At that moment, there was an explosion of yelling from somewhere in the building. A man and a woman were arguing. Of the two, it was the woman who was shouting more loudly and angrily. The man seemed to be on the defensive, and was about to give in. Roberto wasn’t sure if the voices came from the apartment above or the one below.
“They’re downstairs,” the doctor said, guessing Roberto’s question.
“Why are they arguing?”
“Because they’ve reached the end of the line but can’t summon up the courage to admit it.”
In the meantime, the shouting had stopped. Roberto felt an incomprehensible sense of anguish about that private tragedy being played out downstairs. He thought about those disintegrating lives and those hearts filled with resentment and the things those two must have imagined for their future together.
“Do you know something?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry for those two. I don’t understand why, but I really feel sorry for them. As if I knew them, as if they were friends of mine.”
From the apartment downstairs came the noise of a door being slammed, but no more voices.
“Am I mad?”
The doctor made a gesture with his hand, as if to brush away something that was bothering him.
“We all have our share of madness. The question is how we live with it. Some manage quite well, others don’t. People come to me to learn to live with their own madness. Even though almost nobody is aware of it.”
The words should have scared him. Instead, Roberto felt an unexpected sense of calm. Like something that could be accepted and which, when you confronted it, was much less unpleasant than when you imagined it hidden in some fetid compartment of your consciousness.
“There’s something I’ve never asked you, Roberto.”
“Yes?”
“Do you like reading?”
It was strange that he should be asking that question now. A little earlier, Roberto had been thinking that he ought to find out something related to Emma’s interests. Do some research on the Internet but also read something. To be ready to talk to her without feeling that he was on shifting sands.
“I can’t say if I like reading. I haven’t really read much. Whenever I have, sometimes I liked it, but reading has never been a habit of mine.”
“Do you remember what you liked?”
What had he liked? He couldn’t remember. He did recall a good book on the history of basketball that he had read a few years before, but that didn’t seem the most appropriate thing to mention. He realized that he was trying to look good in front of the doctor, and that he was ashamed of his own ignorance. More or less the same feeling he had had less than an hour before, talking to Emma.
“A few years ago I read a book about lies that a lawyer had given me. It was by an American psychologist …”
“Paul Ekman?”
“Yes, that was him. They also did a TV series about him.”
“Lie to Me. The book you read was probably Telling Lies.”
“Yes, that’s the one. In a way, I even applied it to my work. I mean it gave me a few ideas.”
“What about novels? Do you ever read novels?”
Novels. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever read a novel in his life, which probably meant he hadn’t. And anyway, when would he have had time to read novels? At the age of nineteen he had joined the Carabinieri. The course, then the first posting, the work, always more of it and always more intrusive. In his free time, of which there had been less and less, he had done other things. Most of them things he didn’t like to remember.
“It’s no big deal if you don’t like novels.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever read one. It was never something I thought about. Now that I realize, I feel ashamed.”
“Shame can be a useful feeling. It’s a sign that something’s wrong and it can be a stimulus to change for the better.”
Roberto felt like crying. He was forty-seven years old, most of his life had passed and fallen to pieces, and he had nothing left to show for it. He was a failure, a lonely, ignorant, unhappy man who had lived in a senseless way.
The doctor’s voice interrupted this unbearable sense that everything was slipping away.
“Let’s do something. Now that the session’s over, if you have nothing else to do, go to a bookstore—choose a big one, they’re more suitable for those who need practice—and spend a little time there. Look at whatever books you like—sports books would be fine too—and when you find one that looks interesting, buy it, take it home, and read it. Then, if you feel like it, we can talk about it next time.”
11
The doctor had suggested a big bookstore. He remembered there was a really big one in the Largo Argentina, which he could easily reach on foot from the doctor’s office in less than half an hour.
He walked quickly, as usual, and it took as much time as he had anticipated. Outside the entrance, two Africans tried to sell him some books of fairy tales and he had to make a bit of an effort to refuse, walk around them, and go inside.
Once inside, he realized he didn’t know how to behave. Whenever he had been in a bookstore in the past, he had always done so for a particular reason. A specific book, to buy for a specific purpose. Go to the assistant, ask for the book, take it to the cashier, pay, and leave. Without even seeing all those other books, thousands of them, on the shelves, on the tables, even on the floor.
He looked around cautiously, as if the others might notice him, realize he was a stranger there, and start whispering among themselves while watching him suspiciously. It took him a few minutes to convince himself that nobody was paying any attention to him. More generally, people seemed to be ignoring one another. They were walking around between the books and the shelves, browsing, selecting, going to the cashier, or else leaning against a bookcase, sitting down on a little sofa, and reading for a long time as if this was a library. The sight of these people reading without paying at last managed to relax him. If nobody was paying any attention to them—and nobody was, not even the assistants—then nobody would pay any attention to him.
