City

by Alessandro Baricco

  Gould stopped. In Room No. 3, a woman was crying, she was crying loudly and every so often she cried out that she wanted to leave, she was angry with everyone because they wouldn’t let her leave. Her husband was outside the door. He was talking to another man, who was rather fat, and old. He was saying that he no longer knew what to do, she had thrown herself down the stairs on Christmas night, it had happened very suddenly, since her return from the clinic she had seemed well, quite normal, then on Christmas night she went and threw herself down the stairs, I don’t know what to do anymore, I can’t take her back to the psychiatric clinic, her leg is broken in two places and three ribs are cracked, but I can’t go on, I’ve been here for eighteen days, I can’t go on. He was leaning against the wall, and he spoke without tears and without moving his hands, very calmly. From the room came the voice of the woman crying. When she cried you seemed to hear a child crying. A very small woman. Gould began walking again. When he reached Room No. 8 he went in and sat down again on the chair next to Prof. Taltomar’s bed. The machine continued to breathe. Taltomar was in the same position as before, his head, slightly turned, on the pillow, his arms outside the covers, his hands shriveled. Gould stayed for quite a while, watching the stationary film of an old man who was departing. Then, without getting up from the chair, he leaned over the bed and said

  “Fifteenth minute of the second half. Nothing-nothing. The referee whistles and calls the two captains. He tells them that he is very tired, that he doesn’t know what’s come over him, but he’s so tired, and wants to go home. I’d like to go home, he says. He shakes their hands, then turns and, walking slowly, crosses the field, toward the locker rooms. The crowd watches in silence. The players stand still. The ball is sitting in the middle of the penalty area, but no one is looking at it. The referee sticks the whistle in his pocket, murmurs something that no one can hear, and disappears into the tunnel.”

  Taltomar’s hands didn’t move. His eyelids trembled slightly, the machine breathed. Gould sat motionless, waiting. He looked at Taltomar’s lips. Without the cigarette butt they looked uninhabited. You could hear from the corridor the woman who was crying with the voice of a child. Time was passing, time, passed.

  When Gould got up, he put the chair back in its place. He picked up his jacket and held it over his arm because it was stiflingly hot there. He glanced at the breathing machine. Then he stopped at the foot of the bed, just for a moment.

  “Thanks, Professor,” he said.

  Thanks, he thought.

  Then he left. He went down the six flights of stairs, crossed the big entrance hall where a man was selling newspapers and sick people in pajamas were calling home. The door was glass and opened by itself when you got close to it. Outside the sun was shining. Poomerang and Diesel were waiting for him, leaning against a garbage can. They went off together, along the tree-lined avenue that led downtown. They all three danced Diesel’s crooked steps, but skillfully, and gracefully, like professionals.

  After a while, when they had reached the intersection with Seventh, Poomerang rubbed one hand over his shaved head and didn’t say:

  “The two captains consult, then the teams start playing again. And they don’t stop until the end of eternity.”

  Gould had an old piece of chewing gum stuck to the bottom of his jacket pocket. He found it, unstuck it from the material, and then put it in his mouth. It was cold and quite hard, like a friend from elementary school whom you haven’t seen for years and run into on the street one day.

  21

  It was five in the morning when Shatzy got home. She hated to spend the night after she went to bed with someone. It was silly, but she always found some excuse and left.

  She sat outside on the steps. It was still dark. There were strange noises, noises that you didn’t hear during the day. Like bits of things that had been left behind and now were busy trying to reach the world, to arrive punctually at dawn in the belly of the planetary noise.

  You always lose something along the way, she thought.

  I ought to stop it, she thought.

  Ending up in the bed of someone you’ve never seen before is like traveling. At the moment it’s a lot of trouble, even a little silly. It’s nice later, when you think back on it. It’s nice to have done it, to go around the day after, clean and impeccable, and think about how the night before you were doing those things and saying those things, above all saying those things, and to someone you’ll never see again.

  Usually she never saw them again.

  I ought to stop it, she thought.

  You end up nowhere, that way.

  It would all be simpler if they hadn’t hammered into you this business of ending up somewhere, if they had taught you, rather, to be happy standing still. All that nonsense about your road. Finding your road. Taking your own road. Maybe we were made to live in a plaza, or a park, instead, to stay there, as our life passes, or maybe we are a crossroads, and the world needs us to stand still, it would be a disaster if, at some point, we were to go off on our road, what road?, others are roads, I am a plaza, I lead nowhere, I am a place. Maybe I’ll join a gym, she thought. There was one nearby, which was open at night. Why do I like to do everything at night? She looked at her shoes, and her bare feet in the shoes, and her bare legs above the shoes, up to the edge of her skirt, which was short. Her stockings, which were nylon, were rolled up in her purse. She never managed to put them back on when she got out of the bed to get dressed and leave. It was like reloading your gun after a shoot-out. Stupid. What would you say about it, old Bird? Did you put your guns back in the holster unloaded after firing them? Did you roll them up and stick them in your purse? Old Bird. I’ll arrange a lovely death for you.

