The Past is a Foreign Country Read online

  ‘And what did your friend do?’ I asked.

  ‘Once he got over his astonishment he tried to calm her down. She did calm down, turned all lovey-dovey, and they fucked again. Then he left – they were at her place – and starting the very next day, she set about methodically tearing him apart. Sometimes she’d phone him and tell him she was madly in love with him, he was the love of her life, he was different from all the others, that kind of thing. Then she’d disappear and no one knew where she was for a week. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the idiot hadn’t fallen in love with her. So he went along with all of it. She’d tell him she was sleeping with other men and he was just a passing fancy. Then she’d cry and beg forgiveness and say – I remember this well – that he had to teach her how to love. And he stuck with her through it all.’

  ‘How did it end?’

  ‘It just ended. She got fed up with the game eventually. Assuming it was a game, because I think she’s really out of her mind and has a kind of compulsion to behave like that. Anyway, it ended. More than a year ago, but he’s still trying to pick up the pieces.’

  Before he went on, he looked at me, as if to see if I had any questions.

  ‘She goes to parties and clubs, looking for men, especially if they’re younger than her. She takes them home – I suppose she’s already told you she’s separated – and the merry-go-round starts up again.’

  We were silent for a few moments. Then I turned to the sofa again. This time Clara had vanished. I shrugged, as if to say, OK, end of conversation.

  ‘So have you organised the next game?’

  He had. We were playing on Saturday night at the home of someone with a lot of money, over in Altamura. So it was better if we didn’t stay too late this evening. Fortunately, Giulia would still be ill, so I didn’t think I’d have any problems. Francesco slapped me on the back and told me he’d introduce me to a woman who was worth it, another time. Then he walked away again.

  ‘I’m going to spend a bit of time with Patrizia. Out of politeness, you know.’ He gave me a knowing smile, and left me alone.

  Suddenly I felt empty and uncomfortable. The excitement I’d felt a little earlier had turned into something else. Something unpleasant. So I wandered around, drank a few more glasses and smoked a few more cigarettes, just to kill time.

  About an hour later, Francesco came back and said we could go.

  9

  THE NEXT DAY was a beautiful winter’s day, cold and clear.

  I was alone at home. My parents had gone out while I was still asleep.

  My sister Alessandra had left three years earlier.

  She still had a few exams to take to get her law degree when she informed the family that she had decided to abandon her studies. She didn’t know where she was going with her life, but she did know – she said – where she wasn’t going. She didn’t want to become a lawyer, or a notary, or a judge. Nothing connected with any of the things she’d studied in the last few years. She hated those things. From the way she said this – and a few other things – it was clear she also hated our parents.

  A few weeks later she left with a guy ten years older than her, whose ideas were as clear as hers, if you can imagine that. They went to London and stayed there for six months, working in a restaurant. Then they came back and went to live on a farm near Bologna. It was a kind of commune, well past its sell-by date. She became pregnant, and he went back to being free. He was convinced he was destined for great things and couldn’t be tied down by anything as trivial as a family.

  Alessandra had an abortion, stayed in the commune a while longer, and had other adventures with men, but I don’t think any of them worked out. In the end, she came back to Bari, stayed with a girlfriend for a few months and then found a little apartment and a job.

  She was a secretary for a works accountant, preparing pay slips for manual workers, clerks, waiters, and so on. Life sometimes plays tricks like that.

  Every now and again, she’d pay us a visit and even stay for a meal. Whenever she did, you could feel the tension in the air. My parents would try and pretend that everything was normal, and sometimes Alessandra tried, too.

  But everything wasn’t normal. She couldn’t forgive them for her own failure, their inadequate love, their clumsy concern. So, most times, the fiction couldn’t be kept up and the resentment came to the surface. She would end up saying something nasty, even very nasty depending on the occasion and her mood, and then walk out.

  When it came to me, things were no different from the way they’d always been, ever since we were children. As far as my sister was concerned, I simply didn’t exist. I had never existed.

  After breakfast, I wandered around the house, switched on the TV, and went over my whole repertoire of excuses.

  In the end, I sat down at my desk with the manual of civil procedure in front of me. But I had no desire to open it, and I had no desire to stay at home. So I went out.

  It was unusually cold, even for January, but the air was clean and dry because of the wind, which had swept away all the dampness. Opening the street door, I felt the icy air on my face and ears. It wasn’t a painful or unpleasant sensation. It was good to feel the cold. It reminded you that you had a face and ears and all the other parts of your body that weren’t covered. My mood immediately improved.

  I walked quickly towards the centre of town, spent some time looking in the shop windows, bought a shirt, and then went to the old Laterza bookshop.

  Ever since I was a kid, I’d been coming in here whenever I was in the neighbourhood and at a loose end. I spent a lot of time in that bookshop. There were more books I wanted than I could afford, so I tried to read as much as I could while I browsed.

  Sometimes I stayed until closing time and I always wondered if the assistants recognised me and had identified me as a persistent freeloader. I wondered if one day they’d ban me from the shop.

