Holding a spray bottle of window cleaner, Marta treads cautiously into the living room in high-heeled cream pumps and nylons, a pencil skirt suit and a lace shawl-hopeless cleaning attire, but she has come directly from Mass. Ornella, who adopted her late husband's distaste for religion, insists that Marta clean every Sunday.
"How was God this morning?" Ornella asks. "Did he have anything nice to say about me?"
Marta smiles automatically, the window before her. It is not clear if she understands. Their common language is English, but Ornella's grasp of it, having used it at a thousand diplomats' dinners, is excellent, whereas Marta's is elementary. She hesitates in case her mistress plans further remarks. When none is forthcoming, she sprays the cleaning fluid in a blue mist that forms into beads on the pane; they hold briefly, then streak downward. She works faster than normal because her husband, Wojciech, is waiting downstairs, sitting on a park bench, leg hopping up and down, scratching dust with his dress shoe, dirtying the hem of his cheap gray suit, which Marta ironed that morning.
"A tribe in Rwanda killed hundreds of thousands of people belonging to another tribe in the past two weeks," Ornella says, slapping the article with the back of her hand. "How is it possible to destroy so many humans so fast? Even in practical terms, how? And why didn't the paper say anything about this when it was going on? Why only at the end?" She glances at Marta, who is wiping her way down the window. Ornella continues: "Lloyd Burko, in his piece, makes the point that it's not just the Africans. The Yugoslavians are as bad, and they're Europeans. Everyone's killing everyone else. Maybe it was better during the Cold War. You probably don't agree, Marta-you were right in it, weren't you. Being a Pole. But at least that war was cold. Listen to this: 'Peace is a state humanity will not tolerate. Man's instinct is to commit violence.' That's from Lloyd Burko's piece. Is that true? I can't believe it is."
Marta collects the remaining cleaning rags around the apartment, rinses them, wrings them out, stashes them under the kitchen sink. For the final task of her day, she carries the stepladder into the hall and climbs to the top rung to reach the storage space, which is crammed full of copies of the paper. Editions that Ornella has read are placed to the left; unread copies are on the right. Marta reaches for tomorrow's, April 24, 1994.
"No!" Ornella cries, clamping her hands to the stepladder. "I don't want that one yet. I'll ask you for it when I want it. I'm still on April twenty-third. I'll let you know, Marta. Don't just push ahead like that, assuming."
Marta descends the ladder and takes her pay-twenty euros-her head bowed, murmuring. She hastens out of the apartment, exhaling only when she is a full flight down the stairs.
Ornella snoops around to ensure that she has not been cheated of twenty euros: hallway, bedroom, en suite bathroom, study, dining room, kitchen, terrace, guest room, guest bathroom, living room. Marta is impeccable, as usual, and this doesn't especially please Ornella.
She seats herself on the sofa and clears her throat, blinks as if to sharpen her vision, and surveys the front page of April 23, 1994, the same front page she has been stuck on for three weeks. It is a day she cannot surmount. Tomorrow-April 24, 1994-is too hard to bear again.
She has read every copy of the paper since 1976, when her husband, Cosimo de Monterecchi, was posted to Riyadh. He, the Italian ambassador, traveled without restriction in Saudi Arabia. But she, as a woman, was effectively detained in a guarded zone for Westerners, while her two sons attended the international school all day. From boredom, she took to reading the paper, which in the late 1970s was one of the few foreign periodicals available in the kingdom. She had never learned the technique of newspaper reading, so took it in order like a book, down the columns, left to right, page after page. She read every article and refused to move on until she was done, which meant that each edition took several days to complete. Much was confusing at first. At night, she posed questions to Cosimo, initially basic ones like "Where is Upper Volta?" Later, her queries grew more complex, such as "If both the Chinese and the Russians are Communists, why do they disagree?" Until she was posing questions about the Palestinians' role in Jordanian affairs, infighting among apartheid opponents, and supply-side economics. Cosimo occasionally referred to an event that she hadn't reached yet, spoiling the surprise, so she gave him strict orders not to leak anything, even in passing. Thus began her slow drift from the present.
One year into her newspaper reading, she was six months behind. When they returned to Rome in the 1980s, she remained stranded in the late 1970s. When it was the 1990s outside, she was just getting to know President Reagan. When planes struck the Twin Towers, she was watching the Soviet Union collapse. Today, it is February 18, 2007, outside this apartment. Within, the date remains April 23, 1994.
These are her day's headlines: "Thousands Slain in Rwanda, Red Cross Fears;" "Mandela Set to Win South Africa Elections;" "After Suicide, 'Grunge' Star Cobain Viewed as Icon;" "Cold War Over, Hot War Begins." This last piece is a news analysis by the paper's Paris correspondent, Lloyd Burko, who reported on the siege of Sarajevo, and compares the slaughter in Yugoslavia to the recent massacres in Rwanda.
Ornella phones her eldest son, Dario, to complain about Marta. "She forgot to bring me down my paper for tomorrow," she tells him in Italian, which is the family language. "What am I going to do now?"
"Can't you get it yourself?"
Ornella flings up her arms, which tinkle with jewelry, and chops the air. "No," she says, "I cannot. You know I can't." What if she read a headline by mistake, something from 1996, or 2002? She doesn't ask Dario to come over, but repeats the problem until he volunteers.
She opens the front door and leans back slightly when he enters, as if to avoid a kiss, though none is offered. His six-year-old son, Massimiliano, trails in. "You're here too, Massi," she says, patting her grandson's head as if he were a rather pleasing spaniel, but a spaniel nonetheless.
Dario sets up the stepladder. She watches the tendons in his wrist flexing as he grips and shifts it into position-she wants to grab his arm and stop him. She can't look at April 24, 1994. No one but she seems to remember that day. She says softly, "Wait, wait."
He turns. "What for?"
"Shall I make us coffee first?"
"Not for me."
"What about the boy?" she says, though Massi is standing right there beside them. "Will he want something?"
"You can ask him-Massi?"
The child, instead of responding, walks away.
"Come with me to the living room," Ornella tells Dario, to delay him "I want to show you something." She hands him the paper of April 23, 1994. "This piece by Lloyd Burko. It's really worth reading."
He smiles. "I won't bother telling you that it's somewhat out of date." He turns the page. "So, what's happening today?" he says wryly, and reads out a few headlines. "God, I remember that."
She watches: Is he making fun of her? He considers me stupid. Well, I am, she thinks, burning at the insult. He looks over, about to speak, but she diverts her gaze fractionally above his sight line, as if reading the wrinkles on his forehead.
"Massi!" she calls out. "Where are you?"
He is all around the room, in the form of framed photographs. Portraits of him and Ornella's three other grandchildren stand on the table, on the mantelpiece, in the crystal cabinet. This is strange, since in person she recoils from the young-when handed a baby, she holds the child as if it were a squirming octopus. But not all the portraits are of kids. A few show her husband, Cosimo, at various postings around the world. He died more than a year ago, on November 17, 2005. Others show Ornella herself, when she was dashing, too thin and too young. (She was only sixteen at the time of her marriage to Cosimo.) She has a different face today, matted with peach foundation, orange lipstick, liner around her eyes, green mascara so thick that when she blinks one sees frog's fingers clasping. Her hair is yellow, dyed at great expense and pulled back in a bun so tight that the canvas of her face appears to be held fast by the knot at the back of her head.