He believes that he could turn himself in, present Milo to the authorities. Only in the precincts of Florence could he hope to do this and emerge, through the influence of his father, with a moderate, even commuted sentence. He has years of information to trade on. Too, he’s tired, all the time tired, more tired than when he had mononucleosis after leaving school and home the first time.
The road is quiet. Christmas and the dead chill have banished all traffic. Holm oaks, towering naked chestnuts, and firs zip by. Arranged in columns to rove over rounded bluffs are tidily pruned olive trees. Familiar landscape, to make him feel warm inside. The town of Greve, its river clotted along the banks with black ice; l’Ugolino, in the undulant hills lined with cypress; Grássina; Ponte a Ema; Badia. The snow is beginning to pick up as the Peugeot crosses the Arno. There are more people walking in the streets of Florence—dressed-up, strolling under the fine pellets of hard sleet—than he might have expected. Not that he would be recognized by anyone (this bothers him, he has to admit, a little).
It is as if the decision is being made for him, as if the hands at the wheel inform the car by instinct to follow the Arno past the Ponte alle Grazie and San Nicolò, by the spectral high-rise apartment buildings huddled like a dozy mirage around the Campo di Marte, and up the hill toward home. The Peugeot comes to rest alongside a stone wall covered in denuded branches of vines and rosemary bushes that topple like tumbleweeds over its edge. Lupi’s fingers locate the key, turn it, and at once the enveloping whine of the engine, his constant companion these past hours fallen into the night, dispersed on the kilometers of road behind him and his helpless companion in the trunk, coughs into a muteness. He sits for a moment. Twenty feet ahead, up to the right, gates open to the gravel drive. The snowfall accompanied by a frozen sleet is crystalline and makes a series of multiple pitched taps—pings—on the roof of the car. He pushes against the door and climbs out into another world, and his exhaustion, a hazy confusion unto nervous delirium, folds in over him. The door snaps shut, configuration of thin steel colliding. An indistinct recollection of his own extinct childhood, his youth, is conveyed by the simple smell of this snow that wavers through the familiar air. Florence burns like so many cats’ eyes below. It comes as a pleasurable shock to the homecomer, all this tranquility. Lupi traces the city line from the campanile of Giotto and Brunelleschi’s dome up over roofs, hills, faint rises, whitened treetops as he leans against the side of the car before gathering his senses.
Head thrown back, mouth agape, he drinks in bitter little flakes that smack on his tongue. What was it he had done here as a boy, beside the granite wall with its irregular rows of cleats pointed like so many square fingers at the sky? Merely thrown snowballs at passing buses which wound their way laboriously up past the Medici villa to Fiesole’s square? Had he hidden in the thick hedges across the road, face and hands blue and his lips eelish, eyes withdrawn and terrified blebs caught in the flashlight beam before he was commanded to come forth by … by who had it been? his father? the family’s manservant? What had he done then that required he hide himself in the juniper hedges in the middle of winter, terrified but openly defiant? It was a memory summoned by a perfect scent of sleety rain over the hard grass (dead grass) and in the foliage.
He opens his eyes, walks around to the trunk of the car. He has decided he will release his captive long enough for him to walk a hundred paces down the road and back. It was not stipulated, after all, that he had to act inhumanely toward Milo; he was entrusted to communicate the victim from one point to another: no more, no less. He opens the trunk and sees that he is still there, yes, motionless, silent, before he hears the deep grind of a camion rounding the fork in the road below. The trunk is slammed shut. He ducks down behind the Peugeot as the camion, its open bed filled with children, singing, shouting, lurches by. Lupi peers from his hiding place at this strange vision of the truck with its load of children, all bundled in coats and wrapped in scarves and shawls, bright smears of color against the bowing sky. He continues to watch until it winds around the bend of road and disappears up toward Fiesole.
