The Edge of the Horizon

8

They got on the bus in Piazza del Parlasolo, under the bell tower. The clock said eight o’clock, and, it being Sunday, the square was quiet, deserted almost, the three buses lined up in a row, their engines ticking over, each with a card on its windshield announcing a destination. The clock struck eight and the driver promptly folded up his paper, pressed a button to close the automatic doors and slipped into gear. They went to sit up front, on the driver’s side, Sara by the window. On the seat at the back was a group of Boy Scouts, halfway down the aisle an elderly couple in Sunday best, then themselves.

Sara had brought sandwiches and on her knees held a guidebook to Romanesque churches in the area. The book was in color and its cover featured a stone ceiling rose. The bus drove along the almost deserted sea front. The traffic lights hadn’t been switched on yet and the driver slowed down at every intersection. After the flower market they took a wide road that climbed rapidly in long curves. In just a few minutes they were halfway up the hillside, already out of town, running along beside an old ruined aqueduct. Another moment and it was open country with thickets of trees and vegetable gardens planted on terraces; olive, acacia and mimosa trees seemed on the point of flowering despite the season. Below, they looked down to the sea and the coast, both pale blue and veiled in a light mist which didn’t penetrate the city itself.

Sara closed her eyes and perhaps slept a little. Spino’s eyes were also half-closed as he let himself be lulled by the motion of the bus. The Boy Scouts got off a stop before the village by a roadside Madonna. Then the bus crossed the village and turned round in the square, stopping in a yellow rectangle painted on the flagstones. Before starting their climb they had coffee in a cafe on the square. The little woman behind the counter watched them with a curiosity they satisfied by asking for directions to the sanctuary. She spoke in a harsh, rather primitive dialect, showing bad teeth. They gathered she was suggesting they eat in a trattoria that belonged to her daughter where the cooking was good and the prices reasonable.

They decided instead to climb up the path marked in their guidebook. The book promised a steep but picturesque walk with dramatic views across the bay and the countryside inland. All of a sudden the bell tower rose pink and white amongst the holm oaks. Sara took Spino by the hand, pulling him along, like two children coming out of school.

The churchyard is paved with stone flags, grass growing in the cracks between, while a low brick wall runs along the edge of a sheer drop to the other side. From up here the horizon stretches away from one bay to the next and the sea breeze blows in with a sharp tang. On the facade, near the door, an inscription explains how in the year of grace MCCCXXV the Madonna now in the sanctuary was carried in procession down to the sea, where she vanquished the terrible plague then afflicting the valley, after which the people chose the Madonna as patron saint of the bay. The first stone of the convent annex was laid on June 12th MCCCXXV and the inscription preserves the memory of that day. Sara read aloud from her guidebook, insisting that Spino pay attention.

The sun was hot. To eat their sandwiches they stretched out on a patch of grass at the end of the churchyard where an iron cross on a stone pedestal commemorates a solemn visit paid by the Bishop in 1918, in gratitude, it says, for the end of the war, and for Victory. They ate slowly and calmly, enjoying the pleasure of being there, and when the sun began to slip behind the promontory, leaving a hazy light along the coast, they went into the church by a side door near the apse where a fresco shows a knight on a white horse crossing a landscape dominated by a native allegorical representation with a background of spring celebrations and festivals to the left and fires and hangings to the right. Then they went along the aisles, looking at the votive paintings hung on the walls. Most of them are seascapes: shipwrecks, miraculous visions saving mariners from storms, windjammers with their rigging devastated by lightning finding the right route thanks to the intercession of the Madonna. The Holy Mother is always shown between flashing clouds, her head covered by an azure veil as in popular iconography, her right hand reaching through the sky to make a gesture of protection toward the wave-tossed boats. Rough handwriting has traced out phrases of devotion across the paint.

