Three-Card Monte (16 page)

“It is strange,” he said as he handed Snijders the sandwich on a plate. “You know why? Research in Italy isn't original because it's commissioned by dinosaurs. In Italy, forty-seven percent of full professors are over sixty. Sixty. Gioacchino Rossini couldn't be original at sixty, and you want people like that to succeed?”

“But why don't they retire?” Snijders asked with his mouth full. “Don't they realize that they're not doing any good?”

“No. They don't realize. Because in this damned country we're used to doing good in a morbid way. I'll give you a simple example. A lot of the professors say, ‘I can't retire now, even though I'm entitled to and even though I don't want to do a damn thing anymore, because first I have to sort out my graduate student, my research fellow, or whatever I call my current slave.' The concept is that since this person has done his thesis, his doctorate, and everything else with me as his supervisor, I have a kind of moral obligation to sort him out. Of course. The pity of it is that if only you packed your bags and left, you'd release enough money for three, and I mean three, researchers. But maybe then your protégé wouldn't qualify. Especially if he's a complete dickhead whose only gift is stubbornness. Because the fact is that in the last few years people haven't gotten into university in Italy because they're good. They've gotten in because they have nowhere else to go. And that's the first problem.”

“Oh, you mean there's a second problem?” Snijders asked, chewing on his sandwich.

“Oh, yes. The second problem is that there are too many young people. And too many of them are totally unsuited. I saw people who as undergraduates had difficulty passing exams being accepted as graduate students. And why was that? Because those candidates who were better than them had enough initiative to go abroad, or to go to work outside the university. Whereas those who couldn't even wipe their own asses stayed, and started the whole rigmarole. The contract, the doctorate, the scholarship, the research fellowship, and all the rest of that crap. Let's be clear, the professors have their fair share of blame in all this. Instead of setting a ceiling to guarantee quality, they've continued to take a fixed number of people, a number that's too large in relation to what they'd be able to absorb in the future. So, along with good people who deserved to do their doctorate and stay to do research, they've collected the dead and the wounded. People who, after starting at the age of twenty-five, are twenty-eight by the time they've finished their doctorate, and thirty or thirty-two after the research fellowship. And at that point, unless they're hired as guinea pigs by the pharmaceutical industry, they're stuck, because right now industry doesn't want a thirty-two-year-old graduate, not even one with a doctorate, and not even if he comes free and gift-wrapped. I should know. I'm one of them.”

“How do you mean?” Snijders asked, having in the meantime finished his sandwich, scarily, in about thirty seconds flat.

Massimo puffed briefly through his nose and smiled. If only you knew. “It's rather a long story,” he said.

“Take as long as you like,” Snijders replied. “I need time to digest.”

I can believe that. Well, if that's the way it is . . .

Massimo was quite reluctant to tell the story of how he had moved from a computer monitor to a bar counter. Firstly, because he didn't believe that people could possibly be all that interested in what concerned him. Secondly, because he didn't really think it put him in a good light.

“I graduated in mathematics in exactly four years. In November of the fourth year. And I started on my doctorate in January of the following year. I don't how interested you are in the subject I was supposed to be studying, but anyway, it was to do with the mathematics of string theory.”

Snijders raised his eyebrows. “I don't know anything about that.”

“Don't worry, you're in good company. I don't say that as a joke. The subject I was supposed to be dealing with was extremely complicated, and when I started my postgraduate studies I felt as if I'd wandered into a nightmare. The more I studied, the less I understood. Sometimes, I had the feeling I'd grasped something, then immediately afterwards, I found another article that demolished that idea. The worst thing in all this was that I had the impression that even my thesis supervisor, who as it happens was a physicist, didn't understand a damn thing about what I was doing. Let's be clear about this, I don't blame him: he was quite an elderly man, and this particular subject was quite new and really complicated. But, after a while, the suspicion started to weigh on me. Then, one day, I went to him with a pile of articles and a page of questions. To cut a long story short, that was when I realized he didn't understand anything about the subject either. Worse, the doubts I'd been having hadn't even occurred to him. I was much further ahead than the person who should have been guiding me, and at the same time, I was completely in the dark. When I left his office, I looked at myself in the mirror. You know what the most important gift is for a mathematician?”

