Passport to Crime

Perfect Pitch
by Daniele Del Giudice

Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel

“You see,” said the man sitting across from me in the train, “I deal with dust, nothing but dust,” and he said this with a feigned regret for not dealing with more substantial things, while actually suggesting that dust was a rich, diverse universe, about which I certainly knew nothing. “I imagine that for you dust is just an annoyance, the neglect and aging of the world, whereas on the contrary it is alive with freshness.” We were alone in the compartment, the Scottish countryside had recently faded into the night, and the window glass reflected our profiles. We had already done everything that can be done on a train trip: read, dozed, made our introductions, commented inconsequentially on the weather and the landscape, and now we were talking about dust. Or rather, he was talking, I was listening. “There is a good deal of dust that comes from space, cosmic dust, infinitesimal particles of comets and meteorites that fall to earth, so that each year the planet’s weight increases, each year the earth weighs ten thousand tons more, ten thousand tons of dust. But this is noble dust, or at least the noble part of my trade, and now and then we who are in this profession meet in Edinburgh for a few days and talk about the new information that the dust has brought us, as if a voice from the cosmos were sending news flashes through a divine afflatus of dust.”

I was uneasy, not because of the dust, which at that hour would have fascinated me like any other topic, rather because of the man’s face; when I was young I thought that faces like that would disappear, that they belonged to a time before me and that every era had the right to its own faces. But as I got older I discovered faces that were repeated decades apart, indifferent to change, and his was one of those, biologically crafted according to a bygone imperative. The point however wasn’t his face, it was mine. I would have preferred that he not study it so closely, that he not be able to remember it at all, and it was this new feeling, whose reason I didn’t know, that made me uneasy.

“Naturally there is a less noble dust, and a less noble part of my profession. It’s the dust that collects under beds, behind wardrobes, along the moldings of walls. Dust found in houses is more difficult to decipher because it is more complex, but just think how much information is contained there! Details about those who live there; as unmistakable as a fingerprint.”

Our train passed another, and the draft of air caused us to start, a jolt which each of us contained in our own way. He continued: “A lot of dust doesn’t occur in the house, it comes from volcanoes that erupt or forests that burn on other continents, the particles carried by the wind, but we account for the rest. You and I and all the others produce thousands of tons of dust, and I deal with this too. Every fuzzy particle is different from the others, it all depends on the habits of the homeowners. You just need to know how to read the dust; magnified thousands of times, it’s like a forest with tree trunks, woody vines, rocks, and a myriad of animals. It’s the world of mites, which live there by the millions, with no eyes, sharp little legs, a single unit that forms the trunk and the head. They lurk there, waiting for the scales of our skin.”

If I really had to think about dust, I recalled the pleasure of seeing the vacuum-cleaner nozzle swallow it up, leaving a clean furrow in the carpets as if plowing a field, a true resurrection of the nap. I’m not saying that resurrection of the house from dust was a resurrection for me too, but I got a certain peace of mind from it. When I tried talking about it to my traveling companion, he replied ironically: “I know, you all have a mania for cleaning your houses, all you do is dust and polish, you Italians most of all. Couldn’t you find satisfaction another way? Fortunately, dust is never eliminated, it’s simply moved around with ingenious tools like your vacuum cleaner, and as soon as it leaves the house or gets dumped somewhere by the truck, it returns to circulation. Believe me, you never get rid of dust.”

I certainly couldn’t explain to him that the sense of peace I mentioned referred to a long time ago, to certain mornings on days off when I tidied up and did the cleaning, to a time when my life was orderly and coherent, before several holes opened up, which I was familiar with; recently however there was a glacial crack, a cold breath of pure iciness that I had never felt before. For this reason, even if I tried to make myself invisible, or at least easily forgettable to the dust scholar (as I now called him), I still clung to his words because every conversation followed a thread—his implacably moreover—and any thread distracted me from what I feared.

“You can’t get rid of mites either,” he went on. “Our bedrooms may be clean and tidy, the mattresses fresh, the sheets lavender scented, yet nonetheless in your bed as in mine there are several million mites. You don’t see them and they don’t bother you, they eat the scales of dead skin that you shed each night. Thousands of small scales are sloughed off, end up in the mites’ stomachs, and are then evacuated. You can see them at the movies, they’re those bright specks that shine in the beam of light from the projector, or in a thin ray of sunlight that slips through the shutters of your bedroom; those suspended particles are not dust, they are excrement, your skin digested and released by tiny vermin.”

