A Walk in the Dark (17 page)

“This isn’t a good time for me. At work and especially outside. If I were inclined to dramatize, I’d say I can’t go on. But I don’t want to inflict my problems on you. If I wanted to unburden myself, I could write a letter to a women’s magazine – using a false name obviously. You know the kind of thing: forty-year-old woman in such and such a career, life an emotional desert, burned all her bridges, growing realization that she’ll never be a mother, etc, etc.”

What a strange sensation. Alessandra Mantovani had always given me an impression of invulnerability. Now, suddenly, here she was, a normal woman, looking with alarm at the passing years, and the years to come, and trying desperately not to go to pieces.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t call you to cry on your shoulder.”

I made a gesture as if to say, no problem, if she wanted to cry on my shoulder, or whatever, she could. She didn’t even see the gesture.

“I told them I agreed to the assignment. Almost without thinking. Because right now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I want . . . Anyway, it’s OK. I told them I was available and yesterday morning this arrived.”

She handed me a fax. The letterhead was in somewhat antiquated cursive writing. Senior Board of the Judiciary. The text said that Dottoressa Alessandra Mantovani, magistrate of the court of appeal, working as an assistant public prosecutor at the law court of Bari, had been assigned, having given her agreement, for a period of six months, renewable for further periods of six months, to the Public Prosecutor’s department of Palermo. Dottoressa Mantovani had to
present herself to the Public Prosecutor’s department of Palermo within six days of the order being communicated.

The rest was technical details. Pure jargon. I stopped reading and looked up.

“Go to Palermo.” Not exactly the most intelligent sentence in my life, I thought immediately afterwards.

“I have to be there by next Monday. I wanted a change, and now I’ve got what I wanted.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing and waited. She stubbed out the filter of her cigarette in a glass ashtray. She stubbed it out much more than she needed to in order to put out the cigarette.

“There are a few trials and a few investigations I’m sorry to leave. Apart from everything else. One of them is ours, this Scianatico business. With that one and some of the others, I have the nasty feeling I’m running away.”

I was about to say something, but she stopped me with a gesture. She had no desire to hear me say anything forced.

“Actually, I’m not even sure why I called you. Maybe I feel like a coward and wanted to tell you directly, in person, that I’m leaving you alone with all this hassle. You’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Maybe it’ll be all right, and you’ll get a good man. Or a good woman. Or maybe not . . .”

“Do you think you’ll stay in Palermo?”

“Who knows? The transfer, as you read, is for six months, renewable. In fact, it’s always at least a year, often longer. In a year, I’ll think about what to do. What’s for sure is that I don’t have many things to keep me here in Bari. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”

I felt sad and old. I felt like someone watching time passing, someone watching other people
changing, growing up for good or ill, going away. Making choices. While he stays on in the same place, doing the same things, letting chance decide for him. Watching life pass him by.

Damn it, I really wanted that Camel.

That was pretty much the end of the conversation. I told Alessandra I’d drop by her office again to say goodbye, but she said it was better to say goodbye right now. She didn’t know how much time she’d be spending in her office in the next few days: preparations, and so on.

She came round her desk as I stood up. I looked straight at her, just before we embraced.

She had little red spots, and lines I’d never noticed before.

As I closed the door behind me, I saw her light another cigarette. She was looking towards the window, somewhere outside.

Alessandra left without our having the opportunity to see each other again. As she had foreseen.

It was almost spring. Life was going on as normal. Whatever the word normal meant. Margherita and I would go out together, sometimes with her friends. Never with my friends. Even supposing I still had any.

After Emilio’s funeral, I’d occasionally had the idea of calling someone and saying,
Let’s go out one evening, grab a couple of beers, have a bit of a chat about life
. Then, fortunately, I’d let it go.

Two or three times, Margherita asked me if something was wrong, and if I wanted to talk. I said no thanks, not at the moment. When the right moment might be wasn’t clear. She didn’t insist. She’s an expert on aikido and knows perfectly well that you can’t push – or help – someone to do something they haven’t initiated themselves.

More and more frequently I slept in my own apartment.

One time when I’d stayed with her, I was lying on the bed when I had a strange sensation. I half closed my eyes and suddenly found myself observing the scene from a different position, not the one I was in physically. I could even see myself. I was a spectator.

Margherita was getting undressed, the light was dim, everything was silent, I was lying on the bed with my eyes half closed, but I wasn’t asleep.

It was a very sad scene, like one of Hopper’s silent interiors.

So I got up and dressed. I said I needed to get a bit of air, and was going for a walk. Margherita looked at me and for the first time I had the feeling she was really worried about me.

About us.

She stayed like that for a few seconds, and there was a kind of sad awareness in her eyes, a fragility she didn’t usually have. She seemed to be about to say something, but in the end she didn’t. All she said was,
Good night
, and I escaped.

When I was at last in the street, I felt a bit better. The air was cool, almost cold, and dry. The streets were deserted. As you’d except about midnight on a Wednesday, in that part of the city.

Without thinking about it, almost without realizing what I was doing, I phoned Sister Claudia. As I dialled the number, I told myself that if she was asleep, her mobile was sure to be switched off. If she wasn’t asleep . . .

She answered at the second ring. Her voice sounded a tiny bit puzzled, but she didn’t ask me what had happened, or why I was phoning her at that hour. It was a good thing she didn’t ask me, because I wouldn’t have known what to reply.

I was walking round the city, alone. I wasn’t sleepy. Maybe I’d like her to walk with me for a while and chat? Yes, I’d like that. No, there was no need for me to go and pick her up, we could meet somewhere. How about the end of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, in front of the ruins of the Teatro Margherita? Yes, that’d be fine. In half an hour. Half an hour. Bye. Click.

