Antonio Tabucchi

Time Ages in a Hurry

After the shadow, time ages in a hurry.

CRITIAS

The Circle

“I asked him about the old days, when we were still so young, naive, hotheaded, silly, green. A little bit’s still there, except the young part, he answered.”

The old professor had stopped talking, his expression almost contrite, he’d swiped away a tear that had welled up on his eyelashes, tapped himself on the forehead as if to say how stupid of me, would you pardon me, tugged at his incredibly orange bow tie, and said in his French marked by a strong German accent: please pardon me, please pardon me, I’d forgotten, the title of the poem is “The Old Professor,” by the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, and at that moment he pointed to himself as if suggesting that he coincided somehow with the character in that poem, then he drank another Calvados, which was more responsible for his emotion than the poem was, and let out a half sigh, everybody rising up to console him: Wolfgang, don’t do this, keep reading, the old professor blew his nose with a large, checked handkerchief: “I asked him about that picture,” he continued in a stentorian voice, “the one framed on his desk. They’ve been and gone. Brother, cousin, sister-in-law, wife, daughter on the wife’s knees, cat in the daughter’s arms, cherry tree in blossom, above the tree, a bird, unidentified, in flight, he answered.”

She hadn’t heard the rest, or perhaps she hadn’t wanted to hear it, that sweet old professor from the canton of St. Gallen, the St. Gallen cousins are a bit rough, something she heard her great-aunt say one night in the kitchen, strange creatures, they’re good people, but they live in that isolated place surrounded by mountains and lakes, whereas she herself found the old professor of St. Gallen delightful, she’d even photocopied the poem he’d wanted to read for the toast, so courteous, and made the copies available for guests on the dining-room table, among the desserts and cheeses, because according to him that was the best tribute to the memory of the grandfather, “my late and unforgettable brother Josef in whose place the Lord should have called me.” But here he was, alive and kicking, the spider veins on his nose all the more pronounced from the alcohol, meanwhile the grandmother was listening blissfully (or perhaps she was asleep) to her brother-in-law’s poetic eulogy for her dead husband, because the anniversary of his death, ten years past now, was the reason for this solemn family reunion, one must celebrate the dead, yet despite everything life goes on, and the life that goes on deserves to be celebrated as much as or even more than the dead are, and to hell with all those who are envious, because family is family, especially an important family like ours that at the start of the nineteenth century already had mail stops from Geneva to the canton of St. Gallen, and from Lake Constance to Germany, and from Germany to Poland, there are still prints and photographs, all in the family album, from all those old mail stops the web of trade was born that makes the Ziegler family famous today in Switzerland and through all of Europe, the founders died long ago, the eldest heirs will be dead soon, but the family goes on, because life goes on, and that’s why we’re here, the great-uncle from St. Gallen triumphantly concluded, to celebrate the life that goes on, with our children and our grandchildren.

And there they were, the heirs of so much tradition. The theatrical gesture of the great-uncle from St. Gallen who declaimed the poem in an emotional voice seemed directed right at them: at the little blond, curly-haired boy who already wore a tie and at the little girl with the face full of freckles, both unaware that that gesturing hand was aimed right at them, and unaware of the memory of the unknown grandfather Josef, intent as they were on arguing over a piece of chocolate cake, and the little boy, who’d won out over his sister, already carried the victory smudge under his nose, like a mustache in a Guignol theater, and the latest daughter-in-law, the white Greta, so thoughtful, with a lace napkin, also from St. Gallen like their great-uncle, wiped the chocolate from the boy’s face and smiled. A nice smile on a healthy face of milk and blood, as she’d heard it said once in that country, though maybe not in Geneva, maybe in Lugano: milk and blood. What a strange mixture, the first time she’d heard that expression it had a strange effect on her, almost nauseating, perhaps because she’d imagined a jug of milk into which drops of blood were falling. And her thought had turned all on its own to a childhood that wasn’t hers, to a village lost in time, at the foot of the mountains in a country that here, in this city where they were now celebrating a grandfather Josef who wasn’t hers and whom she’d never known, they called Maghreb, as if it belonged to an abstract geography. When she was young she didn’t know that the place where her ancestors lived was called Maghreb, even they didn’t know its name, they simply lived there, not even the grandmother knew, the grandmother, whose image surfaced from memory as though from a buried well, how strange, because this wasn’t a memory of a person, it was the memory of a grandmother she’d been told about, whom she’d never known, how could she recall so well a face she’d never seen? And then her mother came to mind, she was strong, her mother, but also so fragile, and so beautiful, with that proud profile and those big eyes, and she remembered her talking, and the ancient accent, so ancient, because it came from the heart of the desert where neither the Arab raiders who dealt in people’s bodies nor the Catholic priests who dealt in souls had ever dared penetrate, better to leave the Berbers in peace, they aren’t marketable. And at the same time she also wondered where that profound sense of herself came from, which for a moment she could feel surfacing in response to the perfect and resolute gesture Greta made as she wiped the chocolate blotch off her son’s cheek. From nowhere, that sense came from nowhere, like her memory that wasn’t a true memory but the memory of a story, and it wasn’t yet a sense, it was an emotion, and in the end not even an emotion, just images her fantasy had created when she was a little girl listening to others’ memories, but she’d forgotten that remote and imaginary place, and this astonished her. Why were those places of sand her mother had talked about when she was a little girl left buried in the sand of her memory? The Grands Boulevards, this was the geography belonging to her memory, the great avenues of Paris, where her father had an elegant law office with floral wallpaper and leather armchairs, her father, a well-known lawyer in a large Parisian office. On the next floor was the apartment where she’d grown up, an apartment with very high windows and plaster moldings, a building Haussmann wanted, at home they’d always said so: it’s a Haussmann building, and Haussmann was Haussmann, and that was that, yet what did Haussmann have to do with what she was?

She wondered this while Greta was wiping the chocolate blotch off her son’s face, and what she was asking herself she’d have liked to ask everybody at that family gathering, this family so hospitable and generous, which celebrated an enterprising grandfather who’d known how to transform old mail stops into a profitable venture that now belonged to her as well, because it belonged to Michel. But why bring up Monsieur Haussmann now? They’d look at her as though she were crazy. My dear, Greta might say (maybe it would indeed be Greta), what does Haussmann have to do with anything, he’s the greatest French urban planner of the nineteenth century, he redid Paris, you grew up in one of the buildings he wanted, what ever made you think of Haussmann? Greta had a complex about living in Geneva, which she considered provincial compared to Paris, and perhaps she would have felt provoked. This really wasn’t something to bring up in the dining room during a family gathering, in this solid house with its large windows facing the lake, in front of that table laden with every blessing, she could have talked about the desert, but they’d have asked her what the desert had to do with anything, she could’ve answered that it mattered as contrast, it’s just that here you have a wonderful lake before you overflowing with water and there’s even a fountain in the middle spouting water a hundred meters high, whereas my grandmother was surrounded by sand and when she was a child, each morning she had to go for a jug of water at the well at Al Karib, even now the name comes to mind, and she had to walk three kilometers in the dark and three kilometers back under the burning sun, with the jug on her head, and you can’t know what water really is because you have too much of it.

Why talk of these things? And what fault was it of theirs? But perhaps she could say she’d recalled the expression milk and blood, a really monstrous expression in her opinion, because when she was a child her grandmother would sometimes bring her into the shed in the evening, and she would watch, fascinated, while her grandmother squeezed that white liquid from the goats’ teats into a zinc bowl that they’d then carry home with the reverence due a gift of God, yet if some drops of blood fell into that pure white liquid, it would’ve seemed monstrous to her, she’d have run away frightened, but she couldn’t say that, because it wasn’t a memory, it was a fantasy, a false memory, she’d never been in that shed, and so, running from a false memory I now find myself here, in this nice family that has welcomed me with open arms, pardon me, everyone, what I’m saying isn’t logical, perhaps it’s because I was looking at my slightly darker hands and the expression milk and blood just sounded strange to me, perhaps I need a little fresh air, in the summer, Geneva is even hotter than Paris, even more humid, I’ve enjoyed this gathering quite a lot, you’re all so dear, I just need some air, years ago, when we were engaged, Michel took me up to the mountain pastures, we went by bus, the one that goes up to the last village, if I remember, it’s not that far, I’ll get there in half an hour by taxi, after all, the pastures aren’t even a thousand meters up. Michel must have gone already for his siesta, tell him not to worry, I’ll be back before dinner.

It was really hot. She wondered how it could possibly be hotter at a thousand meters than it was in the city. Perhaps the city felt the benefits of the lake effect, it was logical that a large body of water cooled the air all around. But maybe Geneva was the same temperature, maybe she was the one feeling the heat, an internal heat as when the body’s temperature, for reasons only the body knows, becomes much higher than that of the surrounding environment. The sun was beating down on the plateau, and there weren’t any trees, only a vast expanse of meadows, rather, a stubbly field, many years earlier when Michel had taken her up there for the first time, it was spring, the plateau was green after the winter rains, they hadn’t known each other long, she’d never been to Switzerland, they were young or nearly so, Michel was in his last year of medical school, so around fifteen years back, because that June he’d graduated and they’d also celebrated his birthday then, his twenty-fifth. For a moment she thought of time, and of what it might be, but it was only for a moment because once more the panorama of that yellowish plain caught her gaze and thoughts, the stubble wasn’t easy to walk on, probably the grass had been cut in June for the farmers’ winter supply, green goes yellow, she thought, and then her mind returned to the calendar, the months, the years, the dates, almost forty years, she said out loud, actually, thirty-eight, but thirty-eight’s almost forty, and I haven’t had a baby yet. She was aware that she’d spoken out loud, as though she were addressing a nonexistent audience on that scorched yellowish plain, and she continued aloud: why have I never asked myself that before?. How is it possible that a woman married for almost fifteen years hasn’t had a baby yet and hasn’t asked herself why? She sat on the ground, on the bristly grass. If it had been something planned, an agreement with Michel, it would’ve made sense, but it hadn’t happened because they’d willed it, that’s just how it had gone, a baby never arrived, period, and she’d never asked why, she’d found it normal, just as she’d found it normal growing up in a beautiful building on the Grands Boulevards, as if that elegant Parisian apartment were the most natural thing in the world — it wasn’t — the most natural thing in the world didn’t exist, things exist as you want if you think them and if you want them, then you can guide them, otherwise they go along on their own. All right, she said to herself, but then what’s guiding everything? Was there something on the outside guiding that sort of huge breath she perceived all around? The grass that becomes stubble and that will go green again as the season turns, that suffocating late-August day which was ending, and the old grandmother from the house in Geneva whom she suddenly felt she loved very much, and also the great-uncle from St. Gallen, who drank too much and read poetry, she thought of his undone bow tie and the red spider veins on his nose, and tears welled up in her eyes and who knows why she saw the image of a child and his mother walking hand in hand from a village fair, the fair is over, it’s Sunday night, and the child has a balloon tied to his wrist, he displays it proudly like a trophy and suddenly, ploff, the balloon goes flat, something has punctured it, but what, perhaps a hedge thorn? She seemed to herself like that child who was suddenly holding a deflated balloon, someone had stolen it from him, but no, the balloon was still there, only the air had been stolen. So that’s how it was, time was air and she’d let it exhale from a tiny hole of which she was unaware? But where was the hole? — she couldn’t see it. She thought back to Michel, to those first years when he spent his days in his laboratory and came home late at night, dead tired, it was good waiting for him till midnight and eating a little spaghetti thrown together, Michel was searching for a drug that would save young children from a cruel disease, and this was wonderful, though why save abstract children if their own child wasn’t among those to be saved? Those evenings returned clearly in her memory, Chopin’s nocturnes playing softly, Michel sometimes suggested an album of Berber music, he said the beat of the tambourine soothed his weariness and distress, but she really couldn’t stand those tambourines, and then they’d go to bed in that little apartment overlooking an unadorned square in Paris, and they’d love each other with an intense love, but from that love a baby was never born.

And why was she wondering just then about the why, in this place that wasn’t hers, on this desolate plain shrouded in August heat? Perhaps because Greta, two years younger, had produced two splendid children? That was the word exactly, produced, and she regretted thinking it, the word was somewhat obscene, but at the same time she sensed its intimate truth, the truth of flesh, because the body produces, and flesh reproduces itself, propagating, when it’s alive, through the vital humors circulating within it, when there’s water, that amniotic fluid of the placenta nourishing the tiny witness who’s received the transmission of the flesh. Water. She felt she’d grasped that everything depended on water and all she could do was ask herself if her own body lacked water, if she too couldn’t avoid the destiny of her people who’d fought against the desert for centuries, resisting the sand that covers everything, and who then had to surrender and go somewhere else, and by now the wells were all buried where her ancestors once lived, only dunes remained, she knew that. Panic invaded her, her gaze wandered, lost, over that yellow plain where a too-red sun was beginning to set. And in that moment, she saw the horses.

A herd of a dozen horses, maybe more, almost all of them gray, some dappled. And a little farther on, head raised proudly as though he was the leader, a black stallion pawed at the ground and whinnied. The horses weren’t far, no more than two or three hundred meters, yet she hadn’t seen them, and only now, looking at them, it seemed to her that they were looking at her, and then the black stallion whinnied louder, and as though their mutual gaze were a sign of agreement, the horses started forward in waves on that trembling hot afternoon, the stallion shook his mane, whinnying louder now, and began galloping on, dragging the herd behind him. She watched them advance, unable to move, realizing that the space of the vast plain had distorted the view, they were more distant than she’d thought, or they were taking too long to approach, like certain scenes in films where movements occur more slowly in space, almost like liquid, as though their bodies were endowed with a hidden grace revealed only by a strange sorcery. They advanced like this, the horses, with that fluidity a dream sometimes offers, almost as though they were navigating in the air, but their hooves were touching the ground because behind them rose a thick curtain of dust, veiling the horizon. They advanced, changed formation, now a line, now fanning out, now splintering off as if each had a separate aim, and finally reuniting in a compact line, each head and neck following the same rhythm, the same pace as they fanned out again like an ocean wave of bodies. For a moment she thought of fleeing, but realized she couldn’t. She turned toward the animals and stood still, hands crossed over her breasts as if to protect them. In that moment the black horse halted, planting his hooves in the dust, the whole herd stopped with him as though an unknown conductor’s baton had decreed a pause in that mysterious ballet without music, it was only an interval, this she understood. She watched and waited, they were no more than ten meters away, she could see their huge moist eyes, their pulsing nostrils, the sweat shining on their backs. The black horse raised his right hoof as circus horses do when the show begins, kept his hoof raised, then bolted ahead, circling around her, his hooves scoring a perfect circle in the soil, and then, almost as if this were an agreed-upon signal, all the other horses began following after, first at a trot, then at a gallop that gained in intensity, their speed set by the stallion’s, like a crazy whirling merry-go-round with broken brakes. So she saw them streaking by, an ever faster circle, so fast there was almost no space between them, only a wall of horses become one horse, the uninterrupted shape of a horse whose head resumed with a tail and whose tail was a head; and the hooves, raising a cloud of dust all around her resounding on the dry ground, seemed to her like the pounding of drums from a place she didn’t recall but sensed with utter clarity, and for a moment she saw hands beating the drum skins, the music rising to her ears emerged from the soil, as if the earth were shaking, she sensed it, before reaching her ears it climbed from her feet to her legs, her torso, heart, brain. Meanwhile the horses were circling, ever faster, fast like her thoughts gone circular, a thought that thought itself, she was aware only of thinking she was thinking, nothing more, and in that moment the leader of the herd, in the same sudden way he’d drawn the circle, now broke it, and with an unexpected swerve that seemed to defy the laws of nature, he slanted off dragging the whole herd behind him, and the horses galloped away.

She stood there, watching the shimmer of the straw specks raised in the dust as they glinted in the sunset, she thought she should keep thinking of not thinking of anything, she sat down and scraped at the grass stubble, searching for the ground, the sun was disappearing and the orange light already held hints of indigo, up there the horizon was circular, it was the only thing she was able to think, that the horizon was circular, it was as though the circle drawn by the horses had expanded to infinity, transmuting into the horizon.

Drip, Drop, Drippity-Drop

The pain that woke him ran down his left leg, from the groin to the knee, but its provenance was elsewhere, by then he knew this all too well. With his thumb he began to press from his tailbone upward, when he arrived between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, he felt a sort of electric current running through his body, as if right from that spot a radio station was broadcasting out from the neck to the toes. He tried rolling over in bed. At the first attempt the pain paralyzed him. He stayed on his side, actually not even on his side, on half his side, which isn’t a precise position, it’s a would-be position, a passage. He stayed suspended in this movement, if one can put it that way, as in certain Italian Baroque paintings where the saint, male or female, gracefully overexcited from fasting or from Christ, remains forever suspended within the painter’s brushstrokes, because the craziest of painters, who are also the ones of genius, are marvelous at catching the unfinished movement of their depicted character, usually crazy himself, and the pictorial miracle happens as a kind of bizarre levitation that seems to dispense with the force of gravity.

He tried to wiggle his toes. With a little pain they moved, the big toe included, the one most at risk. He stayed like this, not daring to shift a millimeter, looking at his toes, and thought of that poor guy from Prague who one day awoke out of context, meaning that instead of lying on his back he was lying on his armor-plated shell, and watching the ceiling of his little room, which he imagined to be pale blue, who knows why, he helplessly waved his hairy little paws and wondered what to do. The thought irritated him, not so much because of the comparison but because of the reference to genre: literature, literature again. He tried out an experimental phenomenology of the situation. He got up his courage and shifted his side a centimeter. From the fourth vertebra a dart of pain shot to the base of the neck — he could almost hear the whistle — then it spun around, reached the groin, and spread along the entire leg. How to Speak with Your Own Body was a book he’d read with skepticism yet with a certain curiosity, he couldn’t deny that, a popular book though probably not very reliable in scientific terms, but why shouldn’t one talk to one’s own body? There are people who talk to walls. As a young man he’d read a novel by a writer quite popular at the time, then unjustly neglected, quite a guy, who really got down to the nitty-gritty at times and who in that book spoke to his own body, indeed a specific part of his body, which he called his “him,” and from there arose a dialogue that was anything but banal. Here though it wasn’t the same, since his “him” wasn’t involved, and so he simply said: leg, oh leg! He moved it and it responded with a lacerating pain. Dialogue was impossible. He stretched it very carefully and the pain concentrated in his spinal column. The column of infamy. He grew irritated again. He thought that if he called the doctor, who at this point he was all too familiar with, he’d tell him he was suffering from literature, an observation already made in the past. He pictured the doctor saying: my dear fellow, the problem is mainly due to the fact that you assume the wrong positions, actually you’ve assumed the wrong positions all your life, to write, because the problem unfortunately is that you write, don’t be offended, instead of leading a life more consonant with hygiene and well-being, that is, going to a pool or jogging around in shorts like other men your age, you stay all bent over writing your books for whole days at a time, and not only bent over — I’ve seen you — you’re all crooked too, like a misshapen biscuit, your spine looks like the sea when a southwest wind blows, all crooked, but it’s too late to reform it now, you could try torturing it a bit less, you don’t seem capable of reading the X-rays I brought you, so to make you really understand, tomorrow I’ll bring you the plastic articulated spine I used to study with at college, and I’ll shape it like yours, so you’ll finally see what you’ve reduced it to.

