"Burke, Betsy - The Orphan Of San Frediano" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke Betsy)
By Betsy Burke
I got to know Joe at Harry's Bar in Florence. It was an okay place, not too much tourist action if you were patient and went at the right time of day. Patience was the thing that both Joe and I had plenty of. I could only do research during the mornings and after that the nuns gave me filthy looks if I tried to wheedle an extra hour out of them.
I was researching the past for war orphans and DP's who'd been shipped out of Italy as kids and weren't sure who they were. Some of them had their real names, some of them didn't. CAIWO, Canadian Association of Italian War Orphans, was my employer. A lot of these CAIWO guys were so sleek and prosperous you would wonder why they bothered at all. They'd made their fortunes, had their families, and lived most of their lives in Canada. Why did they want to go poking around in the past? I decided early on that if I came up empty and didn't want to disappoint my clients I could always invent or borrow relatives for them, keep them happy. Relatives from working class families, respectable but poor, so that at least the emigration could be justified. And with CAIWO footing the bill I could afford to drink at Harry's Bar.
And it was strange, because Joe was exactly the kind of person I was researching.
We both liked Scotch. Johnny Walker Red Label. Joe said it was the first time he had tasted booze, that he wasn't a drinker. And it was funny because no matter how much of the stuff he poured down his gullet, he never got drunk. I mean, most guys, especially non-drinkers, would be dancing around the room like debutantes with that kind of proof in their bloodstreams, but Joe, nothing. I liked drinking with a guy who could hold his booze. We could stay there all afternoon and evening and be as cool as two cucumbers.
The first week he came in every day, took the seat next to me and drank, silent as a clam. When I figured he was pretty much of a regular, I broke the ice, asked him what he was doing in Florence, how he was fixed for a place to live, that kind of stuff. He looked at me with these pale eyes of his and fiddled with the swizzle sticks that were in a glass on the counter.
"I'm looking for my past," he said.
"No kidding," I said. "I'm sort of in the past business myself." I told him what I was doing in Florence.
He said, "What a coincidence. I'm trying to trace my family. If any of them are still living."
"Coombs," I said, putting out my hand. "Morris Coombs. Italian on my mother's side."
"Joe Bianchi," he said, shaking mine, and I thought my heart would freeze right up, his hand was so cold. You've got to understand, it was midsummer in Florence. I'm talking thirty-eight degrees Celsius with eighty percent humidity. The man was freezing cold.
He was trying to trace his family in the San Frediano neighborhood. He'd had an amazing lucky break and found a house to rent in the same block where he thought his old stomping ground had been.
Joe told me he was fifty-five. He was gaunt, silver pale like a skinned almond under moonlight, kind of sickly-looking, his face too smooth for a guy of his age, like he never took the sun. His eyes were almost colorless, gray, and he was anxious, always just about to reel around and check for somebody behind him. He said he was the caretaker of a building in Montreal, said if I was ever in the area to look him up, and wrote out his address for me.
That's how it is when you travel. You meet some other poor slob in a bar who's as lonely as you, and you're nearly crying because you both speak the same language, and after a couple of snorts you're exchanging addresses. I've got a whole black book full of names that I can no longer put faces to. But Joe was different.
It all came out in those long hot afternoons. He said in his entire life he felt that he'd never accomplished anything, like he'd been drifting around in a dream. Like there were a whole lot of "should haves" and "would haves," but none of them came to anything. He never got married. Never had been able to get up the nerve to get himself a girlfriend, but after a few years got used to living alone like that. Said he didn't miss it. Didn't know what it was about. Didn't care much about the outside world except for Italy. Didn't even own a television. But Florence made him feel alive.
Joe said that back in Montreal he would often get up in the dark. He suffered from bad insomnia. He would get up and putter around, fixing things in the building. Didn't have many friends. There was an old lady, a retired nurse, who lent him books. He'd known her for a long, long time. I asked him what the hell he did with himself for a whole goddam bastard of a lifetime like that and he said he read books; said he figured he'd read the lion's share of what was written in English and now he was teaching himself Italian and reading some of the Italian books in his library. I have to say he spoke well, he was almost a fancy talker. He had a lot of passion for a guy whose life was such a vacuum. And he was not the kind of guy who felt sorry for himself. He didn't. He had done it all alone and that was okay.
But he had gaps in his memory and that worried him. I liked his company and I told him if he could hang around for a while and let me get finished with my other clients I would look into his case toward the end. He smiled a cool shivery smile and said we had a deal and we should drink on it.
I began to look forward to our afternoons.
I was staying in a pensione on the North bank of the Arno River, a modest one star joint, but clean, with a shower in the room and a cappuccino and brioche included in the price. I was up early every morning. Nobody was sleeping in that heat. People walked around like overcooked pink hams, dazed by the torrid waves that wafted from the cobbles and stone buildings. Clouds passed overhead and there were rumblings of thunder, but the rain never came.
Wherever there were archives you would find me on those hot mornings.
The city's records were in a terrible state, the flood of '66 had ruined a lot of them and there was no way to connect children with parents. So I was knocking on different convent doors every week. The nuns would open up and look at me like I was Beelzebub's dog. I figure they could smell the Scotch in my sweat. But when I explained what I was after they usually softened and let me in. Then there would be a lot of unbarring of massive wooden doors and clanging of old iron keys and they would lead me into cloisters and silent gardens, down long cool medieval passageways and steep narrow stone steps to some crypt where the old files had been dumped. And there, with one forty-watt lightbulb on its last legs and the bones of dead monks to keep me company, I'd get to work, sifting through the brittle papers, trying to turn up lives.
On one of those mornings I was taking a break; I was a little more exhausted than usual, my hangover ranting at me, staring into space and exchanging grimaces with all those skulls when I got this feeling. For half a second, I could have sworn there was somebody else there with me, looking over my shoulder at documents.
It was slow unhappy work. Once I came up with a name, I would have to go to the neighborhood and see if anybody was around that could remember. The good thing about Florentine families is their tendency to stay put. They hand their houses down from one generation to another. And if they do move, it's often just around the corner and there's some old busybody that knows all about it.
The bad thing was that a lot of the old busybodies were by now too senile to remember their own names, let alone the names of kids from fifty years ago.
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