Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  At the university I said I was sick. I spent three whole days at the computer, cruising the internet for hours on end, looking for answers to the questions which had suddenly started eating away at me, but which in reality—even though I hadn’t realized it—had been eating away at me for weeks now, preventing me from feeling anything. Using every search engine I could find, I looked for addresses and phone numbers, and called whoever I thought could help me, at any hour of the day or night. I forgot to eat and slept in fits and starts.

  When, at seven in the evening on the third day, I typed out one last brief e-mail message and pressed send, a sense of heat and torpor fell over me like a tree trunk. It was the reply to a mail from Greg four days earlier, in which he asked me if I was in town and if I felt like meeting. I struggled out of my chair at the desk, dragged myself into the bedroom, took off my trousers and, before my head even touched the pillow, fell, until the next day, into the deepest sleep I had ever known.

  3

  THE HUGE TAXI DRIVER with the turban dropped me in front of the glass entrance of the building. Watery green reflections filtered out from inside and spilt onto the sidewalk. The blacked-out glass doors slid open as I approached, and I stepped into an area of intense white light. To the left of the entrance, behind a highly polished black lacquer desk, a square man with a shaved head and wearing a black suit gave me the memory of a smile and said good evening. I took out my ID card, put it on the desk, and said I was there to see Mr Mariani. A tiny trace of my fingerprint remained imprinted on the black lacquer of the desk and as the square doorman typed my data into the computer, I couldn’t help pulling my cuff out with my fingertips and trying to wipe it away.

  “Very good,” the doorman said, giving me back the card and pointing with the other hand to my right. “Elevator number two, code 136. Welcome back, Mr Ferri.”

  The elevators went directly up to the suites, and once the data had been put in the computer every visitor was given a personal code. That meant that, in the unlikely event of the doorman being absent, nobody was able to just go to the elevators and straight up to the desired floor. It particularly meant that every single entrance and exit by a visitor was individually recorded. This was another of the delightful little characteristics of the Gold Club, the highly exclusive international society which—for an annual fee that most ordinary people could not amass even in a lifetime—provided, in all the most important cities in the world, suites, chauffeur-driven cars, a considerable number of hours on private aircraft, a dedicated butler twenty-four hours a day, and a personal telephone assistant who followed all your movements and knew all your schedules, tastes, preferences, vices and obsessions. All of this, obviously, in the most total secrecy. Greg didn’t have any real obsessions, but one evening at dinner he told me with obvious amusement how a Lithuanian friend of his named Sergej found, every time he got in one of the cars provided by the Gold Club, an espresso ristretto and a lit Tuscan cigar, in tribute to the happy time he’d spent in Rome at the age of twenty, soon after escaping from the Soviet Union. Apparently for Sergej, the mixture of his Roman memories and the luxurious lifestyle he had somehow managed to achieve in the meantime created a short circuit that always led him into a wonderfully overblown nostalgic state.

  I asked Greg one day why the Club maintained such secrecy.

  “Let’s just say that some of the members often risk the anger of their competitors, and also of some governments.”

  “Ah,” I said, then asked him why the hell he bothered with all that pantomime.

  He looked at me reprovingly. “I have a ton of money and no relatives. Let me satisfy my little whims.”

  I had no idea what floor the elevator was going to, but to judge from how long it took, it certainly wasn’t the second.

  The doors opened to reveal a vast, glass-lined room. Straight ahead towered the monolith of the AT&T building, and beyond it, the skyscrapers of the Financial District glittered in the night like ships at anchor. On the left of the room, a uniform sheet of yellow and blue fire emerged from the base of what seemed like a huge aluminium frame.

  “Hello, Skinny.”

  I turned to my right. Greg was sitting at a black table at the corner of the window, his blond hair barely illuminated by the one light on the table. He finished tapping something on the keyboard of a computer, then sat back in his chair and looked at me. I slowly crossed the room and approached the window. If I’d suffered from vertigo I would certainly have felt uncomfortable. From a hi-fi I could not see came a piano piece by Haydn.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  I shrugged and for a moment kept looking out of the window. Greg lifted the receiver of the telephone on the table.

  “Two vodka martinis, please,” he said, then hung up and stretched again on the chair. After a few moments he stood up, slowly walked across a good part of the room and went and sat down behind me on one of the two black leather couches that faced each other at right angles to the fireplace.

  “If you’ve come to look at the view you could have stayed in your pigsty of an apartment. You only had to tell me and I’d have sent you a postcard.”

  I waited a few seconds, then turned. I didn’t really know what to do or where to begin. Greg was sitting there with that usual half-smile of his which had always amused me, but was now getting on my nerves like a guitar being tuned. I went straight to the couch until I was very close to Greg. He raised his eyebrows and looked me up and down from behind the black frames of his glasses. The next instant, I threw myself on him and aimed my right fist directly at his face. But Greg was faster than I’d anticipated, and by springing to the left managed to avoid the blow almost completely. I lost my balance and fell forward. My fist ended up stuck between the cushion and the arm of the couch, with my wrist twisted in an unnatural fashion.

  “Aaah!” I screamed like a little boy.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Greg yelled above me.

