town?”
“Recently he would be here for a couple of hours.”
“Would he drop in to the bar to see you?”
“No, absolutely not. He never set foot in here. He would come to my house.”
“And then?”
“He would always arrive very early in the morning. No problem for me, I get up early to open the bar. We would have breakfast together, then he would go off for a walk.”
“Where?”
“Oh, I don’t know… Towards the oratory of San Matteo along the embankment.”
“Why there?”
“Old people are generally fond of the places they used to go to when they were young. Our family contributed to the restoration of the oratory and once, when there were more people here than there are now, they used to say mass for this quarter of the town.”
“Was the oratory the only place he went?”
“Sometimes he would visit Don Firmino in the parish house.”
“Was he very religious?”
“He became so as he grew older. I couldn’t tell you why,” the woman said as though this fact was somehow inconvenient.
“Did you notice anything else about this change? I mean, something he said, some change in his behaviour that might have explained the reasons, the motives behind it?”
As he put the question, he saw Claretta looking at him with a kind of irritated bewilderment. He found himself staring into an obtuse face, and there seemed no way of making any headway with her. They stood saying nothing, looking at each other for a while, until some young people who had arrived in a large, black B.M.W. came into the bar.
Even later, as he walked under the colonnade in the direction of the parish house, the commissario continued to see in his mind’s eye that obtuse expression. It was the disorientation of a person used to thinking only in material terms, who quite suddenly finds herself obliged to deal with an abstraction, with something which has no weight, no shape, and no price.
As he stood face to face with Don Firmino, he would have liked to explain in detail what was on his mind, but he remembered he was a police officer. The priest, on the other hand, had the combative air of someone brought up in the days when the Reds would do anything to make his life difficult. He was a chubby man, but his hands betrayed someone more accustomed to handling a spade than an aspersorium.
“I’m very worried about Anteo,” he said. “Disappearing in the Po valley is simply impossible. Only the river can keep you hidden, but it nearly always gives back what it has taken.”
“So there’s nothing for it but to wait?”
“I don’t know about that,” Don Firmino said quickly. “I’m going on intuition.”
“Unfortunately, that’s all I can do too,” Soneri said. “I came to you hoping that you could help me to understand.”
“I don’t know if I can help you in any way.”
“Lately, Anteo came to see you quite often, is that not so?”
The priest drew himself upright, assuming a solemn pose, but all he said was, “Yes.”
“The impression I am getting is not of a particularly devout man. What was it that encouraged him to come back to the Church?”
“There’s always a moment when we become aware that it’s time to draw a line under things, to make your final reckoning. It’s my belief that that moment had arrived even for Anteo. He came to see me the first time in May. I was surprised, but I felt the joy that only a priest can feel when he sees someone return to the Church.”
“Did he feel death was near?”
“It would be only natural if he felt that way. He was about eighty. But that doesn’t matter. Have you any idea how many people die without having faced the need for repentance?”
“Did he repent the life he had led?”
“That, among other things. Anyone who has been through a war inevitably will carry on his shoulders a weight which sooner or later he will look to shed. And when your strength begins to diminish… No-one emerged unscathed from the times he had had to live through…”
“Tonna was a Fascist, an activist, a Blackshirt…”
Don Firmino sighed deeply. “Don’t delude yourself that the other side…”
“But he’s the one who has disappeared.”
“I understand your curiosity, but what does the past have to do with it? More than fifty years have gone by.”
“As I told you, I’m working only on suppositions. There’s a lot to be taken into account.”
“He did have some sense of remorse, that is true,” the priest said hesitantly, as though that sentence had been dragged from somewhere deep inside him.
“What for?”
Don Firmino gave another sigh before looking at a point halfway up the wall where a crucifix was hanging. “For having been a member of a corps notorious for its atrocities. Once he spoke to me about burning down a house, but I don’t know what he was referring to. Maybe it was an act of reprisal, or perhaps a punitive expedition. There were many partisans in these parts.”
Soneri thought of the many fires he had seen in his years with the police force. The crackle of the flames, the floors collapsing suddenly after being weakened by the heat and the windows exploding like eyes pulled out of their sockets. A burning house is an insult to memory. “Do you remember where the house was?”
Don Firmino raised his eyebrows. “No, he never told me.”
“Is that the only grave matter he ever spoke to you about?”
“In general, he felt guilty for the outrages which had been committed around here by the Blackshirts.”
They sat facing each other in silence in the low-beamed room where the parish priest received the faithful on Saturday afternoons. At a certain point, Don Firmino removed his biretta to reveal a head almost totally bald and as pale as the underside of a snake. For some seconds his few remaining hairs seemed to move about in agitation. After smoothing them with one hand, the priest threw his hat into a corner of the sofa.
“Was he preparing for death?” the commissario insisted.
Don Firmino spread out his arms: “There are many old people here, but none of them behaved like him. Those who came to church when they were young have continued to come, but those who never set foot across its threshold have not changed.”
“Do you think someone was pursuing him for certain things which had happened in the past?”
Once again the priest revealed himself incapable of replying. “I do understand your curiosity, but it is different from mine. What I was looking for was something inner, while you are looking for something external.”
“Sometimes it’s necessary to look inside to understand what is going on outside.”
“I can tell you that Anteo was very troubled, but he had found the path to peace. In the last few weeks he had seemed to me much more serene than usual. He told me he would give up sailing and that the barge would become his home once he had restored it. He liked the idea of a house-boat, like the ones he had seen in Amsterdam. It also seemed to him a good compromise. He would give up spending whole nights at the tiller, but he would not abandon the water and his barge.”
“Did he ever speak to you about Maria?”
“He was a widower and he tried to make a new life for himself. However, neither he nor she were really the marrying kind. Both of them preferred to go their own way, like cats.”
“Did he ever refer to a telephone call? Somebody who was searching for him, using the nickname he had had in his Fascist days?”
“Yes, he did mention that to me.”
“Was he agitated about this?”
“No, he had attained a state of serenity. He felt that his life was drawing to a close. Once he even confessed to me that he was at an age when it was possible to die without recriminations.”
