We're Flying (8 page)

I didn’t leave the house at all the next day. I burned everything I could find: cardboard boxes, my grandparents’ photo albums, old wooden skis that were in the broom closet, a broken stool. Whatever was too big I sawed or chopped into pieces with the ax. The tools were old and hadn’t been used in a long time, the saw blade was spotted with rust, and the ax was blunt.

The following day I started on the furniture. My grandparents’ things were solidly built, and I had no idea how much work it was to destroy something. It was probably easier to kill someone, I thought. The application of pressure to the correct spot, a twist of the neck, a blade slipped between the ribs, the way I had seen it done in films. I thought more in terms of killing Elio than Lucia, but it wouldn’t have changed anything. When the shops opened after the holidays, I bought a new ax.

Destruction had a smell. Torn paper, cardboard, ripped cloth soaked in gasoline to make it burn. Wood smelled when it splintered as if it was freshly felled, as
though the smell had been secreted inside it the whole time. And then the smells of burning: the sour smoke from paper that I pushed into the stove in great wads, and that slowly turned to ash. The thick smell of burning gas, the acrid smell of varnish that bubbled and blackened before the wood underneath caught fire.

Whatever I couldn’t burn I stuffed in garbage sacks that I stowed in the Volvo, first in the trunk, then when that was full on the back seat, and finally on the front passenger seat.

School had begun again. I had gotten much calmer. During class, my thoughts were already on the work of destruction I would continue that evening. Thinking of it seemed to calm me. When I met the headmaster in the hallway, he gave me a friendly nod, and offered me best wishes for the new year.

One weekend I drove out of the village and took a narrow road up the mountain. At the beginning of the road was a sign saying no passenger cars, only farm and forestry traffic. There were very few marks in the snow. I followed the zigzagging road up the mountain. After a couple of miles it came to a sudden stop. I left the car and walked back. When I got home I was frozen to the marrow.

After a week the village policeman phoned and said my car had been found. He was suspicious and asked various
questions. He didn’t seem to believe whatever cock-and-bull story I told him.

On Sunday I went to church for the first time since I was living in the valley. I sat in the back pew. When the minister asked the congregation to come forward for the blessing, I stayed put. I saw Lucia, kneeling down with maybe a dozen other believers. The minister laid his hand on their heads, one after the other, and spoke the blessing. After the service I tried to speak to Lucia. It was the first time in ages that I’d seen her without Elio. I love you, I said. You’re crazy, she said, you’re imagining things. She walked off. I followed her and said it again: I love you. But she didn’t react, wouldn’t even look at me. I followed her back to her house, climbed the stairs after her to the back entrance. She opened the door, went in, and slammed the door in my face.

At the end of January I took the bed apart and sawed and chopped it up in the garage into little pieces that I burned in the stove. That was the last of the furniture. There was only the mattress to come.

On one of the following days I walked up to the place above the village where I’d sat with Lucia. I wiped the snow off the bench and sat down. The sun was already gone over the mountains. After a while I saw Lucia coming up the road. She was walking fast and had her eyes on the ground. Once she looked up at the bench. I waved, but I wasn’t sure
whether she saw me or not. She walked on a bit, then she turned back and returned to the village.

The next day I was just about to give my students a dictation when I saw Lucia through the window. I told them I’d be back in a minute, and ran out of the classroom. By the time I was on the street, though, she had disappeared. I hesitated for a minute, then I went home, packed a few things, and called a taxi. I knew the driver, one of his kids was in my class. He didn’t ask me any questions, and didn’t seem to be surprised when I told him to take me to the station.

There was half an hour until the next train, and I was suddenly worried someone might come and prevent me from leaving. The driver had parked his taxi outside the station. He had got out and was smoking and talking on the phone to someone. He laughed, I could hear him from the platform where I was standing. Sometimes he looked across at me, and in spite of the distance, I thought I could make out a triumphant expression on his face.

The train arrived. A couple of skiers boarded with me, but they got off at the next station and I was alone in the car. I opened a window and leaned out. Cold air flowed in. The sky was overcast, and the mountains looked threatening as they passed. Not until the train turned a corner and entered a tunnel did I calm down.

