City (3 page)

They were rifling through Mrs. Mortensen's intimate lingerie when, by a banal and vulgar association of ideas, in their blood rose the memory of the woman dark metallic nylon compass—a violent shake that compelled them to rush all the way back to the yellow taxi, and remain there, on the edge of the street, a little dazed by the disastrous discovery: the disastrous disappearance of the yellow taxi into the bowels of the city—a whole avenue full of cars but empty of yellow taxis with heroes making themselves comfortable on the backseat.

“Gone,” Poomerang didn't say.

“Christ,” Diesel said.

On the curved surface of the black spike heel they stared at an entire city, at thousands of streets, hundreds of blank yellow cars.

“Lost,” Diesel said.

“Maybe,” Poomerang didn't say.

“Like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“Not the car.”

“There are thousands of them.”

“Not the yellow car.”

“Too many cars.”

“Not the car, the shoes.”

“Where, exactly, can a yellow car go?”

“Shoes. A shoe store.”

“Where she said she wanted to go.”

“A shoe store. The nearest shoe store.”

“She looked at the taxi driver and said . . .”

The nearest shoe store. Shoes with black spike heels.

“. . . the best shoe store, near by.”

“Toxon's, Fourth Street, second floor, women's shoes.”

“Toxon's, for Christ's sake.”

They found her in front of a mirror, black shoes on her feet, spike heels, and a salesman who was saying

“Perfect.”

They never lost her again after that. For an indeterminate number of hours they catalogued her gestures and the objects around her, as if they were testing perfumes. It was something that by now they breathed, when, after an endless dinner, they followed her to the bed of a man who smelled of eau de cologne, and who, using the remote control, played Ravel's
Bolero
over and over again. In front of the bed there was an aquarium with a purple fish in it, and a lot of stupid bubbles. He made love in religious silence; he had put his gold wedding band on the night table, next to a five-pack of a brand-name prophylactic. She pressed her nails into his back, hard enough so that he could feel it, gently enough not to leave a mark. At the seventh
Bolero
she said

“Excuse me,”

slid off the bed, got dressed, put on the spike-heeled black shoes, and left, without a word. The last thing they saw of her was a door closed, gently.

Rain. Asphalt mirrorlike around the black spike heel, a shiny eye staring at them.

“Rain,” said Diesel.

They looked up, to a different light, gray, not many people, sound of tires and puddles. Soaked shoes, water down their necks. The time on their watches was no use.

“Let's go,” Diesel said.

“Let's go,” Poomerang didn't say.

Diesel walked clumsily, slowly, dragging his left foot, the ridiculous immense shoe suspended on a leg that changed course below the knee and bent awkwardly, twisting every step into a Cubist dance. And he breathed heavily, like a cyclist going uphill, a smudged rhythmic painful breathing. Poomerang knew that walk and that breathing by heart. He was attached to them and he danced them gracefully, with the weary look of someone emerging from a tango marathon.

The one and the other, close together, and the soaked stretches of the city on the way home, the liquid lights of traffic signals, cars in third that sounded like toilets flushing, a heel on the ground, farther and farther away, the eye wet, without, any longer, an eyelid, without a brow, finished.

The photograph of Walt Disney was a little bigger than the one of Eva Braun. It had a pale wood frame, and a foot that folded out from the back: to hold it up, if necessary. Walt Disney had white hair and was standing astride a little train, and smiling. It was a train for children, with a locomotive and a lot of cars. It didn't have rails, it had rubber tires, and was in Disneyland, in Anaheim, California.

“Get it?”

“More or less.”

“So he was the biggest, had been the biggest. A terrible reactionary, if you like, but he was good at happiness, it was his talent, he got to happiness directly, without many complications, and he brought everyone along with him, really everyone. He had happiness for hire, the most ever seen, he had some for every pocket, for every taste, with his stories of ducks and dwarfs and Bambis, if you think about it, how he did it, and yet he started there and distilled from that whole big mess something that if someone asks you what is happiness, even if it kind of makes you sick, in the end you have to admit that, maybe it's not quite that, but it has the flavor, the taste, I mean, as in strawberry or raspberry, happiness has that taste, no way around it, maybe it's a fake, maybe it's not authentic happiness, original, so to speak, but those were fabulous copies, better than the original, and anyhow there's no way of . . .”

