Involuntary Witness (11 page)

“And the object?”

“A bicycle. Now tell me yours.”

“The quote is really a quick exchange. From
On the Road
. It goes like this: ‘We gotta go and never stop going till we get there.’ The reply: ‘Where we going, man?’ ‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’ ”

“The book?”

“You’re sure not to know it. It’s
The Foreign Student
, by a French writer—”

“I’ve read it. It’s the one about a young Frenchman who goes to study in an American college in the 50s.”

“Nobody knows that book. You’re the first. What a coincidence.”

Her eyes flashed for a moment in the darkness of the car, like little knife blades.

We were parked on the cliffs, almost sheer above the sea at Polignano. Outside it was February and very cold.

Not inside the car though. Inside the car, that night, we seemed to be sheltered from everything.

“I’m glad I came out with you this evening. At the last moment I was about to call you and say I wasn’t feeling up to it. Then I thought you must have already left home and that anyway it would be bad-mannered. So I said to myself: we’ll go to the cinema and then I’ll ask him to take me home and I’ll get an early night.”

“Why didn’t you want to go out?”

“I don’t want to talk about it now. I only wanted to tell you I’m glad I came. And I’m glad I didn’t ask you to take me home right after the cinema. Let’s play some more. I like it. Tell me the song and the object.”

“The object is a fountain pen. The song is ‘Pezzi di vetro.’ ”

“Can I say something about the book?”

“What is it?”

“I’m no longer sure about
The Catcher in the Rye
.”

“You want to change?”

“Yes, I think so.
The Little Prince
. It seems more appropriate, maybe. What does the fox say to the little prince when he wants to be tamed?”

“ ‘The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat ...’ ”

She turned and looked at me. In her eyes was a childlike wonder. She was very beautiful. “How do you manage to remember everything by heart?”

“I don’t know. It’s always been like that. If I like something, I only have to read it or hear it once and it sticks in my mind. But
The Little Prince
I’ve read lots of times. So it’s not really fair.”

“What do you think is the most important quality in a person?”

“A sense of humour. If you have a sense of humour – not irony or sarcasm, which are different things entirely – then you don’t take yourself seriously. So you can’t be catty, you can’t be stupid and you can’t be vulgar. If you think about it, it covers almost everything. Do you know any people who have a sense of humour?”

“Very few. On the other hand, I’ve met a lot of them – men especially – who take themselves a hell of a lot too seriously.”

She had a moment of hesitation, then added: “My boyfriend is one of them.”

“What does your boyfriend do?”

“He’s an engineer.”

“Pompous person?”

“No. He can make you laugh, he’s nice. What I mean is, he’s intelligent, he makes funny remarks and so on. But he can only joke about other people. About himself he’s always tremendously serious. No, he hasn’t got a sense of humour.”

Another pause, then she went on, “I’d like it if you had a sense of humour.”

“I’d like to have one too. To tell the truth, in view of what you’ve just said, I’d sell my mother and father to the cannibals just to have one. Without taking myself seriously, of course.”

She laughed again and we went on chatting like that, in the car that protected us from the wind and the world. For hours.

It was past four in the morning before we realized that we ought to get back.

When we arrived outside her place, in the centre of town, the sky was already beginning to lighten.

“If tomorrow you think you still want to come out with me, phone me. If you call, I’ll give you a book.”

Sara took my chin between finger and thumb and gave me a kiss on the lips. Then, without a word, she got out of the car. A few seconds later she had disappeared through a shiny wooden door.

I gave myself a couple of light punches in the face, on one side and the other. Then I started up the car and drove away, music playing full blast.

 

 

Ten years later there I was alone in my empty office, with my memories and their heart-rending melody.

It was a long time since I’d been able to memorize songs, passages in books or parts of films just by hearing or reading them once.

Among the many things gone down the drain there was also that.

So I had to go home at once, hoping that among the books I had brought away with me I would find
The Little Prince
. Because at that hour there were no bookshops open and I was in a hurry, I couldn’t wait till the next morning.

It was there. I turned to near the end, where the little prince is about to be bitten by the snake and is saying farewell to his airman friend.

 

 

“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night ... You – only you – will have stars that can laugh!
”
...

I slept for exactly two hours.

I slipped between the sheets a few minutes before three, opened my eyes at five on the dot and got up feeling strangely refreshed.

I had no commitments that morning, so I thought I’d go for a walk. I had a shower, shaved, put on some comfortable old cotton trousers, a denim shirt and a sweatshirt. I wore gymshoes and a leather jacket.

Outside it was starting to get light.

I was already at the door when it occurred to me that I might take a book, stop and read somewhere. In a garden or a café, as I used to do years before. So I looked over the books that I’d never arranged but were there in my flat. All over the place, scattered provisionally.

I had a momentary thought that they were provisional there just as I was, but immediately I told myself that this was a banal, pathetic notion. I therefore stopped philosophizing and returned to simply choosing a book.

I picked up Arthur Schnitzler’s
Dream Story
, in a cheap edition that fitted easily into the pocket of my leather jacket. I took some cigarettes, deliberately did
not
take my mobile, and left the house.

My flat was in Via Putignani, and immediately to the right as I went out I could see the Teatro Petruzzelli.

