“Tell me what comes into your head when I say the word ‘bicycle’.”
I stared at them for a moment, then turned towards Tommaso.
“Bicycle?” I asked him.
“Yes, bicycle.”
“Bicycle bicycle?”
“Yes, bicycle bicycle.”
“What do they want to know about bicycles?”
Tommaso turned towards the table where the board sat. “He’s asking what you want to know about bicycles,” he said in English.
“Whatever comes into your head,” he translated.
I stared at him for another moment or two, dumbfounded.
“Whatever comes into my head? Well, what comes into my head is spokes, wheels, pedals, chains, cogs, gears, slopes, rates of incline, Gino Bartali, effort, mineral salts, Ivan Lendl, heat, friction, work, hard graft, water, steak, dust, molecules, hydrogen, vectors, centrifugal force, groin pain, sunshine, cyclists’ hats, plastic marbles, petrol, refineries, factories, fumaroles, the baths of Petriolo, sulphur, rotten eggs, magma, an erupting volcano, the…”
Tommaso was going mad trying to keep up with me.
“Thank you, that’s fine,” one of the members of the board stopped me with a smile. Then he asked me what I thought about clouds.
“You mean—again—whatever comes into my head?”
Tommaso asked for elucidation.
“No, they’re actually asking what you think about them, what your opinion of them is.”
Jesus, I thought.
By the time we got back to the room in the evening, I was exhausted. I tried to ask Fredrick, the German boy I was sharing with, how it had gone for him, but he pretended not to understand, and I found myself simply staring up at the bare white ceiling, wondering once again what kind of place I’d ended up in.
The board also seemed quite curious about my way of solving the exercises, the way I was always tearing off pages and sticking them together with Scotch tape, the way I was always surrounded with rolled-up balls of paper. When, on the first day, at the end of the morning’s tests, I approached the table where the board sat with the exercises copied in a fair hand, they asked me if I could also leave them the other papers. In my left hand I was holding a pile of pages all crumpled and stuck together as best they could be.
“These?”
“Yes, those.”
“Are you sure?”
They smiled. “Yes, we’re sure.”
I put the papers down on the table. As I was leaving the lecture room, I saw two of the board members leaf through them and laugh. Two young guys who were there with me for the tests also said something to each other and laughed. I really didn’t think it was nice of them to laugh at me: I might have been a foreigner, I might have been a fish out of water, my native village and my clumsy way of solving equations might have been remote from this place, but there was no need to be laughing at me. This cold city might well have great centuries-old universities carved like monuments in stone, but where I came from we had something called politeness. I gradually started to feel that I was somewhere sinister and inhospitable, somewhere I needed to escape from as soon as possible.
On the last afternoon, the board retired to draw up a shortlist, planning to announce the names of the three winners before dinner. So we had a few hours free and Tommaso asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to see.
“The underground.”
“The underground?”
“Yes, the underground.”
In the small amount of free time they’d left us, Tommaso had already shown me the central complex of the university with its towers and its courtyards and its spires and its sinister fifteenth-century arches, but they meant nothing to me now, they were just monuments to this dark, repulsive place. The previous day, though, while looking for something to eat, we had walked through the area surrounding the campus, and Tommaso had pointed out a large opening and told me, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, that it was the entrance to the underground.
“But there’s nothing to see. The Glasgow underground is horrible.”
I shrugged. I had never seen an underground railway and to tell the truth, ever since I’d heard that word, I hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind.
“All right,” Tommaso said, shaking his head. “We could take it to the centre of town and maybe go for a walk there.”
I shrugged again without saying anything. It was, as I had anticipated, one of the most extraordinary things I had ever come across. A man in a blue uniform sold us some tickets from inside a steel cage, and with them, along with various other people, we went through the mechanical turnstiles. We then all went in single file down a long escalator and onto the platform, which had tunnels at either end. The whole station was covered in brown and cream tiles, with a number of posters. After a couple of minutes we felt a gust of wind and gradually heard the muted din of an electric train. It appeared all at once from the darkness of the tunnel, and for a moment it seemed to me to be rubbing against the walls, so exactly did it fit the circumference. Once it had stopped, the doors opened automatically. Through the nearest one, two or three young men and an old lady with a dog got out. The carriage was rather low, and the perfectly cylindrical shape was reminiscent of a worm. Inside, two rows of upholstered seats faced each other. Everyone was silent and motionless, doing everything they could to keep their eyes away from anywhere that wasn’t either up at the ceiling or down on the ground. Actually, compared with all the underground railways I would later discover around the world, the one in Glasgow was somewhat ridiculous. Small and low, narrow, worn and dirty: a dishevelled worm that simply went in a circle round the centre of the city. On the seats, the remains of sandwiches and empty beer cans. And yet that river of people walking in silence underground and going round corners like a single snake and the shuddering of the train over the rails and the neon lighting and the seats on either side of the carriage all seemed to be telling secret stories of a civilization that might have been in a desperate state but that suddenly seemed much more attractive.