The Result

T
HE BANDAGE ON
Bruno’s back felt tight. The wound hardly hurt, but thinking about it got to him and made him sweat more than he usually did. It had been hot for weeks. It was late August, and some people said it would stay hot well into September.

Bruno had worked at reception for thirty years. The past week he had been on the early shift. He was home at three, and Olivia got him to go shopping with her. In the shops she asked him questions he couldn’t answer.

Bruno showered before supper. When he came out of the bathroom in clean clothes, Olivia wanted to change his bandage. The thought that she had left the kitchen and waited for him outside the bathroom door bothered him. I’m sure
the bandage has gotten wet, she said, and she followed him into the bedroom. It hasn’t, he said, it doesn’t matter.

Olivia unbuttoned his shirt. He was too feeble to resist, and sank down onto the bed. She sat down beside him, pulled the shirt over his shoulder, and told him to turn around.

Watch out, she said, and already the bandage was off. It doesn’t hurt, said Bruno. It looks fine, she said. It was just a couple of punctures, he said. She said he had always had good powers of healing. He said it felt a bit tight. Olivia was immersed in her work. There, she said, and she stroked his hair, now you’ve earned your supper.

It was seven o’clock. They always ate at seven. It’s supposed to get cooler tomorrow, said Olivia, as she heaped Bruno’s plate. He wasn’t hungry, but he had long since stopped trying to tell her that.

After supper he went out in the garden and stayed out a long time, longer than usual. It was already getting dark when he came in. Clouds had appeared from somewhere. Olivia was in the living room, watching the late news. Bruno went into the bedroom. He got undressed and lay down. Is it raining yet? Olivia asked as she came to bed. Bruno didn’t reply.

He was glad he was on the late shift again tomorrow. He didn’t have to be at the hotel until three, and could sleep
in as long as he liked. Olivia woke him with lunch, and after coffee he was out of the house. They didn’t live far from the hotel, and Bruno loved biking home from work. At night the town center was full of young people talking animatedly in the cafes. When he got home, Olivia was usually in bed already, and he went into the bedroom to wish her good night. He kissed her quickly, and she said, Mind you don’t stay up too long.

The cold front had reached the town overnight. Suddenly the air was almost twenty degrees colder, and it had gotten darker, almost autumnal outside. When was he expecting the result? Olivia asked him over lunch. She asked him every day, since he’d gone to the doctor a week ago, to get the mole removed. Tomorrow, he said. It’s bound not to be anything, said Olivia. Of course it’s nothing, said Bruno, just a routine check. Well, better safe than sorry, said Olivia, it’s one less thing to worry about. The uncertainty. That’s why I had it done, said Bruno. Quite, said Olivia. Will they call you, or do you have to call them?

Bruno had left the number of the hotel with the doctor’s assistant. She had promised to call on Wednesday, sometime during the afternoon. The doctor hadn’t even thought it necessary to offer any words of optimism. The chances of it being a melanoma were really very
small. Bruno wasn’t worried. On the contrary, he was in a sparkling mood that day, perhaps because it had cooled down at last. He made a joke when he took over from his colleague, and personally arranged the flowers in the room where the Christian businesspeople were meeting in the evening. Then he stepped out onto the terrace and contentedly surveyed the landscape, the little section of the lake you could see from there, and the forested mountains, which seemed to be much nearer now than when it was hot. It didn’t even bother him when Sergio called in to say he was sick. The student who generally filled in on such occasions wasn’t home, but his mother said he would be back soon. Bruno called Olivia. He said he would be back late, he couldn’t say how late. Why today of all days? said Olivia. Bruno didn’t reply.

The Christian businesspeople had all gone home. Marcella emerged from the room with the last of them, and stopped at the reception desk for a chat with Bruno.

Those Christians are lousy tippers, she said, I hope they’ll at least remember us in their prayers. She asked what Bruno was doing there still.

Sergio is sick, he said.

What about the student? asked Marcella. What’s the matter with Sergio?

Bruno shook his head. We’ve known each other for thirty years, he said. He began here shortly after me. You weren’t even born then.

Marcella laughed. She said she was thirty-five.

You don’t look it, said Bruno. Who looks after your kids when you’re at work?

They can look after themselves. My younger girl is ten. My older girl is thirteen. The boy is fifteen.

He had three children too, Bruno said, but they all moved out a long time ago. Marcella said she was just going to straighten out the hall. See you in a minute, she said.

