The Past is a Foreign Country

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  Nicola?

  Damiano.

  Damiano Mastropasqua.

  Mastropasqua, Moretti, Nigro, Pellecchia…

  ‘Do you still play football, Cipriani? Right back, wasn’t it?’

  I hadn’t played for months. But it was true, I played right back. Mastropasqua might not have been a genius, but there was nothing wrong with his memory.

  ‘Yes, I still play.’

  ‘Me, too. Once a week, on Saturday afternoons, in the Japigia fields. That’s how I keep in shape.’

  In shape. I couldn’t help looking down at his distended belly. I guessed his trouser size at about forty-four, and he couldn’t have been much more than one metre seventy tall. He didn’t notice.

  ‘You know something, Cipriani?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of my happiest memories of junior high school is when Signora Ferrari made us write a story and you wrote that crazy one where all the teachers and our classmates turned into animals and monsters. She gave you a ten – the only time she ever gave anyone a ten – and then read out the composition in class. My God, how we laughed. Even Signora Ferrari laughed.’

  I was flung back into the past, as if sucked into a vortex. All the way back to ten years previously.

  The Giovanni Pascoli State junior high school. In the same building as the Orazio Flacco senior high school, known as the Flacco. All the classrooms had bars on the windows, after a student, walking along a cornice for a stupid bet, had looked down. I was still going to elementary school at the time, but a few boys who were older than me had told me about the scream. You could hear it all through the school. It had frozen the blood – and the youth – of hundreds of boys and girls.

  It was cold in the Pascoli and the Flacco. Because the building faced the sea and from November to March the wind came in through the cracks in the window frames. I could almost feel that cold now, the whistling of the wind, the smell: a mixture of dust, wood, boys and old walls. And from among those memories the image of Signora Ferrari emerged.

  Signora Ferrari was a really good teacher, justly famous. We all wanted to be in her class.

  She was a fine-looking woman, with blue eyes, short white hair and prominent cheekbones. She looked like someone who wasn’t afraid of anybody. She had a deep voice, a bit hoarse from smoking, and a slight Piedmontese accent. When I was in junior high school, she was between fifty and sixty.

  She couldn’t have been much more than twenty when, on 26 April 1945, she had entered Genoa with the partisan brigades from the mountains, carrying an English submachine gun.

  I don’t remember her ever losing her temper, in my three years of junior high school. She was the kind of teacher who doesn’t need to lose her temper, or even to raise her voice.

  Whenever a student did or said something he shouldn’t have, she would look at him. She probably said something, too, but I only remember the look she gave and the way she moved her head. She would turn her head, slowly, keeping the rest of her body still, and look the unfortunate student in the eyes.

  She didn’t need to lose her temper.

  The ten she gave my composition was unique: the highest mark Signora Ferrari ever gave was eight. Or very occasionally nine. It was also unique for a composition – a humorous composition at that – to be read out in class.

  And Mastropasqua was right: even she couldn’t help laughing when she came to some passages.

  I don’t remember what kind of animal I’d turned the maths and science teacher into. But it must have been funny because when Signora Ferrari came to it, she really burst out laughing. She laughed so much, she had to stop reading, put the paper down on her desk, and cover her face with her hands. My classmates were laughing, too. The whole class was laughing and so was I, though mostly to hide the satisfaction and pride on my face. I was eleven or twelve years old. When I grew up, I thought, I’d be a famous writer of humorous novels. I was happy.

  The image faded. Mastropasqua was saying something I didn’t understand. He must have changed the subject. I nodded vigorously, half closing my eyes and making an effort to smile.

  ‘We must have a reunion. I’ll call everyone after my exam.’

  A reunion. Great idea. Let’s have one now and then another one after twenty years and another one after thirty years. I nodded again, and again made an effort to smile, but I realised that the smile was turning into a grimace. Great to see you again, Cipriani. You and your books, eh?

  Nice to see you, too. Bye, Cipriani – another hug – Bye, Mastropasqua.

