Maybe they once imitated the songs of poets, Mistral muses.
She vents her melancholy thoughts in drawings, which are becoming increasingly detailed and colorful and help her pass hours of lessons and evenings spent all alone. Her mother works late creating perfumes, and many times she comes home right before Mistral goes to sleep.
Meanwhile, in New York, Ermete has gathered a squadron of carrier pigeons, training them in the icy parks in Queens. He spends his days on the Queensboro Bridge, teaching them to cross the river and delve down among the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Now he can finally trust them with his secret messages. The first note he’s had delivered among the rooftops of Grove Court, to Harvey Miller’s aerial address, reads:
Hi, Harvey. Want to meet up for pizza?
March. New York is still gripped with cold. Harvey is still going to the gym. He goes there every chance he gets, without even mentioning it to his parents. He often stays there late.
One night, Olympia pulls him aside. “I was watching you practice on the punching bag.”
“Am I lousy?”
“No. You’ve really improved, but you’ve got some strange anger going on inside you. I know it’s none of my business, but have you got it in for somebody?”
“No,” Harvey replies. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“But it isn’t normal for a kid your age….”
“I’m paying you, aren’t I?”
“You’re spending more time here than at home.”
“I like it here. It makes me feel good.”
“Three times a week. An hour a day. Not a minute more!”
Harvey stiffens as a stabbing pain runs through his shoulders. “I don’t see why.”
“You got any brothers or sisters, Harvey?”
“Not anymore.”
Olympia raises both hands in a gesture halfway between an apology and a sign of surrender. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
“Let’s pretend I never said anything.”
Harvey shoots her a withering glance.
“I get it now,” Olympia continues. “If you want, go ahead and keep punching away at the bag until it’s in shreds.”
The door to the locker room opens and closes again. The water in the shower streams out like an icy waterfall. Harvey doesn’t even try to get it to run warmer. He clenches his teeth and doesn’t think about it. He knows how to empty his mind.
Later on, in the subway, Harvey is zooming southbound. It’s six o’clock. When the train reaches Central Park, the cars fill up with people. Harvey stubbornly remains in his seat, even though he knows he should leave it for some elderly person.
Nobody pays any attention to him. Engrossed in their books, their newspapers and the colorful displays on their iPods, thousands of indifferent strangers let themselves be whisked away down the tracks. Muffled music can be heard coming from dozens of earphones. Aching, Harvey leans against the backrest and patiently waits for his stop: Christopher Street, in the heart of the Village.
Olympia’s voice is clear in his memory. I’m sorry…. Keep punching away at the bag …
Harvey clenches his teeth, thinking how much he’d love to be able to hear his brother’s voice with that same clarity. Instead, nothing. Only silence. And noises. Millions of useless noises.
At the Twenty-third Street station, a girl gets on. She’s very tall and is wearing inebriating perfume. Looking at her, Harvey thinks of Mistral and her mother, who designs perfumes. He should call her. He should call Elettra, too. And answer Ermete’s messages. Go out for pizza with him for once.
But he doesn’t feel like doing any of that. It’s been a long time now since he’s thought of the days spent in Rome, his three friends (who all shared his birthday, Leap Day), the Ring of Fire, the tops, Jacob Mahler’s lurking shadow and Alfred Van Der Berger’s delirious messages. A few times he’s even managed to convince himself it was all just a bad dream, a surreal, imaginary adventure. But each time the train lurches on its tracks, Harvey can feel a vague dizziness inside. It’s the memory of the professor’s building collapsing all around him.
The girl beside him reaches into her purse, pulls out a little gold compact and checks her impeccable makeup. Even that brings back memories of New Year’s to Harvey’s mind. The old bronze mirror that Elettra found in the Basilica di San Clemente. They call it the Ring of Fire and they’re convinced it isn’t just any old mirror, but something much more important. Something different. When Elettra looked at her reflection in it during those last few minutes of the year that had just gone by, something happened. Something that none of them understood but that seemed to have been understood by Rome. And by the world around them. Rome had switched off; the electricity had disappeared, as if the whole city had gone centuries back in time. Past and present. And the darkness surrounding both of them. Sure, it was crazy. Harvey told himself that every day. It was probably just as crazy as bringing the mirror to New York and entrusting it to the least accurate of scholars imaginable, the only one willing to believe it had been found by following clues from a crazy professor, a gypsy woman, four toy tops and a trunk full of human teeth.
He arrives at Christopher Street.
Harvey gets off the train car and walks down the platform. Once he’s outside, he huddles up in his coat. The windows of the cafés are lit up, and behind them, dozens of businessmen are enjoying a break. Greenwich Village is a little labyrinth of short brick houses and ailanthus trees. It’s the neighborhood where they shoot all the love scenes for movies. Maybe because it doesn’t look like any other neighborhood in New York. Its streets are narrow and curvy; the houses rise up only a few floors and have wooden shutters and little gardens. Around here, people even walk a little more slowly than in the rest of the city.
