And now I was surrounded by uniforms, I was in their hands. They brought me coffee, asked me if I wanted to see a psychologist in case I was in shock. I didn’t feel like I was in a state of shock, though. I had seen a man killed. But I’m a doctor, after all: I’d seen people die as far back as med school; when I was interning at the hospital, a little girl with heart complications expired in my arms. They questioned me a little disrespectfully at first, then—once they had verified that I really was a speaker at the ophthalmology conference—more courteously. When they finally let me go, it was five in the morning. I had told them what I knew, in other words nothing, and I felt relieved; I went back to the hotel, climbed in bed, and crashed. I was exhausted. I woke up at noon, feeling fresh and rested, I checked out and took a taxi to the airport. I got a seat on the first plane. I was home by three.
I had a nice house. I’d lived there for five years. First I’d lived in the historic center, in an old building, a labyrinth of stairs and courtyards. You could see the cathedral’s bell tower from my windows, a slice of the façade with its rose window, and a swath of red tiles. I liked it and would have stayed. But Denise kept saying that there was too much pollution, that the smog was dangerous, and that our son needed to grow up in nature. The sight of trees teaches respect for life. Denise—not her real name, but you have to forgive me for concealing it—worked for the Green Party; she handled public relations for the regional headquarters, and had strong convictions about the fate of the planet. So we went to a real estate agency and they found us a house on the outskirts, in the foothills. Close enough to the center so you could bike there, but far enough away that we could see the mountains from our porch, and I think I chose it mostly for that. Three stories, a recent construction by a trendy architect. It had a rec room, a yard with tall trees and a swing, and a whole slew of bedrooms. I would have liked a big family, and was counting on convincing Denise over time. It took us a year to decorate it. She did it all, because I’ve never cared in the least about furniture. A bed is a bed, a table a table. Over time, Denise began to regret moving to the countryside. She quit her job when Marco was born, and the bucolic solitude of that enormous house—shared only with a newborn and a Moldavian babysitter whose vocabulary was limited to about a hundred words—turned out to be really hard for her, almost unbearable. I was never home before nine. But by that point I liked our house, I’d fallen in love with the trees, the birds, the mountains, I wasn’t up for moving again. And we’d also gotten a cat—a Persian, Soraya, who quickly became the queen of the yard, and I never would have confined her to a city apartment. It may sound strange to you, but as the years passed, Soraya’s happiness became more important to me than Denise’s.
I didn’t tell Denise anything about Calogero’s murder. It was something that happened hundreds of miles away. There was only a brief article in the newspapers, and she never read the news unless something happened in our city—and nothing ever happened in our city. When Marco ran to greet me and I held him in my arms, it was like the whole thing had never happened, at least not to me. Like a hallucination, a nightmare, but one from which I had awoken into my previous existence.
I have experienced just about all the sensations a man can experience in life. I never denied myself anything. But nothing feels more amazing than the gentle weight of your son’s head on your shoulder as he wraps his arms around your neck and slobbers your cheek with kisses, quivering with joy because you’ve finally come home. It’s hard for me to write about him, but if I didn’t, I would be hiding from you the only good thing I’ve been able to do in my life. Marco is his real name. I know I shouldn’t write it, but I can’t help myself. It’s a way of having him here with me, even if only for an instant.
He has blue eyes and blond hair and everyone says he looks exactly like me. But the most recent photograph I have of him is from last Christmas, and maybe he looks different now. I haven’t seen him in a year. I’m sorry I haven’t told you about him. It wasn’t because I wanted to hide his existence from you, but because I can’t talk about him without doubling over in pain. It’s a physical pain, as if someone were twisting a knife in my guts. I know you can understand me—in fact you may be the only person who can. Everything lessens with time. Solids sublimate and become gas. Water evaporates. Rocks crumble—even granite turns to sand in the end. Radioactive materials decay, it takes centuries, millennia, billions of years, but even uranium, cesium, and thorium become harmless. Not pain, though. Pain is indestructible, like gold, like diamonds. My pain has withstood the passage of time, of everything; if anything, it’s growing stronger.
I have to say that I can make do without everything else. My house, my work, my family, Denise. But not my child. The next day I returned to my office, my patients, my hospital rounds, my usual routine. I examined eyes affected by macular degeneration, myopia, exotropia, presbyopia. I handed out eyedrops, prescriptions, and atropine. I performed cataract surgery. Keep in mind that seventy-five percent of people over seventy have problems with cataracts, and one hundred percent of those over eighty do. Given Italy’s aging population and the increase in the average life span, I’d chosen an ideal profession, and I didn’t have to worry about being unemployed. Nearly eighty percent of my work was cataract related. The technical term is phacoemulsification. I would use ultrasound to emulsify the crystalline lens, aspirate it, make an incision, remove the natural lens, and implant a synthetic one. Making the incision requires real skill—we’re talking about minuscule measurements, barely six millimeters in diameter, and during the extraction you have to be careful not to damage the surrounding tissue—but it had become routine to me.
