heavier towards the western horizon where it came down to touch the plain. “Sometimes it is more painful to renounce than to resist,” he said.
The Woodsman nodded. “Your father had the strength to renounce, or to sacrifice himself, if you prefer to put it that way. He knew how to master himself, unlike me. He was able to tell you why he did what he did and there were times when he convinced even me. Sometimes I admired him, but at others I’d have happily punched him.”
Images of his father swirled about in Soneri’s head. Contrary to what Gualerzi was now saying, he had always considered his father a resolute, strong-minded man, and found it difficult to cope with a description of him in different terms.
“He was a man of few words, and in any case there are things you don’t tell your children.” The commissario was trying to defend his father, but in words addressed more to himself than to the Woodsman.
“You don’t tell them, no,” the Woodsman agreed, as though talking to himself. “And he wasn’t a man to go boasting about anything.”
“What should he have boasted about?”
“Of having dedicated many years of his life to you,” Gualerzi replied dryly, almost with contempt.
“Isn’t that what a father is supposed to do?” Soneri said. He knew there was something more behind his words, and fear gave his voice an awkward tone.
“He wanted to get away from this village, to go to the city, but he had to take you into account. He preferred to stay with the Rodolfis, to hold on to a job he hated and to live in the family home where he didn’t have to pay rent. He hung on until you’d finished school. That takes guts. He buried himself before his time so you wouldn’t have to face the grim life he endured.”
Soneri understood where his fear was coming from. From incomprehension and ingratitude. From taking everything for granted. Now he felt merely mean-minded, crushed by a sentence against which there was no appeal. He still regretted all the time he had not spent with his father. He knew it would have been hard to have discussed all the things the Woodsman was telling him, but he had not even made the effort. He cursed the profession which required him to investigate under orders the lives of people he did not even know, when he should have undertaken a more private enquiry, one in which he would have been simultaneously the investigator and the investigated, the policeman and the criminal, the victim and the killer. Only in that way could he have found relief from the sense of alienation he now felt.
The Woodsman had another coughing fit, which took the commissario’s mind off these thoughts. “You’d better get on your way now. I want to be able to stare at the sun,” he said, in a sinister tone.
Soneri stared at him and understood his intentions. His throat tightened, but the man was unshakeably determined his story would end the way the commissario most feared.
“Life must be spent, like money,” the Woodsman said, with a mixture of ferocity and amusement. “Anyway, come what may, life always ends in bankruptcy.”
Soneri understood that there was more than a little pride in those words. Gualerzi had sought only to spend his days without pursuing any particular objective. He had never left the Montelupo woods, a tiny kingdom from whose heights he had watched everything change while he himself remained unchanged, like the seasons or the snow. He had conducted himself with the carabinieri as he had with the Germans. His life was as it had always been.
“I’ve never let money go to my head,” he shouted over his shoulder as he took his first steps on his journey. By now it was clear he was at the terminus, and, in the bright, eleven o’clock sunlight, he seemed to be preparing himself for some pagan rite. The commissario tried to approach him, but the Woodsman stopped him with a peremptory gesture. “Some things must be done alone.”
“Stay here,” Soneri tried to coax him.
“I must go. I’ve a long way ahead of me and I want to arrive before the light fails,” he said, moving on. “I’m doing the same as an ageing animal who knows his time has come.”
“Tell me one last thing about my father,” the commissario said, fighting off his own fear. “Tell me if it’s true that he went to ask the Rodolfis to give him a job when he was unemployed.”
The Woodsman’s expression betrayed his indifference. He shook his head and shrugged. As he continued on his way, the commissario heard him mutter that it was all nonsense, but he had not the courage to call him back. He watched him climb the path towards the Duca pass, and as he turned the first corner, their eyes met once again. He raised his arm in a final salute, another farewell destined to lie on the commissario’s spirit as heavily as a spadeful of earth. He stood where he was, leaning on a boulder, while in the valley below, in the pitiless sun, life went on. Not far off, the Woodsman was setting out on his final journey, and soon would leave the woods and consign himself to a cave in the rocks.
Soneri thought again of his father, of the life he had lived, of the opportunities he had forgone to guarantee them for his son, who in his turn had wasted them pounding the pavements of a misty city, trailing along the corridors of police stations and criminal courts, or else hanging about at the corners of streets, hour after hour, waiting for someone to appear.
It was past midday and already the light was beginning to fade. The clouds to the west now filled half the sky, and the sun was making an attempt to take refuge behind the mountains. Soneri waited, without being aware of anything other than the light, the space and the immensity of the woods. A time he could not measure passed, and when he turned away, the rays struck him in the eyes with that subdued light which was a foretaste of winter twilight. It was then that he heard a shot ring out in the infinite prism of the mountains. The air retained the echo for some time, and when it died away, Soneri understood that the Woodsman had closed his account and said farewell to all that he had held most dear: the sun, the woods and the sky over Montelupo. He looked in the direction from which he believed the shot had been fired. An obscure trigonometry suggested to him that it came from the Pass of the Snows. That night the snow would fall and cover forever the master of those mountains.
12
In the morning, dirty, slushy snow lay on the fields and the roofs around the village. On the higher ground, the snowflakes had finally closed the eyes which had remained open as the Woodsman savoured for the last time the enchantment of the peaks. Soneri tossed his clothes pell-mell into his suitcase and carried it out to the Alfa Romeo. The previous evening, Ida had come round to settle the bill. She told him that Sante would survive, but would be confined to a wheelchair. “He doesn’t understand anything any more, but maybe it’s better that way. I mean, better for him not to see how it’s all ended.”
There was never going to be a happy ending, the commissario thought to himself, leaning on his car and contemplating the pensione and restaurant of the Scoiattolo, whose doors were now locked and barred. He had previously come to the conclusion that people were made up of many things, including the things they loved and were familiar with, and so the closure of the Scoiattolo meant the death of that part of him which was tied up with it. Bit by bit, people became like Sante, who had no longer the use of his legs and whose mind was muddled.
He took out his phone and called Angela. “I’m leaving,” he said. “There’s nothing more for me to do here.”
“It sounds as though you are keen to get out.”
“If I hang about a couple of hours more, I’ll not be able to move. It’s snowing heavily.”
“But you always liked the snow.”
Soneri looked at the pensione, thinking he had been the last guest. This was something more than a goodbye. “Palmiro killed his son: the past cancelling the present,” he said.
“The father?” Angela murmured.
“He couldn’t see a future for himself. There was nothing but shame ahead of him. Men like Palmiro think that everything belongs to them, even their own sons. They carry inside themselves both success and failure. The very qualities which raise them up bring them down.”
“They ought to find someone stronger than themselves,” Angela said, “but they only produce sons who are inept.”
“It can’t be easy having a father like Palmiro.”
