But instead I’m suddenly the one spinning through a planetarium of stars and explosions, in a cloud of glass shards — I’m the one having an accident, my E270 is being destroyed, the air bag explodes against my stomach all red and sticky with blood, and I’m the one gasping in the silence and the dark, blanketed with windshield fragments like a mirrored disco ball. Everything is still — I’ve landed — I’m afraid to move, I’m afraid I’ve broken in half, I’m afraid my throat has been slit, that these are the final moments of my life. Then a car stops on the side of the road and shines its lights on me, making me sparkle all over, and someone comes closer, a silhouette against the brightness who manages to force my door open, the hinges coming apart, the door folding and flipping over and dropping to the grass.
Now she’s leaning over me, whispering in my ear. “Everything’s okay now, don’t worry.” She tries to unbuckle my belt, practically hugging me, and says, “I had to pay you back for rescuing me, right? Now it’s my turn to take you to the hospital.”
4
THE NEXT MORNING MY COLLEAGUES, RELATIVES, AND FRIENDS WERE WHIPPED UP into a maelstrom of worry: for two hours they flooded the nearby hospitals with phone calls; some calls were anguished (from Witold’s wife, while he was out searching for me in the emergency rooms), some were furious (Carlo, threatening lawsuits and digressing into an attack on the regional governor for his irresponsible decentralization of health services), and some were warbling, shrill, nearly incomprehensible (Malik gets like this when he panics); and while all this was happening I was asleep in my own bed, Monday morning; I had a cut on my cheekbone and a bruise on my left thigh, but otherwise I was beatific. The problem was that the tow truck, which I had called the night before, didn’t reach the body shop until midnight, after closing time, and so it towed my E270 back to my courtyard. It looked pitifuclass="underline" it was completely destroyed. They say cars that look this bad are often dumped on the ocean floor to make playgrounds for the fish.
The first one to arrive, at 7:45, was Witold, who drove over in his Fiat Panda because he was alarmed that I didn’t show up at our usual appointment and didn’t answer my cell phone or my house phone (both of which were turned off). He grew even more alarmed when he saw the jagged, twisted, stripped, mutilated Mercedes, with its blood-spattered air bag dangling from the steering wheel like the tongue of a cow impaled on a butcher’s hook; then he panicked completely when no one answered the doorbell (I didn’t hear it; I’d taken a sleeping pill at six when I couldn’t get back to sleep). My R4, parked under the canopy, proved that I hadn’t driven off somewhere under my own steam, so therefore I must have been in a hospital, or staying with friends or relatives to recover from the accident. Malik was the nearest possibility. He got back in his car, drove around the hill, and rang at the famous photographer’s gate. He poured all his panic through the video intercom onto Malik (who’s always very susceptible to other people’s anxiety), and then drove off to check the nearest emergency room.
At 8:15, Malik stepped out of the chestnut woods and appeared in my courtyard together with Indra, the striped dachshund who had fathered the new litter. Malik walked around the carcass of the E270 three times, weeping in pain as he pictured my torn and lifeless body in some morgue; he tried ringing the doorbell and knocking weakly on all the shutters, and noted with surprise that the ones in the back were all closed: that didn’t augur well. Meanwhile Indra pissed on Gustavo’s dog bed, an unpleasant detail that did nothing to unravel the mystery. Then they both went home. Malik tried to call a few hospitals, but — as he himself later reported — he was so upset he couldn’t make himself understood.
After searching for me fruitlessly in one hospital, Witold thought it might be best to alert my family; but to avoid alarming my mother, who wouldn’t have been able to help search anyway, he called Carlo at 8:40. My brother immediately concluded that I must have taken refuge in our childhood home, and he devised a scheme with Witold: he would call my mother on some pretext, without mentioning the wreck of the Mercedes, and if I were there with her, surely she would tell him about it. But my mother saw through his pretext — first of all because Carlo almost never calls her (especially not at 9:00 a.m. on Monday), and second because he mumbled that he wanted to thank her for Sunday lunch, on his behalf and the children’s. That was too far-fetched.
“Is someone hurt?” she asked, without wasting words. Carlo denied it, but he wasn’t very persuasive, and my mother was now sure that something was up.
After an hour, during which she considered and then discarded all the simple explanations, she concluded that Carlo was hiding something from her, and she gave in and called me; I’d woken up by then, so I answered the phone, telling her that I’d had a little accident, nothing serious … and Carlo? No, Carlo couldn’t have known about it, I really didn’t think so.
“So was he calling to tell me something about Cecilia?” my mother asked me.
“I don’t think there’s anything new,” I said, and we were silent for thirty seconds, which was our way of commenting on their separation, Carlo’s errors, Cecilia’s revenge, the possibility of a reconciliation, the risks that Carlo would run if he stayed single. After having thought about these things together, and having tacitly agreed that Carlo should persist in trying to win her back, and Cecilia should give in honorably, that this would be best for the kids (but I don’t agree, not completely: sometimes I think exactly the opposite, and my mother thinks I agree only because I don’t have to speak out loud), we said goodbye and I made myself a big cup of coffee and got a chair and went out to settle down in the sun, battered but happy, next to the wreck of the Mercedes. I got a certain pleasure from seeing how the smooth lines of the car had gotten all smashed up; it was tangible proof of change, a satisfying sign that my old life was finally shattered.
After talking with our mother, Carlo checked back with Witold, who was driving over to the second local hospital (which his wife, moreover, had already phoned). They decided that Carlo would try calling the hospitals in the city, from the biggest to the smallest, and then he would contact the highway patrols (Witold preferred not to — he doesn’t like authorities, because, he says, his surname makes them suspicious; I think he’s just irritated because they always spell it wrong). All this searching turned up nothing. In the last of his calls, Carlo found time to accuse a male nurse of being a right-wing flunky, and the nurse retorted that he had been a card-carrying union man for the past twenty-five years, at which point Carlo’s tone softened and he said, “I’m sorry, comrade, I’m just scared because I don’t know what happened to my brother”; and when the left-wing nurse answered kindly, Carlo added, “I’ve already lost one brother, to drugs; please try to understand.” It was ages since he had last called someone “comrade”; he must really have been distraught. I keep thinking about what Carlo said (what he himself reported to me) not because it’s funny (though it is) but because it moves me. When he told me about that phone call, I had to pinch my inner thigh to keep from crying.
At 10:15, exhausted and disheartened, Witold drove his Panda into the farmhouse courtyard a second time. He was giving it one last try before Carlo called the police. But there I sat, coffee in hand, calm and sore, pondering my life and the events of the night before, and feeling the sun on my bare arms. Witold squeezed my arms with relief when he found me safe and sound, and kept asking me obsessively if I was okay; there was no way to reassure him: he wanted to take me right back to the hospital for tests. “I’m fine, really, don’t worry,” I said, “no bones are broken, I’m just a bit banged up,” but I realized that he wasn’t listening, or he didn’t believe me, because if the car looked that bad, then I must have hit my head, and clearly I could not be the one to decide if I was okay or not.