Michael Dibdin - Back to Bologna

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.

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.