Arianna opened her fist. She’d kept it shut for four hours.
“Ridiculous,” I said, and with a clumsiness that even now torments me I tried to grab her hand, but she stuck it in the pocket of her raincoat.
* * *
By now the skyscrapers of EUR were gleaming in the sun. Arianna shook her hair out impatiently and lowered the sun visor on her side of the car. “Damn,” she said. “I should have worn a pair of dark glasses. Why do I always make the wrong choices? I was so happy at the idea of going to your place, and now I have to go back to Eva!”
That’s what she said, surprising me one last time. So Eva was the sister she was running away from. But in what way was it running away from someone if you spent the evening with them? She said they hadn’t spent the evening together at all. They hadn’t said a single word to each other all evening, hadn’t I noticed?
I didn’t say anything. I was very tired and couldn’t stop shivering. I was at the end of my tether, and all I wanted now was my bed in my room overlooking the valley. Besides, if a day is the time separating the moment you get up from the moment you go back to bed, all I had to do to put an end to this day was to go to bed. Because it had been a god-awful day, truth be told.
“Shall I take you back to your car?” she said when we were back downtown.
A low, piercing sun shot out from above the roofs, splintering on the windows of the buildings, on the fountains, and on the sheet-metal surfaces of the cars. The streets were dry and here and there vast patches of dust indicated where the puddles had been.
“No, thanks,” I said.
We’d reached the slopes of Monte Mario and stopped to give way to a line of men leaving a market. They looked stupid, carrying big bunches of flowers.
“But call me,” she said when we were outside my building.
I looked at her. She was so beautiful it hurt. “Of course,” I said.
Then I got out of the car and crossed the courtyard, once again feeling, as I had in the corridor at the Diaconos’, her eyes on my back, like a weight. I stopped by the front door and listened to the car driving away. It disappeared, leaving an unbearable silence behind.
“Good morning, Signor Gazzara,” the doorman said.
I said something in reply and started climbing the stairs, my legs shaking. The steps seemed higher than usual and I stumbled a couple times. This reminded me of occasions when I’d climbed the narrow stairs of hotels where I’d been living, mornings when I’d been hungover and confused. Just like then, the first thing I did when I got inside was look for a little bit of warmth. I crossed the apartment, which smelled of cigarette smoke and mustiness, and, in the uncertain light filtering through the shutters, went to the kitchen and took out my wonderful Ballantine’s bottle, with its heraldic label, which I reserved for whenever I caught a chill. I filled it with boiling water, then took two aspirins and collapsed on the bed, clutching it to my stomach.
But the chill didn’t go away. And so I did a stupid thing. I started crying.
4
I got out of bed four days later and, sneezing fiercely, caught a bus and went and recovered my old Alfa Romeo, feeling as if it was part of me that had been blown off in an explosion. On the way back, I stopped to buy more aspirin and a few provisions, then shut myself in at home, determined not to go out until the world had apologized to me.
It did its best, truth be told. The days were warm and the sky a disarming blue, but in a way the very beauty of the weather merely increased my anguish. I roamed the apartment, gripped by an invincible sense of futility. Even when I went out on the balcony to read and have a smoke, I caught myself wondering why I was doing it. I would go downstairs just to pick up my mail without any idea of what awaited me apart from the usual advertising flyers—for detergents, mainly—which I stuck in the mailbox next to mine. One time, I received a postcard from Graziano Castelvecchio. He was on Crete, and wrote: There are stones here, don’t come. Another time, I found a letter from my family that I’d have preferred not to receive, all things considered, not so much because my mother was complaining that she hadn’t seen me for a year but because my father was sending me money for me to buy him a set of Vatican stamps, which meant getting up at dawn and standing in line outside His Holiness’s post office.
