Four days a week she went to the foundation’s office in the city. She was the one who dealt with the charitable operations, the funding requests, and the awarding of academic grants. No one had asked her to do it. But after Alberto’s accident she thought it was the perfectly normal thing to do.
“It’s bookkeeping; I like it, it keeps me busy …”
“And Alberto?”
Nowadays Alberto devoted himself to the management of Alfredo’s intellectual legacy.
“And what does Mosca have to do with the foundation?”
Mosca had always been in charge of the Renals’ money; he was an old family friend. He occasionally went in to the foundation’s office, where he mistreated the secretaries and generally made a mess of things.
I asked her where the foundation’s office was. She looked up from her plate and stared at me without answering. Then she smiled. “You followed me there too …”
“No, I don’t know where it is — I swear.”
“In the city, in the old Renal apartment.”
It would have been stupid for me to deny it; at that moment it seemed that she could read my mind. “Oh, then, yes, I followed you there too, but I didn’t know it was the foundation’s office.”
“How many times did you follow me?”
“Into the city, just once … I almost got found out. I was on the landing when the door opened and someone came out, a woman, who mistook me for one of those guys who put flyers in people’s mail slots … For a moment I thought she was your mother.”
She stares at me, unmoving, her fork halfway to her plate with the tines pointed at me, and I picture her stabbing me in the face.
“And what else?”
“What else what?”
“Did you investigate?” she murmurs.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you investigate me?”
“Well, I asked about the Renals … I always ask about clients … To protect myself.”
“What do you ask?”
“I find out whether they’ll pay my bill in the end,” I say, without much conviction in my voice.
Again I get the look from her, and an ironic smile. “I don’t believe that you’re such a busybody. And you don’t think about money. When you need information, who’s your informant?”
“All right, it’s true. I don’t always investigate. This time I asked because”—I stop myself from lying again—“because I didn’t even know that you were once Alfredo’s wife—”
“You thought I was his sister?”
“Yes.”
“Everybody thinks so … And maybe it’s not far from the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe it’s not far from the truth. What else did you ask about?”
“I wanted to know about Alfredo, about his friendship with Alberto … He himself made me wonder about it …”
“But that’s not why you asked around.”
“No.”
“You wanted to know about me — where I come from, why I married Alfredo — isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t told me who your informant is.”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Okay. Don’t tell me. What else did you find out?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, then, your informant isn’t very good.”
“Why?”
“Because there are other interesting things to find out.”
I asked her what they were, but she shook her head. Now she was distracted. Her anxiety would grip her all of a sudden, and I would see her staring at her glass, or at one of my copper pots hanging on the wall, and then the dinner was over: there was no way to bring her back. She was afraid that someone else was following her around those days, and she made me swear I had stopped following her; she felt there was always another car tailing her. “What kind of car?” I asked. She didn’t know. If she had been able to identify one in particular, whether or not she knew whose it was, her fear would have been more direct, sharp, and controllable.
“You say that as if you’ve never had any real reason to be afraid.”
She replied that a real reason produces a real but limited fear, no matter how terrible it may be, but that false, irrational fear is more flexible: it shapes itself to fit any situation, and it spreads across your whole landscape, blanketing everything.
I too had recently had the impression I was being followed; one night when I was parked with Cecilia outside the hypermarket, I had trouble concentrating on her words because it seemed that a gray Fiat Brava had trailed me all the way there and then disappeared, and that there was now a yellow Renault Scénic with some guy reading a newspaper — I watched him in the right-side mirror.
Cecilia had finally met with Carlo, so I had a thousand reasons for listening to what she said, but this thing was too strong: my eyes kept snapping back to the mirror. Carlo had met with his wife, whom he claimed he wanted to get back together with, not only for the children’s sake but because he really still loved her, because she was the love of his life; he didn’t care about other women, other women just vanish without leaving a trace. (“But what if he leaves a trace?” Cecilia once said to me. “What if he has a love child hidden somewhere — do you really think these girls are using protection? Because if you think he’s using protection, you’re wrong; he’s the classic egotist who just wants to shoot his wad.” “Shoot his wad?” “Shoot his load, ejaculate, come — Good god, Claudio, you’re like a ten-year-old.”) Carlo had met with this perfect woman after months of having doors slammed in his face and telephones slammed down, and it was his one chance to talk to her, this meeting that was arranged partly because I’d interceded for him. And what had he done? He’d told her how anguished he was by the war. The Americans had bombed a hospital.
The man I saw at the wheel of the Scénic seemed more and more familiar, especially in the position of his head: he seemed to be asserting the superiority of the rigid over the flexible, as if a tree is superior to a shrub, or brick is superior to gravel.
“Are you telling me that you didn’t talk about the two of you?”
“I’m saying that he walked into that bar with a depressed look that was clearly fake, moaned for five minutes about how lonely he was and how much he missed me, and then launched into this half-hour diatribe about how the war changed his life, how he realizes now what’s been happening in the Balkans in recent years, and that’s the worst part of it, this is our punishment, and—”
“Okay, but then he must have asked you what you thought—”
“About the war?”
“No, about the idea — I mean, the possibility of—”
“Of him moving back in? No, no, no, he didn’t ask — don’t you get it? Don’t you get what he’s like — don’t you see what your brother is really like? Don’t you see what a massive shithead he is?”
I nodded. I looked in the mirror. It was one of the twins: Rossi was having me trailed by the twins. He had figured out what I really was — that I was a traitor.
“Plus, I don’t really believe him …”
“About what?”
“I think he’s got someone else. Or at least he’s got someone else in mind. By now I can sense these things.”