Anna Maria is a cousin of Marco’s mother. Thirty years earlier she was slim and brunette, she had straight teeth like all the members of her family, and her long fingers lent the same grace to washing the dishes or to playing the piano — by her own admission, she’d never played anything but the C major and D major scales, though legend had heard her play with brio some operatic arias. Massimo had fallen head-over-heels in love with her the day he’d seen her hang up red silk underwear from her window. His courtship was persistent and thoughtful, highlighted by the christening of his brand new boat, which was painted the same red as her briefs. But Anna Maria, amply wooed though she was only a fisherman’s daughter, knew that she had enough cards in her hand to live a life different from her mother’s. And so she rejected Massimo’s advances, though she liked him well enough, and became engaged to Sergio, who expected to study engineering thanks to his father’s savings. No sooner was she betrothed however than Sergio intensified their encounters in a remote cabin, following which they had to get married — fast. One thing led to another and his father’s savings were spent on grappa, and in the end Sergio bought a boat from a retired fisherman and christened it with the name of his wife.While he spent part of his nights on the lake, Anna Maria’s beautiful hands were busy changing diapers. Then, after fifteen years of fried fish and boredom, she grew stout, lost a few teeth, and bought cotton underwear. You don’t rechristen a boat. As far as Sergio was concerned, the blue Anna Maria transported to the middle of the lake his wife’s bad moods and her reproaches as to the quality of the fish, the profession of fisherman, her children’s bad grades, and life in general. In the eyes of Massimo, who’d never married, the red Anna Maria still played operatic arias, he could hear it on the water just before dawn, and when he bent over her side to straighten his nets, his reflection could see beautiful hands coming out the window between two clothespins.
From the harbour, in exchange for a considerable sum, tourists set sail for the Blue Island. In the Middle Ages the island had belonged to a prince who offered it as a gift to the pope. Monks lived there, perhaps some prisoners too. Now it’s owned by an American. On the south coast, a natural stairway in the rock descends ceremoniously into the water. The island is streaked with paths that cross the forest, opening now and then onto a clearing, an ancient field cultivated by the monks. It has nine chapels in more or less good shape. In one of them can still be seen remains of a fresco executed by a well-known artist whose name the tourist guide always forgets. Another chapel stands balanced on the cliff from where the monks would attack with slingshots any fishermen who violated the territory of the Church. An unusual hole one metre wide and ten deep — dungeon or observatory — adds to the mystery of the site. The sky is wide, the water crystal-clear, tourists leave the island already missing it, and as the boat moves away, they watch it sparkle — peaceful, eternal.
They go back to the harbour. In the harbour, objects move and people walk. By day and by night the pulleys beat an unsettled rhythm on the masts. A cement wharf juts into the water and branches off at a right angle, hugging the boats to protect them from the waves. From the end of the wharf only the lake can be seen and, rarely, the other shore.You can make out the silhouette of the Blue Island — asymmetrical, like a cake that’s fallen on the left, similar also to the snake swallowing an elephant on the first page of The Little Prince. On the left, a little farther away, emerge the humps of its four sisters, among them the one from where, one stormy day, Marco’s grandfather abducted his grandmother.
Near the wharf there are stands overflowing with souvenirs, each more morbid than the others: Etruscan key rings, Etruscan ashtrays, plastic vases, plastic fruit, plastic popes, plastic pottery.A public telephone displays an “out of service” sign, a clock shows eleven o’clock for all eternity, and no one minds because twice a day, it does show the right time.
