The Tenant and The Motive

I

Mario Rota went out for a run at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. He immediately noticed the street was suffused in a halo of mist: the houses opposite, the cars parked by the sidewalk and the globes of light from the street lamps seemed to shimmer with an unstable and hazy existence. He did a few arm and leg stretches on the tiny rectangle of lawn in front of the house and thought: Fall’s here already. Instinctively, while jumping up and down and pulling his knees up to his chest, he reconsidered. He told himself September had barely begun, and vague threats flitted through his mind of ecological catastrophes. The initial symptoms, according to a well-known Italian weekly he’d been reading on the plane, on the way back from his summer vacation, would be a gradual disruption to each season’s normal weather conditions. After this worrying reflection he smiled somewhat incongruously. He went back inside and came out again a moment later, this time with his glasses on. The mist having dissolved, Mario began to run along the path of greyish flagstones between the road and the meticulous gardens, enclosed by flowerbeds and wooden fences lined up in front of the houses.

Although the difficult relationship he maintained with reality withheld any benefits that might have resulted, Mario was a fanatic for order: when he went out for a run each morning he followed an identical itinerary. Last year he ran up West Oregon, crossing Coler, McCollough and Birch, turned left on Race and kept going till Lincoln Square, an early twentieth-century plaza dominated by the mass of new stone and strange capitals of the First United Methodist Church. There he took Springfield, now on the way back, past automotive repair shops, banks, supermarkets and pizzerias, and when he got to Busey, turned left again and carried on until arriving back at West Oregon. This year, however, he’d decided to modify his route. Since he’d resumed his morning jogging routine, having returned from his vacation two days earlier, he ran in the opposite direction: now he turned left on McCollough, where the First Church of Christ Scientist stood at the corner of West Oregon, and headed towards the west of the city, crossing Nevada, Washington and Orchard. Then he ran along Pennsylvania to the end, where it was cut off by Lafayette Avenue; beyond that he ran across a grass field and up a gentle slope topped with a bare spot. Mario stopped for a moment at the crest, inhaled and exhaled deliberately, trying to keep his breathing regular, briefly admired the scenery and then took the same route back: colonial two-storey wooden houses painted white, red or olive-green, with ironwork screen-doors and garden fences covered with creepers; brick bungalows with sloping roofs; big mansions converted into student residences; squirrels swarming walnut, plane and chestnut trees, their profuse branches occasionally obstructing the paths of greyish flagstones running between the road and the meticulous gardens.

II

It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning. The streets were deserted. The only person he saw during the first five minutes of his run was a young woman crouched down beside an anemone bush in the back garden of the First Church of Christ Scientist, as he was turning right on to McCollough. The girl turned: she bared her teeth in a devout smile. Mario felt obliged to return the greeting: he smiled. Later, by then on Pennsylvania, he crossed paths with a grey-haired man in shorts and a black T-shirt, who was jogging in the opposite direction. The man’s expression seemed concentrated on a buzzing emitted from two earphones fed from a cassette player strapped to his waist. After that came a postal truck, an old, bandy-legged black man, who supported his decrepit steps with a wooden walking stick, a young woman with diligent Oriental features, a family having a boisterous breakfast on the front porch, complete with laughter and parental warnings. When, on the way home, he turned back on to West Oregon, the city seemed to have resumed its daily pulse.

That’s when he twisted his ankle.

Since he was feeling agile and keeping his breathing even, he picked up the pace for the last part of his run. When he got to West Oregon he tried to take a little short cut by jumping over a bed of dahlias. He landed badly: his left instep took the weight of his whole body. At first he felt a piercing pain and thought he’d broken his foot. With some difficulty, sitting on the lawn, he took off his running shoe and sock, checked that his ankle wasn’t swollen. The pain soon eased and Mario told himself that with any luck the mishap wouldn’t matter at all. He put his sock and shoe back on, stood up and began to walk carefully. A sharp pain tore through his ankle.

He arrived home with an obvious limp. On the porch, accompanied by a man, was Mrs Workman.

‘Mr Rota, what happened?’ said the woman with alarm, pointing at Mario’s ankle. ‘You’re limping.’

Mrs Workman was a tiny old woman, a widow with white curly hair, scrawny hands and lively green eyes. She was also Mario’s landlady.

‘Nothing serious,’ said Mario, grabbing on to the railing to pull himself up the porch steps. Neither Mrs Workman nor the man came to help him. ‘I just twisted my ankle in the most idiotic way.’

‘I hope it’s not serious,’ said Mrs Workman.

‘It won’t be,’ said Mario, as he reached the top of the steps.

Mrs Workman changed her tone.

‘I’m so pleased to have bumped into you, Mr Rota,’ she said, stretching out a hand: Mario felt as if he was shaking a bundle of dry skin and bones. ‘Let me introduce Mr Berkowickz. Barring unforeseen circumstances he’ll be the new tenant of the apartment across from yours, where Nancy used to live.’

‘Nancy’s moved?’ asked Mario.

‘She was offered a job in Springfield,’ said Mrs Workman. ‘A good job. I’m happy for her, she’s a nice girl; I loved her like a daughter. I suppose you’ll also be pleased that Nancy’s moved to Springfield,’ she added ambiguously.

‘Of course,’ Mario agreed hurriedly.

‘As for her apartment,’ Mrs Workman went on, looking at the new tenant with eyes that sought confirmation of her words, ‘I got the impression Mr Berkowickz was pleased with it.’

‘Absolutely,’ Berkowickz said. ‘It’s exactly what I need.’

He paused, then looked at Mario. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I’m sure I’ve found the perfect neighbour.’

Berkowickz cited the title of the only specialist article Mario had published in the last three years, in Italica. Smiling and turning to Mrs Workman, he declared that he and Mario were colleagues, researching matters of a similar nature, and that they’d undoubtedly be working in the same university department. Mrs Workman could not hide the satisfaction this happy coincidence gave her: a surprised smile lit up her face. Only then did Mario take a good look at Berkowickz. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with suntanned skin and a frank expression in his eyes; his incipient baldness didn’t contradict the youthful air his face exuded. He was dressed with elegance but without affectation. Otherwise, his appearance was less that of a university professor than of an elite athlete. But perhaps his most striking feature was his solid self-confidence revealed by each and every one of his gestures, as if he’d planned them in advance, or as if they were ruled by necessity.

‘I assumed,’ Berkowickz went on in the same cordial though distant tone of voice, ‘that Professor Scanlan would have announced my arrival.’

He said he’d decided to take up the university’s offer last month and had only signed the contract two weeks ago. He was sure the misunderstanding would soon be cleared up, although, he added, they shouldn’t be surprised: summer vacations easily lend themselves to these kinds of mix-ups. Finally, he was delighted it had all led in some way to this meeting, as pleasant as it was unexpected.

Berkowickz brought these words to a close with a tidy smile. Mrs Workman joined the new tenant in his optimism with a sort of clucking that for an instant threatened to dismantle her fragile frame of skin and bones. Mario felt uncomfortable: the blood of all his veins was throbbing in his ankle. Soaked in sweat, his T-shirt clung to his chest, and his armpits stung. Brushing against the grass had made his legs itch.

Mario forced a smile.

‘I’m sure it’ll all be cleared up,’ he said. ‘And I’m absolutely delighted we’re going to be neighbours.’

Mrs Workman and Berkowickz remained silent. Mario supposed he’d better add something.

‘Well.’ He smiled again, spread his arms in an apologetic gesture. ‘I’m going to go have a shower now. I’m at your service if there’s anything I can do to help,’ he added, looking at Berkowickz.

‘Thanks,’ said Berkowickz. ‘If Mrs Workman has no objections, I’ll move in this very afternoon. I’ll let you know if I need anything.’

‘OK,’ said Mario. ‘In any case, I suppose we’ll see each other tomorrow in the department. And in the evening there’s a cocktail party at the boss’s house.’

‘Excellent,’ said Berkowickz, smiling. ‘See you tomorrow. And take care of that ankle.’

‘Yes,’ chimed in Mrs Workman. ‘Do look after your ankle, Mr Rota. Sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

III

Mario had a shower when he got home. After carefully examining the injured ankle, he took an anti-inflammatory spray and cream out of the cabinet and applied them to the swollen area. Then he made breakfast (peach juice, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, coffee with hot milk) and ate hungrily while listening to the news on the radio.

He washed the dishes and went to his study. Sitting at his desk, he wrote out a few cheques for overdue bills (water, gas, electricity) and sealed them in envelopes ready to be mailed. Then he read over various circulars from the university and the department, threw a couple of them in the wastepaper basket and filed the rest away. He made a note in his diary of the telephone calls he should make the following day from the office, he outlined the plans for the courses he’d probably be teaching that semester and postponed a more detailed design until the department had confirmed them. Classes began on Wednesday: he’d spend Tuesday preparing for them.

At eleven-thirty he went into the living room. He put on a record, opened a can of beer, sprawled out in the armchair in front of the television and lit a cigarette, trying to ignore the annoying tingling sensation in his foot.

Then he thought of Berkowickz.

At first he felt flattered that he’d known his article, the only one Mario had published since finishing his doctorate; but the flimsy research, to which Mario was the first to admit, as much as the utterly undistinguished quarterly where it had been published, made him think again. He came up with just two hypotheses to explain Berkowickz’s curious erudition: either he’d recently been working in the same area as Mario had been when he’d written the article, in which case he’d perhaps felt obliged to examine everything published on the subject in recent years, however insufficient or faulty it might be, or else he belonged to that limited caste of academics who, solely for intellectual pleasure or to satisfy their curiosity, read through the regular publications with morose assiduousness and keep up to date on any and all investigations in their field of interest. Mario discarded the second notion out of hand, not only because it didn’t fit with the impression Berkowickz had made on him, but also because in such a case the new tenant would undoubtedly be notorious in the profession, and truth was his name didn’t even ring a bell with Mario. This conclusion comforted him.

There was not the slightest doubt, in any case, that Berkowickz was aware of the unrefined intellectual bouquet of Mario’s work — unless he only knew the title of the article or had merely leafed through it distractedly without gaining an appreciation of the poverty of its contents. This fact, however, did not worry him: though it was certain to put him in a slightly uncomfortable situation vis-à-vis Berkowickz, it was no less certain that his departmental colleagues (among them Scanlan, who was, all things considered, the only one who mattered) would never read the article, as they hadn’t read the ones he’d published before nor would they in all probability read the ones he would publish in the future. There was nothing, therefore, to worry about. Furthermore, it was unlikely, according to his earlier reasoning, that Berkowickz would turn out to be anything more than a novice in the profession; from there it could be hoped that his own work might be either immature and incipient, or as mediocre as Mario’s. If, to either of those two possibilities, he added the knowledge Mario possessed of the explicit and implicit rules that governed the mechanics of the department, the result was that he found himself in an advantageous position in respect to Berkowickz.

He got up from the armchair, turned over the record and sat back down again. He took a long drink of beer, lit another cigarette. Then he tried to foresee the immediate consequences Berkowickz’s arrival might produce. According to his contract, Mario taught two phonology courses per semester; in practice, however, they’d always ended up turning into three, rounding his annual salary up to a satisfactory sum. If, as happened the previous year, the department didn’t manage to attract a sufficient number of students to fill three classes, they’d come to a tacit agreement by which Mario would teach a course in another speciality, either semantics, syntax or morphology. So, three classes were practically guaranteed. Seen from this basic perspective, the presence of Berkowickz could not alter things in any essential way: in all probability, the new professor, recently arrived in the department and therefore with fewer rights, less experience and, surely, with a more skeletal curriculum vitae even than Mario’s, would take one of the phonology courses he regularly taught, completing his workload with one of the leftovers from the other specialities. As for Mario, he’d undoubtedly add to his two courses — leaving aside the possibility, which they’d considered in the first semester of the previous year, of opening a fourth phonology class — a third in semantics, syntax or morphology, or else — which might even be preferable — some administrative work, not only ensuring his income would not suffer from Berkowickz’s arrival, but might well benefit from it.

After this series of petty reflections, the vague anxiety planted by the aggressively optimistic and healthy air the new tenant had brandished on the porch dissolved into a sort of pity not lacking in sympathy. And although he didn’t deny that Berkowickz could eventually become a threat to the preservation of his privacy — for Mario considered the separation of work and private life indispensable, on a par with an adequate salary — nothing led him to believe that it might make him feel uncomfortable or, in the last resort, oblige him to toy with the possibility of moving to a new apartment, especially since the one he occupied now satisfied him from every point of view. Not only was it located in a nice residential area relatively close to campus, but it also had a veranda, back yard and garage, and furthermore, he’d managed, with some effort, to furnish it entirely to his taste during the year he’d been living there.

The apartment consisted of a study, living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. As well as the typewriter and computer, there was a dark oak table in the study, with drawers on both sides, which served as his desk, a filing cabinet, several bookshelves; there was also a wicker armchair, an easy chair and a few other places to sit. The bedroom furnishings were sparse: two closets built into the back wall with full-length mirrors on the doors, a chest of drawers made of a pale wood against the right-hand wall across from the bed, which was covered with a deep red eiderdown. An extension of one wall divided the living room in two. On the left-hand side was a pale wooden table surrounded by metal chairs; two vaguely cubist pictures hung on the walls, along with a poster for an exhibition of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec in a gallery in Turin. On the right-hand side of the living room there was a television, a record-player, a cream-coloured sofa, two armchairs of a similar colour but different design, a transparent, low double-decker table (through the top level periodicals, books and magazines piled on the lower level were visible); hanging from a hook on the wall was a reproduction of a medium-sized Hockney painting. Separating this part of the room from the dining area was a glass cabinet crammed with valuable and not so valuable objects: a marble elephant, an Algerian pipe, an hourglass, three antique pistols, a frigate imprisoned in a Chianti bottle, several clay figures and other trifles that Mario had collected over the years with neither acquisitive nor sentimental zeal. Except for those of the kitchen and bathroom, the walls of the house were covered with grainy wood panelling; the baseboard and door and window frames were painted white.

