Imperfect Delight

by Andrea de Carlo

  Nick Cruickshank makes his way down toward the square with extreme caution, keeping in the shadows as much as possible. Aldino would be out of his mind if he knew: he’d give him the usual spiel about what was the point of paying him so much to handle his security, just to throw caution to the wind and expose himself to terribly real dangers for no reason. He would reply that he’s exaggerating, that the dangers aren’t that real, though he knows full well that they are: there do exist crazy fans just waiting to transform their veneration into hate. John was killed with five gunshots, by a guy who knew all his songs by heart and only a few hours earlier had asked him for his autograph. George was attacked in Friar Park, by a fan who punctured his lung with a seven-inch knife and would certainly have killed him if his wife, Olivia, hadn’t managed to smash a lamp over the fan’s head. Paul’s bus was surrounded by a dangerous crowd of fans in Mexico City, and who knows how it would have ended if the police hadn’t arrived in time. But it’s not as if going around with a bodyguard is ever a guarantee of anything: many a Middle Eastern despot has been gunned down while surrounded by entire armed phalanxes. Absolute security doesn’t exist; life in general is risky and difficult to predict.

  In any case the guys in the circle in the deserted market square certainly don’t seem like dangerous maniacs, though they certainly must be a little weird to be doing what they’re doing in this place, at this hour. Nick Cruickshank moves a few steps closer, gets a better look at them: they’re young, in their twenties, half guys and half girls. If despite everything they did turn out to be Bebonkers fans, the worst they could do would be to crowd around him and ask him for a selfie, or his autograph on a T-shirt; none of them has the physique or demeanor of the potential killer. They’ve set their bags on the ground in the middle of the circle to be free to move around but kept their scarves and coats and caps on to protect themselves from the humidity and cold of the night. There’s a taller and skinnier one who seems to be guiding them, or who at least is the first to do the movements, which the others immediately repeat. The choreography certainly isn’t much to look at: they’re standing there, rocking back and forth ever so slightly at the knee; now they press their hands over their eyes and then remove the hands, then press them again. This variation too lasts for a couple of minutes, like the previous ones; when it’s over they all go back to looking at each other, serious, intent. The taller guy’s eyes sweep over the others, then go a little farther and spot Nick Cruickshank. The guy smiles at him, then motions for him to come join them, pointing to a spot in the circle: go over there, go over there.

  Only now does Nick Cruickshank realize that he’s come too close: he’s within a couple of yards of them. But he isn’t particularly alarmed, especially since none of the guys and girls seem to recognize him, probably because of the shadows and the mist and the yellow light, the hood he’s wearing. Even the tall guy inviting him into the circle does so with an attitude of general benevolence, not specifically aimed at him; or that’s how it seems, at least. Anyway, since eye contact has now been established, it would be rude as well as cowardly of him not to accept; and besides, he doesn’t have anything else to do just now, if not walk farther down along the narrow and deserted streets, or go back up to the parking lot and get back in his car and drive around aimlessly, or head back home to dozens of people he has no desire to see. So he takes his place in the circle: feet planted, hands in his jacket pockets, hood covering down to his forehead.

  The tall guy nods at him approvingly, then turns to everyone, with a low voice that’s difficult to hear. “Now let’s look at another person in the circle and smile at them.” He doesn’t have the authority of a leader, nor do the others seem to consider him one. He simply seems to have taken it upon himself to indicate the sequence of actions to be performed, maybe because he knows them better than the others, maybe because he was the one to suggest coming here, maybe simply because his height makes him particularly visible.

  The sixteen—no, eighteen—people in the circle look at each other and smile in couples; it isn’t clear whether after choosing partners or completely at random. Nick Cruickshank finds himself smiling at a lanky and pale girl, with a blue woolen beret and a gray coat with lots of buttons. The girl smiles back at him in turn: her face is smooth, clean, her eyes are incredibly clear, devoid of any hidden intentions. He takes a peripheral glance around to see if anyone has recognized him, but they all seem to be absorbed in their smiles, don’t pay him any particular attention. The couples continue smiling at each other for a few dozen more seconds: there in the circle, silent in the mist, they rock slowly back and forth, their hands in their pockets and their faces either illuminated or put in shadow by the light of the yellow lamps, and they smile.