I love underground railways. For some time now, I’ve been forcing myself to walk whenever I can, to be in the open air as much as possible. There have been times in my life when I was either indoors reading by lamplight or stuck in an underground train and never saw sunlight and rarely breathed fresh air. My skin ended up wrinkling and taking on a surreal, translucent colouring, and my mood was like the surface of a carpenter’s rasp. So when I can, I walk. And yet, every time I set foot in an underground, I sink back into that strange sense of peace, that paradoxical feeling of respect for the human race. There we all are, together, underground, all trying in our clumsy, stubborn way to give meaning to our lives.
All right, let’s go and take this tooth out, I thought, when my turn came to hear the results of the selection process. I walked in with Tommaso, assuming a nonchalant, even bored air, and sat down. I wondered who would laugh this time, and what bizarre new questions they would ask me. I didn’t mind: if nothing else, I’d have something to tell my friends when I got back.
The man who spoke was the one who had probably spoken least during those three days. If I’d understood correctly, his name was Jones and he was SETEC’s internal guarantor for the scholarship. He had floppy grey hair that almost completely covered one eye and his nose was red and swollen, as if someone had blown inside it with a straw.
He seemed very serious and spoke very slowly, and for the first time I got a fairly clear idea of what was being said. As he spoke, he rolled an orange-coloured pencil between his fingers.
“Dear Mr Ferri, I want to tell you right away that as of now you are one of the three candidates chosen for a scholarship.”
The muscles of my face fell and I turned for a moment towards Tommaso, but he didn’t seem to react much. He had grown a bit distant towards me since I had asked him to stay on the underground for two whole circuits, not saying a word.
“We really liked some of your
solutions, and the way you arrived at them. They did contain a number of naïve elements which occasionally led you astray, but it’ll be our task to help you overcome such frivolities. We believe that if you learn to control yourself and find a better method, your impulsiveness may bring you great satisfaction. We also like the way in which you’re able to abstract yourself from what you do. I confess that you share this with a number of your compatriots: you Italians can be quite vague and confused, but often, we have to admit”—here Dr Jones glanced quickly round at the other members of the board, some of whom smiled—“you have really brilliant ideas. I’ve worked with a number of Italians in the course of my life and I’ve come to the conclusion that your brilliance depends on your capacity to look around you and be surprised. But anyway, that’s another matter. We would be very happy to have you studying here with us. However, we’re not very satisfied with your level of English. It’s quite unacceptable for a serious course of study. So I have to inform you that we’re going to keep a fourth candidate on standby. Apart from the TOEFL, which you’re expected to pass in order to be admitted to the university, we’ll be giving a supplementary language test in September, before the beginning of classes, on the basis of which, whether or not you have the TOEFL, we’ll decide if we’re going to accept you for the scholarship.”
Then at last the whole board stood up and smiled at me.
“Congratulations Mr Ferri. We’ll see you in September.”
When I got back home and told my parents all about Glasgow and the scholarship, my father looked at me for the first time with that mixture of pride and mistrust which over the course of the years would always leave me somewhat bewildered. Ever since I was little, I’d had the vague feeling that for my parents having a son was a strange experience. There were small signs I would dredge up from my memories and put together only long afterwards: a way of looking at me, of serving me my food, of taking me by the hand and walking me to school. There had always been some kind of mistrust there. Yes, that’s what it was: they treated me with a vague but unmistakable degree of mistrust. It was as if one day they’d found an already well-formed child outside their front door, four or five years old perhaps, that somebody had abandoned. As good Christians, they’d decided to take that child into their home and treat him as one of their own. And yet they appeared to feel completely unsuitable. To a large extent, they managed not to let it show, but this small creature that was growing before their eyes and scurrying about the yard, with a passion for little red pencil cases, and who’d one day sprouted longer limbs and facial hair, must have constantly surprised them. Not to mention when he had started solving impossible equations and winning big scholarships to study abroad. An alien in the house. I think the few times my parents—especially my dad, out of medical deformation if nothing else—considered that the alien was in reality the product of their own secretions and humours, it had caused such a short circuit that they had preferred not to think about it. One day a friend of mine at university asked me if I had brothers or sisters and why my parents hadn’t had more children. “It would have been unthinkable,” I found myself replying. That was another reason the usual quarrels, conflicts and dramas between parents and children were completely unknown to me, and my dad had always been able, even at the most difficult moments, to behave like a reasonable person: it was as if I didn’t belong to him. My life choices were no concern of his, any more than they might be the concern of a pleasant uncle who likes you a lot. He is, and has always been, wonderfully free of all those complexes that govern the frustrations and successes of parents and children. Since I was very small, my parents had had their life and I’d had mine. The fact that we might share part of it was, all things considered, accidental.
