The wood floor is warm. I crush a mosquito against my knee and listen to my mother explain the plan in her robe: Berlusconi’s legal woes will cripple him, but the international élites still don’t trust a left-wing government to stabilize the market, since “the Left believes in the market only when it’s convenient to.” It’s stuff the papers don’t discuss, and she comes from the left-wing élite, but now she’s into Realpolitik, maybe to please her husband. I crush another mosquito with the hand I just used to caress my mother’s shoulder. I get up and wash the tiny black-rimmed flower of blood from the palm of my hand.
I live with them now. I’m not far away; I’m right there. New York has evaporated like a dream or a fairy tale. Was the person who lived there—that person who placed orders on his phone while reading from folded menus, who tipped extravagantly, who was so moved by the view across the river—was that me?
I retreat to my room and pray a rosary for the dead, for Vera and for “Marcello.” I scorned her when she talked about her injured friends, her dead comrades. She’s gone. “Marcello,” Marcellino. I bring milk and cookies to my room, and I place them on the bedside table next to my iPad, three books, and an issue of Wired. I lie down, my bones soften, my head dries out. I take a nap and then start working on a GQ piece about Breaking Bad.
I don’t have much time left, though. I’m dying now. My body is lost in a bed that feels so vast I can’t reach the edges. Only when someone comes in to visit me and sits on one of the three chairs at my bedside does the distance seem manageable, only once the person holds my hand.
I realize that Sergio has come in and taken a seat, and I ask, “Sergino, do you promise I will die for real?”
“I have no belief in anything, Darietta, but I will stay and make sure you’re really dead, okay?”
I haven’t got enough strength left in my body to laugh. I touch my face, trying to figure out why it’s not moving. It’s wrinkled and cool. Sergio has clothes on, a face, an age. I see him from the corner of my eye and feel the strength of his hand holding mine.
“You’ve never held my hand like this.”
“Like how?”
“This decisively, Sergino mio. It feels like you have grown.”
“Now?”
“Now the hand has changed.”
“It’s Tullius’s hand.”
“Oh! Did you two make peace?”
“We did.” It’s Tullius’s voice. He too has a face, an age. “Daria, I’m sorry for being late, but you see, I still came.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Can I sing a few psalms?”
“Oh, come on.”
“They are spagnoleggianti; you’ll like them. They’re sweet, and they suit the moment, what it means to us.”
“I can’t go telling people I let you sing me flamenco psalms, Gusty, Reghiuleit.”
The three of them laugh good-heartedly.
“Berengo, my love, you’re here, and you made peace with Tullio, too?”
“Does the light bother you? Want me to turn it down a bit? This room has these switches that blend in with the walls.”
“What are they like?”
“I can’t tell. The walls radiate too much light, and I can’t find the switches.”
“It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?”
“Yes, love.”
“I’m pretty tired now. Let me rest. Promise me I’m going to die for real.”
As the silence settles, I notice the light, the almost sandy light, which isn’t harsh but is still somehow bright. I don’t know what corner of the room I’m looking at exactly; my eyes are dazed, I can’t hear my friends, I’m scared that I might wake up again after I’m dead.
“And yet,” Ludovica says, having been here for a while, delicately holding my hand over the bed, “it’s something everyone does. Remind yourself of that; it might cheer you up.”
We laugh. Her laughter feels old and wise.
“It’s surreal for me, too.”
“I can’t see you, but I’m happy you came to visit. Are you sad I can’t see you?”
“No. I see you.”
“Do I have a sheet on?”
“Yes, just one sheet. It’s summer.”
“That’s why there’s so much light. Did it rain sand?”
“No, no…” she reassures me.
“Are you just passing by?”
“I just stopped by to visit you, but I feel awkward.”
“Why? There’s no need.”
“There is.”
“No, really, I’m glad you came.”
“But I wanted to ask you to forgive me.”
“Of course I forgive you, Ludovica.”
“Thank God.”
“It’s all forgotten.”
“Thank you.”
She lets go of my hand, and it falls back on the sheet. It’s a white silk sheet, or maybe it’s a silklike fabric that absorbs sweat and never gets wet. My skeleton sinks into the mattress, but I’m so light that there’s no heat and no sweat at all between my back and the bed. I feel funny, as if I were capable of holding everything in: pee, fear, yawns. I feel that I have effortless control over myself, which gives me a strange buzz behind my eyes, the sense of cruising or stroking the membrane of time.
