Last Summer in the City Read online

  “What are you talking about, good night?” she said, once we were out in the courtyard. “These people have been working for hours!” She sighed. “I always feel really guilty coming here, but at this time of night I’d do anything for a warm brioche, wouldn’t you?”

  They were warm and fragrant, nothing like the sad little cakes you get in cafés, the ones the rest of the city would be dunking in their white-collar cappuccinos in a few hours’ time. “There must be some advantage in being rich,” I said, but she was miles away, swaying meditatively on the cobblestones of the courtyard in time to her chewing of the madeleine. “Are you looking for a loose paving stone?” I asked.

  My display of Proustian culture impressed her. “There’d be no point,” she said, looking at me, her curiosity aroused. “Madeleines aren’t the way they used to be.”

  “Nothing’s the way it used to be.”

  “That’s a good beginning,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s it, really. We’re living in quite depressing times, but what can we do about it? We have no choice.”

  “No,” she said, holding back a smile, “no choice at all. Have you ever thought how many pleasures progress has deprived us of?”

  “Oh, sure. Drinking milk from glass bottles, for instance.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s not bad. What else?”

  My suggestion was leafing through books without having to take off the plastic wrapper, to which she proposed blowing up paper bags, and I said slicing ham by hand, and she said walking on rubber soles and breaking glass decorations on the Christmas tree. When I stumped her with the smell of old leather armchairs, she changed the subject.

  “When would you have liked to have been born?”

  “In Vienna before the end of the empire,” I said.

  “Quite good,” she said, getting in the car. “Me, in Combray. Do you mind driving? I’d like to see the city from the terraces of the Capitoline Hill.”

  We got there in five minutes and went and leaned on the parapet just above the Forum. Beneath us, the squares were deserted, and the basilicas, frozen in marble, were dreaming of the day they would thaw.

  “It’s stupid,” she said softly.

  “What is?”

  “Feeling nostalgic for something we never had.” She turned to look at a few tramps sleeping on the benches. It wasn’t too hard to find a young one with a beard for her game. “Basically, I envy them,” she said. “They’re so naturally part of things. What about you, what do you do for a living?” That wasn’t an easy question to answer, so I told her I did nothing. “What do you mean, nothing?” she said. “Everyone does something. Even me, though it may not look like it. I’m studying architecture, I just haven’t taken my exams yet. How do you spend your days?”

  “Reading.”

  “And what do you read?”

  “Everything.”

  “What do you mean, everything? Even streetcar tickets, labels on mineral water bottles, orders from the mayor for clearing snow?” She laughed.

  “Yes, but I have a predilection for love stories,” I said. She took me seriously and said she found them frustrating because for her to like them they had to end badly, and if they ended badly, she didn’t like them. Had I read À la recherche? “I don’t have enough breath in me,” I said, maintaining that Proust was one of those writers who ought to be read aloud. The idea amused her, and she wanted to know which others that applied to. I mentioned the first books that came into my head: the Bible, Moby-Dick, the Arabian Nights. It struck me as a sufficiently engagé choice.

  “You must have some favorites, though.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Henry James Joyce, Bob Dylan Thomas, Scotch Fitzgerald, secondhand books in general.”

  “Why secondhand?” she said, not picking up on my erudite wordplay.

  “Because they cost less and because you can tell in advance, with a fair amount of certainty, if they’re worth reading.”

  “How so?” she said, sitting on the parapet.

  So I told her I looked for bread crumbs or pieces of crust between the pages, because a book you read while nibbling your food was sure to be good, or else I looked for grease stains, fingerprints, and not too many pages with folded-down corners. “Where you should look for folding is at the spine. If you fold a book back at the spine when you’re reading it, that means it’s good. If it’s a hardback, I look for stains, grazes, scratches—they’re all reliable signs.”

  “What about if the person who read it before you was an idiot?”

