“Because St Francis was good,” the girl had replied.
“…in eighty-year-olds the figure reaches 70 per cent. In any case, from now on you’ll have to undergo regular PSA tests, but I feel moderately optimistic in your case.”
When they left the museum, it was still snowing, although less hard. She had put her arm through his as if afraid of getting lost. They had taken shelter in a café near the Naschmarkt, where they had laughed, drunk hot tea and eaten Sachertorte.
“…without a prostate you will encounter a number of small inconveniences…”
Then they had ended up in a pension behind the opera house and made love all night, while outside it had snowed without respite.
“Such as impotence…”
Where did that memory come from? Did the prostate have a memory and was this one of its reminiscences? Why had he never thought of it again until today? Were they his memories or his organ’s memories? The Master wondered.
“Are you listening to me?”
The Master left the girl sleeping in the unmade bed in the pension, and nodded at The Urologist.
“I was saying that without a prostate you will encounter a number of inconveniences, such as impotence. But at your age certain appetites are probably…”
The Urologist said this as if he were a priest hearing the dying confession of a whoremonger. The Master looked at him sternly.
“Impotence, and incontinence.”
“Am I going to piss in my pants?”
“You see, since the demolition phase of the prostatectomy, the bladder, the distal urethra and the periurethral and perineal muscles have remained intact. Except that we had to reconstruct your urinary tract, establishing communication between the bladder and the remaining urethral segment. This will cause you problems with urination.”
The Master got off the spaceship. “Are you saying I’ll have to wear incontinence pads?”
“You’ll have to undergo rehabilitative treatment to strengthen the muscle fibres and the perineal region.”
“Doctor, I’m in the running for a very important prize. There’s a strong possibility I’ll win it. I can’t risk pissing myself onstage.”
“It’s just a matter of doing some very simple exercises, for instance, interrupting the flow of urine.”
“…”
“When you feel the urge, go to the toilet and try to interrupt the flow suddenly… then start again… then interrupt it again, on and off, on and off… like a tap… Treat it like a game.”
“…”
“Another very useful exercise worth repeating is this.”
The Urologist stood up, walked solemnly to the middle of the room and planted his feet firmly on the floor.
“Back straight, legs open…”
The professor threw his weight onto his thighs, bent his knees and slowly crouched, down, down, down, as if intending to shit on the carpet.
“Then pull yourself up by contracting the perineum.”
The Urologist got back into a standing position, although not without a certain effort. A bead of sweat glistened on his tanned forehead. Then he straightened his coat and sat down again.
“Another exercise, which also involves contracting the perineum, is to contract it as much as possible and then…” The Urologist coughed twice, sharply. “Or else blow your nose. All these exercises involve the abdominal muscles. The important thing is to keep up the contraction. Is that clear?”
“Almost. How do I contract the perineum?”
“Clench your buttocks, damn it! Now we really should end there. Oh! Perhaps before you go you’d be so kind as to inscribe something… for my wife, you know, she has all your books.”
The fact that she had all of them didn’t mean she’d read them, but The Master kept this thought to himself.
The Urologist opened a drawer and took out a book still in its cellophane wrapper, which he proceeded to tear off without any embarrassment.
The book, thought The Master, was like one of those whales that die choked by plastic bags. On the cover was an erotic scene, a detail from a Greek vase. It looked less like a book than a brochure for a guided tour of an Etruscan tomb. And then they complain my books don’t sell, thought The Master. Angrily, he grabbed the pen.
“To?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“Oh, Sara. But, well, actually… it isn’t for my wife… Write ‘to Alessia’, or rather, no, ‘to Alessia’ sounds wrong, write ‘for Alessia’.”
So now as well as teaching me how to pee, he also has to teach me how to write, thought The Master.
Behind the trendy glasses, The Urologist’s eyes oozed self-satisfaction.
The biro traced a nervous inscription on the title page. As he autographed the copy with a grimace, he was already trying to contract his perineum—or at least to clench his buttocks…
“My secretary will give you an information leaflet summarizing the exercises, along with a measuring cup and a urination diary.”
“A measuring cup? And what the hell is a urination diary?”
“It’s a diary in which you note down the frequency with which you urinate, and the volume of urine you expel. It’s a very useful tool. Please keep it with you at all times and write everything down, symptoms, sensations and so on… Anyway,” said The Urologist, “don’t worry, you have in front of you… I won’t say a bright future, but at least a future. Which isn’t to be sniffed at.”
He turned a dazzling smile on The Master and held out his hand. The Master shook it without vigour. As he left the
consulting
room, his steps made no noise on the carpet. It was as if he
were floating. Could a man without a prostate actually be lighter? How much did a prostate weigh?
The Master’s questions remained unanswered. He paid the secretary for the consultation: two more like this and the advance from The Small Publishing Company would be gone. The
secretary
handed over the urination diary—a little notebook with a dark cover—and an anonymous-looking plastic measuring cup. Of the two things, he couldn’t have said which was the more demeaning. The secretary came to his aid.
“Don’t worry, it comes in a bag,” she said, inserting the
measuring
cup into the top of the bag and immediately extracting it again, as if the bag could bite. Suddenly The Master had an idea. Instead of heading for the exit, he turned on his heels. The secretary watched him anxiously, unsure whether or not to intervene. Without knocking, he walked back into the consulting room. The Urologist, who was on the phone, instinctively looked up and covered the receiver with one hand.
“Excuse me for a moment… What is it?”
“Could you give me the scan?”
“What’s the matter, missing your prostate?”
There was a fearful thud, and glass showered the room like dew. The Beginner felt tiny fragments of glass frost his bare legs, and a weak current of air filled the room, made the curtains billow and lifted the corners of the tablecloth. Glass everywhere, on the carpet, on the cupboards, in the kitchen sink.
