Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

“You can’t touch me,” she said, as coldly as before.

  She then finished off what must have been the simple ballet she performed for all her customers, made me lift the bikini top over her head and pulled me towards her breasts.

  “Now get out of here and wait for me outside, and don’t let anybody see you,” she whispered in my ear, then got up and put the bikini top back on and went back to the main stage. So as not to be too conspicuous, I stayed there for another ten minutes and finished my vodka, then stood up, nodded goodbye to the girl at the cash desk and the guy at the door as I went out and headed for the far end of the parking lot. I settled down to wait round the corner, leaning on the boot of a car. By the time Tara appeared, two hours later, I was already thinking of leaving.

  “Hi,” I said, somewhat embarrassed, when she emerged from the parking lot.

  “Move,” she said looking behind her and continuing to walk quickly. “If they see me leaving with a customer they’ll fire me.”

  I walked quickly behind her as far as the subway station and up onto the elevated. As we waited, I smiled at her and tried to kiss her on the cheek. She threw me a glance, then again stared along the platform to where the train was due to arrive.

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “I followed you.”

  She looked at me gravely for a moment or two. We heard the noise of the train and waited for it to arrive, then sat down side by side on one of the blue plastic benches. We didn’t say anything else to each other. When we reached the end of the line, two stops later, we got off and I followed her down Ditmars Boulevard and along one of the streets on the left. She went through a small iron gate and opened the door of a small two-storey brick building, identical to all the buildings in the street. She climbed to the upper floor, opened another door and let me into a small untidy two-room apartment, full of clothes and magazines left lying around. There was a smell of incense and dust and even before taking off her jacket, Tara hastened to light two scented candles.

  “Sit down, I’ll be right back,” she said, throwing her jacket on the sofa and disappearing into what must have been the bathroom. I moved a few garments, sat down on the couch and leafed through a fashion magazine. For a few minutes I heard the shower running. Then I heard something fall, maybe a jar. When she reappeared, Tara had a long blue towel tied round her breasts and on her head the kind of turban women use to dry their hair. She walked straight to a small old stereo and put a disc in, then approached, moved aside the little table in front of the couch with her foot and sat down astride my legs. Through the folds in the towel, I could see a few short hairs of her shaved pubis. She unrolled the turban, opened the towel and, as I started running my fingertips over her skin, gave me a long kiss. Then she stood up, held out her hand and led me towards the bed. She undressed me very calmly, laid me down on two pillows and finally mounted me. We made love for a long time, silently, and although I was fairly sure she didn’t come, it struck me this might be the first time we had really made love. Afterwards, she got up and went back to the bathroom. After a few moments I heard the water running, then the sound of a hair dryer.

  As I lay there, still buried in a mire of mixed emotions I couldn’t identify, my eyes fell on some sheets of paper on one of the little shelves next to the bed. I took them and leafed through them. They were in Spanish and looked important. Attached to one of the sheets was a faded little yellow plastic card with a photograph of Tara. She looked very young and innocent, and I wondered what the girl in the photo had to do with the woman I had seen stripping a few hours earlier at the Boom Bar. Or, to tell the truth, with the woman who had just stripped me and laid me on the bed. Under the photograph was the name Rosalita Hernández, with some other numbers and a date that made her three or four years older and next to it what must have been her place of birth: México, Distrito Federal.

  Tara reappeared completely naked, went to a chest of drawers without even looking at me, opened one of the drawers, took out a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and put them on. Then she looked at herself in the mirror for a moment.

  “Well, Rosalita?” I said, smiling. There was no particular reason why I said it, nor, to be honest, was I even thinking about what those papers and that card meant. Tara looked at me in the mirror, then turned, looked at the papers I was holding in my hand and again at me.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  She seemed very serious and very angry and I felt an icy wave flood through my veins. “Nothing, I just happened to notice these—”

  “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” she suddenly screamed.

  “Nothing, I was only—”

  She leapt at me, tore the papers from my hand, threw them on the chest of drawers and turned with her face suddenly hard, staring at some indeterminate point on the floor. “Get out,” she said.

  “Tara, I don’t give a damn about these—”

  “GET OUT!” she screamed hysterically.

