He didn’t expect to find her here today. She was now studying in a different area, but still he had to come visit the place again. Just in case. To commune with the past. To reopen old wounds. To feel the hurt inside. It was foolish, he knew, but if he had to march down this calvary road of his own making, the Feltrinelli bookshop could not be avoided. The latest novel by Walter Veltroni and the Italian edition of the final Harry Potter book were piled high by the cash registers and staff kept on replenishing the displays on a steady basis. He’d sent her the English-language edition of the Rowling when it had appeared, but by then they were no longer on speaking terms and she had not even thanked him or acknowledged the gift, one of many over the months they had known each other. The first book she had sent him as a gift was a collection of stories by Italo Calvino. Strange how he remembered every single, irrelevant detail.
Finally, his stomach reminded him he hadn’t had a real meal since a dim sum in London’s Chinatown the day before, so he left the bookshop and headed across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II toward the Campo dei Fiori and the Pollarolla restaurant where he had a pleasant memory of fragole di bosco with a fine dusting of sugar. Of course, he had also taken her there, once upon a time. Because of a stomach condition, she was not allowed to eat any spicy food, which he’d always considered something of a tragedy. But the meal today, insalata verde and risotto ai funghi, could not feed the pain inside, and later, as he walked back to his hotel, he made a detour by Stazione Termini and under cover of darkness surrounded by rushing commuters and loitering teenagers he slipped his left hand deep into the plastic bag he had now been carrying for half of the day and felt the hard grip of the gun down there. It felt real. By Stazione Termini he sat down and wept.
He woke up early. Escaping the inevitable dreams of her, of them. The sheer epiphany of her body, the ever so subtle and patently unique color of her nipples, the broadness of her smile, the terrible harshness of her words on the phone the last time he had called her, the luscious sound of her sigh every time he had penetrated her. The places they’d been, the things they’d said.
He always woke up early these days, maybe as an automatic reaction to the sleeping memories of her and the abominable pain they invariably inflicted on his soul.
He adjusted his eyes, wiped the night away, and moved his right leg.
Yes, he was in Rome.
Alone.
He passed on breakfast, picked up a map of the city from an older woman now manning the hotel’s reception desk, and, avoiding the elevator and its ornate metal grille, walked down the stairs to the street and found the rental car. He hadn’t been ticketed, after all. Small mercies.
He pulled the gun from the depths of the Rinascente plastic bag and moved it to the glove compartment. Not an ideal place to keep it, but there were few good hiding places in the hotel room. He would just have to drive carefully and not attract police attention. The busy Roman traffic would help.
Before driving off, he phoned Alessandra, Giorgio, and Marina and made appointments to see them separately throughout the day. They were all surprised to find out he was in Rome, but sounded happy enough to meet up with him.
With the festival organizers he talked about books and movies and cultural politics. As they always did when they met at events. It was amazing how buoyant they remained every single year in the face of mounting difficulties in obtaining funding, grants, and sponsorships. Of course, they asked him why he was in Rome. “Just passing through,” he would answer with a fake smile, and this seemed to satisfy them. They embraced and made a vow to see each other again at the next festival and went their separate ways.
Alessandra knew a small trattoria in the Trastevere, concealed within a labyrinth of cobbled streets and small churches only a local could navigate with impunity and find a way out of again. He meekly followed her. Night was falling. Inside, he felt ever so empty. Following the break-up with Desi, he had almost fallen into bed with Alessandra since both had been on the rebound from heart shattering affairs. But it hadn’t happened. They knew each other professionally, and she had also been aware of his relationship with Desi, as they both freelanced for the same magazines. Maybe it was because neither of them were sufficiently head over heels about the other, or maybe they both lacked the energy for purely recreational sex. Sometimes you want the tenderness and the feelings, and the physicality wasn’t enough to conquer the inner thirst. At any rate, after a failed attempt at meeting up in Paris for a tryst, they’d drifted apart, either to other adventures or, in his case, a desert of loneliness. He expected nothing of tonight either. It was just a way of saying goodbye to a friendship. No less, no more.
The cuisine was Sicilian and for the first time ever he tried pasta with sardines, followed by great bowls of steamed shellfish, with a succulent sauce they both soaked up with freshly baked local bread. The small piazza outside the restaurant was shrouded in darkness as he looked out of the windows of the restaurant, somehow expecting Desi to walk by at any moment, like a ghost from the past.
“Still thinking about her?” Alessandra asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “It’s a sickness. I know. Don’t tell me.”
“There’s a character in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera who tries to cure himself of a case of unrequited love by bedding 622 women,” she remarked, as if proposing a cure.
“It would feel too much like revenge,” he pointed out. “Anyway, it wasn’t unrequited. I have pages and pages of e-mails, text messages, and letters to prove it. And I know every square inch of her body at rest and play, every obscene crease and every single silky surface.”
“You always had a wonderful way with words...” Alessandra sighed.
“But words are insufficient now,” he answered. “Powerless. She no longer answers my messages, listens to me. She probably thinks I’ve gone mad. And she’s probably right.”
“Did you come to Rome to try and see her?” Alessandra asked.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe I just came for myself...”
He offered to drive her back to her apartment on the other side of the river.
The car moved along the Tiber on the Lungotevere heading north. Even at this time of night, the traffic was thick. Alessandra insisted on smoking a cigarette. He opened his window and looked out. Across the river was an old-fashioned building, white and functional under the light of a three-quarter moon: the San Filippo Neri Hospital. A knot twisted inside his stomach — wasn’t this where she had been born or where her father, the surgeon, worked? Or both?
Alessandra invited him up for a final coffee, but he declined.
“I have to get up early in the morning,” he said. It would have been pointless.
Back on the hotel bed, he prayed for sleep. When it finally came, hours later — the sounds of the Roman night punctuated by sirens and the odd boisterous laugh of passersby in the street outside — it was an ocean of despair and memories that he just couldn’t banish. It was a warm night and he kept wiping away the sweat between his legs and under his chin, as he thrashed around feverishly between the crisp white sheets.