Last Summer in the City Read online

Graziano was looking at her, forgetting to breathe. “A very productive day,” he said.

  “Why?” she said. “I produced red blood cells, isn’t that enough?”

  Graziano fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “When shall we get married?”

  She laughed. “Not before September. I have to take a vacation first. What are you two doing?”

  “We’re writing a movie.”

  “What kind of movie?”

  “A traditional avant-garde movie,” Graziano said. “It’s about a guy who, when he turns thirty, goes home and murders his father.”

  “How about if he murders his sister instead?” Arianna said. She was flirting, she’d always liked flirting, and every now and again I caught her glancing at me. Without saying anything, I went and sat down at the typewriter. I couldn’t say a word, not even when, around seven, before leaving, she asked if she could come see us again. But from that day on she came every afternoon. Around six she would ring the bell and come in, with that insolent air of hers, always looking slightly different, maybe with a new blouse, or pair of pants, or sandals, or else just her hair combed in some weird way. She’d wander around the room, looking at herself in the mirror wherever there was one, and regularly end up on the bed, playing solitaire. Sometimes she’d make tea, and we’d have it on the balcony, still warm from the sun. She’d flirt shamelessly with Graziano, light his cigars, make sure there was ice in his tandem, force him to tell her something amusing, and listen with her eyes wide open. And then, around seven, she’d go, liberating the mirrors.

  “Christ,” Graziano would say, “why don’t you ever talk to her?” But from the window I could see her car and the bag with the tennis racket on the backseat and I knew that when she left us it was to join Livio Stresa.

  * * *

  Our last day’s work left us with a big void that we tried to fill with a dinner. I asked the paper if someone else could take my shift and set off for Signor Sandro’s, as arranged. Arianna and Graziano were waiting for me.

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  “Tired but unhappy,” I said.

  I was pleased when she replied, “Even Graziano here isn’t so cheerful. You both look quite fucked-up,” she said, adopting our jargon. “I don’t understand, didn’t it come out well?”

  “Please,” Graziano said, “don’t use verbs like come. How about a pick-me-up?” he said next, holding out his glass to me.

  “I want one,” Arianna said. “I want to get drunk tonight.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because Leo doesn’t love me anymore,” she said.

  We took her car. The sweltering heat had emptied the city, but in Trastevere the trattorias were full of people and guitar players. We chose a place that was fashionable at the time, where you sat on church pews to eat. We had a long wait before we were served and we killed time with a couple of bottles.

  Our morale started to improve. Even Arianna drank a lot, and the more she drank, the more her eyes glittered. They must have given off more light than the candles on the tables because there wasn’t a man in the place who wasn’t looking at her. “And what if she says no?” she said.

  “I’d like to see her try,” Graziano said. “I’ll take her on a cruise and if she says no I’ll refuse to perform my conjugal duties. What do you think, Leo?” Because he hadn’t yet found the right time to talk to Sandie about the movie.

  “Sure,” I said. “No woman can resist if you catch her at the right time, and there are plenty of right times on a cruise.”

  “It’s the only place there are any,” Arianna said.

  “Sure,” Graziano said. “I’ll ask her one moonlit night on the Baltic. ‘Darling,’ I’ll say, ‘do you want to help me out financially?’ How about you, what are you going to do?”

  “Oh,” Arianna said, “I’m still not sure. I’m supposed to be going with my brother-in-law to some friends of his who have a villa by the sea.” That’s what she said.

  “Everyone’s going away, only Leo is staying here,” Graziano sang softly. “The old alley cat! He knows a thing or two.”

  When we finished dinner, we decided to do the rounds of the bars and Arianna insisted Graziano and I sit in the backseat of her car. The wine made her drive fast. “Two famous filmmakers and their delightful Girl Friday die tragically on the Muro Torto,” Graziano said, breaking off from singing Elvis Presley to himself. “I just had an idea. How about we go to that disco and look for our two friends? What do you say, Leo?” I said nothing, abruptly grabbing hold of my seat because Arianna had turned the wrong way onto a one-way street at high speed. Miraculously, we dodged a few cars and had almost gotten to the end of the street when we were stopped by a red signaling disk. Immediately, two carabinieri approached us with their hands raised to their caps—but that was the limit to their politeness. “License,” one of the two said to Arianna.

