A Walk in the Dark

29

Alessandra left without our having the opportunity to see each other again. As she had foreseen.

It was almost spring. Life was going on as normal. Whatever the word normal meant. Margherita and I would go out together, sometimes with her friends. Never with my friends. Even supposing I still had any.

After Emilio’s funeral, I’d occasionally had the idea of calling someone and saying, Let’s go out one evening, grab a couple of beers, have a bit of a chat about life. Then, fortunately, I’d let it go.

Two or three times, Margherita asked me if something was wrong, and if I wanted to talk. I said no thanks, not at the moment. When the right moment might be wasn’t clear. She didn’t insist. She’s an expert on aikido and knows perfectly well that you can’t push – or help – someone to do something they haven’t initiated themselves.

More and more frequently I slept in my own apartment.

One time when I’d stayed with her, I was lying on the bed when I had a strange sensation. I half closed my eyes and suddenly found myself observing the scene from a different position, not the one I was in physically. I could even see myself. I was a spectator.

Margherita was getting undressed, the light was dim, everything was silent, I was lying on the bed with my eyes half closed, but I wasn’t asleep.

It was a very sad scene, like one of Hopper’s silent interiors.

So I got up and dressed. I said I needed to get a bit of air, and was going for a walk. Margherita looked at me and for the first time I had the feeling she was really worried about me.

About us.

She stayed like that for a few seconds, and there was a kind of sad awareness in her eyes, a fragility she didn’t usually have. She seemed to be about to say something, but in the end she didn’t. All she said was, Good night, and I escaped.

When I was at last in the street, I felt a bit better. The air was cool, almost cold, and dry. The streets were deserted. As you’d except about midnight on a Wednesday, in that part of the city.

Without thinking about it, almost without realizing what I was doing, I phoned Sister Claudia. As I dialled the number, I told myself that if she was asleep, her mobile was sure to be switched off. If she wasn’t asleep…

She answered at the second ring. Her voice sounded a tiny bit puzzled, but she didn’t ask me what had happened, or why I was phoning her at that hour. It was a good thing she didn’t ask me, because I wouldn’t have known what to reply.

I was walking round the city, alone. I wasn’t sleepy. Maybe I’d like her to walk with me for a while and chat? Yes, I’d like that. No, there was no need for me to go and pick her up, we could meet somewhere. How about the end of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, in front of the ruins of the Teatro Margherita? Yes, that’d be fine. In half an hour. Half an hour. Bye. Click.

To kill that half-hour, I went to an all-night bar. A kind of splash of light in the darkness, rather squalid and unreal, in the border zone between the new town and the Liberta neighbourhood. It was a bar that had always stayed open all night, since long before the city filled up with all kinds of venues and there was an embarrassment of choice when it came to staying out late. When I was a child that bar was always full, because it was one of the few places you could go in the middle of the night, when you were out fooling around, and get a coffee, or buy unlicensed cigarettes. Now it’s almost always deserted, because you can get a coffee anywhere and there are automatic cigarette machines.

I went in. The place was empty except for one couple. They were middle-aged, in other words, just a few years older than me. They were at one end of the L-shaped counter, on the shorter side of the L. I sat down on a stool, on the other side, turning my back on the big window and the street. The man was wearing a jacket and tie. He was smoking, and talking to the thin, fair-haired barman, who wore a white jacket and cap. The woman, a sad-looking, scruffily made-up redhead with deep-set eyes, was staring into the distance and seemed to be asking herself what she had done to be reduced to this.

I ordered a coffee, though I really didn’t need it, because I wasn’t going to get any sleep that night anyway. During the ten minutes I was there, no other customers came in. I couldn’t shake off the disturbing feeling I’d already lived through – already witnessed – this scene.

Claudia got out of the van with the usual sinuous movement. She was dressed as usual – jeans, white T-shirt, leather jacket – but she had her hair loose, not gathered in a ponytail like all the other times I’d seen her.

She nodded in greeting and I returned her nod. Without saying anything we walked along the seafront, in the light of the old iron street lamps.

“I don’t know why I phoned you.”

