THE
MEASURE
OF TIME
Gianrico Carofiglio
Translated by Howard Curtis
BITTER LEMON PRESS
LONDON
Contents
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
Lorenza
6
7
Lorenza
8
9
Lorenza
10
11
12
13
Lorenza
14
15
Lorenza
16
17
18
19
Lorenza
20
21
22
23
Lorenza
24
25
Lorenza
26
27
28
29
30
About the Author
Also Available from Bitter Lemon Press by Gianrico Carofiglio:
Copyright
1
“What do we have today, Pasquale?” I asked as I walked into the office, thinking as I did so, for the umpteenth time, that this was a ritual I was tired of.
“Let’s see… The Colella woman should finally be coming to pay. Then there’s the expert witness in the Moretti trial, the public contracts case – he’s coming to pick up the papers, but says he wants to talk to you for five minutes. And at seven there’s a new client, a woman.”
“Who is she?”
With his usual slight aloofness, Pasquale leafed through the spiral notepad he always carries with him. Each one of us has something that identifies us and with which, assuming we’re aware of it, we identify. For Pasquale it’s his notepad. He buys them himself, without putting them on the practice’s stationery expenses, and he always gets the same ones, an old-fashioned kind to be found only in a dusty and rather heart-warming old stationer’s in the Libertà district. They have rough black covers with slightly red edges, like the ones my grandfather used.
“Her name’s Delle Foglie. She phoned yesterday afternoon and asked for an appointment as soon as possible. She said it’s about something serious concerning her son.”
“Just Delle Foglie?”
“How do you mean, Avvocato?”
“Did she only give her surname?”
“Just the surname, yes.”
For a few months, so many years earlier that I preferred not to count them, I’d known a girl named Delle Foglie. It was a period very distant in time and extremely distant in my memory. A period I hadn’t thought about since it had happened and then melted away. While Pasquale spoke, vague, unreal memories came back into my mind, almost as if they concerned someone else, events I thought I knew about because somebody had told me about them, not because they’d really happened to me.
“She’ll be here at seven. But if you have other commitments,” Pasquale added, maybe noticing something strange in my expression, “I can call her back.”
“No, no. Seven’s fine.”
Pasquale went back to his post in the waiting room. I thought for a few minutes about this new client and decided she wasn’t the Delle Foglie I’d known before. There was no reason it should be her, I told myself, somewhat irrationally, and dismissed the matter from my mind.
At this point I should have devoted myself to studying the case files for the following day’s hearings. I didn’t feel like it. Nothing new about that: for some years now legal papers had been filling me with a sense of nausea, and the syndrome was getting slowly but inexorably worse.
Somebody once wrote that we should be capable of dying young. Not in the sense of really dying, but in the sense of stopping what we’re doing when we realize we’ve exhausted our desire to do it, or our strength, or when we realize we’ve reached the limit of our talent, if we have any. Everything that comes after that limit is repetition. We should be capable of dying young in order to stay alive, but that almost never happens. I’d often thought that thanks to what I’d earned in my profession, of which I’d only spent a small part, I could quit, sell the practice and devote myself to something else. Travel, studying, reading. Maybe trying to write. Anything just to escape the grip of time. Time that kept passing, never changing. Nearly motionless in its daily repetition, yet fading fast.
Time accelerates with age, they say. The thought wasn’t a new one, but that day it had been bouncing around unpleasantly in my head.
At the appeal court that morning, I’d run into a colleague of mine, almost a friend. A civil lawyer named Enrico Garibaldi – “No relation to the general,” he would say like a child whenever he was introduced to someone.
A pleasant guy – you could have a good laugh with him. A really nice person and a good professional too. We’d occasionally hung out together.
“Everything all right, Enrico?” I’d asked him with a smile as I shook his hand. It wasn’t a real question, just something you say. Everything all right? Yes, everything’s fine, and you? Everything’s fine, we really should get together one of these evenings, bye, see you soon.
“Not too good, to be honest,” he replied. And after a brief pause, but before I could ask him anything or even just prepare myself (face, tone of voice, all the essentials), he continued: “My mother died two days ago.”
The air went out of me for a moment, as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, Enrico, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry, forgive me…”
“Don’t worry, Guido. Obviously you weren’t to know. And anyway, I’m ashamed to say this, but it was a liberation. A year of illness had taken away all her dignity. Not just hers, poor thing. Ours, too.”
He paused. His eyes became watery. I remained silent, basically because I didn’t know what to say. He hesitated, then decided he needed to talk. Maybe he’d been waiting to meet me – well, not specifically me, he’d been waiting to meet somebody and I’d happened to show up – to get things off his chest, at least a little.
“You know, you realize you’re losing your dignity when you become intolerant and irritable, when you actually tell off a person humiliated by old age and illness. A person who doesn’t understand why her children are treating her so harshly.” He couldn’t continue. “Oh shit,” was all he added, his voice breaking. Then his lips quivered and he started crying. I overcame the impulse to look around me to check if anybody was watching us and wondering what was happening. My usual problem with other people’s judgement.
