Death In Florence

by Marco Vichi

  He went out and decided to walk to the station, to work off the dinner of the night before. It wasn’t too cold. In the few passing cars he saw families dressed up in their Sunday best. He’d resolved not to smoke until midday. At the end of the war he’d met an English officer who smoked every other year. And every other New Year’s Eve, after twelve months of smoking, he would enjoy his last cigarette, and then, after a year without smoking, on New Year’s Day, he would relish his first cigarette. No Italian would ever be capable of doing such a thing.

  When he got to Piazza della Repubblica he stopped at the Giubbe Rosse café to take a coffee comfortably sitting down. Two tables away from his there was an attractive woman of about thirty, rather provocative and a little vulgar. She was with a nondescript man. She knew she was attractive, and though she didn’t look at anyone, it was clear she knew she was being looked at by everyone. Bordelli, too, was looking at her. Her beauty was the sort that caught the eye. Blonde, fleshy lips, almond eyes. A bit behind her sat another woman, also attractive, but with a completely different kind of beauty. Fine, delicate, with perfect little ears and chestnut hair tied in a short ponytail. She too was with a nondescript man. She did not attract attention; hers was a connoisseur’s beauty. The salesgirl, for her part, had both kinds, a blend of different beauties. That was what Bordelli liked about her.

  He carried on looking at the two women, imagining what their lives were like. Was the blonde married to a rich man whom she tried to milk as much as possible? Like a sort of high-class whore? And was the other one perhaps a young mother who had left her beloved child with Grandma so she could go out for a drink with her husband?

  He heard someone say something in Latin behind him, and turned round. Seated behind him was a slender, handsome elderly gentleman of about seventy, smiling. He was well dressed, with pure-white hair and the moustache of a Habsburg general. He had an upper-class air about him, and his black suit was from another era.

  ‘What was that?’ Bordelli asked, taking an instinctive liking to the man.

  ‘Man is never what he appears to be, and woman even less so,’ the old man translated for him, an ironic gleam in his eye.

  ‘Juvenal? Seneca?’

  ‘Manlio Ceramelli de’ Lupi Scarlini, that is, yours truly,’ the man introduced himself, holding out a bony, well-manicured hand.

  ‘Pleased to meet you. Franco Bordelli Casini Postriboli,’32 said the inspector, making the old man smile. They shook hands, and the gentleman’s eyes gestured discreetly towards the two beautiful women.

  ‘Have a good look at them … The striking blonde lady is a devoted wife who would rather be burnt alive than betray her husband. The other one, the little nun, is also married, but has the bad habit of sleeping in a different bed every night.’

  ‘How did you know I was thinking about them?’ Bordelli asked in amazement.

  ‘I’m under the illusion that I can intuit what is going through the minds of others.’

  ‘Apparently it’s not just an illusion.’

  ‘At any rate, I was lying. I don’t know the first thing about those two women, but I always try to avoid the lure of my first impressions. My greatest fear is the enslavement of prejudice.’

  ‘I’ll try to do the same.’

  ‘You work with the police?’

  ‘I’m beginning to think you’re a sorcerer.’

  ‘I’m not. A few months ago I happened to see your picture in the newspaper, and I’m lucky enough still to have a good memory,’ said the old man, lightly touching his temple with an index finger. Bordelli felt increasingly curious about the strange gentleman with three surnames.

  ‘And what do you do, if it’s not too indiscreet to ask?’

  ‘I squander inheritances. It may seem a rather simple occupation, but in reality it hides a whole host of insidious obstacles.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A sense of guilt, the fear of poverty and scorn, common morality, reflection, fits of parsimony, far-sightedness … I could go on, but I’d rather not bore you.’

  ‘It must be tiring work.’

  ‘Extremely tiring, I assure you. Because of these contrary forces I’ve managed to save just one home, the last one remaining. A penthouse flat in Via de’ Bardi, with a view of the Ponte Vecchio. As you can see, I’m not a terribly good inheritance squanderer, otherwise I should already have taken up residence under a bridge, perhaps dans un château de carton.’

  ‘How romantic.’

