Limbo (53 page)

And there it was. A motorcycle appeared from the farthest corner of the parking lot. The front headlight, a white glow through a veil of rain, lit up the hood of the SUV. There were two people on the bike, and the passenger wasn't wearing a helmet. “Calogero,” he said. “Christ,” the gynecologist said. Then I heard two bangs. Not particularly loud. Like a thud. But I knew right away that they were shots. I didn't think anything; I wasn't even scared. It seemed like a bad movie I'd ended up in by pure chance. But I instinctively crouched down behind the car door, which was still open. Stupidly because, if they wanted to do me in, all they had to do was go around the car: I was exposed, no cover, like a sitting duck. But the motorcycle accelerated and took off. I stayed crouched on the gravel, petrified. I don't know how much time passed. A few minutes, I think. The rain dripped from my hair onto my neck, an icy rivulet creeping down my back. I was cold. There was an eerie silence. The voices had disappeared, now the only sound was the waves on the rocks. I kneeled down: a puddle was spreading out from under the SUV, and since the ground was slightly uneven, it flowed toward me. And then I saw a hand, still clutching a set of keys.

I didn't even know the guy. I'd seen him for the first time in my life just three hours earlier. Now that name, Calogero, was lodged in my brain. If they hadn't called out to him, he would have remained a stranger. I stood up. There was no one in the parking lot. The shadows that had been milling about a minute earlier had disappeared. I didn't know what to do. But I'm a doctor first and foremost. I went around to the other side of the SUV, kneeled over him, and checked his pulse. As I held his wrist in my fingers, I noticed that he had two bullet holes in him, one in his forehead, the other in his chest, right at heart level.

I thought about my flight at eight the next morning. I just wanted to go home. There was nothing more I could do for that Calogero, whoever he was. But I couldn't leave him there, lying in a parking lot in the rain like a dog. You don't know how many times I told myself that I should have just started walking toward the city, which was only a few miles away. A lot of people had seen me with the dead man—in fact, I was the last person to see him alive, and that's never a good start. But Livia and the older man had dined with him, too, and they could have explained everything. I was just a speaker at an ophthalmology conference. I lived six hundred miles away, in a quiet place where things like this didn't happen, I didn't know the first thing about him. I could have said I was scared, and no one would have blamed me. I should have vanished, like that couple in the BMW. Like everyone else in the parking lot and inside the restaurant. But I didn't. I can't explain why. I couldn't imagine. But in a certain sense I could. I was a stranger there, but I'm not an idiot. And I'm a doctor first and foremost. That man wasn't dead yet. He had no chance of surviving, and I knew it. But my fingers had felt the echo of a pulse. I think that's why.

I went inside the restaurant and told the waiter to call an ambulance because someone had shot Dr. Calogero. The waiter pierced me with a cold stare, as if I were a nuisance. But he picked up the phone. I sat on a chair and waited. The gynecologist was no longer breathing when the ambulance arrived. I died at midnight, in the parking lot of a restaurant overlooking the sea. My name is not Mattia.

 

 

BELLAVISTA HOTEL, JANUARY 7

I didn't take the 8:00 a.m. flight. At that hour I was asleep. I had spent the night at the police station. All things considered, the police were very understanding. Keep in mind that I have always had a complicated relationship to authority. Perhaps as a reaction to my father's being so overbearing, I don't know, I'm not very interested in psychology. The fact is that until that night I'd only had three run-ins with the police in my life, and it was my fault each time: I'd broken the law, or helped someone else break it. At sixteen, on my way home from a party, I was stopped for drunk driving and driving without a license. At nineteen I was involved in a brawl at a stadium after a game. Soccer didn't interest me in the least, you must have realized I don't get it the other day, but I'd gone with a friend who was crazy about our city's team. She had a knife with an eight-inch blade in her backpack and they loaded us both in the police van. At twenty-two my girlfriend got herself arrested for insulting a public official: she spat at a riot cop during the evacuation of a community center where she taught illegal immigrants Italian. She was really committed, a radical who wanted to make the world a better place—that's why I fell in love with her, even though I didn't do anything to help her, all I did was waste my father's money: to keep my motorcycle running, to pay for cigarettes and plane tickets to climb pristine mountains in Nepal, Alaska, and Chile. I was an okay mountaineer and a pretty good rock climber. As you can see, behind all my troubles you'll find a woman. But anyway, now I was thirty-eight and I hadn't set foot in a police station since I'd had to renew my passport. I don't like uniforms, as I think I already told you.

