Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  He looked up, and for a moment his eyes had the unseeing gaze of a newborn baby. Then they lit up and he raised his eyebrows.

  “Ah, Mr Ferri. You here too?”

  “Yes, I sometimes come in here on my way to the department.”

  I propped my rucksack against one of the legs of the bench and sat down. We both looked at the lawn and Kibble Palace, he leaning back against the bench and me with my elbows on my knees. He asked me how my second year was going.

  “I don’t know… last year was better.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him turn his head slightly towards me. “Why’s that?”

  “No particular reason,” I said. Then I told him a bit about Mathías and Krista and the new hall of residence. I also told him that luckily I’d found a job in a club two or three evenings a week and I even mentioned the attic, where I could spend my free time, which at least distracted me a little.

  “And the course?”

  “What about the course?”

  For a moment I played with a chipped nail, then said, “I sometimes wonder what the point of it is.”

  Inside me, just under the surface, there was another face contracting its muscles and screwing up its mouth and eyes, as if expecting to be hit. But nothing happened, and after a few seconds I turned and saw Dr Jones simply sitting there, quite still, looking at me with a grave, nostalgic gaze.

  “I know,” he said after a while, leaning forward and also putting his elbows on his knees. “In the long run, mathematics isn’t as comforting as it seems.”

  I wasn’t quite sure I knew what he meant, but, encouraged by his unexpectedly melancholy reaction, I decided to risk going a bit further and see what happened.

  “I’d like to have the feeling that what I study might one day be of some practical use. Help people in some way. I’d like to know I didn’t do all this just to solve puzzles and because I liked it. I don’t know how to explain it… I’d like to study something that enters the world and changes it. That enters people’s lives.”

  “For example?”

  “I don’t know. Physics, for example, astronomy… whatever. To study something concrete.”

  Dr Jones leant back again and looked at me for a few seconds from behind. “You could try.”

  I turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I could talk to some of the staff, arrange for you to follow a course, to see if you like it.”

  “What about the scholarship?”

  “I said, try. And then if you really like it, we can find a solution. You could graduate in mathematical physics, but in any case, if you changed departments and maintained your standard, we could easily carry on with the scholarship. It wouldn’t be the first time. A few years ago, an Indian boy did the opposite, moving from physics to pure mathematics. Obviously he wasn’t all that interested in the world.”

  “Was he good?”

  “He was brilliant. Very strange, though. I think he’s back in India now. He went to Chicago after he finished here, but apparently the classes started to scare him and in the end he had a breakdown. Another half-Indian boy who was studying with him went to see him and said he never goes out: he spends all day in his room reading and solving equations in piles and piles of exercise books.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes, a strange business.”

  Dr Jones looked at his watch and said he had to go, but that he would talk to a few people about my situation and let me know.

  A couple of days later, Dr Jones came to see me in one of the classrooms.

  “I’ve talked to Dr Marker,” he said in the doorway. “Go tomorrow morning just before the lesson. This is the time and the room. In the Physics Department, obviously.” He handed me a sheet of paper and winked. “Good luck.”

  Perhaps it was just an impression of mine, but I’d never seen him look so cheerful. He even seemed a bit rejuvenated.

  *

  Productivity: that was the word. Related to it was the thrilling feeling that overcame me the following morning as soon as I went in search of the room indicated by Dr Jones.

  The Mathematics Department was on the street which led from the steps behind Ashton Lane to University Avenue and the main building. It was a shabby grey pebble-dashed building next door to the Boyd Orr Building. It was everything you’d expect of a Mathematics Department: precise, simple and boring. The linear structure had none of the age-old charm of the university’s older buildings, let alone any hint of the boldness of the Department of Medicine. It was a plain, dull block of concrete stuck there with no apparent thought. The interiors were similar: emergency door bars and upholstered armchairs and large formica tables. Sobriety. “This is the kingdom of numbers,” every corner of the building seemed to say. “Nothing else matters.”

  The Physics Department was another matter entirely. In order to get there that morning, I didn’t go in through Botany Gate, as I usually did, but walked a bit further on and went in where the cars did. A narrow road wound between old buildings and more recent buildings with large shiny air ducts. It looked like the entrance of a factory, and if I listened carefully I could almost hear the clatter of production lines. Not that the Kelvin Building, which housed the Physics Department, was much more intriguing from the outside than the Mathematics Department building, but when I went in and looked for the staircase that would take me up to the third floor and the room I wanted, I caught glimpses of strange machinery and electrical wires and metal pipes through a few open doors. I went down a couple of corridors very similar to those of my department, and through a massive door, and found a broad wooden staircase, which for the first time seemed to be telling me the stories of all those who had gone up and down them over the decades or centuries. Even the students seemed different. Everyone you came across in the corridors of the Mathematics Department seemed grim and sad: people who would put you to sleep before they finished a sentence. Here, though, the two or three students I passed looked quite lively. They had bright shirts and crazy hairstyles and the way their bodies tilted forward made you think they were on their way to do something exciting. To do something. There they were, the magic words. The pipes, the machinery, the age-old wood: everything suggested a world where you didn’t rack your brains for nothing, but where you did something, you produced, you somehow entered the world fully.

