Five minutes later, Vittorio was looking around the room in bewilderment. He weighed the silence of the room, without finding any substantial differences between the before and the after. The world was still there. He was still there. Soon the sky would clear and he’d feel on his flesh the uptick in temperature. However possible it was that the news was plummeting down into him like a ball of cement tossed down a stairwell, he was still unequivocally alive. If there had been a change, it had to do with the perception of time. A mass of detritus had been steadily accumulating at a blind collection point. Now the hatches were open and he needed to act quickly.
From then to nine-thirty was still a long time. At that hour, a twittering would emerge from Gioia’s bedroom (on the phone with a girlfriend from the university, with her boyfriend) capable of testifying to the little one’s state of wakefulness.
At the break of dawn, though, his wife would appear in the kitchen. She’d ready the water for the tea and she’d stand there waiting, back turned to the solitary flame, erect and pensive in her translucent nightgown, observing as the garden slowly emerged from the shadows. There was no time to waste. He was awake while that little corner of the world still remained closed in the darkness.
Vittorio shifted his gaze to the bookshelves. The ladybug had vanished. He picked up his cell phone and started making calls.
Gioia tossed and turned in the sheets, warded off the faint glow that filtered in through the shutters. She curled up in the bed. The teddy bear on the chair lingered like a negative behind her eyelids, and vanished. Her neck muscles relaxed. Philosophy of language. It was necessary to imagine the exam as divided into interconnecting categories. If the first question were to be too complicated, she’d need to sort it into safer territories. But what were the odds that they’d actually ask her that one? She toyed again with the idea of not getting up at all.
Convincing herself that luck was on her side concealed the desire that during the exam itself, she’d be aided by a happy combination of physical appearance and veiled seductive appeal. Gioia persuaded herself of that further idiocy, feeling it rest on top of the only unconfessed presupposition actually capable of favoring her: her surname.
She embraced her pillow, peering over the edge of the bed.
The large rooms of the villa. The hand-wrought angels on the fireplace screen. And then the outside: the garden with the stone fountain, the palm trees and the oleanders. That was what gave her peace and, at the same time, ensured every morning that she could forget what rare good fortune was hers, and how she hadn’t had to lift a finger to deserve it. She rubbed her heel up and down the calf of her other leg.
Like so many other young women brought up in accordance with the rhetoric of merit, she never made the mistake of using her status to stand out. Her strategy was subtler. Gioia immersed herself in the pretense that her condition was no different from anybody else’s. Debunking that claim was hard for her friends to do without creating tensions—as if they were guilty of some reverse racism. And so the difficulties of her exam must be analogous to those faced by someone who lived off campus and had to work weekends. And since on Monday mornings Gioia was usually fresher, more understanding, and better tempered than most of her fellow humans, this attitude elevated her, in her own estimation.
The young woman transferred the concept to her family. What would have become of her father, always so tense and irascible, if she hadn’t been there to temper his bad moods? And her mother? Signora Salvemini’s discretion could be mistaken for aridity if it hadn’t been possible with patience (and who if not the youngest of her children was endowed with the same?) to distill from her, every now and then, drops of genuine sweetness.
In her moments of optimism, Gioia convinced herself that it was she who held the family together. For the past few months, she’d been seeing a boy. She’d introduced him to her mom and dad. She’d even arranged for him to get to know Clara. Beautiful and inscrutable in a red Diane von Furstenberg dress, her older sister had come to the villa accompanied by her husband to celebrate her thirty-sixth birthday. Gioia’s boyfriend had been daunted by the magnificence of the candelabras and the old, repainted pieces of furniture, without fully realizing that the objects revealed their true preciousness when they served as Clara’s backdrop. After dinner, Gioia and the boy had gone into town to get a drink. There they’d had a fight over an old movie, suited to their rancorous dispositions in search of pretexts.
When they quarreled over trifling matters, Gioia could get him to fall back in line with just a few moves. Had he seen the house they lived in? The boy shrugged. “Do you seriously not see the kind of risks a family like mine runs?” The higher you fly, the more thunderous the fall. Every year they heard about similar cases. Very well-to-do families found themselves, out of the blue, shamefully sweeping up the shards. A catastrophe. Their villa, in contrast, reflected an unchanging bond. “Which, if you don’t mind my saying so, is at least in part thanks to me.” The bringer of harmony: that was her task, and she’d performed it well. If she was capable of managing the mood swings of a great man like her father, then how dare a student behind on his credits in business and economics contradict her? At these words, Gioia’s boyfriend swallowed his pride—intimidated more by the mountain around which they were fluttering than by the fumes of her reasoning. She had him in her grip, and she was traversed by a quiver of pleasure.
Something similar to the sensation that, right this second, made her stretch a third time in the bed.
Gioia thought about her father and then again about her boyfriend, now more electric with allure. She thought about the exam that a little more sleep would do nothing to undermine. She felt her legs relax languidly. Her mouth stretched in a yawn. She plunged under the hot line that separates the illusions of our walking hours from the depths inside which flows the rest.
