And I have. I’ve stayed here. After all, Jean-Claude is still my boss: even if they took away his aero, even if he’s slated to be history soon, he’s still my boss. So we can put it this way: until the day his bearded head rolls on the business pages of newspapers, I’ll do whatever Jean-Claude tells me. He told me, “Stay here,” and I have. I’ve stayed in front of this school.
Now it’s been ten days that I’ve been staying here from eight to four thirty, and it doesn’t even seem like that big a deal. It comes to me naturally. Quite simply, I have the impression that I’m better off here than I would be anywhere else. Claudia is happy: a little dismayed, perhaps, but happy; she doesn’t stop paying attention in class to look out the window. She limits herself to peeking out the window when she can and waving to me. Then, when she leaves the building, we go home and don’t even talk about it. I told her once, and it was enough: sweetheart, I told her, I’ve decided to remain in front of your school for a while; it’s something I’m doing for myself, and Jean-Claude agrees. She thought about it, leaning her head to one side, and then said, “What about if it rains?” If it rains, I replied, I’ll stay inside the car. I have everything I need to work from there. She smiled. End of story. That was six days ago.
For two days now, it’s been raining. The summer ended all at once, the temperature dropped, and the pleasantness of this corner of the world seems to have dissolved. But not for me. I had thermal paper inserted in the car fax, put on warmer clothes, bought a nice new umbrella, and waited in front of the school in the rain. I observed the changes that the beginning of fall had brought to the neighborhood, all of them for the worse, but I continued to feel good. I worked, doing the little you can in a company that’s paralyzed: I received people in my car, or at the café opposite the school, and I signed the contracts I was supposed to sign. I repeat: although it might sound like a big deal, it really wasn’t. It’s something between me and myself, mostly, besides being between me and my daughter; a wish that I have and that I fulfill every day. Rarely have I felt so focused on a single wish that is so satisfying and—let me come right out and say it—so exciting to fulfill: to leave the house every morning with the curiosity you should always have, but never really do, to discover variations on the theme that you’ve decided to give the day: it’s a very pleasant feeling that in and of itself would be enough to make me stay here. If I, then, compare it to what I expected to feel, given the situation, I feel blessed. I’m supposed to be grieving: all of a sudden, a finger pointed at me and a voice thundered, “You, Pietro Paladini! Grieve!” But I’m not grieving, you see, and I can spend all my time with my daughter, which is what I want, and retreat from the daily bedlam that is wearing out all my colleagues; and I can remember, compile my lists, look at people on the street, and go home to watch TV and eat and sleep like before; and if this isn’t a miracle, it’s pretty damn close. And it doesn’t make me feel guilty. My wife is dead, and I’m not grieving. I don’t know how long it will last, but for now that’s how it is: I’m not grieving, and I don’t feel guilty.
How are other people reacting? Not that it matters, but that’s the most surprising thing about this business. Everyone knows by now, also because I don’t hide it—nor could I: how can you hide the fact that you spend the whole day in front of a school? Everyone around here knows by now: the teachers, the custodians, the other parents, the guys at the café, the men at the newsstand, the traffic cop—the one in the morning even saves a parking spot for me—and their reaction is a mix of respect and sympathy, although, given our lack of familiarity, no one dares to comment on or even talk about it. I stay here from eight to four thirty, and for these people that’s fine. Maybe, I told myself, it’s because I’m considered a big shot: I suddenly realized that being an executive at a cable TV channel to which everyone either subscribes or wishes they subscribed is a prestigious position; and if, after your wife dies, you do such an unusual but clearly inoffensive thing as spending every day in front of your daughter’s school, that prestige counts in the eyes of others. It’s not right, of course, and there was a time when, like many others, I, too, fought against this trend: but that’s still the way of the world. If a relatively well-to-do and powerful man like me does it, then it’s accepted and respected; if, let’s say, a day laborer does it, then it’s suspect. Maybe I’m wrong—which would be nice, meaning that we didn’t fight in vain—but in my opinion that’s the way things are. I see it, I feel it: the simpler they are, the more people feel honored that I’m here. Strangers are no problem.
