The Past is a Foreign Country (11 page)

But of course I didn’t know what they meant. If they meant
anything
at all.

I had to walk nearly an hour to get back home, with long,
effortful
strides. I felt dazed with tiredness and beer. I walked with my head down, looking at nothing except the metre of pavement in front of me.

I went to bed and slept for a long time. A deep sleep, with dreams forever out of reach.  

ON TUESDAY MORNING it rained, steadily and insistently. It wasn’t June weather at all.

The noise of the rain had woken me early and I hadn’t been able to stay in bed. I’d got up no later than eight. It was too early to phone and I had to find a way to pass the time. So I had a leisurely breakfast, cleaned my teeth and shaved. Then, seeing as it was still early, I thought I’d tidy my room before getting dressed.

I switched on the radio, found a station broadcasting Italian
music
without too many commercial breaks, and started.

I collected together old newspapers, notes I didn’t need any more, odds and ends left at the back of my desk drawers, and two old
slippers
which had been under the bed for God knows how long, and put everything in two big rubbish bags. I arranged the books on the shelves, and rehung a poster – Magritte’s
Empire of Lights
– which had been hanging crookedly for several months, held up by a single flimsy piece of adhesive tape. I even dusted the room with a damp cloth. I’d learned to do that when I was a child and my parents paid me to help out in the house.

Then I washed and dressed, went straight to the telephone and, without thinking any more about it, called Maria.

Again a conversation without innuendo. Like a business call. Did
I want to come right now? Yes, I did. If she could tell me how to get to her house. From her number I assumed she probably lived in the suburbs, over towards Carbonara. When she told me, I saw that I was right. She lived not far from the tennis club, a few kilometres before Carbonara. An area where rich people had their villas. As I’d thought.

When I left home, the rain was still falling steadily from a heavy grey sky. I got in the car, sure that I wouldn’t get out of the centre of town in less than half an hour. It was one of those days when the traffic is impossible. Usually it would have bothered me. Today, even if I was stuck in a jam, I found it relaxing to spend a long time in the car, listening to music – the same station I’d tuned to at home – and not thinking of anything, not doing anything, just letting the time hang there, suspended.

So I drove slowly through the city, between double-parked cars, puddles out of the Third World, dazed-looking people with short-sleeved shirts and black umbrellas, traffic police in oilskins. I listened to the radio and followed the hypnotic movement of the wipers sweeping away the raindrops from the windscreen. After a while, I realised I was moving my head imperceptibly in time to the windscreen wipers, and when I reached the vicinity of the tennis club I wouldn’t have been able to say how exactly I’d got there.

The garden of the villa was surrounded by a wall of ochre bricks, at least two metres high, with a hedge of cedars protruding above it, their leaves iridescent, somewhere between moss green and
turquoise
. The rest of the world was in black and white.

I got out by the gate, rang twice at the entryphone, and got back in the car without waiting for an answer. I had the feeling, at that moment, that I was moving as if I’d been programmed. Not a single gesture I was making had been determined by me.

The automatic gate opened suddenly, noiselessly, as if in a dream.

As I carefully drove forward and glimpsed a two-storey villa in
the distance, I was overcome with anxiety. I had a strong sense of unreality and an urge to escape.

Everything was unreal and irremediably strange. The car
advanced
slowly along the drive between tall pines, and I thought of making a U-turn and driving away. But when I looked in the
rearview
mirror I saw the gate closing, as silently as it had opened.

The car kept moving. Of its own volition. Right up to the villa.

There was a kind of portico, and Maria was standing beneath it, pointing to the right. I didn’t understand at first, I thought she was telling me to get out of there. Something unexpected had cropped up – maybe her husband had returned? – and I had to escape. For a few moments I felt a mixture of panic and relief.

Then I realised she was only pointing me towards a parking space. There was an ivy-covered canopy and I left the car beneath it, next to an old Lancia that seemed to have been there for a very long time. There was also a dark-coloured runabout. Maria’s car, I assumed. As I walked from the parking space to the portico, with the rain falling on me, I had the impression I was moving in slow motion.