Daria has sat down next to me, and now she’s the one holding my hand. Her hand and mine are identical, so holding it feels like stroking my own numb arm. I’m so curious to see her face for the first time, and I try to open my eyes, but I can’t because the light that filters through my eyelids is too bright, I’m forced to keep them shut. “Daria, are you moved?” I ask her. “I don’t want you to be unsettled, but I’m happy you paid me a visit.”
“Darietta, yes,” she says, barely audible, and my eyelids still keep me from seeing her.
“Don’t be scared. I hope this time’s the one.”
“Let’s hope,” still barely audible.
“Do you love me, though?”
“I do, my beloved Daria.” It’s as though she’s spoken to me from inside my chest, it’s that faint.
“Let’s be like this for a while, I’m tired. You know who stopped by earlier?”
“Ludovica—I saw her when I came in.”
“Isn’t that really weird?”
“It is. I’d have never imagined. It’s weird.”
We sneer, but I’m tired and she’s in pain. I know her thoughts and I know what she will say, and here she says it: “Do you forgive me?”
When I reply, this will end.
NOTES FOR THE HAPPY LIFE OF NICO BERENGO
To identify oneself absolutely with oneself, to identify one’s “I” with the “I” that I tell, is as impossible as to lift oneself up by one’s hair.
MIKAIL BAKHTIN
What made me stop considering novels in my literary criticism is the success of that American literary Restoration by which every work must be dedicated to the moral elevation of the reader by means of the superstructural device of empathy towards characters. That empathy is always cheap and yet it’s considered the only moral compass of storytelling. The purpose of the literary American novel seems to have become the “increment in humanity” of a “human being.” In my opinion, what is perceived as an educated reader is in fact a bourgeois, not a Mensch, but s/he convinces her-/himself of the contrary: that s/he’s a Mensch and not a bourgeois, that s/he’s a Person and not the vessel of class values. Which is completely absurd if we think of the importance that twentieth-century French theory has in the American universities where contemporary authors were educated. With the pretext of teaching their readers to be more human, the American novelist plunges American literature in the abyss of the Religious and the Pedagogical.
FLORENCE MATHIEU
What is Catholic purgatory according to our catechism? A purifying fire. Before going back to inhabit a body now glorious in contemplation of God, the soul cleanses itself with the only instrument she has: words. Words are the purifying fire. That fire is the immate
rial that cleanses. That fire is pure language, the impalpable residue of the soul after it abandons the body. Purgatory is an area of pure language in which the dead examine, alone but guided by the invisible force of the angels, the shortcomings of their life. The history of the novel in Christian Europe and its cultural offshoots, the ex-colonies, clearly foretells what purgatory is for Christians: it uses language to cleanse sins; and it confirms in the most unexpected place—the house of novelists, prostitutes of the Positivistic era, whom Jesus wouldn’t have minded being seen in public with—the marvelous love story God and Man have lived by means of Logos.
FATHER KACZMAREK
LOTTA DI CLASSE
According to Daria, Berengo is the only member of the bourgeoisie—the left-wing, upper-middle-class bourgeoisie—ever to overcome the problem of personal fulfillment, the obsession with individual accomplishments. He is the philosophe of the bourgeoisie, its great reformer. And according to Berengo, who takes Daria’s opinions very seriously, Daria—a Marxist—loves that he is comfortable exactly where he is: on the wrong side of class conflict. (I have yet to get in touch with Daria to ask her for her opinion on the matter; I’m afraid to do so.)
Berengo has, for example, come to terms with the fact that his Hispanic doorman never greets him when he returns home, that he responds with nothing more than a glare every time he walks in. Berengo lives in an apartment building the color of hazelnuts. The place is very much of its time: it was built in the early nineties, and its lobby smells overwhelmingly of carpeting. An entire squad of ushers and concierges keep it running, and according to Berengo, only the youngest among them—the twenty-something students on the night shift—acknowledge him. The middle-aged men—or those the same age as him, just under forty—stare at him with quiet disdain from the reception desk at the end of the mirrored lobby, or they bow their head slightly, imperceptibly, when they stand next to the glass entryway. The Hispanic guy with the salt-and-pepper hair, the round goatee, and the calculated, languid look never says hello. He can’t be older than forty. He makes a point of greeting Berengo’s female guests when they stroll in at night, arm in arm with the short, slim, balding Italian—the young master who seems to abide by no schedule and seems to have no job to speak of. But even then, he never greets Berengo.
