Audio: Jhumpa Lahiri reads.
Now and then on the streets of my neighborhood I bump into a man I might have been involved with, maybe shared a life with. He always looks happy to see me. He lives with a friend of mine, and they have two children. Our relationship never goes beyond a longish chat on the sidewalk, a quick coffee together, perhaps a brief stroll in the same direction. He talks excitedly about his projects, he gesticulates, and at times as we’re walking our synchronized bodies, already quite close, discreetly overlap.
Once he accompanied me into a lingerie shop, because I had to choose a pair of tights to wear under a new skirt. I’d just bought the skirt and I needed the tights for that evening. Our fingers grazed the textures splayed out on the counter as we sorted through the various colors. The binder of samples was like a book full of flimsy transparent pages. He was totally calm among the bras, the nightgowns, as if he were in a hardware store and not surrounded by intimate apparel. I was torn between the green and the purple. He was the one who convinced me to choose the purple, and the saleslady, putting the tights into a bag, said: Your husband’s got a great eye.
Pleasant encounters like this break up our daily meanderings. We have a chaste, fleeting bond. As a result it can’t advance, it can’t take the upper hand. He’s a good man, he loves my friend and their children.
I’m content with a firm embrace even though I don’t share my life with anyone. Two kisses on the cheeks, a short walk along a stretch of road. Without saying a word to each other we know that, if we chose to, we could venture into something reckless.
This morning he’s distracted. He doesn’t recognize me until I’m right in front of him. He’s crossing a bridge at one end and I’m arriving from the other. We stop in the middle and look at the wall that flanks the river, and the shadows of pedestrians cast on its surface. They look like skittish ghosts advancing in a row, obedient souls passing from one realm to another. The bridge is flat and yet it’s as if the figures—vaporous shapes against the solid wall—were walking uphill, always climbing. They’re like inmates proceeding, silently, toward a dreadful end.
“It would be great, one day, to film this procession,” he says. “You can’t always see it, it depends on the position of the sun. But I’m amazed every time, there’s something hypnotizing about it. Even when I’m in a hurry, I stop to watch.”
“So do I.”
He pulls out his cell phone. “Should we try?”
“How does it look?” I ask.
“No good. This contraption can’t capture them.”
We continue to watch the mute spectacle, the dark bodies that advance, never stopping.
“Where are you headed?”
“Work.”
“Me, too.”
“Should we have a coffee?”
“I don’t have time today.”
“O.K., ciao, see you soon.”
We say goodbye, separate. Then we, too, become two shadows projected onto the wall: a routine spectacle, impossible to capture.
In spring I suffer. The season doesn’t invigorate me, I find it depleting. The new light disorients, the fulminating nature overwhelms, and the air, dense with pollen, bothers my eyes. To calm my allergies I take a pill in the morning that makes me sleepy. It knocks me out, I can’t focus, and by lunchtime I’m tired enough to go to bed. I sweat all day and at night I’m freezing. No shoe seems right for this temperamental time of year.
Every blow in my life took place in spring. Each lasting sting. That’s why I’m afflicted by the green of the trees, the first peaches in the market, the light flowing skirts that the women in my neighborhood start to wear. These remind me only of loss, of betrayal, of disappointment. I dislike waking up and feeling pushed inevitably forward. But today, Saturday, I don’t have to leave the house. I can wake up and not have to get up. There’s nothing better.
Inevitably I bump into my ex, the only significant one, with whom I was involved for five years. It’s hard to believe, when I see him and say hello, that I ever loved him. He still lives in my neighborhood, alone. He’s a small but handsome man, with thin-rimmed eyeglasses and tapered hands that lend him an intellectual air. But he’s never amounted to much, he remains puerile and full of complaints, in spite of his middle-aged man’s body.
Here he is today in the bookstore. He stops in often, he fancies himself a writer. He was always writing something in a notebook, though I have no idea what. I doubt he’s ever managed to publish anything.