She said Hi, come in, and went inside the house while I was still replying to her greeting. Inside, everything was excessively tidy, and there was a smell of some scented detergent.

We went into the kitchen and had some fruit juice and talked for a while. The only thing I remember of what she said is that the maid would be there at lunch time because she didn’t like having people in the house in the morning. I’d be gone by then.

We were still in the kitchen when she pressed her mouth to mine. She had a hard, dry, fleshy tongue. I could smell the perfume she’d put on her neck just before I got there. There was too much of it, and it was too sweet.

I don’t remember exactly how we ended up in the bedroom. It
obviously
wasn’t her and her husband’s room. The guest room maybe. Or one specially set aside for clandestine fucks. It was clean and very
tidy, with twin beds placed side by side, a clear wooden sideboard and a window looking out on the garden. I could see two palms out there, with a hedge behind them.

The house was silent, and from outside the only noise was the tap-tap of the rain. No sounds of cars, no sounds of people.
Nothing
. Only the rain.

Maria had a dry, muscular body. The result of hours and hours in the gym. Aerobics, body building, God knows what else.

But at one point, as I lay on my back and she moved above me, I saw the stretch marks on her breasts. The image of that moment – those aging breasts on an athletic body – has stayed in my memory with photographic precision.

A sad, indelible image.

As she moved methodically, joined to my body – and I moved, too, as if doing a gymnastics exercise – I felt my nostrils filling with that excessively sweet perfume and another, less artificial smell that was just as alien.

As we approached a climax, she called me Darling. Once. Twice. Three times.

Then many times. Faster and faster. It was like that children’s game where you keep repeating a word until the brain goes into a kind of short circuit and you lose sight of the meaning.

Darling.

Afterwards, I wanted to light a cigarette but didn’t. She hated cigarette smoke, she’d told me. So I didn’t move, just lay on my back, naked, while she talked. She also lay on her back, naked. Every now and again she would pass a hand over her ribs, as if she was soaping herself.

She talked, and I held my breath, and the rain kept falling, and time seemed to stand still.

I have no memory of getting dressed, or retracing the steps that had brought us to that guest room, or arranging to meet again, or
saying goodbye. Some images of that morning are still very clear in my mind, like a series of photos. Others vanished immediately.

When I left, it was still raining.

UP UNTIL THAT Tuesday in June my memories follow one
another
in normal chronological order. After it, things seem to speed up, in a surreal, syncopated rhythm. It’s all a jumble of scenes, some in colour, some in black and white, some with a bizarre
non-synchronised
soundtrack.

I can only see these scenes from the outside, like a spectator.

Many times, over the years, I’ve made the effort to think myself back into the situations I lived through. I’ve tried to see the scenes again from the same positions I was in when they happened, but I’ve never managed it.

Even now, as I write, I keep trying, but as soon as I seem to be getting there, a kind of invisible elastic band makes me leap back and I lose my bearings. When I try to get the scene back into
focus
, I’m a spectator again. From a different angle, sometimes closer, sometimes from a distance. Sometimes – and this is a little scary – from above.

But always as a spectator.

I saw Maria quite often after that. Almost always in the morning, but sometimes also late at night. The house was always silent and very clean. Whenever I left, I’d be feeling slightly nauseous,
and to get over that feeling I’d tell myself that this was the last time.

A few days later I’d phone again.

I don’t remember a single conversation with my parents. I was trying to avoid seeing them, and whenever I saw them I would avoid looking at them.

I would get home late at night, and stay in bed until late in the morning. I would go out, go to the sea or to Maria’s house, or
simply
drive around with the air conditioning on and the music at full volume. I would get back late in the afternoon, wash, change, and go out again, and finally get home in the middle of the night.

I remember many poker games, both before and after our trip to Spain.

Games in air-conditioned rooms stagnant with smoke, games on terraces, games in the gardens of houses by the sea. Once even on a boat.

And once in a gaming club. That one I’ll never forget.