Besides, time is different. It’s in the way they all move, catlike, reserving their sustained attention for a possible encounter, as if walking were neither an activity in itself nor a means of getting from one point to another, but rather the creation of a public space, a lure for coincidence. As if people only walk to stop at any moment.They walk or they drive around the block.They look around in case they might recognize someone. They recognize someone: they stop. Nothing else matters.Time is elastic, there’s always room in it for a coffee, sure, why not, a good coffee.The place where they’re going can wait, because they’re needed in the place where they are now. They chat. While they chat, they lock eyes firmly with the other, place a hand on his arm. With excessive gesticulation, they import the entire universe into the limited circle of their narrative — because in the end they rarely say anything that sticks. They smile. Their smile comes straight from childhood, passing through a zone of shadow during adolescence, which claims to be above everything but that reappears eventually — intact, more and more childlike as age takes back the necessary modesty. A smile stripped of any agenda, in the space of which objective time broadens out: even if they stop they’ll never be late, because being late is part of being punctual, richness is proportionate to slowness. And anyway, if administrations worked as well as coffee machines, it wouldn’t be exactly their country anymore.
This village still exists, as it is, at this very moment.
After the harbour, the promenade continues along the lake. Pine trees alternate with willows here and there. Between restaurants and campgrounds there are gardens where, on some nights in June, foam snows onto round grass, green stars, mature flowers. Night falls softly, attracted to the ground by their frail fingers. On the terraces the setting sun flickers in the metallic lacework of chairs and tables, glasses and utensils flow, transparent as water, onto a display window. One terrace, set back, with pink tablecloths and plastic chairs, belongs to a modest café where they make a revolting cappuccino, and where very early one morning, Marianne saw the waitress crying between willows that suddenly resembled her distraught face.
The promenade ends at a second, wider beach that all summer is littered with burned flesh, children’s shouts and beach balls, sputtering radios, the smell of almond and coconut, towels, parasols, cartons of cigarettes, snatches of conversations in all the languages of Europe, dominated always by German. On the hottest days, the beach spills over into the lake.There are so many swimmers, the water turns cloudy. Even if you swim with your eyes open, you make out other bodies only by bumping into them, and some moustachioed males take advantage of it, rubbing up against the blondest teenage girls. Between May and September the only time to find peace and quiet is before eight in the morning, in the company of two or three retired Englishmen with very white ankles.
The road ends at a traffic circle, conveniently for some nonchalant drivers who come there to watch the girls swim, their windows all rolled down. They travel at three kilo-metres an hour, turn back onto the road from the traffic circle, driving past the beach again and then into a hotel parking lot; they wait a while, then drive around again until a girl comes out of the water.Then they park, get out of their cars, and in a version of English that sounds like Romanian, they hold out a card that turns them into doctors or optometrists, invite her for a drink, “perchè no?” for dinner, “you see I have car, I can outside of village take you.” To which the girl, tangled up in her towel that’s suddenly too short, manages to murmur, “no, grazie,” and they compliment her effusively on her command of Italian, “how you learn so good?” To which, sure that she is thereby putting a final stop to the conversation, she claims that there’s already a man in her life, and they step up their efforts. But a firm rejection is enough for their attitude to change. As they’ve done with girls on other days, they level a smile at her which shows that, in spite of everything, they’re pleased; they say goodbye and leave to resume their patrol, giving the impression that the purpose of the game was merely to formulate the invitation, to practise the innocent art of being virile according to principles internalized since childhood, like repeating
a prayer learned by heart, bereft of content but whose strung-together syllables possess a kind of authority. In fact they’d have been upset if she had accepted, because then they’d have had to lie to wives or mothers, had to spend money, and make an extra effort to speak English.
Behind the beach, a path runs into a clump of rushes bent over at the most vulnerable point on their stems.The packed sand stretches out, damp, onto the grass-covered slope.The sun drops in shreds. Humidity wraps everything in an extreme green. Footsteps crush stems and the planks of rotten wood flung onto the less negotiable parts. On the left, an endless fence protects the gardens of the lakeside residents, gardens that boldly reveal their owners’ character — by means of lawn chairs, hammocks, bottles no longer virgin, and lanterns; or lawns that are neglected but fertile; or tables set in the open air with faded cloths; or yellowed newspapers, cups, ashtrays, children’s toys, sailboards, open windows, closed windows, barred windows. On the right, the rushes open onto private beaches, and behind them the lake — vast, bright, misty, choppy, flat. Abandoned boats, other chairs, beach balls: as if for some people the gardens had jumped the fence to come and sit by the water. On the beaches people raise ducks, build open structures that the vegetation carefully finishes off; party leftovers are abandoned to age there, debris of happy days spent listening to the water flow; they make a dock from which to dive or embark on a sailboard, postponing the moment of getting wet.These are the estates of the poor, anonymous kingdoms protected by a padlock on some chicken wire.
