I did it, yes. I stuck my big nose in her e-mails. Theoretically I should not have been able to, since Lara didn’t connect automatically and I didn’t know her password. But I nailed it on my second try: TOANSE. It’s because I remember perfectly what happened when she took that intelligence test, the one they say NASA gives in order to select astronauts. If you are given a sequence of letters O T T F F S S E N T E T T F F S S E N T T T…what letter would come next? Forty seconds to answer, but anyone who can’t do it in twenty will never be an astronaut. Go. I couldn’t solve it when they asked me. None of the people I asked could, and I asked a lot of people. But Lara, after twenty seconds she said T. What did you say? I said T: the next letter in the sequence would be T. That’s impossible: you were just guessing, tell the truth. No, I didn’t guess: T as in twenty-three. They’re all numbers: one, two, three, four, five, six, etc. And they stop at twenty-two, so…So you already knew, someone gave you the test: come on, tell the truth. Not out of any lack of respect, but I can’t believe that of all the people I know you’re the only one who could become an astronaut: you already knew the answer, admit it, no harm done. No, I didn’t know, I swear. It’s that I used the same system for my passwords: I take important dates, the ones I could never forget, and rather than expressing them in numbers, which would be too easy to guess, I use the initials of these numbers. Do you see? For me it’s normal when I see the letter O to think immediately of one, or when I see T to think of two, or twenty, it’s the first thing that comes to mind. I’m no more intelligent than you, don’t worry…
ATNSE. April Twentieth Nineteen Sixty-Eight. Her date of birth. I got it on the second try, because the first time I tried ATNNF, April Thirteenth Nineteen Ninety-Four, Claudia’s date of birth. In other words I did it, I went into her e-mail: I never spied on her when she was alive, but I have done it now that she’s dead.
I didn’t feel at all good when I started. Opening Outlook I felt as if Lara’s computer was scolding me, and I sat for more than half an hour with the downloaded mail in front of my eyes without clicking on it. Resist, I told myself, she’s not here anymore, what you want to do doesn’t make any sense—delete everything instead. And the funny thing is the more I said this to myself the stronger I felt, far from the doubts that had driven me to this point, more and more determined to give the computer the only commands that made any sense—SELECT ALL, DELETE—after which I could go to bed with my mind at peace. The list of messages Lara received after her death was right there in front of my eyes, but I managed to not read a word, as if they were written in Arabic, and I enjoyed sitting there perched on the edge of an abyss that had opened up beneath my feet, it gave me an inebriating sense of inviolability, the same way you feel playing sports sometimes, in those rare moments of grace in which you feel that everything, absolutely everything, depends on you, and you feel sure that—surfing, let’s say—the surfboard will go exactly where you want it, because you don’t have the least doubt that your feet are exerting just the right amount of pressure to make it cut into the wave at the angle that will connect you to it for as long as you want. Or else, since it’s the same thing, the feeling of immunity I had twice in the space of a few minutes on the day that Lara died—probably right while she was dying—first together with Carlo when we dove in to rescue the two women who were struggling, or to tell the truth when we looked into each other’s eyes before diving in and it really seemed that it was already all over, and then by myself, a little later, when I was struggling with the drowning woman who was trying to pull me under, when I grabbed her from behind and pushed her toward the shore with thrusts of my cock and got maybe the most memorable erection of my life. Just as I was sitting here in front of Lara’s inbox and I cherished this wise sense not to go through it and was more and more certain that, effortlessly, indeed with a feeling that all of Creation was inclined like the plane of a pinball flipper toward that imminent gesture, I was about to hit DELETE.