“Maybe you felt lonely.”

“Is that a valid reason?”

“One of the few.”

“Why did you become a nun?”

“Why did you become a lawyer?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. Or if I did know, I was afraid of trying.”

She seemed surprised that I’d answered, and she appeared to be considering my answer. Then she shook her head and didn’t say anything. For some minutes, we walked in silence.

“Do you live alone?”

I had the impulse to say yes, and immediately felt ashamed.

“No. That is, I have my own apartment, but I live with someone.”

“You mean, a woman.”

“Yes, yes, a woman.”

“And you don’t have anything to say about the fact that you’ve come out alone in the middle of the night?”

As Claudia asked me the question, the faces of Margherita and my ex-wife, Sara, were superimposed in my head. It made me feel dizzy: I mean, really dizzy, as if I were somewhere high up, without any parapet, without anything to grab hold of, as if I were about to fall into empty space and everything would break into pieces, irreparably.

Then the two faces separated and returned to their places, in my head. Whatever those places were. I hadn’t answered Claudia’s question, and she didn’t insist.

We started walking more quickly, as if we had a destination, or something specific to do. We stopped at the end of the seafront, on the southern outskirts of the city, and sat down next to each other on the low wall of chalky stone just a couple of yards from the water.

You shouldn’t be here, I thought, feeling the contact of her muscular leg on mine, and smelling her slight, somewhat bitter smell. Too close.

Everything seems out of place and once again I don’t understand what’s happening, I thought, as our hands – my right hand and her left – touched in an innocuous and totally forbidden manner. We both stared in front of us. As if there were something to look at between the ugly apartment blocks, standing there in the darkness, blurry against the background of the grim, disreputable suburb of Iapigia.

We stayed like that for a long time, without ever looking directly at each other. It seemed to me, without her having said or done anything, that a current of pure pain flowed from her hand.

“There’s a record,” she said, turning to me without warning, “that I’ve often listened to over the years. I’m not sure it does me good to listen to it. But I do it all the same.”

I turned too. “What record?”

“ Out of Time by REM. Do you know it?”

Of course I know it. Who do you think you’re talking to, sister?

I didn’t say that. I just nodded, yes, I know it.

“There’s a song…”

“ ‘Losing my religion’.”

She screwed up her eyes, then said yes. “You know what that means: losing my religion?”

“I know what it means literally. Is there another meaning?”

“It’s an idiomatic expression. It means something like: I can’t take it any more.”

I looked at her in amazement. That was the last thing I would have expected to hear from her. I was still looking at her, without knowing what to say, when her face came closer, and then closer, until I could no longer make out the features.

I just had time to think that her mouth was hard and soft at the same time, that her tongue reminded me of when I was fourteen and kissed girls my own age, I just had time to place my hand on her back, and to feel muscles as thick as metal cables.

Then she drew back abruptly, though she kept her wide-open eyes on my face for a few seconds. Then she stood up, without saying anything, and started walking back in the direction from which we’d come. I walked behind her, and fifteen minutes later we were again at her van.

“I’m not much of a talker.”

“It’s not essential.”

“But sometimes you just want to talk.”

I nodded. You often want to talk. The problem is finding someone to listen to you.

“I’d like to talk to you another time. I mean: no flirting or anything like that. I don’t know why, but I’d like to tell you a story.”

I made a gesture that meant, more or less: if you like, you can tell it to me now.

“No, not now. Not tonight.”

After a brief hesitation, she gave me a quick kiss. On the cheek, very close to the mouth. Before I could say anything else she was already in the van, and driving away into the night.

I walked slowly back home, choosing the darkest, most deserted streets. I felt absurdly light-headed.

Before I went to bed, I searched through my discs. Out of Time was there, so I put it in the player and pressed the skip button to the second track: “Losing my religion”.

I listened to it with the booklet of lyrics in my hand, because I wanted to try to understand. That’s me in the corner

That’s me in the spotlight

Losing my religion

Trying to keep up with you

And I don’t know if I can do it

Oh no, I’ve said too much

I haven’t said enough.

I’ve said too much. I haven’t said enough.