When Witold is agitated he talks in the infinitive without conjugating his verbs, and he kept saying: “Why to speed up? Why to speed up? Bad thing to kill their dog. How to explain now? Bad sign, to kill pet. Poor dog. Poor dog to become white ghost.” I looked at the dog, and I let Witold vent, jerking his head about and fingering his sideburns. Then I pointed out that the dog had no collar and no tags — he was a stray, and probably rabid. Who said he was a household pet? Witold stopped talking. We spread newspapers in the rear bed of the station wagon, put on gloves, and loaded in the dog; I didn’t want it to be left there in the road. There were no fresh signs of damage on the R4, or if there were they were indistinguishable from the old ones.
But my decision to go looking for Elisabetta Renal wasn’t a sudden decision at all. Six days had passed since her last call, and in that time I’d convinced myself that I knew her voice. I’d convinced myself that I had to hope I knew her voice, and with all my strength I’d decided that I must believe it and make it be the voice of a woman I’d encountered five months earlier, left in the emergency room of a hospital, and never seen again. She never got in touch to thank me (she didn’t know my name), I never got in touch to see how she was doing (I didn’t know hers). Neither of us was particularly in touch that night … we’re never particularly in touch and alive (well, I should speak only for myself — I don’t know her: I’d seen her for two hours, five months ago, but it’s like she’s an old friend, as if I’d always known her).
So, five months ago I’m sitting in my car, parked diagonally inside a painted parallelogram at the far end of the parking lot of a mini-mall. It’s an old place, originally built as a supermarket surrounded by boutiques but later raised in status out of provincial ignorance, so it’s now a hybrid that has expanded around a rickety nucleus. I wouldn’t go in there even if I were fresh out of milk or razor blades, and I’m not going in there tonight either, I’m staying outside and waiting. Also waiting, like me, is the man I’m observing from about twenty yards away, silhouetted against the lights and the reflections on the wet asphalt; he’s gotten out of his car to smoke a cigarette, and he pays no mind to the mantle of wetness that falls on his shoulders. I pay no mind to the moist cold that’s penetrating all the way to my bones: I don’t want to turn my engine on, so I pull my down jacket tighter around me and slide down in my seat, the steering wheel caressing my inner thighs.
Suffocating fog, exhaust steaming from a car moving through the herringbone pattern of the parking lot; the faint illumination from the only two lampposts nearby, one hundred feet high, which give a dull saffron glow. And then the smoke from the cigarette of the man I’m watching: it escapes from under the brim of his hat and rises straight up from the crown as if the hat were a chimney. It’s November fifth, a Tuesday like any other, and the mini-mall isn’t doing very welclass="underline" the parking lot is half empty. It’s 7:30; the man is waiting for someone who, at this point, is probably late. I’m late too. I can’t tell whether he’s noticed me: he keeps his eyes down, the hat tilted to cover his face, standing immobile with his legs apart, beneath a hostile sky.
He raised his eyes when he was lit up by the high beams of the Ford Ka that appeared at the entrance of the driveway, and finally I saw the pallor of his face, the expression both tense and smug, the stout body that moved forward to the center of the roadway. I waited without anxiety for the car to pull up in front of him, to stop and let him get in, and then to move off again or stop and park. The car trotted along at about fifteen miles per hour, sending up inoffensive sprays of water on either side. Those insistent high beams, the false aggressivity, the camouflaged desire, and the tranquil, impassive man in the middle of the lane were complicit smiles that mirrored one another — maybe the smiles of a pair of lovers not necessarily in love with one another.
When it was about twenty yards away from him, the Ka stopped and its wheels turned to the right and then to the left — all the parking spots were free, there were too many to choose from; then it decided, it slid in crooked across two parallelograms, outside the lines. The lights went off, no one got out. The man didn’t move. I was looking at him from behind, but I could see his surprise and uncertainty in the face of this new provocation. I thought, Now he’s going to go to her. But instead he just stood there; for a moment he turned his head toward me, toward his Alfa Romeo 166, and I thought, It’s not possible, he can’t decide to leave.
Meanwhile, from the end of the parking lot comes the retching sound of an engine revving up fast; it’s a white van, it shoots down the driveway as if it’s on the highway, as if it’s late with its delivery schedule — we’ve all gotten used to the daredevil vans, the dispatch trucks cutting you off in traffic, the pizza delivery cars running red lights. I barely see it, and the man doesn’t even turn around; he just steps sideways, maybe to avoid a surprise shower of water from a puddle.
The van hits him squarely at full speed, tosses him ten yards ahead, skids sideways, wobbles across the white lines, and, instead of turning toward the exit, disappears into the other half of the parking lot, behind the supermarket.
But the image of the collision doesn’t disappear, it’s imprinted on the night, has created a vacuum around the crumpled body. I move only my eyes: they dart back along the trajectory of the van, and I can’t get them to stop going back and forth, back and forth — there’s no mouse or cursor to bring the man back up into a vertical position.
I think, What’s he waiting for, with his naked head resting on the asphalt? Why doesn’t he get up? I think, A living man would never be able to leap so far from a standing start, not even if he had spring-loaded shoes.
When the lights of the Ka go on, the world begins to spin normally again. The car backs angrily into the driving lane and rushes the downed body, running it over so fast that the car’s tail flies up in the air as if it had raced over a speed bump. It becomes just a trail of red light exiting the parking lot, and turns onto the road outside.
Silence, and not a single eye looks out on the deserted lot from behind the luminous lids of the mini-mall. Probably there was also total silence during the accident — the first, the second, I don’t remember which. I have no recollection of the sound a head makes as it’s crushed beneath the wheel of a car, and anyway I was cocooned in my muffling Mercedes E270.
Here are my hands gripping the wheel, my nails sunk into the rubber, my eyes glued to the broken body on the ground. Then there’s nothing here at all.
I fasten my seat belt, turn on the engine and the windshield wipers, put the car in gear, and leave the parking lot with my headlights off.
Now I have this deserted road ahead of me: the drizzle has transformed the asphalt into the viscous trail left by an enormous snail, there’s scarcely any visibility, but nothing would prevent me from speeding up and zooming along the curves and the straightaways that lead toward the nearest town, leaving the supermarket lot behind me. I’m slowed down, though, by a shell that I suddenly find on my back, a guilty feeling that’s like an invisible mobile home. This isn’t fog, this isn’t fog, if it’s raining it’s not fog. I keep saying the words out loud; it was my father’s old litany, If it’s raining then it’s not fog, it’s just low clouds: why “just”? Why should low clouds be any less dangerous than fog? It’s important for me to figure this out, but not to show that he was wrong, if indeed he was wrong. My father is always sitting next to me — I’m accustomed to driving with him, I was accustomed to our four eyes looking at the world together, accustomed to the reaction that was a synthesis of our individual reactions (a synthesis achieved not without friction, not without pain). But at this moment I have nothing else in my head, no particular feeling, neither joy nor disappointment: just the wish, more or less, to catch up with the Ka that disappeared into the night.