“Let’s have a cup of coffee.”
We join him in his apartment across the landing. When he hears us come in, Lucio reaches out a hand to switch on the lights. I feel a twinge in my heart at the thought that he’s doing it just for us. His electric bills must be low. Carla looks around, without bothering to conceal her curiosity. She observes the unadorned walls and the mismatched colors, and perhaps she’s drawing the same conclusions I came to, long ago. Every decision in this apartment was made on the basis of functionality and the elimination of corners and edges. The aesthetic side of things is a luxury that Lucio has been obliged to renounce. And like any luxury, it turns out to be unnecessary.
Our host heads for his tiny kitchen.
“You two sit down while I make the coffee.”
Carla blocks his path.
“No, I’ll do it.”
“But…”
“No ifs, ands, or buts. You worked this evening, and I’ve just been enjoying myself all day long. Sit down and let me serve you. For once, it’s my choice whether to serve, and that’s a new experience for me.”
Lucio gives up and sits down at the table. Carla vanishes into the tiny kitchen and we listen as she rummages through the cabinets in search of the Moka pot and the necessary materials. I’m still standing in the middle of the room, next to a credenza with cabinet doors and drawers. On the counter is a telephone, a radio, and a glass container with some keys, a few sheets of paper, and some coins.
Next to them are some pictures. I look at them closely and I see that one of them depicts Lucio, a few years younger, with some other young men onstage. They’re posing like the musicians they are and all around them are musical instruments, microphones, and amplifiers. On the bass drum is written the name of the band, in Gothic letters: Les Misérables.
“You never told me you played in a band.”
“How do you know about that?”
“There’s some pictures here, on the dresser.”
My friend resolves the minor mystery.
“I showed them to Chico, before we went out. He forgot to put them back. I’ll have to get a new butler.”
“How long did it last? The band, I mean.”
Lucio smirks.
“Not long. We kept it up for a while, but we were good, we weren’t great. And the other guys in the band had some projects in mind that had nothing to do with music.”
“What about you?”
For the first time since I’ve known him, he allows regret to appear on his face.
“I went on playing on my own, but without the necessary drive. When those pictures were taken, even if you can’t tell, my eyes were already practically shot.”
I look back at the pictures. Lucio is the only one who isn’t smiling. I put them back on the dresser and I go back to sit at the table, across from him.
“Bravo, can I ask you a question?”
“Naturally.”
“You know what I do for a living. Now you’ve even had a glimpse into my past. What line of work are you in?”
It’s already hard to describe it in general. It’s very difficult to do so in particular with someone as sharp as Lucio.
“Shall we just say that I’m a businessman?”
He smiles and concedes.
“I have the feeling that, if I were to ask what kind of business, you might not give me an exhaustive answer.”
I minimize with my tone of voice, since he can’t see my instinctive gestures.
“Business is all the same. It all has one single objective, to take home money. And whatever is limited to making money isn’t worth our consideration.”
Carla shows up with the coffee to interrupt this moment of intimacy. She has certainly heard what we said but says nothing about either of the two topics. She sets a demitasse on the table in front of each of us. Then she goes back into the kitchen to get her cup and the sugar.
“How about you, Carla? What kind of work do you do?”
Carla comes back, puts the sugar bowl and the little spoons on the tabletop, and sits down between us, her demitasse in hand. I serve the sugar, as usual. Two spoonfuls for Lucio, half a spoonful for me. Carla takes hers bitter.
“Until yesterday I worked for a cleaning service. Now I’m looking around for something else.”
“You, a cleaning woman? With that scent? I can’t believe it.”
“But it’s true. Or rather, it was true.”
The coffee, hot and aromatic, silences us for a little while. We sit saying nothing, under the light pouring down from above, each of us rapt in imagining what our lives would have been like if things had gone differently. Constructing a fictitious and illusory alternative reality, which as such cannot be any sweeter.
Lucio is the first to break the silence.
“Carla, can I touch your face?”
She has to stop and think about that question, apparently. I have plenty of time to light a cigarette before she answers.
But there is no uncertainty in her voice when she does.
“Sure.”
She stands up and walks around the table to where Lucio is sitting. He senses her presence and stands up. He raises his hands and slowly runs the tips of his fingers over her face. He runs his fingers through her hair, over her forehead, down the bridge of her nose, and surveys her skin. He explores her with the care and curiosity of an expert deciphering an antique document.
“My God, you’re beautiful.”
Pain appears on Carla’s face, after a long journey from some faraway place. She turns to look at me with a question in her eyes. I nod my assent.
Then she takes Lucio’s hands and places them on her breasts. She moves them slowly, to acquaint him with that part of her body as well. Then she draws close to him and kisses him. At first, she simply places her lips on his and then pulls back. An exchange of breath and nothing more. After a moment’s hesitation, as weightless as air, Carla leans back toward him and the kiss becomes real, a kiss of tongues and saliva, the only pen and ink in which a man and a woman can write a perfect message of love.
Carla pulls away again, steps back, and takes Lucio by the hand. Without a word, she moves off with him, leading him down the hallway to a door, which I assume leads into the bedroom.
I’m left sitting alone.
In a way that now seems limitless.
I finish my cigarette and light another, before going in. When I walk into the bedroom, it’s lit only by the glow that arrives from the living room, making its way down the short hallway.
I take a seat on a chair against the wall across from the bed, and I watch Lucio and Carla make love. Without noticing it, all three of us slip into an enchanted, provisional evening where nothing belongs to anyone. The two nude bodies on the bed twist and writhe, offering each other every sort of venom and its exact antidote. I sit there watching, trying to absorb oxygen from their exhalations, like a plant. Immobile, like a marble statue, in the presence of a sexual act performed by someone who can’t see it, doing it in place of someone who will never do it again.
11
At noon, when I wake up, Carla’s still sleeping.
I hadn’t locked the apartment door, though I assumed that she would stay at Lucio’s until morning. Instead, sometime during the night, I felt her slip into the bed without a word. She turned her back to me and sought contact with my body. I dropped back into slumber, as if having her sleep at my side was something normal.
I turn on the lamp on my nightstand and look at her. She’s stretched out on her side, naked, her body only partly covered by the sheets. I reach out a hand and caress her skin, following the gentle line of her side. Sighing, she turns over, offering me the loveliness of her breast. Then she wraps her arms around my neck and, without opening her eyes, buries her face in the hollow of my shoulder.
Her breath is warm and scented with sleep.
“Bravo…”
I don’t know if that’s my name or an approval of the quality of my caress. I opt for th
e first instance.
“What is it?”
“Everything’s nice with you.”
I know these words. I’ve heard them before, many different times. But only once before this did they come to me in this way, ready to be accepted and with the possibility of hurting me. Another time, in another place, when I was a different man from who I am now. And the woman who spoke these words to me was a different woman.
When we both lived in the illusion that we were better people than we actually were.
Still, there are moments you don’t forget, and Carla just gave me one, whatever the nature of the hour that this second concludes. I don’t know what the future marked by the hour that follows will hold, but I do know it’s a threshold beyond which I’ll only be able to foget and look for substitutes.
Not right away, though.
“I’ve got things to do. And so do you.”
“Yes, I know.”
“We can talk about it later.”
“Okay.”
She releases me and lies back on the pillow, still with her eyes closed. Perhaps that’s why I survive and manage to make it out of bed intact, and perhaps that’s why I’m able to hurl my useless body into the shower, with the impulse to scrub myself until I take all my skin off.
I spend a long time in the bathroom, shaving and thinking. The whole thing that happened with Tulip keeps spinning in my head. I’m reasonably certain that I did everything carefully and right and that I left no traces of my presence. Moreover, the fact that nobody saw us when he walked me to his car outside the Ascot, which was shitty luck at the time, is now another detail in my favor. That’s as far as the police are concerned, if they’re somehow able to track me down. Where Tano is concerned, things get just a shade more complicated. His methods might be rather more unorthodox, if he did decide to dig into the matter. I wonder to what extent I’d be believable if I was just to tell him the raw, unvarnished truth.
Sometimes, only the stupid and the innocent lack an alibi …
As I’m patting aftershave onto my face, my eye happens to fall on the copy of La Settimana Enigmistica sitting on the laundry hamper. I catch myself smiling at the thought of how much those brainteasers are like life itself, in aesthetic terms as well.
When you’re born, it’s really the luck of the draw. The page you wind up on is a matter of dumb chance. From then on, it’s all black-and-white, blank spaces you need to clear of unknown factors, letters ready for any handwriting at all, each letter in its little square, each with the conceit of self-importance. Only to realize in time that it means nothing without all the other letters.
When all is said and done, this is what we are: horizontals and verticals. A simple series of attitudes and positions, words that intersect—down and across—as we walk, sleep, play, make love, come home with the shakes, fall into bed with a fever. Until one day it all evens out and it dawns on us that the puzzle, the puzzle that we’ve all been working so long and so hard to solve, will never be solved.
The rest of time becomes a long horizontal line.
I hear someone knocking at the bathroom door.
The robes of Zarathustra melt away and I find myself wrapped in my old terry cloth bathrobe, with Carla distorted by the pebbled glass of the bathroom door, asking if she can come in.
“Come on in.”
Her head pokes around the frame of the door, held slightly ajar. Her eyes are made of the blond wood from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
“I made some pasta, if you’re hungry.”
I had absolutely no idea there was anything edible in my apartment. The only thing I make on my stove here is coffee. I hope she didn’t make pasta with espresso.
“Like with what?”
“With what little I could find. Oil, salt, a can of peeled tomatoes. Your pantry wasn’t exactly well stocked.”
“Just give me a second.”
I wait for her to walk away down the hallway before I come out. I open the closet door and pull out a pair of slacks and a shirt. I go into the bedroom, where the bed has been made, with sheets and blanket pulled so tightly into place you could bounce a coin off them.
I close the door and get dressed.
She’s already seen me naked once and we both bear the consequences.
When I get to the living room, Carla is wearing nothing but the shirt I wore yesterday. On her, it looks something like an evening gown. She’s sitting at the table with a bowl of spaghetti in front of her. Another bowl is sitting across from her, at what she has chosen as my place at the table.
I sit down and sample a forkful.
“Good.”
I mean it. The pasta is really good.
Carla smiles at me.
“Not as good as dinner last night.”
“Maybe not. But it has the flavor of something new. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten at home in my life.”
“I’ve never eaten anywhere else.”
These two simple phrases tell more about our lives than long conversations could. We go on eating without speaking, certain of each other’s presence. Neither of us makes any reference to last night or what happened with Lucio.
I finish my bowl of pasta first, and once she’s done eating I stand up.
“I’ll do the dishes. You go get ready.”
“Okay.”
She stands up too and vanishes down the little corridor. I stack the dishes in the sink, leaving them to the tender care of the cleaning woman. I light a cigarette, without giving in to the siren song of a cup of coffee. In part because I don’t feel like making it.
While Carla takes a shower and gets ready to be as spectacular as she needs to be, I take care of a little business. I arrange appointments for a couple of my old clients, docile, trouble-free, who ask for nothing more than a little of the company that they don’t seem able to procure for themselves. A reliable arrangement, for them and for yours truly. Thirty percent of me is extremely sympathetic. The remaining 70 percent is a matter involving the men in question, their conscience, and the girls.
Beep.
My pocket butler alerts me to the fact that someone wants me. I retrieve from the Eurocheck switchboard a phone number without a name, a call from the usual unknown john. I return the call. A male voice, slightly hesitant, answers the phone, with a faint foreign accent I can’t place. I introduce myself according to the well-tested formula. In practical terms, it’s as if I were pulling open the curtain.
“I received a call from this phone number.”
“Are you Bravo?”
“I certainly am. What can I do for you?”
“I got your number from a friend. He told me that you’re a trustworthy and very reliable person.”
Very kind of him, but that’s not enough. One or two references are necessary, when possible, in cases like this.
“May I ask the name of your friend?”
“Dr. Larsson.”
I remember the name. He’s a Swedish plastic surgeon who comes to Milan on a fairly regular basis and has a certain predilection for the company of women. Accompanied by various forms and quantities of smoke and powder. He’s a fan of Betsy, a stunning Jamaican girl. Standard procedure for a Scandinavian. I doubt that he used full anesthesia when he operated on her. All the same, I decide to lay a little trap for my potential client, just to be safe.
“Ah, of course, Dr. Larsson. One of the finest dentists in Göteborg.”
My interlocutor fails to realize that the mistake is intentional. But he immediately corrects me and passes the test.
“No, you must be confused. Dr. Larsson is a surgeon and his practice is in Stockholm.”
“Of course. So silly of me. How can I be of service?”
“Well, I was just wondering if…”
Many of my clients are shy and hesitant at their first contact. I wait while he tries to find the right words. As far as finding courage is concerned, that’s either there or it isn’t. In any case, he manages to come up with a reasonab
le facsimile.
“I was wondering if you could supply me with very young girls.”
“All the girls who work with me are young.”
The voice on the other end of the line shifts from uncertain to allusive.
“No, I’m talking about very, very young girls…”
His voice trails off and I finish the sentence for myself. Then I act accordingly. My moral fabric is pretty accommodating, but there are still a few things too big to slip through its holes. I hiss like a serpent as I respond. I imagine that it’s the only language that bastard will understand.
“Listen to me, you son of a bitch, and listen good. I don’t know who you are, but I know who I am. If you ever dare to call me again for your filthy pursuits, I’ll track you down and break your arms and legs. And don’t you even think of asking around for what you’re looking for here in Milan. I’d find out about it, and you’d receive the exact same treatment. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, but I—”
I don’t give him a chance to finish.
“Yes, but I my ass! You just go fuck yourself, you piece of shit.”
I slam the receiver down onto the hook with such violence that at first I’m afraid that I broke it. I take a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen and I take note of the number that I just called. The first chance I get, I’ll slip it to Milla with an urgent request to look into the case.
Carla’s voice comes as an unexpected plot twist.
“I’m ready.”
I turn around and I’m struck. Struck by what I couldn’t say. I’m not sure I could come up with the words.
Carla is wearing one of the dresses she bought yesterday, something soft and dove gray, and it goes perfectly with her eyes. Over it she’s wearing a jacket with a jacquard pattern, against a background the same color as her dress. Her shoes, even though the heels are not dizzyingly high, elevate her until she could touch the summit of K2.
She makes a show turn, smiling, allowing herself the hint of vanity that she richly deserves.
“How do I look?”
“You’re stunning.”
Carla turns serious.
“I always want to look this way for you.”