by Edoardo Nesi
— Of course, damn it. It’s called retaliation.
— Or give at least one-half of the world the chance to survive…
— The first one for sure…
— Cesare, let him finish.
— A soldier can only choose the first option, Arianna.
— I don’t remember you ever being a soldier, Cesare. You didn’t even do the military service.
— What’s that got to do with it, Arianna? I had to start to work, I couldn’t waste time in the military…But I am of course someone who has great respect for the American army, Arianna. That is pretty obvious…
— Wait, Dad. The soldier isn’t actually just a soldier, but a man who thinks freely, and he asks himself if he is capable of being responsible for the deaths of so many millions of people…He who has never hurt anyone in his entire life…
— What? Why? He’s not the one pressing the button.
— But Dad, he is involved, because he is the only one who knows the way to the base in the mountains. If he doesn’t escort the general to the base, nothing happens, you see? If, instead, he takes him there, the general will obliterate half of Russia and kill millions of people.
— Hey, a soldier is a soldier. He’s got orders.
— Come on, Cesare, let him finish.
— Yeah, go on, go on…I really want to see where this is going.
— Well, in the story, when they arrive at the secret bunker, just as the old general is about to press the button, the soldier decides to shoot and kill him and let millions of Russians live.
— He’s a traitor.
— But he saves millions of people, Dad.
— He betrays his nation and his people.
— Yes, but he saves the rest of the world.
— That means nothing! He’s a coward, a vile coward.
— But Vittorio, that way the soldier has become a murderer anyway…
Arianna put out the cigarette she had smoked too fast, without enjoying it, filling the living room with the unnecessary smoke of her graceful exhalations.
— Yes, Mom, but he decides to live with just one murder on his conscience, rather than millions.
— Noooo! He has betrayed all of his own people, all of those who died! He’s also a deserter. I don’t like your story at all, Vittorio. What, are you going to become a Communist, too? In the meantime I’m going back to work hard for private property. Arianna, can I get a coffee or should I go to the bar?
— Wait, I’ll make it now, she said.
— No, now it’s too late. Bye, Vittorio. Say hi to Karl Marx.
He then turned to Arianna.
— Bye, sex bomb.
And he left, leaving them staring at their feet, both bright red.
The next morning, as soon as the bell rang for break, Vittorio set off down the long corridor that led to a dozen classrooms, in search of the beautiful girl. She wasn’t in the corridor, or in Section F. The friend she had hugged so eagerly the day before was there, but she was not.
Stunned by that totally unexpected absence, Vittorio vainly looked into all the first-year classrooms. She wasn’t there, either. Infinitely disappointed, he told himself she might be unwell, and he imagined her with a mild cold or a blister.
The next morning she wasn’t at school, either. And not even on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. Vittorio fell into the darkest of moods. All those absences at the beginning of the year! It was impossible! Had she fallen ill the first day of school? But she hadn’t seemed the slightest bit unwell! She was so beautiful…
He began to think that she might have changed schools, or maybe her family had been forced to move all of a sudden to follow her father — whom Vittorio imagined thin and severe, tall, with spiky hair, a banker or someone in the military who had been abruptly transferred to another city, so they had to quickly pack all their suitcases and jump in the car at dawn, headed for the unknown.
He spent an interminable Friday afternoon shut up in his room listening to Jesus Christ Superstar, terribly worrying his mother because of his decision to hear over and over at full volume all thirty-nine lashes that Pilate ordered Jesus to suffer.
On Saturday morning, Vittorio decided that if the beautiful girl was still absent, he would go and talk to her friend, the girl who was hugged that morning and was in Section F, whose name — he found out — was Cinzia. He would say hello to her, introduce himself, get to know her, and then, using some ploy, would ask who her friend was and why she didn’t come to school anymore.
At break time, however, as he was walking the long corridor toward Section F, Vittorio realized he didn’t even have the courage to talk to Cinzia. He walked past her twice, completely ignoring her, and she did the same.
