Translated by Ann Goldstein
Settled at a table in a café, I check my watch: It’s still early for our appointment, but I’m already anticipating her arrival. I like to stretch out the tension, up until the moment I see her, suddenly, in the crowd, head high, with that unmistakable gait, which distinguishes her, and, I would say, elevates her above all others. Today, however, I know in advance how I’m going to spend the time that separates me from the first glance, the first furtive kiss, the first thrilling moment of the day we’ll spend together. I’ve brought a notebook with me, here to the café, a small book with a black binding, held shut by an elastic band: a handsome object with uncut pages, whose first lines I am filling with an old pen. Now I’ve taken a break, ordered a beer, lit a cigarette. What could be better, on a warm spring afternoon, than to sit in a café in the heart of Rome, have a sip of cold beer, take a drag on a cigarette, and prepare to write about the woman you love, knowing that in a couple of hours you’ll see her?
My name is Jack Galiardo, I’m fifty years old, I’m an American citizen of Italian ancestry: My grandparents emigrated to New York in the early part of the twentieth century—they came from the countryside right around here. I’m a lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer, and I have a professional bias toward writing: When I accept a new case, after studying the details I need to slowly construct the line of reasoning that I’ll use to defend my client, and the only way to do so effectively is to take notes, otherwise I can’t think. Cogito, ergo sum. Paraphrasing Descartes, I could say: I write, therefore I think. It’s valid here, too, at the café table, although the case I have to think about now is my own.
Two years ago, I was sitting on a plane next to a woman, an Italian. I was going to Rome to meet a witness who might be useful in a trial. She was returning to Italy from a short working trip to the United States. The flights from America to Europe generally arrive at dawn, so the majority of the passengers try to sleep; but that night the two of us weren’t tired and we got to know each other. I had recently begun to study Italian, drawn by a sudden curiosity about the land of my forebears, which had never much interested me as a boy; so the conversation unfolded mainly in her language. After a couple of drinks and the initial chitchat, I revealed something about myself: that I had been married and divorced twice, had two children already in college, two houses, one in New York and one in Florida, two cars. “Two of everything,” she commented, laughing. Then she told me that she was a journalist, that she was married, and that her husband was also a lawyer, in Rome; unlike me, he was not a criminal lawyer but, rather, worked in commercial law. They had three children, two boys and a girl, the last still small. Giulia—that was the name of my traveling companion—must have been forty, but she looked at least ten years younger. I soon discovered that she loved to talk: She did almost all the talking, jumping from one subject to another, telling endless anecdotes, little stories, situations—quite entertaining, I think. I can’t be sure, because after a while I had trouble following her, given my limited knowledge of Italian. But the sound of what she said, the tone of her voice, the rippling laughs with which she punctuated her speech fascinated me. I would have liked her never to stop.
The truth is that she could also have stayed silent: The effect on me would probably have been the same. I was in love with Giulia from the moment I saw her. I’ve never believed in the classic thunderbolt. I’ve had a certain number of women, some of whom—including the two I married—I liked a lot at first, but I’ve never really lost my head. I suppose that as a boy I must have had, like everyone else, a crush on the cutest girl in the class, but as soon as I reached the age of discretion I left romanticism behind; love songs, for one thing, have always seemed to me banal, foolish, excessive. I found all those sighs, that agitation, vaguely comical; they seemed a pose, an attitude, rather than expressions of true feeling. With Giulia, however, it was like plunging into a state of adolescent regression. To please her, win her, possess her suddenly became my only purpose in life. Every other concern or consideration disappeared. I had to make an effort, that night on the plane, not to make myself look ridiculous by kneeling at her feet and declaring my love, then and there, in front of stewardesses and passengers.
When we landed, I asked for her phone number, and proposed that we see each other the next time I came to Rome. My stay this time would actually be very short: I had to leave within twenty-four hours so that I wouldn’t miss a court hearing in New York. “I’d love to,” she said simply. And we parted.
