Bramards case, p.1
Bramard's Case, page 1
BRAMARD’S CASE
Also by Davide Longo in English translation
The Last Man Standing
MacLehose Press
an imprint of Quercus
New York · London
Copyright © Davide Longo, 2014
English translation copyright © 2016 by Silvester Mazzarella
Jacket design by Demir Jellici; Front jacket photograph © Mark Owen Trevillion Images
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e-ISBN: 978-1-681-44442-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016016552
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
www.quercus.com
To Sandro and Dario,
friends and teachers
With a deep distrust and a deeper faith.
—BEPPE FENOGLIO
Contents
Cover
Also by Davide Longo
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
1
The door of the hut was ajar. Her body lay in ethereal afternoon light, a pattern of cuts across her bare back, her long black hair spread around her.
He took a couple of hesitant steps, determined to persuade himself nothing had happened, then fell to his knees and stared, hands hanging uselessly by his sides, perhaps no more able to drop his gaze than Hector when he understood Achilles was going to kill him.
2
When the alarm went off Corso was in his sleeping bag, hands behind his head, intently watching his own breath condensing in the cold air, rising to disappear in the darkness.
An hour or maybe two hours before, the distant cry of an animal had woken him, and he had lain motionless, listening, imagining a creature at the point of death or of giving birth, until the cry was lost in the soughing of the wind.
Now he silenced the alarm with a precise gesture of his hand, turned on his flashlight, and checked the Cyma watch on his wrist: 1:57. The wind had dropped and the silence around his tent was full of tiny sounds.
He glanced down at the book he had left open beside his water bottle the night before, its pages turned back and divided unequally, like the wings of a bird forced to fly round in a circle.
He had read that a woman had been telling her husband, just back from a long journey, that while he had been away their little girl had always been quiet and well behaved, but had eaten almost nothing and had started saying, “don’t even think about it,” whenever anything was suggested to her. The man sitting on the sofa listened, then took off his shoes and said something that did nothing to solve the problem.
Corso massaged his neck. Two drops of condensation were running down the side of the tent, like translucent insects. Then he pulled trousers and socks from the bottom of his backpack, shoved everything else back into it, and went out.
Outside everything was a uniform gray in the moonlight.
He lit the stove he had left in the shelter of a rock and, while the flame guttered, went down to the lake to fill his small pan and wash his face. On the mirror of water, scarcely larger than the area of a country dance, moon-colored circles expanded, but by the time he got up to go back to the tent the surface had once more become dark and still.
He dropped a teabag into the little pan and studied the surrounding mountains: ancient peaks a little over three thousand meters, without sudden surges, marked with veins of nickel darkened by water.
He considered why he had come. The evening before, under the setting sun, he had seemed to see beauty in the mountain even if it was a kind of beauty that needs patience to understand. But now she was no more than a triangle of cold shadow.
“Are you really so wicked?” he asked her.
The mountain continued to stare back at him in silence, her profile sharp as the five letters of her name. Corso nodded to show he knew that it would soon be clear, then moved a few steps to one side and opened his trousers to urinate. The night above him was clear, the clouds far off and still. A few stars were visible in the darkest part of the sky.
He took the tent, the bag, and the stove out of his backpack and hid everything under a large stone at the foot of the rock face, gave a last glance at the area of stones he had just crossed, and started forward.
He climbed the first few meters slowly, almost indolently, to give his body time to get used to what he was asking of it. The rock, cold but not icy, gave his fingers exactly what it promised, so that his mind slipped quickly into the white room for which he had come: a silent room with no doors hung with a single great picture, and all the time in the world to get to the top of the picture.
He realized he was near the summit when he could see the metal cross damaged years before by a storm. It was hanging head down now, held in place only by a single metal support.
He passed it with a short diagonal walk, and a dozen handholds later he was at the summit.
He poured himself some tea from the thermos in his backpack and looked down at the area of stones at the foot of the mountain. In the blue moonlight the flint fragments looked like the spines of cold-blooded animals, come over the centuries to die side by side in a cemetery their ancestor had chosen. Beyond that was the perfect opal of the lake, the path, the wood and finally the road, where beside the bridge he could see his own car resting, as small and simple as a tile. Everything seen from up here looked to be motionless but breathing, as it must have been before any life had ever existed.