  She thought about going in and going to sleep. But in the glow of the street lamps she saw the trailer, sitting motionless in the yard, slightly less yellow than usual. Once a week she washed it thoroughly, even the windows and the tires, the whole thing. Because she had been seeing it there, every day, for months, it had become a part of the landscape, like a tree, or a bridge over a river. All of a sudden, in the dark at the end of the night, with her whore’s stockings rolled up in her purse, Shatzy understood: motionless, sparkling, yellow: it was no longer something that was waiting to leave. It had become one of those things whose task is to remain, to anchor the roots of some piece of the world. The things that, when you wake up or come home, have been watching over you. It’s strange. You go in search of some amazing contraption to have yourself transported far away, and then you cling to it with such love that far, sooner or later, comes to mean far from it.

  Bullshit, it’s only a matter of finding a car, she thought.

  It couldn’t be done without a car. Trailers don’t move by themselves.

  They’d find a car, that was it.

  And they’d go far away.

  It’s like a tree, she thought. She felt something rising inside her that she didn’t like, she knew it and she didn’t like it, a kind of distant rumble of defeat. The secret, in this situation, was not to give it time to get out. It was to shout so loud that you couldn’t hear it anymore. It was to put on a pair of black nylon stockings, leave the house, and end up in the bed of someone you’ve never seen before.

  Already done, she thought. So she went for a version of “New York, New York” at the top of her lungs.

  “Did you hear that drunk last night?” Gould said the next morning while they were making breakfast.

  “No, I was sleeping.”

  The telephone rang. Shatzy went to get it, and it was a while before she came back. She said it was Rector Bolder. He wanted to know if Gould was all right. Gould asked if he was still on the phone.

  “No. He said he didn’t want to disturb you, he just wanted to know if you were all right. Then he said something about a seminar, or something like that. A seminar on particulates?”

  “On particles.”

  “He says they had to put it off.”

  Gould said something tha
t was hard to understand. Shatzy got up and put a cup of milk in the microwave.

  “Is Rector Bolder fat? I mean, is he fat, or what?” Shatzy asked.

  “Why?”

  “He has a fat voice.”

  Gould closed the cereal box, then looked at Shatzy.

  “What did he say exactly?”

  “He says it’s been twenty-two days since they’ve seen you at the university, and so he wanted to know if you were all right. And then he said that thing about the seminar.”

  “You want some more cereal?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “If you get to two hundred boxes you win a trip to Miami.”

  “Splendid.”

  “And it took all that time just to tell you those two things?”

  “Well, then I suggested some stratagems for losing weight, people usually don’t know that with just a couple of tricks you can spare yourself a lot of pounds, you just have to eat with a little intelligence. I told him that.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “I don’t know, he seemed uncomfortable. He said something that didn’t make sense.”

  “He’s very thin. He must be seventy years old, and he’s very thin.”

  “Oh.”

  Shatzy began to clear the table. Gould went upstairs, and came down with his jacket on. He looked for his shoes.

  “Gould . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I wonder . . . imagine a boy who is a genius, OK?, and who ever since he was born has been going to the university every blessed day that God puts on earth, OK?, well, at a certain point it happens that for twenty-two days in a row he leaves the house but he doesn’t go to his damn university, not even once, ever, so I ask myself, do you have any idea where a boy like that might go, every blessed day?”

  “Around.”

  “Around?”

  “Around.”

  “It’s possible. Yes, it’s possible. Likely, that he goes around.”

  “Bye, Shatzy.”

  “Bye.”

  That morning he ended up near the Renemport school, the one that had a rusting fence all around it, high enough so that you couldn’t get over it. Through the windows you could see children in class, but on the playground there was a boy who wasn’t in class because he was on the playground and, to be precise, was playing with a basketball, precisely in the corner of the playground where there was a basketball net. The backboard was peeling, but the net must have been replaced recently, it was almost new. The boy was maybe twelve. Thirteen, something like that. He was black. He was dribbling the ball, confidently, as if looking for something within himself, and when he found it he stopped and took a shot at the basket. He always hit it. You could hear the sound of the net, a kind of breath, or a tiny gust of wind. The boy went over to the basket, retrieved the ball, which was coming to a stop, as if worn out from exhaling that microscopic breath, picked it up, and began dribbling again. He didn’t seem sad, or happy, either, he dribbled the ball and shot at the basket, simply, as if it had been written thus, for centuries.

  I know all that, Gould thought.

  First, he recognized the rhythm. He closed his eyes so that he could hear it better. It was that rhythm.

  I am seeing a thought, Gould thought.