  The tall guy lowers his head to indicate that this step too is concluded; he seems neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with the results, his attitude is equidistant. He gestures, without any emphasis. “Now everyone will go to someone else in the circle and hug them.”

  Nick Cruickshank wonders whether the situation will suddenly lose its suspended magic just an instant before the hug. (“You’re Nick Cruickshank! Hey, guys, it’s Nick from the Bebonkers!”)

  The tall guy looks over to encourage him, but once again without insisting. He looks away almost immediately, goes to hug a really short girl, bending over a bit clumsily to put his arms around her.

  Nick Cruickshank moves as well, and meanwhile a guy has set out from the other side; they meet in the middle of the circle, look each other in the eye: fortunately there’s no sudden change. Again he has the impression he’s looking into a face that’s extraordinarily uncontaminated: the guy doesn’t make the slightest attempt to project an image of himself, doesn’t propose any type of exchange. They hug each other and stay that way for several dozen seconds in a manly hug, their torsos touching and their pelvises and legs apart; they give each other a few slaps on the back. Then like the others they go back to their places in the circle; they resume rocking back and forth at the knees, barely moving their arms.

  The tall guy nods, in his controlled, mild-mannered way. He’s not a persuader, he’s not an orator, he’s not a firebrand; he simply stands there in the circle, giving instructions. “Now let’s hug someone else, but without looking at them first, and let’s try to communicate to them the meaning of our hug. Only after will we look at them and smile at them.”

  There’s a general pause for reflection after his words, then a rustle of movement as the people arranged in the circle feel their way one to another, eyes closed and hands out, searching for an encounter without looking for it.

  Nick Cruickshank does likewise: he closes his eyes, steps cautiously until he touches someone who judging by feel and smell is a girl; but he forces himself not to look at her, like the tall guy explained. They hug each other blindly, not too strongly but holding each other tight, with the intimacy of two total strangers who are nonetheless aware of each other’s forms. The fact that the hug is so gratuitous, so unmotivated by an attraction or bond of any sort, provokes a strange burst of thoughts and sensations. It’s as if an infinite succession of hugs passes through his body, like in a time-lapse video, bringing with it a variety of explicit and implicit requests, which manifest themselves one after another and then dissolve. Is this the meaning the tall guy was talking about?

  This hug lasts significantly longer than the one with the guy; it’s difficult to say whether this is due to the combination of hard and soft surfaces, or because they didn’t look at each other first, or because in every ritual there’s the expectation of a progression, and this blind hug is more than likely the grand finale. Whatever the case, Nick Cruickshank wasn’t expecting the wave of emotion that wells up inside him, the general weakening of his defenses. It’s almost like starting to cry in public for no apparent reason, with the most intense feeling of loss, or rediscovery, or both simultaneously. When he tries to break away, he can’t. It’s unclear whether it’s because the girl continues to hold him o
r because he doesn’t really want to break away, because it seems like the moment isn’t over yet, because a strange force keeps them locked together. It isn’t even clear what the others are doing; there’s no sound of rustling or shuffling of stepping back, let alone any final words. So he and the unseen girl continue embracing each other for an undefinable period of time, absorbed by the pressure and the body heat, in the meaning they’re trying to communicate, whatever it is.

  Finally they separate, with the slowness of someone waking up from an unexpected sleep; they take a step back and finally look at each other in the face, and Nick Cruickshank sees that she is Milena the Italian gelato girl. The surprise has the same unfiltered intensity as the sensations preceding it: it passes through him with the violence of an electric shock, takes his breath away.

  She reacts similarly: she jumps back, with a frightened expression.

