Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

For a frontal collision with a truck in which no one else would come to any harm, the coast road was out of the question. Heavy trucks would be unlikely to drive there, and it was also true that at the time in question there would be far too much traffic. For this plan the only possible road was the one via Molassana to Chiávari. He would have to assume that trucks drove there on Monday afternoons. It was disagreeable to him that his terrible scheme depended on other people and their temporal plans. Immediately, before it disappeared in darkness and silence, his own time would have to cross the time of others. When he set the map down on the seat beside him and lit a cigarette, Perlmann was overcome with nausea at the unbridled self-involvement expressed in such thoughts.

The handbrake was pulled up tight, and was only released the third time he pushed the button. As if in a dream , he thought, as he steered the car uncertainly out of the car park. He drove like a beginner, and very soon he had hit the curb and cut off someone’s right of way.

Judging by the map, the turn-off to Molassana was to the east of the center, so he drove first along the industrial plants and then the harbor, down a deserted road with dilapidated houses, dead construction sites and mountains of rubble. In spite of the radiant weather it was an oppressive backdrop, and he drove so quickly over the uneven cobbles and the many potholes that several times the steering wheel was knocked out of his hand. He saw no signs for the center, and when it was all becoming impossible he discovered that he was already on the way to Genova Nervi. He started sweating and took off his jacket. It wasn’t that bad, after all. He had just lost a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes at most. He turned and took the next road that led into a residential district. ‘Straight ahead,’ said the sulky gas station attendant when Perlmann asked the way.

Immediately, it seemed to him, he found himself in one of the squares that he had passed – it was an eternity ago – on the way to the record shop. He hesitantly drove on, turned at random into the next street, had to do a loop because of the one-way system and ended up in the same square. The city center was curiously quiet this Sunday, there was no sign of the industrial fair, and he had to chase after the few passers-by to ask them the way.

‘Keep going along the river,’ an old man told him at last, dressed in his Sunday best and creeping past the dark shop windows with his walking stick. Only now did Perlmann see the river on the map. Annoyed with himself, he drove in the direction indicated. At a bus terminal he asked a driver.

‘Molassana is a well-known part of Genoa, a suburb; nobody needs a road sign,’ the driver replied to Perlmann’s reproachful remark, looking at him as if he had lost his marbles.

Behind the wheel, Perlmann cursed the misleading representation on the map, and only calmed down when he crossed the river, where there was in fact a road sign. He had just put his foot down on the accelerator when he braked and turned off to the right. I can’t get lost tomorrow. That would be hell. For a while he tried to reconstruct the direct route here in his head, cutting out the various diversions. But it didn’t work. The toing and froing had been too confusing. Five past one. He’ll be landing in exactly twenty-six hours . He took a few hasty drags, threw the cigarette out the window and drove back to the port road.

Driving back to Molassana, he stopped repeatedly and memorized the crucial spots. First of all there were the two ironmongers’ shops, which were precisely identical: the same size, both on a corner, both with rusty shutters. If you turned by the first, the one-way system forced you back to the port, while a similarly inconspicuous turning near the second led towards the center. On no account turn at the first . Next he had to be careful that at the square where the building with the portico stood he didn’t – as he had before – follow the tram tracks to the right, but take the bend to the left. At the construction site with the diversion he got lost twice: you had to turn off immediately past the bakery to get back to the main road. And finally, the place with all the bus stops was critical: you couldn’t follow the three-lane road into the underpass; you had to keep to the left and keep going along the cobbles at a sharp angle to the main arterial road. It was still a rather roundabout route, he thought. Probably there was a simpler one, but he couldn’t lose any more time.

At two o’clock he was back at the river, where he had turned. On the almost empty street he drove far too quickly. He was afraid of reaching a spot where it could be done, but even worse was the uncertainty, and it became more unbearable with every kilometer that didn’t match his requirements. He might have to wait longer for a truck. At the spot in question there had to be a rest area where he could park beside the road. He would have to be able to see the truck coming from a long way off, so that there was enough time to drive off, speed up and pull the car over to the left at the last moment. And it would have to be impossible for the driver to swerve. Ideally, there would be a cliff on his side of the road.

On the steep piece of road before the tunnel which cut off the loop into the mountains and formed the apex of the stretch, there was just such a point. Perlmann stopped, his heart thumping. No, this wouldn’t do, he thought, as he dried his moist hands with the towel. Having the long, stable hood between himself and the truck, everything depended on high speed, and even with this car he couldn’t achieve that on the mountain. Besides, the truck’s brakes could be damaged by the impact, and then, with the wreck of the Lancia in front of it, it would roll down with mounting speed and unforeseeable consequences.

After the tunnel there were a few spots which might have been possible in terms of the course of the road. But in those there were houses with people who leaned, gawking, in the windows. There would also be people like that tomorrow, and it would be impossible to do it in front of them. There were too many houses generally; one village followed on from the other. And everywhere there were people in the windows, hundreds of them, it seemed to Perlmann. This wasn’t how he had imagined it. On the map there was no sign of these hamlets.

He had already covered far more than half of the stretch when a piece of road that was the right length appeared: straight and at a slight slope, with a supporting wall on the other side. At the exact spot where he expected the collision to occur there was a road sign, black on white: pian dei ratti. At the end, where the truck would appear around the bend, there was a house, but the shutters were closed and it looked uninhabited. At the bend around which he came himself, there was a workshop for the cutting and grinding of slate slabs. People would be working there tomorrow. Perlmann drove to the spot where the trees meant that he couldn’t be seen from the workshop. The rest of the stretch was still long enough. Only stopping was a problem. On the right there was a sheer drop to the river, and in spite of the damaged crash barrier he could only get about half of the big car on to the narrow strip of grass. Nonetheless, he thought, it could be done here. But he would have to fix in his mind the features leading up to that spot so that he didn’t miss it tomorrow.

He turned and drove to the next road sign: so the name of the village was piana. After the road sign came a biggish, abandoned-looking factory building, then two well-tended houses and behind them, at the start of the bend, three pines with a big poster for Renault customer services. When he passed the poster, he was already in the bend with the workshop. He could see the sign that said pian dei ratti, and then it was only another fifty meters.