But there was so little I could do for him these days that the following morning there I was, yawning so much I almost fainted, standing with that little crowd of peaceful maniacs known as stamp collectors. Around ten, after I’d sent the stamps by registered mail, the beauty of the morning induced me to go read by the river. The area was deserted and I sat down on a deck chair with the book on my lap, but I couldn’t concentrate and in the end I closed the book and sat there listening to the soft murmur of the traffic as it rolled across the bridges and watching the rowers gliding over the surface of the water like large dragonflies. Around two, I started to feel hungry and went to Signor Sandro’s. The first person I saw was Annamaria. “Look at you!” she said on spotting me.
I hadn’t seen her since she’d been fired by the paper she was working for because in an item on the funeral of a local dignitary she’d included the dead man’s name among the names of the mourners. “What are you doing so far from home?” I said.
“I live around here now,” she said, “on Via Whatsit, Via…” There were times she gave the impression she could hardly even remember her own name, but we’d spent some great evenings together.
“What are you doing this evening?”
“No idea. Ever since I went on a diet, I’ve been a hit with men.”
“Only with men?” I said, remembering a fling she’d had with a very well-known theater actress.
She laughed. “What about you and girls, huh?” she said.
The pain I carried with me in my chest started to throb. So I made up my mind, asked for a telephone token, and went to make a call. The male voice that answered was very polite, and when I asked for the signora he hesitated in a professional manner. Soon afterward, I heard Viola’s voice. “This is Leo,” I said, and she gave one of her little laughs. “Stop laughing every time I get in touch.”
“I laugh when I feel like it,” she said. “Are we allowed to know where you’ve been? I’ve been trying to find you at that damned newspaper of yours for a week now. Don’t you ever work?”
“Sick,” I said. “I’ve been sick.”
“I don’t want to know about your problems. I want you to come over here today and keep me company. We’ll have tea and I’ll shorten some old skirts.”
Basically, it was what I’d wanted, and so at five o’clock, the very hour when the marquise orders her carriage and goes out, I went to see her.
She was sitting by the window, with the radio on, and a few hundred skirts scattered on the carpet. The white velvet couch looked like an abandoned raft. I sat down on it to have tea. “Arianna was asking after you today,” Viola said, slipping off one skirt to try on another. It was as if after a week a drum had stopped beating.
“How is she?” I said.
“She’s hysterical about you. She says you dumped her just like that and didn’t get in touch again.”
Well, it had been kind of her to tell it that way. “Everything okay with the sister?”
“Of course. All they ever do is fight and make up.”
“She’s an unpredictable character.”
“She’s beautiful, my dear, and beautiful people are always unpredictable. They know that whatever they do, they’ll be forgiven.” She picked another skirt off the floor. “Oh, yes,” she sighed, “it’s even better than being rich, because beauty, my dear, never has a whiff of struggle or effort about it, but comes directly from God, and that’s enough to make it the only true human aristocracy, don’t you think?”
“Very profound.”
“It’s a simple observation,” she said. “All I’ve been doing lately is observing. Why do you think that is?”
“I have no idea. Have you tried going to a doctor?”
“Arianna would do that,” she said, amused. “Ever since she was in that clinic, she hasn’t been able to live without doctors. Did you know she was even going to marry one? Then she moved to Rome, and nothing came of it.”
“What kind of clinic?” I said. What kind of clinic did I think? One of those horrible places where people go in feeling a little nervous and come out completely crazy. All she did, shut in there, was sleep and play solitaire. When Eva found out, she got on the first train to Venice and brought her to Rome.
I stayed for dinner, of course. “All right,” I said, lost in thought. I felt as if it really was me who’d ditched her that morning. “Why do they fight?” I asked after a while. Oh, for a whole bunch of reasons, each one more futile than the last. Plus, you had to remember that when it came to her nerves, Arianna was still a little bit fragile. She couldn’t go anywhere without her bottle of perfume and her pack of cards. Once, when she left her cards at home, she’d gone around the streets in tears, did I know that?