We gave her oxygen because she was having difficulty breathing, said the doctor, but her condition is stable, don’t worry. Which meant: stay calm tonight, she’ll get through it. He entered on tiptoe. The room was dim. The patient in the next bed was asleep. She was a chubby blond woman who yesterday had spent all afternoon on her cell phone while lying in bed in her robe, waiting for the operation she needed to have as soon as possible, she said. And added: I don’t know why I decided to check myself into the hospital, today of all days, with the Easter holidays and our restaurant in Porto Venere packed, you know, dear sir (she said it like that, dear sir), ours is one of the very few Ligurian restaurants that appear in the Michelin Guide, and imagine that, I came here to have this little operation on this of all days, when diners are waiting in line to get in, could I be any stupider, just for a few gallstones, Armando, Armando (meanwhile Armando, who must have been her husband, was on the phone), please don’t make Leopoldina set the tables, she does her best but she always mixes up the glasses, puts the wine glasses in the wrong spot, I spent the whole winter teaching her but she doesn’t get it, she’s a girl from the country, bye, Armando, mi raccomando. And having gotten rid of Armando with a rhyme, she went on: you’ll understand, dear sir, demanding clients, they’re almost always from Milan, or they’re Lombards, anyway, and as you know better than I, it’s Lombardy that pulls the cart in our country, they’re rich because they work, and it’s understandable that they’re demanding, and if a Milanese says I’m paying and I demand, you can’t object, because if someone’s paying then he demands, dear sir, it stands to reason. And then she began describing in detail the specialty of the house, tagliatelle with lobster, but fortunately she was cut off by another call from Armando.

He avoided passing too close, circled around her bed, and sat at the foot of the other one. His aunt wasn’t sleeping, she always seemed to be sleeping yet as soon as she heard a rustle she’d open her eyes. When she saw him she removed her oxygen tube. She didn’t want her body to look ravaged by illness, even flat on her back she was able to eye him up and down, she noticed the cane right away, perhaps she read the suffering on his face, even though the worst of it had passed with the painkillers. What happened to you? she asked, yesterday you were fine. It’s been since this morning, he said, I don’t know, I talked with the doctor, it seems my spine has had another crash like last year in May, I need another X-ray, I’ll do it when I can. She wagged her finger, a warning sign: in Italy the only good kind of crash is a financial one, she murmured, today the woman in the other bed spent the afternoon watching TV, she wanted a TV, she says it’s her right since she’s paying for the room, they gave her headphones so I wouldn’t be disturbed, at a certain point they interviewed that show-off from Telecom who caused a shortfall of I don’t know how many millions, he fixed himself right up with that crash. Unfortunately mine is only vertebral, he replied. The conversation was mouth to ear, so the restaurateur wouldn’t wake up and start reciting the second part of the recipe for tagliatelle with lobster. Don’t come anymore, she said, sitting in that chair day and night is destroying you, with that spine of yours, stay at home a few days. What are you saying? he said, excuse me, I stay home lazing away like the doctor would want while you’re here in this bed, at home I get depressed, at least here we chat. Don’t be silly, she said, what chatting, in a whole day I get out three words, I don’t have the breath anymore. And she smiled. It was strange, the smile on her face; on the suffering mask drawn by illness the smile restored that beautiful woman with prominent cheekbones and enormous eyes whom the disease had buried in extensive swelling, as if she’d reemerge stubbornly, that young woman who had acted as a mother to him when he was a kid and his own wasn’t able to. And an image returned that his memory had erased, a precise scene, the same expression on the aunt’s face now, and her voice saying to the sister: don’t worry, just go to the hospital, I’ll take care of the boy like he’s my own, I’ll think only of him. And right after came the image of Enzo, surfacing from an eternity of time came Enzo, the judicious student of jurisprudence, Enzo, so proper and so polite, who after graduating was supposed to join the firm of his grandfather as an intern because he’d be marrying this aunt, and he was so earnest, Enzo, everybody used to say, and still surfacing from the well of memory here was Enzo now, waving his arms and shouting, he, who was so proper and polite, was yelling at the aunt, telling her that she was crazy: but you’re crazy — I’m taking the bar exam and you’re heading to the mountains for three months with the kid, and what about us, when are we supposed to get married! And he saw again his self from back then, a scrawny little kid, wearing glasses because he was nearsighted, he didn’t understand, and then why was his left knee always hurting, he didn’t want to go to the Dolomites, they were far away, and up in the mountains he couldn’t play bandits with his friend Franco, his aunt whirled around, her voice was icy and low, he’d never heard her use that tone before, Enzo, you don’t understand anything, you’re broke, and you’re also a bit of a fascist, I’ve heard that you and your friends criticize my father for his ideas, this kid has tuberculosis of the knee, he needs to be in the mountains, and I’m taking him to the mountains with my own money, not yours, which you don’t have, except for what my father is kind enough to give you every month, and if you ever feel like taking a real curve, now’s the moment. Go ahead and take the curve: was it possible his aunt had used this expression? And yet the words resounded in his ears: go ahead and take the curve.

For the rest of the afternoon the woman talked about her gallstones, his aunt murmured in his ear, it’s not possible they’d put her in a ward like this for gallstones, it has to be more than gallstones, poor woman, and then she watched Big Brother, her favorite show, I pretended to sleep, so she took off her headphones and lowered the volume but I could hear too, I didn’t want to call the nurses, what do you expect, educating people is a waste of time, besides, by now these people have made their money and Big Brother has educated them, that’s why they vote for him, it’s a vicious circle, they vote for those who educated them, you’ve lost the tail end of the tagliatelle with lobster, but I wanted to humor myself, you know how much she charges her demanding diners for a lobster tagliatelle? Fifty euros, and it’s frozen lobster, I made her confess. She seemed to want to stop talking, turning her head on the pillow. But then she murmured: Ferruccio, I want to say several words I’ve never said in my life, or I haven’t said them often, only when nobody could hear me, but now I’d really like to say them out loud, and if I wake that one up over there, too bad. He nodded and winked at her. What a fool, poor woman, she said. And then added: they’re all a bunch of assholes. She closed her eyes. Perhaps she’d really fallen asleep.

Ferruccio. He remembered that name, Ferruccio. She’d called him Ferruccio only a few rare times, when he was a child, though, then she stopped. His uncle’s name was Ferruccio, but no one called him Ferruccio, it was his given name, the kind people are given but never use, that used to happen where they lived, the newborn would be given the name of some ancestor, to honor his memory, and then they’d call the baby something else. He’d always heard his aunt’s brother called Cesare, sometimes Cesarino, maybe that was his middle name, Ferruccio Cesare, who knows, but on his gravestone there was no Cesare, just Ferruccio. His aunt was the only person who’d always called her brother by the name Ferruccio, he died in Mussolini’s war, in the pictures sent from that Greek island where he’d refused to surrender to the Germans, he was a scrawny little lieutenant with an honest face and curly hair, he was studying engineering, when his draft card arrived in ’39 the aunt had a terrible fight with him, she’d told him about it once, she didn’t want her brother to leave, but where do you want me to go, he objected, are you crazy? Go into the mountains here behind us, she said, hide in the caves, don’t go to war for these cockroaches. But in ’39 nobody was in the mountains yet, there were only wild rabbits and foxes, the aunt was always ahead of her time, and so Ferruccio left for Il Duce and for the King.

He moved close enough to brush against her face. She wasn’t sleeping: she suddenly opened her eyes and put a finger to his lips. The aunt’s voice was a whisper, so feeble it seemed like the rustling wind. Pull up your chair and move closer to my mouth, she said, but don’t think I’m dying, I’m talking like this so the restaurateur won’t wake up, if we interrupt her dream she’ll get upset, she’s dreaming of lobster. He laughed softly. Don’t laugh, she said, I need to talk, I’d like to talk to you, and I don’t know if there’ll be another occasion. He nodded and whispered in her ear: what would you like to tell me? About your childhood, she said, when you were so small you can’t remember. It was the last thing he expected. And she sensed it, his aunt didn’t miss a thing. Don’t be surprised, she said, it’s not all that strange, you think you’re so smart but it probably never occurred to you that memories of the time when someone is very young are kept by the grown-ups near him, you can’t recall such far-off memories, you need the grown-ups from back then, if I don’t tell you about it myself maybe something of it will remain but only in a confusing, thick fog, like when you’ve dreamed something but can’t really remember what, so you don’t even try to remember since it doesn’t make sense to try remembering a dream you don’t remember, this is how the past is made, especially if it’s really past, I couldn’t possibly remember when your uncle Ferruccio and I were children, yet I remember it like it was yesterday though more than eighty years have passed, because in her last days my grandmother thought to tell me what I was like before I knew who I was, when I wasn’t aware yet of being myself, have you ever thought about this? He shook his head no, he never had, and said: so what years do you want to tell me about? When you were five and everyone at home had come to believe you were a bit retarded, as the kindergarten teacher said, but that just didn’t make sense to me, how could you be retarded if you already knew how to write your name? I’d already taught you the alphabet and you’d learned it in the blink of an eye. I write the letters on the blackboard, the teacher said, I ask him to repeat them, like everybody else, and he stays silent, there are two possibilities, either he’s a difficult boy and is refusing, or he just doesn’t understand. I suddenly grasped the problem one July day, we were at Forte, a woman with a white apron and a basket on her arm was walking along the beach, yelling: doughnuts! We were under the beach umbrella, you wanted a doughnut, and your father was about to call her over, but I said to you: Ferruccio, go and get one by yourself, then I’ll give you the money, do you remember? He said nothing, drifting back. Go on and try, she said, see if you can catch hold of the memory, you were sitting on a black-and-white rubber ring your father had made for you from the inner tube of a moped to which he’d stuck a waterproof, papier-mâché duck head he’d found in a warehouse for carnival floats, it must have been one of the first Viareggio carnivals after the disaster, you were hugging it all morning long but didn’t have the courage to take it into the water, now can you see yourself? He could see himself. Or it seemed like he did, he saw a skinny little boy hugging an inner tube with a duck head attached to it and the little boy saying to his dad: I want a doughnut. I see him, Aunt, he confirmed, I think I’m back there. And then I told you to go and get the doughnut, she murmured, you left the duck and ran toward that white apron on the beach, hurrying hurrying, afraid that apron would go by, an imposing man was standing at the water’s edge showing off how elegant he was in his white robe and he took you by the hand, not understanding, and called to us in a haughty voice, and I said to your father: the kid can’t see distances, he mistook that man for the doughnut woman, he is really nearsighted, no way he’s retarded, take him to an eye doctor.

The aunt’s phrasing came back to him. She’d never say a game was nice, it was really nice, and she hadn’t bought him a colorful book but a really colorful one, and we had to go for a walk because that day the sky was really blue. Meanwhile she’d moved on to another memory, murmuring in that silent room, all those devices over the bed: the tanks, the plastic tubes, and the needles inserted in her arms, then she went quiet and suddenly the silence grew heavy, the sounds of the city seemed almost from another planet, the vast grounds surrounding the hospital isolated it from everything. And in that silence he listened to her murmuring in his ear, leaning forward, curiously his back pain had ceased, and behind that feeble voice he found he was navigating in a self he’d lost, back and forth like a kite twisting on a string, and from up there, from that kite upon which he was seated, he began to discern: a tricycle, the voice of an evening radio broadcast, a Madonna everybody claimed was crying, a little girl from a “displaced” family, with bows in her braids, who as she hopped on a chalk pattern on the ground exclaimed: square one, bread and salami! and other things like that, the aunt by then was talking in the dark since even the dim overhead light had been shut off, only the pale blue lamp over the bed remained and a glowing slice of neon coming from under the door. She closed her eyes and fell silent, she seemed exhausted. He straightened up in the chair and felt a sharp pinprick of pain between his vertebrae. She’s fallen asleep, he thought, now she’s really fallen asleep. Instead she brushed his hand and beckoned for him to come closer again. Ferruccio, he heard her breath saying, do you remember how beautiful Italy used to be?

How can the night be present? Composed only of itself, it’s absolute, every space belongs to it, its mere presence is imposing, the same presence a ghost might have that you know is there in front of you but is everywhere, even behind you, and if you seek refuge in a patch of light you become its prisoner because all around you, like the sea surrounding your little lighthouse, is the impenetrable presence of the night.

Instinctively he dug in his pocket for his car keys. They were attached to a small black device as big as a matchbox with two buttons: one set off a dot of red light that opened and closed the car, from the other, a mini-eye with a convex lens, emerged a bright fluorescent beam. He pointed the white beam at the floor. It cut through the dark like a laser. He scribbled with the light until he found his shoes, how strange, he’d never realized that they were still those shoes. Italian shoes? the woman at the next table had asked, studying them with interest. It’d started like that, with the shoes. But of course they’re Italian shoes, madame, he mumbled to himself, handmade, finest leather, just look at the uppers, shoes are judged mainly by their uppers, here, madame, put your finger inside, don’t worry, no, it doesn’t tickle, do you like? But why do people hold on to a pair of shoes for twenty years, even Italian shoes, they wind up ruined, old shoes must be thrown out. The fact is they’re comfortable, madame, he continued mumbling, I wear them because they’re comfortable, don’t kid yourself that these worn-out shoes are the madeleine of your lovely lashes, the point is lately my feet get a bit swollen, particularly at night, bad circulation, this damn discopathy has brought on arterial stenosis in my leg, the capillaries have been affected and so, madame, my feet swell.

Cautiously he pointed the beam of light toward the wall, like a detective searching for clues in the dark, he avoided the patient, especially her body, slowly scrolling down over the bed. He began to catalog. One: the plastic bag full of that milky stuff, with a narrow tube leading to the stomach: food. Two: next to it some sort of intravenous drip that disappeared under the sheets. Three: the oxygen boiling soundlessly in the water, now emerging from the inhaler she’d removed. Four: a little white bottle hanging upside down from a rack, with a thin tube that made a U-turn, the drops falling one after another before descending in a fixed rhythm down to the arm: morphine. With that same rhythm, all day and all night, doctors administered an artificial peace to a body that otherwise would shake from a storm of pain. He would’ve liked to avert his gaze but couldn’t, as if he were being drawn in, hypnotized by that monotonous rhythm of drops. He pushed the little button and turned off the light. And then he heard them, the drops. At first they were muffled sound, a subterranean thrum, as though coming from the floor or walls: drip, drop, drippity, drippity, drip, drop, drippity-drop. They reached into his skull, tapped against his brain, but with no echo, a snap that pops and disappears to make way at once for the next snap, seemingly similar to the previous snap, but actually with a different tone, the same way rain begins falling on a lakeshore but if you really listen you can hear there’s a variation of sound from drop to drop, because the cloud doesn’t make the drops identical, some are bigger, some smaller, you just have to listen: drip, drop, drippity-drop, according to their own musical scale, they sounded like that, and after arriving and getting muffled inside his head, began growing in intensity to the point where he heard them burst in his head as though his skull couldn’t contain them anymore, and they burst from his ears into the surrounding space, like bells gone crazy whose sonic waves grew to a spasm. And then, by sorcery, as though his body were a magnet able to attract sonic waves, he felt they were swarming toward him, but no longer in the brain, in the vertebrae, at a precise point, as though his vertebrae were the well of water where the rod discharges the lightning bolt. And it was also right at that point, he felt, that they extinguished themselves, tearing through the pall that the night imposed on the earth, lacerating its presence. The chinks in the shutters began going pale. It was dawn.

And if we were to play the if game? The memory came with a voice at the little table next to his, as though his uncle were there, hidden behind the hedge bordering the terrace of the coffee bar. It was his uncle’s voice this time, actually his uncle was the one who’d invented that game. Why? Because the if game is good for the imagination, especially on certain rainy days. For instance we are at the beach, or in the mountains, it doesn’t matter, since the kid is sick and the sea and the mountains are both good for him, it all depends, otherwise a bad worm will gnaw at his knee, and for instance it’s September, and in September sometimes it rains, never mind, if it’s raining and he’s at home, a kid can find a lot to do, but during this forced vacation, especially in a poorly furnished rental cottage or even worse in a pensione, if it rains, boredom sets in, and with it melancholy. But fortunately there’s the if game, and so the imagination gets to work, and the best player is the one who throws out the craziest ideas, totally crazy, mamma mia that laughter, listen to this: and what if the pope were to have landed in Pisa?

He asked for a double espresso in a large cup. The hospital grounds were coming to life: two young doctors in white uniforms were chatting, a little truck marked Hospital Supplies set off, a man in light-blue coveralls came down a side street carrying a whisk and a plastic bag, now and then he’d stop and sweep up some leaves, some butts. On his little table he spread out the paper napkin folded next to his cup and smoothed it carefully so he could write on it. On a corner of the napkin, a brand: Caffè Honduras. He circled it with his fountain pen. The paper, porous, absorbed a little ink but held up: he could try. The first sentence was obligatory: what if I were to go to Honduras? He continued numbering the sentences. Two: and what if I were to dance the Viennese waltz? Three: and what if I were to go to the moon and eat Cain’s fritters? Four: and what if Cain hadn’t made any fritters? Five: and what if I had left on the ship? Six: and what if the ship had already left? Seven: and what if at a whistle it would turn back? Eight: and what if Betta were to get married? Nine: and what if the Maltese cat were to play the piano and sing in French?

Read as a poem it had its own personality, maybe that woman who’d asked him to write something for a poetry anthology for children would like it, but that wouldn’t be honest, it wasn’t for children, it was a poème zutique. But children like zutiques, what matters is saying silly things, so even if it’s done out of melancholy, children won’t realize. I’ll phone him, he said to himself. There was no need for a cell phone, besides, he’d never had one: right by the coffee bar was a phone booth, and some change left on the table, tempting him. Sure, it wouldn’t be easy to explain himself, the conversation had to be set up right, like a teacher wants with an essay, because if you set up the theme correctly, you’re safe, even if you express yourself poorly. Perhaps before approaching the topic you’d need a code, something that once suggested complicity, a sort of watchword, like sentinels in the trenches would use when they changed guard. He thought: hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. Sure that he’d get it. And then he’d say: I know very well you can’t wake up someone at this hour after not calling him for three years, but the fact is I went into hiding for a bit. Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. He went on: I set my mind on writing a big novel, let’s put it that way, that novel everyone’s waiting for, sooner or later, the publisher, the critics, because sure, they say, the short stories are splendid, and also those two books of meanderings, even that fake diary is a text of the first order, no doubt, but a novel, when are you going to write us a real novel? Everyone’s fixed on the novel, so I was fixed on it too, and if you’re going to write the novel everyone wants from you, which will be your masterpiece, you realize you need the right atmosphere, and the right place, and you need to search for the right place God knows where, because where you are is never the right place, and so I went into hiding to look for the right place to write my masterpiece, am I making myself clear? Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. Ingrid is in Göteborg, she went to see our daughter, I don’t know if you know but she got married in Göteborg, she went back to her maternal roots, besides, she’s better off there than here around someone dying, but I’ll explain that later, no, I’ll explain right now, I’m in my usual haunts, at the city hospital, no, no, I’m really fine, sure I’d like to see you, I’m coming to the point, because my call is nothing but an SOS from a radio operator who turned off his radio, but it’s not that there was a storm around me, if anything a dead calm, without even any shadow lines to cross, they had been crossed a long time ago, there was a sandbar instead on which the boat ran aground. Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. My aunt is dying, said en passant. Mine, not yours, we each have a mother, and our father didn’t have sisters, so it’s my aunt, though that’s not really why I’m calling, it’s that actually I wanted to read you a passage from the novel I’ve been working on these past three years of silence so you’ll have some idea of the effort I’ve put into it, I’m sure you’ll understand why I didn’t show up earlier, you ready? It goes like this: and what if I went to Honduras? And what if I danced the Viennese waltz? And what if I went to the moon and ate Cain’s fritters? And what if Cain hadn’t made his fritters? And what if I left with the ship? And what if the ship had already left? And what if at a whistle it would turn back? And what if Betta got married? And what if the Maltese cat played the piano while singing in French? It cost me more than the Serchio River cost the people of Lucca, you like it?