Like his face, his way of speaking also characterized what, as a young man, I would have thought of as “before my time,” a beleaguering way of cornering his listener with some topic but never finally getting to the substance, as if the words served another purpose and there were a parallel space of curiosity and consciousness, a silent space, and that alone counted. In fact, it had taken him a long time to speak, stealing glances and gauging the situation, waiting for the two women—mother and daughter, bundled up in raincoats, who had gotten on with us in London—to get off at York. Then he’d made some observation or other and I had replied with a simple comment. The longer the conversation went on, the more I tried to end it, limiting the remarks on my end to just the marginal, assents, smiles, silences.

In the train window the darkness reverberated with the city’s electric orange glow as the train slowed down to enter Waverley Station, the Edinburgh station. He stood up with a sigh, looking like someone who had completed what he had to do without being entirely satisfied with it; he put on his overcoat and took down his suitcase.

I was quite aware that a train is the ideal place to invent a false identity, a different life, a brief performance for oneself and for the others in the small theater of the compartment, since outside the train you will never meet each other again. I had often thought about it, being careful not to do it. But when I too was on my feet and he stated his fine English name and said “I must have bored you with all that talk about dust. . . . We haven’t even introduced ourselves,” I heard myself say a name that wasn’t mine, one I had never heard or borrowed from anyone else, speaking instinctively and with such composure that my astonishment overcame everything else. He considered me for a moment, then asked if we might have dinner or lunch together, I would find him at the Caledonian Hotel, I could call him there first thing in the morning. I said yes, but that’s not all I said: I told him that this was my first time in Edinburgh, that it was a brief autumn holiday, that I would be the guest of acquaintances. And not a one of these statements was true.

At the hotel, no longer subject to the inquisitorial attention of the dust scholar, I presented my passport, still incredulous about the name I had invented shortly before, incredulous and edgy. The Abercromby Hotel was an average English hotel of those years of straitened circumstances, its facade pretentious and its furnishings worn, but the room was spacious, with a bow window overlooking a street that must have been quite busy during the day. I unpacked my bag and put my things in the closet, having no idea how long I would stay. I also took a small tape recorder from the suitcase and set it on the small table in the bow window. I know that there are better devices for listening to music, but I come from an era in which fidelity was not very high; I’m not bothered by the hiss or the lack of bass and treble notes. I’m probably losing something but that’s not what matters. On the contrary, the few times I had tried to listen with headphones and more sophisticated equipment, the music had been so enveloping and captivating and intimately strong that I was distracted. The quality of the sound had prevailed over everything, and I listened to that quality, dazed, no matter what the music was. Any music would have been the same, it was like words of love read from a loudspeaker; using those devices, I prevented the music from speaking to me.

I filled the electric coffee maker in the room with water and coffee; I was in store for a sleepless night, I might as well encourage it. While I waited for the liquid to filter I thought about the dust scholar; outside the station he had insisted on having me ride in his taxi, and I had declined. I had been able to situate the hypothetical house of my hosts so far out of the way that it could not conveniently be reached along any route. He stared at me through the still-open door, then saluted ironically, barely moving his fingers. I had climbed into the next taxi, fearful of being followed, and every so often I turned around, but the streets sped by behind us, swift and empty, and all that looking back to check appalled me.

As for speaking to me, it’s not true, music has never spoken to me; instead it hooked thin strands like algae, deep down inside me that I wasn’t aware of, reeled them up to the surface until suddenly the end of one emerged, I just had to grab it and tug on it. Music was revelation, but not of a general nature; it revealed things “for me,” it was a smuggler who crossed the border at night and left what I didn’t question on this side. What’s more, music smuggled me as well, it guided me across the border as if I were an illegal emigrant, it got me out, and this getting out always resulted in an action. It was music that made me marry my wife, another music that made me leave her several years later. In my memory I divide my life not by decade or by city but by music. I know which music made me leave my country, which music led me to graduate in political science with a thesis on international dispute resolution, which music made me abandon that career and begin the profession that I entered afterwards, one of those mediation roles that are so easy and lucrative they don’t even seem like work, reconciling seemingly distant activities, establishing contacts between people that seem unthinkable, lots of travel, lots of meetings, lots of chatting. I remembered all the music of my life very well, but I could no longer listen to it, it was my past, no longer real. Music was revelation, what it brought to the surface in me was often murky, putrescent matter, other times clearer and more admissible; over the years you learn to acknowledge a lot about yourself, a few years more and you learn to enact who you are without scruples. Music, for me, was action.

