Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (14 page)
‘And how long do you want to spend, combing that field,’ he asked, dropping his respectful tone.
‘Who says it’s still in the field?’ said Fiorenzo.
‘If it’s not in the field you’ve got it at home.’
‘That’s my home,’ said the man, and pointed away from the road. ‘Come with me.’
Fiorenzo’s territory ended where the first scattered apartment blocks of the outskirts turned their backs on each other in foggy fields. And near the border, where the capitals of the most remote countries tend to be situated, was his house. All kinds of historic events and upheavals had combined to create it: the low brick walls, half in ruins, were part of an old army stable, later closed upon the decline of the cavalry; the Turkish toilet and an indelible piece of graffiti were the result of later use as an armoury for the training corps; a barred window was the sinister reminder that the place had been a prison during the civil war; it was to winkle out the last platoon of warriors that they had started that fire that had almost destroyed the place; the floor and the piping belonged to the period when it had been a camp first for the wounded and then for refugees; later a long winter plundering for firewood, roof tiles and bricks had once again demolished the place; until, evicted from their last abode, along came Fiorenzo and family with their beds and boards. He completed the effect by replacing half the roof with an old rolldown shutter found in the vicinity and apparently twisted in some explosion. Thus Fiorenzo, his wife Ines and their four surviving children once again had a home where they could hang pictures of relatives and family allowance slips on the walls and await the birth of their fifthborn with some hope that the child would live.
If one could hardly say that the look of the building was much improved since the day the family moved in, this was because Fiorenzo’s genius in inhabiting the place was closer to that of the primitive man huddling up in a cave than the industrious castaway or pioneer who strives to recreate about him something of the civilization he has left behind. Of civilization round about him Fiorenzo had all his heart could desire, but civilization was hostile, forbidden territory to him. After losing his job and having quickly forgotten the meagre skills he had somehow once managed to acquire—those of a copper pipe polisher—his hands made sluggish in a manual job that again had not lasted very long, cut out—from one day to the next and with a whole family dependent on him—from the great circular flow of money, it hadn’t taken Fiorenzo long to retrace man’s steps back along the course of history, until, having lost the notion that if you need something you build it or grow it or make it, he now cared for nothing but what could be gathered or hunted down.
Fiorenzo now saw the city as a world of which he could not be a part, just as the hunter does not think of becoming the forest, but only of plundering its wildlife, plucking a ripe berry, procuring shelter against the rain. So for Fiorenzo the city’s wealth meant the cabbage stalks left lying on the cobbles of district markets after the stalls are taken down; the edible grasses that garnish the suburban tramlines; the public benches that could be sawn up piece by piece for firewood; the lovelorn cats that would intrude on common property at night never to return. A whole city existed for his benefit, a cast-off, second- or third-hand city, half buried, excremental, made of worn-out shoes, cigarette stubs, umbrella handles. And even way down at the level of these dust-laden riches there was still a market, with its supply and demand, its speculations, its hoarders. Fiorenzo sold empty bottles, rags and catskins, thus still managing the occasional fleeting peck at the monetary cycle. The most tiring activity, but the most profitable too, was that of the mine prospectors who would dig at the bottom of a steep bank below a factory looking for scrap iron in the industrial waste there, and sometimes in a single day they would unearth kilos and kilos of the stuff at three hundred lire a kilo. It was a city with seasons and harvests all its own: after the elections there were the layers of posters to strip from all the walls with the fierce insistent rasping of an old knife; the children helped too filling sacks of coloured scraps to be weighed by the miserly steelyard of the wastepaper dealers.
