The Past is a Foreign Country Page 7

  I should have felt uncomfortable, and yet all I felt was a kind of mindless elation.

  During a pause, we lit a cigarette and smoked it together. She giggled and nudged me with her elbow at the noises coming from the other room. She even started to say something about it but then stopped abruptly. For a moment, she was completely still, with a strange, rapt expression on her face.

  Then she farted.

  It was a thin, prolonged sound, like a toy trumpet, in the semi-darkness of that strange room.

  She put her hand over her mouth for a moment, then said, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry. It sometimes happens after I’ve had a good fuck. I can’t hold back. It must be because I’m so relaxed.’

  I was so surprised, I didn’t know what to say.

  What can you say in reply to something like that?

  Don’t worry, I also like to let out a nice noisy fart when I’m relaxed? Depending on my mood and what I’ve eaten, I also burp a bit? That kind of thing, just to put her at her ease?

  I didn’t say anything, and in any case she was already perfectly at ease, without any help from me.

  She took my hand and moved it over her belly and then down between her legs. I let her.

  It was evening by the time we left, and I realised I hadn’t thought about Giulia once the whole time.

  5

  I WAS SUPPOSED to be taking civil procedure at the beginning of May – I was considered good enough to take it early – but I’d hardly opened a book in the previous few weeks. On the day of the exam, I went to the university like a sleepwalker, filled out the form and waited my turn. When they called the name of the person who was before me on the alphabetical list, I stood up and left.

  It had never happened before. I had consistently high grades, and had never missed an exam.

  Until that morning in May.

  I left the university, feeling slightly dazed. I wandered around for a while, barely aware of what I’d done, but with a vague sense of imminent disaster.

  Then I thought, what the hell, these things happened. I’d done the right thing not taking the exam, because I’d been a bit distracted in the past few weeks and hadn’t studied much. I’d avoided an unnecessary bad mark, which would have affected my average.

  No, I’d take one or two days off and then I’d get back to studying. I’d take civil procedure in June, or July at the latest. I’d graduate in December instead of in the summer. I’d still be ahead of all my friends who were doing the same course, anyway. There was nothing wrong with slowing down a bit. I’d been going too damn fast, up until now. What was the big deal?

  Thinking these things calmed me down and I started to feel better as I walked home. I was pleased I never told my parents beforehand when I had an exam. I wouldn’t be forced to make up any lies today.

  I took those two days off.

  Then I took some more, because I didn’t feel ready yet to start again. And then even more, because I’d gone out too many times and been up too late at night, and had to catch up with my sleep during the day.

  Then I just stopped thinking about it.

  Apart from anything else, I’d been studying a new subject in the past few weeks.

  6

  ONE EVENING, WHILE we sat in the car, smoking and chatting about this and that, I asked Francesco why he didn’t teach me some of his tricks. I said it like that, off the top of my head, one of the many things you say that never leads to anything. Of course, I liked the idea of doing what he did with cards, but I didn’t think he would take my question seriously.

  In fact, he took it very seriously.

  ‘Are you sure you want to learn?’ he said, catching me off guard. He always did things differently from the way you expected. I’d say something serious and he’d treat it as a joke. And I’d feel embarrassed, and start to think, maybe yes, when you came down to it, it wasn’t really serious.

  Or else you’d say something as a laugh, a joke, whatever. He wouldn’t laugh and would look at you in surprise, almost offended, and not say a word. Or else he’d tell you that this was a serious subject, no laughing matter at all. And again you’d feel embarrassed or uncomfortable, and would think he was probably right and that once again something had eluded you.

  He had this ability to pass judgement on everything in a way that seemed irreversible, and always with a hint of contempt for anyone who didn’t agree with him.

  All this I’ve realised since. At the time I simply thought he knew more about the ways of the world than I did, and had a clearer idea of how to behave in different situations.

  ‘Manipulating cards, like manipulating objects, is more than just a matter of simple dexterity. The real skill of a magician is the ability to influence minds. Performing a magic trick successfully means creating a reality. An alternative reality where you’re the one who makes the rules. Do you follow me?’

  ‘I think so. As far as I can see–’

  He interrupted me. It was obvious he wasn’t interested in my reply. ‘Anyone who tells you that life isn’t a constant series of manipulations is either a liar or a fool. The real difference isn’t between manipulating and not manipulating. The difference is between manipulating consciously and manipulating unconsciously. Take a guy who’s only recently got married. One evening he comes home and tells his wife he’s been invited to a reunion of old friends, or maybe a poker game, if we want to keep to the subject. Does she mind if he goes out? No, he can go if he wants to, she says after a short hesitation, but her face says the opposite of what she’s just said in words. If you don’t want me to, I’ll stay at home, he replies. No, no, you go, she says, in words. Her face, though, says, It’s obvious you don’t care about me if you want to go out on your own. So then he feels confused, because he’s getting these mixed messages, and he starts to get a bit rattled. It doesn’t really matter, he insists, he can stay at home. No, she insists, in words, he can go. In the end, he feels so guilty, he decides not to go out. He can’t accuse her of forcing him to stay, because she told him he could go if he wanted to. And he can’t complain because he was the one who decided not to go out. So now he feels really uncomfortable. She’s manipulated him, but neither of them know it, at a conscious level.’

