Listen to My Voice (12 page)

It wasn’t hard to track him down. I called up his publishing house and asked for his address. They told me most politely that – for reasons of privacy – they weren’t authorised to give out his address, but that I could write him a letter care of the house and they’d be sure to forward it to him.

So I took pen and paper and wrote to him. I presented myself as a philosophy student, young, shy, and filled with admiration for the fascinating complexity of his work.

Could we meet?

The reply wasn’t long in coming. He didn’t live very
far
from Trieste. He thanked me, fended off my compliments, and added that there was no use in my making an appointment with him, because he was at home every afternoon except on Sundays. All I had to do was ring his bell downstairs and speak my name – Elena – into the intercom, and he’d buzz me in.

The first name I’d chosen for myself was Elena. For my family name, I used your mother’s maiden name. I didn’t want to run the slightest risk of arousing even a tiny suspicion and having our meeting cancelled.

And so the ‘student’ Elena, on a cold day with the bora blowing, took a bus to Grado to meet her father for the first time. She was on her way like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, like Hop o’ my Thumb’s ogre, like all those fairytale creatures capable of biting and causing pain. But she was also going like a child, in naive anticipation, hoping that the story had taken a different turn with the passage of time, because that imaginary embrace was always there, waiting, the arms spread out inside her like the claws of a giant crab.

What was I feeling in the half-empty bus that carried me toward the seacoast, as I prepared myself for this meeting?

Was I fearful? Was I angry? Angry, for sure, but probably more afraid than anything. I watched a landscape
of
monotonous desolation roll by outside my little window. Soon after passing the cranes rising from the shipyards in Monfalcone, we began to cross over the estuary of the Isonzo River. Every now and then, the slow flight of a heron traversed the sky. Maybe I was more fearful than anything else because – after giving the matter so much thought and devising so many elaborate strategies of attack – I was no longer sure I’d have the nerve to push the button on the intercom or the strength to climb the stairs or the courage to meet his eyes without betraying my emotions, like Ulysses upon his return to Ithaca, shortly before he massacred the Suitors.

When we reached the stop I wanted, I was the only person who got off the bus. An elderly bicyclist pedalled toward me rather unsteadily from some distance down the deserted street.

Despite the name of the place – Grado Pineta, the pinewood of Grado – there were really very few pines to be seen, most of them pretty bare-looking and imprisoned in a grid of dilapidated blocks of flats with poetically evocative names: The Sirens, Seahorse, Star of the Sea, Nausicaa.

Over the course of the long winter months, the various little gardens had accumulated all sorts of bottles, waste paper, beer cans, and miscellaneous rubbish blown there by the wind.

In the days of the economic boom, this was a
fashionable
location for a second home; now the entire neighborhood seemed like a galleon set adrift. For some time, the salinity in the seawater had been busy about its work of corroding plaster and wood, particularly door and window frames. Many shutters hung askew; some rolling blinds had collapsed. A crooked sign, riddled with holes, was posted in front of a crumbling cottage: ‘Villa Luisella’. During the winter, apparently, someone had amused himself by firing bullets at the sign. In the yard, which I could see through the gate, a bicycle with only one rim lay on its side.

I couldn’t imagine how Professor Ancona had wound up in a backwater like this. After a few vain attempts, I finally managed to find the right street and the right address: 18 via del Maestrale. Before me, in silhouette, rose a building no less spectral than all the others, distinguished only by a little portico where it looked as though people set up stalls in the summer (I imagined their wares: inflatable dinghies and soccer balls, sun lotion and beach chairs, lots of little buckets and spades); now, however, the shops were empty, and I could look through the dismal security shutters and see the empty counters, the layer of dust on everything, the newspaper pages scattered across the floor.

Massimo Ancona. It was one of the few names on the intercom panel. I couldn’t hesitate any longer; my doubt was growing with each passing second. And out of that
doubt
, there arose the overwhelming certainty that it would be better – for my life as well as his – if I were to turn on my heel and plunge back into the darkness from which I had come.

‘Elena,’ I said to the intercom.

‘Fifth floor.’

I pushed the glass door open; as I entered the atrium, I spotted an orange and white life preserver hanging on the wall (in case these flats go under?) and printed with the name of the building: ‘The Naiads’. I took the lift; then a door opened, and I found myself face to face with my father.

8

A CLOSED-UP ODOUR
– the smell of cold smoke – and semi-darkness. White furniture in summerhouse-on-the-beach style, doors falling off cabinets and wardrobes, laminated surfaces swollen by humidity. Books everywhere, scattered pages, on the floor an old typewriter under its dust cover, an open laptop – the single light source in the room – newspapers, magazines, a bottle of whisky standing next to a glass so smeared and smudged as to be nearly opaque, and a dirty quilt laid over a child’s bed transformed into a sofa.

And in the middle of the room, him.

Same face as in the snapshot, just a little fuller; black hair, salt-and-pepper beard, burning eyes. His upper body was still slender, but sagging slightly because of his paunch, which pressed so hard against his shirt that the buttons seemed about to burst.

‘What a lovely surprise on an otherwise melancholy afternoon!’

‘I’m Elena, pleased to meet you,’ I said. Then I sat down on the rickety sofa-bed.