I raised the bow window, and a breath of cold, nocturnal sea air came from the Firth of Forth, a smell of port and naphtha that seemed especially damp due to vapors rising along the hill of Holyrood; that’s what I liked about Edinburgh, not the repetition of homes and artificial parks, but the stark bare hills planted in the middle of the city, left there as natural monuments to the land. Urban life surrounded them with caution, even the railway was set in a deep channel; there, where in other cities a river might flow, tracks stretched out along a kind of dry bed. From the window you could see where Abercromby Street ended in a semicircular square, two crescents of houses facing one another. I had always liked shops at night, illuminated and empty, stage sets awaiting the actors; I could see the window displaying Chinese vases and the coin-operated laundry with the unbeatable price of laundry painted on the door.

For some time now I had spent my nights like this: I would turn on the small recorder, go back and forth through the radio stations, slowly, listening, rejecting, going over them again. And I did so that night drinking coffee, sitting in the bow window, who knows what music they were broadcasting in Scotland at that hour, I was searching out of habit, or maybe out of curiosity—no, dread, because unfortunately I already had my music at that moment, even if I didn’t always have the courage to listen to it. It was in there, recorded on the tape in the recorder.

At first it had seemed like an inconsequential piece of music to me, after I’d come across it by chance a few weeks earlier (for that matter, silly little songs and great polyphonies have been equally significant in my life, African drums or isolated notes, solemn and intense, repeated endlessly, the music presented itself to me as a whole from which I extracted what I needed each time); here was a worthless little tune, imperfect and laughable, and it had been a few seconds before I felt a shiver, then a few more as I fumbled with the keys to record it, so all in all I must have lost a good part of it. It ended almost immediately, I waited for someone to announce the title, but the music abruptly faded into another, perhaps more beautiful selection, completely insignificant for me.

Impossible to find that station again in the following days; impossible to learn what that music was by going around the music shops with my recorder and playing the fragment. There were sales assistants who spread their arms hopelessly, others who immediately said, “Sure, of course,” but then my music wasn’t on the tape they sold me. As happens with things you saw but no longer remember where, you start wondering if you really saw them, and end up believing you never saw them. I sometimes think that piece of music doesn’t exist, and only when it comes to that point, only when I can convince myself of it and make certain I’m free of it, only then do I find the force, as I do now, to push the button. There’s a rustling, an empty noise, the whirring strain of rewinding. Then the sound starts.

I turned off the lights in the room, even the light was a noise; I wanted to hear clearly, listen to everything, be positive: not about the music, which I knew all too well, but about the insane, violent image that it brought to the surface each time. The music was there, no matter how it got there, I couldn’t deny it; I could still delude myself that I had misunderstood the action it was demanding. But listening to it again was like redoing a calculation, resulting in the same, periodic outcome each time.

In recent weeks I have learned not to let my body absorb the full impact of fear, to deflect some of it by converting it into marginal impressions; I thought about Edinburgh, which was now a damp, nocturnal, foggy glow out there. This is a city of ups and downs, not only window sashes, but staircases that descend and rise through hidden passageways, unexpected, dark courtyards, arching tunnels from one building to another, walkways carved out over the centuries as though eroded by maggots, a city where the dead can be heard, assembled and present, raucous undead. You can hear their breathing and their loud snoring, there is an age when you begin to notice it clearly, and little by little you come to understand that the thought of death is nothing other than this, the ability to muffle all other sounds, vain and transitory, and to perceive the drone of the disembodied, snuffling community to which one will belong forever. This listening is not possible in all cities, the world is full of unaware or deluded cities, inattentive cities, where the dead are not heard, and therefore have simply disappeared. In those cities you have to look for them in the layers down below, open a trapdoor in back of a cellar, and uncover a grim sky over streets still teeming with carts and poverty, with coal, and horse-drawn trams and street vendors selling water, with people in period costume and dusty shoes, where factories continue to churn out inadequate machinery, and a crowd of toothless, illiterate kids look up at you contemptuously.