“Have you read this?” he asks me, pointing to a book that just got a prize.
“I don’t know it.”
“You should.” He looks at me and adds, “You’re looking well.”
“You think?”
“I’m a mess, I hardly slept last night.”
“Why not?”
“The kids in the bar below my apartment are too rowdy, it’s an ongoing problem. I need to find a new place.”
“Where?”
“Away from this godforsaken city. I’ve been thinking of buying a little house by the sea, or maybe in the mountains, far from everything and everyone.”
“Are you serious?”
He’ll never do it. He’s not the type, he’s too fearful. When we were together, all I did was listen to him. I would try to solve his problems, even the tiny ones. Every time his back went out, every existential crisis. But by now I can look at him without absorbing a drop of that tiresome anxiety, that ongoing lament.
He was terrible at planning or remembering things. Distracted, the opposite of me. He never checked to see what was in the fridge, he’d buy the same stuff twice, we were always tossing food that had gone bad. He was almost always late, there was always some hitch, we were always rushing into the theatre halfway through the movie. In the beginning it irritated me, but I got used to it. I adored him, I forgave him.
When we’d go on vacation together he would inevitably forget something essential: shoes for walking, a cream to protect his skin, the notebook for jottings things down. He’d forget to pack the heavy sweater, or the lightweight shirt. He was prone to getting fevers. I’ve seen several small cities alone while he recovered in a hotel room, while he slept wanly in the bed, coated with sweat under the covers. I made him broth when we got home, I prepared the hot-water bottle, I ran to the pharmacy. I didn’t mind playing nurse. Both his parents had died when he was young. You’re all I’ve got in this world, he’d say.
I was happy to cook at his place. I’d spend the whole morning doing the shopping, I’d crisscross the city for the meals I prepared for him. I remember absurd expeditions from one neighborhood to another searching for a particular cheese, for the shiniest eggplants. I’d arrive at his door, I’d set the table, he’d take his place and say: What would I do without your soup, without your roast chicken? Convinced that I was the center of his universe, I took it for granted that, sooner or later, he’d ask me to marry him.
Then one day in April someone rang my buzzer. I thought it was him. Instead it was another woman who knew my boyfriend just as well as I did, who saw him on the days I didn’t. I’d shared the same man with this woman for nearly five years. She lived in another neighborhood, and she’d come to know about me thanks to a book I’d lent him, the same book that he in turn, idiotically, had lent to her. Unbelievable. Inside that book there was a piece of paper, the receipt from a doctor’s visit, with my name and address. At which point all the little things that puzzled her about their relationship made sense. She realized that she was only one of his lovers, and that we were an unwitting threesome.
“Did you tell him that you found that receipt? That you were coming to see me?” I asked her once I was able to speak. She was a short woman with bangs, caring eyes, a glow to her skin. She spoke calmly. She had a soothing voice.
“I didn’t tell him anything, I didn’t see the point. I just wanted to meet you.”
“Would you like a coffee?”
We sat down and started to chat. Pulling out our agendas, we reviewed, point by point, details of our parallel relationships: vacations and other memorable moments, herniated disks, bouts of the flu. It was a long and harrowing conversation. A meticulous exchange of information, of disparate dates that solved a mystery, that dispelled a nightmare I’d been unconsciously living. We realized that we were two survivors, and in the end we felt like partners in a crime. Each revelation was devastating. Everything she said. And yet, even as my life shattered in pieces, I felt as if I were finally coming up for air. The sun started to set and we were hungry, and when there was nothing left to say we went out to share a meal.
Ispot them on the street, in the middle of a crowd of pedestrians waiting for the light to change: the couple who live around the corner, my friend and the kind man I cross paths with now and again on the bridge. I quicken my pace to catch up to them, I think of saying hello, but then I realize that they’re having an argument. It’s a wide avenue, there’s confusion right and left. You can hardly hear a thing, but they manage to make themselves heard. They talk at the same time, their sentences overlapping so that it’s impossible to know what they’re fighting about. Then I hear her voice: “Don’t touch me, you disgust me.”
