“No, no, the President didn’t mention that to me, it was my own idea,” I said, a bit annoyed despite myself because my colleague didn’t believe me capable of any initiative.
Cordà’s reaction, on the other hand, took me by surprise. He laid the typescript on the desk and shook his head. “We still don’t understand each other,” he said at once. He began to give me figures on the city’s industrial production, the coal, the fuel oil consumed daily, the traffic of vehicles with combustion engines. Then he went on to meteorological data, and in every case he made a summary comparison with the larger cities of northern Europe. “We are a great, foggy industrial city, you realize; therefore smog exists here, too, we have no less smog than anywhere else. It is impossible to declare, as rival cities here in our own country try to do, that we have less smog than foreign cities. You can write this quite clearly in the article, you must write it! We are one of the cities where the problem of air pollution is most serious, but at the same time we are the city where most is being done to counteract the situation! At the same time, you understand?”
I understood, and I also understood that he and I would never understand each other. Those blackened façades of the houses, those dulled panes of glass, those window sills on which you couldn’t lean, those human faces almost erased, that haze which now, as autumn advanced, lost its humid, bad-weather stink and became a kind of quality of all objects, as if each person and each thing had less shape every day, less meaning or value. Everything that was, for me, the substance of a general wretchedness, for men like him was surely the sign of wealth, supremacy, power, and also of danger, destruction, and tragedy, a way of feeling filled – suspended there – with a heroic grandeur.
I wrote the article a third time. It was all right, at last. Only the ending (“Thus we are face to face with a terrible problem, affecting the destiny of society. Will we solve it?”) caused him to raise an objection.
“Isn’t that a bit too uncertain?” he asked. “Won’t it discourage our readers?”
The simplest thing was to remove the question mark and shift the pronoun. “We will solve it.” Just like that, without any exclamation point: calm self-confidence.
“But doesn’t that make it seem too easy? As if it were just a routine matter?”
We agreed to repeat the words. Once with the question mark and once without. “Will we solve it? We will solve it.”
But didn’t this seem to postpone the solution to a vague future time? We tried putting it in the present tense. “Are we solving it? We are solving it.” But this didn’t have the right ring.
Writing an article always proceeds in the same way. You begin by changing a comma, and then you have to change a word, then the word order of a sentence, and then it all collapses. We argued for an hour. I suggested using different tenses for the question and the answer: “Will we solve it? We are solving it.” The President was enthusiastic and from that day on his faith in my talents never wavered.
One night the telephone woke me, the special, insistent ring of a long-distance call. I turned on the light: it was almost three o’clock. Even before making up my mind to get out of bed, rush into the hall, and grope for the receiver in the dark, even before that, at the first jolt in my sleep, I already knew it was Claudia.
Her voice now gushed from the receiver and it seemed to come from another planet; with my eyes barely open I had a sensation of sparks, dazzle, which were instead the shifting tones of her unceasing voice, that dramatic excitement she always put into everything she said, and which now arrived even here, at the end of the squalid hall in Signorina Margariti’s apartment. I realized I had never doubted Claudia would find me; on the contrary, I had been expecting nothing else for all this time.
She didn’t bother to ask what I had been doing in the meanwhile, or how I had ended up there, nor did she explain how she had traced me. She had heaps of things to tell me, extremely detailed things, and yet somehow vague, as her talk always was, things that took place in environments unknown and unknowable to me.
“I need you, quickly, right away. Take the first train. . . .”
“Well, I have a job here . . . The Institute . . .”
“Ah, perhaps you’ve run into Senator . . . Tell him . . .”
“No, no, I’m just the . . .”
“Darling, you will leave right away, won’t you?”
How could I tell her I was speaking from a place full of dust, where the blinds’ slats were covered with a gritty black grime, and there were cat’s prints on my collar, and this was the only possible world for me, while hers, her world, could exist for me, or seem to exist, only through an optical illusion? She wouldn’t even have listened, she was too accustomed to seeing everything from above and the wretched circumstances that formed the texture of my life naturally escaped her. What was her whole relationship with me if not the outcome of this superior distraction of hers, thanks to which she had never managed to realize I was a modest provincial newspaperman without a future, without ambitions? And she went on treating me as if I were part of high society, the world of aristocrats, magnates, and famous artists, where she had always moved and where, in one of those chance encounters that occur at the beach, I had been introduced to her one summer. She didn’t want to admit it, because that would mean admitting she had made a mistake; so she went on attributing talents to me, authority, tastes I was far from possessing; but my real, fundamental identity was a mere detail, and in mere details she did not want to be contradicted.
Now her voice was becoming tender, affectionate: this was the moment that – without even confessing it to myself – I had been waiting for, because it was only in moments of amorous abandon that everything separating us disappeared and we discovered we were just two people, and it didn’t matter who we were. We had barely embarked on an exchange of amorous words when, behind me, a light came on beyond a glass door, and I could hear a grim cough. It was the door of my fellow tenant, the police sergeant, right there, beside the telephone. I promptly lowered my voice. I resumed the interrupted sentence, but now that I knew I was overheard, a natural reserve made me tone down my loving expressions, until they were reduced to a murmuring of neutral phrases, almost unintelligible. The light in the next room went off, but from the other end of the wire protests began: “What did you say? Speak louder! Is that all you have to tell me?”
