Back to Bologna (15 page)

29

Rodolfo Mattioli sat on an obdurate chair in a waiting room on the third floor of the hospital, a pile of magazines much thumbed by other hands on the table beside him. He was wearing a suit, his best shirt and tie, and had polished his shoes.

That afternoon, he had walked the streets and ridden the buses at random for hours before ending up in Cluricaune, where he had been approached by some bearded wrinkly who wanted to score cocaine. Normally Rodolfo wouldn’t have got involved in anything like that, particularly with a stranger who might well be a nark, but after what he had already done, nothing seemed to matter any more. He’d feigned a near collapse at the bar and then, while apparently clutching him for support, had not only got rid of the incriminating pistol into his prospective client’s overcoat pocket but also lifted the man’s bulging wallet. After that he left the bar and ran back to the apartment he shared with Vincenzo.

There was no sign of the latter. Rodolfo peeled off the leather jacket he’d borrowed and flung it on to the pile of assorted clothing scattered on the floor of Vincenzo’s bedroom, then quickly showered and changed into his most respectable outfit. He knew now, and with overwhelming certainty, what he needed to do, but there was no time to waste. He had been just about to leave when his mobile rang.

‘I’m in deep shit, Rodolfo,’ a dull, self-pitying voice declared. ‘My dumb parents just called. Apparently the silly bastards hired a private investigator to find out where I was living and what I was doing. Now he’s trying to blackmail them by claiming he has proof that I committed some crime.’

‘What crime?’

‘It’s all bullshit, of course, but with a record like mine the cops will be after me in a Milan moment if he spills what he has to them. So I’m going to have to hide out for a while.’

‘This all sounds a bit weird, Vincenzo. Are you fucked up?’

‘No! This is real, God damn it! And what really pisses me off is that it’s all my lousy parents’ fault. Anyway, like I said, I’m going to have to go into deep cover for a while, only there’s some stuff I need and I can’t risk going back to the apartment. Can you meet me tonight with a bag full of clothes and some spare shoes?’

‘Where?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

Rodolfo thought a moment.

‘Do you know a place called La Carrozza? Opposite San Giacomo.’

‘I can find it.’

‘I’ll be there after nine with your stuff.’

Typical Vincenzo, thought Rodolfo as he hung up. Despite his denials, he was almost certainly on a paranoid stoner. If the cops did come round to their apartment asking questions, those questions would concern not Vincenzo but himself.

But that wouldn’t happen, because he was going to forestall them by making a full and frank confession to the victim in person before turning himself in to the police right after seeing Flavia that evening. On the phone she had sounded guarded, almost cool, understandably enough after the way he had treated her the night before, but had agreed to meet him at La Carrozza. It would be tough to say goodbye to her, almost as tough as the inevitable prison sentence he would have to serve, but there was no other way to put a definitive end to the madness that had swept over him in the past few days.

In retrospect, Rodolfo conceded that Flavia might have been right about Vincenzo being a bad influence. Certainly his own behaviour had been unrecognisable, first taking the pistol that he had found hidden behind the books in his room, then following Edgardo Ugo back from the university lecture hall to his house in the former ghetto. For a moment it had looked as though he would be foiled by bad luck, when Ugo was involved in an accident with some woman who had come running out of a restaurant and collided with his bike. In the end, though, everything had gone according to plan. Well, almost everything.

Outside his town dwelling, Edgardo Ugo had caused an art work to be (re-)recreated, the high concept behind which he recounted to anyone who would listen–which necessarily included all his graduate students–at every possible opportunity. The house to the left of his stood slightly proud of the general alignment in the street, leaving a dark corner just beside Ugo’s front door where drunks and homeless people were wont to urinate. A man as influential as Ugo could certainly have persuaded the city authorities to bar it off with a metal grid, as was normally done in the case of such illegal facilities, but he had instead come up with a typically witty and post-post-cultural solution.

Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 ready-made
Fountain
, consisting of a mass-produced glazed ceramic urinal rotated on its horizontal axis, had long been an icon of the modernist movement. Ugo’s stroke of genius had been to subject this signifier itself to a further stage of semiotic transformation (invoking the process of ‘unlimited semiosis’ and Lacan’s ‘sliding signified’) by having it reproduced in the finest white Carrara marble and finished to the intense, glossy sheen associated with the sculptures of Antonio Canova–or, for that matter, mass-produced glazed ceramic ware. As with Duchamp’s ‘original’, the finished piece had been mounted at ninety degrees to the vertical, in the filthy corner where derelicts went to pee furtively. But thanks to them this object functioned as a literal fountain, the urine pouring out through the aperture for the mains inlet pipe on to the miscreant’s trousers and shoes.

When Rodolfo had fired the pistol, while Ugo had his back turned to unlock his front door, this sculpture had been his intended target. The gesture was intended to be purely symbolic, a way of saying, ‘Fuck you and your clever jokes and everything you stand for!’ Instead, the bullet had deflected off the polished marble and must have ended up somewhere in Ugo’s body. The victim had screamed and fallen over, while Rodolfo had taken to his heels. But now the time for running away was over.

