He tried to reflect in an orderly fashion.
Should he show up? He guessed that Berkowickz wanted to talk to him about Ginger, or about the relationship that, to judge from the scene he’d witnessed that morning, linked them or was beginning to link him to her, or about what Ginger had told Berkowickz about him, or about all those things at once. He discarded the idea: he hadn’t noticed the slightest sign of concern or vexation in Berkowickz’s attitude when surprised with Ginger this morning on the landing, nor when saying goodbye to him. Furthermore, if he had any knowledge of the bond that up till then had linked Mario to Ginger – which seemed fairly improbable – it was almost certain he’d prefer to forget it or, more reasonably, that it held no interest for him. At other moments (walking into Lincoln Hall, during class, while crossing the Quad) he envisioned the possibility that Branstyne might have told Berkowickz or insinuated that he, Mario, absurdly attributed the whirlwind of misfortunes that had befallen him to Berkowickz’s presence. Berkowickz would have felt somehow responsible, and perhaps wanted to give him some explanation, or simply make it up to him, gain his sympathy. He also discarded this hypothesis: Either I don’t know how the world works, he thought, or guys like Berkowickz don’t know the meaning of guilt. On the other hand, what interest could the new tenant have in winning his friendship, if he can’t even imagine him as a potential enemy . . . ? Later he thought that Berkowickz wanted to crush him definitively, humiliating him with an exhibition of curriculum vitae and amiability, intellectual energy and exuberant vitality.
After his nap he tried once again to put his ideas in order. He reconsidered the hypotheses he’d formulated, ventured some more. They all led to a curious operation: each of the motives he managed to ascribe to Berkowickz’s thinking in arranging the meeting metamorphosed into another set of reasons not to go. This led him not to discard the possibility, which at one point had seemed remote, that Berkowickz, just as he’d declared on the porch, wanted to get to know him, to talk to him: after all, it was true they had not yet had a chance to exchange opinions. In any case, he concluded, with a resolution not exempt from satisfaction at the implacable logical rigour with which he’d linked his ideas, what’s sure is that, if I don’t show up, Berkowickz is going to think I don’t dare confront him alone.
Just after eight he knocked on the door of the apartment across the hall. Berkowickz took a while to open. When he did (wearing dun-coloured drill trousers, a T-shirt scribbled with signatures of famous artists and an anagram of the Art Institute of Chicago, canvas espadrilles, in his left hand a folded newspaper), Mario realized from the look in his eyes that he’d forgotten the arrangement. Perhaps to hide this fact, or just as a greeting, Berkowickz smiled excessively.
‘Come in, Mario, come in,’ he said, making room for him to pass through. He admitted straight away, ‘The truth is I’d forgotten we were getting together. With so many things to do my head gets muddled. But it doesn’t matter . . .’
Berkowickz kept talking. Mario wasn’t listening to him: as soon as he entered the apartment he was overtaken by a visceral discomfort that translated into a kind of vertigo, something like a hollow in his stomach. He sat down on a sofa leaving the crutch on one side. Berkowickz handed him a glass of whisky he didn’t remember asking for; he held it weakly and squirmed on the sofa. He saw his host gesticulating, smiling and arching his brows, but he was unable to concentrate on what he was saying: Berkowickz’s words slid through his ears without leaving any trace whatsoever. He rubbed his eyes, the bridge of his nose, his forehead. Only then did he begin to recognize the pale wood, the metal chairs, the vaguely cubist paintings, the advertisement for a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in a gallery in Turin; he recognized the television beside him, the record player, the double-decker transparent table, the Hockney reproduction hanging from a hook on the wall, the cream-coloured sofa he was sitting on, the two armchairs of the same colour. He recognized the minute cluster of things that packed the glass cabinet: the Algerian pipe, the antique pistols and the hourglass, the frigate imprisoned in the Chianti bottle, the clay figures, the marble elephant.
A chill shot up his back.
Bewildered, abruptly gullible, he realised that Berkowickz’s apartment was an exact, though inverted, replica of his own: the perverse reflection of it in an atrocious mirror. He was frightened: he felt his hands drenched in sweat; his heart pounded wildly in his throat. He tried to control his nerves, to pull himself together. To tackle the situation, he constructed a phrase: ‘Bravery does not consist in not being afraid: that’s called temerity. Bravery consists in being afraid, struggling against it and winning.’ Comforted and strengthened by this reflection, he forced himself to listen to the monologue that Berkowickz, sitting in the armchair in front of him, continued delivering amid gesticulations. At some moment, hazily, he thought he understood that Berkowickz was setting out a problem related to the configuration of the syllable in Italian. Mario nodded in agreement. After a while he realized he couldn’t take any more: with the excuse of a sudden headache, he stood up from the sofa without looking at Berkowickz (on the table, the glass of whisky remained untouched) and headed for the door.
‘Here: read this when you have a moment,’ he heard Berkowickz say with an impeccable smile, thrusting a sheaf of photocopied pages into his hand. ‘If you like, we can talk it over some other time.’ Then, resting a fraternal hand on Mario’s shoulder, he added, ‘And take care of that headache: sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’
When he lifted the telephone receiver he noticed his hands were trembling; it took him several attempts to dial the number.