I start to follow them. I don’t go into the store where I was heading, it’s not urgent. We cross the broad street together. He’s handsome, lanky. She’s got long hair, a bit tousled, and wears a flame-colored, egg-shaped coat.
They pay no attention to passersby, they’re not ashamed of fighting in public. It’s as if they were in the middle of nowhere, on a deserted beach, or inside a home. They’re having a bad, bitter fight. It rises above the mayhem that surrounds them; they act as if they were the only people who inhabit the entire city.
She’s furious, and in the beginning he tries to appease her. But then he, too, loses his temper, and he’s as irritated and spiteful as she is. It feels unseemly, a quarrel so intimate in front of everyone. Their biting words pierce the air as if physically puncturing it, seeping into the blue of the sky, blackening it. And it upsets me to notice that his face has turned mean.
At the intersection she says, “See those two?”
She points to an elderly couple. They hold hands and walk with measured steps, in silence.
“I wanted us to get where they’ve gotten.”
My friends aren’t so young anymore, either, even though they’re now behaving like children. After crossing the busy avenue, we turn onto a quieter street. I’m still walking a few paces behind them. And as I do I begin to understand what they’re arguing about.
They’d gone to their daughter’s school to listen to a concert, and then they’d stopped to have a coffee. After that she wanted to take a taxi home, whereas he wanted to walk. He’d offered to call her a taxi and then return on foot. And this suggestion had offended her to the point where she’d exploded.
Now she’s saying that he’d never have suggested such a thing when they were first dating, when he was deeply in love with her.
“It’s a bad sign,” she says.
He replies dryly, “You’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You’re always going your own way these days. I don’t see how we can resolve this.”
After making this statement, she starts to cry. But he keeps walking slightly ahead of her. At the next intersection he stops and she catches up to him.
“Why were you so opposed to walking and enjoying this sunny day?”
“I’m wearing a new pair of shoes that I haven’t broken in yet.”
“Well, you could have told me that.”
“You could have asked.”
At that point I stop following them, having already heard too much.
In August my neighborhood thins out: it wastes away like an old woman who was once a stunning beauty before shutting down completely. Some people spend the month here on purpose; they hole up gladly, turning antisocial. Others cower at the thought of those shapeless days and weeks, the severe closure. Their moods dip, they flee. I’m not a great fan of this month, but I don’t hate it, either.
At first I enjoy the peace and quiet. I greet the neighbors who are still around, who walk out in their flip-flops as if they were in some sleepy seaside town. In the few stores that remain open, at the coffee bar, people talk about their plans, upcoming vacations. They say: I love parking wherever I want, these days there’s so little traffic you can cross the avenue with your eyes closed. It’s startling to see the piazza nearly abandoned. Then at a certain point everything grows static, choked by silence and inertia, and the very lack of activity feels, paradoxically, depleting.
For the past few days the bars have been shut tight; I can’t even have a coffee outside my home. I go out in the late morning anyway, to buy food: only two of the farm stands are open, there’s not much. The food looks flaccid. It’s overpriced and already half-cooked by the sun. The proprietors stand like statues under their white tents: mute, listless characters in a mise en scène. They’re not the people I like to buy from. The ones I’m loyal to, who give me a discount, are away. These two are wily, they’re cheating the tourists who come here for a week or two, who rent the apartments of people who normally live on the piazza and are spending these weeks on their boats, or in the mountains, or abroad. The tourists visit the city in spite of the torrid heat, the gloomy atmosphere.
It’s impossible to spend money other than at the market. All the store owners are on vacation, they’ve pulled down their grates not for a death in the family but for merriment, and they’ve left exuberant handwritten signs with exclamation points on their doors wishing everyone a good vacation and saying when they’ll open up again. But this year there’s something unusual going on: one of my neighbors—he’s a guy in his thirties, a bit unkempt—has decided to get rid of certain things in his house. He lives in an atypical building, it looks as though it was originally a storefront. It has a grate instead of windows or a front door.
