Andrea Camilleri - The Age Of Doubt

Was it possible the same thing was happening to her as was happening to him?

Was it possible the proverbial coup de foudre had struck them both?

He felt angry at himself for thinking of a cliché (even if it was French), but nothing more original came to mind.

And he began to feel weak in the knees, torn in opposite directions, happy and scared at once.

Why don’t you help me? he thought of asking her.

But as he was asking for help without saying anything, he wished he could embrace her and hold her tight.

And to keep from doing this, he had to make such an effort that a few droplets of sweat formed on his brow.

Then he did the only thing that could be done, if he was really the man he thought he was, even though it cost him great physical pain, a sort of knife blade piercing his chest.

“Well, given the fact that we’ve met,” he said indifferently, as if not having understood a word she’d said or grasped the suffering in those words, “let me take advantage of the fact and ask a favor of you, assuming you’re able to do it for me.”

“Go ahead.”

She seemed disappointed and pleased at the same time.

“My second-in-command on the force is a man named Mimì Augello, who’s not only an excellent policeman but a very good-looking guy who has a way with women.”

“And?” asked Laura, somewhat taken aback by that preamble.

“I thought it could be very useful to have him meet the owner of the yacht.”

“I see. You think that if they hit it off, your man might manage to get some information out of her?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you mind telling me why you’re so fixated on this yacht? You should know, at any rate, that the boat has undergone many Customs inspections and they’ve never found anything abnormal.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t really explain, not any better than that. It’s just, well, a feeling, an impression…”

Damn! He was supposed to make like the hunting dog on the scent of its prey, not tell her the whole story of Vanna!

“And these impressions of yours, are they always correct?” she asked with a hint of irony.

“So for you she’s just a rich widow whose only form of amusement is to sail the seas, ending up, from time to time, in the captain’s bed?”

“Why not? What’s so strange about that?”

“All right then. We’ll just leave it at that.”

“Wait a second. Just because I have a different opinion from yours doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you. Tell me how I can be of use to you.”

“You have to arrange things so that Augello can meet Signora Giovannini.”

She remained silent for a spell.

“If you don’t feel like it…,” Montalbano began.

“No, I do, I do. But, before we go any further, are you sure the people on the yacht won’t know who he is?”

“Absolutely certain.”

“So the question is how to get them to meet. It won’t be easy, you know. I’ll have to bring him with me aboard the yacht; but first I have to find a good excuse for boarding the ship myself.”

“I was thinking you could introduce him as some sort of specialist who needed to go aboard to check something.”

Laura started laughing.

“Well, you can’t get any clearer than that!”

“Sorry, but I don’t-”

“Let me think for a minute. I’ll come up with something, I’m sure of it.”

And she reached out to drink more wine. Montalbano stopped her.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit much, on an empty stomach? Would you like to eat something?”

“Yes,” she said. Then, suddenly, “No. I’m going to leave.”

She stood up.

“No, come on,” said Montalbano.

She sat back down. Then stood up again.

“I’m leaving.”

“Please!”

She sat back down.

She was like a puppet controlled by invisible strings.

Montalbano went into the kitchen and opened the oven. Inside a casserole were four large mullets cooked in a special sauce of Adelina’s own invention.

He lit the oven and turned it on high, so the fish would warm up fast.

Then he opened the refrigerator, stuck in another bottle of wine, and pulled out a plateful of olives, cheese, and salted sardines. From a drawer he extracted a tablecloth, napkins, and cutlery and set these all on the kitchen table, to be taken outside momentarily onto the veranda, where he would set the table.

At this point, wanting to make sure the mullet weren’t burning, he opened the oven and grabbed the pan, and as he was still bent over he felt the weight of Laura’s body press against his back as she silently embraced him, joining her hands over his chest.

He froze in that position, half bent over, feeling the blood begin to course ever faster in his body and fearing that his pounding heartbeat could be heard in the room, loud as a jackhammer.

He didn’t even notice that the scalding-hot handles on the casserole were burning his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” Laura said softly.

And immediately she detached her body from his, unfolding her hands very slowly, letting them slide away as in a long caress.

He heard her walk out of the kitchen.

Stunned, flummoxed, and numb, Montalbano set the casserole down on the table, turned on the faucet to let the cold water run over his scorched fingers, then grabbed the tablecloth and silverware and went to set the table outside.

But he stopped in the kitchen doorway.

He had only five or six more steps to take to reach the veranda and perhaps find happiness there.

But he felt scared. Those few yards were more daunting than a transatlantic crossing. They would take him very far from the life he had lived up to that moment and would certainly transform his existence completely. Could he handle that, at his age?

No, there was no time for questions. To hell with doubt, conscience, reason.

He closed his eyes, the way people do before jumping off a cliff, and resumed walking.

On the veranda there was no sign of Laura.

At that moment he heard the sound, very near, of a car driving off.

Laura had left the same way she had come.

And so he collapsed on the stone bench.

The lump in his throat almost prevented him from breathing.

He finally managed to doze off at around four o’clock in the morning. From the moment he’d gone to bed he’d done nothing but toss and turn, repeatedly getting up and lying back down. The Sicilian dictum said that of all things, the bed is best-if you can’t sleep you still can rest. But that night he’d found neither sleep nor rest, only discomfort, heartache alternating with melancholy and self-pity. “Let go of it, and it’s lost,” went another proverb. In his case, it was lost forever. He remembered a poem by Umberto Saba. Normally poetry helped him get through his worst moments. In this case, however, it merely twisted the knife in the wound. The poet compared himself to a dog chasing a butterfly’s shadow, and like the dog, he had to content himself with the shadow of a girl he was in love with. Because he knew, disconsolate sadness / that such was the way / of wisdom [9] . But was it right, was it honest, to be wise in the face of love’s richness?

An hour after he had managed to fall asleep, his eyes were wide open again. As he woke up, for a second he was convinced that he had dreamt the scene between Laura and himself in front of the oven, but then the pain of his burnt fingers reminded him that it was all real.

Laura had been wiser than him.

Wiser or more frightened?

But running away from reality didn’t negate reality. It left it whole-indeed more solid than ever, because now they were both fully conscious of it.