He opened the door and went out.
70
Bath time was always a complicated affair.
And Flora Palmieri sensed that her mother didn’t like it at all. She could see it in her eyes. (Flora, dear, why the bath? I don’t feel like it…)
‘I know it’s a nuisance, Mama, but you must have one occasionally.’ It was a delicate operation.
If she wasn’t careful, there was a risk of her mother’s head going under the water and her drowning. And the heater had to be switched on at least an hour beforehand, otherwise she might catch cold, and that would be serious. With a blocked nose she couldn’t breathe.
‘Nearly done …’ Flora, on her knees, finished soaping her and began rinsing with the shower that white, shrunken little body huddled in the corner of the bath. ‘One more minute … and I’ll pop you back into bed …’
The neurologist had said that her mother’s brain was like a computer on standby. One tap on the keyboard and the screen lights up and the hard disk comes back to life. The trouble was her mother wasn’t connected up to any keyboard, and there was no way of reactivating her.
‘She can’t hear you. It’s out of the question. Your mother is not there. Don’t delude yourself. She’s electroencephically flat,’ the neurologist had said with the sensitivity that is the hallmark of his profession.
In Flora’s view the neurologist was talking through his hat. Her mother was there all right. A barrier separated her from the world, but Flora’s words could pass beyond that barrier. She could see this from many signs, which would have been impossible to recognise for a stranger or for a doctor who relied solely on electroencephalograms, CAT scans, ultrasound and other scientific gadgets, but which were crystal clear to her. A twitch of an eyebrow, a tightening of the lips, a gaze less opaque than usual, a vibration.
This was her imperceptible way of expressing herself.
And Flora was sure it was her words that kept her alive.
There had been a time when her mother’s health had deteriorated and she had required constant care, day and night. Eventually Flora hadn’t been able to cope any longer and on the doctor’s advice had taken a nurse who treated her mother like a mannequin. Never talked to her, never caressed her, and instead of improving, her mother’s health had got even worse. Flora had dismissed the nurse and gone back to taking care of her herself and immediately her mother’s health had improved.
And another thing, Flora had the clear perception that her mother could communicate with her mentally. Now and again she heard her voice break in upon her thoughts. She wasn’t mad or schizophrenic, it was just that, being her daughter, she knew exactly what her mother would have said about this or that, knew what she liked, what she disliked, what she would have advised her to do when there was a decision to be taken.
* * *
‘There we are, all done.’ She lifted her out of the bathtub and carried her dripping wet into the bedroom, where she had prepared the towel.
She rubbed her down vigorously and was sprinkling her with talc when the house phone buzzed.
‘Who can that be? Oh, my goodness …!’
The appointment!
The appointment she had made that morning at the Station Bar with the haberdasher’s son.
‘Oh my goodness, Mama, I’d completely forgotten. How could I be so stupid? There was a man who asked me to help him write a CV.’
She saw her mother’s lips tighten.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of him in an hour or so. I know, it’s an awful nuisance. But he’s here now.’ She put her under the bedclothes.
The house phone buzzed again.
‘All right! I’m coming. Just a minute.’ She emerged from the bedroom, took off the apron she used when she was washing her mother and glanced at herself in the mirror …
Why are you looking at yourself?
… and picked up the receiver.
71
The schoolmistress was waiting for him in the doorway.
And she hadn’t changed her clothes.
Does that mean meeting me isn’t important to her? Graziano wondered, and then held out a bottle of whisky. ‘I brought you a little something.’
Flora turned it over in her hands. ‘Thank you, you shouldn’t have.’
‘That’s all right. Don’t mention it.’
‘Come in.’
She led the way into the sitting room.
‘Would you mind waiting for a minute …? I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home,’ Flora said awkwardly and vanished into the dark corridor.
Graziano was left alone.
He checked his appearance, using the window as a mirror. He straightened his shirt collar. And with slow, measured paces, hands behind his back, he strolled round the room, inspecting it.
It was a square room, with two windows which looked onto the hills. Through one you could glimpse a segment of sea. There was a fireplace where some embers were smouldering. A little sofa covered in blue material patterned with little pink flowers. An old leather armchair. A stool. A bookcase, small but crammed full of books. A Persian carpet. A round table on which papers and books were tidily arranged. A small television on a stand. Two watercolours on the walls. One was a storm at sea. The other was a view of a beach on which a large tree trunk had been washed up by the tide. It looked like Castrone beach. They were simple and not particularly successful, but the colours were pale and subdued and conveyed a sense of nostalgia. Some photographs were neatly arrayed on the mantelpiece. Black and white. A woman who resembled Flora sitting on a low wall, behind her the bay of Mergellina. And one of a newly wed couple at a church door. And other family memories.
This is her den. It’s here that she spends her lonely evenings …
That sitting room had a special atmosphere.
Maybe it’s the low, warm lights. She’s certainly a woman with great taste …
72
The woman with great taste was in her mother’s bedroom talking in a low voice.