He could not have found the apartment more satisfactory, which was why Mario considered it foolishness even to raise the possibility of leaving it, for no other reason than the fact that a colleague had suddenly turned into a neighbour. Furthermore, he thought optimistically, it’s hard to imagine I’ll be worse off for the change. There was no doubt that Nancy had been at the very least an annoying neighbour. She was an untidily stout woman, careless about her appearance, with dry, straw-coloured hair, quite ugly but at the same time endowed with an obvious and aggressive sexuality. The feminist ideas and prejudices against Latin men that Nancy brought up in any conversation, no matter how casual or brief (on the stairway, taking out the garbage, while washing the car), had not facilitated pacific cohabitation in the building. Otherwise, the strange affection Mrs Workman professed for her translated into a blind trust that had always made Mario feel uncomfortable, for it put him in an awkward position not only each time Nancy accused him of getting drunk on his own, but also when she denounced him to Mrs Workman for spying on her whenever a man entered her apartment, especially at night. On another occasion, Mrs Workman and the rest of the tenants in the building — a married couple of Belgian origin, and a young woman who worked in the admissions office at the university — had to intercede to keep Nancy from filing an official complaint with the police for his alleged sexual aggression: she insisted she’d caught him masturbating behind the curtain in his living room while she was sunbathing on a lounge chair in the back yard.

IV

‘Ginger? It’s Mario.’

‘How are you?’ asked Ginger. Not waiting for a reply, she asked another question. ‘When did you get back?’

‘A couple of days ago,’ answered Mario. ‘I haven’t called because I’ve been getting things organized. You know.’

‘Yeah.’

Mario thought: The telephone dulls people. Ginger’s voice sounded neutral, colourless. Mario said, ‘If you like, we could have lunch together.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘At Timpone’s,’ Mario insisted. ‘We’ll celebrate our reunion.’

‘I don’t know,’ Ginger said again.

Mario insisted again.

There was a silence. The murmur of another conversation crossed the line. Mario heard, ‘OK.’

‘I’ll meet you at Timpone’s in an hour then.’

He hung up. He looked at his watch: it was noon.

At five to one he arrived at the restaurant. Ginger was sitting at one of the tables at the back, in front of the big windows that gave the room so much light. She was wearing a light-blue dress; her hair was bunched in an imperfect bun at the nape of her neck. As he pulled out a chair to sit down, Mario thought: She looks lovely.

‘What happened?’ asked Ginger. ‘You’re limping.’

‘Well,’ said Mario, smiling as if in apology, ‘this morning I twisted my ankle. Jogging.’

‘I hope it’s nothing serious.’

‘It’s not.’

Ginger ordered a cold steak with rice, Mario, a salad and curried chicken. They drank burgundy.

‘You don’t seem too happy that I’m back.’

‘I don’t know if I am,’ admitted Ginger. Then she asked, ‘How did it go?’

‘I got bored,’ said Mario with his gaze buried in the chicken. ‘By the second week I didn’t know what to do with myself.’

They ate in silence. The waiter came over twice to see if they needed anything and make sure they liked the food; they both nodded without enthusiasm.

Though he already knew the answer, Mario enquired, ‘How have things been going around here?’

‘Same as ever,’ said Ginger. ‘All very quiet; too quiet really: there was hardly anyone left to talk to.’

‘You must’ve got a lot of work done,’ Mario ventured.

Ginger had stayed at the university all summer to keep working on her thesis. To Mario’s question she replied with a shrug of her shoulders and a gesture of fatigue. She said, ‘I suppose, quite a bit, and in lots of different directions, but I’m still not sure which is the right one.’

Mario thought Ginger’s expression now was opaque and inexpressive, like her voice had been a little while ago on the phone. They talked about the details Mario had suggested she examine during his absence. Ginger answered Mario’s questions in monosyllables. At one point the girl’s features seemed to brighten up.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, as if leaving something behind. ‘Tomorrow I’ll talk to Berkowickz.’

‘To whom?’

‘Berkowickz,’ Ginger repeated, looking Mario in the eye. ‘They finally managed to hire him. Apparently he made all sorts of demands; you know how those people are. Anyway, Scanlan managed it; he was very determined and he did it. Branstyne told me he’s very pleased.’

The waiter took the plates away and asked if they wanted dessert. Ginger ordered apple pie; Mario declined the offer and lit a cigarette.

‘But I thought you already knew about Berkowickz,’ said Ginger.

‘I didn’t know,’ said Mario, puffing out a smoke ring.

‘I’m sure it had already been mentioned before you went on holiday.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Mario repeated.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ginger said. ‘The thing is, we all stand to benefit. Especially me.’

Ginger said that Berkowickz’s latest article, ‘The Syntax of the Word-Initial Consonant in Italian’, published in the April issue of Language, left the investigation open at precisely the point where she had begun. She said she was sure Berkowickz must have continued working in that very direction and, even if that was not the case, he would undoubtedly be interested in the study she was attempting to carry out and would certainly hasten to offer her his support. She declared again that the following day she would speak to Berkowickz. If things went as she expected (she’d been told Berkowickz was a kind, hard-working and enthusiastic man), perhaps he might offer to supervise her thesis. She was sure Mario wouldn’t mind letting him take over.

‘Besides,’ she concluded, half-closing her eyes and feigning an expression she meant to appear mischievous or dreamy, ‘just imagine: it always looks good having a guy like that direct your thesis.’

Mario was disconcerted. He didn’t know why he still hadn’t told Ginger that Berkowickz had just rented an apartment in the building where he lived, nor could he understand how Ginger could humiliate him like that, taking it as a given that he, seemingly incompetent, wouldn’t mind giving up the supervision of her thesis, however insignificant or merely nominal a position it might be, in favour of Berkowickz, whose intellectual worth was seemingly beyond doubt. And what surprised him even more — although here the surprise was perhaps only an instinctive form of defence — was not having recognised the title of the article Ginger had mentioned. For the rest, he found it impossible to associate Berkowickz’s name with anything vaguely related to phonological investigation. But what really had Mario stunned was the aplomb with which he was accepting the situation: not a single gesture of objection, nor of impatience, nor of nervousness. It was like when he realised he was dreaming while still dreaming: everything lacked importance except the certainty that nothing could affect him and that at any moment he would wake up and the dream would have vanished into thin air, without leaving the slightest trace.

After a while Mario realised Ginger had been talking away without his paying any attention, absorbed in the task of crafting smoke rings. Feeling rather tired, Mario supposed she’d been talking about Berkowickz, about her thesis, about herself, maybe about him. He tried to change the subject by asking about mutual friends, about Ginger’s parents, whom she’d visited for a few days, about news from the department. Then the conversation lagged again. They paid and left.

On the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant, Mario noticed his ankle was hurting.

‘I’ve got some things to do right now,’ he said. ‘But what do you think about coming over this evening for a drink?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ginger apologised, perhaps insincerely. ‘I promised Brenda we’d go see a movie.’

Brenda was Ginger’s room-mate; to soften the blow of the rebuff, Mario asked after her. Ginger told him she’d just come back from California, where she’d spent two weeks.

‘You could see a movie some other time,’ Mario suggested without much conviction. Then he lied. ‘I have to talk to you about something.’

‘Some other time,’ said Ginger. ‘I can’t today.’

‘OK,’ Mario gave in. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ Ginger agreed vaguely, and as Mario walked towards his car she added, raising her voice slightly, ‘Take care of that ankle, Mario. Sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

Mario thought: Everything repeats itself.

V

Instead of going home he drove towards the hospital. He parked on an expanse of asphalt surrounded by grass, and was about to enter the building through the main door when he noticed someone waving to him. He changed direction and approached the car window out of which a young woman with bulging eyes had just been waving her hand.

‘Sorry,’ said the young woman when Mario was a few feet away. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

Mario thought: How strange.

He went into the hospital. At the end of a corridor with very white walls, he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy hands was entrenched. Leaning on the counter to take a bit of weight off his ankle, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone, Mario explained the problem. The nurse made him fill in a form and asked him to sit down and wait in one of the rows of chairs facing the counter. Mario sat down in one of the chairs, leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. A couple of times he was distracted by the nurse leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He could hear her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. It’s incredible, he thought, as if smiling. I’m going to end up obsessed. After a while he stood up and went over to the counter. He asked the nurse if it would be much longer before he was seen. With a certain harshness, perhaps angrily, the nurse answered, ‘No,’ stood up and disappeared through a back door in the cave. As he limped back to his seat, Mario thought that since he’d entered the hospital he hadn’t seen anyone except the crimson-faced nurse, no doctors, no patients, no other nurses. Then, as if someone had read his mind and wanted to reassure him, he heard his name: at the other end of the foyer a nurse was motioning him to follow her.

They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to remove his shoe and sock from his left foot and lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room. She examined the injured ankle, which had now swollen considerably. Since he thought the nurse was caressing him, Mario sat up, leaning on one elbow: he noticed she was young and pretty. The nurse placed a hand on his chest and brought her face close to his with a smile Mario didn’t know how to interpret.

‘The doctor will be here in a minute,’ she announced, and the beam of oblique light revealed a downy shadow darkening her upper lip.

After a few minutes the doctor came in. He was a pale, small Oriental man who moved with a strange blend of nervousness and precision. He greeted Mario in a friendly way and tried to joke about the benefits of sport. Mario said to himself that at least he’d read the file he’d filled out in the foyer.

‘Hmm,’ the doctor murmured, looking extremely closely at the ankle, seemingly trying to decipher the meaning of the bulge of flesh around it.

Smiling, the nurse watched from a discreet distance. The doctor pressed the foot in several spots. He looked carefully; his eyes narrowed into tiny slots.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asked, pressing one finger against the lower part of his ankle.

‘Quite a bit,’ Mario admitted. He was on the verge of adding, somewhat impatiently, ‘I wouldn’t have come here if it didn’t hurt.’

‘Hmm,’ the doctor murmured again.

‘Is it serious?’ asked Mario.

‘I don’t think so,’ the other man answered, straightening up and looking him in the eye: the two slots turned into green ovals. ‘Nothing’s broken, it’s just a sprain.’

Mario wanted to ask something, but the doctor turned to the nurse, whose quiet smile had not altered, and gave her some instructions he couldn’t quite catch, then left the room.

The nurse began to bandage his foot. Just as she fixed the bandage in place with a piece of surgical tape, the doctor reappeared.

‘Excellent,’ he said.

‘How long will I have to wear this?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the doctor, incredibly. ‘A week. Maybe more. It depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor said again. ‘Come back in a week.’

‘I suppose I’ll be able to walk.’

‘Of course,’ said the doctor. ‘The nurse will give you a crutch to help you. But carry on as normal, avoiding excessive efforts, of course: the less you use your ankle, the better.’

Mario called a taxi from the cave by the entrance. The nurse accompanied him to the door. When the taxi stopped on the driveway outside, the woman smiled. She said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to the doctor. Come back whenever you like.’

For no particular reason, Mario thought: Thank goodness.

VI

Mario had arrived in the United States in August 1981. He’d been given a grant from the Italian government that would allow him to complete a doctorate in linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin.

The first months in the new country were not pleasant. He couldn’t or didn’t want to begin any friendships. With Americans, mostly young southerners, he found it difficult to get past the limits of simple utilitarian relationships. As for the Europeans he chanced to meet, they all struck him as bland, entirely lacking in charm. Although he had ample time and resources, he barely worked; he spent his time in the city’s cinemas, reading newspapers, watching television, waiting for the Christmas holidays. When they arrived, Mario returned to Turin.

He’d always believed that no special link bound him to his country; back in Italy he understood that no special link bound him to any place other than his country. He felt happy.

By the time he returned to Austin after the holidays, he’d decided to give up the grant in the summer and go back to Italy for good.

That was when he met Lisa.

Lisa was then a twenty-seven-year-old woman with straight, black, shiny hair, gentle eyes and sharp features, as if chiselled on to her face. She walked with short, very quick steps, and her every gesture revealed an iron will. But the thing that really attracted attention, in the midst of the sloppy attire that reigned on campus, was the extreme care, almost luxury, with which she dressed. She applied her lipstick time and again, meticulously, and her eyebrows were always a perfect line.

Although no one had introduced them, Mario and Lisa smiled at each other whenever they passed in a corridor, on the stairs, or at the entrance to the humanities building. From there they quickly struck up a conversation at a party to which Enzo Bonali, a history professor Mario had met by chance and who was supervising Lisa’s doctoral thesis, had invited them both. Hiding behind cocktails and canapés since entering the house, knowing none of the other guests, Mario was pleased to see Lisa arrive at the party: he immediately approached her.

They spent the whole evening talking. Lisa told him she’d been born in New York, although she’d spent most of her life in San Diego. Now she was working with Bonali on her thesis, whicn dealt with some aspect of the process of Italian unification. Mario told her he intended to return to Italy in the summer, and laughingly confessed to not liking the United States. Lisa admitted she didn’t like it much either, but insinuated that she considered it an error not to take advantage of the opportunities the country offered. At the end of the party Lisa offered to drive him home.

Two days later they went out for dinner.

Mario didn’t go back to Italy in the summer. Spurred on by Lisa, he’d begun to work on his thesis, and thought that a vacation in Italy would unnecessarily interrupt the rhythm of his work. He only allowed himself a week off to go to New Orleans with Lisa.

A year and a half later he defended his thesis; Lisa had done so a few months earlier. They both applied for teaching positions in various North American universities. Mario had several interested replies, but nothing definite. Lisa, on the other hand, received three offers. After discussing it with Mario, she accepted a position at Brown University: it wasn’t the best, but the university agreed to employ the contracted professor’s spouse.

They were married in July, travelled around Italy for all of August, and returned to the United States just in time to begin the new semester.

Before a year was up Mario had realized his marriage was a failure. One night, after two weeks of fights and uncomfortable silences, Mario and Lisa went out for dinner, then they went to a movie. When they got home they sat in the back yard and smoked in silence. It was a clear spring night, but the smell of summer was on the breeze, the sky was strewn with stars. At some point, Lisa said, ‘Mario, it’s over.’

They divorced that summer.

VII

The next day Mario woke up at eight, had a shower with his left foot wrapped up in a plastic bag and had breakfast. Then he called a taxi.

At nine-thirty he arrived at the foreign languages building: in his left hand he carried a leather briefcase, in the right, a crutch. When he crossed the foyer of the building he noticed that his bandaged foot and precarious gait attracted more attention than he’d expected: he felt uncomfortable.