Phrases that are repeated an infinite number of times, in an infinity of casual encounters, in the course of a life. We might never have seen each other again. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Giulia, and after just a few days I called her from New York. “Ciao, it’s Jack Galiardo … I’d like to see you again,” I recall myself saying, emotionally. I got immediately to the point: “I could come to Rome next week, if you have time.”
She had a moment of hesitation. “You’d come to Rome just for me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She paused again, then said, “All right.”
Our first meeting was at Villa Borghese. Sitting on a bench, I made the declaration of love I would have liked to make on the plane. In a mixture of English and Italian, I described my image of her: alone, in a state of crisis with her husband, desperate for affection, for a man who desired her as no woman had ever been desired. And that man was me. Slightly put off, she said that I had misunderstood: She had agreed to see me, but that didn’t mean that her marriage was in trouble. I apologized. I added, however, that this suited me as well. That is, I was still happy to be there, on that bench, near her, even if she wasn’t having trouble with her husband and I was, at most, just slightly likable. It wasn’t a strategy to induce her to yield. I really felt that way: I felt that my love was so great that it was enough, at least at the beginning, for both of us. We got up from the bench and walked in silence for a little while, barely brushing against one another. In the square overlooking Piazza del Popolo she let me kiss her. We had lunch on the terrace of the Hassler. We continued to kiss, and then to touch, on the sofa of a deserted drawing room in the hotel, after lunch. We took a room there at the Hassler, although I was staying in another hotel. We made love until late afternoon. Then we descended to Piazza di Spagna, where she hastily said goodbye and got in a taxi. Walking as if in a trance, intoxicated with happiness, not knowing where I was or where I was going, I got a message on my cell phone: I already miss you. At that moment I knew: I had been knocked down. And I’ve never gotten up.
Rome, from then on, became the fixed destination of my vacations. As soon as I have a few days, I get on a plane and fly to Italy. Every so often, it happens that I can stay for a week, and then I manage to see Giulia two or three times. More often, they are whirlwind holidays: I leave at night from New York, arrive in Rome early the next morning, stay a day and a night, leave the following morning: a weekend in all, including the nine hours in the plane to get there and the same coming back. But it almost never happens that my Roman weekend coincides with an actual weekend. In fact, on Saturday and Sunday she has to be home, except for one weekend a month, when it’s her turn in the office, and so she’s just as busy. On some pretext, she can take a day off during the week as compensation, and devote it to me. Usually we see each other a couple of times a month. It works like this. I arrive and take a double room at a luxury hotel: the Hassler on Trinità dei Monti, the Hotel de Russie on Via del Babuino, the Plaza on Via del Corso, the Raphael near the Pantheon, the Excelsior on Via Veneto: These are my favorites. I earn a good living, enough to afford them, and besides, I love five-star hotels: They’re the only luxury I indulge in. But in this case I choose them for other reasons. They’re in the center, first of all, and Giulia lives in a residential neighborhood in the south of Rome, so it’s less likely that she’ll meet someone she knows. Furthermore, in these hotels the doormen are worldly, used to looking the other way in exchange for a generous tip, if in the late morning a woman accompanies a guest to his room without presenting her documents, as is usually required in Italy. Thus I spare her the embarrassment of disclosing her identity, of leaving traces. Finally, since we spend most of our time together in the room, I like it to be large, comfortable, elegant. I always wait for her in a café near the chosen hotel. When I see her coming, I get up and pay the bill, and she follows me, like a stranger, brushing my hand, pausing to give me a kiss in the doorway of a building, then immediately starting to walk again. Arriving at the hotel, we begin kissing in the elevator, start again as soon as I’ve closed the door of the room, and almost never stop. We take off our clothes quickly, we fall into bed, we make love—in every possible way—until evening. Maybe we fill the bathtub and spend awhile there. Sometimes we have room service: When the waiter comes in with the table, she goes into the bathroom, even though it’s obvious, from what we order, from the unmade bed, and from the Do not disturb sign hanging on the door, that there are two people in the room. Sometimes, at night, we have dinner in a tourist trattoria in the neighborhood between the Pantheon and Piazza del Popolo. Rome is full of these trattorias; they are places where no Roman would ever eat and so there, too, the risk of running into someone who might recognize her is not so high. It’s a system that guarantees eating badly, or at least not especially well, but it’s not the food that interests me. For Giulia and me, it’s enough to sit together in a dark corner, our knees touching, hands seeking each other under the table, letting ourselves be dazed by wine, only to hurry back to the room as soon as we’ve finished eating.
