The Tenant and The Motive (2 page)

There was not the slightest doubt, in any case, that Berkowickz was aware of the unrefined intellectual bouquet of Mario's work – unless he only knew the title
of the article or had merely leafed through it distractedly without gaining an appreciation of the poverty of its contents. This fact, however, did not worry him: though it was certain to put him in a slightly uncomfortable situation vis-à-vis Berkowickz, it was no less certain that his departmental colleagues (among them Scanlan, who was, all things considered, the only one who mattered) would never read the article, as they hadn't read the ones he'd published before nor would they in all probability read the ones he would publish in the future. There was nothing, therefore, to worry about. Furthermore, it was unlikely, according to his earlier reasoning, that Berkowickz would turn out to be anything more than a novice in the profession; from there it could be hoped that his own work might be either immature and incipient, or as mediocre as Mario's. If, to either of those two possibilities, he added the knowledge Mario possessed of the explicit and implicit rules that governed the mechanics of the department, the result was that he found himself in an advantageous position in respect to Berkowickz.

He got up from the armchair, turned over the record and sat back down again. He took a long drink of beer, lit another cigarette. Then he tried to foresee the immediate consequences Berkowickz's arrival might produce. According to his contract, Mario taught two phonology courses per semester; in practice, however, they'd always ended up turning into three, rounding his annual salary up to a satisfactory sum. If, as happened the previous year, the department didn't manage to attract a sufficient
number of students to fill three classes, they'd come to a tacit agreement by which Mario would teach a course in another speciality, either semantics, syntax or morphology. So, three classes were practically guaranteed. Seen from this basic perspective, the presence of Berkowickz could not alter things in any essential way: in all probability, the new professor, recently arrived in the department and therefore with fewer rights, less experience and, surely, with a more skeletal curriculum vitae even than Mario's, would take one of the phonology courses he regularly taught, completing his workload with one of the leftovers from the other specialities. As for Mario, he'd undoubtedly add to his two courses – leaving aside the possibility, which they'd considered in the first semester of the previous year, of opening a fourth phonology class – a third in semantics, syntax or morphology, or else – which might even be preferable – some administrative work, not only ensuring his income would not suffer from Berkowickz's arrival, but might well benefit from it.

After this series of petty reflections, the vague anxiety planted by the aggressively optimistic and healthy air the new tenant had brandished on the porch dissolved into a sort of pity not lacking in sympathy. And although he didn't deny that Berkowickz could eventually become a threat to the preservation of his privacy – for Mario considered the separation of work and private life indispensable, on a par with an adequate salary – nothing led him to believe that it might make him feel uncomfortable or, in the last resort, oblige him to toy with the possibility
of moving to a new apartment, especially since the one he occupied now satisfied him from every point of view. Not only was it located in a nice residential area relatively close to campus, but it also had a veranda, back yard and garage, and furthermore, he'd managed, with some effort, to furnish it entirely to his taste during the year he'd been living there.

The apartment consisted of a study, living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. As well as the typewriter and computer, there was a dark oak table in the study, with drawers on both sides, which served as his desk, a filing cabinet, several bookshelves; there was also a wicker armchair, an easy chair and a few other places to sit. The bedroom furnishings were sparse: two closets built into the back wall with full-length mirrors on the doors, a chest of drawers made of a pale wood against the right-hand wall across from the bed, which was covered with a deep red eiderdown. An extension of one wall divided the living room in two. On the left-hand side was a pale wooden table surrounded by metal chairs; two vaguely cubist pictures hung on the walls, along with a poster for an exhibition of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec in a gallery in Turin. On the right-hand side of the living room there was a television, a record-player, a cream-coloured sofa, two armchairs of a similar colour but different design, a transparent, low double-decker table (through the top level periodicals, books and magazines piled on the lower level were visible); hanging from a hook on the wall was a reproduction of a medium-sized
Hockney painting. Separating this part of the room from the dining area was a glass cabinet crammed with valuable and not so valuable objects: a marble elephant, an Algerian pipe, an hourglass, three antique pistols, a frigate imprisoned in a Chianti bottle, several clay figures and other trifles that Mario had collected over the years with neither acquisitive nor sentimental zeal. Except for those of the kitchen and bathroom, the walls of the house were covered with grainy wood panelling; the baseboard and door and window frames were painted white.