A little different, but even more surprising in the end, is the reaction of friends and family. Since they’re close to me, they use their intimacy; they feel authorized to ask, to object, to try to dissuade me. But it’s an effort that lasts only a few minutes. Whether they drop by in person or simply phone me, they, too, after a while, accept that I am here in front of the school all day. It’s odd how simple things can be, after all: quite simply, they accept it. I realize that everyone starts out with the suspicion that I might have gone a little crazy, and their first approach is mainly to check up on me: have I by any chance lost my mind? But I haven’t lost my mind, and by answering their questions, telling them the truth, I show them. There’s nothing wrong with my being here: I’m not neglecting my work or my person, I’m not shirking any of my duties, and I even have a kind of unlimited authorization from my boss—whose cruel fate is not yet known to anyone. They’re forced to accept it. Over the past few days, I’ve repeated the same lines to a bunch of people, who are, in order: my secretary; my brother; my sister-in-law, Marta; my aunt Jenny; my two colleagues Enoch and Piquet—and even my father, who called, from Switzerland, to ask me what was going on. But I always had to tell them only once, never twice, because evidently my explanations must have been reassuring. And not only: I even got the impression that, after I reassured them, just about all of them envied me. I got this impression because I know them well, and I know that none of them is happy, although I’m maybe not completely up to date on the actual issues complicating their existence. Starting with the certainty that I’m grieving—but here there’s a misunderstanding, because I’m not grieving—and imagining me stranded in front of my daughter’s school like a vagabond, and seeing instead that I’m enjoying an entirely unexpected peace of mind and rationality, they must have thought of their own suffering and of how standing still in one specific corner of the world was a happy move that might extend some peace to them, too, if only they had the courage to do it; something along the lines of “I’m stopping here. Go on ahead without me,” which is not what I did but rather what they would like to do—but they can’t. Envied in this sense, is what I’m saying.
But maybe I’m exaggerating, and the biggest mistake I’m making is to generalize: my brother, for example, still seems somewhat perplexed and is maybe only postponing his objections until he comes to Milan—he lives in Rome—well aware of the fact, having experienced it more than anyone else, that no matter how hard it is to do in person, it’s absolutely impossible to get me to change my mind over the telephone.
If I’m exaggerating, on the other hand, it’s because things have happened that deserve consideration. I’ve received two rather strange visits, each one quite terrible in its own way. One yesterday and one this morning. One from my colleague Piquet and one from my sister-in-law, Marta. They had both been here already some days ago, like everyone else, to inspect my mental state, and one afternoon Marta came back with her children to wait for Claudia at the exit from the school; but they were very normal visits: Piquet and I spoke about the situation at the company while with Marta I spoke about family matters, vacation plans, and issues related to Lara’s estate. Normal visits. But the ones yesterday and this morning were not, they were not normal visits, and not because of what Piquet and Marta had purportedly come here to do: shoot the breeze, keep me company, or put to rest any lingering doubts they had over my mental condition. They came here to suffer: both of them, like Jean-Claude. They came to me to unload all their pain on me, blindly, relentlessly, in front of this school.