There have been exceptions to the rule of these encounters in the two years since we’ve been seeing each other. Once we went together to the Sistine Chapel, she hidden under a scarf and a pair of big dark sunglasses—well camouflaged among the legions of foreign tourists. Another time we took a car and went to Fregene, out of season, to stroll on the beach. It was sunny, we tumbled among the dunes. We also went to the movies one afternoon, not for the film but for the excitement of finding ourselves in the dark, in a half-empty theater, doing everything that is forbidden. Occasionally, I climb up behind her on her motor scooter and she drives me around, with no set destination: Since we’re wearing helmets we’re both unrecognizable. And since so many Romans travel around the city the same way—two wheels are the only alternative to the slow pace of cars and the inevitable traffic jams, Giulia explained. Protected by the mask of the helmet, holding onto her, I traverse the Eternal City like an invisible man to whom all is granted.
But it is in bed that we spend most of our time together. Partly we stay in these hotel rooms because ours is an illicit, clandestine love, which can’t be lived in front of others. The main reason, though, is that we like it. However nice it is to eat together, walk together, go somewhere together, nothing seems better to us than staying in bed together. I’ve never felt anything like that. I’ve had other women who excited me, but I’ve never spent eight, ten, fifteen hours in bed with one of them—at a certain point, desire always ran out. With Giulia it’s different: It never ends. Even if I’m tired after we’ve made love for a long time, an electric current impels me to caress her butt, lick the inside of her thighs, kiss her mouth, trace the line of her teeth with a finger, bite her ear, and on and on, without stopping. I can never have enough of her. It’s like a universal truth that was suddenly revealed to me: For the first time it seems obvious, as it never had before, that things should always be this way between a man and woman who are in love. That or nothing. No half-measures. The idea that a couple can lie together, I don’t mean for ten minutes but for an hour or two, and that each prefers to read a book, watch television, sleep—that is, do something else—now seems inconceivable, sad, wrong. If two people are in love, if they want each other, love should be the way the two of us live it: uncontainable. Morbid. A disease. Now I believe that the moment this passes and excitement turns into routine, love starts to end. Rather, it’s already over.
Eventually, however, a worm began digging a hole in my obsession with Giulia, very tiny at first, then larger and larger: the thought of her husband. I’m a free man, without ties; I could be with her, if we wanted, all the time. And I would like it to be all the time. But Giulia isn’t free; she’s a married woman. For months, after that first meeting at Villa Borghese when I said that I saw in her a neglected and unhappy wife, we never returned to my mistake. Besides, it seemed to me that the facts expressed our wish to be together. Mistake or not, I thought I had understood everything: Giulia and her husband were the typical couple who married very young, but after twenty years things had cooled. As an explanation it suited me. I had no doubts, residual questions, uncertainties. But the worm, quietly, slowly, continued to dig. The hole got bigger. And I fell into it. I had to admit to myself that the classic roles of the triangle were reversed: I, the lover, was jealous of the husband. Of course, every so often Giulia mentioned his egotism, the fact that he never listened to her or that he dumped on her shoulders as wife and working mother all the responsibilities for the house and the children. But she said it as a simple fact, without much complaint, without expecting to change him or the situation. Of him she never spoke with malice, never.