  Room 12 on the third floor was a rather dark room full of upholstered armchairs similar to those in my department. Dr Marker turned out to be an attractive woman of no more than fifty with fluffy dark hair, covered in necklaces and rings and bracelets. She was looking through some papers in a disorganized kind of way, and when I approached and told her who I was and that Dr Jones had sent me, she didn’t seem to understand at first. She stared at me without saying anything, as if I were transparent and she was looking through me at something behind my back.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My name’s Jacopo Ferri. Dr Jones from the Department of Mathematics sent me.”

  “Oh yes! All right, take a seat,” she said simply, then went back to searching among her papers. About ten minutes later, when the room seemed to have filled, she finally gathered the papers together, looked around, picked up a pair of eye-catching red glasses, put them on and looked at the class, waiting for everyone to quieten down.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  The class replied more or less in unison.

  “So, how were the exercises?”

  A murmur and some laughter went through the class.

  “All right, we’ll see about that later.”

  She paused and took a long look around, first at the last rows, then slowly all the way to the front rows. When she got to me—not sure where to go, I’d sat down right in front—she stopped. She stared at me for a moment or two and I started to feel a bit embarrassed.

  “And who are you?”

  I wondered if there had been some hitch, and it took me a moment to reply. “My name’s Jacopo. Dr Jones sent me,” I sa
id in a low voice, leaning forward slightly.

  “What? Speak up, boy.”

  I felt everyone’s eyes on me, and for a moment I would have liked to curse and run out. “My name’s Jacopo Ferri. Dr Jones sent me here.”

  After staring at me for another moment or two, Dr Marker’s face seemed all at once to open wide. “But of course, Dr Jones… our doubt-ridden mathematician. Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, addressing the rest of the class, “our friend here is a student from the Mathematics Department who seems a little confused in his ideas. My friend Jones asked me if he could follow our course and see how it goes.” I heard some chatter and a few more laughs behind me. “I told Dr Jones it might be a bit ambitious to start with a course on relativity, but it appears that our friend in the front row is quite brilliant, so we’ll see.”

  What was she trying to do, make me look like a swot? It might have been better to stay in the silent sobriety of the Mathematics Department.

  “But I need a volunteer to give him a hand and monitor him a bit.”

  Her gaze started to wander over the rows behind me, but apart from some more murmurs, nobody seemed to give any signs of life.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t believe it,” Dr Marker opened her arms wide. “Haven’t we progressed beyond that point? You’re at university, or hadn’t you noticed?”

  More murmuring, but obviously no arms raised.

  “All right, you, over there.”

  The noise of heads and bodies turning.

  “Yes, you.”

  A few laughs.

  “I can’t remember your name.”

  “Trisha,” came a weak, expressionless voice from the back of the class.

  It seemed the right moment for me to turn as well. In the corner on the left, a tiny girl with a funny button nose was sitting sideways in her chair. She was wearing a broad woollen hat with a little brim and hadn’t taken off her coat.

  “Trisha. Will you give him a hand? Study together. If he has any difficulties you can guide him.”

  Trisha shrugged without saying anything.

  “All right, then. Thank you, Trisha.”

  Trisha limited herself to nodding and forcing her mouth into a thin, vague smile, then started to scribble something in an exercise book. At last she raised her eyes to me. I tried to smile and wave a hand in greeting, but she replied with that same false smile and immediately looked back down at her exercise book. More laughter came from the class. Trisha turned towards someone and showed him her middle finger.

  Outside the room, as the other students passed us, still laughing, I shook Trisha’s hand awkwardly and again thanked her and asked her how she wanted to do this.

  “I won’t come to your place, and I don’t study in the library.”

  “Oh. Then I’ll come to yours. When’s okay for you?”

  Trisha shrugged, but in the end we managed to make some kind of an appointment.

  She lived in a small flat with two other girls she hated, but the rent was quite low and the place was nicely furnished. When one of her flatmates saw me come in and disappear into Trisha’s room, she ran to the third girl’s door and told her something in a low voice, laughing.

  “Forget them,” Trisha said, once inside.

  Even indoors, she still had that funny big woollen hat on with the narrow brim, and was wearing a number of layers, one over the other. She sat down at a little desk and told me to sit wherever I liked. Not that there were many places to sit, and in the end I settled for the floor. That’s how it was, with my back resting against Trisha’s bed and my feet pointing to the sides of her desk, that I at last entered the magical world of physics.

  Every time I asked Trisha to explain something, she reacted with hints of ill-concealed irritation, but she was very clear in her explanations, and even though she always seemed to be making a great effort to summon up the necessary energy, she managed to make me understand what she wanted to in the end.

