I tried another tack. “What exactly is the name of this discipline again?”
“It’s called wing tsun.”
“Not exactly girls’ play.”
“Most girls’ play, like most boys’ play, isn’t interesting. According to legend, wing tsun was devised by a nun, as a way of allowing physically weak people to defeat bigger and stronger opponents. But there are legends like this in all the martial arts. The best one is about the origins of ju-jitsu. The one about the Japanese doctor and the weeping willow. Do you know it?”
“No. Tell it to me.”
“There was a doctor in ancient Japan who had spent many years studying methods of combat. He wanted to discover the secret of victory, but he was disappointed, because in the end, in every system, the thing that won out was either strength, or the quality of weapons, or dirty tricks. In other words, however much you trained and studied martial arts, however strong and prepared you were, you could always find someone else stronger, or better armed, or more cunning, who would defeat you.”
She broke off, as if she’d just thought of something that bothered her.
“Does this really interest you, or are you just being kind?”
How do you answer a question like that? Especially when asked by a woman-a nun – who’s just finished beating up a bruiser over six feet tall as if she were juggling? You don’t answer at all. Obviously.
All I did was look her in the eyes with a slightly comical expression, as if to say, We could dispense with all this point-scoring. Or else, I’m not the kind of person who says something just to be kind.
Incredibly, it worked. Her features relaxed a little, and for the first time her face lost a little of its hardness. It was transformed. Pretty, I couldn’t help thinking, and immediately felt ashamed and repressed the thought. Unusual as she was, Claudia was still a nun, and I’d been taught by nuns all through elementary school. Some ideas, associations, patterns of behaviour, are very hard to abandon if you were taught by nuns at elementary school. You just don’t say, you don’t even think, that a nun is pretty.
Claudia resumed her story without making any other comments. I stopped thinking about nuns, both in general and in particular, and my stupid taboos.
“Anyway, this doctor was dispirited, because he wasn’t making any progress in his quest. One winter’s day, he was sitting by a window. Outside, it had been snowing for hours. He was looking out, deep in thought. The whole landscape had turned white, with all the snow. The meadows, the rocks, the houses, were covered in snow. The trees too. The branches of the trees were heavy with snow, and at a certain point the doctor saw the branch of a cheery tree bend under the weight of the snow and break. Then the same thing happened with a big oak. There’d never been a snowfall like that before.”
There’s no doubt about it: I have a childish turn of mind. I like being told stories, if the storyteller is good. Claudia was good, and I wanted to know how her story was going to end.
“In the grounds, not far from the window, there was a pond with weeping willows all around it. The snow was falling on the branches of the willows too, but no sooner did it start to accumulate than the branches bent and the snow fell to the ground. The branches of the willows didn’t break. When he saw that, the doctor felt a sudden sense of elation and realized he’d reached the end of his quest. The secret of combat was non-resistance. Whoever is yielding overcomes all tests. Whoever is hard, rigid, is sooner or later defeated, and broken. Sooner or later he’ll meet someone stronger. Ju-jitsu means: the art of yielding. The secret was in yielding. Wing tsun works on more or less the same lines.”
It struck me that if the secret was in yielding, Claudia didn’t seem to have mastered it at all. To be honest, she didn’t give the impression of being a yielding person.
She’d read my thoughts. Or more likely she was simply continuing the speech she had in her head. “Obviously you have to understand what yielding means. It means resisting up to a point, and then knowing exactly when to yield and divert your opponent’s strength, which in the end will rebound against him. The secret is in knowing how to find the point of balance between resistance and yielding, yielding and resistance, weakness and strength. That’s where the principle of victory lies. To do exactly the opposite of what the opponent expects, which to you comes naturally or spontaneously. Whatever those two words mean.”
Yes, I thought. That’s true for other things too. To do exactly the opposite of what the opponent expects, which to you comes naturally or spontaneously. Whatever those two words mean.
I remembered a book I’d read a few months earlier. “It’s a nice story. It reminds me of what Sun Tzu says in his book on Chinese military strategy.”
She looked somewhat surprised. What did I know about Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategy, that kind of thing?
“ The Art of War.”
“That’s the one. He says strategy is the art of paradox.”
“Exactly. You’ve read his book?”
No, I have a manual full of useful quotations for every occasion. I took that one from the chapter entitled “How to Impress Nuns Who Are Martial Arts Masters”.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
What a strange question. Why? Why do you read a book? How should I know? Because I felt like it. Because I came across it when I had nothing else to read, or to do. Because the cover intrigued me, or the title. Or a few consecutive words on a page opened at random.
Why do you read a book?
“I don’t know. I mean, there’s no reason. I saw it in a bookshop, I bought it and I read it. The thing that struck me the most was this question of paradox, even though I wasn’t sure I understood it when I read it. Now it seems clearer to me.”
Claudia looked me straight in the face for a few more moments. She seemed to be changing her mind about the category she’d put me in, whatever that was.
Then she curled her lips, for a fraction of a second. Her idea of a smile. The first. She lifted her hand to say goodbye: a somewhat clumsy gesture, but a friendly one. Then, without saying anything else, she turned and walked towards the changing rooms. Without waiting for my answer.
So I left the gym and looked at my watch. I wasn’t going to get a taxi, and I wasn’t even going back to the office.
It was almost ten, and it was time to go home.
I set off with my head down. Walking quickly towards the centre of town, past closed shops, past clubs and pubs, with everything I had seen and heard jumbled in my head.
22
Many years ago, in Old Bari, just opposite the moat of Castello Svevo, there used to be a pizzeria. Very small, just one room, with a counter, an oven and a cash desk.
Nino’s, it was called. There were no tables – where would they have put them? They made only two kinds of pizza: Margherita, and Romana with anchovies. The pizza maker was a short, thin man about fifty, with a hollow face and feverish eyes that didn’t look at anyone. With a baker’s shovel, he’d place the hot pizzas on a tiny marble work top, where a fat young man, with a pockmarked, hostile face, would wrap them one by one and hand them over to us with a curt manner. As if he wanted to get rid of us as quickly as possible because he obviously didn’t like us. He didn’t like anyone.
There were four of us, four friends, and we went and ate the pizzas with our hands, on the low moat wall. The best pizzas in Bari, we would say, burning our tongues and palates, trying to avoid the white-hot mozzarella ending up on our clothes.
I don’t know if they really were the best pizzas in Bari. Maybe they were only normal pizzas, nothing different, but we’d feel very Bohemian venturing at night into the old town, which at that time was a dangerous, forbidden place. Maybe they were only normal pizzas, but we were twenty years old and we’d sit on the wall and eat them, and drink Peroni beer from big bottles, and then light our cigarettes. We’d stay there, talking, smoking, drinking beer, until late, endured by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, until the inhabitants of the neighbourhood went to sleep and the pizzeria closed.