He passed a hand over his brow, feeling his sweat already caked into a solid dust.
He imagined the last pages of the novel he had been reading: the woman would be in the middle of the room and the man listening to her would be sitting on the sofa with his feet on a low glass table. Behind them would be a light-colored staircase, as rational and unremarkable as everything else in the house.
He saw himself climbing those stairs and going down a corridor to a room with a partly open door where a little girl of four was asleep, her left leg outside the bedclothes.
He saw himself go in and sit beside her, pushing aside a lock of her fair hair and lightly touching the hollow behind her knee, where blue veins showed through her delicate skin. Then he laid his head on the pillow and stayed with his face very close to her, listening to the soft murmur from her lips, until he became aware of an obscure evil beating in her chest like a second heart.
Then he saw himself get up, go to the window, and realize, seeing the headlights of the motionless car below the house, that once out of there he would never be allowed to see the little girl again or know anything about her. Ever again.
Corso leaped to his feet, opening his mouth wide like a drowned man. The darkness around him seemed immense and he felt an urge to jump, until the sight of a lone cloud approaching from the sea, slow and innocent, calmed him. He stopped trembling and mouthing the little girl’s name.
To the east, far off across the plain, were shining the bright lights of villages that with a little effort he would have been able to name, and beyond them was the luminous mass of the great city.
He gave these a last glance before pulling his backpack onto his shoulders a nd beginning the descent.
The wind had gotten up, and the night was starting to change color in the east. From far away, on the French side, came the barking of a dog, as if to indicate that something was beginning.
3
He quickly came down the sharply curving mule track, through clumps of alders from which flew out small birds that had spent the night hiding from owls. A few weeks earlier the path had been trodden by cows that had left behind the cold smell of their dung. From somewhere in the darkness echoed the steady sound of a stream.
When he was about a hundred meters from the river he recognized the form of a small off-road vehicle parked next to his Polar. Leaning on the hood and looking at him was a man dressed in gray or blue with a cap on his head. The rifle on his shoulder was softly reflecting the pale moonlight.
He crossed the last few meters without hurrying.
The man waited for him on the parapet of the bridge, staring at the foam under the arch. When Corso approached, he took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and went through the motion of offering it. When Corso shook his head, he raised his face to the moon.
“Are you married?” he said.
He had a dry body and hair as gray as his uniform. Middle-aged.
Corso said no.
“Wise,” said the man, puffing smoke from between irregular teeth. “Women cannot understand these places the way we understand them.”
He kept the burning end of the cigarette concealed in the hollow of his hand, even though they were not on the bridge of a ship and there was no breath of wind.
“Where have you come down from?”
“The Picca.”
“The one over the iron mine?”
“Facing it.”
The man took a longer pull on his cigarette.
“My brother’s a priest at Comiso. We don’t see each other very often, but I always ask him why he took the cloth. And he always gives me the same answer: that no one who hasn’t heard the call can ever understand the joy of serving Our Lord.” He spat the stub of his cigarette into the river. “So that’s why I’m not asking you why you went up there.”
Corso made a gesture of agreement that doubled as good-bye and went toward his car. The man came up while he was unlacing his boots and began moving the surrounding grass with his foot as though he had lost something hardly worth looking for.
“There’s a dead ibex under the Picca, did you notice?”
Corso took off his climbing trousers and pulled on his jeans.
“No.”
The forester looked toward the valley where the light was getting stronger.
“Two men from Savona shot it and didn’t bother to retrieve it. When I confiscated their rifles, one said not to scare him because he had a weak heart.” He spat. “Poachers aren’t what they used to be. They used to shoot straight at you.”
Corso fastened his sandals.
“Have a good day,” he said.
As he drove out of the clearing he could see the man lighting another cigarette. He held him in his mirror until the red of the cigarette was swallowed up in the darkness the daylight was not yet strong enough to overcome; then he opened the window and stuck out his elbow.
