“Do you really think you can manage?” she insists, ironically.
“You’re radiant… Why? Is there any news?”
She gives me a broad smile. “Apparently there’s a promotion in the air.”
I must have opened my eyes wide.
“At least that’s how I chose to interpret the director’s words,” Barbara continues, “when he summoned me to his office and showered me with praise over the way I handled a couple of things.”
“Congratulations,” I say, trying to maintain my usual tone. “At this rate you’ll be taking my place.”
Barbara, too, chooses to continue on the path of irony. “Anyway, you’ve always known what my intentions were,” she says. “Get rid of a man like you and replace him with a woman like me. You know what a blow that is for all male chauvinists?”
“Sounds encouraging. But don’t crow too soon.”
“And don’t get to your appointments too late.”
I find her sense of humour totally inappropriate at a moment like this, and can’t help thinking of the look of indifference on her face the day I was taken ill. I’d always thought she wasn’t quite as cynical as she wanted me to believe, that our constant teasing was just an innocent game. But I was wrong, completely wrong. I’m certain she’d climb over anybody or anything to get that promotion.
“I won’t bother you any more,” she says. “How about grabbing a coffee later?”
I nod and give a little smile, while in my mind I see hundreds of cups of coffee flying across a counter, and hands trying to grab them. I smile again, then say goodbye.
I have to fly, too, I have to hurry. One hand on the computer, the other on my mobile. If I had another hand, I’d even be able to hold the receiver of the telephone without having to wedge it between my neck and my shoulder. I have to be quick. I write a message, move an appointment, tell Elena to send a fax. Right now, she could fall down in a faint and I wouldn’t even notice, so determined am I to finish as soon as possible. I want to be back in that park before it gets dark.
I have to wait for a week, another very quick week, before I see Isabelle again. At ten o’clock on Monday morning I go to my bank for a quick chat with the manager. For once I arrive ahead of time, but out of breath. At work, I’m slowly and laboriously regaining ground, and I’ve arranged another meeting with Righini at lunchtime, the director will be there, too. The situation is more complicated than it was a month ago, Righini has had other offers and has retreated from his previous position, but we’re still in negotiation and the game is far from over. In the afternoon I have another important meeting with a young local councillor about that old question of the building permits, which is still unresolved. It’s going to be a difficult day, not that there have been any easy ones lately. My impatience is tangible, I don’t want to risk being distracted for a moment and finding that it’s already the middle of the afternoon. I can’t afford that today.
Anyway, it’s a good thing I got here a bit early and that the manager is keeping me waiting, because when I look around I see her.
I always knew it would happen sooner or later, but it’s like a sudden shock: Isabelle sitting at a table, busy signing some papers. She’s wearing a light raincoat and her curly hair is gathered in a bun. Her daughter is waiting for her silently in the pushchair.
“Giulia?”
I approach the little girl, smiling, and she returns my smile with a disarming and quite unexpected sweetness.
Isabelle, too, seems happy to see me. “It’s you! How are you?”
Fine, now that I’ve found you again in such an unpredictable way. Now that I can stop and look at you and catch my breath.
“What are you doing around here?”
“This has always been my bank,” she says.
I’m surprised to discover that we’ve shared the same branch without knowing it. God knows how many times we’ve both been in the queue, one behind the other, like that day at the airport, without our eyes ever meeting. When it comes down to it, life is a long series of queues, waiting for an encounter.
“I’ve been thinking about her future,” she continues, glancing at her daughter. “A savings account.”
“A good idea,” I say, imagining the day Giulia will come here to take advantage of her mother’s foresight, as if it’s going to happen tomorrow. Isabelle puts the forms in her handbag, grabs her shopping bags, grabs the handle of the pushchair and is about to say goodbye. But I have no intention of letting her escape again. I offer to help her, like that first time at the airport, and she accepts.
“But I thought you were waiting to see someone.”