“No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”
“Shall I get dinner ready, signora?” Afternoon had passed and evening was spreading in from the windows. Viola gave a start and switched the light on to reveal a little man with a deep voice, wearing a striped jacket. He had emerged from his afternoon off, looking contrite.
“I think he had a falling-out with the baker’s boy,” Viola said when he’d gone. “For two weeks now, he’s been forcing us to eat crackers, he says they’re good for the figure.” But I was barely listening to her. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. The matter was Arianna shut up in that clinic, playing solitaire. The matter was the anguish I felt, that tightness in the middle of my chest. The matter was my undervalued life, which needed changing.
There had been an imperceptible ringing of the doorbell, and five minutes later Renzo appeared. “Good old Leo!” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “I’ve been looking forward to a game all day.” He was in a good mood, very sure of himself, and very sure that I’d also want to play chess. I stood up reluctantly and sat down opposite him. It was a brief, fierce battle. After two cautious openings, I let my anxiety get the better of me, leading to some tense skirmishes between our pawns and the loss of my bishop. Then I unleashed my knights and managed to draw level, cornering his king in a messy siege. The king seemed on the verge of packing his bags and heading south when the queen, promising some desperate pawns she would satisfy god-knows-what secret lusts, organized a sortie that saved the kingdom. A duel ensued between our rooks, and we exchanged sword thrusts, until, at last, I was run through. Renzo couldn’t help snickering. Rubbing his hands together, he called in the servant and ordered a bottle of Chablis.
“Congratulations, darling!” Viola said at dinner, kissing him on the forehead. Renzo shielded himself with exaggerated modesty and she laughed. I watched them. The Chablis was cold and comforting, but not enough to make their smooching bearable. Stuck there in front of the TV all evening, I felt very alone until the presence of the servant, sitting at the far end of the living room, still looking contrite, at last drove me over the edge. I left and went to Signor Sandro’s.
Yes, Annamaria had been there, but she’d left ten minutes earlier.
* * *
The end of the month was drawing closer and I had to start going regularly to the newspaper office so that I could pay the rent without being forced to camouflage my voice on the telephone. Then one afternoon one of the telephones in the booths rang and Rosario went over and answered it. “It’s for you,” he said, his face making it clear he had no intention of acting as my secretary.
It was Viola, inviting me to the theater that evening. “Put on your good suit,” she said. “We’re all going to be very elegant.”
“I’m not sure if I feel like it.”
“Oh, of course you feel like it,” she said.
So I drove home through the evening traffic. I found a note stuck to my door with a pin: I’m alone, rich, and attractive. How about a Western? Claudia. I read it twice, then put it in my pocket and phoned the laundry to get my shirts sent over. I did everything with enormous calm. First of all, I switched on the record player, and undressed, then I unearthed a dark suit I’d ordered in a moment of grandeur from the Count of Sant’Elia’s tailor and laid the pants under the mattress. In the bathroom, I turned on all the faucets because I liked to hear the water running, and lay down in the bathtub to think. When I heard the doorbell ring—my shirts had arrived—I got out of the bath and wrapped myself in a red robe Serena had forgotten to take with her to Mexico. I went to the door, checked they’d sewed the buttons on my shirts, paid, and retrieved my pants from under the mattress. They were perfect. Then I brushed the jacket and the shoes, with different brushes, and dressed with all the care of a bullfighter.
The Diaconos were late arriving, and we walked into the theater just as a girl onstage was invoking her lost youth. It was a totally fucked-up production of Three Sisters made fascinating by the desperate attempts of the director and cast to ruin the play and the play’s wonderful, ironic resistance. It was such a close-run thing that in the intermission everyone rushed to the bar. The Diaconos’ friends were all there, of course, and they managed to be a group even in a crowd of some hundreds of thirsty people. Eva stood beneath a huge crystal chandelier, shaking. By her side, the bird man was holding two glasses, from one of which she took a few distracted sips, every now and again. He had an elastic bandage on his wrist, as if some ornithologist had captured him, then set him free again, but with that sign on him in order to follow his migrations. Arianna wasn’t with them. I didn’t see her until the end of the show, when I had to throw myself into the mob at the cloakroom to retrieve Viola’s coat, and I wouldn’t even have noticed her if I hadn’t heard her voice. She was crossing the foyer in the company of a fat little man in glasses and begging for a vodka. The only result of her passing was that I lost the good place in line I’d captured for myself near the cloakroom, which meant I was one of the last to reach my target.
