“Oh, yes, of course, me too, I am too—” I said, and I laughed.
I get the hose and refill the dog bowls, and the kids drink from the hose before I can offer to go inside and get them some more bottled water. Looking at them more closely, I see that one of the guys must not be part of the group, even though he’s dressed in black like the others. He has Nikes instead of work boots, and he’s wearing not a T-shirt but a short-sleeved blue shirt, and though his head too looks shaved, he is actually bald. He’s less dirty and threadbare than the others.
“Why don’t you all sit down and rest a while?” I say before I can stop myself, and I regret it immediately; this alien element has upset me again.
Thanks, they say, we’d be glad to, and they sit down with their backs against the wall of the farmhouse. I look at them, unsure whether I should offer them chairs, and then I go back inside. I don’t shut the door.
I peer out at them through the shutters. I think, They’re here to kill me. I watch them for ten minutes and I think, They’re just kids, they’ve walked for days and days, they’re worried about the war, and I have a fridge full of meat that’s going to spoil.
So I went out and I suggested that they stay for lunch. I explained that I had been expecting my brother and his kids, but they didn’t come, and I have a lot of meat for grilling if they want it. They looked at one another, conferring together in silence. I noticed that the outsider wasn’t part of their exchange of glances.
“We’re generally vegetarians, but we haven’t eaten for two days, and maybe it would do us good,” said the guy who had been leading the line at the beginning.
“Good, then that’s decided. Would one o’clock be okay?”
They exchanged glances again.
“If you like, we can start the grill right away.”
“Maybe that’s better,” a girl said. “Otherwise we’ll fall asleep.”
They helped me carry out a table, the girls started preparing the meat and vegetables, the guys started a fire in the barbecue, and the outsider fell asleep sitting against the wall with his head straight up — I don’t know how he held it there. I wanted to ask if they ever ended up sleeping in the meadows, if they came across old shortcuts between the fields and the industrial sheds, if they were often invited to lunch or if the people who live here on the plains turned their backs instead and shooed the group away from their courtyards. But they said nothing and asked nothing; they weren’t curious about my life — why all that gardening stuff? Why did I live alone? Why was the dog bed empty?
Even their dogs were calm and polite: they stayed near the table hoping for some scrap of meat. I remembered that I still had half a bag of Gustavo’s biscuits; I went to fetch it and called the dogs to come to me under the canopy, but they didn’t trust me and only when one of their owners joined me did they come over, wagging their tails and sniffing around suspiciously. These three black dogs were so tired that they didn’t even bark when Indra appeared at the edge of the woods, drawn by the smell of the meat on the grill. The dachshund and I had become friends: he often came by to sniff around, and he never pissed where he shouldn’t. But he was noisy and touchy and pretty unbearable. The group’s dogs looked at him unperturbed for ten minutes while he went running up and down like mad, trying fruitlessly to provoke them, and then he went off. I explained that he was the neighbor’s dog, and I would have liked to tell them about the famous photographer’s obsession with tigers, but clearly my guests wouldn’t have been interested. They were starving and couldn’t wait to eat.
So we ate. We ate everything. At least this way we could communicate. Even the outsider ate, sitting apart from everyone else. I asked the others if he was unwell, and the spokesman said he was his cousin, who had some problems; he came along with them to get out of the house, but he didn’t share their views and they didn’t share his — still, they would help anyone who was standing against the system, one way or another. He was evasive and mysterious; or maybe not.
After we ate, I told them that the other wing of the house was empty, and if they wanted to rest for a few hours they could lay down their mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor in one of the rooms. They accepted. The outsider went back to sleeping outside, on the pavement.
I worked on the computer for a while, but I was distracted. I’d found several voice messages on my cell phone, and I’d played them back voraciously, thinking they were Elisabetta’s. But instead it was just a whiny voice saying, “Sonia, we’re stuck in traffic, you go on ahead, don’t wait for us,” and then, “Sonia, I left you a message, you go on ahead because we’re stuck, there’s been some kind of accident, okay, call back when you can,” and then, “Sonia, why aren’t you answering, are you at a truck stop? We’re still in this traffic jam, maybe it’s an accident or something.” I tried to work, but I kept thinking about all the people moving around this weekend, about the radio waves bouncing over the landscape of the plains, waves pushing out ahead of the cars and following them like shadows, and about Elisabetta on the highway surrounded by those millions of strangers.
Every twenty minutes I got up to peek at the outsider through the shutters. At one point I saw that he’d woken up and was sitting with his legs crossed, having a smoke. He was tossing pebbles at the middle of the courtyard, snapping his wrist as if he were skipping stones on water. I went out and over to him. There was a fine smell of hashish in the air.
“Everything okay?”
“Great. We needed that.”
I smile and look out toward the road.
“You wouldn’t have some of that to sell me, would you?”
“Sure I do; and even better stuff if you want.”
I don’t tell him that I haven’t smoked for more than twenty years, ever since my brother died. I pay him, and I go back inside.
With the bag of hashish next to the computer, I was calmer, and I worked uninterruptedly for two hours. Then I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge; there was a partially eaten chocolate pudding that looked like an ancient ruin, there was half of a Crescenza cheese, and a package of prosciutto: provisions that would be hard to keep fresh without a fridge. So I gathered some packages of cookies and crackers, as well as canned meat, peas, corn, and beans. I filled up a plastic bag; maybe my guests were opposed to using plastic, but I couldn’t think of any other container.
Useless. They were gone. They had left the door half open and the room as clean as if no one had been there. I glanced around the courtyard, out of habit, but nothing was missing; they weren’t the kind of people who would steaclass="underline" they’d be more likely to die of hunger. I got mad. Why the hell did they leave like that, without saying goodbye? And then I thought, Who knows if Fabio said goodbye when he went around like a vagabond? That was good for a few tears. I wanted Elisabetta to come; it was four in the afternoon, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
I tried to kill some time dragging out the wicker chairs and table; I mixed up two vodka martinis, but after half an hour they were warm and I drank them myself. Then I drank another, a cold one, because I was thirsty. I was too sad to stay outside, and too sad to go back in.
Then I thought I would go find my old self-inflating mattress in the basement and bring it outside. While looking for it, I went to check that the pistol I’d hidden was still where I’d put it, behind one of my father’s metal cabinets. I unwrapped the newspaper and weighed the pistol in one hand. The newspaper was from the beginning of May, and it had headlines about the bombing of Belgrade. That meant my mother had wrapped it up and put it aside for a month before entrusting me with it. Who knew if it still worked? I could never use it anyway, because I didn’t know where to get bullets.