He went up in the elevator alone. When he got to the fourth floor, instead of going to the central office of the department, he walked towards his office. He was happy not to bump into anyone in the corridor: although he knew he was going to have to explain about his ankle, the mere thought of it made him feel sick. After poking the key about in the lock for a moment he opened the office door. He instinctively closed it again, because the light was on and someone was inside. He apologized as he pulled the door closed. ‘Sorry.’

How strange, he said to himself. I’ve never gone to the wrong office. Immediately he reasoned logically: the key to his office could only open the door to his office. He looked at the number on the key and the number on the door. They were the same: 4043. He was about to put the key back into the lock when the door was opened from inside: the silhouette of Berkowickz filled the frame.

‘What a coincidence,’ Berkowickz exclaimed with a smile. ‘We seem to be condemned to meet in the most unexpected ways.’ Then, pointing at the white bandage around Mario’s foot and the crutch tucked under his right arm, he asked, ‘But hey, what’s happened with your ankle?’

‘There must be some mistake,’ Mario stuttered clumsily, immediately noticing the incoherence of his observation.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Berkowickz went on, as if he hadn’t heard what Mario had just said. ‘Though with things like that, you can never tell.’

Mario thought: Now he’s going to say that sometimes the silliest little things can complicate our lives. He repeated, ‘There must be some mistake.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Berkowickz, perhaps understanding. He turned around and left the office door open. ‘Of course, there’s been some mistake. This is a complete pigsty. I understand that before I arrived it was occupied by one of those Spaniards who shower once a week and leave a trail of filth wherever they go. There’s a bit of everything here,’ he said, sweeping his arms around the office, ‘beer cans, empty yogurt tubs, ashtrays full of cigarette butts, even a little fridge with a piece of mouldy cheese in it, and papers in a mess all over the place. I’m going to have to find someone to help me clean all this up. I can’t do it on my own.’

‘I’m going to speak to the secretary,’ said Mario.

‘Thanks so much, Mario,’ said Berkowickz. ‘But I don’t think it’s worth your trouble. I don’t think the secretary will be able to come and help me: she looked very busy.’

When he got to the main office of the department, Branstyne and Swinczyc were speaking in low tones. They stopped talking as soon as they noticed Mario’s presence; they turned towards him and said hello. Mario thought they’d been talking about him.

Branstyne was younger than Mario, short with a fragile complexion, receding hairline, indistinct features. He had very intense blue eyes, which revealed a vigorous intelligence: he was without doubt, despite his youth, the most brilliant member of the department. To all that, Branstyne added an unfailing congeniality and an Italian wife, Tina, young and lovely, who made absolutely divine fettuccini al pesto. Tina had managed to turn the friendliness they felt towards one another into a closer bond. As for Swinczyc, Mario barely had anything more to do with him than the routines of work imposed, but at the same time had little enthusiasm for his sidelong glances, at once servile and haughty, his nervous little laughs and the annoying jokes he frequently enjoyed. He knew, however, that Branstyne had a link with Swinczyc, though he was unaware how strong it was, and this caused him to treat the latter with a certain deference, which could at times be mistaken for affection.

Branstyne and Swinczyc asked about Mario’s ankle. He tried to play down the importance of the mishap, joking about the benefits of exercise. While he was talking, strangely, he felt an excessive awareness of the smiles of the two professors, as if someone was focusing a spotlight on their faces. He thought: I’ve experienced this before.

Branstyne said, ‘See you this evening at the boss’s house.’

‘Of course,’ said Mario. ‘See you there.’

VIII

‘What is professor Berkowickz doing in my office?’ Mario asked brusquely.

Without knocking, he’d barged into the office of the secretary, who never closed her door.

‘You don’t know how glad I am to see you, Professor Rota,’ exclaimed Joyce, smiling behind her desk and standing up from the chair on which she’d spread her flesh. She immediately asked, remorsefully, ‘But what’s happened to your ankle?’

‘It’s nothing,’ answered Mario.

‘What do you mean nothing? Is anything broken? Is it a sprain? Oh, my goodness! You have to be so careful! Just this summer, as a matter of fact,’ Joyce went on, her eyes bright, ‘a friend of my Winnie’s. . incidentally, I suppose you’ve heard that Winnie got into the University of Iowa. I’m so proud of her, imagine: already in university, and she’s really just a little girl. . Anyway, as I was saying, this summer a friend of Winnie’s. .’

Joyce was the secretary to the head of the department. A mature woman, with hair so blonde it looked bleached, eyes without brows, she was at least six foot two and easily weighed over 250 pounds: all this combined to give her a notorious cetacean air. The childish clothing she tended to wear (flowery dresses with flounces, silk ribbons in her hair and around her waist, flared or pleated skirts, kilts) and her innocent ponytails, as well as her habit of swaying down the corridors of the department like a subway car, humming charming popular children’s songs, contrasted starkly with her age and the boundless dimensions of her body. She was a widow and had but one passion: her daughter Winnie, the ups and downs of whose life each and every member of the department could expect to be punctually and personally informed of. At the end of the previous year, however, she made an exception: the day that Winnie received her acceptance from the University of Iowa, Joyce stood in front of the elevator door, on the fourth floor, shouting the news in a tone sounding vaguely like a radio announcer. Later, when the university police — alerted by someone who’d told them a fundamentalist preacher was causing trouble in the building — came to arrest her, Scanlan had to intervene to clear up the misunderstanding.

‘Excuse me for interrupting, Joyce,’ Mario cut expeditiously into the secretary’s discourse. Then, with the impression that he was about to formulate a question that would remain unanswered, he added, ‘I’m in a bit of a hurry. Could you be so kind as to explain what Professor Berkowickz is doing in my office?’

Joyce seemed disappointed: her eyes dulled. She sounded almost irritated. ‘Oh that,’ she said, turning away to sit down behind her desk. ‘Professor Scanlan wants to talk to you. He’ll probably explain it. I just follow orders,’ she concluded while smiling in a way Mario thought either stupid or worrying.

He knocked on Scanlan’s office door.

‘Come in,’ he heard.

He opened the door. Scanlan stood up and came over to shake his hand. He asked about the state of his ankle and how the accident had happened. Then he asked him to sit down in one of the leather chairs facing his desk and said, ‘Just let me finish signing these papers and then we’ll talk.’

Scanlan had been running the department with a firm hand for several years, combining demonstrable administrative capability with academic prestige cleverly carved out over the years not so much with intellectual tools as with political ones. He was getting on in years, a tall man, exaggeratedly slim, with complex, polite, almost cloying gestures. His hair, white and plastered down at the base of his skull and at his temples, lengthened, greying into a pointed goatee beard. Like fish swimming in a fishbowl, his eyes worried the lenses of his glasses. He dressed immaculately with a calculated touch of extravagance.

‘Joyce told me you wanted to speak to me,’ Mario said when Scanlan set aside the papers he’d been signing.

‘Well, there’s no rush,’ said Scanlan, smiling with all his teeth. ‘Really, it’s not so important. We can talk about it some other time more calmly.’

‘Whatever it is,’ said Mario, ‘I’d rather do it now.’

Scanlan lowered his eyes, shifted in his chair, changed position, pensively straightened the papers he’d just signed and stroked his beard. When he raised his gaze, the fish flashed anxiously behind the lenses of his glasses.

‘You’re right, it’s better to do it now,’ he agreed. His tone of voice had changed. ‘It can’t wait till later. Allow me to get straight to the point.’

‘I’d appreciate it,’ said Mario.

IX

‘As I believe you know,’ Scanlan began in a neutral voice, ‘the department is going through a difficult time economically. Actually it’s not just the department: the whole university is over a barrel. The state teaching subsidy has been reduced by five per cent compared to last year and, this past month, we have been obliged to bear a series of expenditures and anticipate others that have put us in the firing line. I’ll spare you the details: the circumstances don’t differ fundamentally from those I described at the last meeting we held in June; if they have changed, it’s for the worse. I don’t know if the elections are going to improve the outlook; what I do know is that at this moment it’s disheartening. I’m left with no option but to battle with it and, believe me, it’s no easy task: the main thing is to protect the general interests of the department, even if this adversely affects one individual. Well.’ He paused, ran his right hand over his hair, stroked his beard, went on in the same tone of voice. ‘On the other hand, as you must undoubtedly know as well, we have managed to attract a professor as prestigious as Daniel Berkowickz. I must admit it wasn’t easy. Between you and me, up to the last minute I didn’t believe we’d be able to achieve it: the conditions he demanded were virtually prohibitive. Nor will I hide from you that I’ve spared no effort to secure what I had set out to achieve. As you’ll understand, it’s barely possible to exaggerate the significance that the presence of someone at the forefront of linguistic investigation and with such an enviable CV might have for the department. But, as well as improving the department’s prestige, I am convinced that Berkowickz will be an invaluable stimulus for us all, even those who publish an article every five years in a third-rate journal.’

Since he’d seen the allusion coming, Mario was able to take it without batting an eye. He just pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger, and, as he noticed his right arm beginning to get faint pins and needles, he eased it off the brace of the crutch. When he heard Scanlan’s voice again he wondered if he might have stopped listening as he changed position.

‘At last we have him here.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What do we have here?’ asked Mario, glancing over his shoulder.

‘Professor Berkowickz, of course,’ Scanlan explained kindly, without apparently registering Mario’s momentary lapse. He went on, ‘To do so we had to make him an offer that I wouldn’t hesitate to describe as attractive. Once again I’ll spare you the superfluous details and summarize; among other things we’ve guaranteed him a minimum of three courses per semester. You’ll understand that this affects you directly: your situation is going to have to change, but I’m convinced you’ll be able to accept the sacrifice for the good of the department.’

‘No, I won’t,’ Mario heard himself say. ‘Cut it short.’

Scanlan looked annoyed. He explained, ‘At the moment, we’re only able to offer you one course per semester. This means your salary will be reduced to a third of what you were earning. You’ll also have to keep in mind that taxes have gone up: we’ll all be feeling that. On the other hand, we mustn’t rule out the possibility that, student numbers permitting, we could at some point (not, of course, this semester) open a new course; naturally, that class would be yours. Moreover you could always apply for one of the research grants the university offers, or even one of the administrative posts from the rector’s office, although I fear they’re all taken for the time being. And it goes without saying that you can count on the department’s support and, if need be, on my own.

Mario didn’t listen to the last sentence of Scanlan’s speech. He blinked. He tried to put his ideas in order. Affecting a false self-assurance, he began, ‘Look, Scanlan, in my contract it states that the department —’

‘Mario,’ Scanlan gently checked him, ‘don’t make things any more difficult. I expect you realize you’re in no position to demand anything: if we’ve been able to offer you three courses up till now it’s because we had them. Things have changed now. As for your contract, don’t force me to tell you it’s not worth the paper it’s written on: it was hard enough keeping you here with all the pressure I’ve been getting. Rest assured you can be thankful not to have found your contract rescinded when you returned from your vacation.’

Mario blinked again. He mumbled something Scanlan didn’t hear, or pretended not to hear.

‘I suppose I don’t need to tell you either that any legal action would be counterproductive,’ added Scanlan. ‘You’d find yourself out of a job before you knew what hit you.’

‘Sons of bitches,’ Mario murmured in Italian.

‘What did you say?’ asked Scanlan.

Mario erased the comment with a gesture. Scanlan sighed.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘it’s a matter of tightening your belt for a while. I’m sure that by spring at the latest, if not after the elections, things will change.’

Mario stood up to leave. Perplexed, he noted that he didn’t feel resentful: a strange calm overcame him, as if nothing he’d just heard could really affect him, or as if instead of it happening to him he’d been told about it. That’s why he wasn’t surprised by Scanlan’s almost affectionate tone of voice.

‘I hope you’ll be coming to the house this afternoon,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Joan would like to see you. It’s at five.’

‘Of course,’ said Mario unthinkingly. ‘I’ll be there.’

As he left the office he reflected: I’ve gone crazy. Scanlan just practically fired me and I’m going to go to his party. And instead of protesting I say nothing. I’ve gone crazy.

X

‘Professor Rota,’ warbled Joyce at his back. ‘Let me show you your new office.’

Mario walked down the hall beside the secretary, whose voluminous body oscillated dangerously over the high heels of a pair of summer shoes, with tiny buckles. Joyce talked about a possible boyfriend for Winnie. They crossed paths with two graduate students who looked at Mario’s bandaged ankle and the crutch that supported his vacillating steps. They said hello; he returned their greetings. As they passed the office that until recently had been Mario’s, Joyce pointed, like someone finding a piece of information that confirmed a new hypothesis, at the pile of objects mounting up in the hallway: a portable fridge, books, cardboard boxes brimming with papers, dirty ashtrays. Mario said to himself that Berkowickz had found someone to help him with the clean-up. He also noticed that the office door was slightly open and caught a snippet of conversation, which he didn’t understand.

His new office was at the end of the hall, among the grad students’ offices. The door had a metal plaque with a number — 4024 — and two names: Olalde, Hyun. Humming through her teeth, Joyce wrestled with the lock; finally she opened the door.

‘Good morning, Professor Olalde,’ the secretary sang out. ‘I’ve brought you a new office-mate.’

Mario thought Joyce was making fun of him, but didn’t say anything. At the far end of the office Olalde looked up suspiciously from the heap of papers he had in front of him, arched his eyebrows, emitted a grunt and lowered his gaze again.

Olalde was Spanish, overweight, almost completely bald and rather ungainly. He leaned to the right when he walked, with one shoulder higher than the other, and never smiled, but when he opened his mouth he revealed a double row of uneven, ochre-coloured, quite deteriorated teeth. He was a bachelor, and some attributed this fact to his notorious lack of attention to personal hygiene. But the most striking feature of his physical appearance was the black patch held in place by a band that crossed from one side of his virtually bare skull to the other, covering his right eye and making him look like an ex-combatant, an appearance his broken-down frame did nothing to contradict. He taught Spanish literature and, despite his being one of the longest-standing members of the department, Mario knew that his opinion barely counted at decision-making time. Mario also knew he was a sort of scrap the department had decided to keep on for some reason that escaped him.

‘Professor Olalde, as friendly and communicative as ever,’ said Joyce, addressing Mario with a voice tinged with animosity. ‘But don’t worry, Hyun is a charming young man. And you’ll see that, even though it doesn’t have air-conditioning, the office is very good. It’s just a matter of tidying it up a little. Oh, and before winter sets in we’ll get the heating fixed.’

