The Past is a Foreign Country (10 page)

SHE HADN’T SOUNDED at all surprised. She’d reacted as if she’d been expecting me to phone that very morning. She said she was busy today but we could see each other the following morning.

You can come over tomorrow morning, she’d said. To her house. Naturally, to be on the safe side, I had to phone first. All right.
Tomorrow
then. Tomorrow. Bye.

Bye.

I sat there for a long time with the receiver in my hand. Amazed by the total absence of hints and innuendo in that call. Wondering where I was going.

Well, to start with, I was going to her house, tomorrow.

After phoning, to be on the safe side.

She hadn’t said, Come over, we’ll have a chat, a drink. For
appearances
’ sake, at least. All she’d said was, Come tomorrow morning.

I felt empty, and at the same time excited in a facile, mindless way.

The consequence of this strange mental chemistry was a kind of slow motion short circuit. I was thinking without really thinking. A slow series of images started unfolding in my head, uncontrollably. My mother. My father. Both looking older than they really were. I pushed the images away with difficulty, and my sister appeared, out of focus. I couldn’t see her very well.

What I mean is: I couldn’t remember my sister’s face. But it made me sad and I pushed her image away too. That wasn’t so hard, but in
pushing her out I let Francesco in. He, too, was out of focus. Then a flash of something from the past. Memories of junior high school, the first day of vacation at the end of the fourth grade. Why that one in particular? Why was I remembering that? A boy in floods of tears at a party, when I was a child. Why was he crying? I felt sorry for him, but I couldn’t do anything to help him. Two older children laughed at him and I didn’t say anything. I simply felt really
humiliated
and turned away.

Then other images, even further back in time. So far back, I couldn’t distinguish them one from another. And all of them slow.

Everything was very slow, almost unbearably slow.

Something was falling apart inside me, and finally I got to the point where I couldn’t stand it.

I went into my room and put on a Dire Straits cassette. Mark Knopfler’s guitar drove away the silence and all the things crowding into my head. I took out the cards and started to practise. The music finished and I carried on practising, as if nothing else mattered. I didn’t stop until I heard my mother’s key in the door, about two o’clock.

My hands hurt, but my brain was clear and calm now.

Like a frozen lake.

After eating I went to sleep. A good method of escape. The
perfect
natural anaesthetic. When I woke up it was nearly six and, as I couldn’t bear staying at home after the argument with my parents the day before, I went straight out.

It wasn’t warm for June, and after wandering a little aimlessly, I ended up in my usual bookshop.

None of the regulars were there. In fact, no one was there when I went in.

As I started moving around between the counters and the shelves, I realised that even books no longer interested me.

I’d gone into the bookshop the way people go to a particular café or greasy spoon. Out of habit, because I didn’t know where else to go or who to go to. The only person I ever saw these days was Francesco. And he decided when we met.

I picked up a few books at random and leafed through them, but it was a purely physical gesture. A gesture of boredom and emptiness.

My interest was aroused for a moment in the Games and
Hobbies
section, coming across something called
The Big Book of Magic Tricks.
I’d never heard of the publisher, I’d never seen the book before, and I’ve never seen it since. I leafed through it until I got to the chapter on card tricks, but when I realised it only described a few simple tricks for family parties, I put it back on the shelf, disappointed.

I was about to glance at the
Complete Guide to Juggling
when I heard someone calling me loudly – too loudly – by my surname.

‘Cipriani!’

I turned to my left and saw this chubby guy coming towards me – from the section containing manuals for public exams, I noticed – and as he approached, with a big smile all over his face, I recognised him.

Mastropasqua. A classmate of mine from junior high school.

Unequivocally, unanimously recognised as the stupidest person in the class. Not the bottom of the class, though, because he had the
obstinacy
of a mule, and by studying eight hours a day he’d always managed to get just enough points in all subjects.

The two of us had never been friends. In three years we’d
exchanged
maybe thirty words. Mostly while playing football in the street after leaving school on Saturday.

I hadn’t seen him since we’d taken the written exams for third grade.

He came up to me and put his arms round me.

‘Cipriani,’ he said again, affectionately. As if to say, I’ve found you at last, my old friend.

After holding me for several seconds – I was afraid someone I knew might come into the bookshop and see us – Mastropasqua finally let go of me.

‘I’m pleased to see you, Cipriani.’

I heard my voice answering him. ‘Me too, Mastropasqua. How are you?’

‘Oh, I’m fine. Still watching my back.’

Still watching my back. It was an expression we boys had used in junior high school. Mastropasqua hadn’t updated his vocabulary much.

‘How about you, are you still watching your back?’

All our slang phrases of those years came back to me. A slang I’d abandoned and immediately forgotten when I moved up to senior high school. Mastropasqua clearly hadn’t. He must have cultivated it, the way some people cultivate dead languages, because of their wealth of meaning and power of evocation.

‘Yes. Still watching my back.’ It was my voice, but as if it was someone else’s.

‘Well, well, Cipriani. I’m so pleased to see you. What are you doing these days?’

I’m cheating at cards, I’ve stopped studying, I’m planning to fuck a forty-year-old woman, and I’m breaking my parents’ hearts. That about sums it up.

‘I’ve almost finished law. How about you?’

‘Damn it! You’ve almost finished law! Well, it was obvious you were going to be a lawyer. Anyone could see that from the way you used to do in tests.’

I was about to tell him I didn’t have the slightest desire to be a lawyer. But I stopped myself. It wasn’t as if I had any clear idea what
I was going to do.

