The Edge of the Horizon

6

On the sliding door Pasquale had left a note: “Back Soon.” Pasquale always goes and has his morning coffee around eleven. Instead of waiting in the courtyard, Spino decided to go and join him; after all he knew where to find him. The sun was bright, the streets were pleasant. He went out of the hospital and down a dark side street that led into a small square where there was a café with a terrace and tables set out. Pasquale was sitting at a table reading the paper. Spino must have frightened him, because when he came up from behind and spoke to him, Pasquale started slightly. With a look of resignation he folded his paper and left some money on the table. They walked calmly, as if out for a stroll. Then Pasquale said it was a sad story, to which Spino replied, “Right,” and Pasquale said: “I want to be buried in my own village. That’s where I want them to put me, beneath the mountains.”

A bus went by and the noise drowned out their last words. They crossed a patch of garden where people had worn a footpath between flowerbeds defended by “Keep Off” signs. Spino said he wasn’t going to the morgue, he just wanted to know if anybody had shown up, a relative, someone who knew the man. Pasquale shook his head with an expression of disgust and said: “What a world.” Spino asked him not to leave the morgue if he could possibly avoid it, and Pasquale replied that if the relatives did come forward, the first place they’d go would be to the police, they certainly wouldn’t come to the hospital. They parted at the crossroad where the path through the gardens plunges between the houses of the old city center, and Spino set off to catch the number 37.

Corrado wasn’t in the office, as Spino had feared. He had guessed his friend would want to go in person to try and find out more. Obviously the facts his reporter had picked up hadn’t satisfied him. He hung around in the editorial office for a while, saying hello to people he knew, but no one paid much attention to him. There was an atmosphere of impatience and nervous tension, and Spino imagined that this death with its burden of tragedy was weighing down on the room, making the men feel feverish and vulnerable. Then somebody came through a door waving a piece of paper and shouting that the tanks had crossed the frontiers, and he named a city in Asia, some improbable place. And shortly afterwards another journalist working at a teleprinter went over to a colleague and told him that the agreements had been signed, and he mentioned another distant foreign city, something plausible perhaps out there in Africa, but as unlikely-sounding here as the first. And Spino realized that the dead man he was thinking of meant nothing to anybody; it was one small death in the huge belly of the world, an insignificant corpse with no name and no history, a waste fragment of the architecture of things, a scrap-end. And while he was taking this in, the noise in that modern room full of machines suddenly stopped, as if his understanding had turned a switch reducing voices and gestures to silence. And in this silence he had the sensation of moving like a fish caught in a net; his body made a sudden involuntary jerk and his hand knocked an empty coffee cup off a table. The sound of the cup breaking on the floor started up the noise in the room again. He apologized to the owner of the cup, who smiled as if to say it didn’t matter, and Spino left.