Limbo (54 page)

I met them in my office. I've forgotten the face of his colleague, who didn't say a word; but the commissioner had bags under his eyes and was unshaven, as if he hadn't slept in days. He asked me if any other details had come to mind, anything that I might have omitted during my first deposition. But I hadn't given it any further thought, so I told him no. At that point he showed me some photographs. I had stupidly told him that the guy on the back of the motorcycle wasn't wearing a helmet, and that I'd seen his face. A kid, roughly twenty years old. I looked at the photographs, but not very carefully. It was cold but I was sweating like a pig. Because I understood perfectly well the situation I'd gotten myself into, and I wanted out, but I didn't know how to get out. And then I saw him. I would have picked him out in a crowd of a million. His face was stamped on my memory, a snapshot frozen right at the instant he said “Calogero.” And now there he was on my desk, alongside my ophthalmology books and international journals, in which I managed to publish an article every once in a while, alongside the photos of Marco in the pool, Marco skiing, Marco with me in Santorini, in the dazzling white of the houses of Imerovigli. And that kid had shot a forty-year-old gynecologist in the face right in front of me.

I ask myself all the time what I would do if I could do it all over again. If I could have imagined all this. I told you, I don't believe in anything, I'm allergic to ideologies and I've never done anything for my neighbor simply because it was my duty to do so. I just tried to be happy, and I'd succeeded for thirty-eight years. I'd deceived everyone, myself most of all. I don't have a particularly elevated opinion of humanity, and I don't consider myself better than other people. When the law restricted my freedom I broke it without remorse. I'm not particularly bound to institutions; as a student and then as a doctor I knew only their most corrupt and repugnant aspects. The word
Italy
means nothing to me beyond the language I speak and the country I live in. I get annoyed when people talk to me about the homeland. For me the homeland isn't the land of our fathers but of our children. It's not an expanse of space or a history, but something alive and present, that each one of us carries inside. I know you don't agree, but for me Italy can be reduced to a passport, my son's school, and the hospital. I'm not particularly courageous—if anything I'm reckless, I'd risk my life trying to clear a path in the Himalayas for the sheer pleasure of the challenge. But recklessness is the opposite of courage. And anyway, I wasn't thinking about any of this then. Calogero the gynecologist was not innocent, but I probably wouldn't have been either, in his place. I didn't owe him anything. I had everything to lose and nothing to gain.

And yet I believe I would do what I did again. I put my sweaty fingers on the photograph and nodded. “That's him, I recognize him beyond any reasonable doubt.” The man who had traveled six hundred miles to hear those words sighed and scratched his beard. He was happy, but also sad. Sad for me, but I didn't know it then. He told me I would have to make a statement, and I had to go with him to the nearest police station. The report took about an hour. When it was over, both visitors thanked me and shook my hand. I didn't really understand what they were thanking me for.

I didn't know the kid's name, and I didn't want to know. In fact, I stated clearly that it didn't matter to me who he was. For me, he was just someone who had shot a man in the face. If they caught him, sure, I'd be willing to testify at the trial, but I didn't want to know anything more till then. The man who had traveled six hundred miles for me thought that it might not be so simple, but he didn't say anything at the time. Later, I found out that the kid was named Marco, like my son, and I still can't forgive him for that.

Some time later—I can't remember exactly when, my memory has erased the intervals, but at any rate some time later—I found out that Marco's father was one of the twenty most dangerous fugitives in Italy. With that murder, his son was proving that he was an adult and could control his father's territory even in his absence. Marco was suspected of various crimes, but they had never been able to gather enough evidence to charge him. My deposition could turn out to be decisive in upsetting the family's plans and in apprehending both the instigators and the accomplices. So I was a precious witness. To cut a long story short, the prefect's office sent a public security representative to see me. He informed me that the police had been ordered to set up appropriate protective measures to guarantee my safety. Nothing serious. Standard procedure, as provided for by the penal code. I shouldn't worry. A provisional measure, purely precautionary. Nothing bad would happen to me. I shouldn't be afraid. But I had to talk to my wife. My family had to be informed of the new protective measures, it was essential for our safety. “She's not my wife,” I said. Just think: he was trying to tell me that my old life was dying, and all I could think to do was point out that Denise and I weren't married. Maybe it was a way of defending myself from reality.