  I was looking at him: where was he going with this?

  ‘Magic tricks – or cheating at cards – are a metaphor for everyday life, for relationships between people. There are people who say things and at the same time do things, and what they’re really doing is hidden behind their words and above all their gestures. And it’s different from the way it appears. Only the person doing it is aware of it and controls the process. The substance of things, their truth, is almost always different from what we generally think it is. Things really happen at times and in places which are different from those we believe or experience through our senses. Our true intentions are different from our stated intentions. Look, for example, at what really motivates people to perform so-called charitable acts. You won’t like what you find. The truth is hard to bear, and not everyone can face it.’

  I tried to get a word in edgeways, but it was impossible. He had to express his ideas fully, and he was just coming to the part that meant most to him.

  ‘Look at poker, for example. Anyone sitting down to a game of poker does it because he wants to hurt someone else. You have to be cruel, it goes with the territory. Let’s take a mediocre player who sits down to play, hoping his luck will be good to him and bad to his opponents. Now imagine that someone – an angel or a devil – appears to this hypothetical mediocre player before a game, and tells him he has a way of making him win a lot of money in that game. In return, he wants half of the winnings. Our player asks, how is this possible, and the other person tells him not to worry. He just has to decide: yes or no. If it’s yes, he’ll have to promise to give him half the winnings of that game. And that’s it.

  ‘What do you think our hypothetical player will do? Do you think he’ll refuse because knowing in advance that he’s going to win
is a violation of the ethics of poker? Do you think anyone would ever refuse a proposal like that?’

  I took out my cigarettes and lit one. Francesco took it from my mouth after the first drag and kept it for himself. As I lit another, he started speaking again.

  ‘Our player will accept. He’ll get a kick out of sitting down to play with the awareness that destiny is already on his side, and he’ll enjoy every moment of the game. The only thing that’ll bother him a little is that he’ll have to share his money at the end of the game.

  ‘Or else take a game between Sunday players and a professional gambler. I don’t mean a card shark. I mean a professional poker player. What chance do you think these amateurs have against a professional? Do you think they’d have more chance than they would if they played us? No. They’d have exactly the same chance – none at all. The methods are different but the results are the same. Luck has nothing to do with it.’

  His eyes glowed in the semi-darkness of the car. His cigarette had burned down almost to his fingers. The windows were down, the air was mild, and the silence was broken only occasionally by a passing moped with a souped-up exhaust.

  ‘Until we became partners, you used to play poker normally. Do you remember the emotion you used to feel when you had a good hand and the pot was a big one? Was it any different from the emotion you feel now when you have a good hand, even though you know it has nothing to do with so-called luck?’

  He was right. Damned right.

  ‘People manipulate and are manipulated, cheat and are cheated constantly, without realising it. They hurt other people and are hurt themselves without realising it. They refuse to realise it because they wouldn’t be able to bear it. A magic trick is an honest thing because we know in advance that the reality of it is different from the appearance. And in a way, on a universal level, cheating at cards is honest, too. I mean, we’ve taken control of the situation away from pure chance and put it in our own hands. I know you understand. That’s why I chose you. I wouldn’t say these things to anyone else. We’re challenging the mindless cruelty of chance and defeating it. Do you understand? Do you? You and I are violating commonplace rules and choosing our own destiny.’

  He’d said these last words in a curiously high-pitched voice. Now he suddenly broke off. He seemed exhausted. He took the packet of cigarettes from my pocket and lit another one, having only just put out the previous one. We were both smoking too much, I thought: I had a stale taste in my mouth. For a few moments, I felt dizzy. A sentence was going round and round in my head: ‘It’s all bullshit. It’s all bullshit.’ It was a weird phenomenon: I could see the words inside my head as if they were on a blank page, and at the same time I could hear them as if someone was saying them, also inside my head. I had a sense of them as an actual physical entity.

  I didn’t say anything, though, and when Francesco started speaking again, after rapidly inhaling half of his cigarette, those words dissolved.

  ‘I’ll teach you. You’re the only person I can teach, because I know you understand what I’m doing.’

  I nodded and then he asked me to take him home. He was very tired.

  I started the car and switched on the tape deck. The BMW glided through the poorly-lit streets, as liquid as mercury.

  Inside the car, the voice of the young Leonard Cohen was singing Marianne at low volume. Francesco was silent now, looking straight ahead. He was miles away.

  Suddenly I felt alone and afraid and frozen to the bone. I remembered something from when I was a child, but it was only a vague memory and vanished before I could catch hold of it. Like a dream, the kind you have in the morning, between sleep and waking.

  A sad dream.

  7

  TWO DAYS LATER, Francesco phoned me. I could come round at three o’clock in the afternoon, he said. To make a start.

  I’d never been to his home before, had never even tried to imagine what it was like.