He started focusing on the microcosm around him. Up until that moment he had been aware only of masses, some colorful, some dusty, and individuals moving between those masses.
There was a group of men in gray suits and loose ties; a boy photographing the cover and a few pages of a book with his mobile phone; an elderly lady examining the crime section with a professional demeanor; two girls talking nonstop, apparently completely uninterested in books or anything else apart from their conversation; a man with a beard like an Alpine officer, looking at history books and every now and again sniffing and loudly clearing his throat.
After wandering for a few minutes in the middle of all this humanity, as if in an aquarium, Roberto asked an assistant to point out the section for theater books. Maybe, he thought, he’d find something there that would give him a few ideas for what to talk to Emma about. But none of the titles he looked through seemed suitable. There were plenty of plays, of course. Roberto pulled out a volume of Beckett, read a page, and emerged feeling anxious. Then there were volumes about the theater with titles like For a Shamanistic Theater or The Empty Space. He tried leafing through these too, and again gave up quickly.
Next to the theater books was a section of books about writing, and among these Roberto was drawn to a manual entitled How to Write the Story of Your Life.
As he leafed through it, he noticed a fat man in a dark baggy raincoat looking at him furtively. He had a book in his hand and a rucksack on his back—which seemed tiny on that bulk—and as is often the case with fat people he was of indeterminate age. After a few seconds, he put the book back on the shelf and approached Roberto.
“May I ask you a question? You might think it’s indiscreet, and you can just tell me it’s none of my business, I’ll apologize, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Go on.”
“You don’t spend much time i
n bookstores, do you?”
Roberto felt a twinge of annoyance, and for a moment thought of telling him that it genuinely wasn’t any of his business. “Is it that obvious?”
“Actually, yes.”
Then he held out his hand and introduced himself. He said he was a journalist, and was supposed to be writing a series of pieces on people who frequented bookstores. The regulars and the occasional ones. Roberto had immediately struck him as an interesting subject.
“Do you mind if I ask you why you came in here today?”
Explaining everything, Roberto thought, could be a little complicated.
“I met a woman who loves the theater,” he said. “I’d like to buy her a book, but I have no idea what to get.”
It was a lie, but as he said it Roberto had the impression he had discovered the real reason he had ended up in here.
“Buy The World’s a Stage,” the man said, taking a book with an orange cover from a table and handing it to Roberto. “It’s a very good book about Shakespeare and his period, entertaining and serious at the same time. It’ll impress your lady friend, even if she’s already read it. In fact, maybe even more so if she’s already read it.”
Just at that moment, a scruffy-looking woman approached, holding a volume with a dark blue cover, and asked the fat man if he could sign it for her. The man smiled, said yes, took out a cheap pen that looked small in his hand, and wrote something on the first page. The lady thanked him, apologized for the interruption, and went back to a friend who was waiting for her about ten feet away.
“I sometimes write books too,” the man said in a vaguely embarrassed, almost apologetic tone. They stood there without saying anything else. The arrival of that woman had disturbed the balance. In the end the journalist-writer broke the silence, said good-bye—nice to meet you—and headed, as rapidly as his bulk allowed, toward another part of the shop.
Roberto looked at the cover of the book he was holding in his hand and then headed for the cashier.
He felt like a fish out of water, but pleasantly so. In fact, he felt quite light-headed.
12
The light-headedness did not last long and soon gave way to anguish and a sense of emptiness. An alternation of excitement and depression. He and the doctor had talked about that some time earlier. For a few weeks or a few months the two states might well alternate as the situation improved.
But was it really improving?
By the time he went to see the doctor, on Thursday afternoon, his thoughts were mostly grim ones.
“Did you go to a bookstore?”
“Yes, I went as soon as I left here.”
“And was it a positive experience?”
Roberto hesitated for a few seconds. Positive. Yes, it had been, even though he was in a bad mood today. But those were two distinct things.
“Yes, I’d say it was. I met a journalist. Actually, I then discovered that he’s also a writer.”
“A writer? What’s his name?”
Roberto told him about his trip to the bookstore and the encounter with the journalist-writer whose name he couldn’t remember—from the description the doctor seemed to figure out who he was, but said nothing—and the only time he hesitated was before replying to the question about what he had bought.
“A biography of Shakespeare.”
If the mention of Shakespeare had any effect on the doctor, he didn’t let it show.
“So all in all, you liked your visit to the bookstore?”
“Yes, and I went back home in a good mood. It lasted one day and then yesterday I woke up early in the morning with an unpleasant feeling.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“Sadness and fear. Almost as strong as the first few times I came here. And from yesterday morning until today, my mood has only gotten worse. I thought I was getting better, but now I’m scared. I feel as if I don’t have any control over what’s happening inside here.” He gave himself quite a hard tap with his hand on his forehead.
The doctor took a deep breath, rolled up the sleeves of his dark cotton shirt over his slim, muscular forearms, and cleared his throat.