  “Please,” she said, and started searching under the dashboard. She searched for a long time, much longer than was necessary, while the two carabinieri waited in silence. At last she made up her mind to find the license and held it out through the window. One of the two took it.

  “Are you sure you gave it to the one who can read?” Graziano said serenely.

  We ended up at the station house. What happened was, they also knew that joke about how stupid carabinieri are supposed to be and when they asked Graziano to repeat what he’d said he told them the whole joke. Instead of laughing, they made him get in their car. We followed them.

  At the traffic lights Graziano waved to us and on one occasion leaned out the window. “They don’t have the slightest sense of humor. What do you think, Leo? Shall I tell them the one about the old lady and the electrician?”

  When we reached the station, I started to follow them inside, but they wouldn’t let me. “Don’t worry, Leo,” Graziano said as one of the two carabinieri took him by the arm. “If they hit me I’ll scream. Anyway, I’ll give you custody of the twins.”

  We sat, waiting. Arianna was very nervous. “What’ll they do to him?” she said. “Couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut?” I didn’t reply, just sat there looking at the streetlights. I could smell her perfume and feel her eyes on me, like a weight. I had to make an effort not to turn to look at her. She kept staring at me, then said, “Do you love me, Leo?” She said it warily, in a low voice.

  “No,” I said, still looking at the street. It was a street like any other.

  “Yes, you do,” she said angrily. “You love me.”

  “No,” I said again, feeling as if for the rest of my life the only thing I’d be able to say was no.

  “I think you do,” she said.

  “And what does Stresa think?” I said.

  I distinctly heard her catch her breath. Then I heard her voice, cracked with pain. “Who told you?” she said in desperation.

  Just then, Graziano came out of the station house. He was smiling and waving his hand as if to silence applause. “I fooled them,” he said as he got in the car.

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “I apologized. Where shall we go to celebrate my regained freedom?”

  “I’m going home,” Arianna said. She was looking straight ahead in that conceited way of hers.

  “Why?” Graziano said, but nobody replied, so after a moment he said, “All right, if that’s the way things are,” and lit a cigar.

  Nobody said another word until we got to Piazza del Popolo. There, Arianna waited for us to get out, still looking straight ahead. Graziano hesitated for a moment, chewed his cigar a couple of times, then got out after me. He stood there watching the little English car disappear at the far end of the square.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s always the best who leave.”

  “Let’s go sit down,” I said, pointing to the obelisk. The square was deserted and you could hear the noise of the fountains. We sat down with our backs to the Pincio.

  “What’s happening to you, Leo?” Graziano said.
r />   “I’m tired,” I said, “very tired.”

  “The whole world’s tired,” he said. “What can we do?” Then he produced the bottle of scotch from his pocket and took a big slug. He looked at it in disgust. “These pick-me-ups pick me up less and less,” he said, putting the bottle back in his pocket. “What a bummer,” he said, letting his gaze wander over the deserted square. “I think I’m in love with Arianna too.”

  8

  And then came August, the black month. Under an oppressive sun, the city was deserted, the streets empty, the echoing cobbled squares covered in a layer of burning dust. Water was running low and the fountains were crumbling, showing all the signs of old age, with the cracks plastered over and tufts of yellowish grass sticking out. Cats hid in the shade of cars and only toward sunset did people start coming out of their homes to gather around the watermelon stands, waiting for the wind. According to the newspapers, it was the hottest summer in the past ten years.

