Back to Bologna

by Michael Dibdin

  Outside his town dwelling, Edgardo Ugo had caused an art work to be (re-)recreated, the high concept behind which he recounted to anyone who would listen–which necessarily included all his graduate students–at every possible opportunity. The house to the left of his stood slightly proud of the general alignment in the street, leaving a dark corner just beside Ugo’s front door where drunks and homeless people were wont to urinate. A man as influential as Ugo could certainly have persuaded the city authorities to bar it off with a metal grid, as was normally done in the case of such illegal facilities, but he had instead come up with a typically witty and post-post-cultural solution.

  Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 ready-made Fountain, consisting of a mass-produced glazed ceramic urinal rotated on its horizontal axis, had long been an icon of the modernist movement. Ugo’s stroke of genius had been to subject this signifier itself to a further stage of semiotic transformation (invoking the process of ‘unlimited semiosis’ and Lacan’s ‘sliding signified’) by having it reproduced in the finest white Carrara marble and finished to the intense, glossy sheen associated with the sculptures of Antonio Canova–or, for that matter, mass-produced glazed ceramic ware. As with Duchamp’s ‘original’, the finished piece had been mounted at ninety degrees to the vertical, in the filthy corner where derelicts went to pee furtively. But thanks to them this object functioned as a literal fountain, the urine pouring out through the aperture for the mains inlet pipe on to the miscreant’s trousers and shoes.

  When Rodolfo had fired the pistol, while Ugo had his back turned to unlock his front door, this sculpture had been his intended target. The gesture was intended to be purely symbolic, a way of saying, ‘Fuck you and your clever jokes and everything you stand for!’ Instead, the bullet had deflected off the polished marble and must have ended up somewhere in Ugo’s body. The victim had screamed and fallen over, while Rodolfo had taken to his heels. But now the time for running away was over.

  A nurse came into the waiting area and approached him.

  ‘Professor Ugo will see you now.’

  Head bowed like a man on his way to the gallows, Rodolfo followed her down a long corridor. The nurse knocked lightly at one of the doors.

  ‘Signor Mattioli is here.’

  ‘Va bene,’ said a familiar voice within.

  The nurse withdrew.

  ‘Ah, Rodolfo,’ the voice said languidly. ‘How very good of you to visit me. You of all people.’

  The room was in almost total darkness. After the bright lights in the waiting area and corridor, Rodolfo could discern nothing.

  ‘On the contrary, professore, it’s very good of you to receive me,’ he replied haltingly. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, only…Well, I’ve come in a hopeless but necessary attempt to apologise for…’

  The answer was a soft laugh from the figure on the bed that Rodolfo could now just identify as such.

  ‘That’s all nonsense,’ Ugo said.

  Meaning, who cares about your apologies when I’m going to have you arrested the moment you leave, thought Rodolfo.

  ‘Sit down, sit down!’ Ugo went on. ‘There’s some sort of chair over there in the corner, I believe. I’ve been ordered by the powers that be to lie on my right side, so I can’t turn to look at you, but we can still talk.’

  Rodolfo found the chair and seated himself.

  ‘Giacometti,’ said the voice from the bed.

  ‘Alberto?’ queried Rodolfo, utterly at a loss.

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  Rodolfo scanned his memory.

  ‘Italian Swiss, a sculptor and painter, born around 1900. Died some time in the 1960s, I think. Famous for his etiolated figures which express, according to some commentators, the pain of life.’

  Ugo’s laugh came again, louder and longer this time.

  ‘Bravo! You were always my best student, Rodolfo, although of course I never told you that. Unless perhaps I did, by barring you from the class.’

  ‘I want to apologise for that too. Absolutely and without any reservations. I think I must have gone slightly mad recently, but you see…’

  He broke off.

  ‘Yes?’ queried Ugo.

  Rodolfo hesitated a long time before replying.

