The Queen's Necklace Read online

  Driving through the suburbs on his scooter that morning did not prompt Enrico to return to youthful reflections on the squalor of workers’ housing projects. Instead, like a deer after fresh grass, his nose picked up the scent of potential building sites.

  Indeed it was a potential site he had been meaning to go and see early that morning when he got into Umberta’s car. They were coming out of a party, she was drunk and didn’t want to go home. Take me to this place, take me to that. For his part Enrico had been toying with the idea for some time: and since they were driving here there and everywhere they might as well go and take a look at a place he knew; there wouldn’t be anybody there at this time of day and he could get a good idea of its potential. It was a piece of property Umberta’s husband owned, some land around a factory. Enrico was hoping that with her help he could get the man to give him a contract for something big. It had been on the way to the factory that Umberta had come close to jumping from the moving car. They were arguing; she was pretending to be more drunk than she was. ‘And where are you taking me now?’ she whined. Enrico said: ‘Back to your husband. I’m fed up with you. I’m taking you to see him in his factory. Can’t you see that’s where we’re going!’ She half sang something to herself, then opened the door. He braked hard and she jumped out. Which was how she had lost the necklace. Now he had to find it. Easily said …

  A bushy slope of abandoned land fell away beneath him. He only knew he was in the same place as this morning because the road was dusty and not often used and the tyre marks were still there where he’d braked: aside from that the whole landscape was shapeless; never had the official expression, terrain vague, taken on such a precise and subtly disturbing relevance in his mind. Enrico took a few steps this way and that peering between the branches of the bushes at the matted ground beneath: as soon as he set foot on the mean barren earth, insensitive to any footprint, strewn with litter, elusive and indefinable, smeared with a streaky pale light that might have been slug slime, any zest for adventure ebbed, the way a readiness to love shrinks and retreats when met by coldness, or ugliness, or apprehension. He was seized by the nausea that had been coming over him in waves ever since he woke up.

  He began his search already convinced that he wouldn’t find anything. Perhaps he should have settled on a rigid method first, established the area where Umberta had probably been, divided it into sectors, scoured it inch by inch. But the whole enterprise seemed so pointless and unrewarding that Enrico went on walking about at random, barely bothering to move the twigs. Looking up, he saw a man.

  He had his hands in his pockets, in the middle of the field, bushes up to his knees. He must have sneaked up quietly, though where from Enrico couldn’t have said. He was lanky and lean, pointy as a stork; he had an old military cap pulled down on his head with balaclava flaps dangling like bloodhound ears, and a jacket, likewise military, its shoulders in tatters. He was standing still, as if waiting for Enrico at some threshold.

  The truth is he had been waiting there for quite a few hours: since even before Enrico had realized he would have to come. It was the unemployed Fiorenzo. Having got over his first flush of frustration at seeing those two workers snatch what might well be a treasure from under his nose, he had told himself that the thing to do was to stay put. The game was by no means over yet: if the necklace really was valuable then sooner or later the person who had lost it would come back to look for it; and when treasure was at stake there was always the hope you might grab a bit of it.

  Seeing the other man standing there motionless put the architect on the alert again. He stopped, lit a cigarette. He was beginning to take an interest in the story again. He was one of those people, Enrico, who think they have put down foundations in things and ideas, but who really have no other guiding principle in life than their shifting and intricate relationships with others; confronted with the vastness of nature, or the safe world of things, or the order of reasoned thought, they feel lost, recovering their poise only when they get wind of the manoeuvres of a potential enemy or friend; so that for all his plans the architect never actually built anything, either for others or for himself.

  Having caught sight of Fiorenzo, Enrico, to get a better idea of what the fellow was up to, went on stooping and searching along a straight line that would take him nearer to the other but not actually to him. After a moment or two, the man also began to move, and in such a way that he would cross Enrico’s path.

  They stopped a yard or so apart. The out-of-work Fiorenzo had a gaunt, bird-like face, mottled with scraggy beard. It was he who spoke first.

  ‘Looking for something?’ he said.

