The Charterhouse of Parma (28 page)

This office had dirty walls studded with nails on which hung the officials’ dirty hats and pipes. The big pinewood desk behind which they were entrenched was stained with ink and wine; two or three big ledgers bound in green leather bore stains of all colors, and the edges of their pages were blackened by fingerprints. On the ledgers piled one on top of the other were three splendid laurel crowns which had done duty, a few days back, in one of the Emperor’s festivals.

Fabrizio was struck by all these details, which made his heart sink;
such was the price he paid for the immaculate luxury of his pretty apartment in the Palazzo Sanseverina. He was obliged to enter this dirty office and represent himself as his social inferior; he was about to be interrogated.

The official, who held out a yellow hand to take Fabrizio’s passport, was short and dark, and wore a brass pin in his necktie.

“A nasty bourgeois if ever I saw one,” thought Fabrizio. The fellow seemed excessively surprised as he read the passport, which reading lasted a good five minutes.

“You have had an accident,” he said to the stranger, glancing up at his cheek.

“The coachman ran us into the embankment of the Po.” Then silence resumed, and the official stared fiercely at the traveler.

“That does it,” Fabrizio said to himself, “he’s going to tell me he regrets to inform me that I’m under arrest.” All sort of wild ideas ran through our hero’s mind, which at this moment was not very logical. For instance, he thought of making his escape through the office door, which had remained open.

“I take off my coat, I jump into the Po, and probably I can swim across. Anything is better than the Spielberg.” The police official stared hard at him during this moment while he was calculating the chances of a successful escape; they afforded a fine contrast in physiognomy. The presence of danger bestows genius upon the man of reason; it raises him, so to speak, above himself; in the man of imagination it inspires romantic notions, bold it is true, but frequently absurd.

You had to have seen our hero’s outraged expression beneath the searching eye of the police official embellished with his brass jewelry. “If I were to kill him,” thought Fabrizio, “I’d be convicted of murder and condemned to twenty years in the galleys or put to death, which is not so bad as the Spielberg with a hundred-and-twenty-pound chain on each foot and eight ounces of bread a day, for twenty years! I’d be forty-four when I got out.…” Fabrizio’s logic was forgetting that, since he had burned his own passport, there was nothing to indicate to the police that he was the rebel Fabrizio del Dongo.

Our hero was sufficiently frightened, as we have seen; he would have been much more so had he known the thoughts that were agitating the police official. This man was a friend of Giletti’s; imagine his surprise when he saw his friend’s passport in another man’s possession; his first impulse was to have this other man arrested; then he realized that Giletti might well have sold his passport to this handsome young fellow, who had apparently just done some nasty business in Parma. “If I arrest him,” he said to himself, “Giletti will be compromised; it will easily be discovered that he has sold his passport; on the other hand, what will my superiors say if they manage to find out that as a friend of Giletti’s I stamped his passport when someone else submitted it to me?” The official stood up with a yawn and said to Fabrizio: “Wait a moment, sir.” Then, out of official habit, he added: “A difficulty has arisen.”

To himself, Fabrizio murmured: “What will arise is my escape.”

As a matter of fact, the official went out of the office, leaving the door open and the passport on the pinewood table. “The danger is clear,” Fabrizio thought; “I’ll take my passport and slowly walk back across the bridge; I’ll tell the officer there, if he questions me, that I forgot to have my passport stamped by the police commissary in the last village on the Parma side.” Fabrizio already had his passport in his hand when, to his inexpressible astonishment, he heard the official with the brass jewelry saying: “Lord help me, I can’t take any more of this; the heat is stifling; I’m going to the café for a demi-tasse. Go into the office when you’re done with your pipe, there’s a passport to stamp; the traveler’s in there.”

Fabrizio, who was making a stealthy exit, found himself face to face with a handsome young fellow who was humming to himself. “All right, all right, where the devil is this passport? I’ll put my scrawl on it somewhere.… Where does the gentleman wish to go?”

“To Mantua, Venice, and Ferrara.”

