I took the pistol and the newspaper and the mattress upstairs, left the pistol by the front door, under the portraits of the unknown couple, laid the mattress on the cement pavement outside, and read the eight pages of the two-month-old paper.
I turned on the stereo in the E270 and put on Witold’s Rigoletto at top volume, with the car doors wide open. I waved my arms around and pretended to sing along.
Later on I heated up the hashish, crumbled it, and prepared a joint. I didn’t smoke it. I looked at the blue sky instead, those endless days of early summer.
I’m sitting on the wicker chair waiting for Elisabetta; she can’t be late. But the chair slowly sinks into the ground and disappears. I can’t get back on my feet. The farmhouse also falls into a chasm. I struggle and drag myself up, but actually I’m just swimming in the dirt, which is crumbly, like corn kernels. I do the breaststroke. Then I see the shore, not far off, with two men on the beach.
One is dressed bizarrely in a lace bodice and puffy shorts, and shoes with big square buckles. The other is dressed as a Buddhist monk. They’re arguing. I try to get their attention, but they don’t see me. The first one tosses a pebble in the water, nearly hitting me. He says, “Who decides how it is?”
I recognize the other one immediately. It’s the pope. He says, “No one. It’s always been that way.”
The concentric circles spread across the water and run out of energy, and the surface of the water goes flat again.
“That’s not an answer,” says the first one. “Tell me whether it smooths out again because the turbulence is suppressed by force, or whether there’s a reconciliation between the pebble and the lake.”
The pope looks irritated.
I finally manage to get out of the water. I shake hands with the pope and introduce myself: “Witold Witkiewicz.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he replies. “Good, you’re a fine young man.”
Then he turns to go. The other one stops him by grabbing his arm. “And explain this to me, please. Does equilibrium come from revenge or from forgiveness?”
The pope rolls his eyes upward, takes a deep breath, and sings in a baritone voice:
Yes, revenge, terrible revenge
Is all my heart desires.
The moment of your punishment is near,
The hour that will be your last.
I fall down again. I want to get to Malik; he’ll know how to save me. I drag myself through the chestnut woods by my hands, grabbing whatever I can reach — roots, low branches — painfully, ripping my nails off and bloodying my fingertips. I start cursing and punching the ground.
I look up. The man from before is standing in front of me, wearing a thick double-breasted suit of black wool. He’s old, but his hair is still black, combed back close against his square skull with its pointy ears; on his small nose are a pair of glasses with heavy frames. He kneels down, washes my hands in a basin, and then disinfects them.
“Why are you so angry? You have to learn how to forgive,” he says paternally.
I smile. “Hey, I know you—”
“Of course you do,” he says, lowering his shoulder and jerking his thumb back toward his evident humpback. “Do come along”—as if we were already late for some appointment.
He leads me along the driveway going to the famous photographer’s villa; the dogs aren’t there — Malik must have taken them away for a holiday, and it doesn’t surprise me. But the photographer’s house isn’t behind its gate. There’s just a sort of dump with a dirt road rising and falling and twisting through it; they’re building a garden here, I think.
On the edge of the road is a man sunk up to his waist in a mud puddle. He is encrusted with mud, all over his small head and massive body; there are only two narrow slits for his eyes. He’s breathing with difficulty; his mouth is wide open, and I can see the pink — red — inside, the broken teeth, the whitish tongue. He’s gigantic and says nothing.
“There’s nothing to be done,” whispers the old man. “He wasn’t forgiven.” He shrugs.
After a while we come upon another man, sitting on the ground; he’s naked and emaciated, and next to him is a pup tent; he’s holding a notebook and writing in it, and the pup tent is full of crumpled-up pages; he doesn’t look up to see who we are, he just goes on writing.
“Not him, either,” the old man tells me.
The third man we encounter is hanging upside down from a cherry tree, struggling to right himself. My guide is about to speak, but I gesture for him to stop. He nods, as if to say, Of course, who wouldn’t recognize him?
We walk through the desolate landscape. No one is visible any longer. The old man seems hot in his double-breasted suit, and more tired than I am. He falls behind, and every now and then I wait for him to catch up.
“Most of them are forgiven. Some are not so fortunate. What’s wrong with forgiveness …”
I can’t tell whether it’s a question. We’ve been walking for hours. I’m exhausted, and I turn back to ask him what he meant to say, what he plans to do, where we are. He has disappeared.
I say loudly that I want to get to the crest of the next hill, and if I don’t find Malik I’ll turn back. Just so he’ll know.
When I turn again and look up the road, I see a ghost a few feet away. I stop, and he doesn’t come closer.
For the first time in my life I think how tall and strong my father was.
I see me crying from outside, as if I’m someone else watching me from behind. Then I’m not crying anymore.
The ghost nods. He disappears. I look at him until I realize that I’ve turned around and started down again along the dirt road that brought me here.
I’m calm. Tired. I drop to the ground. I sink down and start swimming again. I’m in the courtyard of my farmhouse.
My right cheek is resting on the gravel when I feel a vibration and see the Ka driving into the courtyard. Then Elisabetta is next to me, asking what happened — why am I asleep on the ground?
Because … I don’t know; I don’t know the reason for all the things that happen to me.
But didn’t you see? I ask her: I didn’t throw myself to the ground, I fell; and she caresses me and helps me up. She takes me into the house, and she’s crying and I ask her why — don’t cry, my angel, you don’t have to cry, we’re together again.
6
SHE KEPT STUDYING HER FAVORITE PIECES OF MUSIC, SITTING AT THE KITCHEN table and reading the scores, following their development and the turning points in the music, the quickening and the slackening pace; she rarely played now because arthritis had deformed her hands, but maybe she didn’t need the piano anymore: it was satisfying enough for her to trace the thread of the notes pulsating along the staff like a faulty and unsteady heart, hypnotized by the counterpoint. Monday morning I showed up at my mother’s door with an excuse even more far-fetched than the thing about the button: I told her that I had to look for an old manual, and she asked me what manual — there were no more books in either my room or Carlo’s — and I mentioned an old gardening manual that I couldn’t find but that I needed desperately, which might have ended up in the attic or the basement, in one of the storerooms she had begun emptying. “There are no books,” she murmured.
But I was already moving around the apartment — it’s one way to assert my presence in her house: walking up and down the hall and from room to room, looking for the cellar keys, making as if I were about to go out, shaking my head and reminding myself out loud that we had already moved the boxes of old schoolbooks over to my place—“how stupid of me.” I passed by the kitchen again and asked her if she was sure that there were no books left in the attic; she didn’t look up from her score when she answered yes, she was sure. I took the attic keys anyway, but I had no intention of going up there; I just held them and walked through the rooms again — through the world’s last remaining display of Fratta Furniture’s products: the living room, my parents’ room, Carlo’s room, my room (where the bed had been turned into a sofa, as if to deny that anyone had ever slept there). And across from that one remaining bed was the desk that filled the space where Fabio’s bed had been; after his bed was taken apart and stacked in the basement, it had disappeared; I lost track of it — maybe my father burnt it. So that no one could ever die in it again. On the desk was an electric sewing machine that had never or rarely been used.