He sat there, with the coins in hand, staring at the phone booth, there’s a world of difference between saying and doing, and doing was saying: listen, I’m back, I’m here at the hospital, no, I’m totally fine, well, not totally, the fact is these three years have heaped up one on top of the other as though they were all just one day, actually just one night, I know I’m not making myself clear, I’ll try to be clearer, think of plastic bottles, the ones for mineral water, the bottle makes sense as long as it’s full of water, but when you’ve drunk it you can scrunch it up and throw it out, that’s what happened to me, my time has scrunched up, and my vertebrae too, if I can put it that way, I know I’m jumping around but I can’t express myself any better, be patient. And while he was thinking of what he’d come up with, he noticed a nurse in white pushing a wheelchair coming out of the low pavilion not far from the coffee bar, its glass door opened from the inside. And on the door closing behind them was a yellow sign with three blades, like a fan. The nurse was moving forward slowly because the path from the pavilion to the coffee shop rose slightly, and in the wheelchair was a boy, or at least from a distance it seemed a boy because he had no hair, but gradually as they approached he realized it was a girl. The features of the face, even though it was a childish face, weren’t male, because the difference is already clear at ten or twelve, which seemed roughly the age of that boy, which is to say, that girl, and also the voice was already female, since at that age the vocal cords are well differentiated, and she talked with the old nurse pushing the wheelchair, although from there he couldn’t make out what they were saying, he caught only the sound of the voices. He’d stood up with the coins in his hand aimed at the phone, rather he’d almost stood, he half stood, just like the day before getting out of bed, when the same razor blade cut into his back again, slicing all the way down to below his navel. He stood very still, like that figure of Pontormo he liked so much, whose face is a landscape of pain almost as though he were bearing the cross instead of the one destined for such a task. The two female voices were still too feeble to be deciphered, but they were cheerful, this he got from the tone, they seemed to be twittering back and forth, like two little sparrows telling each other something, he shut his eyes and the twittering became a squeak and he thought instead of mice chattering together in their cage, those white mice that scientists experiment on, they were two guinea pigs for the science of so-called life, the most agonizing science of all, one of them was being subjected to it prematurely, the other, the old one, had endured the experiments and gone on. They fell silent, perhaps because the woman pushing the wheelchair was getting tired and the girl didn’t want to wear her out, but as soon as they reached the top of the path the girl began talking again, and must have been responding to something the nurse had said, from her tone of voice it was clear she was affirming something, a solemn affirmation that nobody could prove wrong. Her voice was joyful, full of life, as when life, through the voice, is willful and affirms itself. The girl repeated what she’d said just as they were passing him, and while she spoke a broad smile lit up her face: but this is the most beautiful thing in the world! But this is the most beautiful thing in the world!

The path continued down toward a clinic in the middle of the grounds. They’d stopped talking, but he could hear the noise of the wheelchair rolling over the gravel. He wanted to turn around but was unable to. The most beautiful thing in the world. That’s what the girl had said, this bald girl, being hauled in a wheelchair by a nurse. She knew what the most beautiful thing in the world was. He, however, did not. How was it possible at his age, with all he’d seen and experienced, that he still didn’t know what the most beautiful thing in the world was?

Clouds

— You stay here in the shade all day, said the young girl, don’t you like going in the water?

The man gave a vague nod that could have meant yes or no, but said nothing.

— Can I use tu with you? asked the girl.

— If I’m not mistaken, you just did, the man said, and smiled.

— In my class we also use tu with adults, said the girl, some teachers allow it, but my parents won’t let me, they say it’s impolite, and lei, sir, what do you think?

— I think they’re right, responded the man, but you can use tu with me, I won’t tell anybody.

— Don’t you like going in the water? she asked. I think it’s special.

— Special? the man repeated.

— My teacher told us we can’t use awesome for everything, that sometimes we might say special, I was about to say awesome, for me going in the water at this beach is special.

— Ah, said the man, I agree, it seems awesome to me too, even special.

— Sunbathing’s awesome too, the young girl went on, in the first few days I had to use the SPF forty cream, then I went to twenty, and now I can use the golden bronzing cream, the one that makes your skin sparkle like it has little gold specks all over it, see? But, sir, why are you so white? You came here a week ago and you’re always under the beach umbrella, don’t you like the sun at all?

— I think it’s awesome, said the man, I swear, to me sunbathing is awesome.

— Are you afraid of getting sunburned, sir? asked the young girl.

— And what do you think? answered the man.

— I think you’re afraid of burning, sir, though if a person doesn’t start out slowly, he’ll never get tan.

— That’s true, the man confirmed, it seems logical to me, though do you think it’s mandatory to get tan?

The girl mulled this over.

— Not entirely mandatory, nothing is mandatory except for mandatory things, but if someone comes to the beach, doesn’t go in the water, and doesn’t get tan, then why is he coming to the beach?

— You know what? said the man, you’re a logical girl, you have a gift for logic, and that’s awesome, to me the world today has lost its logic, it’s a real pleasure to meet a logical girl, may I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance? What’s your name?

— My name is Isabella, though my close friends call me Isabèl, but with the accent on the e, not like the Italians who say Ìsabel, with the accent on the i.

— Why’s that, you’re not Italian? asked the man.

— Of course I’m Italian, she objected, totally Italian, but I care about the name my friends give me, because on television they always say Mànuel or Sebàstian, I am totally Italian like you and maybe even more than you, sir, but I like languages, and I also know the Mameli anthem by heart, this year the president of the republic came to visit our school and talked with us about the importance of the Mameli anthem, which is our Italian identity, it took so long to unify our country, for instance that political guy who wants to abolish the Mameli anthem, I don’t like him.

The man didn’t say anything, he was squinting, the light was intense and the blue of the sea and the sky merged, swallowing the horizon line.

— Perhaps, sir, you didn’t get who I’m referring to, said the girl, breaking the silence.

The man didn’t speak, he kept his eyelids half closed, the young girl seemed to hesitate, drawing squiggles in the sand with her finger.

— I hope you’re not in his party, sir, she went on, as though encouraging herself, at home I was taught that one must always respect others’ opinions, but that guy’s opinion, I don’t like it, am I being clear?

— Perfectly, said the man, one must respect others’ opinions yet not disrespect one’s own, above all not disrespect one’s own, and why don’t you like this guy?

— Oh, well … Isabella seemed to hesitate. Apart from the fact that when he talks on television, he gets some white foam at the corners of his mouth, but this I could forget, the main thing is he swears a lot, I heard him with my own ears, and if he swears, I wonder why they yell at me when I swear, but luckily the president of the republic is more important than him, otherwise he wouldn’t be president of the republic, and he explained to us that we ought to respect the Mameli anthem and sing it like the national team does at the world championship, with our hands on our hearts, at school we sang it together with the president, we read the copies our teacher gave us, but he didn’t read, he knew it by heart, I think that’s awesome, don’t you agree, sir?

— Pretty special, confirmed the man. He dug into the bag he kept next to his beach chair, took out a glass bottle, and put a white pill in his mouth.

— Am I talking too much? she asked, at home they say I talk too much and might annoy people, am I annoying you, sir?

— Not at all, answered the man, what you’re saying is even special, please go on.

— And then the president gave us a history lesson, since as you know, sir, we don’t study modern history at school, in the last year of junior high the really good teachers get us up to World War One, otherwise we don’t make it past Garibaldi and the unification of Italy, but we learned a ton of modern things, because our teacher’s been great great, but the credit should go to the president, because he’s the one who gave the input.

— Who gave the what? asked the man.

— That’s what they say, explained Isabella, it’s a new word, it means someone starts and drags the others along with him, if you want, sir, I’ll repeat what I’ve learned, really a ton of things that not many people know, d’you want to know them?

The man didn’t answer, kept his eyes closed, and was completely still.

— Did you fall asleep, sir? Isabella’s tone was shy, as though disappointed.

— I’m sorry, sir, perhaps I chattered so much I made you fall asleep, it’s also why my parents didn’t want to buy me a cell phone, they claim they’d have to pay an astronomical bill because I talk so much, you know, in our house we can’t afford anything extra, my father is an architect but he works for the municipality, and when you work for the municipality …

— Your father’s a lucky man, said the man, his eyes still closed.

Now he spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper.

— Be that as it may, he continued, the profession of building houses is beautiful, much better than the profession of destroying them.

Isabella gave a little shriek of surprise.

— My god, she exclaimed, there’s a profession of destroying houses? I didn’t know that, they don’t teach that at school.

— Well, said the man, it’s not that it’s really a profession, you can also learn it in theory, like at a military academy, but then moments arrive when a certain knowledge has to be put into practice, and when all’s said and done that’s the goal, to destroy buildings.

— And you, sir, how do you know this? asked Isabella.

— I know it because I’m a soldier, answered the man, or rather I was, now I’m retired, let’s put it that way.

— So, you destroyed buildings, sir?

— What happened to tu? the man replied.

Isabella didn’t answer right away.

— The thing is, I’m naturally shy even if I don’t seem so because I talk too much, I asked you, sir, if you destroyed houses once too.

— Not personally, no, said the man, and neither did my soldiers, to be honest, mine was a war mission for peacekeeping, it’s kind of complicated to explain, especially on a day like this, but, Isabèl, I’d like to tell you one thing that maybe they didn’t tell you at school, in the end the story can be summed up like this: there are men like your father whose profession is to build houses, and men of my profession who destroy them, and things go on like this for centuries, some build houses and others destroy them, build, destroy, build, destroy, it’s a little boring, don’t you think?

— Very boring, answered Isabella, really very boring, imagine if there weren’t ideals, fortunately there are ideals.

— Sure, confirmed the man, fortunately in history there are ideals, who told you this, the president or your teacher?

Isabella seemed to mull this over.

— Now I’m not sure who told me.

— Perhaps the president gave the input, said the man, and what can you tell me about ideals?

— They are all respectable if one believes in them, answered Isabella, for example the patriotic ideal, then maybe someone makes a mistake because he’s young, but if his intentions are good, the ideal is valid.

— Ah, said the man, this is something I need to think about, but it doesn’t seem the right day for it, today is so hot and the sea looks so inviting.

— Then get in the water, she prodded.

— I don’t really feel like it, responded the man.

— That’s because you aren’t motivated, I think your problem is stress, you can’t imagine the negative effect of stress on our spirit, I read it in a book my mother keeps on her bedside table, would you like me to get you something at the hotel bar, something for stress? As long as it’s not a Coke, that I wouldn’t get.

— This you’ll have to explain, you really must, said the man.

— Because Coke and McDonald’s are the ruin of mankind, said Isabella, everybody knows it, at my school even the janitors know it.

The man dug into his bag and took another pill.

— You sure take a lot of stuff, exclaimed Isabella.

— I have an hourly schedule, said the man, my prescription calls for it.

— All these pills can’t be good for you, she stated with conviction, Italians take a ton of pills, they said that on television, what we should be doing instead is tuning our spirit to the positive forces in the universe, that’s why we should avoid certain foods and drinks, because they carry negative energy, they aren’t natural, am I being clear?

— Isabèl, can I tell you something in confidence?

The man wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. He was sweating.

— Coke and McDonald’s never took anybody to Auschwitz, to those extermination camps you must have learned about at school, but ideals did, have you ever thought of that, Isabèl?

— But those were Nazis, objected Isabella, horrible people.

— I totally agree, said the man, the Nazis were truly horrible people, but they too had an ideal and went to war to impose it, from our point of view it was a perverted ideal, though for them it wasn’t, they had great faith in that ideal, you have to be careful with ideals, isn’t that true, Isabèl?

— I need to think about it, answered the girl, maybe I’ll do it at lunch, it’s twelve thirty, before long they’ll serve lunch, you’re not coming?

— Maybe not, said the man, today I don’t have much of an appetite.

— Excuse me for repeating this, but in my opinion you take too much medicine, you’re doing the same as all the Italians who take too many pills.

— So are you Italian or not? the man repeated.

— You already asked me that and I already answered, replied Isabella, irritated, I’m totally Italian, maybe even more than you, anyway if you don’t come to lunch you’ll be missing out, today there’s a buffet lunch at the hotel and after that Croatian stuff they’ve been giving us, they’re finally going to serve fettuccine all’arrabbiata, actually on the menu it says fetucine all’arrabbiata, anyway it should be ours, sometimes when you’re abroad you have to forgive spelling mistakes, but sorry, why do you take so many pills, you aren’t a deviant like those guys who go to discotheques, are you?

The man didn’t answer.

— Come on, tell me, insisted Isabella, I won’t tell anybody.

— I’ll be sincere, said the man, I’m not a discotheque deviant, a doctor prescribed them to me, they are legal pills, they just make me less hungry, is all.

— They make you throw up too, said Isabella, I realized that, yesterday you came for lunch and at a certain point you got up and ran to the bathroom and when you came back you were white as a corpse, I bet you went to throw up.

— You’re right on target, said the man, I really did go and throw up, that’s the pills.

— So why take them? Don’t take them, she concluded.

— That would be logical, the thing is, on the one hand they’re good for me, but on the other they’re bad, maybe pills are a bit like ideals, it depends who you force to swallow them, I don’t push them on anyone else, I’m not hurting anybody.

The girl kept making squiggles in the sand.

— I don’t understand, she said, sometimes it’s hard to understand you adults.

— We adults are stupid, said the man, we’re often stupid, however, sometimes you wind up having to take pills regardless of whether you’re Italian or not, but you, Isabèl, since you say you’re totally Italian, will you tell me where you were born? Look, it’s not fundamental, I for instance was born in a country that’s no longer on any maps since they call it something else now, but I’m Italian, to the point where I am, or rather I was, a captain in the Italian army, and to be a captain in the Italian army you can’t be a foreigner, does that seem logical to you?

Isabel nodded.

— And where were you born? she asked.

— In a district that was just invented now, have you heard of Walt Disney?

Isabella’s eyes shone.

— When I was little, I saw all the Disney movies.

— Right, it’s a place like that, a wonder-world, all made of crystal, a crystal that’s actually ordinary glass, from a realistic point of view it’s in northern Italy, in the same way Tuscany is in central Italy and Sicily is in southern Italy, but at this point geography has become secondary and so has history, better not to talk about culture, what counts today is the fable, but since adults aren’t just stupid, they’re complicated, I don’t want to complicate things any more, let’s get to the point, the question I first asked you, where were you born?

— In a little town in Peru, said Isabella, but I became Italian really soon, as soon as my parents adopted me, that’s why I feel Italian like you.

— Isabèl, said the man, to be perfectly honest, I did realize you weren’t Aryan like me — anyway I’m white as a corpse, you said so yourself — whereas you’re a little bit darker, you’re not pure Aryan.

— Which means?

— It’s a nonexistent race, answered the man, some fake scientists invented it, but you know, if the people with these kinds of ideals had won the war, you wouldn’t be here now, or rather, maybe you wouldn’t be at all.

— Why? asked Isabella.

— Because non-Aryan people wouldn’t have had the right to exist, dear Isabèl, and people with skin that’s a little dark, like yours, which actually has a very beautiful color, especially now with the bronzing cream, would’ve been …

— Would’ve been what? she asked.

— Never mind, said the man, it’s a complicated matter and on a day like this it’s not worth complicating our life, why don’t you take a good swim before lunch?

— I can maybe take one later, answered Isabella, right now I don’t feel like it, but then, sorry, when I saw you last week, always here reading under the beach umbrella, I thought you were someone who could explain things I didn’t understand, I thought I would have an interesting conversation with you like it’s hard to have with grown-ups, but now it’s even worse, we’ve been talking for half an hour, and to be perfectly honest you seem a little out of it, all the nonexistent countries and people destroying houses and you making war that was really peace, in my view there’s a lot of confusion in your head, and I don’t get what your so-called profession was, either.

— It involved watching those who destroyed each other’s houses, responded the man, this was the war mission for peacekeeping, and it was happening right here.

— On this beach? asked Isabella, excuse me, but that doesn’t seem possible, no offense.

The man didn’t answer. Isabella stood up, she had her hands on her hips and was looking at the sea, she was thin and her slender figure was outlined against the strong noon light.

— In my view you say these things because you don’t eat, she said in a slightly altered voice, not eating makes you say strange things, you’re not thinking straight, excuse me for saying this but we have a first-class hotel here, it’s super expensive because I’ve seen the prices, you can’t say these things just off the top of your head, you don’t eat, don’t sunbathe, don’t go into the water, I think you have some problems, perhaps you need to get some food in you or drink a good fruit shake, would you like me to get you one?

— If you’d really like to be kind, I’d rather have a Coke, said the man, it quenches my thirst.

— I want to be kind, declared Isabella, but you’re the one who isn’t kind, first you have to explain to me why you came right here for vacation if there was a war and houses were destroyed and you stood here watching, can that be true?

— That’s how it was, it’s just that nobody wanted to know it, and even now, you know, people don’t like to know that there was a war where they spend their vacation, because if they think about it, their vacation gets ruined, you follow the logic?

— So why’d you come here too? It’s a logical question, if you don’t mind my asking.

— Let’s say it’s for the rest of the warrior, said the man, even if the warrior wasn’t fighting, in the end he was a warrior, and he must find rest where the war once was, that’s classic.

Isabella seemed to be mulling this over. She was kneeling in the sand, half in the sun, half in the shade, she was wearing a bikini on her slender, childish body, but the top wasn’t necessary, her thin shoulders began shaking as though she were weeping, but she wasn’t, she seemed cold, she kept her hands buried deep in the sand and her head was bent over her knees.

— Don’t worry, she murmured, when I get like this everyone worries, but it’s only a little developmental crisis, the thing is, I have developmental problems, that’s what the psychologist said, I don’t know if you understand.

— Perhaps if you raise your head, I’ll understand better, said the man, I can’t hear you very well.

The girl looked up, her face was red and her eyes damp.

— Do you like war? she murmured.

— No, he said, I don’t like it, do you?

— So then why’d you do it? asked Isabella.

— Like I told you, I didn’t, I was there to watch, but I also asked you a question, do you like war?

— I hate it, exclaimed Isabella, I hate it but you talk like all grown-up people and you’re making me have a developmental crisis, because last year I didn’t have any developmental crises, then at school they taught us about the various kinds of war, the bad ones and the good ones, and we wrote three essays about it, and it was only after that when I started having these developmental crises.

— Take your time explaining yourself, said the man, tell me calmly, in any case the fettuccine all’arrabbiata is being kept warm under the halogen lamps, I didn’t even ask you what grade you’re in.

— I just finished seventh grade, but after ninth grade I’ll go to ginnasio so I’ll also be studying Greek.