The new office was no smaller than the old one, although Mario was going to have to share it with two colleagues. There were three desks covered in books and papers, with several drawers on each side, three revolving chairs, two metal cupboards, a filing cabinet with a coffee maker on top of it and some shelves built into the walls, where books piled up in perfect disorder. A picture window looking out on to a red-brick wall let in insufficient light. There were damp stains on the ceiling.

Joyce said, ‘I’m going to go get Sue to help us bring your things from the other office, Professor Rota. I’ll be right back.’

As soon as the secretary had left, Olalde raised his gaze from his papers and looked at Mario with his one eye. Then, as Mario took a seat, he stood up, as far as his stoop would allow, and lumbered towards him.

‘Don’t worry, young man,’ he said in a laboured and complicit English, as if he were confiding a secret. ‘That’s the way things work around here. What are you going to do?’

Since he thought Olalde wanted to console him, Mario replied drily, ‘I’m not worried.’ Then he thought and didn’t say: But I should be. He asked, ‘What makes you think I am?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Olalde repeated, ignoring Mario’s question. He went on without sarcasm, ‘Deep down this is paradise. You only have to look around: everything’s clean, everyone’s friendly, everything works — except this office, you understand. I suppose at first it was an accident, but later, when I saw that nothing worked here (pay no attention to whatever they might say, we’ll spend the winter without heating and no one will fix the broken pipes that soak the walls), once I realized that, it was me who requested staying here.’

With a mixture of pity and scorn, Mario thought: He’s crazy.

‘And tell me,’ Olalde enquired, ‘why have they sent you here?’

‘I requested it.’

‘I see, I see,’ nodded Olalde, twisting his mouth into a grimace that might have been a smile. He clicked his tongue against his palate. ‘You feel hard done by. I don’t blame you: it’s normal not to trust anyone any more. I confess I don’t trust anyone either. And nevertheless I’ll tell you something: this country is full of fantastic people. Yes, sir: enterprising, healthy people, bursting with optimism, a little dull, perhaps boring, I’ll grant you that. But let me tell you something else, the great advantage of this country, something that makes me feel a bit at home, because in Spain the same thing goes on, you don’t have to listen to anyone here, the only thing you have to do is talk. People talk and talk and talk, but no one listens. You’ll realize that for someone like me that’s a delight.’ He paused pensively and added, ‘Otherwise, I understand, young man, Europeans never get entirely acclimatised: the old civilisation, the experience of centuries and all that. Have you read Henry James?’

‘I don’t have time to read philosophy.’

‘Henry James wrote novels; the philosopher was his brother.’

‘I don’t have time to read novels either.’

‘You don’t have to read them all, man. One’s enough: in reality all James’s novels say the same thing.’

Mario was glad when Joyce walked in just then with Sue, a typist who worked in the main office. Olalde retreated to his desk and turned his attention back to the papers on it.

In half an hour they’d completed the transfer of Mario’s things from one office to the other. Olalde, enclosed in a gruff silence, didn’t move from his chair in all of this time. Mario thanked Joyce and Sue, then went over to Ginger’s office, which was on the other side of the hall. He knocked on the door: no one answered. He returned to his office and called a taxi. When he passed Berkowickz’s office, as he was leaving the department, he noticed the door was shut. He stopped for a moment, stuck his ear to the door, held his breath but heard nothing.

When he got home he phoned Ginger.

‘Brenda? It’s Mario.’

‘Oh. How are you?’

‘Fine. Is Ginger there?’

‘I haven’t seen her all morning. Do you want me to give her a message when she gets home?’

‘No, that’s OK,’ Mario hesitated. ‘Just tell her I called.’

‘I’ll tell her,’ said Brenda. ‘How was your vacation?’

‘Really good,’ Mario lied, to avoid explanations. ‘And yours?’

Brenda spoke passionately about California.

XI

At five o’clock on the dot a taxi dropped Mario off in front of Scanlan’s house. It was a one-storey, rectangular building, long and low, with an expanse of cream-coloured walls, interrupted only by the pale wooden front door, and a big picture window on the right. In front of the house were clumps of hydrangeas and chrysanthemums and an ample lawn watered by constant sprinklers. Two slate pathways cut across it: one led directly to the front door, the other, parallel to the first, ended at a shed or garage made of dark wood, with a red door, in front of which were parked two cars of European design.

Scanlan’s wife came out to meet him on the path. She was wearing a very tight black dress. Ash-grey highlights lightened her short, straight hair here and there. Her hands had more rings than fingers. Whenever he saw Joan, Mario reflected that years of shared life eventually conferred on couples a similarity that had something depraved about it: Joan moved her hands with the same quick, almost nervous precision with which Scanlan moved his. They also shared that sort of resignation that softens the faces of people who’ve given up the struggle to camouflage the ravages of time and taken refuge in the consolation of a dignified old age.

‘How are you, Mario?’ Joan greeted him, taking his arm. ‘David just told me about your ankle. If he’d told me earlier I would have come and picked you up at home.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Mario. ‘I’m starting to get used to it. To taxis and to the ankle.’

Joan laughed deafeningly and said without irony, ‘The best people get the worst luck.’

They went inside. In the living room there were two tables covered with canapés and drinks. Beyond them was a glass door giving on to a garden with flowerbeds, potted plants and hammocks. Scanlan was standing in the middle of the living room serving punch and talking to a group of graduate students. Mario raised his eyebrows in greeting, and forced an awkward smile. Joan offered him a glass of wine and asked, ‘How was your vacation?’

‘By the second week I didn’t know what to do with myself,’ answered Mario, feeling immediately, almost physically, that he’d been there before and given the very same reply. He thought: Everything repeats itself.

‘The same thing happens to me,’ Joan assured him. ‘That’s why I never like going away from home for more than two weeks in a row. And then only when there’s something definite to do. Luckily, David shares that opinion. This summer, in fact. .’ She stopped for a moment to look out the window in front of them, which gave a view of the entrance: several guests were getting out of a car. Setting her glass on a shelf, she said, ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ and went out to greet the recent arrivals.

Mario went to the library. Wojcik, a Polish semantics professor, tall, bony and impersonal, was talking to a young man with olive-coloured skin and exaggeratedly thick lips. They were sitting in two armchairs, face to face, and each had a glass of wine in his hand. They stood up when they saw Mario come in; he had no choice but to approach them. Wojcik introduced him to the young man, who seemed to have arrived in the department with a grant from the Indian government. His English sounded to Mario like Russian at first. While they were talking the library kept filling up with guests. At some point, Mario excused himself from Wojcik and the Indian. He went to the living room, said hello to a few familiar faces, and looked around for Ginger: he didn’t see her. He felt uncomfortable among so many people. He opened the sliding door that opened on to the garden and went outside to smoke.

Olalde was stretched out in a hammock, at the bottom of the garden, with his gaze lost in a bed of gladioli. From his lips hung a disparaging cigarette. Mario lit a cigarette and went over to him.

‘Excellent bibliography,’ Olalde was muttering, ‘excellent bibliography.’

Sensing Mario’s presence, he stood up. ‘And what do you think of these parties, young man?’ he asked without looking at him. ‘I’ve spent God knows how many years in this country and I have yet to find a better pastime.’ Gesturing and projecting his voice, he began, ‘I’ve just read your latest book, Professor So-and-so. Excellent bibliography, excellent bibliography. I’ll not deny it, Professor Something-or-other, and I’ll tell you something else: Professor What’s-his-name copied it unashamedly in his latest tome, which is otherwise filled with errors. Indeed, Professor Something-or-other, I also read your last article and I must admit I was impressed by the scientific honesty with which you refuted the ridiculous hypothesis of that lamentably slapdash Professor What-have-you, according to which the progenitor of Pitarra was twenty-seven years old at the moment of the writer’s conception, when it is quite obvious, as revealed by the data you contribute with your habitual modesty, that she was twenty-five.’ Olalde took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled the smoke through his nose, smothered a giggle and went on. ‘Mass of mediocrity: they find merit in reading what no one wants to read, they puff up like turkeys when they speak, and think they have the right to express their opinions on everything because they know how to distinguish a thirteenth-century manuscript from a fourteenth-century one. What I don’t understand is why this country insists on isolating them in these paradisical concentration camps called universities, hundreds of miles from anywhere, in the middle of the desert, as they say. I imagine that it used to have a certain rationale: you know, the danger of infecting society with pernicious ideas and all that. But now, tell me, how the hell are they going to infect society now when they haven’t an idea in their heads, not a single one; they’ve got dates and facts and statistics, but not a single idea. And don’t go thinking I consider myself any different, no, sir. I’ve passed the stage of self-indulgence; when you get to my age only idiots and those with a calling for slavery condescend to indulgence.’ Olalde paused, as if an idea had just crossed his mind, then smiled in a way meant to look meaningful. ‘Yes, sir, I’m just like them, except in one detail: while they’re blinded by drunken vanity and completely unaware of the insufficient, petty lives they lead, I realize that we are the real barbarians.’

The appearance of Branstyne and Tina, and Swinczyc and his wife Phyllis, interrupted Olalde’s speech. They arrived with cheerful greetings and glasses of wine in their hands. Mario felt a bit dazed; his temples were buzzing slightly. He thought: It’s the wine. Olalde put out his cigarette on a patio stone, threw it into a flowerbed and sat back in the hammock with laboured slowness. As he did so Swinczyc cast Mario a sidelong glance. ‘I bet Professor Olalde has been saying nasty things about us,’ he said with irony but not spite, since Olalde was listening. ‘Or about the department, the university, the country, whatever. I’ve always wondered,’ Swinczyc went on in an almost joyful, almost affectionate tone, ‘why Professor Olalde doesn’t leave this country that treats him so badly once and for all and go back to live in Spain.’

‘Spain’s no place to live,’ said Olalde, very slowly, turning towards them and looking at Swinczyc with his one good eye. ‘Spain’s a place to die.’

There was a silence too long not to be uncomfortable. Other guests wandered into the garden: Wojcik and the young man from India, Deans, Sarah Soughton and her husband, a few graduate students. The group divided into several circles of animated conversation. Tina and Mario talked about their vacations. Then Tina asked, ‘When are you coming over for dinner?’

‘That depends on the chef,’ Mario joked.

‘The chef will outdo herself.’

‘In that case, name the day.’

‘Thursday?’

‘Thursday.’

Mario claimed he needed more wine and went back inside. He looked for Ginger: she wasn’t in the living room or the library. Only then did he notice that Berkowickz hadn’t arrived either.

He went into the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror; he barely recognized himself: his skin was pallid, his lips and cheeks gaunt, his chin tense. Although it didn’t reach that far, the echo of the conversations in the garden still hummed in his head. Without meaning to he thought: I’m going to end up like Olalde. He immediately regretted having thought such a thing. He relieved himself, washed his hands, splashed water on his face and wrists, dried off with a towel. When he came out of the bathroom, feeling slightly more at ease, he noticed most of the guests had moved from the garden to the living room. Blatantly absorbing the attention of the most numerous group, who’d gathered round the fireplace, Berkowickz was speaking energetically, explaining something, gesturing. The group exploded in unanimous laughter as Mario approached. When the laughs died down, Berkowickz carried on speaking in a calmer tone. Mario saw Ginger at one side of the circle, beside Branstyne. He smiled affectionately at her and wondered if she’d arrived at the party with Berkowickz. He thought: She looks lovely. The group broke up. Mario noticed that Ginger stayed talking to Berkowickz, Scanlan and Tina. Branstyne, Swinczyc, Wojcik and Deans chatted and laughed by the drinks table.

Mario went back out to the garden; he didn’t see Olalde. While he lit a cigarette he wondered if he’d gone out with the intention of talking to the Spanish professor. He couldn’t answer himself because Branstyne interrupted his thoughts.

‘What’s the matter, man?’ he said in a tone of light-hearted disapproval. ‘You’re not being too sociable.’

‘No,’ Mario admitted, smiling weakly, then added by way of an excuse, indicating the garden with the hand holding the cigarette, ‘I came out to get some air and smoke. The truth is my head aches a bit.’

‘You’re not worrying about the courses.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘No one had to tell me,’ said Branstyne. ‘I only had to sum up and subtract. There’s no two ways about it.’

‘I wasn’t worried until you reminded me that I should be,’ said Mario. ‘I wonder how you’d be in my place.’

As soon as he said it he thought he’d been unfair to Branstyne, who’d undoubtedly not meant to irritate him. As he began to apologize, Scanlan, Ginger and Berkowickz came out to the garden. There were jokes and greetings. Mario reflected: I can’t stop talking, I can’t stop thinking: it’s like a nightmare. Now Berkowickz was talking again slowly, enunciating carefully. Scanlan, Ginger and Branstyne were listening to him wide-eyed. Looking at Ginger, Mario thought he was in love with her. He thought: I’ve always been in love with her. Then he heard: ‘You must know that Mario and I are neighbours.’

Scanlan and Branstyne made comments on the coincidence; Ginger looked at Mario through narrowed eyes. After a moment Branstyne returned to the living room; Scanlan and Berkowickz walked to the back of the garden, where the hammocks were.

Ginger spoke. ‘You didn’t tell me Berkowickz was your neighbour.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t tell me Berkowickz was your neighbour,’ Ginger repeated.

‘I forgot.’

Ginger spoke again. ‘He’s offered to supervise my thesis.’

‘Who?’

‘Berkowickz.’

‘I’m delighted for you,’ Mario lied, feeling all his bitterness towards Berkowickz, towards Scanlan, towards Ginger, towards Branstyne, towards everything and everyone welling up in his throat. As if trying to free himself of something, he said in a rush, ‘Why don’t we see each other later at my place? I’d like to talk to you on our own.’

‘I can’t,’ Ginger hurried to answer. ‘I still have to prepare tomorrow’s classes.’

Back in the living room, he looked for Joan.

‘Could I use the telephone?’

‘Of course,’ said Joan.

She took him into an interior room. Mario dialled a number and asked for a taxi. Then he went back to the library with Branstyne and Tina.

‘I’m going,’ he said.

‘Do you want us to give you a lift?’ asked Tina.

‘That’s OK,’ Mario said. ‘I’ve already called a taxi.’

‘Tomorrow I’ll come and pick you up before ten,’ said Branstyne. ‘You don’t want to spend your whole salary on taxis.’

‘The way things are going, it wouldn’t be too difficult,’ Mario admitted.