“But I’m not alone. . . .”
“What? Who’s with you?”
“No, listen, you’ll wake up the tenants, it’s late. . . .”
By now she was in a fury, she didn’t want explanations, she wanted a reaction from me, a sign of warmth on my side, something that would burn up the distance between us. But my answers had become cautious, whining, soothing. “No, Claudia, you see, I . . . don’t say that, I swear, I beg you, Claudia, I . . .” In the sergeant’s room the light came on again. My love talk became a mumble, my lips pressed to the receiver.
In the courtyard the kitchen workers were rolling the empty beer drums. Signorina Margariti, in the darkness of her room, began chatting, punctuating her words with brief bursts of laughter, as if she had visitors. The fellow tenant uttered a Southern curse. I was barefoot, standing on the tiles of the hall, and from the other end of the wire Claudia’s passionate voice held out her hands to me, and I was trying to run toward her with my stammering, but each time we were about to cast a bridge between us, it crumbled to bits a moment later, and the impact of reality crushed and denied all our words of love, one by one.
After that first time, the telephone took to ringing at the oddest hours of the day and night, and Claudia’s voice, tawny and speckled, leaped into the narrow hall, with the heedless spring of a leopard who doesn’t know he is throwing himself into a trap, and since he doesn’t know, he manages, with a second leap, as he came, to find the path out again: and he hasn’t realized anything. And I, torn between suffering and love, joy and cruelty, saw her mingling with this scene of ugliness and desolation, with the loud-speaker o
f the “Urbano Rattazzi”, which blurted out: “Noodle soup,” with the dirty bowls in Signorina Margariti’s sink, and I felt that by now even Claudia’s image must be stained by it all. But no, it ran off, along the wire, intact, aware of nothing, and each time I was left alone with the void of her absence.
Sometimes Claudia was gay, carefree, she laughed, said senseless things to tease me, and in the end I shared in her gaiety, but then the courtyard, the dust saddened me all the more because I had been tempted to believe life could be different. At other times, instead, Claudia was gripped by a feverish anxiety and this anxiety then was added to the appearance of the place where I lived, to my work as managing editor of Purification, and I couldn’t rid myself of it, I lived in the expectation of another, more dramatic call which would waken me in the heart of the night, and when I finally did hear her voice again, surprisingly different, gay or languid, as if she couldn’t even remember the torment of the night before, rather than liberated, I felt bewildered, lost.
“What did you say? You’re calling from Taormina?”
“Yes, I’m down here with some friends, it’s lovely, come right away, catch the next plane!”
Claudia always called from different cities, and each time, whether she was in a state of anxiety or of exuberance, she insisted that I join her at once, to share that mood with her. Each time I started to give her a careful explanation of why it was absolutely impossible for me to travel, but I couldn’t continue because Claudia, not listening to me, had already shifted to another subject, usually a harangue against me, or else an unpredictable hymn of praise, for some casual expression of mine which she found abominable or adorable.
When the allotted time of the call was up and the day or night operator said: “Three minutes. Do you wish to continue?” Claudia would shout: “When are you arriving, then?” as if it were all agreed. I would stammer some answer, and we ended by postponing final arrangements to another call she would make to me or I was to make to her. I knew that in the meanwhile Claudia would change all her plans and the urgency of my trip would come up again, surely, but in different circumstances which would then justify further postponements; and yet a kind of remorse lingered in me, because the impossibility of my joining her was not so absolute, I could ask for an advance on my next month’s salary and a leave of three or four days with some pretext; these hesitations gnawed at me.
Signorina Margariti heard nothing. If, crossing the hall, she saw me at the telephone, she greeted me with a nod, unaware of the storms raging within me. But not the fellow tenant. From his room he heard everything and he was obliged to apply his policeman’s intuition every time the phone’s ring made me jump. Luckily, he was hardly ever in the house, and therefore some of my telephone conversations even managed to be selfconfident, nonchalant, and, depending on Claudia’s humor, we could create an atmosphere of amorous exchange where every word took on a warmth, an intimacy, an inner meaning. On other occasions, however, she was in the best of moods and I was instead blocked, I answered only in monosyllables, with reticent, evasive phrases: the sergeant was behind his door, a few feet from me; once he opened it a crack, stuck out his dark, mustachioed face, and examined me. He was a little man, I must say, who in other circumstances wouldn’t have made the least impression on me; but there, late at night, seeing each other face to face for the first time, in that lodginghouse for poor wretches, I making and receiving amorous long-distance calls of half an hour, he just coming off duty, both of us in our pajamas, we undeniably hated each other.
Often Claudia’s conversation included famous names, the people she saw regularly. First of all, I don’t know anybody; secondly, I can’t bear attracting attention; so if I absolutely had to answer her, I tried not to mention any names, I used paraphrases, and she couldn’t understand why and it made her angry. Politics, too, is something I’ve always steered clear of, precisely because I don’t like making myself conspicuous; and now, besides, I was working for a government-sponsored Institute and I had made it a rule to know nothing of either party; and Claudia – God knows what got into her one evening – asked me about certain Members of Parliament. I had to give her some kind of answer, then and there, with the sergeant behind the door. “The first one . . . the first name you mentioned, of course . . .”