“I have no idea. Intelligence, maybe.”

“No. It's important, but not by itself. No, the fundamental gift a mathematician needs is humility. The humility to admit when you haven't understood something, and not try to fool yourself that you have. If you haven't understood something, or you aren't convinced, don't take it as read. If you do that, you'll only get hurt. You must be absolutely honest with yourself. Well, as far as mathematics was concerned I always tried to be honest with myself. And the only conclusion I could possibly reach was that I wasn't good enough. I wasn't cut out for that kind of work, it was beyond my capabilities. If I'd continued, I'd have been wasting time and deceiving myself.”

Snijders looked at him. With one finger, he pointed at the bar. “So . . . ”

“Precisely. You see, I'm a fussy kind of person. Things have to be done the way I say, and if they aren't, well, I tend to get upset. I'm pleased with myself when I do something well, and it doesn't really matter what it is. Anyway, just before these things happened, I'd come into a bit of money. Not a fortune, but enough to open a bar. And I realized that I preferred life to a career. I chose to be an excellent barman, rather than a frustrated mathematician.”

“And doesn't it bother you? Don't you think someone like you is wasted in a bar?”

“It depends. Sometimes, if I think about the time I spent poring over my books, I could hit myself. But, if I am the person I am, I also owe it to everything that I studied. If ‘owe' is the right word. But do I feel wasted? No, absolutely not. I'm much more useful to the world, doing a job I like, than one of those sons of bitches who ends up in an executive position, creates an unexplained deficit the size of the Grand Canyon, and then gives himself a massive golden handshake when he's forced to resign. And besides, working in a bar isn't so bad.”

Snijders looked at him. He didn't seem terribly convinced. “Really? Isn't it a bit boring?”

“Yes,” Massimo said, as he walked to the back room. “Sometimes it is. But I don't mind that. And besides, sometimes a boring job can bring out the best in a person.”

Snijders smiled. “Now you're pulling my leg.”

Not completely, Massimo thought. A boring job can bring out the best in a person. Don't think about what you're doing, go onto automatic pilot, and let your brain keep ticking over. When he developed the theory of relativity, Einstein was working in a patent office. Böll was a census gatherer, and Bulgakov a country doctor. Pessoa worked for the land registry office, I think. Borges was a librarian, and Cavafy an employee of the water company.

Give an imaginative man a dull, repetitive job, one that puts him in contact with other people, and there's a strong possibility you'll produce a Nobel Prize winner. Often, left to his own devices, someone who isn't constantly plagued by the anxiety of having to produce lets his thoughts settle of their own free will, so that they gradually sink to the bottom and crystallize, sometimes, into forms of rare beauty. Of course, I spend my free afternoons slumped on the couch playing computer games, but that's another matter. I'm not a poet.

Fortunately, while Massimo's thoughts were in danger of moving in a depressing direction, Del Tacca came in, followed by Ampelio.

“Good evening,” Pilade said, while Ampelio went and sat down at a table. “What are you two talking about?”

“About the fact that Massimo is a perfect barman,” Snijders said, pointing emphatically at Massimo.

“Who, him?” Ampelio said. “For heaven's sake. And you listen to him?”

“I'm not perfect,” Massimo admitted. “But I am way above average. What, the hell, I only use fresh produce. I have six different types of coffee. I have almost forty types of beer. This is the only bar within a radius of twelve miles that does granita with freshly squeezed fruit juice, and not with synthetic syrups. And now I have an orange wall, so I'm up-to-date on an aesthetic level too. I'd even have wi-fi, if a flock of elderly pains in the butt hadn't made their nest on the one table where it works. Be that as it may, the fact remains that I'm the barman, that this is my bar, and that from today onwards, conversations about murders, deaths, and premeditated tragedies are banned. Now, can I get you anything?”

