IV
‘Ginger? It’s Mario.’
‘How are you?’ asked Ginger. Not waiting for a reply, she asked another question. ‘When did you get back?’
‘A couple of days ago,’ answered Mario. ‘I haven’t called because I’ve been getting things organized. You know.’
‘Yeah.’
Mario thought: The telephone dulls people. Ginger’s voice sounded neutral, colourless. Mario said, ‘If you like, we could have lunch together.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘At Timpone’s,’ Mario insisted. ‘We’ll celebrate our reunion.’
‘I don’t know,’ Ginger said again.
Mario insisted again.
There was a silence. The murmur of another conversation crossed the line. Mario heard, ‘OK.’
‘I’ll meet you at Timpone’s in an hour then.’
He hung up. He looked at his watch: it was noon.
At five to one he arrived at the restaurant. Ginger was sitting at one of the tables at the back, in front of the big windows that gave the room so much light. She was wearing a light-blue dress; her hair was bunched in an imperfect bun at the nape of her neck. As he pulled out a chair to sit down, Mario thought: She looks lovely.
‘What happened?’ asked Ginger. ‘You’re limping.’
‘Well,’ said Mario, smiling as if in apology, ‘this morning I twisted my ankle. Jogging.’
‘I hope it’s nothing serious.’
‘It’s not.’
Ginger ordered a cold steak with rice, Mario, a salad and curried chicken. They drank burgundy.
‘You don’t seem too happy that I’m back.’
‘I don’t know if I am,’ admitted Ginger. Then she asked, ‘How did it go?’
‘I got bored,’ said Mario with his gaze buried in the chicken. ‘By the second week I didn’t know what to do with myself.’
They ate in silence. The waiter came over twice to see if they needed anything and make sure they liked the food; they both nodded without enthusiasm.
Though he already knew the answer, Mario enquired, ‘How have things been going around here?’
‘Same as ever,’ said Ginger. ‘All very quiet; too quiet really: there was hardly anyone left to talk to.’
‘You must’ve got a lot of work done,’ Mario ventured.
Ginger had stayed at the university all summer to keep working on her thesis. To Mario’s question she replied with a shrug of her shoulders and a gesture of fatigue. She said, ‘I suppose, quite a bit, and in lots of different directions, but I’m still not sure which is the right one.’
Mario thought Ginger’s expression now was opaque and inexpressive, like her voice had been a little while ago on the phone. They talked about the details Mario had suggested she examine during his absence. Ginger answered Mario’s questions in monosyllables. At one point the girl’s features seemed to brighten up.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, as if leaving something behind. ‘Tomorrow I’ll talk to Berkowickz.’
‘To whom?’
‘Berkowickz,’ Ginger repeated, looking Mario in the eye. ‘They finally managed to hire him. Apparently he made all sorts of demands; you know how those people are. Anyway, Scanlan managed it; he was very determined and he did it. Branstyne told me he’s very pleased.’
The waiter took the plates away and asked if they wanted dessert. Ginger ordered apple pie; Mario declined the offer and lit a cigarette.
‘But I thought you already knew about Berkowickz,’ said Ginger.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Mario, puffing out a smoke ring.
‘I’m sure it had already been mentioned before you went on holiday.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Mario repeated.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ginger said. ‘The thing is, we all stand to benefit. Especially me.’
Ginger said that Berkowickz’s latest article, ‘The Syntax of the Word-Initial Consonant in Italian’, published in the April issue of Language, left the investigation open at precisely the point where she had begun. She said she was sure Berkowickz must have continued working in that very direction and, even if that was not the case, he would undoubtedly be interested in the study she was attempting to carry out and would certainly hasten to offer her his support. She declared again that the following day she would speak to Berkowickz. If things went as she expected (she’d been told Berkowickz was a kind, hard-working and enthusiastic man), perhaps he might offer to supervise her thesis. She was sure Mario wouldn’t mind letting him take over.
‘Besides,’ she concluded, half-closing her eyes and feigning an expression she meant to appear mischievous or dreamy, ‘just imagine: it always looks good having a guy like that direct your thesis.’
Mario was disconcerted. He didn’t know why he still hadn’t told Ginger that Berkowickz had just rented an apartment in the building where he lived, nor could he understand how Ginger could humiliate him like that, taking it as a given that he, seemingly incompetent, wouldn’t mind giving up the supervision of her thesis, however insignificant or merely nominal a position it might be, in favour of Berkowickz, whose intellectual worth was seemingly beyond doubt. And what surprised him even more – although here the surprise was perhaps only an instinctive form of defence – was not having recognised the title of the article Ginger had mentioned. For the rest, he found it impossible to associate Berkowickz’s name with anything vaguely related to phonological investigation. But what really had Mario stunned was the aplomb with which he was accepting the situation: not a single gesture of objection, nor of impatience, nor of nervousness. It was like when he realised he was dreaming while still dreaming: everything lacked importance except the certainty that nothing could affect him and that at any moment he would wake up and the dream would have vanished into thin air, without leaving the slightest trace.
