XXI. GLANCES

The next day I waited in front of the gate to the Istituto Gramsci for the library to open with the first two mummies to have arrived. At nine-thirty, the glass doors slid open, and, though the sun was shining, the temperatures inside dropped to those of a wine cellar. The heavy tomes trapped the daylight, the halogen lights hummed like dying insects and one glance at the students already grinding their way through the tedium of term papers made me nervous. Tatiana wasn’t there yet, perhaps she wouldn’t show up today at all, all the same I took a seat, stuck with a book and looked towards the door when it opened now and again, even if only to let in some more sad PhD students. Then I turned and looked out the window onto the stem of the palm as it fanned out towards the top. I was looking for pigeons, but the tree seemed uninhabited.

Tatiana briefly appeared before my eyes, contemptuously wedging the pack of cigarettes over the edge of the rubbish into the bin. My hand slid across her hips. Someone bumped into a chair, a pile of papers plopped down onto a desk, a door closed. I started at every sound; Tatiana’s curves flared up, then became blurry. She simply did not allow herself to be held in my memory. As if she were defending herself. As if she were forbidding me.

Maybe she was slinking through the corridors of the Russian embassy again. All of a sudden I was so sure of it that I wanted to jump up and run back to Mr Golubev, but in the end I stayed where I was, for I knew that as soon as I left she’d show up, sit down at the desk next to mine and look for me in vain while out in front of the embassy a kid-like Carabiniere would be attempting to take my personal information again. Everything seemed to be getting in our way, and ultimately we prefer to be unhappy among other unhappy people, which was precisely why the institute was allowing this courtyard—lost beneath the red plastic cordons and site fences and continuing to rust on unobserved—to deteriorate: it was a way to conceal the misery inside.

By the time I’d had another look through the room, Tatiana was there, at a desk, her face bathed in the unhealthy light of a halogen lamp and the room tingling like cat fur with an electric charge. I couldn’t see what she was reading and maybe she was reading a number of different books, I could only concentrate on that little spot, on a point above her eyes where there was a wrinkle between her brows, and I didn’t want to do anything else than run my fingertip along it.

I couldn’t say how long I watched her. Mummies kept interrupting my line of sight, coming in with piles of grubby documents in their arms, and then a library employee informed me that the seats were reserved for working visitors.

A young student sat down next to her, holding a newspaper from the archive that had become transparent with the decades and threatened to blow away like an abandoned cocoon. Crumbs of tobacco stuck to the fluff of his sweater. I recognized him immediately. I knew his kind. Guys like him would stand at the edge of the smokers’ area with their hand-rolled cigarettes, and show up in seminars with deadly serious eyes and overwrought papers. They read Camus and Foucault but could not put together a single clever idea about them and were nothing for women like Tatiana.

She slid him a piece of paper; he bent over it and scribbled something on the edge. She leant towards him as if she couldn’t wait for him to slide the paper back. Their arms touched. It looked like she was whispering something to him. I bent back over the picture of the star athlete in the book in front of me, over her wiry, grey-striped upper arms. There was no point in getting upset about guys like him. He would never be a milestone in a woman’s life, just a low point, and his whole life long he would probably never get it. I squinted over towards them. Tatiana’s face seemed older and more angular, as if her neighbour’s ashen skin was rubbing off on her. He was no good for her, I could see that straight away.

He stood up and moved behind her, bent so low that his chest touched her shoulder. He whispered something to her, but what? Then she stood up too. They were standing so close, one in front of the other, obscuring a few books on Palmiro Togliatti; then next to Tatiana I saw a title on the paramilitary organization Gladio. Gladio had been responsible for bombings in Bologna in 1980 and Rome in 1969 and, if you paid any attention to Ilsa, for Aldo Moro’s death too. Tatiana’s fingers drummed against the fuzzy sweater. A piece of clothing like a Shetland pony. I stood up. I couldn’t stand to look any more. She deserved better.

On the left, a collection of speeches by Palmiro Togliatti and the Shetland pony; on the right, Tatiana and the bombing in Bologna. The guy eyed me irritably while pompously explaining something about the concept of the state to Tatiana, as if he were the first person to have read something about the integral state. He tumbled onward, dragging Tatiana from Gramsci to de Tocqueville all the way to Machiavelli before treating her to an explication of Venetian tax law.

