Reticence

II

It was a little past nine thirty when I left my room the next morning. Apparently all of the guests had already left the hotel because the hallway was perfectly silent when I started up the little stairway leading to the top floor. It was a very narrow staircase that doubled back on itself and led up to a long, dark hallway covered with threadbare carpeting. Four doors led onto the hallway, the first of which was partway open revealing a sort of walk-in closet where several chairs were stored in the darkness beside an old mattress lying on the ground. The other doors, closed and silent, must have belonged to guestrooms because there were white plastic numbers glued to all three. So there were rooms on the top floor after all, numbers fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Still standing in the hallway I looked at the three closed doors thinking that Biaggi was staying in one of these rooms. Because Biaggi, now I was sure of it, must have come to stay at the hotel a couple of days before my arrival. In fact he’d always needed such isolation to work, and even if I couldn’t be sure he’d already taken a room in Sasuelo in the past, I did know he had a habit of working in hotel rooms in other cities for more or less prolonged periods of time. But above all, I thought, where had Biaggi been last night if not at the hotel? Because last night — this I knew for sure — Biaggi hadn’t been at home.

I’d gone down for breakfast, and the owner didn’t even look in my direction when I came into the dining room. Leftovers still covered the tables, small half-finished packets of jam and butter lay on the plates, and here and there wrinkled napkins were rolled up into balls and abandoned on the tablecloths amid a scattering of crumbs. Four tables had been occupied, which intrigued me because it seemed to me that there hadn’t been so many guests on other days. Could it be that someone who didn’t normally eat breakfast in the dining room came down today for the first time? Could it be that Biaggi — because I immediately thought of Biaggi — had come down to have breakfast in the dining room this morning? But if it was Biaggi, I thought, why had he come down precisely today for the first time? Why, if he was at the hotel, didn’t he have his breakfast brought up to his room as he must have done on the other days? Was he now indifferent to whether or not I knew he was staying at the hotel, or had he realized I’d cottoned on and given up trying to hide altogether?

When the owner brought me my coffee, setting it on the table without a word, he lingered for a moment at the sliding window and looked out at the deserted terrace. It was drizzling, and a transparent plastic tarp had been thrown over the little rock wall that was being built a little farther off, its corners flapping in the wind from time to time. A couple of masons’ tools lay nearby in the mud, and water dripped slowly from the branches of the surrounding tamaris. The owner was still standing next to me, looking outside without paying the slightest attention to me. You didn’t sleep too well last night, right? he said without turning, as if he were talking to someone on the terrace, and suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. I didn’t respond, pouring my coffee instead, and he didn’t insist, nodding thoughtfully and clearing the tables onto the tray he’d brought my coffee over with. He moved off, loading the dirty cups onto the tray as he went along. I didn’t sleep well either, he finally said, and, clearing the tables all the while, he started telling me about the insomnia he’d been suffering from for some time now, which obliged him to read very late in his room before falling sleep. In fact he never went to sleep before two or three o’clock in the morning, he said, and he slept so lightly that the slightest noise in the hotel woke him up. He looked at me. Was he trying to tell me he knew perfectly well it wasn’t the first time I’d left the hotel in the middle of the night?

Because it wasn’t the first time I’d left the hotel during the night. Two nights earlier, in fact, I’d left the hotel and gone into the village. A short while before leaving I’d stood for a long time at my window listening to the murmur of the sea close at hand, which had eased my senses and my mind, but when I’d gone to bed I hadn’t been able to get to sleep, turning over and over in my mind the reasons for the initial reticence I’d felt on the first day at the thought of going to visit Biaggi. Finally I’d gone out to get a breath of air and clear my head, and I’d walked down to the port and onto the jetty. I was wearing a dark coat, I remember, a gray suit and plain tie, and it was perhaps this very image of me that Biaggi had seen that night as I walked out in the night on the stone wall of the jetty, a silhouette in a dark coat and tie walking slowly in the port under the moonlight which was identical every night, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, or perhaps he’d only seen me later, bending down over the cat’s body at the side of the dock, as the beam from the lighthouse lit up my face intermittently before plunging it once more into darkness.

