XXV. MICHELANGELO

Tatiana had stopped showing up at the Institute. After a few days, however, I saw the pony again. It had discarded its fur and was wearing a grey, washed-out T-shirt and acting important at the other end of the room with all kinds of papers a wafer-thin boy had brought it from the archive. I stared at it for a while, then stood up and walked over.

‘When will Tatiana be back?’

‘You again!’ it said in a hushed voice.

‘Is she on holiday?’

‘How should I know?’

‘But you know her.’

‘Know!’

‘You were talking with her.’

It waved its hand. ‘Come on, talking, whatever.’

‘Why don’t you want to tell me? What kind of claims of owner-ship are these?’

‘Sorry, but I think there’s been a misunderstanding. On top of it, I’ve got work to do.’ The pony bent back down over its papers.

‘You can’t keep a woman all to yourself,’ I said so loudly that even the mummies turned around. Well, they finally had to learn that there were more things to life than coming to an end in the alphabet. I turned away and left the reading room.

I stopped at reception, the librarian peeped up.

‘Could you tell me if Tatiana reserved any books this week?’ I asked.

He inched his glasses down his nose and looked over the edge. ‘Who?’

‘Tatiana. Light brown curls. About this long,’ I explained and held my hand flat against my earlobe. ‘Delicate. And her mouth. You’re familiar with Michelangelo’s statue of David, right? Of course you are. That mouth. In reality, it’s a woman’s mouth, that’s why it’s so beautiful.’

‘If you are looking for a book, you can easily submit a request,’ the librarian said, pushing a grey cardboard box across the counter. ‘Processing can take a while, as you know.’

I shook my head.

‘Maybe it’ll go a bit quicker today,’ he said with a conciliatory tone. ‘It seems’—he flicked his glasses up his nose—‘to be somewhat urgent.’

‘Thank you,’ I said drily and turned away. I didn’t want to read a book. Nothing that would bring me closer to Gramsci, to the Party congress in Livorno, the one in Lyon, to the schism among the socialists and their coming back together, I had absolutely no interest in making my way through all of those things any more, what was the point? Just stones and pebbles, footnotes and references.

For a while I stood out on the slanted stretch of asphalt in front of the Institute, looking at the old tyres, and couldn’t say if anything had ever struck me as that empty. The earth was a cold stone falling through the universe. Research was absurd, life was absurd and life without Tatiana most certainly was. After Tatiana, I knew that much, it’d be over. Tatiana was perfect. No, worse, she outdid the perfect, she left it behind as a given and went beyond it. Her mouth was that of a David, that’s what made it so refined. She was extraordinary in a way you could not invent but simply run into. And once you’ve experienced something that beautiful, everything you previously thought was beautiful just seems gruesome and dull.

On Fridays she had a violin lesson, I imagined, and Saturdays she’d leave the house late to meet friends at a pizzeria. Sundays she slept in. There was no way Tatiana was a fan of Sundays, that day of traditions and table manners, when, at three o’clock, you had to be on your way to your family with a package of sweets from the baker’s or be consumed by a melancholic sense of dejection much greater than those few remaining hours of the weekend would lead you to believe. No doubt she liked Calvino and Ginzburg, she liked the silence of 4 a.m. when you awake unexpectedly, she liked oranges, Saltimbocca and the snow in Tuscany which clings to the slopes like an unreal mist and disappears as soon as you approach.

 

‘And what did you find out today?’ Brevi asked as I attempted to creep past his living room. He was sitting in front of a pile of manuscript pages, had pushed back his snow-white hair and looked like Pasolini’s older brother.

‘It’s complicated,’ I answered.

‘I have no time for such statements,’ Brevi replied. ‘That philosophy is something difficult is simply a generally held prejudice, but you, Anton, cannot fall into that trap. Use your common sense.’

‘The research material in the archive,’ I defended myself. ‘It was sorted out in private.’

‘Perhaps the archive is not the right place for you.’

Ach, Brevi. You don’t get it. You believe in archives and facts. You believe that you simply have to come to the right conclusion.

‘I was at the Quisisana Clinic today,’ Brevi announced. ‘An old caretaker took me through the storage room. He nattered on a bit about the poor morals of the doctors and nurses. Everyone so busy trying to fill their own pockets that they pay no attention to everyone else trying to do the same. Nothing new really, it was already like that decades ago. You should have a look around Tania’s building,’ Brevi decided.

‘Tatiana’s building. Right, of course.’

‘And Tonio, I want results.’

‘Of course,’ I repeated. ‘It’s just that it’s a bit complicated,’ I said, then added, ‘very complicated’ and with that retreated to my room in order to stare at the wall.