They ate at a restaurant in a side street, a simple place with sawdust on the floor, frequented by workmen. He was obviously a regular customer. The owner smiled at her and shook his head in acknowledgement of life’s singularity when Giorgio introduced his grown-up daughter from Denmark. No, she didn’t speak Italian. What a shame! She understood that much. After lunch, as they were having their espresso, Giorgio pulled a photograph out of his pocket with a secretive look on his face. Was it a picture of them together? Maybe there was still a trace of the years when he had after all been there. A fleeting impression of a New Year’s Eve when she sat in his arms dressed as an Indian princess. A proof that it was true that he had once run with her on his shoulders among the spruce trees of the plantation, with laughter bubbling and rising inside her like waves.
She looked at the black and white photograph and recognised the young Giorgio. He stood with a boom in one hand, the other resting on the shoulder of a man she also thought she had seen before. A handsome man, more handsome than Giorgio, with tired, screwed up eyes and a prominent chin. He placed a finger on the picture and she remembered the witch in Milan and her portrait of her son and daughter-in-law with red eyes. He looked at her in triumph. Mastroianni! he said, smiling nostalgically as he emptied his coffee cup. She gave him back the picture. He looked out at the street through the coloured fly curtain. Suddenly he pointed at his watch, as he had done the previous day. She visualised the projecting room where they had sat eating chicken and smiled, embarrassed.
They went back to the cathedral. Now it was time to say goodbye. She knew it, and she could see he knew it too. They embraced. She had decided to leave him alone, but only now did she realise what it meant. He stood looking at her, hands at his sides, for a moment without the clown’s conciliatory grimaces, which swore by laughter because the last freedom in the world was obviously that of being voluntarily comical, ridiculous at one’s own expense. But she did not think of that until long afterwards, many years later. She would remember his face framed by the Baptistery’s limpid uncluttered Renaissance geometry, his face devoid of waggishness. He too knew their parting was behind them, that it was only a matter of seconds, and so he could allow himself to stay a little longer.
She noted his untidy grey hair, the furrows on his forehead and cheeks, his mouth’s natural expression of mute regret and the eyes with the smile lines deeply scored into the thin skin. He must have smiled so much in his life. He raised his hand, hesitated a second and gently brushed the tip of her nose with the knuckle of his index finger. His nose. The only trace of himself he had left apart from her name and a few blurred pictures. Then he slowly took a step backwards, and another. His eyes turned dark as tunnels and he raised his arms a little way, hands open, as he turned and walked away with quick steps.
Everything inside her clenched into a hard breathless knot, and for a moment she clung to the iron railing between the traffic and the marble wall of the Baptistery, until the knot loosened and the cobbles beneath her melted and flowed out of sight. She let the tears run at will down her cheeks, indifferent to the worried or curious glances of passers-by. It was easier to breathe when she walked with long steps and a salty smarting at the corners of her mouth. When she reached the station her eyes had dried. Only the dried-up traces of tears made her cheeks feel slightly taut.
12
The sky above the walls encircling the courtyard had taken on a deeper blue when she was woken by a knock on her door. She got up and opened it. The pregnant woman in the apron signed for Lucca to follow her. When they came to the desk at the end of the corridor she caught sight of a tall man dressed entirely in white. He was probably in his mid-thirties, his long, chestnut-brown hair fell over his forehead and his green eyes looked straight into hers as he stretched out his hand with a smile. He spoke fluent English, his name was Giorgio Montale.
He had got her message. She looked at him, uncomprehending. He showed her the note with her name and that of the boarding-house and she recognised her own handwriting. She explained that she had thought he might be her father. He looked at her attentively, apparently he understood everything straight away. He had no children. He smiled again, more carefully now. He had thought she might be one of his unknown cousins. He had come back to Italy a year or two ago, had been living in England. But had she found her father, then? She nodded. The pregnant woman observed them curiously from the kitchen, stirring her eternal pot. Couldn’t he at least offer her a drink? Now they had established the fact that they had absolutely no connection with each other… she smiled. Why not?
His car was parked at the door, a black Ferrari. As she leaned back in the soft leather seat she came to think of the little white dot, like a visual disturbance in a corner of the picture, which had told her father to start the second projector so that the cinema audience did not notice the reel-change. But this was not just another reel, it was quite a different film. The white-clad Giorgio drove along the narrow streets completely at home. He taught English at the university, he had studied at Cambridge.
She told him about her journey, about the reunion with Giorgio and about Stella, surprised that she could talk so easily to him. It was like hearing someone else telling the story. It had been an illusion, she said, astonished at the word. She had believed the reunion would be a revelation, but he was nothing more than the man who happened to be her father. How could they have anything to say to each other after all those years? Giorgio contemplated her with his green eyes, and his serious face made her feel she was discovering something about life as she spoke, something hard and adult.
They had a glass of white wine on a terrace from where they could look over the town’s misty silhouette with the irregular tiled roofs and the dome of the cathedral in the evening light among the gentle wooded slopes of the mountains. During a pause he suddenly smiled. Listen, he said, and she heard the bells, some faint and distant, others closer, linked in a pealing perspective of high and low resonant strokes. He asked if she had any plans for the evening. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head with a smile. He rose and went inside to telephone. She saw him standing at the pay phone, a fabulous white figure in the semi-darkness of the bar. Soon he returned. Did she like lobster? Carlo had gone out shopping.
The whole property belonged to Carlo’s family, it was a seventeenth-century palazzo. He was not boastful about it, rather apologetic as he led the way through the gateway with its large, iron-framed lantern. The gateway led to a courtyard garden which had a little fountain surrounded by dark foliage. The bleached Carlo met them at the door, in a kimono as before, of dark red shiny silk. Later she thought Carlo must have at least as many kimonos as there were rooms in Giorgio’s apartment. She was not sure she got to see all of them, either the rooms or the kimonos. The apartment seemed endless and all the rooms were high-ceilinged and square, with chess-board marble floors, heavy velvet curtains and imposing, formal antiques.
It all happened without noticeable transition, in one gentle movement that resembled Carlo’s way of moving in his smooth kimonos, as muscular and lithe as the big blue cat that followed him everywhere. While they ate Lucca kept laughing at his exaggerated theatrical attitudes and melodious voice, which lingered over the words. He didn’t mind her laughing, almost caricatured himself to amuse her, and meanwhile Giorgio observed them slyly with his shining eyes. He translated what Carlo said and talked of the English writers he was writing a thesis on. Gays, the lot of them, as he said with one of his unexpected smiles.