  I suddenly felt as though my head were in a vice. I sat down on the edge of the bed and started getting dressed. She stood there motionless, staring at the same point on the floor, nervously biting her lip. I finished dressing, then looked at her.

  “Tara, I don’t—”

  “You have to go.”

  “I don’t want to go. I’m not interested in those papers. I only want—”

  “YOU HAVE TO GO!” she screamed again in that hysterical voice.

  I tried to reach out my hand and touch her arm. “Tara…”

  She knocked my hand away, pushed me aside and strode across the living room. I couldn’t really believe it, but I actually saw her slap her face a few times. She opened the door to the apartment, went across the landing and started beating on the door opposite.

  “COSTA!” she screamed.

  Tara had told me, with a laugh, about a neighbour of hers, a Greek named Costa, who sometimes gave her a hand to mend a pipe, carry a piece of furniture or put up a shelf. She always said she didn’t know what she would have done without him, and that once he had even saved her from an attempted assault near the building. I had always assumed Costa was a muscular guy with tattoos all over him, but kind and affectionate in his way. But the man who came to the door in an undershirt a few moments later was middle-aged with a paunch and a long lock of hair brushed over a bald patch.

  “What’s going on, Tara?” he said, sleepily. “It’s five in the morning.”

  “This asshole hit me,” she said, gesturing behind her without even looking at me.

  “What?”

  Costa looked at her, then at me inside the apartment, trying to connect the two.

  “This son of a bitch slapped me twice and now he won’t go.”

  “But it isn’t true!” I cried, my voice sounding ridiculously boyish.

  “Oh, no? Look,” said Tara, or Rosalita or whoever she was, turning her face from side to side in front of Costa.

  Costa opened the door fully, tied a towel round his waist and came slowly towards me. In a flash of lucidity I told myself, with a certain interest, that this was perhaps the first time I had experienced real terror. The voice that emerged from my mouth was like the squeak of a mouse.

  “Look, Mr Costa, there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  Costa approached and stopped in front of me. For a moment I fooled myself that I could reason with him, then all at once I felt my cheek explode. I was flung to the floor on the other side of the room. He kicked me twice and I screamed, begging him to stop. I couldn’t say anything except, “Stop, I can explain, please stop.”

  “Did he have anything else?” Costa asked, turning towards Tara.

  “That jacket.”

  Costa picked up my jacket from a chair, approached me again, gave me another few—fortunately inaccurate—kicks, and grabbed me by the hair. I managed somehow to get up and follow him, bent double, my head attached to his hand.

  “Tara,” I said as I passed, reaching out a hand towards her. She brushed it away and went b
ack inside. Costa dragged me down the stairs, still bent in that ridiculous position. Once outside the little gate, he threw my jacket into the middle of the street, then changed the hand with which he was holding my hair, lifted my head, and as I let out another scream landed a second punch on my cheek. I was thrown to the ground and for a few moments all I saw was darkness and a thousand coloured flashes. When I opened my eyes again, I was flat on my face on the sidewalk.

  “And if you try to come anywhere near Tara again I swear I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

  I heard him spit, presumably at me, then out of the corner of my eye saw him go back up the few steps that led inside the building and slam the door behind him.

  As I got up, I noticed someone peering at me from behind the curtain of a little house on the other side of the street. As soon as our eyes met, the figure disappeared behind the curtain. I dragged myself to the middle of the street and picked up my jacket. I tried to pull myself together and figure out where I was. Half my face throbbing like the open heart of an animal, I walked slowly towards the subway. The train was there at the end of the line, waiting to set off again. A couple of shady individuals who got on with me sniggered and pointed out my obviously swollen face to each other. I told myself I would phone Tara the next day, or else I’d go to the restaurant and we’d talk and everything would pass. For a moment, I even persuaded myself that I’d be able to help her and maybe for the first time I realized that I really loved her and I didn’t care if she wasn’t Venezuelan and had never lived in a commune in California and was probably an illegal immigrant who had grown up in a shantytown in Mexico City. I didn’t care about anything: we’d talk about it and I would understand her and I would marry her and protect her and cure her of whatever it was that was troubling her.