  Then I felt an anvil descend on my right side and the air abandoning every corner of my lungs and a dull pain in my ribs. For a brief instant, as I fell to one side and tried to cry out, I felt as though I were going to die of suffocation. I was on the floor next to the couch now, bent double, not sure whether to hold my wrist or my chest. After what seemed an eternity, I managed to get my breath back enough to produce a groan, and got up into a kneeling position. The pain in my ribs was easing off, becoming diffused, but my wrist was still throbbing, crying vengeance like a crazed animal.

  “Have you gone mad?”

  Greg was standing behind the couch with an expression on his face I’d never seen: a mixture of anger and surprise and fear I wouldn’t in all honesty have thought him capable of. He passed a hand over his cheek and looked at it.

  “You hit me! What the fuck’s got into you?”

  I wanted to say something, anything to wipe out that clumsy attempt to strike my oldest friend.

  “For Christ’s sake! Why the fuck did you hit me?”

  With no small effort, I moved back as far as the edge of the couch opposite. I bent double again. My wrist was still screaming with pain, and I wondered if I’d broken it.

  “You know why,” I finally managed to murmur, then coughed twice and screwed up my face with the pain.

  “Shit!” Greg cried. “I know? I KNOW? No, God dammit, no, I don’t know! Jesus, I ought to call the doorman and have you kicked out of here!”

  I glanced at him, then lowered my head again and tried slowly to move my wrist. It was still hurting like hell but, although it creaked in a rather sinister way, it seemed to be moving all right.

  “Forget it. You’re a mess, but you’re not exactly dangerous.”

  He was agitated, more agitated than I had ever seen him, which struck me as a fairly acceptable result.

  “Shit!” Greg said again, but more softly, jerking his head to one side. He touched his cheek again and looked at his hand.

  “I didn’t even hit you.”

  “Actuall
y you did, damn you. A glancing blow, but you did hit me. If you’d hit me properly you’d have taken my head off. But what the fuck’s the matter with you?”

  For a few seconds I kept moving my wrist a bit and throwing him a couple of quick glances.

  “I know everything, Greg,” I said softly after a while.

  “Everything about what?”

  “I managed to track down the former president of the Cirri Foundation. I talked to him and Lucio and several others. I spent three days in front of the computer and on the phone, sleeping three hours a night. I’ve reconstructed everything.”

  I finally raised my head and looked Greg straight in the eyes. He stared back at me, but didn’t say anything. After a few moments a little bell rang in the room. Greg let a couple of seconds pass, still staring at me.

  “Fuck off,” he snorted, before going towards a narrow counter that emerged like a breakfast bar from the wall opposite the windows. He walked around it, opened a kind of dumbwaiter in the wall and took out a tray with two cone-shaped glasses on it. As he came back towards the couch, I stood up and went back to the window. I tried to move my chest and ribs: they hurt quite a bit, but nothing was broken.

  “I should smash this on your head,” Greg said, slamming the tray on the glass surface of the table. Then he sat down, picked up one of the glasses and took a sip, giving me a final furious glance. But after a few moments he gave a deep sigh followed by a little laugh. “Did you have to hit me?”

  I turned. “I don’t know, you tell me: did I have to hit you?”

  Greg drank again. “What do you want me to say, Skinny?”

  “Why you did it, that’s all.”

  “Honestly, I don’t understand why you’re so pissed off.”

  “Oh, really? You don’t understand?”

  “No, I don’t understand. I gave you everything you have. You should thank me, you should drink a toast to me, not come here and try to hit me and stand there like an idiot.”

  At last. This was what had obsessed me and worn away at me slowly since that damned phone call, the day before Biagio’s funeral, this was what, from the moment I’d hung up my parents’ grey telephone, had been burrowing away inside me like a termite.

  I’ve already done as much for Biagio as I could. Now it’s up to you.

  Here was that sentence again: and yet, without my realizing it, until that sinister laugh a few nights earlier, it hadn’t been the sentence that had taken away my breath and my ideas for weeks. It was, though, a sentence so simple as to seem exactly the same. The mere replacement of one word by three others: “I’ve already done as much for all of you as I could.” That wasn’t what Greg had said, but it was what had bounced around my head until it made me feel nauseous, preventing me from feeling anything else. As if half of me already knew and wanted to inform the other half, without success. Until that night, in Amanda’s apartment, when Greg’s laugh had thrown it in my face more strongly than usual. I had woken with a start, with my heart pounding like mad and sweat on my neck and forehead. For all of you? What did that mean: for all of you? What had Greg done for us? What had Greg done for me?

  Obsessed by that shadow, and with the terrifying sensation of losing control and going mad, I had left Amanda’s apartment and gone back to mine. I had gone on the internet and investigated every useful lead and called whoever I could think of at all hours of the day and night, hoping that all my doubts would be swept away and vanish like a passing madness and I could at last go back to my lessons and my books and my relationship with Amanda and everything that up until that summer I had called “my life”. But none of the people I contacted had removed my doubts. In fact, they had confirmed them, and all at once what I’d lived through until a few months earlier seemed hardly to belong to me at all.

