City

by Alessandro Baricco

  “He played the piano in an enormous department store, on the main floor, under the ‘up’ escalator. There was a piece of red carpet on the floor and a white piano, and he wore a tuxedo and played for six hours a day—Chopin, Cole Porter, stuff like that, all from memory. He had been given a printed card that said, in fancy lettering, ‘Our pianist will return immediately’: when he had to go to the bathroom he brought it out and set it on the piano. Then he came back and started up again. He wasn’t bad like other fathers, I mean, not bad the way . . . he didn’t beat anyone, he didn’t drink, he didn’t screw his secretary, nothing like that. Even when it came to the car . . . he didn’t buy one for himself, he was always careful not to have a car that was too . . . too new, or fancy, he could have, but he didn’t, he was careful, it came naturally, I don’t think he had a specific plan, he just didn’t do—he didn’t do any of those things, and that was the problem, you see? Right there, that was the origin of the problem . . . that he didn’t do those things, or a thousand others; he worked and that was all, he did it, as if life had insulted him, and so he had withdrawn into that job that was a defeat, without any desire to get himself out of it; it was like a black hole, an abyss of unhappiness, and the tragedy, the real tragedy, the heart of all that tragedy was that he had dragged us down, totally, me and my mother, into that hole along with him, all he did was drag us down, every moment of his life, every instant, with a miraculous constancy, devoting every gesture to the insane demonstration of a lethal theory, which was: that if he was like that it was for us two, for me and my mother, this was the theory, for us two, because we existed, because of us, for our protection, the two of us, for for for, and the whole damn time he was reminding us of this idiotic theory, his whole life with us was this one long, uninterrupted, exhausting action, which, on top of everything else, he purposely carried out in the cruelest and cleverest way possible; that is, without ever saying a word. No, he never said a word about it, never said anything, he could have spoken to us, clearly, but he never did, not a word, and that was terrible, that was cruel, never to say a thing, and then to be saying it the whole damn time, in the way he sat at the table, and what he watched on television, and even how he had his hair cut, and all the goddam things he didn’t do, and his expression when he looked at you . . . it was cruel, it’s the sort of thing that can make you turn out crazy, and I was turning out crazy. I was a child, a child can’t defend itself. Children may be nasty but in certain areas they have no defenses, it’s like if you beat a child, what can the child do, he can’t do anything, I couldn’t do anything, I was turning out crazy, so one day my mother took me aside and told me about Eva Braun. It was a good example. The daughter of Hitler. She told me to think of Eva Braun. She managed, so you can manage. It was an odd conversation, but it made sense. She told me that at the end, when he killed himself with a cyanide capsule, she killed herself, too: she was there in the bunker, and she killed herself along with him. Because even in the worst of fathers there is something good, she said to me. And you must learn to love that something. I thought about it. I tried to imagine in what way Hitler could have been good, and I made up stories about him, such as he comes home at night, all tired out, and speaks softly, and sits in front of the hearth, staring at the fire, dead tired, and I—I was Eva Braun, right?—a child with blonde braids, and pale white legs under my skirt, I watched him from the next room, without getting any closer, and he was so splendidly tired, with all that blood dripping from him everywhere, and so handsome in his uniform, all you could do was just stand there looking at him, until the blood disappeared and you saw only the tiredness, the marvelous tiredness, so I stood there adoringly, until at last he turned towards me, and saw me, and smiled at me, and got up, in all his dazzling tiredness, and came towards me, right up to me, and squatted down beside me: Hitler. Pretty crazy. He spoke to me, whispering, in German, and then with his hand, his right hand, he slowly caressed my hair, and although you might have thought it would be icy, that hand was soft, and warm, and gentle, it had a kind of wisdom in it, it was a hand that could save you; and although you might have thought it would be repulsive, it was a hand you could love, which in the end you did love, in the end you thought how lovely it was that it was the right hand of your father, gently caressing you. That was the sort of stuff I had going through my head. It was my exercises, you see? Eva Braun was my gym. In time I became very good. At night I’d stare at my father, sitting in his pajamas in front of the TV, until I saw Hitler, in his pajamas in front of the TV. I’d focus on that image for a while, drink it in, then it would go blurry and I’d go back to my father, to his real face: goodness, how sweet it seemed, all that tiredness, that unhappiness. Then I went back to Hitler, then I pulled out my father again, and so I went back and forth with my fantasy; it was a way of escaping the torture, the silences, all that shit. It worked. Except for a couple of times, it worked. All right. A few years later I read in a magazine that Eva Braun wasn’t Hitler’s daughter but his lover. Wife, I don’t know. The point is she slept with him. It was a blow. It confused the hell out of me. I tried to readjust, somehow, but there was no way. I couldn’t get out of my mind the image of Hitler going up to that child and starting to kiss her and all the rest, it was disgusting, and the girl was me, Eva Braun, and he became my father. It was a mess, just terrible. My little game was shattered, and there was no way to put it back together; it had worked, but it didn’t work anymore. It stopped right there. I never loved my father again until he changed trains, as he put it. It’s a funny story. He changed trains one ordinary Sunday. He was playing the piano, under the escalator, and a lady all covered with jewels, who was a little tipsy, came up to him. He was playing ‘When We Were Alive,’ and she started dancing, in front of everyone, with her shopping bags in her hand, and her face beaming. They went on like that for half an hour. Then she carried him off, and she carried him off forever. At home all he said was: I’ve changed trains. At that point, to tell you the truth, I went back to loving him somewhat, because it was like a liberation, I don’t know, he even did his hair in a sort of Latin lover style, with the part as if carved into his white hair, and a new shirt—right then and there I began to love him, at least for an instant, it was like a liberation. I’ve changed trains. Years of domestic tragedy wiped out by a trivial sentence. Grotesque. But lots of times things are like that, in fact they almost always are: you discover in the end that the suffering, all that suffering, was pointless, that you’ve suffered horrendously, and it was pointless, neither just nor unjust, not good or bad, merely pointless, all you can say in the end is: it was pointless. Stuff to drive you crazy if you think about it, so it’s better not to think about it, all you can do is not think about it any more, never, you see?”

