Carlo won’t get back before Mosca and Giletti arrive; he may not intend to come back at all; in fact, my problems are almost certainly the last thing on his mind right now, so I can’t put this off any longer; I have to deal with it myself. And the first thing I have to deal with is my weapon. It’s 8:00 a.m., the air is still fresh, and I go out to the courtyard a second time; who knows whether Martino has ever pulled the trigger on this pistol? There’s a chance it might not work anymore. Guns have to be oiled, and he never did that, for sure. I cock the hammer.
I point the pistol at the sky. I try to pull the trigger, but I can’t. I’m afraid of the sound it’ll make, of the chance that the muzzle might flare, or that the gun might even explode and maybe kill me too. I run back inside and down to the basement to grab Carlo’s old full-face motorcycle helmet. Outside again, I lower the visor, reach my arm as high as I can, and shoot. The recoil knocks the pistol to the ground, where it almost hits my foot; but it works.
At the edge of the woods I aim into the shade beneath the trees and shoot again, to learn how to keep from dropping the pistol. It’s too big for shooting point-blank in an enclosed space; inside a car it would rupture my eardrums, and inside the house it would make huge holes in my walls. I was right to take it away from Martino before he got himself killed by some nutcase. I shoot into the woods without aiming at any particular tree; I shoot the woods straight in the heart.
I take off the helmet, and suddenly all the noises around me go back to normal volume: I can hear Malik’s dogs barking furiously, the hysterical magpies, and the distant hum of the main road — it’s the sound of people driving toward me, shocked and outraged by this sudden noise of mine, because I’m usually so silent … I must have been overcome by the heat. But the sound of moving cars doesn’t subside into the aural background again, even as the animals calm down and the echoes die out; after a few minutes the car noise intensifies, modulates down, and breaks out of its monotone — second, third, second gear — someone is shifting gears on the road that leads up here. I go over to my gate and see the car appear around the curve: it’s the black Ka.
I tuck the pistol into the helmet, and the helmet into a stand of hydrangeas, and go back to the middle of the courtyard and turn my head as if I’ve just noticed her; she parks next to the other cars, and I think back to the early days when she used to stop half in and half out of the gate. I go to meet her without smiling; I’m unshaven and my hair is tousled and I fear my hands and T-shirt stink of gunpowder. But even if she smelled it, she wouldn’t say anything today; by now I recognize that anxious gaze fixed somewhere beyond my shoulder — she avoids my eyes and spins around me like a satellite.
An hour later we get to the villa, which makes no impression on me even though I haven’t been there for three weeks; we go in through the greenhouse and up to the second floor, where one of the twins sits in a chair in front of the door to Rossi’s room, waiting like an old-time valet. He immediately rises and gestures for me to take his seat, and I hesitate for a moment, flattering myself with the idea that the door will open as soon as the master of the house hears my voice; but Elisabetta pushes me toward the seat, too, so I give in unwillingly and look at my watch and think that I haven’t got much time.
“Mr. Rossi,” I said. “Mr. Rossi, can you hear me?”
Elisabetta gestured for me to lean toward the door.
“So you came,” he said faintly through the door.
He said that he needed to talk to me but he didn’t want to let the twins or his wife into the room because he knew this time they would take away his key. He made them go down to the garden, and when he saw them by the concrete balustrade on the terrace, he opened the door for me. He was in the old wheelchair, the one I’d seen the very first day, with the foam and the towel-wrapped cushion. Otherwise he was dressed as usual, in his habitual cardigan, where he pocketed the key after double-locking the bedroom door.
He asked me to let the others know that I was in the room, so I went to the window; Elisabetta was looking at the ground with her arms crossed, but one of the twins was on lookout, and when he saw me he touched her shoulder lightly and she looked up and I waved to her. Rossi told me to take a chair. We sat in silence for several minutes.
He starts talking about the garden: he was wrong, it wasn’t the story of Alfredo Renal, right? — it’s his own story, the story of Alberto Rossi. All his life he tried to be as good as his friend, but he believed it was hopeless. Then he realized that he wanted to be something more than his friend: he wanted to be him and also be something else, something more complete. But now he isn’t sure whether the something more isn’t in fact something missing, and in the condition he’s in now, he can’t do without that missing thing.
Without giving me time to react, he goes on.
Because the three arches are the road that bring three different people to the same house.
And the rocks represent the difficulty of moving through the world.
Then there are the roots, which are preserved in a glass vitrine instead of being forgotten.
And the squalid, bleached-out tree trunks show the danger of moral poverty.
Then there is a revelation, a new sense of life, in the water running through the glass tube, all the way to the cistern and its pile of treasures: treasures of the spirit, ready to shine.
“Is that what it is?”
How can I answer?
“I believe that everyone is free to see whatever he likes in it, so why not your life? But I didn’t know anything about you, I couldn’t have done it on purpose …”
He smiles. “No, you didn’t do it on purpose,” he says thoughtfully. “So maybe it’s a portrait of your life. You’ve never told me anything about you. I know that you had two brothers; maybe the three arches have some meaning there? And the roots at the center of the garden are an homage to your father? I hear he was a gardener.”
I shake my head; I don’t think I was trying to say something about myself, at least not consciously.
We hear a knock at the door, and Elisabetta asks if everything’s okay and if we want some coffee. Rossi makes a silent no, as if he’s asking me to turn down the offer too.
Instead of spending the whole morning in this room, I might end up grabbing the key away from him and opening the door.
He starts talking to me about his wife again, whispering so she won’t hear him. Then he asks, “Why don’t you come and live here with us? Elisabetta has great respect for you.”
I smile. “I’m glad to hear that,” I say.
“I’ve already told you that my wife is a very fragile woman?”
“Yes, you told me.”
“It’s her family’s fault.”
“Is it?”
We go on like this for an hour; every now and then, one of the twins knocks and asks whether we need anything.
“Did you know that Alfredo Renal discovered them in prison?”
“The twins?”
“They were swindlers: they exploited the fact that they’re identical. They’re quite devoted to me, have you noticed? They were quite devoted to Alfredo as well.”
I listen to Rossi’s stories without any particular pity; I just sit and listen. I picture Elisabetta outside, and I try to imagine her at my house again or traveling with me, sometime in the future, or at the movies, or at a restaurant. They all seem like old images to me, as if we’ve already had that affair, and in the end she’s decided to leave me and go back to her husband — non-husband … whatever he is to her. Or she’s decided in a huff to leave me because I wanted to keep her on the margins of my life, because I didn’t want her to be involved in it, because I didn’t want to tell her the true fairy tale of the mute old man.