He sits for half the day in a pair of shorts—I bet he also sleeps in them—on a stool in the middle of an alleyway closed to traffic. It’s a road to park on, or to turn down simply in order to back out again. Next to the stool, he’s set up two or three folding tables, and on them he’s displayed a series of objects that are both useful and utterly useless: vases, silverware, science textbooks, chipped hand-painted porcelain bowls, lacklustre teacups, toys, various knickknacks. Women’s shoes, pretty but battered. Evening bags lined with silk that’s faded and slightly soiled. There’s an ugly multicolored fur on a hanger, looking out of place, totally out of season.
He’s arranged some books in a lopsided hutch that belongs in a kitchen. Costume jewelry sits on one of the tables, on top of a piece of velvet. Plates and bowls are carefully stacked on the same table. I ask myself: How many meals are behind those beaten-up forks and knives? How many bouquets of fresh flowers filled those vases before withering? Every day the merchandise changes slightly as he combs through more layers of stuff. “Cheap Deals,” he’s written on a piece of paper. When I ask how much something costs, he almost always tells me the same price.
In the afternoon, before lunch, he moves all his objects inside, pulls down the grate, and goes somewhere, probably to the beach. The following morning, he’s there again. As I pass by his house I catch a glimpse of the dark, dusty, jumbled source of his little venture.
I say hi to him every day, I pause to look at this and that. I worry that it would seem impolite not to. At the same time, even though he’s the one putting everything on display, I feel hesitant, somehow invasive. I worry about touching his things, I feel strange coveting them, wanting to purchase them.
A painting on canvas, not too big, catches my eye. It’s a portrait of a girl with short, side-parted hair. The portrait is unfinished. There are no shoulders, no bust, instead there’s just the dirty surface of the canvas. The girl seems anxious, she gives me a sidelong glance.
My neighbor—is he the hale and hearty son of the pallid young girl?—is friendly, but he doesn’t pester me. He’s rather indifferent to my curiosity. In any case, since all the stores are closed, I decide to give him some business. One day I buy a couple of drinking glasses. Then, for the same price, I buy a magazine that was sold thirty-three years ago at a newsstand, that was read, perhaps, on a train. I buy a necklace. Then I buy the portrait. The more I buy, the more new things turn up on the tables. In the stark summer desert, this oasis of objects, this ongoing flow of goods, reminds me that everything vanishes, and also reminds me of the banal, stubborn residue of life.
Even though I don’t need any of this stuff, I keep buying things from him. And back at my house, in the mornings, I taste the day’s first coffee from one of those chipped cups. I read the magazine on my balcony and learn all about the actors and gossip and goings on of another generation. I hang up the portrait and look at that young, timid face. What would have made her happy? Did she grow up to wear that flashy fur coat? Was it hers? Did she like feeling elegant, being admired as she rushed about doing errands in winter under a chilly blue sky?
One day the young man invites me in, he owes me some change. As soon as I set foot in the room I’m uneasy. The life lived in that house overwhelms me. It’s all been hoarded, neglected, ransacked.
Finally I ask, “Who owned these things?”
“My family. And me. I put together all those puzzles. I graduated from high school because I read those books. My mother cooked meals for decades in those pots and pans. My dad played with those cards. He never tossed anything out. When she died he didn’t want to get rid of her things. But this year he died, too, so it’s up to me, otherwise my girlfriend won’t spend the night here.”
And so for very little money my house transforms, and my spartan life perks up a bit. It builds in flavor like a slow-simmering broth, even though the yellowed paper of the magazines makes my eyes water and there are termites in the portrait. It doesn’t bother me, these new acquisitions entertain me, they keep me company. My orphaned neighbor, on the other hand, grows tired of the tedious sale, and maybe also of his only regular client. So one day he shoves it all into a big garbage bin and speeds off to the beach on his motorcycle, with his girlfriend’s arms clasped around him for dear life.