  “More or less.”

  “Is the hamburger good?”

  “Yes.”

  Diesel and Poomerang never made it to the offces of CRB, anyway, because at the intersection of Seventh Street and Bourdon Boulevard they saw in the middle of the sidewalk, right before their eyes, the heel of a black shoe that had rolled there from somewhere or other but was now motionless, like a tiny rock in the full flood of people heading out on their lunch hour.

  “What the hell,” Diesel said.

  “What is it?” Poomerang didn’t say.

  “Look,” Diesel said.

  “What the hell,” Poomerang didn’t say.

  They stared at that black heel, a spike heel, and it took no time to see—a moment after the inevitable flash of an ankle in dark nylon—the step that had lost it, the exact step, imagined as rhythm and dance, compass female varnished nylon dark. They saw it first in the pendulum swing of the legs, and then in the gentle bounce of the bosom, under the blouse, which sent it on to the hair— short and black, thought Diesel, short and blond, thought Poomerang—smooth and light enough to dance to that rhythm, which by now in their eyes had become female body, and humanity and history, when it suddenly tripped on the tiny syncopation of a heel that be
gan to totter on one step, and on the next gave way, detaching itself from the shoe and from that whole rhythm— of woman humanity and history—forcing it to falter—not really fall—and from there to find again the equilibrium of immobility—silence.