He could not have found the apartment more satisfactory, which was why Mario considered it foolishness even to raise the possibility of leaving it, for no other reason than the fact that a colleague had suddenly turned into a neighbour. Furthermore, he thought optimistically, it's hard to imagine I'll be worse off for the change. There was no doubt that Nancy had been at the very least an annoying neighbour. She was an untidily stout woman, careless about her appearance, with dry, straw-coloured hair, quite ugly but at the same time endowed with an obvious and aggressive sexuality. The feminist ideas and prejudices against Latin men that Nancy brought up in any conversation, no matter how casual or brief (on the stairway, taking out the garbage, while washing the car), had not facilitated pacific cohabitation in the building. Otherwise, the strange affection Mrs Workman professed for her translated into a blind trust that had always made Mario feel uncomfortable, for it put him in an awkward position not only each time Nancy accused him of getting
drunk on his own, but also when she denounced him to Mrs Workman for spying on her whenever a man entered her apartment, especially at night. On another occasion, Mrs Workman and the rest of the tenants in the building – a married couple of Belgian origin, and a young woman who worked in the admissions office at the university – had to intercede to keep Nancy from filing an official complaint with the police for his alleged sexual aggression: she insisted she'd caught him masturbating behind the curtain in his living room while she was sunbathing on a lounge chair in the back yard.

‘Ginger? It's Mario.'

‘How are you?' asked Ginger. Not waiting for a reply, she asked another question. ‘When did you get back?'

‘A couple of days ago,' answered Mario. ‘I haven't called because I've been getting things organized. You know.'

‘Yeah.'

Mario thought: The telephone dulls people. Ginger's voice sounded neutral, colourless. Mario said, ‘If you like, we could have lunch together.'

‘I don't know.'

‘At Timpone's,' Mario insisted. ‘We'll celebrate our reunion.'

‘I don't know,' Ginger said again.

Mario insisted again.

There was a silence. The murmur of another conversation crossed the line. Mario heard, ‘OK.'

‘I'll meet you at Timpone's in an hour then.'

He hung up. He looked at his watch: it was noon.

At five to one he arrived at the restaurant. Ginger was
sitting at one of the tables at the back, in front of the big windows that gave the room so much light. She was wearing a light-blue dress; her hair was bunched in an imperfect bun at the nape of her neck. As he pulled out a chair to sit down, Mario thought: She looks lovely.

‘What happened?' asked Ginger. ‘You're limping.'

‘Well,' said Mario, smiling as if in apology, ‘this morning I twisted my ankle. Jogging.'

‘I hope it's nothing serious.'

‘It's not.'

Ginger ordered a cold steak with rice, Mario, a salad and curried chicken. They drank burgundy.

‘You don't seem too happy that I'm back.'

‘I don't know if I am,' admitted Ginger. Then she asked, ‘How did it go?'

‘I got bored,' said Mario with his gaze buried in the chicken. ‘By the second week I didn't know what to do with myself.'

They ate in silence. The waiter came over twice to see if they needed anything and make sure they liked the food; they both nodded without enthusiasm.

Though he already knew the answer, Mario enquired, ‘How have things been going around here?'

‘Same as ever,' said Ginger. ‘All very quiet; too quiet really: there was hardly anyone left to talk to.'

‘You must've got a lot of work done,' Mario ventured.

Ginger had stayed at the university all summer to keep working on her thesis. To Mario's question she replied with a shrug of her shoulders and a gesture of fatigue. She
said, ‘I suppose, quite a bit, and in lots of different directions, but I'm still not sure which is the right one.'