  I breathed the good, familiar smell of new paper as I entered. It was Saturday morning and so there were quite a few customers, including several regulars. Many of them, like me, stayed a long time, read for free and didn’t buy much. Among them, there was someone I’d always been curious about: a somewhat elderly lady – certainly over sixty – who wore a blue sailor-style jacket in winter, with a copy of L’Unità always sticking out of the pocket. She was a pleasant lady who always looked busy, as if reading books without buying them was a job of work for her. She bustled about from spot to spot, but was usually in the crime and horror sections, and very occasionally in the politics section. Sometimes she’d nod to me, and I’d nod back.

  That morning, she was engrossed in what I assumed was a crime novel, as that was the section she was closest to. Our eyes didn’t meet and I moved on.

  I wandered past the history books, the sporting manuals, avoided the law books, and ended up at foreign fiction. There was a brand new book there, clearly a new arrival. It was called The Foreign Student. On the cover, against a light brown background, there was a kind of plaster statue of a young man walking with his hands in his pockets. The author was a French writer I’d never heard of.

  I picked up a copy. If the book, as I suspected, had been put on display that very morning, I might well have been the first person to touch it.

  I turned it over and read the blurb on the back page. Even now I remember parts of it by heart. It was all about youth and the ‘fragile days when everything that happens happens for the first time and leaves an indelible mark on us, for better or worse.’

  I opened the book, intending to read the first few pages, as I usually did.

  I stopped at the page just before the prologue. There was a quotation by an English writer. I’d never heard of him either.

  The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

  I didn’t turn the page. Instead I closed the book, went to the cash desk and bought it.

  I went back home, impatient to read. In peace, lying on my bed, without being disturbed.


  It was a beautiful, passionate novel, full of a heady nostalgia.

  The story of a young Frenchman and his youth in America in the Fifties. A story of adventures, taboos violated, initiations, shame, love and lost innocence.

  I read all afternoon, unable to put the book down until I’d read the last page. And while I was reading, and after I’d finished, and for a long time afterwards – even many years afterwards – I couldn’t shake off the extraordinary feeling that, in some way, the story was about me.

  By the time I’d finished reading, it was time to go out. So I phoned Giulia, who was still ill, and told her I was going to the cinema. Who was I going with? My friend Donato and some of his gang: I made a mental note to tell Donato. Did I mind not seeing her another evening? Of course I minded, I missed her.

  If she wanted, I said, bluffing, I could go round and keep her company instead of going to the cinema. She said no, as I expected. She said what she’d said the previous evening. There was no point in my making myself ill, and so on. All right, bye then, darling, see you tomorrow. Bye, darling.

  I put the phone down and went to get changed. I was in a good mood.

  I was free, and ready, and impatient.

  10

  THE GAME WAS at the home of someone our age, who lived in a residential area on the outskirts of town. There were five of us. Apart from Francesco and me, there was the host, the son of a builder, there was a guy who couldn’t have been even thirty yet and was already completely bald, and there was an angular woman named Marcella, who had greasy skin and small eyes.

  From the moment we were introduced, I felt hostile to all of them. They all looked ugly to me, and I thought they deserved what was coming to them. It’s obvious I was trying to justify myself.

  At least it’s obvious to me now. At the time it was a quick, involuntary, effective way of stifling the last stirrings of my conscience. Whatever that word means. I needed to see them as nasty, ugly people, and so I did see them as nasty, ugly people.

  The evening was similar to the first one, except that I knew how it worked now, and I liked it much more. As would always be the case whenever I played with Francesco, I felt as if this really was a game of chance. Only more intense. The certainty of winning didn’t diminish the excitement: on the contrary it increased it. When we came to the decisive hands, the ones where we would make serious money, I felt a shudder at the back of my neck. When I was betting high and I threw down the cards and won, I forgot that what we were doing had nothing to do with luck. I was winning, and that was it.

  By the time we left that evening, I had several hundred thousand lire in my pocket, in cash, and two cheques for six-zero figures. We’d won against the host and the angular woman, and I thought we’d done a good thing taking money off them.

  I told myself I would have to open a bank account: I could hardly keep all that money in cash.

  When I got back home, I went straight to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

  We started playing regularly. Three or four times a month, five at the most. Usually in private houses and apartments, and very occasionally in illegal gaming clubs like the place we went after the bust-up at Alessandra’s party. Francesco knew all of them, just as he knew a lot of places to go to at night.

  Sometimes we even played more than once with the same people, but it was all part of a strategy. It helped to avert any possible suspicion. For example, after winning at the home of the fat man who owned the hardware store, we went back about ten days later and played with him and his surveyor friend again. They won – we let them win – a few hundred thousand lire and they had the impression they’d got a kind of revenge, and that everything was open and above board.

  I was making five, six, even seven million a month, which was really a lot of money.