— Wonderful, but what does that have to do with your crisis?

— Maybe nothing, said Isabella, the thing is that throughout the year we studied Caesar and also a bit of Herodotus, but most of all whether war can serve peace, that was the theme in history class, am I being clear?

— Not quite.

— In the sense that sometimes war is necessary, unfortunately, she said, war sometimes is useful for bringing justice to countries where there isn’t any, but then one day two kids came from that country where they’re bringing justice and the kids were hospitalized in our city, and it was my class that brought them candy and fruit, that is, me and Simone and Samantha, the best students, am I being clear?

— Go on, said the man.

— Mohamed is right around my age, and his little sister is younger, but her name I don’t remember, though when we entered the little room in the hospital, the thing is that Mohamed didn’t have any arms and his little sister …

Isabella broke off.

— His little sister’s face … she murmured. I’m afraid if I tell you about it, I’ll have another developmental crisis, their grandmother was with them, keeping them company because their mother and father died from the bomb that destroyed their house, and so I dropped the tray with the kiwis and tiramisu, I started crying and then I had a developmental crisis.

The man didn’t say anything.

— Why aren’t you saying anything? You’re like the psychologist who keeps listening to me and never says anything, say something to me.

— In my opinion you don’t really have to worry, said the man, we all have developmental crises, each person in his own way.

— You too?

— I can guarantee you, he said, despite what the doctors think, I believe I’m right in the middle of a developmental crisis.

Isabella looked at him. Sitting cross-legged now, she seemed calmer and no longer had her hands buried in the sand.

— You’re kidding, she said.

— Not at all, he answered.

— Wait, how old are you?

— Forty-five, answered the man.

— Like my father, that’s late for having a developmental crisis.

— Absolutely not, objected the man, the developmental period never ends, in life we don’t do anything other than evolutionize.

— The verb evolutionize doesn’t exist, said Isabella, we say evolve.

— Right, though in biology it exists, and it means each one of us evolutionizing has his own crisis, your parents have theirs too.

— And you, how do you know that?

— Yesterday, said the man, I heard your mother talking with your father on her cell phone, and it was easy to understand that they’re right in the middle of a developmental crisis.

— You are such a spy, exclaimed Isabella, you shouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations.

— Sorry, said the man, your umbrella is three meters from mine and your mother was talking as if she were at home, what should I do, plug my ears?

Isabella’s shoulders shivered again.

— The thing is they aren’t together anymore, she said, and so I was left in my mom’s custody and Francesco in my dad’s, one for each is just, said the judge, Francesco was born after they’d stopped waiting, but I love him like I love no one else and at night I feel like crying, but my mom cries at night too, I’ve heard her, and you know why? Because she and my dad have existential disagreements, that’s what they call them, does that mean anything to you?

— Sure, said the man, it’s a normal thing, everybody has existential disagreements, there’s no need to get worked up about it.

Isabella had her hands in the sand again, but now she seemed almost jaunty, and she giggled a little.

— You’re clever, she said, you haven’t told me yet why you spend your days under the umbrella, you know everything about me and you don’t talk about yourself, but why did you come to the beach if you spend your days in a beach chair taking pills, what are you doing?

— Well, murmured the man, to put it simply, I’m waiting for the effects of the depleted uranium, but that takes patience.

— What do you mean?

— It’s too long to explain, effects are effects and to understand the results there’s nothing to do but wait for them.

— Do you have to wait for long?

— Not so long now, I think, about a month, maybe less.

— And meanwhile what do you do all day long, here under the umbrella, don’t you get bored?

— Not at all, said the man, I practice the art of nefelomanzia.

The girl opened her eyes wide, made a face and then smiled. It was the first time she’d really smiled, showing little white teeth crossed by a metal thread.

— Is that a new invention?

— Oh no, he said, it’s a very ancient thing, imagine, Strabo talks about it, it has to do with geography, but you won’t study Strabo till ginnasio, in junior high you only study a bit of Herodotus as you did this year with your geography teacher, geography is a very ancient thing, dear Isabèl, it’s existed forever.

Isabella was watching him, doubtful.

— And what would this stuff consist of, what’s it called?

— Nefelomanzia, said the man, it’s a Greek word, nefele means cloud and manzia, to foretell, nefelomanzia is the art of predicting the future by observing the clouds, or rather, the form of the clouds, because in this art, form is substance, and that’s why I’ve come on vacation to this beach, because a friend from the air force who deals with meteorology assured me that in the Mediterranean there’s no other coast like this one where clouds form on the horizon in an instant. And as quickly as they take shape they dissolve again, and it’s right in that instant that a real nefelomant must practice his art, to understand what the shape of a certain cloud foretells before the formation dissolves in the wind, before it transforms into transparent air and turns to sky.

Isabella had gotten to her feet, mechanically shaking the sand from her thin legs. She combed back her hair and threw a skeptical glance at the man, but her gaze was also full of curiosity.

— I’ll give you an example, said the man, sit in the chair next to mine, to study the clouds on the horizon before they vanish you need to sit and focus carefully.

He pointed toward the sea.

— Can you see that white little cloud, down there? Follow my finger, more to the right, near the promontory.

— I see it, said Isabella.

It was a little puff rolling in the air, very far away, in the lacquered sky.

— Watch carefully, said the man, and consider it, in nefelomanzia you need quick intuition but consideration is indispensable, don’t lose sight of it.

Isabella shaded her eyes with her hand. The man lit a cigarette.

— Smoking isn’t good for your health, said Isabella.

— Don’t worry about what I’m doing, think about the cloud, in this world there are lots of things that aren’t good for your health.

— It’s opened at the sides, exclaimed Isabella, as if it’s taken on wings.

— Butterfly, said the man confidently, and the butterfly has only one meaning, there’s no doubt.

— Which is? asked Isabella.

— People with existential disagreements stop having them, people separated will be reunited and their life will be gracious like the flight of a butterfly, Strabo, page twenty-six of the main book.

— What book is that? asked Isabella.

— The main book of Strabo, said the man, that’s the title, unfortunately it was never translated into modern languages, it’s only studied in the last semester of college because you can only read it in ancient Greek.

— Why was it never translated?

— Because modern languages are too hurried, said the man, in the haste to communicate they become synthetic and grow less precise, for instance ancient Greek uses the dual in conjugating verbs, we only have the plural, and when we say we, in this case you and I, we can also mean many people, but for the ancient Greeks, who were quite exact, if only you and I are doing or saying that thing, only a pair of us, the dual was used. For instance, the nefelomanzia of that cloud is being done only by the two of us, only we know about it, and for this they had the dual.

— Really awesome, said Isabella, and let out a little shriek, putting a hand over her mouth, look at the other side, at the other side!

— It’s a cirrus, the man said, a beautiful baby cirrus that in a moment will be swallowed by the sky, ordinary people would mistake it for a nimbus, though a cirrus is a cirrus, too bad for them, and the form of a cirrus can’t have any other meaning but its own, which other clouds don’t have.

— Which is? asked Isabella.

— Depends on the shape, said the man, you have to interpret it, and here’s where I need you, otherwise what kind of nefelomanti are we?

— It seems to be splitting in two, said Isabella, look, it really is split in two, they seem like two little sheep trotting side by side.

— Two cirrinus lambs, without a doubt.

— I just don’t get it.

— It’s easy, said the man, the meek lamb by itself represents the evolutions of humankind, Strabo, page thirty-one of the main book, watch carefully, but when it splits, it becomes two parallel wars, one is just and the other unjust, they’re impossible to distinguish, which ultimately isn’t all that important to us, what matters is to understand how they’ll both end up, what their future holds.

Isabella glanced at him like someone awaiting an urgent response.

— A miserable end, I can assure you, dear Isabèl.

— Are you really sure? she asked in an anxious voice.

— You tell me, whispered the man, I’m closing my eyes now, you have to interpret them, watch them, be patient, but try to catch just the right moment, because after that you’ll be too late. The man closed his eyes, extended his legs, lowered a cap over his face, and remained still, as though falling asleep. Perhaps a minute passed, even more. Over the beach was a great silence, the bathers had gone to the restaurant.

— They’re flaking in a kind of stracciatella soup, said Isabella in a low voice, like when the trail of a jet breaks up, now you can hardly see them, how weird, I can hardly see them, you look too.

The man didn’t move.

— It’s not necessary, he said, Strabo, page twenty-four of the main book, he wasn’t ever wrong, two thousand years ago he prophesied the end of all war, but nobody up to now has fully grasped it, and today we’ve finally deciphered it on this beach, the two of us.

— You know you’re an awesome man? said Isabella.

— I’m perfectly aware of that, answered the man.

— I think it’s time to go to the restaurant, she went on, maybe my mom is already waiting at our table and she gets angry, can we keep talking this afternoon?

— I don’t know, nefelomanzia is a very tiring art, maybe this afternoon I’ll have to sleep, otherwise this evening I won’t even make it to dinner.

— Is this why you take so many pills? asked Isabella, because of the nefelomanzia?

The man raised the cap from his face and looked at her.

— And what do you think? he asked.

Isabella had gotten up, she stepped out of the circle of shade, her body shone in the sunlight.

— I’ll tell you tomorrow, she replied.

The Dead at the Table

C’était un temps déraisonnable,

On avait mis les morts à table,

On faisait des châteaux de sable,

On prenait les loups pour des chiens.

LOUIS ARAGON

First of all, he would have told him that what he liked most about the new house was the view of the Unter den Linden, because this made him still feel at home. In other words, it was a house that made him feel at home, as when his life still meant something. And that he liked that he’d chosen Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, because this too was a name that meant something. Or it used to. Hadn’t it? Of course it had, especially la Grande Struttura.

The tram stopped and the doors opened. People boarded. He waited till the doors closed again. Go ahead, go ahead, I’d prefer to walk, I’ll take a healthy stroll, the weather’s too nice not to. The light was red. He studied his reflection in the glass of the closed door, although a strip of rubber divided him in two. Divided in two is fine, caro, always divided in two, half here, half there, that’s life, life’s like that. But not bad at all: a handsome older man, white hair, an elegant jacket, Italian loafers from a downtown shop, the well-off look of a well-off person: the rewards of capitalism. He hummed: tout est affaire de décor, changer de lit, changer de corps. He knew quite a bit about that, yes, he’d spent a whole life in that mode. The tram left. He waved after it, as if waving good-bye to someone on board. Who was that person on the tram headed off to the Pergamon? He gave himself an affectionate pat on the cheek. Well, it’s you, my friend, it’s really you, et à quoi bon, puisque c’est encore moi qui moi-même me trahis. He softly sang the final lines of the stanza, his voice deep and slightly dramatic, like Léo Ferré used to do it. The boy waiting for the green light, sitting on his scooter with his Pizza Hut box, stared at him in wonder: an elegant old man singing like a lark at a tram stop, funny, no? Go on, young man, it’s green now, he waved the boy on, take your shit pizza to its destination, clear out, clear out, nothing to see here, just an old man humming the poems of Aragon, a faithful comrade from the good old days, he’s cleared out too, sooner or later we all clear out, even his Elsa’s eyes were dull now, good night Elsa’s eyes. He watched the tram turning onto Friedrichstrasse and waved good-bye to Elsa’s eyes. The cabdriver looked at him, bewildered. So, he said, you getting in? The old man apologized: sorry, my mistake, I was saying good-bye to someone, I wasn’t waving to you. The cabdriver shook his head disapprovingly. Turkish, probably. This city’s full of Turks, Turks and Gypsies, they all pour in here, those bums, to do what? to beg, yes, to beg, poor Germany. Ah, and now he’s complaining too, the immigrant, the nerve of this guy. I told you you’ve got it wrong, he argued, voice rising, you’ve misunderstood, I was waving at someone else. I only asked if you needed help, the guy explained in broken German, excuse me, sir, do you need help? Do I need help? No, thank you, he answered crisply, thank you, I’m very well, young man. The cab drove off. Are you well? he asked himself. Of course he was well, it was a beautiful summer day, so rare in Berlin, maybe a little too hot. In fact, maybe a little too hot for his liking, and with the heat one’s blood pressure does tend to rise. No salted food and no exertion, the doctor had warned him, your pressure is borderline, it’s probably anxiety, is something worrying you, are you getting your rest, do you sleep well, do you have insomnia? Such questions. Of course he was sleeping well, how could a tranquil old man sleep badly when he had a nice bank account, a magnificent apartment in the center of the city, a vacation cottage in Wannsee, a lawyer son in Hamburg and a daughter married to the owner of a supermarket chain, come on, doctor. But the physician persisted: bad dreams, trouble sleeping, waking up startled? Yes, sometimes, doctor, but life is long, you know, and at a certain age you think back to people who aren’t there anymore, you look back, at the net pulled over us, this torn net, of those who were fishing, because now they’ve all been fished themselves, you understand? I don’t understand, the physician said, so, can you sleep or not? Doctor, he wanted to tell that good man, what do you want from me at this point? I’ve played all the solitaire and vomited all the kirsch I could, and I stuffed all the books in the stove, doctor, and you expect me to be a sound sleeper? But instead he answered: when I sleep I sleep well, and when I don’t sleep I try to sleep. If you weren’t retired I’d say you were suffering from stress, declared the physician, but quite frankly that’s not possible, so your high blood pressure must be due to anxiety, you’re an anxious person even if you appear calm, take two of these pills before going to bed, avoid salted food, and you have to quit smoking.

He lit a cigarette, a nice, mild American cigarette. When he worked in la Grande Struttura there were people who would’ve denounced their parents for a pack of American cigarettes, and now the Americans, after having conquered the world, were deciding that smoking made you ill. Asshole doctor sold out to the Americans. He crossed Unter den Linden at Humboldt University and sat under the square umbrellas of the würstel kiosk. In line at the kiosk was a nice little Spanish family, dad, mom, and two teenagers, trays in hand. Tourists everywhere now. They weren’t sure how to pronounce the dish. Kartoffeln, the woman claimed. No, no, the husband objected, since they were fried you had to ask for pommes, in the French way. Clever, this Spaniard with his little mustache. Passing alongside the man he started whistling “Los cuatro generales.” The woman turned and looked at him, almost alarmed. He pretended not to notice. Were they nostalgists or did they vote socialist? Who could tell. Ay Carmela, ay Carmela.

A sudden gust of wind swept napkins and empty cigarette packs off the ground. This happened often in Berlin: on a muggy day a sudden cold wind might send debris and moods whirling. As though it carried memories, nostalgia, lost sayings like this one: stormy weather and loyalty to principles. He felt a rush of rage. But what loyalty, he said aloud, what loyalty are you talking about, in your private life you’ve been more unfaithful than any man I know, I know everything about you, principles, sure, but which ones, those of the Party you’ve never wanted to know about, your wife you always cheated on, which principles are you ranting about, you fool? A little girl stopped in front of him. Her skirt dragged on the ground, she was barefoot. She pushed a piece of cardboard under his nose: I come from Bosnia, it read. Get lost, he told her, and smiled. The little girl smiled back and went away.

Maybe it was better to take a cab, he felt tired now. Who knew why he felt so tired, he’d spent the morning doing nothing, lounging around reading the paper. Newspapers make you tired, he said to himself, the news makes you tired, the world makes you tired. The world makes you tired because it’s tired. He headed toward the metal trash can and threw away an empty pack of cigarettes, then that day’s newspaper, he didn’t feel like keeping it in his pocket. He was a good citizen, he was, he didn’t like to dirty the city. But the city was already dirty. Everything was dirty. He said to himself: no, I’ll go on foot, I can control the situation better. The situation, what situation? Well, the situation he was used to controlling at other times. Back then, yes, it was rewarding: your Target would walk ahead of you, unaware, calm, going about his business. You too, apparently, were going about your business, but not at all unaware, quite the opposite: from the photos they made you study, you knew each and every feature of your Target, you’d recognize him even in a theater audience, while he knew nothing about you, you were an anonymous face to him, like millions of other anonymous faces in the world, he went his way and going his own way he guided you, since you had to follow him. He was the compass for your route, you merely had to follow.

He chose a Target. When he left home he always needed to find a Target, otherwise he felt lost, would lose his bearings. Because the Target clearly knew where to go, while he didn’t, where could he go at this point, now that the job he’d always had was finished and Renate was dead? Ah, the wall, such nostalgia! It was there, solid, concrete, it marked a border, marked life, gave a person a sense of belonging. Thanks to a wall you belong to something, you stay on one side or the other, the wall is like a cardinal point, here it’s east, there it’s west, you know where you are. When Renate was still alive, even though the wall was no longer there, at least he knew where to go, because he had to do all the housework, he didn’t trust the woman paid by the hour, she was a little Indian woman who looked shifty and spoke awful German and constantly repeated yes sir, even when he sent her to hell. Go to hell, you ugly stupid little thing. Yes sir.

First of all he’d go to the supermarket. Every day, because he didn’t like to buy too much, only little daily supplies, according to Renate’s wishes. What would you like this morning, Renate, for instance, would you like those Belgian liqueur chocolates, or would you prefer some hazelnut pralines? Or else, look, I’ll go to the produce section, you can’t imagine everything in that supermarket, you know, there’s no comparison with the grocery stores of our day, you can find everything, really everything, for instance, would you like some nice juicy peaches on this gray December day? I’ll bring you some, they come from Chile, or from Argentina, those places way over there, or would you prefer pears, cherries, apricots? I’ll bring you some. Would you like a very sweet, yellow melon, the kind that goes well with port or with Italian prosciutto? I’ll bring you some of that too, today I’d like to make you happy, Renate, I want you to smile.

Renate would smile at him wearily. Going along the path in the garden, he’d turn to look back at her as she waved from the window on the terrace. The terrace wall hid the wheels of her wheelchair. She seemed to be sitting in an armchair, seemed like a normal person, still pretty, her face smooth, her hair blond, never mind her age. Renate, my Renate, I’ve loved you so much, you know? you can’t imagine how much, more than my own life, and I still love you, truly, even if there is one thing I need to tell you, but what’s the point now? I have to take care of you, wash you, nurse you as if you were a child, poor Renate, destiny’s been cruel, you were still pretty, and really you aren’t so old, we wouldn’t be so old, we could still enjoy life, who knows, traveling, instead you’re reduced to such a state, all this is such a pity, Renate. He’d turn on the path and walk beneath the trees along the wide boulevard. Life is out of phase, he’d think, everything’s off schedule. And he’d head to the supermarket, spend a nice morning there, it was a good way to pass the time, but now, since Renate was no longer there, it was difficult to pass the time.

He looked around. Another tram had stopped across the street. A middle-aged woman with a shopping bag, a guy and a girl holding hands, an elderly man dressed in blue. They seemed ridiculous Targets to him. Patience, patience, don’t act like a little boy, have you perhaps forgotten your craft? It takes patience, don’t you remember anymore? So much patience, days of patience, months of patience, paying attention, being discreet, hours and hours of sitting in a café, in a car, behind a newspaper, always reading the same newspaper, for entire days.

Why not wait for a good Target reading the newspaper, like this, to know how things were going in the world? He bought Die Zeit at the nearby kiosk, it had always been his weekly, in the days of real Targets. Then he sat on the terrace of the würstel kiosk, under the lindens. It wasn’t lunchtime yet, but he could have a nice würstel with potatoes. Normal or with curry? asked the little man with a white apron. He decided on the curry, something entirely new, and asked for more ketchup, really postmodern, which was a word on everyone’s lips. He left practically the whole thing on the paper plate, just disgusting, who knew why it was so popular.

