“Anyway, I was telling you about my mother. She was pleased when I asked her to stay with Giacomo, because I almost never go out in the evening and she’s worried about me, because I’m alone, I don’t have a boyfriend, or a partner, whatever you want to call it. I don’t think we ever stop worrying about our children. Sometimes the thought of that scares me. We want to protect them from everything, but we can’t do that forever.”
We want to protect them.
Our children.
Dizziness.
Calm down. Everything’s under control. Calm down.
Listen to her voice. Concentrate on her voice and breathe.
Calm down.
“Giacomo gets on well with his grandmother. Less with his grandfather. My mother’s still young, my father’s quite a bit older than her. They’re both doctors—he’s retired now and she’s still working. He isn’t aging well. He was a handsome man—actually, he still is—and he can’t bear the thought of old age. He cheated on her lots of times and she knew. I’ve often wondered why she stayed with him, and I’ve never found an answer. Or rather, I’ve found it and I don’t like it, so I try not to think about it. Now the positions are reversed: she’s the one who has someone else, a married man. She doesn’t flaunt it, but she doesn’t do anything to hide it either. She lies, but without worrying too much whether or not her lies are believable, without making too much of an effort not to be found out. Actually, I think my father knows all about it and just pretends he doesn’t. Because he’s afraid that if he says something she may leave him. She’s kind to him, she takes care of him, and they still sometimes go out together. But the whole power balance has changed, and now my father is the weaker of the two. Life can be pitiless.”
From somewhere in the distance came two brief screams, almost moans.
“You know I’m astonished?”
“Why?”
“I’ve told you … some very private things. Why do I trust you?”
“I don’t know,” Roberto replied, with a shrug.
“Maybe I trust you because, despite appearances, you seem fragile. When you got on the bike I realized you were scared. Please don’t take what I’m about to say in the wrong way, but I felt sorry for you.”
“Was I scared?”
“Why, weren’t you?”
Roberto would have liked to tell her about himself, but knew he wasn’t capable.
And yet he was tired of feeling so alone and desperate and guilty.
Guilty.
We never stop worrying about our children.
We want to protect them from everything.
“The noise of the fountain’s starting to get on my nerves. Shall we go somewhere quieter?”
Roberto made contact again, with difficulty.
“Yes, of course.”
They put on their helmets, glided along in the darkness for a few hundred yards, and ended up sitting on a bench between the Garibaldi monument and the cannon.
“Can you give me another cigarette?”
Roberto took the pack from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
They smoked calmly. The air was mild, as if spring were well advanced. Emma’s story began suddenly, taking him by surprise.
“I got married because I was pregnant. He was a screenwriter.”
She said a surname as if Roberto was sure to know it. But Roberto had never heard it before, or if he had ever chanced to hear it he had forgotten it.
“It was a mistake and I knew that perfectly well. There’s a sentence by a writer—I can’t remember who—that he loved to quote. It’s something like this: ‘Love means inventing the other person with all our imagination and all our strength, without yielding an inch to reality.’ Unfortunately we’d already yielded several yards to reality when we discovered that we were about to have a baby. The most sensible thing to do would have been to keep the child but separate. The thing that everybody would have expected was for us to keep the child and continue living together, without being married. But he said maybe we should get married and I said yes. Without thinking. Or maybe I was thinking. Maybe I was thinking this would make things that weren’t solid more solid. Or the opposite, thinking this was the best way to make sure things ended quickly.”
Roberto remained silent. The words that came into his head all seemed stupid and banal.
Anyway—Emma continued—they got married, the child was born and they called him Giacomo. Three years later, she met someone else and they started seeing each other. In secret, of course, but it was obvious that sooner or later her husband would find out. And in fact he did, and wasn’t pleased. Quarrels, screaming and shouting, a pretense of fair play, just make up your mind, if you want me to I’ll leave, don’t be so theatrical, that’s too easy, these things happen to everyone, maybe it’s even happened to you, sorry to disappoint you but no, it’s never happened to me, yes I have this boring habit of sticking to the rules, I hate you when you put on that air of moral superiority, oh well of course I realize the word ‘moral’ isn’t one of your favorites. Anyway, after a few quite unpleasant days she decided that she had no desire to tear everything apart for a casual affair. Fun while it lasted, maybe, but only a casual affair. She promised she would break off the relationship, he believed her and for a while—maybe almost two years—they both pretended that everything was fine. Obviously it wasn’t. Everything was wrong. So one day, as was only inevitable, she met someone else and went for it.
“I know I’m starting to sound like a slut, no, no, I’m sorry, don’t interrupt, I know it isn’t true and at the same time it is true. Of course I felt the need, or the desire, or whatever you want to call it, but at the same time I wanted to do something that would break everything up. I felt trapped and I was looking for a way to get out of the trap or, better still, smash it to pieces.”
