The Past is a Foreign Country Page 11

  From the videogames room you went through into another room, a smaller one, with three billiard tables. No one was playing, the air conditioning was slightly more effective, and there was another guy who asked who I was looking for. I was still looking for Nicola.

  The man told me to wait there. He went to a small metal door at the far end of the room and spoke into an entryphone, saying something I couldn’t hear. Less than a minute later, Francesco appeared and signalled to me to come in. We walked along a corridor dimly lit by a naked bulb and down a steep, narrow staircase until at last we reached our destination. It was a low-ceilinged cellar with six or seven round green tables, all except one already occupied. At the far end, opposite the door, was a kind of bar. Behind it, a gaunt, mean-looking elderly man.

  The air conditioning worked well here. A bit too well: I shivered with cold as I entered. The room had that stale smell you find in places where people smoke a lot and the only change of air is provided by the air conditioning. A green lampshade hung above each table, as if to lend a professional tone to this gambling den on the outskirts of town. The overall effect was something between the surreal and the squalid. A dimly lit cellar, cones of yellow light, wisps of smoke forming vaguely malign-looking spirals, men sitting astride their chairs between the lights and the surrounding dark.

  We went to the bar and Francesco introduced the old man and two nondescript guys who were going to play with us. We were waiting for someone else: there’d be five of us playing tonight. While we waited, Francesco explained the house rules.

  To get a table you paid half a million to the manager. So, as there were five of us, we’d have to pay a hundred thousand lire each. In return we’d get a new pack of cards, chips, and the first coffee. As well as the right to play all night. To get more coffee, alcoholic drinks, or cigarettes, you had to pay a supplement. The initial stake was five hundred thousand lire and at the end of the game you had to give the manager five per cent of your winnings. If you won, of course.

  The fifth man arrived a few minutes later. He apologised profusely for the delay, breathing heavily and wiping the sweat from his face with an old-fashioned white handkerchief. Everything about him looked slightly incongruous. He was wearing a white shirt with the kind of collar that was about thirty years out of date. His grey hair was slightly too long, and the index finger and middle finger of his left hand were yellowed with nicotine.

  His eyes, framed by deep, dark rings, were curiously gentle, with flashes of anxiety in them. He was clean-shaven and smelled of aftershave. It was a smell that reminded me of my early childhood. I must have smelled it on my grandfather, or my uncle, or someone else who was already very big when I was very small. Something out of the past.

  He seemed like something out of the past, as if he had emerged from a neo-realist film or an old black and white newsreel.

  He was a lawyer, or at least that was what he was introduced to me as. I don’t remember his surname. Everyone called him Gino the lawyer or just Gino.

  We sat down at the table, and they brought us coffee, cards and chips. I was about to take out my wallet to pay the fee, but Francesco stopped me with a glance and a slight nod. This wasn’t a place where you paid in advance. The owners, whoever they were, didn’t have any problems with customers being insolvent.

  I don’t know how many hours we played, but it was definitely longer than usual. When I look back at the scene now, I see a fog, composed of cigarette smoke, artificial light and shadows. Almost the only things that emerge from this fog are the face and gestures of Gino the lawyer, in a series of still photos, quite separate from each other. I don’t remember the names or faces of the other players. If I’d passed them in the street the next day, I probably wouldn’t have recognised them.

  All through the game, I kept my eyes on that fifty-something lawyer, with his heavy breathing, his permanently lit cigarette – he smoked the strongest kind of MS’s – and his apparently imperturbable expression. For some reason, he drew my attention. I was hypnotised by him.

  Noting again that he was clean-shaven, it occurred to me that he must have shaved just before coming here. To this dirty, smoke-filled cellar, filled with crooks and delinquents of all kinds, including me.

  He’s the same age as my father, I thought after a while, and I felt uncomfortable.

  Whenever he lost, the left corner of his mouth would tremble slightly. A moment later, though, he would smile, as if to say, ‘No need to worry about me, really, there’s no need to worry about me. What does it matter if I lose one pot?’

  He lost a lot of pots. He bet on every game. He played in a way that was both methodical and febrile. As if he didn’t care at all about the money that lay there on the table in the form of those dirty chips. Maybe it was true, in a way. Maybe he was sitting there for a reason other than money.

  And yet there was something sick, feverish, about the very calm way he moved the chips into the pot, even though he rarely got them back at the end of the hand.

  He would have lost even if we hadn’t been there.

  We stopped playing at four in the morning. The other tables were empty when we stood up, almost all the lights had been turned out, and an unsettling greyish cloud hung in the air.

  Naturally I won, and one of the nondescript guys also won, though much less than me. Francesco would later tell me that he was someone you’d do best always to settle your accounts with. And make sure you didn’t upset him. That was why he had let him win. He wanted everything to go as smoothly as usual, without snags of any kind.

