught by some items of clothing. They were T-shirts, hanging from a wire suspended at the end of one of the carts. The colours differed, but the words printed on them were all the same: 'Life's a beach'.
He stopped and fingered one of the garments. Noticing Zen's inte
rest, the vendor came over and named a variety of prices in rapidly declining order. Zen shook his head, but.the man unhooked one of the shirts and turned it over to display the alleged quality of the cloth and manufacture. On the back of the shirt, in exactly the same lettering, was printed 'And then you die'.
Zen waved the salesman aside and hurried on his way, turning the foreign phrase over in his mind. La vita e una spiaggia e poi si muore. It made no sense. Perhaps it was some idiomatic expression he didn't understand. There were so many things about English speakers he didn't understand, like Ellen, his one-time American girlfriend asking him, 'Why are all the things I like either fattening or bad for me?' He'd shrugged and replied, 'Because you like the wrong things.'
It had seemed self-evident to him, hardly worth saying, but Ellen had reacted as though he'd slapped her. ‘I can't help what I like!' she'd wailed. He'd sensed then that Americans liked to like things that were bad for them. It added a frisson of sin to their indulgence, and a self-righteous glow to abstinence.
'Life's a beach and then you die.' Absurd. Another piece of dream jetsam with no significance. People would buy clothes with any nonsense on them as long as it was in English. For all they knew, they could be walking round sporting a shirt or jacket which said 'I'm a Complete Idiot.' It didn't matter. English was chic.
He emerged into the piazza in front of Santa Maria Novella, retrieved his baggage from the Lazzi office and climbed aboard the bus just as the driver started the engine in a cloud of diesel fumes.
Lucca
The warm evening light washed down, its heat glowing back up off the worn flagstones where four boys were playing football. Couples and clusters of locals stood about gossiping in a drowsy harmony punctuated by the brief appearance of bicyclists transiting in a leisurely manner from one portal of the small oval piazza to another. In the midst of it all, at an outlying table of a cafe, protected from the sun's rays by a blue ombrellone, Aurelio Zen sat clad in a new cream linen suit and his Panama hat, lingering over the dregs of a coffee and smiling inanely at the sheer blissful pleasure of it all.
For the first time in his life, he felt himself to be a complete gentleman of leisure. He had spent the intervening ten days at the beach, sunning himself, relaxing, and lunching or dining with Gemma either at a variety of local restaurants – including one in a village perched on a crag at the end of a hair-raising mountain road up which she had driven without complaint or comment – or at the villa where he had reinstalled himself. Nothing had 'happened' between them, but there seemed every reason to suppose that something was about to, and it was their very sense of the inevitability of this that had precluded any hasty moves on either side. Nevertheless, the day before Gemma had definitely made a move of some kind by inviting Zen to dinner.
'I should invite you’ he had replied.
'You can't’
'Why not?'
'Because the invitation is to my house’
At these words, the ancient core of Zen's cerebrum, the only part he had ever really trusted, told him that something significant was going to happen this evening. Hence the new – and, truth be told, ruinously expensive – linen suit, hence the tingle of pleasurable anticipation transforming the mundane scenes in the piazza of this sleepy provincial town into signs and symbols of powers still in effect from when the place had been a Roman
amphitheatre. Unspeakable things must have happened in the space where those ragazzi were kicking their ball around, seemingly recklessly and with complete abandon, yet always ensuring that it did not cause any bother or inconvenience to any of the other players in the arena. That was part of the game, one of the rules.
Something was going to happen, of that he was sure, but he had no clear idea what, still less any sense that he could control the event in any decisive way. On his reappearance at the beach, Gemma had initially seemed a bit cool and distant. Zen had explained his abrupt absence as being due to 'business', to which she had responded by a curt nod, as if to say 'If you have your secrets, so have I’
Nevertheless, he could not help grudgingly admitting to himself that the prognostications were good. He hadn't heard a word from the Ministry over his misuse of the high-tech communication device they had given him, sending out an all-points urgent alarm over some burglar breaking into his apartment in Rome. He had, however, heard from Gilberto Nieddu, who had taken Zen's advice, made the necessary penitential pilgrimage to Sardinia, and convinced Rosa to return home with him and the children. Her terms, according to Gilberto, had been surprisingly mild: 'Very well, but next time – if there is a next time – I won't just leave you, I'll leave you for dead.' Zen had enthusiastically seconded Nieddu's opinion that coming from Rosa this amounted to a declaration of total forgiveness and eternal love.
