List of the girls I’ve kissed:
Lara, Caterina, Patrizia, Silvia, Michela, the French camper, the German camper, Giuditta, Laura, Lucia, Gabriella, Cristina, Marina, Luisa, Betty, Antonella, Monica, Nicoletta, Amelia, the girl from Cagliari, Paola, Beatrice, Daria, Leopoldina, Sonia, the pranotherapist friend of Sonia, Barbara, Eva, Silvia 2, Antonella 2, Eleonora, Isabelle, the German girl in Paris, Alessandra, Marcella, Daniela, Isabella, Carmen, Laura 2, Annalisa, Marta, Angelica, Betta, Maria Grazia, Mia, Claudia, Phil, Patty, Sandra, Chiara, Patricia, Valentina.
Fifty-two. I’ve kissed fifty-two girls. Girls, not women, because almost all of them came before Lara, when I was young. Almost all of them. No, I wasn’t completely faithful to Lara. It would have been nice to be able to say that I never cheated on her, that I never even kissed another woman when I was with her, but I can’t. I cheated on her. How many times doesn’t matter—not very many, at any rate—and the fact that I cheated on her doesn’t even matter anymore. What matters, again, is that a list I drew up by plunging into my memories doesn’t bother me. It didn’t bother me while I was compiling it, and it doesn’t bother me now, when I’m rereading it and counting the names a second time. Fifty-two. How many girls do you think the traffic cop has kissed? And the Pakistani windshield cleaner?
Yet despite my reluctance to dredge them up from my past—and the risk that, in doing so, it would finally hit me—those kisses, like Lara, are no longer here. Those kisses are no longer kisses. They’re nothing. Most of them don’t even evince the memory of a kiss. They happened, and maybe even if I don’t feel like remembering it now, while I was kissing each one of those girls I was brimming with emotion, and my heart was beating hard, and I felt good: yet nothing has remained, nothing except the authority of this number grouping them all together and, in the brief space of these two syllables, reawakening each of them, every last one, conjuring up the impression of a life filled with love and passion. So I hold on tight to the number, even if in the end it’s nothing, either. But it is still a big number, an honor. It’s still something you can boast about, seated at a bar in Lorenteggio at two o’clock in the morning, drunk as a skunk, trying to detain the last customer before he pays his tab. “You want to know something, buddy? I’ve kissed fifty-two girls.” “Fantastic. Can I go now?”
—Pietro!
Jean-Claude. I recognize him even before turning around to see him—and more than anything I’m surprised that he’s come here, and at this hour of the morning, he who never arrives in the office before eleven. I recognize him by his French r and his raspy, unmistakable voice. Then I turn around right away and see him. Jean-Claude.
He comes toward me with a smile, walking slowly, in his shirt-sleeves. Behind him is his gray Alfa Romeo, one of the perks of being CEO, idling near the park, with Lino, the driver, at the wheel. It’s a very strange image: one of the most powerful men I know—and among them the most brilliant, ingenious, and independent by far—coming toward me with a smile in front of my daughter’s school. What’s he doing here? He’s my boss, after all. He can order me to return to the office. He can fire me. I close the notebook with the list of kissed girls and toss it in the car, furtively, with a sudden fear of being reprimanded.
We shake hands. How’s it going, splendid day, summer’s lasting longer this year, we should be at the seaside…He’s already expressed his condolences on several occasions. He came to the funeral, sent a beautiful wreath. He was the one who told me to take as much time as I needed and to come back to the office only when I’d gotten past the acute phase.
—It’s nice out here,—he says, looking around. Then he contemplates the austere school building.—Is this it?
—Yes,—I say.—Claudia’s classroom is up there, the third window from the left,—and I point it out to him.
Jean-Claude looks up and stares at the window. No, he hasn’t come to bring me back to the office. I stare at him, with his wild gray beard, as unruly and long as bin Laden’s. It’s a clamorously incongruous feature of his appearance, a kind of challenge to the conventions of the world in which he excels. A blatant affront to the West, you could say, that initially baffles people, generating an instinctive distrust, and immediately after forces you, for the sake of your peace of mind, to scan his person for all the good qualities that accompany the beard: the chiseled beauty of his features, the blue steadiness of his overpowering gaze, the cosmopolitan grace of his gestures, the refinement of his bespoke suits, the sophisticated details, like the tantric wedding ring—he’s married to an Indian woman—or the vintage watch he wears on his wrist. One by one, you find yourself separating these qualities from his Taliban beard, and while you’re at it you find yourself thinking of how conformist and prejudiced you are if all it takes is an unusual beard to put you on your guard when, in fact, you’re facing a rare and noble creature; and someone who forces you to do all this has already conquered you.
—Is that your daughter?—he asks. I look up and see a little head popping out past the windowsill, between the suddenly opened windowpanes. Boom boom, my heart’s in my throat: it’s Claudia, yes, even if you can barely recognize her, so high up, in the shade, with such a little head amid the archaic mass of the window.