After breakfast I went discreetly to the hotel reception, making sure no one saw me in the hall. The room was very dark when I went in. The bluish lights of an aquarium reflected onto the walls and floor, and several fish swam in silence amid miniature rocks and carrageen moss. A banged-up couch stood against one wall and a telephone and a couple of telephone books lay on the old wooden counter in the dull light. I slipped silently behind the counter and took a close look for a moment at the little keyboard hanging on the wall, seeing that while the keys to rooms fourteen and fifteen weren’t there, the key to room sixteen was hanging on a nail. I took it from the corkboard and hurried up to the top floor of the hotel.

I was now standing in front of room sixteen, holding the key I’d just taken from the reception, and I didn’t make a move, fully persuaded that it was Biaggi’s room, that this was the room he’d moved into when he came to stay at the hotel, and that it was here that he’d been working in complete isolation for several days now. He must have gone out, no doubt to take a walk around the village, because I couldn’t hear a sound behind the door, and I made up my mind to go in now that he was out. Softly I slid the key into the lock, and pushing open the door I was so convinced I was entering Biaggi’s room that I was sure I’d find a dark little nook under the attic with no more than a small wooden table against the wall with Biaggi’s typewriter on it, the black plastic cover overturned on the table, an ashtray and several sheets of paper on the desk. There was none of all that, judging from the rayon dressing gown on a hanger beside the washbasin the room was occupied by a woman. The wallpaper was similar in every respect to that in my room, just as dingy and damp, and the same grimy orange-beige color. The bed was unmade and the curtains were open, and a suitcase lay on the floor against the wall. Very elegant, the suitcase contrasted somewhat with the modesty of the room. It was made of soft, padded blue leather and had gold-colored locks, and a tiny key was attached by a wire to the handle. I closed the door and was about to go back downstairs when I heard someone walking along the hall down below, who almost immediately started up the little staircase. I stood there transfixed in the hallway, and the owner appeared in front of me at the top of the stairs, a little out of breath, holding a bucket and broom to clean the rooms. Was it you, I blurted out, who closed the sliding window in the dining room last night while I was out? He seemed not to understand the question, or at least not to make the connection between the window and the fact that I’d been outside the previous night, or maybe he was making other connections in his mind whose consequences I had no way of grasping, and after thinking about it while giving me a strange look, he finally said that yes, in fact he had gotten up in the night because he’d heard some noise in the hotel, and that, when he came into the dining room, he’d seen that a cat had taken advantage of the window’s being open to slip inside — a black cat that had run away as soon as he’d entered the room.

So it was the owner who’d closed the window the night before. Unless, I thought, without having really lied to me, he’d avoided telling the entire truth to cover up to a certain extent Biaggi’s presence at the hotel, and that last night when he went into the dining room he knew very well that Biaggi was still outside, simply because he’d heard him leave a short while earlier, and that, realizing that the sliding window was open in the dining room, he must have thought that it was Biaggi who’d left it open and so hadn’t touched it. And so it was Biaggi who, having preceded me into the hotel on his way back from the port, had closed the sliding window on me, not staying outside on the terrace as I’d thought, but simply coming back into the hotel where he had a room. Because, if Biaggi was staying at the hotel, I thought, if Biaggi had moved into the hotel a couple of days before my arrival with the intention of working there in complete isolation for a spell, he certainly must have asked the owner to tell no one he was there so that he could work in peace and quiet.

