Now I’m here, in the bleachers of this old gym, and I can’t take my mind off it. Claudia leaps, flexes, and twists four yards below me, and training with her are other girls and boys, and older boys and girls, all together in a triumph of the purest spirits—they hope to successfully complete the exercise, to successfully eliminate the flaw, to successfully get on the team for the next championship—and I have to focus to avoid thinking about Marta. It’s upsetting. Usually these two hours are my form of yoga, but today Marta upset me and I’m afraid that something’s changed. And not only Marta: mostly her, but also Piquet yesterday and Jean-Claude the other day. They came to me, all three, to suffer, to unload their pain on me, then they left. It must mean something. To be honest, however, I’ve only recently learned to enjoy this place: taking Claudia to the gym used to be Lara’s job; I’ve only started taking her since Lara’s been gone, now that classes have started again, and it’s been a real discovery. It’s nice here, I really mean it. An old gym that offers four courses in artistic gymnastics at the same time, from beginner’s to competition, is a spectacle I could never have imagined; meditative, pure, but also energetic, cheerful, harmonious: it’s perfect for people like me, who want to be close to their daughters, but with lightness, without thinking about it too much. And it is a temple of lightness: here the force of gravity seems old-fashioned, obsolete; you look down from the bleachers and see handstands, vaults, arches, splits, tumbles, flips, as if the gymnasts were truly weightless—and for me, with the detour my life has taken, it’s a precious gift to be here two hours straight three times a week. And to think it was right here, within reach, for more than five years, and I didn’t even realize it; Lara didn’t, either, and she was the one who used to accompany Claudia, it’s true, but she didn’t stay in the gym to watch her, using those two hours to go to the supermarket, see the hairdresser, or do other errands: what kind of a life were we living? She was sick—the sense of guilt Marta tried to slip between my ribs like a knife. It’s not true: Lara wasn’t sick, so why is Marta saying she was? Why is she saying that I and even Claudia didn’t love Lara? I loved my wife, and Claudia loved her mother: what Marta said is untrue, so far. And what about Marta? Did she love her sister? Did she not love her? Did she maybe hate her and is simply looking for someone to share her guilt with? That must be why Lara disappeared from my thoughts during our embrace and why I could be so selfish that the only person I cared about was Claudia, down there in the gym: I have to focus on her. The freestyle exercises: along the diagonal of the springboard, second in line after Gemma, Claudia is standing there being scolded by Gaia, the instructor, because of a bad habit she has of moving her pelvis. An error I can’t even see, barely perceptible, which nevertheless seems to be her weak point. Watch: Gemma goes first again, immediately followed by Claudia; there she goes, doing a brave series of handsprings, one, two, three, and to me her pelvis seems to be in the right position, this time I’d say she did nothing wrong, but no, here comes the instructor, stops the whole class, goes up to Claudia, and, in front of everyone, Jesus, without the minimum tact, tells her that she moved her pelvis again. She shows her by doing a handspring herself, but grossly exaggerating the error so that even I can see it, while before, when I was watching Claudia, I swear you couldn’t—and that’s not right, oh, no, my dear Gaia: Claudia was not moving her pelvis like that at all; there’s no way she can know, but her classmates do and they’ll tell her, Gemma will tell her, she’ll tell her, Look, Claudia—or rather Claudina (because that’s what she calls her, Claudina, from the heights of her thirteen and a half years, which make her the oldest girl in the group as well as the captain of the team, already a junior champion, always running around winning medals and thus a kind of idol, especially for Claudia, who is always following her around trying to imitate her, immoderately, not only in the exercises but also in her attitudes and poses outside the gym, at home, and at school, with obviously grotesque results, because in her still nymphlike but already statuesque beauty Gemma is already physically formed, and some stridently feminine poses might look natural on her, but they definitely do not on Claudia, who to all intents and purposes is still a little girl)—look, Claudina, she’ll tell her, you barely move your pelvis, she’s exaggerating, don’t take it to heart; and I myself would like to bring in a camcorder to the next class and film the whole thing so Claudia can see with her own two eyes the difference between the error she really made and what Gaia is showing her. An error that ultimately boils down to the fact that, at the age of ten and a half, she’s not perfect. What the fuck. It’s what impresses me most about this place, the attitude toward perfection. Because what matters here is not your age, or the difficulty of what you’re learning, or the almost mathematical certainty that you’re never going to find yourself losing an Olympic medal by bare thousandths of a point; what you have to focus on here is perfection, pure and simple—which rules me out, since I’ve never felt this kind of pressure in my life and I have no idea what it means: I’ve always tried to do the best I could, of course, and in some cases I was obliged to do things well, at the risk of loss of esteem, money, even affection, but I have never dreamed of achieving