On these and other expeditions Fiorenzo was accompanied by his two eldest sons. Having grown up to this life they could imagine no other, and would run wild and voracious about the city’s outskirts, akin to the mice they shared their food and games with. Ines on the other hand had developed the mentality of the lioness; she wouldn’t budge from the lair where she licked their lastborn, she had lost the homely habit of tidying and cleaning, she pounced greedily on the loot that man and sons brought home, sometimes helping them to make it saleable by unstitching pieces of shoe uppers to be sold for patches to cobblers, or scraping the tobacco from the cigarette stubs; and despite their famished life, she had become fat and squat and, after her fashion, calm. The other world, of stockings and cinema, no longer called to her from hoardings whose images to her mind had completely lost their meaning, had become huge indecipherable enigmas. Day after day, when she dusted the glass of the photograph of herself wearing her bride’s white veil beside Fiorenzo on their wedding day, she was no longer sure whether it was herself or her great-grandmother. Rheumatism had led to the habit of lying down all day, even when she had no pain. On her bed in broad daylight in the ramshackle house, her baby beside her, she looked up at a heavy, foggy sky and fell to singing an old tango. Thus Enrico, approaching the hovel, heard singing: he was understanding less and less.
With expert eye he took in the warped tilt of the roof, the irregular angles of the fire-mottled walls. One or two effects would not have been out of place in a seaside villa. He should bear that in mind. He remembered a paper he’d once given at a conference on urban design: It is not from the chateau that we set out upon our adventure, gentlemen, but from the shack…
You should have heard my Uncle Donald, who had sailed with Admiral Drake, when he started telling us one of his yarns.
‘Uncle Donald, Uncle Donald!’ we would shout in his ears when we caught the glint of an eye through his ever half-closed lids, ‘tell us about that time you were becalmed in the Antilles!’
‘What? Ah, becalmed, yes yes, truly becalmed…’ he would begin in a feeble voice. ‘We were sailing off the Antilles, advancing at a snail’s pace, sea smooth as oil, all sails unfurled to catch any rare breath of wind. And all of a sudden we’re only a cannon shot away from a Spanish galleon. The galleon was hove to, so we down sails as well and there, in the middle of that dead calm, we prepare to engage. We couldn’t get past them, and they couldn’t pass us. But the fact of the matter is that they had no intention of advancing: they were there on purpose so as not to let us pass. Whereas we, Drake’s fleet, had sailed far and wide for no other purpose than to give no quarter to the Spanish fleet, to seize the Grand Armada’s treasure from papist hands and deliver it into those of her Gracious Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Still, with that galleon’s cannons to deal with, our handful of culverins weren’t enough to carry the day, so we were careful not to fire the first shot. Ah yes, m’boys, that was the position of the opposing forces, get it? Those damned Spanish had provisions of water, fruit from the Antilles, open supply lines back to their ports, they could stay there as long as they liked: but they were as careful not to start shooting as we were, because the way things were going that little war with the English suited His Catholic Majesty’s admirals down to the ground, whereas if the situation were to alter, as a result of a naval battle, whether won or lost, then the whole balance of power would go up in smoke, inevitably there would be changes, and they didn’t want any changes. So the days went by, still the wind wouldn’t blow and still we were here and they were there, lying off the Antilles, becalmed…’
‘And how did it end? Tell us, Uncle Donald!’ we said, seeing the old seadog’s chin already sinking on his chest as he nodded off again.
‘What? Ah yes, becalmed! Weeks it went on. We could see them through our spyglasses, those mollycoddled papists, those make-believe mariners, under their tassled sunshades, handkerchiefs between scalp and wig to soak up the sweat, eating their pineapple icecreams. While we, the most able seamen of all the oceans, we whose destiny it was to conquer for Christendom all those lands that lived in darkness, we were stuck there with our hands in our pockets, fishing lines dangling over the bulwarks, chewing our tobacco. We’d been sailing the Atlantic for months, our supplies were down to the dregs and rotting too, every day the scurvy carried someone off, we dropped them into the sea in sacks while our boatswain muttered a couple of quick verses from the Bible. Over on the galleon, the enemy watched through their spyglasses, seeing every sack that plunged into the sea and making signs with their fingers as if busy counting our losses. We railed against them: they’d have to wait a long time indeed before they could count us all dead, we who had survived so many hurricanes, it would take a lot more than a becalmed sea off the Antilles to finish us off…’
‘But how did you get out of it, Uncle Donald?’