“It isn’t urgent,” I reply, leaving the bank with her bags in my hand.
The only thing in my life right now is you, Isabelle. I want to see if you can slow everything down again.
I walk with her through the neighbourhood. Turning a corner, we find an ice-cream parlour and a small lawn. We sit down in the open air.
It wasn’t a chance occurrence, limited to that evening. When I’m with her, time quite simply stops racing. The ice cream doesn’t melt, my watch says 10.05, and the clouds in the sky remain where they are.
I feel that for her, too, it’s more than simple attraction, she’s looking for something in me. We’re scrutinizing each other as we talk, moving around each other in a series of seductive little skirmishes that make me feel good, make me feel better than I’ve felt in a long time. Gradually, I forget about time, I’m sure she’ll remind me of it sooner or later, when she has to go home to feed her daughter, and then I’ll go to my appointments. The only thing I’m certain of is that it’s still morning and that there’s suddenly no need to hurry any more.
Isabelle is a caring mother. You can tell that from the way she wipes the chocolate from her daughter’s mouth. I learn a lot about her from these maternal gestures, like that day at the airport, when she made me feel I wanted to be in Giulia’s place. She makes people want to be children again.
I ask her to tell me something about her life. She says she came to Italy for love and stayed out of respect. “Respect for Giulia, who was born here, and who has the right to live the life I dreamt for her when I brought her into the world.”
Giulia’s father is an architect. Apparently their relationship unravelled between all those endless meetings and business trips of his. At a certain point they realized they couldn’t keep going on the way they had been. It was painful but inevitable, she admits. “Luca told me you also work hard and have an active social life.” There’s no trace of reprimand in her voice, although I have the feeling Luca wasn’t all that complimentary about me.
She wants me to tell her a typical day of mine. I don’t hold back. I describe in broad outlines what my work consists of, what I do in my spare time, as if I still had any, and the life I led until not so long ago, when almost every evening I’d book a table in some fashionable restaurant or club, obviously sparing her the more regrettable details.
“So apparently, you spend almost all your time sitting at a table,” she remarks, with an amused smile. “Behind your desk by day, at tables in restaurants and clubs at night. Even your weightlifting is mainly done sitting down. Maybe that’s why you stopped?”
I’ve never thought about it like that. I try to regain a few points by taking her observation as a joke. I’m encouraged by the fact that she’s still looking at me the same way. On paper, I may seem a bit off-putting, I know, I’m the type of man a woman like her ought to run a mile from, but I have the impression that Isabelle doesn’t look at things the way other people do, that she sees beyond appearances.
Suddenly Giulia starts crying. She’s been walking on her own and has fallen on the ground. She hasn’t hurt herself, but you know how children are, she gets upset easily. “Giulia, come here, darling. Let mummy give you a kiss… It’s all right.” But Giulia continues crying. “She’s tired,” Isabelle says. “I have to take her home. It’s best if we go.”
I don’t want to
know what time it is and give up this miraculous state of serenity. I still have time for the lunch with Righini, I know. Maybe that’s the secret, I have to keep thinking that there’s no hurry, I mustn’t let my anxieties overwhelm me. Time goes more quickly when I think I don’t have enough of it.
“Are you free tomorrow?” Isabelle asks me as I walk her to her car.
“I’ll be free after lunch.”
“What a pity. Tomorrow morning I’m going shopping at the market near where I live, and it’s something I very much like doing in company.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” I say, implying that I’ll be there, and that for her sake I’d get out of any prior commitment.
I help her to arrange the pushchair and the shopping bags in the boot. “Do you ever go to Villa Balestra?” I ask her instinctively, just before saying goodbye. “I mean… do you ever take Giulia for a stroll there?”
“Villa Balestra?” she replies in surprise. “No. Why should I? I live in the centre.”
So Luca just made me waste more time, the last thing I needed in this situation.