I stood up, got some water from the sink and a blanket from the top shelf of the closet. I felt cold. The music had always decided for me, snatching my actions out of my hands. They had not always been honorable or tasteful actions, they were simply decisive actions, driving my life forward, directing it with modest adjustments, gradually making it conform to my destiny. In periods of uncertainty there was no longer any music in me, not even the kind of internal chant that accompanies the step, a gait, the rhythm of the body. So I started looking for it and sooner or later I found it. I found my music again, or rather it found me, and it brought up something in me that I had not expected, that no one would ever expect, and that was now irremediably clear: the obvious and irrepressible need to kill someone.

*   *   *

To kill you need a victim and a weapon, and I had neither of the two. The next morning I left the hotel early. I would have been better off getting the weapon first, it would be easier to find; but it is the victim who brings with him the way in which he will be killed, and thus the place of the crime. Not the place where the crime occurs, but the place that already conserves that crime, waiting for someone to come and perform it. At the moment the only thing I had was this: pure motive, originating from a piece of music, with no need to be corrupted by other feelings, a motive that propelled me, strong in itself, like those tailwinds that push you from behind.

So I started looking at people sub specie victimae. It doesn’t take much, already on the bus heading towards Queen Street I achieved that narrowing of the field, that concentrated focus, which crosses into the restricted, taut circle of obsession. There are plenty of people to study and choose from, the entire city stretches from one hill to the other, descending and ascending, passing over the dry railway bed on the George IV or North Bridge. The middle-aged man waiting at the tram stop, for example? Or the younger man buying a newspaper? The Indian student, I’d swear he was a student, in a suit and tie and turban? The woman in front of me, blonde, tight skirt, quick step, profile turned to the shop windows? But she’s so wary! Or the girl in the shop window who is arranging fake turtles in a fake Japanese garden? The professor, he must be a professor, with his briefcase and baggy jacket over his shoulders, there at the traffic light? The young man with the carton of milk? The Jamaican, or better yet two Jamaicans, why not?, sitting on a door step? What if I butchered the old Scotsman blowing Whiskey and Glory into his bagpipes on the corner of Lawnmarket?

No. Surveyed like this none of them was right or all of them were right, regardless of opportunity. I began to see that it wasn’t a question of choosing a victim at random, but of finding my victim, the one a deep need would bind me to, like a slug to its filament of slime. I entered a department store and spent a long time on each floor. The goods were displayed as if the store were a house divided by function and arranged vertically; at that hour all the floors were frequented solely by women, sometimes with children, sometimes alone, and old people, a rather sector-based sample. I wandered into grocery markets catering to ethnic communities and pretended to be interested in jars of crab paste, freeze-dried seaweed, rices, tubes of exotic spices and sauces, but I was actually studying the people going in and out, and after the last one went out, I left too. I slipped into the back of courtyards, where a couple of pale, wiry guys dressed in black were kissing amidst scorched tarpaulins and stacked crates. Every now and then I felt a pang of wistfulness, each of them had his own life, whether good or bad, and remained in the saddle, I alone was unhorsed and upended, like someone carrying his horse on his back. I ate something in a crowded pub, men in ties and women in suits were taking their lunch break from a job probably no different from mine, with the same efficiency, same data, same competition, same manuals for success, same obedience to a single law (which was the only topic of conversation even during the meal), monotonous and dominant. But they were united and perfectly in step, whereas I was isolated and lost.

As victims they were totally unsuspecting, not a single one of them was right. Because during the course of the afternoon I became convinced that I had to discover my victim the way a detective discovers his perpetrator: I had to suspect him, stalk him, wait for him to reveal himself. But how does a victim make himself known? What misstep can expose him, what slipup would give him away? I chose crowded streets that offered a vast variety of subjects, but occasionally switched to deserted ones where the concentration of unusual people was greater, and allowed more time for seeing them approach from a distance, using that time to gauge them, then releasing the tension in a furtive exchange of glances as they passed, the pace quick and impersonal. I felt instantaneous compulsion or instantaneous fright, a fleeting terror, as if my intentions were transparent or visible to others, or as if I were already doing what I had to do. So I tried to distract myself by browsing through the shirts in a shop, rather than looking at the clerks or the customers, a new shirt would do me good, a moment of respite. I could buy myself a hat, one of those hats that top off a person like a roof or a flag; a shirt or a hat or a pair of shoes would mean a bit of future and normality. But in the end when the shopkeeper said “Can I help you?” I looked for something personal, hidden in his question, an implication, a variation in his tone, an entente, and I stared at him wordlessly; and when he repeated, “Do you need some help?” I said no and left.