  The others, Francesco included, lost. Gino the lawyer most of all. He took his umpteenth cigarette out of the crumpled and now almost empty packet, lit it, and said that if I didn’t mind he would pay by cheque, because obviously he didn’t have all that much cash on him. If I didn’t mind, he’d also postdate the cheque. There was nothing to worry about because he was expecting some money from a client. It would only be two or three days. But to be on the safe side, if I didn’t mind, he would postdate the cheque by a week. I said that was fine by me, though for some reason I avoided looking at Francesco as I said it.

  We paid the old man, Francesco paid – in cash – the nondescript man you’d do best always to settle accounts with, a few more banknotes were passed from hand to hand, and I ended up with a post-dated cheque. The handwriting was elegant and nervous. Aristocratic, I caught myself thinking. Such a contrast with the man’s haggard appearance. As if it were the last vestige of the person he must once have been. Some time in the past, long ago.

  15

  A FEW DAYS later, on the date indicated on Gino the lawyer’s cheque, we went to the bank to cash it and divide the money. As usual.

  The cashier ran the usual checks and then said he was sorry but the account was overdrawn and they couldn’t accept the cheque. This had never happened before and I felt, absurdly, as if I’d been caught in the act. I was sure the cashier was going to ask me how I had got hold of that cheque, as well as a whole lot of other questions, and, seeing the guilty look on my face, would find me out. The silence only lasted a few seconds, but they seemed very long. I didn’t know what to say. I’d rather not have been there, however I’d got there.

  Then I heard Francesco’s voice, just behind me. He asked the cashier to give us back the cheque, because obviously there’d been a misunderstanding with the client. Those were his exact words: ‘There must have been a misunderstanding with the client.’ These things happened. There was no need to make it official, no need to re-present the cheque, we’d handle it ourselves. Thank you and have a nice day.

  A few moments later we were outside the bank, in the sultriness of the Bari summer.

  ‘The asshole. I should have expected this.’ For the first time since I’d got to know him, Francesco seemed angry. Really angry. ‘It’s my fault. We shouldn’t play in gaming clubs and we shouldn’t play with people like that. Damn it.’

  ‘What do you mean, people like that?’

  ‘G
ambling addicts. Compulsive players. That’s what he was.’

  There was rage and contempt in what Francesco was saying and the way he was saying it. For some reason I found this quite natural, even though I didn’t understand why.

  ‘Did you see how he played?’

  He paused, but it wasn’t to hear my answer. In fact, I didn’t say anything.

  ‘People like him play the way other people take heroin. They’re junkies. And you can’t trust them, any more than you can trust junkies. They’d rob their own mothers, fathers, wives, their own children to be able to play one more time. They borrow money from their friends and never pay it back. They think they know how to play, and to hear them talk they always have some foolproof scientific system that means they can’t fail. But then when they sit down to play, they play like madmen. And when they lose they immediately want to play again. They always want more. They need it, because playing makes them feel alive. Cheapskates, all of them. There’s nobody I’d trust less than one of those people. And yet I sat down to play with one of them, knowing what he was. It’s my fault.’

  Francesco continued speaking but after a while I stopped listening. His voice faded into the background, and I seemed to have a sudden intuition into the reason for his anger. For a few moments, or maybe longer, I can’t say, I thought I glimpsed the hidden meaning behind what he was saying.

  Then that meaning dissolved, as suddenly as it had formed.

  Many years later, I would read that compulsive gambling is an attempt to control the uncontrollable, and gives the gambler the illusion that he’s the master of his own destiny. And I would recall, quite clearly, the intuition I’d had that morning.

  The reason Francesco resented Gino the lawyer so much was because the poor wretch was his double, his mirror image. He couldn’t bear looking in that mirror and so he destroyed him, thinking he would destroy his own fear.

  They both had the same fever in their souls. Francesco, too, when he manipulated cards – and people – was chasing after the illusion that he could dominate his own destiny.

  Both, in different ways, were walking on the edge of the same precipice.

  And I was close behind them. Very close.

  We went and sat down on the terrace of a bar on the sea front where all the big Fascist-era buildings are, near the Art Gallery.

  Francesco said we absolutely had to get that money back. Immediately after the game, he had paid the money he had lost. He had lost it deliberately, to that dangerous man whose face I couldn’t even remember, to avoid any suspicion that the game wasn’t straight. Added to that was the cost of the table, the percentage of the winnings I’d paid to the manager of the club, and so on.

  First of all we had to make up those losses. One way or another, he said, in the neutral tone of a businessman discussing a balance sheet. But I didn’t like the expression on his face as he said it. I didn’t like it at all.

  I had the feeling something was about to go wrong. The feeling that something – something that wasn’t good – was looming. The feeling that I was close to a point of no return.

  So I feebly suggested we forget about the man. We didn’t really need the money, we already had more than enough. We should divide our losses and drop the subject.

  He didn’t like that.

  He was silent for a while, his jaws clenched as if he were making an effort to contain his anger. Then, without looking at me, he started speaking in a low, tense voice. He had the icy, almost metallic tone of someone talking to a subordinate who wasn’t doing his job. I went red, but I don’t think he noticed.

