Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  The next morning, I bought a bit of furniture from a bric à brac stall in the Barras Market. For me, that market was like an adventure on a new continent. I should make it clear that when I talk about Glasgow I’m basically talking nonsense. Glasgow is quite a big, complex city, whose tortuous history stretches from the Celts up to the most recent industrial unrest. The granitic Scottish identity and the recent collapse of big industry, especially the shipyards, have left a kind of strange urban swamp in which an extraordinary variety of life forms manage to grow. Sometimes I’d hear about places like the East End, Ibrox, Maryhill, places where terrible things were said to happen: stabbings, gang fights, robberies. When Carlo, one of my fellow students, was questioned one day on the way out of an algebra class as to why he had a black eye and thick glasses patched together with tape, he told Dr McKenzie, me and two other classmates that he’d ended up in the middle of an Orange parade in the East End wearing a green jacket. Some policemen had seen Carlo wandering brazenly in the middle of the road. They’d watched him as he stopped suddenly and stared in astonishment at the crowd, which was already pointing at him. Carlo told us that when he saw that formless mass of huge men dressed in orange he had frozen. Then he had felt himself being yanked strongly to one side, thrown to the ground, crushed by what seemed like dozens of hands, his arms twisted unnaturally behind his back. He’d tried to look around, but all he remembered were dark clothes and incomprehensible cries in Scottish and the asphalt crushing his face. He’d been taken and handcuffed and even a bit manhandled by policemen in riot gear, who lifted him up and threw him into a van. Bewildered and terrified, Carlo kept asking what had happened, what he was doing in that van, why he had been beaten and arrested. In his confusion, he even mentioned the Italian ambassador and, giving great autistic movements with his head—he did this sometimes in class too—kept repeating that it was unacceptable, completely unacceptable… A young policeman, perhaps the only one who had figured out what was really going on, gave him back his broken glasses and apologized. It had taken quite a while and quite a lot of shouting to clarify that Carlo wasn’t a fanatical Celt carried away by heroic delusions and convinced that he could face an Orange parade by himself, but simply an innocent Italian student who deserved, at most, mockery and a bit of compassion. Once the parade was over, the policemen had let him get out of the van, advised him to turn his green jacket inside out and told him how to get back to the university. Carlo had set off with some trepidation along one of the wide, desolate streets of the East End, with his jacket turned inside out and half a black eye and his thick glasses held on by only one arm, constantly looking around as if entering an uninhabited house. The three remaining policemen must have watched him for a few seconds, then probably nudged each other and laughed and drove towards him. One got out and told Carlo to get in again.

  “Again?” Carlo said, on the verge of tears.

  “We’ll take you home.”

  So Carlo got back in the van and, while the ride lasted, felt for the first and last time in his life what it was like to be a criminal. When the policemen dropped him outside the main gate of the university, they smiled and asked if he could find his way home from there.

  “Yes, thanks,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” the policeman at the wheel replied. “And keep away from the East End. In fact, try to keep away from anywhere that isn’t the university campus.”

  When the story was over, we all laughed and told Carlo it wasn’t bad advice.

  Dr McKenzie shook his head and smiled. “It may also be time to throw away that green jacket,” he said as he finished putting his books back in his leather briefcase.

  “But it’s a gift from my mum.”

  “Precisely.”

  In four years of university, I heard quite a few stories like this. To me they all seemed as exotic as night battles on the outskirts of Baghdad or journeys along the Yellow River. I never went to the East End or Ibrox or any other area of the city that wasn’t either the centre or Hillhead, the university area. Going as far as the end of Queen Margaret Drive to have dinner with a couple I knew who lived in the area—no more than ten minutes on foot—was quite enough travelling for me. In every city I’ve ever lived in, I’ve been able, in a surprisingly short space of time, to establish a restricted but solid network of places where I could find the basic necessities and feel at home, and to go outside it as little as possible. For some time, this deep-rooted rejection of novelty has been another of those tiresome elements that lead people to make all kinds of insinuations about me, but previously it was never a great problem. Under the pressure of other people’s arguments I began to wonder about myself, but in the end I simply decided that it wasn’t about unresolved issues, and it wasn’t a phobia: it was more like a simple lack of interest. I’ve lived in several places, and have always lived in a small part of them. What’s wrong with that? I can well understand the charm of new landscapes, I know how excited people get about them, and I respect anyone who decides to devote a lot of time and money, maybe even the best moments of their lives, to such activities. But if I’m not like them, what can I do about it? From time to time, over the years, I’ve been dragged into pointless discussions over this. Some people smile, some drop the subject, some get annoyed. They can’t understand how it’s possible for someone not to like travelling: that’s usually the more or less explicit subtext of the conversation.

  “I don’t know,” I’ve learnt to answer. “I don’t like aubergines either, but I’ve never had to argue about it.”

  I’ve discovered that this sentence often manages to silence even the most pigheaded.

  *

  The day the previous year that Mathías had suggested we go to the Barras, I’d felt as if I were venturing into the unknown. It was a cold Sunday morning and I was quietly reading under the blankets, minding my own business.

