—So, I continue, if the voices I hear give me an order, I have to obey, you see how it works?
He thinks it over a bit, the poor devil.
—And you … can’t you talk to them, to these voices?
—Talk to the voices? That’s a good one.
—Why? Can’t you try?
—No, of course you can’t talk to the voices.
—I see a lot of people in the streets talking to themselves.
—Those people are not schizophrenics. And even if I could, what am I supposed to say to the voices?
—What you told me before about how it isn’t worth it to shoot me. I mean, there’s no reason to shoot morons.
—In other words, you want me to put in a good word for you.
—Right.
I consider this. And I think that I can indeed pretend to give him a shred of hope.
—So you think that if I tell them, I can convince them?
—Yes! Yes! Definitely! In fact, I’m sure you can!
—Could be. Maybe you’re right. Wait, I’ll give it a try.
I wrinkle my forehead, squeeze the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, forcing myself to appear as absorbed as possible. Out of the corner of my eye I see the imbecile watching me in the little mirror, full of expectation. I let the operation go on until I see the sign for the exit Campo Nomadi, a local gypsy camp.
What fucking luck, I think.
I come out of my trance. I open my eyes.
—I’m really very sorry, Marcè, I tell him with a heavy voice, but your request was turned down.
—What do you mean, turned down? Why was it turned down?
—I don’t know why. It’s a surprise that they even answered me. That’s never happened before. In a certain sense I’m grateful to you, I didn’t know I could do it.
He turns around. He looks at me, desperate. We’re about to swerve again.
—Do you mind watching the road, dickhead? I scold him, even raising my voice a little, I must admit.
—Sorry.
—Don’t worry about it. Drive, go on.
—Please, officer, don’t hurt me, I got a family.
I put a hand on his shoulder.
—No way, Marcè. I have to shoot you in the ear, they tell me.
He instinctively covers the part in question with his right hand, and begins crying like a baby.
—Hey, look, I can shoot you in the ear even through your hand, you know. It doesn’t change much.
But I don’t know if he even hears me, he’s so disconsolate.
—Take this exit, go on, I tell him, indicating the gypsy camp, I’ll shoot you there.
He obeys, with a kind of resignation to the awful day he’s having.
I tell him to drive to a particularly squalid area with some really ugly trailers.
—Get out, go ahead.
He complies. He is still crying, though less than before.
From their ratholes on wheels, a couple of gypsies are watching us like hyenas hoping for prey.
I get out too. I make him walk two or three yards from the car, then I tell him to turn around. Though it is a rotten thing to do, I let a few seconds go by.
I take his place behind the wheel. I close the car door.
The sound makes him turn around.
—Hey, Marcè, I say loudly, do you have your wallet?
He pats his back pockets.
—Y-yeah, he answers automatically.
—Did you hear that? I shout in the direction of the gypsies, who have just stepped out of their shitty vans. —He has his wallet on him, this guy!
Marcello looks at me in shock. He probably hasn’t understood a damn thing, demented as he is from everything that’s happening to him.
I start the car.
I pass alongside him.
He looks at me, incapable of any reaction.
—And now they’re your problem, I say, tossing my head back toward the gypsies who are beginning to approach.
Then I drive off.
In the rearview mirror, I see the hyenas starting to circle.
The two have already become four.
ROMAN HOLIDAYS
BY ENRICO FRANCESCHINI
Villa Borghese
Translated by Ann Goldstein
Settled at a table in a café, I check my watch: It’s still early for our appointment, but I’m already anticipating her arrival. I like to stretch out the tension, up until the moment I see her, suddenly, in the crowd, head high, with that unmistakable gait, which distinguishes her, and, I would say, elevates her above all others. Today, however, I know in advance how I’m going to spend the time that separates me from the first glance, the first furtive kiss, the first thrilling moment of the day we’ll spend together. I’ve brought a notebook with me, here to the café, a small book with a black binding, held shut by an elastic band: a handsome object with uncut pages, whose first lines I am filling with an old pen. Now I’ve taken a break, ordered a beer, lit a cigarette. What could be better, on a warm spring afternoon, than to sit in a café in the heart of Rome, have a sip of cold beer, take a drag on a cigarette, and prepare to write about the woman you love, knowing that in a couple of hours you’ll see her?
