Target in the Night

EPILOGUE

Many times, in different places, through the years, Emilio Renzi remembered Luca Belladona. He always remembered him as someone who’d had the courage to live up to the heights of his own illusions. Months could go by without Renzi thinking about him, and then some fortuitous event would bring him back to mind, and he’d resume the story where he’d last left it — with new clarifications and details for his friends in a café in the city, or having a few drinks at his place at night with a woman sometimes — and the images of Luca would return vividly, his frank, reddened face, his clear eyes. He remembered the empty factory, the building in the middle of the plains, Luca wandering among his instruments and his machines. Always optimistic, always finding a way to find hope, unable to imagine that reality would deal him a fatal blow, like so many others. A fall brought about by a small change in his behavior, as if he were being punished for making a mistake, not for a character flaw but for a lack of foresight, for a failing he could not forget and would return like a remorse.

That night Renzi was talking with a group of friends after dinner in an open balcony facing the river, in a weekend house in the Tigre Delta, and he felt as if that night — always in spite of himself, mocking such a natural state — he’d gone back, and that the delta was an as-of-yet unknown quadrant of reality, like that town in the country had been for him, where he’d spent a few weeks in a kind of archaic interruption of his life as a city man, unable to understand such a return to nature — even if he never stopped imagining a drastic leaving that would take him to an isolated, quiet place where he could dedicate himself to what Emilio, like Luca, also imagined was his destiny, or his vocation.

“Luca couldn’t imagine that there might be a defect in his character, because he’d reached the conviction that his way of being was something separate from his decisions, that it was a kind of instinct that guided him through every conflict and every difficulty. But he’d been defeated — or at least he’d been forced to make an unforgiveable decision, he must have thought that he’d deserted — and he couldn’t forgive himself. Even though any other decision would have been just as impossible.”

The light from a kerosene lantern and the smell from the coils that kept the mosquitoes at bay reminded Renzi of the nights of his childhood. His friends listened to him in silence, drinking white wine and smoking, sitting before the river. The steady glow of the cigarettes in the darkness, the flickering light of the occasional boats passing by, the croaking of the frogs, the rustling wind in the trees, the clear summer night — were like the landscape of a dream.

“He was so proud and stubborn that it took him a while to realize that he’d fallen into a trap with no way out. By the time he realized what was happening, it was too late. I think about that when I remember the last time I saw him, a few days before leaving town.”

He’d called a taxi and asked the driver to wait by the side of the road while he walked up to the factory. There was light in the windows. Renzi knocked a few times on the iron gate. It was getting dark and a freezing drizzle was falling.

“After a while Luca open the front door a crack. When he saw me, he stumbled backwards, waving his hand. No, no, he seemed to be saying as he retreated. No. Impossible.”

Luca closed the door, followed by a sound of rattling chains. Renzi stood there for a while before the tall front of the factory. As he made his way back to the street, he thought he saw Luca behind the lighted windows of the upper level, pacing, gesturing, speaking to himself.

“And that was all,” Renzi said.