Back in my room I went over to the window and looked pensively outside. My son was sleeping behind me, I could hear him breathing regularly in his travel cot, and I went soundlessly over to watch him sleep. He was lying on his back, his little eyes closed and his hands limp, and I watched tenderly as he slept, even somewhat surprised I must say, he slept more than anyone I knew. He woke up a little after eleven o’clock in a soft, almost imperceptible fit of hiccups and tears that grew louder bit by bit, becoming clipped and furious as he tried to straighten up in bed with his head and hands pressed against the finely stitched fabric of the little Centre Georges Pompidou. I took him in my arms and held him high in the air, just the way he liked it to judge from his sudden silence and blissful, toothless smile, before putting him down softly on my bed and getting him dressed to go out, slipping on his big anorak and little shoes. I waited until he was in the stroller before I put on his balaclava (it was always a bit of a bullfight). We didn’t run into anyone when I dropped off my key at the front desk, and I picked up his stroller and carried it down the front steps. The stroller was brand new, very light and very practical, and I was really rather proud of it, having bought it just a few days before I left home. It had a chrome-plated metal frame and pale green plastic trimmings, with very solid rubber wheels. The color of the seat was perhaps not as uniform as I’d have liked, because when I bought things for my son I generally looked for the greatest simplicity, preferring simple materials and plain fabric, whereas this was many shades of gray and splashed with a whole nebula of jungle animals, tigers and elephants, even if they were really rather little and quite discreet I must say, blending in pretty well with the rest of the thing. In any event it was very easy to maneuver, even if there was only one handle — the other had broken off the day I arrived and was still in my pocket, together with a wheel clip that had come off two days ago. The road rose slightly and the wheels squeaked (that was new). I stopped for a moment on the shoulder and bent down to see what was wrong, but not finding anything that could explain the squeaking sound I started walking again. Probably wear and tear, who knows. I walked calmly along the side of the road, my son holding his head high as if I’d put him on the lookout at the head of our convoy, a task he carried out with the utmost seriousness, his eye sweeping the terrain under his balaclava — just one eye, because his hood had slipped down and more or less covered the other — watching for anything that moved in front of him, be it nothing more than a dead leaf carried by the wind, whose peregrinations he followed attentively from the asphalt where it had commenced its flight to its final destination on the roadside where it was caught by a clump of wet grass.

A fine sliver of sunlight had found its way between the clouds, and we finally passed the battered little sign indicating we were leaving Sasuelo. Right beside the sign on the side of the road was the municipal dump, consisting of a simple wire container on the side of the road. The cover was open and hung down one side, and the cage was overflowing with cardboard boxes and more or less well tied garbage bags. Some of them, fastened elegantly with little pink ribbons, had been particularly fawned over before being discarded, while others were wide open, sometimes even ripped, whose contents — open food cans, potato peels, shards of broken glass, fish bones, and chicken carcasses — were spilled all over the ground. The rain had soaked everything, and most of the cardboard boxes were drenched and had burst in places, finally splitting altogether under the weight of the garbage. A foul odor hung in the air and only let up a hundred yards farther on, when the sea air finally regained the upper hand. I continued along the cliff and, as I approached the Biaggis’ house — because I was now starting to get close to the Biaggis’ house — I started to feel a sort of apprehension at the thought of being surprised so close to their property. However it seemed no one was following us, and the road was now lined on both sides by a dense grove of trees. Soon the wall of the property appeared between the pines, a large wall of irregular stones almost entirely covered by a coat of dried ivy, and I walked alongside it for a couple of yards. The first thing I saw when I stopped in front of the gate was that the old gray Mercedes was gone. It had still been there the night before, however, so someone must have driven off in it this morning, and everything pointed to that person being Biaggi. Because even if Biaggi was staying at the hotel, I thought, even if Biaggi had moved into the hotel a couple of days before I arrived, nothing would stop him from coming and going in the village as he pleased or from using his car from time to time. He could even go home every day if he liked, and stay there for a couple of hours without opening the shutters, sure that no one would suspect he was there. So in fact he could alternate between two separate locations in the village, his home and his room at the hotel, and it occurred to me then that he must certainly have gone from his house to the hotel several times since I’d arrived, meaning that each time he wasn’t at the hotel he’d no doubt been at home.

