Back to Bologna

by Michael Dibdin

Vincenzo shrugged impatiently.

  ‘What do those jerks know? Anyway, the important thing is the bastard’s dead, and there isn’t a true-hearted Bologna fan who isn’t totally over the moon. So of course we’re all going along to this memorial thing they’re putting on, only–get this!–we’re going to laugh all the way through it. Sure, I’m a little stoned. The others will be too. We won’t do anything outrageous, but up there in the stands we’ll be holding our own private commemorative service. And I promise you, the tone will be rather different from the official one down on the pitch. So give me that jacket of mine you stole.’

  Rodolfo retrieved the battered, black leather garment and handed it to Vincenzo, who stomped out of the apartment without another word, slamming the front door behind him.

  Blissfully solitary once more, Rodolfo took one last lingering look at the Disprezzo engraving that he had scanned and downloaded–using the university’s state-of-the-art technical facilities–and then forwarded to Professor Ugo. Knowledge of his email address and mobile phone number was another of the privileges that Ugo made available to graduate students.

  Not that Rodolfo was one any more. His tutor had made it very clear that he had been barred from attending the seminar course and stood no chance of receiving his final degree, although like any other member of the public he was at perfect liberty to attend the professor’s celebrated weekly lectures, the next of which was tomorrow. Rodolfo smiled reflectively. Maybe he would go along and hold his own ‘private commemorative service’, just like Vincenzo and the rest of the yobs at the stadium tonight. Nothing outrageous, as Vincenzo had put it, but he might put in an appearance. He’d have to go back to the uni soon anyway, if only to return the Andrea de Jorio book and all the others that he had borrowed over the past months, most of which were long overdue.

  He walked through to his bedroom and was scanning the shelves for the necessary titles when the phone rang.

  ‘It’s your old dad, Rodolfo. Just my usual weekly call. Like to keep in touch, you know.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘So how are things?’

  ‘Fine, dad. Fine.’

  ‘Wish I could say the same.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Oh, nothing really.’

  The voice paused.

  ‘At least, nothing I want to talk about over the phone. You understand?’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  The resulting silence was finally broken by a bitter guffaw.

  ‘What do they teach you up there at the university?’ his father mused quietly, as though to himself. ‘You know nothing. Less than you did when you were ten. Five, even. Nothing, nothing…’

  The voice died away.

  ‘I know a few things,’ Rodolfo replied truculently, hoping that he wouldn’t be asked to provide an example.

  But now his father sounded contrite.

  ‘Of course you do, of course. You’re very learned, I’m sure. You must forgive me, it’s just…’

  ‘What, dad?’

  ‘Nothing. Just keep talking, that calms me. It’s probably just that I’ve been overworking.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Well, we’ve been rebuilding a retaining wall on a bend in the road up past Monte Iacovizzo, up there in the Gargano. It’s in the national park, so we have to use the original granite blocks. An absolute bitch. We’ve been there all month, and we’re not done yet. It’s going to be way over budget, but it’s for the government so of course there’s no problem about cost overruns.’

  Silence fell.

  ‘What’s a retaining wall?’ asked Rodolfo artlessly.

  His father laughed harshly.

  ‘Don’t pretend you give a damn!’

  ‘I do.’

  Another long silence.

  ‘Well,’ his father began hesitantly, as though still suspicious of a trap, ‘basically they support unstable ground. And they’re always problematic, especially old ones like the one we’re mending.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they defy the laws of gravity and of soil mechanics. There are so many ways they can fail.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Sliding, foundation failure, you name it. Overturning is the most common. What most people don’t realise is that mortar isn’t a glue, it’s just to level out the irregularities in the stone blocks and keep the pressure diagram constant. That sort of wall is a simple gravity structure, so you need to calculate the overturning moment.’

  ‘You can predict when it will fall down?’

  His father laughed again, with indulgent contempt this time.

  ‘Not that kind of moment, idiot! The outward push at a given distance from the base. The weight of the blocks times the horizontal distance from the front of the wall gives the restoring moment. That obviously has to be greater than the overturning moment if the thing’s going to stand up.’

  ‘I never knew anything about this,’ Rodolfo remarked.

  His father laughed cannily.

  ‘You’re taking the piss, aren’t you? Patronising your dumb old dad banging on about stuff the Romans knew as if it was breaking news!’

  ‘It’s news to me.’

  ‘I’m sure it is, but why should you care?’

  ‘What about failure?’ his son replied.

  ‘It can happen for lots of reasons. Rising water levels during the rainy season, seasonal shrinkage and swelling.’

  Rodolfo murmured his comprehension.

  ‘So failure is the key to everything,’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the possibility of failure. That’s the truth maker, as philosophers say. The only authentic tasks are those at which you can fail.’

  A silence fell. No, there was a sound of the sea, or maybe the soughing of a breeze in the oak grove around the house. Then he thought that his father was laughing quietly. But as the sound went on, Rodolfo realised that he was weeping.

  ‘What’s the matter, dad?’ he cried with genuine alarm.

