When I got back to my office, tasks and meetings oozed around me like some kind of amoeba out of a sci-fi film. This slimy, gelatinous creature held me captive until late that evening, when it finally decided I wasn’t particularly digestible and expelled me, in the physical and moral state of a half-digested zombie. Moreover, since the trip to Rome the following day wasn’t part of my planned workflow, I had to arrange for substitutes to attend my hearings and I had to reschedule my appointments.
When I got home, I was exhausted. I took a few halfhearted jabs at Mister Bag, just to reassure him that we were still friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to do a proper workout. I wasted more water than I should have on a long hot shower, with the bathroom door wide open and Bruce Springsteen playing at full volume. At eleven o’clock I was back on the street, riding my bike. I was wearing my old black leather jacket, faded jeans, and a pair of track shoes. All in all, I looked exactly like what I was: a middle-aged man, well into his forties, dressing like a kid, as if that allowed him to thumb his nose at time.
I told myself that I knew perfectly well what I was doing, and that I didn’t care a bit. Even if I understood the mechanism behind it, it still put me in a good mood.
When I walked into the Chelsea Hotel, I recognized a number of regular customers. They recognized me, too, and a few even nodded hello. I was that strange guy who wasn’t gay but still dropped by frequently to eat, drink, and listen to music. There was a feeling of familiarity that I really liked, as if that place had somehow become partly mine. A sense of safety.
I looked around, but Nadia wasn’t there. I was disappointed. I thought of asking the bartender where she was, but her expression-as welcoming as a punch in the nose-dissuaded me.
So I sat down and ordered a plate of orecchiette with wild mushrooms and a glass of Primitivo. I managed to focus only on the food and the wine.
Nadia arrived just as I was leaving.
“Ciao, Guido,” she said cheerfully. “I was out at a friend’s birthday party. She’s a sweet girl, but she has the most amazingly dull friends you can imagine. The catering was ghastly: baked pasta in aluminum foil trays. I swear. One of your fellow lawyers, a guy with a gut and dandruff, tried to get my number. You’re not already leaving, are you?”
“Well, yes, it’s past midnight.” I realized there was a hint of resentment in my voice, as if the fact that she hadn’t been there when I arrived was a deliberate act of rudeness on her part. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice.
“Of course, I always forget that other people have jobs and have to get up in the morning.”
“Actually, I can sleep in a little bit tomorrow morning. I’m going to Rome for work, and the flight is at eleven.”
“Then stay a little longer. I still have to recover from that party. I’ll let you taste something I think you’ll like.”
“Another type of absinthe?”
“Something better. Give me a minute to see if they need my help. I doubt they do. Then I’ll come sit with you.”
Five minutes later she was at my table with two glasses and a bottle with an attractive, old-fashioned-looking label.
“You’ve eaten, right? This isn’t something you want to drink on an empty stomach.”
“What is it?”
“It’s an Irish whiskey called The Knot. Try it and tell me what you think.”
It didn’t taste like a whiskey. It had the scent of rum and it reminded me of Southern Comfort, without being sticky sweet.
“It’s good,” I said, after draining my glass. She filled it again and poured herself a generous serving as well.
“Sometimes I think I’m getting a little too fond of this stuff.”
“Sometimes I think the same thing myself.”
“Okay, we’ll hash out that problem some other evening. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“So, you’re going to Rome tomorrow. I’ve got to get there one of these days. See a couple of old girlfriends and spend a little money.”
I was trying to figure out how I could bring up the topic of my investigation and the questions I wanted to ask her, but I couldn’t seem to find the words. I pretended to focus on my whiskey, admiring its pale golden hue, but I must have seemed about as authentic as Monopoly money.
“Is there something you wanted to ask me?” she inquired, sparing me at least a little effort. For a moment I wondered if I should tell her a lie, any old lie; I told myself that would be a terrible idea.
“Well, actually, yes, there is.”
“Then go ahead and ask.”
I told her, as concisely as I could, the whole story, leaving out any details that weren’t, in my opinion, absolutely essential. Among the nonessential details I skipped were the details of my trip to Rome. For instance, the fact that I wouldn’t be going alone.
But when the time came to ask the question I’d come to ask, I couldn’t keep myself from looking around warily.