“He hates me, and I get that. I’m fine with it. You couldn’t be him and not hate me.” Some of his female friends tease him about his antagonist: they tell him that one night they’ll run off and marry the Hispanic doorman. “He totally hates you!” they say. “But he always smiles at me.”
Nico comes from a liberal, democratic family—“de sinistra,” he says in Italian, with what I think is a Roman accent. Like all progressive, upper-class Romans, he seems at once good-natured and somewhat simple, both spoiled and naïve. Since childhood he’s been taught to respect all social classes, all of which happen to fall below his own. When he first moved to New York, he would always greet ushers, concierges, doormen, but for them, responding to his greetings was a hassle, an activity unworthy of their time. Bob, the head doorman, is a handsome man, white-haired and blue-eyed. He has a third-generation New York accent, Italian or Jewish, and he always sits with his legs crossed as he looks down the hall, tracing its hardwood floor and turquoise carpet accents through his gold-rimmed glasses. He loves to stare at Berengo without acknowledging his presence, like a Buddha. It drives Berengo crazy that this is still happening, years after he first moved in, and it’s gotten so bad that for a while now he’s been unable to look the doorman in the eye.
If an Amazon shipment comes in for Nico, Bob lets him walk right past, and only as he turns the corner for the elevator does he call out: “Berengo? 8D? Package for you.” The thought that a man who doesn’t acknowledge his presence actually knows his name is deeply upsetting to Berengo. “It’s humiliating. Everything I buy—a new pair of pants, a jacket, comics, posters, PlayStation games—all of it has to pass through those hands. I feel ashamed every time.”
Berengo is convinced that all the concierges and porters and doormen are acting out of hostility, that they’re talking about him behind his back and discussing his reactions, that of the hundreds of Americans and foreigners that live in this skyscraper near Times Square, they find him to be the most amusing, the most worthy of their mockery. “Their hostility is a weapon,” says Berengo. “It’s an instrument of class warfare.”
CORTE AMOROSA
This is the name Berengo uses for his circle of lovers and female friends. The people around him seem to genuinely love him and care for him. He doesn’t come across as a cynic or a nihilist, though I don’t quite know how he manages to put up with himself—I like spending time with him, but I can’t imagine doing it all the time. How does he do it?
“Corte Amorosa” isn’t an elision or a joke, nor is it another word for harem. Nico sees himself as an idealist, and each relationship he has he embeds within a philosophical framework he has named Corte Amorosa, in honor of its medieval antecedent. Like the noblemen who came together to compose love poetry and recite it and discuss amongst themselves the mysteries of attraction and romance, Berengo thinks of eroticism as a complex experience: partly an act; partly a conversation about this ongoing, or imminent, act; partly a recollection that takes place after said act. Each amorous encounter is thus related to all the others, and everyone participates in the collective experience of passion. His lovers’ stories are passed along to other lovers, forming a Boccaccioesque narrative cycle of which Berengo is very proud. The exception is Daria, his main lover, who is never told about his other experiences.
NEWSPAPERS
He doesn’t read the newspapers, and he doesn’t follow Italian politics. He doesn’t vote. When he picks up an American newspaper he flips through it quickly, the fingers on his right hand ever ready to turn the page. He skips to the sports section and the arts and culture section and throws away the rest. Whenever he deigns to read about politics, he lifts his brow and curls his lip upward, as if the corner of his mouth is hanging from pegs on a clothesline. “All you ever need to read are the titles,” he tells me one day.