The timid ray of sunlight that had succeeded in piercing through the clouds had disappeared by now and the sky was once more low and heavy over the villa, which was enveloped in a thick gray blanket of mist. All of the shutters were closed and the garden was deserted behind the gate, silent and abandoned. Great quantities of dead leaves were scattered all over the grounds, some yellow and still dry, others ruddy and wet, limp and soaked with water, while still others floated on the puddles in the gravel driveway. This was the first time I’d seen the Biaggis’ villa in full daylight since I’d arrived, and it looked very different than how I remembered it from a previous visit, all sunny under a limpid blue sky that had poked through the high branches of the pines and palms. The grass had been dry the last time I was there, mowed short and scorched by the sun, and classical music had wafted from the large, permanently open bay window on the ground floor that led out onto the terrace. Inside the house the depths of the living room had been fresh and welcoming, with the bookshelves barely visible along the walls, while outside a white sun umbrella had shaded the terrace marked by splashes of color from the swimsuits and towels drying on the seatbacks in the sun.

Now the villa was closed and silent, stretching out in the mist behind the wall of the property, and I stood in front of the gate, apparently alone on the road with my son beside me in his stroller. I’d taken out the three letters to Biaggi that I still had in my possession, and looking at them I saw that the brief dunking the night before had done them practically no damage at all. Fine, they looked like they’d gotten a bit wet, the paper was slightly crinkled and puffy in places and the ink had run somewhat on the envelopes, but they were still perfectly presentable, it seemed to me, at least presentable enough to be put back into the Biaggis’ mailbox without anyone suspecting they hadn’t been there since the mailman had delivered them, and, just as I was about to let them go — because I now wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible — my hand froze and I sensed that passing shiver of dread I always felt before dropping letters into a mailbox, the second when I read the letter over in my mind, going over all the turns of phrase and mentally checking this or that word, suddenly wondering if I’ve spelled it correctly, or even questioning what I’d written, and, while my hand still had the option of pulling back, while only a few inches separated the letters from the box and all of these vague sensations blended inside me, it was at this moment that I let them go — my hand completed its movement and I let the three letters drop into the slot.

Back at the hotel I climbed the little chain-link gate that led onto the terrace and walked silently around the building to the sliding window, where I peered into the dining room with my body hidden in an angle of the wall. The lunch service had begun and I could see the owner trudging heavily back and forth between the tables. He couldn’t see me where I was standing, and as I watched him I realized I now felt a sort of apprehension as far as he was concerned, a vague fear of being in his presence. As I wasn’t particularly hungry I decided not to have lunch, and to take advantage of the owner’s being occupied to check out the two rooms on the third floor I hadn’t been able to enter that morning. Because I wanted to be sure that, as I thought, Biaggi really did have a room at the hotel.

There was no one at the front desk when I went in, and I hesitated for a moment in the dim bluish light, standing beside my son who’d gone to sleep in his stroller. The door to the dining room was open at the end of the hall and I could hear the sound of muffled voices, a vague murmur of conversation mixed with the occasional clatter of knives and forks. No one had heard me come in, and I slipped soundlessly behind the counter to take the key to my room before cautiously taking hold of the keys to rooms fourteen and fifteen, which were also hanging on the corkboard. I went quickly up to my room to put my son to bed, then left again immediately and took the little stairway up to the top floor. I could no longer hear any noise at all from the ground floor, and the silence grew more and more oppressive the further I climbed up the stairs. When I got up to the third floor I walked a couple of yards down the hall. Before slipping the key into the lock of room fourteen I turned around once more toward the stairway, scrutinizing the curved wall in the feeble light. I knew that someone could appear at the top of the stairs at any moment, even Biaggi, because Biaggi must have been outside at the time. Otherwise I didn’t see how Biaggi could have come back to the hotel before me without my seeing him, as I’d been on the road the whole time since I left his property. But now, I said to myself, now, Biaggi could come back to the hotel at any moment and head straight upstairs to his room — all the quicker no doubt when he saw that his key was missing from the reception area.