He had seen the ibex the evening before, when the setting sun had painted yellow the snowfield where the animal was lying. Sitting outside his tent, he had contemplated it at length, but the ibex never moved, its head turned toward the valley, already one with the substance of stones and bones it had trodden only a few days before. Either a young male or a female, he had thought.
He turned on the car radio and drove for a few kilometers listening to an old song by Françoise Hardy. The words did nothing for him, nor did the tune or even Hardy’s face, though he could not get it out of his mind. But he listened to the song right to the end.
When the car came to a group of low buildings, he turned off the radio and slowed down before stopping in front of the last house, distinguished by the yellow sign of a public telephone.
The name of the telephone company had changed twice since the time the sign had been put up. There were no lights in the windows of the house, and but for the sound of Arab music coming from the interior, you would have thought the house had been abandoned for years.
Corso got out of the car, threw a handful of gravel at one of the windows, then turned his back to wait. The house opposite had been done up like a town house, and two demijohns had been left upended to drain under its balcony, along with a motorcycle and a kennel complete with a steel chain strong enough to tow a steamship.
“Come in,” said a dry voice behind him.
Corso climbed three steps to a room with a bar and half a dozen tables, its walls decorated with the heads of wild boars, ibex, chamois, and small animals immortalized by the taxidermist in fierce or cunning poses. The floor was covered with tiles decorated with small flowers and beyond a folding partition there was a TV set and an antiquated threshing machine.
Corso sat down on one of the stools at the bar.
The tall, thin old man arranging a cup under the spout of the coffee machine looked as if he had just escaped from a hospital, taking advantage of a door left open by mistake, without waiting to comb his white hair or change out of his pajamas.
“You know someone else who used to be like you?” he said.
Corso was searching for the music he had heard from outside, but the place was silent.
“Nino Oggero.” The man answered himself. “An eccentric figure who used to go off alone without saying anything to anyone, until one day he didn’t come back. It took us a week to find him. He’d broken his back falling off the Traverso. We never told his mother, but he didn’t have a finger nail left, he had struggled so hard trying to get back on his feet.”
He put the coffee on the bar.
“He had frozen so fast,” here he beat his knuckles on the wooden surface, “that we couldn’t even get him off with a shovel. We lit a fire in the hope that might help, but the people who were supposed to be watching the fire at night fell asleep and in the morning there wasn’t much left of Nino Oggero’s hair. His mother saw him in his coffin with that burnt head, and after that she was good for nothing but church.”
Corso took a sip of coffee.
“Didn’t his feet get burned another time?”
The old man studied him carefully, then looked away to the dog stretched out under one of the tables. By now the sky outside had developed a sort of diffused clarity.
“What do you think you’re looking at?”
The dog lowered guilty eyes.
“If I leave him outside he complains of the cold,” the old man shook his head. “And if I keep him inside he complains because it’s his nature to be outside. I really ought to take him into the forest with a shovel, and it would be better still if someone else could do the same for me. Hungry?”
“What have you got?”
“There’s some boar left.”
Corso went into the bathroom, took off his pullover and short-sleeved shirt, and washed himself with the piece of soap on the basin. He scratched the dried blood from the wound at the base of his thumb and wrapped it in his handkerchief.
When he came back into the bar he was wearing a clean shirt.
“There was a new forester at the bridge,” he said, getting back on the stool.
The frizzling of olive oil could be heard from the kitchen stove. After a while the old man elbowed the curtain aside and placed a plate on the bar containing meat floating in a broth the color of mercury. Beside this he put a basket of bread.
“Says he caught two poachers from Savona red-handed.”
“Naturally,” said the old man.
Corso let some fragments of bread fall onto his plate.
“Wasn’t that what happened?”
“Those two don’t even know which end to hold a rifle.”
Corso picked up one of the glasses draining on the sink. The old man poured in a finger of tamarind and lengthened it with water, making it the same color as the shirts of the footballers in the photo propped against the mirror.
“You know why they moved that man here?”
Corso shook his head.
“His brother-in-law controlled some reforestation contracts and found him the job. They were unable to catch him in the act, so they sent him to us.”
