About Time (10 page)

By now the candles are flickering and the evening is winding to its end. Everyone is walking towards their own cars. Kisses, words of farewell. I don’t lose sight of her for a moment. I’m waiting for her to approach me and say something.

“Goodbye, Svevo. It’s been nice meeting you.”

I take her hand and she squeezes mine in return. All I can find to say is a whispered “See you soon”. I’m usually more talkative, more self-confident. If it was any other woman, I’d already have her phone number in my pocket.

She hesitates, as if she wants to ask me something, but Giorgio is still calling her. I see her get in his car and I can’t do anything about it. I’ve become afraid of time again, I sense You’re about to resume Your race and I don’t know how to stop You.

When I get back behind the wheel, my mind clouds over and all I can do is press my foot down on the accelerator. All the same, 
I have the feeling I’ll see her again. There must be a reason she’s entered my life at this particular juncture, a reason she’s managed to slow down my time.

By the time I get to the garage, my watch has taken a leap forward and it’s already two o’clock in the morning. The whole evening reminds me of one of those music videos where some of the images are speeded up and others are suddenly slowed down, and when they slow down she comes towards me, swaying, with her haze of red hair.

Just before I put my key in the lock, I hear a woman crying behind me.

W
HEN I TURN,
I see Gaëlle, curled up on the mat by the door that leads up to the terrace of the building. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her crying.

“Gaëlle, what are you doing here?” I ask, sitting down next to her. “What’s the matter?”

She looks so defenceless, my first instinct is to put my arms around her. But Gaëlle aims at me those sapphires she has instead of eyes and asks me to switch off the light on the stairs. “I don’t want to give you the satisfaction of seeing me in this state.” Her tone is sharp and irritable. She doesn’t give me time to open my mouth. “Look, I know you’re enjoying this.”

I shake my head, I’d like to tell her she’s wrong.

“Don’t be a hypocrite.”

“It’s the last thing on my mind,” I reassure her in a paternal tone that doesn’t even sound like me.

“You like it, don’t you?” she insists. “Seeing me crumble like this. You can’t fool me, I know how your mind works. You vanished because this is what you wanted, to see me crumble at last.” She throws me a fiery gaze, then immediately turns away.

She’s pale, there are rings under her eyes, and her lipstick is smudged. 

“What are you talking about?”

She gives a nervous little laugh. “I hate you,” she says. “And to think I lost my head over you.” More impatient than ever, she gets up and comes and stands in front of me. “Why don’t you say anything?”

She doesn’t give me time.

“You’re really hurting me,” she says, with a look in her eyes that in any other circumstances I’d find disarming. “I did everything I could to stay with you, even deluded myself I could be satisfied with that kind of non-relationship. But now I can’t stand it any more…”

“Who are you?” I’d like to ask, but once again I don’t have time, because suddenly Gaëlle opens the door of my apartment. “I’m sleeping with you,” she announces, walking in. “I want to fuck you all night long.”

If everything was normal, a scene like this would have excited me more than you could imagine. Not this time.

“I know you like it when I talk like that,” she continues, but it’s as if she’s addressing someone who doesn’t exist any more.

She touches my neck, first with her fingertips, then with her lips, which are cold and damp. I remain rigid, distant. She bursts into tears again. Because of my accelerated time, her behaviour comes across as psychotic, which of course it may actually be. “I shouldn’t have…” she stammers. “I knew I was wrong, but I wanted to hurt you in some way… I didn’t think anything would make me feel better.”

She’s on the verge of a confession, which is the last thing I’d have expected of her. I make an effort to appear surprised. “What are you talking about?”

She wipes her tears. “I’m talking about Federico,” she says. “I slept with him.” 

I know this is the image of her that will remain with me, perhaps the most genuine: her head held high, that angry, accusing look in her eyes, even as she admits to a nasty gesture like that.

“Did you hear what I said?” Her voice rises in pitch. “I slept with your best friend!”

I give her a slap, just to make her stop. Shouting it at the top of her voice won’t make it seem like my fault.

I wonder if two months ago I would have forgiven her, or if I would have continued sleeping with her, even knowing. Now I’d only like to pick her up out of the hole she’s rushed headlong into. She seems like a little insect that’s dying, her wings crumpled, too weak to fly again.

She lays her cheek on my chest and at last closes her eyes. I hold her in my arms, while she asks me to understand her. “I did it to take everything from you,” she says, “the way you took everything from me.”

She’s fragile, a beautiful orchid deprived of water. Her hair is unkempt, and she’s breathing heavily. “Don’t leave me.”

I don’t know who she is. All those nights of sex, those forbidden games, the shameless phone calls and messages, and now I don’t have the slightest idea who she is. It’s incredible, the distance I’ve ended up putting between myself and people.

