by André Aciman
He unscrewed his pen top, opened his ledger, and immersed himself in writing a long negative report.
Once out on the street, we never tried to stay together, since as soon as we were outside the school the usual configurations reformed, and Luciano was there, ready to glue himself to my side, very often not leaving me until we were at the corner of Via Terranova, halfway up Corso Giovecca. But apart from the afternoons when we saw each other for gym lessons (at least two of them), we began to phone each other in the evening, usually before going to bed.
What did we talk about? I couldn’t say; I’ve forgotten.
I suppose we talked about the teachers, about our schoolmates, about the books we were reading—we had utterly different tastes: I preferred cloak-and-dagger novels of adventure, Dumas, Ponson du Terrail, Verne, and the Children’s Encyclopaedia; he was more advanced and liked books of popular science and fictionalized biographies. We talked, I suppose, about things without much importance when set beside what was brewing. But how else could we have behaved? The sound of our words was the ink with which the cuttlefish, in order to flee from a threat, darkens the water around it. Under the refuge of that acoustic ink we kept on studying, brushing against each other the cautious tentacles we had extended.
However, what Cattolica told me about Boldini and Grasso, I remember very well indeed.
Against all my expectations, Cattolica displayed an absolute freedom of judgement toward them. In his opinion, Boldini had “an excellent brain.” He lacked imagination, though, that flair which always accompanied true intelligence. Very ordered, punctual as a Swiss watch, over-precise, he was too closed up in himself, too egotistical. In the six years he’d known him, he’d never been able to put together a coherent argument, never any proper reasoning. At every attempt of his, Boldini always replied with the usual grunts, the usual whistling through his teeth, the same old pats on the back. He was strong, that was certainly true, more than strong. Last month he had swum across the River Po, up at the Giarina, when the temperature was almost sub-zero. But all considered, he was a mediocrity, and his cultish devotion to building up his muscles was abundant proof of that. As for Grassi, although his mind and character were the opposite of “that other one,” he didn’t amount to much either. He read a great deal, knew masses of things, but at the end of the day, what did that count for? . . . Boldini never read a single book that wasn’t an assigned text, and that, it was clear, was a mistake. But Grassi read too much, at random, with the result that he stuffed his head with junk and made his short-sightedness worse day by day. Was he a good character? He tried hard enough to be considered as such, with that sickly air of a Silvio Pellico!** But at the end of the day he was sincere, a friend you could count on . . . Maturity, balance, a harmony between their various mental and physical qualities, that was what they were both missing, Boldini as much as Grassi.
By such criticism, it became evident that it was his intention to place himself and me on another, higher plane. But I didn’t let myself become spellbound. Hearing him hold forth in that way about his best friends made me more distrustful than ever.
I had a burning desire to teach him a lesson. For this reason, too, I often made a point of speaking well of Luciano. He wasn’t an idiot at all—I would say—nor was he the hypocrite everyone thought him. I understood that he looked unprepossessing, and from the beginning even I’d had to overcome no small internal resistance. On the other hand, if one were only to choose one’s friends on the basis of their physical appearance, what would become of mankind? And goodbye to any Christian charity! When Pulga arrived in Ferrara—I recounted, moved by my own words despite myself—he knew no one and had nothing, not even the school books. His family had yet to find a house—they had to camp out in the Hotel Tripoli: in the condition he found himself in then, how could I refuse the help and hospitality he was in such urgent need of? True: although he wasn’t an idiot at all—he made as if he was, mainly because he was too lazy to make an effort—I didn’t get much from studying with him, but not even intellectual capability constitutes the true cement of friendship.
“And what, according to you, does constitute the true cement of friendship?” Cattolica asked me at this point one evening.
We were on the phone. Heralded by a little sarcastic chuckle, the question took me by surprise.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s hard to say. How do two people ever become friends? Because, fundamentally, they like each other, I suppose. But would you tell me why you’re asking me a question like that?”
“Just because,” he replied mysteriously. “No particular reason. I only wanted to have your learned opinion on the matter. So then the true cement of friendship would consist of”—here he laughed again—“reciprocal feelings. Have I got that right?”
“Absolutely.”
For a moment, he added nothing more. But the next evening, again on the phone, it was he who returned to the topic once more. He began by declaring that he’d thought long and hard about what we’d spoken of the day before. It was right that amity and “amore ” had the same root: “am .” And if love is fundamentally a desire to be in accord with, to identify oneself with the other, to feel with the other (“sun-pathèin ”), it follows that “sympathy” is at the root of friendship as well. But now would I let him put another question to me?
“Of course.”
I registered a slight hesitation on the line.
“Let’s be frank with each other,” he said in a strangely wearied voice. “Do you really like Pulga?”
“I do, yes,” I replied with a laugh, relieved. “Why shouldn’t I like him? He might not be a high-flyer. Sometimes he can be a bit of a bore, a bit interfering. But at heart he’s a good character. You people immediately shut the door in his face, because . . . Poor thing. He really hasn’t deserved that kind of treatment.”
I was confident he would see I was right, would recognize how wrong he’d been and say sorry.
“Have you ever been to his house?” he asked instead.
