“Yes. But I’ve done all kinds of things I’d rather not boast about.”
“It’s beautifully photographed.”
“You’re right, it’s beautifully photographed, but the story is unbearable. It’s a theoretical and self-important exercise. But I’d prefer to drop the subject of avant-garde art. It always makes me a little nervous, I’m probably too common for it.”
As so often, the restaurant wasn’t crowded. Partly because of the dim lighting, there was the usual pleasant sensation of intimacy, a little like having dinner at the house of friends.
Our dishes arrived and our glasses were refilled.
“So, what’s been happening in your life in the months since I last saw you?” Nadia asked after tasting the smoked scamorza in an orange and spicy oil preserve.
For a few moments, I had the impulse to tell her the story of the mistaken tests, but I decided to avoid it; it would merely have thrown a pall of gloom over the evening.
“Nothing worth reporting. Every now and again, I consider the possibility of quitting this job. But it’s only a whim.”
“I think it’d be a terrible idea. You like being a lawyer, except that for some strange reason you’re ashamed to admit it, even to yourself.”
I made a gesture with both hands to stop her and go on to something else. It always makes me nervous when people say sensible things about me.
“I invited you to dinner because I’m leaving next week and I wanted to say goodbye,” Nadia said.
“Oh, you’re leaving. Actually, you’ve been doing nothing but leaving for some time now.”
For years, Nadia had had a place – a mixture of bar, restaurant and nightclub – called Chelsea Hotel No. 2. I’d really liked going there, late, and staying and chatting with her after closing time, when there was nobody left except her Corsican dog Pino. He was her bodyguard and her family.
One evening, right there in the Chelsea, the dog had died of a heart attack and she had lost all desire to work there any more. She had sold it – I had stopped going there – and started travelling, in search of some new idea that would change her life. She’s something of an expert in changing her life, because for many years in her youth she was a high-class prostitute. Although nobody meeting her and talking to her would ever think so, or even thought so at the time.
“This time I’ll be away a little longer.”
“Where are you going?”
“Sydney, Australia. I’ll be there for three months.”
“And what are you going to do in Sydney for three months?”
“A friend of mine who lives there has to be away on business. I’ll be staying at her place. All I have to do in return is water the plants. A pretty good deal, I think.”
“All right, but I repeat my question: what are you going to do in Sydney for three months?”
“Improve my English – I know, most people go to London for that, but when do I ever do what most people do? – and look around to see if it’s worth considering a more permanent move there. It’s an idea I’ve often fantasized about, going to live in Australia.”
“I feel really bad about it,” I said.
She stared at me. “Are you joking?”
“No. I’ll feel much more alone when you’re not here. Knowing you’re not here.”
She hadn’t expected me to say something like that, and nor had I, to be honest. She took my hand across the table and squeezed it. “You’re one of the very few people I’ll be sorry to leave.”
Her words hung in the air between us for a long time. When she spoke again, she had a tone of forced cheerfulness.
“Maybe I won’t like Australia. Apparently there are more deadly creatures there than anywhere else in the world.”
We didn’t say any more about her leaving. We let the time pass pleasantly, eating and drinking and talking cautiously about books and films. We were both careful to avoid sad subjects. By the time I saw her home it was after one, and we said goodbye as if it had been an ordinary evening.
I’ve never been very good at putting my thoughts in order, but that night they were particularly tangled. Regrets, twinges of fear, faces, voices, flashes of old desires, images of long-forgotten places crowded into my head in time to my footsteps in the empty street, mixing with the façades of the buildings, the signs on the walls, the billboards.
Without intending to, I took a bit of a long way round and passed the building where I had lived as a boy with my parents. It was as if I was seeing it again after an absence of many years, that dark wooden front door, with the cracks in the paint, the oxidized handle, the rust on the hinges. A shudder went through me as I realized how many times, how many thousands of times, I had come close to my past without paying any attention to it, without hearing the frantic murmur of time. My thoughts started moving at an unusual speed, succeeding one another in my feverish head without any apparent connection.