Now Giulia had someone to listen to her: me. As in our first conversation flying over the Atlantic, it was always she who did more of the talking, telling me an infinity of stories great and small, about the articles she commissioned or wrote for the paper, about the minor incidents of life in the office, petty feuds, jealousies, injustices, the confidences of friends, the problems or successes she had with her children, the things she bought for the house, the vegetables she got at the market, the delicious meals she cooked. There—that’s where my uneasiness made itself felt for the first time, I remember clearly, at the table. One of those evenings when Giulia couldn’t stay with me, but had to hurry home at dinnertime—breathless, in her constant struggle with time—as if she were coming from the newspaper. Suddenly, as I was eating dinner alone in a squalid pizzeria, I saw her at the stove, preparing food for her family, and then at the table, laughing with her children, telling her husband something, receiving compliments from them all for the wonderful meal she had made. I felt a pang of jealousy. From that day, I began to desire Giulia not only in bed. I began to want to share with her the little rituals of daily life: dinner with friends, an outing with the children, a vacation, shopping at the supermarket. I thought how, in all those situations, it was the husband who got to be close to her, who enjoyed her presence continuously: not me. And I wondered how she really was with that man. I wondered if, and when, and how, they made love: odd, I had never thought about this before. Giulia talked so much, she told me so many things, but about him, and what she really felt, she said little. Was it reserve, a need to protect the privacy of her marital relations? Or perhaps only timidity, a difficulty in opening up? I then realized that she had rarely said to me, “I love you,” “I adore you,” phrases typical of lovers. It seemed to me that I could see love in the way she looked at me, but she measured her words, as if she distrusted them. She was much freer with text messages. She wrote: What are you doing to me? I’m yours more and more, I miss you, I want you, I think of you, dream of you, you’re inside me, part of my life. And yet when, having received the message, I called her, I had the sensation that it was a different person who had sent it, that she was retreating, that she no longer wanted to talk about it. And the worm, planted inside me, kept on working. I would have liked to ask her: You, what do you really feel? What is the difference between me and your husband? Would you leave him if I asked you to? How would you react if I asked you, for example, to marry me? Would you run away with me to New York? Or, if I moved to Rome, would we live together? But I couldn’t: It was stronger than me: I couldn’t. These were the sort of questions that, the other way around, women had always asked me, in the various relationships I’d had. Relationships without love. Relationships in which I listened to those plaintive questions—What about you, what do you feel? Do you love me? Do you care for me, think of me?—with an increasing sensation of nausea. With the wish to silence their mouths, flee, never see them again.
The Italians take long summer vacations: usually an entire month. During the second vacation after we met, which Giulia spent at the beach with her whole family, we talked very little on the phone. It was complicated, her husband or children were always around. When finally we saw each other again, during a hot September in Rome, Giulia was more stupendous than ever: tanned, polished by the sun, slightly rounder, from days of repose and, I imagined—in vexation—from the food she had lovingly prepared over the four weeks. We made love furiously. Then I pounded her with questions. All the questions that the worm had burrowed into my body. Giulia didn’t expect it. She was stunned, almost frightened. Then she answered. She said that her husband wasn’t perfect, that their relations in twenty years of marriage had obviously changed, but that he was a good father whom the children adored, a good man, intelligent; certainly he neglected her somewhat, but not out of meanness or insensitivity—he just was like that. Once she had thought of leaving him, of divorcing, she admitted, without specifying if it had been after we met or before, but she had abandoned the idea: It wouldn’t be easy, it would have been too painful for too many people, the children would never forgive her. Then, speaking of the two of us, she asked me point-blank if I would really be willing to leave my law office in New York. She knew that I loved my work. Before I could answer, she said that she loved hers as well. She said she needed me, that she was happy when she had me near her and heard me on the phone, that she didn’t want to lose me—but life was a magical accord made up of many things: love, work, children, the city where she was born and raised, family ties. And she didn’t want to lose any of them. Then she went silent, exhausted by all these explanations that she evidently wasn’t used to.
Was it really like that, as she had said? I didn’t know. But instead of making me angry, instead of her seeming egotistical or evasive, that speech made me feel a tenderness toward her. “When your children are grown up, will it be less painful?” I asked, laughing. “When you’re old. When you’re eighty. When you’re ninety and I’m a hundred. Then I’ll carry you off. Then we’ll run away to the south in a convertible. Then you’ll be mine and only mine.”