On his way home he told himself he really was an idiot who would never get anywhere in life. This for sure. But it made no sense at all to keep on looking for a girl who had disappeared without a trace. Perhaps she was from the future, he joked, and had teleported to another space and time. Maybe she wasn’t even a terrestrial. He sighed, decided she would be the first of his unlucky loves, and forgot her.
ASHURBANIPAL
IT WAS THE MORNING OF THE EPIPHANY, January 6, 1980, when Ivo called Arianna from New York to tell her he had met the Marquis Emilio Pucci and had greeted him with a bow and called him Maestro, he who in his entire life had never bowed to anyone.
Pucci, the great Florentine whom Ivo respected more than any other stylist, that genius of taste who in the 1950s, right after the war, had invented women’s ski suits made of stretch wool gabardine and dyed them in bright colors, before going on to revive and ennoble scarves, shirts, blouses, evening dresses, sundresses, swimsuits, skirts, handkerchiefs, jackets, and trousers and shorts — everything a woman could wear — with the most colorful, rich, and elegant prints that the world had ever seen: totally abstract, brand-new, and yet born of an ancient and profound, quintessentially Italian tradition, each drawn by him, always inspired by the intoxicating beauty of whatever the Maestro saw around himself — the jewels in the crown of Italy: Cortina and Florence and Capri and Taormina and Syracuse.
Ivo told Arianna he had been to Studio 54, an absolutely crazy nightclub where a very important client had insisted on taking him, and he had met Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí, who were the client’s friends, and everyone, Arianna, everyone except me, of course, was taking every possible drug, you should have seen it!
Now that the new factory was pretty much finished, he added, he wanted to buy himself a very large house, a mansion, to refurbish and redecorate completely. He wanted it on the hills over Florence, with a huge Italian-style garden of centennial oaks and cypresses and pines and mimosas, a greenhouse with tropical palms and ferns and delft tiles on the walls, an immense fountain, and a tennis court. He told her that the idea of the mansion had come to him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he had spent the entire Sunday alone, devastated as ever by the jet lag.
As he roamed those silent halls, he had seen a bas-relief with a cuneiform inscription — Assyrian, he specified — which read: “I built thereon [a palace…] for the enduring leisure life of my lordship Ashurbanipal II,” and he had been enchanted by the description of that immense palace built almost nine hundred years before Christ in the lost ancient city of Nineveh, which must serve for the purification of the King, the adoration of the Gods, and the ritual protection from Demons. It was enormous and elegant, surrounded and protected by sacred plants such as boxwood, mulberry, cedar, cypress, pistachio, tamarind, and poplar.
And then, once he had finished giving her all that unsolicited information in the total silence of his fortieth-floor room overlooking Central Park, his gaze fixed on the sinuous back of the client, a sleeping Haitian beauty whose name he had momentarily forgotten, Ivo fell silent and stayed that way for a while, listening to the barely audible noises Arianna made while smoking.
A little more than a year had passed since that morning, and its memory had become weak and distant, held i
n suspended animation by a regret that never forgets or disappoints. Even his telephonic courtship had become nothing more than a simulacrum: every time he called her, he felt like a commander of one of those World War II destroyers which, hoping to sink enemy submarines, blindly released depth charges in the abysses, never knowing whether they had hit their targets but continuing to drop them anyway, day after day.
He never knew how much she liked it when he called her from abroad and his tales became films projected onto the ceilings of the bedroom in which she always lay during those calls, bored and tired, free only to imagine herself happy elsewhere.
He told her about London and New York and Amsterdam and Frankfurt and Munich. He told her of the crazy German highways that he would drive on at 220 kilometers per hour to get to the factories that some of his powerful clients had built in the middle of nowhere in the Bavarian countryside, among the cows and the crows, simply because they were born in those places and didn’t want to leave, just like him, and he would always manage to drop her into every call, telling her how fantastic it would be if she were with him, next to him, and explained all the wonderful things they would do together and described all the fantastic places they would visit.