  It was Greg who’d had the Rocky Road tarred, Greg who had made sure that Lucio had come to see Biagio ride, Greg who’d somehow put that damned card in my book and had me entered in the selection process for the scholarship, through the foundation of which his father had been one of the biggest sponsors. And it was Greg who had allowed Paolino to be granted the finance to open his dealership and expand. Suddenly, through those simple interventions, the chilling, slender shadow of Greg hovered over every single part of our lives, with his hands in his pockets and that sinister smile on his lips.

  “And who told you I wanted it? Who told you any of us wanted it?”

  Greg gave an affected laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Of course I’m serious. Very serious.”

  “Why, did you want to stay in San Filippo?” he asked, passing a hand over his mouth.

  “Maybe, yes. What do you know about it? You should have asked us.”

  “Asked you what?”

  “You should have asked Biagio, for instance, if he wanted Torcini to be contacted. Or you should have asked me if I wanted you to help me get a scholarship.”

  “What difference would it have made? Would you all have said, ‘No, thanks’?”

  “How do you know? Maybe, yes. It’s too late now.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Skinny? Would you all have turned down the most important opportunities of your lives?”

  “That’s exactly the point: it wasn’t the opportunity of our lives, it was an opportunity for you.”

  True, none of us had ever admitted it, but as I’ve already said, I’m sure that more or less consciously, from the moment our eyes fell on the black surface of the Rocky Road, our lives had secretly been opened up to a vaster world. Suddenly, strange and surprising things had started to happen, about which we preferred not to ask too many questions, but which filled us with a new, thrilling enthusiasm. We found motorcycles forgotten in sheds and roads mysteriously covered in asphalt, we rode fast bikes and people offered to race us and postcards appearing in our books transported us to great universities abroad. Who would have taken the trouble to say no to all this? Something greater than us was dragging us—perhaps despite ourselves—outside the village where we had grown up and where, until that moment, we had been happy, and who were we to oppose it?

  If, though, all these mysterious forces were nothing but thin, invisible threads in the hands of a man as limited and shortsighted as the rest of us, that changed things. If Greg had asked us, if Greg had come to me one day and said, “Listen, Jacopo, our family is a partner in a foundation that among its other activities selects candidates for major scholarships. Do you mind if I put your name forward?” how would I have reacted? Would I have applied anyway, or would the honest, pure part of me have said, “Thanks, but I don’t need help from anybody else”? And if that had happened, what would have become of me? What would have become of all of us? What about Biagio? Would he have gone to those motorcycle trials knowing that one of the sponsors was his best friend? I remembered it well, that sense of inadequacy, the day we went to Mugello, that question buzzing in both our heads, and especially his: “What are we doing here?” Imagine if, on top of that, we had suspected we were only there out of friendship.

  “All right, Jacopo, do me a favour. This conversation makes no sense: take a sleeping pill and go to bed, then maybe we can talk about it again calmly and remember the good old days. Right now I’m tired and you punched me and you’re really starting to piss me off.”

  “I don’t need a sleeping pill.”

  “The drink is getting you all worked up.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the drink.”

  “A pity, it’s a good drink. They aren’t easy to make.”

  “Who told you we wanted to go?”

  “Come on, Skinny, stop it. Did you really want to stay in that hole all your life?”

  “How do I know? And above all, how did you know?”

  “For God’s sake, what’s happening to you? Where is that lucid, disenchanted person I always loved talking to on the phone? Can you call him, please? Because I can’t talk to you. What is it? Would you have preferred to study mathematics in Rome
and be a scientist in a country as broke and chaotic as ours? Or maybe you’d have preferred to teach at the wonderful Fermi high school in Posta!”

  “What do you know about it? Maybe, yes.”

  “Fuck off, Skinny. You get excited about Ozawa’s concerts at the Boston Opera House, you investigate the behaviour of dark energy, and you develop credible ideas about the destiny of the universe.”

  “Theories, Greg, mathematical models. I realize you’re not too familiar with certain expressions, but that’s all they are.”

  “Don’t get on your high horse: I’m already trying to resist the temptation to call the Polish doorman and have you kicked out. I wouldn’t stretch the point if I were you.”

  “I’m not developing any credible idea, just making mathematical gambles. And for a while now everyone’s been amusing themselves throwing them back in my face.”

  Physics Review D, after a bit of sparring back and forth, had refused to publish either of the last two articles I had submitted, which had never happened before and which certainly did not help to lift me out of what now appeared increasingly like the beginning of my premature decline. My only published article challenged the theory of the expanding universe, maintaining that the Big Bang was not where time and space had formed, but simply one of the times and spaces. In collaboration with Yuko Atori, a Japanese friend and colleague of mine, through the analysis of seven years’ data from the WMAP space probe, I had managed to establish that in background cosmic radiation, the oldest perceptible signal in our universe, appreciable uniform variations in temperature could be found similar to those of spherical waves, the origin of which we claimed could be attributed to gravitational wrinkles caused by the collision of black holes preceding the Big Bang. This was compatible with the picture of a universe which one day would start shrinking again, increasing in density until it reached a new point of infinite density and set off a new Big Bang.