Piquet arrived yesterday afternoon at around two thirty, in a taxi, in the pouring rain. He got into my car, sat down next to me, and looked at me for a while, forcing himself to smile but saying nothing. His gaze, which is already paranoid on a normal basis, blinking and shifting side to side, was like a flock of birds after a gunshot, darting off in every direction in a fatal frenzy: the gaze of a person in grave danger. His ugliness, which was usually compensated for by a rather assertive elegance and harsh and insistent facial expressions, seemed to be naked in its complete helplessness: his acne-scarred complexion, his no-lipped mouth, his abnormal protruding forehead—like a cassowary, Claudia had remarked; and Lara and I, who had never heard of cassowaries, confirmed her simile when we looked it up in a science book. Although Piquet looked at me, he was really demanding to be looked at, because of his obvious state of shock, and finally he asked me whether he couldn’t talk to me about a personal matter. I said yes, but in reality it wasn’t so natural, because Piquet and I had never spoken about personal matters; indeed the only personal thing between us in the past had been his alleged aversion for me, motivated by my appointment to an executive position that everyone coveted, which had led him to circulate lugubrious predictions of my future at the company that were totally unjustified but descriptive enough for some people to start calling me “dead man walking.” Then, over time, our relationship smoothed out, he even apologized, and I have to admit that he turned out to be a loyal colleague, but we never did establish the intimacy that would have made it natural to talk to each other about our respective personal affairs. But I said yes anyway—what was I supposed to do? So he lit a cigarette and remained in silence for a little while longer, as if to assess his last chance of not speaking at all and of leaving as he had come, without saying a word. Then he started, sparing me no details: he summarized a series of things that I already knew, namely that two years ago he had left his wife and son to take up with a young and beautiful designer, Francesca; that his wife hadn’t taken it at all well and had dragged him through a huge legal battle; that his son had taken it even worse and started to manifest strange psychosomatic disturbances (actually, I didn’t know this); and that nevertheless he was happier with the designer than he had ever been. Everyone knew these things; at the office it was common knowledge and fodder for gossip—obviously, in his absence. More stuff about his wild life with this Francesca, the wild sex they had every night, the profound interior rebirth he had consequently achieved, and at that point you didn’t have to be a genius to know the lengths to which he would go to shield his personal affairs. But I never could have predicted what Piquet was getting ready to tell me. He continued to expatiate for a while longer, accurately describing the transition from the blind passion phase to a more conscious bonding, the important step of moving in together—something else that I was well acquainted with, since it’s always the same, always the same when a man leaves his wife for a younger woman, as I had been told many times. All without neglecting the viciousness he’d suffered at the hands of his ex-wife, the pain of seeing his son overcome by twitching and stuttering, and finally the growing sense of frustration in the office caused by the rumblings of the imminent Great Merger.
At this point it had stopped raining, and I proposed that he continue his story outside. He had smoked one cigarette after the other, polluting the car—in which I, on account of Claudia, carefully avoid smoking. We got out, although he, in his Replay jacket, was dressed too lightly not to feel the cold. We walked as far as the park, which we couldn’t enter on account of the rain, and we stopped at a random point on the sidewalk, like two drug dealers. It wasn’t a good place to talk, but Piquet kept smoking like a fiend and I didn’t want him in the car anymore. But for him this place was fine; he was just impatient to continue his story.
—And so,—he began,—one evening, last June, I invited Tardioli over for dinner. On the spur of the moment; we had been working on the budget for the Venice Festival and as usual there wasn’t enough money, and as usual your friend Jean-Claude told us it was our problem, and we worked late, till around nine. When I’m getting ready to knock off I see Tardioli, all by his lonesome; I know that his girlfriend broke up with him, I know that at home there’s no one waiting for him, and I tell him to come over to dinner at my place. He gets all shy, says he doesn’t want to be a bother, you know how he is, and I tell him to knock it off, if there isn’t enough to eat at home we’ll go to a restaurant. And he comes. I think of informing Francesca, but then I change my mind and don’t telephone, we’ll be home in ten minutes anyway. We get home, go in, and Francesca’s in the kitchen ironing. She works like a dog, but then she gets her mind set on ironing; I must have told her a thousand times, why are you ironing, we’ve got Lou, that’s what she’s paid to do, let her do the ironing, relax. But she ignores me, says that the maid doesn’t know how to iron, that she ruins the clothes, and that basically ironing is a way of relaxing for her, even if I don’t think so. At any rate, Francesca is in the kitchen ironing. Hi sweetheart, hello honey, from the hall. I tell her that we have Tardioli over for dinner, and if she prefers we can go out for dinner. And she calls out, still from the kitchen, that she doesn’t feel like going out, she’d be happy to cook some pasta, and apologizes to Tardioli for not coming out to say hello, but she’s finishing ironing a shirt. I