Gianrico Carofiglio - Reasonable Doubts

Confessing your wishes, your real wishes, even to yourself, is dangerous. If they can be realized, which they often can, stating them confronts you with your fear of trying. In other words, with your own cowardice. So you prefer not to think about them, or you tell yourself they’re impossible, and grown-up people don’t wish for impossible things.

That night I replied without hesitation. “When I was a little boy I used to say that I wanted to be a writer.”

“All right. And what colour is that wish?”

“Blue, I’d say.”

“What kind of blue?”

“Blue. I don’t know.”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand, like a schoolmistress dealing with a pupil who’s a bit thick. Then she stood up, left the kitchen and came back a minute later, with a book called The Great Atlas of Colours.

“There are two hundred colours here. Now choose your wish.”

She opened the book at the first page of the section on blues. There were lots and lots of little squares with the most incredible shades of blue. Under each one, a name. Some I’d never heard of, and not knowing the names I hadn’t even seen them. Things don’t exist unless you have names for them, I thought, as I started to leaf through the pages.

Prussian blue, turquoise, slate, dark sky blue, Provencal lavender blue, topaz blue, cold blue, powder blue, baby blue, indigo, French marine, ink, Mediterranean blue, sapphire, royal blue, clear cyan, fleur-de-lys, and many others.

“You mustn’t be approximate, otherwise your wishes won’t come true. Choose the exact colour of your wish.”

It only took me a few more seconds. “The exact colour is indigo,” I said.

She nodded, as if it was the answer she had expected. The right answer.

“Second wish.”

It was getting harder now, but again I didn’t hesitate.

“I’d like to have a child. Right now I’d say that’s a lot more unrealistic than the first wish.”

She looked at me strangely. She didn’t seem surprised, though. It was as if she’d expected that answer, too. “And what colour is it?”

I leafed through the book, then closed it. “Many, many colours.”

This time she didn’t insist on having me say the exact colour and didn’t make any comment. I liked the fact that she didn’t make any comment. I liked that naturalness, I liked the way everything seemed right, at that moment.

“The third one.”

“You told me one of the wishes can be a secret.”

“Yes.”

“This is the secret one.”

“All right. But you still have to tell me the colour, even if the wish is secret.”

Right. The wish is secret, not the colour. OK. I took the atlas and opened it at the section on reds.

Wine, crimson, vermillion, powder rose, red rose petal, modern coral, neon red, cerise, terracotta, garnet, flame, ruby, academy red, rust, radicchio, dark red, port.

“Crimson. I’d say crimson. Now it’s your turn.”

“I want Anna Midori to be happy and free. And that wish is leaf green.”

There was something in the way she said it that sent shivers down my spine.

“Then I’d like to know if Fabio is guilty or innocent. If he told me the truth or not. I’d like to know.” She hesitated. “This desire to know is brown, but it changes shade constantly. Sometimes it’s the colour of mahogany, sometimes it’s like leather, or tea, or bitter chocolate. Sometimes it turns almost black.” She looked me straight in the eyes.

“And the third one?”

“My third one’s a secret, too.”

“And what colour is it?”

She didn’t say anything, but leafed through the atlas to the end of the section on reds. My heart started beating slightly faster.

Just then, we heard a prolonged, heart-rending scream. Natsu put down her glass and rushed to her daughter’s room. I ran after her.

Midori was lying on her back, the sheets thrown off, the pillow on the floor. She had stopped screaming and was talking now in a laboured way, in an incomprehensible language, and trembling. Natsu put her hand on the girl’s forehead and told her Mummy was here, but she didn’t stop trembling, didn’t open her eyes, and kept talking.

Not even realizing what I was doing, I took Midori’s hand and said, “It’s all right, sweetheart. Everything’s all right.”

It was like magic. The girl opened her eyes, without seeing us. There was a look of astonishment on her face. She trembled one more time, said a few more words in that mysterious language, but calmly now, then closed her eyes again and let out one last sigh, like a sigh of relief. As if the malign force that had made her tremble had been sucked out of her at the touch of my hand. The sound of my voice.

I had caught her as she fell. I had saved her. I was the catcher in the rye.

If a body catch a body coming through the rye…

The line hung there in my head, like a magic formula. I had a hunch as to what had probably happened: the girl had confused me with her father and that had driven away the monsters. Natsu and I looked at each other, and I realized that she was thinking the same thing. I also realized, very clearly and very insistently, that I had rarely in my life had such a feeling of perfect intimacy.

We stayed there, in silence, for a few more minutes, just to be on the safe side. The girl was sleeping now, her face calm, her breathing regular.

Natsu put the pillow back in place and tucked her in. We didn’t talk until we were back in the kitchen.

“I told her her father had to go away on a business trip. A very long trip, abroad, and I didn’t know when he’d be back. I don’t know how, but she knew everything. Maybe she heard me talking on the phone to someone when I thought she was asleep. I don’t know. But one evening we were watching television and there was this scene in a film where policemen followed a robber and arrested him. Without looking at me, Midori asked me if that was how they’d arrested her daddy.”

She broke off. Clearly she didn’t like to tell – or remember – that story. She poured herself another rum. Then she realized she hadn’t asked me if I wanted one. I did, and poured one for myself.

“Obviously I asked her what she was thinking of. Her daddy was away on business, I said. She didn’t believe me, she replied, but that was the last time she asked about it. Since then, maybe two or three nights a week, she’s been having nightmares. The terrible thing about it is that she almost never wakes up. If she woke up I could talk to her, reassure her. But she doesn’t. It’s as if she’s a prisoner in a strange, frightening world. And I can’t enter it, I can’t save her.”

I asked her if she had taken Midori to see a child psychologist. A stupid question, I thought, as soon as I’d asked it. Of course she’d taken her to a psychologist.

“We go once a week. Gradually we’ve managed to get her to tell us her dreams…”

“Does she dream that they’re coming to get you, too?”

Natsu looked at me in surprise for a few moments. What did I know about what goes on in the head of a six-year-old girl? She nodded weakly.

“The psychologist says it’s going to take a long time. He says it was a mistake not telling her the truth from the start. He says we should be able to tell her eventually that her father is in prison. Unless her father is released before that. We decided to wait for the result of the appeal before making a decision about exactly how and when.”

When she said the result of the appeal I felt a hollow stab in the pit of my stomach.

“It isn’t going to be easy. You do realize that, I hope?”

She nodded.

I remembered my own childhood nightmares. I remembered nights spent with the light on, waiting to see the daylight filter through the shutters before I could finally sleep. I remembered other nights when the fear was so unbearable that I spent all night sleeping on a chair outside my parents’ bedroom, wrapped in a blanket. I was eight or nine. I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t ask to sleep in their bed, because I was too old. So, when the nightmares woke me, I would get up, take the blanket, drag a chair from the living room all the way to the door of my parents’ bedroom, would curl up on it, cover myself and stay there until dawn, when I would go back to my own little room.