A Walk in the Dark

23

After that night, I didn’t think any more about Emilio. The days passed, smooth and silent. Without rhythm, without colour. Without anything.

A few days before Christmas, Claudia phoned me. A strange call. She wished me a happy Christmas, I returned the greeting, and then we both fell silent. A silence heavy with embarrassment. I had the impression she’d called me for a specific reason, to tell me something specific, not just to wish me a happy Christmas, and then had changed her mind while the phone was ringing.

The silence continued, and I had the strange sensation of being suspended somewhere, or over something. Then we hung up, and I still hadn’t understood.

I don’t think she’d understood either.

On 23 December a card arrived at the office, from Senegal. Nothing on it except the words: For Christmas and the New Year. No signature.

It was Abdou Thiam, my Senegalese client – a street peddler in Italy, an elementary school teacher in Senegal – who had been tried the year before on a charge of kidnapping and murdering a nine-year-old boy. After being acquitted, he had returned to his country and every now and again sent me cards, with just a few words on them, or sometimes nothing at all. Always without a signature and without his address.

Abdou had narrowly escaped life imprisonment and these cards were his way of letting me know that he hadn’t forgotten what I’d done for him. I thought again for a few minutes about that trial and all the things that had happened just before and just after it. It had been less than two years before, but it felt as if a whole lifetime had gone by, and I told myself I had no desire to start thinking about the meaning of time and the nature of memory. So I put the card away in a drawer, with the others, and called Maria Teresa, in order to get through the remaining papers, leave, and let myself be sucked into, and overwhelmed by, the crowded, frantic streets.

We had been invited by some friends of ours for Christmas Eve. Margherita said we should exchange presents before we went out, and so, at nine o’clock, there we were in her apartment, all dressed up, standing next to the little Christmas tree, which was decorated with giant fir cones and thin slices of dried citrus fruit. They were almost transparent and gave off coloured reflections. The apartment was full of nice, clean smells. Pine needles, scented candles, the chocolate and cinnamon dessert that Margherita had made for the party. The cheerful melody of “Bright Side of the Road” was coming from the stereo speakers.

“Empty-handed, Guerrieri? You’re running a risk, you know. If you take another book or a CD from inside your jacket, or anything else that isn’t a real present, I swear I’ll leave you tonight and go and get hitched – so to speak – to a South American dance teacher.”

“I see I got you all wrong. I thought you were a sensitive girl, not at all materialistic, interested in the arts, literature, music. And besides, I don’t see heaps of presents for me under the tree.”

“Sit down and wait here,” she said, disappearing into the kitchen. She came back a minute later, pushing a huge package, irregular in shape, wrapped in electric blue paper with a red ribbon.

“This is your present, but if I don’t see mine you can’t even go near it.”

“But what about the sheer pleasure of giving, just to make another person happy, with no compensation apart from his gratitude and his smile? What about-”

“No. I’m only interested in barter. Bring me my present.”

I shook my head. All right, seeing as how you don’t understand the poetry of giving, I’ll go.

I went to the door, stepped out on the landing, and came back holding by the handlebars a red, shiny and very beautiful electric bicycle.

“Is this enough of a slap in the face?”

Margherita stroked the bicycle for a long time, as if just seeing it wasn’t enough. Like one of those people who get to know things by touching them, not just by looking at them. Then she gave me a kiss and said I could open my present now.

It was a rocking chair, part wood, part wicker. I’d always wanted one, ever since I was little, but I couldn’t recall ever telling her. I sat down in it, closed my eyes, and tried rocking.

“Happy Christmas,” I said after a minute or two. In a low voice, still with my eyes closed, as if talking to myself in a kind of half sleep.

“Happy Christmas,” she replied – also in a low voice – stroking my hair, my face, my eyes with her fingers.