Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  Greg’s mouth creased into a smile. “Is that the end result of all your academic efforts?”

  “I know about nasturtiums.”

  Greg shook his head. “All right,” he said, turning serious again, “let’s think it over for a bit and then talk again. Now fuck off, I have work to do.”

  He shifted closer to the desk and gathered the papers that he had been leafing through earlier.

  “And this?” I asked indicating the syringe.

  “You can stick it up your arse.”

  “I think that’s more your style.”

  “I wouldn’t even feel a little thing like that, kid. I’m used to much bigger sizes.”

  I gave a little laugh, wrapped the syringe in the kitchen towel again, stuck it back in my trouser pocket and left.

  I don’t know what I’d give now to be able to say that I spoke to Greg again the next day and that we had found a solution and went to our friend’s house and took him away and managed to stop his downward spiral. We could have gone there in Greg’s helicopter and landed directly in front of the house. We could have taken Paolino with us. It would have taken us a moment to load that heap of skin and bones into the helicopter. In the state he was in, Biagio probably wouldn’t even have resisted. We could have done a whole lot of things, a whole lot of damned things that will now continue to knock at our doors like the living dead. But it didn’t happen, because, like the good racer he was, Biagio was quicker than us. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said that a woman came to clean the house. Twelve days later, she showed up and found Biagio lying dead on the sofa in the living room. The stench was already unbearable, and the doctor who came to issue the death certificate said he must have been dead at least three days. If I think about it, I can almost see him: alone, lying in that cavity in the sofa as if in a sarcophagus, one arm hanging over the side, his mouth half open, his skin and face hollowed by death like rotten wood.

  So yes: Greg had in fact already done a lot for Biagio. Once the corpse had been discovered he had even used some of his contacts to get the body transferred quickly to San Filippo. We wondered if Biagio would have preferred it like that, but in the end we told ourselves that it was definitely better than having him buried in a cemetery somewhere on the island of Elba.

  Why then, when I asked Greg if he was coming to the funeral and he gave me that curt reply, did I start despite myself to slip into that pit of apathy? Greg had often made an effort for Biagio, even though it had been a while since he’d stopped wasting much time on what he couldn’t understand or touch or buy. And yet, from the very moment when—through my parents’ telephone—Greg’s words had struck my eardrum, they started to bounce around in my head like the tolling of a gong, preventing me from seriously considering any other thought and pulling me into a relentless vortex of confusion. Dazed: that’s the word. For some weeks now, or maybe unconsciously for a few months, my neurons hadn’t exactly been models of reactivity, but from the very moment my hand put the grey receiver of my parents’ phone back on its cradle, that’s the word that best described me.

  The next day, at the funeral, facing a crowded church—people had come from all the neighbouring villages, in the hope, I imagine, of seeing TV cameras and reporters—Don Roberto said that he had never known Biagio, but that over the years the love of his fellow villagers—those were the words he used—had conveyed the image of a gentle young man with a sunny disposition who always had a good word for everybody. I could barely hold back my laughter. He discussed the famous words “and the last shall be first” and concluded by praying to the Lord to help this sensitive soul find a little peace. That idiot Cardini, the mayor, spoke next and gave an incoherent speech about misfortune and temptation and solitude and how the State was now incapable of helping its most isolated citizens. Feigning emotion, he beat his hand on the lectern and almost cursed as he declared that this sad passing should be a spur to everyone to fight with all their might the widespread solitude that surrounded us. Then he paused theatrically for a moment.

  “It is therefore with great pride,” he went on, “that the municipal council has already engaged a prestigious sculptor of international fame to make a monument to our talented and unfortunate fellow villager.”

  The church resounded with applause and Cardini was unable to hide his satisfaction, however hard he tried. Inside me, I heard in the distance the echoes of an angry crowd shouting and whistling and cursing, but I couldn’t find the strength to follow them.

  On the way out some ladies in their Sunday best, with handkerchieves in their hands, answered the questions of two or three reporters spread around the square. They approached me, too, but even before they could say anything to me I muttered that if they didn’t get out of my way I’d kick them from there to kingdom come. In a corner of the square, I spotted Lucio. I’d informed him two days earlier. We walked towards each other and hugged, but briefly. Then he put his hands on my shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I nodded and said nothing. We stood for a few moments watching everyone coming and going and I wondered what Biagio would have said if he had been there.

  “Are you going to the cemetery?” Lucio asked.

  The coffin came out of the church, carried by Graziano and some people Biagio had never even met.

  “No, I think I’ll go home.”

  Lucio nodded. We watched the coffin disappear into the long dark Mercedes and begin its slow journey to the cemetery, followed by that flock of people. When the square was empty again, I looked up and for a moment watched the branches of the pines moving slightly in the wind. This, then, I found myself thinking for some reason, is what remains, though I wasn’t very sure what that meant.

  “All right,” I said. “I think I’m going.”

  Lucio nodded again. “Yes, me too.”

  For the first time I looked at him a little more closely: he had grown older, and he looked like the uncle I had never had. I hugged him again quickly and gave him a slight pat on the back of the neck.