  ‘You’re probably wondering why I’m speaking so lightly of my personal affairs to you, a complete stranger. I confess I don’t really know why; it’s the first time this has happened to me. But it’s just the sort of thing I like, the fact that at my age I can still sometimes surprise myself.’

  ‘I wish I could do the same.’

  ‘Homo faber fortunae suae …’33 said Manlio Ceramelli de Lupi Scarlini, smiling.

  ‘Do you know Latin well?’

  ‘Just enough to have fun with it.’

  ‘Do you think you could translate a phrase for me?’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘It’s carved over a shrine at the crossing of two paths in the woods, just a few steps away from an ancient abbey … Omne Movet Urna Nomen Orat.’

  ‘Well, let’s see … Firstly, if that’s really the way it’s written, it’s untranslatable. If it were: Omne movet urna nomen … Ora, or Orate or Oratius, or more precisely Horatius with an H, it would translate as follows: “The urn shakes every name. Pray.” It’s more or less a line of Horatius Flaccus, Third Book, First Ode, which begins thus: “Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo …”’

  ‘So it’s famous …’

  ‘You must certainly have read it at school … I hate the vulgar rabble, and keep them away. The quote on your shrine is the last line of the fourth stanza, which is thus: Omne Capax Movet Urna Nomen. The transcription omitted the word Capax, but it’s not necessarily a mistake – actually I’m convinced it was left out on purpose. For the Romans the urn was a receptacle in which they put lots to be drawn, lots with names on them for the gods to read. In a Christian context it means: Pray so that your names will be the fortunate ones … Which is probably an echo of the Book of Revelations, where it says that the names of the saved are written in the Book of Life. What seems unusual and interesting to me is that they use a line of Horace that to common mortals must sound rather sybilline. I would have been less surprised had the phrase been inscribed inside the abbey. Quotations of that sort might be quite familiar to the majority of the monks, many of whom were scribes and recopied ancient codices. But it might have been simply the whim of a cultured, humanist monk, perhaps the abbot himself … More than that I can’t tell you. I’m sorry …’

  ‘I think that’s more than enough,’ said Bordelli, in a bit of a daze. In front of this inheritance-squandering old man, he felt like a perfect ignoramus.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question myself?’ asked Manlio Ceramelli de Lupi Scarlini.

  ‘If it’s not too difficult.’

  ‘It’s quite easy, actually. Would you be so good as to lend me a thousand lire?’

  ‘Well … yes, of course …’ said Bordelli, reaching into his jacket for his wallet. He took out a one-thousand lira note and handed it to the old man.

  ‘You’re very kind.’

  Ceramelli de Lupi Scarlini put the filthy lucre in his pocket with the utmost elegance and crossed his legs. His eyes had clouded over with nostalgia like those of an old stationmaster seeing a steam engine again after many years. The inspector would gladly have given him another thousand lire but was afraid to offend him. He turned round to look at the two women, but in the meantime they’d both left.

  ‘Excuse me for just a minute,’ Bordelli said, getting up. He went to the men’s room, and when he returned the old gentleman was gone. He went up to the cash register to pay, but the barman said his coffee had already been taken care of. As he was leaving the Giubbe Rosse he noticed that a tip of three hu
ndred lire had been left on Ceramelli de Lupi Scarlini’s table, and he couldn’t suppress a smile.

  Early the following morning, Bordelli set out to make the climb from La Panca to Monte Scalari on foot. He’d put on his hiking boots and an anorak with a hood, in case it rained. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He just wanted to take a long walk in the woods. He felt he really needed it. Having left his cigarettes in the car to avoid temptation, he trudged up the path, breathing deeply, wanting only to grant himself a few hours of peace and quiet. He couldn’t get the bitterness out of his heart. He felt defeated, and not only as a law enforcement officer. His life was a disaster. Alone and womanless. He was even getting fat. And his work was a miserable business. What, in reality, did he do? Merely try, as best he could, to sew up the small tears in a tattered, worn-out piece of fabric, rather like trying to heal a blemish on the body of a leper. When things went well, he would feel as if he had accomplished some sort of mission, and when they didn’t, he felt incompetent. A magnificent line of work, really. Four more years and they would put him out to pasture, perhaps with the title of deputy commissioner. Better not to think about it …

  It took him about half an hour to reach the top, where the trail more or less flattened out. Great mud puddles made passage difficult, as streams of water, fed by the prior day’s rain, poured down the slopes. The dark trunks of the chestnuts and oaks were enveloped in a bluish haze given off by the damp earth. For November it wasn’t too cold. A sort of dim glow, at once spectral and light, rose up from the dead leaves rotting in the mud and highlighted the combination of colours of the forest.