Denise and I went shopping at the supermarket near our house, Marco sitting in the cart; I took the babysitter to the train in the evening; we invited friends over for dinner—I liked to cook and was pretty good in the kitchen. It seems to me now that the week after the ophthalmology conference was the best week of my life. Because somewhere inside of me I knew it couldn’t last. It may sound strange, but I felt guilty. Almost as if I’d been the one to shoot Calogero. In truth, I’d shot myself, and somehow I knew it. So I tried to make peace with my life. To ignore the rough patches and celebrate the joys.
Denise and I had gone through some tough times. She was only one of my girlfriends. I’d never felt particularly bound to her. But when I was thirty-one I got it in my head that I wanted to have a child. I’d had an absent father and was a terrible son, but I was convinced I would be a good father and that my son would be happy. I know it doesn’t usually happen to men, that the biological clock usually ticks only for women. But I really wanted to have a child. I was seeing three women when the idea seized me and wouldn’t let go: Denise, Valeria, and Giada. Each one would have liked to be the only one, but all three knew about the others; I don’t like lying to people. Giada, a third-year medical student, was too young. Valeria was a dark-haired nephrologist who laughed all the time and was an octopus in bed. She knew every trick there was to please a man. She was as promiscuous as I was; she wasn’t jealous, and never would have suffocated me or gotten depressed over an affair. I was happy with her and she would have been the ideal mother. But she was already forty and I worried we would have trouble conceiving. I was very pragmatic, maybe even cynical, and I’m sorry about that—she was very hurt when Marco was born; even someone as easygoing as she was can get depressed. Anyway, I got Denise pregnant and we went off to live in the countryside with our son. But I continued to see Giada and then Giada’s cousin, too, and obviously Denise found out about it, and tried in vain to make me leave them. She had put on forty pounds during her pregnancy and, diets and workouts notwithstanding, she never managed to drop the extra weight. She started feeling depressed, neglected, and ugly, even though it wasn’t true; she actually looked better with a little more flesh on her. I found her new shape more reassuring. We started fighting, poisoning our relationship. I would promise her any- and everything because I didn’t want her to leave and take M
arco with her, but I never kept my promises. Deep down I knew she wouldn’t leave: she loved me.
That week I always made it home in time for dinner. I didn’t cheat on her. On Saturday we went snowshoeing in the mountains. The snow was perfect, powdery, packed—zero risk of avalanches. All alone, we walked for almost three hours, in single file in the woods. Every now and then we would come across hare or chamois tracks. The only sound was the thud of snow falling from tree branches. It was all so white and pure, and I felt good. Denise was tired so I hoisted Marco on my shoulders and carried him as far as the Alpine hut. We sunbathed on the terrace. I made Marco a snow bear. We’d been told that they cross the border from Slovenia sometimes, and make their dens in the caves below the peaks. Marco wanted to see one and was disappointed when I explained that bears sleep through the winter. On Sunday my brother and his wife came to visit and we had a barbeque. Marco didn’t want to go to bed and I finally convinced him by promising him a bedtime story. He was crazy about “Puss in Boots.” So I read him “Puss in Boots” until he fell asleep. The next morning I got a phone call. It was the police commissioner who had questioned me the week before. He told me there were some new developments and that they needed to talk with me. He asked me when I might have a few hours to go down and talk with them. I explained that I was extremely busy, I didn’t have any vacation time and couldn’t get away. Since he couldn’t convince me to go there, in the end he said that he would come to me.
I met them in my office. I’ve forgotten the face of his colleague, who didn’t say a word; but the commissioner had bags under his eyes and was unshaven, as if he hadn’t slept in days. He asked me if any other details had come to mind, anything that I might have omitted during my first deposition. But I hadn’t given it any further thought, so I told him no. At that point he showed me some photographs. I had stupidly told him that the guy on the back of the motorcycle wasn’t wearing a helmet, and that I’d seen his face. A kid, roughly twenty years old. I looked at the photographs, but not very carefully. It was cold but I was sweating like a pig. Because I understood perfectly well the situation I’d gotten myself into, and I wanted out, but I didn’t know how to get out. And then I saw him. I would have picked him out in a crowd of a million. His face was stamped on my memory, a snapshot frozen right at the instant he said “Calogero.” And now there he was on my desk, alongside my ophthalmology books and international journals, in which I managed to publish an article every once in a while, alongside the photos of Marco in the pool, Marco skiing, Marco with me in Santorini, in the dazzling white of the houses of Imerovigli. And that kid had shot a forty-year-old gynecologist in the face right in front of me.