The intrusion has made him apprehensive; he wonders, what does he possibly think he is doing?—
The police are looking for him throughout the central and southern regions of the country. By evening the newspapers and RAI will have christened him Rapista di Natale, the Christmas Kidnapper. Isn’t it so tragic—each will mourn—such a horrid thing could happen during this holy week, this religious period, a time of pacific introspection and prayer, hardly a time of taped wrists, ugly demands. They will have taken telephone calls from extremist organizations as diverse as the neofascist Ordine Nero and the Sinistra Proletaria (on and on and on), and all will claim responsibility for the abduction, all will denounce the Christian Democrats as charlatan and Dr. Milo as the merest threadbare puppet—shelved but symbolic—in their stupid show.
The temptation grows to throw himself at the feet of his father, and to confess that he had been right—no, not-right, but had made points which should have been better taken, listened to—and beg his forgiveness, hope that he as well would ask his son to, well, if not forgive actually, at least understand the stiffness that can come with habit, and then of course turn freezing Milo over (Milo out in the trunk, it was preposterous—this was the way to save people, save the country—), hope for immunity in exchange for names, locations, activities. It seems so plausible. The prospect wells inside him. He is, he rues, hungry.
He decides to leave Milo where he is. It would be too dangerous to let him out of the trunk. Someone might spot them, might identify them. He locks the car, shoves the key into his jacket pocket, walks up the twig-covered shoulder to the front gate. There is a brass placard, eaten green at its edges, beside the buzzer at the gate, beautifully incised with serif lettering; Andrea Gabriele Battista Lupi.
Turning up the drive, hands pushed low into his trouser pockets, the familiarity of the landscape deepens. Pace quickening, he walks up into the grove of pines where he would be enshrouded in evergreen branches and bushes heavy with berries as he approaches the house. Lights that shine in the windows of the villa spill out across the blue-white lawn. There are cars—heavy, new, expensive cars—parked before the front door, which is decorated with a sprig of holly tied with a red ribbon. Through the windows along the north corridor of the villa, behind wrought-iron grill-work and framed by shutters, Lupi can see a group of people seated around the dining-room table … and he begins to think, Questo non va. This is not going to work.
Christmas dinner is under way. A fire burns in the stone hearth. Bottles of champagne stand in ice buckets, white linen tied at their necks—things tied, he begins to imagine them, strangled, everything being choked, the holly, the champagne. He sees his mother grayer, heavier than he remembered her, more brightly dressed, perhaps to make up for it in some way—her gown, red as the berries in the holly sprig, backdrop to the shimmery bracelets that encircle her forearm. As she speaks she waves her arm and the bracelets tumble where she defines an extravagant S-curve, emphasizing a point. She engages a man seated at her left, diminutive, whose dark head seems outsize for the paltry shoulders beneath it. He follows the course of her animated talk with politeness. Lupi does not recognize him; most likely he is a barrister, a judge, or local administrator—he and the others, several with their backs to his shrub out in the forlorn world hung in sleet, are seated at their supper (his supper? no), beneath the chandelier (also not his, he is quick to tell himself).
The table is presided over by Gabriele Battista, face contorted in laughter. Not an atom in his body seems to have changed in the years that have intervened; he appears inexorable, ineradicable. All at once, as son observes the fork carry lamb into father’s mouth, it becomes evident the shrewdest, most violent, most sophisticated and committed collective of radicals could never hope to arrogate from this man a single fleck of power. It would be possible to murder him, slay the whole smug group of them where they sit eating their magnif
icent Christmas dinner, burn the villa down. Nothing would be accomplished by it.
Lupi’s face exhibits recognition. It is a mixture of the pain that has cropped up out of what he stares at through the window and reaction to the idea that has just dawned on him. One thing is evident: he cannot change the course he is on, cannot confess, cannot come home.
He slouches across an octagonal stone piazza, at the center of which stands a fountain with three granite dolphins, each capped with white, and enters the villa by the servants’ porch. Voices imperative and rushed he hears in the kitchen. A pan clatters as it is placed on the burner. The maid, her Tuscan accent softening each “c” into tightly clinched shushes, is scolding someone (who?—has his father come so far, done so well, that there are submaids, underlings under the underlings? well, telling from the voices, yes, it’s so, as she is scolding someone) for burning biscuits. He smells the scents of lamb roast, gravy from the drippings, cooked arugula, of vinegars and olive oil, warm and winy, which fill the hallway. He rubs his hands together unhappily, breathing into them, and glances around sees what he can see, which isn’t much. The kitchen falls quiet. The maid’s voice, that was it, the maid pecking down the pecking order on yet another housekeeper, or a cook, or whomever, stops. He makes up his mind what he is going to do.