  That first day, when I asked my fifth question, Trisha sighed and paused for a moment. “All right, let’s do something,” she said, turning towards a bookshelf over her desk. “Take this… and this… and while we’re about it, this too.” She handed me three thick tomes, one after the other. “Look at them, and if you like them we’ll start studying together. Otherwise we’ll never get through this.”

  “All right,” I said, then sat there for a moment in a bit of a daze, not quite sure what to do.

  “Now go,” Trisha said, resuming her work without even looking at me. “We’ll see each other in class.”

  In a week, sleeping at most four hours a night and spending as much time as possible in the attic with the headphones on in order not to hear any noise coming from the club, all the while continuing with my mathematics course, I went through the whole tangled history of modern physics, from Galileo and Newton, through Maxwell and his colleagues, to the Lorentz transformation and the special theory of relativity.

  It was one of the most intense weeks of study in my life, and perhaps the one that more than any other would turn my life upside down. Some of the mathematical functions I encountered were hard to figure out, but as soon as I did so I was plunged into dark corners of the universe, surrounded by electromagnetic waves, heavenly bodies and tiny particles whirling around me like ballerinas until they made me dizzy. Those letters and numbers hid stories about the world, something I could observe, or at least try to imagine, and more than once, overwhelmed by a sudden ecstasy while music roared in the background, I found myself lying on my mattress, arms open wide, with the clear impression that the magnetic fields were vibrating inside me and all around me.

  In class the following week, after reluctantly greeting me, Trisha was surprised to see me already giving her back the books and thanking her.

  “Already done?” she said, unable to repress a clear hint of scepticism. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Shall we see each other tomorrow at your place?”

  She nodded in bewilderment, said, “All right,” and continued scribbling in her exercise book.

  The next day, she tried to set a few traps for me. She talked about this or that complex aspect of the Michelson-Morley experiment that I wouldn’t have been able to grasp if I hadn’t really studied them, and the fact that I followed everything in an apparently relaxed way must have really surprised her.

  There were a number of small signs that showed her new-found consideration for me: the brief but spontaneous greeting when she saw me in class, the quick kiss she allowed me to give her when she opened the door of her flat, the simple gesture of clearing the corner of the bed so that I could sit comfortably. In other words, she manifested her respect for me by admitting my existence, which when you came down to it was already something of a coup.

  One day, when we were in her flat, both working on one of the exercises set by Dr Marker, but separately—one of the few occasions when I was able to do without the satisfaction of explaining something to Trisha—in the next room one of her flatmates and a few of her friends were listening to disco music at full volume and shrieking incomprehensibly. After a while Trisha leapt to her feet and went next door, and I heard her say something.

  “What?” one of the girls screamed.

  Trisha spoke again at the same volume as before. The girl turned down the music and again asked Trisha what she wanted.

  “Could you make it a bit softer, please?”

  Even without seeing her, I could hear in her voice her efforts to remain calm. From the little I knew of her, I was sure she was looking down at the floor as she talked, or maybe throwing just brief glances at the other girl.

  “Oh, of course, I’m sorry,” the other girl said, laughing.

  By the time Trisha came back, the girl had turned up the music again. The volume was definitely lower than before, but still fairly annoying. Trisha sat down again at the desk, put her elbows on it, took her face in her hands and for the first time since I had known her made a small confessio
n.

  “God, how I hate them.”

  I looked at her for a few seconds. From behind, with that big hat of hers and the colourful sweater, she looked like an extraterrestrial.

  “If you like, we can go to my place.”

  “Yes, to play cards with your Muslim friend,” she said pulling herself together and picking up the thread of the exercise with a sigh. One day, laughing, I had told her about Hamal and how, a few weeks earlier, I had tried to teach him how to play scopa (I’d also had to explain to her what scopa was). It had gone rather well until, just I was showing him a particular trick to liven up the game, he opened his eyes wide and asked me what time it was.

  “Twenty past four.”

  Hamal had sighed as if somebody were dying and rushed into his room, came out with his doormat, turned it to face southeast, and started saying his prayers.

  “Bloody hell, Hamal, we can’t even finish a game of scopa!” I said in Italian to avoid a diplomatic crisis. It was the first time I saw a real attempt at a smile appear on Trisha’s face.

  “No, I have an attic room all to myself.”

  Trisha half turned. “An attic room? Where?”

  “Above Leonard’s Lodge, the bar where I work. It’s small and there isn’t any lighting or heating, but there’s a good fireplace that gives off a decent amount of heat, and I have a few oil lamps.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “You said you didn’t want to come to my place.”

  For a moment Trisha looked at me reprovingly. Then she gathered her books and exercise books, put them in her bag, stood up and put on her coat.

  “So, are we going or not?”

  The fact that I was going up to the attic with someone—and that this someone was actually a woman—filled me with embarrassment, and when I got to Leonard’s I hurried straight to the door at the back of the club.

  “Hi. I’m going up,” I said quickly.

  Leonard smiled as he watched us rush past. Luckily, Trisha’s reticence protected me from further embarrassment and, as we passed, Leonard and I simply nodded at each other.