  Thoughts when they take the form of a question. They bounce, strolling around to pick up all the fragments of the question, following a course that seems random, an end in itself. When they have reconstructed the question they stop. Eyes on the basket. Silence. Lifted off the ground, intuition gives it all the strength necessary to sew up the distance to a possible response. Shoot. Fantasy and reason. In the air unrolls the logically deduced parabola of a thought sent spinning by a flick of the wrist initiated by the imagination. Basket. The statement of the response: a sort of breath. To state it is to lose it. It slips away and already it is the bouncing pieces of the next question. From the beginning.

  Shatzy, the trailer, a psychiatric hospital, Prof. Taltomar’s hands, the trailer, Couverney would be an honor for us to be associated with the chair of, either you watch or you play, Prof. Kilroy’s tears, when Shatzy smiles, the soccer field, Couverney, Diesel and Poomerang, the railroad tracks, bam, right left, mother. Eyes on the basket. Lift. Shoot.

  The black child played, and he was solitary, inevitable, and secret, like thoughts when they are true and take the form of a question.

  Behind him was the appointed home of knowledge, the school, armored and separate, with its production of questions and answers in accordance with an established method, within the comfortable framework of a community intent on rounding the sharp corners of the questions, and astutely transforming into a public ritual that which, isolated, would be hyperbole, and abandoned.

  Expelled from knowledge, thoughts struggle, Gould thought.

  (Fellow-child, you in the emptiness of an empty playground, you and your questions, teach me that confidence, the sure movement that finds the net, the breath, at the other end of every fear.)

  He walked home, his steps closely following the imaginary bounces of a hypothetical ball pushed into the emptiness by his hand; he heard it hitting the pavement, warm and regular, like heartbeats rebounding away from a quiet life. What people could see, and saw, was a boy who as he walked played with a yo-yo that wasn’t there. So they stared, struck by that rhythmic glimpse of the absurd, incorporated into adolescence, as if to announce, far in advance, madness. People are afraid of madness. Gould, then, went along like a threat, although he didn’t know it—without knowing it, like an attack.

  He arrived home.

  In the yard was a trailer. Yellow.

  22

  An English scholar arrived at Gould’s university. He was very famous. Rector Bolder introduced him in the Great Hall. The Rector rose to his feet and, standing at the microphone, reviewed the scholar’s professional life and accomplishments. It took a long time, because the English scholar had written numerous books and in addition had translated and founded and promoted, and in addition to that had been the chairman of a lot of things, or an adviser to them. Finally, he collaborated. He did that to a truly massive degree. He collaborated like a madman. So Rector Bolder had to speak for quite a while. He spoke standing, holding up the pages of the speech in his hand as he read.

  Next to him, seated, was the English scholar.

  It was a curious situation, because Rector Bolder was speaking of him as if he were dead, not out of rudeness but because such situations require the speaker to say things that inevitably seem to be from a eulogy, that have something funereal about them, and the odd thing is that usually the dead person is very much alive, and is sitting right there, and, contrary to every expectation, is sitting there contentedly, without protesting, although he is being subjected to this torture, and is sometimes, in fact, unaccountably enjoying it.

  It was one of those times. Instead of sinking into embarrassment, the English scholar let Rector Bolder’s funeral eulogy pour down on him in an utterly knowing and natural way. Although the loudspeakers of the Great Hall emitted phrases like “with driving passion and incomparable intellectual rigor” and “last but not least, he accepted the honorary chairmanship of the Latin Alliance, a post already endowed with,” he seemed to be shielded from any embarrassment, armored, so to speak, in his own, already tested hyperbaric chamber. He stared out into space with a fixed expression, but he did so with a firm and noble determination; a slightly lifted chin supported this, along with a few wrinkles that furrowed his brow, demonstrating a serene state of concentration. At regular intervals, he clenched his jaws slightly, sharpening his profile and allowing an observer to imagine an inner vitality that had never been tamed. Every so often, the English scholar swallowed, but the way someone else might turn over an hourglass: with a graceful gesture he introduced an immobility into another immobility, sealing the impression of a patience that had been dueling with time forever, and forever winning. Altogether he presented a figure that displayed to near-perfection conc
entrated power and absent-minded detachment simultaneously: the first confirming the praises of Rector Bolder and the second relieving them of the weight of vulgar flattery. Wonderful. At one point, just as Rector Bolder was speaking of his pedagogical activities (“always in the midst of his students, but as primus inter pares”), the English scholar surpassed himself: he suddenly abandoned his hyperbaric chamber, took off his eyeglasses, inclined his head, as if overcome by an unexpected trace of weariness, brought the thumb and index finger of his right hand to his eyes and, dropping his eyelids, allowed himself a light circular pressure on the eyeballs, a most human gesture in which the entire audience could see, summed up, all the moments of pain, disillusion and difficulty that a life of successes had not eliminated, and the memory of which the English scholar now, before all, wished to share. It was lovely. Then suddenly, as if reawakening from a dream, he raised his head again, put on his glasses with a rapid but precise gesture, and returned to his perfect immobility, staring into space, with the strength of one who has known pain but has not been defeated by it.