I turned the key in the lock and opened the door. The room was silent and deserted, and the daylight coming through the window infused the room in a feeble, rainy half-light. The bed was made up against the wall and there were neither clothes nor newspapers; apparently the room was unoccupied. I left and closed the door behind me. There still wasn’t the slightest sound in the corridor. I’d now gone over to the door of room fifteen, which was slightly lower and somewhat indented in the wall, and I had a hard time opening it as it resisted when I pushed. It was a tiny room with a sloped roof, permeated by the smell of cold tobacco. There was just one bed and a table against the wall. Apparently the room had been cleaned this morning, but it seemed that someone had come back in the meantime and sat for a moment on the bed, because the bedspread was crumpled and a small transparent, hexagonal ashtray lay on the floor beside it. There was a travel bag near the door, but what struck me the most was the camera and two lenses on the table. One of the lenses was very short, it could have been twenty-eight millimeters, and the other much longer, a very long zoom lens, two hundred millimeters maybe, protected by a cylindrical, padded leather case. Beside it, also made of leather, was a stiff rectangular bag that must also have contained photographic material, films and filters, other lenses perhaps.

Was it me Biaggi was photographing with this equipment, I wondered all of a sudden, was it me? With this long zoom lens with which you can take photographs of someone from far away without being detected? But why would Biaggi have photographed me in the village without my knowing? Or had he photographed me in the port, on the jetty in the port on one of the previous nights? But at night, I thought, even in the moonlight, because the night before the jetty had been bathed in moonlight, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, and even with very sensitive film pushed to the maximum, it must be impossible to identify anyone at all in the photo, which would be very dark, showing nothing more than a stormy night sky in the background, the extended, immobile clouds in the moon’s halo and a silhouette in a dark coat and tie far off on the shadowy outline of the jetty. I was still standing motionless in the doorway when I heard the almost imperceptible sound of tears coming from down below, the very soft sound of my son’s tears drifting up through the ceiling and floorboards.

I went quickly back downstairs where I could now hear the sound of my son’s crying more distinctly. I stood in the stairwell, both keys still in my hand, and had no idea what to do. Should I go straight back to my room to take care of my son, or should I first take the keys back to the reception desk? I took a quick look over the banister to assess the situation down below. Everything was perfectly still, and I started down. I hadn’t quite made it to the bottom when I once again heard the murmur of conversation coming from the dining room, from time to time a short fit of coughing and a chair scraping against the ground and, just as I was about to enter the reception area, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the owner’s silhouette in the hallway. He disappeared almost immediately into the dining room, and I wasted no time in slipping behind the counter and putting the keys back in their place. Then without waiting I went back up to my room to join my son. I opened the door and went straight over to him, knelt at the foot of his bed, and took him in my arms.

I stood at the window holding my son, softly stroking his head to soothe him. He’d put one of his hands on my shoulder and we looked outside as his tears subsided little by little. The weather was bleak, and the road was still glistening slightly from the rain. The lone donkey was seemingly at loose ends in the weed-covered lot across the way, scratching itself nonchalantly against the fence. Look at the donkey down there, I said softly to my son, placing a fingertip on the window and pointing at the animal. My son turned to me and smiled an unexpected and complicitous little smile, still flushed with tears. You see the donkey? I said, but in fact it was my finger he was looking at more than anything else, which he finally clenched softly in his small hand. And that’s how we stayed, my son and I, very tenderly for a moment at the window. Then I slowly closed the curtains and put my son back in his cot, because I’d decided to take a nap.

I lay down and remained with my eyes open in the half-light without sleeping. My son had fallen asleep as soon as I’d set him down and now breathed quietly in his cot, I could see his little body curled up on the mattress through the fine stitching of his bed. I couldn’t hear anything from outside, and each time I closed my eyes my thoughts came obsessively back to the cat’s body in the port, its whiskers like translucent gauze and its ears rising vertically above the waterline, turned sideways and floating heavily on the surface of the gray water, and soon another image — one I’d already seen — appeared to me gradually, the image of Biaggi watching me, and then I saw Biaggi’s body floating face up in the port, unmoving, and his arms spread wide, dressed in a sailor’s jacket and canvas pants that were slightly pulled up over his calves, his shoes and socks soaked with water. The tie around his neck was ripped and his head was twisted to one side, a bluish cheek slightly immersed in the water. The tie wasn’t fastened with a normal knot, but floated loosely around his shoulders like a scarf, and red marks appeared at the base of his neck, faint but unmistakable traces of strangulation, in all likelihood he’d been strangled with this tie. Biaggi had been strangled on one of the previous nights on the jetty with this tie by someone who’d met him there during the night, someone who’d approached him from behind under the moonlight that was identical every night, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, and who’d slipped his tie around Biaggi’s neck, his own tie which he hadn’t taken off and which was still tied around his collar, and which he’d pulled tight while Biaggi’s hands gripped his wrists to make him let go, but he hadn’t let go, he’d continued to pull in the long luminous beam of the lighthouse on Sasuelo Island that intermittently lit up his face as he tugged harder and harder on his tie, to the point of strangling himself as well to a certain extent, but he hadn’t let up and continued to pull with all his might until, almost simultaneously, the tie had broken leaving no more than a ripped clump of fabric around my collar, and Biaggi had relaxed his grip, falling onto the pier with the rest of my tie around his neck — a kick of the foot was all it took to topple his body into the bay.