He looked around. Everyone seemed so ugly. Fat. Even the thin ones seemed fat, fat on the inside, as if he could see them on the inside. They were oily, that was it, oily, as if covered in suntan oil. They were practically gleaming. He opened the newspaper: let’s see how the world’s going, this vast world that’s waltzing along so happily. Well, not so much. The Strategic Defense Initiative, claimed the American. Who’re they defending themselves from? he snickered. Who are they defending themselves from? — from us? — when we’re all dead? There was a picture of the American on a podium, alongside a flag. He must’ve had a brain no bigger than a thimble, as the little French ditty went. He recalled the song he liked so much, that Brassens sure was quite a guy, he hated the bourgeoisie. Long time ago. Best mission of his life, Paris. Un jolie fleur dans une peau de vache, une jolie vache désguisée en fleur. His French was still perfect, no accent, no inflection, neutral like the voice over the loudspeaker in an airport, that’s how he’d learned it in the special school, you really had to study back then, no kidding, five chosen out of a hundred and those five had to be perfect, as he was.

There was a line in front of the booth of the Staatsoper, must be an important concert that evening. And what if he went? Why not, I could … A man was coming down the staircase of the library, an elegant man, a thin briefcase under his arm. There he was, the perfect Target. He pretended to be buried in his newspaper. The man passed right by him. What a goose. He let the man walk on another hundred meters or so and then he stood up. Crossed the street. Always better to stick to the opposite sidewalk, that was the old rule of thumb, one mustn’t ignore the old rules. The man went in the direction of the Scheunenviertel. What a sweet Target, he was taking his same route, couldn’t get any better than that. The man seemed to be heading to the Pergamon. And in fact he went inside. How clever, as if he himself hadn’t understood. He chuckled to himself: sorry, dear goose, if you’re here on a mission or are pretending to be a university professor it’s logical you’d enter the Pergamon, do you really think someone with my experience would be fooled by such a cheap trick?

He sat on the base of a statue and calmly waited for him. He lit a cigarette. Up to now the physician allowed him only four cigarettes a day, two after lunch and two after dinner. But this Target deserved a cigarette. Waiting, he glanced at the newspaper, the arts page. There was an American film that was a popular box-office hit. It was a spy film set in Berlin in the sixties. He felt a strong yearning. He had the urge to go where he’d decided to go and not lose any more time with this stupid little professor he’d gotten involved with. It was too banal, too predictable. And in fact, there he was, exiting with a clear plastic bag full of catalogs that probably weighed a ton.

He threw his butt in the canal and stuffed his hands in his pockets, as if he were just dawdling. This, yes, this was what he liked: pretending to stroll around. But he wasn’t strolling around, he had a visit to make, he’d decided on this the night before, an agitated night, full of insomnia. He had some things to say to him — this guy. First of all, he’d say that he’d worked everything out. So many of his colleagues, including those at his level, had wound up taxi drivers — fired just like that — but not him, no, he’d fixed himself up quite nicely, he’d had the foresight, like you should, and so he had, to set aside a nice nest egg. How? That was his business, but he’d succeeded in setting aside a nice nest egg, and in dollars — in Switzerland, no less — and when everything had flopped he’d bought a nice single-family home on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, which was a name that meant something, a few steps from Unter den Linden, because this made him feel at home. All told, it was a house that made him feel at home, like when his life still held meaning. But did it once? Of course it did.

The Chausseestrasse seemed deserted to him. Few cars passed. It was Sunday, a nice Sunday at the end of June, Berliners were in Wannsee, taking in the first rays of sun on the Martin Wagner beach, drinking aperitifs before their nice little lunch. He realized he was hungry. Yes, if he thought about it, he was hungry, that morning he’d had only a cappuccino, maybe because the evening before he’d gone overboard. He’d eaten oysters at the Paris Bar, at this point he went to the Paris Bar almost every evening, when he wasn’t trying out other chic restaurants. Don’t you get it, you knucklehead, he murmured, you acted like a Franciscan your whole life, but now I’m having a ball at chic restaurants, eating oysters every night, and you know why? Because we aren’t eternal, caro, you said so yourself, and so it’s worth eating oysters. He liked the courtyard. It was simple, uncluttered, it resembled the knucklehead, rough as he’d been, with tables under the trees where two foreign tourists were drinking beer. The man was in his fifties, with the round eyeglasses of an intellectual, metal frames, like his own beloved knucklehead, bald with fringes on the side. The woman was a brunette, pretty, with a determined and frank expression, big dark eyes, younger than the man. They were speaking in Italian, with some snippets in an unknown language. He pricked up his ears. Spanish? Maybe Spanish, but he was too far away. He walked by them with a purposeful air and said: Hello, welcome to Berlin. Thank you, replied the man. Italian? he asked. The woman smiled at him: Portuguese, she answered. The man spread his arms wide looking pleased: changing countries more often than shoes, I’m a little Portuguese too, the man said in Italian, and he caught the quote. Very nice, my little intellectual, I see you’ve read that knucklehead, congratulations.

He decided to have lunch inside. You had to go down to a cellar, and maybe that’s what it was once. Of course, sure, it was that cellar, now he remembered, often the knucklehead would meet a little failed actress there, a bitch older than Helene who then told all in a book that came out in France, called … he could no longer recall what it was called, even though he’d followed the whole thing himself, during his Parisian years, ah, yes, it was called Ce qui convient and ostensibly it talked about the theater, yet it was also a kind of philosophy of life: gossip. But what year was that? He couldn’t remember. The knucklehead had set up a sofa and a side lamp in that cellar, right under Helene’s nose, Helene, who in her life had swallowed more bitter pills than mouthfuls of air.

The restaurant was fairly dark, with a cabaret atmosphere, like Maria Farrar and other expressionist stuff the knucklehead had been devoted to in his youth. The tables were of rough wood, the other furniture charming, the walls full of photos. He examined the photos. He knew most of them, had seen so many of them while looking through dossiers in his office. His assistants had even taken a few of these pictures. Whoremonger, he said to himself, you were a real whoremonger, a moralist without morals. He studied the menu: the lady never knew how to win over lovers, but at least she’d succeeded with food, all her life she’d demanded Austrian cuisine, and the restaurant respected her tastes. Appetizers, best not. First course, soup. He began pondering. There was a potato soup he liked better than the German version. Actually he’d never much liked German food, too greasy, the Austrians were more refined, but maybe he should avoid the potato soup, it was hot out. The roe deer? Why not the roe deer? You couldn’t beat the Austrians at cooking roe deer. Too heavy, the physician would disagree. He decided on a simple wiener schnitzel. The fact is, wiener schnitzel done the Austrian way was sublime, and then those potatoes they made here, well yes, he’d take the wiener schnitzel. He drank white Austrian wine, even if he didn’t like fruity wines, and mentally made a toast to the memory of Helene. To your thick skin, he said, my dear prima donna. To finish, a decaf, to avoid nighttime arrhythmia.

When he went out into the courtyard he was tempted to visit the house, a house museum now, how amusing. But, who knows, maybe the place had been renovated, painted, all traces of life scrubbed away, adapted for intelligent tourists. He recalled the house one night in ’54 when that jerk was there in the wings with the Berliner Ensemble, staring at Mother Courage’s cart. He’d inspected each room, drawer by drawer, sheet by sheet, letter by letter. He knew it like no one else: he’d violated it. I’m sorry, he said softly, I’m sorry, really, but those were my orders. He went out onto the street and walked a few meters. The little neighboring cemetery, protected by a gate, was accessed by a driveway. It was deserted. There were many trees, everyone resting in the shade. A little cemetery, but racé, he thought, with certain names: philosophers, physicians, literary figures: happy few. What do they do, the important people in a cemetery? They sleep, they sleep just like the ones who don’t count for shit. And everyone in the same position: horizontal. Eternity is horizontal. He turned around and there was Anna Seghers’s tombstone. When he was young he’d really loved her poems. One came to mind: years ago, a Jewish actor recited it every evening in a little theater in Le Marais, a frightening, heartrending poem that the man didn’t have the courage to say by heart.

When he arrived before the tomb he said: hi, I’ve come to see you. Suddenly he had no desire at all to talk with him about the house and how he’d set himself up well for his old age. He hesitated and then said only: you don’t know me, my name is Karl, it’s my baptismal name, look, it’s my real name. Just then, a butterfly arrived. It was a common little butterfly with white wings, a small cabbage butterfly wandering into the cemetery. He stood stock-still and closed his eyes, as if making a wish. But he had no wish to make. He reopened his eyes: the butterfly had perched on the tip of the nose of the bronze bust in front of the tomb.

I’m really sorry, he said, that they didn’t give you the epitaph you dictated when you were alive: here lies B.B., clean, objective, bad. I’m really sorry they didn’t put it on there for you, a person should never come up with his own epitaph ahead of time, since his descendants never obey. The little butterfly beat its wings, raised them, then drew them together as if about to take flight, though it didn’t move. You really did have a great big nose, he said, and a bristly head of hair, you were a knucklehead, you’ve always been a knucklehead, you gave me a whole lot to do. The butterfly took off briefly, then settled back on the statue’s nose.

You fool, he said, I was one of your friends, I loved you, are you amazed that I loved you? So now listen, that August in ’56, when your coronary arteries exploded, I cried, really, I cried, I haven’t cried that much in my life, you know? When he had the time, Karl cried very little, but for you I cried.

The butterfly rose in flight, made two turns over the head of the statue and fluttered off. I have to tell you something, he said rapidly as if he were talking to the butterfly, I have to tell you something, it’s urgent. The butterfly disappeared beyond the trees, and he lowered his voice. I know everything about you, I know everything about your life, day by day, everything: your women, your ideas, your friends, your travels, even your nights and all your little secrets, even the tiniest one: everything. He realized he was sweating. He took a breath. On the other hand, I didn’t know a thing about myself, I thought I knew it all but I didn’t know a thing. He paused and lit a cigarette. He needed a cigarette. It was only two years ago, when they opened the archives, that I discovered Renate had been betraying me all along. Who knows why it suddenly occurred to me that even I might have a file like everyone else. It was a complete file, detailed, of someone who’d been spied on every day. The item “Relatives” was a whole dossier, with photos taken with a zoom lens, showing Renate and the head of the Internal Office naked in the sun, on a riverbank, like in a nudist colony. Underneath was the caption: Prague, 1952. I was in Paris by then. And there are many others: in ’62 while leaving a hotel in Budapest, in ’69 on a beach on the Black Sea, in ’74 in Sofia. Up till ’82 when he died, his coronaries exploded like yours, he was old, twenty years older than Renate, proof positive.

He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and stepped back. He was bathed in sweat. He sat on the wooden bench, on the other side of the little alley. You know, he said, I would have liked to tell Renate, I would have liked to tell her I knew everything, I’d discovered everything, but things are comic, Renate had a stroke, there was hope at first that she’d recover, and in fact they took good care of her, with physiotherapy too, everything that was necessary, but she didn’t get better, in the final years she remained in a wheelchair, and her facial paralysis didn’t go away either, every evening I said to myself: tomorrow I will tell her, but how can you say you’ve discovered everything to someone who has a distorted face and twisted legs? I didn’t have the courage, really, I didn’t have the courage.

He checked his watch. Maybe it was time to go. He felt tired, maybe he’d get a taxi. He said: what I like most of all about my new house is the view over Unter den Linden, it’s a nice house, with all the modern conveniences. He started down the little alley to the entrance gate. He hesitated and turned, waved good-bye to the trees. In the evening I eat in classy restaurants, he said again, for instance tonight I’m thinking of going to an Italian restaurant where they make this spaghetti with shrimp you can’t imagine, with more shrimp than spaghetti. He closed the gate delicately, careful not to make a sound. Back in our time, such places didn’t exist, caro, he murmured to himself, we missed out on the best.

Between Generals

“I’ve never believed life imitates art, that saying’s widespread because it’s so easy, reality always outstrips the imagination, that’s why some stories can’t be written, they’re too pallid to evoke what actually was. But let’s forget about theories, I’ll gladly tell you the story, but then you can write it yourself if you wish — you’ve got the advantage over me — you don’t know who lived it. The truth is he only told me the backstory, I learned the ending from a friend of his, a man of few words; we limit ourselves to talking about music or chess moves, probably had Homer known Ulysses he would’ve thought him a banal man. I’ve come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren’t the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself. Who knows why he came to this city to die when it doesn’t remind him of a thing, perhaps because it’s a Tower of Babel and he started to suspect that his story was an emblem of the babel of life, his own country was too small to die in. He must be almost ninety, he spends his afternoons gazing out the window at New York’s skyscrapers, a Puerto Rican girl comes each morning to tidy up his apartment, she brings him a dish from Tony’s Café that he reheats in the microwave, and after he listens religiously to the old Béla Bartók records that he knows by heart, he ventures out for a short walk to the entrance of Central Park, in his armoire, in a plastic garment bag, he preserves his general’s uniform, and when he returns from the park, he opens its door and pats the uniform twice on the shoulder, like he would an old friend, then he goes to bed, he’s told me he doesn’t dream, but if he does, it’s only of the sky over the Hungarian plains, he thinks that must be the effect of the sleeping pill an American doctor prescribed. So I’ll tell you the story in a few words just as the one who lived it told me, all the rest is conjecture, but that is your concern.”

When the story begins, its protagonist was a young officer in the Hungarian army, and according to the Gregorian calendar the year was 1956. For the sake of argument we’ll call him László, a name that renders him anonymous in Hungary, though truth be told he wasn’t just any László, he was that László. From a purely conjectural viewpoint, we might imagine him to be a man of around thirty-five, tall, thin, reddish-blond hair, gray eyes with a faint glint of blue. One might add that he was the sole heir of a family of landowners on the Romanian border, and in his household, they spoke German more than Hungarian, according to Habsburg Empire tradition. After the expropriation of their land, the family moved to Budapest into the large apartment they were granted by the Communist regime. Perhaps we could say our protagonist was drawn to the humanities at school, that he excelled in ancient Greek, that he memorized entire passages from Homer and secretly composed odes in the manner of Pindar. His teacher, the only person to whom he’d dared show them, had predicted for him a future as a great poet, a new Petöfi, something he himself hadn’t believed, an insignificant detail in any case, merely conjecture. The fact was his father wanted him to serve in the military, like he had when he was young, serving as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and for the father, that the army now belonged to a Communist regime was altogether secondary, because Hungary came before anything else, it was for this land that people bore arms, not for some ephemeral government. Our László accepted the will of his father without protest; he was very much aware that he’d never be a new Petöfi and couldn’t stand being second to anyone, he wanted to excel at something, whatever that might be, he didn’t lack willpower, and sacrifices came naturally to him. At the Budapest Military Academy he was soon the best cadet, then the best officer-in-training, and finally the first-class officer who, at the end of the training, was entrusted with a delicate command post in a frontier zone.

At this point, a digression might be necessary that no longer belongs to the realm of conjecture but to the imagination of the teller of a story as heard by somebody to whom the story was told in turn. It is permissible to think that László, in the village where he spent his youth and where his father once owned the land, had left his first love yet remained faithful to her. Some emotional clarification is called for concerning our László, otherwise he might seem to be only a puppet in uniform consigned to a story that reckons on willpower and physical force but excludes the mysterious strength of the cardiac muscle. László had a sentimental heart, and to attribute feelings to him that we all feel in our hearts isn’t groundless conjecture, for László’s heart was also beating for a great love, and his lamented great love was a pretty country girl to whom, after an afternoon in a cornfield in his youth, he’d sworn eternal fidelity, and she in her father’s large house protected by a line of trees would have assured him a line of descent. But meanwhile László was there, in Budapest, with all the grand buildings in that city, the general chief of staff had taken a liking to him, the last Sunday of each month he gave a party and all those invited were in dress uniform, after dinner people danced, a pianist in a tailcoat performed Viennese waltzes, the general’s daughter, while dancing, was lost in his gaze, and who knows if she was really seeing László there or the most brilliant officer of the Military Academy as described by her father. But this is altogether secondary, the fact is that after a brief engagement they were married. It can’t be ruled out that for László, imagination was stronger than reality. He loved his wife, who was pretty and kind, but he wasn’t able to find the same love for her that he thought he’d betrayed, that is, the now-blurred image of a country girl with blond hair. So he went searching for that ghost in the brothels of Budapest, at first going with some of his brothers-in-arms, then melancholically on his own.

And meanwhile we’ve arrived at 1956, the year when the Soviet army invaded Hungary. The reason for the invasion, we know, was ideological in nature, but it’s not possible to establish if László’s response was along those lines or had other motivations: the education he had received at home, for instance, because this was Hungarian soil, and as his father had taught him, Hungarian soil came before any government; or was his reaction merely for technical reasons, so to speak, because a soldier must always obey his chief of staff and never question orders. It’s also true, however, that László, raised in a big family, had access to a large library, and this might allow for more specious conjecture, that he knew his Darwin, for instance, and thought that political systems, like biological organisms, have an evolution, and that Hungary’s system, somewhat coarse though rooted in good intentions, could, if headed by a man like Imre Nagy, lead to a better outcome. Or that he’d read Return from the USSR by André Gide, which all of Europe had read and which had also circulated underground in Hungary. Along with this second-level conjecture we can introduce something more: that he took comfort in the possible support of the communist parties of several European countries, and especially in the words of a young functionary of the Communist Party in a country he deemed important, a distinguished man who spoke perfect French and knew everything about the gulags, who at a cocktail party confessed that he was a migliorista communist, a term whose definition remained vague to him but which he’d believed analogous to his own ideas.

The night Soviet tanks crossed the Hungarian border, László remembered the migliorista, and since that young functionary had left him his phone number, he called him right before the Russians cut the lines: he knew that the symbolic support of a democratic country would have been more important against the Russian tanks than the small, poorly equipped army at Hungary’s disposal. The phone rang for a long while, then a sleepy voice answered, a maid, sorry, the onorevole was out for dinner, the caller could leave a message if he liked. László told her to say only that László had called. No one called back. László thought domestic servants couldn’t be trusted, but he wasn’t much concerned, because at that moment he had other things to think about, and then, two days later, when he heard on the radio that the foreign comrade, on behalf of his own party, had called the Hungarian patriots counterrevolutionary, he realized he hadn’t gotten it wrong. What László’s thinking now, instead, as he gazes out the window at the New York skyscrapers, is how curious things are, because he’s just read a poem by Yeats, “Men Improve with the Years,” and he asks himself if it’s really like this, if time actually improves men, or if this improvement actually means they’re becoming other men, because as time carries them along with it, what once was true now seems more like a mirage, and meanwhile he’s listening to Béla Bartók’s music, the sun is setting over New York, he has to take his constitutional up to Central Park, and he’s thinking of the time when he was the one who wanted to improve his era.