No sooner does Isabelle drive away than my mobile phone starts ringing, in that rapid, insistent way that makes me think of a firing squad, and an anxious shudder shakes my chest. I can’t afford another leap forward in time.
“Romano, it’s Righini.”
His tone is the reasonably impatient one I’ve learnt to recognize, and can mean only one thing: I’m late for our appointment again.
Resigned, I wait for his outburst of temper, instead of which he surprises me by saying, “I’ll be ten minutes late. I wanted to tell you well in advance, though I’m usually the one who has to wait for you.”
“Why, what time is it?”
“11.30. There’s time, Romano, there’s time.”
13
IN THE CAR, on the way to the restaurant, all I could do was think again about Isabelle and the incredible feelings she arouses in me. But it was no good, because You started racing again, faster than ever.
Once again I arrived late, I practically didn’t touch any of the food or follow a word of what Righini and the director were saying. All the way through lunch, they kept glancing at me uneasily. My nervous state, my inability to handle the situation, was all too obvious.
Before going back to the office, the director, who’s managed, without my help, to arrange a meeting to sign the contract next week, is forthright in his criticism of my undignified behaviour. “We can talk about it more calmly once we’re back in the office.” I try to make him understand that I don’t have time for his lectures, that over the past few months I’ve lost the ability to do things calmly, and that I have a councillor waiting for me in a bar in little more than an hour. “You can keep him waiting,” he retorts, “it’s what you do to everyone else. Maybe I haven’t made myself clear: I’m losing patience with you.”
The thought of being reprimanded again makes me want to drop everything, to run to the sea and walk on the beach with Isabelle waiting for the sunset. With her beside me, I could once again see it the way normal people do, watch the sun slowly melting into the waves, the way it does in my sweetest memories. I never thought that one day I’d feel nostalgic for a sunset, just as I never thought I’d get to the point of hating my work and everything it represents, but, despite everything, the ambition that has led me all these years still burns inside me and tells me I mustn’t give up, I must do whatever the director asks, once again, as I’ve always done, until I follow him into his office.
First, it’s just an awkward exchange of opinions. Mine don’t stand up, any more than anything else that’s left of my life. The director, on the other hand, is shrewd, he doesn’t hesitate to put the knife in, and he’s impatient, the way everyone is now towards me. At the umpteenth question to which he doesn’t obtain a prompt response, he throws me a look full of contempt and starts shouting, “This isn’t a game here! Don’t you realize you owe everything to my support? I trusted you, I treated you like a son! And now I find myself dealing with a completely different man. You don’t seem to give a damn about anything any more. Congratulations, you’re throwing your future away!”
This time I react as if it isn’t the director talking tome, but You, Father Time: “You have no idea of the sacrifices I’m making so as not to throw my future away!”
The director’s eyes widen. “Sacrifices? Do you actually have the nerve to call them sacrifices? You don’t even realize what you’re saying any more. And that’s no surprise, given that you can’t even seem to think clearly! Just look at your office, it’s become a pigsty. And as I always say, someone who can’t keep his things tidy can’t keep his thoughts tidy.”
I can’t bear this onslaught any more, it’ll end up consuming me. So I decide to turn things round the other way. “It’s never happened to you, has it?” I reply. “You’ve never been in a situation you didn’t understand. You’re far-sighted, you always see everything with extreme clarity. Even when it’s something that reduces a man to having no more time left, like a terminal illness, and yet that same man decides to waste what little time he does have, continuing to work in the same company, the company that’s been his whole life.”