—Yes.
It’s Claudia, and she waves to me. Boom boom. I wave to her, too. She must be smiling, even if you can’t see from here, and this smile I can’t even see still moves me. I must be weak, still, extremely weak, to be moved by so little: no, Jean-Claude, the acute phase is not over. He waves to her, too. This summer, when he came to visit us at the seaside with his wife, he gave her a fantastic T-shirt.
—My father was a fighter pilot,—he says,—and maybe a secret agent. He was always away. He never came to pick me up at school, not once.
His French accent softens considerably the roughness of his Marseillean voice, making it sound gentle. This is another good quality. Claudia is still at the window, and next to her is another little girl, whom I don’t recognize. I look at the time: ten thirty-five. So recess must be at ten thirty. We wave to each other again.
—How’s she doing?—Jean-Claude asks me.
—Fine,—I reply.—I don’t understand how she gets by, but she’s fine.
—Oh, Annalisa gave me some documents for you to sign,—he says.—I’ve got them in my car.
I feel like laughing, because life really is a mystery. You think you know someone, and then things happen that, as far as you know, are simply impossible. How did this happen? Where did Annalisa find the gumption to give the CEO the small amount of paperwork I was supposed to sign, since he was coming here?
—They took away my aero, my airplane,—says Jean-Claude, pronouncing it aero. The only defect in his Italian is that he can’t pronounce the word for airplane. But maybe this, too, is a charming flourish.
I look at him: he smiles, but it’s obvious that he’s announced something terrible. The absurd breeze continues to blow, as if we weren’t in Milan but rather in Izmir, Rhodes, or Tangiers, ruffling his sideburns and the tips of his beard.
—What do you mean, took away?
—Took away. A decision from Paris. I can no longer use the company jet.
Claudia waves to me one last time from upstairs, then she vanishes and the window is closed. There’s no one in the park. The kissing teenagers have disappeared, the benches are empty.
—Shall we sit down over there?—I propose, and Jean-Claude nods. We walk by his car, where Lino is reading La Gazetta dello Sport. He looks up from his newspaper, waves to me, and goes back to reading. He’s a great driver. And a Juventus fan.
On the park bench Jean-Claude lights a Gitane, then leans back and inhales deeply. I light a cigarette, too. From somewhere in the distance, the wind carries strains of music that sound like, yes, “Cuccuruccucú Paloma.”
—Why did they take it away?—I ask.
Jean-Claude bursts out laughing.
—Budget cuts…
Ahiahiahiahiahi, cantava…
—Do you know what that means?—he adds.
—I don’t think so.
—It means I’m history, Pietro.
De pasión mortal, moría…
—What do you mean, history? Come on, now, you’re exaggerating.
I say these words for the sake of saying them, without realizing how absurd they sound. People like Jean-Claude are so far ahead of the pack, have been sitting in the lap of a most comfortable, bourgeois luxury for so long, that of course they are sincerely, atrociously pained by the thought that now, years later, they, too, have to wait in line at the airport to check in. However obscene it might sound by comparison to the suffering of other people, right now Jean-Claude is suffering like a dog: he’s suffering because the meaning of the decision is clear, and so tomorrow he might receive another decision, instructing him to shave his beard before the next board meeting; but mainly, he’s suffering because by now he’s gotten used to traveling with his own private aero and was having fun inviting other people along, and piloting it also, for stretches at a time, with the captain sitting next to him saying bravo—he did it both times when he took me along—and now that he’s told me his father was a pilot, it naturally takes on a much deeper significance, but even if that weren’t the case, there is always a father lurking behind the satisfactions men seek in life—even if the jet was just a giant toy for top managers, like I thought, taking it away from him all at once, zap, when he was convinced that the jet was his, must have given him the same maddening and unbearable pain that my nephew Giovanni felt when Claudia tore his scuba mask out of his hands. With the difference that a high roller like Jean-Claude can’t even fax a reply to Paris saying, “Prenez garde de moi, car je suis sage!”
Cuccuruccuccú, paloma…
—It’s true, it’s just a jet. And do you know who signed the decision?
—Thierry?
—Oui.
Cuccuruccuccú, no llores…
— Well, he had to sign it, didn’t he?
—No. He could have had Boesson sign it. He could have pretended he didn’t even know about it…—he takes a deep puff on his Gitane, then he slowly exhales the smoke and adds:—He betrayed me.
—But weren’t you already on the outs, you and Thierry?—I ask.—Weren’t you expecting it, in the end?
Rather than reply, Jean-Claude smiles, stares for a while at the cigarette butt, as if deciding whether to take another puff, then he tosses it aside.
Silence…
De pasión mortal, moría…
Tiziana. Of course. She was older than me. One night we were kissing on her bed when she got a phone call and had to run. Her daughter wasn’t feeling well. Tiziana. Fifty-three.
—He betrayed me,—Jean-Claude repeats.