I look at him there, posing in the last photographs, framed in the old way. He doesn’t even seem to be the same person: a calmer man, a man at peace with his conscience. Only now do I realize that in his way he was trying to break through the wall of ill feeling that had built up between us. I can’t say he didn’t try. In his own way, of course, but I can’t say he didn’t do it.
How could I have imagined an outcome like this? Standing here alone in the apartment where my father lived, the man whose love, respect and understanding I kept looking for all through my childhood. A man overwhelmed with grief and inadequate to the role that had descended on him without warning. And now that he’s no longer here, everything appears so different. Around my stooped exhausted body, a line of photographs. Of course, I’m in some of them: the day of my graduation, a few birthdays or family meals. I always look so absent, many of those occasions I don’t even remember. I was looking at the camera, but I was looking somewhere else, looking ahead to what I still had to do, to all those things that would have to fill my little days. And then, seven years pass, like a flash, and he goes, without my even giving him time to tell me. The last thing he wanted to tell me is all in those silences, in the heavy breathing that fills the last messages in my voicemail. Now, unexpectedly, he smiles to me from these photographs, and among these objects, tidily collected over the years, I discover something more about his life: the journeys he took, the money he put aside, without ever telling me that he never did anything with the money I sent him. Maybe he was too embarrassed. Or maybe he was just trying to humour me. In his study, there’s a wall covered in papers, notes, photographs. My father wrote thoughts, read novels, had a companion. I would never have imagined it. There’s a photograph showing him together with Anna in Guatemala. The wind is blowing hard, they are smiling and holding hands. Anna seems about to fly away. Behind them, a stormy sea, a wave almost a couple of metres high is about to crash on the beach. On the back of the photograph, a pencilled note:
Do you remember, Anna? The power of those waves and what the locals used to say: you can’t beat the wave. To survive you have to stop. Look it in the face and abandon yourself to its force. That’s the only way you hope to save yourself. Salvation is inside you.
I turn the photograph over again and take another look at his smile.
His life is all here, among these papers. He may be gone, but everything is still in its place, and this apartment, like Anna’s tears, tell me about him, about the marks he left in time.
My apartment, on the other hand, wouldn’t say anything to those left behind. It’s a shop window, the work of a brilliant designer. Spotless and antiseptic. A shrine to efficiency and technology. Efficient, above all, at cataloguing parties, tits, arses, fucks. All the same. Perfect bodies, Botoxed, plastic, racing against time, but all the same. My life has been nothing but a long sequence of moments, all of them the same. An hour or a minute, it doesn’t matter. How much time wasted, sitting behind a table, spending money or accumulating things which, when the day comes, will all be left behind. I open the desk drawer and there I find my mother, her dark unruly curls, held in place by a gaudy yellow clip. In some photographs I’m with her: those endless afternoons by the sea, playing under the beach umbrella. My mother reading a novel, my father leafing through the newspaper with one hand and stroking her hair with the other. In these photographs, I look at the camera without thinking about what I will be in twenty years. I’m smiling at whoever is taking the photograph, with my hand held tightly in my mother’s and the little plastic bucket filled with sand. My fears are small ones, of monsters that don’t exist, life itself does not scare me.
I collapse on the bed, and am overcome by the unmistakable smell of tobacco and the aftershave my father used for more than twenty years. I imagine I still have that look, the one I had as a child, and that I’m not afraid, I don’t fear the passing of time.
When you’re a child everything seems to go so slowly. Feeding all our needs is that love in its pure state, without compromises. That’s the kingdom of childhood, where everything is exaggerated, suspended, without coordinates or directions. Happiness is there, in that unmeasured time, in that hand guiding you, in the smell of her skin, which, when life starts racing, you somehow end up forgetting.
18
THERE COMES A MOMENT when we have to come to terms with what we have been, what we are and what we hope to become. There comes a moment when it is necessary to try to make peace with our own failures, and to dig down into the sometimes nauseating magma of our own consciousness in search of answers. I mustn’t erase anything. It isn’t too late, I can still start all over again.
This afternoon, the top brass are meeting to sign the long-awaited contract that will give us control of Righini’s company, on which the director set his eyes last year. And this very morning, when the agreement gets his signature, I will no longer be formally part of his team, because I’ve decided to hand in my resignation.
No elegant suit and matching tie for me, I’ve deliberately opted for a T-shirt and a tracksuit top that I found in my father’s wardrobe, still impregnated with his smell. Even though I’m still running, still trying to keep up with You, I at least need to feel comfortable, and the absurd fantasy that I can still feel him near somehow gives me a sense of security.
To tell the truth, my last race was the one at the airport, because I knew the plane wouldn’t wait for me. As for the rest, I want to respect my time, and everyone else has to adapt. I have already done enough running.
Antonio is waiting for me when I leave the airport, with his usual disapproving look, the look of someone who’s tired of waiting. Not that there’s any reason: the plane arrived on time, Signor Romano has no luggage to reclaim, why the hell is he taking so long?
When I get in the car, I tell him that there’s no need to go fast, I’m not in any hurry. He seems surprised: maybe he thinks I’m still overcome with grief.
I am, but discreetly, it doesn’t show through in any way, it’s just a persistent background, which I’ll have to learn to live with. During the lightning-fast ride I don’t look at the road, I don’t care how long we take. For the first time in I don’t know how long I feel like chatting.
I didn’t know that Antonio had an eighteen-year-old daughter, I’ve never before heard him laugh, but I hear it now in response to a joke of mine about young girls nowadays. “A constant worry,” I add, talking the way a father would talk. And he knows he can trust what I say, after all, I’ve known a lot of girls in my life. I don’t know how long he’s been parked outside our office building, but when the conversation runs down and he throws me one of his questioning glances, I get out of the car and prepare to face my last day at work.
I go in through the glass door, knowing that it’s the last time I’ll do so in my official role. Everyone is immediately struck by the way I’m dressed. Paola quickly closes the fashion magazine she’s been leafing through and gives me one of those contrite, pained looks that pass for condolences.