Francesco didn’t usually like playing in gaming clubs. He said it was dangerous and exposed us to needless risks. Those clubs are a closed environment, rather like the world of the drug addict.
Everyone
knows everyone else. At the pace we were going – four, five, even six games a month – they’d soon recognise us. They would
notice
that I almost always won. Then they would notice that we were always together. Finally someone would watch us, and would notice that I always won the most when Francesco was dealing.

So we generally played well away from those circles, thanks to Francesco’s incredible capacity for always finding new places to play, often outside Bari, and new people to play against. Almost all of them were amateurs, and if we ever saw them again it would only be once, for a return match.

How Francesco managed to arrange so many games, with so many people who didn’t know each other, I could never understand. 

Over the months, there’d been a gradual change in the kind of people we played against. At first they were always people with
money
, lots of money. People for whom losing five, six, ten million lire at the poker table was a bother, but not a personal or family tragedy. Over time, I’d seen fewer and fewer of these people at our games. Over time, we’d started playing more and more often with clerks, a few students like us, a few manual workers, even a few pensioners. Sometimes not much more than down and outs. Sometimes less. They lost like rich people, but it wasn’t quite the same for them.

This wasn’t the way it was meant to be when we’d originally come to an understanding. It was if we were on a slippery slope.

Towards what, I didn’t want to know.

A bald man in a vest, with tufts of black hair on his shoulders, was sitting at the front door of the club. I told him I had come to see Nicola. I had no idea who Nicola was, it was what Francesco had told me to say. The bald man looked around, moving only his eyes, and then jerked his head towards the interior. I crossed a large room. It was hot in there and the old, wheezy air conditioning didn’t make it any cooler. The room was filled with dozens of innocent-looking video games. Star Wars games, car races, shoot-outs, that kind of thing. There weren’t many people at the machines that evening. They were all adults and as I crossed the hall I wondered vaguely what games they were playing. Francesco had told me that many of these machines were equipped with a device – activated by remote control or even just a key – which transformed them into lethal poker games. The customer would ask the manager if he could play. If he was a stranger, he’d be told curtly that there were no video poker games in the club. Just in case he was a policeman or a
carabiniere
. If, on the other hand, the customer was already known or was
introduced by someone, the manager would transform the machine by turning the key or pressing a button on the remote. There were people who spent hours and hours there, playing a few thousand lire at a time, and ended up losing millions. If the machine didn’t receive an impulse in fifteen seconds, the innocent legal game would automatically reappear on the screen. Which was what the police saw if they came in to check the place out, maybe after receiving an anonymous letter from some desperate wife.

From the videogames room you went through into another room, a smaller one, with three billiard tables. No one was playing, the air conditioning was slightly more effective, and there was another guy who asked who I was looking for. I was still looking for Nicola.

The man told me to wait there. He went to a small metal door at the far end of the room and spoke into an entryphone, saying something I couldn’t hear. Less than a minute later, Francesco
appeared
and signalled to me to come in. We walked along a corridor dimly lit by a naked bulb and down a steep, narrow staircase until at last we reached our destination. It was a low-ceilinged cellar with six or seven round green tables, all except one already occupied. At the far end, opposite the door, was a kind of bar. Behind it, a gaunt, mean-looking elderly man.

The air conditioning worked well here. A bit too well: I shivered with cold as I entered. The room had that stale smell you find in places where people smoke a lot and the only change of air is
provided
by the air conditioning. A green lampshade hung above each table, as if to lend a professional tone to this gambling den on the outskirts of town. The overall effect was something between the surreal and the squalid. A dimly lit cellar, cones of yellow light, wisps of smoke forming vaguely malign-looking spirals, men sitting astride their chairs between the lights and the surrounding dark.

We went to the bar and Francesco introduced the old man and two nondescript guys who were going to play with us. We were
waiting for someone else: there’d be five of us playing tonight. While we waited, Francesco explained the house rules.

To get a table you paid half a million to the manager. So, as there were five of us, we’d have to pay a hundred thousand lire each. In
return
we’d get a new pack of cards, chips, and the first coffee. As well as the right to play all night. To get more coffee, alcoholic drinks, or cigarettes, you had to pay a supplement. The initial stake was five hundred thousand lire and at the end of the game you had to give the manager five per cent of your winnings. If you won, of course.