After a while Mario realised Ginger had been talking away without his paying any attention, absorbed in the task of crafting smoke rings. Feeling rather tired, Mario supposed she’d been talking about Berkowickz, about her thesis, about herself, maybe about him. He tried to change the subject by asking about mutual friends, about Ginger’s parents, whom she’d visited for a few days, about news from the department. Then the conversation lagged again. They paid and left.
On the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant, Mario noticed his ankle was hurting.
‘I’ve got some things to do right now,’ he said. ‘But what do you think about coming over this evening for a drink?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ginger apologised, perhaps insincerely. ‘I promised Brenda we’d go see a movie.’
Brenda was Ginger’s room-mate; to soften the blow of the rebuff, Mario asked after her. Ginger told him she’d just come back from California, where she’d spent two weeks.
‘You could see a movie some other time,’ Mario suggested without much conviction. Then he lied. ‘I have to talk to you about something.’
‘Some other time,’ said Ginger. ‘I can’t today.’
‘OK,’ Mario gave in. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ Ginger agreed vaguely, and as Mario walked towards his car she added, raising her voice slightly, ‘Take care of that ankle, Mario. Sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’
Mario thought: Everything repeats itself.
V
Instead of going home he drove towards the hospital. He parked on an expanse of asphalt surrounded by grass, and was about to enter the building through the main door when he noticed someone waving to him. He changed direction and approached the car window out of which a young woman with bulging eyes had just been waving her hand.
‘Sorry,’ said the young woman when Mario was a few feet away. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
Mario thought: How strange.
He went into the hospital. At the end of a corridor with very white walls, he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy
hands was entrenched. Leaning on the counter to take a bit of weight off his ankle, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone, Mario explained the problem. The nurse made him fill in a form and asked him to sit down and wait in one of the rows of chairs facing the counter. Mario sat down in one of the chairs, leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. A couple of times he was distracted by the nurse leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He could hear her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. It’s incredible, he thought, as if smiling. I’m going to end up obsessed. After a while he stood up and went over to the counter. He asked the nurse if it would be much longer before he was seen. With a certain harshness, perhaps angrily, the nurse answered, ‘No,’ stood up and disappeared through a back door in the cave. As he limped back to his seat, Mario thought that since he’d entered the hospital he hadn’t seen anyone except the crimson-faced nurse, no doctors, no patients, no other nurses. Then, as if someone had read his mind and wanted to reassure him, he heard his name: at the other end of the foyer a nurse was motioning him to follow her.
They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to remove his shoe and sock from his left foot and lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room. She examined the injured ankle, which had now swollen considerably. Since he thought the nurse was caressing him, Mario sat up, leaning on one elbow: he noticed she was young and pretty. The nurse placed a hand on his chest and brought her face close to his with a smile Mario didn’t know how to interpret.
‘The doctor will be here in a minute,’ she announced, and the beam of oblique light revealed a downy shadow darkening her upper lip.
After a few minutes the doctor came in. He was a pale, small Oriental man who moved with a strange blend of nervousness and precision. He greeted Mario in a friendly way and tried to joke about the benefits of sport. Mario said to himself that at least he’d read the file he’d filled out in the foyer.
‘Hmm,’ the doctor murmured, looking extremely closely at the ankle, seemingly trying to decipher the meaning of the bulge of flesh around it.
Smiling, the nurse watched from a discreet distance. The doctor pressed the foot in several spots. He looked carefully; his eyes narrowed into tiny slots.
‘Does it hurt?’ he asked, pressing one finger against the lower part of his ankle.
‘Quite a bit,’ Mario admitted. He was on the verge of adding, somewhat impatiently, ‘I wouldn’t have come here if it didn’t hurt.’
‘Hmm,’ the doctor murmured again.
‘Is it serious?’ asked Mario.
‘I don’t think so,’ the other man answered, straightening up and looking him in the eye: the two slots turned into green ovals. ‘Nothing’s broken, it’s just a sprain.’
Mario wanted to ask something, but the doctor turned to the nurse, whose quiet smile had not altered, and gave her some instructions he couldn’t quite catch, then left the room.
The nurse began to bandage his foot. Just as she fixed the bandage in place with a piece of surgical tape, the doctor reappeared.
‘Excellent,’ he said.