‘Mama, you’d never imagine the get-up he’s come in. With that shirt … And those tight-fitting trousers … How stupid I am, I shouldn’t have let him come.’ She pulled up her mother’s blankets.
‘All right. That’s enough dithering. I’ll go now. And get it over with.’
She fetched some blank sheets of paper from the cupboard in the hall, took a deep breath and went back into the sitting room. ‘We’ll write a rough draft and you can make a fair copy afterwards. Let’s sit here.’ She cleared the papers off the table and pulled up two chairs, opposite each other.
‘Did you do those?’ Graziano pointed at the watercolours.
‘Yes …’ Flora murmured.
‘They’re beautiful. Really … You’re very talented.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, blushing.
73
She wasn’t beautiful.
Or at least, that morning she had seemed more beautiful.
If you took each part of her face separately, the aquiline nose, the wide mouth, the receding chin, the expressionless eyes, she was a disaster, but if you put them all back together, there emerged something strangely magnetic, with a disharmonious beauty all of its own.
Yes, he liked Miss Palmieri.
‘Mr Biglia, are you listening to me?’
‘Oh, yes…’ His attention had wandered.
‘I was telling you that I’ve never written a CV in my life, but I’ve seen some, and I think the best thing to do is to begin at the beginning, with your date of birth, and then go on from there, selecting any information that might interest the owners of that place you want to go to …’
‘Right, let’s get started, then … I was born in Ischiano on …’
And off he went.
He immediately lied about his date of birth. He knocked four years off his age.
It was a brilliant idea, the CV.
He would be able to tell her about the adventurous life he had led, fascinate her with his innumerable
interesting encounters all over the world, explain his passion for music and everything else.
74
Flora glanced at her watch.
More than half an hour had passed since he had started talking and she still hadn’t managed to write a word. He had stunned her with such a flood of words that her head was spinning.
The man was a windbag. Sure of certainties based on nothing. So full of himself you’d think he would burst, so convinced of the importance of what he’d done you’d think he was the first man to set foot on the moon, or Reinhold Messner.
And the most unbearable thing was that he seasoned his adventures – as a DJ in a New York night club, as a supporting act for a Peruvian band on tour in Argentina, as a co-driver in a rally in Mauritania, as a cabin-boy on a yacht on which he had crossed the Atlantic in force-nine gales, as a volunteer in an isolation hospital for patients with infectious diseases, as a guest in a Tibetan monastery – with a phoney, second-hand philosophy. A jumble of New Age concepts, watered-down Buddhist principles, banal Kerouackian On the Road ideas, echoes of the Beat Generation, picture postcard images and teenage disco culture. In actual fact, if you eliminated the heroic deeds, the only thing this man seemed to be interested in was lying on a tropical beach playing that wretched Spanish music in the moonlight.
None of which was of the slightest use for a CV.
If I don’t interrupt him he might go on all night. Flora was anxious to finish the job and send him away.
His presence in the house made her nervous. He looked at her in a way that made her blood run cold. There was something sensual about him that disturbed her.
She was tired. Miss Gatta had given her a hellish day and she sensed that her mother needed her.
‘Now then, I’d forget about the reintroduction of red deer into Sardinia and try to concentrate on something more concrete. You were talking about that man Paco de Lucia. We could mention that you’ve played with him. Is he an important musician?’
Graziano sat up with a jolt. ‘Is Paco de Lucia important? He’s fundamental! Paco’s a genius. He’s made flamenco known to the whole world. He’s like Ravi Shankar was for Indian music … Let’s be serious now.’
‘Good. In that case, Mr Biglia, we could add him …’ She tried to write, but he touched her arm.
She stiffened.
‘Miss Palmieri, would you do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t call me Mr Biglia. I’m Graziano to you.’
Flora gave him a look of exasperation. ‘Very well, Graziano. Now then, Paco …’
‘And what’s your first name? May I know?’
‘Flora,’ she whispered, after a brief hesitation.
‘Flora …’ Graziano closed his eyes like a man inspired. ‘What a lovely name … If I had a daughter, that’s what I’d like to call her…’
75
She was a really tough nut to crack.
Graziano hadn’t realised he was up against General Patton in person.
The stories he’d told her had cut no ice with her. And yet he’d pulled out all the stops, he’d been creative, imaginative, charming, the sort of thing that would have had them falling at his feet in droves at Riccione. And when he’d seen that his usual repertoire wasn’t doing the trick, he had reeled off such a string of unlikely tales that if he’d done half the things he claimed to have done he would have been happy for the rest of his days.
But it was no good.
The schoolmistress was a grade-six ascent.
He glanced at his watch.
Time was passing and the possibility of taking her to Saturnia seemed suddenly remote, unattainable. He hadn’t succeeded in creating the right atmosphere. Flora had taken the CV too seriously.
If I ask her to come for a bathe at Saturnia now, no prizes for guessing where she’ll tell me to go …
What could he do?
