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CHAPTER 1
I'm toying with Alice. We've been living together for more than a year now, but after just the first month of cohabitation we were on closer terms than a government bureaucrat and the automatic espresso dispenser. If I want love, understanding, tenderness, passion, or even if I just want to piss her off, all I have to do is push the corresponding button. She's twenty-eight years old, with a nice sinuous body and two white streaks in her mass of raven black hair that she never thought for a second of dyeing to match. She's a smart one. And so mature that, if she were my age, she'd avoid me like the plague.
It's raining again today. The bronzed Air Force colonel who delivers the weather report on Italian state television tells us that what's behind this weather is a stream of cold air pouring west out of the Balkans and temporarily fucking up the Azores anticyclone completely. I'm dealing with two opposing wind systems: one is a gust of conscience that's forcefully driving me to tell Alice that I'm not in love with her anymore and another powerful current, testicular in origin, that is generating instability and the distinct thought that you should never kick a good-looking girl like her out of your bed, if not your life.
I'm in the mood for a little passion; leaning against the kitchen door jamb, I watch my automatic espresso dispenser as it washes the dishes. My gaze is glued to her derriere as it sways in solidarity with her arm, which is furiously scrubbing a food encrusted saucepan.
"What is it, Diego?" she asks me brusquely, barely turning her head in my direction.
"Hey, what's up?" she asks a little more sweetly after taking the time to notice my gaze focused on her ass cheeks.
"Nothing," I reply.
"What do you mean nothing?" she says, smiling at my trance.
"No, it's just that ..." a technical pause, "you just manage to be sensual even when you're washing the dishes."
"What an idiot you are!"
Fifteen seconds later, the idiot in question, thrown savagely down onto the bed, has obtained exactly what he wanted. And no, he wouldn't have obtained it just as easily by sneaking up behind her and kissing her on the nape of the neck. That works with new espresso dispensers. After a year, the gears get all encrusted and you have to operate with cunning and patience.
It's always the woman who demands the first lie, no two ways about it. First, she drills it into your head how important honesty is in a relationship, then not two months into that same relationship she's pressuring you to tell her that she's the only woman you've ever loved and that you'll never betray her. In other words, before you've even gotten started you've already told the biggest lie of all, so how big a deal are all the other lies that follow going to be?
I see the sarcastic smirks playing on the faces of women my age when I go out with one of my girlfriends in her mid-twenties. You don't have the balls to go out with a woman your age, they say. You keep chasing after worshipful schoolgirls because you couldn't take a relationship with a woman your age, a woman your equal, they think. Bullshit. Here's how it works: You're a male, you're sixteen years old, and you're desperately looking for a girl your age to go out with. Unfortunately, you have acne, you're fighting a losing battle against dandruff, and if you want to go somewhere, you have to drive your second-hand motorscooter; the girls your age, in contrast, already know how to dress and apply makeup like grown-up women, they know where the shower is and how it works, and they're dating guys in their twenties, guys who pick them up in their father's car. And so, eight out of every ten sixteen-year-old boys are forced to turn to fourteen-year-old girls for their dating needs. Now you're still a male, but this time you're twenty years old, you're a little confused about life, you're in college majoring in a subject you picked at random, and you don't know what you want to do when you grow up; the girls your age don't know either, but they like a little stability so they're going to bed with guys in their thirties, forcing you to avail yourself of sixteen-year-old girls for company. You're still the same old male, now you're twenty-seven, you have a distinctly unexciting degree and a blank resume, and you're struggling along in your first few underpaid and depressing jobs, but still you hope against hope to make a big impression on at least one of the girls your age. Unfortunately, they all have at least ten years of failed relationships behind them and now they're looking for safety with guys in their forties. So now you're forced to fall back on freshman college girls. In other words, an average male makes it to age thirty with only the slimmest of chances that he'll be noticed by a woman his age. For years, they've been telling you that girls mature earlier and they grow up faster, so then, by the time you're in your forties, when finally, thanks to their vastly superior maturity they've burned their love lives to the ground, instead of calling themselves pathetic idiots, they call you a miserable coward. Have they lost their minds?
Through no fault of my own, then, here I am with yet another girl in her twenties who obviously feels sufficiently mature to take on a love affair with a guy in his forties. She's a cornucopia of silly fondness, little gifts, hugs and kisses, giddy surprises. She's all over me like a shawl on an old man's knees. The problem with twenty-somethings is that when something serious happens and you really need them, or even when you just need them to know enough not to bust your balls, they tend to go a little haywire.
"So what are we doing tonight?" she asks me.
"Tonight I have to go see my father."
"Oh, again?"
