by Ben Pastor
“Well,” Guidi spoke in the wind. “Could Lisi have been a gambler?”
“You’ve seen how padded his bank accounts were. If he gambled, they surely didn’t bump him off because he couldn’t afford to pay his gambling debts. Of course it could have been an assassination à la Matteotti. A political adversary is done in without witnesses, and even History is left wondering.”
“Major Bora!”
“What? Isn’t that what happened to Matteotti twenty years ago, and only because he was a famous socialist? I’m not stupid.”
“You ought not to speak so lightly.”
“Ha!” Despite the stiffness of his gait, Bora forced Guidi to keep up with him. “In our case, it’s more likely the widow did it.”
“Likely, but unproven. And between you and me, Major, if that were a fact – mind you, if it were a fact, could you honestly blame her?”
So that it wouldn’t be snuffed out by the wind, Bora spoke with the cigarette in his mouth. “I told you once that I haven’t been asked to handle this case in order to pass moral judgement. You’re much more concerned about matters of ethics than I am.” Bora pressed his lips and smoke escaped from his nostrils in a faint quick cloud, soon snatched by the wind. They had walked more than a mile when clear patches of grey evening sky began to float above the convulsed race of late-autumn clouds. “There’s our fair weather,” Bora observed.
Guidi, whose bladder was starting to resent the amounts of beer and coffee stored in it, had stayed behind for a respite. From the wayside where he stood, careful the wind would not spray urine against his trousers, he could see Bora waiting a few feet away. His back was turned, and he stood ramrod-straight as if the march were not affecting the pain in his wounded leg.
A minuscule star pricked the east like a pin. Another followed, and another, and soon the darkening sky was full of them, little lights now bold, now dim, as if panting with fears of their own. Already a frail, opaque moon sailed like a glass boat up high. Bora raised his eyes to the crescent. As wraiths of tardy clouds overtook it, it more and more resembled a delicate wind-filled sail overhead; rushing, finely wrought, the moon would not be so graceful again until after it went entirely dark, tomorrow or the day after. For reasons of his own, Bora showed no ill humour this evening, something that Guidi was ashamed to resent more than an argument.
“Luna mendax.” Quoting the Latin saying, Bora smirked, and kept his eyes on the moon.
“‘The moon is a liar’?”
“Yes. You never heard the proverb? I’ll tell you about it some time. You know, Guidi, we ought to check De Rosa’s alibi.”
The words came as an attempt at conciliation. Guidi, who tonight treasured the notion that Claretta had been long refusing her bed to Lisi, fell for it.
But Bora’s indulgence sealed over like ice. “On the other hand, it is impossible not to see her as an ungrateful mate after what Enrica Salviati had to say.”
Dusk gathered around them, and soon they were silent.
They had resigned themselves to wandering in the dark when the round hum of an engine rose from the distance behind them. Guidi glanced back in alarm. He couldn’t help thinking that a partisan band was about to find him in the company of a German officer. Alongside him, Bora’s only reaction was to unlatch the holster on his left side. Guidi, too, reached inside his coat.
A large car was approaching, the slits of its blackened headlights projecting feeble cones of glare ahead. Bora and Guidi couldn’t make out how many people were inside, and kept on the defensive. The car scaled down its gears, creeping to a halt on the shoulder by them. From the semi-darkness of the lowered window, “Wollen Sie mitfahren?” The question floated to them over the idling of the Mercedes-Benz engine.
Bora and Guidi were both surprised, but while Bora’s hand left the holster, Guidi’s did not. The bald head of a stout old man emerged like a strange birth from the window. He smiled. After speaking a few sentences in German to Bora, who readily answered, he spoke to Guidi in Italian. “I saw a Fiat stopped a while back, and was wondering who might have left it there, with the curfew and the danger of night air raids. Now,” he said, clearly pleased at the sight of Bora’s uniform, “I understand. My house is less than four miles off that way.” He pointed to the twilit flat countryside broken by hills like islands. “You are welcome to spend the night, and I can take you to town in the morning.”
Bora did not trouble himself with consulting Guidi on the matter. “Yes, please.”
