The following morning I had a trial in Lecce. So I got up early and after a shower and a shave put on one of the serious suits I wore whenever I was working out of town. Wearing a serious suit, usually dark grey, was a habit I’d adopted when I was a very young lawyer. I’d passed my exams at the age of twenty-five, when I still looked like a first-year college student. To look like a real lawyer I had to become older, I thought, and a dark grey suit was perfect for that.
As the years passed, the grey uniform stopped being essential. People knew me in Bari, and besides, as the years passed, I have to admit I looked less and less like a first-year student.
By the time I turned forty, I only put on a grey suit when I went out of town. To make it clear, in places where I wasn’t known, that I really was a lawyer. A concept I still secretly had doubts about myself.
Anyway, I put on a grey suit, a blue shirt, a regimental tie, picked up the briefcase I’d brought home from the office the previous evening, left a cup of coffee on Margherita’s bedside table, and went out. Margherita was still asleep, breathing peacefully but resolutely.
I’d reached the garage and was just about to get in my car when my mobile rang.
It was my colleague from Lecce, who’d got me involved in that case. He told me that the judge who was dealing with it was ill, which meant that the trial was going to be postponed. So there was no point in my going all the way to Lecce just to hear the order for the postponement. I agreed, there was no point. But how had he found out, at seven-thirty in the morning, that the judge was ill? Oh, he’d known since the day before, but it had been a very heavy day and he’d forgotten to tell me. Bravo. But he would tell me the new date for the trial. Oh, thanks, very kind of you. Bye then. OK, bye. And fuck you.
I don’t generally like to get up early in the morning if it isn’t absolutely necessary. If I want to see the dawn – it sometimes happens – I’d rather stay up all night and then go to sleep in the morning. Not easy to do, when you’ve got work the next day. Waking up early – having to wake up early – makes me quite nervous.
That morning, I’d woken up early because of my colleague from Lecce. So now I found myself adrift in the city on a lovely November morning. Without anything to do, since I’d supposed the whole day would be devoted to that out-of-town trial which had been adjourned.
Obviously, in a while I’d start to feel anxious and end up in my office going through papers that weren’t urgent and making phone calls that weren’t necessary. I knew that perfectly well. I know all about anxiety. Sometimes I’m even wise to its tricks and manage to beat it.
Most of the time, it wins and makes me do stupid things, even though I know perfectly well that they are stupid things. Like going to the office on a day when I could go somewhere else and read a book, listen to a record, see a film in one of those cinemas where they have morning shows.
So I would go to my office, but it wasn’t eight yet: too early to get sucked back into the vortex of the work ethic. So I thought I’d take a stroll, maybe as far as the sea. I could have breakfast in one of those bars I liked on the seafront.
I could have a nice smoke.
No, not that.
Stupid idea to quit smoking, I thought as I headed towards the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele.
I’d almost reached the ruins of the Teatro Margherita, which was endlessly in the process of restoration, when I saw a vaguely familiar face coming towards me. I screwed up my eyes – I never wore glasses except to go to the cinema or to drive a car – and saw that the man was giving me a kind of smile and raising his arm to greet me.
“Guido!”
“Emilio?”
Emilio Ranieri. We hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. Maybe more. We came level with each other, and after a moment’s hesitation he embraced me. After another moment’s hesitation I responded to his embrace.
Emilio Ranieri had been my classmate at secondary school, and then we’d been at university together for two or three years. He’d quit before graduating, to become a journalist. He’d started out at a radio station in Tuscany and then was hired by L’Unita, where he’d stayed until the paper shut down.
Every now and again I’d hear something about him from mutual friends, though less and less as the years went by. In the mythical period of my life that straddled the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, Emilio had been one of my very few real friends. Then he’d vanished, and in a way I’d vanished too.
“Guido. How nice to see you. Damn it, you’re just the same, except for a bit less hair.”
He wasn’t the same. He still had all his hair but it was completely white. There were lines at the corners of his eyes that looked as if they’d been carved in leather: harsh and painful, they seemed to me. Even his smile looked different somehow. There was something scared, defeated, about it.
But it was nice to see him. In fact, I was really pleased. My friend Emilio.
“Yes, it is nice to see you. What are you doing in Bari?”
“I work here now.”
“What do you mean: you work here?”
“I was unemployed after they closed L’Unita. Then I heard they were looking for people here in Bari to join the editorial staff of ANSA, so I applied and they hired me. The way things are these days, I think I was lucky.”
“You mean you’re back here for good?”
“If they don’t throw me out. Not impossible, but I’ll try to behave.”
While Emilio was talking, I felt a very strange, painful mixture of contentment, anger and melancholy. I’d suddenly realized something I’d been keeping carefully hidden from myself: it was a long time since I’d had a friend.
Maybe that’s normal, when you get to your forties. Everyone has their own affairs – family, children, separations, careers, lovers – and friendship is a luxury you can’t afford. Maybe real friendship is a luxury after you’re twenty.
Or maybe I’m talking bullshit. The fact remains, at that moment I came to the painful realization that I no longer had any friends.
But I was glad Emilio was here with me, glad the trial had been postponed, glad I’d decided to take an hour off.
