A Walk in the Dark

27

I was lying sprawled on the sofa in my apartment, waiting for Margherita to come home and call me upstairs for dinner. I liked the fact that, even though we were more or less living together, going up to her place in the evening was like being invited out. Even though it just meant walking up two floors. It made things less obvious. Not predictable.

I was listening to Transformer by Lou Reed. The album that includes “Walk on the Wild Side”.

Not a CD, but a genuine, original vinyl LP. With lots of crackles and pops.

I’d bought it that afternoon, in my so-called lunch break. Whenever I had a lot to do, for example when I had an appointment early in the afternoon, I didn’t go back home for lunch. I’d go to one of the bars in the centre, where the bank clerks eat, and have a roll and a beer standing up. Then I’d take advantage of the break to visit a bookshop or record shop that didn’t close for lunch.

That afternoon I’d ended up in a little shop run by a young man who played bass in a band: they played a kind of jazz rock, and were actually quite good. I’d heard them play several times, in the kinds of places I went to at night. The kinds of places where, in the last few years, I’d started to get the nasty feeling I was out of place.

Playing jazz rock, or whatever it was, didn’t provide much of a living, though, especially as he and his band refused to play at weddings. So he sold records, though the hours he kept were very personal. There were days when he stayed closed without warning, others when he opened about eleven in the morning and stayed open without interruption until night time, when the place attracted some very strange, surreal people. The kind who made you wonder where they hid themselves during the day.

Apart from new CDs, the shop also stocked a lot of old vinyl LPs, strictly second, third or fourth hand. That morning, on the LP shelf, I found an original American copy of Transformer, sealed in plastic. It was a record I’d never owned, though I’d had various cassettes with a few of the songs from it, and had lost or destroyed all of them.

I’m one of the few people who still own a turntable in perfect working order, and I didn’t think I should let this record go. When I got to the cash desk – or rather when I got to the chair where the bass player was sitting reading Il mucchio selvaggio – and heard the price, I thought maybe I could let it go after all, buy a remastered version, and with what I had left over have a meal in a luxury restaurant.

A throwback to my teenage years, when I didn’t have any money. Now I earned much more than I knew what to do with. So – without the bassist/cashier being remotely aware of this interior monologue – I took out the money, paid, got him to give me a bag, insisting on a used one, put in old Lou with his Frankenstein face, and left.

I’d played the record through once, and was about to start the turntable again, put the needle back down and listen a second time, when Margherita called me and told me I could come up, she was prepared to feed me again tonight.

She’d made beans and endives, in the old way, the country way. Bean puree, wild endives, red onions from Acquaviva, hard bread and, on a separate plate, fried peppers. The peasant my parents bought fruit, vegetables and fresh eggs from when I was a child would have said this was a real luxury.

For me, there was also a bottle of Aglianico del Vulture.

Only for me. Margherita doesn’t drink wine, or any alcohol. She’d been an alcoholic for many years before I met her, then she’d recovered and now she has no problem if someone drinks in her presence. “In ten days I have my first jump. Weather permitting.”

She’d really gone and done the parachute course. She’d finished the theory and the physical preparation, and now she was getting ready to throw herself into empty space from a height of thirteen to sixteen hundred feet. While she talked, I tried to imagine it, and felt something like a hand clutching me in the pit of my stomach.

She was still talking, but her voice grew distant, while my mind went whirling back to a spring afternoon many years before.

There are three little boys on the sun roof of an eight-storey building. Surrounding this sun roof is a low parapet, and around that a ledge, more than three feet wide, almost like a footpath. Beyond that footpath, empty space. Terrible in its banality, with cats and shabby plants in the yard below.

One of the boys – the one who’s best at football, has already smoked a few cigarettes, and can explain to the others what their willies are really for, apart from peeing – suggests a contest to test their courage.

He challenges the other two to climb over the parapet and walk along the ledge all the way round the edge of the roof. He doesn’t just say it, he does it. He climbs over and starts walking fast, all the way round, and climbs back over to safety. Then the second boy tries. He takes the first steps hesitantly, then he too walks quickly and before long he too has finished.

Now it’s the third boy’s turn. He’s afraid, but not that much. He doesn’t really fancy walking so close to empty space, but it doesn’t seem too dangerous to him. The other two have done it with no problems and so he can do it too, he thinks. As long as he keeps close to the parapet, just to be on the safe side.

So he climbs over too, a little clumsily – he’s not very agile, certainly less so than the others – and starts to walk, looking at his two companions. He walks, running his hand along the inside of the parapet, as if for support. The one who’s good at football and knows all about the use of the willy, and so on, says that’s cheating. He has to take his hand away and walk in the middle of the ledge, not leaning over, as he’s doing. If not, it’s cheating, he repeats.

So the boy takes his hand away, shifts a few inches closer to the edge, and takes a few steps. Short steps, looking at his feet. But looking at his feet he can’t help his eyes moving until they focus on a point all the way down there in the yard. It’s less than a hundred feet, but it’s like an abyss that can suck everything in. Where everything must end.

The boy looks away and tries to move forward. But now the abyss has entered into him. At that precise moment, he realizes he’s going to die. Maybe not just then, maybe another time, but he is going to die.

He understands what it means, with a sudden, absolute insight.

So he grips the parapet and lowers his body, until he’s almost kneeling. As if to present less surface to the wind – in fact it’s only a light breeze – which might make him lose his balance.

Now he’s almost hunched over that low wall with his back to the abyss, and he doesn’t have the courage to stand up again, not even enough to climb back over to the other side, and safety.

His two friends are saying something, but he can’t hear themor rather, he can’t understand what they’re saying. But suddenly he starts to feel afraid of something else. That they’ll come closer and play a joke on him, like making a gesture as if to push him, or climbing over again themselves to play some terrifying game.

So he says Help me, Mummy, he says it under his breath, and he feels as if he wants to cry, very loud. Then, starting from his hunched position, he slowly clambers over the parapet, almost crawling, scratching his hands, grazing his knees and all that. If he stood up it would be easy to climb over, but he can’t stand up, he can’t run the risk of looking down again.

Finally he’s back on the other side. The other two tease him and he lies, he tells them that as he was walking he twisted his ankle and that’s why he couldn’t go on, that’s why he climbed over in that ridiculous manner, like a cripple. And then when they leave – and even in the days that follow – he makes sure he limps, to convince them the story about twisting his ankle was true, not just an excuse to hide his fear. He limps for a whole week, and repeats the story – to his two friends and to himself – so many times that in the end he himself can’t tell what he made up from what really happened.

Ever since, at recurring intervals, the boy has dreamed of climbing over the railing of a terrace and jumping off. Directly and without hesitation. Sometimes he dreams of jumping on the railing and walking along it like a kind of mad tightrope walker, certain not that he can do it, but that he’ll fall at any moment – which promptly happens. At other times, he dreams about his two friends making fun of him, and then he runs to the railing, places a hand on it, and vaults over it, while they look on in amazement and alarm.

That’ll teach them to make fun of me, he thinks as he wakes up, gripped by an overwhelming sadness, because his childhood is over, and because he could have been so many things. So many things he’ll never be.

When I wake up, I always think that. I could have been so many things I’ll never be, because I haven’t had the courage to try.

Then I open – or close? – my eyes, get up, and go to face the day.

“Guido, are you listening to me?”

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry, I was a bit distracted. While you were talking I thought of something.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Just something to do with work. Something I left unfinished.”

“Something important?”

“No, no, something stupid.”