The Measure of Time

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  In the weeks that followed I would try again several times, always without success. She was never at home, or maybe didn’t answer her bell. One piece, among many, in that mosaic of elusiveness I would never be able to put together.

  14

  Nothing memorable happened during those weeks. Or if it did, I didn’t notice. The days passed, almost all the same, slow and fast at the same time – and a little scary for that very reason, if you stopped to think about it.

  I went twice to the prison to talk to Iacopo. He was starting to trust me and, quite unexpectedly, I was getting to like him.

  In the second of our interviews an interesting element emerged.

  The previous time I’d asked him to think over the afternoon of the murder, to see if he recalled any useful details. And he had done just that.

  “I thought about it, and one thing did come into my mind.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know if it’s important.”

  “Anything might be important, as I told you.”

  “When they came to get me, outside the bar, I knew one of the cops. After they searched me and found the pills on me, they put me in the car and he sat in the back with me.”

  “Go on.”

  “On the ride to Headquarters we talked. He asked me if I’d seen my friend Cosimo that afternoon.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I asked him if he meant Gaglione – I told him I’d never called him Cosimo, always Mino. Then I said I’d been to his apartment for a coffee, though of course without telling him he’d given me the pills.”

  “Did this police officer inform you that Gaglione was dead?”

  “No. I only found that out when we got to Headquarters.”

  “This isn’t mentioned in the case file,” I said out loud, though talking more to myself than to him.

  “Could it help?”

  “It might. Do you know the officer’s name?”

  He did, and he told me.

  “How can this help us, if they didn’t even write it down?” he asked.

  “That’s just it – the fact that they didn’t write it down.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The prosecution case is based, among other things, on the fact that they can place you in the vicinity of the crime scene, at about the right time, thanks to the testimony of the woman in the cafe. The implication is that, if they hadn’t identified you by questioning this woman, they wouldn’t have known.”

  “Of course! I told them I’d been at Mino’s place of my own free will. Which means I had nothing to hide.”

  “Put that way, it’s a little too neat, but it’s true. Calmly admitting, even if informally, that you’d been at Gaglione’s place that afternoon doesn’t exactly tally with you being responsible for the murder. It would have been natural for you to deny it.”

  Iacopo straightened on his chair. I’d already thought I noticed a new liveliness in his eyes the time before, but now Cardace seemed the older, more mature brother of the arrogant, apathetic street punk I’d met the first time.

  “You mean, if I were guilty, I wouldn’t have come out and said I’d been with Gaglione just before he died?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But if it isn’t written anywhere, how do we bring it up?”

  “You can mention it when you testify in court. But I’d also like to call the police officer and ask him. It isn’t the done thing in terms of procedure, but we’ll see.”

  But the most significant event of that period was some hours spent with my friend Ottavio at his Osteria del Caffellatte, which despite its name is a bookshop. With a somewhat rare feature: it’s only open at night.

  It happens for no particular reason. Or at least for no reason I can pin down. It seems an evening like any other, I do more or less the usual things: I leave the office, go home, maybe exercise a little, then go back out for dinner or make myself something, watch a series on television, read a book. All normal. And yet just as I’m about to go to bed I realize – I know for a fact – that I won’t be able to sleep that night. It’s like a small electric shock that goes through my skin and into the spaces between my thoughts. Like an entity – an alien but very familiar entity – that usually goes about its own business, but which sometimes takes up a position next to me and decides we have to stay awake together.

  Each time, I try to pretend it’s nothing: I go to bed and tell myself it’s only the power of suggestion, that in twenty minutes I’ll be asleep, as happened in similar situations when I was twenty-five years younger.

  It never happens.

  After an hour spent tossing and turning in the dark between the blankets, sheets and pillows, forcing myself to “think of nothing, concentrate on your breathing” as I’d learned from an indispensable manual on the cure for insomnia, I finally decide to switch the light back on. If the next day I have any commitment that requires a modicum of clear-headedness and is therefore incompatible with a sleepless night, I knock back about fifteen drops and soon afterwards sink into an artificial sleep. Otherwise, I start reading, watch television and, if the electric shock is more intense than usual, and the anxiety less bearable, I go to the Osteria del Caffellatte.

  That’s what happened this time. I got dressed, grabbed an umbrella – it had been raining intermittently, wearyingly, for a couple of days – and set off through the shiny, spectral 2 a.m. streets.

  There was only one customer in the bookshop: a sturdy, vigorous-looking old gentleman with a very short white beard and a red face typical of someone who spends a lot of time in the open air. He looked like a friendly old boatswain straight out of a children’s book illustration. He was sitting in a small armchair, leafing through a volume, with other books on a little table next to him. Our eyes met and, although we had never seen each other before, we exchanged a smile and a nod.

