He broke off.
‘Yes?’ queried Ugo.
Rodolfo hesitated a long time before replying.
‘I think I’m in love, professore,’ he heard himself say.
‘Ah. In that case I won’t detain you long. Anyway, what you may not know about Giacometti is that during his years in Paris he was run down by a bus while crossing the street. A friend he was with reported later that the artist’s first words after the accident were, “Finally something has happened to me!” I’ve always thought it a good story, although I never really understood what Giacometti meant by that comment. But now I do, perhaps because something has finally happened to me.’
He fell into a silence which Rodolfo did not attempt to break.
‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book,’ Ugo said at last. ‘For years, I mean. Cornell, early 1980s. Wonderful campus, magnificent library. Some reference text in English. I’ve never been able to remember which.’
‘The Anglo-American Cyclopedia,’ Rodolfo replied without thinking.
After a moment, Ugo laughed heartily, then moaned.
‘Ow! Yes, yes, very good. Borges’ Uqbar. But this wasn’t the forty-sixth volume of anything. Much earlier in the alphabetical series of voci. It was entitled, in gold-blocked letters on the spine, “BACK to BOLOGNA”, those being the headings of the first and last articles in that particular volume.’
‘A completely random phrase.’
‘Utterly. You may remember the fuss that Zingarelli ran into when the eleventh edition of their dictionary featured masturbazione as the headword in bold type on one page. Anyway, most of the volumes of the work I saw on the stacks at Cornell were entitled with quite meaningless phrases. “HOW to HUG”, for example. Ridiculous.’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’
Ugo’s smile, if not visible, was audible.
‘Well, you may of course be better informed than I. At all events, this experience made me realise two things. One was the obvious fact that I was homesick, my research project was stalled, and the only way that I could salvage something from it was by going back to Bologna.’
‘Which you did?’
‘I came home, yes. And, as it turned out, wrote the book that really launched my career. What I didn’t write was the second thing suggested to me by that reference work in the library at Cornell, namely Back to Boulogne, a mystery in which the detective solves nothing. For my protagonist I had in mind a certain Inspecteur Nez, playing on the French word for nose, as in “has a nose for” but also “led by the nose”. In short, at once a deconstruction of the realistic, plot-driven novel and an hommage to Georges Simenon, the master of Robbe-Grillet and hence in a sense of us all. Any amount of atmosphere and sense of place, in other words, but no solution, just a strong final curtain line.’
Rodolfo stole a glance at his watch.
‘Why not scrap the sense of place too?’ he murmured.
The patient was silent for a moment.
‘Like a late Shakespearian romance, you mean?’
‘Why not?’
‘Located in a notional site named Illyria or Bohemia or…’
‘Ruritania.’
‘That’s been done.’
‘Surely the whole point is that everything’s been done.’
Professor Ugo was silent for some time. When he spoke again, it was in a distinctly crisper tone.
‘Possibly. At any rate, the reason I gave the nurse permission to admit you, Mattioli, was that I wanted to announce a decision that I’ve come to regarding what has happened.’
Rodolfo sighed. Here it comes, he thought.
‘I just don’t know what to say, professore. Apologies are obviously useless. No one could forgive what I’ve done to you.’
‘That seems a little extreme,’ Ugo replied. ‘But even if I couldn’t forgive, I can at least forget. In fact, I’ve already forgotten. So come back to the seminar, write your thesis and take your diploma. You’re an intelligent if rather forthright young man with your life to lead, a life in which many things will happen to you. Perhaps one already has. I believe you said that you were in love.’
‘I think I am.’
‘The distinction is specious. And now I must ask you to go. I’m still quite weak, but the doctors say that I’ll be back on my feet, if not my bum, by next week. So I expect to see you in class then. Understand?’
Rodolfo didn’t understand in the slightest.
‘Grazie infinite, professore,’ he said, and left.
30
After his conditional release from the clutches of the Carabinieri, Zen felt like a drink. On the other hand, he didn’t fancy returning to the bar near his hotel, where half the clientele, judging by the stacked trophies and plaques on display, were high-ranking officers from the Questura. He’d had enough of cops for one day.
In the end he stumbled on the perfect refuge in a side street off the market area. The customers here were drawn from a much broader social range than at Il Gran Bar, and were less interested in showing off their status and style than in chatting animatedly, drinking deep and pigging into the astonishing range of non-fat-free appetisers piled high on the bar: glistening cubes of creamy mortadella, chewy chunks of crisp pork crackling, jagged fragments of golden stravecchio Parmesan. The Lambrusco was of the increasingly scarce authentic variety, unfiltered and bottle-fermented. On that bleak evening, when the gelid smog in the streets seemed not just a meteorological fact but a malign presence, its rich purple froth provided a welcome confirmation that there was more to life than hospitals, police stations and faithless lovers.
Most people are familiar with the temporary euphoria produced by a few glasses of wine, but few would claim that the experience had saved their marriage. For Zen, however, this may just have been the case, because when his phone rang he was in a particularly mellow and affable mood, amenable to anything and treating it all lightly.
‘It’s me,’ Gemma’s voice said.
‘At last! How are you? Where are you?’
‘In a bar.’
‘Me too.’
He laughed.
‘We really must stop meeting like this.’
There was no reply, but instead of regretting his flippancy and moodily clamming up in turn, he signed the bartender to refill his glass and carried on as though there had just been a brief lapse in transmission, of no personal intent or significance.
‘Which bar? I’ll come immediately.’
‘No, no, don’t. Stefano’s here.’
‘Stefano?’
‘My son.’
‘Oh, Stefano! Yes. Yes, of course. I thought you said…er, “sto telefono”.’
‘You’re the most awful liar, Aurelio.’
‘That’s because I never get any practice.’
‘Anyway, the reason I’m calling is…I’m having dinner with them, as I told you. Then I was planning to drive home, but after what’s happened I’m not so sure that would be a good idea.’
‘Don’t dream of it, particularly in the dark. The truckers on the autostrada are vicious. The doctor I spoke to at the hospital was horrified that you’d even discharged yourself. He said you needed more tests and…’
‘It’s not just that. But I really need a bed for the night, only because of this trade fair there don’t seem to be any hotel rooms to be had.’
‘Do you want to sleep with me?’ Zen replied in a lighthearted tone that he had thought he would never be able to manage again.
‘If that’s what it takes.’
‘It’s a sort of bed and a half rather than a full double.’
‘I’ll take it.’
He laughed again, quite naturally.
‘It’s yours, signora. We’ll just need a credit card number to secure the deposit. I had an appointment this evening, but I’ll cancel it.’
‘Don’t do that. I won’t be free till later anyway. Probably much later. They’ve had some bad news, you see. That’s why Stefano arranged to meet me here before dinner, so that he could break it to me alone. Anyway, it looks like being a long evening in every sense.’