He wants me to look in the mirror to see the overall effect. The overall effect is pure shit, in other words good. Would I like people to notice me? Certainly. Does it have something to do with a black Ka? Certainly. Because I actually have followed Elisabetta Renal. I know who she spends time with, I know the kind of clothes worn by the men she spends time with. I know who she sees in the evening, at night. But I don’t think I’ll go tell Rossi.
The first time, I didn’t have to lie in wait for her, I didn’t even mean to follow her, not in the morning, anyway, but we needed some fertilizer, and I heard the Ka driving away and I told Witold that I’d go buy it. She had a five-minute advantage; when I got out to the road I turned right, toward the plant nursery, and if she had gone the other way I would already have lost her. I sped up to catch her before she got to the other fork in the road, the one in front of the abandoned factory, and I was just in time to see her turn left; she was behind a blue van that must have slowed her down, helping me out. After half an hour, we were still on the same main road; there were three cars between us, and Elisabetta didn’t seem in a hurry: she didn’t try to pass but simply kept to her place in the line of cars, behind a Fiat Panda, like a well-behaved carriage in a train. Was she also reading the wooden billboards along the road — those affable and inoffensive wayfarers from another era that rose on the dusty shoulder to advertise Morpheus Mattresses and Beta Tools? And what was she thinking, what ideas was she spinning? In any case, I decided to phone Witold: I told him that I’d gotten a call from my mother, that she needed me, that I didn’t know if I’d get back to the villa before late afternoon. He stuttered something confusing, and it took me a second to realize that it was a famous quote for me to identify (“Be careful not to get mixed up in riots and not to raise your elbow too often”); I said I had a weak cell-phone signal, I couldn’t hear, I’d call him later.
Three times I was tempted to stop following her, and three times I ignored the temptation; my eyes were attached to the Ka with elastic bands, and I hadn’t felt so peaceful and relaxed in days — all I had to do was follow a woman who was cheating on her husband, maybe, and if at times I felt like turning around and going back (stopping off to see my mother for real, perhaps), it was only a reflection of the boredom of driving on a flat, straight road without any hope, at fifty miles an hour, when even the sky was cloudy, like a great curtain of pale gray flannel. I listened to the Trovatore that Witold had left — maybe on purpose — in the Mercedes. The landscape of the plain seemed even greener in that milky light; the leaves above the road whirled in the wake of each passing car, but the trees themselves didn’t get involved, and the whirling died down right away.
By the end of the hour-long drive, she had led me into the city; I smiled about the time I’d wasted, childlike, and I had the same feeling I’d had on the days I played hooky from school. I waited with my motor running beneath a row of horse-chestnut trees while Elisabetta parked her car, paid the attendant, and displayed the receipt on her dashboard. Then she headed for a building that had a dark wood door with shining brass knobs, pushed a buzzer, and went in. This, I thought, will be the first and last time I follow her.
I parked too. I walked past the dark wood door, slowing down and examining the panel of buzzers long enough to see “Renal” amid a crowd of strangers’ names: Renal, third floor on the right. I didn’t know what to do, what a professional detective would have done in this case; maybe he’d have waited all day — but his business would have been tailing people, not designing gardens. In any case, I needed to call some suppliers, and the bar across the avenue didn’t look too smoky. I sat down at a table by the window and ordered a cappuccino and two croissants. I made my calls while running my eyes over the imposing 1920s building: some windows were plain, but others were French doors opening onto balconies; bow windows ran up each corner of the building; and in the hierarchy of the apartments, the best ones were clearly on the lower floors. I stared so long at the façade that suddenly it seemed to move, to expand and stretch and swell as if something were pushing to get out, like an enormous sigh that would shatter the window glass and scatter transparent debris along the avenue.
After an hour I got bored: the building didn’t get a lot of visitors; in fact, no one had gone in or out, and wasting a day like this didn’t seem childish anymore — it seemed just moronic. I paid and abandoned my post. As I crossed the avenue, I noticed that the sky was clearing, and I pictured the woods and the pond and the slope of the meadow, and Witold and the others at work, and the details of the project, the little mistakes that were surely piling up in my absence. When I got to the car, I picked a flyer off my windshield, and it suddenly hit me that Elisabetta Renal could have come out during my brief stop in the bar’s bathroom. The flyer promised “Easy Financing! — Full-time employees: get a cash advance on your paycheck — Small-business owners: moneyorder financing available—5 million lire in 120 payments of 69,000 lire each, at only 6.5 %—Only one signature needed (even for married applicants) — Don’t worry if you have a poor credit rating or outstanding liens — No matter what other loans you already have — Even if you already have a paycheck advance — Let us come to your home and tell you how.” A wastepaper basket stood at the corner, a few yards beyond the building’s entrance.
I went past the buzzers, and on a sudden impulse I pressed a buzzer at the top left. A man’s voice answered, said “Who is it?” a few times, but he didn’t open the door. I pressed another buzzer, a few buttons down, and the people buzzed me in without saying a word. The dark lobby opened onto a narrow courtyard lined with green climbers that absorbed all the light. The stairs were made of black stone, the railing of hammered iron. I went up to the third floor, but the plaque on the door was as vague as the buzzer: RENAL. Before I could turn and go back downstairs, one side of the double doors opened up.
An old woman appeared: metallic blue hair, camel coat with enormous buttons. She had keys in her hand: she was going out. I stepped back into the shadows on the landing and stood silently. The woman studied me without interest, waiting for me to speak. I hesitated five seconds, and then I held out the flyer I had in my pocket. Suddenly she sprang to life. “No, no — there’s a big sign downstairs, didn’t you see it? No flyers allowed in this building.” And she shook her withered finger in my face, taking me for a deaf-mute. I nodded and shrugged and even produced a disappointed whimper. Then from inside the apartment I heard Elisabetta’s voice, very nearby, saying, “Did you take the letters to be mailed?” The woman turned around. I was paralyzed. “Did he offend you?” Elisabetta continued. “No,” the woman answered, “I know him pretty well by now.”
At this point I managed to tear myself away from the landing and flee down the stairs. Out in the street, I hugged the wall to keep from being seen, just in case Elisabetta Renal came to the window. When I reached the corner, I turned left so I could get to my car by going all the way around the block, and that was when I discovered the clothing shop, the same shop I would go back to a few days later; I studied the display windows, trying to act nonchalant, pretending that I’d just been passing by, but I hadn’t yet decided to redo my wardrobe; no, I was actually thinking of Fabio.
It’s incredible that it took so many hours for Fabio to come to mind: Elisabetta Renal and Conti were not the only two people I’d tailed in my life, and that other time, too, someone had asked me to do it, and that other time, too, I had refused at first but then secretly obeyed. “Go and see where he goes,” my mother had said to me. I couldn’t do that — it wasn’t right. I had turned her down. And then I followed him. I didn’t tell my mother where he went — she already knew anyway, we all knew … what was there to discover? But of course my mother was actually asking for something else. She said “Go and see where he goes,” but clearly she meant “Do something, save him”—how absurd that she asked it of me: I didn’t even know how to save my dog from his insane passion for the woods, and now he was gone. Why me? Why not Carlo? Just because Carlo was far away, studying in another city? Or to avoid distracting him, because it was important not to worry him? So it fell to me: “Go and see where he goes.” As if nothing bad could happen to him as long as I was following him. But it seemed that the opposite was true: when I followed people, I hurried them toward their deaths.