She presses her lips to mine with a new urgency that’s unusual in her.

A moment ago she told me she knew how my mind worked. Who was that man you filled your head with strategies for, Gaëlle? Tell me, I’d like to know too. How did I look at you, what did I say to you? This kiss is pointless. You know that too, don’t you?

I move her away from me and ask her to go, to go now.

She sweeps her hair back from her face and again pours out all her resentment on me. I lose the thread of her attacks. “You’re 
not like me,” she says. She mentions my inability to love, my superficiality, the drugs, the boredom, the pain. “If you’ve got to your age like that, I doubt you’ll ever be able to change. You’re just a poor bastard.”

Then she opens the door and leaves my apartment without another glance.

In a moment, faster than ever, Gaëlle is out of my life. I wonder if she was ever part of it. Of everything she’s said, that
unstoppable
flow of words she’s poured over me, one truth remains: I was never able to love her. I’ve never been capable of loving anybody. The most alarming thing is that now everything seems devoid of meaning. It hardly matters that sex is something that’s over in an instant, that a beautiful girl turns suddenly into an old woman, or that my baby is nothing but a dusty relic. In this exhausting race, my life is overtaking me, and almost everything that was part of it leaves me completely indifferent.

The morning light is coming in through the living-room window. Another night has flown past.

I’m exhausted. I’ve almost lost the will to start running again.

But Isabelle and what I felt when I saw her last night oblige me not to give up.

I have to find her. Somehow, I have to start living again.

It’s the middle of the day, and I’m out and about in the city
trying
to attend to all the things I’ve left unresolved. Federico keeps calling me on my mobile, he’s filled my voicemail with messages, but I have no intention of calling him back.

Instead, I call Luca. “I had a great time with all of you the other night,” I tell him, trying to get straight to the point before the time at my disposal is used up. “I hope there’ll be an opportunity to—” 

“What are you talking about, Svevo? Of course there will be. I had a great time, too.”

“There’s something I wanted to ask you,” I go on, my tone changing. “Tell me about Isabelle… Do you know how I can find her?”

Luca’s tone changes, too: he’s on the defensive. “Svevo, listen, I don’t want to get into that. Giorgio’s a friend.”

“But they’re not together.”

“No, but he likes her a lot. And I think he’s right for her, we just have to give her time.”

“You’re talking like a priest, Luca. Let me put it another way. You know me, you know I tire quickly of things, but this time it’s different. I have to see her again, it’s important.”

Luca sticks to his guns, and for a specific reason. “I also know your hang-ups,” he says. “Isabelle’s a nice girl. Believe me, she’s not for you.”

“For once, you have to trust me,” I insist. “You know I don’t bullshit, you have to admit that at least.”

He sighs. He’s still reluctant, not to mention all the time I’m making him waste.

I suggest a compromise. “Let’s do something, you give me a clue, I don’t know, somewhere she does her shopping, the place where she works. Give me just one thing, I’ll see to the rest.”

Luca hesitates some more, but finally gives in. “She takes her daughter for a walk in Villa Balestra park most afternoons.”

“Thanks, Luca. You’re a friend.”

At lunchtime, I’m sitting on a bench with a roll in my hand—my usual meal over the past three months—waiting for her.

It’s quite a small park, finding her shouldn’t be too difficult. 
It’s quite windy today, though, so she might have decided not to come. The thought of coming here every day doesn’t bother me, waiting has become easier since the minutes have started flying by so quickly. I have a weight on my stomach like a stone, but I don’t really care. I haven’t felt like this since I was young: maybe the first time I had sex or when I graduated.

A smell of grass smoke reaches me on the wind. A group of young guys close to the little fountain are smoking joints and listening to the Beatles. This park doesn’t seem like the best place to take a little girl for a walk. I assume Isabelle lives in the neighbourhood. Instinctively I glance at the buildings beyond the railings, trying to imagine her apartment, the style she chose to decorate it in. I walk to the far end of the park, behind the cafeteria, where some ladies are sipping tea. There’s a little playground, a skating lane shaded by pines and a few benches with words scratched on them, some little boys are hopping on the gravel, a dog runs beside them, but there’s no sign of Isabelle and Giulia.

Soon the sun starts going down. It’s the first sunset I’ve
happened
to see in this new dimension. In an instant, the sun is swallowed up by the horizon, as if You’re in a hurry to hide it from me and are forcing it down with a big, invisible hand. The sky is tinged with red as quickly as a tablecloth is stained with wine when you knock over a bottle by accident. All this can’t just be the result of my imagination. My mind alone wouldn’t be able to devise something like this.

I leave the park and the pitiless spectacle You’ve just offered me. How long will it last? I look up at the sky, now calm and full of stars, and shout, “What are You waiting for?”

