"I"ll walk you to your car."
"You"ll be even later."
He did not reply, walked out, opened the umbrella, and nodded to her to follow him. The rain was beating down harder than before, so hard that there was almost n.o.body in the street. Emma leaned close to him to get under the shelter of the umbrella. The mere contact of her hand on his arm sent a quiver through him.
Identical-he thought, astonished that such a distant memory should well up so powerfully out of nowhere-to the quiver he had felt so many years earlier, on the b.u.mper cars, when a girl the same age as he was-fourteen-had placed her hand on his leg.
They reached the car. She opened the door while he protected her and got wet in the process.
"Well," she said, "thank you. Let"s hope it isn"t raining next Monday."
"Yes, let"s hope so," he said, feeling like a fool.
"Bye then, officer."
"I"ve written my telephone number inside the book. Just in case."
"Oh, good."
"Bye then."
"Bye."
"I"m sorry about last time."
"There"s no need to apologize. It was only natural you should get angry with me."
Roberto looked at him, bewildered.
"Why?"
"Why do you think it happened?"
"I don"t know. At that particular moment I was really angry with you. Afterward it seemed absurd."
"It was quite normal."
"It seems strange to me."
"I agree with you, it may seem strange. But it"s fine."
"I don"t know what to talk about today."
"Let"s not say anything for a while, then."
14.
That was how the fifty minutes pa.s.sed, with a lot of silence and a few words, in a suspended atmosphere. If he"d been asked, Roberto would not have been able to say if he was cheerful or sad, calm or restless, excited or depressed. He wouldn"t have been able to say anything about himself. He was feeling things he couldn"t give a name to. After a while it occurred to him that he was in the position of somebody who has complicated emotions to explain but is forced to express himself in a language he barely knows. That seemed to him a good intuition and he tried to develop it, but before long he lost the thread and his thoughts floated away.
At the end of the session, the doctor told him that he would be away at a conference on Thursday, which meant they would see each other again in a week"s time, next Monday.
Roberto registered the information but did not realize its full significance until he was going out into the street, where the rain was still coming down unrelentingly.
His movements around the city, his thoughts, his sleep, his meals, the television, the computer, smoking, drinking, exercising, washing, cooking, shopping-everything revolved around those two fixed times: five o"clock on Monday and five o"clock on Thursday.
The doctor"s conference shifted the center of gravity and produced a kind of landslide in Roberto"s consciousness. Walking in the rain, with the umbrella not really protecting him and the water soaking him to the skin, he was. .h.i.t by a distressing awareness of the indistinct time opening in front of him. A sea as flat as oil, an infinite, deserted expanse, without terra firma on the horizon.
The week pa.s.sed with gluey slowness, marked by a constant dull headache that was resistant to pills.
Roberto moved laboriously-as if having to drag a weight heavier than that of his own body-through a succession of identical days strung together.
He woke up early in the morning and went to sleep late at night. He walked obsessively throughout the city in the rain, which lasted a long time, most of the week, almost without interruption. Dripping wet, he would stop to eat in rotisseries and shabby restaurants hidden away on the extreme edge of the city, places he wouldn"t have been able to find again an hour later. He smoked damp cigarettes in the precarious shelter of doorways or arcades. A couple of times he thought he saw faces he knew, but he had no idea who they were and had no desire to find out. Both times he looked away and moved on quickly, almost furtively.
On Sunday, the headache stopped.
On Monday morning, Roberto emerged from the dark, muddy pool he had been wading through all week.
Giacomo
I made the compilation. It wasn"t easy to choose the songs and it took me several days, partly because I thought there shouldn"t be too many of them, but above all I couldn"t risk putting in stuff she wouldn"t like. In other words, I had to play it safe.
In the end I chose six songs: "Time Is on My Side" by the Rolling Stones, "Everybody Hurts" by REM, "Tunnel of Love" by Dire Straits, "Don"t Stop Me Now" by Queen, "With or Without You" by U2, and "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, which is my favorite song, because it reminds me of something beautiful, even though I can"t remember what.
I also thought of giving the collection a t.i.tle, but the ones I thought of didn"t seem appropriate. In fact, they made me want to puke. Stuff like: Songs for Ginevra or Giacomo"s Selection or other sappy things that make me ashamed just to write them in this diary.
In the end I gave up on the t.i.tle, put the memory stick in my backpack, and carried it back and forth from home to school for a week without finding the opportunity or the courage to give it to her. Then she was away, and for two days now she hasn"t been to school. I thought of phoning her, but I don"t have her mobile number, and even if I had it there"s no guarantee I"d find the courage to call her.
Last night, after hesitating for at least an hour, I asked her to be my friend on Facebook. Let"s see what happens.
I had a nightmare, which hadn"t happened to me for a while.