There’s no food in my refrigerator, so I head to the supermarket, where I bump into my married friend, for whom I represent . . . what, exactly? A road not taken, a hypothetical affair? I carry a basket with a few things inside, the routine purchases of a woman on her own, while he pushes a cart overflowing with all kinds of food: cereal boxes, bags of biscuits and cookies and melba toast, jams, butter, whole milk, skim milk, soy milk. He tells me what each member of the family likes to eat, the ongoing battle to sit down to breakfast together, something that, to his regret, rarely happens. He likes to have ample stores in the pantry: boxes of rice and pasta, cans of chickpeas and tomatoes, containers of coffee and sugar, bottles of oil, bottles of still and sparkling water.
“In case disaster strikes,” he says, kidding.
“Why would there be a disaster?”
With or without the food, I doubt a disaster will ever take place in that home. I never stock up, I shop from day to day. My refrigerator is never full, neither is my pantry.
We pay at the register, separately. It takes him fifteen minutes to put all that food into shopping bags. I follow him down to the parking lot below the supermarket. We escape the banal music, the neon lights, the odor of food, the excessive air-conditioning.
“Can I give you a ride?”
“I don’t have much to carry, I can walk.”
“It’s supposed to rain, let’s head back together.”
He opens the trunk. All the shopping bags are made of a sickly transparent green and they merge into one big mass. We decide to put my two bags on one of the car seats. It’s a little disgusting, covered with crumbs, and around it I see the detritus left by his children, imprisoned for long journeys in that car: all manner of toys, dismembered action figures, battered books.
He pulls a chocolate bar out of one of his bags.
“We need to eat this right away,” he says.
I know the reason. My friend, his wife, is worried about his blood sugar, his intake of saturated fats. He gives me a little piece.
“No one knows about this parking lot. See how empty it is? I like to keep it a secret, I never tell anyone that I know about it.”
He drops me off at my door. I take my bags, thank him, and say goodbye, kissing him on the cheeks like always.
“Sure you don’t need anything else? Want a few of our bags? Half of it’s just stuff for the pantry.”
“If disaster strikes, I’d suggest you abandon the house.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
In any case, I don’t need anything else. The tenderness he sets aside for me is enough.
Never married, but, like all women, I’ve had my share of married men. Today I think of one I met here, in this bar on the other side of the river where I now happen to be, on my own. That day I’d had a coffee and I was about to head out. He’d followed me, he’d stopped me on the sidewalk. He’d run like a lunatic behind me.
It was the first time a man had pursued me so vehemently. I’m attractive enough, but not the kind of beauty to make heads turn. And yet he’d said, panting for breath, “Sorry to bother you, but I’d like to get to know you.”
That was the gist of it. He was about fifty years old and I was in my twenties. He’d looked at me, fixing me with pale, restless eyes, not saying anything else. His gaze was kind, also insistent. My impulse was to brush him off and yet I was flattered, he didn’t strike me as the type who does nothing but chase after women.
“Just a coffee,” he’d added.
“I just had one, I’ve got some things to do.”
“Later on, then, around five? I’ll wait for you here.”
That afternoon I met up with a girlfriend. I told her what had happened.
“What was he like? Were you into him?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Good-looking? Well dressed?”
“I’d say so.”
“Well, then?”
At five-twenty I went back to the bar. He was seated at a small table, waiting, as if he were expecting someone at the airport, waiting and doing nothing else. I’ll never forget the warmth in his eyes when he saw me walk in. He was unhappily, permanently married. We had a fling. He lived in another city, and he would come down from time to time, for the day, for work. What else is there to say?