  Enrico raised his cigarette to his lips. Fiorenzo smoked his own breath, a small thick cloud in the cold air.

  ‘I was looking …’ Enrico said vaguely, making a gesture that took in the landscape. He was waiting for the other to declare himself. ‘If he’s found the necklace,’ he thought, ‘he’ll try to find out how much it’s worth.’

  ‘Did you lose it here?’ asked Fiorenzo.

  Immediately Enrico said: ‘What?’

  The other waited a moment before saying: ‘What you’re looking for.’

  ‘How do you know I am looking for anything?’ said Enrico quickly. He had been wondering for a moment whether he should be brutally direct and intimidating, as the police were with anybody scruffily dressed, or polite and formal like urbane and egalitarian city folk; in the end he had decided the latter was better suited to that mixture of pressure and readiness to negotiate which he thought should set the tone for their relationship.

  The man thought a little, let out another little puff of air, turned and made to leave.

  ‘He thinks he’s got the upper hand,’ Enrico thought. ‘Could he really have found it?’ There was no doubt but that the stranger had put himself in the stronger position: it was up to Enrico to make the next move. ‘Hey!’ he called and offered his pack of cigarettes. The man turned. ‘Smoke?’ asked Enrico, offering the pack, but without moving. The man came back a few steps, took a cigarette from the pack, and as he pulled it out with his nails snorted something that might even have been a thank-you. Enrico returned the pack to his pocket, pulled out his lighter, tried it, then slowly lit the other man’s cigarette.

  ‘You tell me what you’re looking for first,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll answer your question.’

  ‘Grass,’ the man said, and pointed to a basket laid by the side of the road.

  ‘For rabbits?’

  They had climbed back up the slope. The man picked up the basket. ‘For us. To eat,’ he said and began to walk along the road. Enrico got on his scooter, started up and moved slowly alongside the man.

  ‘So, you come round here looking for grass every morning, do you?’ and what he wanted to say was: ‘This is your territory in a way, isn’t it? Not a leaf falls here without you knowing about it!’ But Fiorenzo got in first ‘This is common land, everybody comes.’

  Clearly he had understood Enrico’s game, and whether he had found the necklace or not, he wasn’t going to say. Enrico decided to show his hand: ‘This morning somebody lost something right there,’ he said, stopping the scooter. ‘Did you find it?’ He left a pause then, expecting the man to ask, ‘What?’ Which he eventually did, but not before having thought it over a bit: a bit too much.

  ‘A necklace,’ Enrico said, with the twisted smile of one referring to something that was hardly important; and at the same time he made a gesture as though stretching something between his hands, a string, a ribbon, a child’s little chain. ‘It’s got sentimental value for us. So you give it to me and I’ll pay,’ and he made to pull out his wallet.

  The unemployed Fiorenzo stretched out a hand, as though to say: ‘I haven’t got it,’ but then was careful not to say so, and with his hand still stretched out said instead: ‘That’ll be hard work, looking for something in the middle of all this … it’ll take days. It’s a big field. But we can start looking …’

  Enrico le
ant on his handlebars again. ‘I thought you’d already found it. That’s too bad. Not to worry. I’m sorry for you more than me.’

  The jobless man tossed away his cigarette stub. ‘The name’s Fiorenzo,’ he said. ‘We can come to some arrangement.’

  ‘I’m an architect, Enrico Pré. I was sure we could get down to business.’

  ‘We can come to some arrangement,’ Fiorenzo repeated. ‘So much every day and then so much on delivery of the missing item, whenever that is.’

  Enrico almost whirled round, and even as he moved he didn’t know whether he was going to grab the man by the scruff of the neck, or whether he just wanted to test his reactions again. As it turned out, Fiorenzo stopped still without making any move to defend himself, an ironic expression of defiance on his plucked-chicken face. And it seemed impossible to Enrico that the pockets of that skimpy crumpled jacket could hold four strings of pearls; if the man knew something about the necklace, God only knew where he had hidden it.

  ‘And how long do you want to spend, combing that field?’ he asked, dropping his respectful tone.