To solve the problem of English, my mum suggested a new DeAgostini course she’d seen in Piero’s tobacconist shop the day before and had also, she seemed to remember, seen advertised on TV. I didn’t think it was such a great idea. Then Dad remembered Mrs Hampton, a massive Englishwoman with skin as smooth as an apple who’d bought a little house in the area a few years earlier. It was around the Easter holidays and apparently he had met her a couple of days before at the Coop. The previous year he’d treated her for a nasty and foul-smelling intestinal infection and had refused payment for it. He was sure Mrs Hampton would be really happy to give me a hand with my English.
Mrs Hampton had made her Italian dream come true along with her husband. They had bought the property and had sacrificed a great deal to refurbish it, doing much of the work themselves. Mr Hampton must have been dazzled by his own tanned skin and reinvigorated physique, and had suddenly run off with the female owner, also English, of the agency through which they’d found the house. It was assumed in the village that she was a younger and more attractive woman than poor Mrs Hampton, but in fact, when she appeared with him in the local bar one day, everyone found it hard to hold back their laughter when they saw that she was equally bulky and equally smooth, and not necessarily younger. A kind of clone of Mrs Hampton. Obviously there had been some idle speculation about the new partner’s hidden qualities, but for the rest of their days, everyone would use Mr Hampton and his wife and his new partner as the basis of any sensible conversation on the delicate subject of marriage and the longevity of relationships.
Once the final exams were over, my summer with Mrs Hampton proved to be a real trial. I had never found anything as hard as learning English: it had never cost me so much effort before to get something into my head. Or to keep it there. I spent every afternoon at Mrs Hampton’s studying irregular verbs and trying to write and make decent conversation. She was very understanding of my difficulties, but eventually yielded to moments of obvious exasperation. At first I had the terrible suspicion that behind her willingness to help me there was actually a touch of mischief, but gradually this was transformed into more than a hint of annoyance.
“I don’t understand how you managed to win a scholarship!” she cried one afternoon early in August, getting up and disappearing into the kitchen. I sat there in the living room without saying anything, wondering if this put an abrupt end to our lessons, but five minutes later Mrs Hampton reappeared carrying a tray.
“Let’s have a nice glass of iced tea,” she said, recovering her usual amiable smile.
I went back to Glasgow feeling very nervous and for the first and only time was aware of the kind of nausea most students report when they have to take an exam. The fact was, I had never felt any kind of panic about exams. My character, I think. The coldest, most rational part of me would say that I was simply aware of my own preparedness and my own abilities, but I’ve had dozens of companions who were just as capable and well prepared as I but felt an overwhelming desire to vomit before every exam.
But not this time. No, this time my blood was anything but cold, and my gastric juices were seething so much that it was impossible for me to eat. Fortunately, the internal English test—I had already passed the TOEFL in a language school in Rome at the end of August—was just the day after my arrival in Glasgow, otherwise I would probably have died of starvation. Obviously what made it all worse was my lack of confidence in my English, but it was, above all, a matter of aesthetics: here I was, one step away from the most important opportunity of my life, an opportunity any reasonable student would give his eye teeth for, and that big train filled with equations and functions and dreams of glory was about to crash, derailed by a stupid English test. As I placed my hand on the brass door handle of the lecture room, repressing a great desire to throw up over it, I imagined an older and dustier version of myself telling a class of spotty-faced kids about the time I’d been selected for one of the most prestigious international scholarships, and how fate had played the most sinister of tricks on me by depriving me of the slightest talent for languages.
2
THE DAY I FELT CLOSEST to the others, even though we were many thousands of kilometres from each other, I was with Trisha in the attic room I’d been using for a few we
eks thanks to Leonard. The evening I discovered it, I’d been working at Leonard’s Lodge for more than a month.
One morning, walking along Ashton Lane as I did every day, I’d seen a hand stick up a notice in a window. I turned left into the alleyway and then towards the steps that led up to the university, which always reminded me of the steps in The Exorcist. My foot was just coming to rest on the first step when I stopped and let another student overtake me. I stood there at the foot of the steps, in a daze, then turned and walked back as far as the window where I’d seen the notice. Help Needed, it said.
A bell rang softly as I opened the door. Beyond it, a narrow staircase led directly to the first floor. I’d been in that bar a couple of times the previous year. It was furnished like somebody’s house, not very tidily, with a red carpet and sofas, a few framed posters, table football and a counter. By night, if I remember correctly, the lights were as red as the walls; at the moment it just looked very scruffy. A man with a droopy Mexican-style moustache and wearing a lumberjack’s shirt over a T-shirt came through a door behind the dark wooden counter and put a box down next to the sink. He threw me a glance and started taking bottles from the box.
“Yes?” he said after a while.
“I saw the notice downstairs.”
He finished taking out the bottles and threw the box aside, then crouched behind the counter and said something incomprehensible.
Enchantment Page 9