After holding forth (and remaining duly vague) for a short while on the subject of myself and my studies, I gave him the floor. Which seemed to be just what he was waiting for. It occurred to me that he must be a very solitary man, his head always full of thoughts, and he leapt at the chance to address an audience.

My anger had given way to curiosity. I tried to see him through my mother’s eyes: what had struck her about him? What emotions had he stirred in her, emotions with the power to determine her fate so tragically?

I tuned into his long monologue. ‘You must be surprised,’ he was saying, ‘that I’ve chosen to live in such a shocking place. Perhaps you would have preferred to visit me in Venice, in a renovated loft above what was once a fishmonger’s, with antique furniture and old prints on the walls, but that, you see, would have been too conventional. It would have meant adhering to a pre-established type – the philosophy professor in his natural habitat – and that’s exactly what I don’t want to do: step into a mould. Besides, there’s something about cutting all ties; it’s like setting up outposts in the void. I’m going where no one else would ever have the nerve to go, and do you know why? Because I’m not
afraid
. That’s all there is to it. Since I don’t live the lie of attachment to anything or anyone, I have no fear. It’s duplicity that makes us fragile. We have to build around us a wall of things, of objects and simulacra, to hold terror at bay, but all this accumulation, instead of providing relief, generates an even greater terror, the terror of loss. The more attachments we have, the more we live in panic; things get lost or break, people die or leave us, and suddenly we find ourselves completely naked. Naked and desperate. Of course, we’ve always been naked, but we pretend not to know it, not to see it, and by the time we realise it, it’s often too late for us to save ourselves. You may be wondering how a person can save himself if he can’t hold on to anything. He saves himself by not acting – or rather by acting in harmony with the void. The void precedes us; the void will close in again after our brief passage. In the void there’s a sort of wisdom, the wisdom of appearing and disappearing, and therefore we must entrust ourselves to the void as to a generous wet-nurse . . .
Outposts in the Void
is actually the title of the book I’m working on . . .’

Time passed, and I couldn’t manage to step into the flowing river of his sentences. I still had an hour before the last bus. I didn’t know how to approach the object of my visit.

Luckily, after a while he got up to refill his whisky
glass
, and my eye fell on an extremely beautiful Persian rug, the only antique in the house.

I pointed to it and asked, ‘So where did that come from?’

‘Does it seem like a contradiction to you? It is, in fact. My father was a rug merchant – it’s one of the few I still have.’

‘Is it an heirloom?’

‘No, it’s my strongbox. Something I can sell if I have to . . .’

Instead of returning to his chair, he sat beside me on the sofa-bed. Its springs squeaked under his weight. We stayed like that for a while in silence; not far away, a dog was barking desperately. Then he took one of my hands and began examining it. ‘According to the ancients, a person’s hand contains all the qualities of his soul . . . Here I see intelligence and nobility of thought . . . Your hand is a lot like mine.’

Our hands were resting on my leg, side by side. Mine shook a little.

‘It’s a lot like yours because I’m your daughter,’ I said, in a voice whose calmness amazed me.

The curses of an old man who was trying unsuccessfully to silence the dog overlaid its barking.

The professor sprang away from me. ‘What’s this, a joke?’ he asked, in a voice halfway between alarm and amusement. ‘Or a bit of bad theatre?’

‘Padua, the seventies. One of your students . . .’

He stood up so he could see my face better. ‘Marvellous years. Girls flung themselves into my arms like bees diving into a flower.’

‘Naked-truth-telling.’

A hard light came into his eyes, rendering them opaque and extinguishing their bright flashes. ‘If you’re here to make accusations, let me tell you at once that you’ve come to the wrong place.’

‘No accusations.’

‘Then what do you want? Some compensation, some money? If that’s the reason, the most I can give you is a rug.’

‘I don’t need money, and I don’t want a rug.’

‘Then why, assuming that you really are my daughter, have you come all the way out here?’

‘Simple curiosity. I wanted to get to know you.’

‘Human beings can never completely know each other.’

‘But curiosity is an attribute of intelligence.’

‘
Touché!
’

The bus would be passing very soon. While I was putting on my jacket, he opened the front door and said, ‘Come back whenever you want. I’m always here in the afternoon. I often go out in the morning, so if you’re going to come then it’s best to call first.’

After that first time, I visited him once a week for three months. We often took walks along the beach. In the beginning, the bathing season was still far off, and on sunny days the strong-smelling clumps of algae rotting in the shallows along the shore attracted flocks of herring gulls, which were always on the lookout for food.

The water level varied greatly, in accordance with the tides. Sometimes, the fishermen-pensioners had to wade out almost to the horizon in order to find clams and scallops.

We frequently came across joggers, athletic young men or older, big-bellied fellows, dripping with sweat even in the middle of winter.

Often, during the milder days, we saw lovers sitting on the trunks of trees blown down by sea storms. On one such occasion, my father pointed to a couple locked in an embrace and said, ‘Do you know why lovers love to look at the sea? It’s because they’re convinced that their love is without end, like the horizon. In short, they gaze at an illusory line and superimpose on it an illusory sentiment.’

He missed no opportunity to demonstrate to me the speciousness of the visible world. Maya – the great cosmic illusion, according to Indian Vedic philosophy – imprisons us in its magic net, from which only a select few manage to escape by finally opening their eyes. All the others are compelled to follow shadows.