“Done.”

“Done?”

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“All right.”

“Shall we go?”

“Let's go.”

Shall we go? Let's go.

1

“This house is disgusting,” said Shatzy.

“Yes,” said Gould.

“It's a disgusting house, believe me.”

Technically speaking, Gould was a genius. This had been determined by a committee of five professors who had examined him at the age of six, subjecting him to three days of tests. On the Stocken scale, he turned out to belong in the delta band: at that level intelligence is an abnormally developed mechanism whose limits are difficult to conceive. Provisionally they assigned him an IQ of 180, a prodigious figure in itself. They had taken him out of elementary school, where for six days he had tried to seem normal, and had entrusted him to a team of university researchers. At the age of eleven he had graduated in theoretical physics, with work on the solution of the Hubbard model in two dimensions.

“What are the shoes doing in the refrigerator?”

“Bacteria.”

“Meaning?”

“An experiment with bacteria. Inside the shoes are glass slides. Gram-positive bacteria.”

“And the moldy chicken has something to do with bacteria?”

“Chicken?”

Gould's house was two stories high. It had eight rooms and features such as a garage and a cellar. In the living room there was a carpet with a pattern of imitation Tuscan terra-cotta tiles but since it was two inches thick the idea didn't work all that well. In the corner room, on the first floor, there was a table-soccer game. The bathroom was completely red, including the fixtures. The general impression was of a house belonging to rich people where the FBI had gone to look for a microfilm of the president screwing in a Las Vegas brothel.

“How do you manage to live here?”

“I don't really live here.”

“It's your house, isn't it?”

“More or less. I have two rooms down at the college. And there's also a cafeteria there.”

“A child shouldn't
live
in a college. A child shouldn't even study there, in a place like that.”

“Then what should a child do?”

“I don't know, play with his dog, fake his parents' signatures, have a bloody nose all the time, things like that. Certainly not live in a college.”

“Fake something?”

“Forget it.”

“Fake?”

“At least a governess, they could at least have a governess for you, has your father ever thought of that?”

“I
have
a governess.”

“Really?”

“In a certain sense.”

“In what sense, Gould?”

Gould's father was convinced that Gould had a governess, and that her name was Lucy. Every Friday, at 7:15, he telephoned her to find out if everything was OK. Then Gould handed the telephone to Poomerang. Poomerang imitated Lucy's voice very well.

“But isn't Poomerang a mute?”

“Right. Lucy's a mute, too.”

“You have a mute governess?”

“Not exactly. My father thinks I have a governess, and he pays her every month by money order. I've told him that she's very good but she's mute.”

“And to find out how things are going
he telephones her
?”

“Yes.”

“Brilliant.”

“It works. Poomerang is terrific. You know, it's not the same thing listening to an ordinary person be silent and listening to a mute be silent. It's a different silence. My father wouldn't fall for it.”

“Your father must be a very intelligent man.”

“He works for the Army.”

“I see.”