  They were surrounded by noise and confusion, but it was as if nothing could dislodge them, Diesel even more bent over than usual, his eyes fixed on the ground, Poomerang rubbing his shaved head with his left hand, back and forth: the right, as always, hanging onto Diesel’s pants pocket. They were staring at a black spike heel but in reality they were seeing the woman as she wavered, slowed down; they saw her turn for an instant and say

  “Shit”

  and not think even for a second of stopping, as a normal woman would—stop, turn back, retrieve the heel, try to stick it back on supporting herself with one hand on a street signpost, wrong way—not even think of doing such a reasonable thing, but continuing instead to walk, just out of habit saying

  “Shit”

  at the very moment when, refusing to let the syncopation of an involuntary limp wrinkle her beauty, she takes off the damaged shoe with a casual gesture, still not stopping, and then indeed for those two she becomes heroic by taking off the other— shoeless compass chromed nylon dark—she picks up the shoes, tosses them into a blue trash can as she looks around, searching for what she immediately finds, a yellow vehicle slowly cruising the street: she raises an arm, something gold slides down from the wrist, the yellow vehicle puts on its turn signal, stops, she gets in, gives an address as she pulls her slender leg—foot shoeless—onto the seat, lifting her skirt and, for a moment, flashing a warm prospect of lace that disappears, replaced by an inch of thigh— white—and then reappears on the edge of her panties: little more than a flash, yet it registers in the eyes of a man in a dark suit who doesn’t stop walking but keeps going, follows along behind, the warm flash imprinted on his retina, burning his consciousness and breaking on the defenses of his stupor—the stupor of a wearily married man—with a loud crash of metal and lament.

  What happened was that Diesel and Poomerang stayed with the dark-suited man, sucked in by the quiet wake of his distress, which moved them, so to speak, and pushed them on, until they saw the color of his bathrobe—brown—and smelled the odors of his kitchen. They ended up sitting at the table with him, and noticed that his wife laughed too hard at the jokes spinning out of the blaring television, while he, the man in the dark suit, poured some beer in a glass for her, and got himself a bottle of mineral water, warm and non-carbonated, the kind he had been drinking for years, thanks to the memory of four long-ago renal colic attacks. In the second drawer of his desk they found seventy-two pages of a novel, unfinished, which was entitled “The Last Bet,” and a visiting card—Dr. Mortensen—with two purple-painted lips printed on the back. The clock radio was set on 102.4, Radio Nostalgia, and, shading the bulb in the lamp on the bedside table, there was a pamphlet from the Children of God, whose theme was the immorality of hunting and fishing: the title, a bit scorched by the bulb, was: I will make you fishers of men.

  They were rifling through Mrs. Mortensen’s intimate lingerie when, by a banal and vulgar association of ideas, in their blood rose the memory of the woman dark metallic nylon compass—a violent shake that compelled them to rush all the way back to the yellow taxi, and remain there, on the edge of the street, a little dazed by the disastrous discovery: the disastrous disappearance of the yellow taxi into the bowels of the city—a whole avenue full of cars but empty of yellow taxis with heroes making themselves comfortable on the backseat.

  “Gone,” Poomerang didn’t say.

  “Christ,” Diesel said.

  On the curved surface of the black spike heel they stared at an entire city, at thousands of streets, hundreds of blank yellow cars.

  “Lost,” Diesel said.

  “Maybe,” Poomerang didn’t say.

  “Like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “Not the car.”

  “There are thousands of them.”

  “Not the yellow car.”

  “Too many cars.”

  “Not the car, the shoes.”

  “Where, exactly, can a yellow car go?”

  “Shoes. A shoe store.”

  “Where she said she wanted to go.”

  “A shoe store. The nearest shoe store.”

  “She looked at the taxi driver and said . . .”

  The nearest shoe store. Shoes with black spike heels.

  “. . . the best shoe store, near by.”

  “Toxon’s, Fourth Street, second floor, women’s shoes.”

  “Toxon’s, for Christ’s sake.”

  They found her in front of a mirror, black shoes on her feet, spike heels, and a salesman who was saying

  “Perfect.”

  They never lost her again after that. For an indeterminate number of hours they catalogued her gestures and the objects around her, as if they were testing perfumes. It was something that by now they breathed, when, after an endless dinner, they followed her to the bed of a man who smelled of eau de cologne, and who, using the remote control, played Ravel’s Bolero over and over again. In front of the bed there was an aquarium with a purple fish in it, and a lot of stupid bubbles. He made love in religious silence; he had put his gold wedding band on the night table, next to a five-pack of a brand-name prophylactic. She pressed her nails into his back, hard enough so that he could feel it, gently enough not to leave a mark. At the seventh Bolero she said

  “Excuse me,”

  slid off the bed, got dressed, put on the spike-heeled black shoes, and left, without a word. The last thing they saw of her was a door closed, gently.

