The Silence of the Wave (8 page)

Roberto said good-bye and the man left, the dog walking perfectly in step with him, like a soldier happy
to follow orders. Roberto had the impulse to go after the man, stop him, and ask him to explain what he could do so as not to waste a single minute. Of course he didn’t. He stood there watching the man walk away, thinking that, like most of the people he had met in his life, he would never see him again.

* * *

He arrived at a quarter to five. He went into the bar opposite the doctor’s office and ordered a juice, keeping his eye on the building. He had just come out and was crossing the road when the front door opened.

“It seems we have a date,” she said smiling at him.

Roberto responded to the smile, while thinking, with a vague sense of panic, that he did not know what to say.

“It seems we do.”

“It occurs to me we haven’t even introduced ourselves. My name’s Emma.”

Roberto held out his hand, and told her his name.

“I already know your name. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I had a look at some of your videos. From what I gather, you’re very good.”

He spoke quickly, as if fearing he wouldn’t be able to say everything he wanted. She did not seem either touched by the compliment or annoyed by the intrusion.

“At my best, I
was
good. I mean, I wasn’t bad, but that’s my old life. I don’t act anymore.”

Roberto managed to hold back the question. What
was she doing now? Better not to ask questions when you don’t know what they might lead to. A lawyer friend had told him that once. It was a rule of trial procedure, but it was obviously valid in many other cases.

“I saw that you also acted in the theater.”

She seemed thrown, as if the subject made her feel uncomfortable, or at least was completely unexpected.

“Do they have those things there as well? I mean, can you actually find those videos on the Internet? I never use it, just sometimes for e-mail.”

“I saw that you acted in Shakespeare,” Roberto insisted, but as soon as he had finished the sentence he felt awkward and stupid. He had spoken in the confident tone of someone who goes to the theater and knows all about Shakespeare.

The only times he’d ever set foot in a theater in his whole life was when he’d been to a few concerts—apart from once, to arrest a couple of prop men who supplemented their income by dealing cocaine in theatrical circles. That was the one occasion he’d actually seen a play. If his memory served him correctly, it was by Pirandello and, while he was there in the darkness, something in the dialogue had struck him.

“Do you like the theater?”

Here it came.

“To tell the truth, I haven’t seen much. But yes, the little I have seen I liked. I like Pirandello.” There, he’d said it. Now she would ask him what he liked by
Pirandello, he wouldn’t be able to reply, he would look really stupid, and she would realize what a slob he was.

“I was once in
As You Desire Me
,” she said. “We toured Italy with it.” From the faraway look in her eyes it was obvious it was something she had long forgotten that had suddenly come back into her mind.

Roberto nodded his head slightly, with the expression of someone who is perfectly familiar with what is being talked about. He hoped intensely that she would change the subject, and swore that this evening he would go on Wikipedia and find out all about Shakespeare, Pirandello, and that play, the title of which he had memorized:
As You Desire Me
.

“The kind of things that come up when you meet someone by chance,” she said at last. Mentally, Roberto sighed in relief.

“Now I really must dash. Actually, I always have to dash. Next time you could tell me what kind of work you do. Bye.”

She passed in front of him, wrapping her scarf around her neck and leaving behind her a slight smell of perfume. Roberto watched until she had disappeared around the corner and then went inside the building.

Climbing the stairs, he told himself there could be no doubt: Emma, too, was one of the doctor’s patients. When a coincidence is repeated, it constitutes first a clue and then evidence. It was a prosecutor Roberto had often worked with who had loved repeating that sentence, but now that he came to think about it, it wasn’t as profound or original as all that. Not at all, in fact.

For some obscure reason, this thought put him in a bad mood.

“Is there something wrong today, Roberto?”

Obviously, the doctor had noticed. Roberto had the childish impulse to contradict him.

“No, no. It’s only that last night I had a dream that made an impression on me and I was just thinking about it.”

“Tell me about it.”