‘Mrs Workman? This is Mario Rota.’
‘What do you want?’ Mrs Workman’s voice sounded deep, drenched in sleep.
‘I’m calling about the new tenant.’
‘What about the new tenant?’
Mario answered with a thread of a voice: ‘He has the same furniture as me.’
There was a silence.
‘Mrs Workman?’ Mario enquired. ‘Are you there?’
‘Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to call me at this hour to tell me such a thing?’ mumbled Mrs Workman as if talking to herself.
‘Pardon?’
‘Don’t you think it’s a little late to be phoning me?’ said Mrs Workman in a friendly tone. She continued in a tone of gentle scolding: ‘I believe I’ve told you many times that I go to bed very early, to try to call me at reasonable times. Or have you been drinking?’
‘No, Mrs Workman, I assure you I haven’t,’ Mario hurriedly swore, his voice shrunken with anguish. ‘But it’s horrible, can’t you see? Berkowickz has the same pictures as I do, the same sofa, the same armchairs, everything the same.’
‘And what do you want me to tell you?’ the old woman croaked in annoyance. ‘He must have the same taste as you, which would be a shame. Or you bought them at the same place. What do I know, man, how should I know?’
‘But it’s that they’re exactly the same,’ Mario almost shouted. Immediately he begged, ‘Mrs Workman, something must be done.’
‘That’s for sure,’ answered Mrs Workman. ‘Get into bed and sleep it off.’
XVIII
During the night he woke up several times bathed in sweat, the sheets twisted. One time he imagined he’d just dreamed the visit he’d made the previous evening to Berkowickz’s apartment; another time, as he smoked a cigarette of insomnia looking out the window of his study (outside the bulbs of the street lamps projected a weak light over the street), he wished vehemently for that whole week to have been a nightmare. At some point he managed to get to sleep, comforted by the hope that the next day everything would be different.
The next day he woke up with the certainty that nothing was going to be different. It was seven in the morning; filtering through the curtains, the skeletal light of dawn lit up the room. Although overwhelmed by the prospect (a Saturday without a single activity to occupy his time), he got up immediately, shaved and s
howered, and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. He tried to banish from his mind the ominous proximity of Berkowickz’s apartment, on the other side of the landing. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. Morbidly he leafed through the sheaf of photocopies that Berkowickz had given him the day before: it was an article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz. He left the sheaf of photocopies on the sofa and went to his study where he spent a while putting papers in order. By nine-thirty he didn’t know what to do with himself any more. If only I could at least go out for a run, he thought, lighting a cigarette. That was when he remembered that it had been almost a week since they bandaged his ankle. He remembered the doctor’s words: ‘Come back in a week.’ He called a taxi and, while he waited for it on the porch, he was happy to have found something to occupy the morning. He was also happy at the mere possibility of getting rid of the bandage, crutch and limp that had been humiliating him all week.
The taxi stopped on the expanse of pavement surrounded by grass where Mario had parked his car the previous week: the old second-hand Buick was still there; Mario felt a sort of tenderness towards it.
He went into the hospital. At the end of the 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. Mario recognized her. Leaning his crutch and his elbows on the counter, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone she turned to Mario and handed him a form.
‘I don’t know if you recognize me,’ said Mario, smiling, because he was sure the nurse recognized him and could perhaps save him the paperwork. ‘I was here last week and –’
‘Be so kind as to fill in the form,’ the nurse parried curtly. Then she added in a quieter voice, ‘That’d be great if I had to remember everyone who came through here.’
Mario filled in the form, handed it back to the nurse. She pointed him towards the row of chairs opposite the counter and asked him to wait. Mario sat down in a chair and set down in the one beside it a bag in which he’d taken the precaution of putting the shoe and sock that matched the ones he was wearing on his right foot. He leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. On a couple of occasions he noticed distractedly that the nurse was leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He heard her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. Almost in disgust, he thought: There’s no getting away from him. He again felt a ball of anguish in his throat; his hands sweated again. Then he 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. He shuddered. Absurdly, he thought of going home and taking the bandage off himself. An instant later he heard a nurse, at the other end of the foyer, calling him by his name and motioning him to follow her.
They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room; she removed the bandage from his ankle and examined it. Under the oblique light that illuminated them, Mario noticed the thick shadow that soiled the nurse’s upper lip; he realized she was the same one who had attended him the week before. He sat up a little, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her anxiously, as if searching for a sign of recognition in her eyes. The nurse smiled coldly. She said, ‘The doctor will see you straight away.’
After a moment the doctor came in: pale, Oriental, small, nervous. Mario was no longer surprised that it was the same doctor as the previous week. He lay back down on the table while he felt the pressure of investigating fingers on various parts of his foot. He tried to relax, not to think of anything. Bent over Mario’s ankle, the doctor squinted; his eyes thinned into slots.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked the doctor, gently squeezing his instep.