For her, with her, he would have even made an effort to suppress his hatred for the French and France, and he would have gladly brought Arianna to Paris to eat foie gras and escargots and lobster and Malossol caviar, and drink champagne and the sublime mineral white wines from Burgundy, and then he would take her to the Ritz, to a room with a view onto Place Vendôme. He told her of the fun they would have ordering those monumental breakfasts to their room — all kinds of pastries, fried eggs, pâté, wild salmon, every kind of cheese, strawberries with cream and champagne — all of which they would only pick at because both of them, in the morning, preferred just an espresso and a plain croissant.
Once — just once, and she immediately regretted it, though Ivo basked for a while in that small victory — Arianna allowed the words “in another life” to slip from her mouth. She said that she would love to go away with him in another life, because she had never left Italy, and then added that, always in another life, she wouldn’t even mind taking part in the longest and most boring of his work meetings: she’d be happy just to sit to one side, listening or reading a book, and wouldn’t have bothered anyone.
Ivo went to the window and looked at the whole of New York City sprawling in front of him. He felt like a fool. Arianna continued answering his phone calls, yes, but why shouldn’t she? All she was required to do was lift the receiver once every ten days. Why should she interrupt the worn-out decadence of a passion only to risk setting it aflame once more?
She was simply waiting for his desire to grow weak and die, until the day in which all that would remain of those moments together in the Pagoda under the storm would be a barely perceptible widening of smiles every time they greeted one another on the street or at the tennis club Christmas party.
Only with time, after suffering the cruel decay of their bodies and souls, would they understand whether it had been an irrelevant folly or the last, splendid, precious moment when their lives could have still changed course.
No, Ivo decided. It was over. Best say it now, from New York. Leave her — if “leave” was the right verb, then, for an affair that had never really started. He closed his eyes and told her that this was his last call, and that he would never call her again.
Arianna was silent for a while, just breathing into the receiver, then she spoke.
— No, please don’t stop. Not yet. Call me again a few more times. Then you can stop.
WHOSOEVER UNCEASINGLY STRIVES UPWARD
ONE COLD MORNING in mid-March, as he was returning home from school and fantasizing about being given a motocross bike, Vittorio saw her.
A long, transparent ruler poked out of her rucksack full of books, and she was walking some fifty meters in front of him, trudging but at a good pace, dressed exactly as she had been the day he had seen her: the shearling coat, the Camperos, the perfectly faded 501s. His heart skipped a beat, and he decided that he would follow her home without being seen, at any cost. If she got on a bus, he would have steeled his nerves and jumped on that bus, too.
The girl cut a perfect diagonal across a square, turned a corner, and stopped in front of a large door. Vittorio managed to hide himself behind the wall of a medieval palazzo just in time, and when he dared to stick his head out like the cartoon coyote, he saw her vainly rummaging in her bag for a while, then she raised her eyes to the sky, huffed, rang the doorbell, and drew close to the intercom.
— Mom, it’s me.
A buzz, a loud metal click. The door opened and she walked in. Vittorio rejoiced silently, shutting his eyes and squeezing his fists. He waited a good minute, then walked up to the doorbell. There was just one name card, but it was blank. The door number was 40 and the sign attached to the wall nearby proclaimed VIA ALBERTO FRILLI.
He returned home full of a wild hope that he vainly struggled to contain. During lunch he spoke without pausing for breath, and informed his parents that Harlan Ellison was undoubtedly the finest writer of all time. And not just of science fiction. Seeing their eyes glaze over, he ran to his room and returned with an enormous book that was more than one thousand pages long. He placed it on the kitchen table and read:
“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktock Man
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
The Deathbird
Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W
Then he gave the smile of a madman, asked where the phone book was, took it under his arm, kissed his mother on the forehead, said goodbye to his father with an unprecedented slap on the back, shouted, “Ave Cesare, moriturus te salutat,” and went to lock himself in his room.