“Darling, where are you?”
The crash had woken The Girlfriend.
“Here.”
He gently moved the curtain, then drew it right back.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
He walked barefoot, a fragment of glass lodged in his right foot. He brought the foot up to the height of his left knee, twisting the sole inwards, and extracted the splinter. A small amount of blood came out. He didn’t feel any pain, although he probably would later. But first of all, before anything else, there was that dark patch in the middle of the terrace. Whatever it was.
He advanced towards the dark—or rather, black—patch—or rather, mass—in a corner—or rather, in the middle—of the
terrace,
two metres—or rather, one metre from him, and two from what remained of the pane of glass.
“What was it?”
“…”
A huge black bird lay lifeless on the terrace, its half-open beak looking like a congealed streak of lava, its eyes a cobalt blue, its stiff legs pointing skywards, its wings outspread as if crucified.
“That’s disgusting… What is it?”
Standing in the doorway, her breasts pushing against her nightdress, The Girlfriend looked on in horror as The Beginner walked towards the bird. He was silent for a while.
“A parrot.”
The police helicopter flew over the ring road around Rome,
bestowing
its blessing from the sky on a sesquipedalian traffic jam between the Cassia Bis and Flaminia exits. From above, the tailback looked like a steel lizard sleeping in the sun. Among the vehicles caught in the bottleneck, there were two which deserve closer attention.
Neither of the two drivers was in a position to know the reason for the tailback. It was in fact due to a rather delicate operation: the removal by the fire brigade of a nest of white storks (
Ciconia
ciconia
) from a speed camera. The presence of the winged couple had interfered with the sophisticated equipment, which explained why it had recently been malfunctioning, resulting in a large number of fines and an equally large number of appeals.
Now although the drivers of the two cars worthy of closer attention were as unaware of each other as they were of the storks, there was a relationship between them, one that was both coincidental and elective. Not so much because the two of them were listening to the same song on the same radio station, which can happen, but because they were two of the three finalists for the same Prize.
The Writer looked at the woman on the seat beside him. The woman was silent. The Writer raised the volume of the radio:
…y me pintaba las manos y la cara de azul…
…pienso che un sueño parecido no volverá mas…
The Beginner lowered the volume of the radio and looked at the cardboard box on the seat beside him. In the mysterious darkness of the box, something was about to happen.
All this was going in inside these two cars caught up in the traffic jam. The Writer was on his way somewhere, The Beginner was coming back from somewhere. But where?
“To the sea?”
“To the lake.”
He had never liked lakes. They had always made him feel really sad, like empty restaurants, cover bands, fifty-year-olds on motorbikes and inflatable swimming pools in gardens. He had only said it for fear of meeting someone who might know him, which would have been quite likely if he had headed for Fregene or Circeo on a fine day like today.
She was passing through the city, or so she had said, and had hired a car.
“Would you like to drive?”
“You drive on the way there. I’ll drive on the way back.”
She had agreed to this pointless arrangement with a touch of amusement, as if it were one of the games they had played when they were younger. The Writer had wanted her to drive so that he could get a better look at her. If only she’d take off those sunglasses! Then The Writer could read her intentions in her eyes.
How many years had passed since he had last seen those eyes, sometimes as calm and clear as an Alpine lake, sometimes green and sparkling like a beetle’s wings?
They had taken the Via Cassia, heading north. As she drove, she occasionally pushed back the blonde hair that kept falling over her face and nervously touched the frames of the big Bakelite glasses that only a diva could have worn with the same nonchalance.
He would have liked to talk, to tell her everything that had happened between the last time they had seen each other and now, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to find the words (which may seem strange for a writer, but there it is). And not only because of the inhibition her beauty had always exerted on him, and not even because he did not really know where to start—but rather because something was interfering with his thoughts. And that something was the feeling that he had forgotten something important, as if he had not switched the gas off before leaving home, or had left his car with the headlights on. The food for The Baby? No, that wasn’t really a problem, The Filipino would pick it up (talking of whom, was he back yet?).
As they got farther from the city and the landscape became less oppressive, the unpleasant sensation also began to abandon him, as if the origin of the sensation were the city itself, or something undefined but now too distant to harm him. Warehouses gave way to cultivated fields, vineyards and vegetable gardens, villages with curious names, cut in two by the road like watermelons split on market stalls, old men on benches in squares or at the tables of bars looking impassively at the passing lorries.
The car with The Writer and the mystery woman on board was rolling down the Via Cassia on a journey without direction and without time.
This may be the moment to reveal the identity of the mystery woman: she was the great love of The Writer’s youth, and for the purposes of her fleeting appearance in this story we shall call her The Old Flame, not so much because she’s old, no, that wouldn’t be very tactful, but because it’s an old story, an affair that once flamed passionately and is now like a lamp with its wick dry.
We can talk freely about her, given that The Second Wife is in her office and can’t hear us. She is sitting at her desk, replying to the mountain of e-mails that have accumulated during the night and the early hours of the morning.
Some time later, just before The Second Wife stepped away from her desk for her lunch break, The Writer and The Old Flame were walking beside the lake, which was streaked with silvery light.
They were walking unhurriedly, already drawn into the tranquil lakeside rhythm. They sat down first at the tables of a café, then moved to those of a restaurant, one of the many which, with the somewhat homespun optimism so common in the provinces, had already put tables outside.
They drank house white and ate seafood salad (even though they were at the lake) and fish (even though they were still at the lake) with potatoes.
At last she took off her glasses, and he saw her eyes. They were girlish eyes, just as he remembered them, still bright, but obscured somehow by an invisible veil of sadness, like a pale sun behind a cloud of ash.
“I read your last book,” she said. “It was very moving.” Then she added, “There’s something I have to know.”