  ‘I think I’m in love, professore,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Ah. In that case I won’t detain you long. Anyway, what you may not know about Giacometti is that during his years in Paris he was run down by a bus while crossing the street. A friend he was with reported later that the artist’s first words after the accident were, “Finally something has happened to me!” I’ve always thought it a good story, although I never really understood what Giacometti meant by that comment. But now I do, perhaps because something has finally happened to me.’

  He fell into a silence which Rodolfo did not attempt to break.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book,’ Ugo said at last. ‘For years, I mean. Cornell, early 1980s. Wonderful campus, magnificent library. Some reference text in English. I’ve never been able to remember which.’

  ‘The Anglo-American Cyclopedia,’ Rodolfo replied without thinking.

  After a moment, Ugo laughed heartily, then moaned.

  ‘Ow! Yes, yes, very good. Borges’ Uqbar. But this wasn’t the forty-sixth volume of anything. Much earlier in the alphabetical series of voci. It was entitled, in gold-blocked letters on the spine, “BACK to BOLOGNA”, those being the headings of the first and last articles in that particular volume.’

  ‘A completely random phrase.’

  ‘Utterly. You may remember the fuss that Zingarelli ran into when the eleventh edition of their dictionary featured masturbazione as the headword in bold type on one page. Anyway, most of the volumes of the work I saw on the stacks at Cornell were entitled with quite meaningless phrases. “HOW to HUG”, for example. Ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  Ugo’s smile, if not visible, was audible.

  ‘Well, you may of course be better informed than I. At all events, this experience made me realise two things. One was the obvious fact that I was homesick, my research project was stalled, and the only way that I could salvage something from it was by going back to Bologna.’

  ‘Which you did?’

  ‘I came home, yes. And, as it turned out, wrote the book that really launched my career. What I didn’t write was the second thing suggested to me by that reference work in the library at Cornell, namely Back to Boulogne, a mystery in which the detective solves nothing. For my protagonist I had in mind a certain Inspecteur Nez, playing on the French word for nose, as in “has a nose for” but also “led by the nose”. In short, at once a deconstruction of the realistic, plot-driven novel and an hommage to Georges Simenon, the master of Robbe-Grillet and hence in a sense of us all. Any amount of atmosphere and sense of place, in other words, but no solution, just a strong final curtain line.’

  Rodolfo stole a glance at his watch.

  ‘Why not scrap the sense of place too?’ he murmured.

  The patient was silent for a moment.

  ‘Like a late Shakespearian romance, you mean?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Located in a notional site named Illyria or Bohemia or…’

  ‘Ruritania.’

  ‘That’s been done.’

  ‘Surely the whole point is that everything’s been done.’

  Professor Ugo was silent for some time. When he spoke again, it was in a distinctly crisper tone.

  ‘Possibly. At any rate, the reason I gave the nurse permission to admit you, Mattioli, was that I wanted to announce a decision that I’ve come to regarding what has happened.’

  Rodolfo sighed. Here it comes, he thought.

  ‘I just don’t know what to say, professore. Apologies are obviously useless. No one could forgive what I’ve done to you.’

  ‘That seems a little extreme,’ Ugo replied. ‘But even if I couldn’t forgive, I can at least forget. In fact, I’ve already forgott
en. So come back to the seminar, write your thesis and take your diploma. You’re an intelligent if rather forthright young man with your life to lead, a life in which many things will happen to you. Perhaps one already has. I believe you said that you were in love.’

  ‘I think I am.’

  ‘The distinction is specious. And now I must ask you to go. I’m still quite weak, but the doctors say that I’ll be back on my feet, if not my bum, by next week. So I expect to see you in class then. Understand?’

  Rodolfo didn’t understand in the slightest.

  ‘Grazie infinite, professore,’ he said, and left.

  30

  After his conditional release from the clutches of the Carabinieri, Zen felt like a drink. On the other hand, he didn’t fancy returning to the bar near his hotel, where half the clientele, judging by the stacked trophies and plaques on display, were high-ranking officers from the Questura. He’d had enough of cops for one day.