There was a silence.

‘Sorry about what I said earlier,’ Branstyne apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to annoy you.’

‘You didn’t annoy me.’

‘We’ll see you on Thursday,’ said Tina.

‘See you on Thursday,’ repeated Mario.

Joan accompanied him to the door. Before he left, Mario looked for Olalde among the swarm of guests, but didn’t find him. Scanlan’s wife said, ‘I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.’

Mario didn’t recall having said he’d enjoyed himself.

‘Yes,’ he said, nevertheless, ‘great party.’

When he was installed in the back seat of the taxi, waving goodbye to Joan, who was standing in the doorway of the house, Scanlan appeared at his wife’s side, waved his hand and rushed down the slate path, shouting something that Mario didn’t hear because the car windows were all wound up tight.

He unenthusiastically prepared Tuesday’s classes when he got home. Then he opened a bottle of Chablis, sprawled out on the sofa and drank and smoked and watched television for a while. At eleven he got into bed.

He slept fitfully. Towards dawn a nightmare woke him. He tried to retain it, not to let it be dissolved by wakefulness, but he couldn’t. The only thing he managed to recall was Berkowickz’s voice. ‘Excellent bibliography,’ he was muttering. ‘Excellent bibliography.’

XII

Immediately after his divorce from Lisa, Mario felt as though he’d been freed from a crushing burden. Soon this initial relief turned to unease. At first he felt inconvenienced at having to assume all the responsibilities he’d left to Lisa; later he realised he’d got used to trusting her and loving her in his way, and that her absence left a hole, not in his feelings but in his affections, which he had nothing to cover with. Solitary living became unbearable: he came to detest the house he’d shared with Lisa (they agreed when they separated that he would stay there; she chose to move to an apartment on the outskirts of the city). To all that was added the increasing agitation of seeing Lisa almost daily in the university, since the history and linguistics departments were located in the same building. The peaceful course her life seemed to take, her fabulous appearance and the infinite vitality she radiated and that hadn’t been diminished, but perhaps the opposite, by the shock of the separation, the news of her constant professional successes, which Mario always heard from someone else, never Lisa, and the growing academic prestige she derived from them: this series of circumstances, along with his own state of moral neglect, contributed to convincing him he’d fallen back in love with Lisa.

He decided to speak to her. He arranged a date. At length he explained his point of view. He asked Lisa to move back in with him. She smiled sweetly.

‘Mario,’ she said slowly, as if caressing the words, ‘your problem is you confuse love with weakness.’

Two months later Lisa married one of her students, who was five years younger than her. By then Mario had decided to leave Brown University. He again thought of returning to Italy. In the meantime he applied for jobs at various North American universities. When he received the offer from the University of Illinois he didn’t doubt for a second before accepting it.

In August he took up his new position. He didn’t like the university or the department to which he was assigned. Nevertheless, since he knew he’d be staying there for a while, he hastened to make friends, something he managed almost immediately, thanks more than anything to the open and congenial disposition of the rest of the professors in the department.

On one of the first days of the semester a graduate student burst into his office. She was of medium height, with long straight hair, dishevelled in an orderly manner, blue eyes and fleshy cheeks. She was wearing a lilac T-shirt that strove to contain the vigour of her full breasts, and a white miniskirt, which trimmed her hips and revealed her pale, somehow childish legs. Her name was Ginger Kloud. They spoke for a while; Mario noticed her eyes shone and guessed she was about twenty-five years old. When she left his office, Mario had agreed to supervise her thesis.

Ginger attended one of Mario’s classes. They chatted often. He treated her in a slightly off-hand but flirtatious manner: he was aware of being rather attractive to her, and this fact, perhaps paradoxically, flattered him at the same time as it made him feel uncomfortable.

At the beginning of October Ginger invited him to a party at her house. They drank whisky, danced, smoked marijuana, chatted.

The next day, when he woke up, Ginger was still at his side.

From then on they saw each other frequently outside of class. Mario, in spite of that, still kept a certain distance between them. At first that attitude came naturally to him: he did not want to fall into another emotional dependency. Later he cultivated it consciously, because he observed that distance was an instrument of domination: Ginger would continue to be dependent on him as long as he kept it up. He also discovered that the situation afforded him a constant well-being and brought back the balance he’d lost when he separated from Lisa: he enjoyed all the benefits of Ginger’s devotion and withdrew from all the concessions and subjugation that investing his affection in her would have entailed. At the beginning Ginger readily agreed to the tacit conditions Mario had imposed: she declared that she didn’t want their relationship to go any further than close friendship. Later, although she still told him about the occasional affairs of the heart she found herself involved in, she began to complain of the scant attention Mario paid her and the inconsiderate way he treated her. Finally, since she was unable to overcome the barrier he’d placed between the two of them, she became obsessed with Mario: in a single evening, with barely a transition, she would sleep with him, get annoyed, cry, contradict herself, insult him and leave the house slamming the door behind her, while Mario took refuge behind an indifferent silence. Hours later a telephone call from Mario would reconcile them.

This went on for almost a year.

The night before Mario left for Italy on vacation, they went out to dinner. He thought as they said goodbye that he was going to miss her.

During the month-long vacation he missed her: he wrote her a postcard from Nice and another from Amsterdam, where the airplane made a stopover, as well as several letters from Turin. In one of them he wrote: ‘It’s as if I’m condemned always to want what I don’t have and never to want what I have. Managing to get something is enough to make me lose interest in it. I suppose that ambition is born of things like this, but I’m not even ambitious: I lack the energy to desire constantly.’ In another letter he confessed: ‘I’m only capable of appreciating something once I’ve lost it.’

By the second week in Turin he wished Ginger had come with him. At one moment he thought he was in love with her. Another time he told himself he’d soon be thirty and, if he were to get married again, Ginger was undoubtedly the right person.

By the time he landed in Chicago, back from his vacation, he’d decided to propose to Ginger.

XIII

The next morning Branstyne came by his house at nine-thirty to pick him up. Mario heard a car horn, looked out the window of his study, saw a car and went out.

‘How’s the ankle?’ asked Branstyne, turning left from University Avenue on to Goodwin.

‘Fine,’ answered Mario. ‘Sometimes I get the impression that when they take the bandage off and the crutch away I won’t be able to walk.’

Branstyne smiled. ‘When does it come off?’

‘They told me to go back on Sunday,’ Mario explained, ‘but I’ll probably go before that. I think the swelling’s gone down.’

Branstyne dropped him off at the door of Lincoln Hall. Mario thanked him for bringing him that far.

‘If you want, I can come by your place at the same time tomorrow,’ said Branstyne. ‘I’ve got another class at ten.’

Mario accepted. They said goodbye.

He went into Lincoln Hall. The corridors were crammed full of students. He went up to the second floor and into Room 225: some students were already waiting for the class to begin. Mario sat down behind the teacher’s desk, which was on a wooden platform, leaned the crutch against it and took some papers out of his briefcase. When the bell rang, twenty-four pairs of eyes were upon him.

He introduced himself. In a confusing way he explained the course outline he proposed to follow and the evaluation methods he’d be using. Then he opened the floor to questions; since there weren’t any, he concluded the class. The students began to leave. As he was putting the papers he’d taken out of his briefcase back into it, he noticed a young woman with bulging eyes and red hair was looking at him mockingly as she passed his desk. For a second he was sure he’d seen her somewhere before, thought he was about to recognise her, but couldn’t. By the door the young woman joined another student, shorter and thicker-set than her, and both of them burst out laughing. He couldn’t help feeling slightly ridiculous. He finished collecting his things and left.

In the Quad (a vast square of grass enclosed by the university buildings and criss-crossed by cement paths that joined one building to another), under a hard, brilliant sun, reigned the usual quiet of class time: just here and there the odd student, dressed in shorts and baggy T-shirts, sat in the sun or talked with eyes half closed. Others read leaning up against tree trunks; others threw baseballs or plastic disks that glided lazily just above the lawn; very few walked along the cement paths. These last, however, as soon as the bell marking the end of class rang, turned into a heaving throng of students hurrying towards the building where their next lecture was: then the air filled with shouts, music, conversations, greetings. When the bell rang ten minutes later, this time marking the beginning of the next class, the Quad went back to being like a millpond.

Mario entered the foreign languages building. He went up to the fourth floor, picked up his mail from the main office and went to his office. Neither Olalde nor Hyun were there. He arranged books and papers in the desk drawers, on the shelves, in the filing cabinet. Then he went to Ginger’s office and knocked at the door: no one answered. In the main office he found Swinczyc, who offered to drive him home. Mario accepted.

He phoned Ginger from his apartment. He suggested they have lunch together. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he said. Ginger came to pick him up half an hour later. They went to Timpone’s.

‘What did you want to talk to me about?’ asked Ginger, her eyes glued to the menu.

‘Nothing special,’ Mario admitted. ‘I just thought we could chat for a while. It’s been quite difficult lately.’

‘Yes,’ Ginger agreed. ‘The truth is I’ve been pretty busy. The start of term is always like that.’

The waiter came over; they both ordered steak and salad. Ginger was wearing a brown leather skirt and a very loose-fitting pink shirt; her shiny hair flowed over her shoulders. Mario thought: She looks lovely. He went on with the interrupted conversation, saying without resentment, ‘Me, on the other hand, I’ve got more free time than ever.’ He paused, then added, ‘Scanlan has taken two of my courses away.’

‘And he’s given them to Berkowickz,’ Ginger continued for him. ‘Branstyne told me, but it didn’t take a genius to predict it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’

Since he didn’t want to argue, Mario changed the subject. Ginger was soon talking about the party at Scanlan’s house, about the possibility of finishing her thesis that very year, of the interest Berkowickz had shown in her, the suggestions he’d given her. Then she brought up the possibility of applying to the department for a grant; if she got one she could give up the classes she was teaching and devote all her time to her research. When they finished eating, Mario tried to take her hand; she pulled it away.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mario, looking her in the eye. ‘Everything’s been going wrong since I got back.’

‘As far as I remember it was never going well.’ Ginger’s voice sounded different now, thinner.

‘In one month you’ve changed.’

‘I’ve changed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said it.’

‘Why don’t you leave off the verbal fencing and tell me once and for all what’s the matter?’

‘I’ve changed,’ Ginger said again. ‘I don’t love you any more.’

There was a silence.

‘I don’t love you,’ she repeated with more conviction, as if urging herself on. ‘And I don’t want to go back to things as they were.’

‘Everything will be different now.’

‘It’ll be exactly the same,’ she said. ‘And even if it were different it doesn’t matter. I don’t love you any more. And I don’t want to talk about this again.’

They paid and left.

XIV

Wednesday after class (he’d finished before time because he felt tired, weak and maybe a bit uncomfortable or embarrassed by the bandage and the crutch leaning against the blackboard), he went home by bus. When he alighted on West Oregon he noticed a young woman with bulging eyes waving to him from a parked car on the other side of the road. At first he thought it was the redheaded student whose attitude had disconcerted him the previous day, at the end of class; as he crossed the street he realized it wasn’t her.

‘Sorry,’ the young woman apologized when Mario was a few feet from the car. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

Mario thought he’d experienced a similar situation that week, but he couldn’t remember when. He thought: Everything repeats itself.

After lunch he took a nap. He woke up with his mouth feeling furry and a faint buzzing in his temples. In the bathroom a face criss-crossed by pillow lines looked back from the mirror. He washed his face and brushed his teeth, then made coffee. In the dining room, he tried to read, but soon realized it was futile: he couldn’t concentrate. He went to the kitchen, opened a can of beer, turned on the television and stretched out on the couch. He switched from one channel to another with the remote control, without spending much time on any of them. At about six he thought he heard footsteps and voices on the landing. He turned the volume on the television down as low as it could go, got up off the couch, held his breath and pressed his eye against the peephole in the door: he didn’t see anyone, but he heard a hushed noise, of music or conversation, coming from Berkowickz’s apartment. He went back to lying on the couch, turned the television back up, and went back to switching from channel to channel. After a while he got tired of the TV. He went to his study and pushed one of the armchairs over to the window at the front of the building, on West Oregon: pouring through the window came a clear light, not yet rusted by the setting sun.

He tried to read. A while later, lifting his eyes from the book, he saw David and Joan Scanlan parking their car in front of the building. Instinctively he moved the chair back from the window and hid. Scanlan and his wife entered Mario’s building. He thought: They’re going to Berkowickz’s place. He went to the dining room carefully, taking a little weight on the injured foot, so as not to make a noise with the crutch. He looked out through the peephole and saw Scanlan and Joan knocking on the door across the hall. Berkowickz opened straight away and invited them in. Later he saw Swinczyc and his wife arrive, Branstyne and Tina, Deans, Wojcik and several other professors; he also saw a couple of graduate students go in.

It was completely dark when he guessed that all the guests had arrived at Berkowickz’s party. Mario went to the kitchen, opened a bottle of Chablis, stretched out on the couch and turned the TV back on; for a while he sat there smoking and drinking. He thought that at some point it might occur to Branstyne, or to Swinczyc, or to Berkowickz himself, to knock on his door and invite him to join the party. Then he sprang up, turned off the television and the lights in the kitchen, his study and the dining room. He sat back down on the couch, in the dark, glass of wine in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. A faint grey light came in through the windows; each time he took a drag on his cigarette the ember lit up his face momentarily. Some time passed, after which he heard voices on the landing, maybe recognising Tina’s. They knocked on the door. He held his breath, kept still. He heard Branstyne’s voice: ‘He must’ve gone out.’ Someone whose voice he didn’t recognise made some comment. He thought he heard laughter, and then a door slamming. Almost immediately he heard noise on the landing again. He stealthily sneaked over to the door, looked out through the peephole: he saw Phyllis, Swinczyc’s wife, and Tina carrying glasses and bottles; Ginger was carrying a tray behind them. For some reason he wasn’t surprised to see her. I bet she was the first to arrive, he thought.