  He walked off to the cash desk with his manual on how to pass the entrance exam to become a police officer. I stayed where I was, pretending to look at a book on bridge, waiting for my classmate to leave the shop. When I turned round, he was gone, sucked back to where he had come from. Wherever that was.

  Then I left, too, and walked along the sea front, and then further, as if I was escaping from something, all the way to the southern edge of the city, to where the pavement and the buildings end. I bought three big bottles of beer from a stand and went and sat down on the stone base of the last lamppost, facing the sea, not looking at anything in particular. And not thinking about anything in particular either.

  I stayed there for a long time, drinking and smoking. The daylight faded slowly. Very slowly. The horizon dissolved just as slowly. The day seemed infinitely long, and I didn’t know where to go. There were moments when I had the feeling I’d never be able to get up again, never be able to move. It was as if I was trapped in a spider’s web.

  It was already dark by the time I got down from that block of granite, and in my place I left the empty bottles standing in a line, facing the sea. Before turning and leaving I stood for a few moments, looking at the three reddish-purple silhouettes against a background of Prussian blue. They must mean something, I thought, those bottles standing there facing the sea, waiting for someone to knock them over.

  But of course I didn’t know what they meant. If they meant anything at all.

  I had to walk nearly an hour to get back home, with long, effortful strides. I felt dazed with tiredness and beer. I walked with my head down, looking at nothing except the metre of pavement in front of me.

  I went to bed and slept for a long time. A deep sleep, with dreams forever out of reach.

  13

  ON TUESDAY MORNING it rained, steadily and insistently. It wasn’t June weather at all.

  The noise of the rain had woken me early and I hadn’t been able to stay in bed. I’d got up no later than eight. It was too early to phone and I had to find a way to pass the time. So I had a leisurely breakfast, cleaned my teeth and shaved. Then, seeing as it was still early, I thought I’d tidy my room before getting dressed.

  I switched on the radio, found a station broadcasting Italian music without too many commercial breaks, and started.

  I collected together old newspapers, notes I didn’t need any more, odds and ends left at the back of my desk drawers, and two old slippers which had been under the bed for God knows how long, and put everything in two big rubbish bags. I arranged the books on the shelves, and rehung a poster – Magritte’s Empire of Lights – which had been hanging crookedly for several months, held up by a single flimsy piece of adhesive tape. I even dusted the room with a damp cloth. I’d learned to do that when I was a child and my parents paid me to help out in the house.

  Then I washed and dressed, went straight to the telephone and, without thinking any more about it, called Maria.

  Again a conversation without innuendo. Like a business call. Did I want to come right now? Yes, I did. If she could tell me how to get to her house. From her number I assumed she probably lived in the suburbs, over towards Carbonara. When she told me, I saw that I was right. She lived not far from the tennis club, a few kilometres before Carbonara. An area where rich people had their villas. As I’d thought.

  When I left home, the rain was still falling steadily from a heavy grey sky. I got in the car, sure that I wouldn�
�t get out of the centre of town in less than half an hour. It was one of those days when the traffic is impossible. Usually it would have bothered me. Today, even if I was stuck in a jam, I found it relaxing to spend a long time in the car, listening to music – the same station I’d tuned to at home – and not thinking of anything, not doing anything, just letting the time hang there, suspended.

  So I drove slowly through the city, between double-parked cars, puddles out of the Third World, dazed-looking people with short-sleeved shirts and black umbrellas, traffic police in oilskins. I listened to the radio and followed the hypnotic movement of the wipers sweeping away the raindrops from the windscreen. After a while, I realised I was moving my head imperceptibly in time to the windscreen wipers, and when I reached the vicinity of the tennis club I wouldn’t have been able to say how exactly I’d got there.

  The garden of the villa was surrounded by a wall of ochre bricks, at least two metres high, with a hedge of cedars protruding above it, their leaves iridescent, somewhere between moss green and turquoise. The rest of the world was in black and white.