“No. Why? He always comes round to mine.”
“Well, listen . . . ” he went on, once again, hesitantly, “ . . . do you think that he likes you ?”
I was shaken by the question, but even more by the tone of his voice, at first unsure and subdued, then suddenly resolute: like someone who, after hesitating a long time between two roads, one easy and level, the other steep and perilous, finally decides on the second. I didn’t understand. Where was all this going?
I replied that everything made me believe my feelings were reciprocated.
“You’re sure of that?”
“I would say so. As I told you, it’s always he who seeks me out. If he didn’t like me, wouldn’t you think that rather than coming round every afternoon to my house, he’d go to someone else’s? Even . . . ” I added ironically “ . . . round to yours.”
He sighed.
“How naive you are!”
“Naive?”
But he didn’t want to explain it to me. He was so unwilling that, to persuade him, or rather, to use his own phrase—to rid him of the lead weight he was carrying—I was forced to insist a great deal. At last, he burst out by saying that I ought to hear Pulga—my dear Pulga—what delightful things he said about me behind my back!
9.
“DON’T TAKE it amiss, but you really are naive,” Cattolica had repeated in conclusion. “And that’s precisely why I’m so disgusted by his behavior.”
I could see he wasn’t trying to hoodwink me, that he was telling the truth. And yet although I was hurt (my heart had almost stopped), it was all I could do to stop myself yelling with joy. This was my big chance to get free of Luciano—I suddenly thought—here it was at last!
I managed, somehow, to restrain myself.
“I don’t believe it,” I said irritably.
“I expected that,” he replied. “But I can give you proof if you want.”
I didn’t reply, and put down the receiver. I w
as sure he’d ring back. I waited for some minutes, shut in the telephone cupboard. Nothing. Suddenly the door opened and my mother’s face appeared.
“What are you doing sitting there in the dark?” she asked, scrutinizing me with worried eyes.
“I was on the phone.”
“To whom? Cattolica?”
“Yes.”
“Why is it, these last few days, you’re always on the phone to him?”
Instead of replying, I gave her a light kiss on the cheek and said goodnight.
It was very hot in my room. As soon as I entered I locked the door and opened the windows wide. It was a lovely, starry night, moonless, but very bright. Down in the garden the shape of the trees stood out sharply: there the magnolia, and farther back the fir-tree, and down at the end where the three arches of the entrance terminated was the lime-tree. Between the flowerbeds was the milky whiteness of the gravel, and in the middle of the even brighter clearing that opened in front of the dark cave of the entrance, a black spot: a stone perhaps, or maybe Filomena, our ancient tortoise, whose awakening from hibernation my mother had joyfully announced at supper.
“Filomena!” I called out in a muffled voice. “Hey!”
I stepped back into the room, slowly undressed, and, without closing the window, stretched out on the bed with my hands linked behind my neck. I was completely naked. From the garden the intense odor of plants and the grass was perceptible. More than ever convinced that Cattolica had not been lying, I thought about Luciano. But of course! I said to myself again and again, gradually taking in the huge injustice Luciano had done me, and yet at the same time feeling glad, lightened, freed of a crushing weight. But of course! How blind I’d been for so long, not to have seen what a traitor Luciano was! I tried to shrug it off, to rise above it. “What a swine!” I muttered between my teeth, “what a bastard!” Tomorrow, at school, I would confront that Judas straightaway. I would ask him point blank: “So it’s like that, is it? So it’s true you badmouth me behind my back?” and without waiting for him to deny or confirm it, I would give him a slap in front of everyone. I could see the whole scene: me, red in the face with my eyes popping out, fists raised to punch him; he, the little wretch, the despicable little cad, writhing at my feet as he tried to protect his swollen, bruised face, while the others stood around in a circle in silence. I would fly into a fury, rain down blows on him, and Luciano wouldn’t defend himself. He would only try to shield his face with those repellent palms of his, without even crying. He would take his punishment, and that would be it.
The next day, as soon as I awoke from a dreamless, leaden sleep, everything took on a different aspect. I was still determined to profit from the opportunity that had been offered me to break with Luciano, to unchain myself once and for all from the enslavement of that hideous nightmare, which had, for some time, secretly and unconfessably, darkened my days. But my role of executioner quickly seemed absurd to me, and, besides, hard to put into practice. And with Luciano standing at the corner of Corso Giovecca and Via Borgoleoni, waiting for me—without doubt, he was waiting for me: and, spotting him, I felt myself seized with an obscure sense of guilt and fear—I tried to behave as if nothing had happened. That cool, sunny morning we walked together to school, speaking of matters both trivial and serious. Every now and then I glanced at him. He seemed smaller than ever, weak and pathetic in his grey vicuña short trousers, with skinny legs like a flamingo. But I could barely bring myself to look at his high, slightly bulging forehead, the seat of so much malice.
Further down the entrance corridor, flanked by his usual cronies, I saw Cattolica. He was walking with Boldini and Grassi, looking tall and slender between them, and he stared at me with a serious, haughty expression. I pretended not to see him. But in class, as we waited for the lesson to begin, it was he who spoke first.
