Here everything is the same: nothing is good but everything keeps moving along thanks to an unpleasant sense of inertia. Since receiving your email, all I do is reread it, in the hopes of finding something between the lines. But what? I don’t know. You’re a wonderful person. I don’t know if, actually I know perfectly well, that I would never be able to forgive or even have kind words for a coward like me.
I’m not even a shadow of the person I was a few years back. I’m more cynical, disillusioned, tired and—you’re right—maybe a little depressed. You were my adrenaline, my hot chocolate, my woolen scarf, my wine bank, my English teacher, my best friend.
Sometimes I reflect upon humanity, people’s behavior, their madness. When I’m feeling particularly kind, I can even find some plausible explanations for what I did to you, but when I’m feeling spiteful (that is, most of the time) I can only kick myself. I gave you up because I felt strong. Because I thought I could live without you. Nothing of the kind. You are and always will be, even if you don’t want to be, the only woman who has made me happy. I understood this too late, extremely late in the best Hollywood tradition.
I get by. I trick myself into believing (only when I’m feeling kind) that there will be some peace for me. But I’d really like to see you again. Recently I’ve had this recurring thought: I keep seeing myself as the owner of a farmhouse in Tuscany or Piedmont and imagining a couple of blond children and you writing at the computer. Very picturesque, don’t you think? Hallucinations like I had long ago? Will I see you one of these days?
p.
THERE WAS A CERTAIN courtyard hierarchy in the Spanish Quarter. On the sixth or seventh floors, there was a surplus of light, sweeping views, sometimes even sea breezes. From those upper floors, the anarchy of the streets often seemed far away. Those one hundred and sixty-eight stairs were at once a test of the survival of the fittest and our Great Wall.
But already on the third floor, not to mention the second—or, heaven forbid, the first—it was like being inside a house of cards. Balconies were stacked upon balconies, sheets were hung upon sheets, and the buildings themselves, as if they weren’t already close enough together, were shackled to each other by electrical wires, from which streetlights dangled, as though to keep them from drifting apart. Until death do you part. On those lower floors, sunshine could be measured in centimeters. A bar of gold would appear once a day on the kitchen table, like something left behind by a guest, but before you could slip it into your pocket it would warp into a rhombus, its edges nibbled away by the dark, until there was nothing left but a nugget—and then it was gone. As for living on the ground floor, that was a concept we couldn’t even contemplate.
The locals made ample use of that wicker or plastic breadbasket called il paniere (’o panaro in dialect). I liked watching the paniere forced to bungee-jump from the higher floors down to the street, where it would pick up bread or drop off forgotten keys or money. It reminded me of a spider dropping fearlessly down its silky strand, accompanied by hollered, and often misunderstood, instructions. But the paniere was too ghetto for us university students. The rope we used to make contact with the noisy and often unruly world below us was much subtler and far more modern: the intercom.
“Hey, Pie’, is Eddie there?” crackled a voice one day.
“Tonino. For you.”
I ran to press the speaker button with a pang of guilt. I’d hardly been at home with the boys of late, thus jeopardizing that undisciplined daily routine on which our entire relationship was founded, not to mention leaving them at the mercy of their upcoming exams. As if to confirm my fears, Tonino’s tone was harsh.
“You need to come home now, Eddie. There’s no time to explain.”
I rushed down the stairs. Even with those short legs, Tonino was practically speed-walking through the neighborhood, which had gone into hibernation after the midday meal; I struggled to keep up with him. All the while the sun pendant under my shirt jingled more and more persistently as I pressed Tonino for an explanation, but all he said was, “We couldn’t find your camera.”
“What do you need my camera for?”
“You’ll see with your own eyes. But you’re going to think you’re tripping.”
We summited the stairs and stepped inside the house. Immediately I noticed, through Angelo’s wide-open door, that inside his room was a thick haze like when a movie cuts to a dream sequence. And yet it was all very real: the air tasted like lime, and I could make out Angelo himself standing by the window in a rather pensive pose but dusted ridiculously in flour like a pizza maker. Sonia, too, was covered in powder; seated on the bed leaning against the wall, she was as white as a geisha. Both were frozen in position like actors waiting for the curtain to lift.
“What’s going on here?”
From the hallway came Luca’s voice. “Look up.”
Above Angelo’s bed, the ceiling was gouged with a large, deep wound fringed with inlets like Sardinia. Below it, right on top on Angelo’s now virtually unrecognizable cow rug, was a massive slab—of plaster or stone, I couldn’t have said—and everywhere chunks, shards, dust. I should have understood, but the scene as a whole was one of such devastation that I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“Sonia and Angelo were just sitting there on the bed watching the usual crap on TV,” said Tonino, “when out of nowhere a piece of ceiling came down on them.”
“It could have broken our necks,” added Angelo, trying hard to contain his enthusiasm. “It was a close call. It grazed my leg.”
“Are you OK?” I made to step over the rubble toward them, but Tonino stopped me.
“Don’t move anything, gorgeous. We need to take pictures first, to show the landlords, or the insurance company, or whoever the hell needs to see them. Otherwise no one will believe us.”
“I’m all right, Eddie,” said Sonia. “It just scratched my arm. We could have cleaned ourselves up a bit but we were waiting for you to take pictures.”
“The camera’s in the drawer … the one below the dictionaries,” I said distractedly to Tonino. “But it has a roll of black and white in it.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s all white in there anyway.”
I focused my Minolta and only then did I begin to make sense of the scene before me. Click, and I captured the rebel stone that on its trajectory from the ceiling had broken its edges against the bed. Angelo with bits of plaster in his hair. The bedspread covered in debris. Sonia’s combat boots that were no longer black but white. If she had been a few centimeters farther from Angelo, it probably would have broken her leg. And if Angelo in that moment had leaned over to change channels … Angelo was right: they had both narrowly escaped serious injury—or worse. So then why did it hurt so bad to be safely behind the lens instead of right there with my friends, in that room I knew so well, covered from head to toe in dust? It was an absurd envy.
No sooner had I finished than Angelo was already making his way around the slab in the direction of the kitchen for a well-deserved coffee, while Sonia was heading to the bathroom for a shower.
“No,” said Luca, “we need to get out of here. This house is no longer safe.”
“The damage is already done, Falcone,” protested Tonino. “It’s not like the ceiling’s gonna fall again.”
“The crack upstairs is only getting bigger. It’s obviously connected. This place is falling apart.”
And with that, he sent us out to the corner café so that he could go talk to the landlady. Only Luca knew which vascio in the Spanish Quarter was hers, since he was the one who had rented the apartment in the first place,