  It was a dark, oppressive apartment, which smelled stale, shut in. The furniture was old. Not antique, just old and undistinguished.

  The place was tidy, but in a strange way. There was something not quite right about it, just below the surface, something really not right.

  I knew that Francesco lived alone with his mother, but I’d never realised until that afternoon how old she was. An elderly lady with a curt, hostile, resentful manner.

  Francesco let me into his room and closed the door. It was quite a large room. The stale smell that lingered in the rest of the apartment was less noticeable here. A child’s desk, covered with books. Books on shelves, books on the floor, even a few books on the bed. A large cardboard box full of Tex Willer and Spiderman comics. Walls bare except for an old poster of Jim Morrison, his face staring out into space. His fate already written in his eyes.

  Francesco didn’t say anything and wasn’t even looking at me. He opened a drawer in the wardrobe, took out a pack of French cards, shifted a few books to make space on the desk, indicated a chair for me, and sat down on the other. Only then did he turn to me. He looked at me for a long time, with a strange expression on his face, as if he didn’t know what to do. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed vulnerable, and for a moment I felt a real affection and tenderness towards him.

  At last he put the cards down on the desk.

  ‘My father left home when I was thirteen. He was younger than my mother and went off with a woman who was younger than him. Much younger. A pretty commonplace thing, I suppose. Two years later he and his girlfriend both died in a road accident.’

  He broke off almost abruptly, went to the window and opened it. Then he took an ashtray from a drawer, sat down and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I never forgave him. I mean: not only for leaving us. I never forgave him for dying before I had a chance to make him pay for going away and leaving me alone. When he died I had a strange feeling about it, a really nasty feeling. I felt terrible grief and at the same time real anger. He’d escaped me. Damn it, he’d escaped me. I didn’t think it in so many words, but that was the feeling. I’d thought so many times of how, as an adult, I’d confront him with what he’d done to me and rub his face in it. I’d be grown up and successful, and he’d be old and maybe desperate to rebuild his relationship with the son he’d abandoned so many years earlier. Too easy now, I’d have said. Too easy now, after you left me alone when I needed you. Too easy to die that way, without paying what you owed.’

  He rubbed his face with his hands, moving them up and down vigorously, as if he wanted to hurt himself.

  ‘Damn it, I really loved the bastard. I felt so alone when he left. Damn it. I always felt alone, after that.’

  As he’d started, so he stopped. Abruptly. He picked up the pack of cards, did a few very quick exercises with one hand, and then said we could begin.

  Now he looked and sounded like the Francesco I knew.

  He took the queen of hearts from the pack, along with the two black tens: clubs and spades. ‘Do you know the three card trick?’

  I knew it in the sense that I’d heard of it, but I’d never seen it done in real life.

  ‘All right, follow me. The queen wins, the ten loses. The queen wins and the ten loses.’

  Delicately, he put the three cards down on the table, one next to the other. I could see clearly that the queen was the one on the left.

  ‘Which one’s the queen?’

  I touched the card on the left with my index finger. He told me to turn it over. It was the ten of clubs.

  How had he done it? He had put the cards down so slowly, I didn’t see how I could possibly have got it wrong.

  ‘Do it again,’ I said.

  He picked up the queen and one of the tens with his right hand, holding them between his thumb and index finger and between his thumb and middle finger. He picked up the other ten with his left hand, holding it between his thumb and his middle finger.

  ‘The queen wins, the ten loses. OK?’

  I didn’t reply. I was watching his
hands to make sure I caught every move. Again he put the cards down slowly, and asked me which one was the queen. Again I pointed to the card on the left. He told me to turn it over and again it was a ten.

  He repeated the trick six or seven times and I didn’t pick out the queen once. Not even when I just guessed, to escape the illusion of those hands moving so hypnotically and elusively.

  It’s hard to explain, to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, the sense of frustration produced by such an apparently simple trick. There are only three cards. The queen is definitely there, and it’s all happening right in front of your eyes, at a distance of a few centimetres. And yet there’s no way you can find the queen.

  ‘The odds for the person betting are very close to zero. Learning this trick is a good way to start. All the basic principles can be grasped immediately.’

  He explained how the trick worked, and then he repeated it two or three times, even more slowly. To demonstrate the technique. Even now, now that I knew the trick and knew where the queen was, I still pointed to the wrong card.

  Then he gave me the three cards and told me to try.

  I tried. I tried again and again and again, and he corrected me, explaining how I had to hold the cards, how I had to let go of them, how I had to direct the other person’s eyes away from the queen, and so on.

  He was a good teacher, and I was a good pupil.

  By the time we stopped, maybe three hours after we’d come into the room, my hands hurt, but I was already able to perform the trick to an acceptable standard.

  I felt quite exhilarated, and was dying to show it to someone – maybe my parents when I got home.

  Francesco read my mind. ‘I shouldn’t have to say this, but you should never show a trick to anyone until you’ve completely mastered it. Doing a trick and getting found out is frustrating but commonplace. Doing a trick at the card table and getting found out can be a lot riskier.’