At sunset the city came alive again down one hill and up another, buses lined up on the bridges and cars backed up at the intersections. The light faded in a cirrostratus sky, scoured by brisk overhead winds; it was not yet night, however, the houses were lit but not yet for dinner. Cars passed me by, went a short distance, and parked along the quiet streets; someone got out, closing the car door, and with it, a chapter of his day while opening the front door and another chapter. I was no longer looking at people, at least not the way I had been looking at them all day. I had gotten my fill of faces, types of walks, personalities, possibilities, and candidates without finding my prospect. I walked along moved by inertia, an inertia of thwarted energy, of an urge that, having eliminated its objects, withdraws completely, mortified and without further hope, feelings that I knew so well.

I found a small restaurant on a street still bustling and full of lights. Once inside the door there was a restrained clamor and four or five customers waiting in line. In a short time the soldier with his girlfriend and the elderly pair of gentlemen were seated. That left me and a woman whose great mass of black hair was the only thing I had noticed until then. The waiter asked, “Two?” The woman looked at me and I looked at her. I explained to the waiter that we weren’t together, but he turned towards the room and indicated a table at the back, the only one free. We sat facing each other, and since the arrangement did not require conversation, we managed to order (she the boiled vegetables, I the heaviest and spiciest meat-based dish on the menu) and started eating our food as if we were each alone. Having dinner like this wasn’t easy but I didn’t want to disturb her. I looked around the restaurant blankly, and at the end of each glance I retained some detail of her face: the pronounced curvature of her cheekbones, the slightly elongated eyebrows drawn towards the temples, like those of certain severe-looking birds. And then the broad, thin shoulders, and the hands, their skin pale and smooth. And on her wrist, her watch. It was a Swatch, one of those plastic watches which enabled the Swiss to regain their supremacy in global time-reckoning, one of the first, I think, and which have now become rare. In place of the numbers there were four small words in different colours, don’t at 12 noon, be at 3 p.m., too at 6, and late! where the hour hand pointed to 9 at that moment. Don’t be too late! I could take the exhortation not to be too late as a reference to the time I’d wasted that day on my fruitless searches, and quickly do what I had to do. All my life I’ve felt late, and the industriousness I’ve tried to combat this feeling with is now just a habit. Was Don’t be too late! a sign? Or maybe more than a sign, a message to me from this woman: Here I am, be quick about it.

She broke the silence without looking up from her vegetables, and said: “Today my ex-husband’s new wife came to visit me. I had never seen her, a pretty girl, she told me about the faults that she has gradually discovered in him, she wanted to know if he’d behaved that way with me too. So funny, they were completely different shortcomings from the ones I knew. Surprised, I asked: ‘Are you sure?’ The man I’d married was so serious and absorbed as to be nonexistent. He was there as a presence in the house, yes, just as you are there in front of me at this moment, but he was part of the furnishings, virtually a wardrobe or a table, a piece of furniture that constantly moved about, once you might find it in the bedroom, another time in the living room. I never understood what she could have been thinking.”

I had to be prudent, not rush the situation, not say anything that would seem too hasty or too slow, continue eating even though an inexplicable tension clenched my stomach. So I didn’t say anything, and when she stared at me to see if I had been listening, I returned the look with a guarded, easy smile.

“Instead,” she continued, “the man this girl described to me is overflowing with attention and tenderness, very welcome at first, then increasingly oppressive. A man who talks continuously, there is no topic on which he doesn’t have an opinion; he never sleeps at night, and just when she is about to fall asleep he says, Listen, sweetheart, remember what we discussed the other day, well I gave it some thought, you see, and I think that’s exactly right, and he repeats the same argument he made before. This worries her most of all, the repetition, each time he follows the same line of thinking, like a guinea pig in a maze, he bumps into the same obstacles but doesn’t realize it, he’s happy to slam straight into the barrier as if it were a way out, he doesn’t even notice the obstruction, he thinks he’s out, and only then, towards dawn, does he fall asleep.”