Mario thought Ginger's expression now was opaque and inexpressive, like her voice had been a little while ago on the phone. They talked about the details Mario had suggested she examine during his absence. Ginger answered Mario's questions in monosyllables. At one point the girl's features seemed to brighten up.

‘It doesn't matter,' she said, as if leaving something behind. ‘Tomorrow I'll talk to Berkowickz.'

‘To whom?'

‘Berkowickz,' Ginger repeated, looking Mario in the eye. ‘They finally managed to hire him. Apparently he made all sorts of demands; you know how those people are. Anyway, Scanlan managed it; he was very determined and he did it. Branstyne told me he's very pleased.'

The waiter took the plates away and asked if they wanted dessert. Ginger ordered apple pie; Mario declined the offer and lit a cigarette.

‘But I thought you already knew about Berkowickz,' said Ginger.

‘I didn't know,' said Mario, puffing out a smoke ring.

‘I'm sure it had already been mentioned before you went on holiday.'

‘I didn't know,' Mario repeated.

‘It doesn't matter,' Ginger said. ‘The thing is, we all stand to benefit. Especially me.'

Ginger said that Berkowickz's latest article, ‘The Syntax of the Word-Initial Consonant in Italian', published
in the April issue of
Language,
left the investigation open at precisely the point where she had begun. She said she was sure Berkowickz must have continued working in that very direction and, even if that was not the case, he would undoubtedly be interested in the study she was attempting to carry out and would certainly hasten to offer her his support. She declared again that the following day she would speak to Berkowickz. If things went as she expected (she'd been told Berkowickz was a kind, hard-working and enthusiastic man), perhaps he might offer to supervise her thesis. She was sure Mario wouldn't mind letting him take over.

‘Besides,' she concluded, half-closing her eyes and feigning an expression she meant to appear mischievous or dreamy, ‘just imagine: it always looks good having a guy like that direct your thesis.'

Mario was disconcerted. He didn't know why he still hadn't told Ginger that Berkowickz had just rented an apartment in the building where he lived, nor could he understand how Ginger could humiliate him like that, taking it as a given that he, seemingly incompetent, wouldn't mind giving up the supervision of her thesis, however insignificant or merely nominal a position it might be, in favour of Berkowickz, whose intellectual worth was seemingly beyond doubt. And what surprised him even more – although here the surprise was perhaps only an instinctive form of defence – was not having recognised the title of the article Ginger had mentioned. For the rest, he found it impossible to associate Berkowickz's
name with anything vaguely related to phonological investigation. But what really had Mario stunned was the aplomb with which he was accepting the situation: not a single gesture of objection, nor of impatience, nor of nervousness. It was like when he realised he was dreaming while still dreaming: everything lacked importance except the certainty that nothing could affect him and that at any moment he would wake up and the dream would have vanished into thin air, without leaving the slightest trace.

After a while Mario realised Ginger had been talking away without his paying any attention, absorbed in the task of crafting smoke rings. Feeling rather tired, Mario supposed she'd been talking about Berkowickz, about her thesis, about herself, maybe about him. He tried to change the subject by asking about mutual friends, about Ginger's parents, whom she'd visited for a few days, about news from the department. Then the conversation lagged again. They paid and left.

On the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant, Mario noticed his ankle was hurting.

‘I've got some things to do right now,' he said. ‘But what do you think about coming over this evening for a drink?'

‘I'm sorry,' Ginger apologised, perhaps insincerely. ‘I promised Brenda we'd go see a movie.'

Brenda was Ginger's room-mate; to soften the blow of the rebuff, Mario asked after her. Ginger told him she'd just come back from California, where she'd spent two weeks.

‘You could see a movie some other time,' Mario suggested without much conviction. Then he lied. ‘I have to talk to you about something.'

‘Some other time,' said Ginger. ‘I can't today.'

‘OK,' Mario gave in. ‘See you tomorrow.'

‘Yes,' Ginger agreed vaguely, and as Mario walked towards his car she added, raising her voice slightly, ‘Take care of that ankle, Mario. Sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.'