“And so I was wondering if any of the regulars here at the Chelsea might have anything to do with that world-the world of cocaine and drug dealing, I mean. Let me be clear: I don’t have any specific ideas, no suspicions. When my client told me that he’d found out some information from a gay friend of his, it occurred to me that I might ask you and see if anything useful came up.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t know what to tell you. If any of my customers uses or buys or sells cocaine-and I’d guess the likelihood is high-I don’t know anything about it. Obviously, nobody snorts it here-they’d have some explaining to do to Hans and Pino-and we haven’t noticed any suspicious activity, nothing to indicate that anyone is using this place as a base to sell coke. I don’t know anything about drugs, these days.”
“Why do you say ‘these days’?”
“Well, in the first half of my life-in my other life-white powder made an occasional appearance. A number of my clients liked coke, and I knew a few people who sold it, though I never used it, much less bought it. Anyway, I’m talking about a long time ago, years ago. It’s a world I had a few brushes with, but it’s light-years away now. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
“Don’t worry. It was a stupid idea, the kind of idea only an amateur investigator would come up with.”
We went on chatting while the bar slowly emptied out. Then the staff went home, one by one, and in the end we were sitting there alone, with most of the lights turned off, and the music still playing, turned down low. She went and fetched Pino/Baskerville from the car and let him come in and sit with us. He seemed to remember me, because he came over and let me pet him and then stretched out on the floor under our table.
“I like to sit here, after the place shuts down, with Pino. The bar changes-it becomes a different place. And then I can smoke because when it’s closed it’s no longer a public place. It’s my place, and I can do what I want. Pino doesn’t mind cigarette smoke, or at least he never objects.”
“Can I say something incredibly stupid?”
“Be my guest.”
“It seems incredible to me that until just a couple of years ago it was okay to smoke in bars and restaurants. I have a hard time even picturing it. I have to make an effort to remember that there were cigarettes, and that some places you walked into the air was practically unbreathable. It’s as if the regulations against smoking interfered with my memories and manipulated them somehow.”
“I’m not sure I follow you on that last part.”
“Let me give you an example. This afternoon, I was sitting in a bar waiting for someone. While I was sitting there by myself, I thought back and remembered a time, years and years ago, when I was sitting in that same bar with my friends. It was a memory from my time in college, and for sure at least three people who were there with me were smokers. I’m certain on that afternoon we were smoking. And yet the scene, as I saw it in my mind, had no cigarettes. It’s as if the prohibition of smoking in public places had a sort of retroactive effect on my memories.”
“A retroactive effect on your memories. You say some odd things. Nice, though. Why did you happen to remember that particular afternoon?”
“We were talking about novels and characters. Each one of us named the character we identified with most.”
“Who did you pick?”
“Captain Fracasse.”
“Would you say the same thing today?”
“No, I doubt it. Captain Fracasse is still one of my favorite characters from literature, but if I had to play the same game today, I’d pick someone else.”
“Who would you pick?”
“Charlie Brown.”
She burst into laughter, a short, sharp explosion.
“Come on, really.”
“Charlie Brown, really.”
She stopped laughing and looked me in the eye to see if I was joking or not. She decided I wasn’t joking.
“But you said characters from literature.”
“You know what Umberto Eco said about Charles Schulz?”
“What?”
“I’m not sure if I remember it word for word, but I’m pretty sure this was the concept: ‘If poetry means the capacity of carrying tenderness, pity, and wickedness to moments of extreme transparence, as if things passed through a light and there were no telling any more what substance they are made of, then Schulz is a poet.’ And I would add to that: Schulz was a genius.”
“Why Charlie Brown, though?”
“Well, as you probably know, Charlie Brown is a prototypical loser. His baseball team always loses. The other kids make fun of him, and he’s hopelessly in love with a little girl-the Little Red-Haired Girl-even though he’s never been able to talk to her. She doesn’t even know Charlie Brown exists.”
“But what does a loser like Charlie Brown have to do with someone like you? I don’t get it.”
“Wait, let me finish. Have you read the one where he goes to summer camp with a paper bag over his head, with holes cut out for his eyes?”
“No.”
“When Charlie Brown puts the paper bag with eye holes over his head, suddenly, inexplicably, he becomes popular. All the kids at the camp go to him for advice and help. He becomes another person. I haven’t read many books that I identified with so intensely as that series of Peanuts comic strips. The Charlie Brown who became someone only when his head was covered with a paper bag is me.”
She sat in silence, looking at me. Underneath the table the dog wriggled on his back, making low sounds of pleasure like a giant purring cat. Keith Carradine was softly singing “I’m Easy.”
“I like to read, but it’s always been easier for me to identify with characters in movies. I think I like movies more than anything in the world. I like everything about going to the movies, and the moment I like best is when they turn off the house lights and the film is about to begin.”
