2

Saturday evenings they usually go to the Magic Lantern. It’s a film club at the top of Vico dei Carbonari in a small courtyard that looks like some corner of a country village and reminds you of farmhouses, patches of countryside, times past. From up here you can see the harbor, the open sea, the tangle of tiny streets in the old Jewish ghetto, the pinkish bell tower of a church hemmed in between walls and houses, invisible from other parts of the city, unsuspected. You have to climb a brick stairway worn by long use, a long shiny iron bar serving as a handrail, twisting along a pitted wall invaded by tufts of caper plants obscuring faded graffiti. You can still read: “Long live Coppi” and “The exploiters’ law shall not pass.” Things from years gone by. On summer nights, after the film, they wind up their evening in a small café at the end of the narrow street where two blocks of granite with a chain between them mark off a little terrace complete with pergola and surrounded by a shaky wall. There are four small tables with green iron legs and marble tops where the circles of wine and coffee the stone has absorbed and made its own trace out hieroglyphics, little patterns to interpret, the archaeology of a recent past of other customers, other evenings, drinking bouts perhaps, late nights with card games and singing.

Beneath them the untidy geometry of the city falls sheer away together with the lights of villages along the bay, the world. Sara has a mint granita that they still make here using a primitive little gadget. With a grater fitted inside a small aluminum box, it scrapes the fragments of ice together compact and soft as snow. The proprietor is a fat man with bags under his eyes and a lazy walk. He wears a white apron that emphasizes his paunch, he smiles, he pronounces his always miserable weather predictions: “Tomorrow it’ll get colder, the wind is from the east” or “This haze’ll bring rain.” He prides himself on knowing the winds and weather; he was a seaman when he was younger; he worked on a steamship on the Americas route.

Even when it’s hot Sara draws in her legs and covers her shoulders with a shawl, since the night air gives her pains in her joints. She looks towards the sea, a brooding mass that might be the night itself were it not for the stationary lights of the ships waiting to come into harbor. “How nice it would be to get away,” she says, “wouldn’t it?” Sara has been saying how nice it would be to get away for ten years now, and he answers her that one day maybe, sooner or later, they ought to do it. By tacit agreement their exchanges on this subject have never gone beyond these two ritual phrases: yet all the same he knows that Sara dreams of their impossible departure. He knows because it isn’t difficult for him to get close to her dreams. There’s an ocean liner in her fantasies, with a deckchair under cover and a plaid blanket to protect her from the sea breeze, and some men in white trousers at the end of the deck are playing a game the English play. It takes twenty days to get to South America, but to which city isn’t specified: Mar del Plata, Montevideo, Salvador de Bahia, it doesn’t matter: South America is small in the space of a dream. It’s a film with Myrna Loy that Sara liked a lot: the evenings are stylish, there’s dancing on board, the deck is lit up by garlands of lights and the band plays “What a Night, What a Moon, What a Girl” or some tango from the thirties, like “Por una cabeza.” She’s wearing an evening dress with a white scarf, she lets the dashing captain flirt with her and waits for her partner to leave the infirmary and come and dance with her. Because, of course, as well as being her partner, Spino is also the ship’s doctor.

If Sara’s dream is not exactly that, then it’s certainly something very like it. The evening they saw Southern Waters she looked so wistful; she hugged his arm tight, and while she was eating her granita went back to the old chestnut of his unfinished degree. These days even the line that he is too old doesn’t deter her. Won’t she accept, he says, once and for all, that at his age you don’t feel like going back to school any more? And then the exam registration booklet, the bureaucracy, his old college friends who would be his examiners now. It would be intolerable. But it’s no good, she doesn’t give up: life is long, she says, longer maybe than one expects, and you don’t have the right to throw it away. At which he prefers to look off into the distance, doesn’t answer, falls silent to let the matter drop and to avoid it leading to another argument that’s connected to his not getting his degree. It’s a subject that distresses him: he understands well enough how she feels about it, but what can he do? Of course at their age this life as secret lovers is a somewhat inconvenient eccentricity, but it’s so difficult to break with old habits, to pass suddenly into married life. And then, the idea of becoming the father of that evasive eighteen-year-old with his absurd way of speaking and indolent, slovenly manner terrifies him. Sometimes he sees the boy walk by on his way back from school and thinks: I would be your father, your substitute father.

No, this is definitely not something he wants to talk about. But Sara doesn’t want to talk about it either; she wants him to want to. So like him she doesn’t mention it; instead she talks about films. The Magic Lantern has been holding two retrospectives dedicated to Myrna Loy and Humphrey Bogart; they even showed Strictly Confidential: there’s more than enough for them to chew over here. Did he notice the scarves Myrna Loy was wearing? Of course he did, for heaven’s sake, they’re so flashy; but Bogart’s foulards as well, always so fluffy and with those polka dots, truly unbearable . . . sometimes it seems like wafts of cologne and Brylcreem are coming off the screen. Sara laughs quietly, with that delicate way of catching her breath she has. But why don’t they have a retrospective for Virginia Mayo, too? That Bogart treated her like a dog, the bastard. She has a special soft spot for Virginia Mayo, who died in a motel room, destroyed by alcohol, because he’d dropped her. But, by the way, that ship in the harbor, doesn’t it look like a liner? It has too many lights, she thinks, to be a cargo ship. He isn’t sure, hmm, no, he wouldn’t know. Though perhaps, no, they don’t have ocean liners anymore these days, they’re all in the breakers’ yards, just a few left for cruises. People travel by plane these days, who would cross the Atlantic in a liner? She says: “Right, you’re right,” but he senses from her tone that she doesn’t agree, is merely resigned. Meanwhile the proprietor of the café moves around with a cloth in his hand, wiping the empty tables. It’s a silent message: if they would be so kind as to call it a day he could close down and get off to bed, he’s been on his feet since eight this morning and the years weigh heavier than his paunch. Then the breeze has got a bit cool; the night is oppressively silent and humid; you can feel a film of brine on the arms of the chairs; perhaps they really had better go. Sara agrees it would be better. Her eyes are bright, he never knows whether this is emotion or merely tiredness. “I’d like you to sleep with me tonight,” she tells him. Spino says he’d like to as well. But tomorrow is his day off, she’ll come to his place in the morning and they’ll be together until evening. He’ll prepare a quick snack to eat in the kitchen and they can spend the whole afternoon in bed. She whispers what a shame it is they met so late in life, when everything was already settled; she’s sure she would have been happy with him. Perhaps he’s thinking the same thing, but to cheer her up he tells her no, it’s one thing being lovers and quite another being married, the daily routine is love’s worst enemy, it grinds it down.

The proprietor of the café is already lowering his shutters and mumbles goodnight under his breath.