How László was able to hold the Soviet army in check for three days, nobody can determine. We can make some conjectures: his strategic skill, his stubbornness, his fervid faith in the impossible. But the truth of the matter was that the tanks of the invading army couldn’t get through, the Soviets sustained many losses until, on the fourth day, their forces finally prevailed over László’s fragile platoon. The Russian commander was a man close to his age, let’s just call him Dimitri, which in Russia ensures anonymity, but he was none other than that Dimitri. A Georgian, he’d studied at the Moscow Military Academy, he loved three things in life: Stalin, because loving Stalin was mandatory and because Stalin was Georgian like he was, Pushkin, and women. A career officer, he’d never been involved in politics, he simply loved Russian soil, he was a hot-tempered, hearty man, who was unhappy, maybe, because while he’d been decorated for bravery as a young man in the fight against the Nazis, he also really hated the Nazis, while he wasn’t able to muster up any hatred at all for the Hungarians and couldn’t understand why he had to. Yet their unexpected resistance bothered him, he grieved for his dead soldiers but mostly he was bothered by this useless resistance that made no sense to him, the Hungarians knew they’d be swept away like twigs and every hour they resisted was just an illusion made of blood. Why shed blood over an illusion? This disturbed him.

When order was restored in Budapest as Moscow wanted, and the unwanted government was replaced with more loyal men, the Hungarian officers who’d taken part in the rebellion, as the resistance was called, were tried in court. Of course László was among them, he’d been one of the worst rebels and deserved to be made an example of. To support its own charges, that fake court asked the officer Dimitri for a written report, which he sent from Moscow. The sentence had already been set, this was just for show, yet because of the sheer force of the writing, László thought he was being condemned mainly because of Dimitri’s report. He was given the sentence a rebel like him deserved: he was publicly disgraced, then expelled from the army, eventually jailed in civilian clothes, because the Hungarian uniform must remain guiltless. When they freed him he was already an old man, his house had been confiscated, he had no means of support, his wife was dead, he suffered from arthritis. He went to live with his daughter, who’d married a country veterinarian. And so time went along, until the day the Berlin Wall collapsed, and the empire of the Soviet Union collapsed as well, along with the systems of satellite countries such as Hungary. A few years later the democratic government of his new country decided to rehabilitate the career officers who in 1956 had guided the revolt against the Soviet Union. Only a few were still alive, László among them.

Sometimes the deep meaning of an event reveals itself just at the point when that event seems to be settled. László’s life seemed almost at an end, and his story too. And yet it’s right at this point that the story acquires an unexpected meaning.

His daughter and grandchild took him to Budapest for the solemn ceremony that would reintegrate him into the army and award him the Hungarian medal of heroism. He went to the ceremony wearing the old uniform that had withstood time except for a few moth holes. The ceremony was imposing, broadcast on television, in that immense hall of the ministry: so, like many years before when he’d been demoted from one moment to the next, from one moment to the next he was now promoted, and found himself once again a lieutenant general, with a bunch of medals pinned to his chest. The Defense Ministry had reserved a luxurious suite for him in a fine hotel in Budapest. That night László fell asleep quickly, perhaps because he’d drunk too much, but he awoke in the middle of the night, experienced a long bout of insomnia, and during that sleepless time, he pondered something. It’s difficult to guess the motives behind this idea, but the fact is that the next morning László telephoned the Defense Ministry, gave his name and his rank, said the first and last name of a certain Russian officer, and asked for his coordinates. These were furnished to him in a few minutes: the Hungarian secret service knew everything about this officer and even provided his phone number. Dimitri, too, was a general; gold medal of honor of the Soviet Union, now retired, he lived alone in a small apartment in Moscow. The new Russia offered him a pension; a widower, he’d joined the Russian chess-players’ association and had a Saturday night season ticket at a little theater where they performed only Pushkin. László called him very late at night. Dimitri answered after the first ring, László told him his name, and Dimitri remembered immediately. László said he wanted to get to know him, Dimitri didn’t ask why, he understood. László proposed that he come to Budapest, he’d pay for the trip and lodging for a weekend at a fine hotel in Budapest. Dimitri refused, offering plausible reasons: a Hungary he didn’t like, certain foreign secret services, who knows what could happen to him, he hoped he’d understand. László said he did, and so, if Dimitri agreed, he’d go to Moscow instead.

He left the following day. His daughter tried to talk him out of it, but László told her to go back home, to not leave the vet by himself too much. When he returned, all he told his daughter and son-in-law was that the trip had gone well. They insisted on more details, and he repeated that the trip had gone well, nothing else. It was only later that he explained about that weekend in Moscow, when he was gazing at skyscrapers from a small apartment in Manhattan.

Saturday nights he’d go for dinner at a little McDonald’s on Seventieth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. He went there for two reasons. First of all because he’d discovered that in the elegant restaurants of New York, they served only breast of chicken and disdained the other parts, which ended up at McDonald’s, the restaurant for poor people, and László liked precisely these parts of the chicken reserved for mediocre restaurants. Plus he’d gotten to know a little group of fellow countrymen who stayed there late playing chess. He’d started playing chess with one of them, someone like himself who’d resisted the Soviets and had the great quality of knowing how to listen. László chose to recount his voyage to Moscow to this man: it was late, snowing, and the only ones left in the restaurant were the two of them and the waiter who was sweeping the floor. Dear Ferenc, he said, three days in Moscow, a city I’d never been to before, what a great city, you’d have liked it too, the people are like us, it’s not like here, where we all feel like strangers. The first day, Dimitri and I talked about this and that and played chess, he won three times in a row and the fourth time I won, but I had the impression he let me. The following day we took a long walk along the Moscova and that night we went to see a play by Pushkin. The third day he took me to a brothel, it was a very elegant place, the sort you can’t find anymore in Budapest, I had quite a good time there and found a virility I thought dead. Ferenc, I want to tell you something, perhaps you won’t believe me, but it was there in Moscow that I spent the best days of my life.

Yo me enamoré del aire

The taxi stopped in front of a wrought-iron gate painted green. The botanical garden is here, said the driver. He paid and got out. Do you know from which side you might be able to see a building from the twenties? he asked the driver. The man didn’t seem to understand. It has some Art Nouveau friezes on the façade, he explained, it was certainly a building with some architectural value, I doubt they demolished it. The taxi driver shook his head and left. It must have been nearly 11:00 a.m. and he was starting to feel the strain — the trip had been long. The gate was wide open and a sign informed visitors that on Sundays admission was free and the doors closed at 2:00 p.m. He didn’t have much time, then. He started down a driveway lined with tall, thin palm trees topped with meager tufts of green. He thought: so are these the Buritì? At home they always talked of the Buritì palms. At the end of the driveway the garden began, with a paved clearing from which little paths departed for the four cardinal points. A compass rose was designed in the paving stones. He stopped, not sure which direction to take: the botanical garden was large and he’d never find what he was seeking by closing time. He chose south. In his life he’d always looked south, and now that he’d arrived in this southern city he thought it fitting to continue in the same direction. Yet, within, he felt a tramontana breeze. He thought of the winds in life, because there are winds that accompany life: the soft zephyr, the warm wind of youth that later the mistral takes upon itself to cool down, certain southwesterly winds, the sirocco that weakens you, the icy mistral. Air, he thought, life is made of air, a breath and that’s it, and after all we too are nothing but a puff, a breath, then one day the machine stops and that breath ends. He stopped too because he was panting. You’re really short of breath, he told himself. The path climbed steeply toward the terraced land he could just make out beyond the shadows of some enormous magnolias. He sat on a bench and pulled a little notebook from his pocket. He jotted down the names of the countries of origin of the plants around him: the Azores, the Canary Islands, Brazil, Angola. With his pencil he drew some leaves and flowers, then, using the two pages at the center of the notebook, he drew the flower of a tree with a very strange name, which came from Canary-Azores. It was a magnificent giant with long lanceolate leaves and huge swollen flowers shaped like ears of corn, which seemed like fruit. The age of that giant was quite remarkable, he worked it out: at the time of the Paris Commune it must have already been full grown.

He’d caught his breath now, and he took off at a brisk pace down the path. The sun hit him straight on, blinding him. It was hot, yet the breeze from the ocean was fresh. The southern part of the botanical garden ended in that huge terrace that provided a complete panorama of the city: the valley and the old districts with their dense grid of roads and alleys, the buildings mostly white, yellow, and blue. From up there you could embrace the whole horizon, and far off to the right, beyond the port with its cranes, lay the open sea. The terrace was bordered by a low wall, only chest-high, on which the city was depicted in a mosaic of yellow and blue azulejos. He began deciphering the topography, trying to orient himself with that primitive map: the triumphal arch of the lower city from which the three main arteries departed, that Enlightenment architectural style owing to reconstruction after the earthquake; the center, with the two large squares side by side, to the left the rotunda with the huge bronze monument, then the newer zone toward the north, its architecture typical of the fifties and sixties. Why did you come here? he asked himself, what are you looking for? It’s all vanished, everybody evaporated, poof. He realized he’d spoken aloud and laughed at himself. He waved at the city, as if it were a person. In the distance, a bell rang three times. He checked his watch, it was a quarter to noon, he decided to visit a different part of the garden and headed back to another path. At that moment a voice reached him. A woman was singing, but he didn’t know where. He stopped, trying to locate that sound. He went back, leaned over the wall, and looked down. Only then did he realize that to the left, just by the garden’s steep embankment, there was a building. It was old, one side to the botanical garden, but its façade was fully visible, and he could see it was a building from the beginning of the twentieth century, at least judging by the stone cornices and the stucco friezes representing theatrical masks laced with laurel wreaths. On the building’s flat roof was a huge terrace with chimneys jutting up and laundry cords running across it. The woman had her back to him, from behind she seemed a girl, she was hanging sheets but had to stand on tiptoe to reach the cords, her arms raised like a dancer. She was wearing a cotton print dress that outlined her slender body, and was barefoot. The breeze swelled the sheet toward her like a sail, and it seemed she was embracing it. Now she’d stopped singing, she bent over a wicker basket on a stool and pulled out colored garments, shirts it seemed to him, as though trying to decide which to hang first. He realized he was sweating a little. The voice he’d heard and no longer heard wasn’t gone, he could still hear it in his head, as if it had left a continuing echo, and at the same time he felt a strange yearning, a truly curious sensation, as though his body had lost all weight and was now fleeing into the distance, who knows where. Sing again, he murmured, please, sing again. The girl had put on a head scarf, had taken the basket off the stool, and now was sitting on it, trying to find shelter from the sun in the little bit of shade created by the sheets. Her back was to him so she couldn’t see him, but he stared at her, mesmerized, unable to avert his gaze. Sing again, he whispered. He lit a cigarette and realized his hand was trembling. He thought he’d had an auditory hallucination, sometimes we think we hear what we’d like to hear, nobody would sing that song anymore, those who once sang it were all dead, and then what song was it, from what era? It was quite old, from the sixteenth century or earlier, who could say, was it a ballad, a chivalrous song, a song of love, a song of farewell? He’d known it in another time, but that time was no longer his. He searched his memory, and in an instant, as if an instant could swallow up years, he returned to the time when somebody used to call him Migalha. Migalha means crumb, he said to himself, back then you were a crumb. Suddenly there came a strong gust of wind, the sheets snapped in the wind, the woman stood and began to hang colored shirts and a pair of short pants. Sing again, he whispered, please. At that moment the bells of the church nearby began pealing the midday hour and, as though summoned by the sound, a boy leaned out of the little rooftop dormer, where surely there was a set of stairs leading to the terrace, and ran toward her. He must have been four or five, curly-haired, his sandals with two semicircular openings at the toes and his shorts held up by suspenders. The girl put the basket on the ground, crouched down, cried out: Samuele! and opened her arms wide, and the boy dived into them, the girl stood and began spinning around, hugging the boy, they were both spinning like a merry-go-round, the boy’s legs were outstretched, and she was singing, Yo me enamoré del aire, del aire de una mujer, como la mujer era aire, con el aire me quedé.

He let himself slide to the ground, his back against the wall, and he gazed upward. The blue of the sky was a color that painted a wide-open space. He opened his mouth to breathe that blue, to swallow it, and then he embraced it, hugging it to his chest. He was saying: Aire que lleva el aire, aire que el aire la lleva, como tiene tanto rumbo no he podido hablar con ella, como lleva polisón el aire la bambolea.*

*A free translation of the two stanzas: “I was in love with the air, / With the air of a woman, / Because the woman was air, / I was left with a handful of air, / Air that carries off the air, / Air that the air carries off, / Because she went so quickly, / I couldn’t talk with her, / As if it were lifting a skirt / The air swayed her.”

Festival

He asked me what I thought about it. It wasn’t easy finding the words, it was late, tiredness weighed on me, I’d have liked to go to sleep, I was staring at the lights of the gulf, a damp breeze had risen up, the usual three or four night owls lingered on the hotel’s terrace, it was hard to follow what he was saying, even more so in a language foreign to us both. Now and then he’d pause to search for the right word and in those lapses my attention wandered even more, a country under surveillance, he hoped I’d understand, sure I understood, I understood perfectly, even if to really understand things, you needed to experience them firsthand, yet I knew very well that in those years his was a country under surveillance, or to be more precise, it was a police state. Exactly, he said, a police state, and I was a poor state employee, because everything was the state’s, do you get it? Do you want to know why in the bio I gave to the festival jury under “profession” I wrote “lawyer,” it’s simple, because that was my profession, I was a state lawyer, on behalf of the state I defended people the state wanted to convict, I don’t know if you understand what a vicious circle this was, that was the function of my profession, to accept this vicious circle, I was the dog who bites his own tail, no, I was the tail the dog bit. And then he added: what if we get something to drink? An excellent idea indeed, I agreed, for me maybe a tisane, the violent images from the last movie we’d had to sit through that day lingered in Technicolor on my tired retinas. Violence in Technicolor, he went on, in our country on the other hand violence was gray, not even black and white but gray, and I had to adapt to that gray, because I was the gray functionary of a state that, in order to make other countries believe democracy belonged to the people, provided the accused with a public defender like in a real democracy, yet the accused I dealt with hadn’t committed thefts, frauds, homicides, or any other crimes appearing in the penal code, they’d committed the crime of thinking differently from how the state thought, and they’d expressed their thoughts in public, or in private, perhaps because they’d talked about it with a cousin, or a brother-in-law, and those people had reported it to the state police. He paused, and meanwhile the waiter had arrived with our orders, but I’d changed my mind, I preferred a coffee, an Italian espresso, there are occasions, rare occasions, when you must be wide awake, I thought of the Italian proverb, the sleeping man won’t catch the fish, and asked him if he knew the saying, perhaps there was a similar version in his country, and he clearly did, if you don’t sleep tonight, you’ll catch a strange fish, he said smiling, a dog with a bitten tail, better make a joke of it, that way I won’t turn too dramatic, I’ll tell you about a dog whose tail was bitten.

The breeze had died down suddenly, leaving a clear night, on the promenade a small group passed singing “Cielito lindo,” in the morning we’d watched a Mexican movie, it wouldn’t win, the director and actors knew it, it was a simple and heartfelt movie, the kind that doesn’t win awards in important festivals, maybe some refined critic will talk about it. They’ve understood and are playing along, I said. Back then I too was playing along in some way, he said, but you play along even if it’s rigged, because you hope one day to draw the winning card, this is the perversity of the vicious circle, it’s like Achilles and the turtle, on paper the turtle wins the race, the logic is tight, but the truth is that Achilles is Achilles and you are the turtle, forgive me the zoological digressions, I’ve moved on from dogs to turtles, and the thing is that at the trial we’d begin from the same point, and the turtle in theory could arrive before Achilles, and the finish line would be the acquittal of the accused, but that finish line would never arrive for the turtle, my run consisted in trudging painfully after the fleet-footed one so he wouldn’t cross the line too many meters ahead of me, the race was his anyway, let’s say I had to be satisfied with centimeters, I was working with centimeters, I don’t know if I’m being clear, I’ll put it in an equation: one centimeter, one year less in a labor camp, two centimeters, two years less, and so on, sometimes you had to be satisfied even with millimeters, I’d try to nibble away at a few millimeters, two or three months less in jail can mean a great deal to a man, for example: my defendant had absolutely no intention of undermining state security, it’s true the books found in his apartment were published in France, though I did point out to this venerable court that they’re about the French Revolution, which, as we know, put an end to absolute monarchy: things of this kind, and the prosecuting attorney never did voice any objection, or interrogate, or question, anyway the race had already been won from the start, the sentence was already set, the judges needed only a few minutes in a fake meeting in the council chamber to read a slip of paper they already had in their pockets, yet how solemn they were as they listened to my closing address, my speeches asking for clemency or claiming the right to think, depending on which millimeters I was nibbling away at, at the moment.

