About Time (15 page)

I
SABELLE MUST ALREADY
have put Giulia to bed by now, maybe she’s reading a book. When I say goodbye to Antonio, closing the car door behind me, I have the taste in my mouth of things postponed, made even more bitter by the smell of my father on the sweatshirt I’m wearing. I force myself to walk to her front door, I owe it to myself to confront her, now, and to strip myself naked, to ask her for a second chance.

Maybe she’ll invent an excuse, she’ll certainly insist that I leave, but I can’t give up yet, not before I’ve told her my story. A story of time racing, of a life that can’t keep up with it and a new love that’s able to slow it down.

In the late evening, the square has divested itself of its frills and is bathed in the golden light of the street lamps. The front door is closed. I’m about to press the button by the entryphone, but before I have time a man rushes out, allowing me to slip inside. Better that way. It’ll be easier to try and convince her when we’re looking each other in the eyes.

As I climb the stairs of the building my legs are shaking, because I’m afraid, just as I always am when I’m about to see her again.

One, two, three…

Abruptly I stop counting.

I don’t need to get to five any more.

I ring the bell. The neighbours’ dog has started barking. “Pablo, stop it!” its mistress immediately yells at it.

Isabelle comes to the door. She sees me through the spyhole, and I sense that she gives a start. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

“I need to talk to you. Please, open the door.”

She half opens the door without taking off the chain. She’s in a nightdress and dressing gown. Her eyes are cold. “It’s late,” she says in a trembling voice. “Giulia’s asleep and I was just about to join her. Please, Svevo, go away.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I told you, Isabelle, you’re in my blood,” and I feel fear relaxing its grip.

Her eyes become watery.

I take a deep breath. “Since I met you, so many things have happened…I don’t even know where to start…Maybe with that day at the airport. When I saw you…”

“When was this?”

“A few months ago. You were on your way to Paris with Giulia. We saw each other just before getting on. I asked you if you needed a hand to carry your case…”

She remembers, I’m sure, but she continues to keep her distance. “I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“For a start, I’d like to come in.”

“Svevo, it’s late.”

“No, it isn’t late. It would be late if I left. And if I look back, it seems to me all I’ve ever done in my life is leave. My father died three days ago…” And as I say this, the image of his coffin
parades in front of my eyes, and I realize only now that it really happened. I see my grief reflected in her eyes, which open wide in surprise, and in the features of her face, which crumple in a grimace of sorrow. She’s about to take off the chain, but I stop her, taking her hand in mine. “Give me just a few minutes, Isabelle. I don’t want your compassion, I want your respect. I’m not proud of what my life was and I can’t hide it from you. Maybe you deserve a simpler story, someone capable of loving you without complications. I don’t know what love is, I’ve never believed in it. But I believed in you from the first moment I saw you. In your power to change me, to make me see things in a different way. I can’t turn back, without first insisting… I want to try my hardest for you, Isabelle. I don’t want to harm you, and I could never harm your daughter, above all I don’t want to leave anything unresolved, any loves ‘for ever and never’. Time doesn’t forgive, and I can’t risk regretting this moment: the promises I could have made you, the words I should have said to you. I’ve accumulated too many heavy silences, I won’t leave without first telling you what I think…”

As I speak, her hand reacts to my touch until her fingers intertwine with mine. I see her yield little by little, her eyes turn large and round and full of hope. She takes off the chain as I continue to speak, and looks at me, but I know that her mind has flown ahead, to the consequences of this choice. “Just give me a few minutes…” I say again, and find her lips pressed to mine. She hugs me tight, tighter, then moves back to let me into the apartment. Her kisses are like promises, she wants to give me more than a few minutes, she might even be mad enough to grant me a whole lifetime.

When I close the door of her apartment behind me, I know that Isabelle will carry me with her to the place where moments
have no time, and I know that happiness tastes like her lips and the tears bathing her cheeks. It smells like her hair and sounds like my thoughts, as I close my eyes, wanting this night never to end.