Mario sat up again: he noticed that the swelling around his ankle had completely disappeared. The yellow pallor and stains of dirt that darkened his skin revealed the recent presence of the bandage. The nurse watched them smilingly from a discreet distance.
‘Does it hurt?’ the doctor repeated.
‘No,’ Mario assured him. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’
‘Hmm,’ murmured the doctor.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘The ankle is fine,’ the doctor said, straightening up and looking at Mario: the two slots turned back into two green ovals. He smiled, walked over to the sink that was on the other side of the room and washed his hands.
‘Completely?’ asked Mario.
‘Completely,’ the doctor answered, turning around as he dried his hands on a towel.
Perhaps stupidly, Mario asked, ‘Could I go out for a run tomorrow?’
The doctor looked him in the eye again, this time maliciously. Then he looked down to his dirty, naked ankle against the white of the sheets.
‘You could,’ he ventured. ‘But it might be better to leave it till Monday.’
In a rush, wanting to get out of the hospital as soon as possible, Mario washed his foot before the nurse’s immutable smile, and put on his sock and shoe. He crossed the foyer accompanied by the nurse, walked down the corridor and reached the door. When he was about to leave, the woman stopped him by grabbing his arm. She looked up and down the corridor, stared at Mario in a strange way, and smiled.
‘I recognized you,’ she whispered. ‘I knew you’d be back.’
Before the nurse approached to kiss him, Mario thought: Now I’ll wake up.
XIX
Mario went out for a run at eight o’clock on Monday morning. He immediately noticed the street was suffused in a halo of mist: the houses opposite, the cars parked by the sidewalk and the globes of light from the street lamps seemed to shimmer with an unstable and hazy existence. Trying not to strain his ankle, he did a few arm and leg stretches on the tiny rectangle of lawn in front of the house and thought: Fall’s here already. Then he remembered something; he almost smiled. He went back inside and came out again a moment later, this time with his glasses on. The mist having dissolved, Mario began to run along the path of greyish flagstones between the road and the meticulous gardens, enclosed by flowerbeds and wooden fences aligned in front of the houses. At first he ran with care, almost fear, barely putting any weight on his left foot; then, as he noticed his ankle wasn’t suffering, he quickened his pace.
The streets were deserted. The only person he saw during the first five minutes of his run was a young woman crouched down beside an anemone bush in the back garden of the First Church of Christ Scientist, as he was turning right on McCollough. The girl turned: she bared her teeth in a devout smile. Mario felt obliged to return the greeting: he smiled. Later, by then on Pennsylvania, he crossed paths with a grey-haired man in shorts and a black T-shirt, who was jogging in the opposite direction. The man’s expression seemed concentrated on a buzzing emitted from two earphones fed from a cassette player strapped to his waist. After that came a postal truck, an old, bandy-legged black man, who supported his decrepit steps with a wooden walking stick, a young woman with diligent Oriental features, a family having a boisterous breakfast on the front porch, complete with laughter and parental warnings. When, on the way home, he turned back on to West Oregon, the city seemed to have resumed its daily pulse.
That’s when he saw the bed of dahlias where he’d twisted his ankle last Monday. He didn’t think anything.
Panting, sweating and almost happy, he arrived home. He took a shower, made some breakfast (peach juice, scrambled eggs with bacon, toast, coffee with hot milk) and ate hungrily as he listened to the news on the radio. As he left the house he told himself that the physical exercise had done him good, banished his anxiety and perhaps the fear as well: he felt spirited.
At a quarter past nine he parked the Buick in front of the foreign languages building. He picked up his leath
er briefcase from the passenger seat on his right and went into the building. The hall was half empty: just a few young people, sprawling on the carpeted floor, leaning against the walls, studying or dozing while waiting for the next class.
He went up in the elevator alone. When he got to the main office of the department Branstyne and Swinczyc were speaking in low voices. They stopped talking as soon as they noticed Mario’s presence: they turned to him, said hello. After a few innocuous comments on the weather or the tedium of weekends (or maybe about the Conference of the Association of Linguists), to which he barely paid any attention, Mario got to his cubbyhole. He picked up an envelope, he opened it: Scanlan asked to speak to him right away. Resigned, he thought: This is it.
Since he didn’t see Joan, he knocked directly on Scanlan’s door.
‘Come in,’ he said.
Scanlan was sitting behind his desk; he didn’t stand up. With a gesture he indicated that Mario should sit down across from him. Mario sat down. The morning sunshine lit up the office: the white walls, the leather chairs, the desk covered in papers, the poster advertising a retrospective of the work of Botero, Scanlan’s eyes, dark and intelligent behind the thick lenses of his glasses.
Scanlan stroked his beard and blinked.
‘Well, Mario,’ he said softly. ‘I suppose you can give me an explanation.’
Mario looked him in the eye without understanding.
‘Of what?’ he asked.
Scanlan stared back for a moment, blinked again, sighed. Then he opened a drawer in his desk, took out a piece of paper and handed it to Mario. He read it: the students from the first and second sections of phonology informed the head of the department that the professor in charge of the courses had not shown up for any of the lectures since term began.
The Tenant and The Motive Page 7