She was right. It’s a perfect moment when the lights go down and everything’s about to begin. For a little while neither of us spoke. I let my eyes roam over the film posters hanging on the walls.
“Where do you get these posters?” I asked after a couple of minutes.
“They’re almost all originals. Only a few of the oldest ones are reproductions. I started collecting them years ago, and back then to find them you had to go around to junk shops, old film distribution companies, and bookstores that specialized in cinema. Now you can find anything you want on the Internet. But I still prefer going around to dusty old shops to look for posters.”
There were posters from every era: from La Dolce Vita to Manhattan , from Cinema Paradiso to Dead Poets Society, with a picture of Robin Williams being lifted in triumph by his students, against a yellow background that looked like embossed gold.
“Call me corny, but at the end of that movie, when the boys climb onto their desks, it was all I could do not to cry,” I said, pointing at the poster.
“I’m way cornier than you, then. I sobbed like a little girl. And then, when I saw the movie again, I cried just as hard as the first time.”
“There’s a line I always remember from that movie-”
“O Captain! My Captain!”
“ ‘Our fearful trip is done.’ But that’s not the part I meant.”
“Which one, then?”
“Something that Robin Williams as Keating says to his students: ‘No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.’ ”
“It would be nice if it were true.”
“Maybe it is true.”
She gave me a serious look, the look of someone hearing something she liked.
“I like movies that make you cry.”
“So do I.”
“I can name more than you can.”
“Want to have a contest?”
“Sure. You go first.”
“ Il Postino with Massimo Troisi and Philippe Noiret.”
“Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. My favorite scene is the one that echoes Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. ”
“If we’re talking about Chaplin, then City Lights. ”
“Beau Geste.”
“With Gary Cooper?”
“Yes.”
“You’re right. It’s the classic melodrama.”
“Now it’s your turn.”
“ Chariots of Fire. My favorite scene is when the trainer, Mussabini, can’t bring himself to go to the stadium. He looks out his hotel window, sees the Union Jack going up the flagpole, and realizes that Abrahams has won. He starts crying with joy and punches his fist through his straw hat.”
“ Million Dollar Baby. Clint Eastwood is a genius. Plus, he’s definitely my type.”
“ Braveheart with Mel Gibson. The execution scene. He’s on the scaffold, and he yells ‘Freedom!’ while the executioner stands by with his axe at the ready. Just a few seconds before he’s executed, he sees the woman he loves moving through the crowd. She looks at him from a distance and smiles at him, and he smiles back, just as the axe is falling.”
“Ghost.”
“Gladiator.”
“The Green Mile.”
“Schindler’s List.”
“You’re rolling out the big guns. The Way We Were, the whole movie, especially the final scene, and the soundtrack.”
“ Cinema Paradiso. The scene with the reel of censored kisses.”
“It’s true, it’s wonderful. I think that movie won an Oscar for that scene alone. It’s just the kind of thing Americans go crazy over. What about the final scene of Thelma and Louise?”
“Spectacular. There’s a line in that movie that I’ve always dreamed of getting a chance to say, someday.”
“What line?”
“Harvey Keitel is questioning Brad Pitt, and to get him to talk, he says: ‘Son, your misery is gonna be my goddamn mission in life.’ Now that’s the way you threaten someone.”
“It’s your turn.”
“ Jesus Christ Superstar. Mary Magdalene singing by Jesus’ tent while he’s sleeping.”
“ ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him.’ ” As she said the title of the song sung by Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who was in love with Jesus Christ, I realized I’d said the wrong thing.
She didn’t notice. Or rather, she noticed so openly that it didn’t matter.
“As you can imagine, I really identify with that scene.”
At that point, inevitably, there was a pause.
“Okay, fine, I identified with Mary Magdalene. What about you?” Nadia said at last.
“I actually identified with both of the protagonists of Philadelphia, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks.”
“My God, that final sequence with the Super 8 home movies of Tom Hanks’s character, Andrew, as a child! I remember it as if I were watching the movie right now. The swing, the children playing on the beach, the mother dressed in those sixties clothes with a scarf on her head, the dog, Andrew dressed as a cowboy… the music by Neil Young. It’s so heartbreaking.”
“The final scene is the most moving one, but my favorite is during the trial, when Denzel Washington does that direct examination of Tom Hanks.”
“Why is that your favorite scene?”
“If you like, I can recite it for you, and then you’ll see why.”
“Recite it for me? You know the whole scene by heart?”
“More or less.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You remember the story, of course?”