In three steps he is down the short hall, and reaches a door. He ascends by way of back stairs to the second floor, where, in his mother’s dressing room, he proceeds to fill his pockets with brooches, earrings, bracelets, pendants, necklaces. Hidden behind an ornately framed daguerreotype photograph of his grandparents, whose cheeks are heightened in unlikely rose and flesh tones, is the wall safe. He tries his memory on the combination. Faintly, from downstairs, a wave of fresh laughter filters up. A clunk (heard through the burglar’s bones, so soft was it) is registered; exhilaration, and the square metal door comes away. There is no alarm. Down the front of his shirt he stows hundreds of thousands, millions of lire, in paper bundles. A gold fob watch, lapis-studded gold cufflinks, rings, an antique cloisonné snuffbox which later would give up several unset diamonds. He takes everything that will fit in his pockets. On the wall is an eighteenth-century pencil study for an expulsion from Eden which the thief thinks too befitting the circumstances to leave behind. He breaks into the frame, removes the drawing, rolls it up, pushes it into a coat pocket. The bastards, he thinks.
Laden with the jewelry and money he shuffles back through the hallway and downstairs, breath fluted, lungs a burden. He is tempted to risk a foray into the kitchen, as he hasn’t eaten since afternoon the day before, but a lull in the chatter from the distant dining room and an unexpected arpeggio from some ghostly pianoforte, perfectly tuned and suddenly accompanied by a strange, overly vibrato soprano voice, discourages him. Who possibly is singing? and what? A shiver runs through him as, disconcerted, he plunges out into the sinking afternoon.
The storm has let up again, the temperature has fallen. The engine must be turned over three times before it finally catches. He is halfway to Bologna before he remembers the man, sad Milo, his grim charge prostrate in the trunk. For the first time it occurs to him the man might have frozen to death; he will not, however, stop the car to look. He can’t do it. Let someone else see what there is to see back there.
In a trattoria at the outskirts of Bologna, Matteo has a warm meal. Prosciutto, red peppers. Polenta, chicken; spinach in oil and with hard-boiled eggs. Coffee, and grappa. It is a good meal, and he feels well satisfied, sitting alone in the chair next to the window, facing out on passersby in the street bundled up in their winter coats, stepping quickly along their way no doubt to somewhere comfortable, their homes, the houses of friends or relatives.
He asks the waiter for his bill, pays, and goes out to join the others in the cold streets. As he opens the door to the car it strikes him that he might never see his mother or father again.
One thing: that boy, Claudio, the only other person who had touched Nini, Claudio had once called America the corpse of Europe. “The death of Europe in America,” he had said. Okay, the death of Europe in America, fair enough, wise idea. Even dogs and stable cats and pet geese are known to find a place—some favorite haunt way out in a field, or in some secluded closet in the house—where they may die in solitude and in peace, with dignity, perhaps; many animals do. Why shouldn’t an entire culture enjoy the same simple prerogative?
So, there was that. And, also, as he looked out across the street at a collection of five cylindrical chimneys each with conical caps which lent them the appearance of a Chinese family huddled up together, and beyond them, this family group in the melting pot, out at watertowers, eaves, setbacks, curtain walls, skeletons of buildings going up, skeletons of buildings toppling down, roofs, windows closed, opened, cracked, boarded, the infinitely intricate collage that was New York, he knew there was something else.
He knew that Hannah was dissembling on one matter still. While she had come around to telling him that this was the only one of its kind, this pasture, this ranch, and that by the weakness of the way things were she was weakened to the outside world by having it and keeping it (though strengthened in her inner world), he could envision hundreds just like it, thousands of others—not like anything movie could make, nor even anything he had thus far seen with his own eyes—and so he knew that they were there, hidden behind ruinous facades, each resigned to a certain secrecy, perhaps.