In her dream she was riding a train with her boyfriend. It was an old local train, its seats upholstered in fake leather, and the two of them were making their way from one car to the next, hand in hand. They were looking for the bar car. He must have said something funny, because Gioia couldn’t stop laughing. The cars were packed with passengers. Her folks must have been sitting somewhere, too. A conductor went past them. The young man stopped to look at something in one of the compartments. Gioia went back to him. (It was only then that she realized they were no longer holding hands). She, too, peered through the glass door. She didn’t like what she saw. A young woman was sitting between two old men. She was wearing a seductive red dress. She had an expression on her face that was intense and, at the same time, remote. Gioia felt uneasy. But what she saw when she looked down was even more unsettling. On one of the woman’s bare knees there was a small dark seed, which started to wobble and then split in two. Two flies started moving, one atop the other. The old men seemed pleased. Gioia’s boyfriend couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the woman’s legs. He was hypnotized. She gave him a tug, reminded him about the bar. The young man turned around in annoyance. He replied that there had never been bar cars on these local trains. But then where are we going? asked Gioia in alarm. To the bathroom, he replied.
She took a deep breath and clenched her fist. She unclenched it. On her palm the tension was released like a bodiless flower. She opened her eyes. The veil of morning let the stereo speakers sink into the eighteenth-century dresser. She pulled one of her two pillows out from under her head and wedged it between her knees. Her breathing grew jerky. She slid back into sleep. The restroom on the train was so small that now she couldn’t move without constantly ending up pressed against her boyfriend. The train accelerated with a hiccupping motion. Gioia lost her balance and fell, her knees now on the filthy floor. Two flies sketched invisible helixes over the yawning mouth of the toilet. She asked, confused: what on earth is happening? He crouched down in front of her. He’d just seen something about her that she herself had no idea of. Something lovely, something irresistible. H
e laid a hand on her cheek. Then Gioia stretched out on her side and gently pressed her cheek against the filthy floor. She parted her lips, enjoying the wait. She felt him slipping his hand under the coral-pink silk dress. She squeezed the pillow harder between her legs. Her temples were overheated. Her eyes were closed, but she had almost entirely emerged from her half-sleep. First smooth, then soft—she felt the fingers sliding under the elastic of her panties. Gioia turned over on her side, and intensified the movement between her legs to ensure that the young man’s profile remained alive in her memory.
Through the thin shutter of her eyelids, the screen suddenly lit up. The scene shattered. Gioia froze. Her knuckles in retreat beneath the cotton fabric, three small humps that vanished as they withdrew. She opened her eyes. The blinds were still closed, but now the window could be made out in its every slightest detail. And so she turned over onto her other side.
In the open bedroom door, the morning light was framing a black figure. Still stunned with sleep, Gioia struggled to comprehend. The silhouette took half a step forward. The profile devoured the light in a way that made it take longer than usual to reveal itself. Oh, Papà. How many times had she told him not to come in without first knocking?
She leapt out of bed, brow furrowed, blond and slender at five foot six and an eighth, offering up for an instant, possibly not entirely by chance, the tenderest part of her pelvis. “Listen,” said Vittorio, moving toward her. She angrily tugged up her pajama bottoms. Her father’s long and white and deflated face. The smell of old man. She found herself with his fingers blocking her arms.
Gioia found it necessary to think back on how she’d read his lips to get confirmation of what her ears were hearing. She managed to wriggle out of his grasp, fled from the room. My sister, my sister. She screamed and shouted. In the hallway she ran into a second body. Her mother almost fell to the ground from the impact. In the strong blinding spring sunlight, Gioia staggered senselessly to the door of her parents’ bedroom, though they were right behind her.
“Who’s going to take care of notifying him?”
Her mother had said it. She understood that she was talking about Michele.
The woman was dressed in a peach-colored silk nightgown and slippers. Ravaged but freshly composed—a sorrow that had dived into a ditch dug long ago. Her father seemed to have returned from outside. Gioia couldn’t manage to stop crying. The mucus oozed out of her nose, her lips produced a series of popping noises as if she were blowing raspberries, the way children do, because childhood is the dimension in which sorrow and envy, sense of guilt and rancor, coexist with impunity. Gioia ran toward her mother. She threw her arms around her with violence. Annamaria put up enough resistance to stay on her feet. Then she returned the embrace. She felt the warm twenty-six-year-old body sink into hers, skinny and angular. In the throes of her sobbing, one of her daughter’s hands wound up right in her face. Annamaria stiffened. She sniffed again. She tore the hand off her, lifting her head in disgust.
The real estate lots stretched out dark and silent all the way up to the state highway. Separated by surveyor’s stakes, pounded by earth tampers, or already covered with cement. At six in the morning the light still hadn’t stabilized between earth and sky, so the construction site seemed to burn over an underground flame.
There were no practical reasons why Alberto would already be there. The construction workers would arrive in two hours. But the empty space surrounded by scaffolding was the ideal place to reflect.