"What do you mean by 'again'?"
"No, no, it's nothing, but you already went over there yesterday and the day before, and since we said we were going out tonight with Susanna and Marco ..."
"Oh, I'm sorry, do you mind if we do it tomorrow night?"
"Tomorrow night I have to go to the gym."
"The day after tomorrow?"
"I have theater."
"Couldn't you just miss one class?"
"Listen to you! You won't give up your things, but I'm supposed to ..."
"My things? My father's tumor isn't just one of my things, it's a tragedy! A nightmare!"
After I finish going haywire, I see the lights come back on in the windows in her head.
"Hey, don't get all worked up! Look, I understand perfectly, I'm happy that you're going to visit your father ... Don't you remember last week? Wasn't I the one who told you to go see him?"
Wasn't she the one? I don't know, I don't really think so. I think I said to her: "I'm going to see my father," and she was the one who was going out with her girlfriends anyway, and she said: "Oh, all right, you go ahead."
She goes on talking but it's pointless, she's twenty-eight years old and her parents are in their fifties and go hiking in the mountains and run city marathons. What does she know about it. The idea of death and disease is light years away. And right now so am I.
I find a parking spot after driving around the hospital three times. I walk through a dreary little park at a pace that falls well short of brisk. In the past few days, the visits with my father have become agonizing. Every time I cross the threshold of the hospital room, I hope to see a smile on his face but every time his gloom has just deepened. He's in pain. He's frequently delirious. Watching him going through his death throes without a chance to do anything even remotely helpful is killing me. I walk straight toward the main entrance of the hospital, while a part of me is shitting his pants and loiters, wandering to and fro in the park. I climb up dark stairwells while at the same time I sit on a bench and take the sun. I head down the right hallway without allowing myself to be misled by the thousands of contradictory signs, and I simultaneously pet a little stray dog that sniffs the grass, sneezes, and forces me to smile. I take the smile to my father. I walk over to the bed with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddhist monk. The old man is thrashing in the bed, he's hallucinating. I lay a hand on his forehead and look him in the eye.
"How are you?" I ask him.
He swivels his eyes in my direction. My brain registers that blank gaze and catalogues it among the images I'll never be able to forget.
"Yesterday I was all right, but today just look at me ... what are they doing to me in here?" he says.
I cover him with the blanket, I say something reassuring, and I leave the room in search of a doctor. Instead, I find the grocery store clerk. He talks to me about critical condition, test results that are all over the chart, home care assistants, and palliative treatments. Nothing really makes sense right now. The only reason I'm standing here listening him is to avoid my father's gaze. We agree on a short course of rehabilitation that will allow me to take him back home, and I head back down the hospital corridor. The stray dog follows me and licks my hand, a strand of spiderweb glitters for an instant in the filtering sunlight and then I find the strength to enter the room, sit down, and perform a myriad of tasks that are completely useless in terms of alleviating my father's suffering and my own frustration. I straighten his covers, I check his IV, I take a look at his urine drainage bag — it's so full it's just short of popping. So I call the nurse who shows up all irritated and changes his bag, muttering angrily about the attendant who should have checked it but never bothered. My father tells me that his feet are itching. I pull the blanket back and look at them: they're covered with cracks, and I tell him to wait just a minute, I leave the hospital, I walk to the nearest pharmacy, I buy a moisture cream and, without any conscious awareness of all the things I did from when I left the room until when I returned, I start massaging his feet, I think I see a hint of a smile and I tell myself, there, now I can't stop, if I stop he'll be in pain and so I'll keep doing this for the rest of my life, and as these thoughts go through my mind, my eye wanders to the IV tube which is starting to fill with blood, I stop massaging his feet just long enough to call the nurse who bustles in all pissed off asking me what is it this time, I point to the blood in the IV tube, she picks up a syringe without a needle and shoots some liquid into the nozzle to clear it of blood, and my father jerks and barely manages to repress a cry of pain. Deep inside, from the bottom of my heart, I curse.
CHAPTER 2
I took my father home to his apartment and arranged for a modicum of home care. Then, drawing on my last remaining reserves of energy, I set about taking care of the outstanding issues with my automatic dispensers.
When I moved in with Alice, we exorcised the idea that our relationship might go sour by applying little stickers to all my things, labels that said "This belongs to me." "Come on, let's do it, that way when things come to an end, we won't be like other people who are ready to cut each other's throats over a cookbook," we told each other. And that's exactly how it was. Maybe, along with the stickers, we should have drawn up a list of hackneyed phrases not to use, but we forgot, so I found myself telling her that it wasn't about her, true enough, that I was going through a bad stretch and I just needed to have some time to myself, the absolute truth, and that I still loved her, which was a bald-faced lie.
