The Road To The City (19 page)

When I came back to the study he had completed the sketch. He showed it to me and laughed. It was a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it. He wet the tip of the pencil with his tongue in order to make the smoke thicker. I put the thermos bottle down on the desk. He was laughing and turned around to see if I was laughing too.

I shot him between the eyes.

My feet were wet and cold and my blistered heel hurt me at every step. The streets were quite empty and they glistened in the gentle rain. I wanted to go to Francesca's, but I thought probably she was with her lover. And so I went home. There was a dead silence, which I tried my very best not to hear. When I reached the kitchen I knew what I was going to do. It was very easy and I was not afraid. I knew now that I would never have to talk to the man with the olive complexion sitting behind the desk in the police station, and this genuinely relieved me. I would never talk to anyone again. Not to Francesca or Giovanna or Augusto or my mother. To no one. I sat down at the marble-top table, where I could not escape listening to the silence. A cold, rank smell came up out of the sink, and the alarm clock ticked on the shelf. I took pen and ink and began to write in the notebook where I kept an account of household expenses. All of a sudden I asked myself for whose benefit I was writing. Not for Giovanna or Francesca, not even for my mother. For whom, then? It was too difficult to decide, and I felt that the time of conventional and clear-cut answers had come for ever to a stop within me.