  It wasn’t about the money. Not only about the money. We couldn’t just let an unpaid gambling debt pass. It would arouse suspicion, there’d be rumours, one way or another, and for us it would be the beginning of the end. We had to get that money back. All of it.

  I didn’t ask the obvious question. How could there possibly be rumours, since the only person who knew was the man himself, and he certainly wouldn’t be going around advertising the fact that he had paid a gambling debt of millions of lire with a cheque that bounced?

  I didn’t ask that question because I wanted him to stop using that tone. I didn’t want him to be angry with me. I didn’t want him to take away his approval.

  So I told myself that we had no choice. He was right. We couldn’t let something like that pass. It was a risk we couldn’t afford to take. We had to get that money back because otherwise, I told myself, it would all be over for us. I told myself many things, in a confused attempt to convince myself.

  As he spoke, and I found reasons to agree with him, my unease and anxiety subsided, to be replaced by the stupid, false but reassuring belief that I had no alternative.

  So in the end I nodded my agreement, like a businessman who has been persuaded by another businessman to do something that was unpleasant but necessary.

  Because it was clear, very clear, that asking him for that money wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  16

  THE APPOINTMENT WAS at eight in the evening, in the gardens of the Piazza Cesare Battisti, opposite the central post office and the faculty of law. My faculty.

  I arrived a few minutes late and Francesco was already there.

  He had someone else with him.

  The man’s name was Piero. He was quite ordinary-looking, of medium height and medium build, about thirty-five years old, I guessed, maybe a little more. He would have looked quite unremarkable if it hadn’t been for his hair. It was long, unnaturally fair and gathered into a ponytail, tied with an absurd pink elastic band. He was carrying a thick black leather shoulder bag, which had something inexplicably indecent about it.

  Piero would go with me to see Gino the lawyer – he knew where he lived – and would help me to convince him to pay what he owed. Quickly and without fuss. No point in making a fuss.

  Before leaving, Francesco offered to buy us an aperitif at the Caffè della Posta. The same café where, up until the previous year, I’d often dropped in for a drink after lessons or seminars, or after doing an exam.

  As I drank chilled prosecco, chewed pistachios, and saw images of my past life, I felt enveloped in a sense of unreality. As if these things, and this one in particular, weren’t happening to me. And, simultaneously, as if even my earlier life hadn’t been mine. Caught between two feelings of emptiness that were at once nagging and dull.

  We left the café and Francesco – who obviously couldn’t come with us – said goodbye. He shook hands with Piero and patted me smugly on the back.

  We were near the courthouse. An area that was bleak by day and dangerous after dark. Piero pointed to the front entrance of a small, wretched-looking three-storey building. He told me, in dialect, that this was where the man lived. So we sat down on the bonnet of a parked car on the other side of the street and waited.

  Piero worked as a male nurse at the general hospital but, he said, he only went in when they needed him. In other words, almost never. A colleague clocked in for him and the consultant never said anything. In return, whenever they needed a favour, like tracing a stolen car or something like that, they all turned to him.

  He spoke in a flat voice, partly in dialect, partly in Italian, and chain-smoked Cartier cigarettes, putting them out halfway through by crushing the paper and the tobacco between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand.

  Half an hour later, Gino the lawyer appeared. He was dressed in exactly the same way as the other night. The same white shirt, the same old-fashioned trousers. As he walked he smoked.

  We crossed the road and intercepted him when he was almost at the front door of his building.

  He saw me first and was about to smile when he noticed Piero. The smile froze on his lips.

  ‘Good evening,’ Piero said. ‘Shall we go and have a coffee?’

  ‘I really should get home. I’ve been out all day.’

  Piero went right up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s go and have a coffee,’ he said again. I
n the same flat tone. Without hinting at anything, not even a threat. Gino the lawyer didn’t raise any other objections, didn’t resist. He seemed resigned.

  We turned the corner, walked in silence to the end of the block, and then turned again. We were in a small dead-end street without shops or bars.

  ‘Now, what happened with that cheque?’

  We had stopped in front of a closed, rusty shutter, next to an unlit street lamp. Again, Piero had spoken in the same tone, so that it almost didn’t sound like a question. Gino the lawyer was about to say something when he saw Piero’s hand – the one free of the shoulder bag – flash in the dim light. It made a quick semicircular trajectory and struck the man’s face very hard – this man who was my father’s age.

  It was such a hard slap that I saw Gino’s head sway and his neck almost stretch with the impact. Like one of those slow motion replays of a boxing match, where you see glove meet chin and the boxer’s head wobbles uncontrollably from side to side before he collapses to the ground with his eyes upturned.

  That was when I noticed that Gino the lawyer had a bald patch, over which he brushed his hair. I hadn’t paid any attention to it before, but the slap had dislodged a long lock of hair, and you could see the bald patch in the middle of his head and that lock of hair hanging, almost perpendicular, from his forehead to his nose.

  I felt something like panic. But it wasn’t panic at all. It was a mixture of fear, shame, and a kind of mindless, shameful elation. The kind of thing you feel when you exercise almost absolute power over another human being.