He made a sweeping with his hand as if to say enough, picked up his cigarettes and lighter from the table, put a banknote on the bill plate. I don’t want to bother you further, he said in a low voice, you’re tired, and this is a stale story. And at that point, I did something inappropriate, too intimate for our having just met, I stopped him, gripping his arm. We can’t let this story be swallowed by the night, I said, please. I was losing myself in all the details, he said, sorry, I’ll try to be more concise, besides, this old story is simple in the end, or at least it seems simple when looking at it now and the details only weaken it, the thing is that on a certain day, a decisive day, I didn’t have any more millimeters to nibble at, absolutely zero, I was stuck at the starting line, I could have claimed my defendant was unfit to plead but even this was untenable, it wasn’t a proper mitigating circumstance for a talented journalist who everyone knew had never dissented from the regime, but how was it possible, a man like him not responsible for his own actions? They’d have laughed in my face. The case was this: my defendant had leaked some things to a German weekly, documents about the regime’s repression, he had a mole at the Ministry of the Interior and had prepared everything carefully, he’d asked for a passport to go to Frankfurt to do a piece on West German decadence, imagine that, he was supposed to cross the border on January tenth and on the twelfth, a Saturday, the weekly was supposed to publish the photocopies of the documents in a story signed under a pseudonym, which in fact was him. I don’t know what happened, the weekly had the copies for a while and perhaps feared they’d go stale, your press is always afraid news will get old, the inevitable never happens and the unexpected always does, someone wrote, and the unexpected had been this, a banal fact of advance disclosure, this was the turtle’s situation, it wasn’t a matter of nibbling away at millimeters anymore, maybe I could get him into a psychiatric prison, a bit better than labor camp, because the intellectuals who ended up there toiled less and were treated with more respect, but from a moral point of view it was even worse, when I rose for my closing statement I felt I was neither a dog nor a turtle, I really felt like a worm, headed right down the biological ladder, but as I was saying before, the inevitable never happens, the unexpected always does. And the unexpected was that the door to the courtroom swung open, an usher entered followed by a man who approached the bar, he was a tall man, with a few gray strands in his hair, I thought he was a bailiff, he was holding a piece of paper, which he showed to the judges, those magistrates read it in turn and began chattering amongst themselves, the president of the tribunal beckoned the bailiff, he went to the back of the courtroom and let in a young guy with a camera and a microphone, this kid placed the microphone in the middle of the room, then opened a tripod and put a camera on it that faced the bench and would film me and the defendant from the back, the president nodded for me to rise, it was my turn, the robes on my shoulders felt heavy and all of a sudden I felt excessively hot in that courtroom where it was freezing, I was defending a really difficult case and I gave my speech with conviction even though it would amount to nothing, as I told you, they used to stay only a few minutes in the council chamber, the judges in that democracy were in a hurry to get home, especially in winter, when the Warsaw roads are full of icy snow and it’s better to return before nightfall. But this time they were late in reentering, and the minutes passed. There was a silence in that room, you can’t imagine it, to say the silence of a tomb is a cliché, but I can’t find other words, rather, to pay homage to a writer from the country where we find ourselves now, I’d say there was a netherworldly silence. Finally the court came back, yet before reading the verdict the president took care to say that to err is human, to persist is diabolical, and the court was sure the defendant wouldn’t persist, he was a person too highly esteemed by the government and by the people to persist in his error, and this was the verdict, the atonement expected from him was a public admission of his error, possibly in the Party newspaper, which would offer him its generous hospitality. Even though they’d found a cunning way out, because as with the Stalin-era trials, they’d wanted him to plead guilty himself, they still hadn’t convicted him, they hadn’t had the courage to convict him, and this was really unusual in those times, in my country. I congratulated my defendant, whose face wore an incredulous expression, I wanted to hurry out of the room to find out who that elegant man was, the illusionist who’d enchanted the wild beasts, the audience, who’d changed the circus act right before their eyes. He hadn’t found anything strange in this, sometimes artists are like that, I’d never met that filmmaker before, I knew him only by name, the reason for that sudden intrusion, this is what I wanted to know, but what a question, he hadn’t burst in at all, he was simply one of the film directors at the State Documentary Studios, a state institution, and he’d gotten the idea to make a documentary about the trials of citizens accused of activity against the state, and so he’d asked for official permission from the state, and the state obviously had conceded, because a state institution cannot refuse to let one of its own directors film trials concerning the state. Of course all the filmed material was sifted through by high-level functionaries of the state so as to be approved before editing, he was sure he’d never get approval but that was beside the point, because the important thing was to film reality, and those functionaries would have to put reality in the archives, they couldn’t throw it out, and I knew as he did that functionaries of the state, in this case the judges, didn’t like to be judged by other functionaries of the state, because ours was a state founded on mutual respect, the only cohesive element that kept it on its feet: so there, the goal was this, to film our present time in order to leave it in the archives, was I satisfied? And at that point I asked him if he could give me his address, it was better to avoid the phone, I’d have liked to talk to him, I was a film buff. But I didn’t go to see him right away, actually I didn’t care that much about cinema, I went when the right moment arrived, I’ll be brief, otherwise I’ll end up with a screenplay, it was at the end of winter, he received me in his apartment, a sober place, only books and posters, in those days we were all poor. I told him I had another case to propose for his documentary, an even more difficult trial than the first one, something worth keeping in the archives, because this time the accused wasn’t even a person, it was a play, a tragedy or comedy I’m not really sure, he could call it what he liked, it was a theater piece, a performance basically without a script, almost no words were uttered, they talked with their bodies, there was a director, it’s true, yet with a play there are actors who interpret it, a music director, a lighting director, a stage designer, it was impossible to take all these people to court, in short, not even a word against the ideals of the state; the accused, if you can put it like that, was how the play was staged, that was considered subversive, but even the accusation was unclear, how can you charge the staging of a play? Come and film a case against fiction, I told him, a case against pure fiction. He came, and filmed the reading of the indictment by the prosecuting attorney, a reading that proved to be so grotesque that even the prosecutor realized it and at a certain point began wavering, the court didn’t have to retire to the council chamber, the president of the court objected that the charge had no legal substance and the play could be done. Then months passed by, maybe a year when I didn’t need to go see him. Then came the day I had to go ring his doorbell once again. But this time it wasn’t a matter of a play, it was about reality, about a man’s life, I said it like that, because this man’s possible punishment might just bury him alive. I explained the case to him, and he listened carefully. What a shame, he said, he’d be glad to come, but unfortunately at the moment his documentary was on hold, the Institute of Cinema had used up all the celluloid, he’d made a request for it to the relevant authorities more than a month earlier and they still hadn’t arranged to resupply him, I knew more than he did about bureaucratic delays, perhaps the celluloid would get to him by the end of the summer. I acted on impulse, didn’t even have time to think about what I was saying, Director, I said: come without the celluloid.

He paused. Lit a cigarette, hesitating like someone who fears he isn’t believed. So that’s how my trials were filmed from that point on, he continued, with the camera empty, and the sentences were always quite lenient. Of that short documentary, not even a half hour long, which he’d actually filmed and which remains buried in the archives of a defunct state, all the rest — at least a couple more hours of filming, I mean all the images filmed without celluloid — is the most moving, but those images live only in the archive of my memory and at a certain point it almost seemed to me I was seeing them projected on the screen of this clear night in May. He stopped talking, and I was to understand he had nothing else to add, raised his glass in a toast to something only he knew, and then said: now you get why I didn’t put screenwriter down in my bio, but this isn’t important, the funniest thing in this whole story is the line I used to convince him to come and film without celluloid: Director, we’re dealing with reality here, not film. Just think a moment about that bit of nonsense: we’re dealing with reality here, not film. Now that he’s no longer with us and this festival is showing a retrospective of all his movies, except the most important one, the one that’s not on celluloid, a desire has come over me and I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or regret: I wish that through some sorcery he’d pop out of the night, if only for an instant, to laugh with me at that line of mine.

He’d risen to his feet. He made a broad gesture that seemed meaningless, as though he were embracing the night. Only the two of us could laugh about that line of mine, he added, but not just about that one, about many other things, so many really, and now it’s no longer possible, but I fear I’ve taken advantage of your patience and your fatigue, we’ll see each other tomorrow morning at the first screening, it’s a movie taken from a bestseller, good night.

Bucharest Hasn’t Changed a Bit

Not to mention, he was doing well there — too well. Was he exaggerating? No, he wasn’t exaggerating in the least. I feel better here than at home, he said, my meals served, the bed made, sheets changed once a week, and a room all to myself, there’s even a small balcony, true the view isn’t much, a stretch of cement buildings, but from the common terrace with its little tables and wicker chairs you can enjoy a splendid panorama, the whole city, and to the right, the sea, it’s not a nursing home, he said, it’s a hotel. He almost sounded irritated, the way old people sometimes do, and his son didn’t dare contradict him. Dad, he murmured, don’t get worked up, I know you’re doing well here, I realize that. You don’t know anything, mumbled the old man, what do you know, you’re just saying that to make me happy, you had the good luck to be born in this country, when your mother and I were finally able to leave she had a belly out to here, did you ever think that if we hadn’t made it out, you might’ve become some fervent kid with a red neckerchief, one of those boy scouts lining the street when the presidential car would go by, the magnificent couple inside, blessing the crowd? Do you know what you would’ve yelled, waving your little flag? Long live the Conducător who leads our people toward a radiant future. And you’d have grown up like that, forget all the languages you’ve learned here and all your culture and linguistics, forget linguistics, they’d have sewn up your lingua if you weren’t obedient to the ideals of the magnificent conducatrix couple who were conducting the people toward a radiant future.

Perhaps he’s finished, thought the son, now he’s done venting, he’s tired, the son would’ve liked to say something rather than just repeating the obvious stuff he’d said last time, fine, Dad, don’t get worked up, you just said you’re doing well here, better than at home, I think so too, leave the past alone, don’t think about it, it happened so long ago, please, Dad. But he couldn’t find any other words: fine, Dad, don’t get worked up, you just said you’re doing well here, better than at home, I think so too, leave the past alone, don’t think about it. The old man didn’t let him finish, he was entitled to speak, that’s how it should be, now he was staring blankly, he caressed his knees as though wanting to press the creases of his pants, he was sitting on that little padded chair with a white pillow behind his neck, gazing at a photograph in a silver frame that he kept on the side table. It was an image of a young man and woman hugging each other, he had his right arm around her waist, she had a hand on his shoulder almost without touching it, as if she were embarrassed by having her picture taken, she had a ribbon in her fluffy hair, wore a modest dress in a style that made him think of certain movies from before the war, how strange, he’d always seen that picture on the big bureau in his parents’ bedroom, once when he was young he’d asked his mom who they were and she’d answered: no one you knew.

You know that atrocious couple was received everywhere with every honor right up till yesterday? The old man went on with his thoughts, did you know that? He didn’t answer, just nodded slightly, it wasn’t yesterday, Dad, he dared to mumble, they killed them more than fifteen years ago, Dad. The old man didn’t hear. They kept giving her honorary degrees, the great scientist, he continued, she’d invented a magic potion, a rejuvenating gelatin that stopped time much better than the monkey’s glands of that other charlatan, the Russian, a semolina flat-bread, royal jelly, and sludge from the Black Sea, and for this wonderful discovery of hers, the heads of state in the countries where you now spend your time welcomed her like a benefactress to mankind, tons of honorary degrees, in France in Italy in Germany, I can’t remember, in your Europe, anyhow, you, where are you teaching now, Rome? Don’t forget that racial laws were invented right there, in this beautiful country where we made sure you were born, some sinister types, real fascists, are making official appearances, are being received with every honor, everything upside down, and meanwhile, in the country where your mother and I were born, the fervent believers in the radiant future showed up instead, the fake scientist’s eternal-youth gelatin is what attracted them, these old people like me who resisted aging, who planted themselves in a nice hotel on the Black Sea, feasted on lavish meals but every day, first thing, took two spoonfuls of the magic royal jelly, then shamelessly went down to the private beach, progressives and nudists, to check beneath their bellies to see if the treatment was having any effect. She was a nurse, she began her scientific career by sticking bedpans under old people’s asses in places like this one, then she married the conducător of the people and became a scientist, did you tell me you’re going back to Rome tomorrow? If you get a chance, wave at that guy for me when he leans out the window, the television showed him when he traveled to the same place where they used to take me on vacation as a boy, he wore lovely loafers and a white outfit, just the right color for that place, innocence, if only he’d worn a monk’s habit, which is serious clothing in certain circumstances, and as if that weren’t enough, guess what he suddenly thought to utter in his castrato voice? To ask the Lord, his Lord of course, why He was absent, why He wasn’t there, and where He was. What on earth kind of questions were those? Gott mit uns, my son, that’s where He was, He was with them, He was there, next to the sentries guarding the barbed wire, in case any of us got the idea to escape, even if we could barely stand.

He lit a cigarette he’d hidden under a napkin in the drawer where he kept his medicines. When you leave, open the window, he said, if the nurse realizes, she’ll make a fuss about it, she’s a softie but she sticks to the rules, here everyone’s obsessed with rules, in any case I do feel much better here than at home, besides, it wasn’t a palace, and of course you remember the social worker assigned to me by the municipality to look after me four hours a week, can you imagine, that pigheaded Ukrainian used to look at me as though I were an official document, and not a word of Romanian, and then giving people like us — I’m thinking of your mother’s family now, after all they had to go through in Ukraine — giving people like that a Ukrainian as a social worker, a pigheaded person who pretends not to understand if you talk to her in Romanian and answers in her own language. He wanted to tell him: Dad, please, don’t say absurd things, she didn’t talk to you in her language, she was talking to you in Hebrew, and she didn’t pretend not to understand Romanian, she really didn’t understand it, it’s you who never wanted to learn how to speak Hebrew correctly, you always insisted on speaking Romanian, even with me, I’m grateful for that because you gave me your language, though you can’t make a chauvinistic matter out of it, I understand your problem, when you and Mom arrived here you were more than forty years old, it wasn’t easy, but you can’t blame the social worker if she doesn’t talk to you in Romanian. Instead he preferred not to say anything since the old man had launched into his soliloquy again, going back to a seemingly finished subject, as he tended to do now. Please don’t make me repeat myself, he said, I feel like I’m in a hotel here, and if you want to remain in Rome to teach, don’t let your conscience disturb you, see this nice room? I’ve never in my life been in a hotel as nice as this, you can’t even imagine when your mother and I were able to crawl out of that sewer, you can’t imagine the place where I left my brother, after his illness, that was no nursing home, it was a lager, the lager of the great conducător of the Romanian people, I left him in a wheelchair in the hall, he tried to follow us to the exit but he didn’t move a millimeter, the wheelchairs of the conducător’s nursing homes were nailed down, and then he began praying out loud, he called after me, reciting the Talmud to make us stop, you understand? If your mother and I left, nobody else would go see him, take care of him, but in that moment, as I was crying and trying to hide my tears, with all those witches in white uniforms staring at me, all of them spies dressed up like nurses, I mean, in that moment, hey, a brother can’t be treated like that, you, would you do that to a brother even if you don’t have one? And then I turned and said clearly, so the spies in white uniforms could hear: we both managed to avoid the Codreanu camps, but this one, the great conducător’s, I did all by myself, for five years, my dear brother, and since I’ve been reeducated, now I can leave, because sometimes they allow visas for reeducated people, and I’ll preserve an entirely personal memory of my reeducation.

He grew quiet, as if he’d finished, but he hadn’t, it was only a pause, he only needed to get his wind back. You know, my son, he went on, you can go ahead and tell your memories to others, they’re eager to listen to your account and perhaps they get everything, even the smallest nuances, but that memory will still be yours and yours alone, it doesn’t become someone else’s memory just because you’ve told it to others, memories are told but not transmitted. And then, since it seemed like the right moment, he said: speaking of memory, Dad, the doctor told me you refuse to take your medicine, the nurse realized that you pretend to swallow the pills and then spit them out in the sink, why do you do that? These doctors I don’t like, murmured the old man, they don’t understand a thing, believe me, they are ignorant know-it-alls. I don’t think there’s much to understand, Dad, he replied, they’re only trying to help a person of your age, that’s all, besides, the diagnosis is encouraging, there is no serious pathology as we feared, if there were, your attitude would be understandable since it wouldn’t be an attitude but the indicator of a progressive pathology, in your case it’s an attitude, or rather a purely psychological fact, so the doctors say, that’s the reason they prescribed these pills for you, it’s a very light psychoactive drug, nothing much, just a little help. The old man looked at him with an expression that struck him as indulgent, perhaps his voice had an ironic tone. A helping hand, sure, a helping hand, those people think they can polish your memory like a mirror, this is the point, to make it function not the way it wants but the way they want, so it doesn’t obey itself anymore, its own nature, which has no geometric shape, you can’t represent memory with a nice geometric drawing, it takes the shape it wants according to the moment, to the time, to who knows what, and they, the big doctors, they want to make it trigonometrical, that’s the right word, so it’s easily measured, like dice, this is reassuring for them, a die has six sides, you turn it over and can see them all, does memory seem like a die to you? He waved as though whisking away a fly. He grew quiet. He’d stopped smoothing the creases of his pants. His eyes closed, his head on the pillow of the armchair, he seemed to have fallen asleep. Many years ago, he whispered, I had a recurring dream, I started having it when I was fifteen, in the lager, and I carried it with me for half my life. A night rarely passed without that dream, to tell the truth it wasn’t even a dream, because dreams, even the most disjointed dreams, have a story, and mine was only an image, like a photo, actually, my head was snapping that photo, if I can put it that way, because I was standing there looking at the fog and at a certain point, click, my brain snapped a photo, and in front of me a landscape would be displayed, or rather, there was no landscape at all, it was a landscape made of nothing, mainly there was a gate, a beautiful white gate, thrown open onto a landscape that wasn’t there, nothing other than that image, the dream was mostly what I felt while looking at that image my brain had photographed, because dreams aren’t so much what happens as the emotion one feels while living what happens, and I wouldn’t know how to tell you about the emotion I was feeling, because emotions aren’t explainable, to be explained they have to transform into feelings, as Baruch knew, but a dream isn’t the right place for transforming emotions into feelings, I can tell you this was real torment for me, because while I longed to take off running, go through that wide-open gate, and dive into the unknown beyond, fleeing toward I don’t know where, at the same time I also felt a sense of shame, like guilt for something I didn’t do, the fear of hearing my father’s voice scolding me, but there was no voice in that dream, it was a silent dream, with the fear of hearing a voice. That dream vanished the first night we got to this country. We slept in Jaffa at the house of some friends you never met, they died soon after, your mother couldn’t fit into her clothes anymore, we had only two suitcases and there was a feeling of war in the air, for that matter it’s always felt like war in this country, we slept on the terrace, on two makeshift beds, it was hot, you could hear sirens in the distance and noise coming from the streets, which wasn’t reassuring for people used to the silence of Bucharest nights, but even so, I slept like a child that night and never had that sort of dream again.

He broke off. Opened his eyes for a moment and then shut them again. Began talking in a voice so low that the son leaned forward to hear him. Last week the dream came back, he whispered, exactly the same, the same iron gate, really white, apparently dreams don’t rust, and neither do the emotions that go with them, exactly like what I used to feel, the same torment, the desire to take off running and cross over, to run in order to see what lies hidden beyond, but something holds me back, and it’s not my father’s voice, my film is silent like photos are silent, it’s not the voice of my father, if only I could hear his voice, it’s the fear of hearing it, but enough now.

He opened his eyes and in a firm voice asked: when are you leaving? On Wednesday, Dad, he answered, but I’ll come back to see you in a month. Don’t throw your money away, said the old man, I bet the airfare from Rome is really pricey. Dad, he said, getting ready to go, don’t be the cheap old Jewish man, please. I am a cheap old Jewish man, said the old man, what else could I be if not a cheap old Jewish man? Before you go, open the window, please, if the nurse smells the stink of smoke, she gets angry.

Fortunately he had only a carry-on bag, enough for a weekend, otherwise he’d have lost who knows how much time waiting at the luggage carousel, he knew that. When he emerged from the arrivals lounge into the main airport hall, he was hit by a glaring light much fiercer than the one in Rome, and above all he felt the heat, which was almost shocking to him, as though he’d forgotten that the end of April in Tel Aviv is practically summertime, and he sniffed some familiar scents that piqued his appetite. There must have been a cart nearby of some street vendor frying falafel, he looked around because he had the idea of buying a bagful to bring to his father, he knew well that he’d be told the falafel didn’t stand comparison with the Romanian covrigi his mother had cooked all her life, but at the Ben Gurion Airport one couldn’t expect to find covrigi, he could find them at a Romanian bistro near the Carmel Market, but who knows how much time he’d lose because of the traffic. He spotted the falafel vendor, bought a small bagful, and got in line for the taxi. A cab turned up, driven by a young Palestinian, a beardless guy with a tentative mustache on his upper lip, who at first sight didn’t even seem to be of age. He spoke to him in Arabic, so as not to force him to speak Hebrew. A driver’s license, d’you have one? he asked. The young guy looked at him, wide eyed. Do you think I’d like to get myself arrested, sir? he answered, these people arrest everybody, you go to jail for even less. The answer disturbed him: these people arrest everybody, these people who? His country, he thought, “these people” were his country. He gave his destination imprecisely. Around Ben Yehuda, he said, then I’ll tell you exactly where. An elegant place, observed the young guy with a shrewd smile. Very elegant, he answered, it’s a home for old people. The car had just slipped into the traffic when he had an idea. Do you know a good Palestinian bakery? The falafel he had, the covrigi he didn’t feel like looking for, why not bring his father a Palestinian specialty? All during his childhood he’d heard his father say that Romanian Jews were the other Palestinians of Israel. I know a great one, the young man answered enthusiastically, my brother works there, they even make a baklava like you can’t find anywhere these days. Baklava isn’t Palestinian, it’s Iraqi, he replied, sorry, it’s Iraqi, no offense intended. No way it’s Iraqi, said the young guy, that’s a good one.

The nurse at the lodge told him his father was probably on the common terrace, at that hour tea was served to the guests. He found him sitting at a small table with three friends. Next to the cup there was a pack of cards, perhaps they’d played a game. He was almost surprised to see the old man get up and head toward him, arms spread wide, cheerful.

