Last Summer in the City Read online

  “I like it here.”

  “Really? Then why are you always drunk?”

  “Not always,” I said. “Often. There’s a big difference.” Then I looked at the valley stretching below. It was vast, cut in half by a multi-arch bridge crossed several times a day by a train as long and silent as a caterpillar. On either side rose the walls of two convents, alive with bells when the sun went down, while, opposite, the closest buildings merged with the greenery on the horizon. The sky was high and wide, and so was the light. It was a gorgeous spot.

  “It’s all yours,” Glauco said, indicating the room we were in. No need to make an inventory: there was an old armchair, a bookcase, and a sofa bed. The other two rooms weren’t furnished at any greater expense, pleasant, old furniture from the Porta Portese flea market, for the most part. One room was almost completely filled with canvases, cans of paint, and all the things a painter usually needs. “If you run out of money, don’t sell the paintings,” Glauco said, as if anyone might want to buy them. He went out, saying that he still had to say good-bye to someone in town. He didn’t ask me to go with him, and I guessed that he was going to say good-bye to his girlfriend. Everyone knew he had another woman. A burly, aggressive type, he could never avoid boasting. He even knew there was a very definite fondness between Serena and me, but he left us alone because he wasn’t the kind of man to fear anyone.

  Serena was still in the bedroom, surrounded by open suitcases. She must have been afraid they would swallow her, because she was walking up and down, wringing her hands. “Where’s Glauco?” she said. I told her he’d be back soon, and she continued to move around the room with an air of tragedy. When she passed me for the third time, I finally put an arm around her shoulders, and she huddled against my chest and looked at me in confusion. But when I hugged her tighter, she stiffened, and I realized the answer was no, that she would have liked it to be yes, but some other time, right now it was no, it was too late. We talked about Mexico until Glauco came back.

  “So,” he said, “shall we go?” I was surprised by the sadness in his voice. That final farewell must have been particularly hard. Standing in the middle of the room, with that muscular body of his, he had the cheated, immature look of a heavyweight who’s lost his title. For the first time, I felt a kind of fondness for him.

  I went with them to the airport. We said good-bye, kissing one another’s cheeks, and then I went up to the observation platform to watch them leave. As they climbed the steps up to the plane, they looked around for me. We waved at one another until they got on board. The plane took a while to get going, but at last it moved toward the center of the runway, where it stopped, as if to catch its breath, taxied, then started gathering speed until it rose out of sheer force of habit and kept climbing, glittering in the sun, and at last disappeared. Only then did I leave the airport.

  On my way back to the city, I thought about other farewells. I thought about when I’d said good-bye to my father and when I’d said good-bye to Sant’Elia, and I thought about how all these farewells had changed my life. But it’s always like that, we are what we are not because of the people we’ve met but because of those we’ve left. That’s what I was thinking, as I calmly drove the old Alfa Romeo. It was as slow and noisy as a whale, and the birds in the trees fell silent as the car passed, as if a dark cloud had crossed the sky. It had a list of owners as long as the phone book of some provincial town, but its aroma of ash and leather was almost intoxicating.

  * * *

  I decided to make a serious attempt to stop drinking. I would sit out on the balcony in the sun, reading, and keep away from bars and the people who frequented them. The heat made the mixture of sweet wine and cold water I was using to wean myself off alcohol a little less disgusting, and gradually I even started to put on weight. The hardest part was the evenings, when I’d leave the copy department of the Corriere dello Sport and have to face those dead hours that stretch from ten o’clock to one in the morning. Girls were a great help to me. I’d always been lucky with girls, and in those months my battle with alcohol aroused their maternal instincts, so it often happened that I would wake up in strange beds, alone, since the girls I went out with were mostly teachers or salesclerks, which meant they had to keep regular hours. And it was great to wake up like that, truth be told. I’d get up, wander around the apartment, switch on the record player, check to see if coffee had been made and find it almost always had been, so that all I had to do was reheat it. Then I’d walk into clean bathrooms strewn with towels, brushes, hairpins, and mysterious jars of pale-colored creams. I’d look for an actual bathtub, almost always find it, and spend a long time soaking in it. Finally I would dry myself, get dressed, and leave, closing the door behind me and hearing the sound echo in the empty apartment.