He had decided to find the phone number of the family that lived at number 40 in via Frilli, and the only way was to check in the phone book the address of everyone who had a phone number, starting with the surnames beginning with A. He sat on his bed and set off at a brisk pace, thinking he would be finished before dinnertime, but when his father growled for him to come to the table, Vittorio had only got to CAVICCHI Andrea, without finding anyone who lived in via Frilli. After dinner, a terrible headache came over him and he fell fast asleep.
The next morning at school he decided not to force himself through the ordeal of walking the length of the corridor at break time just to see Cinzia and not find the courage to greet her, so he stayed in class, confident in his new method and his good fortune.
After lunch, he started again from CIABATTI Teresa. When he arrived at FARINA Sergio, he had a shock: this man lived in via Alberto Frilli, at number 12. He jumped to his feet and celebrated that small victory. Comforted, he quickly ran through the F’s and the G’s, the few H’s — a German textile firm and the hotels — and halfway through the I’s, he was called to dinner.
He hadn’t found any other residents of via Frilli, and his eyes were so tired from the effort of reading the microscopic characters in which the addresses were written, that he decided not to continue.
The next morning at break time he met Cinzia halfway down the corridor and she smiled at him and greeted him with a timid “Ciao,” to which he responded with a stilted smile. It was a good omen, he said to himself. Once at home, he announced he would lunch frugally, put The Wall by Pink Floyd on the record player, and immediately resumed his search through the phone book.
At L, he found two residents of via Frilli, first LEOTTI Antonio at number 18, then LONGO Carlo at number 38. By the time he got to MARZOCCHI Edoardo, it was dinnertime, after which he decided to go on and arrived at PAZZAGLIA Alessandro, having found just one other resident of via Frilli: PATRIZI ZIBETTI Marco, at number 2.
At eleven o’clock, his father entered his room and ordered him to turn the music off and go straight to bed, now! V
ittorio obeyed willingly, exhausted both by the task and from having listened to Pink Floyd all day. Before falling asleep, he asked himself whether he had undertaken an impossible task. What if her family didn’t have a telephone? And even if they did, and he found the number, would he call? Really? Would he find the courage? And even if he did find it and he did call, what if she didn’t answer? What if her mother or, God forbid, her father answered? What should he say? “Could I please speak to your daughter, sir?” And what if she had a sister, and the mother or father said something like, “Yes, sure, which one would you like to speak to?” What would he say? The beautiful one with the sheepskin coat and the Camperos? He didn’t even know her name…
The next day at school Cinzia said hello to him again, and he reciprocated promptly. For a moment he thought about the possibility of stopping his stride and starting a conversation and finding the right moment to ask her in the most indirect manner about her friend, but then he decided it was too much, and gave up.
On his way home, Vittorio decided to pass by the girl’s house, and walked the whole of via Alberto Frilli as if it were his domain. He marched in the middle of the road, pointing to the house numbers and pronouncing under his breath the names of the people who lived there. When he arrived at her door, he drew close to it, stroked it, and went home.
He ate his lunch absentmindedly, providing only monosyllabic answers to his mother’s concerned questions, as she had just returned from a meeting with his teachers and had been told that her son was barely following class anymore. Vittorio sloped to his room, sat cross-legged on his bed, put on Pink Floyd, and got going. By dinnertime he had got to T, and the only numbers of via Frilli he hadn’t found were numbers 30 and 40.
Though he ably defended himself from the skirmish instigated by the bored, empty questions his father had been urged to make by Arianna, Vittorio felt lost. He only had eight pages of the phone book left, and was now certain that the girl’s address had somehow escaped him. He hadn’t seen it, he had somehow missed it among the thousands of names he had searched through in those fevered days, and now he didn’t know what to do if he reached the end and didn’t find the number. Should he start back at A, or should he just ask Cinzia, who for some incomprehensible reason continued to greet and smile at him?