She laughed too, relieved. “Idiot.” Her voice trembled. We embraced. We made love again. We didn’t talk about it anymore. The worm, for that day, vanished.
She hadn’t answered all my questions, but she had said something. And I myself had always theorized, when women assailed me with questions, that words count for little in a relationship; what counts are actions. Promises, explanations, confidences mean nothing; in fact, they’re a sure way to begin poisoning a relationship. Giulia was the proof of it. I thought of her as of a splendid jungle animal, guided by instinct. There were many components to her life, and the part that I played was crucial, but it didn’t exclude or cancel out the others. That was it. In meeting, we had received from destiny a talisman of happiness—and only we could damage it, destroy it, lose it. Besides, I wouldn’t have wanted to change places with her husband. How many times, proclaiming that love should always be like this, crushing, enveloping, like a dream or a drug, did I reflect that if I lived with Giulia I wouldn’t rush to leave a bouquet of flowers in her office with an anonymous note; coming home from work, I wouldn’t fling myself at her, since we would have fought because one of us had forgotten to buy toothpaste; we wouldn’t exchange phone calls punctuated by sighs, or erotic text messages. So it was better this way. The question of jealousy seemed to me closed.
Some time afterward, however, I had the temptation to do something. I was spending a week in Rome, rather than the usual two days, and, not being able, naturally, to spend it with Giulia, I found myself with a lot of free time. Some I spent walking in “our” neighborhood, up and down Via del Corso, wandering between the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain, sitting first in one café and then another, letting myself be pulled along by the river of foreign tourists until I lost any sense of where I was. Even today, after two years of Roman vacations, I get lost in the center of the city as soon as I leave the perpendicular line of the Corso. For someone accustomed to the perfect symmetry of Manhattan, the twisting streets of the Italian capital seem a labyrinth of squares and narrow alleys, all the same: a fountain, a column, a flaking wall, a café, a market stall, a wild dog, a motorcycle, a beggar, a group of American or Japanese tourists, another fountain … And in appearing to me indecipherable, impenetrable, Rome reminds me of Giulia: mysterious, seductive, majestic, happy, talkative, endowed with an ancient wisdom, breathtakingly beautiful, capable of making you lose your head and then demolishing everything with that laugh of hers …
But I’ve lost the thread, I was saying something else: that at a certain point I had the temptation to do something. I wanted to see her husband. I knew his surname. I knew he was a lawyer. A couple of phone calls were sufficient and I knew what day he would appear in court. I went with my heart beating madly. What impression would he make? What if he was hideous, the man for whom Giulia lovingly made dinner every night? Or what if, on the other hand, he was incredibly handsome? When I finally saw him, and heard him speak in front of the judge, I realized that he was neither. He was a normal man, with the face of a decent, respectable person. Against every expectation, I found him congenial. Yes, jealousy really seemed to have passed. To ask her and myself too many questions would only ruin everything. I became even more careful than before not to compromise the secrecy of our love. Giulia was no longer alone in protecting her marriage. Now I, too, wanted to help her.
I would never have imagined, as I was thinking along these lines in the courtroom, just a short distance from her husband, in what way I was to find myself helping her. Three months ago, while Giulia was following me along the route from a café near the Pantheon to the entrance of the Raphael, a storm broke. Umbrellas opened, tourists fled, streets emptied. I turned to look at her: With her rain-wet face she was beautiful, terribly desirable. I committed an imprudence: I pushed her into a doorway and kissed her for a long time, as if in a trance, slipping my hands under her skirt, where, I knew—she had promised me—she wasn’t wearing panties. When we came out again into the street, embracing and running in the rain, someone saw us without our noticing. A man. A journalist. A colleague of Giulia’s, who had worked for years at the same newspaper, and who had tried in vain, for years, to get her into bed. He followed us to the entrance of the Raphael. Maybe he waited for us there, maybe he simply gave the doorman a tip, more generous than mine, or maybe he even had an informant. The fact is that the next day, when they were both at the office, he sent Giulia a message and began to blackmail her. Either she slept with him or he would tell her husband everything. “You’re scum,” Giulia said to him when they met in a corridor at the office. “Yes,” the man answered, and I imagined him drooling. Let me make it clear: Everyone—at the newspaper and outside it—courted Giulia. I would like to explain the reason for this fascination. She’s beautiful, of course, but it’s not only that. It’s that Giulia has a particular sensuality which certain women are granted, and by virtue of which she emanates an eroticism without realizing it, without even trying. She has the air of a woman who is ready to flirt with anyone, whereas in reality she doesn’t think about it at all. The result is irresistible. Men fall at her feet. I know because, with that innocent laugh, she told me herself. But when one of them, like the colleague in question, insists, and the pursuit becomes annoying, she won’t play, she coldly cuts it off. That man, therefore, detested her. He was like a hungry beast who follows his prey for months, years, and knows he will never be able to savage it. Giulia in spike heels. Giulia wearing boots. Giulia in shorts. Giulia with her navel showing. He was going mad. And when he saw her with me, he thought that he had finally found his chance to capture that prey. “I’m not in a hurry,” he told her, excited.