Then the bell rang out and the Prior came in from the vestry to celebrate afternoon Mass. They sat to one side, near the confession-box, reading the inscriptions on the stone slabs on the walls. Afterwards, they found the Prior in the vestry as he was taking off his vestments and he led them through to his study next to the now empty cells of the convent beyond the refectory. Perhaps he mistook them for a mature married couple wanting advice, who knows, or for two inquisitive tourists. He invited them to sit on a small couch in a bare room: there was a dark table, a small organ, a bookcase with glass doors. On the table, with a chestnut leaf to mark his place, was a book about destiny and the tarot. Then Spino said he had come about a man who had died, and the priest immediately understood and asked if they were relatives or friends of the man. Neither, he said. The first time he’d seen him he was already dead, and now he was being kept in a refrigerator, like a fish, but he ought to be given a proper burial. The priest nodded in agreement, since from his point of view he imagined he was hearing and perhaps warming to a version of his own compassion as a man of faith in the words of another. But what could he say? Yes, he had known the boy, but not in the sense of knowing his name, place of birth and so on. He had always believed he was named Carlo and perhaps he really was. All he could say about him was that he was a nice boy, he loved his studies, he had said he was poor, and the Order had helped him. He didn’t know for certain if he was really born in Argentina, that was what he had said, and the Prior had never doubted it, and why should he have? In the two months he had stayed in the monastery he had read a great deal and they had talked a great deal. Then he had moved to town so as to be able to study and the Order had continued to help him by offering the modest charity of a low rent. He was sorry he had gone, he was a boy with a sharp, clear mind.

He looked them in the eyes, insistently, as priests will sometimes. “Why do you want to know about him?” he asked.

“Because he is dead and I’m alive,” Spino said.

He wasn’t sure why he’d answered like that. He felt it was the only plausible answer, since, truth to tell, there was no other reason. So then the priest clasped his hands together on the table, and, stretching out his arms, his white cassock slipped back to show his wrists, which were also white, and his fingers fidgeted a little with each other.

“He wrote to me,” said the priest. “I’ll show you the letter.” He opened a drawer and took out a blue envelope with a postcard inside showing a view of the city that Spino sees every day. The priest handed it to him and he read the few lines written there in a large, rather childish hand. Then Spino asked if anyone else had seen it, and the priest shook his head smiling, as if to say that no one had bothered to come and talk to him. “I couldn’t be of much use to the police,” he said, “and then it’s too much of an effort to climb up here.”

They exchanged a few casual remarks about the beauty of the place and the history of the church. Sara embarked on a pleasant conversation with the priest about the frescoes, Spino restricting himself to listening to their authoritative remarks as they spoke easily about the Knight, the Angel, Death, and the Hanged Man, until he remarked that it was odd but they sounded like tarot figures, and he pointed to the book on the table. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d like it, Father,” he added, “it being about life’s strange coincidences.”

The priest smiled and looked at him indulgently. “God alone knows all the coincidences of this existence, but we alone must choose our own set of coincidences from all those possible,” he said, “we alone.” And so saying he pushed the book towards Spino.

So then, for fun, Spino took the book and opened it at random without looking. He said: “Page forty-six,” and with a solemn voice, as if pretending to be a fortune teller, read aloud the first paragraph. They laughed out of politeness, as one does after an amusing remark, and it was clear that this laughter also marked the end of their conversation. So they said goodbye and the priest showed them out. The sky was growing dark and they hurried down the path, having heard the horn of the bus in the village square announcing its imminent departure.

Sara flopped on her seat with a sigh of satisfaction and tidied her hair slyly. “We should go on vacation,” she said. “We need a vacation.” He nodded without saying anything and leaned his head back on the headrest. The driver turned off the interior lights and the bus sped out of the village and along the hillside. Spino closed his eyes and thought of destiny, of the sentence he had read from that book, of life’s infinite coincidences. And when he opened them again the bus was already driving through the pitch dark and Sara had gone to sleep with her head on his shoulder.