tell her that I can cook the pasta, she says not to bother, that she’ll take care of it. Nice, peaceful; normal, in other words. I was going slow, because for a little while now, I don’t know, we’d been starting to read each other wrong: misunderstandings, mix-ups like “Wasn’t I the one that was supposed to come?” “No, we had agreed that I was supposed to come,” and such. Silly things, apparently, but I didn’t underestimate them, because two people who live together should understand each other, no? It’s no good if they don’t understand each other. This is why I insisted on the idea of going to a restaurant: because she’s in there ironing after working all day, and I’m bringing her an unexpected guest, and the idea of having to start cooking might piss her off—right? But she repeats that she’s fine with staying home and that as soon as she finishes ironing she’ll come and have a gin and tonic with us. All this via the corridor, you remember my house? Tardioli and I in the living room, Francesca in the kitchen, and all this shouted from either end of the corridor. I get busy making the gin and tonics, Tardioli sits down on the sofa, and after five minutes she appears, holding a big pile of pressed clothes in her hands. Smiling, pretty, relaxed. She hands the pile of clothes over to me and says: “Could you throw them out the window, please?” I’m dumbfounded. “What did you say?” I ask, and she, with the exact same expression, Pietro, the same smile, the same tone of voice, and the same cadence as before, says: “Could you place them on the armchair, please?” I took the pressed clothes, but I was speechless, because the first time she said to throw them out the window, I was absolutely sure of it. Francesca goes to Tardioli, apologizes again, gives him a peck on the cheek as if it were nothing…And so I do something, instinctively, yes, I say stop everything and I ask Tardioli, who was there and must have heard, I ask him to repeat what Francesca said the first time. Francesca doesn’t understand, Tardioli is embarrassed, but I persist, I ask him to repeat what Francesca said the first time. The first time, I insist, and not the second. And Tardioli, you know how shy he is, turns all red, lowers his eyes, and says, in a tiny voice, “She said: Could you throw them out the window, please.” Jesus. Thank God he was there, otherwise who knows how long that story of our not understanding each other would have lasted. Francesca bursts out laughing: “What did I supposedly say?” and starts to think we’re teasing her, like we’d gotten together to play a joke on her. She doesn’t want to believe us. I tell her again: I’m serious, Francesca, we’re not joking, you asked me to throw the clothes out the window, he heard it, too; she keeps going with the idea that it’s a joke, laughs, says to cut it out, but I insist, it’s become important, dammit, you can’t just leave something like this alone; Francesca, I tell her, you asked me to throw these clothes out the window, and at that point she gets pissed off. All of a sudden she’s really pissed off and says that she knows perfectly well what she said, says that both of us are deaf and need professional help; we’re either stoneheads or shitheads, to keep the joke going, and at that point I drop it. I drop it, Pietro, because I realize she’s sincere, do you get it? I know her inside out, I know when she’s pretending and when she’s sincere, and that night she was sincere. She was really convinced that she hadn’t said anything. I drop it, and Tardioli drops it, too, go figure, we tell her that the two of us must have misheard her, that she had the pile of clothes in front of her mouth, that it can happen, of course, sometimes you’re sure you heard something and instead something else is said, and in fact it was too absurd, the clothes from the window, ha ha, in other words the crisis is over. Francesca calms down right away, prepares a nice dinner, we eat out on the balcony, drink, talk, laugh, joke, the swallows, the jasmine, and when Tardioli leaves, Francesca and I make love on the sofa, clothes on, and then again in bed, clothes off, and we fall asleep tired and happy. But she said it, Pietro, that’s what she said. She asked me to throw the clothes out the window, I swear…
Only then did Piquet pause, and only because it had started raining again. He spoke for, I don’t know, ten minutes straight almost without stopping to catch his breath, his deer-caught-in-the-headlights eyes, the crushed, defeated look on his face. A sudden downpour came, and we ran to the car again, and right at that moment Claudia showed her face at the window and waved to me. I waved back while getting into the car with Piquet, and Claudia immediately disappeared: she must have thought I was working, that the cassowary had come on some business matter—I’ve been out here for ten days and it already seems normal to her that I work from my car. But there was nothing normal about that moment: Piquet was beside himself, and I didn’t know what to say, so in the car I said nothing, I put on a CD—always the same one, the one I’ve been listening to ever since I’ve been here, a CD by Radiohead that I didn’t even know I had, because it must be Lara’s, she must have left it here—and I even lit a cigarette, me. The rain beat against the windshield and we got as wet as drowned rats. Piquet’s hair was standing straight up in the middle of his head. He no longer looked like a cassowary: he was a cassowary. Who knows what he was thinking; maybe he was ashamed, maybe he realized the absurdity of what he was doing. Why was he telling this to me, of all people? And in the end he, too, was quiet, and his silence was taut, the silence of a rope about to break. I realized that he needed me to ask him a question, to give him the illusion he was satisfying my curiosity, so he could start talking again.
