We stood like that, rooted to the spot, waiting for something to happen, for one of us to make the first move. In the end I opened my arms and after a moment’s hesitation she started to undress. She did so briskly, without looking at me, as if she were alone and getting ready to go to sleep. My heart leaped when she took off her panties. For the first time in my life, I felt bashful.
“What about you?” she said, once she’d pulled the sheet up over her. I sat down next to her. “Are you still angry?” she said gently.
I shook my head. I still had the flash of her body in my eyes and felt intimidated. I turned out the light and started to undress. When I was lying next to her, next to that small, hard body of hers, without touching her, I was overcome with unhappiness.
“Stroke me,” she said softly, while the radio brought us moans and groans from the world outside. “Just that, please.”
I put my hands on her small, flat belly, but couldn’t move her. I was frozen and unhappy and there was nothing in me, not even a little of that warmth I would have liked more than anything else in my life, that all-consuming warmth that would have spread from my belly through my body so that in the end I’d be able to reach her. And that low, imploring voice of hers was even worse. Instead of bringing her closer, it made her even more distant, more unattainable, and I was ice cold, inert, filled with sadness.
For a long time, the radio continued alternating static and spluttering with distinct bursts of music and it was very late when I got up and switched it off. Arianna had sat up between the sheets. Huddled on the bed, with her back against the wall, she was looking at me in silence. Then I sat down facing her and we sat there staring at each other, scrutinizing each other, until we lay down again. But nothing had changed, and in the end she fell asleep.
Toward dawn, the air turned cooler and the trees in the valley filled with birdsong. Arianna woke up and we lay there listening while the room grew lighter. Then she stood up and got dressed. “Stay where you are,” she said, giving me one of those light kisses on the lips. But I went to the window that looked out on the courtyard so that I could keep watching her. She was walking to the gate, stooped against the dawn light. She fiddled with the lock, then got in her car and drove off. I went back to the room overlooking the valley. The sight of the ruffled bedsheets gave me a pang in my stomach, so I tossed everything up in the air and carefully remade the bed. But the sheets still held her perfume. I went to brew myself some tea.
As I waited for the water to boil, I switched on the radio. It was broadcasting old songs and world news. All things considered, it was in good health.
5
I was awakened by the silence. The apartment was full of light, but even though it was almost noon not a sound came through the open windows. Something else must have happened during the night, something that was yet to play itself out. I got out of bed and went out on the balcony. The valley was silent beneath the weight of a still, clear sky and the air was motionless as if waiting for a sign. It took me a while to realize it was the heat.
All at once, I knew what to do. It’s strange how a change of season makes us want to be in a different place than where we are. Maybe it’s because the air feels different, suggesting other climates, or maybe it’s because we realize time is passing and we’re standing still. The fact remains that every time the weather changed I felt like getting the hell out. Most of the time I did nothing. That morning I decided to act. I filled a small suitcase with some shirts and a few books and as I sat down for breakfast started thinking about the places I could go with the money I had. There weren’t many places and there wasn’t much money, which meant there were even fewer places.
I thought about the north. Not Milan—it wasn’t a homecoming that I needed. For some reason, I thought about Lake Stresa, which at that time of year must have been full of azaleas and old people dressed in white drinking orange juice and reading the papers in the shade of the big trees, with Europe peering out from behind the mountains.
“Yes, it’s not bad,” Graziano Castelvecchio said when he phoned me early in the afternoon. “Whatever you do, don’t go to Crete. There’s nothing there but stones.” He’d come back the previous day, or the day before that, he couldn’t remember, but what he could remember was that he’d been looking for me. “Anyway, never make decisions in haste. I’ll wait for you here,” he said, “it’s a real beauty.”
The beauty was Piazza Navona, and when I got there I had the usual stupid idea that the sky was more beautiful there than over the rest of the city. I spotted Graziano immediately. He had on one of his legendary white shirts and was sitting in a small armchair at Domiziano’s, his pale face turned to the sun, his eyes shielded by a pair of dark glasses. He’d let his beard grow and both his hands were occupied, one holding a glass of beer and the other a glass of scotch.
“Don’t drink like that,” I said, coming up behind him. “Don’t you know alcohol kills slowly?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “I’m in no hurry.” It was an old joke. We kissed each other on the cheeks, and I asked him why the beard. He lifted a finger to get me to lower my voice. “I’m incognito,” he said. “Beard and dark glasses. Like a fucked-up cool jazz musician.” Not that he did drugs—that was a college students’ thing, he said. No, a good tandem was better than anything. He was what you’d call a serious drinker. I’d once seen him lift a beer to his lips and pour it down the collar of his shirt. I couldn’t ever remember displaying such classic lack of coordination, even in my best moments.
“That’s where you reveal yourself,” I said. “Nobody drinks in duplicate like you.”
“Not true at all,” he said, raising the two glasses. “That’s another thing that’s changed. It’s not scotch on the left and beer on the right now, but beer on the left and scotch on the right. I know a thing or two. How are you?”
“Who are you hiding from?”
“From my wife, man. Remember, you never saw me,” he said. “But don’t think you can bullshit me, I asked how you are.”
“How do you want me to be?” I said, letting my gaze wander over the square. “Well, that’s what I am.”
At that hour, the square was mainly full of old people, kids on bicycles, mothers sitting around the fountain. In the cafés, in the shade of the church, a few customers were drinking coffee and leafing through newspapers. All that was missing were the azaleas and the lake. There wasn’t a single face we recognized. Only a couple of years earlier, we would have seen nothing but friends, we’d have talked, turning from one table to the next, with our hands on the backs of our chairs so they wouldn’t be taken away from us. Those days were over, only the waiters were the same—the waiters are always the same whatever happens—and when I saw old Enrico, with his failed comedian’s face, I ordered an orange juice.
Graziano snickered. “Don’t think you can bullshit me, don’t think you can pull the wool over your best friend’s eyes. I know you shut yourself in the bathroom to have a pick-me-up when the sun goes down.”
“No,” I said. “That’s a lie, and you know it.”
“Sure,” he said, “I always know when I’m lying. Only, it’s sad going home and there’s nothing to welcome you back but vitamins. Can you explain why you dried out?”
“Fear of success.”
“At what?”
“Dying,” I said.
He was silent for a moment, then started lighting a cigar. It took him a while, and when he was done he gave me a dazzling smile. “Good for him,” he said. “He knows a thing or two.” And he once again stretched his legs on the armchair, which was turned toward the sun. But from behind his dark glasses he was studying two young men at the table opposite. They had well-combed long hair, sandals, belts, and Indian shirts, and were trying to play the flute. All at once, Graziano blew cigar smoke in their direction. “Pennywhistle rebels,” he said.
The two young men stopped playing and looked at each other. Then the sturdier of the two held up his flute
and said politely, “Want it up your ass?”
Graziano smiled behind his glasses. “Wouldn’t make much difference to the sound,” he said.
I stood up and put money on the table. I knew what he was like when he got that way, he never knew when to stop. “Can you believe those guys?” he said as we moved away under the covered walk. “But I put them in their place, didn’t I?”
“Of course,” I said. “You showed them.”
“Sure, I showed them, I can’t stand these pennywhistle rebels. Did you see how good-looking they are? I bet their teeth would break iron like it was nougat.”
His own teeth were small and decalcified. That’s what made him look like a poor man still, in spite of his two-hundred-thousand-lire clothes. It’s always the teeth that betray that a person was born poor, the teeth and the eyes, and Graziano had known a lot of hunger during the war. They’d had to operate on him twice before they’d discovered that what gave him those pains in his stomach was simply the memory of the hunger he’d experienced as a child.
We’d taken off our jackets and were walking in the sun. “So,” I said, “nothing but stones on Crete?”
“And not even a slingshot.”
“Big stones?” I said, grasping the fact that once again things hadn’t gone well for him.
“Big stones, little stones, stones of all sizes. Fucking boring!” he said as we entered Campo de’ Fiori.
We started strolling amid the market stalls. The market was bright and alive with cries—only the statue of Giordano Bruno was grim and silent, but he had his reasons. When we got to Ponte Sisto, Graziano didn’t want to cross the river because it would take him closer to his wife, who like all American women in search of local color was in Trastevere.
I barely knew her, Sandie, an abrasive character a dozen years older than him. Daughter of a sausage king, she had brought him, as a dowry, a Bentley, a blue poodle, fifteen-year-old twin daughters, and a faint smell of smoke. Graziano had treated her dismissively, but had had to stop doing that when he found himself incapable of having sex with her. That had happened during a trip to her home in Texas, when he’d realized quite how incredibly rich she was. From that point on, he’d been unable to touch her. The impotence of shock, he called it. It was the reason they traveled so much, so that Graziano should find some kind of distraction, but the more he traveled, the greater the shock.
The trip to Crete had been boring as hell. After a month in which he should have finished his novel, he’d met a Greek girl named Niarcos, and they’d gotten the hell out of there together, taking four million lire of his wife’s money with them. He’d lost it in a quarter of an hour at the casino on Corfu. The plan had been to double their capital, give Sandie her money back, and vanish to some little island in the Aegean, but Niarcos had disappeared the morning after the debacle at the casino, and he’d had to phone his wife and ask her to come spring him from the hotel, where he was being kept prisoner until he paid his bill. Sandie had arrived with the twins, and when Graziano, as his only justification, had given her encouraging news about his Inert Appendage she’d hit him with her handbag, bruising one eye. “But, Leo,” he said, taking off his glasses to show me the eye, which still bore the mark, “she was amazing! Niarcos, I mean. Really hot stuff, like you wouldn’t believe. No relation to the tycoon, you know—to the croupier, maybe.” He was silent for a moment, thinking about Niarcos. “Anyway,” he said, “what can you expect from life when the first thing they do to you as soon as you’re born is give you a slap?”
“Very profound,” I said. “And?”
“Man, she was one hell of a lay. I assumed that having made progress once, the Inert Appendage had started working again, and thinking it was the only way to calm her down—Sandie, I mean—I grabbed her and threw her down on the bed. A real macho man. If only! There she was, ready to forgive even Jesus, and nothing happened. There I was, thinking about Niarcos like a fucked-up millionaire.”
“Well,” I said, “these things happen.”
“Don’t tell me,” he said bleakly. Then he understood. “Don’t tell me it’s happened to old Manolete too?”
“Last night.”
“Poor kid,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “Is that why you want to get the hell out?” I didn’t feel like replying and we sat down on the parapet and looked at the river, which was dirty, placid, and indifferent. “‘I don’t know a lot about gods,’” Graziano said in a dignified tone, “‘but the river is…’”
“‘I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river / Is a strong brown god…,’” I said. “That’s Eliot, man, you can’t just quote him like that.”
“What are you doing, think you can catch me out? Listen: ‘… sullen, untamed and intractable, / Patient to some degree,’” he said, raising a finger. “But, then, what’s that bit about the sea and the river?”
“‘The river is within us, the sea is all about us.’”
“Congratulations, man! What are you reading?” When I said The Iliad, he raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, Christ! Listen to this. I’m away suffering the pains of hell, and what’s he doing? Reading The Iliad.”
“I did that so that when you got back, we’d have something to talk about,” I said. “Weren’t you in the Homeric seas?”
“Big deal,” he said. “Just stones.”
“What about the sea? How was the sea?”
“The sea?” He thought this over for a moment. “The sea was all about us.”
We walked along that side of the river, in the heavy shade of the plane trees. Every now and again, we stopped to look at the view of the two banks, which changed depending on the bends in the river, but each time there were domes and bridges and old buildings drenched in light as if to conserve it for when dusk came, until Castel Sant’Angelo came into view, darker and more compact than the rest, with the corroded angel at the top.
“We have to do something,” Graziano said. “What are you planning to do?”
“I told you.”
“There’s no point, man. You have to make a decision. You can’t just go on like this.”
“What are you doing?” I said. “Are you starting now?”
“Sure,” he said, “I’m doing it for the salvation of your soul. You can’t go on like this,” he said again, pointing to the angel. “What will you say to the thirtieth-birthday angel when he appears before you with his flaming sword and asks you for the last time what you intend to do with your life?”
I told him I would set my guardian angel on him. “It’s his business,” I said, “and he’s really angry.”
But Graziano was lost in thought again and said nothing. We walked on as far as Piazza del Popolo. There, in every bar, we found a message from his wife, which Graziano ignored, securing the complicity of every bartender with an astronomical tip. Whenever he did so, he’d take a mouthwatering wad of money from his jacket pocket.
“The novel is dead,” he said suddenly on our way out of one of the bars.
“They all say that.”
“I mean mine,” he said. I was sorry to hear that—it had been the one thing keeping him going. “Too difficult, too pointless. We have to start doing something substantial, otherwise what’ll we tell the angel?” He raised that thin finger of his. “You should know by now how things really are. Do you want it to be your best friend who tells you how things really are?”
“As long as he’s gentle.”
“I’ve developed a theory. They’re great inventions, theories, much better than practice. Look around you,” he said as we walked down Via del Corso, surrounded by people coming out of office buildings. “Is there anything you feel part of? No, there isn’t. And you know why there isn’t? Because we belong to an extinct species. We happen to still be alive, that’s all,” he said, stopping to light a cigar. Because, if I didn’t know, we were born just when beautiful old Europe was fine-tuning its most lucid, thorough, and definitive suicide attempt. Who were our parents? People who s
laughtered one another on the battlefields of countries that no longer existed, that’s who they were. We were born between one furlough and the next, and the hands that had stroked our mothers’ loins were dripping with blood—not bad, as images go—or else we were the children of the old, the sick, the senile. The wrecked or the wreckers. We had the most fucked-up parents in history.
“Speak for yourself,” I said, but then I recalled my father’s silence, as he repaired the chair in the kitchen on the very day he returned home from the war, and I fell silent.
You just had to look around, Graziano went on. Having returned home, our heroic progenitors threw the most opulent, festive, vulgar funeral banquet in the history of mankind. They made more children, those same pennywhistle rebels who were now replacing us. And what about us? We were an ugly memory, survivors of the slaughter, and we just had to be content with the leftovers.
“When we like them,” I said, thinking of the bowl of peanuts at the Diaconos’ apartment. Then I thought of my old Alfa Romeo and the apartment overlooking the valley. It was true, everything I possessed was someone else’s leftovers. Except for Arianna, and I didn’t possess her. “All right,” I said, “couldn’t we survivors put these leftovers together into a juicy hamburger? I’m hungry.”
“We can,” he said, “but when your angel appears, what will you do, will you offer him ground beef and onions?”
“And a lettuce leaf,” I said. “What else would you suggest?”
“A movie,” he said. “Let’s make a movie, what do you say? The story of someone who, when the angel asks him what he wants to do with his life, goes home and kills his father.” He thought this over for a moment. “Or else let’s make a nice Western,” he said. “Which would go down better right now?”
“A Western,” I said. “I already have a title, The Last of the Mohicans, what do you think?”
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