A few faltering memories. Some trips outside the city at lunchtime, in his car. He liked to drive, take a random exit and find a tiny place in the countryside to have a good meal. A series of empty trattorie come to mind. One time it was just the two of us, the waiter, the padrone, the cook who remained behind the scenes. We’d lingered all afternoon, talking. I don’t remember what we ate, just the abundance and variety of the food that surrounded us, as if it were a lavish wedding.
They’d let him smoke at the table. I had no idea where he lived with his wife, I never asked which city he returned to. He never came to my place. I waited for his phone call and showed up for every date. It was an incendiary time, a momentary surge that has nothing to do with me anymore.
This evening as I read in bed I hear the roar of cars that speed down the road below my apartment. And the fact of their passing makes me aware of my own stillness. I can only fall asleep when I hear them. And when I wake up in the middle of the night, always at the same time, it’s the absolute silence that interrupts my sleep. That’s the hour when there’s not a single car on the road, when no one needs to get anywhere. My sleep grows lighter and lighter and then it abandons me entirely. I wait until someone, anyone, drives by. The thoughts that come to roost in my head in those moments are always the gloomiest, also the most precise. That silence, combined with the black sky, takes hold of me until the first light returns and dispels those thoughts, until I hear the presence of lives passing along the road below me.
Today one of my lovers keeps calling. He presses a key by mistake and reaches me without realizing it. I see his number on my cell phone, I say hello, and he’s already talking, enthusiastically, only not to me. I hear him while he’s having lunch, while he’s asking the waiter what the specials are, while he’s walking down the street, while he’s at the office. His roaming voice ends up in my ear, distant but familiar, present, absent. He’s laughing as he’s talking. While I’m privy to all this, he has no clue.
I’m at home today, I don’t have plans. I’m constantly cold, it’s that patch of autumn before my building turns the heat on, so I’ve put on a heavy sweater and I keep boiling water for tea. Even in bed, in spite of the down comforter, the sheets radiate no warmth whatsoever. They feel like a punishing slab under my bare feet.
Every time the phone rings I pick up, thinking maybe this time he really is trying to call me. But he’s not calling me, he doesn’t hear me saying hello, he’s still not aware of our ongoing, inadvertent contact.
Who is he talking to? Where is he? I have no idea. He’s at work, at a bar, on the platform of the metro, I suppose. It’s just that every time I get one of his calls I feel betrayed. Our communication, of which he’s ignorant, nettles me. It makes me feel particularly alone.
Finally, in the late afternoon, he calls: it’s really him. I pick up and hear the passion in his voice.
“Hi, darling, how are you?”
“Ciao, how was your day?”
“A drag. I was at work all day, I even skipped lunch, it was one thing after another. How about you?”
“My day was also a bit of a drag.”
“So what about dinner tonight?”
“Tonight I think I’ll pass.”
“Why?”
“I’ve had a headache for hours,” I tell him, then hang up and go out, ravenous, to eat dinner on my own. There’s no bite to the air; it was colder inside than out.
At the end of the year, when all the schoolchildren in the city are on vacation, I accept an invitation to accompany my friends and their children—their son and daughter—on a visit to a castle. He drives. He’s my friend from the bridge, the one quarrelling on the street, the one from the supermarket. His wife should have been with us, but she’s come down with a bad cold and has decided, at the last minute, to stay home. So I stand in for her today.
On our way back to the city we stop to stretch our legs in a sleepy little town. He parks in front of a precipice. We get out of the car and walk up the narrow road, seeking glimpses of sunlight. A woman sweeps the piazza—two crisscrossed flags and a small fountain—with a broom. She goes about it as if that public space were her own living room.
We continue walking. The children run on ahead. We linger under a grand house that looms over the countryside. At the base of a statue, we read the name of the noble family that once owned it. It’s a stone façade, but the colors are a mix of pale pink, yellow, and orange—warm shades that form the background for the slanting shadows cast by lampposts. The town, practically abandoned this afternoon, starts to drown in a piercing light.