Because of that pleasure, I think, because of my naïve, greedy desire to prolong it indefinitely, I made the mistake of not deleting it right away. For one fatal second my eyes stopped scanning and came to a stop on an arid piece of alphanumeric information in two messages bearing the fatal date, Monday 8/30/2004—one prior to and one following the time of her death, established by the ambulance medic at 1:55 P.M. It was a matter of one or two seconds, then my eyes started scanning down the list without focusing on anything in particular, but those two seconds were long enough to break the spell and suck me into a series of truly stupid actions that I carried out almost unconsciously, as if I were on automatic pilot. I opened the first of the two messages, yes I did; and I read it; and then I opened the second one; and I read it, too, even though it was long, in one sitting; and then I stopped again, but this time with immense exhaustion, and I started to think again about deleting everything, only to realize that now such a gesture was impossible, ruled out by the ideas that were crowding my head with remarkable urgency, to search for and read all the previous messages from that sender to Lara, for example, and to go dipping into her sent mail to find all the ones she had written to him for the sake of this unknown but evidently long and very intimate friendship, and to do the same with the New Age association that Lara had never mentioned to me, or to go looking through her archives and read all the correspondence between her and Marta, or better yet—to read everything, yes, start from the beginning and move forward a little bit every night, methodically, immediately after putting my daughter to bed, read every e-mail sent and received by Lara in the past…—when did Lara buy that computer? It was 2000, I think, yes, the summer of 2000, Italy had lost the final of the European soccer cup against France, and to console herself she decided to buy a computer—…in the past four years. So once again I was frozen before Lara’s e-mail, once again I was repeating to myself to resist, to delete everything, etc., but unlike before I felt dirty and irremediably weak, certain I would never overcome the urge. Because yes, those moments of grace are spectacular, they’re beautiful, but experience should have taught me that things last as long as they’re going to last, after which they’re always followed by a very powerful opposing force: the surfboard that rears up and then swooshes down, the fatigue that takes the place of inviolability, the list of messages that destroys you.
I don’t know how, from the logjam of thoughts that were paralyzing me, a modest, gray, bureaucratic act emerged: why not print the two messages I had just read—I say “I don’t know how” because I really am ignoring what dictated this urgency, why I considered it so necessary. Except that at the very moment I hit the print command, the only thing that could have possibly torn me away happened: Claudia called out to me. I ran to her room, and she was sitting on the bed drinking a bottle of water. What’s wrong, sweetheart? Did you have a bad dream? Claudia shook her head and kept drinking, but her eyes were frightened, her breathing labored, she had just called to me in the middle of the night—she’d had a bad dream. She finished drinking, put the top back on the bottle, and lay down again, silently, closing her eyes. I sat there in silence and began to pat her, waiting for her to fall back asleep so I could go back to the transgression I had interrupted; and I’m still here: quiet, caressing my daughter, waiting for her to fall back asleep, so I can go back to rummaging through the e-mails of her dead mother.
But you never know how long children are going to take to fall back asleep, you always risk leaving the room too soon: I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve miscalculated, fooled by her somewhat heavier breathing or by my haste to get back to a movie or to chat or sometimes even to fuck Lara (but before today, never to spy on her), I’ve moved with wasted caution before Claudia was actually asleep; I’ve had a lot of experience with these slow leave-takings filled with creaking tendons, followed by three or four mine-sweeping steps toward the door, after the completion of which, just when you’re about to relax because she hasn’t called you back—a sign that she really was asleep, despite the vague, extrasensory perception that she wasn’t and the consequent fear that you had left too soon—she calls you back, and you have to go back there and start all over again. That’s why I’m staying here so long, to pat her. Only for this. Tonight it’s not a loving gesture, it’s not a tender gesture: it’s a calculated gesture.
This is the worst moment since Lara died—and it comes at the end of the worst day. I’m stroking my little girl mechanically, hypocritically, my thoughts elsewhere. The gnawing doubt that Marta planted is contaminating everything, even my time with my daughter, because my mind is fixated on only one thing: going back to the computer. On only one true desire: to continue reading Lara’s e-mail. On only one true hope: to find something fishy, murky, rotten—hidden objective reasons, in other words—to feel bad about. My most fervent hope is to discover an affair, obviously, maybe with the maniac who called me a fucking yuppie, whose book I keep reading to Claudia at bedtime, one chapter a night, but it appeared in our home before the summer, on Lara’s initiative; a secret liaison, yes, stark and inadmissible, hidden from Marta, too, and protracted beyond all limits of prudence, that became practically unbearable but also, because of its ambiguous nature, closer and more unbreakable, so much so that it generated the pain her sister described and involved recourse to Eastern practices in the hope of soothing it, as well as visits to shamans, to vampires, to seminars on overcoming fear and rage, without ever obtaining results, of course, which only increased her pain, as if it were further aggravated by the need to hide it from me, given its cause, and to pretend to live the normal and serene life I thought she was living, the way things used to be, and the way they would definitely have continued to be if at the hour of truth she had done the right rather than the wrong thing—and rejected that first invitation to dinner rather than accept it, closed her lips and turned her face to the side rather than return that first kiss, tell herself, “I’m a married woman, I have a daughter, I can’t do this,” rather than “Fuck it, let’s see.”…Yes, a suffocating sense of guilt that, combined with the aortic aneurysm that condemned her to a premature death in any case, as turned up in the autopsy ordered by the judicial authorities of Grosseto (it’s procedure, they told me, since we’re dealing with, ahem, a suspicious death, not that the adjective was meant to insinuate anything untoward about the circumstances, nor further add to—they realized—the already unbearable grief of her family; suspicious in the sense of without obvious cause, in a subject who was apparently healthy and still young; it’s the term used in the scientific literature, of course: suspicious in the sense of unusual—and I told them yes, but then why doesn’t the literature use the word unusual?); a suffocating sense of guilt that, as I was saying, combined with the deformity that Lara had unknowingly been suffering from since birth, may have contributed to generating, yes, at that precise moment, yes, the fatal rupture—apropos of which, contrary to what Marta thinks, my personal responsibilities, not to say my faults, should be considered equal to…
—Papà…
…zero.