  As for me, it was a month I hated. With my friends gone and the trattorias closed, a person could die of starvation, with nobody to borrow money from to see him through until September. That year I had a job and the empty city shouldn’t have scared me. But I was alone. I hadn’t heard anything more from Arianna, Graziano must have left on his cruise, and the Diaconos had moved to their house by the sea. Sometimes I dialed their numbers anyway, just to imagine the phones ringing in their empty apartments. Apart from that, I slept until noon and then went to the pool, where I’d lie alongside it reading. There were two regulars who played chess and sometimes I challenged the winner, but the games weren’t interesting. Around four, I’d go back home to rest and eat a little fruit while waiting to go to the newspaper. A couple of times I’d heard the phone ringing as I came up the stairs, but I’d never gotten to it in time. Then one afternoon it rang as I was opening the door. I lifted the receiver. It was a voice I didn’t know telling me that Graziano was dead.

  * * *

  The police officer on duty at the hospital got to his feet when I arrived and sat down again only once I’d also sat down. He was very kind. He spoke in the appropriate tone. He told me Graziano had died that morning after two days in a coma. They’d been looking for me ever since he’d been taken to the hospital because they’d found a note on him in which he’d written that whatever happened to him, they had to phone me. They’d tried several times and in the end had come to the conclusion that I was out of town. The call I’d answered was a personal attempt on the officer’s part because he’d felt bad that someone could die alone like a dog. I thanked him. He said there was no need. I asked how it had happened and he said Graziano had been found by the doorman on Monday afternoon in the corner of the courtyard below his living room window. It was purely by chance, because that day the building was practically uninhabited and the doorman had gone there only to water a vacationing family’s plants. The accident had happened on Sunday evening, a few hours after Graziano’s wife and two daughters had left. The doorman had heard the thud but unfortunately hadn’t thought anything of it because it seemed to come from another building.

  So Graziano had lain there, still alive, for a night and a day on the cobblestones of the courtyard. I remembered those cobblestones, they were small and oval and grass grew in the gaps between them.

  “We’ve been trying to get in touch with his wife for two days now,” the officer said. “Do you have any idea where she could be?” I said she might be on a cruise, and he made a note of this, then asked if Graziano had any other relatives and if I knew how to get hold of them. “His father,” I said, and he was about to make another note, but I told him I’d deal with it. He thanked me and asked me if I wanted to talk to the doctor, because the postmortem must be over by now. I said okay.

  The officer walked ahead of me along a corridor of the hospital. The patients were leaning out the windows in search of air. It was a very hot afternoon, and the fans in the corridors were making a lot of noise but nothing else. We stopped outside a pair of double doors just long enough for the officer to take off his hat before knocking. He was a very polite policeman. “Come in,” a voice said. It belonged to a male nurse sitting behind a typewriter. The doctor was at a bigger table. He was holding some papers that every now and again he used to fan his face. He must have been very hot, because he was fat, and fat people feel the heat more than thin people. He wasn’t wearing a shirt under his white coat, and you could see his fat, hairless chest. “Just a minute,” he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. He glanced at the papers he’d been fanning himself with and resumed dictating to the nurse. The police officer motioned me to a chair and I went and sat down. “Loss of upper incisors,” the doctor said to the nurse, “due to the impact. Fracture of the mandible and the third cervical vertebra, contusion with extensive hematoma on the left clavicle. Sagging of the torso with fracture of the third and fifth left rib. Death followed hemorrhage of the cerebellum. Cause: Fall.” He looked at us. “Incredible,” he said, “no fracture of the hands. Usually, people try to shield their face and they break their hands. This one didn’t.” The police officer told him who I was and the doctor looked embarrassed and invited me to sit down, even though I was already sitting. “Do you want to see him?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything and the doctor signaled to the nurse, who stood up from the table. I also stood up. Before leaving me, the police officer asked if I would see about the funeral and I said yes. Then I followed the nurse into the corridor with the patients at the windows. At the end of the corridor was a staircase that led to a sun-drenched courtyard full of parked cars and we made our way through them with some difficulty until we came to the door of a low, ivy-covered building. Inside, it was cold, or so it seemed to me after crossing that sunny courtyard. The door led straight into a very large room. Sheets lay in the corners, heaped up any old way. There was a single table, right in the middle, with something on it wrapped in a sheet. I went closer. On the floor were dark patches of something I assumed was blood, which suggested they’d dragged Graziano in order to get him on the table.