  I got out by the gate, rang twice at the entryphone, and got back in the car without waiting for an answer. I had the feeling, at that moment, that I was moving as if I’d been programmed. Not a single gesture I was making had been determined by me.

  The automatic gate opened suddenly, noiselessly, as if in a dream.

  As I carefully drove forward and glimpsed a two-storey villa in the distance, I was overcome with anxiety. I had a strong sense of unreality and an urge to escape.

  Everything was unreal and irremediably strange. The car advanced slowly along the drive between tall pines, and I thought of making a U-turn and driving away. But when I looked in the rearview mirror I saw the gate closing, as silently as it had opened.

  The car kept moving. Of its own volition. Right up to the villa.

  There was a kind of portico, and Maria was standing beneath it, pointing to the right. I didn’t understand at first, I thought she was telling me to get out of there. Something unexpected had cropped up – maybe her husband had returned? – and I had to escape. For a few moments I felt a mixture of panic and relief.

  Then I realised she was only pointing me towards a parking space. There was an ivy-covered canopy and I left the car beneath it, next to an old Lancia that seemed to have been there for a very long time. There was also a dark-coloured runabout. Maria’s car, I assumed. As I walked from the parking space to the portico, with the rain falling on me, I had the impression I was moving in slow motion.

  She said Hi, come in, and went inside the house while I was still replying to her greeting. Inside, everything was excessively tidy, and there was a smell of some scented detergent.

  We went into the kitchen and had some fruit juice and talked for a while. The only thing I remember of what she said is that the maid would be there at lunch time because she didn’t like having people in the house in the morning. I’d be gone by then.

  We were still in the kitchen when she pressed her mouth to mine. She had a hard, dry, fleshy tongue. I could smell the perfume she’d put on her neck just before I got there. There was too much of it, and it was too sweet.

  I don’t remember exactly how we ended up in the bedroom. It obviously wasn’t her and her husband’s room. The guest room maybe. Or one specially set aside for clandestine fucks. It was clean and very tidy, with twin beds placed side by side, a clear wooden sideboard and a window looking out on the garden. I could see two palms out there, with a hedge behind them.

  The house was silent, and from outside the only noise was the tap-tap of the rain. No sounds of cars, no sounds of people. Nothing. Only the rain.

  Maria had a dry, muscular body. The result of hours and hours in the gym. Aerobics, body building, God knows what else.

  But at one point, as I lay on my back and she moved above me, I saw the stretch marks on her breasts. The image of that moment – those aging breasts on an athletic body – has stayed in my memory with photographic precision.

  A sad, indelible image.

  As she moved methodically, joined to my body – and I moved, too, as if doing a gymnastics exercise – I felt my nostrils filling with that excessively sweet perfume and another, less artificial smell that was just as alien.

  As we approached a climax, she called me Darling. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Then many times. Faster and faster. It was like that children’s game where you keep repeating a word until the brain goes into a kind of short circuit and you lose sight of the meaning.

  Darling.

  Afterwards, I wanted to light a cigarette but didn’t. She hated cigarette smoke, she’d told me. So I didn’t move, just lay on my back, naked, while she talked. She also lay on her back, naked. Every now and again she would pass a hand over her ribs, as if she was soaping herself.

  She talked, and I held my breath, and the rain kept falling, and time seemed to stand still.

  I have no memory of getting dressed, or retracing the steps that had brought us to that guest room, or arranging to meet again, or saying goodbye. Some images of that morning are still very clear in my mind, like a series of photos. Others vanished immediately.

  When I left, it was still raining.

  14

  UP UNTIL THAT Tuesday in June my memories follow one another in normal chronological order. After it, things seem to speed up, in a surreal, syncopated rhythm. It’s all a jumble of scenes, some in colour, some in black and white, some with a bizarre non-synchronised soundtrack.

  I can only see these scenes from the outside, like a spectator.