They were soon travelling along in the ageing German car, toward sites unknown. Guidi marvelled at Bora’s imprudence in accepting a ride just because the driver spoke German.
“By the way,” the old man was saying now, “I know I shouldn’t be out in a private car, but there’s never any checking on this road. My name is Moser. ‘Nando’ Ferdinand Augustus Moser.” He turned to the men seated in the back seat. “Austro-Hungarian subject by birth in Trieste, when His Imperial Royal Apostolic Highness still ruled this land. Good music and good cheer, and all that! My father, God bless his memory, was a physician in Franz Josef’s court, but it was his elders who built the house some three hundred years back. There were scores of Mosers, when this was Austrian land.”
Guidi tried to dredge from his Catholic school education that bit of Italian history. The Peace of Vienna came to his mind, though he wasn’t sure of the date – 1866?
Bora said something in German.
“Ja, ja,” the old man agreed. “Ganz genau, ja.”
As they went along, only remnants of light, or perhaps it was the starlight, allowed the travellers to intuit shapes and distances. Guidi looked through his dusty window. The hills had grown closer to one another, revealing archipelagos of sparsely wooded terrain. Like a new continent of purple darkness, they set limits to the star-pricked sky.
Bora didn’t seem to pay attention to where they were being taken, so Guidi kept alert. Eventually he made out a long façade, and two colonnaded wings spreading out as if to embrace the cultivated grounds.
“It’s not going to be any warmer inside, I’m afraid,” Moser said in Italian. “No hot water. There never was. And no telephone. Tradition. But I’ll show you the fortepiano young Mozart played when he passed by on his way to Verona in 1770 with Papa Leopold. It’s a Silbermann, you know.”
The qualification meant nothing to Guidi, but Bora seemed enthralled. “Really?” He sat up. “Built by Gottfried or the heirs?”
“By Gottfried himself.”
“Ach, so? I played on a Hildebrandt piano in Dresden.”
It was the first time Guidi had heard of Bora’s interest in music.
The car had turned onto a brick or cobblestone path that led them bumpily to the main door. Moser asked Bora, “Saxon, are you?”
“Leipzig.”
“Leipzig – not related to Friedrich von Bora!”
Bora did not elaborate. “He was my father.”
“Well!” Moser kept smiling. “How fortunate for the Silbermann if you’ll play tonight.”
Bora answered nothing at all.
Once the great leaf of the main door was pushed back, a gaping, vast darkness received the men, compared to which the night seemed luminous. Moser groped alongside the wall, awakening faint light bulbs from the sconces to reveal a stage-like, seemingly endless hall. Echoes travelled unknown vaulted spaces above, the ceiling being all but invisible. Each step and each word sounded two, three times, as if ghostly feet and mouths populated the dark to imitate the living. Behind the sleek shape of the fortepiano, the powerful sweep of a staircase sought the dimness of other floors. It seemed to Guidi a frozen waterfall of alabaster, gleaming now opalescent yellow, now thickly white. The stairs lost themselves in the gloom, behind a baluster. Church-like, from unfathomed corners and recesses, stucco reliefs extended white and gilded limbs to the stolen pool of glare. Beyond these, lost to the light bulbs, the domed darkness hinted at a glory of windows and painted images, though nothing but a borderless mist sh
owed at this hour.
Moser’s hunched figure seemed out of place in the shadowy beauty. But there he was, rubbing his hands, with a nod inviting the guests to follow him through a low doorway.
If the partisans pop up and kill us now, it’s all Bora’s fault. Guidi thought the words, and still followed.
The door led to a cavernous kitchen, at the centre of which a wood stove seemed to be the only working thing. Moser went to toss a piece of cut lumber into it. He said, “When you’re alone, there isn’t much point in keeping up the entire house. The rest of the family is long gone, what in 1918 with the Spanish flu, and then with wars and age. The rooms upstairs are in good shape, but there’s no electricity.” Bora had remained on the threshold of the kitchen, half-turned to the hall. “Yes, that is the Silbermann.” Moser acknowledged his interest. “Let me show you.”