  ‘Who says it’s still in the field?’ said Fiorenzo.

  ‘If it’s not in the field you’ve got it at home.’

  ‘That’s my home,’ said the man, and pointed away from the road. ‘Come with me.’

  Fiorenzo’s territory ended where the first scattered apartment blocks of the outskirts turned their backs on each other in foggy fields. And near the border, where the capitals of the most remote countries tend to be situated, was his house. All kinds of historic events and upheavals had combined to create it: the low brick walls, half in ruins, were part of an old army stable, later closed upon the decline of the cavalry; the Turkish toilet and an indelible piece of graffiti were the result of later use as an armoury for the training corps; a barred window was the sinister reminder that the place had been a prison during the civil war; it was to winkle out the last platoon of warriors that they had started that fire that had almost destroyed the place; the floor and the piping belonged to the period when it had been a camp first for the wounded and then for refugees; later a long winter plundering for firewood, roof tiles and bricks had once again demolished the place; until, evicted from their last abode, along came Fiorenzo and family with their beds and boards. He completed the effect by replacing half the roof with an old rolldown shutter found in the vicinity and apparently twisted in some explosion. Thus Fiorenzo, his wife Ines and their four surviving children once again had a home where they could hang pictures of relatives and family allowance slips on the walls and await the birth of their fifthborn with some hope that the child would live.

  If one could hardly say that the look of the building was much improved since the day the family moved in, this was because Fiorenzo’s genius in inhabiting the place was closer to that of the primitive man huddling up in a cave than the industrious castaway or pioneer who strives to recreate about him something of the civilization he has left behind. Of civilization round about him Fiorenzo had all his heart could desire, but civilization was hostile, forbidden territory to him. After losing his job and having quickly forgotten the meagre skills he had somehow once managed to acquire – those of a copper pipe polisher – his hands made sluggish in a manual job that again had not lasted very long, cut out – from one day to the next and with a whole family dependent on him – from the great circular flow of money, it hadn’t taken Fiorenzo long to retrace man’s steps back along the course of history, until, having lost the notion that if you need something you build it or grow it or make it, he now cared for nothing but what could be gathered or hunted down.

  Fiorenzo now saw the city as a world of which he could not be a part, just as the hunter does not think of becoming the forest, but only of plundering its wildlife, plucking a ripe berry, procuring shelter against the rain. So for Fiorenzo the city’s wealth meant the cabbage stalks left lying on the cobbles of district markets after the stalls are taken down; the edible grasses that garnish the suburban tramlines; the public benches that could be sawn up piece by piece for firewood; the lovelorn cats that would intrude on common property at night never to return. A whole city existed for his benefit, a cast-off, second- or third-hand city, half buried, excremental, made of worn-out shoes, cigarette stubs, umbrella handles. And even way down at the level of these dust-laden riches there was still a market, with its supply and demand, its speculations, its hoarders. Fiorenzo sold empty bottles, rags and catskins, thus still managing the occasional fleeting peck at the monetary cycle. The most tiring activity, but the most profitable too, was that of the mine prospectors who would dig at the bottom of a steep bank below a factory looking for scrap iron in the industrial waste there, and sometimes in a single day they would unearth kilos and kilos of the stuff at three hundred lire a kilo. It was a city with seasons and harvests all its own: after the elections there were the layers of posters to strip from all the walls with the fierce insistent rasping of an old knife; the children helped too filling sacks of coloured scraps to be weighed by the miserly steelyard of the wastepaper dealers.