She looked at me as if she were a Grand Slam tennis champion and I’d just asked whether she remembered how to hit a backhand. I raised both hands in a sign of surrender.
“Okay, okay, forgive me. So it’s a crucial point in the trial, and Denzel Washington is questioning Tom Hanks, who plays a lawyer named Andrew. He’s in the advanced stages of the disease and he doesn’t have long to live:
“Are you a good lawyer, Andrew?
“I’m an excellent lawyer.
“What makes you an excellent lawyer?
“I love the law. I know the law. I excel at practicing.
“What do you love about the law, Andrew?
“I… many things. What do I love the most about the law?
“Yes.
“It’s that every now and again, not often, but occasionally, you get to be a part of justice being done. That really is quite a thrill when that happens.
“Thank you, Andrew.”
After a few instants of breathless silence, Nadia started clapping slowly.
I hadn’t played that game in a long time. Years and years ago, I’d had a strange facility for repeating from memory the words of movies, songs, books, and poems. Then, for a number of reasons, I began to find it increasingly difficult.
There is nothing that evokes the disquieting idea of the passage of time as much as observing the deterioration of an ability that you had always taken for granted. It’s more or less the same thing that happens in the gym. You’re sparring with someone and you see-to give an example-that he’s leading with a straight right punch. You know exactly what you need to do in this case: duck, feint, straighten up, and hit back, all in a single, fluid movement. Your brain issues the order to your back and your arms, but the order arrives just a fraction of a second too late, the punch hits you, and your counter-attack is slow-it seems to you-and slightly off-kilter. It’s not a reassuring sensation.
The fact that the words of the movie came back to me that night so easily, so clearly, made me feel good. As if I’d returned to something fundamental about myself.
“How do you do it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always had a gift for learning and reciting things that I liked-and I really liked that exchange-but recently I thought that I’d lost that ability. I’m as amazed as you are that I was able to pull it off. Though, of course, it might be more impressive if we checked the actual words of the movie to find out if I got it right.”
She looked at me, and it seemed as if she were searching for the right words. Or the right question.
“Do you like it so much because you see yourself in it?”
“I think so. It’s not something I talk about much. I became a lawyer pretty much by accident. I always thought of this work as something I settled for. I was a little ashamed of it. And it’s always been hard for me to admit-to myself, much less to others-how much I’ve ended up liking it.”
She flashed me a beautiful smile, the kind that tells you the other person really is listening to what you’re saying. She didn’t speak; she didn’t need to. She was telling me to go on.
“The truth is that I’ve always looked upon my work with an element of condescension. In college I enrolled in law because I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve always had an ideological and stereotypical vision of the work that lawyers do, and I’ve almost always denied myself the right to be proud of being one. I never had the moral courage to revise my slightly childish idea of practicing law being an ethically unacceptable profession. The work of shysters and hair-splitters.”
“Isn’t that true, though? I’ve never had a good experience with any lawyer except you.”
“Sure, it’s often true. The profession is full of scoundrels, shysters, virtual illiterates, and even a few genuine criminals. For that matter, the same is true of the magistrate, or any other profession you care to name. The issue, though, isn’t whether there are bad or incompetent people practicing law, or whether the work tends to exaggerate some of the worst qualities of the human mind, and of human beings in general.”
“So what is the issue?”
“The issue is that this is a profession in which you can be a free man. It’s a line of work that can offer you certain things… well, I don’t think there are many things in life that rank with the feeling of winning an acquittal for a defendant you know is innocent, especially when he was facing hard time or even life in prison.”
“But I wasn’t innocent,” Nadia said with a smile.
True. Technically, she hadn’t been innocent. She had committed the crime of abetting prostitution, that is, she had introduced pretty girls to wealthy men and had received a substantial fee for her intermediation. No one had been forced into it; no one had been blackmailed; no one had been hurt. The idea that we send people to prison-that we deprive people of their freedom-for actions of this sort becomes increasingly inconceivable to me the more time passes.
“It would have been an injustice if you had been convicted. You never harmed anyone.”
I was about to say too much. Something along the lines of, if anything, you did good. Which, when you’re talking to a former prostitute, a madam who recruited and employed other prostitutes, is not exactly the right thing to say. Those words left the neurons of my brain, hurtled at top speed through my nervous system, and were teetering on my lips, about to spring into the air, when I managed to snatch them back.
“You’re a good lawyer.”
It was hard to tell from her intonation whether it was a question or a statement. It seemed to hover halfway between the two.
“Is that a question?”
