The Edge of the Horizon by Antonio Tabucchi

Author:Antonio Tabucchi [Tabucchi, Antonio; Parks, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: e9780811224529
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

11

When you reach the top of Via della Salita Vecchia the town thins out into the hinterland, settles down into a dull plain that the ramparts of the hills would never have led you to suspect. Here the lava-flow of cement hasn’t arrived yet and buildings put up in the twenties—the ones the bombs spared—are still standing: small villas built in a fanciful, petit-bourgeois Deco which, over the years, time’s patina has managed one way or another to ennoble; and then more modest houses, surrounded by walls and vegetable patches, with a few tufts of yellow reeds near the fences, as though this were already the country. The main road is lined by two rows of identical two-story terraced houses with outside brick staircases and tiny windows. They were put up under Fascism. This area was planned as a residential suburb for the clerical staffs of municipal boards, the bureaucrats, members of the less important professions. What the place has preserved of that period and world is the formality, the sadness. Yet there is something charming in the landscape: there’s a small square with a fountain, some flowerbeds, a few rusty swings, a bench where two old ladies with their shopping bags are chatting. And this meager, inert charm makes the place feel almost unreal: likewise improbable, perhaps non-existent, is the thing he is looking for. F. Poerio, Tailor, Via Cadorna 15. That’s what the telephone directory says. The dead man’s jacket is an old tweed with leather patches on the elbows. It could be ten years old, maybe fifteen. It’s too insignificant a clue to lead to anything. And then who knows whether it’s the same tailor. Perhaps there are other Poerios working as tailors in other cities in Italy.

And meanwhile he walks along Via R. Cadorna, a narrow avenue lined with lime trees. The houses here are small, detached, two-story villas preserving vestiges of the wealth of a bygone age. Many of them could do with a fresh coat of paint on walls and shutters, their scanty gardens show signs of neglect and washing has been hung out to dry from some of the windows. Number fifteen is a house with a wrought-iron fence which has been taken over by wild ivies. The entrance is sheltered by a little porch, likewise wrought-iron and of vaguely oriental design. A glass nameplate says: Poerio, Tailor. The letters, once gold, are sandy now and spotted with little stains, like an old mirror.

Signor Poerio has a warm smile and glasses with thick lenses that make his eyes small and distant. He seems protected by an indestructible candor; it must be his age, his sense of already being a part of the past. The glass door opens on a largish room decorated in an old pink color with narrow windows and a pattern of vine leaves painted along the ceiling moulding. The furniture is basic to the room’s function: a nineteenth-century sofa, a stool with a Viennese wicker seat, a tailor’s workbench in one corner.

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