‘What’s that you said? How get out of it? Well, that’s what we were always asking ourselves, all the months we were becalmed there… Many of us, especially the eldest and the most thickly tattooed, they said that we had always been a sprint ship, good for rapid escapades, and they remembered the times when our culverins had thinned out the masts of the most powerful Spanish ships, punched holes in their bulwarks, jousted in brusque gybes… For sure, when it came to rapid seamanship we were strong indeed, but there had been wind then, the ship moved fast… Now, becalmed as we were, all this talk of gun-battles and grappling hooks was just a way of passing the time while we waited for God knows what; a rising south-westerly, a gale, even a typhoon… So our orders were that we shouldn’t even think about it, and the captain explained that the real naval battle was this stopping still where we were, looking at each other, keeping ourselves ready, going over the plans of Her Britannic Majesty’s great naval battles, and the sail-handling rulebook and the perfect helmsman’s manual, and the culverin instruction book, because the rules of Admiral Drake’s fleet were still and in every detail the rules of Admiral Drake’s fleet: if ever they were to start changing those, God only knew where…’
‘And then, Uncle Donald? Hey, Uncle Donald! How did you manage to get moving?’
‘Hum… hum… where was I? Ah yes, woe betide us if we didn’t keep to the strictest discipline and observation of the nautical rules. On other ships in Drake’s fleet there had been official changes and even mutinies, rebellions: people were looking for another way to sail the seas, there were simple seamen, lookouts, and even cabin boys who had become self-styled experts and wanted to say their piece on navigation… Most of the officers and quartermasters felt that this was the biggest danger of all, so woe betide you if they got wind of any talk about a radical rewriting of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s naval rulebook. No, we had to go on cleaning up the mortars, washing down the deck, checking that the sails were shipshape, even though they hung limp in the windless air, and through the empty hours of those long days, the healthiest entertainments, as the officers saw it, were the inevitable tattoos on chest and arms glorifying our fleet that ruled the waves. And when we talked we ended up turning a blind eye on the ones who saw no other hope than a change in the weather, a hurricane perhaps that with a bit of luck would send everybody, friend and foe alike, straight to the bottom, and were tougher on to those who wanted to find a way to move the ship in its present situation… One day a topman, a certain Slim John, whether because the sun had gone to his head or what, I don’t know, began to daydream over a coffeepot. If the steam lifted the lid of the coffeepot, said this Slim John, then our ship, if constructed like a coffeepot, would likewise be able to move, and without sails… It was admittedly a somewhat incoherent line of thought, but perhaps if we had thought some more about it there was profit to be had there. But no: they chucked his coffeepot overboard and very nearly threw him out with it. These coffeepot fantasies, they said, were little better than papist ideas… coffee and coffeepots were Spanish truck, not ours… Well, I didn’t understand a thing, but so long as those pots moved, with that scurvy that was still carrying people off…’
‘And so, Uncle Donald,’ we cried, eyes shining with impatience, taking him by the wrists and shaking him, ‘we know you got away, we know you routed the Spanish galleon, but tell us how you did it, Uncle Donald!’
‘Ah yes, it wasn’t that everybody saw eye to eye in the galleon either, not by a long chalk! Watching them through your eyeglass you could see that they had their people who wanted to get moving too; some wanted to fire their cannons at us and others had decided that the only way out was to join us, since a victory of Elizabeth’s fleet would have given a big boost to trade, which had been falling off for some time… But like us, they also had their officers, and the officers of the Spanish Armada didn’t want anything to change, oh no. On that point the commanders on our ship and on the enemy ship, loathe each other as they might, were wholeheartedly agreed. So that with no sign of any breeze blowing up, they began to send each other messages, with flags, from one boat to the next, as if they wanted to start talks. Except they never went further than a: Good morning! Good evening! Marvellous weather, no! and so on…’
‘Uncle Donald! Uncle Donald! Don’t go back to sleep, please! Tell us how Drake’s ship managed to get moving!’
‘Hey, okay, I’m not deaf you know! You have to understand, no one realized how long we would be becalmed there, off the Antilles, for years even, with the haze and humidity, the sky leaden and lowering as if a hurricane were about to break any moment. We were streaming sweat, all naked, climbing in the rigging, looking for a bit of shade under the furled sails. Everything was so still that even those of us who were most impatient for change, for something to happen, were motionless too, one at the top of the foretopmast, another on the main jib aft, another again astride a spar, perched up there leafing through atlases and nautical maps…’