  Rain. Asphalt mirrorlike around the black spike heel, a shiny eye staring at them.

  “Rain,” said Diesel.

  They looked up, to a different light, gray, not many people, sound of tires and puddles. Soaked shoes, water down their necks. The time on their watches was no use.

  “Let’s go,” Diesel said.

  “Let’s go,” Poomerang didn’t say.

  Diesel walked clumsily, slowly, dragging his left foot, the ridiculous immense shoe suspended on a leg that changed course below the knee and bent awkwardly, twisting every step into a Cubist dance. And he breathed heavily, like a cyclist going uphill, a smudged rhythmic painful breathing. Poomerang knew that walk and that breathing by heart. He was attached to them and he danced them gracefully, with the weary look of someone emerging from a tango marathon.

  The one and the other, close together, and the soaked stretches of the city on the way home, the liquid lights of traffic signals, cars in third that sounded like toilets flushing, a heel on the ground, farther and farther away, the eye wet, without, any longer, an eyelid, without a brow, finished.

  The photograph of Walt Disney was a little bigger than the one of Eva Braun. It had a pale wood frame, and a foot that folded out from the back: to hold it up, if necessary. Walt Disney had white hair and was standing astride a little train, and smiling. It was a train for children, with a locomotive and a lot of cars. It didn’t have rails, it had rubber tires, and was in Disneyland, in Anaheim, California.

  “Get it?”

  “More or less.”

  “So he was the biggest, had been the biggest. A terrible reactionary, if you like, but he was good at happiness, it was his talent, he got to happiness directly, without many complications, and he brought everyone along with him, really everyone. He had happiness for hire, the most ever seen, he had some for every pocket, for every taste, with his stories of ducks and dwarfs and Bambis, if you think about it, how he did it, and yet he started there and distilled from that whole big mess something that if someone asks you what is happiness, even if it kind of makes you sick, in the end you have to admit that, maybe it’s not quite that, but it has the flavor, the taste, I mean, as in strawberry or raspberry, happiness has that taste, no way around it, maybe it’s a fake, maybe it’s not authentic happiness, original, so to speak, but thos
e were fabulous copies, better than the original, and anyhow there’s no way of . . .”

  “Done.”

  “Done?”

  “Yes.”

  “How was it?”

  “All right.”

  “Shall we go?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Shall we go? Let’s go.

  1

  “This house is disgusting,” said Shatzy.

  “Yes,” said Gould.

  “It’s a disgusting house, believe me.”

  Technically speaking, Gould was a genius. This had been determined by a committee of five professors who had examined him at the age of six, subjecting him to three days of tests. On the Stocken scale, he turned out to belong in the delta band: at that level intelligence is an abnormally developed mechanism whose limits are difficult to conceive. Provisionally they assigned him an IQ of 180, a prodigious figure in itself. They had taken him out of elementary school, where for six days he had tried to seem normal, and had entrusted him to a team of university researchers. At the age of eleven he had graduated in theoretical physics, with work on the solution of the Hubbard model in two dimensions.

  “What are the shoes doing in the refrigerator?”

  “Bacteria.”

  “Meaning?”

  “An experiment with bacteria. Inside the shoes are glass slides. Gram-positive bacteria.”

  “And the moldy chicken has something to do with bacteria?”

  “Chicken?”

  Gould’s house was two stories high. It had eight rooms and features such as a garage and a cellar. In the living room there was a carpet with a pattern of imitation Tuscan terra-cotta tiles but since it was two inches thick the idea didn’t work all that well. In the corner room, on the first floor, there was a table-soccer game. The bathroom was completely red, including the fixtures. The general impression was of a house belonging to rich people where the FBI had gone to look for a microfilm of the president screwing in a Las Vegas brothel.

  “How do you manage to live here?”