“It is and it isn’t. That is, I know you’re a good lawyer. I remember when the judge emerged from his chambers into the courtroom and read out the verdict. Never in my life, would I have believed that with the things they had on those wiretaps I could have been acquitted.”
“The wiretaps were inadmissible as evidence. There had been a procedural flaw that-”
“Yes, I know, I know, I remember word for word what you said in your summation. But at the time, I just assumed you were posturing to prove you were earning your fee. I was positive they would find me guilty, and I was completely astonished when I was acquitted instead. It was an unexpected gift.”
“Well, yeah, that went well, it’s true.”
“And you want to know something?”
“What?”
“I was ready to throw my arms around you, at that moment. I was about to do it, and then I decided it would be crazy and I would have embarrassed you. So I did nothing.”
Then, after a pause: “Anyway, it was a statement, but it was also a question.”
“What?”
“Do you consider yourself a good lawyer?”
I didn’t answer right away. I took a deep breath.
“Sometimes. Sometimes it seems to me that the words and the concepts and my own actions all fit together perfectly. Compared to most other lawyers, I think I’m pretty good. But if I measure myself against some abstract standard of good practice of law, then I see things very differently. I’m disorganized. I’m inefficient. Often I don’t feel like working, and I rely upon improvisation far more frequently and extensively than wisdom or caution would recommend.
“I imagine a good lawyer is one who is capable of great self-discipline. When a good lawyer needs to write something-an appeal, for example, or a brief-he sits down at his desk and doesn’t get up again until he is done. What I do is I sit down and I write a few sentences. Then I decide that I’ve completely taken the wrong tack, and I start getting upset. So then I do something else, obviously less important and less urgent. Sometimes I even leave the office, go to a bookstore, and buy a book. Then I come back and sit at my desk and write, but without much interest or determination. And then finally, when the pressure is on, I focus on the task at hand and I write and I do it. Every time I do it though, I have the impression I’ve just dashed it off at the last minute, that I’ve cheated my client. In general, I feel I’m pulling the wool over the eyes of the world.”
Nadia scratched the side of her head. She looked at me as if I were a deeply strange individual. Then she shrugged.
“You’re crazy. I can’t think of any other way to put it.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement that shut down discussion of the topic. I was crazy, and there was no other way to put it.
“And what are you good at?”
I don’t know why I kept putting my foot in my mouth. Even I know better than to ask a woman who has been a porn star and a prostitute what special talents she possesses.
“I really would like to be good at something. Let’s just say I’m still looking. I know how to sketch and I know how to paint, too, but I wouldn’t say I’m really good at either. I know how to sing. I have a good voice and a good ear, though I can’t really belt it out. But when I hear a song, I can reproduce it immediately, either by singing it or playing it on a keyboard. I have a great ear, and I’ve let it go to waste.” She experienced a visible twinge of self-pity but suppressed it immediately.
“And I’m good at listening to people. Everyone says so.”
“Yeah, you told me you had clients who came mostly to talk with you. They wanted to be able to tell you about themselves without feeling judged.”
“Exactly. If you pay someone for her time, you don’t have to worry about your performance. When you talk or when you fuck. I had one client who was a stunningly handsome man, about fifty-wealthy, successful, and powerful. He could have had all the women he wanted, for free, and instead he came to see me, to pay me money.”
“Because when he was with you, he was free of anxiety.”
“He was free of anxiety, that’s right. Since he was paying me, he didn’t have to worry about whether his performance was up to expectations, in terms of both conversation and sex. He wasn’t afraid to be himself.”
She paused, smiling, then continued.
“We might say he could take the paper bag off his head.”
Those words hung in the air, dissolving slowly into a fine, drifting dust.
Our glasses were empty and it was very late.
“Shall we drink one last glass and then go home and get some sleep?”
I nodded slowly, my vision slightly blurred. She filled two glasses but didn’t hand me mine. She kept both on the table in front of her, as if there were a ritual to be completed, before we could drink.
“You know something?”
“What?”
“I notice that when I talk to you I try to choose my words carefully.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s as if I want to sound intelligent. As if I’m trying to choose the right words, so I say something smart.”
I didn’t reply. All the answers that came to my mind were-in fact-unintelligent. So I said nothing.
“I noticed that because I was sitting here and trying to think of a clever, original toast, but I couldn’t.”
I took my glass and touched it against hers, which still sat on the table.
“Let’s forget about words,” I said.
After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up her glass and raised it while looking at me with a shy smile. Then, at last, we both drank.
From the darkness outside came the muffled, muddled sounds of a moment out of time.