Bell for Adano, A - John Hersey [75]
“Number Twenty-three, Via Favemi,” old Bellanca said. “Go to the second floor, look for Spataforo, and forgive him his manners.”
Major Joppolo took down the address and the name. “When must I go?” he asked.
“At your convenience, Mister Major,” old Bellanca said.
And the officials of the town of Adano trooped out of the Major’s office, looking like so many bad children.
The Major did not wish to seem too curious, so he waited until after lunch to go to Number Twenty-three, Via Favemi.
He found that the house at Number Twenty-three, Via Favemi, was just another three-storey grey stone house like all the others. By the front door there was a box-like frame with a glass cover. Inside the frame there were about five portrait photographs of that quaint style with the background touched away so that the heads seemed to float in small private clouds. The frame evidently leaked, for streaks of rain and grey dust had run down the pictures. One of the pictures seemed to be of Tina when she had dark hair.
The Major tried the door and found it unlocked. He went up some stairs to the second floor where he found a door in a serious state of disrepair. It sagged from its hinges and one of the panels gaped and was warped. He knocked.
There was no answer, so he knocked again. There was no answer the second time, so he went in.
Through a dark little entrance hall he went into a large room. It was an old photographic studio, in utter ruin, it seemed.
In the middle of the room there was a huge, woodframed portrait camera, covered with dust, and beside it a high four-legged stool. Between the stool and the box-like camera there was a spider’s web, laden with dust and the carcasses of flies and moths. At the end of the room which the camera faced there was an iron and wood bench, like an old park bench, and behind the bench there hung a faded backdrop, an out-of-scale painting of St. Peter’s Square in Rome. A pile of dusty wooden film packs lay on the floor, and in one corner there was a heap of cuttings of developed film.
The last thing he saw in the room looked as if it were made of cobwebs and old clothes. It was a man.
He was lying on the floor under a window. Major Joppolo hurried over, because he thought he was dead. But when the Major got near, the corpse spoke: “Go away,” it said. “If you want to look at your own face, look in a mirror.”
Major Joppolo said: “I was told to come here and to look for a man named Spataforo. Are you Spataforo?” The man said: “Spataforo is my name.”
The Major said: “They said you would tell me what to do.”
Spataforo said: “Oh Lord in Heaven, deliver me from vain people... Go and sit on the bench.”
Major Joppolo went over to the bench, leaned over and blew away the dust from a spot big enough to sit on. He sat down.
Spataforo still did not get up from the floor. He said: “You are like all the others. You can look at the faces of thousands of your countrymen, but you think your face is more beautiful than all the others. You want to take your face and put it in a frame and put it on a shelf and stare at it. You are disgusting.”
Major Joppolo said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If there is something you wish to do, do it. I do not have all day.”
The old man began slowly to get up. His knees cracked as he moved them. “Vain and in a hurry,” he said. “What is your hurry, vain man? Can’t you wait for your image to be made?”
Spataforo moved slowly over to the stool beside the camera. He sat on it, being careful not to disturb the spider’s web.
“I have been in this business a long time,” Spataforo said. “Eighty years, ninety years, a hundred years, I don’t know how long. Manufacturing faces, so that people can stare at themselves. What do you think of that as a life’s work? Bah!”
The old man got down from the stool and went and stood in front of the Major. “What a facel” he said. “What an ugly thing a man isl”
Major Joppolo was not disproportionately fond of his face, but he did trim his mustache once every three days, he did pull the hairs out of his