  “Come on, get up, we’re going to the Barras,” said Mathías, entering as usual without knocking.

  “Where?”

  “The Barras. How come I never catch you having a wank?”

  “Where’s the Barras?”

  “Here in Glasgow, just past the centre. It’s a market.”

  “A market?”

  “You know, those things where people have stalls and put things on sale and hope someone will come and buy them.”

  “And what will we do in a market?”

  “Have a look at it, whatever. Don’t piss me off, just get a move on.”

  “I don’t know, Mathías… it’s cold, I’m reading. I opened the bathroom window to let a bit of air in and I couldn’t get my hand off the handle.”

  “Get dressed. Its cool, the Barras. It’s like another world. You see a bit of the real Scotland.”

  Maybe that’s the point: real places. We always think where we are is less real than other places. It’s as if we’re each living on an island, as artificial as a stage set, and the neighbouring islands seem more authentic. Not to those who live there, of course: to them, our island is more authentic, which makes the whole thing rather ridiculous and paradoxical. Until not long ago, it had never occurred to me that my life might not be authentic, and to tell the truth, whenever I heard that idea expressed I always treated it with a certain sarcasm.

  Before we left, Mathías knocked at Ricardo’s door and told him we were going to the Barras: there was no answer.

  I had already been to the centre occasionally and had got quite accustomed to the square stone buildings and the lights and all the shop windows. At the end of Argyle, however, where there was an old tower that looked like the bell tower of a ruined church, a completely new landscape suddenly opened up: low and in some cases dilapidated buildings, iron bridges, obese men in torn track suits, street vendors, fish and chip shops. It was as if, just by going a few steps further, we were entering one of those dubious areas on the outskirts of town I had often heard about but had never felt any urgent desire to venture into. Mathías was happiness personified. He ke
pt looking around and pointing out apparently insignificant details that seemed rather seedy to me, but extraordinary to him: an old woman’s hacked-off fingers, a young boy’s patched-up crutches, a group of three men with red faces and swollen bellies, two young men in black T-shirts and broken shoes, and so on.

  “Can’t you feel life?” Mathías asked, all excited.

  The Barras Market was the essence of all this, its most intense, most crystallized expression. A sinister individual with a noticeable scar across one eye, standing behind a stall full of T-shirts and pants and trousers, was screaming incomprehensibly, accompanied by a little boy who was like a scale model of him; another man, fat and with only three teeth in his mouth, was also screaming behind a stall of used records and cassettes; a thin old man close by was laughing and rubbing his hands; small groups of elderly men with red unshaven faces waved lottery tickets and yelled at passers-by to try their luck. The smell of tar and incense and rottenness, the reddish tinge of the light, the impression of being in some strange mythical place at the ends of the earth. On both sides of the main thoroughfare there were three large sheds, also full of stalls. Second-hand drills, tea services, LPs, dolls, books, videocassettes, toy pistols and rifles, broken typewriters, entryphones, military helmets and caps, hooks, chairs, sagging armchairs, bicycles—probably stolen—wooden beams, toy clowns, old telephones, propellers, binoculars, curtains, ornaments and trinkets of all kinds.

  When I went back now by myself, a fat woman with hair stuck to her forehead sold me, for half the original price, an old worm-eaten table and two rickety chairs, two oil lamps, one in aluminium and one in brass, and then congratulated me and told me I was a tough customer. I asked her if by any chance she also had a mattress.

  She thought this over for a moment, then shook her head.

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have a mattress.” She turned towards the back of her stall. “Hey, do we have a mattress for this boy?”

  I didn’t see where it was coming from, but a voice that sounded like a motorbike with a broken carburettor said something I didn’t understand. With the woman too, I’d had some difficulty communicating at first, but we’d managed in the end.

  She turned back to me and shook her head, but after a moment she stopped and, making a sign to me, came out from behind her stall and told me to follow her. She was wearing a horrible hairy pink jumpsuit and her bottom swayed inside it like a straw case on a dirt road. We passed another couple of vendors and walked outside the shed. The woman then started calling someone in a loud voice. A huge shaven-headed man dressed in military green turned and said to wait a minute. He was stabbing his index finger into the chest of a thinner man, who jumped slightly at every blow. The thin man did not seem very pleased at that index finger being stabbed at his chest, but before long he went away without saying anything. The man with the shaved head turned towards the woman and smiled at her and they shook hands. Then the woman pointed at me and said something. It was pointless for me even to try to understand them. The big man looked me up and down. At the sides of his mouth he had two long scars rising towards his ears. The previous year, Mathías had cheerfully explained to me that they called this a Glasgow smile and it was caused by a beer glass thrust in the mouth as someone was finishing drinking. A typically nice Scottish custom. That face and that lopsided smile weren’t a pretty sight at all. Then the man addressed me directly.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I replied, looking at the woman for help. Luckily, she supported me with some words I didn’t understand either. The man shrugged and gestured to us to follow him. He went around the outside of the shed and stopped in front of a rusty little van. Inside it, there were various pieces of furniture: tables, chairs, an armchair, a crystal chandelier, a basket full of cutlery that might have been silver. And stuck in on the side, two mattresses. The man jumped into the van, and with extraordinary ease, holding one upright, pulled out the other. It was a decent double mattress, apparently in good shape. When I moved my face closer to it to smell it, the man and the woman both laughed. He said something to me too, sniffed and passed a finger under his nostrils, but I thought it was best to keep silent and just smile. Then I asked the woman how much the mattress cost. In the end, with a bit of difficulty and, I have to admit, a certain amount of courage on my part, we arrived at a figure. I asked if it was possible for them to take my purchases up to Hillhead. The man and the woman discussed this a bit and in the end we came to an agreement that he would bring the stuff directly to the club on Tuesday morning.