  Fortunately it didn’t happen. Once I had recovered, something grey and slimy continued to float inside me, but it was simply too much: she was too much, her body was too much, and her tongue, and obviously her past, and—however clever I tried to be—the distance between us was too great. I didn’t see her again, I didn’t hear from her, and whenever I happened to be in the area of Novecento a feeling of nausea always made me gave it a wide berth.

  “So, do you think all that desire, all that suffering is any use in looking at the world or giving Amanda a home and child? What do you think I should do?”

  “I don’t know, Skinny, play briscola. What do you want from me?”

  I looked at Greg for a few seconds. I wondered if he was really so sure of himself or if he was just a very good actor. “I think a lot about Paolino,” I said.

  “Paolino?”

  “Yes, Paolino.”

  “What’s Paolino got to do with anything?”

  “He certainly doesn’t go to mass on Sunday or gather blackberries. And I guarantee that with Giorgia he does more than fuck missionary style.”

  “So?”

  “That means they’re happy, Greg. I go back to the village and I go to see them and they’re laughing or arguing or watching TV, but they’re fine. They’re healthy. Sure, they don’t know. But so what? What do I do with all this knowledge? Am I so much better off?”

  “Paolino is a dear boy, Skinny, and Giorgia and the kids have certainly been good for him, but I never heard him say a sensible sentence before he was fifteen. Can you tell me what Paolino has to do with you? Above all, can you tell me what he has to do with me? What do you think, that I really orchestrated all your lives? I put a few opportunities your way. Who knew you would all run with it better than anyone would have imagined? Yes, you all surprised me. Do you think I did anything more than make it possible for you to go in for that scholarship? Well, you’re wrong. Do you want to know what I did? I designed and printed that card, I put it in the book for you and waited for it to arrive at the foundation. Then I simply had you chosen as our candidate. That’s all. You were the person who won that scholarship and the subsequent ones, you were the one who went off at a tangent with all this madness about the universe and relativity and cosmic radiation. I left a quiet, boring wanker who only knew how to solve equations and a few months later I find a sombre, inspired guy wandering the streets of Glasgow like a character in a novel and talking about space and time as if they were his socks. You gave me a lot of satisfaction.”

  “What about the equation?”

  “What equation?”

  “The one on the postcard.”

  “What about it?”

  “Did I solve it?”

  “How do I know if you solved it?” Greg said, with a hint of irritation. “I found it in a newspaper. I never saw that card again.”

  “I always thought I solved it.”

  Greg sighed and again passed his hand over his cheekbone. “And Biagio: do you think I rode the bike? Do you think I knew that arsehole really had all that talent? I said it to Rastello almost as a joke. Once, when we’d been talking, it transpired that one of our companies was sponsoring a motorcycle team. It was a time when motorcycle racing was becoming popular and Rastello thought it was a good investment. I hadn’t given it any more thought in the meantime, not even when we fixed Sandra. But then in the middle of a conversation, I said to Rastello, ‘Look, there’s a friend of mine on the Rocky Road who rides fast. Maybe the head of our team would be interested in him.’ How was I supposed to know Rastello would call Torcini, or that Torcini would really go to the Rocky Road and ask Biagio to go to Mugello, or that that arsehole really would go that fast?”

  By now I didn’t believe much in all these as a jokes and how did I knows, but decided to let him go on. “And what about the Rocky Road?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s the only missing piece: how did you manage to get it tarred?”

  Greg looked at me and shook his head, as if he were talking to a little boy. “Do you have any idea how San Filippo would have been if it weren’t for my family? Do you think it took a lot to send for a roadlaying company and get the authorities to turn a blind eye?” Then he paused for another second and gave an affected smile. “And do you still think the Marshal always let us do what we wanted because he couldn’t catch us? Have you forgotten we’d fixed up his barracks five years earlier? Even at the time I thought it was impossible that nobody had put two and two together, but now…”

  Feeling somewhat ridiculous, I thought for a moment about those days there on the Rocky Road, about the spur, about the Marshal arriving and bawling us out and then going away. I suddenly wondered if on the way back he had laughed or shaken his head in frustration.

  “There’s that image of Biagio that haunts me,” I said.