  As usual, Ottavio was behind the counter, also reading, and as usual, there was a very slight, almost imperceptible smell of caramel in the air.

  “Hi, Guido, haven’t seen you lately at this hour.”

  “I’ve been sleeping well for a while now. It couldn’t possibly last.”

  “What’ll you have?”

  “I’ll have a rum,” I said, sitting down on one of the stools, “that very good rum from the Philippines whose name I can never remember.”

  Ottavio poured me the very good rum whose name I could never remember. “Any particular reason you can’t sleep tonight?”

  “I’m sure there are reasons, but I long ago stopped trying to identify them. I suspect I might not like what I found.”

  Ottavio nodded his approval, like someone familiar with the subject.

  “When you were still teaching and didn’t have the shop, did you stay awake every night?” I asked him.

  “Every night. I’d start to feel sleepy at about five in the morning.”

  “But did you stay in bed or did you get up?”

  “Sometimes I’d get up, read, then go back to bed about half past four. At other times, I was so tired I couldn’t get up, so I’d just lie there and force myself to relax. Those were the worst nights. I’d lie in the dark wondering what I’d done wrong in my life. And the answer, basically and with few variations, was that I’d done everything wrong and there was no way out of my situation. Or maybe there was a way out – there almost always is – but I didn’t have the courage to take it, which was even worse.”

  He poured another small glass of rum for himself and took a little sip.

  “Then the inheritance came along,” I said.

  “Then the inheritance came along. And thanks to the inheritance, for the first time I decided to really do something with my life. I gave up teaching, opened this place … well, you already know the story.”

  After just a few minutes chatting in that almost abstract yet familiar space, my anxiety passed.

  “Something happened to me this afternoon,” Ottavio said suddenly. “I was shopping in the supermar
ket when I passed a guy who looked familiar. I realized he was a classmate of mine from middle school who I hadn’t seen since then – in other words, practically forty years. They used to call him Giovanni the Fart. I don’t suppose I need to go into detail about the nickname or why nobody wanted to sit next to him.”

  “No, I don’t think you do.”

  “I think he actually had a physical problem with controlling himself. He was a kid with all kinds of hang-ups, so many that if a teacher even talked to him, let alone asked him a question, he’d get into a terrible state. He’d wring his hands so hard it was almost like he was trying to break them.”

  Ottavio’s eyes wandered into the distance, as if to recapture the memory of those long-ago scenes. I kept quiet, waiting for him to continue his story.

  “One day somebody decided we had to make it clear to him that the farting had to stop, or maybe he just decided to have a bit of fun at Giovanni’s expense. So, during the break, we pushed him into the toilets and pulled down his trousers. He tried to defend himself – I can still remember how his skinny arm felt in my hands, like a thin rope stretched tight, while we held him still. Then one of us, maybe the person who thought up this stunt, wet him all over with the pump that was used to wash the toilet, saying maybe that way he’d stop stinking. He started crying desperately, almost choking. We let him go; what happened next I don’t remember so well. The thing that’s remained most imprinted in my memory was how humiliated the kid was and how ashamed I was. It all came back to me when I saw him in the supermarket.”

  “How come you recognized him?”

  “He hasn’t changed. I know that sounds absurd, but as soon as I saw him, I knew it was him.”

  “What about him? Did he recognize you?”

  “I don’t think so. I kept my eye on him while he was doing his shopping and for a moment I had the mad idea of introducing myself and apologizing for that stupid prank.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Obviously. I never do such decent things when I have the opportunity.”

  “He wouldn’t have understood. He probably doesn’t even remember the episode,” I commented unconvincingly.

  He shrugged and refilled our glasses. A few minutes passed in silence. There was no hurry, no impatience.

  “What is it you like most about this work?” I asked after a while.

  “The weird characters I meet almost every night and sometimes talk to.”

  “Weird like me.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not weird. Or rather, yes, you are, but in moderation. You wouldn’t be in first or second place. There are some really strange people who come through here.”

  “I feel a bit bad about that. Who’d be in first or second place?”

  “My favourite is the gay policeman, Arturo, who’s often on night shift. He loves reading, he buys a couple of books a week, he’s been writing a novel for years and has practically adopted his niece, the daughter of a cousin of his. The girl, Alice, has Down’s syndrome, is very nice and has an incredible voice. Arturo once showed me a video of her singing ‘Memory’: it took my breath away. I have to introduce you to him some time.”

  “I think I met him a couple of times. Didn’t he buy a book of poetry?”