“What does it mean in practical terms?” was the only thing Denise said when I informed her of the killing and my meeting with the police. “I think they'll send someone to watch the house,” I told her. “Oh well, as long as they don't send a female officer,” she sighed sarcastically. She was still witty despite the disappointments and bitterness she'd endured in recent years. A rather rare quality in a woman. In that moment I forgave her years of accusations and fights she'd picked, and I opened myself to her. I don't know if I loved her, but I cared a lot about her, and I was happy she was my partner.

They didn't come right away, some time passed. For a few days I even hoped they had changed their mind. But I will spare you the delays. When a dark car finally took up position in front of our gate, I picked up Marco and pointed to it. “Do you see that? It's for me. Papà's a big shot now. I have police protection, just like a politician.” “Wow,” Marco said. And we laughed.

 

 

BELLAVISTA HOTEL, JANUARY 8

On the face of it, nothing changed. I still rode my bike to work. The dark car circled our house, following me if I went out, but after a few days I managed to forget about it. And yet, almost without realizing it, my habits changed, and I started to change, too. I was being watched, after all. My personal freedom was cramped by that discreet yet nagging presence. Because I was ashamed to let the judges and police officers—who considered me a serious, honest, upright professional—know that I wasn't what I seemed, that even though I had a partner and a child, I was seeing another woman. Her name was Lara, she was a patient of mine, visually impaired. My office was like a girlfriend recruiting agency, a factory for minting admirers. Three quarters of my patients were women. In that half hour of intimacy—in which they, timid, hesitant, rested their chin on the testing instrument and looked me in the eye—something sparked. I was young. It's hard for two human beings to look each other in the eye like that and remain indifferent. They were seeking comfort, and I wanted to share a little happiness. But Lara wasn't merely a whim. She couldn't see me, so she touched me with an almost shamanic power, identifying the most sensitive parts of my body and sensitizing those that weren't, from the soles of my feet to my elbows, from my fingernails to the folds in my ass. So we made love in the dark, and she taught me to see with my hands.

Maybe I've shown you what a good student I was. Maybe not, and if so, I'm sorry. If you give me another chance, I'll try again. I haven't been able to figure out what you blame me for, and why you're avoiding me, but I'd rather not ask. If you want to tell me, you will. I'm always here, I'm writing facing the balcony, I'm looking at your windows, even though you're not home today. The car that took you away had Italian Army plates. Wherever you are, I wouldn't have been able to go with you, and this thought gives me the strength to carry on. I owed a lot to Lara, and it seemed unfair to leave her just because I had looked a killer in the face.

But in a sense my new circumstances forced me, at least for a while, to behave—that is, to behave the way society holds that one must in order to be considered respectable and therefore credible. It's hypocritical, of course. But still, I left her. I promised her the separation wasn't definitive, because I really believed I would be free again after the trial. But I would understand if she found someone else in the meantime and wished her all the best. And I would keep checking her eyes, as I had done for years. Lara responded sadly that she preferred to wait for me. I was the only sighted man who knew how to see her with his hands and not just with his dick. So, for two months, even though I didn't want to, I conformed to my new role. No women, no daring mountaineering. I lived a normal life, I came home early. Denise understood: “Thank God for Calogero,” she said. “Someday I'll put flowers on his grave, he turned you into a responsible person.”

One night my cell rang at midnight. I was already asleep, and I awoke with a start. My first thought was that something must have happened to Denise's mother. She'd suffered from multiple sclerosis for years, and sometimes she'd have an attack and need to be hospitalized. But it was a man's voice. He asked if he were speaking with the doctor; he said my name. I'm used to phone calls from clients at all hours of the day and night, so I said yes. The voice said something laughingly. I didn't understand. He spoke in heavy dialect. A southern dialect, which might as well be Chinese to me. “Excuse me,” I said, “what is it you want?” The voice repeated it, in the same joking tone, but slower this time. Some of the words were clear. He was telling me I was already dead. At that moment I assumed he was joking or that it didn't have anything to do with me. But his voice was so sinister that when I hung up I felt a chill in my bones, and my heart was in my throat.