—Here I am.
Claudia sits up. She turns on the blue star lamp that IKEA sells for €9.90, the same one that millions of other children in the West have screwed to the wall by their beds, and looks at me. I was right to stay: she didn’t sleep a wink.
—Where were you going?
—When?
—Just now.
—When you called?
—Yes, where were you going?
What an angel…
—Nowhere, sweetheart.
I pat her head, smiling.
—It was just a bad dream,—I say.—Settle down now. Go to sleep.
Claudia settles down, docile. Where was I going…
—But it didn’t seem like a dream,—she whispers.
And in fact it wasn’t, sweetheart. I really was going someplace I shouldn’t. A place full of evil, guilt, far from you. But you saved me…
—Bad dreams never seem like dreams,—I say.—But then you wake up, and they disappear forever.
I continue to pat her, and everything already feels different: she’s tired, and in a little while she’ll fall asleep. She’s completed her mission.
—I’m not going anywhere, you know that…
She saved me, yes, and now I’m strong again, and the world is tilted toward the right hole again. I’ll delete that message, I’ll delete everything, and I won’t repeat my earlier mistake, I won’t mess around with this simple intention when I’m feeling weak, I’ll do it right away…
—Did you hear me? Now I have to go to the other room to finish something important, sweetheart: go to sleep, quietly, I’ll be right back to turn out the light. Okay?
—Okay.
Four giant steps, and I’m there. It’s easy. EDIT, SELECT ALL. 4332 MESSAGES SELECTED. DELETE. Zap, deleted, without even passing through the recycle bin. Lara’s e-mails are gone. They never existed. That writer is now a perfect stranger again, and as far as I know he’s living with his wife, his son, Francesco, and his dog, Roy—according to the blurb on the inside jacket of his book. But that’s not enough; screwdriver and hammer in the third drawer; who would have figured that Piquet’s paranoid advice would prove useful: “Destroy the hard disc.” Every time there was a change of owners at the company—and it had already happened three times—Piquet destroyed the hard disc of his computer and blamed it on a virus. The last time I saw him do it: bam, bam, with blows of the hammer. But do you really have such important things to hide? I asked him. You never know, he replied. Bam, bam. Exactly like I’m doing now: here goes, bam, bam, the hard disk disappears, Lara never had a computer, she died without ever owning one; three and a half years ago she wanted to buy one, but during the finals of the European soccer cup she made a vow: with five minutes to go, when Italy was trailing France by one goal, she said: “If we win I won’t buy a computer,” and then the game went the way it went, everyone knows, tie at the last minute by Delvecchio and the golden goal by Del Piero, fantastic, in an overhead kick, bam, bam, Italy’s the European champion and Lara gets no computer. A Lara who is serene, who is healthy—whose only concern, perhaps, was the low spirits of her beautiful, crazy sister. Bam.
Done. How long did it take me? Two minutes. What time is it? I don’t have my watch. I look for my cell phone to see the time. It’s in the kitchen, who knows why. Twelve forty-four. A new text message. Quarter of an hour ago. From Marta. “Sorry for today. I’m ashamed of what I said. You’re the best part of me.”