Marianne often walks along the corridor of rushes. She peers at the gardens like someone attending a ball through a window. While others are off at work in the daylight, she examines closely the remains of their Sundays and of their summer nights. She does her best to understand, to get used to these lives as to a giddy spell, lives that, if she wanted, could become hers too. She imagines these lives settled into the gardens, guesses the women’s weight from the strain on the chairs, the men’s mood from how well the lawns are kept up. It’s easy to see that there’s no winter. The December rains aren’t much more taxing than the blazing sun. Dozens of generations of eroded objects lie scattered in the sand; chair legs point to utensils that would delight archaeologists; time passes nonchalantly, women, men are born, love one another, hate one another, die — and the faithful objects still lie, indifferent, lazy beneath the sky.
I feel dizzy at the thought that this village still exists, with the moon slung across its serene sky, and that at this very moment, I’m certain, the island is concocting a miracle in the tiny shade of its nine chapels.
I wanted to know everything about you.To crack open your timid heart like a nut and feel its liberated sunlight spread over me.
My first room in the deserted hotel was a big one, with a high ceiling and two vast windows.Through one of them I could see the village squeezed between the walls that leave one tower of the castle visible. Through the other, a whole branch of the chestnut tree in blossom came in, and if I leaned out, I could often see the peculiar statue of Christ that was missing a hand. I met you that way. My room opened onto your country through two unshuttered eyes, and Christ was missing a hand.
I know that it’s impossible to live two lives at once. I entered your country after giving up on it in advance, but still I was eager, still I expected all of it — your sky, its storm, your violent solitude, the barking of your dogs: I wanted everything. I left everything behind, like a puddle of rainwater, like a soiled sheet, like the remains of dinner on the counter, I abandoned it all when I left, just as it was, there, at your place, and you, I simply allowed you to be.There is only one life, only one, and I let you cut into it with another possible life, a life for the two of us that must be extinguished now, slowly, while I melt back into the snow to which I was promised.
There was an empty seat next to mine on the plane, it was surely the void that sat down there. It deplaned with me, went through customs, claimed its baggage, appropriated the free space in my house; it wakes me in the morning by pressing on the pillow, it slips between my hand and the objects of my life. It is the last trial between us and it may be the hardest, the most painful, the longest of our moments together; it’s waiting until I stop missing you before it sneaks away, until I stop trembling when I’ve dreamed about you, until I stop being silent when my friends ask me questions; it is waiting with me, side-by-side, for winter to be over, and then the year; together, we’re waiting for me to stop waiting.
The village still exists, and its image attacks me by surprise, at any hour of the night or day.When I’m reading the bilingual label on a box of cereal, when I’m shovelling the stairs, when I’m making photocopies on both sides of the paper for my boss, and when my godson falls asleep in my arms. Everything is a madeleine for me and my involuntary memory is activated against my will, perhaps so I won’t lose you absolutely, perhaps so I won’t completely lose what I was at that time.
Over there, there was so little horizon.
II
TO BE NOTHING BUT A DOG
Sometimes when Marco was a child, his mother would look for him when she got up in the morning. He wasn’t in the house, he wasn’t in the garden. Eventually she would find him lying in his German shepherd’s kennel. They slept together in the combined and peaceful warmth of animal and child.