  In the end he stumbled on the perfect refuge in a side street off the market area. The customers here were drawn from a much broader social range than at Il Gran Bar, and were less interested in showing off their status and style than in chatting animatedly, drinking deep and pigging into the astonishing range of non-fat-free appetisers piled high on the bar: glistening cubes of creamy mortadella, chewy chunks of crisp pork crackling, jagged fragments of golden stravecchio Parmesan. The Lambrusco was of the increasingly scarce authentic variety, unfiltered and bottle-fermented. On that bleak evening, when the gelid smog in the streets seemed not just a meteorological fact but a malign presence, its rich purple froth provided a welcome confirmation that there was more to life than hospitals, police stations and faithless lovers.

  Most people are familiar with the temporary euphoria produced by a few glasses of wine, but few would claim that the experience had saved their marriage. For Zen, however, this may just have been the case, because when his phone rang he was in a particularly mellow and affable mood, amenable to anything and treating it all lightly.

  ‘It’s me,’ Gemma’s voice said.

  ‘At last! How are you? Where are you?’

  ‘In a bar.’

  ‘Me too.’

  He laughed.

  ‘We really must stop meeting like this.’

  There was no reply, but instead of regretting his flippancy and moodily clamming up in turn, he signed the bartender to refill his glass and carried on as though there had just been a brief lapse in transmission, of no personal intent or significance.

  ‘Which bar? I’ll come immediately.’

  ‘No, no, don’t. Stefano’s here.’

  ‘Stefano?’

  ‘My son.’

  ‘Oh, Stefano! Yes. Yes, of course. I thought you said…er, “sto telefono”.’

  ‘You’re the most awful liar, Aurelio.’

  ‘That’s because I never get any practice.’

  ‘Anyway, the reason I’m calling is…I’m having dinner with them, as I told you. Then I was planning to drive home, but after what’s happened I’m not so sure that would be a good idea.’

  ‘Don’t dream of it, particularly in the dark. The truckers on the autostrada are vicious. The doctor I spoke to at the hospital was horrified that you’d even discharged yourself. He said you needed more tests and…’

  ‘It’s not just that. But I really need a bed for the night, only because of this trade fair there don’t seem to be any hotel rooms to be had.’

  ‘Do you want to sleep with me?’ Zen replied in a lighthearted tone that he had thought he would never be able to manage again.

  ‘If that’s what it takes.’

  ‘It’s a sort of bed and a half rather than a full double.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  He laughed again, quite naturally.

  ‘It’s yours, signora. We’ll just need a credit card number to secure the deposit. I had an appointment this evening, but I’ll cancel it.’

  ‘Don’t do that. I won’t be free till later anyway. Probably much later. They’ve had some bad news, you see. That’s why Stefano arranged to meet me here before dinner, so that he could break it to me alone. Anyway, it looks like being a long evening in every sense.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. But the upshot is that I’m not going to be a grandmother after all.’

  This was a much stiffer check, but once again Zen carried blithely on.

  ‘That’s a shame. Still, they’re young. There’s plenty of time.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It sounds as though this has put the relationship at risk. I get the feeling that Stefano’s relieved, quite frankly. Lidia, on the other hand, is naturally shattered. So a long evening, and I may be a bit weepy when we meet. It’s been a difficult day, one way and another.’

  Zen took another hearty gulp of the effervescent wine and started toying with one of the pork ciccioli.

  ‘Yes, shame about lunch. You misunderstood me. I was talking to my stomach.’

  ‘I’d rather been looking forward to knitting little bootees and jackets.’

  ‘Well, I could use a new pullover.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same.’

  He laughed again, by now quite impervious to anything she might throw at him.

  ‘I should hope not! It would never fit otherwise. I’ll tell the hotel to expect you. Just ask at the desk and they’ll give you a key if I’m not back.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘All part of the service, signora. We know you have a choice. We work hard to be both your first choice and your last.’

  He hung up, grinning widely, and grabbed a lump of Parmesan the size of an inoperable tumour.

  31

  ‘But this is crazy!’ the barber protested. ‘You have a magnificent head of hair, a superb beard! All that’s required is a delicate and discreet trim, a snip here, a hint more shape there…’

  ‘Do what I say!’ snapped Romano Rinaldi.