“A fine way to behave,” he began, with a look both offended and disgusted. “Might you explain why yesterday evening you slammed the phone down on me?”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I’m not sure why myself.”
“Do you believe me, or don’t you?”
Pale, thin, he scrutinized me with those black eyes of his that burned with fanaticism in the depths of their sockets, like those of a medieval monk. I understood clearly that his motive was only the wish to humiliate me. But I needed him now. No one else besides him could help me.
“I’ll believe you when you’ve given me proof,” I replied.
The teacher, I don’t remember which, came in, and we had to shut up. But during the morning Cattolica returned to the topic several times. It was hard to talk that way, both of us covering our mouth with our hands, but we did so anyway.
“Fair enough,” he began, “it’s more than reasonable you should ask for proof. But to have it, you’d have to come round to my house.”
“To your house?”
“Definitely. I’ll ask Pulga to come as well, and so you’ll hear for yourself the kind of stuff he says.”
“But what exactly does he say?”
“If you want me to tell you,” he replied, with a grimace of distaste, “you’ll have to wait till the cows come home. I can’t stand gossiping.”
The idea of a confrontation now began to frighten me.
“Hear for myself?” I murmured. “But how will I do that?”
“Come to my place, I’ve told you. I have a very precise plan to make him sing. Don’t be scared.”
“When should I come?”
“Today, if you’d like.”
“At what time?”
“Oh, whenever you please,” he said in a considerate tone. “At four, at five, at six, at seven . . . come when you want. All you have to do,” and here he smiled, “is tell me exactly when.”
I pointed at the backs of Boldini and Grassi.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “They’ll be there too. For it to work, they need to be.”
I still hesitated, but ended up agreeing. I said that I’d get rid of Pulga with some excuse or other and that I’d be at his house at six.
“Be on time,” he warned me. “Otherwise there’s the risk you’ll meet him at the door.”
At the exit, there Luciano was, once again at my side. But by then I was calm and determined.
“By the way,” I said when we’d come to the top of Via Borgoleoni, “it’s better if you don’t come round today.”
He arched an eyebrow.
“No? Why’s that?”
In the school entrance, a little earlier, I had seen Cattolica say something to him, and him replying and then nodding silently. What a hypocrite! I thought. How good he was at faking, the hideous little worm!
“I’ve an appointment,” I replied brusquely, avoiding his bright blue eyes anxiously searching my own, and staring instead at the little droplets of sweat that pearled above his upper lip.
“An appointment?”
I threw out the first thing that came into my head. I had to go to my Uncle Giacomo’s to be examined. With my mother.
“Has your sore throat come back?”
“Yes.”
I pretended to swallow with difficulty.
“I think my uncle wants to operate.”
He stared at me with a strange, dark, saddened expression. As if he had guessed I was lying. As if he had guessed everything.
“I see. And what time do you go to your uncle’s? If you were going late, I could come round to yours a bit earlier. Perhaps at three, or three-thirty.”
“No, it’s better you don’t. I’m not sure what time my uncle wants to see me.”
We had stopped to talk at the angle of Corso Giovecca, at the same spot where I’d met him that morning, and there we parted.
At six o’clock on the dot I rang the doorbell of Cattolica’s house.
It was he who opened the door, and it was he, having come down the three concrete steps in front of the door, who hefted my bike onto his shoulders and went into the small entrance hall before me.
Outsid
e, it was still very light. I had crossed the city with the low sun in my eyes, but in the narrow entrance hall of the Cattolicas’ house, without a window and lit only by a solitary low-wattage lamp, it was so dark it was hard to see. I noticed, at a glance, the floor covered with dark, shiny, slippery tiles, an enormous coat rack up against the wall of the entrance door, the bare, ugly, skeletal staircase that, in the same kind of dense concrete as the outer steps, ascended in a spiral to the floor above, and in front of me, beneath the stairs, a half-closed glass door, beyond which I could just make out a small dining room crossed by a melancholy ray of sunlight. Heaped up one on top of the other against the coat-rack, were three bicycles. The first was Cattolica’s, a grey Maino. Cattolica added mine to the pile, then, having second thoughts, lifted it back on to his shoulders.
“What are you doing?” I asked in a whisper.
“Wiser to carry it through there into the dining room,” he replied, also in a whisper. “Sly as he is, he’d be bound to notice.”
He made his way toward the glass door and disappeared into the room.
“The others are here?” I asked, recognizing their bikes.
“What?”
“I wondered if Boldini and Grassi had already arrived.”
“Of course,” he said, without looking at me, busy cleaning his hands with his handkerchief.
We climbed the stairs without exchanging another word, he in front and I following, until at the top we reached a kind of anteroom, in its unadorned shabbiness similar to the little entrance hall below, and as if hovering above it. From a single window a hesitant light made its way through the pink curtains. Here, too, I made out a black coat-rack leaning against the far wall, hung with dark material. To the left, two doors, both shut. But through the cracks in the wood and through the keyhole of the nearer one filtered a vibrant, vivid, reddish light.
Having opened the door, Cattolica’s back was suffused with that light.
“Come on in,” I heard him say.