A nurse came into the waiting area and approached him.

‘Professor Ugo will see you now.’

Head bowed like a man on his way to the gallows, Rodolfo followed her down a long corridor. The nurse knocked lightly at one of the doors.

‘Signor Mattioli is here.’

‘Va bene,’
said a familiar voice within.

The nurse withdrew.

‘Ah, Rodolfo,’ the voice said languidly. ‘How very good of you to visit me. You of all people.’

The room was in almost total darkness. After the bright lights in the waiting area and corridor, Rodolfo could discern nothing.

‘On the contrary,
professore
, it’s very good of you to receive me,’ he replied haltingly. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, only…Well, I’ve come in a hopeless but necessary attempt to apologise for…’

The answer was a soft laugh from the figure on the bed that Rodolfo could now just identify as such.

‘That’s all nonsense,’ Ugo said.

Meaning, who cares about your apologies when I’m going to have you arrested the moment you leave, thought Rodolfo.

‘Sit down, sit down!’ Ugo went on. ‘There’s some sort of chair over there in the corner, I believe. I’ve been ordered by the powers that be to lie on my right side, so I can’t turn to look at you, but we can still talk.’

Rodolfo found the chair and seated himself.

‘Giacometti,’ said the voice from the bed.

‘Alberto?’ queried Rodolfo, utterly at a loss.

‘What do you know about him?’

Rodolfo scanned his memory.

‘Italian Swiss, a sculptor and painter, born around 1900. Died some time in the 1960s, I think. Famous for his etiolated figures which express, according to some commentators, the pain of life.’

Ugo’s laugh came again, louder and longer this time.

‘
Bravo!
You were always my best student, Rodolfo, although of course I never told you that. Unless perhaps I did, by barring you from the class.’

‘I want to apologise for that too. Absolutely and without any reservations. I think I must have gone slightly mad recently, but you see…’

He broke off.

‘Yes?’ queried Ugo.

Rodolfo hesitated a long time before replying.

‘I think I’m in love,
professore
,’ he heard himself say.

‘Ah. In that case I won’t detain you long. Anyway, what you may not know about Giacometti is that during his years in Paris he was run down by a bus while crossing the street. A friend he was with reported later that the artist’s first words after the accident were, “Finally something has happened to me!” I’ve always thought it a good story, although I never really understood what Giacometti meant by that comment. But now I do, perhaps because something has finally happened to me.’

He fell into a silence which Rodolfo did not attempt to break.

‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book,’ Ugo said at last. ‘For years, I mean. Cornell, early 1980s. Wonderful campus, magnificent library. Some reference text in English. I’ve never been able to remember which.’

‘The
Anglo-American Cyclopedia
,’ Rodolfo replied without thinking.

After a moment, Ugo laughed heartily, then moaned.

‘Ow! Yes, yes, very good. Borges’ Uqbar. But this wasn’t the forty-sixth volume of anything. Much earlier in the alphabetical series of
voci
. It was entitled, in gold-blocked letters on the spine, “BACK to BOLOGNA”, those being the headings of the first and last articles in that particular volume.’

‘A completely random phrase.’

‘Utterly. You may remember the fuss that Zingarelli ran into when the eleventh edition of their dictionary featured
masturbazione
as the headword in bold type on one page. Anyway, most of the volumes of the work I saw on the stacks at Cornell were entitled with quite meaningless phrases. “HOW to HUG”, for example. Ridiculous.’

‘I’m not so sure about that.’

Ugo’s smile, if not visible, was audible.

‘Well, you may of course be better informed than I. At all events, this experience made me realise two things. One was the obvious fact that I was homesick, my research project was stalled, and the only way that I could salvage something from it was by going back to Bologna.’

‘Which you did?’

‘I came home, yes. And, as it turned out, wrote the book that really launched my career. What I didn’t write was the second thing suggested to me by that reference work in the library at Cornell, namely
Back to Boulogne
, a mystery in which the detective solves nothing. For my protagonist I had in mind a certain Inspecteur Nez, playing on the French word for nose, as in “has a nose for” but also “led by the nose”. In short, at once a deconstruction of the realistic, plot-driven novel and an
hommage
to Georges Simenon, the master of Robbe-Grillet and hence in a sense of us all. Any amount of atmosphere and sense of place, in other words, but no solution, just a strong final curtain line.’

Rodolfo stole a glance at his watch.

‘Why not scrap the sense of place too?’ he murmured.

The patient was silent for a moment.

‘Like a late Shakespearian romance, you mean?’

‘Why not?’

‘Located in a notional site named Illyria or Bohemia or…’

‘Ruritania.’

‘That’s been done.’

‘Surely the whole point is that everything’s been done.’

Professor Ugo was silent for some time. When he spoke again, it was in a distinctly crisper tone.

‘Possibly. At any rate, the reason I gave the nurse permission to admit you, Mattioli, was that I wanted to announce a decision that I’ve come to regarding what has happened.’

Rodolfo sighed. Here it comes, he thought.

