Two streets on, Perlmann saw an unprepossessing sign: trattoria. He parted the glass-bead curtain, walked down the long, gloomy corridor and suddenly found himself in a bright, glass-roofed internal courtyard with dining tables covered by red-and-white checked tablecloths. The room was empty, and Perlmann had to call twice before the proprietor arrived wearing an apron. They themselves had just eaten, he said genially, but Perlmann could still have a minestrone and a plate of pasta. Then, when he brought the food, his wife and daughter appeared as well. Perlmann was itching to read the chronicle, but the family was curious to find out about the man with the big book who plainly lived against the grain of the daily rhythm. In return for their hospitality at such an unusual time, Perlmann told them about the research group. Investigating languages, that was interesting, they thought, and he had to tell them more and more. Sandra in particular, the thirteen-year-old daughter with the long, pitch-black hair, asked question after question, and her parents were visibly proud to have a daughter with such a thirst for knowledge. Talking about these subjects went amazingly well given his poor Italian. Perlmann was pleased with every successful turn of phrase that he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of, and this delight at his linguistic success, along with the desire not to disappoint Sandra made him draw a positive, almost enthusiastic picture of what they were doing over at the hotel, which was grotesquely at odds with his internal misery. When the proprietor and his family finally withdrew to leave him to read, in their eyes he was an enviable man who was lucky enough to do exactly what interested him most; the rare case, then, of a man who lived in perfect harmony with himself.
Perlmann opened the book at the year of his high-school graduation. The first controlled nuclear fusion. A come-back for De Gaulle. Boris Pasternak forced to give back the Nobel Prize. There had been elections in Italy. Pope Pius XII had died. The Torre Velasca in Milan had been completed. The Bishop of Prato, who had insulted a couple as pubblici concubini and pubblici peccatori because they had refused a church wedding, was accused of slander before a court, fined and later, after a rebellion of the church, absolved on the grounds of insindacabilità dell’atto.
Perlmann read with his eyes aflame. The texts weren’t demanding, and by and large his Italian was up to the task. The whole thing was written in a sensational style and had a tabloid whiff about it, but that didn’t bother him. He actually enjoyed it, and the fact that the selection of events was made from the Italian perspective gave the affair an exotic charm. He was boundlessly surprised by his fascination, when he read, for example, that the Hungarian uprising, which had been a great embarrassment to the Italian Communists two years previously, had not lost the Party any votes in the elections. He couldn’t understand why he asked Sandra to bring him one espresso after another, while smoking like a chimney. But he enjoyed surprising himself by making an unexpected discovery about himself, which, he felt vaguely, could be the start of something.
The sky over the glass roof was almost black by now, and the ships’ lanterns on the walls had been lit for a long time when Perlmann left. On a momentary whim he asked the proprietor to keep the chronicle for him; he would come back to go on reading. As he walked through the quiet alleys to the port, Perlmann had the feeling of having found a place or refuge to which he could retreat when the world of the hotel, of the group, threatened to crush him. And he felt a furtive joy at the thought that none of the others would ever find out about this refuge. But as he was walking along the harbor jetty and turned into the shore road on which the hotel stood, those feelings quickly seeped away, even though he paused several times and tried, eyes closed, to stop them. And when he stood by the front steps and looked up at the name of the hotel, written in white neon letters on a gleaming blue background, his bad conscience at having frittered away half a day superimposed itself over everything else.
The two texts by Millar which Signora Morelli handed him were a shock. The one that Perlmann had stuffed into the offprints cupboard at home was fifty-nine pages long; the other one sixty-five, with seven pages of notes. When he was flicking through it in the elevator, the last remainder of freedom that he had experienced in the trattoria fled. What remained was a leaden weariness and the sense that it would take him hours to read so much as a single page.
In his room he set the papers aside. There wasn’t much time left before dinner. He picked up Leskov’s text and wrote down the unfamiliar words that he had looked up so far in his vocabulary book. Several times he paused and stared in cheerful amazement at his Russian handwriting. It was a little clumsy, but correct, and it was Russian without a doubt. The annoying thing was that words appeared in the subsequent sentences that weren’t in his pocket dictionary. Nonetheless, he was by and large able to follow Leskov’s next step. Self-images, the text argued, were something quite different from the experienced contours of an internal world. Making an image of oneself was a process that required far more articulation than the inner perception, the inner exploration of contours of experience could provide on their own.
He had a nose for striking examples, this Vassily Leskov, and gradually Perlmann developed a feeling for the text. He liked its blunt, unembellished style and its laconic tone. As an author, he thought, Leskov was quite different, much more congenial than usual, and Perlmann noticed how the shapeless, pipe-smoking figure of his memory retreated behind another person who had no appearance, but a voice, and thus a clear and strong identity.
It was twenty to nine when he remembered dinner. He quickly changed, grabbed the shirt with the torn-off button and chose a wide tie to hide the spot. Giovanni at reception grinned when he saw him hurrying down the stairs. It was the grin of someone seeing a late school pupil dashing down an empty corridor to the classroom. Perlmann wanted to slap him, this clueless Italian with his bushy eyebrows and ridiculously long sideburns. The glance Perlmann gave him was so poisonous that Giovanni’s grin vanished for a moment.
He didn’t want a starter, he told the waiter before sitting down next to Silvestri who, plainly involved in a heated exchange with Brian Millar, had set his knife and fork down in a cross on his plate and lit a cigarette in the middle of the meal. Yes, he was saying, and absently blowing the smoke into Millar’s face, Franco Basaglia’s experiment in Görz must be deemed a failure. But that was still no proof that the traditional psychiatry of grilles and bolted doors could not be changed; and a malicious tone was entirely inappropriate. At any rate, Basaglia had displayed more sensitivity, commitment and courage than the whole psychiatric establishment, whose inertia was directly proportional to its lack of imagination.
‘Have you ever experienced what it’s like when someone bolts the door in front of your nose, even though you haven’t done anything, as if you’re in prison? Have you seen the big keys that are turned in the lock by the wardens with a noise that never seems to stop echoing?’ Silvestri’s white hand with the cigarette trembled, and a bit of ash fell on the Swiss roll.