I ask myself all the time what I would do if I could do it all over again. If I could have imagined all this. I told you, I don’t believe in anything, I’m allergic to ideologies and I’ve never done anything for my neighbor simply because it was my duty to do so. I just tried to be happy, and I’d succeeded for thirty-eight years. I’d deceived everyone, myself most of all. I don’t have a particularly elevated opinion of humanity, and I don’t consider myself better than other people. When the law restricted my freedom I broke it without remorse. I’m not particularly bound to institutions; as a student and then as a doctor I knew only their most corrupt and repugnant aspects. The word Italy means nothing to me beyond the language I speak and the country I live in. I get annoyed when people talk to me about the homeland. For me the homeland isn’t the land of our fathers but of our children. It’s not an expanse of space or a history, but something alive and present, that each one of us carries inside. I know you don’t agree, but for me Italy can be reduced to a passport, my son’s school, and the hospital. I’m not particularly courageous—if anything I’m reckless, I’d risk my life trying to clear a path in the Himalayas for the sheer pleasure of the challenge. But recklessness is the opposite of courage. And anyway, I wasn’t thinking about any of this then. Calogero the gynecologist was not innocent, but I probably wouldn’t have been either, in his place. I didn’t owe him anything. I had everything to lose and nothing to gain.
And yet I believe I would do what I did again. I put my sweaty fingers on the photograph and nodded. “That’s him, I recognize him beyond any reasonable doubt.” The man who had traveled six hundred miles to hear those words sighed and scratched his beard. He was happy, but also sad. Sad for me, but I didn’t know it then. He told me I would have to make a statement, and I had to go with him to the nearest police station. The report took about an hour. When it was over, both visitors thanked me and shook my hand. I didn’t really understand what they were thanking me for.
I didn’t know the kid’s name, and I didn’t want to know. In fact, I stated clearly that it didn’t matter to me who he was. For me, he was just someone who had shot a man in the face. If they caught him, sure, I’d be willing to testify at the trial, but I didn’t want to know anything more till then. The man who had traveled six hundred miles for me thought that it might not be so simple, but he didn’t say anything at the time. Later, I found out that the kid was named Marco, like my son, and I still can’t forgive him for that.
Some time later—I can’t remember exactly when, my memory has erased the intervals, but at any rate some time later—I found out that Marco’s father was one of the twenty most dangerous fugitives in Italy. With that murder, his son was proving that he was an adult and could control his father’s territory even in his absence. Marco was suspected of various crimes, but they had never been able to gather enough evidence to charge him. My deposition could turn out to be decisive in upsetting the family’s plans and in apprehending both the instigators and the accomplices. So I was a precious witness. To cut a long story short, the prefect’s office sent a public security representative to see me. He informed me that the police had been ordered to set up appropriate protective measures to guarantee my safety. Nothing serious. Standard procedure, as provided for by the penal code. I shouldn’t worry. A provisional measure, purely precautionary. Nothing bad would happen to me. I shouldn’t be afraid. But I had to talk to my wife. My family had to be informed of the new protective measures, it was essential for our safety. “She’s not my wife,” I said. Just think: he was trying to tell me that my old life was dying, and all I could think to do was point out that Denise and I weren’t married. Maybe it was a way of defending myself from reality.
“What does it mean in practical terms?” was the only thing Denise said when I informed her of the killing and my meeting with the police. “I think they’ll send someone to watch the house,” I told her. “Oh well, as long as they don’t send a female officer,” she sighed sarcastically. She was still witty despite the disappointments and bitterness she’d endured in recent years. A rather rare quality in a woman. In that moment I forgave her years of accusations and fights she’d picked, and I opened myself to her. I don’t know if I loved her, but I cared a lot about her, and I was happy she was my partner.
They didn’t come right away, some time passed. For a few days I even hoped they had changed their mind. But I will spare you the delays. When a dark car finally took up position in front of our gate, I picked up Marco and pointed to it. “Do you see that? It’s for me. Papà’s a big shot now. I have police protection, just like a politician.” “Wow,” Marco said. And we laughed.
BELLAVISTA HOTEL, JANUARY 8
On the face of it, nothing changed. I still rode my bike to work. The dark car circled our house, following me if I went out, but after a few days I managed to forget about it. And yet, almost without realizing it, my habits changed, and I started to change, too. I was being watched, after all. My personal freedom was cramped by that discreet yet nagging presence. Because I was ashamed to let the judges and police officers—who considered me a serious, honest, upright professional—know that I wasn’t what I seemed, that even though I had a partner and a child, I was seeing another woman. Her name was Lara, she was a patient of mine, visually impaired. My office was like a girlfriend recruit
ing agency, a factory for minting admirers. Three quarters of my patients were women. In that half hour of intimacy—in which they, timid, hesitant, rested their chin on the testing instrument and looked me in the eye—something sparked. I was young. It’s hard for two human beings to look each other in the eye like that and remain indifferent. They were seeking comfort, and I wanted to share a little happiness. But Lara wasn’t merely a whim. She couldn’t see me, so she touched me with an almost shamanic power, identifying the most sensitive parts of my body and sensitizing those that weren’t, from the soles of my feet to my elbows, from my fingernails to the folds in my ass. So we made love in the dark, and she taught me to see with my hands.
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