We’re doubled over by a sharp wind and our eyes are filled with tears. We see the church at the top of the hill, and an ancient olive tree decorated with shiny red balls, in place of a Christmas tree. The higher we climb the more we feel the wind and the cold. We’re enfolded by the wide-open space, enclosed by all that emptiness.
We pause at one of the side streets, curious to see where it leads. It’s actually a dead end, a sort of courtyard composed of four buildings, or maybe it’s just one building with three or four separate entrances. It’s a sheltered space, so dark that it’s an effort to adjust our eyes. But bit by bit we make out a staircase with a railing that leads to a brick archway, and a few doors, closed and battered. The winter sunset seeps in through some cracks. It’s incredible, it feels as if we’re standing in a grotto, with light that darts through it like fish.
As soon as I step into that secluded niche I dream of inhabiting it, of withdrawing there, away from everything. He’s standing beside me, we admire it together, and before heading out he turns to look at me. “Stunning,” he says. The word burns inside me, but I can’t tell if he’s talking about me or the place we’re in. He’s enigmatic that way.
His daughter wants a hot chocolate, so we walk back to the town hoping to find a bar that’s open. The woman with the broom says, “Ask down that way,” and we proceed to a barbershop, which to our surprise has numerous clients inside. “At the top of that road, in about three hundred metres,” a man tells us, reclining in his chair, his face covered with soap.
We walk to the top of the road, but, alas, the bar is closed. The large awning set up outside, which needs to be taken down for the season, whips wildly in the wind.
We go back to the car parked at the precipice. And as he turns on the engine and puts it into reverse I feel a panic starting to rise, not trusting that low cement barrier between us and the abyss. I don’t trust that the car will move backward, all I feel is its steep downward slope, pointing toward danger. But we go up, the car whines as it pulls out in reverse gear and we move, against the force of gravity, away from the little town with its spotlessly clean piazza, and the hushed grotto that had enchanted me, and the man who will have dinner tonight, freshly shaved. No hot chocolate, just the depleting artificial heat inside the car. We go home without talking, though the little girl hums strange songs to herself all the while.
It’s that spring in my step I’ve always lacked, an absence of ability which held me back and was an obstacle when I was a young girl, at school. For half an hour they let us play outside. Most of the students were euphoric during that short block of time, but I couldn’t stand it. I hated their sharp cries, the spontaneous exaltation. In any case, the game I’d play with my friends back then was to leap from one tree stump to another, as if they were little round islands, a wooden archipelago arranged in a clearing. The stumps were low, they must have come up to our hips, no higher than that, but climbing on top of them made me sick to my stomach, and once I stood up my legs would tremble. Crossing those gaps cautiously and clumsily to get from one to the other took enormous effort, one that humiliated me as the other girls moved back and forth without a thought, relishing every second of the activity as if they were birds hopping from branch to branch. How I envied their brazen strides. It now occurs to me that I was as tenacious as I was timid. I never protested, I did what they did, that is, I clambered up, I hesitated, and then I strode across, afraid each time that the empty space between the stumps would swallow me up, terrified each time that I would fall, even though I never did.
Ever since that trip together with my friend and his children I’ve been feeling off-kilter. I’ve wondered what it would be like to take things further, and I think, too often, about the way he laughs, the way his voice reverts to the high pitch of a little boy’s, and the hairs on his wrists and scattered on the backs of his hands, and the humorous messages he still sends me now and then. I wait but he doesn’t get in touch, it’s been a while since I’ve seen him in the neighborhood, but then one day the phone rings, and his name on the screen already smacks of impudence. My friend is usually at work at this hour, their children are at school. What will he suggest this time? A bite to eat at the bar on the corner?
Instead when I hear his voice I realize something’s happened. He explains it all quickly: my friend’s father has had a stroke and the outlook is grim. They got the call early in the morning and they left the dog and the house without tending to either. The barista on the corner has the keys.