The night before he’d eaten dinner alone at home, lavishing lemon juice on his carpaccio. He hadn’t taken off his jacket or his loafers, sitting at the table straight-backed and composed to avoid giving satisfaction to the empty chair at the other end. He’d loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. On the wall clock, he’d found cause for optimism. The minute hand was running slow with respect to his predictions. Then he’d moved into the living room. He’d taken a seat on the sofa, wandering through the channels until his thumb had remained raised at the sight of a film in black and white.
“Life would be very tolerable, but for its pleasures,” the lead character was saying to his wife as he smoked a cigarette in a nightclub.
When, half an hour later, the same character asked “Do you often lose at this game?” while watching a young woman sliding her compact case across the floor of a half-darkened room, Alberto came to on the sofa. Now he sensed the passage of time, as if that scene were causing a drama, whose premise had been there from the outset, to resonate. The fifteen minutes gained on his watch contained the current delay, because even then no shop in Bari would have been open, no gym, no shopping center, and Clara, quite simply, would not be back until tomorrow morning.
At that point, Alberto had turned off the TV. He’d gone over to the stereo. In less than a minute, jazz from Minton’s Playhouse was filling the living room, dismantling the rage and infamy that was in his heart. Competition contains friendship, envy contains admiration. The cross-accents on the piano keys, the tone clusters and sudden silences, remixed the concepts of before and after, making the world resonate in a single whole, each fragment already redeemed. Didn’t adultery in some sense contain abnegation? The murder of mankind and the curse of a suffered faith? He’d turned off the stereo and gone to bed.
But two hours later, he was still lying sleepless. His wife’s absence continued to make him uneasy. Just as he had earlier with the music, he did his best to reverse the point of view. Not letting him know, not phoning, not bothering to come up with an excuse. The more Clara failed to show him respect, the more the side that made her cleave to him could be reinforced. A mine that produces a diamond’s brilliance: down there, where true love sparkles; love that is not the balancing of a budget, not the caring for oneself or for others. Giving the beloved what one lacks and finding in the nothing one receives the excess that can never be repaid. That’s what. Exactly the kind of experience that he—brought up in accordance with the rules of the provincial petty bourgeoisie—could never have otherwise had access to.
The idea of the sublime (but what evidence could be found to show that these weren’t merely the ravings of an idiot?) went hand in hand with the computational obsession. If Clara was in the company of some other man, there must have been over the course of the evening a specific moment when the two of them had said hello, another when their arms had brushed with no specific intention. His footsteps just slightly ahead of hers. Then all the rest. It might have happened while Alberto was watching the movie on TV. Or else it was happening now—the ungraspable segment in which they weren’t and therefore were a single flesh. Not knowing forced him to think about it continuously, so that it became his own, an instant made eternal until he saw her again, isolating the exact point in Clara’s mind where his name had been uttered even as she betrayed him; or, even worse, isolating the instant of the leap that allowed a woman to keep from thinking about that name.
Or possibly none of that at all, he went on brooding even after four in the morning had come and gone. Clara might have been seized by one of her fits of melancholy. She wanted to be left alone. Like that Sunday so many years ago, at the start of their marriage. He’d woken up and gone straight into the kitchen, and she wasn’t there. She’d vanished without leaving a word, written or spoken. If it had happened six months later, he would have panicked. He would have seen himself again at the steering wheel, with her sprawled in the passenger seat, messed up on Flunox, saying over and over with her eyes closed: “Forget about it, what the fuck, let’s go back home . . .” But that time, he’d waited until early afternoon. Then he’d hopped in the car and gone looking for her. Through the windows, on both sides of the car, he saw a stream of low buildings and narrow courtyards surrounded by metal fences. Cocktail bars, theaters, fashionable restaurants: that was what he was taking care to avoid, as if he’d suddenly understood that the places his wife frequented were exactly those he’d need to pass through in order not
to know her. He’d driven past the old hotel, the Albergo delle Nazioni. He’d continued down the road that ran along the waterfront and among the enormous boulevards on the outskirts of town.
At nightfall he’d finally found her. The immense parking lot around the San Nicola stadium, deserted at that time of day. She was sitting in her Audi, without so much as the company of a cigarette. Head down, she was staring at her right hand, where a scar dating from a couple of years back ran down her palm. When he’d pulled up, Clara had displayed no surprise. A small start. Then she’d lowered her window. Her face illuminated by the first streetlamps. “If you want to help, then please, don’t ask me anything and just go home.” At that point, Alberto had chosen once and for all, had realized that the only way (the only way available to him) to share in his wife’s most distant side was to let her hand it over to him like a treasure chest we do our best not to pry open. That night, in the parking lot outside the large sports complex, what had been an irresistible source of attraction when he’d first met her (and a worrisome cause for embarrassment on their wedding day) had taken on the semblance of a love story.
Tonight, too, something of the sort might have happened. He imagined her alone in a room in a rundown hotel on the waterfront, sitting on the bed and looking out the window. Or not, or not . . .
After the first distant clatters of rolling shutters being raised, he’d gotten out of bed. His insomnia had exhausted him, it was tearing into the barrier that separated the contemplative side from the garbage.
He’d grabbed his car keys. Without realizing it, he was driving toward the construction site even before day had dawned.
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