  “Phone me,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Please.”

  I smiled, said, “Yes,” again in a low voice, then put my hands in my pockets and walked away. At home I wandered for a while in the garden, kicking at the stones around the flower beds. Everything looked very tidy. I went back inside, called the airline and had my return flight brought forward: I would leave in two days’ time. When my parents came back, they told me a place had been found for Biagio right in the middle of the cemetery, not far from his parents, and that Buti had promised to make him an appropriate headstone.

  Two days later, Amanda came to pick me up from the airport. It was the kind of gesture that wasn’t common in our relationship, but it didn’t have any effect on me. Even seeing her didn’t move me all that much. Usually seeing her again gave me a strange sense of disorientation. Sometimes, after only a few hours, seeing her at the corner of a street or at the door of the apartment, I wondered for a moment if she was really smiling at me, and controlled the impulse to turn and see if there was someone behind me. I couldn’t quite get used to the idea that all that beauty was at my disposal. Such an original beauty too, the kind of beauty constantly on the verge of collapse, which only made it all the more intriguing. Looking at her closely, you knew that that big nose and those round cheekbones and full lips could easily turn into something graceless and irritating. And yet it never happened: I often caught myself looking at her in the morning when she woke up, or at night, tipsy after a party, or in the evening in pyjamas in front of the TV with a big tub of ice cream in her hand, trying to discover if her face had finally lost its harmony. But the features and curves of that face seemed to resist any attack, and I had the feeling I was hearing stories about the eternal war between harmony and disorder.

  Amazement. That was what I had felt from the first moment we had started seeing each other. Whenever we found ourselves talking about when exactly our relationship had begun, we imme
diately agreed on one Tuesday evening, just outside the main entrance of the New School. A couple of years earlier, a woman who taught comparative religion had contacted me and told me she’d attended a lecture of mine and had been struck by something I’d said: “Today, this is our religion.” It was a kind of joke, but it corresponded to a quite serious and long-held belief of mine in the element of the unknowable in physics. Patricia, the teacher in question, told me she was working on a wide-ranging book on comparative religion, in which she had long been thinking of including a section on contemporary physics, rather on the same lines as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, but also encompassing non-Oriental religions. So we met for a coffee and became quite good friends. She was an amusing character, was Patricia, and good at organizing quite brilliant dinner parties I surprisingly didn’t mind going to. The year after we met she asked me to give, within her course, a brief cycle of two or three seminars on the most crucial aspects of contemporary physics, focussing in particular on what brought scientific analysis closer to the extreme limits of the universe. I had discovered that it was amusing to find images that attempted to explain some aspects of my work that for me now had a meaning exclusively in mathematical terms, and in those few hours I suddenly had the impression that physics was a much broader and more fascinating field than I might have imagined. Perhaps what partly deceived me was the rapt looks of those listening to me.

  The New School had been founded in 1919 by a group of academics from New York University, with the intention of establishing a more flexible and liberal kind of university. The nicest thing about it is that anyone, of any age and with any qualification, can pay to follow a course on the academic programme as an external student. If he wishes, he can also try his hand in the final exams, which are obviously compulsory for anyone attending the entire course of studies. In the case of Amanda, she had found herself in a somewhat idle period, work-wise, and the idea of gaining a smattering of knowledge about the main religious currents of the world for a few hours a week had appealed to her. It had also been the result—or the fault—of 9/11. Over the years, her doubts about what was so different between her and those people who had flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania had gnawed away at her and the idea of finding out more about the subject was something that intrigued her. On the evening of the second lesson, I found myself standing on Fifth Avenue outside the school for a few moments, a bit unsure, watching the cars go by. I didn’t much feel like going straight home and I wondered who I could call in the area who might invite me to dinner.

  “It was really fascinating,” I heard someone say on my right.

  Not far away, bending forward slightly to see my face better, was Amanda, smiling at me. During those first two lessons I had already noticed her sitting among the others, and had tried to look at her as little as possible. Now here she was, looking me in the eyes and expecting an answer, and I felt very embarrassed.

  “Thank you,” I managed to say in a whiny voice.

  Shamelessly, she asked me if I felt like going for a drink, and we went to a bar somewhere in the neighbourhood. I was by now a respected scientist, who’d long stopped being surprised by the most formidable mechanisms of the universe, and yet being there in the company of this woman with such a magnetic face filled me with dismay. My voice seemed to tremble and I kept giggling idiotically in a way I’d never done before. Amanda meanwhile looked very much as if she were trying to ensnare me: could it be possible that such a beautiful woman—and, as I’ve said, beautiful in such an original way—really wanted to ensnare someone as gauche and boring as me? The whole situation made me awkward and distrustful. After the second glass she asked me how come I couldn’t look her in the eyes. At last I looked up and straight at her. Immediately my defences collapsed and I felt like a little boy.

  “Because I’m afraid I’d never look anywhere else again.”

