Cosi Fan Tutti - 5 by Michael Dibdin Page B

transferred there was cause for endless complaint and commiseration. When he revealed that he had requested the transfer himself, she concluded that he must have taken leave of his senses (a remark he let slip about his father not being dead provided further proof of this) and started treating him with a creepily solicitous reserve.
    Then, imperceptibly, things began to change. The first sign was when he started returning to Rome less often and for shorter periods. But it was Valeria Squillace’s offer of the house on Salita del Petraio which tipped the balance decisively. This property was eventually intended for the use of Orestina and Filomena when they completed their education and got married to young men the family approved of. Since there was no immediate prospect of this, and perhaps as a gentle hint to her daughters, Signora Squillace had kept her word and given Zen a short-term lease on the upper apartment, renewable quarterly, at a rate considerably less than he was paying at the hotel.
    Even once he had moved in, it was a while before he regarded the place as anything more than a dormitory.
    But gradually that too began to change. He started rearranging the furniture to suit his needs, removed a couple of pictures that were getting on his nerves, and even
    smuggled a few items out of the flat in Rome to make his new home more attractive or convenient. His visits there became ever rarer and more grudging, an onerous duty which he soon came to resent having to perform every month. If it hadn’t been for his mother, he eventually realized, he wouldn’t have gone at all.
    For, much to his amazement, he found himself liking Naples. Not as he had on his previous sojourn there, as an up-and-coming officer with every prospect of a brilliant career ahead of him, for whom Naples was one of a series of appointments to major provincial cities paving the road to Rome. Now he liked it for its own sake, not for what it could do for him but for what it was. He was enchanted by every aspect of the city which he had expected to drive him mad. He loved the noise, the crowds, the traffic, the chaos, the pushiness and resilience of the people, their innate sense of tolerance, negotiation and endurance.
    Above all he prized his anonymity in the midst of a city which neither knew nor cared where he was from, what he did, or even who he was.
    Since Zen had never got around to correcting his new landlady’s impression that his name was Alfonso Zembla, this was the name inscribed on the rental contract, and which eventually appeared on the bell-push outside the front door. Partly to avoid confusion, partly on a whim, he had decided to adopt it. He knew no one in Naples and no one knew him. Why not accept the pseudonym which fate had handed him? It would serve to mark the radical break between his old and new lives, and also between his professional persona and his private life, and to keep the latter private. At work he would remain Aurelio Zen, a dedicated slacker. In every other aspect of his life, he would become Alfonso Zembla, whose personality and attributes remained, for the
    moment, fascinatingly vague.
    When the phone rang that morning, Zen was sitting out on the terrace sipping coffee, enjoying the sun and planning his weekend. At ten the carpenter, a nephew of Don Castrese, was coming to give an estimate of cost and time - above all time - needed to extend the shelves in the living room. After that, he’d go to the local restaurant he usually patronized, and then, if he felt up to it, wander around the side-streets around Via Duomo in search of a bedside lamp to replace the bronze horror he had deposited at the back of a cupboard. After so much frenetic activity, a slow start to Sunday seemed in order, punctuated by a visit to the cafe at the top of the steps which did such wonderful pastries. Then a stroll in the gardens of the nearby Monastery of San Martino, followed by a leisurely lunch somewhere at one of the good