“I’ve seen better cloakroom attendants than you,” Viola said as I helped her on with her coat. “Let’s get a move on, we’re supposed to be going to Eva’s for a drink.”
“I think I’ll go home,” I said.
“You just try,” she said, and so we went to Eva’s place.
It was very similar to the Diaconos’, a white apartment building, but the garden was larger, and behind a few hedges an empty swimming pool for the residents lay wide open, waiting for summer. In the living room, there was the usual profusion of armchairs, and a few paintings, including a probably genuine de Chirico and a probably fake Morandi. In the armchairs, the usual people: a serene fifty-year-old whom everyone called by a very long name that was nothing like the very short one by which he was well known as a humorist; a young, left-wing journalist named Paolo, who, it was said, had a secret way with women; and a novelist with a white mustache and a Venetian-style villa in Friuli. Also part of the group were the estranged wife of a TV presenter, who was obliged to attempt suicide every time she wanted to collect alimony; a bearded and spoiled poet, who was heavily involved with the Communist Party; a pleasant foreign correspondent, who’d had a heart attack in Latin America; and an actress, who talked endlessly about Ivy Compton-Burnett. Finally, sitting together on the same couch that evening were a Russian-looking young man with a guitar, a haute couture model in love with a homosexual photographer, and an impoverished noblewoman in love with an Alitalia pilot nobody had ever seen. This was the central nucleus, joined for periods of greater or lesser length by other people who were seized on by the group and then expelled in a kind of natural regeneration that guaranteed its continuity. This sort of thing happened mostly in the winter because in the summer everyone went off in different directions. Seaside romances, travel, adventures—any opportunity was good enough for people to go off and do their own thing. But as soon as the sky turned less metallic and hard, as soon as
the trees started to sway in a wind that brought clouds, as soon as the days began their headlong rush to the deep purple sunsets of October, the telephones started ringing again across the city, and these people once more sought out one another, exhausted but talkative.
“So, have you expiated your sin?” Eva said. Her familiarity surprised me. “What do you have to say about Arianna?” Arianna wasn’t there in the living room and I told her what I’d seen in the lobby of the theater. “Oh, yes,” she said, “she was with the director of the show. Arianna always has to involve someone else in her own needs.” So she must have told Eva the whole story. Maybe that very morning, after our night together, maybe sitting on the bed, drinking tea and nibbling madeleines. Great! “Do you know Livio Stresa?” she said, grabbing the arm of the bird man, who just then was passing in search of an armrest on which to perch. His name sounded familiar, and it only took me a moment to connect it with a well-known tennis player lately down on his luck. He’d been really good a few years before, even playing in the championship with Pietrangeli, but then he’d stopped competing in the major tournaments. Well, now I knew where he’d ended up.
Arianna came in half an hour later, throwing the door wide open. “To Moscow! To Moscow!” she cried, and judging by the face of the director, who followed her in, it was obvious she’d been parroting that line all the time they’d been together. Her hair was tied back, and she seemed very happy.
“Tell me, Chebutykin,” she said, collapsing tragically into an armchair, “did you love my mother?”
“Tell me, Irina,” Eva now said, approaching her, “who’s that knocking on the floor?”
“It’s Dr. Ivan Romanovich. He’s drunk. What a topsy-turvy night! Have you heard? The regiment is being transferred!”
“Oh, that’s just a rumor!”
Last Summer in the City Page 6