I was forty-eight and my life was more than half over, unless – which seemed unlikely – I turned out to be like one of those people on the island of Okinawa, apparently the place with the highest number of centenarians in the world. It would have been much more than half over if that diagnosis had been correct. It could have been almost over. My parents’ home. My father and my mother. How strange, I almost never think about them. No, that’s not quite true. I almost never thought about them, until that business with the tests. They both passed away when I wasn’t yet thirty. When my mother died, the house was cool and full of wind. It seemed like a kind of hymn to life, that wind. Dad joined her a few months later, silently, like a leaf falling from a tree. They often talked about how they were going to enjoy their retirement. They would travel, write, learn Chinese. They would live for a year in Paris, in the home of a friend who was a diplomat. Instead of which neither of them reached retirement age. They didn’t have time. That’s the mistake we all make, thinking we have time. Now strangers live in that apartment. I don’t want to know who they are. Strangers also live in the apartment I shared with Sara, my ex-wife. All my places have been expropriated by strangers, one by one. Is that a banal thought? I don’t know. I feel as if I’m in the middle of some kind of centrifugal movement. Things and people rush away from me while I remain still. Even Nadia’s nightclub. Even my old, small office. Only Maria Teresa and I were there, when she was still my secretary and not a colleague. Maria Teresa is a good person, spontaneously and effortlessly honest, I think she was just born that way. She and Consuelo looked at me in amazement when I told them that Judge Larocca was suspected of judicial corruption and had turned to me for his defence. I didn’t go into details; for some reason I was too embarrassed. I met Sara a few days ago, with her husband. Her second husband, I was the first. Greeting her and embracing her and feeling the strangeness of that body, that perfume, that voice, I felt a kind of dismay. How could you have loved a woman so much, suffered so much because of her, laughed so much with her, and now feel so distant from her? And her husband seems like such a cretin. I know it’s hard to be objective in certain situations, but he really does seem like a cretin. Had I been wrong about her, all those years ago? Had it all been a mistake? I thought I was in love with her. I thought I loved her. For a long time, I thought I loved her for her intelligence. I thought she’d chosen me for the same reason. But maybe that wasn’t the case. You can hardly say she prefers intelligent people, considering the one she’s married to now. We shouldn’t start thinking like this. We risk coming to dangerous conclusions. We shouldn’t go back over our own thoughts and our own actions, it isn’t a nice thing to do. Even though Hannah Arendt thought differently. She said that moral action is born out of inner dialogue, and that it’s the absence of that dialogue, the inability to enter into it, that turns banal people into agents of evil. Though I’m not so sure what this has to do with Sara, who I don’t recognize any more. Or with my parents, who I feel I never really knew. I haven’t thought of them for a long time. Only a few vague, fleeting memories from time to time, qui
te by chance. Just images without voices, without sounds; no conversations, discussions, arguments. God knows why. Just mute presences, distant and sweet. I’ve recently started dreaming about them. That happened in the past, too, but those were silent dreams. Now, though, I sometimes hear their voices, they talk to me, and I talk to them. They’re normal conversations, like the ones in my childhood and adolescence, the ones I’d forgotten. Sometimes I wake up from these dreams weeping softly.
It isn’t unpleasant. They aren’t sad tears.
15
I gave instructions to Consuelo and Maria Teresa to deputize for me in court, then went to the garage, took out my pointlessly expensive and rarely used car, and set off for Lecce.
Consuelo had asked me if I needed company for the ride. I’d said no, thanks, there were lots of things to do at the courthouse in Bari and it was best if we divided the tasks. Actually, Maria Teresa could have dealt with that morning’s chores on her own, but I preferred to be alone for those three hours there and back. I like driving without anybody beside me, especially if I don’t have to keep to a schedule. It may be because it doesn’t often happen, but it makes me feel free, like those first times when I took my father’s car and drove outside the city, at the age of twenty. When I was surprised that I could do what adults did. When I was surprised that I had become an adult.
At elementary school I had the recurring thought that I would never get to middle school. That I would die first. I didn’t have a specific fantasy about how that would happen, just that it wouldn’t be anything traumatic or frightening, or even upsetting. It was just a thought tinged with a slight regret for what I could have been and would never be.
I got to middle school and the belief crept in that I wouldn’t reach the age for high school. Then I entered high school and forgot all about that strange romantic fantasy. I remembered it five years later, when I graduated. I thought, with surprise and gratitude: I didn’t die and now I’m an adult. I can even drive a car and go around the world. I’ll never die.
It was a fine spring day. Trees, big friendly clouds, the wind, the sky a very light blue, blinding near the sun, and an intense, darker blue on the side opposite the horizon. The whitewashed houses, the brown of the earth, the green of the vegetable gardens, the spotted red of the poppies, the yellow and white dots of the little daisies.
The perfect day to remember those times in April when we had our first bathe in the sea. Had Larocca ever come with us? I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure, there were lots of different groups, people would arrive, others would leave, and he may have been there, but I couldn’t remember.
Most times we went to a place between Cozze and Polignano, on this very road I was driving down. Pietra Egea, it was called. Maybe it’s still called that, I don’t know. I don’t know if we gave it that name or if that was what it was called on the map.
At that time, the dual carriageway and the parallel roads didn’t exist. We’d leave our cars on a dusty dirt track and cross the countryside, climbing over drystone walls and pointless gates until we reached some large, flat white rocks, where we’d lie sunbathing or dive off them into the clear water.
Almost unconsciously, I left the dual carriageway, turned onto the exit for Cozze and drove down the parallel road in search of that dirt track from thirty years earlier. It didn’t take me long to find it, but now there was a gate and a fence that stopped me from going any further. I parked the car, looked around to make sure there wasn’t anyone there and, in my grey suit and regimental tie, climbed over the gate, hoping no angry peasant would suddenly appear accompanied by a fierce dog. Apart from the seagulls, though, there wasn’t a soul in sight. A slight sirocco brought me the smells of the scrub, which could be seen at the far end of the fields. The same smells as before. Juniper, wild bay, caper, rosemary and God knows how many others whose names I don’t even know.