He turns pale. He’s speechless. All at once, he can’t think of any more reprimands to fling at me. He takes a few steps back, I think he’s suffering from the pathological phobia he has towards any kind of illness. From the way he looks at me, I can guess what illness has just flashed through his mind: Svevo Romano is a womanizer, and he’s irresponsible, he probably doesn’t take any kind of precautions. Svevo Romano must have AIDS. I can almost see it, that whole tangle of thoughts, that obsession that insinuates itself into the bigoted mechanisms of his mind. He must be wondering if the virus is already everywhere, if I’ve spread it around the room with my hands. It might be anywhere, lying in wait, ready to get in through the myriad of tiny wounds on his skin. It’s on the chair, on his clothes, on the pen he has in his hand, which he immediately puts down on the desk. Everything is contaminated. And his greatest anxiety is: “What’s to become of all this? The investments, the worldwide properties? Who’ll take care of my empire?” Two ex-wives and a daughter who only calls him to ask for money. I can’t see anything else in his mind. How could I ever have wanted to take his place? The master of my life obsessed with the fear of death. The pterodactyl, who moves shrewdly in the circles that matter, surrounded by a herd of eohippuses without prospects, suddenly trapped by his own hang-ups, a mental disorder fed by fear and ignorance.
He keeps his distance. “Svevo,” he says, “what’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” I reply, going to the door.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?”
“Not today, I have no time to lose.” And it’s true, Father Time: while You’re racing like this, I have no intention of wasting what little time I have left being dependent on him. “I won’t be in tomorrow,” I inform him, coolly. “I’ll see you next week, for the signing of the contract. For anything else, ask Elena.”
He’s staring at me with revulsion, but I surprise him by retracing my steps, giving him a vigorous handshake and bidding him a formal farewell.
Once out of his office, my time, with its leaps and gaps, again overwhelms me: it’s after four, and I’m a quarter of an hour late for my appointment with the councillor.
I get to the restaurant nearly half an hour later.
I ask a waiter, who’s busy clearing a table, for information.
“He ordered two coffees and left a while ago. He looked a bit impatient.”
What an incredible relief, discovering that for the first time it’s a matter of complete indifference to me.
14
MY APARTMENT ISN’T FAR from the Campo de’ Fiori, but I don’t know how many hours of common time it would take me to get there on foot. I give the driver a day off and about nine in the morning call a taxi.
I’m in a hurry, but I’m consoled by the thought of seeing her
and the magical possibility that everything might slow down again. The closer I get, the tighter the childish knot in my stomach. I glance at my watch: another half-hour has flown by, as imperceptibly as ever. At the end of the Via del Pellegrino, the noisy market appears before me: first of all, the stalls selling fabrics and kitchen utensils. At this hour of the morning it’s at its most crowded. It’s a hot June day, and the old square, tolerating the stallholders’ din, seems to be bursting with life. The smells of the market mingle together: the blasts of hot air from the rotisserie, the odour of newly cooked pizza, the sharp aroma of dripping olives and the sickly scent of the crates of fruit. They wash away my anxiety, and everything gradually returns to its natural rhythm.
“Fresh fruit! Look how soft these grapes are!” The stallholders lavish praise on their produce, holding forth to their little audience. Amid all the people pushing, shouting, asking for things, muttering, I’m searching for her. It only takes a moment before my gaze comes to rest on a point that seems random, but isn’t really random at all, and our eyes meet. The confusion, the shouts, everything comes to an abrupt halt. There’s nothing else left except her and her flowered skirt. “I was looking for you,” I say, as I walk towards her.
“Me too.”
Isabelle has just bought some huge lemons, and now she’s searching for a grater. Giulia is chattering to herself, alternating vowels and consonants in a language only she can understand. She’s happy, she gives me a comical grin, opening her mouth wide and screwing up her little blue eyes with enthusiasm. She doesn’t look much like her mother, but she does have the same smile.
As we search for lemon graters, Isabelle asks me if I want to hold Giulia. I don’t have time to refuse, I’m already face to face with that little pink bundle.
It’s the first time I’ve ever been so close to a child and I’m surprised to discover that the contact is far from unpleasant, although fraught with anxiety: I’m afraid she’ll fall, that she’ll slip out of my arms or notice my discomfort. But she stays quite still against my chest, and continues to smile at me. There’s no real reason, but she just keeps smiling.
About Time Page 10