I went out to the street just as I was, in my underwear and bare feet. The echo of those absurd words hounded me and their true meaning was becoming clearer inside of me. I even understood the ones I hadn't grasped earlier: there's no escaping, Doctor, we've found you, you don't go very fast on that bike of yours, something like that. The man who was supposed to be protecting us was dozing in the dark car, his head against the window. “They know who I am, they have my phone number,” I told him. We drank a coffee on the porch. It was the end of June, in three days I was supposed to take Denise and Marco to Imerovigli, help them open up the house, and then come back to Italy, before joining them on August 1. The officer asked me if it was hard to become an ophthalmologist. An eye seemed to him like a difficult thing to treat, so small, so strange. “It's a muscle, just like any other,” I answered. Like the heart. But with less blood. I was an impressionable med student. The smell of blood made me sick. But the eye doesn't smell even when it's diseased. Of all the branches of medicine, ophthalmology is the cleanest. If he wanted, I could show him the DVDs of my operations. I kept them, so I could show them at conferences. I would have liked to show them to you, Manuela, because you would have seen that my hands don't shake when I make an incision with a microscalpel, and that I, too, know how to hit an almost invisible target without even looking. I smiled when you told me how much you love your rifle and how much it hurts being separated from it, and you thought I was making fun of you. But I understood how you feel. My hand feels empty without a scalpel.

The next day they advised me to stay on Santorini all summer. I canceled all my appointments and left my associate in charge of the office. Sun, sea, beach, moussaka, swimming pool, motorboat—not a care in the world. Italy was very far away. I didn't let Calogero the gynecologist or Marco the murderer disembark at Santorini. We were alone—Denise, Marco, and me. I taught my Marco to swim. It was the last thing I did for him. We came home on September 15, for the start of school. On September 16 my car caught on fire right in the center of the city. It was parked outside my office. I was using high-frequency ultrasound to bombard a particularly hard, advanced-stage cataract. The girls from the hair salon across the street rang my bell to let me know. The flames reached the second floor.

Everything spun out of control pretty quickly. They informed me that they had to raise my level of protection: I was in clear and present danger, and was no longer safe in my hometown. A change of domicile was necessary. In other words, we had to leave. But everything I had was there. My whole life, within a radius of a few miles. My parents, my brother, my house, the hospital, my practice, the mountains, my clients, Marco's school, Denise's mother, my friends—everything. “We're sorry,” they said. For my own good, for that of my partner and my son, we had to leave. Naturally I would receive all the assistance I required. House, work, social reintegration, I needn't worry about any of it, a situation suited to my existing way of life and my profession would be found, a job was guaranteed. We packed in silence. Denise wept, incredulous. Marco followed me around mutely, putting all his toys in bags: little cars, monster robots, soccer ball, puzzles, stuffed dogs. As we loaded the car, Soraya escaped from her basket and, even though we searched everywhere, we couldn't find her. For months I made them hang up posters with her picture on the lampposts, outside shopping centers, in the piazza, but she never turned up. Maybe she died of hunger in the woods; she was an aristocratic cat, not used to hunting for food. Or maybe she got run over by a truck on one of the narrow lanes that cut through the industrial park. She was the first victim of the earthquake that brought my whole life tumbling down.

Before closing the front door, I turned on the alarm. It was evening, the house stood out like a pink cake against the darkness of the trees. It had never looked so beautiful. I hadn't even finished paying off the mortgage. My son was in my arms. Sleepy, Marco asked me when we could come back. Soon, I told him. There was a plaque next to the gate, Marco designed it, it said
MY HOME
. It pierced my heart. I didn't know where we were going, or for how long. Everything was unfolding above and beyond my will. I watched the house in the rearview mirror until it disappeared in the hedges around the curve. I haven't seen it since.