  Out on the street, I would buy a newspaper, glance at the secondhand books in the stalls, stock up on provisions, and go back home, trying to decide whether to spend the afternoon reading, at the movies, or at the newspaper office. It was on one of these mornings that I realized I didn’t have any money in my pockets. It wasn’t an unusual situation at all, but in this case it was complicated by a whole series of other misfortunes: the door I had irrevocably closed behind me, the car I had left the previous evening in a remote part of the city, the nagging feeling I’d forgotten something, something I couldn’t remember however hard I tried. It looked like it was going to be one of those days when our shirt buttons come off in our hands, we lose our address book, we miss our appointments, and every door turns into a trap for our fingers. One of those days when the only thing to do is shut ourselves in and wait for it to pass. But I couldn’t do that, so I set off on foot, in the rain.

  Yes, apart from anything else, it was raining. I remember that day’s rain very well. A spring rain falling intermittently on a forgetful, surprised city and filling it with scents that became ever more fragrant after every shower. So much so that there isn’t another day in my life as rich in scents as the one on which this story began.

  2

  I got to Piazza del Popolo with an empty stomach and my shoes full of water. The square was overrun with parked cars, and a single beam of sunlight, high in the sky, made the terraces of the Pincio shimmer. The two cafés were full of people annoyed by the fact that they couldn’t sit outside. Under the awning of Rosati’s, I found chairs piled one on top of the other. I grabbed one and looked around for a friendly face, someone who might buy me lunch, but the only people I saw were people I couldn’t stand. Then it started pouring again, so I headed for Signor Sandro’s. He was an old barman, with measured, skillful moves, who’d opened an elegant watering hole with red leather chairs and prints on the walls. It was frequented mainly by literary types, poets, filmmakers, and a few radical journalists, who ate steak and carrots, but naturally that day I couldn’t find anybody I was friendly enough with to invite me to lunch. It was a place where I had credit, though, so I ordered a hamburger and a glass of Barolo and sat watching one of my favorite spectacles, Signor Sandro making cocktails. It was at the climax of this spectacle that a magnificent silk umbrella was lowered in the doorway and, too late to be of any use to me, Renzo Diacono appeared. I hadn’t seen him for a while, not since he too had ended up working in television. “Leo!” he said loudly on seeing me. He was very well dressed, unlike the bearded giant he’d come in with, who immediately vanished in the crowd at the counter. “What are you drinking?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” For a moment, he seemed about to say something, then, with his Piedmontese tact, he merely asked me when I might be available for a game of chess. “I don’t have time for serious things anymore,” he said, indicating his companion, who was returning from his siege of the bar. That was the great thing about him. Whoever he was with, he always gave the impression he’d rather be with you. “How’s life?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can only answer for my own.”

  “Congratulations,” the bearded giant sai
d, joining us with his glass. “Very wise.” He raised his glass to me. He was wearing a military greatcoat, with a scarf that went all the way down to his feet, and a streaming umbrella hanging from his arm, and was considering the world from the sublime heights of a massive hangover. He had a ravaged smile, the smile of a veteran. Renzo said he was the best director in television, when he was sober, but that was a condition he probably hadn’t been in for some time now. Giggling, the man apologized, in reply to Renzo’s remark, and went to get a refill.

  “Why don’t we get together this evening?” Renzo said. He also said that he and his wife had moved and made me repeat their new address twice to make sure I wouldn’t forget it. But there was no danger of that. Even though we were a generation apart, I enjoyed his company, he was a good chess player as well as a highly regarded historian, and his wife, Viola, was an excellent cook. I couldn’t ask for anything better to conclude such an unlucky day.

