"No, no!"
"Where is it then?"
"At Signora Diomira's!" And the pursuers resumed their hunt.
They knocked at Signora Diomira's door. "Rabbit? What rabbit? Are you crazy?" Seeing her house invaded by strangers, in white jackets or uniforms, looking for a rabbit, the old woman nearly had a stroke. She knew nothing about Marcovaldo's rabbit.
In fact, the three children, trying to save the rabbit from death, had decided to take it to a safe place, play with it for a while, and then let it go; and instead of stopping at Signora Diomira's landing, they decided to climb up to a terrace over the rooftops. They would tell their mother it had broken the leash and had run off. But no animal seemed so ill-suited to an escape as that rabbit. Making it climb all those steps was a problem: it huddled, frightened, on each step. In the end they picked it up and carried it.
On the terrace they wanted to make it run: it wouldn't run. They tried setting it on the edge of the roof, to see if it would walk the way cats do; but it seemed to suffer vertigo. They tried hoisting it onto a TV antenna, to see if it could keep its balance: no, it fell down. Bored, the children ripped away the leash, turned the animal loose at a place where all the paths of the roofs opened out, an oblique and angular sea, and they left.
When it was alone, the rabbit began moving. It ventured a few steps, looked around, changed direction, turned, then, in little hops and skips, it started over the roofs. It was an animal born prisoner: its yearning for liberty did not have broad horizons. The greatest gift it had known in life was the ability to have a few moments free of fear. Now, now it could move, with nothing around to frighten it, perhaps for the first time in its life. The place was unfamiliar, but a clear concept of familiar and unfamiliar was something it had never been able to formulate. And ever since it had begun to feel an undefined, mysterious ailment gnawing inside itself, the whole world was of less and less interest to it. And so it went onto the roofs; and the cats that saw it hopping didn't understand what it was and they drew back, in awe.
Meanwhile, from skylights, from dormer windows, from flat decks, the rabbit's itinerary had not gone unremarked. Some people began to display basins of salad on their sills, peeking then from behind the curtains, others threw a pear core on the roof-tiles and spread a string lasso around it, someone else arranged a row of bits of carrot along the parapet, leading to his own window. And a rallying-cry ran through all the families living in the garrets: "Stewed rabbit today"—or "fricasseed rabbit"—or "roast rabbit".
The animal had noticed these lures, these silent offers of food. And though it was hungry, it didn't trust them. It knew that every time humans tried to attract it with offers of food, something obscure and painful happened: either they stuck a syringe into its flesh, or a scalpel, or they forced it into a buttoned-up jacket, or they dragged it along with a ribbon around its neck... And the memory of these misfortunes merged with the pain it felt inside, with the slow change of organs that it sensed, with the prescience of death. And hunger. But as if it knew that, of all these discomforts, only hunger could be allayed, and recognized that these treacherous human beings could provide, in addition to cruel sufferings, a sense—which it also needed—of protection, of domestic warmth, it decided to surrender to play the humans' game: then whatever had to happen, would happen. So, it began to eat the bits of carrot, following the trail that, as the rabbit well knew, would make it prisoner and martyr again, but savoring once more, and perhaps for the last time, the good earthy flavor of vegetables. Now it was approaching the garret window, now a hand would stretch out to catch it: instead, all of a sudden, the window slammed and closed it out. This was an event alien to its experience: a trap that refused to snap shut. The rabbit turned, looked for other signs of treachery around, to choose the best one to give in to. But meanwhile the leaves of salad had been drawn indoors, the lassos thrown away, the lurking people had vanished, windows and skylights were now barred, terraces were deserted.
It so happened that a police truck had passed through the city, with a loudspeaker shouting: "Attention, attention! A long-haired white rabbit has been lost; it is affected by a serious, contagious disease! Anyone finding it should be informed that it is poisonous to eat; even its touch can transmit harmful germs! Anyone seeing it should alert the nearest police station, hospital, or fire house!"