I was sitting on my bed, sure that I was wide awake, when I heard the rustle of wings. I was about to switch on the light but then, in the semidarkness, I saw a pigeon perched on the lamp, looking at me.
Immediately after that, I saw two more of them on the floor, next to the bed. No, there weren"t just two, there were more. Five, or maybe six or seven, or maybe ten. Or maybe twenty. Now they were all around, on the bedside table, on the desk, on the chair, even on the bed. The room was full of pigeons, and from somewhere I couldn"t see others kept coming in. They were on the wardrobe, on the ceiling light, on the football. And now they were all looking at me. All gray, which in the darkness seemed black, all with the same stupid hostile, nasty pigeon eyes.
But none of them moved.
They were too still, I thought, and so, making an effort to overcome my disgust, I reached out my hand to one of them that was on the bedside table. I touched it with one finger but it didn"t move. I touched another and that one didn"t move either.
Then I tried touching the third one, but a bit harder, and it fell to the floor, making a noise like a paper ball or a piece of cardboard. I tried to push another one and that one also fell, without giving any signs of life. Then, even though it really made me want to puke, I tried picking one up. I took it cautiously between my index finger and my thumb, and at that moment I understood.
It wasn"t alive.
It was stuffed.
They were all stuffed, and as I was holding the one I had picked up between my fingers, I heard a rustling spreading from the room. It didn"t come from any place in particular.
The pigeons started falling, one after the other, a whole volley of them. A heavy shower of stuffed pigeons. It was really disgusting.
I shielded my head with my hands, making an effort not to scream, and stayed like that for all the time it lasted. Then, when the shower was over, I looked around, checked the floor and the bed.
There was nothing there, because I had woken up.
15.
He was just getting ready to go out when his mobile phone rang. That was something that happened so rarely that at first Roberto didn"t realize the sound had anything to do with him.
"h.e.l.lo."
"Hi, it"s Emma."
"Emma, hi."
"I remembered you"d written your telephone number in the book."
"Yes, it was inside the cover," Roberto replied, and a fraction of a second later felt like an idiot. If she was phoning him, that obviously meant she"d found the number.
"The book, yes. It"s very good, thank you. Reading it brought back lots of memories."
At that moment it struck Roberto that Emma should have been at the doctor"s office at this hour.
"Aren"t you at the doctor"s?"
"Actually, no. I couldn"t go today. And I won"t be going on Mondays anymore, because ... Well, it"s not important, something to do with work. Anyway, I"ve changed days."
"Oh, so our date is canceled?" He tried to give his voice a light tone, but the thought going through his brain was: if she had changed the day of her session, it was likely they"d never meet again.
"That"s why I"m phoning you. As if we"d had a real date. I know it may seem ridiculous, but I thought that if you didn"t see me you might get worried."
Then she paused, and in those moments of silence it seemed to Roberto that he could hear the frantic murmur of thoughts running out of control.
"It"s true. If I hadn"t seen you today I"d have been worried. Thank you."
Silence, heavy with unexpressed intentions. Each was aware of the other being about to speak and was waiting.
"Maybe-"
"I was thinking-"
"I"m sorry, go on."
"No, you first."
"If you"re not too busy tonight, maybe we could have a bite to eat or go for a drink. Tonight." He said tonight twice, although he couldn"t have said why. And as he finished speaking, he was already regretting what he had said. What did he know about her, apart from what he had discovered on the Internet? She might be married-she didn"t wear a wedding ring; come to think of it, she didn"t wear any ring at all: that was his old attention to detail coming out-she might be with someone, she might have had no intention of seeing him and the phone call had been simply the impulsive act of an unstable person.
"Obviously if you can"t or you don"t feel like it, no problem," he said hastily. "I don"t mean to be intrusive, I just wanted to say it."
She hesitated for a few seconds.
"I don"t have much time. But maybe a drink would be fine. We"d have to meet near my place."
"Of course. Tell me where you live and I"ll come there."
"I"m in the Via Panisperna. We could meet at Santa Maria dei Monti, there"s a bar with tables in front ... It"s almost hot today, maybe we could sit outside."
Roberto did not reply. Santa Maria dei Monti was no more than two hundred yards from where he lived.
"Are you still there?"
"No, I mean yes, I"m sorry, something came into my head-it happens sometimes-and I got distracted. Santa Maria dei Monti would be perfect, I know the bar. What time shall we meet?"
"Maybe you"re a long way away and it"s hard for you to get to Monti, but I can"t go far, I"m sorry."
"Monti really isn"t a problem for me. Shall we say eight o"clock?"
"Yes, eight o"clock"s fine," and then, after a brief hesitation: "I"m sorry ..."
"Yes?"
"I warn you I"m about to make a fool of myself again, but I never listen to names when I make someone"s acquaintance ..."