He realized the party was moving out on to the porch. Hopping on one leg he reached his study, opened the window that gave on to West Oregon — beneath which, covered by a wide overhang, was the porch — and raised the screen. He sat in the armchair and got ready to listen. At first the voices mingled together indiscriminately. Later, listening more closely, he distinguished, or thought he distinguished, Scanlan’s voice, then Berkowickz’s: unanimous laughter blended them all again. A moment later he made out some of what Berkowickz was saying about a conference. He mentioned some well-known names, joked at the expense of a professor with an unpronounceable surname, then a lump of different voices cancelled out Berkowickz’s. Mario went to the dining room, grabbed the bottle of Chablis, a glass, an ashtray and his cigarettes. When he sat back down by the window, an absolute silence reigned on the porch, broken only by the occasional cars that passed by on the road. Then he began to hear Scanlan’s voice clearly: with a sort of friendly conviction he spoke of the efforts he’d been making to raise the level of the department. He said he was confident he could count on everyone’s support, for everyone would benefit from the department becoming a centre of excellence. He affirmed that the only way of achieving this was to raise the level of the teaching staff, selecting rigorously and subjecting degrees of competence, one way or another, to periodic tests that would oblige everyone to remain at a high level. He assured them that, in spite of the fact that contracts currently in effect required professors to deliver a series of publications before the department would renew their contracts or offer a permanent position, they all knew this proceeding had up till then been discharged with an undoubtedly excessive tolerance, which was ultimately as prejudicial to the department as to the individual involved. Finally, he declared that at the next committee meeting he intended to present a concrete project reflecting all those demands. From here on in, he concluded, he hoped to begin a new era.

Mario heard Berkowickz and Swinczyc enthusiastically supporting Scanlan’s proposal; he also heard Branstyne doing so. Then other voices joined these. The conversation split in two, multiplied into meanders, until he could only catch unconnected snippets of it. At one moment (but later he thought he really couldn’t be sure), Mario heard Berkowickz say his name, and then Swinczyc’s nervous laugh.

At ten-thirty the guests began to leave; Ginger was the last to go.

XV

The next day he woke up at eight. He shaved, took a shower with his left leg wrapped in a plastic bag and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. Branstyne came to pick him up at nine-thirty.

‘How’s the ankle?’ he asked, turning left from University Avenue on to Goodwin.

‘Better,’ answered Mario. ‘It’s just a couple more days now.’

‘Last night a bunch of us got together at Berkowickz’s house,’ said Branstyne. ‘We called on you, but you weren’t in.’

‘I went out to run some errands and didn’t get back till late,’ Mario claimed. Then, as if to shake off the uncomfortable silence that had settled over the car, he asked, ‘How was it?’

Branstyne talked about the party until he stopped the car in front of Lincoln Hall. Mario thanked him for bringing him that far. Branstyne said, ‘I’ll come and get you at seven tonight.’

Mario looked bewildered. Lifting his left hand off the steering wheel and raising his eyebrows, Branstyne added, ‘We’ll sample Tina’s fettuccini and have a bit of a chat while we’re at it.’

Mario tried to hide the fact that he’d forgotten about the dinner invitation.

‘Come by whenever you like,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere this afternoon.’

After giving his lecture (once again he couldn’t fill the fifty minutes, and before the bell sounded, he’d dismissed the class) he went to the department office. In his cubbyhole was a note signed by Scanlan, who wanted to speak to him as soon as possible.

He was just about to knock on the boss’s door when he heard Joyce’s voice behind him. ‘Professor Scanlan’s busy.’

Mario turned around. The secretary smiled. Her lips were painted an extremely bright red, which stood out against the whitish pallor of her face and the straw-coloured blonde of her hair; a blue silk ribbon, with white polka dots, held her hair almost at the top of her head, in a sort of ponytail; her hairless brows contributed to giving her a vaguely fishy or reptilian air. Without giving him a single chance to interrupt, answering the questions she herself was posing, gesturing slowly but copiously, Joyce asked about Mario’s ankle and told him about the case of a friend of Winnie’s who’d suffered a similar mishap. Then she changed the subject. She talked openly about Winnie: how she’d been accepted at the University of Iowa, how very young she was to be going to university, that she had a boyfriend called Mike. At some point she assured him that, even though it wouldn’t be necessary until winter arrived, they were already making arrangements to get the heating fixed in Mario’s office. Only when she asked about Olalde did he get the impression that the secretary was waiting for an answer. He could not, however, be certain: just then Scanlan’s office door opened. Berkowickz came out, his face glowing with energy. His lips widened into a smile of solid satisfaction. Under Scanlan’s gaze he greeted Mario with a sportive gesture.

‘You missed a party at my place yesterday,’ he said with an air of cheerful or fake annoyance. ‘It was my fault: I forgot to tell you ahead of time. We knocked at your door, but we didn’t find you in.’

‘I went out to run some errands and didn’t get back till late,’ Mario apologized. Suddenly he thought that wasn’t what he’d meant to say and tried to add something. He couldn’t because Berkowickz beat him to it.

‘See you later,’ he said. And to Mario he added, ‘Let’s see if we can get together for a bit of a chat one of these days.’

Perhaps for no precise reason, Mario thought: Just like a nightmare.

They went into the office. Scanlan sat behind his desk, Mario in one of the leather chairs lined up in front of it. Gently stroking his goatee, Scanlan made some innocuous, perhaps friendly, comments with a cloying smile. Mario got distracted for a moment looking at a poster tacked up on the back wall: it announced a retrospective of the work of Botero. He heard Scanlan clearing his throat.

‘I’m just going to take up a moment of your time: I prefer to inform you personally of the situation,’ he declared. The cloying smile had disappeared. After a brief pause, he continued in an official tone, ‘Next week the departmental committee is meeting. I intend to set out your case there to see whether all together we can find a solution, not for this semester, of course, but maybe for the next or for next year. I can’t promise you I’ll manage it, but of course we’re going to make an effort. For my part, I’m already working on it.’ He paused, cleared his throat again and leaned back in his chair. ‘On the other hand, and this is closely linked to what I’ve just said, I suppose you’re as aware, if not more so, as the rest of the staff, of the effort I’ve been putting into raising the level of this department since I took charge of it. I don’t think I’m talking nonsense if I imagine that everyone is committed to the same goal: it is most definitively to convert the department into a centre of excellence, and that cannot but benefit us all. But, of course, applying for budget increases to enable us to contract new professors is not enough, we also have to be much more demanding of those who are already here, starting with ourselves. And, as I’m ready to see that all these good intentions translate into practical measures, I’m going to put to the committee a new project of departmental regulation. If I’m not mistaken, there should be nothing standing in the way of its approval. The idea behind this new regulation, in substance, is that we fulfil more rigorously what up till now hasn’t been worth the paper it’s written on; that is: the contract of a professor who has not demonstrated the level of intellectual and professional competence the department considers adequate will not be renewed. I know such measures can seem threatening; in reality they’re only intended as a stimulus to everyone. Now then, Mario,’ Scanlan went on, clearly making an effort to adopt a less impersonal or more urgent tone, ‘your contract, if I’m not mistaken, expires in June. I imagine that the committee will meet in the spring. Which leaves you six months, more than enough time to prepare something or finish polishing something up that you’ve been working on all this time: three years is a long time not to have published anything at all. And I must insist this is not a threat, Mario, I’m just stating facts; take it rather as advice from a friend who appreciates you. Work, Mario, get something prepared, anything, and send if off to some journal or present it at some conference, and that’ll be that. Either way, write something, and quickly: I have to tell you that otherwise it’ll not be easy for me to stand up for you to the committee.’

XVI

Branstyne came to pick him up at seven. They took Lincoln Avenue, turned left on University and carried on towards the suburbs north of the city. They barely spoke during the drive. They parked in front of Branstyne’s house, a single-storey building, with white walls, big windows, a smooth green roof, crowned with two chimneys (one very small and metal, the other larger, rectangular and made of stone), above which swayed a willow. A gravel path across the garden led to the garage, whose silhouette stood out against a dense mass of vegetation.

They went into the dining room. From the kitchen they could hear the clinking of glasses, cutlery and saucepans, as well as a delicate smell of pasta. Tina soon appeared wrapped in a brown apron, her hair dishevelled, her smile radiant. Mario thought she looked lovely. They kissed hello.

‘Dinner will be ready in a minute,’ said Tina. Looking at Mario with shining eyes she added, ‘It’s going to be absolutely delicious.’ And she went back into the kitchen.

‘We’ve got time for a drink,’ said Branstyne. ‘What would you like?’

‘A dry Martini,’ answered Mario.

Branstyne prepared two dry Martinis with ice. He handed one to Mario and sat in an armchair, facing him.

‘So, how’s the situation, then?’ he asked as if picking up a recently interrupted conversation where they had left off.

‘What situation?’

‘Your position in the department.’

Mario was annoyed by Branstyne’s brusqueness, by the way he’d almost rushed to raise the issue, as if he’d only been invited to dinner to talk about it. What for? he wondered, in confusion.

‘Bad,’ Mario admitted, suddenly feeling like talking. ‘How would you expect it to be? In reality things couldn’t be any worse since Berkowickz arrived.’ And as he said this he was also thinking it for the first time.

‘What’s Berkowickz got to do with it?’

‘He’s practically fired me,’ said Mario as if to himself, without intending to answer Branstyne’s question.

‘Berkowickz fired you?’

‘No,’ said Mario, returning to the conversation. ‘Scanlan. I spoke to him this morning: now I know that in June they won’t renew my contract.’

‘That can’t be,’ Branstyne declared with conviction. ‘Those kinds of things are decided by the committee, and the committee can’t rescind a contract just like that. They’d have to wait at least until Christmas.’

‘Whether at Christmas or in the spring, it doesn’t matter,’ said Mario. ‘The main thing is the decision’s been made. Scanlan dominates the committee, and it’ll do what Scanlan wants. Today he told me I’m a mediocrity, that I don’t publish enough, basically, that I don’t measure up. He called me in to humiliate me, Branstyne, and also to cover his back, to be able to fire me with impunity, almost with a clear conscience. . What gets me is that he’s such a cynic’

‘It’s his job.’

‘To be a cynic?’

‘To make the department function according to regulations.’

‘And for that he has to fire me?’

‘For that he has to make sure those regulations are respected.’

‘Now you’re starting to sound like him.’

There was a silence.

‘Everything’ll work out,’ said Branstyne at last, in a conciliatory tone.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Branstyne,’ said Mario, no longer repressing the fury pounding in his temples. ‘Nothing’s going to work out here because there’s nothing to work out. At this point I’ll be happy just to make it to June without them cutting my salary again.’

Tina came into the dining room, made herself a Martini and went to sit on an arm of the chair where Branstyne had fallen silent. Since the silence persisted, Tina asked, ‘What were you talking about?’

‘A mutual friend,’ answered Mario. ‘Daniel Berkowickz. Since he arrived here the whole world’s been smiling on me. First it was my ankle, and from then on it hasn’t stopped. I used to be paid a salary; now I get a third of a salary. I used to think I had a secure job; now I know I won’t last long in it. I used to have an office; now I’ve got a sort of stable that can only be called an office so as not to offend the Chinaman and the nutcase I share it with.’ He paused. He looked at his Martini, the pieces of ice floating in the liquid. He added, ‘I also used to have a girlfriend.’

‘But it was just as if you didn’t,’ said Tina softly. ‘You never paid her any attention.’

Mario didn’t say anything; he kept his gaze fixed on his glass, swirling it gently to move the ice around. Branstyne, sunk ever deeper into his armchair, seemed unwilling to emerge from the silence in which he’d enclosed himself. Tina drank a sip of her Martini without taking her eyes off Mario. She asked, ‘What’s happened with Ginger?’

‘I suppose she got fed up,’ said Mario. ‘The truth is she didn’t give me much explanation.’

‘And don’t tell me you’ve decided to fall in love with her now.’

‘I probably already was before,’ Mario ventured, raising his eyes and looking at Tina with a malicious or ironic expression that she didn’t understand. ‘Only I didn’t know it.’

Tina stood up from the arm of the chair and went to sit down on the sofa, beside Mario’s armchair.

‘Look, Mario,’ she began in possibly an admonishing tone. ‘Forgive me for being direct, but someone has to be with you. What you’re saying is fine for someone under twenty years of age. After that it’s pathetic, if not worse. Only adolescents and idiots insist on wanting what they don’t have and not wanting what they have. Only adolescents and idiots are incapable of appreciating something until they’ve lost it.’ She stopped for a moment; then she went on. ‘You know perfectly well you made Ginger suffer terribly. What she’s done is only sensible: I confess in her place I would have done the same thing myself, except much sooner.’

‘You seem to think people are conspiring against you or something,’ Branstyne intervened in support of Tina, sitting up a little in his armchair and crossing his legs. ‘It’s ridiculous. Tina’s right: only a teenager thinks things like that. As for Berkowickz, I’ll tell you one thing: he does appreciate you. As for the rest (and I’m telling you this because I appreciate you as well), you should follow his example, but not just from the academic point of view: Berkowickz is a lively, energetic, enterprising guy who knows how to see the good side of things and get the best out of them. I’m being sincere: I’m delighted that he’s here, it’s as if a breath of fresh air has come into the department. And as for Scanlan, you already know my opinion: he’s only trying to do the job he’s taken on to the best of his abilities. Scanlan’s the boss and he has the right to raise the level of the department; everyone would be harmed if he didn’t. That’s the way things are, Mario,’ Branstyne concluded emphatically, ‘and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

Mario contained the urge to leave. He gulped down the last of his Martini. For a moment he thought he was appearing before a tribunal that couldn’t or didn’t want to tell him what he was accused of. He thought: Just like a nightmare.

‘In any case,’ Branstyne continued, perhaps made impatient by Mario’s silence, ‘I don’t think the situation’s all that serious, at least not yet. What you have to do is buckle down, Mario, get to work. Tell me: how long’s it been since you published something? A year, two, three?’

‘Three years,’ said Mario. ‘Three years and two months, to be precise.’

‘Three years,’ Branstyne repeated, shrugging his shoulders and looking at Tina. He turned back to Mario. ‘Frankly, I don’t understand how you can complain about Scanlan. What you should do instead is get something together and try to publish it somewhere.’

‘I don’t have anything ready,’ Mario admitted.

‘The Association Conference isn’t till January,’ said Branstyne. ‘You’ve still got four months: more than enough time. And whoever gives a paper at the Association Conference can speak anywhere else. It’s just a question of goodwill, Mario, of making a gesture. I’m sure that if you do Scanlan will find a solution; the only thing he’s asking is that you give him a reason to look for one.’

Tina stood up and went to the kitchen. After a moment she returned and sat back down on the sofa.

