The Watcher and Other Stories (10 page)

I didn't let her slip the overcoat off my back; I wanted to go out at once. My only immediate need, as I tried to tell her, was some shelves; I was expecting a case of books, the little library I had managed to keep together in my haphazard life. It cost me some effort to make the deaf woman understand; finally she led me into the other rooms, her part of the house, to a little étagère, where she kept her work baskets and embroidery patterns; she told me she would clear it and put it in my room. I went out.

Purification
was the organ of an Institute, where I was to report, to learn my duties. A new job, an unfamiliar city—had I been younger or had I expected more of life, these would have pleased and stimulated me; but not now, now I could see only the grayness, the poverty that surrounded me, and I could only plunge into it as if I actually liked it, because it confirmed my belief that life could be nothing else. I purposely chose to walk in the most narrow, anonymous, unimportant streets, though I could easily have gone along those with fashionable shopwindows and smart cafés; but I didn't want to miss the careworn expression on the faces of the passers-by, the shabby look of the cheap restaurants, the stagnant little stores, and even certain sounds which belong to narrow streets: the streetcars, the braking of pickup trucks, the sizzling of welders in the little workshops in the courtyards: all because that wear, that exterior clashing kept me from attaching too much importance to the wear, the clash that I carried within myself.

But to reach the Institute, I was obliged at one point to enter an entirely different neighborhood, elegant, shaded, old-fashioned, its side streets almost free of vehicles, and its main avenues so spacious that traffic could flow past without noise or jams. It was autumn; some of the trees were golden. The sidewalk did not flank walls, buildings, but fences with hedges beyond them, flower beds, gravel walks, constructions that lay somewhere between the palazzo and the villa, ornate in their architecture. Now I felt lost in a different way, because I could no longer find, as I had done before, things in which I recognized myself, in which I could read the future. (Not that I believe in signs, but when you're nervous, in a new place, everything you see is a sign.)

So I was a bit disoriented when I entered the Institute offices, different from the way I had imagined them, because they were the salons of an aristocratic palazzo, with mirrors and consoles and marble fireplaces and hangings and carpets (though the actual furniture was the usual kind for a modern office, and the lighting was the latest sort, with neon tubes). In other words, I was embarrassed then at having taken such an ugly, dark room, especially when I was led into the office of the president, Commendatore Cordà, who promptly greeted me with exaggerated expansiveness, treating me as an equal not only in social and business importance—which in itself was a hard position for me to maintain—but also as. his equal in knowledge and interest in the problems which concerned the Institute and
Purification
. To tell the truth, I had believed it was all some kind of trick, something to mention with a wink; I had accepted the job just as a last resort, and now I had to act as if I had never thought of anything else in my whole life.

Commendatore Cordà was a man of about fifty, youthful in appearance, with a black mustache, a member of that generation, in other words, who despite everything still look youthful and wear a black mustache, the kind of man with whom I have absolutely nothing in common. Everything about him, his talk, his appearance—he wore an impeccable gray suit and a dazzlingly white shirt—his gestures—he moved one hand with his cigarette between his fingers—suggested efficiency, ease, optimism, broad-mindedness. He showed me the numbers of
Purification
that had appeared so far, put out by himself (who was its editor-in-chief) and the Institute's press officer, Signor Avandero (he introduced me to him; one of those characters who talk as if their words were typewritten). There were only a few, very skimpy issues, and you could see that they weren't the work of professionals. With the little I knew about magazines, I found a way to tell him—making no criticisms, obviously—how I would do it, the typographical changes I would make. I fell in with his tone, practical, confident in results; and I was pleased to see that we understood each other. Pleased, because the more efficient and optimistic I acted, the more I thought of that wretched furnished room, those squalid streets, that sense of rust and slime I felt on my skin, my not caring a damn about anything, and I seemed to be performing a trick, to be transforming, before the very eyes of Commendatore Cordà and Signor Avandero, all their technical-industrial efficiency into a pile of crumbs, and they were unaware of it, and Cordà kept nodding enthusiastically.