  “What image?”

  “Biagio at night, alone, when he was a boy.”

  “What of it?”

  “Since he died I haven’t been able to separate it from the image of his corpse on Elba. It’s as if I’d actually seen it. Something broke inside Biagio, and it started to break as soon as he left the village. And however much you try and twist the argument, the last and perhaps only moment when I remember Biagio happy was right there in San Filippo.”

  For a moment Greg seemed to take his mask off and looked at me with the same eyes he’d had when he was a little boy. “Jacopo, I know, but it’s been a while now since I stopped feeling guilty about Biagio.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the bike?”

  “To hell with the bike! No, not because of the bike, because of everything else.”

  “What else?”

  “Are you an idiot? All the rest. All the mess he made and the drugs and so on. The rest.”

  “But what has that got to do with you?”

  “I’m sorry, but what do you think was in those cigarettes that Biagio and I had been smoking since we were kids?”

  “It wasn’t cannabis, was it?”

  “It was grass, Jacopo. I grew it in the summer in one of the old greenhouses and discovered that method of tying the leaves with sewing thread and le
aving them to dry on slices of fruit. I don’t remember where I learnt it. But it worked. Then, when I started going round the world with Rastello, I’d often run into Biagio in different places. He was often in Japan or Spain or America for the Grand Prix or the trials. Sometimes, if I was in London or Paris, he’d join me directly from Italy. We’d go clubbing, take a few pills, do a few lines of coke. He swore to me that when he wasn’t with me he didn’t do anything, all he thought about was the bike. But it was different for him. You could see it. Since those first joints from me, his whole expression would change. How come you didn’t see it? To me it was always a bit of fun, a carnival, a holiday. Even now, every once in a while, maybe every couple of years, I smoke a bit of opium. I forget everything for a day and get a few massages and the next day everything starts again. Not him. He went into it head first, his eyes got all hollow, he’d give that half-smile of his and for a few hours it was as if he wanted to take in the whole world and disappear inside it. He’d become another person. Then the next day he’d get up with those silences of his and his hair over his eyes, and each time he’d tell me that maybe, when you came down to it, it was a kind of holiday for him too.”

  Greg looked at me for a moment or two. An insidious lump of anxiety and nausea was doing everything it could to rise from my stomach.

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No, not after that Australian bitch showed up. I swear to you, Skinny, I never thought the human body could contain all that shit and still laugh and chat. When she went out, she always wore big mirrored glasses. The last evening we spent together was right here, in New York. I had some business to finalize and he had a meeting with a sponsor about the photographs for an advertising campaign. We’d been to a party first, then to the private room of a club until eight in the morning and in the end we’d gone back to my hotel. The girl had managed to get some dope from somebody, and although my eyes had already started to close, she was still spreading powder and burning foil and passing the stuff to Biagio as if there were no tomorrow. She walked around the suite in ripped jeans and a bikini top and a Mexican straw hat she’d taken off someone at the party and those mirrored glasses on her nose. She was laughing and hopping around the room as if everything were fine, as if she’d only just woken up and was ready to go to the beach. She was sitting on the couch. I went to her and as a joke reached out my hand and pulled her glasses down onto the tip of her nose and asked her what she was doing. I’ll never forget those eyes. She pushed my hand away and put her glasses back up, then went to the bar as if nothing had happened and poured herself half a glass of vodka. That was what she did. It was as if all the devastation that usually affects every muscle and nerve of a normal human being, in her was concentrated in and around the eyes. They were purple and unnaturally hollow, the bright blue had been transformed into a weak ash-grey corona. The pupils seemed mushy, one was larger than the other, and they were empty, completely empty, and moving in different directions. “I’m telling you the truth. It may have been partly the tiredness and the hangover, but it terrified me. I went into the bathroom and threw up and closed the windows and took a couple of sleeping pills. Before I fell asleep I was convinced I might even die. The next day, when I woke up, Biagio and that thing had disappeared. A few days later we talked on the phone and I told Biagio to be careful. Obviously he didn’t take much notice. From that night onwards, I always made myself scarce when they were together. That was our last night together. I don’t know if I’ve ever understood why.”