The day of Gould's graduation, his father had flown in by helicopter from the military base at Arpaka, and had landed on the lawn in front of the university. There was a big crowd of people. The rector had given a very good speech. One of the most significant passages was the one about billiards. “We look at your human and scientific adventure, dear Gould, as at the masterly course that the intelligence of a divine arm, leaning over the green felt of the billiard table of life, has imparted to the billiard ball of your intelligence. You, Gould, are a billiard ball, and you run between the cushions of knowledge tracing the infallible trajectory that will let you, with our joy and sympathy, roll gently into the pocket of fame and success. It is in confidence but with enormous pride that I say to you, my son: that pocket has a name, and the name of that pocket is the Nobel Prize.” Out of the whole speech what impressed itself in Gould's mind above all was the sentence “You, Gould, are a billiard ball.” Since he was, understandably, inclined to believe his professors, he had adjusted to the idea that his life would roll out with a predetermined exactitude, and for years afterward he tried to feel under the skin of his days the soft caress of the green felt: and to recognize in the intrusion of unforeseen sorrows the geometric trauma of precise, scientifically infallible cushions. The unfortunate fact was that the pool halls he needed to enter were prohibited to minors, and so for a long time he was prevented from discovering that the gilded image of a pool table could be converted into a perfect metaphor for failure, a place that demonstrated the human inability to approach exactitude. A single evening at Merry's could have furnished him with useful hints on the inevitable incursion of chance into any geometric figure. Under the smoky light hanging over the grease-stained green felt he would have seen faces on which was enacted, as if in hieroglyphics, the unmaking of an illusion, an illusion that harmoniously intertwined intention and reality, imagination and deed. It would not have been difficult, that is, to discover an imperfect world where it was extremely unlikely that among the physiognomies of the players you would come upon the solemn and reassuring face of God. But, as stated, you entered Merry's only if you could produce a driver's license, and this allowed the rector's fine metaphor to remain for years illogically intact in Gould's imagination, like a holy icon that escapes a bombardment. And so he found it untouched inside himself years later, on the day when he suddenly decided to devastate his life. He even had time to look at it again, at that moment, with affectionate and hopeless attention, before giving it the most brutal farewell he could imagine.

“Do you have a job, Shatzy?”

“No, Gould.”

“Want to be my governess?”

“Yes.”

2

Behind Gould's house was a soccer field. Children played there, while the grown-ups sat on the sidelines shouting, or in the little wooden bleachers, eating and shouting. There was grass everywhere, even in front of the goals and in the middle of the field. It was a beautiful soccer field. Gould, Diesel, and Poomerang sat for hours at the bedroom window watching. They watched the games, the training sessions, everything there was to watch. Gould took notes. He had a theory. He was convinced that every position corresponded to a precise physical and psychological type. He could recognize a forward even before he had changed and put on the No. 9 jersey. His bravura act was reading team pictures: he'd study them for a while and then he could tell you what position the one with the sideburns played and which was the right wing. He had a margin of error of 28 percent. He was working to get it under 10, and practiced whenever he could on the boys on the ball field behind the house. He was still struggling with the defenders, because although it was relatively easy to identify them, to figure out which one played right and which left was a problem. In general, the right back was physically more compact and psychologically cruder. He had a logical approach to things, and proceeded by deductive reasoning, usually without imaginative variations. He pulled up his socks when they slipped down and seldom spat on the ground. The left back, on the other hand, tended, over time, to take on characteristics of his direct opponent, the notoriously volatile right wing, who had strong anarchic tendencies and obvious mental weaknesses. The right wing transforms his area of the field into a land without laws where the only stable reference is the lateral line, a white chalk stripe that he looks for obsessively, desperately. The left back, who, as a defender, has a psychology founded on order and geometry, is forced to adapt to an ecosystem that is uncomfortable for him, and he is therefore, by vocation, a loser. The need to continually adjust his reactions to unpredictable patterns condemns him to a permanent spiritual and, often, physical instability. This may explain his conspicuous tendency to wear his hair long, to be thrown out for protesting, and to make the sign of the cross at the starting whistle. Given this, to distinguish him from a right back in a photograph is nearly impossible. Sometimes Gould was successful.

Diesel watched because he liked headers. He felt an extraordinary pleasure when he heard the impact of skull against ball, and every time it happened, every single time, he said, “Amazing,” a big smile on his face. Amazing. Once, a boy hit the ball with his head, the ball hit the bar, ricocheted off, the boy hit it again with his head, it struck the wood, and he dived forwards and went for the header before it touched the ground, just grazing it and getting it in the net. Then Diesel said, “Really amazing.” Usually, though, all he said was “Amazing.”