They sat at a small table to the side, he put the two little bags on the table, had no time to say a word since his father was already asking if he wanted tea or coffee, he’d never seen his father so courteous. How are you feeling? he asked. Very well, answered the old man, I’ve never felt so good. He had a shrewd look in his eyes, he was practically winking, almost seeking complicity in something. Are you sleeping well? he asked, and the old man answered, better than a child. The terrace extended around the building on the top floor, but from the table where they were seated the sea wasn’t visible, the city was resplendent under the afternoon sun. They were silent. His father asked him for a cigarette. He himself didn’t smoke, but he’d bought a pack at the airport, like he always did when he came to visit. The old man leaned back in his chair, inhaled a mouthful of smoke with pleasure, and then made a sweeping gesture with his arm, like someone showing a visitor something he owns, pointing to the city spread out at their feet. I’m glad you came back to my country, he said, it was time you did. He made the same sweeping gesture. In all these years Bucharest hasn’t changed a bit, he said smiling, don’t you agree?

Against Time

It’d gone like this:

The man had boarded at an Italian airport, because everything began in Italy, and whether it was Milan or Rome was secondary, what matters is that it was an Italian airport where you could take a direct flight to Athens, and from there, after a brief stopover, a connecting flight to Crete on Aegean Airlines, because this he was sure of, that the man had traveled on Aegean Airlines, so in Italy he’d taken a flight that let him connect in Athens for Crete at around two in the afternoon, he’d seen it on the Greek company’s schedule, which meant this man had arrived in Crete at around three, three thirty in the afternoon. The airport of departure is not so important, though, in the story of the person who’d lived that story, it’s the morning of any day at the end of April of 2008, a splendid day, almost like summer. Which is not an insignificant detail, because the man taking the flight, meticulous as he was, gave considerable importance to the weather and would watch a satellite channel dedicated to meteorology around the world, and the weather in Crete, he’d seen, was really splendid: twenty-nine degrees Celsius during the day, clear sky, humidity within normal limits, good seaside weather, ideal for lying on one of those white beaches described in his guide, for bathing in the blue sea and enjoying a well-deserved vacation. Because this was also the reason for the journey of that man who was going to live that story: a vacation. And in fact that’s what he thought, sitting in the waiting lounge for international flights at Rome-Fiumicino, waiting for the boarding call for Athens.

And here he is finally on the plane, comfortably installed in business class — it’s a paid trip, as will be seen later — reassured by the courtesies of the flight attendants. His age is difficult to determine, even for the person who knew the story that the man was living: let’s say he was between fifty and sixty years old, lean, robust, healthy looking, salt-and-pepper hair, fine blond mustache, plastic glasses for farsightedness hung from his neck. His work. On this point too the person who knew his story was somewhat uncertain. He could be a manager of a multinational, one of those anonymous businessmen who spend their lives in an office and whose merit is one day acknowledged by headquarters. But he could also be a marine biologist, one of those researchers who observe seaweed and microorganisms under a microscope, without leaving their laboratory, and so can assert that the Mediterranean will become a tropical sea, as perhaps it was millions of years ago. Yet this hypothesis also struck him as not very satisfying, biologists who study the sea don’t always remain shut up in their laboratory, they wander beaches and rocks, perhaps they dive, they perform their own surveys, and that passenger dozing in his business-class seat on a flight to Athens didn’t actually look like a marine biologist, maybe on weekends he went to the gym to keep fit, nothing else. But if he really did go to the gym, then why did he go? To what end did he maintain his body, stay so young looking? There really was no reason: it’d been over for quite a while with the woman he’d considered his life companion, he didn’t have another companion or lover, he lived alone, stayed away from serious commitments, apart from some rare adventures that can happen to everybody. Perhaps the most credible hypothesis was that he was a naturalist, a modern follower of Linnaeus, and he was going to a convention in Crete along with other experts on medicinal herbs and plants, abundant in Crete. Because one thing was certain, he was going to a convention of fellow researchers, his was a journey that rewarded a lifetime of work and commitment, the convention was taking place in the city of Retimno, he’d be in a hotel made of bungalows a few kilometers from Retimno, and a car service would shuttle him in the afternoons, but he’d have mornings to himself.

The man woke up, pulled out the guide from his carry-on, and looked for his hotel. What he found was reassurring: two restaurants, a pool, room service, the hotel had closed for the winter and had only reopened in mid-April, and this meant very few tourists would be there, the usual clients, the Northern Europeans thirsty for sunlight as the guide described them, were still in their little boreal houses. The pleasant voice from the loudspeaker asked everyone to buckle their seat belts, they’d begun the descent to Athens and would land in about twenty minutes. The man closed the folding tray table and put his seat upright, replaced the guide in his carry-on, and from the pocket of the seat in front of him pulled out the newspaper that the flight attendant had distributed, to which he’d paid no attention. It was a newspaper with many full-color supplements, the usual weekend ones, the economics-financial supplement, the sports supplement, the interior-design supplement, and the weekend magazine. He skipped all the supplements and opened the magazine. On the cover, in black-and-white, was the picture of the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, with the title: THE GREAT IMAGES OF OUR TIME. He began leafing through, somewhat reluctantly. First came an ad by two fashion designers showing a young man naked to the waist, which at first he thought was a great image of our time, but then there was the first true image of our time: the stone façade of a house in Hiroshima where the heat from the atomic bomb had liquefied a man, leaving only the imprint of his shadow. He’d never seen this image and was astonished by it, feeling a kind of remorse: that thing had happened more than sixty years before, how was it possible he’d never seen it? The shadow on the stone was a silhouette, and in this profile he thought he could see his friend Ferruccio, who for no apparent reason, on New Year’s Eve of 1999, shortly before midnight, had thrown himself from the tenth floor of a building onto Via Cavour. Was it possible that the profile of Ferruccio, squashed into the soil on the thirty-first of December in 1999, looked like the profile absorbed by stone in a Japanese city in 1945? The idea was absurd, yet that’s what passed through his mind in all its absurdity. He kept riffling the magazine, and meanwhile his heart began beating erratically, one-two-pause, three-one-pause, two-three-one, pause-pause-two-three, the so-called extrasystole, nothing pathological, the cardiologist had reassured him after an entire day of testing, only a matter of anxiety. But why now? It couldn’t be those images provoking his emotions, they were faraway things. That naked girl, arms raised, who was running toward the camera in an apocalyptic landscape: he’d seen this image more than once and it hadn’t made such a violent impression, and yet now it produced in him an intense turmoil. He turned the page. There was a man on his knees, palms together, at the edge of a pit, a kid sadistically pointing a gun at his temple. Khmer Rouge, said the caption. To reassure himself he made himself think that these things were also from faraway places and distant times. But the thought wasn’t enough, a strange form of emotion, almost a thought, was telling him the opposite, that the atrocity had happened yesterday, it’d happened just that morning, while he was on this flight, and by sorcery had been imprinted on the page he was looking at. The voice over the loudspeaker stated that the landing would be delayed by fifteen minutes due to air traffic, and meanwhile the passengers should enjoy the view. The plane traced a wide curve, banking to the right, from the little window opposite he could glimpse the blue of the sea while in his own, the white city of Athens was framed, with a green spot in the middle, no doubt a park, and then the Acropolis, he could see the Acropolis perfectly, and the Parthenon, his palms were damp with sweat, he asked himself if it weren’t a sort of panic provoked by the plane going round in circles, and meanwhile he looked at the photo of a stadium where policemen in riot gear pointed submachine guns at a bunch of barefooted men, under it was written: Santiago de Chile, 1973. And on the opposite page was a photo that seemed a montage, surely retouched, it couldn’t be real, he’d never seen it: on the balcony of a nineteenth-century palazzo was Pope John Paul II next to a general in uniform. The pope was without doubt the pope, and the general was without doubt Pinochet, with that hair full of brilliantine, that chubby face, that little mustache, and the Ray-Ban sunglasses. The caption said: His Holiness the Pope on his official visit to Chile, April 1987. He began quickly leafing through the magazine, as though anxious to get to the end, barely looking at the photographs, but he had to stop at one of them, it showed a kid with his back turned to a police van, his arms raised as though his beloved soccer team had scored a goal, but looking closer you could see he was falling backward, something stronger that he was had struck him. On it was written: Genoa, July 2001, meeting of the eight richest countries in the world. The eight richest countries in the world: the phrase provoked in him a strange sensation, like something that is at once understandable and absurd, because it was understandable and yet absurd. Every photo was on a silvery page as though it were Christmas, with the date in big letters. He’d arrived at 2004, but he hesitated, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see the next picture, was it possible the plane was still going around in circles? He turned the page, it showed a naked body collapsed on the ground, a man apparently, though in the photo they’d blurred the pubic area, a soldier in camouflage extended a leg toward the body as though he were kicking a garbage can, the dog he held on a leash was trying to bite a leg, the muscles of the animal were as taut as the cord that held it, in the other hand the soldier held a cigarette. The caption read: Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, 2004. After that, he arrived at the year he found himself in now, the year of our Lord 2008, that is he found himself in sync, that’s what he thought even if he didn’t know with what, but in sync. He couldn’t tell what image he was in sync with, but he didn’t turn the page, and meanwhile the plane was finally landing, the landing strip was running beneath him with the intermittent white bands blurring to a single band. He’d arrived.

Venizelos Airport looked brand new, surely they’d built it for the Olympic Games. He was happy with himself for being able to reach the boarding gate for Crete without reading the signs in English, the Greek he’d learned at school was still useful, curiously. When he landed at the Hania airport at first he didn’t realize he’d reached his destination: during the brief flight from Athens to Crete, a little less than an hour, he’d fallen fast asleep, forgetting everything, it seemed, even himself. To such a degree that when he came down the airplane’s staircase into that African light, he asked himself where he was, and why he was there, and even who he was, and in that amazement at nothing he even felt happy. His suitcase wasn’t long in arriving on the conveyor belt, just beyond the boarding gates were the car rental offices, he couldn’t remember the instructions, Hertz or Avis? It was one or the other, fortunately he guessed right, along with the car keys, they gave him a road map of Crete, a copy of the program of the convention, his hotel reservation, and the route to the tourist village where the convention goers were lodged. Which by now he knew by heart, because he’d studied and restudied it in his guide, nicely furnished with road maps: from the airport you went straight down to the coast, you had to go that way unless you wanted to reach the Marathi beaches, then you turned left, otherwise you wound up west and he was going east, toward Iraklion, you passed in front of the Hotel Doma, went along Venizelos, and followed the green signs that meant highway though it was actually a coastal freeway, you exited shortly after Georgopolis, a tourist spot to avoid, and followed the directions for the hotel, Beach Resort, it was easy.

The car, a black Volkswagen parked in the sun, was boiling, but he let it cool down a little by leaving the doors open, entered it as though he were late for an appointment, but he wasn’t late and he didn’t have any appointments, it was four o’clock in the afternoon, he’d get to the hotel in a little more than an hour, the convention wouldn’t start till the evening of the following day, with an official banquet, he had more than twenty-four hours of freedom, what was the hurry? No hurry. After a few kilometers a tourist sign indicated the grave of Venizelos, a few hundred meters from the main road. He decided to take a short break to freshen up before the drive. Next to the entrance to the monument was an ice-cream shop with a large open terrace overlooking the little town. He settled himself at a table, ordered a Turkish coffee and a lemon sorbet. The town he saw had been Venetian and then Turkish, it was nice, and of an almost blinding white. Now he was feeling really good, with an unusual energy, the disquiet he’d felt on the plane had completely vanished. He checked the road map: to get to the freeway to Iraklion he could pass through the town or go around the gulf of Souda, a few kilometers more. He chose the second route, the gulf from up above was beautiful and the sea intensely azure. The descent from the hill to Souda was pleasant, beyond the low vegetation and the rooftops of some houses he could see little coves of white sand, a strong urge to swim came over him, he turned off the air-conditioning and lowered the window to feel the warm air smelling of the sea on his face. He passed the little industrial port and the residential zone and arrived at the intersection where, turning to the left, the road merged with the coastal highway to Iraklion. He put on his left blinker and stopped. A car behind him beeped for him to go: there was no oncoming traffic. He didn’t move, just let the car pass him, then signaled right and went in the opposite direction, where a sign said Mourniès.

And now we’re following him, the unknown character who arrived in Crete to reach a pleasant seaside locale and who at a certain moment, abruptly, for a reason also unknown, took a road toward the mountains. The man proceeded till Mourniès, drove through the village without knowing where he was going, though as if he did. Actually he wasn’t thinking, just driving, he knew he was headed south: the sun, still high, was already behind him. Since he’d changed direction, that sensation of lightness had returned, which he’d briefly felt at the table in the ice-cream shop, looking down on the broad horizon: an unusual lightness, and with it an energy he no longer recalled, as though he were young again, a sort of light euphoria, almost a happiness. He arrived at a village called Fournès, drove through the town confidently as though he already knew the way, stopped at a crossroads, the main road went to the right, he took the secondary road with a sign that said: Lefka Ori, the white mountains. He drove on calmly, the sensation of well-being was turning into a sort of cheerfulness, a Mozart aria came to mind and he felt he could reproduce its notes, he began whistling them with amazing ease, but then went hopelessly out of tune in a couple of passages, which made him laugh. The road slipped into the rugged canyons of a mountain. They were beautiful and wild places, the car went along a narrow asphalt road bordering the bed of a dry creek, at a certain point the creek bed disappeared among the rocks and the asphalt ended in a dirt road, in a barren plain among inhospitable mountains, meanwhile the light was fading, but he kept going as though he already knew the way, like someone obeying an old memory or an order received in a dream, and at a certain point he saw a crooked tin sign riddled with holes as if from gunshots or from time, and the sign said: Monastiri.

He followed it as though he’d been expecting it all along, until he came to a tiny monastery, its roof in ruins. He realized he’d arrived. Went down. The dilapidated door of those ruins sagged inward. He figured no one was there any longer, a beehive under the little portico seemed the only housekeeper. He went down and waited as if he had an appointment. It was almost dark. Then at the door a monk appeared, he was very old and moved with difficulty, he had the look of an anchorite, with his hair down to his shoulders and a yellowish beard, what do you want? he asked in Greek. Do you know Italian? answered the traveler. The old man nodded. A little, he murmured. I’ve come to change places with you, said the man.

So it’d been like this, and no other conclusion was possible, because that story didn’t call for any other possible conclusions, but the person who knew this story was aware that he couldn’t let it conclude in this way, and at this point he made a leap in time. And thanks to one of those leaps in time that are possible only in the imagination, things landed in the future with regard to that month of April of 2008. How many years ahead no one knows, and the person who knew the story remained vague, twenty years, for instance, which in the lifetime of a man is a lot, because if in 2008 a man of sixty still has all his energy, in 2028 he’ll be an old man, his body worn out by time.

And so the person who knew this story imagined it continued like this, and so let’s accept that we’re in 2028, as the person who knew the story had wanted and had imagined it would continue.

And at this point, the person who imagined how the story would continue saw two young people, a guy and a girl wearing leather shorts and trekking boots, who were hiking in the mountains of Crete. The girl said to her companion: I think that old guide you found in your father’s library doesn’t make any sense, by now the monastery will be a pile of stones full of lizards, why don’t we head toward the sea? And the guy responded: I think you’re right. But just as he said this she replied: no, let’s keep on for a bit, you never know. And in fact it was enough to walk around the rugged red-stone hill that cut through the countryside and there it was, the monastery, or rather ruins of the monastery, and the two of them approached, a wind blew in from the canyons raising the dust, the monastery’s door had collapsed, wasps’ nests defended that empty cave, the two of them had already turned their backs on that gloom when they heard a voice. In the empty space of the door stood a man. He was very old, looked dreadful, with a long white beard to his chest and hair down to his shoulders. Oooh, called the voice. Nothing else. The couple stood still. The man asked: do you understand Italian? They didn’t respond. What happened in 2008? asked the old man. The two young people looked at each other, they didn’t have the courage to exchange a word. Do you have photographs? asked the old man, what happened in 2008? Then he gestured for them to go away, though perhaps he was brushing away the wasps that whirled under the portico, and he returned to the dark of his cave.

The man who knew this story was aware that it couldn’t finish in any other way. Before writing his stories, he loved telling them to himself. And he’d tell them to himself so perfectly, in such detail, word by word, that one might say they were written in his memory. He’d tell them to himself preferably late in the evening, in the solitude of that big empty house, or on those nights when he couldn’t sleep, those nights in which insomnia yielded nothing but imagination, not much, yet imagination gave him a reality so alive that it seemed more real than the reality he was living. But the most difficult thing wasn’t telling to himself his stories, that was the easy part, it was as though he’d see the words of the stories he told himself written on the dark screen of his room, when fantasy would keep his eyes wide open. And that one story, which he’d told himself in this way so many times, seemed to him an already printed book, one that was very easy to express mentally but very difficult to write with the letters of the alphabet necessary for thought to be made concrete and visible. It was as if he were lacking the principle of reality to write his story, and in order to live the effective reality of what was real within him yet unable to become truly real, he’d chosen this place.

His trip was planned in fine detail. He landed at the Hania airport, got his luggage, went into the Hertz office, picked up the car keys. Three days? the clerk asked, astonished. What’s so strange about it? he said. No one comes to Crete on vacation for three days, the clerk replied, smiling. I have a long weekend, he responded, it’s enough for what I have to do.

The light in Crete was beautiful. It wasn’t Mediterranean but African; he’d reach the Beach Resort in an hour and a half, at most two, even going slowly, he’d arrive there around six, a shower and he’d start writing immediately, the hotel restaurant was open till eleven, it was Thursday evening, he counted: all of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, three full days. They’d be enough: in his head everything was all already written.

Why he turned left at that light he couldn’t say. The pylons of the freeway were clearly visible, another four or five hundred meters and he’d be at the coastal freeway to Iraklion. But instead he turned left, where a little blue sign indicated an unknown place. He thought he’d already been there, for in a moment he saw everything: a tree-lined street with a few houses, a plain square with an ugly monument, a ledge of rocks, a mountain. It was a flash of lightning. That strange thing which medical science can’t explain, he told himself, they call it déjà vu, already-seen, it’d never happened to me before. But the explanation he gave himself didn’t reassure him, because the already-seen endured, it was stronger than what he was seeing, like a membrane enveloping the surrounding reality, the trees, the mountains, the evening shadows, even the air he was breathing. He felt overcome by vertigo and was afraid of being sucked into it, but only for a moment, because as it expanded that sensation went through a strange metamorphosis, like a glove turning inside out and bringing forth the hand it covered. Everything changed perspective, in a flash he felt the euphoria of discovery, a subtle nausea, a mortal melancholy. But also a sense of infinite liberation, as when we finally understand something we’d known all along and didn’t want to know: it wasn’t the already-seen that was swallowing him in a never-lived past, he instead was capturing it in a future yet to be lived. As he drove among the olive trees on that little road taking him toward the mountains, he knew that at a certain point he’d find an old rusty sign full of holes on which was written: Monastiri. And that he’d follow it. Now everything was clear.

Content

Antonio Tabucchi
Time Ages in a Hurry

The Circle

Drip, Drop, Drippity-Drop

Clouds

The Dead at the Table

Between Generals

Yo me enamoré del aire

Festival

Bucharest Hasn’t Changed a Bit

Against Time