—And then what happened?—I asked him, but I had no desire to know. Whatever it was, it had to be ugly.
—What happened?—he said, starting to laugh.—All hell broke loose, that’s what happened. She did the same thing again two more times over the summer. Francesca would say something awful or absurd, I would ask her: “What did you say?” and she would say something else that was completely normal, in the exact same tone, and I would forget about it. Once, at dinner, I asked her to pass me the salt, but like that, nicely, I didn’t tell her that her fucking salad had no taste, I simply asked her to please pass me the salt, and passing me the salt, she, smiling, told me: “I’ll pass the salt up your ass”—I swear to God. And me: “What did you say, Francesca?” And she: “You’re right, it needs more salt.” And then in August, in a boat, while we were docking in Porto Vecchio, in front of a couple of friends who had gone on a cruise with us, she comes near me, holding some boat fenders, and says: “This is the last time, you fucking asshole.” Our friends turned around to look at me, appalled. I said: “Huh?” and she, all innocent, raises her voice so I can hear her better and says: “I said that I’ll put in the fenders!” This really happened!
He stopped speaking for a moment, laughing like a maniac, then he stopped laughing and asked me what CD I was listening to. I told him Radiohead, and he sat in silence for a while to listen; it was the point when the song goes, “We are accidents waiting to happen.” He commented on this line, saying he liked it. But you could see he wasn’t done yet. In fact, a little while later:
—But last night she went too far. Last night she really went too far. I couldn’t keep on acting like nothing was happening, Pietro, and last night I told her. Francesca, I told her, there’s something wrong with you. You say these awful things without even realizing it, I can’t keep pretending. Calmly and placidly, but I told her. Tonight, I told her, at dinner with Fiorenza and company, you really put your foot in it and everyone heard, don’t you realize? They heard. And so we start the whole story over again. She goes, “What did I supposedly say?” I repeat it, to the letter, because I’ll never forget it, and she immediately gets pissed off, BAM, like that night with Tardioli, and you know I never said anything to her about it since then. She got pissed off, denied everything, but since I insisted, I tried to stay calm and considerate but I insisted, she told me that I was the crazy one, do you get it, me, she actually told me that I’m not normal and that I frighten her, and she went to spend the night at her sister’s. That’s exactly what happened!