“How about a coffee?”
He stared at me in surprise. Then he sniffed and nodded, a flash of gratitude in his eyes. So we left the courthouse and as we walked he began to tell me about it.
“You know what the worst thing was, Guido? That before she died, she didn’t sleep for ten days. I mean, when she realized she was going to die. Eighty-eight years old and yet, like everyone else, she was scared of dying. The psychologist who helped us, me and my brother, explained it to me. She was scared of going to sleep and not waking up again. That’s why she couldn’t sleep. It’s something I can’t come to terms with, something I find disturbing. When you get to that age you should be resigned, I always thought.”
“Maybe we’re never resigned…”
“No, we’re never resigned.”
“There’s something Marcello Mastroianni said in an interview when he was already old. It was more or less: ‘I like having dinner with my friends. So why do I have to die?’”
Enrico smiled, nodding as if sharing the sentiment. On the surface, the words were bitter. But perhaps they made him feel less alone
with his sadness.
We sat down in a cafe near the courthouse. A fairly awful place which, for that very reason, could almost always guarantee you a free table where you wouldn’t be disturbed.
“Have you ever noticed, Guido, how life seems to accelerate with age?”
“I notice it almost every day.”
“Before her situation got worse, Mamma often said it. ‘I have the thoughts of a young girl and the body of an old woman. Why?’”
I remembered my parents. They had passed away when they were still young, not quite sixty, a few months apart. Almost like Philemon and Baucis, a myth my mother loved. I hadn’t had time to have a proper talk with them. I knew very little about my father and mother. For example, I’d never known if before they met and got engaged, then married, either of them had had someone else. A desperate relationship that had ended tragically, lots of brief affairs, whatever. When I was small I found it completely unimaginable that my father could have touched a woman other than my mother, and more than unimaginable that my mother had touched a man other than my father. On some subjects they were both very bashful. When I was eight and had no idea about matters of sex and reproduction, my father gave me a lecture. It so happened that I’d asked something about eggs. Why in some cases they were normal eggs, the kind we ate – which I liked a lot – whereas in other cases they had chicks in them which emerged after a while, as clearly shown in schoolbooks and in comic strips and cartoons. My father explained to me that the presence of the chick depended on whether or not the hen had gone and taken a walk with the rooster. “If the hen takes a walk with the rooster,” he said, “chicks are born. Otherwise, we can eat the eggs.”
The explanation raised many more problems than it solved. While my father went back to whatever he’d been doing, clearly considering his educational duty fulfilled, I was asking myself – and would continue to ask myself for years – nagging questions, like: When exactly did the chick appear inside the egg? Was there a specific itinerary for the walk that would produce this mind-blowing outcome? What happened if the rooster and the hen were shut up in a chicken coop and not allowed to take walks?
With time, I started to have less confused ideas about certain matters, and sometimes I thought of asking my father what had induced him to tell me such a surreal story.
But I didn’t.
I sometimes make an inventory of what my parents left me. Mostly good, even crucial things. For example, a deliberately simple notion of honesty, a concept about which there shouldn’t be subtle distinctions. Respect for others. A love of ideas.
Other things they passed down to me are more ambiguous, and may be positive or negative depending on how they insert themselves in the structure of a personality. Among these is the conviction, as radical as a moral imperative, that you should always get by on your own. I think the precept has a long history, that it comes from an old, almost ancestral, fear of being in debt.
I reflected on this many years later, when examining my great difficulty in accepting help. Being able to get by on your own is good. Thinking you always must get by on your own, without ever asking for help, is a weakness disguised as a strength. If you don’t know how to ask for help, it generally means you don’t know what to do when it’s offered to you willingly and when it would be moral to accept it (and immoral to refuse it).
“A few months before she died, when she was still lucid,” Enrico went on, “Mamma said something that shocked me.”
“Do you feel like telling me?”
“Yes. She said it was hard for her to imagine the world without her. ‘When you’re young and you think of a world and a time when you didn’t exist, it doesn’t bother you, because history seems to have an implicit direction of travel that leads inevitably to the moment when you burst on the scene. The world without us before we’re here is a long period of preparation. The world without us after we’ve gone, on the other hand, is simply the world without us. As long as it seems a distant thing, we manage to alleviate the dread of that thought. But I know that in a few weeks, a few months at most, I won’t be here any more and the world will still go on, without even a ripple. Without even a tremor. You’ll mourn me, then you’ll have to deal with practical matters and you’ll stop mourning. And anyway you’ll be relieved that all the pain is over. You’ll be able to look away and get on with living. Which is only right. And that’ll be the end of it.’”
