Read Online Shroud by John Banville - Free Book Online

under the chestnut tree, and I woke with a shiver from my reveries. The day had cleared and the sun was hot in the piazza under a cloudless, hard, white sky. I recognized suddenly where I was: it was here that N., in the final months before his collapse, had lodged in a room in the Fino house on the corner looking out on the massive façade of the Palazzo Carignano—that was its name!—scribbling crazed letters and signing them
Dionysus, The Crucified, Nietzsche Caesar
. . . I closed my eyes and pressed a thumb and finger to them until tiny lights like distant rockets began to pop and flare in the darkness behind the lids. I am convinced my blind eye works when it is shut. I saw again, as clearly as I had seen it happen, the truck skidding and the girl spinning and the man with the grey hair throwing up his arm in that strange way and calling out as if to warn off some unwary intruder on this scene of violence and blood. I opened my eyes again and rose unsteadily to my feet, heaving myself up with both hands pressed on the crook of my stick. I was hot; I was thirsty; I was tired.
    When I woke the curtains were pulled against the light of day and I thought it was still dawn and that everything that had happened since my arrival had been a dream. I lay motionless on the bed, staring into the gauzy folds of shadow about me, gripped by an obscure panic. I could not understand why I was dressed in suit and tie; I even had my shoes on, although the laces at least were undone. My right arm had been asleep and tingled unpleasantly now as the blood began to move in it again; my injured elbow ached. Slowly memory began to gather up its fragments. I had drunk a bottle of wine with lunch in the hotel dining room and had stumbled up here to my room to rest and must have passed out, felled by alcohol and the last embers of travel fever. I got myself up cautiously and sat for a moment on the side of the bed with my head bowed. Why had I come to this city? I was too old and worn to travel so far for the sake of a whim. I could have made the writer of that letter come to me in Arcady, that would have tested her resolve. I rose with a groan and went into the windowless bathroom and stood wincing and blinking in humming white light. Dandruff, caries, Doctor Baloardo’s big pockmarked nose. I washed out my mouth; the tap water tasted of tin. I stood and gazed dully in the mirror, hands braced on the basin and my shoulders hunched. I had the sensation then, as so often, of shifting slightly aside from myself, as if I were going out of focus and separating into two. I wonder if other people feel as I do, seeming never to be wholly present wherever I happen to be, seeming not so much a person as a contingency, misplaced and adrift in time. My true source and destination are always elsewhere, although where exactly that elsewhere might be I do not know; perhaps it is in childhood, that age of authenticity the scenes of which I can summon up more and more vividly the farther away from them that I get. Banal possibility. Dull thoughts in a dulled mind. It was the wine, the weariness.
    The taxi was waiting for me at the door of the hotel. I was late already, but I did not care; let them wait. This time the city, in afternoon light, showed me another, softer side to the one I had seen that morning. Sun glanced, white-gold, on car roofs and the windows of caffès. We passed under the Mole, absurd in its pagoda lines. I noted without enthusiasm the thickening flotsam of strolling students in the streets, and presently the grey concrete headland of the university buildings hove into view. When I saw Franco Bartoli on the steps, standing on tiptoe with neck outstretched and casting about him anxiously, I had an urge to duck down and order the taxi driver to drive on. I asked myself bitterly again what had possessed me to come to Turin, what there could be here for me except confrontation, exposure, humiliation. I alighted from the taxi and turned back to