“Who? Who do you mean?”
“That one, yes, the big one, no, smaller . . .”
In other words, I loved her. And I was unhappy. But how could she have understood this unhappiness of mine? There are those who condemn themselves to the most gray, mediocre life because they have suffered some grief, some misfortune; but there are also those who do the same thing because their good fortune is greater than they feel they can sustain.
I took my meals in certain fixed-price restaurants, which, in this city, are all run by Tuscan families, all of them related among themselves, and the waitresses are all girls from a town called Altopascio, and they spend their youth here, but with the thought of Altopascio constantly in their minds, and they don’t mingle with the rest of the city; in the evening they go out with boys from Altopascio, who work here in the kitchens of the restaurants or perhaps in factories, but still sticking close to the restaurants as if they were outlying districts of their village; and these girls and these boys marry and some go back to Altopascio, others stay here to work in their relatives’ or their fellow townsmen’s restaurants, saving up until one day they can open a restaurant of their own.
The people who eat in those restaurants are what you would expect: apart from travelers, who change all the time, the regular customers are unmarried white-collar workers, even some spinster typists, and a few students or soldiers. After a while these customers get to know one another and they chat from table to table, and at a certain point they eat at the same table, groups of people who at first didn’t know one another and then ended up by falling into the habit of always eating together.
They all joked, too, with the Tuscan waitresses, good-natured jokes, obviously; they asked about the girls’ boyfriends, they exchanged witticims, and when there was nothing else to talk about they started on television, saying who was nice and who wasn’t among the faces they had seen in the latest programs.
But not me, I never said anything except my order, which for that matter was always the same: spaghetti with butter, boiled beef, and greens, because I was on a diet; and I never called the girls by name even though by then I too had learned their names, but I preferred to go on saying “Signorina” so as not to create an impression of familiarity: I had happened upon that restaurant by chance, I was just a random customer, perhaps I would continue going there every day for God knows how long, but I wanted to feel as if I were passing through, here today and somewhere else tomorrow, otherwise the place would get on my nerves.
Not that they weren’t likable. On the contrary: both the staff and the clientele were good, pleasant people, and I enjoyed that cordial atmosphere around me; in fact, if it hadn’t existed, I would probably have felt something was lacking, but still I preferred to look on, without taking part in it. I avoided conversing with the other customers, not even greeting them, because, as everyone knows, it’s easy enough to strike up an acquaintance, but then you’re involved; somebody says: “What’s on this evening?” and you end up all together watching television or going to the movies, and after that evening you’re caught up in a group of people who mean nothing to you, and you have to tell them your business, and listen to theirs.
I tried to sit down at a table by myself, I would open the morning or evening paper (I bought it on my way to the office and took a glance at the headlines then, but I waited to read it until I was at the restaurant), and then I read through it from beginning to end. The paper was of great use to me when I couldn’t find a seat by myself and had to sit down at a table where there was already someone else; I plunged into my reading and nobody said a word to me. But I always tried to find a free table and for this reason I was careful to put off as late as possible the hou
r of my meals, so I turned up there when most of the customers had already left.
There was the disadvantage of the crumbs. Often I had to sit down at a table where another customer had just got up and left the table covered with crumbs; so I avoided looking down until the waitress came to clear away the dirty dishes and glasses, sweeping up all the remains into the cloth and changing it. At times this task was done hastily and between the top cloth and the bottom one there were bread crumbs, and they distressed me.
The best thing, at lunchtime for example, was to discover the hour when the waitresses, thinking that by then no more customers would be coming, clean up everything properly and prepare the tables for the evening; then the whole family, owners, waitresses, cooks, dishwashers, set one big table and finally sit down to eat, themselves. At that moment I would go in, saying: “Oh, perhaps I’m too late. Can you give me something to eat?”
“Why, of course! Sit down wherever you like! Lisa, serve the gentleman.”
I sat down at one of those lovely clean tables, a cook went back into the kitchen, I read the paper, I ate calmly, I listened to the others laughing at their table, joking and telling stories of Altopascio. Between one dish and the next I would have to wait perhaps a quarter of an hour, because the waitresses were sitting there eating and chatting, and I would finally make up my mind to say: “An orange, please, Signorina. . . .” And they would say: “Yes sir! Anna, you go. Oh, Lisa!” But I liked it that way, I was happy.
I finished eating, finished reading the paper, and went out with the paper rolled up in my hand, I went home, I climbed up to my room, threw the paper on the bed, washed my hands. Signorina Margariti kept watch to see when I came in and when I left, because the moment I was outside she came into my room to take the newspaper. She didn’t dare ask me for it, so she took it away in secret and secretly she put it back on the bed before I came home again. She seemed to be ashamed of this, as if of a somehow frivolous curiosity; in fact she read only one thing, the obituaries.