“Fine. Yes, absolutely, tomorrow, you and I agree, and meanwhile,” Cordà said to me, “just to bring you up to date...” And he insisted on giving me the Proceedings of their latest convention to read. “Here,” he took me over to some shelves where the mimeographed copies of all the speeches were arranged in so many stacks. “You see? Take this one, and this other one. Do you already have this? Here, count them and see if they're all there.” And as he spoke, he picked up those papers and at that moment I noticed how they raised a little cloud of dust, and I saw the prints of his fingers outlined on their surface, which he had barely touched. Now the Commendatore, in picking up those papers, tried to give them a little shake, but just a slight one, as if he didn't want to admit they were dusty, and he also blew on them gently. He was careful not to put his fingers on the first page of each speech, but if he just grazed one with the tip of a fingernail, he left a little white streak over what seemed a gray background, since the paper was covered with a very fine veil of dust. Nevertheless, his fingers obviously became soiled, and he tried to clean them by bending the tips to his palm and rubbing them, but he only dirtied his whole hand with dust. Then instinctively he dropped his hands to the sides of his gray flannel trousers, caught himself just in time, raised them again, and so we both stood there, our fingertips in mid-air, handing speeches back and forth, taking them delicately by the margins as if they were nettle leaves, and meanwhile we went on smiling, nodding smugly, and saying: “Oh yes, a very interesting convention! Oh yes, an excellent endeavor!” but I noticed that the Commendatore became more and more nervous and insecure, and he couldn't look into my triumphant eyes, into my triumphant and desperate gaze, desperate because everything confirmed the fact that it was all exactly as I had believed it would be.

 

IT TOOK me some time to fall asleep. The room, which had seemed so quiet, at night filled with sounds that I learned, gradually, to decipher. Sometimes I could hear a voice distorted by a loud-speaker, giving brief, incomprehensible commands; if I had dozed off, I would wake up, thinking I was in a train, because the timbre and the cadence were those of the station loud-speakers, as during the night they rise to the surface of the traveler's restless sleep. When my ear had become accustomed to them, I managed to grasp the words: “Two ravioli with tomato sauce...” the voice said. “Grilled steak... Lamb chop...” My room was over the kitchen of the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall, which served hot meals even after midnight: from the counter, the waiters transmitted the orders to the cooks, snapping out the words over an intercom. In the wake of those messages, a confused sound of voices came up to me and, at times, the harmonizing chorus of a party. But it was a good place to eat in, somewhat expensive, with a clientele that was not vulgar: the nights were rare when some drunk cut up and overturned tables laden with glasses. As I lay in bed, the sounds of others' wakefulness reached me, muffled, without gusto or color, as if through a fog; the voice over the loudspeaker—“Side dish of French fries... Where's that ravioli?”—had a nasal, resigned melancholy.

At about half past two the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall pulled down its metal blinds; the waiters, turning up the collars of their topcoats over the Tyrolean jackets of their uniform, came out of the kitchen door and crossed the courtyard, chatting. At about three a metallic clanking invaded the courtyard: the kitchen workers were dragging out the heavy, empty beer drums, tipping them on their rims and rolling them along, banging one against the other; then the men began rinsing them out. They took their time, since they were no doubt paid by the hour; and they worked carelessly, whistling and making a great racket with those zinc drums, for a couple of hours. At about six, the beer truck came to bring the full drums and collect the empties; but already in the main room of the “Urbano Rattazzi” the sound of the polishers had begun, the machines that cleaned the floors for the day that was about to begin.

In moments of silence, in the heart of the night, next door, in Signorina Margariti's room, an intense talking would suddenly burst forth, mingled with little explosions of laughter, questions and answers, all in the same falsetto female voice; the deaf woman couldn't distinguish the act of thinking from the act of speaking aloud and at all hours of the day or even when she woke up late at night, whenever she became involved in a thought, a memory, a regret, she started talking to herself, distributing the dialogue among various speakers. Luckily her soliloquies, in their intensity, were incomprehensible; and yet they filled one with the uneasiness of sharing personal indiscretions.