  Nick Cruickshank thinks for a moment about explaining to her that he didn’t have the slightest idea who she was, but at the same time he begins to doubt whether he wasn’t actually somehow aware of it, imprecisely, as if through an instantaneous glance through half-shut eyelids in bad lighting.

  They say nothing to each other, stepping backward until they’re once more a few yards apart. But the circle game, or whatever you want to call it, is finished: the tall guy nods, with a slightly sad expression. “Now you can walk around town and hug anyone you want.” The guys and girls pick their bags and backpacks up off the ground; they look around, and it doesn’t take them long to figure out that around town there’s absolutely no one else to hug.

  Nick Cruickshank stands there undecided, then approaches the tall guy. “Where are you guys from?”

  The tall guy looks at him for a couple of seconds, as though he considers the question contrary to the spirit of the activity. “Digne-les-Bains.”

  “And you go around doing this thing in different places?” Nick Cruickshank points to the space where, until two minutes ago, there was the circle of people who have now dispersed in various directions.

  The tall guy nods, with the faintest of smiles. He collects his backpack, heads toward one of the sloping lanes of the hillside town. Those who haven’t already left follow him, in silence.

  Nick Cruickshank turns back to the spot where Milena the Italian gelato girl was, but he doesn’t see her. The market square is empty, as if no one has ever been there, with the church façade and the sycamores illuminated by the yellow lamps in the mist. He heads back up toward the stepped lane leading to the main road, his breathlessness growing with every step: nothing. He gets to the main road, looks right, then left, and his breathlessness continues to increase, very difficult to explain: nothing, nothing.

  FRIDAY

  NINETEEN

  OF ALL THE moments of the day, the morning is when the differences in personality between Viviane and her seem to emerge the most; Milena Migliari has realized it for a while now, but it only seems to increase with time. The fact is that for her the transition from sleep to wakefulness needs to happen gradually: she needs to sit on the edge of the bed for a moment to reflect, then slowly make her way down to the bathroom on the floor below, look at her face in the mirror, take a few moments to accept that it really is hers. Pee, wash her face, brush her teeth, go back up to the bedroom to get dressed, go down to the ground floor, pull back the orange curtains to gaze out the kitchen window overlooking the street. Calmly fill up the coffeemaker, put it on the burner, fix herself a bowl of oat flakes, add sunflower seeds and little pieces of apple or slices of banana, pour in soy milk and a little maple syrup, still immersed in the sensations of her last few dreams. It might be fifteen minutes in all, but it’s important to her; being deprived of it makes her feel out of sorts.

  Whereas Viviane throws off the covers as soon as she wakes up and hops out of bed, gathers her clothes off the chair, puts them on and meanwhile starts listing with total lucidity the names of patients, physical problems to be dealt with, her schedule. She goes down and locks herself in the bathroom, and in five minutes she’s already on the ground floor, washed and brushed and ready for the day, anxious to drink her café latte and wolf down her rye cookies. Often in a bad mood, on the lookout for existing or even merely hypothetical difficulties, pissed off at the healthcare system or the banking system or the city sanitation system. She gets annoyed at seeing Milena still a bit hazy, not completely free of the arms of Morpheus: asks her curt questions, pushes her for precise answers. Then she jumps up from the table, goes to rinse her cup, plate, and utensils in the sink with nervous gestures, takes the car keys from the Chinese bowl on the table in the entranceway, exits the house, and goes out to the clearing where she left her car to race off to Draguignan.

  When they first got together their morning routines weren’t nearly so different: if they both had time they would take it easy; if one of them had to rush, the other one would hurry too. It happened entirely instinctively, without asking, without pressure. Sharing the beginning of the day was a joy, a chance to laugh together, tell each other things they wouldn’t have said in other moments. Was there an effort to adapt beneath such seemingly effortless harmony? Were they conducting an experiment? Was it the natural contagion that arises between two people who suddenly become intimate?