I had prepared something about the phases of life, about how we change for the worse or for the better, constant yet different depending on what others bring out of us, and spent a minimum of time on these banalities so that she would continue talking, occasionally raising her beautiful elongated eyebrows. After all, no link can be created with words, not even the appalling one I was pursuing. I listened, I responded, in the meantime I was gauging the intensity, hers, mine, waiting concealed in the margin of one of her sentences, in a sudden transparency of her black pupils, in a stirring of my blood.

“You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if he did something foolish,” she said. “He was so composed, so methodical and focused. I’d hoped that age would soften his rigidity and passivity, that perhaps over time he would understand that not everything is a sacrifice, that not everything must be won inch by inch like on a battlefield. But after the separation I heard almost nothing more about him. I wouldn’t be surprised now if he did something idiotic.”

“What sort of thing?”

“That’s more difficult to predict. There is a moment in every man’s life when he seeks decisive action. He leaves the woman he is with and goes with a younger one, he abandons the job he knows and takes up another in which he fails, or he discovers the importance of plants and devotes himself to gardening. It depends, but almost always he pulls the ground out from under his feet, systematically destroying everything he had meticulously built. It’s a singular moment, and each individual resolves it in his own way.”

Was she the one? I looked at her throat, a double Venus ring was faintly drawn on her skin. A path for kisses, I thought regretfully. Almost simultaneously, horrified, I thought: the exact spot to tighten my hands. How long would it take? What if she wasn’t the one?

The waiter arrived with the dessert, and since there were fewer people he lingered a moment to apologize for the forced seating arrangement, which by now neither she nor I gave any importance to. When he left, she said: “Look at actors. They accompany us from film to film like a family member. For years they strive to appear young beyond all limits, thanks to the roles, thanks to the makeup. Then all of a sudden they appear old, playing old people’s parts, their hair all white.”

With a spoon brimful of dessert she stared at me for a moment, slightly ironic: “Are you an actor?”

I said no, smiling. And immediately afterwards I felt sad. No, she wasn’t the one. It wasn’t about that. If she was the one she guarded herself extremely well, but she wasn’t the one. I felt regretful for a completely different situation, a summertime dinner at the beach, a hotel terrace with a few tables, music (yes, but what music? certainly not the one I now had in mind), a more elusive, more seductive conversation, in which I could engage casually and lightly, even with her perhaps, her and her long eyebrows.

When it came time to pay the bill, I asked and received her permission to pay for the dinner that we had involuntarily eaten together. Outside the restaurant we stopped, and she studied me, amused and a little uncertain, then we exchanged our goodnights. As her hand rose to close the collar of her raincoat, part of the watch appeared, and again I read don’t be too . . . In fact it was getting late.

Abercromby Street couldn’t be far away. I thought about taking a taxi up the block, but I didn’t find one, or maybe I forgot to look for one; in the end I reached the hotel sodden with mist and fog that the night brought from the sea. Once in the room, it took some time for me to warm up. In the dark, I searched for the music on the recorder. It called to me as always, it called loudly, it called as it always did. I curled up in the bed without undressing, wrapped in the blanket. When the strains stopped, a more subtle sound was perceptible, as though the room were breathing, as if the house and the city were sighing, and the disembodied, snuffling community were murmuring. Yes, it was the right city, but I hadn’t found my victim, losing an entire day. I would have done better to start with the weapon, I had seen a shop in the High Street that sold them, I would go there the following morning, to at least have the murder weapon. But by thinking “murder” I was already imagining the thing as done, seen from the point of view of an accomplished fact. And it horrified me. I wanted to kill, not commit a murder. I know that the distinction is imperceptible, but I forced myself to see it, I clung to that distinction because that was the only way I could get to the conclusion—by detaching that conclusion from everything else and not seeing it until the final moment.

Little by little the city’s breathing, or maybe mine, slowed down, one of those long sighs that dogs heave when bowed low with their muzzles on their paws, which we think expresses their submission.

 

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