The previous pattern had repeated itself almost exactly, except that this time there was no screaming and shouting, no quarrels, no dithering. He had simply walked out. For days and days he hadn’t answered the phone, hadn’t called, hadn’t let her know where he was, hadn’t talked to their son.
As Emma continued with her story, her voice had become ever more neutral, ever more colorless, ever more monotone. There were no highs or lows. It seemed like the murky water of certain canals, the kind you have to look at carefully to see if it’s moving or as still and dead as it seems.
“Exactly two weeks later, without our having spoken again, without his having even spoken to the child, he was in a traffic accident. He was on his moped and was knocked down and died on the spot, without suffering. Or at least that’s what the doctors told me. Can you give me another cigarette?”
She smoked it entirely before telling him how everything had fallen to pieces. You want to say that it was all over anyway, you want to say that there’s no connection between what you did and what happened. You want to say—you try to tell yourself—that it was a terrible tragedy that could have happened at any time. The voice that says all these things is drowned out by another much louder, much stronger voice, altogether capable of insinuating itself into the deepest fibers of your soul. This voice says something simple and deadly: it’s your fault.
It’s your fault.
It’s your fault.
It’s your fault.
Your mind starts to set in motion thoughts you weren’t expecting. That you loved the man. That he was the only man you had ever really loved and you’ll never love anyone again.
That if he hadn’t left home, nothing would have happened to him.
That you killed him.
That you deprived your son of his father.
These last words struck Roberto full in the face, like a slap.
“Please don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if awakening from a bout of delirium. “I’m sorry,” she said again after lighting another cigarette and immediately putting it out again without smoking it.
“I won’t go into detail about the following months.
I have the impression you don’t need it. It was my mother who took me to our doctor. He’s a friend of hers and she says he’s one of the few around who’s really good. I remember her words when she first went there with me, before she left me outside the front door.”
“What did she say?”
“It was a very unusual phrase for my mother, who isn’t a very expansive woman, but a practical woman even in the way she expresses herself. She said, ‘He’ll help you to go through the fire and survive.’”
Why was she telling him these things? And was she really telling him, or was it only an opportunity to get them off her chest, and whoever had been there would have done just as well? He looked at her, searching for an answer, but Emma’s face was completely inscrutable. For a few seconds, her words lost their meaning and became only sounds, a rustle in the night and a face moving in the half-light.
When Roberto again heard her clearly, she was talking about her son.
“Giacomo writes very well, he writes things you’d think were by an adult—he takes after his father for that.” She broke off, as if struck by a sudden intuition or a troublesome thought. “You see, I can’t say his name, unless I deliberately force myself. His father.”
“What was his name?” Roberto asked, and as he did so it seemed to him that the question had a deeper meaning, a perfect rhythm that brought him back to what was happening tonight. She took a deep breath before she replied.
“Gianluca. His name was Gianluca. I’ve never liked composite names,” she added, as if it were of crucial importance. Maybe it was.
“He was writing a novel. He was working as a screenwriter but his great dream was to write a novel. It’s all in his computer, I think. I tried switching it on and it asked me for a password. It was a relief. I wanted to read what he’d written, but I was terribly afraid. I was afraid for various reasons. Obviously I was afraid to find things I wouldn’t have liked to discover about him and about me. But you know, I was especially afraid of discovering that the novel wasn’t any good. Anyway, luckily, the existence of the password solved the problem. It’s impossible to gain access to that novel—that fragment of a novel or whatever it is—and that’s it.”
No, Roberto thought, that wasn’t it. Getting into a computer protected by a common password was very easy. But that wasn’t what Emma would have liked to hear him say, and he knew it. So they sat there in silence on the bench, while the background noises of the night took the place of their conversation.
After a while she seemed to be about to make a gesture. To move closer, to stretch out her hand. As if a command had come from her brain and had reached the edge of her body and there had been intercepted by another impulse, which had wiped everything out.
“I just remembered ‘Stairway to Heaven’. It was his favorite song. The times in the past I’ve had to get it out of my head before I start crying. At the beginning the tears were faster than I was. Then I got good at it and managed to stop the song before I felt any emotion. Now it started again and I didn’t notice. I heard it and it took me a while to realize what it was. And it didn’t make me cry. It’s made me a bit sad, but nothing like the desperation I used to feel.”
She looked at her watch.
“Maybe it’s time to go. I’m working tomorrow, although I don’t start too early, not until ten. Something I miss from the days when I was an actress, and Giacomo wasn’t even born yet, is being able to wake up late, to sleep all through the morning.”
“Let’s go to your garage, drop the bike, and then I’ll walk you home,” Roberto said.
“No, I like the idea of taking you home.”
Roberto liked the idea too.
As they were riding back through the deserted city, Roberto thought of their two lives as two trajectories that had begun more or less from the same point, had gone through different worlds and now had mysteriously crossed again.
“I wonder what your apartment is like.”
“Unpresentable.”