perfection—the absolute good, a ten. My daughter’s a different story: ever since she was diagnosed with a talent for gymnastics, she’s had people breathing down her neck about perfection, and I have no idea what it means. Maybe Lara did: for years she studied classical ballet, in which everything is also difficult and everything also has to be done perfectly; Lara may have known what Claudia is feeling, but I don’t. Marta was the one who was good at ballet, the perfect one: the prettiest, the youngest, the best, the most rebellious, the most everything, and also the luckiest, until she started in earnest to build her misfortune with her own two hands—so successfully, in fact, that she became the unluckiest, too. So, if anything, Lara should have been the one who didn’t love Marta, who hated her, which wasn’t the case, I can testify to it: Lara cared deeply about her sister. Maybe the opposite was true? Absurdly, like something out of Dostoyevsky? Why do you hate this son of yours, Fyodor Pavlovitch? What wrongs has he done to you? He to me, none, but I have done many to him… And I really don’t understand how Claudia was able to handle the pressure without exploding. But she did, she does. So they wanted perfection? She simply began to strive for it, a little at a time—and apparently even achieved it sometimes. I was shocked the day I came by the gym to register Claudia for the new year when Gaia, while praising my decision to have Claudia continue (someone must have told her what had happened, scaring her into thinking she wouldn’t be coming back), she listed the points where Claudia was already perfect: her split, the arch of her foot “In what sense perfect?” I asked, thinking she would say, “Well, we are talking about a ten-year-old girl, after all, so I mean perfect in the sense of satisfactory,” but she replied with a Nietzschean purity: “Perfect in an absolute sense.” Her perfect points are utterly useless in and of themselves, of course, amounting to little more than the perfection, let’s say, of lacing your sneakers before a tennis match. But the fact of the matter is that she has achieved them, which justifies belief that she still has more to achieve, and this world that is so alien to me has become naturalized in my daughter’s life. Not to mention the most difficult things, in which Claudia is still far from perfection—like everyone else, for that matter—but she still does them, and to me this is already miraculous, since we’re talking about handstands, splits, pirouettes, walkovers, and front and back flips—and by a ten-year-old girl. The way things operate in here, however, what matters is not so much doing the exercises as doing them perfectly. Even Gemma misses more than she nails, so despite the amazement you feel when you see what these little children can do, to the instructor’s eyes it’s one mistake after the other. Here’s an example of adult-child relations in which the child doesn’t get a single break, except for permission to stop smiling. It’s true that I’m not grieving, yes, and that Claudia doesn’t seem to be, either: but—it’s ridiculous to even think it!—this doesn’t mean we didn’t love Lara. We—and I include Marta, because she loved Lara, too, until I hear proof to the contrary—we’re not grieving yet; we’re dealing with it as best we can, for now, I’d even say we haven’t yet absorbed it, we’re still circling it, acting as if nothing happened, as if Lara were on a trip, perhaps, and we’re waiting for the pain to arrive and flood our lives, and meanwhile we limit ourselves to attracting the pain of others, in my case, or to having a meltdown in the middle of traffic, in Marta’s—and it would be interesting to understand why her version of going nuts, of all the ways she could have done it, was to take her clothes off. Now they’re getting into a circle, sitting down, legs wide apart, and bending their upper bodies forward until they are stretched literally down to the ground, assuming an impossible position. And they start playing like that, spread out on the floor: you can’t tell what game they’re playing, but Gemma is clearly the ringleader. They’re supposed to take turns saying something, and now it’s Claudia’s turn, she…says God knows what, and the others laugh. Gemma laughs, too, and Claudia is proud. Good girl, you made your idol laugh. Lara wasn’t sick. She went to the fortune-teller to accompany Marta, like she always did. Over the years Marta took her to a variety of healers, pranotherapists, yogis, wise men, shamans, witch doctors, ayurvedics, maharishis, acupuncturists, needle less acupuncturists, those who lay stones on your chakra—whatever the fuck they’re called; podologists, who read your feet; tricomants, who read your hair; Tibetan monks, who cleanse your aura with a sword; samurais, who cleanse you with the katana; last year they even went to see a vampire, I swear, on Corso Magenta, a Romanian from Transylvania named Vlad, of course, who for €150 extracts twenty-five centiliters of blood using a sterile syringe, drinks it, and then tells you what’s ailing you and how to restore your balance. But it was Marta who was taking Lara with her, not the other way around, and Lara accompanied her sister so she wouldn’t have to go alone. Marta’s version simply reversed their roles—like Dostoyevsky, again—and now the girls have moved to the balance beam, one leg on the mat, the other behind them, practicing their splits. On this apparatus Claudia is perfect, like Gemma. So good that, from their superior heights, they start to chat, ignoring the others, and Gaia scolds them. You can see the satisfaction in Claudia’s expression, not because she’s doing something miraculous