Harvey heads toward Grove Court, lost in thought. He’s got a nasty feeling he can’t shake…. He stops, listens and looks behind him. Cashmere jackets. Eyeglasses with designer frames. Glittering jewelry. Black clothing. The tick-tack of high-heeled shoes. He tries to figure out what’s causing the nasty feeling inside of him.
A shadow turns down Bleecker Street, together with dozens of other shadows.
They’re following me, thinks Harvey.
It’s crazy, naturally, but he keeps thinking it. Sensing it.
He stops to look at the reflection in the window of a bakery that specializes in quiche, searching for suspicious figures on the other side of the street. But he doesn’t see any. Either that or he sees too many of them.
He walks past the gate to his house twice before deciding to go inside. Six old red houses, their windows and doors trimmed in white, look out over a pretty garden.
Harvey makes his way down the private path without turning around, his head bowed as he walks beneath the tree branches on which the first buds have already appeared.
His house is number 11. Once he’s reached the front door, he takes one last look behind him. The garden is a series of shadows standing out against the distant lights of the bars and restaurants. Overhead, the sky threatens to rain at any moment.
“You’ve got to cut it out,” Harvey grumbles, unlocking the front door. It was Ermete who gave him this contagious obsession with spies and the paranoid feeling of being followed.
The front door opens with a groan. A photocell detects his presence and lights up the stairway. He climbs up to the second floor. “Nobody’s following me,” he repeats to himself.
He walks into his house and calls out, “I’m home!”
His mother is bustling about the kitchen. The air is filled with the smell of soup. Harvey hangs his jacket up in the foyer and takes off his shoes. Inside it’s hot, stifling. Mrs. Miller always keeps the heat turned all the way up. But it isn’t only a question of temperature. It’s stifling because of an empty room, one that none of them can walk into without feeling awkward. His brother’s room.
Outside, on the sidewalk, a man’s imposing shadow is sec
tioned off by the gate’s metal bars. His massive hands disappear into the deep pockets of his dark gray mail carrier’s uniform. When they reappear, they’re clutching a small, round tin canister. The man opens it with unexpected grace and takes out a piece of green candy. He chews on it slowly. It’s mint flavored. He stares at the garden and the door through which the boy disappeared. Then he pulls out a notebook and scrupulously jots something down. Time, address, date.
Finally, he slips it back into his pocket and calmly finishes sucking on his mint. He looks at his watch. It’s almost dinnertime. He lets out a long, wavering whistle. A crow flies down and perches on the top of the gate, a few steps away from him.
“Will you stay and stand guard, Edgar?” the man dressed in gray asks it. One of the crow’s eyes is cloudy. It finds a comfortable position and huddles down among the iron bars of the gate. Taking this as a reply, the man turns around, buries his hands in his pockets and walks off into the darkness.
4
THE CATALOG
“HELLO, HARVEY,” HIS MOTHER SAYS THE MINUTE SHE SEES HIM.
“Hi. Dad isn’t here?”
“He’s in his study. Would you go call him? Dinner’s almost ready.”
“Cabbage soup?”
“Broccoli.”
The boy limps out of the kitchen.
“Harvey, are you okay?”
He stops by the doorway. “Why?”
“You’re walking funny.”
“It’s nothing. I didn’t sleep well.”
George Miller’s study is at the end of the hallway, to the right. Standing guard at its sides are two Roman amphorae, a gift from a Turkish university. Leading to the room is a little antechamber. This is where Professor Miller has his students wait when they come to submit their research work to him.
He teaches dynamic climatology at NYU. Which means everything and nothing to Harvey. His father’s area of expertise is cataclysms. Volcanic eruptions, storms, anomalous waves, research that can predict earthquakes. He makes highly complicated calculations on the drifting of the continents. In his mind are all the planet’s figures. Temperatures, heights, depths. He’s a walking encyclopedia with a passion for statistics, a penchant for sports coats and bow ties, and a prodigious memory.
He wants only perfectly flawless data. In their attempts to provide this to him, his students show up dragging along backpacks full of figures. The professor welcomes them into his study, nods, double-checks … and then, without fail, he finds some kind of fault, an inexact detail, and his students need to start all over again.
“I’m telling you, it’s twelve per mille! One point two percent!” George Miller’s voice booms through the hallway with a tone that is peeved, to say the least.
Harvey sighs, tired of his father’s never-ending agitation. He pauses between the two amphorae and waits for the conversation to end.
“It’s simply impossible!” his father’s voice insists. “Why don’t we stop kidding around?”
There are some framed photographs on the étagère in the hallway. Even though Harvey knows them by heart, he looks at them for the millionth time. In the one taken at the Rocky Mountains are the two of them, standing side by side. His brother is on the right, blond, twice as tall as he is and six years older. Dwaine.
Dwaine was good at everything. He could fix anything at all, an electrical appliance with a piece of string, a car by tightening a few bolts…. He spent last winter putting back together, piece by piece, a grandfather clock from the 1700s he’d found at an antiques shop in Queens. Harvey remembers perfectly well its gold face, its pointy hands that looked like arrowheads, the springs to be inserted one by one with needle-nose pliers, the cogwheels and gears to be positioned just so. The clock is still at the end of the hall, in perfect working condition, but it’s never been wound again.
