Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  I stood there for a few seconds, motionless, looking at Greg and trying to fit everything into a few new pigeonholes, for which I would then have to find names. I wasn’t sure if I was more upset by the content of the story or that subtle feeling of jealousy over a part of our lives from which I’d been excluded and about which I’d been kept in the dark. I went to the low table, finally picked up my cocktail, warm by now, and collapsed onto the couch facing Greg’s.

  “My God,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s our dear Biagio for you.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know it wasn’t my fault. I told you, I got rid of my sense of guilt about Biagio some time ago. And yet it was hard to see a friend disintegrating. I’d just like to find that bitch again. I even thought of hiring an international investigator. But what would I have done then? Let her go to hell and have done with it.”

  For a moment I played with two drops of condensation on the side of the cone-shaped glass. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that he would have been happier?”

  “Where?”

  “In the village.”

  Greg opened his eyes wide and threw his head back. “Oh God… how do I know, Jacopo? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe he’d have ended up dead of an overdose even earlier, like Nannini’s son. He was the brightest and the darkest of us, but it isn’t written anywhere that light has to last for ever. Yes, he saw the abyss, but he did what he knew how to do best, and in his way he did it in style. Who’s to say his life was wasted?”

  “I don’t know, Greg. Even you have somehow found yourself someone who makes you feel at home, someone you’re attached to. That’s what we all want when you come down to it: roots, a place we can call home. What does all the rest matter?”

  That someone I was referring to had emerged over time in things Greg had said to me, appearing first as a mere hint, a person he had to see or he’d been to dinner with, and had gradually become a constant presence. I’d met him one evening, in London, while I was there for a conference. His name was Richard, and he worked in a merchant bank in the City. For some reason, I had imagined an elegant but clearly eccentric person, probably somewhat elderly. Not a bit of it: he was a young-looking thirty-something like all of us, polite and well dressed, clean-shaven, with glossy dark hair and a neat side parting. I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early, and when they both came to the table Richard gave my hand a firm shake and said that he was very pleased to meet me, and that Greg often spoke about me in glowing terms. I looked at Greg and smiled.

  “Don’t get a big head, Skinny. He’s exaggerating to make himself look good.”

  The attraction of that evening, apart—I have to admit—from Richard’s brilliant conversation, was Greg’s obvious discomfort. All his life he had struggled to turn himself into a shadow, the closest thing he could find to the speakerphone in Charlie’s Angels, and now here he was, sitting at a table at Simpson’s in the Strand, sinking his knife into a slice of roast beef as soft as butter and chatting away like any other human being with his partner and his oldest friend.

  So this was the depravity of which Greg was so proud: this kindly London broker who seemed to have a great passion for Italian shoes and romantic comedies. He asked me if I’d like to go with him the following evening to see a new show with Emma Thompson. He’d gone so far as to buy two tickets, but obviously Greg’s slow emotional evolution didn’t yet include comedies with Emma Thompson.

  Greg’s discomfort and his constant muttering as we talked were quite amusing, but he seemed to get over it quite well in the end, and from subsequent phone calls I got the impression that our relationship had warmed slightly. Eventually, Greg and Richard bought a house in Primrose Hill, and Greg now spent most of the free time he allowed himself there.

  “Skinny, the relationship between Richard and me is so far beyond anything your petty little mind could conceive, there’s no point your even talking about it.”

  I smiled and watched the drops of condensation slowly descending the stem of the glass. “Were you really in that monastery?”

  Greg looked at me. “Yes, I really was,” he said, with a bored sigh.

  “And how was it?”

  “Why, are you planning to become a monk?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What can I tell you, Jacopo? It was a monastery in the middle of the mountains. Monks and prayers and all the rest. It was very cold and the food was disgusting.”

  I continued looking at him without saying anything.

  “Do you want to know if they’ve found the solution? Yes, they’ve found the solution. Many haven’t, but some have understood: they know and they’re happy all the same. And so what? What should we do? Should we leave all this and disappear into the mountains? That would be nice, Skinny, but the reality is that they know how the universe is, but they don’t know how things are down here, and don’t have much to leave behind: a few sheep and a patch of frozen ground. They’re better off in a monastery than going around in their tents. I don’t know about you, but I’m better off here. Rubber mattresses are amazing. Have you suddenly realized that this is our great mandala? Congratulations. Enjoy it! What do you care?”

  I sighed, then turned my neck from side to side and heard it crack. I squeezed my right wrist. It still hurt a lot, but I could move it.

  Greg was looking at me with his arms stretched along the back of the seat. He was smiling.

  “You punched me.”

  “You deserved it.”

