Been to a dentist before?
Never.
Get on.
I’m not coming.
You got pain?
No.
Sure you’re not coming?
I’ll keep the pain here. You go far?
To Pinerolo.
Okay, says the shepherd.
And the two men drive down to Italy, the shepherd with his arms encircling the signalman.
It’s fatty on the roof of my mouth. On the outside where it’s burnt brown, it’s dry. Every morning I choose the brownest pain au chocolat I can see. So you’ve made Papa’s coffee, says the baker’s wife, and you’re on your way to school! She says this because Maman has left, and I live alone with Papa. I touch the black chocolate, first with my teeth, then slowly with my tongue. It’s liquid, not liquid enough to drink, you have to swallow it, but, compared to the pastry, it’s liquid. What’s cunning is to swallow your first find, and to leave enough to push with your tongue into every corner of the milky bread so it’s all perfumed with chocolate.
They stop at Pinerolo by the bridge. The shepherd climbs down and, with a wave of his hand but without a word, disappears into a café. The road follows the river, light catches the silver underside of the willow leaves, the water sparkles, there’s a fisherman casting for trout and Jean Ferrero drives on and on, hugging the tank with his knees.
The Casione joins the Po just upstream from Lombriasco. The inhabitants of the village are so used to hearing the rush of waters that if the two rivers were dammed in the middle of the night, they would suddenly wake up and believe themselves dead. Driver and motorbike pass through, attuned as if they were a single creature, like a kingfisher when it flies low over the water.
I’m drinking a cappuccino during my lunch-break. You can find me any day at 1:45 p.m. in the Via G. Carducci. It’s eighteen months now since I came to Modena. It’s as if, eighteen months ago, when I was asleep, somebody moved two letters around: MODANE, MODENA. I found a new town. I speak Italian with a French accent. “The words tap-dance instead of sing!” they tell me. They manufacture tractors and sports cars here in Modena and they make cherry jam in huge quantities. And I love it here. I’m not semplice. They’re not either. All of us know an apricot measures five centimeters and no more! Even in Modena, if a man gets too uptight when it comes to settling the price of cherries for the year, the Cobra Magnums can kill him. Yet I walk through the streets at night here, imagining every kind of happiness and looking behind the trees.
The sky is an early morning blue and there are white clouds near the tops of the trees. The road is straight. And the signalman is doing 200 kilometres an hour.
There’s this exhibition in Verona, and Marella and I, we decide to go in. The posters outside showed a woman’s head in profile. What a neck! The sexiest giraffe in the world, says Marella. On another poster I noticed the way the Egyptians had of tieing up their skirts. Anyway on Sundays it’s free, said Marella. They tie them across the left hip. So we go in. I look at everything. As if they lived next door. The numbers in the street are a bit crazy. They’re 3000 B.C., and we’re A.D. 2000, but there they are next door. I find a model of one of their houses: kitchen, bathroom, dining room, garage for the chariot.
The walls have niches for your body. Niches cut out to fit the shoulders, waist, hips, thighs … like cake tins which mould sponge cakes, but these are for bodies in all their beauty. Bodies to be protected like secrets. They loved protection, the Egyptians. Step into one of those, says Marella, and they’ll wall you up! Take your time, Ninon, I’m going to have an ice cream! If you’re not out in an hour, I’ll come and look for you in the mummy cases!
What a way to go! You lie in the mummy case like a bean in its pod and instead of the bean pod being lined with silky down like a newborn baby’s hair, it’s snug with polished wood — they say it’s acacia wood — and on it is painted the lover god who is going to kiss you forever. They let nothing get lost. There’s even a mummy case for a cat. And the way the statues walk! They face you, no shilly-shallying, their arms raised, their wrists flexed, their palms facing outwards. Men and women. And when they are couples, the woman puts an arm round her man. They come forward, sometimes they take a very short step backwards, but they never never turn round and leave. No turning the back in Egypt, no leaving, no parting.
I try it myself, right foot a little ahead, back absolutely straight, chin high, left arm raised, palm facing forward, fingertips at the level of my shoulders …
Suddenly I know I am being looked at, so I freeze. The eyes looking at me, I can feel, are somewhere behind my left shoulder. Four or five metres away, not more. A man’s eyes for sure. I stay stiller than the Egyptians did.
Other visitors start to stare at the man behind me. They see me but I don’t trouble them because they think I’m joining the Egyptians and I don’t move a fraction, then they notice the man behind me, and they stare at him aggressively, for they blame him for my not moving!
Let up, you hog! I hear a woman’s voice hiss at him. It is the hardest moment for me because I want to laugh. I can smile but I can’t laugh, let alone giggle.
I don’t move till I feel the gaze has shifted. In the reflection of a glass case I see there’s no man behind me any more. He’s been forced into the next gallery. Only then do I stop being Egyptian.
I tell myself I’ll take a look at him. In the next room are five monkeys. Life-size baboons in marble, sitting there, taking the sun. I think the sun’s setting and every evening they come and sit on the same rock to watch the sun go down. The tizio is wearing sunglasses and he has a camera slung from his shoulder. I can’t see through his sunglasses. Anyway, why wear sunglasses in ancient Egypt?
As I leave the exhibition to join Marella in the ice cream parlour, this tizio comes through the turnstile behind me, breathing hard.
Is your name Nefertiti? he asks.
My name’s Ninon.
I’m Luigi. On the road they call me Gino.
9
Zdena, heels clicking, is picking her way down a basement staircase. Ten years ago she used to visit a basement on Stachanovska Street to collect piles of samizdat. At the bottom of the staircase today a man is whistling. She knocks on a door and the whistling stops.
Who’s there?
Zdena Holecek
Gome in, Citizen.
She hasn’t heard the word Citizen, as a form of public address, since the frontiers were open. She wrinkles her nose as if to reply to a bad joke, and opens the door on to a carpenter’s shop, large and well lit. Sitting at the benches are two men in blue overalls. The elder of them has a watchmaker’s eyeglass on an elastic around his forehead.
A friend told me, says Zdena, that you make bird-calls?
Take a seat. We make bird-calls, says the older man. We now have thirty-three species.
Do you by any chance have a thrush?
Which kind were you thinking of? A Mistle Thrush or a Siberian? A Bluethroat or a Red-winged Thrush?
A Song Thrush like the ones in the trees now.
You understand, Citizen, why we make our instruments? They should never be used as decoys for capturing or killing members of the species. We ask every buyer to remember this, and in every box there is a printed notice which says: “I use bird-calls to speak to birds!” I began as a philosophy student. Marek here played in a jazz group. After years of reflection we became convinced that making bird-calls was the least harmful thing we could do in this world — which would at the same time permit us to live.