  ‘I’m just lonely. Since your mother died, I’ve been all alone, and with so many problems, professional and personal. I want you here, but all I get is a disembodied voice down the phone line. I hate telephones, I hate computers, I hate this technology that is stealing our souls! Laugh at me all you like, the fact remains that I want you to be here. Here in Puglia, here at home. You, my only son.’

  Yet another silence.

  ‘Now do you understand?’ his father asked.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure. I mean, what exactly do you have in mind?’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ his father retorted, plainly ashamed of having let his feelings show for the first time. ‘Your problem, Rodolfo, is that you’ve been educated beyond your intelligence. What the hell is this semiotica all about, anyway? Can you explain it to me the way I just explained retaining walls to you? If you have to waste more of your time and my money at university, why not go the whole hog and study ottica? That way you could at least make some money as an eye doctor when you finally graduate, if ever. People always need help with their sight. I can’t tell a tension crack from a spider’s thread without my glasses any more.’

  Absurdly, Rodolfo found himself defending the very position he had repeatedly attacked in Ugo’s seminars.

  ‘You’re confusing the etymology, Dad. The Latin prefix “semi” is derived from the Sanskrit sami, meaning a half or part, whereas semiotics is from the Greek semeion, a sign. It means the study of signs.’

  ‘Like road signs?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit more complex than that. Rightly considered, everything’s a sign.’

  There was a resonant thud.

  ‘This isn’t a sign. It’s a damned table, for the love of God!’

  Rodolfo instantly saw the massive scored and scorched surface, as though it were standing before him. But he had been trained by masters.

  ‘In its
elf, it’s nothing. Now that you’ve so designated it, then its signifier is indeed “a table” for the purposes of this text.’

  ‘What do you mean, it’s nothing?’

  His father’s voice had now taken on an edge of rage which Rodolfo found only too familiar.

  ‘I built this bugger with my own hands from timbers I pulled out of the house where I was born! Hard, seasoned holm oak, at least four hundred years old. Christ, I could hardly cut or plane it even with the most powerful equipment. And you’re telling me that it’s nothing?’

  ‘No word or other sign has any meaning except within the context of a specified discourse. That table is evidently laden with significance for you, given its physical sourcing in the construction material of your natal home, the notion of “the family board”, and by extension the altar in church where communion is taken. But none of these intrinsically or necessarily adhere to the physical object you just struck. Surely that’s obvious.’

  His father sighed.

  ‘All I know is that I built this table, and that my construction company now builds walls, bridges, roads, office blocks, apartment buildings, you name it. They either stay up or they fall down.’

  ‘That’s not the point. If someone says “This book’s really good”, they’re not referring to an object that weighs so much and is such and such a size. They’re talking about the text, the discourse, and the infinite variety of possible interpretations that it offers.’

  ‘You and your damn books!’

  There was a dry click as the receiver went down.

  You and your damn books. Rodolfo surveyed the crowded shelves on his bedroom wall. Yeah well, they were going to have to go. Flavia too, for that matter. Might as well make a clean break. Apart from anything else, his father would go berserk if he learned that his only son had not only been expelled from university but was virtually living with an illegal immigrant from an eastern European country that no one had ever heard of, and whose real name almost certainly wasn’t Flavia.

  Which just left Ugo. Ideally he would have liked to draw a line there too, but couldn’t imagine how it could be done. He began lifting the heavy volumes down and stacking them on the bedside table. As he pulled out Umberto Eco’s La struttura assente, he noticed a dull metallic gleam peeking out from behind the next book on the shelf. He gazed at it for a moment, then reached in and removed a semi-automatic pistol. The wooden grip sported an elaborate metallic crest surmounted by a large red star, and the words ‘Tony Speranza’ were engraved on the barrel.

  13

  The door banged open and her supervisor walked in.

  ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding!’

  ‘I’m not hiding,’ Flavia replied calmly. ‘I’m putting away the equipment. My work is over.’

  The balding gnome stared at her maliciously. He was sweating, and the array of pores on his nose resembled the backside of a bad cep. Conscious of the unearned superiority afforded by her looks and stature, Flavia felt a certain disinterested pity for him, although she would have killed him without a thought if the need had arisen.

  ‘No it’s not! The construction crew just finished putting up the set in B1, but everything’s filthy, the event’s at ten tomorrow morning and all the other girls have gone home.’

  He put his head in his hands and sighed deeply.

  ‘God, the day I’ve had! At the very last minute they decide to hold this stupid event, and guess who has to organise everything on less than twenty-four hours’ notice? I managed to beg, borrow or steal the stoves, pans and all the rest of it from the exhibitors here, but then the stoves had to be hooked up and the whole fucking set constructed from scratch in less than eight hours. I’ve been going mad! Anyway, it’s all done now, but the place is a total mess and we’ll have the TV crew in here at crack of dawn tomorrow to set up. So get your illegal arse out there right now,’ he snapped, stomping out, ‘or I’ll have it shipped back to wherever the hell it came from.’

  Ruritania, she thought. I am the Princess Flavia, and mine is a Ruritanian arse.