But there, there. Out there.
IV
Hung Storm
LeRoy
July 1955
BABYLON: A PUZZLE of buildings arranged around a central spine, a backbone laid out long on the flat, dry ground, which rises up two stories over the Nebraska prairieland. Men and women dwell within the hundred-odd houses that crowd like so much squared scree fallen from nowhere to rest around the main street as if defensive against a nameless threat that lurks out over the parched lip of the horizon. The people here work in small businesses in town, as tailor, grocer, tobacconist, barber, liquor salesman, cobbler, pharmacist, or hand to the farmers whose spreads extend in the outlying grassland. Babylon’s two most unusual businesses (they are unusual, at least, for such a small town) are the movie theater and the slaughterhouse. Both are owned by the same man, Mr. Johnson, who is fond of saying he makes money on the one so he can lose it on the other. He is devoted to picture shows; they take him places he might never go otherwise—exotic huts of the South Pacific in which men like Johnson himself might touch virgin skin the color of seared butter; bordellos of Mexico City out whose balm-breeze-blown windows lean black-haired sinyereetas; boodwars in hot Paris; night alleys of New York. A businessman, Johnson knows the movie house is frivolity. It does not run in the black. There aren’t enough quarters in the county Saturday afternoon to begin to pay off the film distributors. The paint on the marquee is faded, chipping; the screen wants retaping. It constantly sieves money. Johnson doesn’t seem to mind. He feels he can afford it and it has had the not inconsiderable effect of making him both a prominent and popular citizen in town. He is an industrious, clean-shaven, pleasant individual with no remarkable aspirations beyond keeping both his enterprises running efficiently and being seen—personally—by his fellow townsmen as hale, substantial, trusted. This was, as he understood it, good business. The abattoir, owned and run by Johnsons for over a century, is the largest, most venerable firm around. His pioneer forefathers were aware of the power of good public relations and its connection with the profit-and-loss factor. This had come to them, as it had to him, by intuition, but as he was fond of saying, charity is not best learned from books or church, but side by side with other men doing the work they were put on the earth to do.
A set of railroad tracks had been laid at the turn of the century for the purpose of transporting cattle, hogs, and sheep to and from the yards of the Johnson slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town, and by turn to ship weighed head, butchered meat and by-products back out to the markets east as far as Beatrice. In the 1930s the tracks
, owned by Chicago Burlington & Quincy, neither continued into town nor ventured farther west toward Harlan or Furnace, but dead-ended in the stock-crowded yards, and so never attracted the services of a passenger train from the county seat or capital until Bloomington, the next town over, developed the need for them.
Bloomington’s mayor was a shrewd gentleman, whose eye was trained on the governorship of the state, and whose ambition even touched upon a seat in the Senate. His town needed the services of the Chicago Burlington & Quincy. Bloomington must be connected by rail to Hastings and to the rest of the country from there out. He appealed directly to the railroad, proposing that some matching costs of erecting a station could be undertaken by the town of Bloomington itself. Unknown to the men who advised him, Chicago Burlington & Quincy had already drawn up plans to pursue marking a route that more or less satisfied his designs, so they readily accepted his terms, and within some months began to lay track. Though Babylon was miles north, and off a direct course for this connection between Hastings and Bloomington, it was decided that money might be saved by using the prelaid tracks and continuing them across the golden azimuth (as the mayor nicely phrased it) into Franklin County.
This the majority of the townspeople of Babylon disfavored. Some threatened at a town council meeting to move their families away if such a thing took place. They believed a passenger train would cast open gates for strangers, like those they had seen at Johnson’s picture shows—cutthroats, vagabonds, foreigners—to flow in from the outside world, bringing chaos and heartbreak. Even the freethinkers among them pointed to history, saying, Look what happened to the native Americans, the plains tribes, peaceably living off the land until the explorers came, and behind them the hordes of settlers—why allow this second wave? why risk it? Several farmers parked their trucks and tractors on the rails in protest, blocking for an afternoon the progress of a swing train with a full load of ties. The work went on, however.
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