Immediately, it seemed to him, he found himself in one of the squares that he had passed – it was an eternity ago – on the way to the record shop. He hesitantly drove on, turned at random into the next street, had to do a loop because of the one-way system and ended up in the same square. The city center was curiously quiet this Sunday, there was no sign of the industrial fair, and he had to chase after the few passers-by to ask them the way.
‘Keep going along the river,’ an old man told him at last, dressed in his Sunday best and creeping past the dark shop windows with his walking stick. Only now did Perlmann see the river on the map. Annoyed with himself, he drove in the direction indicated. At a bus terminal he asked a driver.
‘Molassana is a well-known part of Genoa, a suburb; nobody needs a road sign,’ the driver replied to Perlmann’s reproachful remark, looking at him as if he had lost his marbles.
Behind the wheel, Perlmann cursed the misleading representation on the map, and only calmed down when he crossed the river, where there was in fact a road sign. He had just put his foot down on the accelerator when he braked and turned off to the right. I can’t get lost tomorrow. That would be hell. For a while he tried to reconstruct the direct route here in his head, cutting out the various diversions. But it didn’t work. The toing and froing had been too confusing. Five past one. He’ll be landing in exactly twenty-six hours. He took a few hasty drags, threw the cigarette out the window and drove back to the port road.
Driving back to Molassana, he stopped repeatedly and memorized the crucial spots. First of all there were the two ironmongers’ shops, which were precisely identicaclass="underline" the same size, both on a corner, both with rusty shutters. If you turned by the first, the one-way system forced you back to the port, while a similarly inconspicuous turning near the second led towards the center. On no account turn at the first. Next he had to be careful that at the square where the building with the portico stood he didn’t – as he had before – follow the tram tracks to the right, but take the bend to the left. At the construction site with the diversion he got lost twice: you had to turn off immediately past the bakery to get back to the main road. And finally, the place with all the bus stops was criticaclass="underline" you couldn’t follow the three-lane road into the underpass; you had to keep to the left and keep going along the cobbles at a sharp angle to the main arterial road. It was still a rather roundabout route, he thought. Probably there was a simpler one, but he couldn’t lose any more time.
At two o’clock he was back at the river, where he had turned. On the almost empty street he drove far too quickly. He was afraid of reaching a spot where it could be done, but even worse was the uncertainty, and it became more unbearable with every kilometer that didn’t match his requirements. He might have to wait longer for a truck. At the spot in question there had to be a rest area where he could park beside the road. He would have to be able to see the truck coming from a long way off, so that there was enough time to drive off, speed up and pull the car over to the left at the last moment. And it would have to be impossible for the driver to swerve. Ideally, there would be a cliff on his side of the road.
On the steep piece of road before the tunnel which cut off the loop into the mountains and formed the apex of the stretch, there was just such a point. Perlmann stopped, his heart thumping. No, this wouldn’t do, he thought, as he dried his moist hands with the towel. Having the long, stable hood between himself and the truck, everything depended on high speed, and even with this car he couldn’t achieve that on the mountain. Besides, the truck’s brakes could be damaged by the impact, and then, with the wreck of the Lancia in front of it, it would roll down with mounting speed and unforeseeable consequences.
After the tunnel there were a few spots which might have been possible in terms of the course of the road. But in those there were houses with people who leaned, gawking, in the windows. There would also be people like that tomorrow, and it would be impossible to do it in front of them. There were too many houses generally; one village followed on from the other. And everywhere there were people in the windows, hundreds of them, it seemed to Perlmann. This wasn’t how he had imagined it. On the map there was no sign of these hamlets.
He had already covered far more than half of the stretch when a piece of road that was the right length appeared: straight and at a slight slope, with a supporting wall on the other side. At the exact spot where he expected the collision to occur there was a road sign, black on white: pian dei ratti. At the end, where the truck would appear around the bend, there was a house, but the shutters were closed and it looked uninhabited. At the bend around which he came himself, there was a workshop for the cutting and grinding of slate slabs. People would be working there tomorrow. Perlmann drove to the spot where the trees meant that he couldn’t be seen from the workshop. The rest of the stretch was still long enough. Only stopping was a problem. On the right there was a sheer drop to the river, and in spite of the damaged crash barrier he could only get about half of the big car on to the narrow strip of grass. Nonetheless, he thought, it could be done here. But he would have to fix in his mind the features leading up to that spot so that he didn’t miss it tomorrow.
He turned and drove to the next road sign: so the name of the village was piana. After the road sign came a biggish, abandoned-looking factory building, then two well-tended houses and behind them, at the start of the bend, three pines with a big poster for Renault customer services. When he passed the poster, he was already in the bend with the workshop. He could see the sign that said pian dei ratti, and then it was only another fifty meters.
He wanted to drive down that stretch of road very slowly to etch it in his memory as sharply and in as detailed a way as possible. But a car with a bridal couple and a tail of rattling tins was hooting behind him like crazy, so that afterwards he had the impression that he couldn’t rely on his memory. He drove back, turned in the factory yard and repeated the whole thing. But it felt as if his memory was simply refusing to absorb the images. It was as if he was jinxed: every time he read the words pian dei ratti again, it was as if what he had just seen had been erased.
He needed more advance warning time and more pointers. Sweating, he drove two villages back, staring at the signs until his eyes hurt: tomorrow he would pass first monleone and then pianezza, which turned directly into piana. Then the pines and the poster, and finally pian dei ratti.
He stopped at the spot in question, exhausted, and lit a cigarette. When he looked forwards to gauge the distance again, he saw that a shutter had been pulled up at the house on the bend. Again he began to sweat. Had he ignored that before? Or had someone come home in the meantime? He put his glasses on his head, but still couldn’t make out whether someone was standing at the window. Perhaps the people were just away today, and tomorrow, when he came round the bend with Leskov, they would be leaning in the window. They would see the Lancia stopping at this unnatural spot, for who knows how long, and dashing off exactly as a truck came from down below. And they would see the car suddenly being pulled off the road. In his mind, Perlmann took up position there at the window: to any observer it would look intentional. There was no doubt about it.