  He thought again of the old gentleman he’d met at the Giubbe Rosse and wondered how he lived. He would have liked to see him again, to hear his ancient voice again. He’d even looked the man’s name up in the telephone book but found nothing. Maybe one day he would run into him again, minus another portrait of Giuseppe Verdi.

  He passed under the great oak, walked past the abbey of Monte Scalari and continued up the path that led to Pian d’Albero. It was All Souls’ Day. At that hour the cemeteries were already besieged by people and flowers, and the freshest graves would enjoy a few tears. He imagined Mr and Mrs Pellissari at the cemetery, hand in hand, staring incredulously at the photograph of Giacomo.

  He stopped on a hilltop that afforded a view of the valley below. Across the horizon a thin strip of blue hovered above a ridge of hills. The luminous azure radiated hope, like a prison door left ajar. The rest of the sky was an oppressive, spotted dome of lead, a dome in motion. He waited for the strip of blue to vanish, then resumed walking.

  The trail continued rising and descending, following its tortuous path. To the right was a steep descent down to an invisible stream. Every so often there appeared a secondary trail that led farther into the woods, and Bordelli thought he’d like to explore them all one day. At one point, where a huge puddle blocked the way, he had to walk along the edge of the chasm, stepping on wet, slippery rocks.

  He noticed a metal object half buried in the ground and bent down to dig it out. It was an unexploded machine-gun cartridge. He put it in his pocket and kept on walking, head full of memories of the war. A dirty war set in motion out of weakness by a weak man posing as a strong man … A weak, powerful man, a tyrannical child driving a tank. A child who dragged Italy into a stupid, ferocious war that the Italians pretended not to have lost, so as not to feel ashamed … not realising that victory would have been more shameful than defeat, an even deeper wound. Good thing they did lose the war. Still, the shame of defeat had entered the people’s blood and bones and it was useless to pretend …

  He heard a large animal running through the scrub at the bottom of a slope, but didn’t manage to see it. A moment later, silence returned, a silence made up of a thousand sounds and rustlings, the silence of the forest. A long blast of wind brought a flurry of dead leaves that fluttered in the air like d’Annunzio’s flyers over Vienna.34

  Underneath his every thought was her, the beautiful salesgirl of Via Pacinotti. She was a ghostly presence, a kind of scent he felt permeated with. He saw once again her impertinent eyes, her fine, impish mouth … Perhaps she too, at that moment, was in a cemetery, taking flowers to a dead grandparent.

  He continued walking for over an hour, until he saw, beyond the trees, a large structure of stone and brick. He’d arrived at Pian d’Albero. Quickening his pace, he soon reached the end of the wood and came into a large clearing. To the right was the house of the massacre, standing against a sky the colour of wet ash. The path curved and then led straight to the house, while another, smaller path forked to the left and into the trees. He followed the broader trail, which went slightly uphill. He could almost hear the sound of the German machine gun cutting down the resistance fighters. It was a quite familiar sound to him.

  Farther up was another fork. The path to the left had to be the one that descended towards Figline. He pushed on as far as the house and stopped to look at it. A large, abandoned house, which nobody would ever live in again.

  He turned towards the valley. From up there he could see the Valdarno plain, and in the background a soft horizon of hills crushed by clouds. He sat down on a big rectangular rock, to rest his legs. It occurred to him that he had almost stopped thinking about Giacomo’s killers, as if he were resigned never to find them. When he’d found the butcher’s phone bill in the wood, a flame had been lit in the darkness – a flame that was now going out.

  Half an hour later, he began to head back, pleased to recognise the stones, trees and puddles he had seen on the way up. Who knew what the colours were like in other seasons? He would soon find out. By now he couldn’t do without these solitary walks.

  All of a sudden he heard a soft but deep murmur. A light drizzle was falling, barely wetting his hair, the kind of misty rain that sometimes falls during the first weeks of spring. It lasted only a few minutes, just long enough to paint the vegetation in livelier colours.