S
o. Now I have to go to the Internet café to get a signal. Then I have to phone the Ricciardi woman to find out when they're planning to pay me, because even though the conference has been suspended I still did two days. Aldo should have done it, but there you are. He's an artist in his soul and doesn't think about money. Then I have to find a way to get that Venetian blind off the door of the bar. Is there anything else? Let's see. Oh, yes, I have to go to the municipal police to get the permit for the tables. And then? It seems to me there's something else, but I can't remember what. You know what, who cares? It'll probably come back to me. An hour after I was supposed to have done it, as usual.

 

Walking to the Internet café, Massimo was repeating in his head the list of Things to Do Today, which constituted one of his usual nightmares.

The fact was, Massimo's memory was starting to work in a similar way to a pipe: events going back months or even years, whether important or not, furred up the walls of the pipe and were almost impossible to get rid of. Whereas information that Massimo acquired constantly in the course of the day, regardless of its importance, entered, ran through the pipe for a limited period, then came out the other end and was gone. At the same time, Massimo prided himself on having an excellent memory and so never wrote down what he was supposed to, which was why when he had a list of commitments to fulfill he went over them in his mind every thirty seconds, with results that didn't always live up to expectations.

On the other hand, Massimo was trying desperately not to think about the murder. And to do this, the only possible way was to find something to do to fill his brain and the day. Having discovered that Asahara's computer contained absolutely nothing, Massimo had been forced to look reality in the face. The hypothesis they had all started from was already very flimsy, and they had nothing else to back it up with. So that was the end of it. But since Massimo hated leaving something half done or not understanding something, in order not to feel really pissed off he needed to find something else to occupy him. Starting with the problem that had been tormenting him in the background for some days now, in other words: why doesn't the wi-fi work in my bar?

That was why Massimo was on his way to the ConnectZone, the only Internet café in Pineta, with the aim of asking the owner if he too had had these problems, and if he had, how he had solved them. Broadly speaking, our hero hated asking favors of people if he didn't know them very well, but the guy at the Internet café was an easygoing type, and Massimo liked him because whenever he came to the bar he'd take the newspapers, read them, and then put them back in their place perfectly folded, just as he had found them. Details, maybe, but Massimo couldn't understand people who took the newspaper, separated the pages, and then after reading it flung it back together as best they could or just left it there all screwed up, as if the newspaper were theirs and not the bar's.

Reaching the Internet café, Massimo went in and looked around. Four or five people were sitting at the computers, among whom Massimo recognized two or three conference delegates: an obese American professor, Asahara's Japanese colleague Dr. Kubo, and a German with a face like a hit man whom Massimo remembered well because, during the first coffee break, he had refilled his plate a dozen times. He went to the back room, where the owner's wife was reading a book while nibbling at strawberries from a small bag.

“Hello. I was looking for Davide.”

“Hi. Davide isn't here.”

“Ah. Do you know when he will be?”

“Oh, he won't be in this morning because he's at home waiting for the boiler man, our boiler broke down the other day and we've had only cold water for the past two days. Can I help in any way?”

“I don't know, maybe you can. It's about my wireless connection. I installed it a week ago, but I'm having a few problems. Basically I can only get a signal in one spot. I wanted to know if you had similar problems.”

“I see. Listen, I don't really know. Davide set it all up, and we haven't had any problems like that. Mind you, we don't use the wireless connection much, people usually come and sit down at one of our desktops. But nobody's ever complained about there not being any signal.”

I knew it. Sometimes I get the feeling certain things happen only to me.

“I see.”

“Anyway, Davide will be here for lunch. I could ask him to go to your bar for a coffee after lunch, that way you can ask him yourself.”