I
T’S ONE MORNING
in March.

I am asleep when I feel a wet tongue start moving up and down my cheek. I recognize him from his breath, which smells of hard biscuits: it’s Bengo, the Beretton family dog.

Isabelle’s mother calls him in French from the corridor. He freezes for a moment, throws me a last puzzled look, then in the end decides to jump down off the bed, disarranging the mattress in the process.

I’m in Paris. And I’m cured.

Isabelle would be able to sleep even if bombs were falling in the street: she’s motionless, a mask over her eyes, her red curls covering half her face. Traces of Bengo everywhere, he must have tried that little trick with his tongue on her, too, but in vain. And yet I know it would only take a few soft words in her ear, whispered in a certain way, to wake her with a start. I can’t help it, it always amuses me.

She jerks up like a spring. “What’s happening?” she cries, moving her arms under the blankets. Then she recognizes the room, realizes she’s in her parents’ apartment for the weekend
and turns to me, a look of surprise still on her face. The mask now covers only one eye, and her mouth is wide open. She’s funny.

We’re in love. She’s untidy, distracted, I’m fussy, a pain in the arse, and yet we’re in love.

She’s always leaving her clothes scattered on the floor, but her untidiness is bearable. I think I know her most intimate thoughts, and I like them. I trust her smiles, they would never be capable of doing me harm. What I know of her is enough for me, sometimes I even anticipate her moves. Habit has made us complicit with each other. For example, I know that in winter she likes to go into the bathroom barefoot, even though the tiles are cold, because then she appreciates the warmth of the bed even more. She’s one of those people who never take anything for granted, and has never demanded to be happy. Sometimes I get the absurd, crazy thought that she could melt into the air at any moment, like a vision. She’s my angel. She saved my life, and she might take flight again now that her mission is complete.

“Think that’s funny, eh?” she says, adjusting her hair and taking off the mask. She threatens to make me pay for it.

“I’m so scared,” I reply, not scared at all.

“It’ll happen when you least expect it, you’ll see.” She jumps out of bed and looks for her slippers. She says they’re always getting away from her, as if slippers could get away. “Don’t forget we have to pick up your aunt from the airport. She’s landing at eight tonight.”

“She’s not an idiot, and besides, she’s with her children, they can take a taxi.”

“Let’s go and pick them up anyway.”

But at about five, before going to the airport, we find ourselves walking along the Seine. Isabelle is wearing a beige coat with a white fur collar, she could have stepped straight out of a painting. The sky has taken on a weary look, the blue has faded and on the horizon brush-strokes of grey seem to make it even sleepier.

Giulia is in front of us. She rushed forward a few metres, and now she’s slowed down. She’s become a beautiful little girl. She smiles at the sight of the line of miniature Eiffel Towers on a rug a street vendor has laid in front of him. She looks at them, grabs them, studies them. She wants them. And we haven’t yet learnt to say no to her, at least not about things of little account.

Isabelle’s hand is intertwined with mine, her warmth in marked contrast to the sharp late-afternoon wind. Our rings rub together, almost as if they wanted to melt into one another. I turn up the collar of my coat with my free hand as we turn on to the Pont des Arts and walk across the worn wooden planks that creak almost imperceptibly beneath our feet. Giulia follows us, skipping, laughing, talking, asking questions, calling us. Her mother humours her with a patience that’s beyond me, the same patience that stunned me that afternoon, when I saw her at the airport for the first time. And now, as only she knows how, she again unsettles me as she leans on the iron railing and turns to look at the Seine, the Île de la Cité, the grim Conciergerie, and gazes in admiration at this City of Light which is almost dreamlike, veiled as it is by the diffuse light of the hour.

“My God, Svevo. Look at this place.”

It’s the place where she was born and grew up, her place. And now it’s as if she’s looking at her whole life on the horizon, such is the emotion I see in her eyes.

