Luca greets her from a distance. He is walking in the corridor with a pretty young nurse with long blonde hair and a white cap worn sideways. Thank goodness he’s found a distraction, thinks Amara, cheerfully approaching him. She is carrying a paper bag containing doughnuts that are still hot. She bought them in the street from a little boy with a squint who was struggling to keep off the flies with a homemade fan made from chicken feathers.
Luca hurriedly dismisses the young nurse and advances with unsteady steps. Now he seems more like the Luca she used to know: tall, suave, seductive and unpunished.
‘How are you?’ she asks, offering the sugared doughnuts.
‘I can’t eat those, Amara, but thanks all the same. Have you thought about my suggestion?’
‘I have, and my answer is no.’
‘Will you go back to Vienna?’
‘I’m staying here three days; I shall go and see my father, then I’m off.’
‘Three days from today? Let’s say four not counting yesterday. Why attach so much importance to that child who must have been dead for years?’
‘I don’t even know why myself. I like to think he could be still alive.’
‘You’ve always been one to chase after dreams. Here am I with my living body and you go running after someone who’s dead.’
‘I want to know if Emanuele made it.’
‘You’re raving mad.’
‘Tell me about your last flame, as Suzy calls her.’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘Was she a blonde or a brunette?’
‘You know I have a weakness for blondes.’
‘How much younger than you?’
‘What does it matter? She treated me as if we were the same age. We did all sorts of things together: journeys, expeditions, planning the future. We’d already paid the deposit on a new home on Viale Michelangelo.’
‘How much did that cost?’
‘A tiny flat. Where the gardener of a villa used to live. Falling to bits but just what we needed.’
‘So you’ve lost the deposit, have you?’
‘I’ve lost it, yes.’
‘Why did your blonde leave you?’
‘Who knows? You women are unpredictable and strange. You can never be trusted.’
‘What did you do to her?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I bet you started fooling around with the maid. Or something of the sort.’
‘A neighbour. Actually the owner. A very elegant little woman. But I wasn’t short-changing my partner. I was head-over-heels in love.’
‘You were head-over-heels in love with your partner but you were caressing another woman.’
‘Well, you know how it is with me. Faced with a beautiful woman, I can’t resist. But I was doing nothing wrong. Just a little flirtation on the side. Neither of us took it seriously.’
‘But as luck would have it your flame … what’s her name?’
‘Angelica.’
‘As luck would have it, Angelica took it badly and left you.’
‘Too jealous. But I wouldn’t have stood for that in any case.’
‘Has it never occurred to you that exclusiveness might be essential for love?’
‘Seems a vulgar idea to me.’
‘Vulgar it may be, but it must have some foundation in reality since most people think it an absolute necessity.’
‘Exactly, absolute. I’m against everything absolute.’
‘You’d even be capable of flirting with death himself, you would.’
‘And would that make life jealous?’
‘Life would have good reason to be, don’t you think? If you’re really flirting with death, you have to be irrevocably abandoning life. Like with your little heart attack.’
‘Well, the metaphor’s spot on.’ He laughs, becoming once again the Luca of long ago whose smile bewitched so many women.
‘Have you never been jealous yourself?’
‘I don’t want to own anyone, you know that. For me it’s enough to caresss another body and feel it respond to my caresses. What need is there for exclusivity?’
‘If you ever really did fall in love you might even get jealous.’
‘I believe in the peaceful sharing of property. Exclusive property doesn’t tempt me. I’m a real democrat.’
‘But when women fall in love they assume you’ll be faithful to them. At least during the short time when you tell them you love them.’
‘They get that wrong. I make no claims on exclusivity but I don’t guarantee it either. I’m a free man.’
‘A free man, with the freedom of a tree in a desert.’
‘I’m not afraid of being alone.’
‘Liar! When all you do is ask me to keep you company.’
‘The contradictions of a fearless spirit like my own. I’m not afraid of being alone but I enjoy company, especially the company of young women like you.’
‘Goodbye, Luca. I’m off to see my father. We’ll meet again tomorrow.’
25
Amara opens the French window to the little balcony overlooking Via Alderotti.
The roses have withered and their leaves are yellow. Despite the fact that she stuck two full bottles of water upside down in the vase. And covered it with fine river-gravel left to soften in water beforehand for two days. But it has been hot and the plants have dried up. With her fingers she detaches a dead rose, straightens a bent corolla, agitates the parched soil and gives the little plants a lot of water while a gecko shoots between her feet and goes into hiding under the edge of a saucer that holds a vase.
Go back to Luca? Why not? asks an insistent little voice. But it would be like reliving something already known and experienced. Perhaps he is right to call preferring a ghost to a living body perversion. Yet Emanuele’s head continues to present itself persistently to her imagination. God is with us, that’s what the name Immanuel means. But is Immanuel with us?
She must find out whether he is dead or alive before she can decide anything. She wishes she was already back in Vienna. She has sent in four articles from the city of Mozart. And her boss has seemed satisfied. It’s not easy to describe the cold war. Perhaps it’s best to start from particular moments, from insignificant details that reveal a common feeling, a smell or a climate. And to expand from there all the way to reflections on history. But she doesn’t always succeed. Sometimes it feels like trying to grind water in a mortar. She has told her readers about her train journey, about the Pension Blumental, about Frau Morgan. She has described Kraków and Auschwitz. She must do some interviews that lie outside her inquiries about Emanuele. Her longing to return to Vienna gets more intense every day. She hasn’t finished her work as a witness to what has happened in that country numbed and impoverished by Nazism and the war. But at the same time she will resume her search for Emanuele. The man with the gazelles is waiting and there is nothing to keep her here in Florence. Her father? Yes of course, the sick Amintore shut up in the care home run by the Ursuline nuns of Villa Cisterna. I must go and see him, she tells herself, steeping a black teabag in a cup of boiling water.
She eats a biscuit sitting on a rush-seated chair in the small single room into which have been crammed a bed, a cooker fixed to the wall on a bracket, a basin that also serves as a bath and, hidden by a curtain, a toilet. How is it possible to inhabit just ten square metres? By using the kitchen table as a writing desk and adding books to the shelves full of food and pans. The house in Via Alderotti that once belonged to grandfather Sironi and later to her father, and is now divided into four flats for the children of her Aunt Miriam. An extra toilet projects from the outside wall like a fungus. All Italy is poor, even if noisy reconstruction work disturbs the sleep of those who have other things to think about.