  “You have to know something about the author,” I said. But in any case, I went on, evidence suggested that since the advent of television, reading had become such an outmoded activity as to endure only among people with a certain level of intelligence. “Readers are a dying species,” I said. “Like whales, partridges, wild animals in general. Borges calls them black swans, and maintains that good readers are now scarcer than good writers. He says reading is an activity subsequent to writing, more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. No,” I went on, “that’s not where the danger lies. Books make different impressions according to the state of mind you read them in. A book that struck you as banal on a first reading may dazzle you on a second simply because in the meantime you suffered some kind of heartbreak, or you took a journey, or you fell in love. In other words, something happened to you.”

  So now she knew what kind of pretentious snob she was dealing with. She’d listened to me in silence, keeping her gaze fixed on the damp gravel of the garden. She looked up. “You’re funny, you know,” she said. “You looked so tragic when you showed up at Viola’s.”

  “It was just hunger.”

  “Hunger?”

  “Yes, ever hear of it?”

  “Of course,” she said, laughing, as we walked back to the car. “Isn’t it that Indian thing you get when you have an aperitif?” Reaching the car, she sat down on the trunk and looked around. “It’d be fun to live here,” she said, “but I don’t feel like marrying the mayor.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Via dei Glicini,” she said, her face lighting up. “Know where that is?”

  “Over toward Viale dei Platani.”

  “Yes, and there’s a street nearby called Via dei Lillà, which I like a lot, and there’s also a Via delle Orchidee,” she said, uttering the names of these flowers—wisteria, lilac, orchid—as if the streets were paved with them. “Drive me home,” she said, letting me take the wheel.

  “Please don’t joke,” I said, because if there was a place where someone like her couldn’t possibly be living, that was the place. Instead of answering, she propped her boots on the dashboard.

  I was at the end of my tether, as far as energy went, but I still wanted to know what she had in mind, so I headed in the direction of the infamous Via dei Glicini. It was a neighborhood I couldn’t stand, a district of ramshackle streets crisscrossed by the most fucked-up streetcars I’d ever seen. The jerry-built houses were falling to pieces, and the sidewalks were lined with disgusting restaurants alternating with electrical appliance stores and auto body shops. Gangs of boys astride lethal motorbikes gunned their engines, making an infernal noise. A stench of disinfectant that knocked you back spewed out onto the sidewalks from the movie theaters, and in all of it there wasn’t a single garden, a single tree, a single flowerbed to protect the inhabitants from the incessant summer sun, so that in the end the names of flowers on the street-corner signs made you feel as if you were in a madman’s dream. What was someone like her doing in a place like this? Without saying another word, I plunged into the long, straight streets of the neighborhood, with their dim fluorescent lights. Huge human hives rose in the night on either side, like towering cemeteries. Arianna looked at them in silence, with those eyes of hers that were too big.

  Once we’d passed a run-down amusement park and the perimeter wall of a vocational school, the car began to be reflected in the windows of the electrical goods stor
es. We wandered in the livid air until I found Via dei Glicini. It was a tunnel through lines of washing—at least that was one objective we’d reached in the game. Apart from that, it was just decay and squalor. “What are we doing here?” she said. “You got it all wrong, this isn’t my Via dei Glicini.”

  “There aren’t any others.”

  “Of course there are,” she said. Then she grabbed the bottle of perfume and dabbed her wrists and temples. The smell of lilacs that pervaded the car did actually make the view of the street more bearable. A night watchman, dressed in black, was coming toward us, pushing his bicycle.

  “Let’s get out of here, please, I beg you!” she said with a moan. “Night watchmen give me the creeps.”

