The Silence of the Wave (13 page)

I sat down on the ground, discouraged. I felt very alone and very unhappy.

Everything all right, chief?

I turned and saw Scott trotting toward me.

“Scott. Thank goodness you’re here. Where have you been?”

Hey, chief, you look terrible. What’s happened?

It didn’t strike me at the time, but Scott is very good at not answering questions when he doesn’t want to.

“Ginevra was here. I waved to her and she didn’t wave back. I tried to go to her and she got away.”

Scott looked at me with an expression I couldn’t figure out.

“What’s happening, Scott? Ginevra hasn’t been to school for days, and now that I meet her here she runs away.”

I don’t know, chief, but I get the feeling something’s wrong on the other side
.

“What do you mean?”

The other side is when you’re awake, chief, you know. But that’s a territory I don’t know much about
.

Even though I was worried and sad about Ginevra, Scott’s words reminded me of things I’d been wanting to ask him for a while.

“Do you remember the first time we met, Scott?”

How could I ever forget, chief?

“You remember who was with me …”

Your father
.

Your father.

I don’t think anyone’s ever said those two words to me. Or at least I don’t remember. The few times when Mom talks about my father she says
your dad
, and with Grandma and Grandpa it’s the same. When I think about my father I almost always use the word
father
, but hearing someone else use it, I don’t know, it just gives me the idea that it’s true and not something that only exists in my memory and my imagination.

Your dad
isn’t a bad expression, not at all. But—it’s difficult to explain—it gives me the idea of a relationship between a man and a child. In other words, the only thing there’s ever been between him and me, which is over forever.

“Why did he leave and never come back?”

As I was finishing the sentence I realized I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the first dream where I met Scott or about when my father left home and never came back. And I realized I was angry—very angry—with him, because he had gone and never come back. In the real world, or in the dream, or in both.

Scott said nothing and continued looking at me with the same serious expression as before.

“You know my father was a writer?”

Yes chief, your father and I know each other well
.

“If you know each other well, why don’t you ever let me see him? I really need to talk to him.”

Your father is always around here somewhere, even though you can’t always see him. There are things he has to tell you, but he doesn’t know how
.

“What does he have to tell me?”

Now Scott didn’t just seem serious, he seemed sad and even uncertain—which was unlike him—about what to do.

“What does my father have to tell me, Scott?”

He sighed and maybe made up his mind to reply. But at that precise moment I woke up. I tried to get to sleep again and go back into the dream to hear that reply, but it was impossible.

It’s always impossible.

When the moment came to drink the Cabernet they had ordered and poured in their glasses, Roberto hesitated for a moment, and Emma noticed.

“You’re not teetotal, are you? No, you can’t be, you had a spritz.”

“It’s just that I’m still on medication and apparently you have to be careful not to mix it with alcohol. I’ve already had one drink … But it’s all right, there’s no problem, I’ll drink the wine but won’t take any medication tonight. The doctor said I can, from time to time. Even though I’ve never done it before, and to be honest the idea makes me a bit nervous. Well, if worst comes to worst, I won’t sleep tonight.”

“Still on medication? How long have you been seeing the doctor?”

“I’ve been going since …”

Again that unpleasant sensation of not being able to locate things in time. How long had he been seeing the
doctor? He floundered, as he had when he’d been trying to remember the year his mother had died.

He had started seeing the doctor just after the end of summer.

Yes, in September. It was April now, which made seven months, give or take.

“Seven months, more or less.”

And what day is today? Monday, of course, because he’d been to the doctor’s and should have met Emma there, but she hadn’t gone. It seemed to him as if it wasn’t just a few hours that had passed since he’d been getting ready to go out, but days, quite a few days in fact. The feeling was so strong that Roberto wondered if it actually had been several days and he was getting confused, caught irreparably now in this personal trap of time. But, to go back to the question, what day was it in April? What date?