In the study, Mr. Miller is still ranting. Harvey decides to interrupt him. “Dad?” he says, opening the door slightly and peeking into the room. Inside are four walls lined with books. His father is in the middle of the room, sitting at a glass desk that’s as shiny as a mirror. When he sees his son, the professor gestures for him to come in and keep quiet.
“Of course, Matt,” he’s saying on the phone, “but there’s no such thing as possible findings. Either they’re right or they’re wrong. And this one, if I may say, is simply ludicrous. It’s impossible for there to have been an increase of that magnitude over the course of only three months. The temperatures weren’t recorded accurately, that’s all…. How should I know where the error is? Faulty instrumentation, kids not paying attention … you figure it out!” He waves some sheets of paper in front of him, flustered. “The fact remains that the documentation you sent me is worthless. And the university doesn’t finance an oceanographic expedition in the Pacific just to be given worthless documentation. If you don’t want to stick around there sunbathing anymore, all you have to do is say so! What …?” George Miller straightens his bow tie, staring up at some imaginary spot to his left. Meanwhile, he waves Harvey over to one of the two chairs in the study.
Harvey sits down stiffly on the edge of the leather armchair. His father’s desk looks like the frozen foods section in a supermarket. There’s not one item too many. Nothing is out of place. There’s not even a pen resting crooked on the desktop. There’s just a big green book and the sheets of paper, which he picks up and waves in the air as if they were an eviction notice.
After his millionth outburst, the professor suddenly calms down. “Listen, we’ll talk about this next week when you have the new data, all right? I’ll be expecting it. But make sure it’s right this time!” He hangs up the phone with a sigh. “This is crazy! They say all our hope lies in today’s young generation! Well, I say we should ship them all off to work in Alaska!”
“Time to eat,” Harvey announces a little coldly, given that he can’t help considering himself part of today’s young generation.
His father grumbles something about the time and picks the green book up from his desk.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing that would interest you,” he replies dryly.
“The Life of Charles Darwin …,” Harvey reads from the spine of the book.
“Have you already studied him at school?”
“Of course,” the boy replies. “He’s the one who thought we descended from the apes.”
The professor walks halfway around his desk. “Amazing.”
“What?”
“That such a complex theory as the one regarding the origin of the species could be summarized like that.”
“Did I get something wrong?”
“No. Actually … it’s the essence of the problem,” he replies, switching off his desk lamp. “Darwin said that today we can find only one percent of the animals that have lived on the Earth since the beginning of life itself.”
“We’ve lost ninety-nine percent of the animals?”
“We haven’t lost them. They’ve changed. And man has changed as well.” Professor Miller picks up a black folder and walks out of the study with Harvey.
“But what if the apes were the ones who evolved from man?” his son asks him as they make their way into the kitchen.
“Possible, but improbable.”
In the kitchen, Mrs. Miller is already serving up the broccoli soup. “What are you two chatting about?”
“Apes and bigger apes.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Her husband hands her the folder. “Take a look at this, if you like.”
“What is it?”
“A catalog from an antiques dealer. He came to see me, passing himself off as a student. An odd fellow, but definitely cultivated. Kind of like a skeleton with a Russian accent. Mmm …,” he adds, sitting down at the table. “This smells delicious.”
“Broccoli and lentils.”
“Lentil soup in March?” grumbles Harvey, whose training at the gym has left him starving. “Isn’t that a winter dish?”
>
“Technically, it’s still winter,” his father points out. “It will be until March twentieth, the spring equinox.”
“Are we having anything else with this?” Harvey asks, tasting the soup. His mother delves into the pages of the catalog.
“They opened up a new restaurant over on Seventh,” Mr. Miller remarks distractedly.
The woman glances up at him. “The Ethiopian restaurant? Terrible. You have to eat everything with your hands.”
“So what? It could be fun! And those spicy concoctions are fantastic!” the professor replies.
“Is there anything else, besides the soup?” Harvey asks.
“But still, I’m not going to eat with my hands.”
“Can I have a steak?” Harvey says insistently.
The antiques dealer’s catalog is removed from the table. Mrs. Miller stands up and takes a brick-shaped steak out of the freezer. “I’ll thaw it out for you in the microwave.”
“At the dinner table,” her husband remarks, raising his fork, “there are those who are evolved and those who aren’t.”
“What about the Chinese, then?” asks Harvey.
“I hate those ridiculous wooden chopsticks!”
“You should try telling Sheng they’re ridiculous.”
“Who’s Sheng?”
“What do you mean, who’s Sheng?”
“Ah, yes,” Professor Miller continues, recalling their New Year’s in Rome. “Your Chinese friend. The one with the eye affliction.”
“What affliction are you talking about?” his wife asks, turning the dial on the microwave all the way up.
“Have you ever seen a Chinese person with blue eyes before?”
The microwave hums for a few minutes and then lets out its high-pitched chime.
“There wouldn’t happen to be two steaks, would there?” the professor asks.
“I believe there are, dear.”
The man nods, pleased by the news. “Everything all right at school, Harvey?”
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