“It’s true,” Arianna would say, “there’s always such a sense of security when you have a villa. Do you think you’ll be able to buy me one sooner or later? I really need a villa.” Then she would sigh, stretching out in the sun.
At first she brought her architecture books with her, but she usually preferred to play a little solitaire, lying there motionless, cultivating her own laziness. Ever since I’d started reading Swann’s Way aloud, the architecture books had vanished from her beach bag, to be replaced by a pillow she put under her head to be more comfortable while she listened to me.
It was nice to read in the sun. Around noon, wearing only my pants, I’d drive to the nearest village and buy sandwiches and beer. By the time I got back, she’d be peering into the villa through the windows or she’d already be in the water if the excessive heat had helped her overcome her fear of swimming by herself. She was terrified of seeing her shadow follow her on the seabed and usually swam on her back. We’d leave around three in the afternoon. At some of the villas we felt so good, we’d leave a note of gratitude on the door.
Back in town, I’d go to the newspaper and stay there until dinnertime, then go wait for Arianna at the top of the Spanish Steps, surrounded by taxi drivers playing baccarat on the hoods of their cars, flower vendors, and tourists. She was usually late and I’d kill time by reading the book I had in my pocket, but at the end of each page I’d look up to see if she was coming. And there she’d be, walking lazily through the crowd, her nose wrinkled in disgust at the exhaust from the cars and her arms crossed to support a never-opened architecture book. She’d look around, searching for me, then, seeing me, she’d slow down even more and, holding back a smug smile, stop at a store window, or walk twice around a lamppost, or turn to look insistently at some tourist dressed in a ridiculous manner. At last she’d reach me and give me a distracted kiss. “Well,” she’d say, “don’t go thinking I love you.”
Sometimes we’d go back together to Eva’s store, which meant having to spend the evening with all the others. It didn’t happen often because by now it was obvious that my relations with Eva were as cold as could be. The time I’d gone there with Graziano had seen to that because if there was one thing Eva couldn’t stand it was drunks and, to top it all off, she’d found out that I too had once exercised the same vocation. Whenever we were all together, I’d avoid speaking to her and would spend my time chatting with the Diaconos, or the writer with the white mustache, or sometimes even the fashion model, but only to see Arianna squirm until I stopped. After that, she wouldn’t talk to me for an hour.
Most times, though, we managed to be alone and we’d have dinner in some open-air trattoria or other and then wander through the city, which was cool and animated, teeming with adventures and rendezvous outside the bars and around the fountains. Usually, we’d roam in search of baroque churches, because Arianna was thinking about a doctoral thesis demonstrating how superior Borromini was to Bernini, and one way or another we always ended up outside the Oratory of San Filippo, pallid under the streetlights, as bloodless yet elegant as a lady who consumes nothing but tea. Although I didn’t understand what the baroque had to do with the hydraulic problems of saving Venice, I would follow her in these wanderings of hers, kissing her in the cavelike entrances of churches, her lips as cool as her breasts, then ending up at my apartment, where we slept together until dawn, when she would leave so that she could be found in her own bed when Eva woke up and get ready for that day’s excursion to the sea. Until, one morning, we found as many as four villas occupied by their rightful owners and we realized that that was the end of that.
One of the first evenings in June, Renzo informed me that in two days’ time I could start work. The following morning I made an inventory of my clothes and realized I didn’t have anything suitable for the occasion, so I decided to invest the money I still had left in a new suit. In a surrender—nobody’s sure why—the loser is always more elegant than the victor, to obtain better conditions, maybe, or maybe when you have nothing left you realize that appearances are at least something, so I went on a tour of the downtown clothing stores. I found a white suit like Graziano’s. True, it wasn’t the same linen—in fact, it might not have even been linen—but it produced the right effect. I put it on, then and there, and went to Signor Sandro’s to phone Arianna. “There’s news, I have to talk to you,” I said, explaining where she could reach me.
“Talk now,” she said. “You surely don’t think I can hold out until I see you.”
“Try to survive,” I said, “it’s worth it.”
She arrived no more than twenty minutes late, walking along the sun-drenched sidewalk. Her heels penetrated my heart. She was wearing a dress with white and blue stripes and was the freshest thing I’d ever seen.
“Wow! Get a load of you!” she said loudly, looking at me. “So, what’s going on?”
“What are you drinking?” was all I said.
She wanted a granata, she was crazy about granatas, so I ordered two of these specialties of Signor Sandro’s, crushed ice with rum and exotic fruit juices served, depending on the quantity of sugar, in a coconut or a bamboo bottle. “One Perverse Virgin granata and one Bamboo,” I said to Signor Sandro and Arianna giggled.
“A very suggestive combination,” she said. She had never thought about that combination before, and I too giggled like an idiot as Signor Sandro began the ritual preparation. Arianna, who was always fascinated by ritual, watched him with close attention. When he noticed, his moves grew even lighter and more elegant. Then he placed the results of his magic in front of us and stood waiting for the verdict. Arianna bent over her straw and sucked two or three times, then raised her big, half-closed eyes and smiled. Signor Sandro returned her smile and bowed his head. They had understood each other.
