first to me, who was rendered speechless by this virtuoso performance, and then to Luciana for signature before endorsing it himself and, by way of completing the business, rubber-stamping it first with a circular and then with a rectangular stamp. When I asked the brigadiere if he were certain that the document he had drawn up would enable me to cross the border he replied, faintly irritated by the doubt implied in my question: Non siamo in Russia, signore.
When I was in the car with Luciana once again, the document in my hand, I felt as if we had just been married by the brigadiere and might now drive off together wherever we desired. But this notion, which filled me with intense pleasure, was short-lived, and once I had recovered my equilibrium I asked Luciana to drop me at the bus stop down the road. There I got out, and, my bag already slung over my shoulder, I exchanged a few more words with her through the open window of the car and belatedly wished her a happy forty-fourth birthday She beamed as if at an unexpected present. Then, her head slightly inclined, she said addio, engaged the gears, and drove off. The Alfa glided slowly down the street and vanished around a bend which seemed to me to lead to another world. It was already midday. The next bus was not due till three o'clock. I went into a bar near the bus stop, ordered an espresso, and soon became so deeply absorbed in recasting my notes that I have not the faintest recollection either of the hours of waiting or of the bus journey to Desenzano. Not until I am on the train to Milan do I become visible again to my mind's eye. Outside, in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, the poplars and fields of Lombardy went by. Opposite me sat a Franciscan nun of about thirty or thirty-five and a young girl with a colourful patchwork jacket over her shoulders. The girl had got on at Brescia, while the nun had already been on the train at Desenzano. The nun was reading her breviary, and the girl, no less immersed, was reading a photo story. Both were consummately beautiful, both very much present and yet altogether elsewhere. I admired the profound seriousness with which each of them turned the pages. Now the Franciscan nun would turn a page over, now the girl in the colourful jacket, then the girl again and then the Franciscan nun once more. Thus the time passed without my ever being able to exchange a glance with either the one or the other. I therefore tried to practise a like modesty, and took out Der Beredte Italiener, a handbook published in 1878 in Berne, for all who wish to make speedy and assured progress in colloquial Italian. In this little booklet, which had belonged to a maternal great-uncle of
mine, who spent some time working as an office clerk in northern Italy towards the end of the last century, everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways, quite as though the world was made up purely of letters and words and as if, through this act of transformation, even the greatest of horrors were safely banished, as if to each dark side there were a redeeming counterpart, to every evil its good, to every pain its pleasure, and to every lie a measure of truth. Soon
the outlying districts of Milan came into view. Satellite developments with twenty-storey residential blocks. Then the suburbs, factory yards and older tenement buildings. The train changed to another track. The low rays of the setting sun passed through the compartment. The girl in the colourful jacket inserted a bookmark into her photo story, and the Franciscan sister also slipped a green ribbon into her breviary. Both now sat leaning back in the fullness of the evening glow, until at length we entered the darkness of the Central Station, and were all changed into amorphous shadows. As the train ground to a halt, the screeching of the brakes reached an excruciating pitch before it finally cut out and gave way to a moment of complete silence into which, almost at once, the heaving noise that prevailed under the great iron vaults flowed back. Filled by a sense of having been abandoned, I remained standing for a while on the platform. The girl in the many-coloured jacket and the Franciscan nun had long since disappeared. What connection could there be, I then wondered and now wonder again, between those two beautiful female readers and this immense railway terminus which, when it was built in 1932, outdid all other train stations in Europe; and what relation was there between the so-called monuments of the past and the vague longing, propagated through our bodies, to people the dust-blown expanses and tidal plains of the future. My bag slung over my shoulder, I strolled down the platform, the last of the passengers, and at a kiosk bought myself a map of the city. How many city maps have I not bought in my time? I always try to find reliable bearings at least in the space that surrounds me. The map of Milan I had purchased seemed a curiously apt choice, because while I was waiting for the quietly rumbling photo-booth where I had had some pictures taken to yield up the prints, I noticed on the front of the map's cardboard cover the black and white image of a labyrinth, and on the back an