‘Mario,’ said Tina to break the silence. ‘We’re all trying to help you.’

Mario talked very little during dinner; he barely ate, he was a bundle of nerves and his throat felt restricted. Branstyne regarded him with a mixture of compassion and affection. Tina kept the conversation going: she talked about mutual friends, Italy, a grant the biology department had given her, their vacation.

At the end of the meal Mario complimented Tina on her fettuccini. He also promised to come back again another day.

Branstyne dropped him off in front of his house at ten.

‘I can’t pick you up tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a morning class and I’ve got a few things to do around the house: you know how it is, having a family is like running a small business.’

Mario nodded. He said, ‘Don’t worry. The bus stops right there.’

He opened the door to get out, then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around: Branstyne was saying goodbye in a way that said, ‘Come on, we’re all trying to help you.’ Mario held back a violent urge to punch him in the face.

When Branstyne’s car turned the corner, Mario lit a cigarette and walked down West Oregon with faltering steps, leaning on the crutch. It was hot, humid and clammy; the bulbs of the street lights, filthy with mosquito corpses, spread a weak, yellowish light over the pavement. He got to Race, turned left and headed towards Lincoln Square. He went into the Embassy.

It was a small bar, dark and narrow, the walls and floors covered in wood. On the right a succession of wooden tables traversed the room, bathed in the light from the lamps that hung above each one. The bar stretched along the left with metal and wood stools that grew out of the floor like mushrooms. Behind the bar a mirror reproduced the smoky atmosphere of the bar, almost deserted at this hour. A young couple were talking at one of the tables near the door, several husky-looking men were throwing darts at a board, another two men were drinking at the bar, alone.

Mario leaned the crutch against the bar, sat on a stool and ordered a whisky. When it arrived he lit a cigarette. At twelve-thirty, after three whiskies and half a pack of Marlboros, he noticed there was no one else left in the bar, except the bartender. He paid and left.

When he got back to his building he saw a light on in Berkowickz’s apartment. He went carefully up the stairs, making sure they didn’t creak. He paused on the landing, listened closely, held his breath: he heard music, and voices he didn’t recognise.

When he got into bed he realized he was drunk.

XVII

The next day he woke up with a dry mouth, his temples pierced by a slight stab of pain. He swallowed two aspirins with a glass of orange juice, shaved, showered with his left foot wrapped in a plastic bag and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast.

He left the apartment. As he was turning the key he heard the door of the apartment opposite open. He turned around: astonished, without understanding at first, he faced Berkowickz and Ginger. They smiled. They said good morning, exclaimed over the encounter with a disproportionate effusion that at first struck Mario as malevolent, later as simply unthinking. Flustered, he stammered something. Berkowickz kept talking as the three of them went down the stairs. They stopped on the porch.

‘Are you going to the department?’ asked Ginger. Her mouth had frozen into a perfect smile. ‘If you want we could give you a lift.’

Mario looked at her with incredulous eyes, almost agonising behind the lenses of his glasses. Ginger didn’t register, or didn’t want to register, Mario’s look, and might have repeated the offer, because he replied, ‘No need.’ Then he lied. ‘Branstyne’s going to pass by to pick me up in a minute.’

Berkowickz took advantage of the silence Mario’s answer had opened up to lament amiably that, despite being neighbours, they still hadn’t found a moment for a quiet chat. ‘I have an idea,’ he said, passing a possessive arm along Ginger’s neck and resting it on her left shoulder. ‘Why don’t you come by my apartment this evening and we’ll have a drink together?’

Mario clumsily looked for an excuse to turn down the invitation. He didn’t have time to find one.

‘OK,’ said Berkowickz, undoubtedly thinking that by saying nothing Mario was consenting. ‘Come by whenever you like: I’ll be home all evening.’

‘See you later, Mario,’ said Ginger, still smiling. ‘We’ll see you at the office.’

He watched them walk hand in hand to Berkowickz’s car. Trying not to think about what he’d just seen, he noticed it had rained overnight: the air was clean and smelled of damp earth, the nine o’clock sun, encrusted in a pure cloudless sky, twinkled on the lawn. Berkowickz and Ginger turned back to wave to him, their hands reaching out of the car windows, as they drove down West Oregon.

Mario took the bus, went into Lincoln Hall, gave his lecture, crossed the Quad, got to the department, picked up his mail, said hello to Joyce, to Wojcik, to Hyun, talked for a while with Olalde, caught the bus again, had lunch and then a nap. None of these activities, however, managed to stimulate his brain enough to stop ruminating over his meeting with Ginger and Berkowickz, nor the engagement, for that very evening, he had with the latter. The first event was easy enough to interpret: since it was now irreversible, he tried to forget it (he couldn’t: Ginger’s smile floated on the lips of the red-headed student, on Joyce’s, on Wojcik’s and Hyun’s, on Olalde’s). Not so the second: in a confusing way he sensed that Berkowickz, perhaps unconsciously, was offering him an opportunity he shouldn’t waste. An opportunity for what? he wondered.

He tried to reflect in an orderly fashion.

Should he show up? He guessed that Berkowickz wanted to talk to him about Ginger, or about the relationship that, to judge from the scene he’d witnessed that morning, linked them or was beginning to link him to her, or about what Ginger had told Berkowickz about him, or about all those things at once. He discarded the idea: he hadn’t noticed the slightest sign of concern or vexation in Berkowickz’s attitude when surprised with Ginger this morning on the landing, nor when saying goodbye to him. Furthermore, if he had any knowledge of the bond that up till then had linked Mario to Ginger — which seemed fairly improbable — it was almost certain he’d prefer to forget it or, more reasonably, that it held no interest for him. At other moments (walking into Lincoln Hall, during class, while crossing the Quad) he envisioned the possibility that Branstyne might have told Berkowickz or insinuated that he, Mario, absurdly attributed the whirlwind of misfortunes that had befallen him to Berkowickz’s presence. Berkowickz would have felt somehow responsible, and perhaps wanted to give him some explanation, or simply make it up to him, gain his sympathy. He also discarded this hypothesis: Either I don’t know how the world works, he thought, or guys like Berkowickz don’t know the meaning of guilt. On the other hand, what interest could the new tenant have in winning his friendship, if he can’t even imagine him as a potential enemy. .? Later he thought that Berkowickz wanted to crush him definitively, humiliating him with an exhibition of curriculum vitae and amiability, intellectual energy and exuberant vitality.

After his nap he tried once again to put his ideas in order. He reconsidered the hypotheses he’d formulated, ventured some more. They all led to a curious operation: each of the motives he managed to ascribe to Berkowickz’s thinking in arranging the meeting metamorphosed into another set of reasons not to go. This led him not to discard the possibility, which at one point had seemed remote, that Berkowickz, just as he’d declared on the porch, wanted to get to know him, to talk to him: after all, it was true they had not yet had a chance to exchange opinions. In any case, he concluded, with a resolution not exempt from satisfaction at the implacable logical rigour with which he’d linked his ideas, what’s sure is that, if I don’t show up, Berkowickz is going to think I don’t dare confront him alone.

Just after eight he knocked on the door of the apartment across the hall. Berkowickz took a while to open. When he did (wearing dun-coloured drill trousers, a T-shirt scribbled with signatures of famous artists and an anagram of the Art Institute of Chicago, canvas espadrilles, in his left hand a folded newspaper), Mario realized from the look in his eyes that he’d forgotten the arrangement. Perhaps to hide this fact, or just as a greeting, Berkowickz smiled excessively.

‘Come in, Mario, come in,’ he said, making room for him to pass through. He admitted straight away, ‘The truth is I’d forgotten we were getting together. With so many things to do my head gets muddled. But it doesn’t matter. .’

Berkowickz kept talking. Mario wasn’t listening to him: as soon as he entered the apartment he was overtaken by a visceral discomfort that translated into a kind of vertigo, something like a hollow in his stomach. He sat down on a sofa leaving the crutch on one side. Berkowickz handed him a glass of whisky he didn’t remember asking for; he held it weakly and squirmed on the sofa. He saw his host gesticulating, smiling and arching his brows, but he was unable to concentrate on what he was saying: Berkowickz’s words slid through his ears without leaving any trace whatsoever. He rubbed his eyes, the bridge of his nose, his forehead. Only then did he begin to recognize the pale wood, the metal chairs, the vaguely cubist paintings, the advertisement for a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in a gallery in Turin; he recognized the television beside him, the record player, the double-decker transparent table, the Hockney reproduction hanging from a hook on the wall, the cream-coloured sofa he was sitting on, the two armchairs of the same colour. He recognized the minute cluster of things that packed the glass cabinet: the Algerian pipe, the antique pistols and the hourglass, the frigate imprisoned in the Chianti bottle, the clay figures, the marble elephant.

A chill shot up his back.

Bewildered, abruptly gullible, he realised that Berkowickz’s apartment was an exact, though inverted, replica of his own: the perverse reflection of it in an atrocious mirror. He was frightened: he felt his hands drenched in sweat; his heart pounded wildly in his throat. He tried to control his nerves, to pull himself together. To tackle the situation, he constructed a phrase: ‘Bravery does not consist in not being afraid: that’s called temerity. Bravery consists in being afraid, struggling against it and winning.’ Comforted and strengthened by this reflection, he forced himself to listen to the monologue that Berkowickz, sitting in the armchair in front of him, continued delivering amid gesticulations. At some moment, hazily, he thought he understood that Berkowickz was setting out a problem related to the configuration of the syllable in Italian. Mario nodded in agreement. After a while he realized he couldn’t take any more: with the excuse of a sudden headache, he stood up from the sofa without looking at Berkowickz (on the table, the glass of whisky remained untouched) and headed for the door.

‘Here: read this when you have a moment,’ he heard Berkowickz say with an impeccable smile, thrusting a sheaf of photocopied pages into his hand. ‘If you like, we can talk it over some other time.’ Then, resting a fraternal hand on Mario’s shoulder, he added, ‘And take care of that headache: sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

When he lifted the telephone receiver he noticed his hands were trembling; it took him several attempts to dial the number.

‘Mrs Workman? This is Mario Rota.’

‘What do you want?’ Mrs Workman’s voice sounded deep, drenched in sleep.

‘I’m calling about the new tenant.’

‘What about the new tenant?’

Mario answered with a thread of a voice: ‘He has the same furniture as me.’

There was a silence.

‘Mrs Workman?’ Mario enquired. ‘Are you there?’

‘Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to call me at this hour to tell me such a thing?’ mumbled Mrs Workman as if talking to herself.

‘Pardon?’

‘Don’t you think it’s a little late to be phoning me?’ said Mrs Workman in a friendly tone. She continued in a tone of gentle scolding: ‘I believe I’ve told you many times that I go to bed very early, to try to call me at reasonable times. Or have you been drinking?’

‘No, Mrs Workman, I assure you I haven’t,’ Mario hurriedly swore, his voice shrunken with anguish. ‘But it’s horrible, can’t you see? Berkowickz has the same pictures as I do, the same sofa, the same armchairs, everything the same.’

‘And what do you want me to tell you?’ the old woman croaked in annoyance. ‘He must have the same taste as you, which would be a shame. Or you bought them at the same place. What do I know, man, how should I know?’

‘But it’s that they’re exactly the same,’ Mario almost shouted. Immediately he begged, ‘Mrs Workman, something must be done.’

‘That’s for sure,’ answered Mrs Workman. ‘Get into bed and sleep it off.’

XVIII

During the night he woke up several times bathed in sweat, the sheets twisted. One time he imagined he’d just dreamed the visit he’d made the previous evening to Berkowickz’s apartment; another time, as he smoked a cigarette of insomnia looking out the window of his study (outside the bulbs of the street lamps projected a weak light over the street), he wished vehemently for that whole week to have been a nightmare. At some point he managed to get to sleep, comforted by the hope that the next day everything would be different.

The next day he woke up with the certainty that nothing was going to be different. It was seven in the morning; filtering through the curtains, the skeletal light of dawn lit up the room. Although overwhelmed by the prospect (a Saturday without a single activity to occupy his time), he got up immediately, shaved and showered, and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. He tried to banish from his mind the ominous proximity of Berkowickz’s apartment, on the other side of the landing. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. Morbidly he leafed through the sheaf of photocopies that Berkowickz had given him the day before: it was an article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz. He left the sheaf of photocopies on the sofa and went to his study where he spent a while putting papers in order. By nine-thirty he didn’t know what to do with himself any more. If only I could at least go out for a run, he thought, lighting a cigarette. That was when he remembered that it had been almost a week since they bandaged his ankle. He remembered the doctor’s words: ‘Come back in a week.’ He called a taxi and, while he waited for it on the porch, he was happy to have found something to occupy the morning. He was also happy at the mere possibility of getting rid of the bandage, crutch and limp that had been humiliating him all week.

The taxi stopped on the expanse of pavement surrounded by grass where Mario had parked his car the previous week: the old second-hand Buick was still there; Mario felt a sort of tenderness towards it.

He went into the hospital. At the end of the corridor with very white walls he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy hands was entrenched. Mario recognized her. Leaning his crutch and his elbows on the counter, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone she turned to Mario and handed him a form.

‘I don’t know if you recognize me,’ said Mario, smiling, because he was sure the nurse recognized him and could perhaps save him the paperwork. ‘I was here last week and —’

‘Be so kind as to fill in the form,’ the nurse parried curtly. Then she added in a quieter voice, ‘That’d be great if I had to remember everyone who came through here.’

Mario filled in the form, handed it back to the nurse. She pointed him towards the row of chairs opposite the counter and asked him to wait. Mario sat down in a chair and set down in the one beside it a bag in which he’d taken the precaution of putting the shoe and sock that matched the ones he was wearing on his right foot. He leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. On a couple of occasions he noticed distractedly that the nurse was leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He heard her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. Almost in disgust, he thought: There’s no getting away from him. He again felt a ball of anguish in his throat; his hands sweated again. Then he thought that since he’d entered the hospital he hadn’t seen anyone except the crimson-faced nurse: no doctors, no patients, no other nurses. He shuddered. Absurdly, he thought of going home and taking the bandage off himself. An instant later he heard a nurse, at the other end of the foyer, calling him by his name and motioning him to follow her.