During the day, when I went into the kitchen to ask her for some hot water to shave with (she couldn't hear a knock and I had to get within her eyeshot to make her aware of my presence), I would catch her talking to the mirror, smiling and grimacing, or seated, staring into the void, telling herself some story; then she would suddenly collect her wits and say: “Oh, I was talking to the cat,” or else, “I'm sorry, I didn't see you; I was saying my prayers” (she was very devout). But most of the time she didn't realize she had been overheard.

To tell the truth she did talk to the cat often. She could make long speeches to him, for hours, and on certain evenings I heard her repeating “Pss... pss... kitty... here, kitty...” at the window, waiting for him to come back from his roaming along the balconies, roofs, and terraces. He was a scrawny, half-wild cat, with blackish fur that was gray every time he came home, as if he collected all the dust and soot of the neighborhood. He ran away from me if he even glimpsed me in the distance and would hide under the furniture, as if I had beaten him at the very least, though I never paid any attention to him. But when I was out, he surely visited my room: the freshly washed white shirt which the landlady set on the marble top of the dresser was always found with the cat's sooty paw prints on its collar and front. I would start shouting curses, which I quickly cut short because the deaf woman couldn't hear me, and so I then went into the other room to lay the disaster before her eyes. She was sorry, she hunted for the cat to punish him; she explained that no doubt when she had gone into my room to take the shirt, the cat had followed her without her noticing him; and she must have shut him up inside and the animal had jumped up on the dresser, to release his anger at being locked in.

I had only three shirts and I was constantly giving them to her to wash because—perhaps it was the still disordered life I led, with the office to be straightened out—after half a day my shirt was already dirty. I was often forced to go to the office with the cat's prints on my collar.

Sometimes I found his prints also on the pillowcase. He had probably remained shut inside after having followed Signorina Margariti when she came to “turn down the bed” in the evening.

It was hardly surprising that the cat was so dirty: you only had to put your hand on the railing of the landing to find your palm striped with black. Every time I came home, as I fumbled with the keys at four padlocks or keyholes, then stuck my fingers into the slats of the shutters to open and close the French window, I got my hands so dirty that when I came into the room I had to hold them in the air, to avoid leaving prints, while I went straight to the basin.

Once my hands were washed and dried I immediately felt better, as if I had regained the use of them, and I began touching and shifting those few objects around me. Signorina Margariti, I must say, kept the room fairly clean; as far as dusting went, she dusted every day; but there were times when, if I put my hand in certain places she couldn't reach (she was very short and had short arms, too), I drew it out all velvety with dust and I had to go back to the basin and wash immediately.

My books constituted my most serious problem: I had arranged them on the étagère, and they were the only things that gave me the impression this room was mine; the office left me plenty of free time and I would gladly have spent some hours in my room, reading. But books collect God knows how much dust: I would choose one from the shelf, but then before opening it, I had to rub it all over with a rag, even along the tops of the pages, and then I had to give it a good banging: a cloud of dust rose from it. Afterward I washed my hands again and finally flung myself down on the bed to read. But as I leafed through the book, it became hopeless, I could feel that film of dust on my fingertips, becoming thicker, softer all the time, and it spoiled my pleasure in reading. I got up, went back to the basin, rinsed my hands once more, but now I felt that my shirt was also dusty, and my suit. I would have resumed reading but now my hands were clean and I didn't like to dirty them again. So I decided to go out.

Naturally, all the operations of leaving: the shutters, the railing, the locks, reduced my hands to a worse state than ever, but I had to leave them as they were until I reached the office. At the office, the moment I arrived, I ran to the toilet to wash them; the office towel, however, was black with finger marks; as I began to dry my hands, I was already dirtying them again.