Terror spread over the rooftops. Everyone was on guard, and the moment they sighted the rabbit, which, with a limp flop, moved from one roof to the next, they gave the alarm, and all disappeared as if at the approach of a swarm of locusts. The rabbit proceeded, teetering on the cornices; this sense of solitude, just at the moment when it had discovered the necessity of human nearness, seemed even more menacing to it, unbearable.
Meanwhile Cavalier Ulrico, an old hunter, had loaded his rifle with cartridges for hare, and had gone to take his stand on a terrace, hiding behind a chimney. When he saw the white shadow of the rabbit emerge from the fog, he fired; but his emotion at the thought of the animal's evil bane was so great that the spatter of shot fell a bit off the mark onto the tiles, like hail. The rabbit heard the shot rattle all around, and one pellet pierced its ear. It understood: this was a declaration of war; at this point all relations with mankind were broken off. And in its contempt of humans, at what seemed, to the rabbit, somehow a base ingratitude, it decided to end it all.
A roof covered with corrugated iron sloped down, oblique, and ended at the void, in the opaque nothingness of the fog. The rabbit planted itself there on all four paws, first cautiously, then letting itself go. And so, slipping, surrounded and consumed by its pain, it went towards death. At the edge, the drainpipe delayed it for a second, then it tumbled down...
And it landed in the gloved hands of a fireman, perched at the top of a portable ladder. Foiled even in that extreme act of animal dignity, the rabbit was bundled into the ambulance, which set off full-tilt towards the hospital. Also aboard were Marcovaldo, his wife, and his children, to be interned for observation and for a series of vaccine tests.
WINTER
12. The wrong stop
For anyone who dislikes his home and finds it inhospitable, the favorite refuge on cold evenings is the movies. Marcovaldo had a passion for Technicolor films on the wide screen, which can embrace the most vast horizons: prairies, rocky mountains, equatorial forests, islands where you live with a garland around your head. He would see the picture twice, and he never came out until they were closing the theater; and in his thoughts he continued living in those landscapes and breathing those colors. But the return home in the drizzling night, the wait at the stop for tram number 30, the realization that his life would know no other setting beyond trams, traffic-lights, rooms in the half-basement, gas stoves, drying laundry, warehouses and shipping rooms, made the film's splendor fade for him to a worn and gray sadness.
That evening, the film he had seen took place in the forests of India: steam rose in clouds from the swampy undergrowth, and serpents slithered along the lianas and climbed up the statues of ancient temples swallowed up by the jungle.
Coming out of the theater, he opened his eyes at the street, closed them again, reopened them: he saw nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even in front of his nose. In the hours he had spent inside, fog had invaded the city, a thick, opaque fog, which engulfed things and sounds, flattened distances into a space without dimensions, mixed lights into the darkness and transformed them into glows without shape or place.
Marcovaldo headed mechanically for the stop of the 30 tram and banged his nose against the signpost. At that moment he realized he was happy: the fog, erasing the world around him, allowed him to hold in his eyes the visions of the wide screen. Even the cold was muffled, as if the city had pulled a cloud over it, like a blanket. Bundled up in his overcoat, Marcovaldo felt protected from every external sensation, suspended in the void; and he could color this void with the images of India, the Ganges, the jungle, Calcutta.
The tram arrived, evanescent as a phantom, slowly
jangling; things existed just to the slight extent that sufficed; for Marcovaldo staying at the rear of the tram that evening, his back to the other passengers, as he stared beyond the panes at the empty night traversed only by undefined luminous presences and by an occasional shadow blacker than the darkness, offered the perfect situation for day-dreaming, for projecting in front of himself, wherever he went, a never-ending film on a boundless screen.
With these fantasies he lost count of the stops; all at once he asked himself where he was; he saw the tram was now almost empty; he peered out of the windows, interpreted the glimmers that surfaced, decided his stop was the next, ran to the door just in time, and got out. He looked around, seeking some reference-point. But the few shadows and lights his eyes could discern refused to form any known image. He had got off at the wrong stop and didn't know where he was.
