The Edge of the Horizon

18

He asked the caretaker if he knew of a monument with an angel and an owl. The caretaker looked at the visitor and pretended to concentrate, though it was perfectly obvious he was disoriented. All the same, so as not to seem ignorant, he said it must be in the Western Gallery, and in revenge flaunted a knowledge that hadn’t been asked for. “It must be one of the first graves,” he said. “During the Romantic period the owl was in fashion.” Then, as Spino was walking away in the direction indicated by his outstretched arm, the caretaker reminded him that the cemetery closed at five and that he’d better be careful not to get locked inside. “There’s always someone gets left in, you know,” he added, as if to tone down the bluntness of his warning.

Spino nodded to show he had understood and set off along the asphalt avenue that cuts across the central squares. The cemetery was all but deserted, perhaps because it was late and the weather was unpleasantly windy. A few little old women dressed in black were busy in the squares tidying the graves. It’s strange how one can spend one’s life in a city without getting to know one of its most famous sites. Spino had never set foot in this cemetery described in all the tourist guides. He thought that to get to know a cemetery maybe you had to have your own dead there, and his dead were not in this place, nor in any other, and now that he was at last visiting the cemetery it was because he had acquired one of the dead who was not his own and was not buried here and to whom he was not even connected by any memories of a common past.

He began to wander about among the graves, distractedly reading the stones of the recently dead. Then his curiosity drew him towards the steps of the ugly neoclassical temple which houses the urns of some of the great men of the Risorgimento and along the pediment on which a Latin inscription establishes an incongruous connection between God and country. He crossed a section in the eastern part of the cemetery where bizarrely ornamented graves, all spires and pinnacles, loom alongside ugly little neo-gothic palaces. And he could hardly help but notice how at a certain period all the titled dead of the city had been concentrated in this area: nobles, senators of the realm, admirals, bishops; and then families for whom the nobility of wealth had stood in for the rarer nobility of blood: shipbuilders, merchants, the first industrialists. From the pronaos of the temple one can make out the original geometry of the cemetery which later developments were to change considerably. But the concept it expressed has remained unchanged: to the South and East, the aristocracy; to the North and West, the monumental tombs of the bourgeois business class; in the central squares, in the ground, the common people. Then there are a few areas for floating categories, for those who don’t belong; he noticed a portico beside the steps of the temple entirely given over to philanthropists: benefactors, men of science, intellectuals of various levels. It’s curious how nineteenth-century Italy faithfully reproduced in its choreography of death the class divisions that operated in life. He lit a cigarette and sat down at the top of the steps, immersed in his thoughts. Battleship Potemkin came to mind, as it does every time he sees an enormous, white flight of steps. And then a film about the Fascist period that he had liked for its sets. For a moment he had the impression that he too was in a scene in a film and that a director, from a low angle, behind an invisible movie camera, was filming his sitting there thinking. He looked at his watch and reassured himself it was only quarter past four. So then, he still had fifteen minutes before the appointment. He set off along the Western Gallery, stopping to look at the monuments and read the inscriptions. He stood a long time in front of the statue of the hazelnut seller, studying her carefully. Her face was modeled with a realism that showed no mercy in reproducing the features of a plebeian physiognomy. It was obvious that the old woman had posed for the sculpture in her Sunday best: the lace bodice peeps out from under a working woman’s shawl, a smart skirt covers the heavy pleats of another skirt, her feet are in slippers. With the hazelnuts she sold her whole life at street corners strung in loops over her arms, she stands to have the statue sculpted, this statue that now, life-size, looks out at the visitor with pride. A little further on an inscription on a bas-relief clumsily representing the throne of the Ludovisi informs him that Matilde Giappichelli Romanengo, a virtuous and kindly woman, having scarcely passed her thirtieth year, left husband and daughters Lucrezia and Federiga distraught. The deceased passed away on the second day of September 1886, and the two daughters, who dutifully hold the sheet from which their mother Matilde is flying to heaven, also support an inscription alongside which says: “Dear Mummy, what shall we offer you if not prayers and flowers?”

He walked slowly along the gallery until he found the grave with the angel and the owl. He noticed that a solitary seagull, blown along perhaps by the southwest wind, was hovering over the squares as if intending to land. On days like this when the southwesterly blows hard it’s not unusual to see seagulls even in those parts of the city furthest from the coast. They flock in, following the rubbish-strewn canal, then wander away from the water looking for food. It was exactly half past four. Spino sat on the low wall of the gallery, his back to the tomb, and lit another cigarette. There was no one under the porticos along the gallery and the old women in the middle of the squares had thinned out. Over to the other side of the squares, in a corner near the cypresses, he noticed a man who seemed deep in contemplation near a cross, and started to watch him. The minutes passed slowly but the man made no move. Then he got up quickly and set off towards the small square by the exit. Spino looked around, but could see no one. His watch indicated that it was a quarter to five, and he realized that no one would be coming now to keep this strange appointment. Or perhaps no one was supposed to come, they had simply wanted to know if he would, and now someone he couldn’t see was watching him perhaps, was checking that he really was willing. It was a kind of test they had set him.

The seagull touched down lightly just a few yards away and began to walk awkwardly between the graves, quietly curious, like a pet. Spino felt in his pocket and threw it a sweet which the bird immediately swallowed, shaking its head from side to side and fluffing out its feathers in satisfaction. Then it took off for a moment, not much more than a hop, to come to rest on the shoulder of a little First World War soldier, from where it looked at him calmly. “Who are you?” Spino asked him softly. “Who sent you? You were spying on me at the docks too. What do you want?”

It was two minutes to five. Spino got up quickly and his brusque movement frightened the seagull, which took off obliquely to glide away over the other square near the steps. Before leaving, Spino glanced at the tomb with the angel and the owl and read the inscription which, in the suspense of waiting, he had overlooked. Only then did it come to him that someone had merely wanted him to read that inscription, this was what the appointment amounted to, this was the message. Under a foreign name, on a bas-relief scroll, was a Greek motto, and beside it the translation: Man’s body dies; virtue does not die.

He began to run and the noise of his footsteps echoed high up under the vaults of the gallery. When he reached the exit the caretaker was sliding the gate along its rail and Spino bid him a hurried good night: “There’s a seagull still inside,” he said. “I think he’s planning to sleep there.” The man said nothing in reply. He took off his peaked cap and pushed back the hair on an almost bald scalp.