  For a moment the barber, reflected in the mirror facing the swivel chair in which Rinaldi was seated, looked as though he might be about to refuse. The man must have been in his sixties, with a moonlike face and the expression of a priest struggling to bring an unrepentant sinner to the foot of the cross, while his shop looked as though it had been furnished about the time of national unification and left untouched ever since. The proprietor clearly regarded himself as one of the city’s top professionals, and was more accustomed to advising his clients on which interventions needed to be undertaken than merely carrying out their orders, particularly when these were eccentric and wilful in the extreme. Nevertheless, he picked up his scissors with a heavy sigh of disapproval and set to work.

  His eyes fixed on the antique sink in front of him, Rinaldi sat there impassively as his shorn locks fell on to the wrap that covered his upper torso. The police would be watching the hotel, the railway and bus stations, and the airport, as well as monitoring both his and Delia’s mobile phones. He had instructed the barber to shave his scalp bald, remove his eyebrows and trim his beard down to a very thin moustache. That should prevent any casual recognition on the street. His plan was to find a small, seedy hotel of the kind used by young backpackers on a tight budget, pass himself off as a foreigner and tell the proprietor that his passport had been stolen but he had informed the consulate and a replacement would arrive within the week. That and a hefty deposit should do the trick in the short term. After that it would be a matter of keeping an eye on the news and seeing how the affair played out.

  The barber finished his job, scowling his disapproval, and whisked away the hair-covered wrap.

  ‘Fifty euros.’

  Getting to his feet, Rinaldi stared speechlessly at his reflection in the mirror while the barber brushed him down like a horse. Even Delia wouldn’t recognise him like this, he thought. He reached for his wallet, but encountered only an alien object, smooth, cool and heavy. Pulling it out impatiently, he found to his amazement that he was holding what looked like an auto
matic pistol.

  It took him only a moment to work out that the little rat at the Irish bar had ripped him off after all. He’d faked that collapse to give him the chance to grab hold of Rinaldi, then lifted his wallet and substituted this cheap replica gun to simulate its bulk and weight. A wave of sheer panic swept over him as the implications sunk in. All his cash and credit cards were gone, and since he was wanted by the police he could not report the incident and get replacements in the usual way.

  He turned to the barber, flashing his radiant Lo Chef smile.

  ‘Look, I seem to have left my wallet at home.’

  The man did not reply. He stood very still, gazing down at the pistol in his client’s hand. Rinaldi hastily replaced it.

  ‘I’ll leave my watch as surety while I go and fetch my wallet,’ he went on. ‘It’s a vintage Rolex, platinum band, worth at least a thousand. I’ll be back in about half an hour.’

  ‘I close in ten minutes,’ the barber stated in a voice like an automated recording.

  ‘Then tomorrow.’

  He thrust the watch at him and walked out. As soon as he reached the corner, he turned left and ran until he was out of breath. The night air felt cruelly cold in his newly shorn state, but at least there was no one about. A few metres further on, lost in the overarching shadows cast by the portici, stood a municipal rubbish bin. Rinaldi rooted about in it until he found an empty plastic bag, and then stuffed his pigskin gloves, cashmere scarf and camelhair overcoat into it. Then he roughed up his blazer, pullover and trousers against the rough plaster on one of the pillars of the arcade, scuffed his immaculately polished brogues repeatedly against a neighbouring doorstep, and set off again looking rather more like a common vagrant, battered bag of belongings in hand.

  But where to? The loss of his wallet changed everything. He was not only homeless and wanted by the police, but down to four euros and sixty-three centesimi in small change, most of which he promptly spent in the first bar he came to, just to warm up. He was staring at the drying stain in his coffee cup, as though hoping to read his fortune in the grounds, when a memory of something he had seen earlier that evening came back to him. He cringed with humiliation at the very idea. What a comedown! Talk about riches to rags. But there was no obvious alternative, and it might just prove to be what he needed to see him through the next few days, until things sorted themselves out. It was certainly worth a try.