Should he adopt the Zonin–Lenci (two of his Riccione friends) technique, and just leap on her? Suddenly, brutally, dispensing with all preliminaries?
You close in and then, quick as a cobra, before she knows what’s happening, stick your tongue in her mouth. It was a possible method, but the Zonin–Lenci technique had a number of contraindications. In order for it to work the prey must be tame, that is to say, already used to approaches of a certain level, otherwise you might end up being charged with attempted rape, and anyway the technique is very much of the all or nothing variety.
And here it would be nothing, damn it. No, the only thing is to be more explicit but without alarming her.
‘Flora, how about trying that whisky I brought? It’s a special one. It was sent to me from Scotland.’ And he began a slow, almost invisible but inexorable shifting of his chair towards the region of General Patton.
76
That’s what Flora’s problem was. She could never assert herself. Express her opinion. Get what she wanted. If she’d had a little more nerve, like the rest of the human race, she would have said, ‘Graziano (and what an effort it was to use his first name), I’m sorry, it’s late, you must go.’
But instead, here she was, bringing him a drink. She returned from the kitchen with the bottle and two glasses on a tray.
Graziano, in her absence, had got up and moved over to the sofa.
‘Here we are. Excuse me, I’ll be back in a moment. Only a tiny drop for me. I’m not too keen on alcohol. I drink limoncino now and then.’ She put the tray on the coffee table in front of the sofa and rushed next door to have a time-out with Mama.
77
Eight forty-five!
There was no more time for delicate approaches.
It’s going to have to be the Mullet technique, Graziano said to himself, shaking his head unhappily. He didn’t like it, but he could see no other way.
Mullet was another pal of his, a junkie from Città di Castello, so called because of his resemblance to the bewhiskered fish.
Both had eyes as round and red as cherries.
Once, in a sudden fit of loquacity, Mullet had explained to him: ‘It’s quite simple. Suppose there’s a girl you want to pull at a party, she’s drinking her gin and tonic or some other alcoholic drink. You stand next to her and the moment she leaves her glass unguarded or turns away you drop in a particular kind of pill, and bingo. In half an hour she’s as high as a kite, there for the taking.’
Mullet’s technique wasn’t very sporting, there was no question about that. Graziano had rarely used it and then only in very serious cases. In competitions it was prohibited, and if you were caught it meant instant disqualification.
But, as they say, needs must when the Devil drives.
Graziano took his wallet out of his inside pocket.
Let’s see what we’ve got here, then …
He opened it and extracted from an inner compartment three blue pills.
‘Spiderman …’ he purred contentedly, like an old alchemist who finds himself holding the philosopher’s stone.
* * *
Spiderman is a nondescript-looking pill. With that light-blue colour and that groove down the middle it could easily be mistaken for a headache or indigestion tablet, but it’s not. It is most definitely not.
In those sixty milligrams there are more psychotropically active molecules than in an entire pharmacy. It was synthesised in Goa in the early Nineties by a group of young Californian neurobiologists who had been expelled from MIT for bioethically incorrect behaviour, in collaboration with a bunch of shamans from the Yukatan peninsula and a team of German behavioural psychiatrists.
After a quarter of an hour the mice on which they tested the drug were doing handstands, balancing upside down on one leg and twirling round like breakdancers.
The reason it’s called Spiderman is that one of its many effects is to make you feel as if you were walking up walls. Another is that, if after you’ve taken it someone leads you to the registry office and puts you at the end of a long queue and tells you, ‘Go and collect Carleo’s birth ce
rtificate’ and you haven’t the faintest idea who Carleo is, you do so, as happy as a sandboy, and when you think back in later years you still remember it as the most hilarious experience of your life.
That is what Graziano Biglia dissolved in Miss Palmieri’s whisky. And then, to be on the safe side, he added another. His own pill he popped in his mouth and washed down with a swig of whisky.
‘And now let’s see if she doesn’t capitulate.’ He undid a couple of shirt buttons, smoothed back his hair and waited for his prey to arrive.
78
Flora took the glass that Graziano offered her, closed her eyes and swallowed. She didn’t notice the unpleasant bitter aftertaste – she never drank whisky, she didn’t like it.
‘Very nice. Thank you.’ She gritted her teeth and sat down at the table again. She put on her spectacles and examined what she had written.
She spent the next ten minutes sorting out all that hot air, those rambling stories, trying to extract the essential information: languages spoken, education, computer skills, work experience, etc etc.
‘I should say there’s plenty of material here. The things we’ve jotted down should be sufficient. I’m sure you’ll get the job, Mr Bigl … Graziano.’
Graziano was still on the sofa. ‘I think I will. But there are a couple of other things that might impress the people who run the village. You see, they try to give everyone a good time … Put the guests at their ease … Create relationships between people …’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Flora, removing her spectacles.
‘Well, I …’ He seemed embarrassed.
She saw him shift on the sofa as if thorns had suddenly sprung out of the cushions. He got up and sat down at the table. ‘You see, I won a cup …’