“Maybe it’s too late,” I mutter to myself, before getting back in my car. 

I
’
VE BEEN BACK
to Villa Balestra every day for two weeks. The same disquieting spectacle every time, but no sign of Isabelle. Luca doesn’t answer my phone calls any more. Almost nobody is looking for me. I’m learning to live with my lateness, with the constant race that my life has become.

The day I go back to work, I find myself impatiently pressing the button of the lift, after dismissing Paola, the switchboard operator, with a hurried greeting, when all she wanted was to know about my convalescence. I’m getting back on the right track. This time I can’t stop any more, whatever happens, whatever hallucination waylays me.

“So you’re back…” Smiling, Barbara sticks her head round the door of my office. “Had a good time, did you?”

I make an effort to tease her the way I used to. “Consider it maternity leave.” I’ve equalized, one-all.

She laughs, then comes in and gives me a hug. “Joking apart, you gave us a real fright.”

A fright they quickly recovered from, apparently, seeing that none of them even bothered to phone me.

“Do you really think you can manage?” she insists, ironically.

“You’re radiant… Why? Is there any news?” 

She gives me a broad smile. “Apparently there’s a promotion in the air.”

I must have opened my eyes wide.

“At least that’s how I chose to interpret the director’s words,” Barbara continues, “when he summoned me to his office and showered me with praise over the way I handled a couple of things.”

“Congratulations,” I say, trying to maintain my usual tone. “At this rate you’ll be taking my place.”

Barbara, too, chooses to continue on the path of irony. “Anyway, you’ve always known what my intentions were,” she says. “Get rid of a man like you and replace him with a woman like me. You know what a blow that is for all male chauvinists?”

“Sounds encouraging. But don’t crow too soon.”

“And don’t get to your appointments too late.”

I find her sense of humour totally inappropriate at a moment like this, and can’t help thinking of the look of indifference on her face the day I was taken ill. I’d always thought she wasn’t quite as cynical as she wanted me to believe, that our constant teasing was just an innocent game. But I was wrong, completely wrong. I’m certain she’d climb over anybody or anything to get that promotion.

“I won’t bother you any more,” she says. “How about grabbing a coffee later?”

I nod and give a little smile, while in my mind I see hundreds of cups of coffee flying across a counter, and hands trying to grab them. I smile again, then say goodbye.

I have to fly, too, I have to hurry. One hand on the computer, the other on my mobile. If I had another hand, I’d even be able to hold the receiver of the telephone without having to wedge it between my neck and my shoulder. I have to be quick. I write a 
message, move an appointment, tell Elena to send a fax. Right now, she could fall down in a faint and I wouldn’t even notice, so determined am I to finish as soon as possible. I want to be back in that park before it gets dark.

I have to wait for a week, another very quick week, before I see Isabelle again. At ten o’clock on Monday morning I go to my bank for a quick chat with the manager. For once I arrive ahead of time, but out of breath. At work, I’m slowly and laboriously regaining ground, and I’ve arranged another meeting with Righini at lunchtime, the director will be there, too. The situation is more complicated than it was a month ago, Righini has had other offers and has retreated from his previous position, but we’re still in negotiation and the game is far from over. In the afternoon I have another important meeting with a young local councillor about that old question of the building permits, which is still unresolved. It’s going to be a difficult day, not that there have been any easy ones lately. My impatience is tangible, I don’t want to risk being distracted for a moment and finding that it’s already the middle of the afternoon. I can’t afford that today.

Anyway, it’s a good thing I got here a bit early and that the manager is keeping me waiting, because when I look around I see her.

I always knew it would happen sooner or later, but it’s like a sudden shock: Isabelle sitting at a table, busy signing some papers. She’s wearing a light raincoat and her curly hair is gathered in a bun. Her daughter is waiting for her silently in the pushchair.

“Giulia?”

I approach the little girl, smiling, and she returns my smile with a disarming and quite unexpected sweetness. 

Isabelle, too, seems happy to see me. “It’s you! How are you?”

Fine, now that I’ve found you again in such an unpredictable way. Now that I can stop and look at you and catch my breath.

“What are you doing around here?”

“This has always been my bank,” she says.

I’m surprised to discover that we’ve shared the same branch without knowing it. God knows how many times we’ve both been in the queue, one behind the other, like that day at the airport, without our eyes ever meeting. When it comes down to it, life is a long series of queues, waiting for an encounter.

“I’ve been thinking about her future,” she continues, glancing at her daughter. “A savings account.”