Marco only adopts dogs whose birth he has witnessed. Peggy has given him two litters from which he adopted first Fulli, sole survivor of a virus, and a few years afterwards Ambra and Argo. When Marianne enters their family story, Peggy is old and mangy with lumps deforming her cancer-riddled body. Marco repeats that she’s had her golden age, that she’s been beautiful, agile, brilliant, that she was loyal. She is the queen and always will be. She sleeps in his room and the two of them share abiding memories of hunting and games. If he exaggerates when he tells the story, she is silent in sympathy so as not to spoil his pleasure.
One autumn day, Marco reluctantly moves Peggy into the cubbyhole with the water heater.These are her final days, he and his mother both know that, but they don’t talk about it because they never talk. About anything. The vet arrives with his syringe. He stabs her hide, Marco turns around, crosses his arms, and tries to focus on his tax return. Every day that follows, every day in his life, he will add baroque gold ornamentation when he talks about her, and when he repeats the story of the three trips he’s taken (Sardinia, Sicily, Calabria), he never leaves out the fact that she was there too, and when he talks about mushrooms, he never forgets to mention that they hunted together, and when he talks about hunting, he’ll most certainly add that she could track an enormous pheasant even after the rain had wiped out any sign of its trail. The cubbyhole still smells like her, like an old dog. “Nobody but me can smell it, I don’t want to clean it. Maybe I should have watched her die, I should have petted her. Maybe she thought I was abandoning her.”
After Peggy’s death, Fulli is promoted to the top of the hierarchy. He moves elegantly, with the stillness of an ambassador, and he has an aristocratic way of holding his head. He never barks except for some serious reason. He observes wisely and he understands every word. When he doesn’t obey, it’s because his master is in the wrong. And yet he always carries a kind of sadness. Marco suspects that he knows he was chosen not for himself but because all his brothers and sisters were killed by the virus. “No one,” he says, “can live in peace with a thought like that, Fulli can’t any more than anyone else.”
Argo and Ambra are twins. He is timid and clumsy, she’s lively and delinquent. They disobey constantly, he from obtuseness, she from intelligence.Ambra often gets hurt and because of her, Marco spends all his spare time with the homeopathic veterinarian who rarely gets paid, because Marco is his best client: aside from the dogs, he also entrusts both himself and his mother to him.
Leaving the vet’s office on the night when Ambra gets a splinter the size of a nail in her paw, Marco takes a rough dirt path — the kind he likes. He stops in the forest, opens the door: Fulli ge
ts out with style, Argo follows. Ambra stays in the Jeep and gives him a pleading look. “Come on, Ambra, get out.” She moans.“Come on,Ambra,” he repeats, changing his tone, “I’m here, I’ll help you, come on, I’m right here.” He bends down and still talking, draws her to him and picks her up. “Come on, I’m here.” She’s heavy. He sets her on the ground and Ambra starts walking and crying. Marco squats down and covers her with his whole body, he tightens his arms around her chest and rubs his cheek against her head. He rocks her. For a long time he rocks her, talking to her in hushed tones. Marianne watches them from a distance: she knows that he’ll never love humans the way he loves dogs, devoted to their straw bodies, steeped in their loyalty.
One morning a few months later,Ambra dies on the floor of the garage, after three cruel days of writhing in pain and one last night of howling while everyone was asleep. He buries her next to Peggy, in the place where he raises his ducks, determined never to resign himself to that task. She was too young, too full of life, with her beautiful, finely sculpted muzzle and her oh-so-feminine way of disobeying him; he doesn’t understand. “There are all kinds of dogs on the street that are hungry, sad, alone, and those dogs will live to a hundred, while mine are dropping like leaves in the first gust of wind.”
From then on he displays an outraged sorrow. He caresses in a new way, eyes closed, with a delicacy as soft as flour and Marianne understands that it’s the death of the dogs that’s shivering in the tips of his fingers, she understands that their interrupted race will pass through all his gestures yet to come.
The Perfect Circle Page 4