  On these and other expeditions Fiorenzo was accompanied by his two eldest sons. Having grown up to this life they could imagine no other, and would run wild and voracious about the city’s outskirts, akin to the mice they shared their food and games with. Ines on the other hand had developed the mentality of the lioness; she wouldn’t budge from the lair where she licked their lastborn, she had lost the homely habit of tidying and cleaning, she pounced greedily on the loot that man and sons brought home, sometimes helping them to make it saleable by unstitching pieces of shoe uppers to be sold for patches to cobblers, or scraping the tobacco from the cigarette stubs; and despite their famished life, she had become fat and squat and, after her fashion, calm. The other world, of stockings and cinema, no longer called to her from hoardings whose images to her mind had completely lost their meaning, had become huge indecipherable enigmas. Day after day, when she dusted the glass of the photograph of herself wearing her bride’s white veil beside Fiorenzo on their wedding day, she was no longer sure whether it was herself or her great-grandmother. Rheumatism had led to the habit of lying down all day, even when she had no pain. On her bed in broad daylight in the ramshackle house, her baby beside her, she looked up at a heavy, foggy sky and fell to singing an old tango. Thus Enrico, approaching the hovel, heard singing: he was understanding less and less.

  With expert eye he took in the warped tilt of the roof, the irregular angles of the fire-mottled walls. One or two effects would not have been out of place in a seaside villa. He should bear that in mind. He remembered a paper he’d once given at a conference on urban design: It is not from the château that we set out upon our adventure, gentlemen, but from the shack …

  The Workshop Hen

  Adalberto, the security man, had a hen. He was one of a team of security men in a big factory; and he kept this hen in a little courtyard there; the chief of security had given him permission. He would have liked, with time, to have set up a whole hencoop for himself; and he had begun by buying this one hen which they had promised him was a good layer and a quiet creature who would never dare upset the severe industrial atmosphere with any loud clucking. As it turned out he could hardly complain; the hen laid at least one egg a day, and apart from some subdued gurgling might have been entirely mute. To tell the truth the chief of security had only given Adalberto permission to keep the bird in a coop, but since the courtyard, only recently annexed to the purposes of industry, abounded not only in rusty screws but likewise in worms, it had been tacitly accepted that the hen could peck around at will. So it went back and forth reserved and discreet among the workshops, was well known to the men, and, for its freedom and irresponsibility, envied.

  One day the old turner, Pietro, discovered that the equally old Tommaso, in Quality Control, was coming to the factory with his pockets full of maize. Having never forgotten his peasant origins, Tommaso had immediately appreciated the productive capacity
of the fowl and linking this appreciation to his desire for revenge for injustices suffered, had embarked upon a stealthy campaign to woo the security man’s hen and encourage her to lay her eggs in a box of scraps on the floor by his workbench.

  Every time he realized his friend was up to some secret trick, Pietro was annoyed, because it always came as such a surprise to him, and he at once tried to go one better. Ever since they had become prospective relatives (his son had got it into his head to marry Tommaso’s daughter), they were always fighting. So he too got hold of some maize, prepared a box using metal scraps from his lathe and in the brief respite the machines he ran allowed him, tried to attract the hen. Hence this game, where what was at stake was not so much the eggs as a question of revenge, was played out more between Pietro and Tommaso than between themselves and Adalberto, who, poor chap, searched the workers as they arrived and left, rummaged in bags and pockets and knew nothing.

  Pietro worked alone in a corner of the workshop set apart from the rest by a section of wall so as to form a separate room, or ‘lounge’, with a glass door that looked out on to a courtyard. Until a few years ago there had been two machines and two workers in this room: Pietro and another man. But one day the other man had gone off sick with a hernia, and in the meantime Pietro had had to look after both machines at once. He learned how to regulate his movements accordingly: he would push down the lever of one machine and go to pull out the piece the other had finished. The hernia case was operated, came back, but was assigned to a different team. Pietro was stuck with the two machines for good; indeed, to make it clear that this was not just forgetfulness, a time-and-motion expert was sent to assess the situation and a third machine was added: the man had calculated that between the operations for one machine then the other there were still a few seconds free. Then, in a general overhaul of productivity bonuses, to have some dubious calculation come out, Pietro was obliged to take on a fourth. At sixty and more years old he had had to learn to do four times the work in the same hours, but since his salary was still the same, his life wasn’t radically transformed, if one excludes that is the development of chronic bronchitic asthma and the bad habit of falling asleep as soon as he sat down, in whatever place or company. But he was a tough old man and, what’s more, full of good spirits, and he was always hoping that major changes were just round the corner.