“Doesn’t anyone ever come to see you?”
“A friend drops by sometimes, or a colleague. But that doesn’t happen often.”
“No girlfriends, nothing like that?”
Roberto shook his head and smiled, as if surprised by the question, as if it were a bit crazy, whereas in fact it was perfectly normal. You’re a single man in good health. It would be only natural for you to see women. And yet the question strikes you as strange, misplaced.
“No, no girlfriends, nothing like that.”
“All right, the tone of your answer and your expression tells me I shouldn’t insist. Good night, then.”
“Good night and thank you,” Roberto said, awkwardly, but she did not go.
“Why did I tell you all those things?”
“Maybe it’s passing.”
“Maybe it’s passing. You’re right. Maybe I went through the fire and survived.”
Roberto looked at her in silence.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Maybe you went through the fire and survived,” he said at last. “That’s it. Maybe we survive.”
19
She slipped into the room between the half-open door and the doorjamb. She seemed thinner than last time, but maybe it was only an effect of the dim light. A window must have been open, because Roberto felt quite a strong shiver when she sat down on the bed. Of course, it was an unexpected visit, and at the moment it wasn’t clear how she had come in. She had never had the key to this apartment. In fact, come to think of it, she had never been in this apartment, so how had she gotten in? Maybe he should just ask her. Except that speaking seemed terribly tiresome. Maybe the tiredness was all down to the fact that he’d been about to go to sleep.
She didn’t seem to have any intention of breaking the silence. She sat there and waited. She must have gotten a lot thinner, Roberto thought. She hardly weighed anything at all. When she had sat down on the bed he had not felt her weight on the mattress. Again a cold draft. He had no idea which window was open. Maybe she had been the one to leave it open, whichever window it was. Maybe that was how she had gotten in. He should have gotten up and gone and closed it, but he was so tired, so terribly tired.
He couldn’t even lift his arm. He couldn’t move a single muscle; it was as if his whole body were paralyzed.
Then she spoke, or rather, he heard her voice. The semidarkness prevented him from seeing her lips moving, and the voice came from an unspecified point in the room. It was a bit different from the last time.
It was different from the last time.
You aren’t asking me any questions.
That’s because I can’t find the words.
You haven’t spoken Spanish for a long time.
Am I speaking Spanish? I hadn’t realized.
You hadn’t realized.
But is it a boy or a girl?
It’s a boy.
What have you called him?
My father’s name. What else?
But what does he know about his father?
He knows he’s dead.
But I’m not dead.
She laughed, and the sound was like some mechanical device. Roberto thought he could smell a slight odor of rotten eggs.
You are dead, of course you’re dead.
I had no choice.
I know, nobody has a choice.
How is he? How are your lives? Tell me.
They don’t exist. Our lives.
What do you mean?
Nothing exists. For you we’re a dream.
I didn’t want it.
Nobody wants anything.
I’m scared.
You’re right, it’s scary.
I’d like to see the boy.
He’s there.
Where?
Where you can’t see him.
Why?
You’ll never see him.
Why?
Because I don’t exist, and neither do you.
Roberto sat up in bed, with difficu
lty, and reached out his hand to touch her or shake her or something else, he didn’t know what. The hand passed through her and she slowly lowered her eyes, looking at his hand going through her. Roberto saw her tilted head, her hair, and at the same time, in an unnatural synchrony, he saw her face, her smiling mouth, which then burst wide open in a laugh and became the most frightening thing of all.
Just as Roberto was thinking that he would go mad with fear, everything suddenly disappeared and the room went back to normal.
Normal.
Giacomo
Ginevra came back to school today, but that’s not good news.
She came in late, after the first hour had already started. As soon as I saw her I realized something was wrong. She was sloppily dressed, which has never happened before, not in all the time I’ve known her. But what struck me most of all was her expression. I watched her all through the five hours of lessons. She was absent, her eyes were staring, she didn’t hear whenever anyone—not me, I didn’t have the courage—said something to her, and she didn’t smile once all morning.
The Italian teacher caught her not paying attention three times during her explanation and in the end gave her a warning. It was the first time I’d seen her get a warning in these last two years.
At the end of the fifth hour she left without talking to anybody, moving like a junkie, and didn’t even seem to know where the way out was. There wasn’t anyone waiting for her outside on a moped or anything like that. She left alone, after passing like a sleepwalker between all the boys and girls chatting and making a noise outside the main entrance.
I had a bad feeling as I went home, wondering what could have happened to her. I’d have liked to meet Scott immediately, to see what he thought and get his advice about what to do. It was such a strong need that after a while I even thought of trying to fall asleep just so that I could dream about him and talk to him.
I lay down on the bed, closed my eyes and tried to sleep, concentrating on the images of the park, and on Scott’s face.
But it didn’t work: I couldn’t sleep, and when I got up after a while I felt very sad and alone.
The Silence of the Wave Page 12