“Let’s go and have a coffee.”
“Let’s go,” he said, again with that scared smile, which looked so incongruous on the face of a man who’d been in charge of crowd control for the Young Communists when they were fighting the fascists on the one hand and the independent trade unions on the other.
We sat down in a little bar on the edge of the old town. I had a cappuccino and a croissant, Emilio just coffee. After drinking it he lit an MS. He’d been smoking MSs since high school. They weren’t like Margherita’s ultra-slim, ultra-light cigarettes, which were easy to give up. They were a piece of history, a prism for the emotions, a kind of time machine.
When I said no thanks, with a simple gesture of the hand, almost pushing away the packet Emilio had offered me, I noted a kind of disappointment in my friend’s face.
Smoking together, I knew well, had always had a special meaning. Like a ritual of friendship.
We talked casually for a while, saying the kind of things you say to re-establish contact when a lot of time has passed, the kind of things you say to find your way again in a terrain that has become unfamiliar.
And so, casually, I asked him about his wife – I’d never met her, all I knew was that Emilio had got married six or seven years earlier, to a colleague in Rome – the usual, commonplace question you ask when you’re about forty.
“Are you separated or are you still holding on?”
As I asked the question, I felt a chill descend. Even before Emilio had replied, even before I’d finished saying the words, which were out now and which I couldn’t retract.
“Lucia’s dead.”
The scene turned black and white. Silent and deafening. And suddenly devoid of meaning.
A sentence of Fitzgerald’s came into my mind, though I couldn’t remember it exactly. In the dark night of the soul, it’s always three in the morning.
It got mixed up with fragments of a non-existent conversation in my head, which was running on empty. When did she die? Why? Oh, her name was Lucia. That’s nice. It’s a lovely name, Lucia. I’m sorry. How old was she? Was she beautiful? How are you, Emilio? My condolences. We have to move on. Why didn’t anyone tell me? But who was there to tell me? Who?
Oh shit, shit, shit.
“She got ill and died in three months.”
Emilio’s voice was calm, almost toneless. As I looked at him in silence, not knowing what to say, he told me his story, and Lucia’s. A woman of thirty-four who one day in April went to her doctor to get the results of some tests, and found out her time was almost over. Even though she still had so many things to do. Important things, like having a baby.
“You know, Guido, when something like that happens you think about so many things. And what you think about most is all the time you wasted. You think of the walks you never took, the times you didn’t make love, the times you lied. The times you measured out your emotions like so much small change. I know it’s corny, but you wish you could go back in time and tell her how much you love her, you think about all the times you didn’t tell her and should have. In other words, always. It’s not just that you don’t want her to die. It’s the fact that you wish the time hadn’t been wasted like that.”
He was speaking in the present tense. Because his time had been wasted.
He told me everything, calmly. As if he wanted to exhaust the subject. He told me how she’d changed, in those few weeks, how her face had grown smaller, her arms thinner, her hands weaker.
I was silent, thinking that I’d never before in my life witnessed grief in such a terrible, clear, pure form.
Such a desperate form.
Then it was time to say goodbye.
We stood up from the table and took a few steps together. Emilio seemed calm. I wasn’t. He took out his wallet, rummaged in it for a bit, and took something out. It was a ticket from a coin laundromat, the kind that were starting to spring up in the city, with yellow signs and an American name. He wrote his phone number on it and gave it to me, and I handed him one of my stupid business cards. He told me to call him. In any case, he’d call me.
He seemed calm, but his eyes were somewhere else.
I let it ring three, four, five, six times. With every ring the urgency grew, and the anxiety. I was about to press the button to end the call, and try on the mobile, when from the other end I heard Margherita’s voice.
“Yes?”
An offhand tone, the tone of someone who’s leaving home to go to work. I was silent for a few moments, because suddenly I didn’t know what to say, and I had a lump in my throat.
“Who is that?”
“Me.”
“Oh. I was just on my way out, you caught me at the door. What is it? Are you in Lecce?”
“I wanted to tell you…”
“What?”
“I wanted to tell you…”
“Guido, what is it? Are you all right? Has something happened?” There was a slight note of alarm in her voice now.
“No, no. Nothing’s happened. I didn’t go to Lecce, the trial’s been postponed.”
I broke off, but this time she didn’t ask anything. She waited in silence.
“Margherita” – as I spoke, I realized I never called her by her name – “you remember that time you sent me a message on my mobile.. .”
She didn’t let me finish. “I remember. I wrote that meeting you was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me. It wasn’t true. It was the most wonderful.”
“I wanted to tell you the same thing. Well, not exactly the same. .. but I wanted to tell you that I can’t explain it to you now…” I was stammering.
“Guido, I love you. As I’ve never loved anyone in my life.”
I stopped stammering. “Thank you.”
“Thank you? You’re a strange guy, Guerrieri.”
“It’s true. Shall we eat out tonight?”
“Your treat?”
“Yes. Bye.”
“Bye. See you tonight.”
She hung up. I was standing on the corner of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and the Via Sparano. The shops were opening, trucks were unloading goods, people were walking with their heads down.
Thank you, I said again, to myself, and went on my way.