To kill that half-hour, I went to an all-night bar. A kind of splash of light in the darkness, rather squalid
and unreal, in the border zone between the new town and the Libertà neighbourhood. It was a bar that had always stayed open all night, since long before the city filled up with all kinds of venues and there was an embarrassment of choice when it came to staying out late. When I was a child that bar was always full, because it was one of the few places you could go in the middle of the night, when you were out fooling around, and get a coffee, or buy unlicensed cigarettes. Now it’s almost always deserted, because you can get a coffee anywhere and there are automatic cigarette machines.

I went in. The place was empty except for one couple. They were middle-aged, in other words, just a few years older than me. They were at one end of the L-shaped counter, on the shorter side of the L. I sat down on a stool, on the other side, turning my back on the big window and the street. The man was wearing a jacket and tie. He was smoking, and talking to the thin, fair-haired barman, who wore a white jacket and cap. The woman, a sad-looking, scruffily made-up redhead with deep-set eyes, was staring into the distance and seemed to be asking herself what she had done to be reduced to this.

I ordered a coffee, though I really didn’t need it, because I wasn’t going to get any sleep that night anyway. During the ten minutes I was there, no other customers came in. I couldn’t shake off the disturbing feeling I’d already lived through – already
witnessed
– this scene.

 

 

Claudia got out of the van with the usual sinuous movement. She was dressed as usual – jeans, white T-shirt, leather jacket – but she had her hair loose, not
gathered in a ponytail like all the other times I’d seen her.

She nodded in greeting and I returned her nod. Without saying anything we walked along the seafront, in the light of the old iron street lamps.

“I don’t know why I phoned you.”

“Maybe you felt lonely.”

“Is that a valid reason?”

“One of the few.”

“Why did you become a nun?”

“Why did you become a lawyer?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. Or if I did know, I was afraid of trying.”

She seemed surprised that I’d answered, and she appeared to be considering my answer. Then she shook her head and didn’t say anything. For some minutes, we walked in silence.

“Do you live alone?”

I had the impulse to say yes, and immediately felt ashamed.

“No. That is, I have my own apartment, but I live with someone.”

“You mean, a woman.”

“Yes, yes, a woman.”

“And you don’t have anything to say about the fact that you’ve come out alone in the middle of the night?”

As Claudia asked me the question, the faces of Margherita and my ex-wife, Sara, were superimposed in my head. It made me feel dizzy: I mean, really dizzy, as if I were somewhere high up, without any parapet, without anything to grab hold of, as if I were about to fall into empty space and everything would break into pieces, irreparably.

Then the two faces separated and returned to their
places, in my head. Whatever those places were. I hadn’t answered Claudia’s question, and she didn’t insist.

We started walking more quickly, as if we had a destination, or something specific to do. We stopped at the end of the seafront, on the southern outskirts of the city, and sat down next to each other on the low wall of chalky stone just a couple of yards from the water.

You shouldn’t be here, I thought, feeling the contact of her muscular leg on mine, and smelling her slight, somewhat bitter smell. Too close.

Everything seems out of place and once again I don’t understand what’s happening, I thought, as our hands – my right hand and her left – touched in an innocuous and totally forbidden manner. We both stared in front of us. As if there were something to look at between the ugly apartment blocks, standing there in the darkness, blurry against the background of the grim, disreputable suburb of Iapigia.

We stayed like that for a long time, without ever looking directly at each other. It seemed to me, without her having said or done anything, that a current of pure pain flowed from her hand.

“There’s a record,” she said, turning to me without warning, “that I’ve often listened to over the years. I’m not sure it does me good to listen to it. But I do it all the same.”

I turned too. “What record?”

“
Out of Time
by REM. Do you know it?”

Of course I know it. Who do you think you’re talking to, sister?

I didn’t say that. I just nodded, yes, I know it.

“There’s a song . . .”

“ ‘Losing my religion’.”

She screwed up her eyes, then said yes. “You know what that means:
losing my religion
?”

“I know what it means literally. Is there another meaning?”

“It’s an idiomatic expression. It means something like: I can’t take it any more.”

I looked at her in amazement. That was the last thing I would have expected to hear from her. I was still looking at her, without knowing what to say, when her face came closer, and then closer, until I could no longer make out the features.

I just had time to think that her mouth was hard and soft at the same time, that her tongue reminded me of when I was fourteen and kissed girls my own age, I just had time to place my hand on her back, and to feel muscles as thick as metal cables.

Then she drew back abruptly, though she kept her wide-open eyes on my face for a few seconds. Then she stood up, without saying anything, and started walking back in the direction from which we’d come. I walked behind her, and fifteen minutes later we were again at her van.

“I’m not much of a talker.”

“It’s not essential.”

“But sometimes you just want to talk.”

I nodded. You often want to talk. The problem is finding someone to listen to you.

“I’d like to talk to you another time. I mean: no flirting or anything like that. I don’t know why, but I’d like to tell you a story.”

I made a gesture that meant, more or less: if you like, you can tell it to me now.

“No, not now. Not tonight.”

After a brief hesitation, she gave me a quick kiss. On the cheek, very close to the mouth. Before I could say
anything else she was already in the van, and driving away into the night.

 

 

I walked slowly back home, choosing the darkest, most deserted streets. I felt absurdly light-headed.

Before I went to bed, I searched through my discs.
Out of Time
was there, so I put it in the player and pressed the skip button to the second track: “Losing my religion”.

I listened to it with the booklet of lyrics in my hand, because I wanted to try to understand.