  When Leonard saw that huge, dubious individual come into his bar and go up the stairs, helping me to carry the things, he wasn’t very happy. Before he left, the big man shook my hand and once again said something I didn’t understand.

  “What did he say?” I asked Leonard when he’d gone.

  “To drop by and see him in the Barras. But who is he?”

  “A new friend of mine,” I said to Leonard, and winked. “He’s a good lad.”

  From a little shop in the area, I bought two pillows and some sheets and blankets, and when the following afternoon, having gathered firewood that morning before going to the university, I lit the fire in the attic for the first time, I felt as if nothing could happen to me now. At last, the world could even disappear: I had my refuge, and as the heat from the fireplace was enough to let me push aside the blankets and take off a couple of sweaters, it honestly seemed to me the most beautiful refuge in the world.

  I went there every afternoon and every evening, and the main room of Leonard’s Lodge became a bit like the hall and front room of my home. Leonard discovered that it was quite convenient for him to have me there, and very soon, instead of my working fixed shifts, we decided that he would call me when he needed me. All he had to do was climb the stairs and knock at my door. For my part, I assured him that if some evening I had to study more than usual and couldn’t give him a hand, I would tell him in advance. In return, for half the pay agreed at the beginning, I had my attic. I would have worked for free.

  5

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN thanks to—or the fault of—the excitement of my newly regained freedom and the crackling of the fire and the light of the oil lamps on the worm-eaten wood of the little table that the idea of moving to the Physics Department had started to grow inside me. But if I think about it again now, seeing the bigger picture, it was more to do with productivity, in the most industrial meaning of the word. The ease with which I understood numbers and functions had started to exasperate me without my realizing it. In reality, the first shoots of this future evolution had appeared much earlier. I was in middle school, and one morning, as our teacher Signora Scarpelli was explaining exponentiation, I suddenly raised my hand and asked what the point of it was. It was a question I’d already asked a couple of times over the previous few months. Signora Scarpelli, who had always singled me out for praise if not actual affection, snorted, “Jacopo, if you ask me again what the point of it is I’ll throw you out and give you four out of ten.”

  Unlike some of my classmates, I wasn’t used to such harsh words from a teacher—or from anybody, to tell the truth—and the violence of that reply must have triggered a small trauma in me. My brain, which was not yet very flexible, must have automatically pigeonholed that “What’s the point?” as something not to ask, especially to a maths teacher, and I pretty much forgot all about it. It wasn’t difficult: I enjoyed maths and I was good at it, so why should I ask what the point was? If nothing else, it helped to reassure my teachers and parents, which was already quite something. And it helped me pass the time pleasantly enough. And when school was over it had taken me to another country and helped me win money and scholarships and discover Frank Zappa and Talking Heads. And yet that question always hung over my head like a dark shadow. True, not everything came as automatically as it once had, and on a few occasions I felt a vague sense of frustration: when you came down to it, it was the same frustration we might feel faced with a complex rebus we can’
t solve. Once solved, it’s only the key to more ambitious puzzles. But in the meantime, that same inescapable question hovered over me like a vulture: what’s the point?

  Now, aware of the risk and with my heart pounding in my chest, I tried once again to ask one of my teachers. This time, though, I asked it in a less arrogant way, with a slight touch of sadness in my voice.

  I was sitting on a bench in the botanical gardens, next to Dr Jones. We’d met by chance. From time to time, as I walked from the hall of residence to the university or Leonard’s Lodge, I liked to go through the park and take a look in the greenhouses. I particularly liked the tropical house. It was a small circular section, with a concrete pond in the middle, and was very hot and humid. There were ferns drooping on all sides and small aquariums with seaweed and tiny fish. In the central pond, which was two or three metres in diameter, curious catfish stuck their mouths out on top of the water and sucked at the surface. There was almost never anybody there, and the silence and the drops of moisture hanging from the leaves and the slight hissing of the water made me feel for a few minutes like an adventurer in a South American rainforest. Sometimes I also liked going to the succulent plants section, where the air was very dry and there was a smell of dust.

  As I was walking along one of the paths in order to get back to the street, I spotted Dr Jones sitting on a bench, facing the big lawn with Kibble Palace in the background. He was staring into the distance, with his hands together on his lap, as still as a statue. His big nose was redder than usual and his floppy hair was moving slightly in the breeze.

  “Dr Jones,” I said, approaching and bowing my head a little.