Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  It was the first time I had let anyone in there, and I was a bit nervous. All at once the attic seemed shabby and untidy, and colder than usual. I wished I had a bit more furniture, even if only another couple of chairs, anything to give it a slightly more domestic appearance. I went straight to the fireplace and started heaping logs on it.

  “It’s cold now,” I said, “but it gets hot quickly if we stay close to the fire. You’ll see.”

  I struck a match and lit the two oil lamps. I left one on the table and put the other one down next to the bed. As the fire started to crackle, I moved the table closer to the fireplace.

  “If you want, you can sit here. I’ll sit on the bed—I’ve got used to it.”

  I tried to smile. I felt like a big idiot, worried and embarrassed about the place where he lived. And yet I couldn’t do anything about it, and I couldn’t find a way to shrug off my awkwardness. Trisha looked around her and for some reason approached the ceiling at the point where it came down almost to head level, near the skylight. She stared intensely at one of the beams and after a while passed her index finger over it.

  “It’s nothing much,” I said.

  “No, I like it.”

  There was a different note in her voice, a slightly warmer tone, which convinced me that she was sincere. She went to the fire, warmed her hands a little, and after a few minutes took off her coat and put her things on the table.

  She started spending time in the attic. The next time we met by chance outside Botany Gate, we said hello with the usual tinge of embarrassment. Then, as I was leaving, Trisha called me back and told me that her flatmates were doing something or other that afternoon and asked me if she could come and study at my place.

  So in the end, she would often arrive even without warning me, and surprisingly it never bothered me. After the first few times, Trisha started to look with a certain envy at the way I’d arranged myself on the bed. She started with little glances, before asking me one day if I would prefer to be at the table. Actually, I’d developed a taste for lying on the mattress, and had even found an arrangement of pillows and blankets that kept me in the ideal position.

  “All right,” I said.

  That day, about a month later, an icy Arctic wind was inching its way through the skylight. We both obviously had little desire to study and were looking for any excuse to distract ourselves. As I was poking the fire, Trisha asked me what life was like in my village.

  “I don’t know, really,” I said, throwing another log of wood on the fire. “Like life in the country: lots of crickets in the summer and lots of bare trees in the winter.”

  “It must be beautiful.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  Trisha looked at me for a moment or two as I crouched by the fire, watching the flames lick the new log and slowly start to turn it brown.

  “And do you have a girlfriend?”

  “I had one.”

  “Aren’t you still together?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “No particular reason.”

  I thought about it for a moment, then picked up the old steak fork Leonard had given me to use as a poker and stirred the logs. A cloud of reddish sparks rose and disappeared into the flue.

  “To be honest, I don’t even know if there was a particular reason to be together.”

  “When did you break up?”

  “I don’t remember. The last year of school, I think, just before the exams.”

  “And did you ever do it?”

  I glanced at Trisha to make sure I’d understood correctly. I smiled. “Of course.”

  I gave another poke to the wood with the fork and watched the cloud of sparks rise again towards the flue.

  “If you like, I could show you mine.”

  I turned. Her lips were twisted in an unprecedented smile that still seemed to bear a trace of embarrassment. I felt my heart beating slightly faster and a rush of saliva filling my mouth and throat. She stared at me for a few seconds, I think to make up her mind whether to really do what she’d said or to laugh and throw a pillow at me and tell me she was joking. Then she pulled herself up into a sitting position on the mattress, rolled down her colourful knee-length socks, unhooked her skirt and slipped it off, swaying slightly as she did so, then unhooked and slipped off a second one, which was purple. She put her thumbs in the elastic of her black tights and in a single movement, shifting her lower back, slipped them down to her calves and off her feet. There was something vaguely sad about her as she did this, as if she had lost a bet, and for a moment—before it was too late—I felt like telling her to stop. On top of the tights, where she had thrown them aside, I also caught a glimpse of her knickers. She put her knees together and placed her hands on them, then turned and looked at me with a shy air I would perhaps never again see in her. Part of her was definitely rebelling and wondering what the hell she was doing.

  “Should I go on?”

  I still couldn’t quite believe it was really happening.

  “Wait a minute.” I pushed the lamp in the corner of the table closer to Trisha and turned it slightly in order to lengthen the wick and give more light, then turned the chair properly to face the mattress and compose myself, trying—to simplify matters—to muster all the detachment I could. “Go on.”

  Trisha sighed, rolled over on to her buttocks, keeping her heels together, and laid her back and elbows on the pillows. Then she opened first one leg and then the other. For a moment, as she was doing this, I wondered how I would behave once I had her parted legs right there in front of me. I liked the shamelessness with which Trisha had made me her offer, as well as the surgical detachment with which I had greeted it. But what next? In a moment we would be there, me sitting like an idiot on a rickety chair and she half dressed, with her legs parted, and we wouldn’t know how to get out of it.