‘I started studying to be a vet,’ he went on. ‘But it was too hard. So now I’m going in for public exams.’

He showed me the book he’d taken off the shelf.
Entrance Examinations for the Police Force
. That was the title.

‘If I can work for the State, who gives a damn about university? I won’t need to watch my back ever again.’

I nodded in agreement. It suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t remember his first name. Carlo? No, that was Abbinante. Another genius.

Nicola?

Damiano.

Damiano Mastropasqua.

Mastropasqua, Moretti, Nigro, Pellecchia…

‘Do you still play football, Cipriani? Right back, wasn’t it?’

I hadn’t played for months. But it was true, I played right back. Mastropasqua might not have been a genius, but there was nothing wrong with his memory.

‘Yes, I still play.’

‘Me, too. Once a week, on Saturday afternoons, in the Japigia fields. That’s how I keep in shape.’

In shape. I couldn’t help looking down at his distended belly. I guessed his trouser size at about forty-four, and he couldn’t have been much more than one metre seventy tall. He didn’t notice.

‘You know something, Cipriani?’

‘What?’

‘One of my happiest memories of junior high school is when Signora Ferrari made us write a story and you wrote that crazy one where all the teachers and our classmates turned into animals and monsters. She gave you a ten – the only time she ever gave anyone a ten – and then read out the composition in class. My God, how we laughed. Even Signora Ferrari laughed.’

I was flung back into the past, as if sucked into a vortex. All the way back to ten years previously.

The Giovanni Pascoli State junior high school. In the same
building
as the Orazio Flacco senior high school, known as the Flacco. All the classrooms had bars on the windows, after a student, walking along a cornice for a stupid bet, had looked down. I was still going to elementary school at the time, but a few boys who were older than me had told me about the scream. You could hear it all through the school. It had frozen the blood – and the youth – of hundreds of boys and girls.

It was cold in the Pascoli and the Flacco. Because the
building
faced the sea and from November to March the wind came in through the cracks in the window frames. I could almost feel that cold now, the whistling of the wind, the smell: a mixture of dust, wood, boys and old walls. And from among those memories the
image
of Signora Ferrari emerged.

Signora Ferrari was a really good teacher, justly famous. We all wanted to be in her class.

She was a fine-looking woman, with blue eyes, short white hair and prominent cheekbones. She looked like someone who wasn’t afraid of anybody. She had a deep voice, a bit hoarse from smoking, and a slight Piedmontese accent. When I was in junior high school, she was between fifty and sixty.

She couldn’t have been much more than twenty when, on 26 April 1945, she had entered Genoa with the partisan brigades from the mountains, carrying an English submachine gun.

I don’t remember her ever losing her temper, in my three years of junior high school. She was the kind of teacher who doesn’t need to lose her temper, or even to raise her voice.

Whenever a student did or said something he shouldn’t have, she would look at him. She probably said something, too, but I only remember the look she gave and the way she moved her head. She
would turn her head, slowly, keeping the rest of her body still, and look the unfortunate student in the eyes.

She didn’t need to lose her temper.

The ten she gave my composition was unique: the highest mark Signora Ferrari ever gave was eight. Or very occasionally nine. It was also unique for a composition – a humorous composition at that – to be read out in class.

And Mastropasqua was right: even she couldn’t help laughing when she came to some passages.

I don’t remember what kind of animal I’d turned the maths and science teacher into. But it must have been funny because when Signora Ferrari came to it, she really burst out laughing. She laughed so much, she had to stop reading, put the paper down on her desk, and cover her face with her hands. My classmates were laughing, too. The whole class was laughing and so was I, though mostly to hide the satisfaction and pride on my face. I was eleven or twelve years old. When I grew up, I thought, I’d be a famous writer of humorous novels. I was happy.

The image faded. Mastropasqua was saying something I didn’t understand. He must have changed the subject. I nodded
vigorously
, half closing my eyes and making an effort to smile.

‘We must have a reunion. I’ll call everyone after my exam.’

A reunion. Great idea. Let’s have one now and then another one after twenty years and another one after thirty years. I nodded again, and again made an effort to smile, but I realised that the smile was turning into a grimace. Great to see you again, Cipriani. You and your books, eh?

Nice to see you, too. Bye, Cipriani – another hug – Bye, Mastropasqua.

He walked off to the cash desk with his manual on how to pass the entrance exam to become a police officer. I stayed where I was, pretending to look at a book on bridge, waiting for my classmate to
leave the shop. When I turned round, he was gone, sucked back to where he had come from. Wherever that was.

Then I left, too, and walked along the sea front, and then further, as if I was escaping from something, all the way to the southern edge of the city, to where the pavement and the buildings end. I bought three big bottles of beer from a stand and went and sat down on the stone base of the last lamppost, facing the sea, not looking at
anything
in particular. And not thinking about anything in particular either.

I stayed there for a long time, drinking and smoking. The
daylight
faded slowly. Very slowly. The horizon dissolved just as slowly. The day seemed infinitely long, and I didn’t know where to go. There were moments when I had the feeling I’d never be able to get up again, never be able to move. It was as if I was trapped in a spider’s web.

It was already dark by the time I got down from that block of granite, and in my place I left the empty bottles standing in a line, facing the sea. Before turning and leaving I stood for a few moments, looking at the three reddish-purple silhouettes against a background of Prussian blue. They must mean something, I thought, those
bottles
standing there facing the sea, waiting for someone to knock them over.