  “That was him. He buys all sorts, but poetry is his great passion. He’s a real expert, apart from anything else. Then there’s a Kurdish girl who escaped from Turkey. She’s an engineering graduate, works in a bar and often, when she finishes her shift, she comes here before going home to bed, reads for free for half an hour and we chat. Every now and again she buys a book.” Ottavio paused for a moment. “Even the professor sitting there isn’t bad.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He used to teach moral philosophy, but not in Bari. He was in some university in Central Italy, I can’t remember which one. He came back here when he retired. When he was young, he was a wrestling champion. Now he’s a philosophical consultant and at least once a week comes here about one, reads, makes notes; he always orders a cappuccino and a slice of cake. About four he leaves.”

  “What’s a philosophical consultant?”

  “It’s not very easy to explain. If I’ve understood correctly, people with problems of an existential kind come to him and he helps them to find the system, the philosophical method that best suits their problem, so that they can overcome it.”

  “So it’s a kind of psychotherapy?” I said, glancing over at the professor, who was still absorbed in his reading.

  “Well, he’d say: absolutely not. They don’t treat illnesses or mental disorders. They help their clients (who they carefully avoid calling patients) to think about their own lives in a new way. But if you want my opinion, it is a kind of psychotherapy. He’s an interesting character. To give you an idea: he collects animal prints.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He goes walking outside the city, in the country, in the woods, on the beaches. He looks for animal prints and where possible makes a plaster cast of them, otherwise he photographs them. Would you like to meet him?”

  “Why not?”

  Ottavio invited him over to have a drink with us. The professor accepted willingly, and we introduced ourselves and started chatting. He explained what his work involved and insisted on one thing: if one of his clients presented a psychological or psychiatric problem rather than an existential one, he would direct him or her straight to a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

  “How do you draw the line between an existential problem and an illness?”

  “I admit it’s not always easy. Not surprisingly, there’s an area of overlap between the work of a psychologist – but not of a psychiatrist – and mine. There are types of personal suffering that aren’t illnesses and that can be treated either with various forms of psychotherapy or with philosophical consultancy. Then there are actual mental illnesses, which absolutely aren’t in my remit.”

  “So if I understand correctly, you talk to the client, get an idea of what their problem is and suggest a philosophical framework in which to fit it and rethink it.”

  “To be precise, I suggest different ways of redefining the problem and together we choose the one that seems preferable. When I say different ways I mean different philosophical systems. The basic question is to give a shape to the suffering, to put it into words.”

  “As Shakespeare says.”

  “There you’ve got me. What does Shakespeare say?”

  “If I remember correctly: ‘Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er-wrought heart and bids it break.’ Macbeth, I don’t remember where. Maybe Act Four.”

  “Yes, of course, that’s exactly it.”

  Some customers had come in, and Ottavio had to see to them. The professor and I continued our conversation, moving to the armchairs in the reading area.

  “Are there philosophers you suggest most often to your clients?”

  “Whenever I can, Montaigne. I also like Pyrrho and the other sceptics. That may seem strange, but it’s an approach that can yield excellent results. I recently suggested Gorgias to a client who has problems with an excess of rationality. With the illusion of objectivity, let’s put it that way.”

  “Why Gorgias?”

  “For various reasons that can be summed up in the phrase: ‘Tragedy is a deception that leaves the deceived wiser than the undeceived.’ Letting ourselves be deceived allows us to discover hidden resources, ideas, strengths and gifts that we didn’t know we had. That we didn’t know existed.”

  “That’s really very interesting.”

  The professor smiled.

  “What about Aristotle?” I asked.

  “Aristotle can be useful in many situations. A few months ago, I talked about him to a girl who’s tormented by a sense of guilt; among other things she can’t be faithful, and thinks – or thought – she was, so to speak, retarded from the ethical point of view. I tried to make her aware, using Aristotle, that our ethical qualities are like m
uscles: they atrophy if they’re not regularly exercised, and they get stronger with practice. We become just by performing acts of justice, we become courageous by performing acts of courage, we become altruistic by performing acts of altruism.”

  We continued chatting about lots of things, some serious, some less so. When the customers had left Ottavio joined us again. It struck me that this was a night I would remember. That’s a nice feeling when it happens.

  “How’s Annapaola?” Ottavio asked after a while. “I haven’t seen the two of you together lately. Everything okay between you?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Don’t let her go. She’s in a special category. Someone who’s incapable of cowardice – that’s rare.”

  I simply nodded, avoiding stupid remarks. Annapaola is the kind of person you want close to you if you have to face serious danger. Ottavio was right: she was in a special category.

  The professor left before five. We said goodbye, saying we would meet again there at the Osteria, one of these nights.

  For breakfast, I had a coffee and a slice of chocolate and coconut cake made by Ottavio the previous afternoon. Then I returned home with an annotated edition of Montaigne’s Essays. I was as wide awake and rested as if I’d had a full night’s sleep.

  15

  Twenty days before the date set for the start of the appeal hearing, Consuelo, Tancredi, Annapaola and I met again to assess the situation.

  Consuelo began.