  In the meantime, there it was. I was as rigid as a block of marble, unable to breathe, while a wave of calm heat invaded my stomach and chest.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  It was nothing like that strange and at the same time disgusting thing that I’d seen in a few magazines, or in Marta’s knickers, or that Francesca had reluctantly given me a closer view of two or three times as we embarked on that cold, clumsy operation we insisted on calling love. This was something new, something soft and round and alive, which seemed to look you straight in the eyes and smile at you. Something that had more to do with the universe than with the world. I leant forward a bit and moved the chair slightly closer. Trisha raised her eyebrows a little and smiled and seemed all at once to become convinced that she hadn’t been wrong to do what she did. I continued to stare at her, moving my head slightly from side to side. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was like a powerful magnet, the beginning and end of the world, and all at once I was overwhelmed for the first time by the one true drama of every man: how can an ordinary fragment of human flesh turn your life upside down like this?

  I threw Trisha a glance: a mixture of innocence and desperation, I suppose. “Can I?”

  She smiled and nodded. I let my knees drop straight from the chair onto the edge of the mattress and gradually, with my gaze held spellbound, I reached out my hand. I don’t think I had ever touched anything softer. It was almost as if I could feel it breathing in my hand, and as I asked again for permission and Trisha laughed and said yes and we rubbed noses and mouths and I felt the urging of her lips and kissed her and smelt her and opened her and licked her and tried to sink inside her and Trisha let her head go back and sighed, I thought it was the most incredible thing that had ever happened to me and that I could never again do without her and that without her I would die and that I would be her slave for life and that I was scared and that I wanted to live and die inside her.

  Trisha started unbuttoning the first of the sweaters she was wearing. I helped her, and when it was unbuttoned, she sat up again and slipped off the others too. For the first time since I had met her, she t
ook off her thick woollen hat. She grabbed the little brim and simply pulled it back, freeing a great mass of wavy hair, dyed plum-red, which suddenly gave her an unexpectedly adult and sophisticated air. I smiled, and another wave of excitement took my breath away. At last we kissed: her mouth too was very soft, and her breasts and her hips and every inch of her skin. The whole of her was extraordinarily soft: the softest creature I had ever come across.

  When, some time later, we lay naked under the blankets, side by side, half entwined, looking up at the beams of the ceiling, I asked how come.

  “How come what?”

  “How come you always keep your hair hidden in that hat?”

  She paused for a moment, and with her hand, which had been around my neck, played with my cheek and the hair of my goatee.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t think my hair is something that should concern other people.”

  6

  THE WORLD BEGAN and ended at the door of the attic, and Trisha and I seemed like the only people on the whole planet. Everyone outside appeared ugly and stupid and useless; our skin was the border of our world. When we went out, we wrapped ourselves in all our layers, me with my sweaters and jacket and scarf, Trisha with her coat and skirts and woollen hat. It was like putting on a mask: we were no longer that frank, naked version of ourselves, we concealed ourselves beneath our clothes and our silences and our apparent solitude. We parted before going into the class and treated each other in public with the same awkward composure with which we had always treated each other. The thought that nobody knew about us, that nobody knew what we were made of, filled us with great excitement.

  What I found overwhelming was the strange experience of discovering, moment by moment, another human being. I liked to stand aside and watch Trisha as she moved, as she studied or wrote or looked around her or walked in the street. She had a great, unconscious passion for details, and liked to feel them at her fingertips. On the coldest days, when the icy mist clung to the branches of the trees or the wrought iron lamp-posts on the streets of Glasgow, Trisha would bend down to get a closer look at the crystals, and after a few seconds reach out her index finger and touch them lightly. She did the same with the sequins or stitches of a dress, the button on a sofa, the surface of a sugar cube. It was the same gesture she had made that first day in the attic, with the sloping ceiling beam and its deep veins: she would look at something from close up, bending or leaning forward slightly if she needed to, and after a few seconds move the tip of her index finger over it. She couldn’t stop herself and, ever since I had pointed it out to her, every time she discovered me watching her she burst out laughing and told me to go to hell. Trisha rarely laughed, but when she did, her laugh, short as it was, was unusually deep and infectious.

  “I never imagined it would be like this. It’s really incredible,” I said one day on the telephone to Greg, sitting at the kitchen table in the hall of residence.

  “All right,” Greg said.

  “Biagio found a girl too, apparently.”

  “Yes, I met her.”

  “Oh, what’s she like?”

  “Dubious.”

  The day we’d gone to the motorcycle trials, Biagio had fallen coming round the Savelli, the second bend in the downhill S which led to the Arrabbiata. By the time I arrived, Biagio was already sitting in the ambulance. He seemed fine, but was complaining of a lot of pain in his left hand. The paramedics didn’t want to take off his glove on the spot, but preferred to take him straight to hospital. I turned and looked at Torcini, the man with the moustache who had invited us to Mugello. He looked at the ambulance driver and asked him where they were going to take us.

  “The trauma unit,” the other man replied.

  Torcini turned to me. “Go with them. We’ll join you later.”

  “What about his clothes?” I said, indicating Biagio.

  “I’ll bring them. Go.”

  So I also got in the ambulance, which—even though Biagio did not seem in a serious condition—tore round the bends with sirens blaring. Biagio was simply lying on the stretcher supporting one hand with the other and looking at the transparent tubes swaying at every bend.