And I circulated a rumor among the extended family that my father was looking for a lawyer who could help him draw up a will, which instantly convinced an elderly aunt and a cousin to volunteer a few hours of patient care every other day.
After moving my things over to my father's house, I take advantage of a morning with nothing to do and drive in the country, just to catch my breath. It's a beautiful day, bright and sunny, and as I drive the SUV I've borrowed from the dealership, I manage to leave behind me all of my scary thoughts. Every time I pull onto the highway and see a strip of asphalt stretching out in front of me, clear and unobstructed, I'm seized with a powerful impulse to take off, to go somewhere far, far away and forget about everything. While waiting for this lurking impulse to develop into an unbridled migratory instinct, I settle for a jaunt southward for an hour and forty minutes, my destination a "renovated farmhouse, three stories, five acres of farmland, immersed in the magnificent countryside," in the wording of the classified ad I'd read while watching over the old man as he slept. I'm curious to see what's wrong with this piece of heaven on earth that costs only about as much as a 900-square-foot apartment on the outskirts of town. I mentally run down the list of possible answers to the riddle. For instance, the renovated farmhouse is actually a tumbledown hovel that's recently been repainted. Or the five acres of farmland is actually a sheer, rubble-strewn hillside where not even a mountain goat would venture. Maybe "immersed in the magnificent countryside" is a description that applies to one of the four sides, while the other three overlook, reading from left to right, an industrial oil refinery, a drainage canal, and a luxuriant gypsy trailer park.
They're excellent thoughts, and they manage to distract me from the crux of the matter: why am I going to look at this farmhouse?
We are a Plan B generation. Working in this country is such a disaster zone that, even if a miracle happens and you manage to get a job in the field you studied, after two years you're sick and tired and you start working on your Plan B. Almost invariably, that involves a bed-and-breakfast in the countryside, at least when you're as disgusted with life in the city as you are with your job. It's the mirage of a better, healthier life, with more free time on your hands. More time to think, more time for it to slowly dawn on you that you're still unhappy, that work had nothing to do with it and neither did the city. You moved to a new place and the first thing you put in your suitcase when you left were your problems. And now here you are, on your lovely hilltop, immersed in the unspoiled countryside. You dreamt of a village where everyone's friendly and sweet but you're surrounded by the same assholes as ever, with the one difference that you can't leave home without always finding them underfoot.
A highway sign announces that from this point forward, the word "Lazio" should be considered a typo that's been crossed out with a red diagonal slash. The correct term from now on will be "Campania."
CHAPTER 3
The GPS navigator, which I've learned to mistrust implicitly, guides me onto a dirt road that cuts through the middle of a vast field of tomato plants. The SUV bounces and jerks indecorously over the potholes. On page six of the brochure, at the bottom right corner under the photograph of the suspension, the copy reads: "Raised suspension to easily face up to the challenge of even the most grueling off-road environments." That's bullshit, right there. I slow down to avoid cracking my raised suspension and, certain that I must have made a wrong turn, I start looking around for a stretch of road wide enough to make a three-point turn and retrace my route. But right after a curve in the road the farmhouse comes into view. From a distance it looks good, at first glance. There are no oil refineries or gypsy trailer parks in sight. The land is on a slight slope and it's run to seed, but it wouldn't take a lot of work to make this place beautiful. Standing in front of the farmhouse, next to a parked SUV and a Swedish station wagon, are two guys looking at me. The taller of the two must be the real estate agent. Six feet tall, about 185 pounds, a bodybuilder, expensive-looking suit, wraparound sunglasses, a goatee long out of fashion, a little bit of a redneck. The other guy is short and skinny, with bald spots and a suit his mother must have bought him. So he has to be the owner.
I park next to the station wagon, get out, and before walking over to the agent I click on the car alarm with the remote control. I only realize how idiotic that appears when I hear the double beep echo away into the silence of the deserted countryside. I pretend nothing happened and reach out to grip the hand that the bodybuilder extends to me.
"Are you from the real estate agency?" he asks me.
"No, actually I thought ... Are you both here for the ad?" I ask, with a smile.
"Yeah, and I got here first," says the skinny short guy, and already I don't like him.
"Have you seen anything? What do you think of it?" I ask.
"Just took a little walk right around here. It looks pretty. It's perfect if you want to bury yourself in the countryside," the bodybuilder responds.
Now that we've exhausted all conversational gambits, I decide to escape the ensuing silence by taking a stroll around the building.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Alfa Romeo 1300"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Edizioni E/O.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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