They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room; she removed the bandage from his ankle and examined it. Under the oblique light that illuminated them, Mario noticed the thick shadow that soiled the nurse’s upper lip; he realized she was the same one who had attended him the week before. He sat up a little, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her anxiously, as if searching for a sign of recognition in her eyes. The nurse smiled coldly. She said, ‘The doctor will see you straight away.’

After a moment the doctor came in: pale, Oriental, small, nervous. Mario was no longer surprised that it was the same doctor as the previous week. He lay back down on the table while he felt the pressure of investigating fingers on various parts of his foot. He tried to relax, not to think of anything. Bent over Mario’s ankle, the doctor squinted; his eyes thinned into slots.

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the doctor, gently squeezing his instep.

Mario sat up again: he noticed that the swelling around his ankle had completely disappeared. The yellow pallor and stains of dirt that darkened his skin revealed the recent presence of the bandage. The nurse watched them smilingly from a discreet distance.

‘Does it hurt?’ the doctor repeated.

‘No,’ Mario assured him. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

‘Hmm,’ murmured the doctor.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘The ankle is fine,’ the doctor said, straightening up and looking at Mario: the two slots turned back into two green ovals. He smiled, walked over to the sink that was on the other side of the room and washed his hands.

‘Completely?’ asked Mario.

‘Completely,’ the doctor answered, turning around as he dried his hands on a towel.

Perhaps stupidly, Mario asked, ‘Could I go out for a run tomorrow?’

The doctor looked him in the eye again, this time maliciously. Then he looked down to his dirty, naked ankle against the white of the sheets.

‘You could,’ he ventured. ‘But it might be better to leave it till Monday.’

In a rush, wanting to get out of the hospital as soon as possible, Mario washed his foot before the nurse’s immutable smile, and put on his sock and shoe. He crossed the foyer accompanied by the nurse, walked down the corridor and reached the door. When he was about to leave, the woman stopped him by grabbing his arm. She looked up and down the corridor, stared at Mario in a strange way, and smiled.

‘I recognized you,’ she whispered. ‘I knew you’d be back.’

Before the nurse approached to kiss him, Mario thought: Now I’ll wake up.

XIX

Mario went out for a run at eight o’clock on Monday morning. He immediately noticed the street was suffused in a halo of mist: the houses opposite, the cars parked by the sidewalk and the globes of light from the street lamps seemed to shimmer with an unstable and hazy existence. Trying not to strain his ankle, he did a few arm and leg stretches on the tiny rectangle of lawn in front of the house and thought: Fall’s here already. Then he remembered something; he almost smiled. He went back inside and came out again a moment later, this time with his glasses on. The mist having dissolved, Mario began to run along the path of greyish flagstones between the road and the meticulous gardens, enclosed by flowerbeds and wooden fences aligned in front of the houses. At first he ran with care, almost fear, barely putting any weight on his left foot; then, as he noticed his ankle wasn’t suffering, he quickened his pace.

The streets were deserted. The only person he saw during the first five minutes of his run was a young woman crouched down beside an anemone bush in the back garden of the First Church of Christ Scientist, as he was turning right on McCollough. The girl turned: she bared her teeth in a devout smile. Mario felt obliged to return the greeting: he smiled. Later, by then on Pennsylvania, he crossed paths with a grey-haired man in shorts and a black T-shirt, who was jogging in the opposite direction. The man’s expression seemed concentrated on a buzzing emitted from two earphones fed from a cassette player strapped to his waist. After that came a postal truck, an old, bandy-legged black man, who supported his decrepit steps with a wooden walking stick, a young woman with diligent Oriental features, a family having a boisterous breakfast on the front porch, complete with laughter and parental warnings. When, on the way home, he turned back on to West Oregon, the city seemed to have resumed its daily pulse.

That’s when he saw the bed of dahlias where he’d twisted his ankle last Monday. He didn’t think anything.

Panting, sweating and almost happy, he arrived home. He took a shower, made some breakfast (peach juice, scrambled eggs with bacon, toast, coffee with hot milk) and ate hungrily as he listened to the news on the radio. As he left the house he told himself that the physical exercise had done him good, banished his anxiety and perhaps the fear as well: he felt spirited.

At a quarter past nine he parked the Buick in front of the foreign languages building. He picked up his leather briefcase from the passenger seat on his right and went into the building. The hall was half empty: just a few young people, sprawling on the carpeted floor, leaning against the walls, studying or dozing while waiting for the next class.

He went up in the elevator alone. When he got to the main office of the department Branstyne and Swinczyc were speaking in low voices. They stopped talking as soon as they noticed Mario’s presence: they turned to him, said hello. After a few innocuous comments on the weather or the tedium of weekends (or maybe about the Conference of the Association of Linguists), to which he barely paid any attention, Mario got to his cubbyhole. He picked up an envelope, he opened it: Scanlan asked to speak to him right away. Resigned, he thought: This is it.

Since he didn’t see Joan, he knocked directly on Scanlan’s door.

‘Come in,’ he said.

Scanlan was sitting behind his desk; he didn’t stand up. With a gesture he indicated that Mario should sit down across from him. Mario sat down. The morning sunshine lit up the office: the white walls, the leather chairs, the desk covered in papers, the poster advertising a retrospective of the work of Botero, Scanlan’s eyes, dark and intelligent behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

Scanlan stroked his beard and blinked.

‘Well, Mario,’ he said softly. ‘I suppose you can give me an explanation.’

Mario looked him in the eye without understanding.

‘Of what?’ he asked.

Scanlan stared back for a moment, blinked again, sighed. Then he opened a drawer in his desk, took out a piece of paper and handed it to Mario. He read it: the students from the first and second sections of phonology informed the head of the department that the professor in charge of the courses had not shown up for any of the lectures since term began.

‘What do you want me to say?’ said Mario, handing the paper back to Scanlan and feeling a slight tingle of satisfaction in his stomach. ‘Ask Berkowickz.’

‘Who?’ asked Scanlan, wrinkling his brow slightly.

‘Berkowickz,’ Mario repeated. ‘He’s in charge of those two sections.’

‘Have you gone crazy, or what?’ bellowed Scanlan, beside himself, standing up and pounding on the desk. ‘Who the hell is Berkowickz, might I ask?’

Confused, not knowing what to answer, almost asking, Mario declared, ‘The new phonology professor.’

Scanlan stared at him incredulously.

‘Look, Mario,’ he said at last, containing the rage that was making his hands tremble, ‘I assure you that I can understand your attempts to shift the responsibility to someone else: it’s petty, but I can understand it. What I can’t get through my head is you taking me for an idiot. You really think I am, or what?’ He paused, took a deep breath, pointed at the door with an admonishing finger and added, ‘And now listen closely: if you don’t get out of my office this instant and go and teach those two classes, or if I receive one single further complaint about you, I swear I’ll tear up your contract right here and now and throw you out on the street. I hope I’ve made myself clear.’

Mario stood up and left the office. Scanlan stood staring at the door, visibly shaken. Then he sat down, stroked his beard gently, looked at the papers he had on his desk, signed a few of them. After a few minutes he raised his eyes and blinked. ‘Berkowickz,’ he murmured, staring off into space, abstracted. ‘Berkowickz.’

XX

Mario walked quickly down the corridor, without saying hello to anybody. He got to the office; with trembling hands he took out a bunch of keys, chose one, tried to open the door but couldn’t. He tried to stay calm; he looked for the key engraved with the number 4024, which corresponded to the number of the office, in vain: the key did not appear. He immediately noticed the door opening from within. Olalde’s hunchbacked silhouette stood out against the insufficient light of the office; he smiled with a grimace that ploughed his forehead with lines and allowed a glimpse of his nicotine-stained teeth.

‘This time you were lucky, young man,’ he said, still sneering. ‘But watch out: next time you might not be.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Mario said hastily, without thinking what he was saying, almost in fear.

‘You know perfectly well what I’m talking about,’ said Olalde. ‘But that’s your problem: you’re old enough to know what suits you. At least you’ll have realized that sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

Mario didn’t say anything; he walked back up the corridor. When he passed in front of Berkowickz’s office he stopped, scanned the corridor left and right, examined the bunch of keys, found the one engraved with the number 4043. He opened the door: he recognized the open books squashed on the desk and the shelves, the portable fridge, the cardboard boxes crammed with papers, the dirty ashtrays, the general disorder and closed-up smell; he understood that all his things were there.

He gave three lectures.

When he got home he dialled a telephone number.

‘Mrs Workman?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is Mario Rota,’ said Mario. ‘I’m calling about a delicate situation.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s about the new tenant.’

‘The new tenant,’ Mrs Workman repeated with a tired voice.

‘Mr Berkowickz, I mean.’

‘Mr Who?’

‘Berkowickz,’ repeated Mario. ‘Daniel Berkowickz. The linguistics professor, my colleague, the tenant who moved into Nancy’s old apartment.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m going to be frank with you, Mr Rota. I hope you won’t take it the wrong way,’ Mrs Workman said at last. ‘You know better than anyone that when Nancy spoke to me about your. . eccentricities, shall we call them, I chose to be tolerant. She acted like a good tenant should, and I’m not going to consent to you bothering her, not her or any of the rest of the tenants, as you certainly did me the other day calling me at an unreasonable hour, probably drunk.’

‘Mrs Workman —’

‘Don’t interrupt me,’ Mrs Workman interrupted him. ‘You were lucky I was half asleep and don’t really remember what you said. Or I probably don’t want to remember. Anyway, let me tell you something: I accept that you and Nancy don’t get along, you’ve had problems, but although I don’t blame you entirely, Nancy has been a tenant here longer than any other and has more right than you to stay here; furthermore, she’s never given me any reason to worry. I’d rather my tenants got along, but I assure you if I have one single further complaint about you or you start behaving strangely again I won’t have the slightest reservation about throwing you out.’

‘But Mrs Workman,’ Mario complained weakly. ‘It was you yourself who introduced me to Mr Berkowickz and —’

‘Look, Mr Rota,’ said Mrs Workman in a final-sounding tone of voice. ‘Stop talking nonsense. I don’t know who Mr Berkowickz is, nor do I care. I don’t want to discuss the matter further; it’s all been said. But I repeat for the last time: I hope I don’t have another complaint about you. And my advice to you is to give up drinking.’

Mrs Workman hung up. She went to the bathroom, washed her face and hands, looked in the mirror, put a bit of colour on her cheeks and lips, brushed her hair, then she dabbed a bit of perfume behind each earlobe. She returned to the room and picked up a beige handbag and a linen jacket that she put on in the kitchen as she took a last look around the house.

She drove out of the garage and took Ellis Avenue up to Green. At the intersection she stopped at the traffic lights. Then, as she waited abstractedly for the lights to change, she murmured, ‘Berkowickz.’

XXI

Sitting on the sofa in the dining room, Mario lit a cigarette; he inhaled the smoke contentedly. Then he dialled a telephone number.

‘Ginger?’ he said when a feminine voice answered. ‘It’s Mario.’

‘How are you, Mario?’ said Brenda. ‘Ginger hasn’t come home yet. Do you want me to give her a message?’

Mario hesitated, then he said, ‘Tell her I called and that. .’

‘Oh, you’re in luck,’ said Brenda. ‘Ginger’s just coming in. I’ll put her on, Mario. See you.’

Mario heard an indistinct murmur down the line.

‘Mario?’ said Ginger a moment later. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ said Mario. ‘I was just wondering if you were doing anything this evening.’

‘Nothing special,’ said Ginger. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mario. ‘I thought you might like to come over here for a bite to eat.’

‘Sounds like a great idea,’ said Ginger. ‘What time do you want me to come over?’

‘Whenever suits you,’ said Mario. ‘Right now, if you want.’

‘I’ll be right over,’ said Ginger. And hung up.

Mario took a last puff of his cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. He looked at all the books and papers in a disorderly pile on the arm of the sofa; he thought about sorting them out, taking them through to the study to fill the time till Ginger arrived.

Then he got an idea. He stood up and stealthily opened the apartment door; he crossed the landing. Pressing his ear to the door opposite, he held his breath, listened in silence.

‘I’ve had it up to here with you, you Italian pig!’ he heard thundering behind his back. ‘Up to here!’

Weighed down with shopping, Nancy dragged the mass of her body up the stairs laboriously. Mario held out his hands, apologized clumsily while retreating into his apartment, then offered to help Nancy with her bags.

‘You little turd,’ answered Nancy, dropping her packages on the floor. She breathed heavily as she hunted around in a pocket of her very ample dress that in vain sought to sow confusion with respect to the true dimensions of what it hid. She took out a bunch of keys, adding, ‘That’s far enough, you Italian swine. I’m phoning the old lady right now.’

‘No, Nancy, please,’ begged Mario, stepping towards her, his arms outstretched in an almost imploring manner. ‘Not Mrs Workman.’

Nancy had opened the door. She turned to confront Mario: he noticed the drops of sweat pearling on the woman’s brow.

‘But what the fuck were you doing there?’

‘The new tenant,’ Mario mumbled. ‘I just wanted to see if Berkowickz. . was. . um.’

Mario smiled without finishing his sentence. Nancy regarded him with resignation, almost with pity.

‘You’re not just a pig,’ she diagnosed, shaking her head gently from left to right. ‘You’re also going crazy.’

Nancy slammed the door. Mario returned to his apartment, closing the door softly.

After a short time Ginger arrived. She was wearing a blue sweater with red buttons, a black miniskirt and slightly worn black shoes; her eyes shone. Mario thought: She looks lovely. They sat down on the sofa in the dining room. Mario offered a whisky. Ginger accepted. Mario poured whisky over ice in two glasses in the kitchen and went back into the dining room.

They talked animatedly, laughing and drinking.

‘I’m pleased,’ said Ginger at one point, after a silence, looking at Mario with serious, blue, love-struck eyes.

‘What about?’ asked Mario, sipping his whisky.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ginger. She smiled weakly. She added, ‘You’ve been so strange this week.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Mario.

There was a silence.

‘I thought we were through,’ declared Ginger after a while.

‘Me too,’ said Mario.

He set his glass of whisky down on the floor, he moved closer to her, put his arm around her neck, stroked the nape of her neck and her hair, kissed her softly on the lips. Lengthening the kiss they slid over to rest against the right arm of the sofa, and laughed as they heard the books and papers heaped there fall on to the floor: an Italian — German dictionary, outlines for lectures, notes, a phonology manual and a photocopied article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz.