A Walk in the Dark

11

Margherita had gone to Milan for two days on business.

So I went straight back to my apartment, with the idea of training for half an hour. Since I’d half moved to Margherita’s, I’d created a gym corner in my own apartment, with dumbbells and a punch bag.

Sometimes I managed to go to a real gym, to skip rope, hit the punch bag, fight a few rounds. And get a few punches in the face from younger men who were a lot faster than me these days. At other times, if it was too late, if I didn’t have the time or the inclination to get my bag ready and go to the gym, I’d train alone at home.

I was just about to get in my tracksuit when it struck me that it was too late this evening even to train at home. Besides, I was almost satisfied with my work – which didn’t happen often – and so I didn’t have a sense of guilt, which was what usually got me pounding that punch bag.

So I decided to make dinner. Since being with Margherita, and spending so much time in her apartment, I’d made sure my fridge and my larder were always well stocked. Nor before, but now, always.

I realize it may seem absurd, but that’s how it is. Maybe it was my way of reassuring myself that I’d kept my independence. Maybe simply being with Margherita had made me pay more attention to details, in other words, to the things that really mattered.

Whatever the reason, my fridge and larder were full. In addition, I’d actually learned to cook. Even that, I think, was linked to Margherita. I wouldn’t be able to say exactly how, but it was linked to her.

So I took off my jacket and shoes and went into the kitchen to check I had the ingredients for what I had in mind. Cannellini beans, rosemary, a couple of small onions, botargo. And spaghetti. That was all.

Before starting, I went to choose some music. I spent a while looking through my collection, then chose Angelo Branduardi’s settings of poetry by Yeats. I went back to the kitchen as the music was starting.

I put on water to boil for the pasta and salted it almost immediately. A habit of mine, because if I don’t do it straight away I forget and the pasta comes out tasting bland.

I cleaned the small onions, sliced them and put them in the frying pan to cook with some oil and the rosemary. After four or five minutes I added the beans and a pinch of pepper. I left them to fry, and lowered half a pound of spaghetti into the boiling water. I drained it five minutes later, because I like pasta very hard, and tossed it in the frying pan with the seasoning. After putting it on the plate – it spilled over the edge a bit – I sprinkled it abundantly (more than was recommended in the recipe) with the botargo.

It was almost midnight by the time I started eating. I drank half a bottle of a fourteen-proof Sicilian white. I’d tried it in a wine shop two months before, and bought two cases of it the following day.

When I’d finished, I took a book from the pile of my latest purchases, still unread, which I kept on the floor next to the sofa.

It was a Penguin edition of My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, brother of the more famous – and much more boring – Laurence Durrell. It was a book I’d read, in Italian, many years before. Well written, intelligent, and above all very funny. Funny as few books are.

I’d recently decided to brush up on my English – when I was younger, I’d spoken it quite well – and so I’d started to buy books by American and English authors in the original language.

I lay down on the sofa and started reading and, almost simultaneously, laughing out loud without restraint.

Without being aware of it, I went straight from laughter to sleep.

A lovely, effortless, serene sleep, full of childlike dreams.

Uninterrupted, until the following morning.