That was it. He had no dream to tell.

“I dreamed that I met a woman. She was someone I’d seen before, and the encounter happened in a familiar place, but I can’t quite pin down where it was. We talked, she told me her name, and then she rushed off. And as she rushed off I could smell her perfume, which is strange for a dream, isn’t it?”

He was surprised at himself for how he had concocted the story. It was all true and all false, he told himself. Like lots of other things, come to think of it.

“Actually, smells in dreams are an unusual experience. But it does happen. What name did this woman give you in the dream?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember what she said, but it was as if we were introducing ourselves and then she had to run because she was in a hurry.”

“And can you identify the smell? Did you like it?”

“I couldn’t say exactly. It was a light perfume, and in the dream it struck me that she probably only put on a little. But I liked it, yes.”

Why was he getting all tangled up in this nonsense? He had never before lied to the doctor, and now he was trying to interpret a nonexistent dream. What does it mean to dream about a smell? Or a meeting with a woman who runs away? He felt guilty.

Immediately, though, and for a few long, disconcerting seconds, he wondered if that encounter a little while earlier had really taken place. The experience, brief as it was, made him feel dizzy.

“Has that ever happened to you before? I mean: to have dreams that involved smells?”

“If I have, I don’t remember.”

Now please let’s change the subject, he thought.

“If dreaming about a perfume is a novelty for you, then I’d say we have a piece of good news. Another sign of development.”

The human mind works in a surprising way. There was no dream and so this whole discussion ought to have been meaningless. And yet when the doctor told him that it was good news, that the smell meant things were changing for the better, Roberto believed it. The light perfume that Emma had left behind her was good news for him.

“I realized something this weekend. I’ve been dreaming a lot more over the past ten days. Really a lot. I never used to dream before. All right, I know, a statement like that doesn’t mean anything. We all dream every night, you told me that.”

“You did dream, but you couldn’t remember. In a way, though, the phrase ‘I didn’t dream’ is correct.”

Roberto looked at him, waiting for an explanation.

“Do you know the story of the tree that falls in the deserted forest, where there’s nobody to hear it crash to the ground?”

“No.”

“Imagine an old tree, with its trunk all rotten and eaten away by parasites, which gives way eventually
and crashes to the ground, among the other trees, destroying branches, sweeping away bushes, and maybe rolling once it’s fallen. Imagine there’s nobody in the forest to hear the tree fall and crash.”

Roberto was looking at him, puzzled.

“Do you follow me?”

“I’m trying.”

“If there’s nobody to hear it fall, does the tree make a noise?”

“How do you mean?”

“If there’s nobody in the forest or in the immediate vicinity, and so nobody hears the noise, can we say it existed?”

“The noise?”

“Yes.”

“Obviously I’d like to say yes, but I assume it’s a trick question.”

“There’s no trick. Did the noise exist or not?”

“Of course it existed.”

“How do we know if nobody heard it and—”

“What has that got to do with—”

“Wait, let me finish. How do we know if nobody heard it and there’s nobody to tell the story?”

Roberto did not reply immediately. This was no chance provocation on the part of the doctor, and so, in all probability, the most obvious reply wasn’t the right one. In the past, the doctor had mentioned the fact that paradoxes help us to understand reality and solve problems. Especially those of an agitated psyche.

“Do you mean that if no one hears it, the noise doesn’t exist?”

“It’s an old Zen riddle, which also has a scientific basis, though I’m not going to bore you with that. The function of Zen riddles—they’re called
kōans
—is to confront the pupil—in this case, you—with the contradictory, paradoxical nature of reality. They help to draw attention to the multiplicity of possible answers to the problems of existence and aim to awaken consciousness. In some ways they have a similar function to the practice of analysis.”

“So?”

“So thinking about the question of the tree in the deserted forest may prompt you to think about dreams and about what it means to remember them or not to remember them.”

“But what does it mean?”