“A good idea,” I say, imagining the day Giulia will come here to take advantage of her mother’s foresight, as if it’s going to happen tomorrow. Isabelle puts the forms in her handbag, grabs her shopping bags, grabs the handle of the pushchair and is about to say goodbye. But I have no intention of letting her escape again. I offer to help her, like that first time at the airport, and she accepts.

“But I thought you were waiting to see someone.”

“It isn’t urgent,” I reply, leaving the bank with her bags in my hand.

The only thing in my life right now is you, Isabelle. I want to see if you can slow everything down again.

I walk with her through the neighbourhood. Turning a corner, we find an ice-cream parlour and a small lawn. We sit down in the open air.

It wasn’t a chance occurrence, limited to that evening. When I’m with her, time quite simply stops racing. The ice cream 
doesn’t melt, my watch says 10.05, and the clouds in the sky remain where they are.

I feel that for her, too, it’s more than simple attraction, she’s looking for something in me. We’re scrutinizing each other as we talk, moving around each other in a series of seductive little skirmishes that make me feel good, make me feel better than I’ve felt in a long time. Gradually, I forget about time, I’m sure she’ll remind me of it sooner or later, when she has to go home to feed her daughter, and then I’ll go to my appointments. The only thing I’m certain of is that it’s still morning and that there’s suddenly no need to hurry any more.

Isabelle is a caring mother. You can tell that from the way she wipes the chocolate from her daughter’s mouth. I learn a lot about her from these maternal gestures, like that day at the airport, when she made me feel I wanted to be in Giulia’s place. She makes people want to be children again.

I ask her to tell me something about her life. She says she came to Italy for love and stayed out of respect. “Respect for Giulia, who was born here, and who has the right to live the life I dreamt for her when I brought her into the world.”

Giulia’s father is an architect. Apparently their relationship unravelled between all those endless meetings and business trips of his. At a certain point they realized they couldn’t keep going on the way they had been. It was painful but inevitable, she admits. “Luca told me you also work hard and have an active social life.” There’s no trace of reprimand in her voice, although I have the feeling Luca wasn’t all that complimentary about me.

She wants me to tell her a typical day of mine. I don’t hold back. I describe in broad outlines what my work consists of, what I do in my spare time, as if I still had any, and the life I led until not so long ago, when almost every evening I’d book a table in 
some fashionable restaurant or club, obviously sparing her the more regrettable details.

“So apparently, you spend almost all your time sitting at a table,” she remarks, with an amused smile. “Behind your desk by day, at tables in restaurants and clubs at night. Even your weightlifting is mainly done sitting down. Maybe that’s why you stopped?”

I’ve never thought about it like that. I try to regain a few points by taking her observation as a joke. I’m encouraged by the fact that she’s still looking at me the same way. On paper, I may seem a bit off-putting, I know, I’m the type of man a woman like her ought to run a mile from, but I have the impression that Isabelle doesn’t look at things the way other people do, that she sees beyond appearances.

Suddenly Giulia starts crying. She’s been walking on her own and has fallen on the ground. She hasn’t hurt herself, but you know how children are, she gets upset easily. “Giulia, come here, darling. Let mummy give you a kiss… It’s all right.” But Giulia continues crying. “She’s tired,” Isabelle says. “I have to take her home. It’s best if we go.”

I don’t want to know what time it is and give up this miraculous state of serenity. I still have time for the lunch with Righini, I know. Maybe that’s the secret, I have to keep thinking that there’s no hurry, I mustn’t let my anxieties overwhelm me. Time goes more quickly when I think I don’t have enough of it.

“Are you free tomorrow?” Isabelle asks me as I walk her to her car.

“I’ll be free after lunch.”

“What a pity. Tomorrow morning I’m going shopping at the market near where I live, and it’s something I very much like doing in company.” 

“That’s an excellent idea,” I say, implying that I’ll be there, and that for her sake I’d get out of any prior commitment.

I help her to arrange the pushchair and the shopping bags in the boot. “Do you ever go to Villa Balestra?” I ask her instinctively, just before saying goodbye. “I mean… do you ever take Giulia for a stroll there?”

“Villa Balestra?” she replies in surprise. “No. Why should I? I live in the centre.”

So Luca just made me waste more time, the last thing I needed in this situation.

No sooner does Isabelle drive away than my mobile phone starts ringing, in that rapid, insistent way that makes me think of a firing squad, and an anxious shudder shakes my chest. I can’t afford another leap forward in time.

“Romano, it’s Righini.”

His tone is the reasonably impatient one I’ve learnt to recognize, and can mean only one thing: I’m late for our appointment again.

Resigned, I wait for his outburst of temper, instead of which he surprises me by saying, “I’ll be ten minutes late. I wanted to tell you well in advance, though I’m usually the one who has to wait for you.”

“Why, what time is it?”

“11.30. There’s time, Romano, there’s time.”