  I’d opened that bank account. I could afford things now that I wouldn’t have considered buying a few months earlier. Clothes, dinners in expensive restaurants, a ridiculously pricey watch. And all the books I wanted – that, more than anything else, made me feel rich.

  And then I bought a car, a BMW – a used one, because I wasn’t that rich. As I was about to sign the contract I had a moment of doubt, because I’d always associated that kind of car with a certain kind of person. But it was only a moment, and when I left the showroom at the wheel of that black, menacing, unnecessary object, I had a happy, mindless smile on my face.

  Obviously I kept it hidden from my family, because it would have been really hard to explain away. I put it in a garage far from home, and to avoid suspicion, I would pretend to take my Mum’s car some evenings.

  ‘I’m taking the keys,’ I would say ostentatiously as I went out. Anyone paying attention would have been brought up short. I was telling them I was taking the car, whereas before I would just take it and that was it.

  They didn’t even notice. But why should they?

  With Giulia, things were going from bad to worse. We were heading for a break-up like a billiard ball rolling calmly and silently towards the hole after a small, decisive push.

  There was a steady trickle of quarrels, a mixture of her incomprehension and resentment and sadness and my lies and impatience.

  I didn’t have as much time to be with her as before, but that wasn’t the point.

  The fact was, I didn’t want to be with her any more. Whenever we met, or went out, I was bored, distracted, annoyed by the banality of the things she said and did. The only things I noticed were her defects.

  After we broke up, she still tried to get in touch with me for a few weeks. It was pointless, and in the end she realised it.

  I don’t know if she really suffered because of me, or how much, or for how long. I’ve never spoken to her again, and on the rare occasions we meet in the street we greet each other coldly.

  When we broke up the only thing I felt was a sense of relief, and I soon forgot even that. I had a lot of things to do.

  And I was in a hurry to do them all.

  PART TWO

  1

  LIEUTENANT CHITI WALKED into his office. Even though it was May, it was cold and rainy outside.

  He had been in Bari for a few months now. Before coming, he had imagined it as a city where the summers were hot and the autumns and springs mild. What he hadn’t counted on was winter in May.

  Nor had he counted on being overwhelmed with work. Bari was considered a quiet place in the Eighties. A place where he could further his career, be promoted to captain, and so on.

  It hadn’t taken him long to realise that things were different.

  Not only were there plenty of routine crimes – possession of drugs, bag snatching, burglaries – there were also major robberies, extortion, dynamite attacks, murders.

  Something not unlike the Mafia lurked beneath the surface. Something opaque, like the stunted but monstrous creature you glimpse through the transparent shell of a reptile’s egg.

  And then there were all these sexual assaults. All similar, all clearly the work of the same man. Despite all the efforts they were making to find him, he was proving as elusive as a phantom. And it didn’t help matters that both the carabinieri and the police were involved in the investigation, because as usual when that happened, they were all pulling in different directions.

  There had been another assault last night. The fifth, as far as they knew. At any rate the fifth to be reported, because with this type of offence the victims often felt so ashamed, they couldn’t even face going to the carabinieri or the police.

  He slumped onto the chair behind his desk, lit a cigarette and started looking through the documents his subordinates had made ready for him.

  The report from the patrol, brief details of the victim, statements by a couple of witnesses, if you could call them witnesses: two men who had seen the girl emerge from the entrance to a building, had gone to her aid, and had called 112. About the perpetrator himself, once again there was nothing. He really was a phantom.

  No one had ever seen him, apart
from the victims. Not that they’d really seen him either. He’d threatened to kill them if they tried to look at him, and they’d all obeyed.

  Chiti was about to read the report that would be sent to the Prosecutor’s Department when Corporal Lovascio appeared and said the same thing he said every morning.

  ‘Coffee, lieutenant?’

  Yes, he said, he’d like a coffee, and Lovascio went off to the canteen to get it.

  The first few times he’d said, no, thanks, he’d go to the canteen and get it himself, there was no need for Lovascio to go to all that trouble. He’d meant what he said: he really didn’t want to put anyone to any trouble, he felt uncomfortable having people wait on him. Then he had realised that Lovascio was hurt by these refusals. The corporal couldn’t even conceive of an officer feeling uncomfortable because of something like that, and concluded that Chiti was refusing because he didn’t like him. When Chiti realised this, he started saying yes.

  He went back to the draft report. He knew he would find all kinds of linguistic errors in it. Some trivial, others quite unbelievable. He knew he would let almost all of them pass, and sign off on the report without querying too much. That was another way he’d changed. At first he’d corrected everything: syntax, grammar, spelling, even punctuation. Then he realised he couldn’t go on like that.

  The men were hurt, he’d spend hours on end trying to correct texts that were usually impossible to correct, and none of his superiors, in the Prosecutor’s Department or anywhere else, ever noticed the difference. So, after a while, he adapted. He would still change a few things here and there, just to show them that he read everything, but, mostly, he adapted.

  Anyway, he’d always been very good at adapting.

  2

  LOVASCIO CAME IN. As he had already brought the coffee, it had to be for another reason.