I know that she would have liked her camera with her and that she can’t bear the idea that she left it at home for one afternoon.
The light is perfect, the colours unrepeatable. She looks at me, then at the scene, then again at me, and at last realizes that she doesn’t need a camera: this scene has impressed itself on her mind just as it would on a photograph.

I remember to check my e-mails on my mobile phone, there are reservations for the villa in Cortona to confirm. In the end Isabelle convinced me to transform it into a little hotel, and basically she was right, we couldn’t have managed with all those free rooms. To furnish it, we didn’t use a designer. She handled it all, adapting old objects she found in the cellar. So now even in Cortona we have a refrigerator transformed into a dresser, and an old sewing machine functions as a bedside table. You certainly can’t say that the villa has no personality, or that it isn’t a hospitable place, otherwise I wouldn’t find myself so often having breakfast with people from all over the world and listening to their stories. Most of them are artists: apparently the countryside around it is a much-prized source of inspiration, I was told by a painter who couldn’t stop contemplating it, until he bought a canvas and started painting it, prolonging his stay by several months.

Isabelle takes the mobile from my hands, her smile is trying to tell me that there is time for everything. There are so many things with which we can fill our life, the prow of that cargo ship without destination. So many books still unread, songs unheard, places not yet explored. So many departures, so many returns. There are days, like this one, when the hands of my watch stand at midday, giving me the illusion we still have the whole day ahead of us, even when the sun is about to set. But time evaporates every day and you can’t dilute it, or stop it, only fill it. Technology can help a bit, though sometimes it ends up swallowing us. These days you can have everything in an instant, and yet I know people who would give everything away to have one moment. One like
this, for example: the three of us, strolling hand in hand on the Pont des Arts.

There is a band in the middle of the bridge. A heterogeneous group of people playing a blues: a pot-bellied sixty-year-old man in a red-and-white tracksuit on trombone, a couple of young boys in jeans on trumpet, a lady in a Fifties-style check suit on saxophone, and two strange characters on drums and guitar, one with yellow-and-blue trousers and the other in camouflage fatigues. They’re all different, and all smiling. They seem to have come together in this place by chance, like the rest of us, we stop to listen to them and find it impossible to keep still. I wonder what their story is, who they were before they turned into this little band, maybe only for a day, and in their eyes I find mine. We’re like Isabelle’s objects: refrigerators becoming dressers, cribs turned into window boxes.

Giulia calls to her mother from the middle of the bridge, because she wants her to dance with her. Isabelle tries to resist, but then yields and goes to her, slightly embarrassed, laughing, without taking her eyes off me.

The girl imitates her mother’s steps, and she’s so comical, some of the onlookers can’t help applauding, and nor can I. Then I grab Isabelle by the waist and start dancing with her, and she stops laughing and looks at me. She looks at me as if she wants to tell me how much she loves me. But I know that, just as I know that I’d like to bring into the world a child with her eyes, that all the richness of this life could be encompassed in a dance like this, that my hands are shaking, that Giulia is pulling my coat, that everyone is watching us, and that I love my wife more than ever.

I know it, just as I know that time devours everything, but not these memories, not this love, not the moments that last for ever.

So here I am, thanking those who made this “new” adventure possible (I say “new”, even though I started writing this story nearly ten years ago), those who held my hand on this treacherous path.

I will start with my nearest and dearest: parents, siblings, friends and relatives. Those who love me are sure to know who I mean. Thank you to all those who racked their brains along with me to come up with a title. To the colleagues who inspired me, my schools and teachers. Next, thank you to Raffaele, Carol, Antonella and the team at Newton who continue to support me. A special thank you to Paolo Taggi, for all his invaluable advice, and to the Coccaglioni family, who ten years ago allowed me to start to dream.

A thank you from the bottom of my heart to a great man who flew up to heaven too early: Oscar, an angel and a true friend.

And a small thank you to Massimo, who told me one evening about a belly button and the fear of getting lost.