The Edge of the Horizon

3

They brought him in in the middle of the night. The ambulance arrived quietly, its headlights dimmed, and Spino immediately thought: something horrific has happened. He had the impression he’d been asleep and yet he picked up the sound of the ambulance’s motor perfectly clearly, heard it turn into the narrow street too calmly, as if there were nothing more that could be done, and he sensed how death arrives slowly, how that is death’s real pace, unhurried and inexorable.

At this time of night the city is asleep, this city which never rests during the day. The noise of the traffic dies down, just every now and then the lonely roar of a truck from along the coast road. Through the empty expanses of night-time silence comes the hum of the steelworks that stands guard over the town to the west, like some ghostly sentinel with lunar lighting. The doors of the ambulance echoed wearily in the courtyard, then he heard the sliding door open and felt he was picking up that smell the night’s chill leaves in people’s clothes, not unlike the sour, slightly unpleasant smell some rooms have when they’ve been slept in. There were four policemen, their faces ashen, four boys with dark hair and the movements of sleepwalkers. They said nothing. A fifth had stayed outside and stammered something in the dark that Spino couldn’t catch. At which the four went out, moving as though they didn’t really know what they were doing. He had the impression of witnessing a graceful, funereal ballet whose choreography he couldn’t understand.

Then they came in again with a corpse on a stretcher. Everything was done in silence. They shifted the corpse from the stretcher and Spino laid it out on the stainless-steel slab. He opened the stiffened hands, tied the jaws tight with a bandage. He didn’t ask anything, because everything was only too clear, and what did the mere mechanics of the facts matter? He recorded the time of arrival in the register and pushed the bell that rang on the first floor to get the doctor on duty to come and certify death. The four boys sat down on the enameled bench and smoked. They seemed shipwrecked. Then the doctor came down and started to talk and write. He looked at the fifth boy, who was wounded and was moaning softly. Spino telephoned the New Hospital and told them to prepare the operating theater for an urgent case, then immediately arranged for the boy to be sent there. “We haven’t even got any instruments here,” he said. “We’re just a morgue now.”

The doctor went out by the back stairs and someone, one of the boys, sobbed and murmured: “Mother,” pushing his hands into his eyes, as if to erase a scene that had been etched there. At which Spino felt an oppressive tiredness, as though the tiredness of everything around him were bearing down on his shoulders. He went outside and sensed that even the courtyard was tired, and the walls of this old hospital were tired, the windows too, and the city, and everything. He looked up and had the impression that even the stars were tired, and he wished there were some escape from this universal tiredness, some kind of postponement or forgetting.