“Fresh fruit! Look how soft these grapes are!” The stallholders lavish praise on their produce, holding forth to their little audience. Amid all the people pushing, shouting, asking for things, muttering, I’m searching for her. It only takes a moment before my gaze comes to rest on a point that seems random, but isn’t really random at all, and our eyes meet. The confusion, the shouts, everything comes to an abrupt halt. There’s nothing else left except her and her flowered skirt. “I was looking for you,” I say, as I walk towards her.
“Me too.”
Isabelle has just bought some huge lemons, and now she’s searching for a grater. Giulia is chattering to herself, alternating vowels and consonants in a language only she can understand. She’s happy, she gives me a comical grin, opening her mouth wide and screwing up her little blue eyes with enthusiasm. She doesn’t look much like her mother, but she does have the same smile.
As we search for lemon graters, Isabelle asks me if I want to hold Giulia. I don’t have time to refuse, I’m already face to face with that little pink bundle.
It’s the first time I’ve ever been so close to a child and I’m surprised to discover that the contact is far from unpleasant, although fraught with anxiety: I’m afraid she’ll fall, that she’ll slip out of my arms or notice my discomfort. But she stays quite still against my chest, and continues to smile at me. There’s no real reason, but she just keeps smiling.
“Oh, here it is, just what I was looking for.” Isabelle has finally found her lemon grater. She turns and asks me, “Do you like it?”
It’s an ordinary yellow lemon grater, with a transparent plastic cover. But the way she touches it, opens it and examines it makes it seem precious.
“Do you ever come here?”
“Not often, and you?”
“I live just up there.” She points to a balcony at the top of a building on the right. “Those geraniums you see are mine.”
“Do you live alone?”
“A woman comes a couple of times a week to do the cleaning, the rest of the time there’s just me and Giulia.”
She’s ready to take her daughter in her arms again, and as soon as she takes her off me I realize that I’d like her back. We’d found our own balance.
As we buy bread and slices of pizza, Isabelle tells me which are her favourite shops, the habits she can’t live without. About a hundred metres from the square, there’s a shop that rents out good films, which is great for her because she’s quite a film buff, and it’s embarrassing to realize that I’m almost completely ignorant on the subject. When it comes to literature, too, it turns out Isabelle has always been a voracious reader, although she prefers the more intimist kind of novel, and I’d like to be able to enliven the conversation with some interesting quotations but, apart from a few historical or philosophical anecdotes, not much comes to mind. I’ve spent most of my life with numbers.
She doesn’t seem to be bothered by these major differences. She takes me by the hand and gives me a light, infectious smile that seems to be saying: We have plenty of time, we may even discover paths we never thought of exploring before, don’t be in a hurry. And with my hand in hers, walking on these black paving stones that smell of life, the sheer everydayness of this little slice of the metropolis has never seemed so invigorating: the restaurant owner coming to the door for a drag on his cigarette, the florist chatting at the side of the street with the waitress from the bar opposite, the market vendors joking among themselves… Everybody seems so relaxed, even a little indolent to me, but of course they know how to take their time. Isabelle greets them, stops to chat, listens to their confidences and keeps receiving gifts: a rose, some basil, a handful of pine nuts for making pesto. The truth is, she knows how to deal with people. She doesn’t make distinctions, she treats everybody the same.
We reach the front door of the building where she lives. Inside, there’s a little lift, but she keeps walking right past it towards the stairs.
“What floor are you?”
“The fourth.”
“What about the lift?”
“I don’t trust the lift,” she says, and I smile. To think that, of all people, I met a woman like her!
I take Giulia in my arms, and we divide the shopping bags. The stairs are not very inviting: the closer we get to her floor, the steeper they get. After the second flight we hear a dog barking, then a woman yelling “Pablo, stop it!” There’s an odour of fried onions and detergent, while the walls smell of the fresh paint someone has crudely applied to it to disguise a small crack.
Isabelle’s apartment is much more welcoming than the rest of the building. The dark clay floor and the wooden beams on the ceiling are typical of apartments in the centre, the furnishings are bohemian, the kitchen filled with colourful accessories, and there are piles of books in Italian and French, DVDs and photographs. There’s something comforting about all this untidiness, about Giulia’s toys scattered everywhere, about the old French books on the shelves, the collections of poetry, the 1960s refrigerator that she’s decided to use as a dresser and the antique wrought-iron crib she’s transformed into a window box. Timeworn objects given a second life, like shells gathered on the beach and strung onto a necklace or glued to a jewel box. Isabelle also has a passion for buses, Fifties- and Sixties-style buses with rounded corners. She has collected so many objects showing buses, she’s lost count. There’s a really nice tin clock shaped like a stylized bus just next to the TV set. “Talking of spending your life sitting down,” she says as she conscientiously picks up Giulia’s toys and puts them in a basket. “The only way to feel you’re not missing anything when you travel is to look out of the window. It’s like seeing a good film or reading an interesting book. Sometimes it’s worth stopping, though, don’t you think?”
The way she looks at me, after expressing such a flexible yet resonant idea, is so extraordinarily relevant to what I’m living through, it takes my breath away. In my life I’ve had to deal with politicians, bankers, people in authority, I used to know how to rattle off clever remarks, obtain favours, box people into corners if necessary, but nobody ever left me speechless. Nobody until today.
Beyond the door of the bedroom, I see a few photographs on the walls and recognize her. She’s very young, and wearing a ballerina’s tutu. Now I understand where she gets that long straight neck, that elegant bearing. “I used to dance when I was a little girl,” she says, when she notices me looking at them. “But it was never very serious.”
“So you stopped?”
“I love life too much to let it be taken over by a single passion,” she says as she goes into the kitchen to sort out the lunch at the stove: the water for the pasta, the cherry tomatoes for the sauce. Everything about the way she talks and behaves suggests a deep culture, but she’s also an old-fashioned, highly organized mother and housewife. She moves with great dexterity in this cluttered space. Here too, there are plenty of photographs, most of them of Giulia: having a bath, at the sea, with a funny hat and a joke pair of glasses. Isabelle stops in front of one of them and with the air of someone who never gets tired of looking at it says, “This is my favourite. There’s so much of me in her, in that smile of hers.” I also look at it closely, and for a fraction of a second have a feeling I’ve already lived through this moment. Now we’re again looking straight at each other and I want to kiss her. I feel a kind of enthusiasm growing inside me that I’ve never known, or that I may have forgotten in the disenchantment of all the easy lays I’ve collected over the years. It’s just a kiss, a tender little kiss, where you hold back desire for the sake of something bigger, and yet it’s like one’s first ever kiss, a completely different way of looking at the world.