XXVII. SAGE

Above me, an old, grimy sign of the Partito Socialista hung out of the wall. Hammer, sickle and red carnation. The Party had been dead for twenty years thanks to bribe money and the collapse of the Second Republic, and when its general secretary Bettino Craxi took off for Tunisia, he left the sign behind like a tissue lost during flight.

It was four in the afternoon and, naturally, the door was closed. Softened by the rain, a few boxes next to the entrance were sagging into papier-mâché. On a note taped below the bell, I could read the opening hours, whatever they were for: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 to 1.

I took the call slip from the library out of my jacket pocket. Martinelli. I’d looked up her address in the phonebook, and although I immediately saw the name next to bell, #4, T. Martinelli, I read all the names above and below, I read them multiple times, as if there might be some kind of mistake, and then one more time for good measure. Bertoni, Franceschini, Inglese.

Tatiana Martinelli’s flat, App. 4, was in the basement, a small, barred window looking onto the street. Hers. I was sure of it, like you sometimes—well, rarely, or almost never—do when the situation is vital yet impossible. The walls were being devoured by useless tubes and differed from the old ruins most of all because they weren’t lit up at night. Looking skyward, I got lost in the confusion of cables but, behind the door, I could hear slow and scratchy, turtle-like steps.

An old woman wearing a sky-blue scarf slid open the door.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Ufficio,’ I mumbled, which could have meant agency or office or even just workroom and left unclear whether I thought the PSI still existed or was simply sharing a desk with a friend.

‘I didn’t wait for the right time,’ I added.

‘Not the right time,’ she confirmed. Sparkling out of soft wrinkles, her eyes first sought me, then the street. ‘It’s been done and over with for years,’ she said, straightening the knots of material beneath her chin. ‘Since then, nothing’s got any better. My leg hurts, and the cancer’s now in my lungs, they’re telling me four months or maybe four years, they don’t want to commit to a thing, the cowards. And the way they build themselves up in front of me with their white coats and carry my life in the palm of their hands, I just want to tear out their throats. Have a nice day.’

She waddled past me, I pushed myself into the entrance before the door shut, and watched her hobble down the street, the left leg stiff, without a natural joint, a quack’s prosthesis. Then I pushed open the door.

Something scurried along the shadow of the wall. A mouse, I thought. I was standing in the courtyard, or what Tatiana was allowed to see of the courtyard, which really was just the backside of the rubbish bins. Maybe it’d been a rat. Only when it walked by again and paused did I see it was an emaciated cat, like the dozens that lived at Largo Argentina. A sickly palm stood in the middle of the courtyard between sacks of concrete and bicycles and there too pigeons had made nests in-between the joints of the stem.

From where I was standing, I could see into Tatiana’s kitchen: a gas stove, some worn wall cupboards, a table, a spice rack, on a board a bottle of vinegar and a large plastic bottle of olive oil. On the stove was a pan with pasta, glistening with butter and a few sage leaves. On the table a plate and a wine glass.

Two plates, two wine glasses. In front of each other.

I went closer to the window to see if maybe Tatiana had put them on the table to dry or just forgotten them there, leftovers from two evenings she’d eaten here alone while looking out onto the rubbish bins. Two wine glasses. Two plates. Two clean napkins.

Was it really necessary for me to run after a woman, to stand between rubbish bins and half-emaciated cats? There were enough women who’d kept my number over the years. Ones that, once a year when they were overcome by memories, would call, let it ring ten, fifteen, twenty times to make sure that, yet again, I wouldn’t pick up. And now, here I was, standing and imagining Tatiana’s unremitting swinging movements as she let the butter melt in the pan. Carefully, almost delicately placing the food onto the plates . . . nothing special, a pasta with sage leaves, but it smelt better than anything I’d ever eaten in my life.