The village stretched out behind me in the mist, and I walked off slowly in the other direction, heading down to the beach with my son in his stroller, who let himself be pushed along indifferently while swinging his legs idly back and forth. At the beach I took him out of his stroller and he started crawling around on the shore on all fours in his little blue anorak. I sat down on the sand beside his stroller and smoked a cigarette while looking pensively out to sea. The distant contours of Sasuelo Island could be distinguished off the coast, little more than a rugged stretch of rocky earth. The tiny silhouette of the lighthouse rose up on the left at the summit of the island, and at its very top, somewhat darker, was the little room with the lantern. Large rain clouds blackened the sky and the sound of the waves was close at hand as they crashed against the shore and threw up all sorts of algae onto the beach, plaited like unruly tufts of hair.

As we walked back down the beach on our way to the hotel I left my son’s stroller at the side of the water for a moment and advanced cautiously onto a mound of dried seaweed on the shoreline to watch a bird flying off the coast, a cormorant perhaps, slowly wheeling around in circles over the water, and I pointed it out to my son. The bird, I said happily, look at the bird, but he was looking at my finger, a little surprised at having been disturbed for so little, and, coming back over to him without taking my eyes off the bird, I crouched down at the foot of his stroller and started to imitate the cry of the cormorant, kneeling on the sand with one hand on my chest. Cui-cui, I said, and my son at once turned his head toward me in amazement. He looked at me in boundless gratitude, his two little eyes dazzling under the oval opening of his balaclava, and it was as if he’d all at once discovered my true nature after having been mistaken about me for the last eight months. For my part I hadn’t had any delusions about my nature for thirty-three years, because I’d just turned thirty-three, yes, the end of adolescence.

Night had started to fall when I got back to the village, and I took a detour down to the port before going back to the hotel. There was no one on the jetty and the wind was blowing hard, ruffling a little piece of red cloth on a boathook that was leaning against the low stone wall. Fishing nets and lobster traps lay on the ground in the dim light and a couple of boats pitched softly alongside the jetty. It was then that I saw that the cat’s body and the letter were gone. The water of the port was perfectly empty in front of me, stretching out silently in the night, and I stared at the dark, untroubled water thinking that to a certain extent we were back at square one, there was no longer a corpse in the port and the letters I’d taken from the Biaggis’ mailbox a couple of days earlier were there once again. We’re right back at the beginning, give or take one letter, I thought, one letter that had fallen into the water the night before and which the Biaggis would never receive no doubt, because by now the current must have carried it out into the distance.

Night had fallen over the jetty, and I stood there alone beside my son’s stroller. Everything seemed strangely simple now, and I continued to watch the black water of the port as it undulated in front of me while thinking that it was even entirely possible that if I hadn’t found the Biaggis at home the night before, they must simply have gone out for a reason unknown to me, and that in the same way if I hadn’t seen their car at their property this morning, it was because they’d decided to spend the day out of the village and that, having left early, they’d had lunch en route and probably wouldn’t be back home until the evening. And it seemed to me then that, paradoxically, as we’d come back to the initial situation in this way and everything was as it had been on the first day, I could now envisage going to see the Biaggis, perhaps not right away, no, I had to bring my son back to the hotel and the Biaggis might not be back yet, but a little later on that evening, just to say hello.