As I feared, Giulia changed. We didn’t see each other for three weeks. Whereas before we talked on the phone practically every day, in that period even phone calls became rare, brief, monosyllabic. Giulia felt stalked, pursued, spied on. She was afraid to see me. To provide the blackmailer with further proof. To be accused by her husband, lose the love of her children. Finally we met, but we were together only for a few hours, in a car with tinted windows that I had rented, and for the first time I saw her cry. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to lose me, but even more she didn’t want to lose her family. She didn’t want to break the magical, fragile accord that held her life in balance. I dropped her at her scooter, saying, “I’m going to the airport, I’ll call you tomorrow from New York,” and I left in a screech of tires. But I didn’t go to the airport.
I took a room at the Excelsior, I telephoned New York, putting off all my appointments indefinitely, and stayed in Rome. Without even needing to think about it, I had found the solution, the only one possible. I knew the name of the journalist who was blackmailing her. I easily found a photograph and information about him on Google. His father, a businessman, had died some years earlier, leaving a substantial inheritance. He didn’t have money problems, or real career aspirations. He wasn’t a famous reporter, having been stuck at a desk all his life. Every so often he was interviewed on television about the activities of the secret services: from there, I imagined, came his propensity for blackmail. I discovered where he lived with his wife and two children—on the Lungotevere, a few hundred meters from the Pantheon—and that was how he had happened to see us on that cursed afternoon. Giulia had told me what sort of man he was. He didn’t get along with his wife, treated her badly, seemed to enjoy making fun of her in public, as if to demonstrate his superiority. The poor woman, at dinners of colleagues that Giulia had sometimes attended with her husband, took it and took it, then every so often they had a tremendous quarrel. One Saturday, I posted myself near the man’s house and saw the whole family go out together, father, mother, children. They went shopping in a small supermarket in the neighborhood. I didn’t at all like the way he behaved with her, not bothering to help her carry the heaviest bags, and, with the children, grumbling with irritation at their innocent whims. In my rented car with the tinted windows, I waited near his house another couple of evenings. He would come home on his motorino, as so many do here in Rome, a little after midnight—always at the same time. A time when the Lungotevere is deserted.
I have to digress here, in order to make what happened next understandable. I was the first in my family of Italian-American immigrants to get a college degree. My family would not have had the money, or the patience or the desire, to send me to college. When I finished high school, I enlisted in the Army. I went to the military academy, became an officer, and, with the rank of lieutenant, served in the Special Forces, the Green Berets. Besides teaching me to kill, the Army paid for the college education that my family could never have afforded. After I got my law degree, I waited a short time, then I resigned and returned to civilian life. Of my years in uniform, what remains is a medal for valor—I prefer not to speak of how and where I got it—and the techniques of hand-to-hand combat. My specialty was the knife.