Zen had also visited the hospital at Pietrasanta once again, this time to have the stitches on his knuckles removed. The doctors had taken the opportunity to examine his general progress one last time, and had pronounced him surprisingly well advanced on the way to total recovery. Better still, the last traces of the huldufolk had vanished along with the stitches. He had heard no more voices, had enjoyed dreamless sleep, and in general seemed fully integrated back into the common lot of humanity.
This of course included a general uncertainty, and a measure of anxiety, about the future. The fact of the matter was that he liked Gemma, to the extent that he had got to know her, and that he desired her as a woman. He had some reason to suppose that she felt something similar where he was concerned, but that was all.
He knew nothing about her in any depth, and almost everything she knew about him was either lies or a distortion of the truth. The most probable scenario therefore seemed to be that they would either end up in bed this evening, or some evening soon, or they wouldn't, but in either case that would be as far as it went. Both of them came with lengthy and elaborate histories, and neither had shown much interest in investigating or explaining them, much to Zen's relief. This made for a trouble-free divertimento in the short run, but suggested that the longer-term prospects were tenuous in the extreme. There was just not enough to hold them together, to give them a reason for not going their separate ways. Even with a marriage and children, not to mention decades of intimacy at an age when the personality is still malleable, Gilberto and Rosa had come within a breath of parting for ever. What lasting hope could there be for two strangers at mid-life, with nothing more in common than that they happened to be seated in opposite ombrelloni at Franco's bathing establishment, and seemed to get along and be mildly attracted to one another?
He glanced at his watch and stood up with a sardonic grin at his own fatuousness in taking all this so seriously. A brand-new suit, a bad case of stage fright, and, yes, some roses would be a good idea, just to complete the caricature. One little bomb under the car he'd been travelling in and a couple of half-hearted attempts by some Mafia thug to silence him, and here he was convinced that a casual and probably purely conventional dinner invitation – Gemma's way of paying him back for his hospitality to her – was the hour of destiny. But it would still be interesting to see her apartment. One could learn a lot from the things people had chosen to surround themselves with, especially if the choice had been made with a view to preventing you doing so.
A lengthy and lazily uncoordinated peal of bells from various churches and towers began to ring out seven o'clock as he walked the length of the piazza and out into the street beyond, which bent and narrowed at the point where it would have passed through the original Roman walls. The cramped space between the tall medieval buildings to either side was packed with tall, elegant Lucchesi on foot or on bikes who wove their way through the seemingly impenetrable mass of pedestrians with the same disinvoltura that the future soccer stars had displayed in the piazza.
A news-stand he passed was displaying copies of a satirical review whose headline read, 'Medical Breakthrough Reveals Why Pisans Are Born – No Cure In Sight.' Zen smiled indulgently and moved on. Unlike most other co
untries, at least Italy did not use neighbouring nations as its stereotype for crass stupidity. The universal butt of such low humour was the carabinieri, but every region had its own ritually despised city, whose inhabitants were depicted as cretinous scum who would believe anything and achieve nothing. In his native Veneto, the traditional target was Vicenza; here in Tuscany it was evidently Pisa, and such gags would have a particular appeal here in industrious, mercantile Lucca, so near to yet so far from the neighbouring citta di mare, with its untrustworthy crew of brigands and adventurers with a weather eye always out for one-off deals and a quick killing.
He found a flower shop and ordered a dozen red roses, then wondered if this might look a bit pointed. After a long discussion of the intricacies of the situation with the florist, who had the soft voice and perfect tact of all the townsfolk Zen had encountered, he emerged with a bouquet of yellow roses and turned left off the main street towards the address which Gemma had given him. I like this place, he thought as he strode along. I could be happy here. Despite being entirely landlocked, Lucca reminded him in some indefinable way of Venice. It was a question of its scale, its look and feel of placid security, and above all the politely reticent manners of its citizens, refined by centuries of trade and commerce.
The moment he turned into Via del Fosso, he felt even more at home. The name – Ditch Street – was not attractive, but the thing itself was: a broad avenue of fine buildings to either side of a stone-embanked canal. The trickle of channelled water here was evidently fresh rather than tidal, the buildings more recent and everything on a smaller scale, but the concept was as familiar to Zen as his own face. This was a miniature version of the neighbourhood in Venice where he had grown up. The district must originally have been outside the Roman and medieval city, open fields later enfolded within the imposing line of red-brick baroque walls visible ahead of him. This is where the middleclass merchants of that time would have built their spacious and imposing mansions, leaving the clogged centro and its anachronistic palaces and slums to the decaying nobles and penniless plebs.
And then you die az-8 Page 13