56
PARTISAN REVIEW
that; God forbid that you should have any fears or suspicions in your head. I
understand, or rather I infer from the report of one of our agents, that you
drove Malcolm to the airport a month ago. A sudden departure, sudden and
final as it turned out! He sold his villa on Posillipo, quick and cheap, he sent
several crates of family mementos back to London, packed his bags, and
"Goodbye to Italy." Like that English poet
(I
don't remember his name) who
wrote a little poem with that very title to say farewell forever to Ischia after
an unfortunate experience with his adolescent boyfriend."
"Pardon me, Signor Commissario, but I don't think we'll get very far
this way. Your countrymen have a saying in these circumstances: don't try
to put too much meat on the fire."
"You're right, you're right a hundred times over,
bmvo, bravissirrw!
You
almost make me blush. I insist on proceeding in an orderly fashion, and the
first thing I do is circle around things. We were still talking about his sudden
departure, however, and since you drove him to the airport, you must have
heard something or other about his reasons for leaving or at least guessed
them."
"Signor Commissario, you mentioned the English poet Auden's 'Good–
bye to the Mezzogiorno,' and made a quite unambiguous reference to his
sexual preferences. But what comes to my mind is a short story by the En–
glish writer Conrad, a Neapolitan tale written early in this century and enti–
tled "II Conde." You don't know it? I thought not. Well nowadays the story
sounds almost laughable. It is the story of a foreign aristocrat who has long
spent a good part of the year in Naples for reasons of health and leaves his
beloved city forever after being the victim of a hold-up in the Villa Comunale.
You have to admit that it would be a laughing matter nowadays. Thousands
offoreigners would have to swear never to set foot in Naples again, if all it
took were a
scippo.
But Conrad's story is much subtler than it might seem
today. The hero feels that the sense of his own dignity has suddenly been
jeopardized.
It
is more than that, though - he feels mortally wounded and
flees, he actually runs away after what has happened. Driving Malcolm to
the airport, I had the impression that I was bidding farewell to someone else
who had been mortally wounded and was fleeing from Naples. At the same
time it would be hard for me to explain precisely or in any detail just what it
was that so mortally wounded him."
"We can combine our forces and think about the exact details later. All
I want to suggest right now is that I wouldn't discount the experience of that
English poet, as you do. In any case, we really ought to stop groping around
in the dark; let's start back at the beginning and then proceed one step at a
time. Otherwise
I'll
never be able to satisfy the request of our colleagues at
Scotland Yard. When did you first meet Malcolm Melton, and what were the