A ceiling lamp, probably left by the last or next-to-last tenant, came on and a deadly pale man tottered into the kitchen, he was so thin that you had no idea how old he was. Hunched over, he made his way to the table, yawned—there was not a single tooth left in his mouth—and let himself slowly sink onto one of the chairs. He checked his glasses in the light of the lamp, and then I recognized him. Gramsci. He didn’t look up at me. He did not, as was so often the case, take any notice of me whatsoever, he just picked up a corner of the tablecloth and began to clean his glasses. He sat there, short, fragile, his hair foaming, boundlessly alone, and his solitude did not cause him to cast at me even a single glance.

A shadow crossed the room; a sky-blue scarf fluttered past the old man. Now the woman with the turtle-like walk was next to him, her white hair follicles exposed, in her face a stiff sadness practiced over decades. Her hair a miserable halo. I wanted to say hello, return some kind of polite and empty phrase, but her severe face told me that something intimate was going on. She kept her face turned towards mine, then walked up to the window and called over to me: ‘Which office are you looking for?’

I stared at her silently. The pinched mouth, the pale, cold skin. When she realized that I wasn’t going to answer, she pulled a curtain in front of the window and I found myself standing alone in the shadowy courtyard. I looked up the wall. The windows with their at-times open but mostly closed shutters were all the same in an oppressive way. That one over there was Tatiana’s flat, I thought, or perhaps that window on the second floor? The one over there could just as easily be it, or did she live all the way up top, right under the roof where, from my perspective, the windows grew together into small strips? I turned and saw even more shutters, most of them closed, a few slightly ajar, only two open, and on all of them the paint peeling from the wood.

There it was again, the pigeons’ deep, soft, almost painful display of courtship. I turned towards the tree but wasn’t sure if it was coming from there, from the window above me or maybe even the one to my left. I thought I could dimly make out a woman in the darkened room and hear her heavy breath before it turned into a moan. I took a step forward, and another, my chest almost touching the sill. In front of the window, a thin, gauze-like curtain had been drawn through which I could make out an antique wardrobe, a nightstand, an engraving of Savonarola on the wall and on the bed the woman, her naked pelvis pushing upwards. Her body twisted the sheet and her hands grabbed after the blanket, more to hold onto than to cover herself, and the man—I couldn’t see the man, but he had to be there, I could see his thrusts in the woman’s movement. Her mouth opened, she laid her head back onto the pillow. Her lips were too full, something I’d never liked on women. It was vulgar. He continued to drive into her body with a quick rhythm, she tore open her eyes in surprise or shock, her stomach shook, the man sank on top of her. I still couldn’t see him, and I stared at the woman and wondered if she looked like Tatiana. But all of a sudden I didn’t know what Tatiana looked like any more.

I didn’t dare to move. I just looked at the rotten shutters, open, partially ajar, closed, more and more shutters wherever I looked, and they were all alike, and they were all falling apart. I felt a light pressure against my leg, an insistent caress. I looked down. The scrawny cat was rubbing itself against my trousers, whining, with torn fur. With a kick I frightened her off and rushed back to the street.

Leaving the decade-old sign behind me, I passed the flat-blocks with their rusty flower boxes, satellite dishes and sooty clinker brick up to a pale, modern church. A kiosk owner was retracting his awning. A heap of used cardboard boxes was being pushed out of a supermarket. At that point I wanted nothing but the normality of bread prices and shopping carts and so I slid in behind a group of schoolchildren and walked into the store.

In front of the refrigerated section full of yoghurt and milk, I calmed down. The cool air was like a soft anaesthesia. Then I saw a woman with the same curly hair as Tatiana. Her hair was cut high on her neck, which made the curls even livelier. I stopped in front of the bread counter, inched closer to her in my by-now-cooled clothes, took a number and hoped her own wouldn’t be called for a long time. Perhaps I was looking at her neck too intensely for she turned around and ran into the little basket with all the used numbers, they flew into the air and sailed down over the floor like numbered pollen. Her face was severe and at least a hundred years old.