From the outside the theatre looked normal, with its dome and all the rest of it. Not so inside. One night
nearly ten years ago it had been gutted by fire, and since then there it stood, waiting for someone to rebuild it. It was inhabited meanwhile by cats and ghosts.

It was towards the theatre that I turned, feeling on my face the cool, clean air of early morning. Very few cars and no pedestrians at all.

It reminded me of the time towards the end of my university days when I often used to come home at that hour.

At night I used to play poker, or go out with girls. Or simply stay drinking, smoking and chatting with my friends.

One morning at about six, after one of these nights, I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water before going to bed, when my father came in to make coffee.

“Why have you got up so early?”

“No, Dad, I’ve only just got home.”

He looked at me for only a second, measuring me up.

“It is beyond my comprehension how you get the urge to make idiotic jokes even at this time in the morning.”

He turned away and shrugged with resignation.

I reached Corso Cavour, right in front of the Teatro Petruzzelli, and continued on my way towards the sea. Two blocks later I stopped at a bar, had some breakfast and lit the first cigarette of the day.

I was in the part of Bari where the finest houses are. It was in that neighbourhood that Rossana used to live – my girlfriend in university days.

We had had a rather stormy relationship, all my fault. After only a few months it seemed to me that my freedom was, as they say, jeopardized by that relationship.

So every so often I stood her up, and if I didn’t stand her up I almost always arrived late. She got mad but I maintained that those were not the things that mattered. She said that good manners did matter and I began, with a wealth of sophistical arguments, to explain to her the difference between formal good manners – hers – and real substantial good manners. Mine, of course.

At the time it didn’t even remotely occur to me that I was being no better than an arrogant lout. On the contrary, as I was so good at twisting words to suit my purpose, I even persuaded myself that I was right. This led me to behave worse, including in the meaning of “worse” a series of clandestine affairs with girls of dubious morality.

I came to realize all this when we had already separated. I had several times thought back on our relationship and come to the conclusion that I had behaved like a right bastard. If I ever had an opportunity I would have to admit it and apologize.

Perhaps seven or eight years later, I came across Rossana again. In the meantime she had gone to work in Bologna.

We met at the house of some friends during the Christmas holidays, and she asked me if I’d care to have a cup of tea with her the next day. I said yes. So we met, we had tea and stayed chatting for at least an hour.

She’d had a daughter, was separated from her husband, owned a travel agency which made her a pile of money, and was still very beautiful.

I was glad to see her again and felt relaxed. It therefore came quite naturally to me to tell her that I’d often thought of when we were together and that I was convinced I’d behaved badly towards her. I just felt like telling her, for what it was worth. She smiled and
looked at me in a rather strange way for a few moments before speaking. She didn’t say exactly what I expected.

“You were a spoilt child. You were so intent on yourself that you didn’t realize what was happening around you, even very close to you.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“You didn’t so much as suspect that for nearly a year I had someone else.”

I’d like to have seen my face at that moment. It must have been a pretty picture, because Rossana smiled and the sight of me seemed to amuse her.

“You had someone else? Excuse me, but in what sense?”

At that point she stopped smiling and began to laugh. Who could blame her?

“How d’you mean, in what sense? We were together.”

“How d’you mean, you were together? You were together with
me
. When did you see each other?”

“In the evening, almost every evening. When you took me home. He was waiting for me round the corner, in his car. I waited in the doorway and when you’d gone I went round the corner and got into the car.”

My head started spinning rather weirdly.

“And where ... where did you go?”

“To his place, on the Walls in Old Bari.”

“To his place. In Old Bari. And what did you do on the Walls in Old Bari?”

Too late I realized I had said something too stupid for words, but I wasn’t connecting very well.

She realized it too, and did nothing to ease matters.

“What did we do? You mean, at night in his flat on the Walls?”

She was tickled to death. I wasn’t. I had gone to have a cup of tea with an ex-girlfriend and found I had to rewrite history.

I discovered that his name was Beppe, that he was a jewellery salesman, that he was married and rich. The place on the Walls, to be precise, was not his home but his bachelor pad. At the time of these events he was thirty-six and had a sterling wife.

At the time of these events I was twenty-two, my parents gave me 40,000 lire a week, I shared a bedroom with my brother and – I was now discovering rather late in the day – I had a whore for a girlfriend.

 

 

I reached the coast, turned left towards the Teatro Margherita, and headed for San Nicola, passing below the Walls. Just where this Signor Beppe had his bachelor pad. Where he used to take
my
girlfriend.

By now it was daylight, the air was fresh and clean, and it was an ideal day for a walk. I continued as far as the Castello Svevo and then further still towards the Fiera del Levante, to arrive perhaps two hours and several miles after leaving home at the pine wood of San Francesco.

It was practically deserted. Only a few men running and a few others seated, preferring to let their dogs do the running.

I chose a good bench, one of those green wooden ones with a back, in the sun. I sat down and read my book.

When I finished it, about two hours later, I was feeling pretty fit and thought I’d take another ten minutes’ rest before setting off for home. Or perhaps for the office, where they certainly must have begun to wonder what on earth had happened to me.

It was starting to get hot, so I took off my jacket, folded it up into a kind of pillow and stretched out with my face in the sun.

When I woke it was past midday. The joggers had multiplied, there were pairs of young boys, women with babies, and old men playing cards at the stone tables. There were also two Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to convert anyone who didn’t show them a sufficiently hostile front.