I don’t know how long my spell lasted, but it must have been a pretty long time, because at a certain point, in a worried voice, she asked me if I was all right.
“Fine, yes. Why, don’t I look fine?”
“Fine? Well, it was a like a scene out of The Exorcist. You looked as if you were talking to someone-you were moving your lips, changing your expression-even though you never made a sound.”
She stared at me for a few seconds. Then she asked, “You’re not insane, are you?”
She smiled as she said it, but there was at least the shadow of a doubt in her eyes.
“It really looked like I was talking to someone?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding vigorously.
“When your dog lifted his head to let me stroke his throat, he reminded me of my grandfather’s German shepherd, who used to do the same exact thing-with the same motion-many years ago.”
“You know, even when he lets people pet him, he doesn’t usually expose his throat like that. He likes you. It’s pretty unusual.”
“Well, when he did, it brought back this flood of memories from my childhood. Things I haven’t thought of in thirty years. I’m not surprised to hear that I was talking to myself.”
We started walking again, in the same formation: Nadia in the middle, Pino/Baskerville to her left, and me to her right. The smell of wet asphalt hung in the air.
“I can hardly remember anything from my childhood. I don’t think it was particularly happy or unhappy, but that’s only because I can’t remember any moments of great sadness or great happiness. If I had sad or happy times, I’ve forgotten them. It’s hard to explain. There are things that I know happened, and so I say I remember them, but I really don’t remember anything. It’s as if I know about the things that happened at that time in my life only because someone told me about them. It feels like I have memories of someone else’s childhood,” Nadia said.
“I know what you mean. Sometimes I’m not sure if something really happened or I dreamed it.”
“That’s it exactly. I think my mother threw a couple of birthday parties for me, but I couldn’t tell you what happened at those parties, who came, or even what year it was. Sometimes it makes my head spin. It’s too much.”
“So, is there a part of your life that you remember more clearly?”
“Yes. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I remember becoming a working girl perfectly.”
“When was that?” I asked, doing my best to preserve as neutral a tone of voice as possible. She ignored the question.
“You know, there’s nothing tragic about the so-called life choices I made. It’s pretty humdrum. More depressing than anything else.”
I made a gesture with one hand, as if to wave something away. It was a small, involuntary gesture, but she saw it.
“Okay, I won’t try to describe it. What I meant is that there aren’t people or events that I can blame for what I became. My family, for instance.”
“What did your parents do-or should I say, what do they do?”
“My father was an administrator in a middle school, and my mother was a housewife. They’re both dead. I can’t say that I had a great relationship with my parents. But they were probably no worse than the parents of lots of other girls who didn’t grow up to be prostitutes. I have a sister who’s a lot older than I am. She lives in Bologna. I haven’t seen her in ages. Every once in a while we talk on the phone. We’re polite and distant, like a couple of strangers. Which is, after all, exactly what we are.”
I admired Nadia’s straightforward honesty and the economy of words she used.
“Anyway, it all started when I was nineteen. I had graduated from high school with a bookkeeper’s diploma, and I enrolled at the university to study business, but I immediately realized that I had no interest in continuing my studies. Or maybe I just wasn’t interested in studying business, but it adds up to the same thing.”
As she was talking, I sorted through my mental files for her date of birth, which I had read in the documents from the trial for which I had acted as her defense counsel. I don’t know why, but I never forget anyone’s age-even people I barely know or know only on a professional level.
I did some quick math in my head: When she was nineteen, I was twenty-four. What was I doing at age twenty-four? I had just received my college degree. I hadn’t yet met Sara, my ex-wife. My parents were still alive. Practically speaking, when Nadia was embarking on her adventures in the real world, though I was five years older than she, I was just an overgrown boy.
“I wanted to be independent. I wanted to get away from home. I hated my boring, ordinary family life. I couldn’t stand that modest apartment, three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, filled with objects in miserable taste and the smell of mothballs that wafted out of their bedroom. I couldn’t stand their meaningless conversations and their pathetic prospects: pay the monthly installments on the car, find a little two-star pensione for our summer vacations, count the years until Dad can retire. I couldn’t stand the calculations they performed to balance the family budget, warmed-over pasta for dinner, my big sister’s hand-me-down clothes, the shiny oilskin tablecloth. But there was one thing I hated more than anything else.”
“What was that?”
“My father drank a little wine, at lunch and at dinner. Just a little, but every day, twice a day. Of course, we couldn’t afford expensive wine, so when we went to the grocery store, we always bought wine in cartons. There was always a carton of wine on the table, and I remember exactly how it went: My mother snipped the carton open with a pair of scissors; my father filled his glass halfway and then diluted the wine with water; at the end of the meal my mother pinched the mouth of the carton closed with a clothespin and put it away; then she put it back on the table for dinner. My God, I hated it. There are times when I relive it, and I can hardly breathe, just the way I could barely breathe then. Other times, I’m just overwhelmed by a suffocating sense of guilt.”
“That’s inevitable, I guess.”
“Sure, I think so. Anyway, I was a good-looking girl, so I got a job with an agency that provided staff and services for conferences, political rallies, and other events. One day, one of the men organizing a convention for drug company representatives asked me out to dinner, after work. He was a gentleman of about fifty, very distinguished, very well-mannered. I accepted the invitation and arranged to meet him far from my house, because I was ashamed to have him see where we lived.”
“Where did you live?”
“It was public housing, over near the church of the Redentore-you know, the Salesian church.”
“Sure, I box right near there.”
“You box? You mean you fight, in a ring?”
“Yes.”
“You know you’re not normal, right?”
“Come on, tell the story.”
“He came to pick me up in a Ferrari Thema and took me to dinner at a well-known restaurant, one of the restaurants I used to dream about eating in. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember everything: the tablecloth, the silverware-real silver-the crystal glasses, the waiters treating me like a lady, even though I was just a kid. And I can still remember everything we ate and the wine we drank. It was a Brunello. It must have cost a fortune, and I can still taste and smell the flavor and aroma of that wine right here, right now, while I’m talking.”
“Which restaurant was it?”
She told me the name, and I remembered it well. Twenty years earlier it had been one of the area’s fanciest restaurants. It was just outside of Bari. I’d never gone there. I didn’t go when I was a young man because I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t go when I was an adult, because it had gone out of business, vanished into the void, like so many other things from that period.
“After dinner, he invited me to his place for a drink.”
Her tone of voice was neutral. Still, you could sense tension and a climax arriving in the narrative. One of those stories with an ending you already know. An ending you don’t particularly like, but there’s nothing you can do to ward it off or change it.