Gianrico Carofiglio - A Walk in the Dark

While Emilio was talking, I felt a very strange, painful mixture of contentment, anger and melancholy. I’d suddenly realized something I’d been keeping carefully hidden from myself: it was a long time since I’d had a friend.

Maybe that’s normal, when you get to your forties. Everyone has their own affairs – family, children, separations, careers, lovers – and friendship is a luxury you can’t afford. Maybe real friendship is a luxury after you’re twenty.

Or maybe I’m talking bullshit. The fact remains, at that moment I came to the painful realization that I no longer had any friends.

But I was glad Emilio was here with me, glad the trial had been postponed, glad I’d decided to take an hour off.

“Let’s go and have a coffee.”

“Let’s go,” he said, again with that scared smile, which looked so incongruous on the face of a man who’d been in charge of crowd control for the Young Communists when they were fighting the fascists on the one hand and the independent trade unions on the other.

We sat down in a little bar on the edge of the old town. I had a cappuccino and a croissant, Emilio just coffee. After drinking it he lit an MS. He’d been smoking MSs since high school. They weren’t like Margherita’s ultra-slim, ultra-light cigarettes, which were easy to give up. They were a piece of history, a prism for the emotions, a kind of time machine.

When I said no thanks, with a simple gesture of the hand, almost pushing away the packet Emilio had offered me, I noted a kind of disappointment in my friend’s face.

Smoking together, I knew well, had always had a special meaning. Like a ritual of friendship.

We talked casually for a while, saying the kind of things you say to re-establish contact when a lot of time has passed, the kind of things you say to find your way again in a terrain that has become unfamiliar.

And so, casually, I asked him about his wife – I’d never met her, all I knew was that Emilio had got married six or seven years earlier, to a colleague in Rome – the usual, commonplace question you ask when you’re about forty.

“Are you separated or are you still holding on?”

As I asked the question, I felt a chill descend. Even before Emilio had replied, even before I’d finished saying the words, which were out now and which I couldn’t retract.

“Lucia’s dead.”

The scene turned black and white. Silent and deafening. And suddenly devoid of meaning.

A sentence of Fitzgerald’s came into my mind, though I couldn’t remember it exactly. In the dark night of the soul, it’s always three in the morning.

It got mixed up with fragments of a non-existent conversation in my head, which was running on empty. When did she die? Why? Oh, her name was Lucia. That’s nice. It’s a lovely name, Lucia. I’m sorry. How old was she? Was she beautiful? How are you, Emilio? My condolences. We have to move on. Why didn’t anyone tell me? But who was there to tell me? Who?

Oh shit, shit, shit.

“She got ill and died in three months.”

Emilio’s voice was calm, almost toneless. As I looked at him in silence, not knowing what to say, he told me his story, and Lucia’s. A woman of thirty-four who one day in April went to her doctor to get the results of some tests, and found out her time was almost over. Even though she still had so many things to do. Important things, like having a baby.

“You know, Guido, when something like that happens you think about so many things. And what you think about most is all the time you wasted. You think of the walks you never took, the times you didn’t make love, the times you lied. The times you measured out your emotions like so much small change. I know it’s corny, but you wish you could go back in time and tell her how much you love her, you think about all the times you didn’t tell her and should have. In other words, always. It’s not just that you don’t want her to die. It’s the fact that you wish the time hadn’t been wasted like that.”

He was speaking in the present tense. Because his time had been wasted.

He told me everything, calmly. As if he wanted to exhaust the subject. He told me how she’d changed, in those few weeks, how her face had grown smaller, her arms thinner, her hands weaker.

I was silent, thinking that I’d never before in my life witnessed grief in such a terrible, clear, pure form.

Such a desperate form.

Then it was time to say goodbye.

We stood up from the table and took a few steps together. Emilio seemed calm. I wasn’t. He took out his wallet, rummaged in it for a bit, and took something out. It was a ticket from a coin laundromat, the kind that were starting to spring up in the city, with yellow signs and an American name. He wrote his phone number on it and gave it to me, and I handed him one of my stupid business cards. He told me to call him. In any case, he’d call me.

He seemed calm, but his eyes were somewhere else.

I let it ring three, four, five, six times. With every ring the urgency grew, and the anxiety. I was about to press the button to end the call, and try on the mobile, when from the other end I heard Margherita’s voice.

“Yes?”

An offhand tone, the tone of someone who’s leaving home to go to work. I was silent for a few moments, because suddenly I didn’t know what to say, and I had a lump in my throat.

“Who is that?”

“Me.”

“Oh. I was just on my way out, you caught me at the door. What is it? Are you in Lecce?”

“I wanted to tell you…”

“What?”

“I wanted to tell you…”

“Guido, what is it? Are you all right? Has something happened?” There was a slight note of alarm in her voice now.

“No, no. Nothing’s happened. I didn’t go to Lecce, the trial’s been postponed.”

I broke off, but this time she didn’t ask anything. She waited in silence.

“Margherita” – as I spoke, I realized I never called her by her name – “you remember that time you sent me a message on my mobile.. .”

She didn’t let me finish. “I remember. I wrote that meeting you was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me. It wasn’t true. It was the most wonderful.”

“I wanted to tell you the same thing. Well, not exactly the same. .. but I wanted to tell you that I can’t explain it to you now…” I was stammering.

“Guido, I love you. As I’ve never loved anyone in my life.”

I stopped stammering. “Thank you.”

“Thank you? You’re a strange guy, Guerrieri.”

“It’s true. Shall we eat out tonight?”

“Your treat?”

“Yes. Bye.”

“Bye. See you tonight.”

She hung up. I was standing on the corner of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and the Via Sparano. The shops were opening, trucks were unloading goods, people were walking with their heads down.

Thank you, I said again, to myself, and went on my way.

The next morning I went straight from home to the courthouse, for a trial. The charge: living off immoral earnings.

My client was a former model and porn film actress, accused of organizing a prostitution ring. She and two other women were the go-betweens for the girls and their clients. She used the telephone and the Internet and took a commission on all completed transactions. She herself serviced a few very select, very wealthy clients. She didn’t run a brothel or anything like that. She simply connected supply with demand. The girls worked from home, nobody was exploited, nobody got hurt.

With a commitment surely worthy of a better cause, the Public Prosecutor’s department and the police had spent months investigating this dangerous organization. They’d staked out the girls’ apartments, and picked up the clients on the way out. More than that, they’d intercepted phone calls and e-mails.