Again that sense of panic, that impression of being lost in unknown territory. A place where monstrous entities might be hiding behind familiar everyday objects. Entities that could jump on you or eat you up. He couldn’t reconstruct what day it was—it must be round about the middle of April—and thought of looking at his mobile. But he would have had to take it out of his pocket and actually look at it, and that struck him as impolite and somehow cowardly. Tomorrow he would buy a calendar and make a note of what day it was, every day. And little by little he would reconstruct the
chronology of the past few months, and then of the past few years, of his life.

“What day is today?”

“Monday, April eighteenth. Why?”

“Every now and again I get mixed up. And yes, I am taking various medications.”

“I stopped taking the heavy stuff a few months ago. I still take a dozen drops of Minias in the evening, though. The doctor says that’s all right, that it’s important to sleep and that a few drops of tranquilizer never hurt anybody.”

Roberto was a little surprised by this light, cheerful way of dealing with the subject. In the end he raised his glass in a toast, Emma responded, and they drank. She was looking at him and he couldn’t interpret her expression but he liked it.

Everything came at the same time: plates and bowls with rice, naan bread, chicken tikka masala, lamb curry, vegetables.

Emma flung herself on the food as if just coming off a long fast, and for about ten minutes they did not talk much.

They emerged from silence as they were waiting for dessert.

“So, to sum up: you said you don’t act anymore?”

“I suppose you’d like to know what I do.”

“If that isn’t confidential information.”

“I’m a shop assistant.” She said it with a slight but perceptible note of aggressiveness in her voice.

“I’m sorry?”

“My friends all get angry when I say that. They say it’s a way to feel sorry for myself and that I’m not a shop assistant. Let’s say I’m a high-class shop assistant, but I’m still a shop assistant.”

“Maybe you should give me a few more clues.”

“When I realized I couldn’t and didn’t want to be an actress anymore, I started looking for a completely different kind of job. The problem was that there wasn’t anything I knew how to do. There still isn’t. Apart from singing a bit, and producers aren’t exactly lining up to sign me up for a record deal. Anyway, I had to find something suitable for someone who doesn’t know how to do anything. I put the word out and, after a few ridiculous propositions, a friend called me. Actually he was a friend of a friend, and he told me he was about to open a kind of art gallery, or rather a cross between an art gallery and a high-class furniture shop. Paintings, sculpture, furniture, objects. Would I be interested in working there? Of course I would, but I wasn’t any kind of expert, either about art or about furniture. High-class or otherwise.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He’s a self-made man. A good man in his way, but not exactly sophisticated. He said he didn’t want me for my expertise. He said, and here I quote, that I was dishy, I had a
fairly
well-known face and knew how to deal with people.”

“And what did you say?”

“Overcoming my annoyance at that bit about being
fairly
well-known, I told him we could talk about it. We met and, to cut a long story short, I agreed. And I made the right decision. It isn’t the life I’d dreamed about when I was studying to be an actress, but the work isn’t hard, and I get to meet interesting people in pleasant surroundings. The wages are nothing to write home about, but I’ve lowered my standards compared with the past. And I don’t have to ask my parents for money to provide for my son, to pay the doctor, to go to the movies or a few concerts. But I never go to the theater. I still don’t think I can bear being in the audience and not up there on the stage.”

“The theater was your passion?”

“It was my passion. I did quite a bit of it, I even played Viola in
Twelfth Night
, but let’s be honest about it: I was very average as an actress. And when I was a little girl and dreamed about being an actress, I didn’t dream about being
average
. For years I looked for and found all kinds of explanations for why I was so average. The most obvious one only became clear to me when I stopped, or rather some time after I’d stopped: I just wasn’t talented enough.”

Roberto noticed at that moment that the waiter had a slight limp and produced a kind of syncopated tapping, that there was music in the background, and that the door of the restaurant made an unpleasant
squeaking sound when it opened and closed. It was as if a muffler had been taken off the surrounding sounds.

“Now you’re wondering why I stopped. Am I wrong?”

“No, you aren’t wrong.”

“Maybe I’ll tell you next time. If we go too fast we risk hurting ourselves.”

