Last year I read in the paper about an investment company under investigation for usury; its president was named Conti. I collected every possible article about the affair. Conti defended himself by saying he was the victim, maintaining that the magistrates were persecuting him because of his ties to a certain political faction. I was very interested in this Conti’s life for a short time: I followed him around and spied on him. A few months after I began trailing him, I witnessed his death in the parking lot of a mini-mall. But I’m not exactly sure that it was the same Conti, and I have no intention of asking my mother. And I’m not sure the subject interests me anymore.
The second time I saw my father cry was the night Fabio died.
A gray and rusty blockhouse next to a subdivision of little houses protected by hatred; long cars spilling out of garages built for families with lower incomes than this; and Pharaonic sidewalks never touched by human feet — sidewalks of asphalt (because around here, in the 1970s, asphalt was seen as wall-to-wall carpeting for the outdoors). It was a little factory, or a warehouse, built with blunt martial angles and bellicosities, reinforced cement and arrow slits, and maybe with skylights on the roof that couldn’t be seen from the street. There must still have been a watchman’s family living inexplicably in an annex, or the owners lived there, despairing of ever selling the place or renting it out — using it to store garden tools seemed like a waste, knocking it down would cost too much, and anyway, why? But they hadn’t lost faith in the future: they had procreated, and they hung out little blue jumpsuits with the other laundry in the courtyard — the kid will grow up with an idea of decayed greatness, and some corner of his mind will always have an image of the abandoned factory, the place where they never let him go play. Childhood memories: a big space that can be neither used nor demolished.
Just as I did the last time, I stop to spy on the factory; this time I do it to calm myself down, but it’s my tenth attempt to get calm: each attempt starts off well but ends quickly, leaving me even more agitated than before. At home, I spent an hour in front of the mirror trying to hide the fact that I couldn’t close my jacket anymore, and with all my fiddling and pressing on the button my mother had sewn, I think I made it stick out even farther: it looks like it’s about to pop off again; it seems bigger than the others. Looking at myself in the mirror, I pushed my spine farther and farther back, hunched over to bring the two sides of the jacket closer together, scrunched my arms up into the sleeves, and tried to flatten my stomach, but that was the hardest thing of all — it was impossible. When my hands were in my pockets and my arms tight against my body, I managed to give the impression (especially in profile) that the jacket could be closed. I look at myself now in the rearview mirror, and the interior light shows the true shape of my eyes — sad, unpleasant, framed pitilessly by the horizontal mirror; at home I didn’t feel I was so poorly built … my mouth and my nose might be okay, but my eyes do me in, together with the extra weight I’m carrying, which adds fat to my cheeks and under my chin.
But the very certainty that I’ve lost before I start impels me to turn the engine back on again and pushes me up the road; my headlights grab the blacktop and pull it in from the thick darkness of the hills, and then the road slides away under my wheels like the treadmill in a gym, and I toss the darkness over my shoulders the way a mole tosses back the earth he’s dug up, and then I pass under the brick arch at the entrance to the property and down into the dusty valley, under the dark, sad green trees, and then I remember that I should piss now to avoid asking to use the bathroom before dinner. I get out, walk around the car looking for some bushes, and decide to stand in front of the headlights — I don’t want to risk wetting my pants and my shoes and then show up at the house spattered with droplets. I piss right in the middle of the street, pleased by my stream sparkling in the light of the high beams.
When I came out of the tunnel of plane trees and arrived at the villa, I braked abruptly before a bundled-up figure who gestured that I should pull over to the side — I saw him only at the last minute and nearly ran him over. It was one of the groundskeepers, the gardener or the hunter (I didn’t remember anymore which one’s hair was shorter in the back, and which had the longer sideburns), and he was wearing — I realized as soon as I got out of the car — a dark green loden coat that was two or three sizes too big for him, buttoned up to his neck and reaching almost to his ankles. He welcomed me and said that my hosts were expecting me; his face was a stony mask, utterly normal. We did not go up the road to the knolclass="underline" instead he led me along the glass wall of the garage-greenhouse toward a little door half hidden by a climbing plant.
We entered the basement level of the house, and my guide halted uncertainly for a moment, as if he expected me to ask something and wanted to give me time to speak up. I had no intention of taking off my jacket, even though it looked dreadful. But he pointed to a small toilet where the door was ajar and the light was on and said, “If you’d like to wash your hands …” For a moment I thought this was what people did in truly elegant houses — that guests were always invited to wash their hands in the basement before going up to the main floor to sit at the table — but no, this was impossible. I didn’t want to irritate him, though, seeing that I’d treated him badly the first time we met (if it was actually he and not his brother), so I thanked him and washed my hands.
We go up two narrow flights of stairs and reach the entrance hall. I can’t square my impression of the exterior with the room that I’m in now. On the inside it’s clearly an old house, from the door frames, terra-cotta floor, and ceiling decorations to the antique furniture and the paintings in their gilded frames. I can give it only a quick glance, because a few steps take us to the threshold of a room where I can hear a fire crackling in the fireplace: we’re in the drawing room and standing in front of Rossi, who’s seated before the hearth in his wheelchair. This time he smiles at me immediately, and I smile back; he shakes my hand—“What a pleasure to see you again”—and invites me to sit in the small armchair next to him. Everything is carefully arranged at just the right distance, we’re at the same height, so that I don’t feel he’s towering over me (as I would if I were sunk into a lounge chair), or that I’m towering over him (as I would if I had chosen a stiff side chair). This skill in anticipating what the guest will do in order to put him at ease fills me with gratitude toward the master of the house, but then — I think immediately — on many occasions that same kind of consideration has gotten on my nerves and made me loathe other hosts. The fact is, I like Rossi; I like his wife, but I like him too, though in his case I don’t quite understand the reason why.
“It seemed like spring was here,” he says, “and instead the cold weather has come back.”
The weather, the climate, the rain and the sun, the hot and the cold, unseasonal oddities and seasonal suitability — whoever invented the idea of conversations about weather gave us a huge gift; what a blessing it is to be able to talk about the weather, that bottomless well of conversation … what a relief.
“You don’t find it chilly, with just your jacket? Would you like us to lend you a sweater?”
If I put on a sweater, I probably wouldn’t even be able to slide the jacket back on. “It’s strange,” I say. “I never got cold even before I grew this fat; I’ve never felt the cold …”
“Oh, come now, you’re not fat …”
I cross my legs and let myself slide down a bit in the armchair; I like the sound of his voice, I like the plaid blanket that covers his legs and makes him look like a peaceful passenger on a cruise along the Riviera. I listen to him talk about a scientific theory that links human endurance to memory: it says that any human being can tolerate the heat of the desert as well as the Tuaregs do, or the cold of a polar ice pack as well as the Eskimos do, as long as he has a mental image, a memory of himself in a certain situation; he has to persuade himself … just as you can persuade yourself not to feel pain while walking on hot coals … and indeed it’s been proved that … I’m not following him anymore, just admiring the way he pronounces his words and the modulations of his voice.