Last Summer in the City

by Gianfranco Calligarich

  “God, I can never talk seriously to this old faggot,” he said. “Can’t you be a little bit serious for once?”

  “Who’s putting up the money?”

  “Now you’re just being negative,” he said, sitting down on the Spanish Steps. “Sandie, who do you think? As soon as I can provide her the necessary guarantees. Couldn’t lend me a dildo, could you?”

  There were azaleas on the steps, great vases of azaleas everywhere, in addition to the painters, the hippies, the tourists, the necklace vendors. A limpid Roman evening was settling over the roofs, and the wind wafted the scent of the flowers to us and ruffled our shirts. Graziano fell silent, wilting, as he watched the traffic circling the fountain. The wind stirred his beard, and his cigar, which he was gripping weakly between his teeth, turned red at the tip.

  The city was caressing us. Gradually, it became less difficult to think about Arianna. Basically, nothing irreparable had happened. Nothing irreparable ever happened in this city—sad things, maybe, but not irreparable ones. And anyway, if I was going to leave town, I wanted to see her. At this hour, she must be in Eva’s store, playing solitaire.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said. “I know some people nearby who could offer us a drink.”

  “Leftovers,” he said, “nothing but leftovers.”

  Graziano pulled himself to his feet and followed me up the steps until we got to Trinità dei Monti, then we took the street that went downhill, leading to Eva’s store. We climbed the front steps, holding on to the railing, then pushed the glass door. A bell rang as it opened. The humorist was there reading something aloud, along with the fashion model, Livio Stresa, and Paolo, that journalist with the special way with women, sitting next to Arianna. I was greeted as if it were the most natural thing in the world for me to be joining them.

  It wasn’t an unpleasant situation. I made the introductions, while Graziano, suddenly concerned with etiquette, struggled with his jacket, searching for a sleeve. “How are you all?” he said. Arianna smiled. This confused Graziano for a moment and as he tried to walk over to her, buttoning up his jacket as he did, he slipped on the rug and almost fell. She laughed. Up until then, I hadn’t realized how drunk he was.

  “Why don’t the two of you sit down?” Eva said. “That seems safer.”

  But I said we had to leave right away, we had an appointment.

  Graziano looked at me in surprise, then joined in the game. “Sure,” he said, puffing at his cigar butt, “a whole bunch of appointments. That’s what we’re like.”

  “Just for a while,” Arianna said, abandoning her cards. “Please!”

  “They said they have things to do,” Eva said. The others said nothing, looking at us with conciliatory smiles.

  “But they only just arrived!” Arianna said.

  Something in her voice hit Graziano in some particularly sensitive spot, because he again looked at her and the smile faded on his lips. “Whose are you?” he said, without taking his eyes off her. Someone laughed, which annoyed him. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Can’t I ask a question?” Then he suddenly fell silent, swayed, and looked around for support. The only thing at hand was a little table with a Chinese vase on it, which wobbled alarmingly. For a moment, we all grimaced, as if hearing the smash. Seeing Eva look so ashen cheered me up and I took Graziano by the arm and walked him over to a chair. “Never sit down,” he said, raising a finger. “Nobody may come to help you up.” Then he moved me aside to get a better view of Arianna. “What shall we talk about?”

  “The subjunctive?” she said.

  “Where we’re going to dinner, you, me, and Leo,” Graziano said. “This is Leo. My best friend.”

  “I thought as much,” Arianna said.

  “But didn’t you have an appointment?” Eva said, her lips still pursed even though she’d recovered from her fright.

  “Canceled,” Graziano said. “All our appointments have been canceled. Why don’t you come along too? Let’s all go eat some leftovers at Charlie’s. Charlie’s leftovers are the best in town.”

  “Drop it,” I said. “Maybe another time.”

  “That’s what you always say. You can’t fool me, you always know a thing or two.”

  “I guarantee it,” Arianna said.

  “All right, all right,” he said, raising his finger. “Never insist. It isn’t good taste. I’m getting up now,” he said, starting to summon his legs.

  I tried to help him, but he pushed me away, and so we all sat there watching his resurgence. He managed to stand on his third attempt, and Arianna gave a little laugh. “If you want something done, do it yourself, right?” she said.

  He looked at her. “I always do it myself,” he said.

  He kissed her hand, then Eva’s, then the model’s. All very proper, truth be told, but by now too late to save face. All we could do now was get the hell out of there, as quickly as possible.

  Arianna walked us to the door. “How are you?” she said to me in a sweet tone.

  “How do you want me to be?” I said. “I’m fine.”

  She stood there watching us as we walked down the stairs, which didn’t make things easier because Graziano kept turning his head to look at her. Outside, things went better. The evening wind revived him. “Whose is she?” he said again.

  “Nobody’s.”

  “That’s impossible. Isn’t she your girl?”

  “No.”

  “Amazing,” he said. “Right now, I’m going to go home, take a shower, and come back for her.” Instead, we went to a trattoria on Via del Babuino and he walked in and asked in a loud voice for the best leftovers in the house. Then he plunged headfirst into a huge plate of macaroni in cream sauce. He ate quickly, in silence, as if giving himself a transfusion. “Don’t expect me to buy that,” he said all at once, raising his head from the plate. “She’s your girl.”

  * * *

  At midnight we ended up in a disco, a dark, noisy place like all places of that kind, full of ghosts. We’d chosen a table a long way from the speakers, but it wasn’t any use and we had to scream in each other’s ears to make ourselves heard. I’d have liked to leave, but Graziano had his eye on a big, phosphorescent cube in the middle of the room where some long-legged girls were dancing. There was one of them he particularly liked. All at once, he threw himself into the mix, insisting that I follow him. For a while the three of us danced, but the girl didn’t seem to mind. Actually, all the people there were doing their own thing, as if they were in a skating rink. All at once, another girl materialized from the darkness, having been wandering through the room on her own, and now there were four of us.

  We managed to keep them with us even when the music granted us a break and we walked back to the table, and Graziano ordered a bottle of champagne, which the girls started drinking as if it were orange juice. They weren’t bad. Very sure of themselves, truth be told.

  “Allow us to introduce ourselves,” Graziano said. “Gazzara and Castelvecchio. The last of the Mohicans.” One of the girls asked if that was a band. “Oh yes,” Graziano said. “We’re banned everywhere. More champagne?”

  But they preferred to dance, and we followed them back onto the floor, determined to enjoy ourselves. Soon afterward, taking advantage of the fact that we were an even number and that, after all, we’d all shared champagne, we tried to embrace them, but they didn’t like our hands on them and they wriggled out of our grasps and continued swaying gently, which made things worse. By dint of insistence, we managed to keep them still for a while when the DJ had the bright revivalist idea of putting on an Elvis Presley song from a dozen years earlier.

  “Hear that, Leo?” Graziano said, winking at me over his girl’s shoulder. “Good old Elvis!”

  But the girl freed herself with an impatient gesture. “Do they still play seventy-eights here?” she said to her companion. They preferred to talk between themselves.

  “Records are the only things progress has slowed down,” I said as we walked back
to our table. It struck me as a good topic of conversation, but when I put it to the girls it fell as flat as some observation about the weather. As they drank, they kept glancing around the room.

  “Christ, girls!” Graziano said. “Let’s talk about something. You make me feel like some fucked-up seventy-year-old, with all this champagne, and the two of you constantly holding your noses in the air.”

  They looked at him in surprise and might even have said something if a long-haired young guy dressed in red velvet hadn’t suddenly appeared at our table and held his hand out to Graziano’s girl. “Are you coming?” he said. The girl was getting to her feet when Graziano turned pale and, before I could do anything, threw himself on the young guy.

  In the darkness and confusion, nobody noticed that there was a fight at our table, not that it lasted very long anyway. When Graziano sat down again, he’d lost his dark glasses and his shirt was torn.

  “Who is that asshole?” the young guy said loudly as he was dragged away by the girls.

  We were left on our own. “I’ll show him,” Graziano said breathlessly. “I’ll show those pennywhistle rebels. What is this—I provide the champagne and he nabs the girls? I’m going to take a shower, then I’ll go find him and smash his face in.”

  But he was all in. He was slumped in his chair, panting, too weak even to hold his glass. It took him quite some time to recover. For a while he sat staring into the darkness and biting his lip, then he stood up and headed for the bathroom. But he stopped in the middle of the room and climbed into the big phosphorescent cube. When he was up there, he didn’t move. He stood there for a while looking down at the floor a couple meters below. By the time I figured out what he was planning to do, it was already too late. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him pull that stunt, but I thought at least by now that was something he’d had enough of. He swayed a little on the edge of the cube, then dropped to the floor face-first.

  I elbowed my way through the crowd. He was lying facedown on the linoleum, so still it was quite scary. Someone touched him on the shoulder with that cautious revulsion with which we touch strangers who get sick in the middle of the street. I turned him over as gently as I could. His beard was smeared with blood. “Lucky Strike,” he said calmly. That was all he smoked at such moments. I passed on the request to the waiters nearby and before long a Lucky Strike arrived. I lit it and put it between his lips.

  “Let him smoke it,” I said to the waiters, who wanted to get him back on his feet. “He’ll get up when he’s finished.”

  And, in fact, it wasn’t long before he asked me to help him up. I walked him to the bathroom, waited at the door of the stall while he finished throwing up, then washed his face with a handful of wet toilet paper. He had a black-and-blue bump right in the middle of his forehead. “Christ, what a knock,” he said, touching himself with his fingertips. “Feel it, it’s throbbing like a heart.” I also tried to clean his shirt, but that only made things worse. “Forget it,” he said. “I have a whole lot of shirts.” To get out, we had to go back across the room, but he didn’t want me to help him. He was walking very upright, his trunk stiff. After a suicide attempt, you always need a lot of dignity.

  He refused a taxi and we set off on foot, but he immediately grew tired and we had to sit down on the steps of a basilica that rose imposingly in a deserted square. He lit a cigar and let his gaze wander along the outside wall of the basilica until he saw a little door. He got up and went to see where it led. We found ourselves in a cloister enclosed by columns carved from boulders.

  “Christ,” he said, “more rocks.”

  Above us were high brick vaults, open to the sky in places, and looking up you could see the starry heavens, divided into circles, ellipses, and triangles, like one of those maps showing the trajectories of the planets. We were looking around when in the silence we heard someone knocking on glass and a monk appeared at a lighted window. “What do you want?” he said in a soft, kindly voice.

  “Which floor is God?” I said. Graziano, in the shadows, laughed quietly. The monk was silent for a moment, not sure how to respond, then jerked his thumb upward. “In the attic,” he said, “but he’s asleep right now. Do you want me to tell him anything?”

  “Yes,” Graziano said, “tell him we looked for him but couldn’t find him. Now it’s up to him to find us.”

  “Try to come here during the day,” the monk said. “Now go, but remember to close the door. Good night.”

  “Did you hear the brother? He knew a thing or two,” Graziano said when we were back outside. “Where do you think we can find a taxi? I’m at the end of my tether.” When we found one, we collapsed onto the seats. Graziano started humming the Presley song. “Man, what a giant!” he said every now and again. “There’s never been anyone else like him, right, Leo? You know what we’re going to do now? We’re going to Sandie’s, we’ll wake her up and tell her she has to finance our movie.”

  “She’ll shoot us down.”

  “No she won’t,” he said. “She’s a woman of the world, didn’t you know that? She knows I’m the man of the house. In a way, at least. And besides, there are no guns in the place.”

  There was no need to wake her. Sandie was up, and didn’t even let us in past the entryway, which was almost entirely occupied by a Ping-Pong table. Graziano looking as wrecked as he did merely increased her anger. Where had we been? What had we been doing? Sandie’s face was covered with some kind of cream, and there was a kerchief wrapped around her head. She wasn’t at her best, in terms of appearance, but she didn’t care.

  I found it hard to defend myself from her attack. Graziano, smiling slyly, had gone and sat down in the one armchair in the room and was looking at us in silence. “Shall we talk seriously?” he said.

  “Now’s not the time, Graziano,” I said.

  “Talk seriously about what?” Sandie said. “This is serious! Who pays the bills? Who pays the bills all day long? I don’t support your friends, and I want to know who pays the bills.”

  Sitting on the Ping-Pong table, the two twins, who were also still up, watched us in silence, chewing gum. Graziano noticed them and started saying, “What are you two still doing up?” but saying it in every possible tone—soft, paternal, worried, irritated, imperious. He was like an actor trying out a difficult line. Then all at once he took his belt off. For a moment I thought he was going to use it on the two bovine figures on the table. Instead, he buckled it around his head and slumped facedown on the armchair. It was his treatment for hair loss.

  “Look at him!” Sandie said furiously. “What does he need his hair for?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “To comb it?”

  Graziano chuckled, and even I couldn’t refrain from a little smile. Given the hour, it wasn’t a bad joke. Sandie, though, didn’t appreciate it and started yelling. “Faggots!” she said. “Faggots!”

  At this point I decided I would get the hell out of there. I bowed, then stopped at the door and asked Graziano if he wanted to come with me. He still had his head down. “No, Leo,” he said, “I only just got back, and Sandie would be offended.” So I left him there looking at life from the most bearable position.

  * * *

  But I was at the end of my tether, truth be told, and when I found myself on the street, heading for Ponte Sisto, I started to kick the garbage cans, overturning them on the cobblestones. The river was black and in the distance the beacon on the Gianicolo pierced the sky at regular intervals. On Campo de’ Fiori they were already setting up the market stalls for the next day and I took two apples from a pile of crates and ate them as I walked toward Piazza Navona. The fountain glistened motionlessly on its blue base in the middle of the deserted square. The square was magnificent at that hour, as if aware of its own splendor and its own pointless survival. I settled down under the arches and sat there looking at it, waiting to feel the desire to go home. But the desire didn’t come and so it occurred to me to go to the sea. The deserted streets urged me to star
t up my old Alfa Romeo. I got there in less than half an hour.

  It was vast, immense, dark. I went and sat down at the end of a jetty. The sea was all about me, the waves beating on the shore, and, in the distance, in the darkness, the lamps of the fishing boats winked. What did old Cavafy say? The city will follow you, he said. For elsewhere, he said, do not hope, there is no ship for you, there is no road, just as you’ve wasted your life here, in this little corner, you’ve ruined it in the entire world. He knew a thing or two, that old Cavafy. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and thought about the packed suitcase I’d left at home. Well, I’d arrived where I meant to arrive. Now all I could do was turn back.

  From some very distant place, the sky was starting to lighten by the time I got home. Outside the gate, a little English car was parked. I knew it well by now. And the girl who was inside it, fast asleep in her seat. “Arianna,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

  It took her a while to figure out where she was. Then she tried to smile. “Oh, Leo!” she said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.”

  6

  Summer arrived unexpectedly early. At the beginning of May, a cloudless Egyptian sky dominated the city for some days, until we found ourselves, almost by magic, in high summer. The cafés threw their glass doors wide open, beneath the awnings along the river the jukeboxes started to scream out the songs nursed during the winter, and hundreds of buses deposited hordes of tourists in front of the ruins. The long, wearying Roman summer had begun and I had made up my mind. I’d asked Renzo Diacono to get me work in TV. He’d cheered up and invited me to lunch at Charlie’s, where he got me to fill out an application form and told me all the good things I’d be able to do once I was hired. He was certain I was the right man for the job. He didn’t specify what the job was, but he was absolutely certain.

  In the meantime, I went to the sea every morning with Arianna. She couldn’t stand beach resorts, all those people under their umbrellas with their portable radios, so we’d preferred to scour the coast northward in search of quiet spots and a little clean water. We’d found it, but most of the time, in order to get to it, we had to climb over the perimeter wall of some still-uninhabited villa, and there, on the sun-drenched concrete terrace, surrounded by the rocks of some private dock, we’d put our towels down and start to read while waiting to take a dip.