“We’ve already talked about that, and I’m sure you remember. These things never have a linear progression. You take three or four steps forward, then two back, then a few more forward, and so on. The backward steps derive from a fear of change. If we live with suffering for a long time, it ends up becoming somehow part of us. When we start to feel better, when we start to detach ourselves from the suffering, we experience contradictory states of mind. On the one hand we’re pleased, on the other we feel uneasy, because we’re missing something that was part of our identity and guaranteed us a kind of balance. That’s the reason for this fluctuation between euphoria and sadness. It’s normal, there’s nothing to be scared of. No more than there is in the fact that you’re alive and in this world, of course.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. I’m scared of living in this world.”
“I think you need to be more trusting. When a situation gets better, in other words changes, we feel the jolts. It’s normal for a few days of genuine euphoria to be followed by moments that are less euphoric. In our jargon, we call them dysphoric moments. When they arrive it’s a bit like ending up under a wave. The basic rule is not to panic, not to resist, because it’s pointless, and wait for it to pass.”
“Does it pass?”
“Almost always. Anyway, you of all people should know what it’s like, ending up under a big wave.”
“You completely lose the sense of your position. You don’t know what’s up and what’s down. You don’t have any control over your movements or over your own body.”
“As if the rules of space were suspended?”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. As if the rules of space were suspended.” Roberto repeated the words slowly.
“And how do you get out of it?”
“You have to wait for it to pass.”
“Precisely. It’s the same thing. Sometimes, if the wave is particularly big, if the fall has been violent, I assume some help can come in useful.”
“Yes. But I always pulled through by myself. Even if it was hard sometimes.”
“Do you think you’d have been able to do that with any wave?”
“No, you’re right. There are cases where you can’t pull through without a helping hand. And sometimes you drown anyway, even if there’s somebody to help. It happened once to a boy I knew.”
“Sometimes it happens, yes. Unfortunately and despite the efforts of whoever’s trying to help.”
“Anyway, it’s just like you said. You have to surrender to the wave, when it comes, without getting in a panic. After a few seconds, almost always, the world returns to its place.”
“Do you want to tell me a bit about surfing? You told me you started with your father.”
“Yes.”
“Any good?”
“Me or him?”
“Both of you.”
Roberto felt as if he’d been caught off balance, as if all at once he’d lost his footing. The words did not come at first, and he moved his hands as if searching for some kind of support.
“My father … was good. Old school, but very good. He’d surfed with some of the best, people who’d ridden really big waves, in Hawaii, at Waimea Bay on the North Shore.”
Roberto broke off abruptly.
“Obviously, these names won’t mean anything to you.”
The doctor made a gesture with his hand as if to say: it doesn’t matter.
“What about you? Were you good?”
“I got by.”
“Is that the most accurate description? I got by?”
Roberto looked at him.
“I was good. In fact I was very good, I might even have been better than my father if I hadn’t stopped.”
The doctor smiled. A real bittersweet smile, as if they were two friends chatting over a beer and one of them had remembered something nice that united them, one of th
e reasons they could say they were friends.
“I once read a novel that featured surfing, and I remember a sentence that struck me. It went something like: ‘It’s one thing to wait for the wave, and quite another to get up on the surfboard when it comes.’”
“Whoever wrote that sentence knew what he was talking about. When you’re there you realize that all the rest is bullshit. I’m sorry, doctor, but bullshit’s the only word for it. You have a feeling of truth, I don’t know how to put this, the sense that everything is … brought into focus. A feeling of beauty, of totality, of being one with everything else. When the wave carries you, you feel you’re part of it, if you understand what I mean, you feel that everything finally has a meaning. And when you’re on certain waves—which are like mountains of water, actual mountains—you don’t care about anything. You just want to find out what you’re made of. Nothing matters except being up there. And there’s a perfect harmony, in those seconds when you’re there, a balance between the sea and the sky, almost still, while you slide very fast between the water and the air, and the roar. You pass through the middle of the wave, exactly equidistant from those opposites.”
Roberto broke off, stunned at how the memories had come out and had transformed themselves into a story.
“Do you believe in God, doctor?”
The doctor looked at him with a hint of surprise on his face. He took a while to answer.
“Do I believe in God? Have you ever heard of Blaise Pascal?”
“No.”
“Pascal was a seventeenth-century French philosopher. A philosopher and a great mathematician. He’s famous, among other things, for his so-called theory of the wager.”
“What’s that?”
“Pascal said it’s worth wagering on the existence of God. I’ll spare you his full argument, but basically the idea is that if we wager on the existence of God, and God exists, we win the wager and our gain is infinite. If God doesn’t exist, we don’t lose anything and at least our life has been made happier by faith. According to Pascal.”
Roberto tried to get the hang of the idea. It was attractive, but also somehow elusive.
The Silence of the Wave Page 7