  She grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard until we were out of the neighborhood. The fact was, not only did she not live on Via dei Glicini, she’d never even been there, she said. That morning she’d read an ad about two rooms for rent, and the fact that the streets had the names of flowers made her think it was a nice residential area. On a map of the city, she’d seen it was more of an outlying district, but how could she ever have imagined it was such a horrible place? How unlucky she was! I didn’t say a word. She must have been relying heavily on those flower names. What I really wondered was who she was running away from, because there was no doubt about it, she was trying to get the hell out, to escape. I wondered who from. Then I found out it was her sister. They’d quarreled that morning and Arianna had decided to leave home even though she was genuinely terrified of living alone. Had she really left with only the Proust book, a few matches, and a bottle of perfume? “And a deck of cards,” she said, in that conceited way of hers. “Why not?” She never went anywhere without a deck, but, as for anything else, in the heat of the quarrel she’d forgotten her keys and locked herself out. That was something I could relate to. I thought about my own dumb departure in the rain that morning and all of a sudden I remembered what it was I’d forgotten. That was it! I’d spent my whole birthday trying to remember that it was my birthday.

  “What? You forgot?”

  “Well,” I said, “birthdays aren’t what they used to be.” But I was thinking of all the things I’d intended to do, starting that day. Then I looked up at the sky, because apparently you always look up at the sky when you turn thirty.

  “You must be crazy,” Arianna said. “How can anyone forget their own birthday? I start crossing off the days on the calendar a month before!” Faced with such an extraordinary phenomenon, she’d forgotten all about Via dei Glicini and the rest of it. “We have to celebrate anyway,” she said. “Let’s find somewhere we can get a drink.”

  And that’s what we did, as dawn came up over the city. In the gray air, groups of people were waiting for the first buses. It was the hour when anyone who’s been on his feet all night demands something hot in his stomach, the hour when hands search for each other under the sheets as dreams become more vivid, the hour when the newspapers smell of ink and the first sounds of day start to creep out like an advance guard. It was dawn, and all that remained of the night were two shadows under the eyes of this strange girl by my side.

  * * *

  “To all the things we haven’t done, the things we should have done, and the things we won’t do,” I said, raising a cup of boiling hot caffè latte. Arianna laughed, said it seemed rather too programmatic a toast, but, basically, it was fine. Then she leaned across the table and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “And now,” she said, settling back on the metal chair, “tell me something amusing.” We were in a café at the bus terminal. Around us was the good smell of coffee, that good smell cafés have early in the morning, and a boy was spreading sawdust on the floor between the feet of a few drivers reading the Corriere dello Sport. I felt good after the coffee, even though my bones ached. So I told her my story about Via dei Glicini, where for a while I’d given Italian lessons to a gang of kids more ready to bum cigarettes off me than to consider Manzoni’s The Betrothed anything other than an endlessly delayed fuck. During the last lesson, I should have been explaining the subjunctive, but I had a three-day hangover and couldn’t keep still on my chair. They noticed, and started patting me on the back, which I pretended to enjoy in order to save face. In the end I couldn’t hold out any longer and crashed to the floor. I think the father of one of my disciples took me back to my hotel on his motorbike, with me lying across it like a dead Indian, I don’t really know. What I do know is, I wasn’t paid even for the lessons I’d given when I was sober, and for a long time I planned to abduct one of the kids and demand ransom. Arianna was laughing, then stopped suddenly and sat looking at me over the rim of her cup. She was looking at me very closely, her eyes half shut.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I like your gray eyes. I was asking myself if I could fall in love with you.”

  “There’s no need,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “You can come to my place anyway, and stay as long as you like.”

  “Do you mean that?” she said. The idea excited her, and she immediately said she wouldn’t be the least trouble, we could share the rent because she had an annuity of fifty thousand lire, which was at least something, and she knew how to cook a fabulous chateaubriand. At this point I felt like showing off a little, and I said she shouldn’t make anything because it made me really sad to think of a poet who went down in history because of a steak. So she asked if I minded in the same way when it came to politicians, and we settled on Bismarck.

  Then she started planning out our days. We would listen to music, read, and study, because she really had to resume her studies, get that damned degree, and go back to Venice, where she would be part of a team of technicians working to save the city. Except she could never really study properly, she was so disorganized, so disorganized!