I took a deep breath and let the air out. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Agnese. For forty-two years she taught Italian and Latin. Her students loved her. Even now I meet people who remember her and say that the reason they’ve learned to love books and reading and so many other things is because of her.”
We stayed in that cafe a while longer. By the time we left, his eyes were no longer red from weeping.
I somehow managed to prepare for the next day’s cases and get through my other afternoon chores.
At exactly seven, I heard the doorbell in the distance – my office is the furthest one from the main door – and half a minute later Pasquale popped his head in, asked if he could show in Signora Delle Foglie, I said yes, and he opened the door wide and admitted a woman.
She was tall and quite slim, with short grey hair, and was wearing a leather jacket that was a little big and shapeless on her.
She came towards the desk and I stood up. She saw the surprise in my eyes.
“Hello, Guido. Don’t you recognize me? Lorenza.”
It was her. If I’d passed her in the street I wouldn’t have recognized her.
There she was in front of me. At this point I knew perfectly well who she was, but equally I didn’t have the faintest idea. It was a feeling I’d never before experienced so intensely, not even when I’d occasionally met old school friends I hadn’t seen for decades who’d turned into fat, bald gentlemen.
Since I didn’t know who she was, I also didn’t know how to greet her. I came round to the front of the desk. She, too, didn’t know how to behave and so we embraced awkwardly, both aware of how forced and unspontaneous the gesture was. There was the smell of a recently smoked cigarette about her, as well as the denser, more unpleasant smell of many other cigarettes, smoked one after the other, which had impregnated her clothes and hair and stained her hands and nails with nicotine.
I motioned her to sit down and sat down myself.
“You’re just the same, Guido. It’s almost weird, looking at you. Apart from a few grey hairs, you’re just the same.”
I smiled, embarrassed. I was looking for a way to return the compliment, but couldn’t find one. I thought I’d offend her if I told her too big a lie, like: You haven’t changed either.
When we’d first met, she was almost thirty and I was almost twenty-five. Now she was fifty-seven, she looked older than that, and she was in my office to talk to me about a serious, urgent matter concerning her son.
2
“Before coming here I did my sums. It’s been twenty-seven years.”
“Oh yes,” I replied almost simultaneously, congratulating myself on my effort at originality.
“I’ve often been tempted to drop by and say hello, have a chat. Especially when I read about you in the papers in connection with some trial or other. I’ve even caught sight of you in the street, but I’ve never had the guts to call out to you.”
I’d never noticed her in the street. The last time I’d seen her was September 1987, then she’d vanished from my life. I hadn’t seen her again and hadn’t heard anything about her.
I had assumed – for as long as I’d thought about it – that she’d left Bari, which was something she’d always said she wanted to do. With a slight sense of dizziness, I realized I’d never told anyone about her, or about those months when our paths had crossed. Maybe that was why my memory of her had faded until it had become intangible. As time passes, a memory untold becomes less and less real and gets mixed up with the even more intangible material in our minds: dreams, fantasies, private le
gends.
I didn’t say any of this.
“What … what do you do for a living?”
“I teach. I do other things too, but basically I’m a schoolteacher.”
“Even back then you did a whole lot of things…”
“Not quite the same kinds of things… But anyway, that doesn’t matter, I’m not here to talk about me.” Her voice had hardened, as if to protect a vulnerable area.
I shrugged, tried to smile and gave her a questioning look. Her jaw muscles tightened.
“I’m here to see you for a professional reason. Meaning your profession, obviously.”
“What’s happened?”
She hesitated, then her hand went to a pocket of her jacket in an automatic gesture, as if searching for a packet of cigarettes.
“I don’t know how to begin.”
“Going to see a criminal lawyer is almost always an unpleasant experience. A person’s unlikely to feel at ease, but we’re in no hurry. My colleague Pasquale has already told me it’s something to do with your son.”
“My son, yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Iacopo has just turned twenty-five. He’s old enough to have already had quite serious problems with the law – and not just the law.” Before continuing, she breathed in and cleared her throat. “Right now he’s in prison. He’s been there for more than two years. He was found guilty of murder.”
She told me what had happened, and there was nothing good about her story.
Iacopo had always been a problem child – maybe because he’d never really had a father, but who can say? She didn’t go into detail about that and I didn’t ask any questions, just did a rapid mental calculation: he couldn’t have been my son.
In any case, Lorenza continued, ever since he was in high school he’d never stopped getting in trouble. Petty incidents with drugs, fights, stealing from supermarkets, two exam failures, beating up the new boyfriend of a girl who’d dumped him. One way or another, she’d managed to help him graduate from school, and he’d even enrolled at university – law, just to be original – but hadn’t done any exams. Instead, he’d been involved in a robbery for which he had been arrested. At that point he didn’t have an actual criminal record and had got away with a suspended sentence. But he hadn’t learned his lesson: Lorenza was sure he sold drugs in discos, and for a long time she’d wondered how to keep him away from bad company.
The Measure of Time Page 1