  She stacked her mop, pail, rags, bottles of cleanser and other equipment on to the trolley, and pushed it and the vacuum cleaner out into the vast arena, its ceiling festooned with an intricate mass of yellow piping like a giant molecular model. Another half-kilometre past stands displaying every kind of food, wine and kitchen equipment brought her to the double doors of hall B1. She shoved the door open with her Ruritanian arse, moved the gear inside and then turned to survey the extent of the task before her.

  Any lingering feelings of self-pity and indignation instantly left her. The vast space was in darkness except for the brilliantly lit stage area, where two kitchens had been constructed, one on each side, with a fake dining room walled off between them. Flavia was instantly enchanted. It looked like a full-sized version of the doll’s house she had played with as a child, before that and all the other family possessions, and indeed the family itself, had been dispersed. She had named it the House of Joy, and then transferred that epithet to the state orphanage to which she had later been sent, as if the concrete walls of that formidable institution could also be folded back and its roof lifted off to reveal a multitude of nooks and crannies where all manner of secrets could be kept accessible but safely out of sight. The memory of the books she had read so many times that she had them by heart, for example. As soon as she discovered the Italian text of one of them at a market stall in Trieste, she realised that it was a key that would unlock this odd dialect of her own sweet tongue. In the event, it had also served as the go-between in her introduction to Rodolfo.

  It was, he had told her later, the first time he had ever set foot in La Carrozza, and he had only done so that evening because it had started pouring down with rain, and he was recovering from a bad cold. The arcades had protected him so far, but the next stage of his journey home was in the open and he would have got drenched to the skin if he had continued. Since there was nowhere else free, he had asked the young woman seated alone, who had finished her meal and was reading a book, if she would mind his joining her. The pizzeria was a no-nonsense establishment where questions like this were a mere polite formality, and Flavia had murmured agreement and waved to the empty chair without even looking up. Rodolfo had ordered some olive ascolane and a beer. Flavia was sitting over a cup of mediocre coffee, laboriously picking her way through the battered paperback garishly emblazoned with the title Il Prigioniero di Zenda.

  ‘Excuse my asking,’ the young man had said at length, ‘but what are you reading?’

  ‘I am learning Italian,’ she’d replied. ‘This is my textbook.’

  He could easily have left it at that, or made some stupid remark which would have put an end to everything there and then. Instead, he nodded sagely, as though she had said something profound.

  ‘Books are good, but to learn a language properly you really need a teacher.’

  This had confused her, with its offered plethora of responses, but only for a moment.

  ‘I can’t afford such luxuries. Besides, I prefer to find things out by making mistakes.’

  He had laughed, seemingly spontaneously, so that she forgave the impertinence of his next remark.

  ‘God almighty, a woman who can make me laugh! Where have you been all my life?’

  His name was of course already as familiar to her as her own, which perhaps helped to explain the ease with which things took their course, quite as though it had already been written in a book she knew by heart. But all books come to an end. Now, two months later, she sensed that the pack of unread pages was running low.

  Never mind, there was work to be done. She walked out on to the stage and set to work with a will, thinking about what she had overheard from another of the cleaning staff about what was to happen the next day. Some sort of duel, it seemed to be, like the one between Black Michael and King Rudolph’s double, only with pots and pans instead of swords and pistols.

  About ten minutes later a man and a woman
came out on to the set from the wings, treading straight through the area that Flavia had just washed and waxed. She glared at them but said nothing.

  ‘So, this is it,’ the woman said to the man. She was about thirty, with fashionably distressed hair, was clad in a beige business suit and carried an imposing briefcase. ‘This one will be your kitchen. Ugo’s is on the other side. Both are visible to the audience, but not to each other or to the judges, who will be seated at the table in…’

  ‘Delia!’

  The man jogged her arm and pointed at Flavia. He was large and bearded, with the air of someone who would have liked to have a good time but didn’t know how. That pushy crow he was with certainly wouldn’t be able to help, thought Flavia, instinctively moved to take Lo Chef under her battered wings. Such scavengers had descended on her own country too, she had heard. Maybe Viorica had even become one. You needed serious wealth and clout to ship food parcels such as the one she had just received intact across so many frontiers.

  The woman strode over to where Flavia was leaning on her mop.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I must ask you to leave. I’m having a very important meeting with Signor Romano Rinaldi about his event tomorrow and we cannot be interrupted.’

  Flavia shrugged.

  ‘No capire. Di Ruritania.’

  She waved her hand vaguely, as though indicating some large but undefined shape at the rear of the set. Delia gave an irritable shake of the head and walked back to her companion.

  ‘It’s all right, she’s just some asylum seeker. Doesn’t understand Italian. Now, as I was saying, the jury will be in the central dining area through there, again visible to the audience but not to either of the competitors.’

  The man took about half a dozen very short, very loud breaths. He grabbed a bottle of pills from his pocket and twisted the knob of a gleaming tap in the kitchen area. Nothing emerged.

  ‘The water’s not hooked up!’ he squealed.

  ‘It will be by tomorrow. Here, I’ve got some Ferrarelle.’

  She passed him a plastic bottle and he downed the pills with a grimace.

  ‘So, how many are ours?’ he croaked.