The fifth man arrived a few minutes later. He apologised
profusely
for the delay, breathing heavily and wiping the sweat from his face with an old-fashioned white handkerchief. Everything about him looked slightly incongruous. He was wearing a white shirt with the kind of collar that was about thirty years out of date. His grey hair was slightly too long, and the index finger and middle finger of his left hand were yellowed with nicotine.

His eyes, framed by deep, dark rings, were curiously gentle, with flashes of anxiety in them. He was clean-shaven and smelled of
aftershave
. It was a smell that reminded me of my early childhood. I must have smelled it on my grandfather, or my uncle, or someone else who was already very big when I was very small. Something out of the past.

He
seemed like something out of the past, as if he had emerged from a neo-realist film or an old black and white newsreel.

He was a lawyer, or at least that was what he was introduced to me as. I don’t remember his surname. Everyone called him Gino the lawyer or just Gino.

We sat down at the table, and they brought us coffee, cards and chips. I was about to take out my wallet to pay the fee, but Francesco stopped me with a glance and a slight nod. This wasn’t a place where you paid in advance. The owners, whoever they were, didn’t have any problems with customers being insolvent.

I don’t know how many hours we played, but it was definitely longer than usual. When I look back at the scene now, I see a fog, composed of cigarette smoke, artificial light and shadows. Almost the only things that emerge from this fog are the face and gestures of Gino the lawyer, in a series of still photos, quite separate from each other. I don’t remember the names or faces of the other players. If I’d passed them in the street the next day, I probably wouldn’t have recognised them.

All through the game, I kept my eyes on that fifty-something lawyer, with his heavy breathing, his permanently lit cigarette – he smoked the strongest kind of MS’s – and his apparently
imperturbable
expression. For some reason, he drew my attention. I was
hypnotised
by him.

Noting again that he was clean-shaven, it occurred to me that he must have shaved just before coming here. To this dirty,
smoke-filled
cellar, filled with crooks and delinquents of all kinds,
including
me.

He’s the same age as my father, I thought after a while, and I felt uncomfortable.

Whenever he lost, the left corner of his mouth would tremble slightly. A moment later, though, he would smile, as if to say, ‘No need to worry about me,
really
, there’s no need to worry about me. What does it matter if I lose one pot?’

He lost a lot of pots. He bet on every game. He played in a way that was both methodical and febrile. As if he didn’t care at all about the money that lay there on the table in the form of those dirty chips. Maybe it was true, in a way. Maybe he was sitting there for a reason other than money.

And yet there was something sick, feverish, about the very calm way he moved the chips into the pot, even though he rarely got them back at the end of the hand.

He would have lost even if we hadn’t been there.

We stopped playing at four in the morning. The other tables were empty when we stood up, almost all the lights had been turned out, and an unsettling greyish cloud hung in the air.

Naturally I won, and one of the nondescript guys also won, though much less than me. Francesco would later tell me that he was someone you’d do best always to settle your accounts with. And make sure you didn’t upset him. That was why he had let him win. He wanted everything to go as smoothly as usual, without snags of any kind.

The others, Francesco included, lost. Gino the lawyer most of all. He took his umpteenth cigarette out of the crumpled and now almost empty packet, lit it, and said that if I didn’t mind he would pay by cheque, because obviously he didn’t have all that much cash on him. If I didn’t mind, he’d also postdate the cheque. There was nothing to worry about because he was expecting some money from a client. It would only be two or three days. But to be on the safe side, if I didn’t mind, he would postdate the cheque by a week. I said that was fine by me, though for some reason I avoided looking at Francesco as I said it.

We paid the old man, Francesco paid – in cash – the nondescript man you’d do best always to settle accounts with, a few more banknotes were passed from hand to hand, and I ended up with a post-dated cheque. The handwriting was elegant and nervous. Aristocratic, I caught myself thinking. Such a contrast with the man’s haggard appearance. As if it were the last vestige of the person he must once have been. Some time in the past, long ago.