I head over right away, the dog needs to go out. It’s the first time I’ve been at their place alone. Until now all I’ve known is the table set for a dinner, the bathroom used by guests, the kitchen crowded with pots and pans. This morning it’s all under control in spite of the call before dawn, the hasty departure. The plates in the dishwasher are clean, and the coffeepot on the stove is the only thing to wash. Someone spilled a bit of sugar on the countertop.
I look into the bedrooms. The bright one, uncluttered, with white linen curtains, that he shares with my friend, and the one right next to it, less spacious, crowded with toys and a bunk bed. But even there it’s all relatively tidy. The hallway is lined with photos of the two of them and of the children, photos of the four of them, moments of parenting they treasure, with their children at the seaside, or abroad, or in their laps. I pull down a few window shades and turn off the lever for the gas. I spread a blanket over the bed. I tie the garbage bag. All this is the private morphology of a family, of two people who fall in love and have children: an enterprise as mundane as it is utterly specific. And all at once I see how they form an ingenious organism, an impenetrable collective.
I find the leash that hangs by the door and take the dog out. I walk him to the villa behind my house, carrying a few plastic bags in my pocket. We walk past the dirty fountains, beneath the sclerotic palms, past the pockmarked statues flecked with lichen and moss.
He’s a good dog, it doesn’t take long for him to trust me. He doesn’t bark, he leads me along the grounds of the villa, and I like the tinkling of the tags on his collar. He stops to drink water from a fountain, in front of a she-lion who crushes a skull with her paw, and another, recumbent, eating an apple.
Three times a day, for the next three days, until they’ve buried my friend’s father, until they come back, the dog and I make the same rounds. I grow fond of the animal, of his ears, always alert, and of his careful gait, his determined muzzle. Our walks together thrust me forward, and though he pulls me, I’m the one holding the leash. Every step puts distance between me and my infatuation until it’s no longer dangerous, until our romance, which never took hold to begin with, loses its hold over me.
Iclean my house from top to bottom. Every neglected nook and cranny, each windowsill, all the floors, the lampshades. I remove the stains that the detergents leave under the sink and the line of dark dust that creeps on top of the molding, dragging my finger along it, wrapped in a cloth. I clean the inside of the washing machine and the inside of my garbage can. I sweep away the detritus that gathers by the threshold of the balcony. After that I get rid of the lime that encrusts the faucets, submerging the washers in a glass of white vinegar. I want to remove every trace of myself.
I move the furniture around, inspecting within, behind, beneath. This type of filth spreads everywhere, there’s no end to it. It works its way into every surface. I go to the hardware store and buy a few things to spruce up the kitchen. Hooks for my pot holders, a receptacle in which my sponges can rest and drain. I toss out the chewed-up wooden spoons and buy new ones, arranging them in a vase like flowers. And as I’m sifting through all my belongings I come across an old ceramic plate in a closet. Something that had broken, long ago. It’s in two pieces now, each still intact, the smaller one in the shape of a triangle, like a slice cut from a cake. I’m about to toss them out when I change my mind. I’m inspired to join them back up. And I think it would be worth the trouble. It’s a hand-painted piece, I’d bought it on vacation in the mountains once. I can’t remember when.
I go back to the hardware store and ask for a glue that’s good for ceramics. They give me a product that has superpowers, they say, that can make anything stick to anything else. Back at home, seated at my desk, I open the tube, follow the directions, and attach the slice to the rest of the cake. It sets instantly so that I can barely see the crack. It looks like a single folded hair. But when I close the tube I press it by mistake and a sizable clump of glue spurts out, covering my fingers, drying immediately, leaving a stubborn film on my skin. I wash my hands but that just makes matters worse. The water doesn’t rinse away the glue, and by now my fingers are sticking to one another as firmly as the slice to the rest of the cake. I look up and see myself in the mirror, weary, stiff hands coated with glue whose ghostly traces resemble the dust I’ve been working hard to get rid of all day, and after a long time, or maybe for the first time, I burst out laughing. ♦
(Translated, from the Italian, by the author.)
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