Guidi was not musically inclined, so he sat to warm his hands by the stove. The thought was taking shape in him that all this had happened for a reason after all. In any case tonight he’d find out more about Bora. He was thinking that finding out about Bora, at least tonight, was part of his lot in life. He overheard the men speaking German in the hall, Moser’s lilting old voice, Bora with his calm tone like running water. The metallic sound of a few notes followed, and Bora’s suddenly eager comments.
What a fuss over an old piano. But at least, Guidi thought with some guilty gladness, he was not wandering the Sagràte fields, hunting down a madman. Well, well. Corporal Turco was surely in a panic. Not to speak of his mother, whom he’d left fussing over home-made pasta.
“Cristofori wrest-plank as in the one made for Frederick the Great,” Moser was telling Bora. “See? And yet little Mozart didn’t like it as well as he would Stein’s.”
“With Stein’s wrest-plank there was no more blocking of the hammer.”
“Precisely.”
Around Guidi, kitchen and house seemed to breathe as if by an inner weather system, winds and currents and rainless storms. The draught from the unused chimney must have once been formidable, a throat of brick and stone mighty enough to gulp rivers of air. How different it all was from Claretta’s enclosed pink world, new and shiny like the inside of a shell. Tonight Guidi could not help comparing Bora’s talkative, animated friendliness to the hard side he showed the girl, and everyone else.
He was presently returning to the kitchen with Moser, speaking Italian. “I spent my summers in Rome between the ages of five and sixteen, at my stepfather’s ex-wife’s. I know all the Roman church organs and historic pianos worth knowing.”
Moser smiled. “And you still don’t want to play mine?”
At once Guidi noticed Bora had not removed the glove from his right hand, so that the gloved mutilation of the left was not obvious. That he did so now, in a calm fashion, was not lost on Moser. There was an embarrassed rounding of shoulders, a turning away to handle an aluminium pot set on the stove. With his back to the kitchen, Moser said, “I hope you gentlemen won’t mind a simple dinner.”
“You shouldn’t trouble yourself, Herr Moser.”
“And why not, Major? How often do you think I have guests any more?”
Dinner was more than simple, even by war standards. In bizarre contrast with the fine plates on which it was served, a fare of soup and bread was all there was to it.
“The house eats more than I do,” Moser forgivingly said afterwards, as if to condone the reality of it. “I don’t know who’ll feed her when I’m gone. Some things you can dispose of, but the house, the house – you’re part of it. It’s like disposing of yourself.”
“Do you still own the land around it?” Bora asked.
Moser shook his hairless round head. “Gone years ago, along with the good times and all that. Only Mozart’s little ghost stays, and I live here like Jonah in the whale.”
German and Italian alternated, or mixed within the same sentence. His mind caught in the other events of the day, Guidi paid little attention, though at one point it seemed to him Moser addressed Bora as Freiherr von Bora. As far as he could tell, Bora had not shared the reason for their being on the road. And although his shoulders were at ease, aloofness was again a part of him, as when he had sat across from poor daunted Claretta. For an inexplicable moment it seemed to Guidi it might even be shyness, but it was absurd that one like Bora could be shy.
Could it really be Baron von Bora?
“It’s best that the family’s gone before it came to this,” Moser chattered on. “My ancestors fought the Turks at Vienna and Zenta and Belgrade. They fought the Turks and won, and those who survived came here to treasure the conquered Ottoman flags. They built the house in this charming countryside and were ready to enjoy life, music, the good things. Soldiers and colonists and farmers these two hundred years.”
Guidi repressed a yawn, his mind on Claretta’s pouting lips drawn around the slender cylinder of her Tre Stelle cigarette. Here was talk of the dead, but Claretta was alive. Lovely, alone. Would she be able to keep her house and livelihood in the future?
“My elders brought back eastern superstitions,” Moser went on, “such as never looking at the waxing moon through a glass pane. That’s bad luck, you know. You didn’t know it, Major? Well, it is, or that’s what the Ottoman Turks said. It wasn’t until my father, bless his soul, that we replaced the windows on the front with clear glass. And it may have been a foolish dare after all. But here, you let me do all the talking. Signor Guidi, what do you say?”
Guidi did not know what to say. He muttered some generic agreement, while Bora spoke to Moser with great composure. “I am like your ancestors. I have my own Turks to defeat.”
They were the most suggestive words Guidi had heard Bora utter to date.
There was more talk of history and music before Bora and Guidi were shown to the Mozart rooms up the opalescent stairway. Hallways escaped candlelight to become lost in the dark, with fugues of unused spaces, panelled entryways. Guidi gave up counting rooms when Moser opened in front of him what seemed the void itself. From it came an overpowering smell of dank and long-accumulated dust, and a gust of icy air that swayed the tips of the candles.
Moser smiled at him. “I think you’ll like Papa Leopold’s room, Signor Guidi. This is the south side, so you’ll be quite cosy. Good night.” And, turning to Bora next, he added, “We go the other way for you, Major. If you don’t mind the chill, you’re welcome to Wolfgang’s room.”
“I don’t mind the chill.”
Guidi wore his clothes to bed that night.
After the clearing at sundown, the wind had taken over the dark, and now scurried all around the great house looking for chinks to blow into. If this was cosy, he hated to think of the temperature in Bora’s room, which was on the north side. The strangeness of the evening deepened now that the candle was out. Insects ticked away in the wood, burrowing their minute channels along spindles and boards. Entering the bleakness of damp sheets was like slipping into an unknown pool of water. This is what he got for listening to Bora. Guidi lay as still as one resigned to drowning, until his body became accustomed to the cold.
Somewhere, this same night, the lonely convict also lay or sat up, with a deadly weapon and God knows how many rounds of ammunition. Perhaps through the brushwood he sensed the distant villages, dark with the curfew. Perhaps he heard the deep sounds of animals in stables and folds, and listened to the wind rustling branches and the spoils of corn in the fields. And if there was a scent of snow in the air, the convict would smell that, too. Perhaps he would move on. Perhaps he would shoot to kill tomorrow.
In his sink-hole of cold and dust Guidi sneezed, cursing Bora for landing him here. What irked him most was that Bora never showed himself vulnerable. He confronted men and women in his aloof, superior way, and never revealed himself. Tonight was the closest he’d got to it (but what did he mean by his Turks?), and had he cared for it, Guidi could have capitalized on the hints. But no, look out, he’s the same son of a whore who sent the Jews to their deat
hs. Guidi sneezed. Searching his pockets for a handkerchief, he suddenly remembered that Claretta had handed him her card the other night. It was still in his coat pocket, where he groped through sandwich crumbs until he found it.
Holding the card to his nostrils, Guidi knew that Bora was dead wrong about her. Her perfume was not cheap, not irritating. And what if her face was patterned after movie stars in the magazines? There was no guilt in that. True, though, he hadn’t said a word about Claretta to his mother. God forbid. Agitated by the discovery of lipstick smears, as late as this morning she’d asked if he’d finally decided to use some sense and get married. Married. Sandro, darling, don’t let me die without grandchildren. Guidi slipped the scented card under the clamminess of his pillow, regretting that he hadn’t kissed Claretta’s hand as he took leave of her.
Is this what a strong mother and Catholic schooling do to a man? With all that Jesus dear, Who the cross bore, may I love Him more and more, one ends up awkward, inhibited with women, there’s no denying that. Uselessly fascinated by symbols, tokens, fetishes. Even by odours, colours. It isn’t as if he didn’t, of course… But whores, afterward (and sometimes before as well) disgusted him. Being a policeman made no difference to that sensitivity. Damn it, he was Bora’s age, and the thought of a woman he hadn’t even kissed kept him awake, while Bora had a wife and one could only guess what variety of sexual experience behind him.
In his rancour, Guidi thought of Bora as strongly sexed, although he had nothing to go by but Bora’s tenseness during Enrica’s testimony. And perhaps his hostility toward Claretta. Damn him, maybe he secretly hankers for Claretta, and she for him. As if, more worldly, jaded in some ways, certainly more cynical than Guidi could ever be, Bora were responding in a resentful manner to women in general.
At the very least, Bora must long for his wife and for their lovemaking, with the potent yearning of marriage. In which case his contempt for women might be no more than loneliness and the forced continence of war.