The Edge of the Horizon

12

He finds Faldini, the accountant, in a dusty office where, on a glass door leading to a dark corridor, a frosted sign says: “Tirrenica Import-Export.” The window offers a view of harbor derricks, a sheet-iron warehouse and a tugboat pitching in an oily sea. Faldini has the face of someone who has spent his entire life addressing letters to distant countries while looking out across a landscape of derricks and containers. Under a sheet of glass, his desk is a patchwork of postcards. Behind him a brightly-colored calendar extols the delights of vacations in Greece. He has a placid look about him, big watery eyes, grey hair cut short and bristling in an old-fashioned style. He is truly amazed to see his jacket again. He lost it so many years ago. No, he couldn’t say how many. Well, twenty maybe.

“You really lost it?”

Faldini toys with a pencil on his desk. The tug has moved through the frame of the window leaving light blue patches on the water. It’s hard to say. He doesn’t know. Or rather, he thinks not, let’s say that it disappeared, so far as he can recall. From the harbor, in the distance, comes the sound of a siren. The accountant considers his visitor with a certain curiosity. Obviously he’s asking himself, what on earth’s this business of my old jacket, who is this man, what’s he after? And Spino finds it so difficult to be convincing, and then he’s not really trying. Faldini watches him with his placid expression. Of course, on the accounts book he keeps open in front of him there are numbers that tell of dream cities like Samarkand, where people maybe have a different way of being people. Spino feels he must tell him the truth, or something like the truth. So then, this is the truth, this is how things stand. Does he understand, this Faldini, the accountant? Perhaps. Or rather he senses it somehow, the same way he must sense his sedentary man’s dreams. But it doesn’t matter, yes, he remembers. It was in ’59, or maybe ’60. He always hung the jacket there, where he hangs the jacket he has now. On that coathanger behind the door. The office was exactly as it is now, identical. He makes a vague gesture in the air. In his memory the only thing different is himself, a young Faldini, a young accountant, who would never go to Samarkand. And there was a workman, a sort of porter that is. He often came into the office, did a bit of everything. He did it because he needed the work, but in the past, if Faldini remembers rightly, he’d had a clerical position at the Customs. He doesn’t know why he’d lost that job. He’d had some personal catastrophe, he doesn’t know what. He was a reserved, polite person, ill perhaps, he wasn’t cut out for being a porter. His name was Fortunato, sometimes names are really ironic, but everyone called him Cordoba. He can’t remember his surname. They called him Cordoba because he’d been out in Argentina, or some other Latin American country, yes, his wife had died in Argentina and he had come back to Italy with his son, a little boy. He always talked about his little boy, on the rare occasions when he did talk. He had no relatives here and he’d put him in a boarding school. That is, it wasn’t a proper boarding school, it was a lodging house run by an old maid who kept a few children, a sort of private school, but on a small scale, where it was he wouldn’t know, he has a vague impression it was near Santo Stefano, the church, perhaps. The boy was called Carlito. Cordoba was always talking about Carlito.

A phone rings in a nearby room. Faldini is brought up short, coming back to the present. He casts a worried glance towards the door and then to his accounts books. The morning is flying by say his eyes now, eyes in which Spino also catches an intimation of constraint and embarrassment. Well then, one last thing and he’ll be off. If he’d just like to take a look at this photograph. This man sitting under the porch here, could it be Cordoba? Does he recognize him? And the boy? The accountant holds the photo delicately between thumb and forefinger. He holds it at arm’s length, he’s farsighted. No, he says, it’s not Cordoba, although, odd, it does look very like him, maybe it’s his brother, though he doesn’t know if Cordoba had a brother. As for the boy, he never saw Carlito.

Faldini is toying nervously with his pencil now. He seems distracted. Yes, well, he wouldn’t like to have been misunderstood, you know, belongings, they’re always so slippery, these belongings of ours, they move about, they even get the better of your memory. How could he not have remembered? In any case, now he remembers perfectly. He gave that jacket to Cordoba. He gave it to him as a present one day. Cordoba was always badly dressed, and he was a decent person.