‘I just don’t know what to say,
professore
. Apologies are obviously useless. No one could forgive what I’ve done to you.’

‘That seems a little extreme,’ Ugo replied. ‘But even if I couldn’t forgive, I can at least forget. In fact, I’ve already forgotten. So come back to the seminar, write your thesis and take your diploma. You’re an intelligent if rather forthright young man with your life to lead, a life in which many things will happen to you. Perhaps one already has. I believe you said that you were in love.’

‘I think I am.’

‘The distinction is specious. And now I must ask you to go. I’m still quite weak, but the doctors say that I’ll be back on my feet, if not my bum, by next week. So I expect to see you in class then. Understand?’

Rodolfo didn’t understand in the slightest.

‘Grazie infinite, professore,’
he said, and left.

30

After his conditional release from the clutches of the Carabinieri, Zen felt like a drink. On the other hand, he didn’t fancy returning to the bar near his hotel, where half the clientele, judging by the stacked trophies and plaques on display, were high-ranking officers from the Questura. He’d had enough of cops for one day.

In the end he stumbled on the perfect refuge in a side street off the market area. The customers here were drawn from a much broader social range than at Il Gran Bar, and were less interested in showing off their status and style than in chatting animatedly, drinking deep and pigging into the astonishing range of non-fat-free appetisers piled high on the bar: glistening cubes of creamy mortadella, chewy chunks of crisp pork crackling, jagged fragments of golden
stravecchio
Parmesan. The Lambrusco was of the increasingly scarce authentic variety, unfiltered and bottle-fermented. On that bleak evening, when the gelid smog in the streets seemed not just a meteorological fact but a malign presence, its rich purple froth provided a welcome confirmation that there was more to life than hospitals, police stations and faithless lovers.

Most people are familiar with the temporary euphoria produced by a few glasses of wine, but few would claim that the experience had saved their marriage. For Zen, however, this may just have been the case, because when his phone rang he was in a particularly mellow and affable mood, amenable to anything and treating it all lightly.

‘It’s me,’ Gemma’s voice said.

‘At last! How are you? Where are you?’

‘In a bar.’

‘Me too.’

He laughed.

‘We really must stop meeting like this.’

There was no reply, but instead of regretting his flippancy and moodily clamming up in turn, he signed the bartender to refill his glass and carried on as though there had just been a brief lapse in transmission, of no personal intent or significance.

‘Which bar? I’ll come immediately.’

‘No, no, don’t. Stefano’s here.’

‘Stefano?’

‘My son.’

‘Oh, Stefano! Yes. Yes, of course. I thought you said…er,
“sto telefono”
.’

‘You’re the most awful liar, Aurelio.’

‘That’s because I never get any practice.’

‘Anyway, the reason I’m calling is…I’m having dinner with them, as I told you. Then I was planning to drive home, but after what’s happened I’m not so sure that would be a good idea.’

‘Don’t dream of it, particularly in the dark. The truckers on the autostrada are vicious. The doctor I spoke to at the hospital was horrified that you’d even discharged yourself. He said you needed more tests and…’

‘It’s not just that. But I really need a bed for the night, only because of this trade fair there don’t seem to be any hotel rooms to be had.’

‘Do you want to sleep with me?’ Zen replied in a lighthearted tone that he had thought he would never be able to manage again.

‘If that’s what it takes.’

‘It’s a sort of bed and a half rather than a full double.’

‘I’ll take it.’

He laughed again, quite naturally.

‘It’s yours,
signora
. We’ll just need a credit card number to secure the deposit. I had an appointment this evening, but I’ll cancel it.’

‘Don’t do that. I won’t be free till later anyway. Probably much later. They’ve had some bad news, you see. That’s why Stefano arranged to meet me here before dinner, so that he could break it to me alone. Anyway, it looks like being a long evening in every sense.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’ll tell you later. But the upshot is that I’m not going to be a grandmother after all.’

This was a much stiffer check, but once again Zen carried blithely on.

‘That’s a shame. Still, they’re young. There’s plenty of time.’

‘Not necessarily. It sounds as though this has put the relationship at risk. I get the feeling that Stefano’s relieved, quite frankly. Lidia, on the other hand, is naturally shattered. So a long evening, and I may be a bit weepy when we meet. It’s been a difficult day, one way and another.’

Zen took another hearty gulp of the effervescent wine and started toying with one of the pork
ciccioli
.

‘Yes, shame about lunch. You misunderstood me. I was talking to my stomach.’

‘I’d rather been looking forward to knitting little bootees and jackets.’

‘Well, I could use a new pullover.’

‘It wouldn’t be the same.’

He laughed again, by now quite impervious to anything she might throw at him.

‘I should hope not! It would never fit otherwise. I’ll tell the hotel to expect you. Just ask at the desk and they’ll give you a key if I’m not back.’

‘Thank you.’

‘All part of the service,
signora
. We know you have a choice. We work hard to be both your first choice and your last.’

He hung up, grinning widely, and grabbed a lump of Parmesan the size of an inoperable tumour.