Poomerang watched because he was looking for a move he had seen years before, on TV. In his opinion it was such a good play that it couldn't have disappeared forever; it must be roaming the soccer fields of the world, and so he was waiting for it to show up there, on that children's playing field. He had found out the number of soccer fields in the world—one million eight hundred and four—and he was perfectly aware that the chances of seeing the move take place right there were minimal. But Gould had calculated that the chances were not much less than those of being born mute. So Poomerang was waiting. The move was the following: the goalkeeper makes a long throw, the striker, a little beyond midfield, sends the ball on with his head, the opposing goalkeeper comes out of the penalty area and kicks it on the fly, the ball sails back beyond midfield, skipping over the heads of all the players, hits the ground at the edge of the penalty area, and, bouncing over the stunned goalkeeper, goes into the net just grazing the wood. From a strictly soccer point of view, it was lamentable. But Poomerang claimed that in a purely aesthetic sense he had rarely seen anything more harmonious and elegant. “It was as if everything were happening in an aquarium,” he didn't say, trying to explain. “As if everything were moving through water, slowly, smoothly, the ball swimming through the air, unhurried, and the players turned into fish, scattered and wandering, looking up open-mouthed and all together rolling their heads to the right and to the left, while the ball bounced over the goalkeeper, his gills wide open, and in the end a wily fisherman caught in his net the fish-ball and the eyes of all, a miraculous catch in the absolute, deep-sea silence of an expanse of green algae with white lines made by a mathematician diver.” It was the sixteenth minute of the second half. The match ended two-nothing.

Every so often Gould went out and sat down at the edge of the field, behind the goal on the right, next to Prof. Taltomar. Minutes passed, and they said nothing. Always with their eyes on the field. Prof. Taltomar was of a certain age, and behind him were thousands of hours of soccer watching. The game mattered relatively little to him. He observed the referees. He studied them. He always had an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth, unlighted, and from time to time he muttered phrases like “too far from the play,” or “play the advantage, asshole.” Often he shook his head. He was the only one who applauded decisions like a sending-off or a retake of a penalty kick. He had some questionable convictions that he had summarized in a single maxim, and for years it had been his comment on any discussion: “Hands in the penalty area is always intentional, offsides are never in doubt, all women are whores.” He claimed that the universe was “a match played without a referee,” but in his way he believed in God: “He is the linesman, and always screws up offsides.” Once, half drunk, he admitted in public that he had been a referee, as a young man. Then he retreated into a mysterious silence.

Gould attributed to him, not wrongly, an infinite knowledge of the rules and sought in him what he could not find in the illustrious academics who were daily coaching him for the Nobel: the assurance that order was one of the properties of infinity. This was what happened between them:

Gould arrived, and, without even saying hello, sat down beside the professor and watched the field.

For minutes they exchanged neither a word nor a glance.

Eventually Gould, continuing to watch the game, said something like: “Cross from the right, striker volleys it to the right midfielder, the ball hits the bar, which breaks in two, then caroms off the referee, ends up between the feet of the right wing, who kicks it at the net. A defender blocks it with one hand and then hurls it back up the field.”

Prof. Taltomar took his time removing the cigarette from his lips and shaking off an imaginary ash. Then he spat some bits of tobacco on the ground and murmured softly: “Game suspended while the bar is fixed, with consequent fine against the home team for carelessness in maintaining the field. When play resumes, penalty kick for the visiting team and a red card for the defender. A one-match ban, unless he escapes with a warning.”

They continued to stare at the playing field for a while, without comment.

At a certain point Gould left, saying, “Thank you, Professor.”

Prof. Taltomar murmured, without turning, “Take care, my boy.”

This happened more or less once a week.

Gould enjoyed it a lot.

Children need certainties.

One last thing that was important happened at the soccer field. Every so often, while Gould was sitting there with the professor, a ball would roll past the goal, heading towards them. Sometimes it passed right beside them and stopped a few yards farther on. Then the goalie would take a few steps in their direction and shout, “Ball!” Professor Taltomar didn't move a muscle. Gould looked at the ball, looked at the goalkeeper, and didn't move.

“Ball, please!”

Gould, bewildered, stared straight ahead, into space, not moving.