He didn’t hear someone shouting, ‘Stoj!’
All he heard was a sudden bang, like a gunshot. A cloud of dust rose up in front of him.
‘Stoj!’
Pierre looked towards the ruin, at the goats, at the house. He couldn’t see anyone. For a moment he didn’t move. Then he put down the suitcase, took a few steps forward, waved his arms above his head and shouted, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’
The dust rose a few inches to the right of his leg, and fragments of bark spattered from a shrub.
‘I’m called Robespierre Capponi, I’m the son of Vittorio Capponi, don’t shoot! I’m looking for Vittorio Capponi!’
He picked up the suitcase and resumed his descent. No one fired.
A minute later he heard the voice, and saw the barrel of the Mauser that had greeted his arrival.
‘Hands up. Don’t turn around.’
Pierre did so, without breathing.
A hand took his suitcase from him. He heard a hinge opening. The barrel of the Mauser was still fixed on him.
‘What are you doing here?’ the voice said again.
‘I’m looking for Vittorio Capponi,’ Pierre said clearly. ‘I’m his son.’
‘Don’t try to be clever, my son is in Italy, tell me what you’re doing here.’ The barrel of the gun against his back stressed the importance of the answer.
This was not how Pierre had imagined it, the meeting between Telemachus and Ulysses.
‘It’s me, dad,’ he said finally in a desperate voice. ‘I’m Robespierre, it’s true.’ He tried to turn round but the Mauser replied that this wasn’t quite the moment. ‘I’ve come looking for you, I didn’t know where you’d got to, I was worried about you, really, if you don’t believe me, ask me some questions, something that only you and I could know, anything you like.’
‘I don’t feel like playing games. You could have learned all kinds of things about me. Aren’t I right?’
‘No, go on, dad, please. Listen —’
‘Fine,’ said Vittorio, interrupting him, ‘our song. The one I sang to put you to sleep.’
Pierre was completely taken aback. Fanti said he had no ear for music, but it was just a question of training. Angela always stuck her fingers in her ears when he sang.
He began. Simple, childlike music, the words in dialect.
After the first two verses, he realised that he could turn round.
Vittorio Capponi was holding the submachine-gun with both hands. He looked hard into Pierre’s eyes, and didn’t move. His grey beard contrasted with his tanned face. He had long hair down to his shoulders. His face was hard, his eyes bright. He looked like a hermit, the shepherd king of some remote Balkan tribe.
Pierre stopped singing.
It wasn’t how he’d imagined it, Ulysses and Telemachus.
He opened his arms, ran forward and threw his arms around his father in a nine-year hug.
Vittorio Capponi took his hand off the barrel of the Mauser, lifted the gun upwards, and stood there, unsure what to do with the weapon.
‘. then a fisherman brought me over here, I slept under the canopy of the market and the moment I woke up I asked around to see if anyone knew where you lived.’
Pierre had run through the whole of the journey in a few minutes. His memories flashed by as though in a film, from Ravenna to
Sipan, his deal with Ettore, the letter to Nicola, the meeting with Darko. Everything.
His father had listened without interrupting, chewing wild fennel, his eye fixed on the goats. He was still holding the Mauser in one hand, and stroked his beard with the other.
They were sitting there, not far from the path, under a maritime pine with a twisted trunk. There was a smell of resin and dry grass.
Pierre had expected to be welcomed into the house. A table, a chair, something to eat, but after the gunfire nothing surprised him. Knowing how to be with other people is a matter of training like everything else. It didn’t look as though there were many visitors around here. Vittorio Capponi had lived in
Sipan for almost three months. He’d probably fallen out of the habit.
Pierre tried to fill the silence and check his thoughts. ‘I made my decision on the spur of the moment. Yes, to cut a long story short, I’d been thinking about it for ages, but difficulties were always coming up. They seemed insuperable to me, and perhaps I’d never have done it if hadn’t been for that letter that never came, and the last one I sent you, to the old address, the one that was returned to me.’
Pierre looked at his father again, as though waiting for a reply to an unvoiced question. He felt it deep down in his throat, a dim awareness suppressed until then by the impetuosity of his quest. Why did you stop writing, dad? Why haven’t I heard from you for over a year? Why?
His thoughts ran through his brain faster than the ticking seconds. He saw his father’s eyes again, just as he had seen them the last time, in Italo’s cellar, in the faint candlelight. Proud, determined, prepared for anything. Their colour darkened by the shade of his beret. Ready to say ‘farewell’, and to linger inside you for ever.
He saw Nicola’s face again. His eyes had changed, too. Now, on the few occasions when he talked about their father, there was no way of telling what light flashed there. He looked away, staring obliquely at the floor.
He stretched out a hand to his father’s shoulder, and chose the easiest among a thousand questions. ‘What’s up, dad, aren’t you feeling well? Aren’t you pleased to see me? What is it, has something happened?’
Vittorio Capponi lolled his head, took a deep breath and finally looked Pierre right in the face.
Nine years later, on a remote Dalmatian island, he saw those eyes again.
Filled with exile and resignation.
Chapter 42
Sipan, a minute later
‘Of course I’m pleased to see you, Robespierre,’ Vittorio began without
smiling. ‘But I’d rather you’d stayed at home and spared me all this.’
‘All this what?’ Pierre insisted.
Vittorio struggled for words. His pronunciation and his way of expressing himself betrayed the fact that he had been used to speaking a foreign language for a long time. ‘This crap,’ he said finally. ‘This rock where I’m forced to live, shooting at anyone who turns up. This poor thing that I’ve become.’
‘But dad, what’s happened to you, will you tell me? Why have you kept us in the dark for so long?’
‘And what was I supposed to tell you?’ Vittorio’s face darkened. ‘Last year I buried my second lifelong companion, she died slowly before my eyes. What else is there to say?’
Pierre got up, so as not to reply straight away.
‘You could at least have dropped a line or two,’ he said. ‘No more than that, just a couple of lines. After Milena died I wrote to you twice: you never replied.’
‘Haven’t I hurt enough people already? I came here to live far from you all, I’ve never made it back, I’ve written twice a year, and now I’m supposed to burden you with my troubles? You knew something, didn’t you? Politics was going badly, life was going badly, things in my head were going badly, but a father doesn’t weep on his son’s shoulders.’
‘And instead you don’t give a sign of life for more than a year?’ said Pierre. Then he regretted it. But it was too late to turn back.
‘I just don’t feel I’m alive, Robespierre. Do you want me to tell you everything? Fine. It’s as though I’m dead. So I thought it was better for you to forget. Death is contagious, a dead man’s letters make you die inside.’
Pierre felt the blow. He swallowed hard to check his tears, but neither operation was entirely successful. Vittorio seemed to do the same, then he started talking again. Pierre listened to him in silence, still walking, slowly, around a white stone that protruded from the grass.