Piquet’s story was starting to irritate me more and more. I was really embarrassed. The bad part was that, the way he told it, so wild-eyed, made me think that he really was the crazy one—and he had been next door to me in the office, for years, and at that moment he was also in my car: it’s not a very pleasant sensation. But at the same time, there was something plausible in it that led me to believe him and to imagine that his Francesca was possessed by a ruthless syndrome that, every now and then, and unbeknown to her, would make her suspend for one moment her daily struggle to paper over with banality the evil harbored within her—since she was sick to death of the cassowary man with whom she had rashly linked herself, though she still could not admit it. So in the end, rather than force me to choose who was crazier, him or her, Piquet’s story made me think they both were, in that desperate way, innocuous to the rest of the world, that people who think they love each other sometimes realize they don’t and go crazy, and realize it was only a serotonin surge at a critical moment in their lives, and they end up hating and mortally wounding each other until the day they leave each other for good. That’s why I didn’t like this story and it made me so uncomfortable. And then I was curious, morbidly curious, I would say, against my better judgment, to know what Francesca had said the night before, but I didn’t know whether Piquet had consciously neglected to tell me or whether, as I thought, he was so upset that he didn’t even realize he hadn’t said it. This, too, was unpleasant. He stopped talking again, but he wasn’t done, you could see it, and all I could do was stare at the clock in the dashboard. Three fifty: in the worst of cases this situation would last another half hour, then Claudia would leave school and it would all be over.
—I went to Tardioli this morning,—Piquet told me after a long silence.—He’s the only witness I have. He knows I’m not crazy.
—And what did he tell you?
—Because it might even be true, you know. I can’t take it anymore: my wife is persecuting me, my son is sick, that damn merger is wearing us all out…It might even be true that Francesca never said those things, that I was only hearing them because I’m going nuts. If Tardioli hadn’t been at my house that night, you know, I think that I’d go see a psychiatrist. It would be easier, after all: Doctor, I’ve been hearing things, I’m sick, please cure me, give me some pills. End of story. It would be easier. But Tardioli was there, he heard, he saw. And the first thing I did this morning was go to him. With the hope, I swear, that he didn’t remember anything. No clothes from the window, nothing whatsoever. With the hope that he’d look at me like I was crazy…
—And instead?
—And instead he wasn’t in. He’s in Paris, can you guess why? For the merger.
At that point Piquet laughed, then he dug his cell phone out of his pocket, turned it on, and called a taxi. It was still raining, but not so hard. He didn’t remember the name of the street, he asked me, I told him. He waited for them to give him the taxi’s number, then he hung up and turned the cell off.
—Well, Pietro, I’m off,—he said.—Sorry for going on like that, I really mean it. You must think I’m an egotist: here you are with your own cross to bear, and I come telling you all about my little problems. But I couldn’t keep this frog inside anymore, not after last night.
—Don’t worry about it,—I mumbled,—you did good to get it off your chest.
—In the office you can’t talk with anyone, you know. I don’t have any true friends. You’re the only person I trust. Maybe because,—he sniggered,—I was unfair to you some time ago…
—Water under the bridge.
—Yeah…
He embraced me, kissed my cheeks, told me “hang in there,” and got out of the car—absurdly, seeing as it was still raining, he didn’t have an umbrella, and the taxi still hadn’t arrived. He circled around me and came close to my window, signaling me to lower it. I did.
—Please don’t say anything about this to anyone. We’re already vulnerable enough at the company: if people found out something like this, I’d be dead.
—No need to worry,—I told him.
—Plus, I’m ashamed, Pietro. Above all, don’t tell anyone what Francesca said last night. I beg you…
So I had understood correctly: he didn’t realize that he hadn’t told me.
—No problem,—I answered.—I won’t tell a soul.
Leaning against the window in the rain, wet, imploring, his eyes bloodshot with suffering, yet completely focused on trying to smile, he reminded me of Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, when he molests the two little girls.
—Thanks, Pietro.
But much uglier than Harvey Keitel. Much more ridiculous: with his Pleistocene forehead and teenager’s jacket to make him look thin. I hate to say it, and maybe I have no right, having heard myself called “dead man walking” because of his envy, and so it might sound like some kind of a vendetta: but he was ridiculous. There was nothing glamorous about him: there could have been —a man trapped in the jaws of a big city, stressed out, threatened by danger from all sides and alone in his sorrow, waiting for a taxi in the rain at four o’clock in the afternoon to go back to the hellhole that awaited him wherever he went; maybe there actually was supposed to be something glamorous about him; but there wasn’t: he was merely ridiculous.