‘So, listen, it’s not that complicated,’ I interrupted. ‘According to Antonio Gramsci, in the integral state we do not observe the political institutions alone but the private initiatives of civil society as well. And that’s where the fight for cultural hegemony takes place, for the dominance of particular convictions. Or, as Gramsci explained in a short formula: “State = political society + civil society, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.”’

‘German, eh?’

‘What does that have to do with Germany?’

‘You should work on your accent. You’re too clipped.’

‘And you’re limping hopelessly behind scientific standards. There’s no point. You’re just wasting your time here.’

‘Do you know each other?’ the pony asked Tatiana.

She shrugged her shoulders. I was captivated by how nervous she was.

‘In any event, she has talent,’ I explained to him. ‘As opposed to you.’

‘You know that for a fact?’ Tatiana asked.

‘Tatiana,’ I said and laid my hand on hers. ‘I am doubtless not the first to compliment you for your intelligence.’

‘Why’s he calling you Tatiana?’

‘Oh, leave him alone.’ She tried to get rid of the pony. But the young lint-carrier didn’t seem to understand. Some people were brilliant at blocking out reality.

‘I think you are now truly superfluous,’ I translated with an unmistakable bluntness.

‘Is that so?’ it asked.

Tatiana looked back and forth between me and the pony without saying a word.

‘Well, I’m out of here. We’ll see each other tomorrow. Or whenever.’ The pony kissed Tatiana on the cheeks, left, right, then trotted towards the exit, the door snapped shut, we were alone. Only a few mummies were left, shrivelling up at their tables.

‘Shall we eat together this evening?’ I asked.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Or do you already have plans?’

‘Wow, you’re smooth. You just got rid of my plans.’

‘You don’t really mean that. You didn’t really want to go out with him?’

‘And why not? Do you know him?’

‘You cannot honestly be telling me that you’re interested in that kind of man.’

‘He’s smart.’

‘Yes, just now I was completely won over.’

‘Maybe he can’t explain things as eloquently as you, but he’s also only half as old.’

‘So, he just turned fifteen?’

‘And, you’re insane.’

‘Well, at his age he should have more to offer.’

‘You were never his age. You were born old.’

For a moment I was confused, I didn’t know what she meant until it became clear that she’d entered the game and was winding me up. I laughed and bent my head to the side. She turned and left the room.

 

The man at reception grumbled something to me as I walked past, the glass doors slid open and there she was, standing with her back to me in that wasteland of asphalt. She was not alone. I saw the pony and the pony saw me. It arrogantly ignored my presence and continued to speak to Tatiana in a quiet voice. She shook her head a few times, and, when the pony paused, began to gesticulate wildly, said something that I was too far away to understand. The pony rummaged about its pockets, pulled out a package of tobacco and grimly rolled a cigarette.

I took a few steps towards her in order to get into her field of vision but kept a good distance. I could feel how I’d struck the ideal balance between understatement and urgency on my face. Most people knew little about their own faces, they just rubbed peeling creams over their skin and bought expensive anti-ageing moisturisers, but as of yet ageing had never been stopped by glycerine and propanedial. They exaggerated their expressions, raised their eyebrows too quickly and either looked ridiculous or remained stony and invisible. The women I chose to look at never thought they saw anything special in my face and yet they still felt something, confusion, some kind of pull, never right away, it always took a few hours to develop. The night was important, the night is the incubation period for everything that touches us more profoundly than the everyday.

The problem was that Tatiana wasn’t looking at me, though she must have felt that I was looking at her. She was keeping her eyes down to excite me, and I liked it, though it was a bit silly, I mean, how old was she? A young woman in her mid-twenties was still allowed to be silly, in fact, she had to be, anything else would just seem precocious and cold.

‘We had a date!’ she said so loudly that it made its way to me.

‘This is too stupid!’ the pony yelled back, then galloped past me and began tampering with a Vespa. Tatiana turned slowly towards me. I smiled; she sank her head. Her face looked fragile, as if she’d just been crying.

‘You shouldn’t get involved with those kinds of people,’ I said.

‘You don’t have any idea what’s going on.’

‘Ach, Tatiana.’

‘I can’t get you to give up on that name, can I?’

‘Let’s go,’ I decided. ‘We’re disturbing the saintly devotion here.’ I cast a glance at the fluffy pony working on its Vespa, and delicately led Tatiana towards the exit. As I pushed open the door, my hand briefly brushed her shoulder. She lurched. I grabbed her arm.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah, yeah. It’s just . . . you just smell an awful lot of cologne.’