“Ferrara then,” the clerk replied, still humming. He picked up a stamp and pressed the blue-ink
visa
onto the passport, scribbling the words
Mantua Venice Ferrara
in the space left blank on the stamp; then he waved his hand several times in the air, signed the passport, and
dipped his pen in the ink to make his flourish, which he executed slowly and taking infinite pains. Fabrizio followed every movement of that pen; the clerk glanced at his flourish with satisfaction, added five or six dots, and finally handed the passport back to Fabrizio, saying quite casually: “Have a good journey, sir.”

Fabrizio was walking away with a rapidity he was attempting to conceal when he felt something pulling his left arm: instinctively his hand closed around the pommel of his dagger, and had he not seen houses all around him, he might have done something rash. The man who was touching his left arm, noticing his expression of alarm, remarked by way of apology: “But I called the gentleman three times, without his answering; does the gentleman have anything to declare to customs?”

“All I have on me is my handkerchief; I’m going somewhere quite close to here, for some shooting with one of my relatives.”

He would have been altogether at a loss, had he been asked to name such a relative. Given the terribly warm weather and the intensity of these emotions, Fabrizio was as soaked as if he had fallen into the Po.

“I have courage enough to confront actors, but clerks with brass jewelry are too much for me; I’ll try to write a funny sonnet about it to entertain the Duchess.”

Entering Casalmaggiore, Fabrizio took a mean street to the right, sloping down toward the Po. “What I need now,” he told himself, “is the succor of Bacchus and Ceres,” and he went into a shop outside of which was hanging a gray rag attached to a stick; on the rag was written the word
Trattoria
. A filthy bedsheet supported by two thin wooden hoops and hanging down to within three feet of the ground sheltered the trattoria door from the direct rays of the sun. Here a half-naked and quite pretty woman received our hero with respect, which caused him the liveliest pleasure; he hastened to inform her he was dying of hunger. While she prepared his breakfast, a man of about thirty came in; he had not greeted anyone upon entering, but all of a sudden he sprang up from the bench onto which he had flung himself quite familiarly, and said to Fabrizio:

“
Eccellenza
, your servant!”

Fabrizio was in high spirits at that moment, and instead of forming sinister plans, he replied with a laugh: “And how the devil do you know My Excellency?”

“What, doesn’t Your Excellency recognize Ludovic, one of Her Grace the Duchess Sanseverina’s coachmen? At Sacca, the country house where we went every summer, I always caught the fever, and I asked Her Grace for my pension and I’ve retired. I’m rich now; instead of the pension of twelve scudi a year which was all I was entitled to, Her Grace told me that in order to ensure me the leisure to write sonnets—for I am a poet in the vernacular—she would grant me twenty-four scudi, and His Lordship the Count told me that if I was ever in need, I had only to come and speak to him. I have had the honor of driving Monsignore for a stage when he made his retreat like a good Christian at the
Charterhouse of Velleja
.”

Fabrizio stared at the man, whom he faintly recognized. He was one of the smartest coachmen of the
Casa Sanseverina
: now that he was rich, as he said, his entire outfit consisted of a torn overshirt and a pair of canvas breeches dyed black some time past, which barely reached his knees; a pair of slippers and a wretched hat completed the picture. Moreover, he had not shaved his beard for at least two weeks. As he ate his omelette, Fabrizio made conversation with him quite between equals; he decided that Ludovic was his hostess’s lover. Rapidly finishing his breakfast, he whispered to Ludovic, “I want a word with you.”

“Your Excellency can speak freely in front of her, she’s a really good woman,” said Ludovic tenderly.

“Well then, my friends!” Fabrizio resumed without hesitating. “I’m in terrible trouble and I need your help. First of all, there’s nothing political about my trouble, I’ve simply killed a man who was trying to murder me because I was talking to his mistress.”

“Poor young fellow!” sighed the hostess.

“Your Excellency can count on me!” exclaimed the coachman, his eyes shining with the liveliest devotion. “Where would His Excellency like to go?”

“To Ferrara. I have a passport, but I’d prefer not to run into the police, who may have found out about the business.”

“When did you do away with this fellow?”

“At six o’clock this morning.”

“Has Your Excellency any blood on his clothes?” asked the hostess.

“I was wondering about that,” said the coachman, “and besides, the material of those clothes is too fine—you don’t see much like that in our part of the country, it would catch people’s eye; I’m going to buy some clothes from the Jew: Your Excellency is about my height, only thinner …”

“For pity’s sake, stop calling me Excellency, that will attract attention.”