  “What time is it?” she asked, even though she had a heavy man’s watch on her wrist. “This thing? Oh, it’s a family heirloom.” It wasn’t accurate, and she’d never had it fixed, because, that way, looking at it was always a surprise. It was six o’clock, and the watch said a quarter to eight, though who knew what day?

  “I’ll be back,” she said, getting up and going to the toilet. It was locked, and she had to ask the barista for the key. When she came back, she had a look of disgust on her face. “Maybe they keep it locked because they’re afraid someone will go in and clean it,” she said. “What shall we do?”

  “We’re going home, aren’t we?” I said, managing to pry myself out of my chair, but Arianna shook her head. After a night spent smoking, the best thing was to run down to the sea and get some oxygen in our lungs, didn’t I agree? I wondered if there was anything in the world capable of destroying her, fragile as she was.

  She sat down behind the wheel, and ten minutes later we were zooming along the straight road leading to the coast, between meadows covered with dew and pines silhouetted blackly against the clear sky, which now had some color. Arianna kept talking in a slightly frenzied way, about the days we would spend together, and I shut my eyes to blot out the light and listened to the sound of her voice, thinking about how it would echo in the bare apartment facing the valley. God, there was still something that could be saved in this world!

  The sea appeared suddenly at the end of the road. We started to drive alongside it as it appeared and disappeared between the beachside resorts. To our left, the out-of-season boardinghouses and hotels exposed their faded signs to a cool, tense wind that made the palms in their gardens sway.

  Everything was very silent, even Arianna now. Once past the developed area, we parked on the side of the road. The sky was turning pink, but the sea was still gray and hostile.

  “It always seems to be asking something,” Arianna said after a while. “But all water’s like that. The rain’s the same, it always seems to be asking something.”

  When we walked down to the beach, the wind got in under our clothes and dispelled what little heat we’d accumulated in the car. She shivered. “It�
��s cold, dammit,” she said, and started running across the moist sand with her hands in the pockets of her red raincoat. In an instant she was far away, while I kept to the part of the beach that had hardened again, walking over a sad carpet of dried-out seaweed and empty shells. The waves lapped at my shoes, and gradually, as the undertow beat on the shore, a final barrier came down and my eyes moved to where her raincoat stood out like a red puppet. The noise it made, carried to me on the wind, was like the crinkling of a paper cone. I followed her tracks, placing my feet where she’d set hers. The wind played a strange trick when I reached her, making it look, as she turned her beautiful face toward me, wounded by the morning, as if she’d stopped breathing, then started again. The red raincoat emitted a few more squeals as her arms rose to my neck. I felt the cold of the sleeves on me and suddenly started to shiver again.

  “Are you cold?” she said, pressing her body, small and hard and warm, against mine. She blew into the collar of my shirt, laughing softly, then I started to feel her lips running lightly over my cheeks. “Poor boy … poor boy … poor boy,” she said softly, taunting me, “what have I done to you … you poor boy…” until I felt her lips gradually turning more tender as her smile faded. Her lips were on mine, and then I felt her tongue searching, tenderly, stubbornly, over my teeth, prying them apart. Then, with inexpressible slowness, she broke away and, still very slowly and thoughtfully, rubbed her lips on the cuff of my raincoat. “Well!” she laughed. “You won’t even want to make love. I don’t really like that idea of yours.”

  She walked away, leaving me alone with my embarrassment. She joined a little group of fishermen dragging a net to shore. Part of it was still in the water, but it was already obvious that it hadn’t been much of a catch, and the fishermen were cursing quietly among themselves as the sky turned from pink to blue.

  “Look!” Arianna cried. “Please!”

  And then I saw the magic transforming the morning. An old man was walking on the beach, risking a fall every time he raised his stick to urge on a filthy, aggressive dog with a docked tail.