My name is Jack Galiardo, I’m fifty years old, I’m an American citizen of Italian ancestry: My grandparents emigrated to New York in the early part of the twentieth century—they came from the countryside right around here. I’m a lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer, and I have a professional bias toward writing: When I accept a new case, after studying the details I need to slowly construct the line of reasoning that I’ll use to defend my client, and the only way to do so effectively is to take notes, otherwise I can’t think. Cogito, ergo sum. Paraphrasing Descartes, I could say: I write, therefore I think. It’s valid here, too, at the café table, although the case I have to think about now is my own.
Two years ago, I was sitting on a plane next to a woman, an Italian. I was going to Rome to meet a witness who might be useful in a trial. She was returning to Italy from a short working trip to the United States. The flights from America to Europe generally arrive at dawn, so the majority of the passengers try to sleep; but that night the two of us weren’t tired and we got to know each other. I had recently begun to study Italian, drawn by a sudden curiosity about the land of my forebears, which had never much interested me as a boy; so the conversation unfolded mainly in her language. After a couple of drinks and the initial chitchat, I revealed something about myself: that I had been married and divorced twice, had two children already in college, two houses, one in New York and one in Florida, two cars. “Two of everything,” she commented, laughing. Then she told me that she was a journalist, that she was married, and that her husband was also a lawyer, in Rome; unlike me, he was not a criminal lawyer but, rather, worked in commercial law. They had three children, two boys and a girl, the last still small. Giulia—that was the name of my traveling companion—must have been forty, but she looked at least ten years younger. I soon discovered that she loved to talk: She did almost all the talking, jumping from one subject to another, telling endless anecdotes, little stories, situations—quite entertaining, I think. I can’t be sure, because after a while I had trouble following her, given my limited knowledge of Italian. But the sound of what she said, the tone of her voice, the rippling laughs with which she punctuated her speech fascinated me. I would have liked her never to stop.
The truth is that she could also have stayed silent: The effect on me would probably have been the same. I was in love with Giulia from the moment I saw her. I’ve never believed in the classic thunderbolt. I’ve had a certain number of women, some of whom—including the two I married—I liked a lot at first, but I’ve never really lost my head. I suppose that as a boy I must have had, like everyone else, a crush on the cutest girl in the class, but as soon as I reached the age of discretion I left romanticism behind; love songs, for one thing, have always seemed to me banal, foolish, excessive. I found
all those sighs, that agitation, vaguely comical; they seemed a pose, an attitude, rather than expressions of true feeling. With Giulia, however, it was like plunging into a state of adolescent regression. To please her, win her, possess her suddenly became my only purpose in life. Every other concern or consideration disappeared. I had to make an effort, that night on the plane, not to make myself look ridiculous by kneeling at her feet and declaring my love, then and there, in front of stewardesses and passengers.
When we landed, I asked for her phone number, and proposed that we see each other the next time I came to Rome. My stay this time would actually be very short: I had to leave within twenty-four hours so that I wouldn’t miss a court hearing in New York. “I’d love to,” she said simply. And we parted.
Phrases that are repeated an infinite number of times, in an infinity of casual encounters, in the course of a life. We might never have seen each other again. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Giulia, and after just a few days I called her from New York. “Ciao, it’s Jack Galiardo … I’d like to see you again,” I recall myself saying, emotionally. I got immediately to the point: “I could come to Rome next week, if you have time.”
She had a moment of hesitation. “You’d come to Rome just for me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She paused again, then said, “All right.”
Our first meeting was at Villa Borghese. Sitting on a bench, I made the declaration of love I would have liked to make on the plane. In a mixture of English and Italian, I described my image of her: alone, in a state of crisis with her husband, desperate for affection, for a man who desired her as no woman had ever been desired. And that man was me. Slightly put off, she said that I had misunderstood: She had agreed to see me, but that didn’t mean that her marriage was in trouble. I apologized. I added, however, that this suited me as well. That is, I was still happy to be there, on that bench, near her, even if she wasn’t having trouble with her husband and I was, at most, just slightly likable. It wasn’t a strategy to induce her to yield. I really felt that way: I felt that my love was so great that it was enough, at least at the beginning, for both of us. We got up from the bench and walked in silence for a little while, barely brushing against one another. In the square overlooking Piazza del Popolo she let me kiss her. We had lunch on the terrace of the Hassler. We continued to kiss, and then to touch, on the sofa of a deserted drawing room in the hotel, after lunch. We took a room there at the Hassler, although I was staying in another hotel. We made love until late afternoon. Then we descended to Piazza di Spagna, where she hastily said goodbye and got in a taxi. Walking as if in a trance, intoxicated with happiness, not knowing where I was or where I was going, I got a message on my cell phone: I already miss you. At that moment I knew: I had been knocked down. And I’ve never gotten up.