If he met a passer-by it would be easy to ask him the way; but whether because of the loneliness of this place or because of the hour or the bad weather, there wasn't a shadow of a human being to be seen. Finally he saw one, a shadow, and waited for it to come closer. No, it was moving away; perhaps it was crossing the street, or walking down the middle of it; it might not be a pedestrian, but a cyclist, on a bicycle without a headlight.
Marcovaldo cried out: "Hey! Hey, mister! Please, can you tell me where Via Pancrazio Pancrazietti is?"
The shape moved farther away, was now almost invisible. "That way..." But there was no telling which way he had pointed.
"Right or left?" shouted Marcovaldo, but he could have been addressing the void.
An answer came, the wake of an answer: "... eft!" but it could also have been "... ight!" In any case, since there was no seeing which way the other man faced, right and left meant nothing.
Now Marcovaldo was walking towards a glow that seemed to come from the opposite sidewalk, a bit farther on. But the distance proved to be much greater: he had to cross a kind of square, with a little island of grass in the middle, and arrows (the only intelligible sign) indicating that traffic had to keep right. It was late, but surely some café was still open, some tavern; the sign he was just beginning to decipher said: Bar ... Then it went out; on what must have been an illuminated window a shaft of darkness fell, like a blind. The bar was closing, and it was still—he seemed to understand at that moment—very far away.
So he might as well head for another light. As he walked, Marcovaldo didn't know if he was following a straight line, if the luminous dot he was now heading for was always the same or had doubled or trebled or changed position. The soot, a somewhat milky black, within which he moved was so fine that already he felt it infiltrating his overcoat, as if through a sieve, between the threads of the cloth, which soaked it up like a sponge.
The light he reached was the smoky entrance to a tavern. Inside, there were people seated or standing at the counter, but, because of the poor illumination or because the fog had penetrated everywhere, even here forms seemed blurred, like certain taverns you see in the movies, situated in ancient times or in distant lands.
"I was looking... maybe you gentlemen know where it is... for Via Pancrazietti..." he began saying, but there was noise in the tavern, drunks who laughed, believing him drunk, and the questions he managed to ask, the explanations he managed to obtain, were also foggy and blurred. Especially since, to warm himself, he ordered—or rather, he allowed the men standing at the counter to force on him—a quarter-liter of wine, at first, and then another half-liter, plus a few glasses which, with great slaps on the back, were offered him by the others. In short, when he came out of the tavern, his notions of the way home were no clearer than before, though, in compensation, the fog was more than ever capable of containing all continents and colors.
With the warmth of the wine inside him, Marcovaldo walked for a good quarter of an hour, with steps that constantly felt the need of stretching to the left and to the right, to gauge the width of the sidewalk (if he was still following a sidewalk), and hands that felt the need to touch continuously the walls (if he was still following a wall). The fog in his thoughts, as he walked, was gradually dispelled; but the fog outside remained dense. He remembered that at the tavern they had told him to take a certain avenue, follow it for a hundred yards, then ask again. But now he didn't know how far he had come from the tavern, or if he had only walked around the block.
The spaces seemed uninhabited, within brick walls like the confines of factories. At one corner there was surely the marble plaque with the name of the street, but the light of the lamp-post, suspended between the two lanes, didn't reach that far. To approach the words, Marcovaldo climbed up a no-parking sign. He climbed until he could put his nose on the plaque, but the letters had faded and he had no matches to illuminate them better. Above the plaque, the wall ended in a flat, broad top, and leaning out from the no-parking sign, Marcovaldo managed to hoist himself up there. He had glimpsed, set above the top of the wall, a big whitish sign. He took a few steps along the top of the wall, reaching the sign; here the street-light illuminated the black letters on the white ground, but the words: "Access to unauthorized persons strictly prohibited" gave him no enlightenment.
The top of the wall was so wide that he could balance himself on it and walk; indeed, when he thought about it, it was better than the sidewalk, because the street-lights were high enough to illuminate his steps, making a bright stripe in the midst of the darkness. At a certain point the wall ended and Marcovaldo found himself against the capital of a gate-post. No: the wall made a right angle and went on...