And now I was surrounded by uniforms, I was in their hands. They brought me coffee, asked me if I wanted to see a psychologist in case I was in shock. I didn't feel like I was in a state of shock, though. I had seen a man killed. But I'm a doctor, after all: I'd seen people die as far back as med school; when I was interning at the hospital, a little girl with heart complications expired in my arms. They questioned me a little disrespectfully at first, then—once they had verified that I really was a speaker at the ophthalmology conference—more courteously. When they finally let me go, it was five in the morning. I had told them what I knew, in other words nothing, and I felt relieved; I went back to the hotel, climbed in bed, and crashed. I was exhausted. I woke up at noon, feeling fresh and rested, I checked out and took a taxi to the airport. I got a seat on the first plane. I was home by three.

I had a nice house. I'd lived there for five years. First I'd lived in the historic center, in an old building, a labyrinth of stairs and courtyards. You could see the cathedral's bell tower from my windows, a slice of the façade with its rose window, and a swath of red tiles. I liked it and would have stayed. But Denise kept saying that there was too much pollution, that the smog was dangerous, and that our son needed to grow up in nature. The sight of trees teaches respect for life. Denise—not her real name, but you have to forgive me for concealing it—worked for the Green Party; she handled public relations for the regional headquarters, and had strong convictions about the fate of the planet. So we went to a real estate agency and they found us a house on the outskirts, in the foothills. Close enough to the center so you could bike there, but far enough away that we could see the mountains from our porch, and I think I chose it mostly for that. Three stories, a recent construction by a trendy architect. It had a rec room, a yard with tall trees and a swing, and a whole slew of bedrooms. I would have liked a big family, and was counting on convincing Denise over time. It took us a year to decorate it. She did it all, because I've never cared in the least about furniture. A bed is a bed, a table a table. Over time, Denise began to regret moving to the countryside. She quit her job when Marco was born, and the bucolic solitude of that enormous house—shared only with a newborn and a Moldavian babysitter whose vocabulary was limited to about a hundred words—turned out to be really hard for her, almost unbearable. I was never home before nine. But by that point I liked our house, I'd fallen in love with the trees, the birds, the mountains, I wasn't up for moving again. And we'd also gotten a cat—a Persian, Soraya, who quickly became the queen of the yard, and I never would have confined her to a city apartment. It may sound strange to you, but as the years passed, Soraya's happiness became more important to me than Denise's.

I didn't tell Denise anything about Calogero's murder. It was something that happened hundreds of miles away. There was only a brief article in the newspapers, and she never read the news unless something happened in our city—and nothing ever happened in our city. When Marco ran to greet me and I held him in my arms, it was like the whole thing had never happened, at least not to me. Like a hallucination, a nightmare, but one from which I had awoken into my previous existence.

I have experienced just about all the sensations a man can experience in life. I never denied myself anything. But nothing feels more amazing than the gentle weight of your son's head on your shoulder as he wraps his arms around your neck and slobbers your cheek with kisses, quivering with joy because you've finally come home. It's hard for me to write about him, but if I didn't, I would be hiding from you the only good thing I've been able to do in my life. Marco is his real name. I know I shouldn't write it, but I can't help myself. It's a way of having him here with me, even if only for an instant.

He has blue eyes and blond hair and everyone says he looks exactly like me. But the most recent photograph I have of him is from last Christmas, and maybe he looks different now. I haven't seen him in a year. I'm sorry I haven't told you about him. It wasn't because I wanted to hide his existence from you, but because I can't talk about him without doubling over in pain. It's a physical pain, as if someone were twisting a knife in my guts. I know you can understand me—in fact you may be the only person who can. Everything lessens with time. Solids sublimate and become gas. Water evaporates. Rocks crumble—even granite turns to sand in the end. Radioactive materials decay, it takes centuries, millennia, billions of years, but even uranium, cesium, and thorium become harmless. Not pain, though. Pain is indestructible, like gold, like diamonds. My pain has withstood the passage of time, of everything; if anything, it's growing stronger.