  Many times, over the years, I’ve made the effort to think myself back into the situations I lived through. I’ve tried to see the scenes again from the same positions I was in when they happened, but I’ve never managed it.

  Even now, as I write, I keep trying, but as soon as I seem to be getting there, a kind of invisible elastic band makes me leap back and I lose my bearings. When I try to get the scene back into focus, I’m a spectator again. From a different angle, sometimes closer, sometimes from a distance. Sometimes – and this is a little scary – from above.

  But always as a spectator.

  I saw Maria quite often after that. Almost always in the morning, but sometimes also late at night. The house was always silent and very clean. Whenever I left, I’d be feeling slightly nauseous, and to get over that feeling I’d tell myself that this was the last time.

  A few days later I’d phone again.

  I don’t remember a single conversation with my parents. I was trying to avoid seeing them, and whenever I saw them I would avoid looking at them.

  I would get home late at night, and stay in bed until late in the morning. I would go out, go to the sea or to Maria’s house, or simply drive around with the air conditioning on and the music at full volume. I would get back late in the afternoon, wash, change, and go out again, and finally get home in the middle of the night.

  I remember many poker games, both before and after our trip to Spain.

  Games in air-conditioned rooms stagnant with smoke, games on terraces, games in the gardens of houses by the sea. Once even on a boat.

  And once in a gaming club. That one I’ll never forget.

  Francesco didn’t usually like playing in gaming clubs. He said it was dangerous and exposed us to needless risks. Those clubs are a closed environment, rather like the world of the drug addict. Everyone knows everyone else. At the pace we were going – four, five, even six games a month – they’d soon recognise us. They would notice that I almost always won. Then they would notice that we were always together. Finally someone would watch us, and would notice that I always won the most when Francesco was dealing.

  So we generally played well away from those circles, thanks to Francesco’s incredible capacity for always finding new places to play, often outside Bari, and new people to play against. Almost all of them were amateurs, and if we ever saw them again it would only be once, for a
return match.

  How Francesco managed to arrange so many games, with so many people who didn’t know each other, I could never understand.

  Over the months, there’d been a gradual change in the kind of people we played against. At first they were always people with money, lots of money. People for whom losing five, six, ten million lire at the poker table was a bother, but not a personal or family tragedy. Over time, I’d seen fewer and fewer of these people at our games. Over time, we’d started playing more and more often with clerks, a few students like us, a few manual workers, even a few pensioners. Sometimes not much more than down and outs. Sometimes less. They lost like rich people, but it wasn’t quite the same for them.

  This wasn’t the way it was meant to be when we’d originally come to an understanding. It was if we were on a slippery slope.

  Towards what, I didn’t want to know.

  A bald man in a vest, with tufts of black hair on his shoulders, was sitting at the front door of the club. I told him I had come to see Nicola. I had no idea who Nicola was, it was what Francesco had told me to say. The bald man looked around, moving only his eyes, and then jerked his head towards the interior. I crossed a large room. It was hot in there and the old, wheezy air conditioning didn’t make it any cooler. The room was filled with dozens of innocent-looking video games. Star Wars games, car races, shoot-outs, that kind of thing. There weren’t many people at the machines that evening. They were all adults and as I crossed the hall I wondered vaguely what games they were playing. Francesco had told me that many of these machines were equipped with a device – activated by remote control or even just a key – which transformed them into lethal poker games. The customer would ask the manager if he could play. If he was a stranger, he’d be told curtly that there were no video poker games in the club. Just in case he was a policeman or a carabiniere. If, on the other hand, the customer was already known or was introduced by someone, the manager would transform the machine by turning the key or pressing a button on the remote. There were people who spent hours and hours there, playing a few thousand lire at a time, and ended up losing millions. If the machine didn’t receive an impulse in fifteen seconds, the innocent legal game would automatically reappear on the screen. Which was what the police saw if they came in to check the place out, maybe after receiving an anonymous letter from some desperate wife.