  4

  WHEN I FOUND myself back on the street half an hour later, I decided to go for a walk. A cool wind was blowing, which forced me to raise the collar of my jacket and stoop slightly. The city seemed calmer and more silent than usual. I thought I could smell roast meat in the air. I walked toward Canal, and then further north, along West Broadway. For the first time in at least five years I passed Novecento. I stopped and approached the window, putting my hands around my face to look inside. I saw my ghost and the ghosts of Tara and her friend and Fausto sitting there at the table and walking around the place with plates and orders in their hands. Rosalita Hernández. Who would ever have thought that we had really been so close? I moved away from the window and for a moment it seemed to me that I saw behind me, in the shimmer of West Broadway, the figures of my friends and me and Tara standing in the middle of the road looking at an imaginary horizon. The morning the towers had collapsed I had been in that area, at the apartment of a weird Canadian girl I’d been trying vaguely to have an affair with for some weeks. The first tower collapsed as I was crossing Washington Square. I heard people shouting and running, looking south, covering their faces and mouths. It took me a while to realize what I was watching: the outline of a single tower immersed in smoke. The world as I knew it had come to an end, and every frozen corner of my body told me so. Within a few minutes, Fifth Avenue was deserted. There were men and women in tears talking on the telephone, others huddled in groups around the news coming from car radios or from the TV sets that some people had put in the windows. Scattered here and there were people standing looking north. They were staring at the Empire State Building, waiting for one of the two planes still in the air to hit it. There we all were, all at once, me and Greg and Biagio and Tara or Rosalita or whatever she was called, and maybe the rest of the world: all standing, disoriented, with our backs to a past that had been bombed out of existence, looking at what remained while waiting for another collapse.

  I went up West Broadway as far as Prince Street and turned left, then turned right and continued uptown, on Thompson. Beyond Houston, I passed the Italian bar where a few years earlier I’d gone to watch Biagio’s last appearances in the Superbike Championships, then the two chess forums where I had been soundly beaten by a twitchy little boy and an elegant old man in a double-breasted suit.

  The fountain in Washington Square was full. I decided to stop for a while and sit down on the edge. The building on the corner of Fifth was reflected in the
motionless surface of the water and every now and again a slight gust of wind made the reflection shimmer. Just to be on that side of the fountain and continue looking north I took my shoes off, rolled up the hems of my trousers and dipped my feet in. The water was quite cold, but I soon got used to it. A young black guy approached me and asked me for a cigarette. I told him I was sorry, but I didn’t smoke. He nodded and told me I was right.

  “It’s a nice night,” he said looking around and up in the sky. He sat down on the edge of the fountain and kept looking around without saying anything. He had a funny round face and I wondered what he was doing around there at that hour. After a couple of minutes he wished me a good day, took a long, deep breath, and went on his way.

  The taxi driver I approached muttered that it was his last run and I lived too far away, but in the end he took me and even thanked me for the two dollars extra I gave him as a tip. I decided to take another sick day and not set the alarm. My little apartment still bore the signs of all those hours I’d spent looking for confirmation of Greg’s machinations: sheets of paper scattered on the table even more untidily than usual, Post-its stuck everywhere, half-filled glasses. The smell of obsession still hovered. I opened the windows that looked out on the street and let a little air in. I also took a big black bag and threw in it all the papers and notes and scraps that reminded me of that pandemonium. I thought of taking a shower, but in the end decided to leave it till the next day and settled for washing my face. And finally, having drawn all the curtains and made it as dark as possible, I collapsed on the bed, exhausted.

  Two days later I told Amanda that I’d passed a real estate agency by chance and that they had a couple of interesting apartments on offer: we might be able to go and take a look. Her hands were smeared with paint and she had an orange-coloured band around her head. As soon as she opened the door, she said she had to finish something and ran back to her studio. When I told her about the apartment she stopped and looked at me. She held her hands up like a surgeon before an operation and frowned.

  “What did you say?”

  She looked like a little girl, with that band on her head and those hands full of paint, and once again I wondered what a woman like her was doing with someone like me.

  “I said I saw photos in an agency of an apartment that seems perfect for us.”

  She looked at me for another moment or two. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.”

  I started to find my classes enjoyable again from time to time. I even asked Jerry, the head of the department, if I could do more popular classes, maybe intersecting with other degree courses. I missed those short seminars at the New School, the effort of looking for ways to explain the laws that govern the universe to those who didn’t know much about it, that gleam in their eyes when they seemed at last to grasp a concept that had previously been impenetrable. I missed the labour of finding the right images and words. Perhaps I missed the words and that was it. And even though words could not explain much of what I was studying, it was still true that they could change the perspective of these young people for ever, even if only by a few hundredths of a degree.

  I looked through some notes from more than a year before, which I’d put aside to give vent to my sudden mad obsession with omniscience. They were still in a rough state, but there were a few aspects worth developing. I got back in touch with some ex-pupils and tried to set up a research group. We did some good work on the correlation between the emissions of neutrinos and the gravitational waves of supernovas, and it was even published. To celebrate, I treated everyone to a steak dinner at Peter Luger.