  “How are you feeling?” a dark-skinned young guy who was sitting with us asked him occasionally, and each time Biagio nodded in silence.

  It was only ten minutes later, as the ambulance slowed down, presumably for the traffic lights, that he said, “What a stupid idiot!” and shook his head.

  “Forget it,” the young guy said. “We see all sorts when we’re at Mugello.” He laughed and tapped Biagio’s leg, then started telling stories about people who’d skidded at two hundred an hour and exposed fractures and broken helmets. The one effect of this was to make me feel like vomiting.

  “And now what do we do?” Biagio asked me just before we arrived.

  “I don’t know. I think we should call home.”

  He nodded and looked again at those tubes dancing. “My mum will kill me.”

  When we got to the hospital they rushed him into a long corridor full of people moaning and left me in a large waiting-room with a floor of shiny reddish tiles, like a huge garage. In a corner of the room, behind a pane of glass, a short nurse with thick hands gave abrupt answers to questions from people who came in. I sat down for a few minutes, unsure of what to do. Next to me, an elderly man was turning an old felt hat round and round in his gnarled and cracked hands, which seemed to belong more to San Filippo than a big city. In the end I made up my mind, dug some coins out of my pocket and went to one of the public phones in a corner of the room. To be on the safe side, I put in a thousand lire’s worth of coins. It was just after one o’clock.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Listen, Dad, we got in a bit of mess.”

  “A bit of a mess?”

  “Yes, I think so. It’s just that this morning Biagio went to the motorcycle trials and he slipped and hurt his hand.”

  “But where are you?”

  “In Florence.”

  “Florence?”

  “Yes, Florence. The trials were in Mugello.”

  “Mugello?… How did you get to Mugello?”

  “On Martino’s Vespa.”

  Dad paused for a moment, as if putting the whole thing together. “I’m sorry, where are you now?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “They said something about a trauma unit.”

  “Oh, yes, the trauma unit at the Careggi. And how’s Biagio?”

  “He hurt his hand quite a bit. They brought him here in the ambulance and he went inside and I haven’t heard anything since.”

  “And how are you? Did you hurt yourself too?”

  “Oh no, only Biagio fell.”

  “Mmm. But whereabouts in Mugello? The race track?”

  “Yes.”

  Dad paused again. “All right, I’ll see what I can do. You wait there. Someone’ll come.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry.”

  “Yes. Stay there.”

  I sat down again on one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room, and after a while Torcini showed up with his assistant.

  “How is he?”

  “There’s no news yet.”

  Torcini didn’t seem angry, but all the same, I felt I had to say I was sorry. He smiled and passed a hand through my hair, as if I were a child. “Don’t worry, it happens. The important thing is that he hasn’t injured himself badly.”

  “What about the Vespa?” I said after a while.

  “It’s there, in the pit. We’ll find a way to get it back to you, don’t worry.”

  After a couple of hours, just before Biagio came out, my father showed up. Part of me would have liked him to act like any other parent, to slap me or something like that, but he came up to me as if everything was fine and asked me if there was any news.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Hello,” Torcini said, approac
hing and holding out his hand. “Lucio Torcini.”

  Dad shook his hand and introduced himself.

  “This is the gentleman who let Biagio ride in the trials,” I said.

  Dad nodded, and for a moment I thought Torcini would be the one he got angry with. But all he said was, “Is it true he hurt himself?”

  “I don’t know. He was holding his hand.”

  “Did you see him fall?”

  “No, I was with your son on the other side of the circuit, just above the finishing line. Apparently he slipped coming out of the Savelli. Do you know Mugello?”

  Dad shook his head slightly. “Not really.”

  “It’s a downhill bend. But I don’t know exactly what happened.”

  Dad nodded, then looked at the glass door that led to the wards. After a few moments we all sat down.

  “You could have told me,” Dad said after a while, glancing at me. “I would have taken you.”

  For a moment I thought of telling him that we had wanted to go by ourselves, that it was a kind of escape, that it was difficult to explain but that journey at dawn on the Vespa with Biagio, in search of a place we didn’t know and that might have been on another continent, had perhaps been one of the most beautiful moments of my life. But then I changed my mind, especially because my dad might have said something like: “Yes, I understand.”

  “I know, Dad. I’m sorry.”

  When Biagio reappeared through the big sliding door of opaque glass, the colourful leathers had been lowered to his waist, with the stiff sleeves floating at his sides like wings, and on his left forearm was a big plaster cast. With him was a doctor.

  “Are you the father?”

  “No,” Dad replied. “They couldn’t come. But I’m a doctor.”

  “Ah.” The hospital doctor held out his hand. “Nannucci.”

  “Ferri.”

  “Well, it’s nothing too serious. A fracture between the metacarpal and first phalanx of the little finger. It’s likely he’ll lose some functionality, but that’s quite common in motorcyclists. He’ll feel right at home.” The doctor smiled and gave Biagio a clip on the ear. “Maybe come back in about a month, and we’ll take off the plaster and see how you are.” Then the doctor looked behind us. “And you are?”