“Reward?” I whispered. “Blackmail?”
In the emergency room they told her that the person who had brought her in hadn’t waited around, which was fairly common. Apparently, anonymous rescuers fall into three categories: some are diligent and selfless, and they wait to hear that the accident victim is safe; some want gratitude from the victim; and some just get the victim to the doctor and wash their hands of it all. But she sensed that I didn’t belong to the third category, that I was a different thing altogether, there was something in my attitude that didn’t fit.
“What ‘something’?”
“Your air of indifference. You pretended to be there by chance.”
“But I was there by chance.”
“Really? I don’t know why, but I got the opposite impression. As if you were following me.”
“But if I didn’t even know you yet …”
“And why did you leave?”
“Because I really am in the third category of anonymous rescuers. I don’t want to get involved.”
“And why were you following me now?”
I don’t answer. After a moment of silence, Elisabetta goes on with her story. That night, the night I abandoned her in the ER, she called Alberto, and when one of the twins had been sent to get her, she almost forgot about the danger that I might come back to pester her. She was distraught: all she wanted to do was sleep, to get home and take a pill and fall asleep until the next day. But the next day she started thinking about me, and she never stopped. “Thinking,” though, was the wrong word. She was afraid of me.
“Afraid?”
“Yes, afraid that you knew something.”
“Knew what?”
“Something you shouldn’t know until I decide to tell you about it. Unless you already know it.”
“I don’t want to know anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because then you’ll be afraid I’ll tell someone else.”
“No, I’m not afraid of that. I’m afraid of you, not of other people.”
I didn’t understand why she should be afraid of me: I had never made anybody afraid, I felt completely inoffensive, and she was much too excited; I couldn’t take her chattering anymore, and I asked her please to keep quiet until we got to the hospital.
Then I immediately began to think that it wasn’t true, that someone had once been afraid of me — or rather, I had been afraid that someone was afraid of me, no matter how strange and unnatural it was. In his final years my father seemed to have become my assistant: I was the contact person for the clients, and I determined the job priorities, on the assumption that he was getting more distracted or losing his memory, so that having a son to help him was a big advantage — but I read in his eyes that that wasn’t the truth. He was afraid of becoming useless, and that’s why he was afraid of me: afraid that I could do without him, that I would find myself another helper and leave him at home, in that house, all day long, every day — so he refused to listen to me and always insisted on doing the most dangerous jobs. (As it happened, I actually had found a helper: Witold, freshly arrived from Poland with his literary, antique opera lover’s Italian; Papa and I thought he was sort of delirious until Carlo explained things for us. According to Carlo, Witold’s linguistic “normalization” was a tragedy as great as the disappearance of a dialect.)
When I finished up in the emergency room, I found her sitting on the edge of a bench, gnawing on her already-chewed-down fingernails and sighing like someone about to take an exam. She belonged to the second category of anonymous rescuers, even though obviously there was nothing anonymous about this.
“They scolded me.”
“Who?”
“The nurses, because I moved you … took you out of the car …”
“And what should you have done?”
“Left you where you were and called an ambulance.”
“You should have said I was the one who taught you to move victims away from the scene …”
I looked around: there was only one couple in the waiting room, a fiftyish husband doubled over with a kidney stone and his drowsy wife watching him. In a piercing voice the man said, “Fortunately I have a high pain threshold.”
I asked Elisabetta to take me home.
We sat down in the kitchen, at opposite ends of the sofa, with a bottle of vodka on the table. She wanted to know why there was a sofa next to the dining table, how long I’d lived in that old farmhouse, why I lived there alone, why I hadn’t rented out the other wing, which I had restored though I didn’t live in it.
“Do you want to come live in it?”
She went on with her questions. Why did I have all those toys scattered around the house, why all the fairy tales, why the Disney videos, why the dog bowl, and did I cook for myself? And did I clean for myself?
“Does it look to you like anyone cleans here?”
She poured herself another drink. I did too. I stared into her eyes — by this point I had nothing left to lose. The worst she could do was leave. But maybe I would have stopped her before she got to the door.
“Was there anything else you wanted to know?”
“Yes, I wanted to know why you didn’t recognize me immediately … why you pretended not to recognize me … when I came here to your courtyard to invite you to dinner, that Sunday evening.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back; I’d claimed that the overhead light bothered me, so I’d turned off all the lights except the spotlight over the stove. I could have sat her in the living room, where I had another sofa that was probably more comfortable. But when we walked in, I suddenly felt it was very important that Elisabetta should sit in the guest’s place. Even though I had never imagined the guest with any particular face — except maybe my own face as an old man — and certainly not a female one.
“Well, I almost never know why I do what I do. Do you?”
“No, not always.”
I told her that I didn’t know why, because I had recognized her immediately — I had even recognized her voice on the phone.
“My voice? But we had never talked on the phone …”
I told her how I had fantasized about her voice and her way of talking. I told her that I had expected her to recognize me too, when we saw each other, that I wondered about the very things she was asking me about now.
“I always had the impression you were avoiding me. Until I realized you were following me.”
“When was that?”
She poured herself a drink, and I did the same.
“Mosca pointed out that it was strange for someone like you to be at that club at that time of night.”
I nodded; I had expected it.
“And why were you following me?”
I don’t understand why she keeps asking me that. I’m no good at replying without actually answering — I don’t know the evasive answers that reveal nothing at all. I wasn’t trained in that sort of conversation. I can’t do it. Either I tell her the truth — that I need her — or I keep quiet. I keep quiet. And to cut the conversation short, I decide to get up and saunter around the kitchen looking nonchalant.
But I fell down as soon as I stood up. The floor rose to greet me, tipped right up to my chin, and I banged my head violently for the second time that night. I didn’t faint — but I found myself on all fours, humiliated. Elisabetta was crouched down talking to me as if she were trying to console a huge, sad dog, and I stared at a tile and thought that one universe wasn’t big enough to hold both the geometric perfection of the square and the turbulence vibrating within me.
She guided me to my big, useless bed. I lay down and knocked off my shoes, but I couldn’t undress. The last memory I have is of her, at 1:30, sitting on the edge of my bed and holding my hand.