  Viviane was certainly much less pessimistic than she is now, and much less insistent; she’d spend whole minutes enchanted by her expression and her gestures, wondering at them, commenting on them. She already worked a lot back then, but the pleasure of doing things easily prevailed over the need to do them; and no sooner was she free than they would both fully share in the spirit of adventure, of traveling off the beaten path, of taking risks together. After all, they were so mutually attracted, so consumed by curiosity for what they still didn’t know about each other, thrilled by even the smallest discovery. Practical problems seemed secondary or became opportunities to put their creative abilities to work; they confronted any difficulty with grace, they got past it. Even the hostile looks and muffled comments of the inhabitants of Seillans amused rather than annoyed them, made them feel like two free women challenging conventions, playing each day at inventing the life they wanted. When is it that that spirit began to change? When did they begin to change? Or have they simply stopped being the way they wished to be and gone back to being the way they are? At what point did the game of inventing turn into the effort of constructing, commitment after commitment, constraint after constraint? When is it that the lightness turned into weight?

  What’s certain is that daily repetition amplifies even the most innocent of mannerisms until it becomes impossible to ignore. For example, Viviane’s way of clearing her throat with quick little coughs when she’s nervous, or of taking off her glasses and wiping the lenses with the hem of her sweater, her napkin, the tablecloth. Or her virtuoso skill in peeling an apple in a single strip, then abandoning it there like an empty vessel on the table, the assertion of who knows what principle. Or her nightly snoring, constant as the hum of a household appliance. Or her way of pulling the covers over to her side, with almost imperceptible little tugs. All things that until a short time ago not only didn’t annoy her, but inspired tenderness, a desire to help. And then?

  “Bon. I have to run; I’ll see you tonight.” Viviane rattles off three or four little coughs, already at the door, already out of the house. Is she anxious about one of the financial or work issues she’s been talking about ever since she jumped out of bed? Does she resent the lack of enthusiasm she senses for the whole fertilization business, for the short-, medium-, and long-term plans they’ll have to share starting Monday?

  Milena Migliari thinks that even the sex between them has lost the improvised and joyous quality it had in the beginning; it’s become a sequence of actions directed at the achievement of a goal in the most efficient (and fastest) way possible. The mechanical side now easily trumps the emotional one; the surprise is gone, there’s no longer the slightest hint of chaos. At the start it seemed like such a rev
olution to have shaken off the demands of a male, his silent needs, his canine insistence, the constant shadow of blackmail, the dormant violence at the heart of every gesture, the voice ever ready to rise up and overwhelm, the offers of protection concealing attempts to control. She had felt such relief at not being scrutinized in every square inch of her appearance, her way of dressing, her attention to detail, her choice of accessories, in a continuous back-and-forth between admiration and disappointment. It seemed too good to be true not to be constantly compared to a catalog of women who were sexier, taller, skinnier, with longer legs, bigger boobs, drawn from a mix of movies, ads, porn sites, workplaces, adolescent fantasies, the gossip of colleagues, the comments of friends. She was so happy not to have to adapt any longer to the predictability and invasiveness of a sexual organ that dominates every choice and behavior of its possessor, and that in certain moments is a weapon, in others an unwieldy tool, in others a distressing proof of weakness. She had so often talked and laughed with Viviane about those stupid anatomical protuberances and the disproportionate importance they hold in men’s lives, their thoughts, their language, in their constant comparisons with their fellow men, their pathetic boasting, their latent insecurity, in the exhausting anxiety of maintaining or improving a hierarchical position. She had so willingly done without the declarations of strength alternating with demonstrations of cowardice, the devouring egocentrism that gives way to losses of confidence, the self-importance that gives rise to consternation, the scholastic displays of knowledge followed by admissions of ignorance, the rationality that hides emotional incapacity. With Viviane she had felt free for the first time simply to be herself, with all her virtues and flaws, together with someone who finally really understood her mentally and emotionally and physically (instead of only pretending to understand for a few minutes, in times of crisis), because she too was a woman. It seemed incredible that she’d never thought of it before, never considered the possibility of an alternative to falling time and time again into the same trap.