  Graziano was there, in the sheet. His face was uncovered, and also part of his chest, protruding in a ghastly way. All the parts of him that could be seen were swollen. For a moment it crossed my mind that this was all a mistake, that it wasn’t him, that he was on a cruise, as he was supposed to be. He was hard to recognize at first because they’d scraped back his hair, revealing his forehead, but then I recognized the curve of his nose and his thin, motionless lips, and then the two hunger scars on his stomach. I felt like crying, but I didn’t. I was aware of the nurse waiting at the door and would have liked to tell him to leave, but I didn’t feel like speaking. So I reached out a hand to the sheet and shifted Graziano’s legs. They were colder, under the sheet, than the air in the room. When I’d made enough space for myself, I sat down on the marble table.

  “You can’t do that,” the nurse said. I looked at him. He was small and thin. He was about to say something, but then just raised his hand and went outside.

  I was glad to be alone. The cold of the marble was pleasant, and I lit a cigarette, looking at Graziano.

  “Who is it?” I said when I heard the door open again.

  A monk with a big purple cross on his chest came forward, moving between the sheets heaped up on the floor. “Come down off there, my son,” he said, putting a hand on my arm. His beard smelled of wax. Which floor is God on? I took my arm away from his hand. I kept my head down so as not to look him in the face, and the smoke from my cigarette got in my eyes. “Why don’t you try to pray?” the monk said.

  “I don’t pray,” I said. “At most I say please.”

  He stood there looking at me with his hands clasped over his belly, then he shook his head and walked out. In the silence, I heard a fly buzzing. It must have come in when the monk opened the door. It flew around a few times and came to rest on my hand. I brushed it away and it landed on Graziano’s chest. Again, I chase
d it away, but it came back immediately, landing on his lips this time. So I got down off the table, covered his face with the sheet, and left.

  The old Alfa Romeo was scorching hot and I had to lean forward in my seat as I drove in order to avoid burning my back. At Graziano’s, the doorman was there. He was mortified. He couldn’t forgive himself for not going to see when he heard the noise. “I didn’t even know he was home,” he said. “I thought he’d left with the signora.” I had him give me the keys and went up to the second floor. I had to try the whole bunch before I found the right one. Inside, the only window now open in the apartment was the bedroom window. It looked out onto the courtyard and I didn’t go near it. I started searching everywhere until under the Ping-Pong table in the entranceway I found his notebook with the telephone numbers. I went through it without finding his father’s number, he probably knew it by heart or maybe he never phoned him. Instead, I found the numbers of a few people I also knew, most of them by sight, and those of a few mutual friends. Mine was there too. I called all of them on the phone in the living room, but not a single person was home. Then I put the notebook in my pocket and went to the newspaper.

  “How come you’re so early?” Rosario said. “Did something happen?”

  “No,” I said, “nothing.”

  I took out the Florence phone books and called all the Castelvecchios I could find, but none of those who answered had any connection with Graziano. I made a mark with my pen next to those numbers that didn’t answer so that I could try them again later and told Rosario he could go. I wanted to get straight down to work, but as soon as he was gone I realized I’d made a mistake. I was too tired to put up with our correspondents’ inanities, but it was too late now, so I started to answer the calls. Every time I finished transcribing an article I tried to call Florence.

  Around midnight I got hold of Graziano’s father. He was a taxi driver and had been on his shift until eleven. Although he had an old man’s voice, it wasn’t so unlike his son’s. He listened in silence to what I had to tell him and remained silent even when I’d finished. When he spoke again, he was crying. He said he would leave right away, he would inform the garage and leave right away, but I told him he didn’t have to leave until the following morning, it was better for him to rest.