  “Hi,” she said at the airport, giving me a big hug when I came out through the sliding door with the other passengers.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  We didn’t say much to each other in the taxi. She asked me how the journey had been and I said: fine. As the cab slowed down for the tollbooth, she looked at me and stroked my cheek. I gave her something that was as close to a smile as I could get it and went back to looking out of the window.

  Driving back into the city did not stir any great emotion. Previously, when the skyscrapers of Manhattan had appeared in the distance, and especially when I approached the bridge and crossed it, a kind of electric charge had always surged through my arteries and I was reminded of why I had decided to live here. There is no better way to understand the attachment or revulsion we have for a place than to leave it and then come back: the degree of unease or excitement that assails us on our return is the measure of our affection. Looking again at the outline of New York had always been very similar to knocking back half a bottle of wine in one go.

  The black taxi driver asked for confirmation of the address. Amanda asked me if I preferred to go to my place. I shrugged and shook my head. It really didn’t matter.

  That was how it was: it didn’t matter. I felt nothing: nothing as I got out of the taxi with my case, nothing as I climbed the stairs to Amanda’s apartment, nothing when we later went for a bite to eat at Vito’s, our favourite restaurant. Nothing as we strolled through Alphabet City, nothing when we got home and washed and went to bed and she huddled beside me and we fell asleep and nothing the next morning when we woke up in the same bed. Nothing. Nothing when two days later I went back to my own apartment, nothing when I opened the windows and saw my papers and my notes and my calculations on the whiteboard. Nothing when I went to the university and said hello to a few of my colleagues and talked to a few students who wanted information about my courses or how to be part of one of my research groups. Nothing when Amanda suggested we take a trip round the United States and nothing when I accepted. Nothing when we flew to Chicago and I got to the home of Fred, perhaps the only really amusing fellow student I had ever known, in fact the only one I’d really stayed friends with. Nothing when Fred took me around the faculty and one of his colleagues, after we were introduced, opened his eyes wide and asked, “The Jacopo Ferri?” and nothing after Fred told him yes and nothing after his colleague told me he was a fan of mine and that he’d found an article of mine in Physics Review D two years earlier quite illuminating. Nothing when Amanda and I hired a Toyota and nothing when she drove for hours between fields of corn—I told her I wasn’t in the mood to drive—and when, just like in the movies, we made love in a seedy motel in the Midwest and nothing when I put my hand on a gigantic sequoia and thought it was the most imposing creation I had ever touched. Nothing even when we got back to New York and Amanda went back to work and I started going to the university again and nothing even on the day the classes restarted and I launched into my usual introduction to the complex question of dark energy.

  Nothing until that night. I was sleeping at Amanda’s. The previous evening we had been to dinner at the apartment of James and Clara, two friends of hers, and as I came back from the bathroom I’d heard Clara ask Amanda how things were going and she answered that it was getting to be a strain, that I didn’t react to any stimulus and she didn’t know what to do any more. For a moment I wondered if things hadn’t worn themselves out and we wouldn’t eventually separate, which was what always seemed to happen to me. Incidentally, even at that moment I felt nothing. This was the way things had ended up with Trisha too: we had simply stopped understanding each other and overnight the softness of her skin had stopped being crucial to me. I had told myself—unlike her—that maybe the world outside the two of us wasn’t so bad after all, and one day she had simply gone back to sleeping at her place and started hating me as much as she hated most of humanity.

  In bed, Amanda tried to rub herself up against me, but it didn’t have much effect. Later, in the middle of the night, the echo of a sinister laugh jolted me from
my sleep. I sat up in bed, trying to calm down and slow my heartbeat. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and took a deep breath. I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, then to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face and looked at myself for a long time in the mirror. My heart was still beating like a bass drum and my stomach was churning. That damned laugh continued to boom in my head. I knew perfectly well who it belonged to. I thought of going back to bed and trying to sleep, but I knew I couldn’t. So I went back to the bedroom and slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible, started dressing. I was already lacing my shoes when Amanda turned to me with a frown.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t sleep,” I whispered. “I’m going to my place. Go back to sleep.”

  “To your place? What time is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered again. “About three. Go back to sleep.”

  Instead, she sat up and turned to me fully. “Three? What are you going to do at your place at three in the morning?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t sleep anyway. An idea came to me. I want to see if it works.”

  Actually, in the three years we’d been together, I’d demonstrated to Amanda that I wasn’t prone to that kind of impulse. We had talked about it once: good ideas, I told her, come when you’re working, and you learn with experience that the ones that come to you when you’re doing your shopping are often false. So are those that hit you when you’re sleeping, so you might as well sleep. But in the past few months, obviously, all the moulds had been broken, and now Amanda, fortunately, preferred not to ask any more questions. She gave me a kiss and lay down again and asked me if we would see each other the next day.

  “Of course,” I said.

  We didn’t see each other the next day. Or the day after or the one after that or the one after that. I kept telling Amanda that I’d finally found the solution to a problem I’d been struggling with in my work for months and that I absolutely had to see it through to the end. On the third day, addressing my answering machine for the umpteenth time, she asked me what she was supposed to do.