My room was inviting, and it faced a courtyard that was showing the fresh and dazzling signs of an early spring. As I was undressing to take a shower, I realized that it had been years since I’d been in a hotel with a woman. The last time, the woman was Margherita.
Part of me objected indignantly. It was wrong to draw any comparison between two such radically different situations. Margherita and I came as a couple on vacation. Caterina and I were in Rome on business. Not only were we not a couple, but she was half my age and we were sleeping in separate rooms.
It was an impeccably logical argument, so I ignored it. If there is one thing that I’m good at doing, it’s ignoring logic when it comes to my private life.
The last time I was in a hotel with Margherita had been three years earlier. We’d gone to Berlin on vacation with two friends of hers. I was crazy about Berlin. If there’d been no such thing as winter, I would have moved there. I even considered taking a German class when I got back. It was one of the best vacations of my life, and I came home bubbling with enthusiasm.
A few weeks after we returned, Margherita told me that she had accepted a job offer in New York. A job offer that she had been considering for months, and therefore even when she was vacationing in Berlin with the clueless, unsuspecting Guido Guerrieri, who was obviously dumb as a post. In Berlin, I’d been walking around like a happy idiot, while she was already in New York in her mind, leading a new life that didn’t include me.
A few weeks after that she left, telling me she’d only be gone for a year. I didn’t believe her for a second, and in fact she hadn’t come back. Not to stay, anyway.
I half-closed my eyes and saw-as if in a theater of my memory-her slender, muscular, self-aware figure in white underwear, in the dim light of that hotel room in Berlin, on the Oranienburger Strasse. It was a picture that was both tragic and, at the same time, pervaded with serenity. The image included both the perfection of that moment and the awareness, visible in hindsight, that it would not last.
I wondered where Margherita was in that moment. It had been a long time since that thought had crossed my mind.
What had happened to me in the years since she’d left? I couldn’t remember much at all, aside from my dangerous encounter with Natsu, who happened to be the wife of one of my former clients, and my adopting a series of daily rituals. Leaning out over this void of memory gave me a sense of vertigo, the exact same way you feel when you lean over an actual abyss.
I thought back to the letter that Margherita wrote to me from New York to say she wouldn’t be coming back. It was a kind letter. It was clear she was trying not to hurt me and to make that good-bye as painless as possible. So, of course, it was intolerable, I thought to myself as I read it for the third or fourth time, before crumpling it into a ball and tossing it into the trash.
Thinking of Margherita’s letter triggered a terrifying plunge down sheer slopes of memory. Those mountainsides became increasingly populated as I tumbled ever further into the distant past. At last, I ended up at the bottom of that deep gorge of memory.
It was the late seventies. Change was afoot in Italy. It was a period of reaction, of backlash. Someone wrote a letter to the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, announcing his intention to kill himself over a love affair, beginning months of interminable, intolerable public debate. And you couldn’t turn around without running into John Travolta. Everyone was trying to imitate him-some successfully, others, including myself, much less so.
I went to see Grease with a girl I was crazy about named Barbara.
We had met at a party and as we chatted she told me that all her friends had already seen the movie. Now she was stuck: Who would go see it with her? Well, how about that! What a coincidence, I hadn’t seen it either and I’d been wondering the same thing, I lied. We could go together. How about the next afternoon? After all it was Sunday.
She accepted my invitation, and the following afternoon, blissfully incredulous at my luck, I was sitting beside her in a theater filled with kids watching and listening to John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, and their friends-some of them far too old for their roles, unrealistic and even grotesque as they tried to play eighteen-year-old high school seniors-sing, dance, and recite dialogue that stretched the limits of the improbable.
I walked Barbara home and, when it came time to say good-bye, she planted a quick kiss on my lips and then, just as she was vanishing behind the heavy door, she turned and flashed a smile full of promise. Or rather, a smile that I interpreted as being full of promise.
That night, I didn’t sleep a wink. I lay there, overjoyed, and when morning came I made up my mind to surprise Barbara by going to meet her after school, since I had cleverly asked her when she got out on Monday afternoons and we had more or less the same schedule.
As I strode briskly and happily toward the Liceo Scientifico Scacchi-Barbara’s high school-my mind was racing with fantasies about our future together.
I was about to learn a valuable lesson: It’s never a good idea to spring a surprise on someone when you don’t have a clear idea of how things stand.
The school bell rang, furious and cheerful, and moments later a clamorous flood of boys and girls surged out into the street. I spotted her almost immediately in that chaotic rush of sweaters, jackets, scarves, backpacks, wool caps, and dark hair, but looking back, I can’t remember her face. If I force myself to focus on the face, all I can come up with is a visual cliche of adolescent beauty-blonde, blue-eyed, high cheekbones, a luminous complexion, and fine features.
I was about fifty yards from her. I started smiling, and then the smile faded from my face, like in a cartoon. Pushing his way upstream through the crowd of students pouring out of the school, and ahead of me-in every sense of the word-another boy was moving toward her, then reached her, then kissed her, and finally took her by the hand.
I don’t know what happened after that, because I instinctively darted into the nearest apartment building lobby with an open door, my cheeks burning from the shame of that visual slap, my stomach churning with despair.
I stood in the lobby for a good ten minutes and ventured out only once I was certain that Barbara, together with someone who all evidence suggested was her boyfriend, had disappeared, and there was no longer any risk that someone-anyone-might see me in that state.
Because in the meantime, I had begun crying, silently, with a swarm of words and questions buzzing around in my head. Why had she gone to the movies with me the day before? Why had she kissed me? How can anyone be so cruel?
I was terribly unhappy for many weeks. After I started to recover, I ran into her, on the Via Sparano. I saw her from a distance. She was with two girlfriends, while I was alone, standing in front of the display window of the Laterza bookshop.
I straightened up, squared my shoulders, and did my best to look proud and unconcerned.
I told myself to be strong, act like I didn’t care, and barely nod to her as we passed. Not scornfully-I had to do better than that. Indifferently. She would probably turn and slow down, but I wouldn’t stop. I’d keep walking, dignified and detached.
What the hell.
We’d gone to the movies one time and exchanged a kiss. So what? That certainly didn’t mean we were married. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time, between modern, freethinking young women and men. We went out, saw a movie, kissed, said good-bye, and went on with our lives. No problem.
By this point we were quite close to each other, but she hadn’t seen me yet. She was deep in conversation with her friends and talking animatedly and suddenly, for no good reason, I assumed that meant she and that boy had broken up. In that case-I said to myself-maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh, too pitiless. After all, she’d treated me badly, but it was the kind of thing that happened. Maybe I should give her a second chance. The best thing to do, in that case, was to assume an expression that was dignified, but not hostile. Maybe I could even let the beginnings of a smile form on my lips. She must have realized what a mistake she’d made, and I could be magnanimous and give her a second chance.