Target in the Night (34 page)

Luca had an extraordinary sense of himself and his own integrity. Life had tested him. In the end, when he finally got what he wanted, he'd
failed
. Perhaps the failure—the crack—was already there and it finally gave in because he couldn't live with the memory of his own weakness. Yoshio's shadow, the fragile Nikkei in jail, would return to him like a ghost whenever he tried to sleep. One fleeting flash in the night is enough to break a man, as if he were made of glass.

Once the priest accepted the version of the death as an accident—because suicides, like hobos and prostitutes, were buried outside the church graveyard—Luca was buried in the cemetery. The entire town attended the ceremony.

It was raining slightly that afternoon, one of those light, freezing
drizzles that go on for days and days. The cortege went down the main street, up the so-called northern slope, and as far as the large gate of the old cemetery, with the black-covered horses of the funereal carriage trotting along rhythmically and a long line of cars following behind at walking pace.

The Belladona family vault was a sober structure imitating the Italian mausoleum in Turin that contained the remains of the officers who'd fought with Colonel Belladona in the Great War. Luca had made the worked bronze door, the light webbing above the small windows, and the hinges of the vault in the family workshop when his grandfather had died. The door opened with a soft sound; it was made of a transparent, eternal material. The tombstones for Bruno Belladona, Lucio, and now Luca seemed to condense the history of the family. They'd rest together. Only the males died. Old Man Belladona stepped forward, lofty, his face wet with the rain, and stood in front of the coffin. He'd buried his father, his oldest son, and now he was burying his second son. His two daughters took their place next to him; dressed in mourning like widows, standing arm in arm. His wife, who'd only left her “lair” three times—one for each of the three deaths in the family—wore dark sunglasses and gloves, and her shoes were dirty with the mud from the cemetery grounds. Cueto observed the scene from the back, standing under a tree, in a long, white raincoat.

The ex-seminary student approached the sisters and asked permission to say a few words. Wearing all black, pale and fragile, he seemed the most appropriate person there to bid farewell to the remains of the man who'd been his mentor, and for whom he'd been a confidant.

“Death is a terrifying experience,” the ex-seminary student said. “It threatens, with its corrosive power, our possibility of living a humane life. There are two kinds of experiences that can protect those—those able to turn to them—from the terror of the danger of death. One is the certainty of truth, the continuous awakening toward the understanding of the ‘ineluctable need for truth,' without which a good life is not possible. The other is the resolute and profound illusion that life has meaning and that the meaning of life is found in performing good deeds.”

He opened his Bible and announced that he would now read from the Gospel of John, 18:37.

“And Jesus said:
For this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.
To which Pontius Pilate answered:
What is truth? Of what truth do you speak?
After he said this, he turned to the judges and the priests and said:
I find no crime in this man.
” Schultz looked up from the book. “Luca lived in the truth and in the search for the truth, he was not a religious man but he was a man who knew how to live religiously. The question of our time has its origins in Pilate's answer. This question implicitly supports the sad relativism of a culture that ignores the presence of the truth. Luca lived a good life, we should say farewell to him knowing that he was enlightened by his illusions of reaching meaning through his works. He rose to the height of those illusions and gave his life to them. We should all be grateful for his persistence in the realization of his dreams and for his disdain of the false lights of the world. His work was done with the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Croce attended the ceremony but stayed in his car, without
getting out, and although no one saw him, everyone knew he was there. Smoking, nervous, his hair graying, the traces of his “suspected dementia” burned in his clear eyes. Everyone eventually left the cemetery, and in the end Croce was the last one there, the murmur of the drizzle on his car's roof and the rain falling monotonously on the road and the tombstones. When night fell on the plains and the darkness too became like the drizzle, a beam of light flashed in front of him. The circular brightness of the light pulsed back and forth, like a white ghost amid the shadows. Then, all of a sudden, it went out, and there was just the darkness.

42
   
“The flash of lightning that illuminated my life with a neat zigzag has been eclipsed” (Dictated to Schultz).

EPILOGUE

 

Many times, in different places, through the years, Emilio Renzi remembered Luca Belladona. He always remembered him as someone who'd had the courage to live up to the heights of his own illusions. Months could go by without Renzi thinking about him, and then some fortuitous event would bring him back to mind, and he'd resume the story where he'd last left it—with new clarifications and details for his friends in a café in the city, or having a few drinks at his place at night with a woman sometimes—and the images of Luca would return vividly, his frank, reddened face, his clear eyes. He remembered the empty factory, the building in the middle of the plains, Luca wandering among his instruments and his machines. Always optimistic, always finding a way to find hope, unable to imagine that reality would deal him a fatal blow, like so many others. A fall brought about by a small change in his behavior, as if he were being punished for making a mistake, not for a character flaw but for a lack of foresight, for a failing he could not forget and would return like a remorse.

That night Renzi was talking with a group of friends after dinner in an open balcony facing the river, in a weekend house in the Tigre Delta, and he felt as if that night—always in spite of himself, mocking such a natural state—he'd gone back, and that
the delta was an as-of-yet unknown quadrant of reality, like that town in the country had been for him, where he'd spent a few weeks in a kind of archaic interruption of his life as a city man, unable to understand such a return to nature—even if he never stopped imagining a drastic leaving that would take him to an isolated, quiet place where he could dedicate himself to what Emilio, like Luca, also imagined was his destiny, or his vocation.

“Luca couldn't imagine that there might be a defect in his character, because he'd reached the conviction that his way of being was something separate from his decisions, that it was a kind of instinct that guided him through every conflict and every difficulty. But he'd been defeated—or at least he'd been forced to make an unforgiveable decision, he must have thought that he'd deserted—and he couldn't forgive himself. Even though any other decision would have been just as impossible.”

The light from a kerosene lantern and the smell from the coils that kept the mosquitoes at bay reminded Renzi of the nights of his childhood. His friends listened to him in silence, drinking white wine and smoking, sitting before the river. The steady glow of the cigarettes in the darkness, the flickering light of the occasional boats passing by, the croaking of the frogs, the rustling wind in the trees, the clear summer night—were like the landscape of a dream.

“He was so proud and stubborn that it took him a while to realize that he'd fallen into a trap with no way out. By the time he realized what was happening, it was too late. I think about that when I remember the last time I saw him, a few days before leaving town.”

He'd called a taxi and asked the driver to wait by the side of the road while he walked up to the factory. There was light in the windows. Renzi knocked a few times on the iron gate. It was getting dark and a freezing drizzle was falling.

“After a while Luca open the front door a crack. When he saw me, he stumbled backwards, waving his hand.
No
,
no
, he seemed to be saying as he retreated.
No. Impossible.
”

Luca closed the door, followed by a sound of rattling chains. Renzi stood there for a while before the tall front of the factory. As he made his way back to the street, he thought he saw Luca behind the lighted windows of the upper level, pacing, gesturing, speaking to himself.

“And that was all,” Renzi said.

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