with her body—having to plant her feet on the mat means the split is even wider than 180 degrees—and she’s actually doing it “perfectly,” but because the scolding likens her to her idol, with whom she starts chatting again as if nothing had happened, and who knows what they’re saying right now, who knows what Claudia is saying and what Gemma is answering, while they stretch the tendons and muscles in their legs, and their bodies—Claudia’s simple, tiny, and provisory body and Gemma’s important, feminine, and fully formed one—earn a few angstroms in their endless journey toward perfection. Marta obviously wants me to suffer, she wants me to feel guilty. She wants me to think about what the fortune-teller told Lara shortly before she died: “You’ll die young” “I’m sorry, you do not have that man.” But when those words were uttered Lara was alive and well, and if she weren’t dead she’d be laughing herself, I’m sure of it, she’d be telling me about the fortune-teller the same way she told me about the samurai or the vampire and we would laugh about it together, because they didn’t merit a second thought. Look at how things ended up instead. She’s dead, and hindsight is the only thing that makes these words sound ominous. Any word, even the most ridiculous, pronounced shortly before a person’s death wavers on the dark border of prophecy, but we should never forget that time runs in only one direction and what we see when we look backward is misleading. Time is not a palindrome: starting at the end and moving all the way back to the beginning always seems to accumulate a variety of disturbing meanings, and we should not let ourselves be influenced by these things. I remember the notorious trial of Judas Priest, the heavy metal group accused of causing the suicide of two boys through subliminal messages that could be heard by listening to their songs backward—sentences like “Do it!” as in “Try suicide” or “Suicide is nice!” Halfway through the trial the group’s singer appeared in court with a bunch of tapes and made the court listen to them being played backward. On one there was a song by Diana Ross, and at a certain point, if you listened to it in reverse, the lyrics said distinctly, “Death to all. He is the only one. Satan is love.” On the others there were songs by his own group, and while the official text said things like “To build a line, strategic force / They will not take a man,” listening to it in reverse yielded “It’s so unlikely / It’s what I deserve” or “Oh, Momma, look, this chair is broken!” No, the fact that the fortune-teller predicted she would die young doesn’t mean a thing. The fact that she so tenaciously denied my presence by her side doesn’t mean a thing. The fact that Lara actually did die a few days after all that bullshit doesn’t mean a thing. The boys are practicing on the other side of the gym, doing handstands on the parallel bars. The instructor spurs them on. But only four of them, the oldest ones, are on the apparatus: the others are sitting down, attentive, watching them. There is no relationship between the boys and the girls in here, neither words nor glances, nothing, not even between the older kids, who on the outside have already started checking each other out, teasing each other; the majority here are children, who impose on everyone the chaotic calm of their senses, leaving no room for heterosexual attraction. It’s as if there were a wall between the boys and the girls—and thanks to this wall, ultimately, everyone is able to focus on their exercises much better. It’s extraordinary how a group dominated by children almost always ends up being more productive than a group dominated by adults. True, but how many days later did she die? Marta said they went to the fortune-teller when I took the children to the Water Park, so it was already the second half of August, around August 20, I’d say, in fact it was the same day as the Luigi Berlusconi Trophy game here in Milan, I remember it clearly because Jean-Claude phoned to ask me to join him on the grandstand and I was at the Water Park and I told him I couldn’t, so it was around the 19th or 20th of August. Lara died on August 30, ten days later. And now, at this late date, Marta wants me to wonder why, for ten long days, Lara never told me a thing about the fortune-teller; and why for ten long days she deprived herself of the pleasure of laughing with me at her absurd prophecies. Marta wants me to believe that Lara had secrets, that she knew her better than I did, in fact, that I didn’t know her at all; she wants me to start tearing my hair out and to start doing things I’ve scrupulously avoided so far, like rummaging through her things or checking out her computer, which I refuse to do. Marta wants to be loved, but by whom? A body that’s still perfect, breasts that are still gorgeous, another son, Fyodor Pavlovitch…Down goes the upper body, her legs still in a split, her forehead resting on her knee (incredible that my daughter is doing this); and who knows where Jean-Claude is right now, who knows what Gabriella Parigi is doing, who knows what the girl with the golden retriever is doing, I have a sudden urge to meet her, an urge to meet Piquet’s girlfriend and hear her drop one of her bombshells; I have an urge to find out whether at the moment Lara was dying someone else was thinking of her—there must be some way—since I was too busy saving our lady of the fat ass. Claudia has been in a split for more than a quarter of an hour now, Lara wasn’t sick, she didn’t have secrets, I’ll never go through her e-mail, and that song is right to say we are only accidents waiting to happen, and today Marta is what happened to me.