Antonio Tabucchi - The Edge of the Horizon

He opened the paper on the table, pushing aside the breakfast things, while Sara began to tidy up the other rooms. “See?” she shouted from the kitchen, “Seems nobody knows him. But the article can’t be by Corrado, it isn’t even signed.”

Spino knows it’s not by Corrado. The facts were dug up by a young and very enterprising reporter who a few months ago caused pandemonium when he wrote about corruption on the docks. Spino sticks to the main story, skipping the opening paragraph about the fight against crime, full of clichés.

“A tragic gun battle took place last night in the working-class Arsenale district in an apartment on the top floor of an old block in Via Casedipinte. Acting on a tip-off from a source which police are keeping strictly secret, five men of the Police Special Corps raided the apartment shortly after midnight. At the warning, ‘Open up! Police!’ an unspecified number of persons in the apartment fired repeatedly through the door, seriously wounding one policeman, Antonino Di Nola, 26, who has been stationed in our city for only two months. Di Nola later underwent what was described as delicate surgery. After the shooting, the gunmen barricaded themselves in a small room leading off from the entrance hall before escaping from a window across the rooftops. But before fleeing (and this perhaps is the most obscure part of the whole incident) they shot one of their own gang. The man was raced to the Old Hospital but was dead on arrival. His identity is unknown. It appears he was carrying false documents. Between twenty and twenty-five years old, brown beard, blue eyes, slim, average height, to all intents and purposes the dead man was a stranger to local inhabitants, despite having lived in the area for about a year. He went under the name of Carlo Noboldi and claimed to be a student, although inquiries made at university offices have revealed that he was not enrolled. Shopkeepers in the area say he was courteous and polite and always paid his bills on time. The apartment, which has two rooms and a loft, belongs to a religious order which took Noboldi in last year when he claimed he had just returned from abroad and was out of money. The Prior of the Order, to which Noboldi was paying a nominal rent, declined to make any statement to journalists. This new murder, which once again sees our city as the stage for violent crime, will intensify the fears of a population already deeply disturbed by recent events.”

Sara has now come up behind him and, leaning over his shoulder, starts to read the paper, her head beside his. She passes a hand through his hair, a gesture of understanding and tenderness. For a moment, engrossed, they stare at the photograph of the unidentified man. Then she lets slip a remark that leaves him shaken: “Grow a beard and lose twenty years and it could be you.”

He doesn’t reply, as if this observation were of no importance.

On the sliding door Pasquale had left a note: “Back Soon.” Pasquale always goes and has his morning coffee around eleven. Instead of waiting in the courtyard, Spino decided to go and join him; after all he knew where to find him. The sun was bright, the streets were pleasant. He went out of the hospital and down a dark side street that led into a small square where there was a café with a terrace and tables set out. Pasquale was sitting at a table reading the paper. Spino must have frightened him, because when he came up from behind and spoke to him, Pasquale started slightly. With a look of resignation he folded his paper and left some money on the table. They walked calmly, as if out for a stroll. Then Pasquale said it was a sad story, to which Spino replied, “Right,” and Pasquale said: “I want to be buried in my own village. That’s where I want them to put me, beneath the mountains.”

A bus went by and the noise drowned out their last words. They crossed a patch of garden where people had worn a footpath between flowerbeds defended by “Keep Off” signs. Spino said he wasn’t going to the morgue, he just wanted to know if anybody had shown up, a relative, someone who knew the man. Pasquale shook his head with an expression of disgust and said: “What a world.” Spino asked him not to leave the morgue if he could possibly avoid it, and Pasquale replied that if the relatives did come forward, the first place they’d go would be to the police, they certainly wouldn’t come to the hospital. They parted at the crossroad where the path through the gardens plunges between the houses of the old city center, and Spino set off to catch the number 37.

Corrado wasn’t in the office, as Spino had feared. He had guessed his friend would want to go in person to try and find out more. Obviously the facts his reporter had picked up hadn’t satisfied him. He hung around in the editorial office for a while, saying hello to people he knew, but no one paid much attention to him. There was an atmosphere of impatience and nervous tension, and Spino imagined that this death with its burden of tragedy was weighing down on the room, making the men feel feverish and vulnerable. Then somebody came through a door waving a piece of paper and shouting that the tanks had crossed the frontiers, and he named a city in Asia, some improbable place. And shortly afterwards another journalist working at a teleprinter went over to a colleague and told him that the agreements had been signed, and he mentioned another distant foreign city, something plausible perhaps out there in Africa, but as unlikely-sounding here as the first. And Spino realized that the dead man he was thinking of meant nothing to anybody; it was one small death in the huge belly of the world, an insignificant corpse with no name and no history, a waste fragment of the architecture of things, a scrap-end. And while he was taking this in, the noise in that modern room full of machines suddenly stopped, as if his understanding had turned a switch reducing voices and gestures to silence. And in this silence he had the sensation of moving like a fish caught in a net; his body made a sudden involuntary jerk and his hand knocked an empty coffee cup off a table. The sound of the cup breaking on the floor started up the noise in the room again. He apologized to the owner of the cup, who smiled as if to say it didn’t matter, and Spino left.

“Still No Name for the Victim of Via Casedipinte.” It’s the headline of an article by Corrado. His initials are at the bottom. It’s a resigned, tired piece, full of clichés: the police search, all leads meticulously followed up, the inquiry at a dead end.

Spino noticed the involuntary irony: a dead end. He reflects that one person is definitely dead and no one knows who he is, so much so that they can’t even legally declare him dead. There’s just the corpse of a young man with a thick beard and a sharp nose. Spino starts to use his imagination. He was dead on arrival at the hospital, but perhaps in the ambulance he mumbled something: cursed, begged, mentioned a name. Perhaps he called for his mother, as is only natural, or for a wife, or child. He could have children. He is married. There’s a ring on his finger, given, of course, that it is his ring. But of course it’s his. No one wears somebody else’s ring.

But no, says Corrado in his article. He didn’t say anything while he was being driven to the hospital, he was in a coma, to all intents and purposes already dead. The policemen involved in the shoot-out said so.

Spino found a pen and underlined the parts he thought most interesting.