Rome, from then on, became the fixed destination of my vacations. As soon as I have a few days, I get on a plane and fly to Italy. Every so often, it happens that I can stay for a week, and then I manage to see Giulia two or three times. More often, they are whirlwind holidays: I leave at night from New York, arrive in Rome early the next morning, stay a day and a night, leave the following morning: a weekend in all, including the nine hours in the plane to get there and the same coming back. But it almost never happens that my Roman weekend coincides with an actual weekend. In fact, on Saturday and Sunday she has to be home, except for one weekend a month, when it’s her turn in the office, and so she’s just as busy. On some pretext, she can take a day off during the week as compensation, and devote it to me. Usually we see each other a couple of times a month. It works like this. I arrive and take a double room at a luxury hotel: the Hassler on Trinità dei Monti, the Hotel de Russie on Via del Babuino, the Plaza on Via del Corso, the Raphael near the Pantheon, the Excelsior on Via Veneto: These are my favorites. I earn a good living, enough to afford them, and besides, I love five-star hotels: They’re the only luxury I indulge in. But in this case I choose them for other reasons. They’re in the center, first of all, and Giulia lives in a residential neighborhood in the south of Rome, so it’s less likely that she’ll meet someone she knows. Furthermore, in these hotels the doormen are worldly, used to looking the other way in exchange for a generous tip, if in the late morning a woman accompanies a guest to his room without presenting her documents, as is usually required in Italy. Thus I spare her the embarrassment of disclosing her identity, of leaving traces. Finally, since we spend most of our time together in the room, I like it to be large, comfortable, elegant. I always wait for her in a café near the chosen hotel. When I see her coming, I get up and pay the bill, and she follows me, like a stranger, brushing my hand, pausing to give me a kiss in the doorway of a building, then immediately starting to walk again. Arriving at the hotel, we begin kissing in the elevator, start again as soon as I’ve closed the door of the room, and almost never stop. We take off our clothes quickly, we fall into bed, we make love—in every possible way—until evening. Maybe we fill the bathtub and spend awhile there. Sometimes we have room service: When the waiter comes in with the table, she goes into the bathroom, even though it’s obvious, from what we order, from the unmade bed, and from the Do not disturb sign hanging on the door, that there are two people in the room. Sometimes, at night, we have dinner in a tourist trattoria in the neighborhood between the Pantheon and Piazza del Popolo. Rome is full of these trattorias; they are places where no Roman would ever eat and so there, too, the risk of running into someone who might recognize her is not so high. It’s a system that guarantees eating badly, or at least not especially well, but it’s not the food that interests me. For Giulia and me, it’s enough to sit together in a dark corner, our knees touching, hands seeking each other under the table, letting ourselves be dazed by wine, only to hurry back to the room as soon as we’ve finished eating.
There have been exceptions to the rule of these encounters in the two years since we’ve been seeing each other. Once we went together to the Sistine Chapel, she hidden under a scarf and a pair of big dark sunglasses—well camouflaged among the legions of foreign tourists. Another time we took a car and went to Fregene, out of season, to stroll on the beach. It was sunny, we tumbled among the dunes. We also went to the movies one afternoon, not for the film but for the excitement of finding ourselves in the dark, in a half-empty theater, doing everything that is forbidden. Occasionally, I climb up behind her on her motor scooter and she drives me around, with no set destination: Since we’re wearing helmets we’re both unrecognizable. And since so many Romans travel around the city the same way—two wheels are the only alternative to the slow pace of cars and the inevitable traffic jams, Giulia explained. Protected by the mask of the helmet, holding onto her, I traverse the Eternal City like an invisible man to whom all is granted.