“The Zen master rarely responds to such a direct question. The idea is that the pupil, in searching for the right answer, finds himself. In other words, self-knowledge.”

At that moment, there was an explosion of yelling from somewhere in the building. A man and a woman were arguing. Of the two, it was the woman who was shouting more loudly and angrily. The man seemed to be on the defensive, and was about to give in. Roberto wasn’t sure if the voices came from the apartment above or the one below.

“They’re downstairs,” the doctor said, guessing Roberto’s question.

“Why are they arguing?”

“Because they’ve reached the end of the line but can’t summon up the courage to admit it.”

In the meantime, the shouting had stopped. Roberto felt an incomprehensible sense of anguish about that private tragedy being played out downstairs. He thought about those disintegrating lives and those hearts filled with resentment and the things those two must have imagined for their future together.

“Do you know something?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry for those two. I don’t understand why, but I really feel sorry for them. As if I knew them, as if they were friends of mine.”

From the apartment downstairs came the noise of a door being slammed, but no more voices.

“Am I mad?”

The doctor made a gesture with his hand, as if to brush away something that was bothering him.

“We all have our share of madness. The question is how we live with it. Some manage quite well, others don’t. People come to me to learn to live with their own madness. Even though almost nobody is aware of it.”

The words should have scared him. Instead, Roberto felt an unexpected sense of calm. Like something that could be accepted and which, when you confronted it, was much less unpleasant than when you imagined it hidden in some fetid compartment of your consciousness.

“There’s something I’ve never asked you, Roberto.”

“Yes?”

“Do you like reading?”

It was strange that he should be asking that question now. A little earlier, Roberto had been thinking that he ought to find out something related to Emma’s interests. Do some research on the Internet but also read something. To be ready to talk to her without feeling that he was on shifting sands.

“I can’t say if I like reading. I haven’t really read much. Whenever I have, sometimes I liked it, but reading has never been a habit of mine.”

“Do you remember what you liked?”

What had he liked? He couldn’t remember. He did recall a good book on the history of basketball that he had read a few years before, but that didn’t seem the most appropriate thing to mention. He realized that he was trying to look good in front of the doctor, and that he was ashamed of his own ignorance. More or less the same feeling he had had less than an hour before, talking to Emma.

“A few years ago I read a book about lies that a lawyer had given me. It was by an American psychologist …”

“Paul Ekman?”

“Yes, that was him. They also did a TV series about him.”

“
Lie to Me
. The book you read was probably
Telling Lies
.”

“Yes, that’s the one. In a way, I even applied it to my work. I mean it gave me a few ideas.”

“What about novels? Do you ever read novels?”

Novels. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever read a novel in his life, which probably meant he hadn’t. And anyway, when would he have had time to read novels? At the age of nineteen he had joined the Carabinieri. The course, then the first posting, the work, always more of it and always more intrusive. In his free time, of which there had been less and less, he had done other things. Most of them things he didn’t like to remember.

“It’s no big deal if you don’t like novels.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever read one. It was never something I thought about. Now that I realize, I feel ashamed.”

“Shame can be a useful feeling. It’s a sign that something’s wrong and it can be a stimulus to change for the better.”

Roberto felt like crying. He was forty-seven years old, most of his life had passed and fallen to pieces, and he had nothing left to show for it. He was a failure, a lonely, ignorant, unhappy man who had lived in a senseless way.

The doctor’s voice interrupted this unbearable sense that everything was slipping away.

“Let’s do something. Now that the session’s over, if you have nothing else to do, go to a bookstore—choose a big one, they’re more suitable for those who
need practice—and spend a little time there. Look at whatever books you like—sports books would be fine too—and when you find one that looks interesting, buy it, take it home, and read it. Then, if you feel like it, we can talk about it next time.”

The doctor had suggested a big bookstore. He remembered there was a really big one in the Largo Argentina, which he could easily reach on foot from the doctor’s office in less than half an hour.