“Now, that’s a bartender!” she said loudly as, freezing cold and a little drunk, we walked back out onto the street. “I’m crazy about him!”
“Of course,” I said. “Aren’t you crazy about all old men?”
“No beating about the bush, what do you want to tell me?”
But still I kept her on tenterhooks as we walked in the direction of Piazza San Silvestro. She was so nervous, she insisted on crossing when the lights were red. We walked into the remainder bookstore and started moving down the aisles, separately, but from time to time I raised my head and looked at her, against the colorful background of the books, with her impatient profile and her hair that kept getting in her face, and that’s the most significant memory I have of this whole story, if not the most beautiful, until we emerged as if from a maze, unsteady on our feet, and found ourselves at the exit, where I gifted her a copy of Under the Volcano, which she never did read.
“Come on, now!” she said, at the end of her tether. “Are you ever going to tell me what all this celebrating is about?”
“I’m getting my head together,” I said. “As of tomorrow, I’m working in television.”
She stood quite still, staring at the photograph on the book cover, the one of Lowry on the shore of the lake with his frayed white shirt and sad goatee. “I don’t know if I like that,” she said at last.
“Why not?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re you.”
And, with this incontrovertible statement, she put an end to the subject and refused to talk about it for the rest of the afternoon. To do something, we went window-shopping on Via Frattina, but she looked at the displays without seeing them. She was very nervous, and when we went to dinner at the usual open-air trattoria she ate listlessly.
“Why are you doing it?” she said suddenly.
“Because I’m tired of leftovers.”
“What does that mean?”
“I know what it means,” I said.
She fell silent, playing with the base of her glass. It was damp and she was using it like a rubber stamp, leaving rings on the white paper tablecloth. “Are you sure you’re not doing it for me? I don’t want you to
do it for me.”
“I’m doing it for myself,” I said, “only for myself.”
“Oh, all right, then,” she said.
We sat for a while in silence, though I felt like screaming, and when I asked for the check I did so in too loud a voice. Arianna stopped playing with her glass and took hold of my hand, gripping it tightly.
“Shall we go to your place?” she said.
She was scared, she hated any kind of change, and we’d had such a great May. I was struck by the sudden hope that at last everything would go right, that tonight would finally be different. But it didn’t work out that way. Once again, we found ourselves in my bed, wearing ourselves out with caresses, listening to each other’s bodies, begging each other, looking for the word that was never uttered—Don’t go thinking I love you—until dawn found us clinging to each other, as inert as a couple of lobsters.
* * *
“Wow, look at that suit!” Renzo said, getting out of his Mercedes in front of the TV center.
As an opener, it couldn’t have been more unfortunate. In the morning sun my suit was reflected in the glass of the building as if it might shatter it, while all around us was a whole crowd of executives in blue jackets with pipes in their mouths. Christ, I stuck out like a sore thumb.
Inside, things went a little better because in the artificial lighting my suit didn’t stand out quite so much. To make up for this, it was almost cold and the nervous sweat the suit had made me break out in chilled my back as I followed Renzo along a corridor lined with doors. We stopped at one marked Personnel Office and went in without knocking.
“Hello, Signor Diacono,” a female employee said, coming up to us. “Hello, Signor Gazzara.” Clearly, they were expecting me. The employee was an efficient young woman who as soon as we came in had slipped an index card into her typewriter. “Surname?” she said, even though she’d just used it. “First name?” She went on to ask my father’s name, and I thought about him, and my mother’s, and I thought about her. Then she asked where I was born and I thought about my gloomy city, then the date of the happy event and I thought about my birthday three months earlier drinking hot caffè lattes in a bus terminus at dawn. “That’s all,” the young woman said with a smile that brooked no reply. It was humiliating to be classified.
Renzo slapped me on the back. “Let’s go to your office,” he said, going ahead of me into an elevator that would take us to the room where within a month I would be earning a figure I’d never seen, at least not all at once, in my life.
* * *
The office was long and narrow and occupied by two tables, at one of which sat a pleasant woman in her forties who got to her feet when we walked in. I shook the hand she held out to me without catching her name, although I assumed I’d get to know it in time. Besides, I wouldn’t have to spend much time in that office and sooner or later I’d end up working with Renzo.
For a while my friend lingered, singing my praises. The woman listened admiringly, throwing me the occasional knowing glance, which I returned with a modest smile. We would probably end up bowing to each other, I thought, and something like that did happen when Renzo, after another little slap on the back, left to go to his office three floors up.
“Are you a graduate?” the woman said as soon as we were alone.
“Yes,” I said. “I have a degree in patience.”
“Then you’ll do well here,” she said, laughing. “Besides, there are so many morons here, as long as you’re not an idiot people think you’re a genius.” This must have been a code phrase, so I didn’t say anything while she explained our work to me. It consisted of drafting press releases about the shows currently in production.
While she said this, I thought about the world outside. Was anything wrong? “It’s cold in here,” I blurted out, massaging my arm.