But it is in bed that we spend most of our time together. Partly we stay in these hotel rooms because ours is an illicit, clandestine love, which can’t be lived in front of others. The main reason, though, is that we like it. However nice it is to eat together, walk together, go somewhere together, nothing seems better to us than staying in bed together. I’ve never felt anything like that. I’ve had other women who excited me, but I’ve never spent eight, ten, fifteen hours in bed with one of them—at a certain point, desire always ran out. With Giulia it’s different: It never ends. Even if I’m tired after we’ve made love for a long time, an electric current impels me to caress her butt, lick the inside of her thighs, kiss her mouth, trace the line of her teeth with a finger, bite her ear, and on and on, without stopping. I can never have enough of her. It’s like a universal truth that was suddenly revealed to me: For the first time it seems obvious, as it never had before, that things should always be this way between a man and woman who are in love. That or nothing. No half-measures. The idea that a couple can lie together, I don’t mean for ten minutes but for an hour or two, and that each prefers to read a book, watch television, sleep—that is, do something else—now seems inconceivable, sad, wrong. If t
wo people are in love, if they want each other, love should be the way the two of us live it: uncontainable. Morbid. A disease. Now I believe that the moment this passes and excitement turns into routine, love starts to end. Rather, it’s already over.
Eventually, however, a worm began digging a hole in my obsession with Giulia, very tiny at first, then larger and larger: the thought of her husband. I’m a free man, without ties; I could be with her, if we wanted, all the time. And I would like it to be all the time. But Giulia isn’t free; she’s a married woman. For months, after that first meeting at Villa Borghese when I said that I saw in her a neglected and unhappy wife, we never returned to my mistake. Besides, it seemed to me that the facts expressed our wish to be together. Mistake or not, I thought I had understood everything: Giulia and her husband were the typical couple who married very young, but after twenty years things had cooled. As an explanation it suited me. I had no doubts, residual questions, uncertainties. But the worm, quietly, slowly, continued to dig. The hole got bigger. And I fell into it. I had to admit to myself that the classic roles of the triangle were reversed: I, the lover, was jealous of the husband. Of course, every so often Giulia mentioned his egotism, the fact that he never listened to her or that he dumped on her shoulders as wife and working mother all the responsibilities for the house and the children. But she said it as a simple fact, without much complaint, without expecting to change him or the situation. Of him she never spoke with malice, never.
Now Giulia had someone to listen to her: me. As in our first conversation flying over the Atlantic, it was always she who did more of the talking, telling me an infinity of stories great and small, about the articles she commissioned or wrote for the paper, about the minor incidents of life in the office, petty feuds, jealousies, injustices, the confidences of friends, the problems or successes she had with her children, the things she bought for the house, the vegetables she got at the market, the delicious meals she cooked. There—that’s where my uneasiness made itself felt for the first time, I remember clearly, at the table. One of those evenings when Giulia couldn’t stay with me, but had to hurry home at dinnertime—breathless, in her constant struggle with time—as if she were coming from the newspaper. Suddenly, as I was eating dinner alone in a squalid pizzeria, I saw her at the stove, preparing food for her family, and then at the table, laughing with her children, telling her husband something, receiving compliments from them all for the wonderful meal she had made. I felt a pang of jealousy. From that day, I began to desire Giulia not only in bed. I began to want to share with her the little rituals of daily life: dinner with friends, an outing with the children, a vacation, shopping at the supermarket. I thought how, in all those situations, it was the husband who got to be close to her, who enjoyed her presence continuously: not me. And I wondered how she really was with that man. I wondered if, and when, and how, they made love: odd, I had never thought about this before. Giulia talked so much, she told me so many things, but about him, and what she really felt, she said little. Was it reserve, a need to protect the privacy of her marital relations? Or perhaps only timidity, a difficulty in opening up? I then realized that she had rarely said to me, “I love you,” “I adore you,” phrases typical of lovers. It seemed to me that I could see love in the way she looked at me, but she measured her words, as if she distrusted them. She was much freer with text messages. She wrote: What are you doing to me? I’m yours more and more, I miss you, I want you, I think of you, dream of you, you’re inside me, part of my life. And yet when, having received the message, I called her, I had the sensation that it was a different person who had sent it, that she was retreating, that she no longer wanted to talk about it. And the worm, planted inside me, kept on working. I would have liked to ask her: You, what do you really feel? What is the difference between me and your husband? Would you leave him if I asked you to? How would you react if I asked you, for example, to marry me? Would you run away with me to New York? Or, if I moved to Rome, would we live together? But I couldn’t: It was stronger than me: I couldn’t. These were the sort of questions that, the other way around, women had always asked me, in the various relationships I’d had. Relationships without love. Relationships in which I listened to those plaintive questions—What about you, what do you feel? Do you love me? Do you care for me, think of me?—with an increasing sensation of nausea. With the wish to silence their mouths, flee, never see them again.
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