“Yes, Excellency,” the coachman replied as he left the shop.

“All right, all right!” Fabrizio exclaimed. “And what about the money? Come back here!”

“Don’t mention money!” said the hostess. “He has sixty-seven scudi which are at your service. I myself,” she added, lowering her voice, “I have a good forty which I’d be glad to let you have; one doesn’t always have money on one when these accidents happen.”

Fabrizio had removed his coat because of the heat when he came into the trattoria. “You have a vest there that might make some trouble for us if someone were to come in: that fine
English cloth
would attract attention.” She gave our fugitive a black-dyed cotton vest belonging to her husband. A tall young man entered the shop through an inner door, dressed with a certain elegance.

“This is my husband,” the hostess said. “Pietro-Antonio, this gentleman is a friend of Ludovic’s; he had an accident this morning on the other side of the river; he wants to get away to Ferrara.”

“Then we’ll get him there,” the husband observed very politely; “we’ve got Carlo-Giuseppe’s boat.”

By another of our hero’s weaknesses, which we shall confess as naturally as we have described his terror in the police office at the end of the bridge, he had tears in his eyes; he was profoundly moved by the perfect loyalty he was encountering among these peasants: and he was thinking as well of the kindness so characteristic of his aunt; he would have liked to be able to make these people’s fortunes. Ludovic came in carrying a bundle.

“Over and done with,” the husband said to him, in the friendliest possible tone.

“Anything but,” Ludovic retorted, sounding quite alarmed. “People are beginning to talk about you; they’ve noticed that you hesitated when you left the high-road and turned down our alley, like a man who was trying to hide.”

“Go up to the bedroom right away,” the husband said.

This bedroom, large and handsome, had gray canvas instead of glass at the two windows; in it were four huge beds each one six feet wide and five high.

“Quick now, quick!” Ludovic said. “There’s a conceited ass of a policeman who’s just been put on duty here and who began trying to make love to the pretty lady downstairs; I’ve told him that when he does his rounds in the country, he might meet up with a bullet here or there; if that dog hears tell of Your Excellency, he’ll try to play some trick on us—he’ll try to arrest you here to give Theodolina’s trattoria a bad name.

“And all this!” Ludovic continued, seeing the blood-stained shirt and the wounds bound with handkerchiefs. “The
porco
put up a fight, did he? A hundred times more than it takes to get yourself pinched; I didn’t buy a shirt.”

He opened the husband’s wardrobe without a moment’s hesitation and gave one of his shirts to Fabrizio, who was soon dressed as a prosperous country merchant. Ludovic unhooked a net from the wall, rolled up Fabrizio’s clothes in the creel, ran downstairs, and rapidly left the house through a rear door; Fabrizio followed him.

“Theodolina!” he shouted, passing beside the shop. “Hide what’s upstairs, we’re going to wait in the willows; and you, Pietro-Antonio—you send us a boat on the double, we’ll pay for it.”

Ludovic made Fabrizio cross more than twenty ditches. There were long, springy planks which served as bridges over the widest of them; Ludovic removed these planks after crossing on them.

Having reached the last canal, he carefully pulled the plank away.

“Now we can breathe,” he said; “that dog of a policeman would have more than two leagues to cover if he wanted to reach Your Excellency now. How pale you look,” he said to Fabrizio; “I haven’t forgotten the little bottle of brandy.”

“Just in time: the wound in my thigh is beginning to throb, and besides I was scared to death in the police office at the bridge.”

“I can believe it,” said Ludovic, “with a shirt full of blood like yours, I can’t see how you even dared go into a place like that. As for the wounds, I can manage that: I’ll get you to a nice cool place where you can sleep a good hour; the boat will come for us there, if there’s some way of getting hold of a boat; if not, when you’ve rested a little, we’ll do another couple of leagues, and I’ll take you to a mill where I can get you a boat myself; Your Excellency knows a lot more people than I do: Her Grace will be in despair when she hears of the accident; they’ll tell her you’ve been mortally wounded, and perhaps even that you killed the other fellow in some underhand way. The Marchesa Raversi will be sure to tell some nasty stories that will hurt the Duchess. Your Excellency might write …”