“Oh yes,” she said, “the air-conditioning’s quite powerful, it always has that effect the first time. But we can’t do anything about it, it’s a general system.”
“Long live the General,” I said, but she must have exhausted her reserves of humor for the morning because my subtle one-liner didn’t raise even the hint of a smile. Instead, she handed me a package of press releases so that I could learn the style.
I’d read better things, but I continued leafing through them until the fatigue from my sleepless night with Arianna and the rarefied climate finally gained the upper hand and I began to genuinely shiver with cold. I started to wonder if by any chance I could get an empty Ballantine’s bottle from the staff bar. But where to find hot water? Was anything hot in here? As for using it, I could have done so surreptitiously, below the table, holding it in my lap. Like an old man in a world where all his friends are dead.
“You know what you could do?” my colleague said as I looked out beyond the wall of glass at the sun beating down on the streets. “You could go to Signor Laurenzi’s office and get some information from him about the latest TV series being imported from America.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” I said with the appropriate enthusiasm. “Where would I find him?”
“Room 212. If it’s not a good time, just wait.”
“It’s always a good time for me.”
“I meant for Signor Laurenzi,” she said.
I stood up, my face turning red. If he didn’t have time, I’d hurry to the bar, no two ways about it. I left the room and immediately got lost in a maze of corridors and rooms all clustered together, where I could see secretaries at work and executives with their feet up on desks, smoking pipes and watching TV sets. There was also a whole bunch of people strolling arm in arm through the corridors, leaving a trail of mild tobacco smoke behind them. I kept pushing doors that were windows, opening windows that were storage closets, and pressing buttons for elevators that were out of order. After a while I gave up, stopped by a real window, and looked out at the inner courtyard. In front of me was a reddish, transparent façade, subdivided with the regularity of a chessboard, and each square was an office, some with a lamp on the desk, to indicate that it was the office of someone in charge of something, and the higher you climbed, the more lamps there were, because, as we know, the higher you are, the easier it is to be in charge. In desperation, I stopped a girl and asked her where Signor Laurenzi’s office was. She was one of those girls who go around as if they’re the only people who can see anything, and she looked at me as if I were an idiot, then pointed to an usher, who reluctantly put down his Corriere dello Sport—ah, the good old days—and led me to my destination.
Signor Laurenzi was there, in person, when I walked into his office. “What’s up?” he said. He might have been around my age, but there wasn’t a hint of generational solidarity in his eyes. While I told him what was up, he focused on my white suit as if it were a shroud. “I don’t have time,” he said. He looked like someone who’d already met his angel and given him the answer he deserved. I told him I’d wait for him. “Not here,” he said and I asked him if the bar would be all right. The sociability of my answer surprised him. He looked at his watch. “All right, in the bar,” he said, “in forty-five minutes.”
Now I just had to find the bar, but I let myself be guided by instinct, took the first elevator that was leaving, and pressed the top button. When the door opened, I was immediately hit by a comforting clink of glasses and bottles. I followed the call and ended up in a vast room whose glass walls granted a view of the surrounding city. I ordered a tandem and sat down on one of the stools lined up along the window.
After an hour and a quarter, Laurenzi still hadn’t shown up, and the more time passed, the more obvious it became that he wouldn’t show up. But he’d told me to wait, so I waited.
In the meantime, I observed the crowd at the bar. Most of them were executives with pipes. It set an impressive tone, having a pipe, and they chattered away, banging their pipes in the ashtrays or else sucking on them with their thumbs over the chamber or else rummaging inside them with a match, morbidly so. It was a scene of
intense activity, tobacco pouches, fingers grabbing, pressing, twisting. They gave off a good smell as I looked at their blue jackets, their shiny shoes, their moderately weird ties, and their pipes.
I turned to the window and looked out at the city. The sun was beating down on Monte Mario, where my apartment was, with its balcony looking out over the valley. It must have been hot out there, at the insurmountable distance of a few inches of greenish glass.
I decided that a second pick-me-up was more than justified and I was on my way to the bar when I saw the director I’d met with Renzo at Signor Sandro’s. He was wearing the same military greatcoat and possibly the same hangover. Without even wondering if he would recognize me, I went up to him. He looked at me through half-closed eyes, making an effort. Then he said, “Do you still answer for your own life?” He’d remembered my line, with the pitiless memory that alcoholics have for trifles.
“No,” I said, “not today.”
“Right,” he said, looking around. “It gets harder every day. What are you drinking?” Then he saw the two glasses. “Christ,” he said, “you know all about it.” He was drinking straight Pernod. At eleven in the morning. Holding our glasses, we made our way through the people to the window, with him constantly having to greet this person or that and be patted on the back by people who called him by his first name, Corrado. “What are you doing in this place?” he said, climbing onto a stool. He touched the glass as if testing its solidity. I said I was working there too. “I punched it once,” he said, lost in thought, “and broke two knuckles. And what work do you do?” I told him. “Two knuckles, I kid you not. Why don’t you come with me to the studios? You’ll come back filled with news and glory and get a prize for fieldwork, simple as that.”
Last Summer in the City Page 10