  In the end we didn’t move to the apartment I’d seen in the photograph at the agency. Eventually, we ended up in an apartment belonging to Columbia University, on 118th Street. We got it thanks to the university, and it was the only way to have a place big enough for both her studio and my study. It even has a little terrace, where we sunbathe a bit before it gets too hot and sometimes even have dinner al fresco. Amanda wasn’t too keen on it—she didn’t like leaving Alphabet City and her Puerto Rican friends, but she was surprisingly happy to live with me. I told myself that maybe that’s what it’s all about: to make someone else happy.

  I think Mrs Schmidt’s children were very relieved too: for quite a while now she’s been in a retirement home in New Jersey, but she made it a matter of honour that I should stay in the apartment for as long as I wanted, and at the rent agreed at the start. I was the one who took her to hospital the night she collapsed. From time to time I pay her a visit, and always find her all dressed up, with her hair nicely combed. The first few times she took me by the arm and showed me off to everyone as her young Italian boyfriend. Now she doesn’t walk so well any more, so we spend most of the time in her room, chatting over a cup of tea. I always take a little bottle of whisky with me and pour some in her cup, without the nurses seeing. I’ve even taught her how to play briscola.

  Mathías was here recently too. A film by a young Brazilian director that he produced was in competition in a festival in New York. We went to an Allman Brothers concert at the Beacon Theater. They played a version of “Mountain Jam” that lasted at least half an hour and brought tears to our eyes. After the concert we went for a walk along Columbus and dropped into a little bar. He was wearing a white shirt, and his big, already greying mop of hair fell partly over his eyes. Since I’d last seen him he’d married and had a son, then fallen in love with another woman and left his wife, who made him buy her a house and plagues him constantly about his responsibilities.

  “You’re a parody of yourself,” I said to him.

  He laughed and ran his hands through his hair, then looked at me and said that I seemed different. I’d never thought I would, but I told him the whole story. He listened to me gravely, without saying anything and without taking his eyes off me. When I’d finished he sat looking at me for a while, still without saying anything, then took a sip of his beer and put the tankard back on the table.

  “A funny thing, luck,” he said, continuing to stare at the tankard and removing a residue of froth from the edge with the tip of his thumb.

  Most of the time, I don’t think about our story. But I do often think about Greg’s final words. I was already in the elevator, and just before the doors closed, I put my hand out to stop them and again looked Greg straight in the eyes.

  “Why?” I asked.

  I wasn’t completely sure what that why meant, but I couldn’t hold it back. Greg stared at me for a few moments and sighed. I thought he would tell me to go to hell and close the elevator door without adding anything else.

  Instead of which, he said, “Pleasure, Jacopo. Pure pleasure. What else do you think matters? Do you really believe there’s anything else worth living for? Congratulations, you’ve got there at last: sooner or later our species and our beloved planet will be swept away like a grain of sand. To tell the truth, I had hoped that with all the money that three universities invested in you, you’d have got there a bit earlier, but better late than never.

  “And yet there’s one thing that nobody will ever be able to take away from us, because it fades the moment we achieve it, before we can even lay our hands on it. Pleasure. That’s what I felt when we were fixing the bike and when we stood on the Rocky Road and when I was drawing and printing that postcard and when I heard about you growing up on the streets of Glasgow and New York and when I watched Biagio come round those bends like a bullet. And that’s what I feel when I have myself oiled and massaged and when I spend time with Richard. Pleasure, my boy. That’s all.”

  I was almost there. Yes, I told myself in the following days and weeks: what else do we need in fact? We get on with our lives, we look the other way, and when the monster gets too close, when we feel its hot breath on our necks and its shadow falling over us, we go and have a nice massage, we make love with our woman, we go and hear a good concert. Pleasure. Beauty. We couldn’t have better rafts at our disposal to stay afloat.

  But
that’s too easy, my dear Greg. You’re too intelligent and too disturbed to really believe that a couple of massages and a concert can save us from the abyss over which we float. It’s true, as we’d said: it isn’t the brilliance of our ideas that makes us apparently so unlike the animals that surround us. The difference lies in the fact that we doubt. But why do we doubt, Greg? You know why as well as I do: because if the answer to all questions was really pleasure, or beauty, we’d have stopped asking ourselves questions long ago. We continue to plague ourselves with questions because we are and always will be unable to answer the only one that matters. Here it is, the monster an ape spotted one day in the recesses of the world. Here is the puppet master who plays with our days. We study the odyssey of that swarm of ants we call the human race, we admire its works and its discoveries, and all we see is the constant, niggling dance of moves and countermoves with that beast of whose existence we are aware but who we never manage to track down.