‘How long will I have to wear this?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the doctor, incredibly. ‘A week. Maybe more. It depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘I don’t know,’ the doctor said again. ‘Come back in a week.’
‘I suppose I’ll be able to walk.’
‘Of course,’ said the doctor. ‘The nurse will give you a crutch to help you. But carry on as normal, avoiding excessive efforts, of course: the less you use your ankle, the better.’
Mario called a taxi from the cave by the entrance. The nurse accompanied him to the door. When the taxi stopped on the driveway outside, the woman smiled. She said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to the doctor. Come back whenever you like.’
For no particular reason, Mario thought: Thank goodness.
VI
Mario had arrived in the United States in August 1981. He’d been given a grant from the Italian government that would allow him to complete a doctorate in linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin.
The first months in the new country were not pleasant. He couldn’t or didn’t want to begin any friendships. With Americans, mostly young southerners, he found it difficult to get past the limits of simple utilitarian relationships. As for the Europeans he chanced to meet, they all struck him as bland, entirely lacking in charm. Although he had ample time and resources, he barely worked; he spent his time in the city’s cinemas, reading newspapers, watching television, waiting for the Christmas holidays. When they arrived, Mario returned to Turin.
He’d always believed that no special link bound him to his country; back in Italy he understood that no special link bound him to any place other than his country. He felt happy.
By the time he returned to Austin after the holidays, he’d decided to give up the grant in the summer and go back to Italy for good.
That was when he met Lisa.
Lisa was then a twenty-seven-year-old woman with straight, black, shiny hair, gentle eyes and sharp features, as if chiselled on to her face. She walked with short, very quick steps, and her every gesture revealed an iron will. But the thing that really attracted attention, in the midst of the sloppy attire that reigned on campus, was the extreme care, almost luxury, with which she dressed. She applied her lipstick time and again, meticulously, and her eyebrows were always a perfect line.
Although no one had introduced them, Mario and Lisa smiled at each other whenever they passed in a corridor, on the stairs, or at the entrance to the humanities building. From there they quickly struck up a conversation at a party to which Enzo Bonali, a history professor Mario had met by chance and who was supervising Lisa’s doctoral thesis, had invited them both. Hiding behind cocktails and canapés since entering the house, knowing none of the other guests, Mario was pleased to see Lisa arrive at the party: he immediately approached her.
They spent the whole evening talking. Lisa told him she’d been born in New York, although she’d spent most of her life in San Diego. Now she was working with Bonali on her thesis, whicn dealt with some aspect of the process of Italian unification. Mario told her he intended to return to Italy in the summer, and laughingly confessed to not liking the United States. Lisa admitted she didn’t like it much either, but insinuated that she considered it an error not to take advantage of the opportunities the country offered. At the end of the party Lisa offered to drive him home.
Two days later they went out for dinner.
Mario didn’t go back to Italy in the summer. Spurred on by Lisa, he’d begun to work on his thesis, and thought that a vacation in Italy would unnecessarily interrupt the rhythm of his work. He only allowed himself a week off to go to New Orleans with Lisa.
A year and a half later he defended his thesis; Lisa had done so a few months earlier. They both applied for teaching positions in various North American universities. Mario had several interested replies, but nothing definite. Lisa, on the other hand, received three offers. After discussing it with Mario, she accepted a position at Brown University: it wasn’t the best, but the university agreed to employ the contracted professor’s spouse.
They were married in July, travelled around Italy for all of August, and returned to the United States just in time to begin the new semester.
Before a year was up Mario had realized his marriage was a failure. One night, after two weeks of fights and uncomfortable silences, Mario and Lisa went out for dinner, then they went to a movie. When they got home they sat in the back yard and smoked in silence. It was a clear spring night, but the smell of summer was on the breeze, the sky was strewn with stars. At some point, Lisa said, ‘Mario, it’s over.’
They divorced that summer.
VII
The ne
xt day Mario woke up at eight, had a shower with his left foot wrapped up in a plastic bag and had breakfast. Then he called a taxi.
At nine-thirty he arrived at the foreign languages building: in his left hand he carried a leather briefcase, in the right, a crutch. When he crossed the foyer of the building he noticed that his bandaged foot and precarious gait attracted more attention than he’d expected: he felt uncomfortable.
He went up in the elevator alone. When he got to the fourth floor, instead of going to the central office of the department, he walked towards his office. He was happy not to bump into anyone in the corridor: although he knew he was going to have to explain about his ankle, the mere thought of it made him feel sick. After poking the key about in the lock for a moment he opened the office door. He instinctively closed it again, because the light was on and someone was inside. He apologized as he pulled the door closed. ‘Sorry.’
The Tenant and The Motive Page 2