I stopped for a moment to fill my lungs with that warm, scented wind. I loosened my tie, resumed walking, and within a few minutes reached the white rocks, which sloped down to the sea like slides for cyclopses.
Often, when you go back to a place from your childhood or your remote youth, it seems smaller, and all at once your memories lose that mythical dimension where you’ve kept them for years.
Pietra Egea, though, was just the way I remembered it. Not just the rocks, but the countryside, the scrub. I felt as if it was only a week since I’d last been there. It was a sensation that was both reassuring and painful.
There was nobody in sight, not even on the sea. Not even a fishing boat in the distance. The water was green and so transparent, I felt like taking my clothes off and diving in without thinking or hesitating. If you hesitated, when it was still April, the fear of the cold would stop you. It’s always the fear of the cold that stops you. In general, I mean. Was that meant to be a profound thought? You can do better than that, Guerrieri. Or maybe not. Maybe the best you can come up with are these rather didactic metaphors. All right, as long as it remains between the two of us, nobody else needs to know.
I didn’t bathe. Too complicated.
I took off my jacket, lay down on the rocks, closed my eyes, felt the warm wind between my layers of clothes and accustomed my ears to the nearby rustling and the very slight lapping of the water.
I remained like that for a minute, without thinking. Then they came back. The thoughts, I mean. The usual ones. Where I would have been at that moment if the first tests hadn’t been wrong, if I really had had that illness – it was hard for me to say the name even in my head: leukaemia. It wasn’t a question. I would have been in some more or less aseptic, more or less white room, as weak as an old man, feeling nauseous, with needles stuck in my veins. Maybe I would already have lost my hair. Maybe I would have been on the verge of dying.
Almost always, thinking these things – but was it really thinking? I asked myself and immediately gave up looking for an answer – left me with a painful sense of fragility, of incurable precariousness. That morning, lying on the flat, friendly rocks, as gentle as they’d always been, immersed in the swarming of so many invisible and invincible lives, I felt instead an overwhelming sense of wonder. I was capable of walking, driving a car, skipping rope, hitting the punchbag, doing press-ups, climbing over a gate. Just like a boy.
In those same years when I thought I would die before getting to middle school, I also imagined that when I grew up I’d be a scientist. Is that a contradiction? I’d say it is. But tell that to the child who was afraid of everything and made up stories he didn’t have the courage to tell anyone. He didn’t know F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the adult he would become would one day read a phrase he’d never forget: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” There, that’s it.
So I would be a scientist, in a light-filled laboratory like the one in an American university that I’d seen in a documentary. The campus was drowned in greenery and peopled by serious but friendly young researchers, happy to be doing what they were doing. Ready for great discoveries. I would be like them: a happy adult.
In remembering my unrealized childhood dreams, I felt an absurd joy – the same I’d felt back then – such as I hadn’t experienced for a very long time. As if those fantasies, and others, could still become reality.
A curious phenomenon, I told myself as I walked back along the dirt road between the low drystone walls, the prickly pear and the olives. It must be a result of the shocks imprinted on your psyche by the business of those tests, I concluded, getting back in my car and setting off again in a southerly direction.
In Lecce, I bought the newspapers because I wanted to check if news of the search had leaked out. There was nothing. That surprised me, and I didn’t know how to interpret it. Had they chosen to keep it secret, or was it a tactical move that I couldn’t figure out?
Still puzzling over this dilemma, I entered the courthouse. It’s a concrete block, quite u
gly, though it certainly can’t compare – in ugliness, I mean – with the courthouse in Bari.
I went to the clerk of the court’s office that deals with the work of the examining magistrates, identified myself, handed over the paper signed by Larocca appointing me as his attorney, and asked to consult the case file for the pretrial hearing.
As I expected, there wasn’t much: three transcripts of Capodacqua’s statements, heavily redacted; two transcripts of Marelli’s statements, the second of which had been taken in hospital; a report by the customs police, with a medical certificate attached, stating that Marelli was seriously ill.
I took a few notes, so that I could pass on to Annapaola the data she would need for her enquiries, and requested a complete copy of the documents filed, to be collected in a few days’ time by my counterpart in Lecce.
I thought of going to the Prosecutor’s Department to talk to one of the magistrates who were handling the case, then told myself there was no real reason to do so: there was no further information they could give me, even supposing they were in the office and could see me without warning and without an appointment. So, about half an hour later, earlier than anticipated, I was outside again.
I called Larocca, and gave him an account of what I’d learnt, deliberately keeping it brief. I didn’t have any desire to hear another series of complaints and curses about the Prosecutor’s Department.
Just as I was about to leave the city, I remembered the instructions I’d received from Consuelo and Maria Teresa. I was supposed to buy a tray of pasticciotti – the excellent local sweets made of crisp short pastry filled with cream – to be handed over to them, without fail, when I got back. If I didn’t bring pasticciotti, I wouldn’t be allowed back into the office. So I did an about-turn, drove to the area near the beautiful Piazza Sant’Oronzo, glanced at the Roman amphitheatre, found the usual pastry shop, where they had just been taken out of the oven, and carried out my instructions.
A Fine Line Page 13