Two middle-aged women left the hotel. Bruno had often been puzzled by the attractive women who stayed as guests of the hotel. They arrived in twos and threes, without their husbands. They shared a room, were out all day, and returned to the hotel in the evening with half a dozen large bags from expensive stores. Sometimes he saw them on his tours of duty by the pool, lying there half naked on their deck chairs. Bruno would stop for an instant and look at them skeptically from a distance. After dinner, the women might leave the hotel once more, and he wouldn’t be around to see them return. Sergio had told him that they sometimes had men with them whom they tried to smuggle in past him. As if he cared who they spent their
nights with. He was quite capable of imagining the rest, when the men slunk past the porter’s desk an hour later, with cigarettes between their lips and frosty expressions.

Bruno thought of Marcella in her black skirt. He imagined her coming home. The children were already in bed, the husband was watching TV in the living room. She went into the bathroom and took off her skirt and underskirt. She washed and went to the bedroom in her underwear and pulled on her nightie.

Bruno thought of the time when his kids had still been at home, all those long, monotonous years, all the mornings and evenings. Sometimes he longed for those meals, where no one had said much, nothing of importance. It was the repetition that made them so lovely, the knowledge that tomorrow and the day after and next week and next year they would be sitting together in exactly the same way. There seemed to be so much time then. Not until the children had moved out did he notice how distant they had remained in all those years. When Bruno saw a disaster movie in which an earthquake or flood or volcanic eruption threatened a town, it wasn’t the destruction that moved him or the deaths, only the fate of the man who had become separated from his family and was desperately looking for them in all the confusion. He would have tears in his eyes, and Olivia said what a load of nonsense.

At ten o’clock Bruno called home and said he still didn’t know when he’d be back. Olivia sounded worried, but she didn’t say anything. He promised her he would call later on.

He thought of the result he would get tomorrow. He thought about the way they would break the news. The doctor would be straight with him. Seventy percent of patients died within five years. Then he would embark on that rigmarole he had seen one of the waiters, a man from Portugal, go through, that endless sequence of tests and therapies. Times when things looked to be improving, and other times when he could barely recognize the man. Sleepless nights, unbearable pain, days of vomiting, and in the end a mean and nasty death.

He stood in front of the hotel. Not many of its rooms were occupied. Only a few of the windows had lights on; in one of them a young man was sitting and smoking a cigarette. He tossed the butt out the window and disappeared. Bruno was terrified, absolutely terrified of the disease that might already have spread throughout his body. He was afraid of losing his life a piece at a time. He had never wished for very much, only hoped things might stay more or less as they were. But maybe that had been enough to provoke fate.

Marcella emerged from the hotel, said good night, and unlocked her bike. Good night, he said, and Marcella waved and rode off.

Bruno looked at the old oil painting that hung next to the front desk. He had almost forgotten it existed, even though he went past it at least twice a day. It was a farewell scene in the golden light of a breaking storm. The man was wearing chain mail and some sort of surcoat. His hair was braided and he had a drooping mustache that gave his appearance something Oriental, a Fu Manchu mustache. He would be gone a long time, perhaps he was going on a Crusade, perhaps he would never return to the castle on the lake, and to the woman in the long flowing robes. When he started at the hotel, Bruno had often stood in front of the painting. He had kissed the woman and set out into the storm full of joyful expectation. Now all he could see was pain and the inevitability of parting.

The student called a little after eleven. Bruno told him not to bother anymore. He was annoyed, even though there was nothing he could blame the student for. Bruno waited, looked at the wall clock, sat down at his desk, got up again. He fetched the bottle of grappa from the cabinet that he had been given for Christmas by a regular at the hotel, and hadn’t opened. It was a good make, the guest had said, but Bruno didn’t care for grappa. He
poured himself a water glass full and drank it down. He shuddered. He filled the glass a second time. He picked up the phone, put it down again. What was he going to tell Olivia? The truth? And what was the truth? That he didn’t want to come home. That he didn’t want to spend this last evening with her and her false concern and her useless chatter. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if she changed his bandage again, ruffled his hair like a little boy’s. He wasn’t a little boy, he was an old man, maybe a man with a deadly disease. And he wanted to spend the evening by himself, without lies and without comfort.