Hurting ourselves. Hurting yourself. Let’s not hurt ourselves. Don’t hurt yourselves, children. I hurt myself, mommy. It hurts. What did I do wrong to hurt myself, daddy? Was I bad?

Daddy.

Bad.

Bad.

Words. Fragments of glass, cutting.

Roberto spoke slowly, choosing with care the few elementary words of the question. Cautiously, as if he were walking on a wire or handling sharp, dangerous objects.

“What year is your son in?”

“He’s in middle school, but he’s a year ahead. He’ll be twelve in May. Now they say we ought to let them play longer, that it isn’t a good idea to send them to school too early. At the time, though, they told me he was so good, so precocious, it was a pity not to let him gain a year. If I could do it all over again, I’d make him go to school normally. What about you? Do you have a wife, children? Tell me about your life.”

Again the tapping of the limping waiter. Much louder than before. Very loud. Too loud. Except that now the waiter was nowhere near them. Pins and needles. Nerves on edge. Elusive reflexes. Are you mad? Maybe, but basically we all are. A wife, no, certainly not. Children? Certainly not. Certainly not. Certainly not.

“No. I’ve never been married.” He heard his own voice. It came from God knows where and had an unusual solidity. Maybe I came close to it, he thought of saying, just to add something. But he didn’t want to.

“And you told me you’re a carabiniere.”

“Yes.”

“But something like a captain, an officer?”

“I’m a marshal.”

“Wow, that’s impressive,” she said with an ironic smile. The same one, it seemed to Roberto, that she’d had in that commercial for condoms. “Of course, when I hear the word
marshal
I think of a man in a rather ridiculous uniform, with a paunch and a big moustache.”

He felt a slight pang of annoyance over the ‘rather ridiculous uniform.’ But that brought him back to the table and the conversation, which was a good thing.

“The marshal in charge of the station where I had my first posting was pretty much like that.”

“And what exactly do you do, as a carabiniere?”

He tried to think of an answer as quickly as possible. Tell the truth. Tell a pack of lies. Mix truth and lies. In other words, what he had always done.

“Now, to tell the truth, nothing. I’m on leave for health reasons. I don’t know where they’ll put me when I go back. If I go back.”

“Because you went mad?” The same smile as before.

“Because they noticed. I was mad before, but I was better at hiding it.” That had come out well.

“And before they noticed?”

For a few seconds Roberto was again aware of a shift in the axis of reality in this conversation. The question—’before they noticed?’—even though part of their humorous banter seemed to him a serious and pertinent one. It fact, it
was
serious and pertinent. Emma knew something about him and was calling him to account. She knew some of the things he had done, things he had never admitted to anyone, not even the doctor. Maybe she also knew some of the things he hadn’t had the courage to confess even to himself. Roberto wavered in fear before escaping that wave of folly and managing to respond. Then the coordinates of the conversation returned to normal.

“I was in a special operations group, and worked undercover for many years.”

“You mean you infiltrated gangs, that kind of thing?”

“Yes, that’s exactly it. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t really talk about it, but I don’t suppose you have many acquaintances who are international cocaine traffickers. And besides, I’ve finished with that work forever. Even if they take me back.”

“Why have you finished with it forever? Is it something to do with the problems that brought you to the doctor?”

“I’d say so.” He was behaving himself. He wasn’t telling lies. He was moving cautiously along the thin ridge separating truth from lies.

They fell silent. Roberto looked Emma in the face, following the line of her cheek all the way from her cheekbone to her mouth.

She drank some wine and wiped a drop from her lips with the edge of her napkin. “You don’t have to answer. I told you I wasn’t ready to talk about my story; I assume it’s the same for you.”

“It’s hard to talk about undercover work. It’s all about playing a part, a role. The problem is, you have to play it for a long time, for months, sometimes even years. The people you spend most of your time with—the criminals—are the same people you’re going to have arrested. They think of you as a colleague and sometimes a friend, but you’re working to put them in prison. It’s easy to lose your balance when you live like that for a long time.”