  * * *

  When I was alone again, I drew up a plan that would be proof against bad luck. First of all, I’d go to the newspaper office to wangle some money, then I’d catch a movie, then I’d proceed to the Diaconos’—having first gone to pick up my old Alfa Romeo. It was such a simple, such a reassuring plan that the combination of it and the wine gave me an immediate feeling of euphoria. I walked out and smelled the rain, which was coming to an end. Big, isolated drops were falling on the sidewalk, and there were large patches of blue in the sky. I set off past the damp but dazzling buildings of the Corso, and ten minutes later walked into the offices of the Corriere dello Sport, humming “Où es-tu, mon amour?” in the Django Reinhardt version.

  The girls at the typewriters, with their headsets on, greeted me with little cries of surprise—this wasn’t the time I usually showed up—and when I asked for Rosario, they pointed me to a booth, from which my friend emerged at that very moment, browner in the face than the wax disc he was holding. “Well, look who’s here!” he said as he passed me. I didn’t lose heart. Even though it was obvious there was no work for me, I could still ask for a loan. He knew that too, so he withdrew into his own headset and immediately set to work playing back the disc and typing out its contents. I sat down and looked at him until he had to give in. “How much do you want?” he said, putting his hand in his pocket. He gave me exactly half of what I asked him for, and on top of that I had to listen to a lecture. How much longer did I think I could continue like this? Didn’t I know that the head of the department was tired of not being able to rely on me? The job was there, why didn’t I take it? He’d gotten me the job, which entitled him to speak. He was a good friend, a melancholy southerner with a discontented wife. He’d left his village, on a promontory overlooking the blue Ionian Sea, to come to Rome and work as a journalist, but all he’d ended up doing was recording other people’s articles onto wax discs, then transcribing them. The complete idiocy of the job was proving a discouraging end to the years of his youth, but he didn’t give up. He was small and dark, weary but indomitable.

  I got the hell out of there. Outside, it was pouring. Torrents of water hammered down on the decapitated statues of the Forum, the collapsed columns, the palaces in the paved squares, the desolate afternoon arenas, the ornate churches, and, absurdly, the overflowing fountains. For a while I waited in a doorway, splashed by rain and cursed at by passersby—other castaways seeking salvation, like me, in the dark, cavelike entrance—then, taking advantage of a break in the weather, I ran, hugging the walls, until I reached a small movie theater nearby. They were showing something with my poor sweetheart, Marilyn Monroe—I refused to think of her as dead—and I watched it all the way through twice, eating salted seeds and listening to the thunder rolling over the roofs of the houses. By the time I came out, I was madly in love with her and very badly disposed toward the world, because a dead sweetheart is already sad enough in and of itself without there having to be rain too.

  There was something cruel about the evening. The crowd had come streaming back out onto the streets, but the traffic was unnaturally suspended, paralyzed. From time to time, the sizzling lights of streetcars illumined the rain-swollen sky. The newspaper headlines spoke of landslides, floods, delayed trains. To the north of the city, the river had overflowed its banks, spreading out into the fields, and the people waiting at the bus stops were staring up at the sky in silence. Glumly, I realized it was too late to try to recover the old Alfa Romeo, and I was forced to head immediately for the Diaconos’. I set off on foot, but soon enough had to take shelter in the entrance of a store that was still open. The traffic had drained away as if by magic, and the street was now deserted. Through the rain, I could hear a radio broadcasting the evening news. They were saying that the weather would change, that spring had arrived in our part of the world. It was at this point that a taxi appeared. I stopped it, told the driver where to go, sat down, and wrung out the cuffs of my trousers. Then I sat back and looked at the city until the meter warned me I couldn’t spend any more.