It was simple to get one. In Rome you can find knives of all sizes in hunting and fishing stores. I chose the one suitable for my needs: a short but sharp blade. The following evening, I waited as usual near the house. When he got off his scooter I came alongside him in the car, asking through the window, in my halting Italian, where was the closest hospital, and waving a huge map of Rome. I coughed, I stuttered, I looked like someone who was about to have a heart attack. He was obviously annoyed, but he opened the car door and leaned in to show me on the map. Under the map I held the knife. With a quick movement, from right to left, I cut his throat and pulled him in toward me. He fell without a cry. I had covered the seat with plastic, and I used a towel to stanch the blood. I closed the door and drove off. I parked a kilometer farther on, along the Tiber, near a bridge. Not a soul in sight. I took his wallet and watch. The body made a thud, and was immediately swallowed up by the water. I threw the knife and the wallet, emptied of money, into the river, much farther on, from two different bridges. I cleaned the car, took it to a garage, slept in the hotel. The next morning I got on a plane and returned to New York, but not before changing my victim’s euros to dollars and destroying the watch.
Giulia, whom I hadn’t heard from since the day of our last, brief encounter, called me three days later. She didn’t want to tell me anything on the telephone. Only that she needed to see me urgently. I took the first plane. We met in one of our usual cafés. She followed me to one of our usual hotels. In the room, she told me everything: the mysterious disappearance of her colleague the blackmailer, the corpse retrieved from the river, the lack of a motive, the police groping for clues, the hypothesis of murder committed during a robbery by some tramp, drug addict, or radical—the only types who hung around under the bridges and along the banks of the Tiber late at night. No one had seen anything. The crime seemed destined to remain unsolved. Without another word we undressed, we made love, then we lay there, silent, close. Until, as if overcome by a profound weariness, we fell asleep. And when we woke, it was as if everything could resume exactly as before.
Like every Italian-American, I’d had a Catholic education. As an adult, I stopped going to church and confessing for Holy Communion, but I remember perfectly well that a man can sin and be forgiven. God has mercy for everything, even a mortal sin. It’s necessary, however, for the sinner to repent. And I didn’t repent. For some time I deluded myself: It was true, I had cancelled out a human life, but that man was a pig, an unworthy being, garbage. I took a husband from a woman who didn’t love him, a father from children who deserved better, I said to myself. But the illusion didn’t last. I had become a lawyer because the concept of justice fascinated me, the attempt by men to come as close as possible to the truth. And the truth, bare and crude, is that I killed a man, I executed him without a trial. And I did it all alone: I was prosecutor, judge, executioner. A monstrosity.
And still I do not repent. I am aware of my sin, and yet I do not repent. I say further: I would do it again. I’ve had many women in my life, many have loved me, but I never really loved any of them in return. As a young man, seducing women was a mark of distinction, a badge attesting to virility and courage. I was attracted to the two I married, but never really in love. With some others it was a fleeting infatuation. For the most part, not even that. Only now that my hair is turning gray do I truly love; for the first time in my life. And I don’t intend to stop. If the seal of our love is secrecy, if the precondition is to maintain a magic circle that includes her husband and children, I will be vigilant so that the circle doesn’t break. If one day someone else discovers us, I’ll get another knife. I will protect my love, however I can, as long as I can.
As a member of the legal profession, I know that the perfect crime doesn’t exist. Sooner or later almost all murderers are discovered. That’s why I’m writing these lines, this memoir. To set down in black-and-white that Giulia had nothing to do with it. Giulia didn’t ask me to do anything. Giulia would never have approved of what I did. She would probably leave me if she knew. But meanwhile, until then, until my crime is eventually discovered, Giulia is mine. Two days a month, twelve hours a day, in a certain sense always, Giulia is mine. My Roman holidays continue, they might continue like this for my whole life, I’d put my signature on it. Like the signature and date I now place at the end of this document: Jack Galiardo, Rome, March 21, first day of spring, sitting in a café between the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain.
I check the time: My love is late today, ten minutes already. Could something have happened? If so, why didn’t she call me? I pay the bill. Light another cigarette. I smoke it with rapid, deep inhalations, eagerly scrutinizing the faces in the crowd, in search of hers. I take the last swallow of beer. I push the chair back, I get up. There she is.