And so, what with angles, niches, junctures, posts, Marcovaldo's route followed an irregular pattern; several times he thought the wall was ending, then discovered it continued in another direction; after so many turns he no longer knew what direction he was headed in, or rather, on which side he should jump, if he wanted to move down to the street. Jump... And what if the height had increased? He crouched on the top of a column, tried to peer down, on one side and the other, but no ray of light reached the ground: it might be a little drop of a couple of yards, or an abyss. The only thing he could do was continue advancing up where he was.
The avenue of escape was not long in appearing. It was a flat surface, a pale glimmer, next to the wall: perhaps the roof of a building, of cement—as Marcovaldo realized, when he began to walk on it—which extended into the darkness. He immediately regretted having ventured onto it; now he had lost all reference-points, he had moved away from the line of street-lights, and every step he took might bring him to the edge of the roof or, beyond it, into the void.
The void really was a chasm. From below little lights glowed, as if at a great distance, and if those were the street-lights down there, the ground must be much lower still. Marcovaldo found himself suspended in a space impossible to imagine: at times, up above, red and green lights appeared, arranged in irregular figures, like constellations. Peering at those lights, with his nose in the air, he soon took a step into the void and fell headlong.
"I'm dead!" he thought; but at the same moment he found himself seated on some soft earth; his hands touched some grass; he had fallen, unharmed, into the midst of a meadow. The low lights, which had seemed so distant to him, were a line of little bulbs at ground-level.
A peculiar place to put lights, but convenient all the same, because they marked out a path for him. His foot now was not treading on grass but on asphalt: in the midst of the meadow a broad paved street passed, illuminated by those luminous beams at ground-level. Around him, nothing: only the very high, colored lights, which appeared and disappeared.
"A paved road is sure to lead somewhere," Marcovaldo thought, and started following it. He arrived at a fork, or rather, at an intersection, where every branch of the road was flanked by those little low bulbs and huge white numbers were marked on the ground.
He lost heart. What did it matter which direction he chose to follow if, all around, there was only this flat grassy meadow and this empty fog? It was at this point that he saw, at
a man's height, a movement of beams of light. A man, really a man, with his arms open, dressed—it seemed—in a yellow overall, was waving two luminous little disks like the kind station-masters wave.
Marcovaldo ran towards this man and, even before reaching him, he started saying breathlessly: "Hey, hey, listen, here in the midst of the fog, how do I—"
"Don't worry," the voice of the man in yellow replied. "Above a thousand meters there's no fog, you can proceed safely. The steps are just ahead; the others have already boarded."
The words were obscure, but heartening: Marcovaldo was particularly pleased to hear there were other people not far away; he advanced to join them, without asking further questions.
The mysteriously announced steps were a little stairway with comfortable steps and two railings, white in the darkness. Marcovaldo climbed up. On the threshold of a low doorway, a girl greeted him so cordially it seemed impossible she was actually addressing him.
Marcovaldo bowed and scraped. "My humble respects, Signorina." Steeped in cold and dampness as he was, he was dazed at finding refuge under a roof...
He entered, blinked, his eyes blinded by the light. He wasn't in a house. He was—where? In a bus, he thought, a long bus with many empty places. He sat down. As a rule, going home from work, he never took the bus, but chose the tram because the ticket cost a bit less. This time, however, he was lost in a neighborhood so remote that surely there was only a bus service. How lucky he was to have arrived in time to catch this one, no doubt the last! And what soft, comfortable seats! Marcovaldo, now that he had found out about it, would always take the bus, even if the passengers were obliged to obey some rules ("... Please," a loudspeaker was saying, "refrain from smoking and fasten your seatbelts ..."), even if the roar of the motor, as it started, was excessive.
A man in uniform passed among the seats. "Excuse me, conductor," Marcovaldo said. "Do you know if there's a stop anywhere near Via Pancrazio Pancrazietti?"
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