I have to say that I can make do without everything else. My house, my work, my family, Denise. But not my child. The next day I returned to my office, my patients, my hospital rounds, my usual routine. I examined eyes affected by macular degeneration, myopia, exotropia, presbyopia. I handed out eyedrops, prescriptions, and atropine. I performed cataract surgery. Keep in mind that seventy-five percent of people over seventy have problems with cataracts, and one hundred percent of those over eighty do. Given Italy's aging population and the increase in the average life span, I'd chosen an ideal profession, and I didn't have to worry about being unemployed. Nearly eighty percent of my work was cataract related. The technical term is phacoemulsification. I would use ultrasound to emulsify the crystalline lens, aspirate it, make an incision, remove the natural lens, and implant a synthetic one. Making the incision requires real skill—we're talking about minuscule measurements, barely six millimeters in diameter, and during the extraction you have to be careful not to damage the surrounding tissue—but it had become routine to me.

Denise and I went shopping at the supermarket near our house, Marco sitting in the cart; I took the babysitter to the train in the evening; we invited friends over for dinner—I liked to cook and was pretty good in the kitchen. It seems to me now that the week after the ophthalmology conference was the best week of my life. Because somewhere inside of me I knew it couldn't last. It may sound strange, but I felt guilty. Almost as if I'd been the one to shoot Calogero. In truth, I'd shot myself, and somehow I knew it. So I tried to make peace with my life. To ignore the rough patches and celebrate the joys.

Denise and I had gone through some tough times. She was only one of my girlfriends. I'd never felt particularly bound to her. But when I was thirty-one I got it in my head that I wanted to have a child. I'd had an absent father and was a terrible son, but I was convinced I would be a good father and that my son would be happy. I know it doesn't usually happen to men, that the biological clock usually ticks only for women. But I really wanted to have a child. I was seeing three women when the idea seized me and wouldn't let go: Denise, Valeria, and Giada. Each one would have liked to be the only one, but all three knew about the others; I don't like lying to people. Giada, a third-year medical student, was too young. Valeria was a dark-haired nephrologist who laughed all the time and was an octopus in bed. She knew every trick there was to please a man. She was as promiscuous as I was; she wasn't jealous, and never would have suffocated me or gotten depressed over an affair. I was happy with her and she would have been the ideal mother. But she was already forty and I worried we would have trouble conceiving. I was very pragmatic, maybe even cynical, and I'm sorry about that—she was very hurt when Marco was born; even someone as easygoing as she was can get depressed. Anyway, I got Denise pregnant and we went off to live in the countryside with our son. But I continued to see Giada and then Giada's cousin, too, and obviously Denise found out about it, and tried in vain to make me leave them. She had put on forty pounds during her pregnancy and, diets and workouts notwithstanding, she never managed to drop the extra weight. She started feeling depressed, neglected, and ugly, even though it wasn't true; she actually looked better with a little more flesh on her. I found her new shape more reassuring. We started fighting, poisoning our relationship. I would promise her any- and everything because I didn't want her to leave and take Marco with her, but I never kept my promises. Deep down I knew she wouldn't leave: she loved me.

That week I always made it home in time for dinner. I didn't cheat on her. On Saturday we went snowshoeing in the mountains. The snow was perfect, powdery, packed—zero risk of avalanches. All alone, we walked for almost three hours, in single file in the woods. Every now and then we would come across hare or chamois tracks. The only sound was the thud of snow falling from tree branches. It was all so white and pure, and I felt good. Denise was tired so I hoisted Marco on my shoulders and carried him as far as the Alpine hut. We sunbathed on the terrace. I made Marco a snow bear. We'd been told that they cross the border from Slovenia sometimes, and make their dens in the caves below the peaks. Marco wanted to see one and was disappointed when I explained that bears sleep through the winter. On Sunday my brother and his wife came to visit and we had a barbeque. Marco didn't want to go to bed and I finally convinced him by promising him a bedtime story. He was crazy about “Puss in Boots.” So I read him “Puss in Boots” until he fell asleep. The next morning I got a phone call. It was the police commissioner who had questioned me the week before. He told me there were some new developments and that they needed to talk with me. He asked me when I might have a few hours to go down and talk with them. I explained that I was extremely busy, I didn't have any vacation time and couldn't get away. Since he couldn't convince me to go there, in the end he said that he would come to me.