THE VIEW FROM HIS WINDOW
[FROM BERENGO’S PERSONAL AUDIO RECORDINGS]
Daytime: “The skyscraper they’re building 200 meters from my window at four o’clock is orange on the inside—you can see it in the parts that haven’t been covered up with dark charcoal glass. Orange inside, with vertical strips of yellow light. When the sunlight comes in from the east, the charcoal glass is more of a…a turquoise-black. There’s a tower on top with a little red light. I see four planes and a helicopter. Another plane cuts from south to north. Another building has four lit-up penthouses slotted into one another across two floors, like a puzzle. Small clouds hover over New Jersey. A plane, high up in the clouds. When all the plane routes disappear and the buildings stand empty like abandoned husks, humanity will still remain great.”
—
NIGHTTIME: “A CITY built up of many levels. What stands out to me is the colossal effort everyone has put in, and the fact that all of it has been in vain makes me feel nothing but tenderness toward everyone and everything.”
—
DAYTIME: “I WOKE up with that usual feeling: we are spirits who wear flesh, and both the fact that we inhabit a body now and the fact that we won’t in the future, both of these things are absurd…I have this tremendous desire that life after death be wholly pleasurable, a place where your wishes and the actual experiences themselves are one.”
—
NIGHTTIME: “IT’S TERRIBLE that Michael Jackson has left the realm of the living. I hope the sound of the air conditioner is coming through. It’s the dominant sound here. Let me get away from the window. I don’t seem to be capable of thinking outside this idea I have of God. He is the best possible thing, the most pleasant, but I can’t think about Him for too long because of the desperate hope that overcomes me when I start thinking about the fact that one day I will have to leave my mortal body fore
ver.”
VERA
Photojournalist, American citizen. Israeli father. Travels to war zones and follows international drug traffickers along their supply routes. One of Berengo’s favorites in the months between the summer of 2010 and the winter of 2011.
THE DEAL
Berengo met her at a dinner party. Everyone there was a photographer except for him. Vera didn’t help with the cooking; she sat at the table and behaved like a man, he said, sprawled out on her chair. Lazy, prone to temper tantrums, not a lesbian. Long, frizzy blonde hair. Not pretty, a little too chunky, but not ugly either, thanks to her more uncommon qualities: she’s tall and blonde and her skin had a rare brightness. She was dressed in a white caftan! Was she a poser? A little bit, yes, but then again, so were most of the photographers at the dinner, according to Berengo. Vera: “Yeah, dude—I mean, I had to leave LA; they were just spaced out all the time. I like the New York vibes more, you know?” During dinner, Vera’s answers to Berengo’s questions are all condescending, as if were annoying her. But the next day she messages him on Facebook and asks him to meet her in Green-point. He accepts. They take a short walk around the neighborhood at sunset, strolling among the shops and the hotels, the marquees all in Polish. Vera found him very pleasant, she says, because he asked her personal questions. According to him, he was sure she couldn’t stand him. A couple of hours into the walk, as things start to get intimate—at some point in the conversation she had said, “You’re funny,” a sign—Nico begins to tell Vera about his sexual idiosyncrasies. He is trying to determine if she has what it takes to become a part of the Corte. He speaks to her in his calmest, most informative voice, a light baritone neither sleazy nor brash. Then, finally: “Look, I’ve been holding back for over half an hour. All I want to say is: I’m here to be abused. I’m fully at the mercy of your psychic power. I think you’re a tremendous woman”—Vera is taller than him, steadier—“and I want you to use me as you wish, to use me and then discard me. But we have to remain friends.” This is when the “deal” is made—it’s the moment Berengo is careful to stage at the beginning of each of his relationships. He believes that he is always acting in nothing less than good faith, but he is careful to stipulate an agreement: the boundaries of the exchange have to be established, the parameters of the playing field defined. What he believes he’s making clear are the boundaries of his involvement, the very grammar of their encounter. Certain lovers will later reproach him for holding back, for not pursuing a relationship with them, for being self-contained and unable to loosen up. At which point Berengo will remind them of what he said, of the way he denied the possibility of a love story from the very beginning. It is all, as far as he can tell, rather explicit. These statements are usually hyperbolic, and his lovers often confess, some time later, that they did indeed treat them as hyperbole, that they hadn’t taken them literally, even though they were key to their relationship. In this case, the abuse Berengo refers to in his original statement finds a form in their relationship: he and Vera develop a habit of engaging in Greco-Roman wrestling during their lovemaking.
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