  * * *

  The wind was rising by the time I got to an apartment block surrounded by a damp, rustling garden. It was only then, perhaps because of the smell of the wet earth, that it occurred to me I should have brought Viola some flowers, but it was too late now, and I was so hungry I could barely stand. So I kept on, confronting the final test, an elevator that throughout the ride up emitted a menacing drone, as if complaining about my weight. Reaching the third floor, I quickly tidied my hair and rang the doorbell. Viola appeared. She looked surprised. Before I could say anything, she let out a little hiccup and burst into irrepressible laughter. I must have looked like a flood victim to her. “Come in, Leo,” she said, taking me by the arm. “God, how happy I am to see you. How did you manage to find us?”

  Those were her exact words, and it only took Renzo leaping to his feet when I walked into the living room for me to realize he’d completely forgotten he’d invited me. “Leo!” he said loudly, for the second time that day. A dozen people turned their heads languidly to look at us. They were sunk in an equal number of armchairs strewn across the vast rugs of the room, and all of them had the satisfied look of people who’d already eaten. There were introductions, to which I responded through clenched teeth. “You’re soaked,” Renzo said with guilty attentiveness. “Sit down by the fire. What can I get you?”

  “A little bit of luck,” I said. But he’d turned and was now pushing a cart in my direction. I hesitated. It had been a while since I’d last seen so many bottles in a place that wasn’t a bar. I chose a scotch, and as Renzo’s hand searched among the bottles they clinked triumphantly. For a while I was the center of attention, with Renzo telling the others how much his book about pirates owed to me. I’d always been very good at helping other people with their work, but Renzo praised me with such conviction, it was as if I’d written the book myself. I even had to answer a few questions on the subject before I was able to disappear into the armchair nearest the fireplace and practice the only two skills I’d ever really mastered: keeping quiet and adapting myself to my surroundings. My return to anonymity coincided with the discovery of a bowl filled with peanuts. Viola joined me. “Hey,” she said, “you look like a monkey with his spoils.” I put the bowl down on the rug and she sat down on the arm of my chair. I looked her over. In the two years since we’d last seen each other, her sweet face had become almost placid, but her legs were the same as ever, the most beautiful I’d ever seen. “Would you agree to be cryogenically frozen?”

  “Only if I was in love.”

  “Oh, how cute!” She laughed. “I’m conducting a survey, and then I’ll make my decision,” she said apologetically. “And don’t make fun of me. No, let’s talk about us instead. Who goes first?” She made the gesture of someone cutting a deck of cards. “You,” I said, to give myself time to recover and retreat into my own daydreams. I was an expert at this, truth be told. With just a few of courses and a few maybes, I was capable of making anyone feel I was listening to them with seriousness and und
erstanding. That’s what I did with her, actually taking advantage of the respite to try to fill in the blank that had been throbbing in my head since morning. I’d have given the whole bowl of peanuts to know what it was I’d forgotten to do that day, but I really couldn’t remember, so I contented myself with the warmth of the flames under my wet shoes until the fire and the alcohol had on me too the comforting effect that makes them both indispensable at social gatherings, where you would never say out loud that the former might burn the building down and the latter might make you feel as if you’re freezing to death on the sunniest morning of your life. “… I couldn’t stand those converted bathrooms anymore,” Viola said, apparently concluding a speech I hadn’t heard.

  “I imagine you must have a beautiful bathroom here,” I said, remembering the lovely old apartment on Campo de’ Fiori, where they’d lived before.

  “Oh, it’s palatial! You absolutely must see it!” For a moment, I thought she was going to take me by the hand and drag me there whether I liked it or not. “And what about you, are you still in that little hotel downtown?” But there was no need to answer, because just then a voice rose up from the armchairs, begging to begin a parlor game, and she had to leave me. Alone now, I started making an inventory of the people around me. For them, the rain was just a pretext to get dressed up in the right way—that much was clear from the start. With their velvet trousers, woolen shirts, and heavy shoes, they made it clear that, yes, of course they knew perfectly well how things were outside, in that world full of rain and sordidness, but they also knew that a glass of Chivas Regal and a pleasant chat with friends would allow them to ignore the multitudes pressing against the walls.