  When the abbey of Monte Scalari came into view his legs were aching. He wasn’t used to walking mile after mile like this. He was thirsty. He’d been a fool not to bring a canteen of water along with him. He came up to the shrine with the Latin inscription and read it again, but without stopping, satisfied to know what it meant. Leaving the abbey behind him, he continued walking, without haste, hand in his pocket, fingering the bullet he’d found along the path.

  Suddenly he saw another person moving through the woods, some thirty paces ahead of him. A young lad was coming down a slope, practically sliding, holding his arms out to keep his balance. When he reached the footpath he stopped and looked around as though lost. He had very close-cropped hair, and his clothes danced on his body as though hung from a coat hanger. Bordelli walked towards him, curious to know what he was doing. The youth noticed him and waited for him to approach, immobile, head hanging.

  ‘Hello,’ said Bordelli, drawing near. The lad still didn’t move, and his lips were contorted in a sort of grimace. At first glance he looked as if he might have a screw loose.

  ‘Hello,’ the inspector repeated, stopping in front of him. He wasn’t really so young after all, and looked to be about thirty.

  ‘The Madonna has it in for me,’ the man whispered, with a sort of smile on his lips.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘She has it in for me …’

  ‘Did you do something to make her angry?’

  ‘She’s wicked … she hates me … everybody knows that …’ he said, head swaying slightly.

  ‘Do you live around here?’ Bordelli asked him paternally.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette? Eh, have you?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘The woods are full of the souls of the dead,’ the young man said, gesturing broadly with his hand.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen them.’

  ‘You smell that stink? Eh, you smell it?’ He sniffed the air like an animal.

  ‘What stink?’

  ‘Bachicche
’s stink …’ said the young man, upset, looking past the inspector. Bordelli turned round and saw a man advancing slowly on the path at a distance, a rifle resting on his shoulder.

  ‘Do you know him?’ he asked the madman.

  ‘Bachicche … Bachicche …’ the young man muttered, then quickly crossed himself and ran off in the direction of La Panca with arms flailing. Bordelli waited for the man with the rifle to approach, then greeted him with a nod of the head.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Greetings,’ said the man, stopping in front of him. He looked to be a little over sixty. Slender, with a square head and skin as tough as parchment. His small, intelligent eyes looked like pebbles removed from a brazier.

  ‘Not even a sparrow?’ Bordelli asked, looking at the empty game bag hanging from the man’s belt.

  ‘I don’t feel like shooting any more. Haven’t felt like it for years.’

  ‘Then why do you go around with a rifle?’

  ‘Habit,’ the man said with a shrug.

  ‘A few minutes ago I ran into a rather strange young man,’ said Bordelli, just to make conversation.

  ‘I saw him. That’s Giuggiolo … He’s not quite right in the head.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘Poor lad, he had a bad time of it when he was a boy.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’

  ‘It was in ’44, round about Christmas time … Are you coming down to La Panca?’ asked the man. Bordelli nodded, and they headed down the trail together. The old man remained silent, staring into space as if collecting memories. Bordelli was curious to hear the story of Giuggiolo and waited patiently. They came to the great oak, which looked more and more imposing every time Bordelli saw it. The old man came to a halt directly under its boughs and looked up. His eyes were on one branch in particular, a long, gigantic branch that loomed over the trail.

  ‘It happened right here … The Germans had their base at the abbey and patrolled the woods during the day with their dogs. One morning they caught the miller with his backpack full of bread and realised he was taking it to the partisan fighters. They hanged him and his whole family from this oak, with their hands tied behind their backs. Father, mother and three children. Then they forced everyone in the area to come and see. I was there, too, and I remember it as if it was today. The women were crying like calves. They hung Giuggiolo from up there, where you see that big knot. He was eight years old. They did him last, and he got to see his whole family hanged. First Papa, then Mamma, then his sixteen-year-old brother, and his ten-year-old sister. One by one, he saw them all stop kicking in the air. Then it was his turn. The Germans put the noose round his neck and pulled him up. Giuggiolo kicked more than the others, and as soon as he stopped, the Germans started singing a song …’