The Break Read online

  All at once, the lady had taken a pen and a sheet of paper from her bag and written down her cousin’s name and address in tiny round handwriting.

  “Tell him I sent you,” she had said, looking Sofia straight in the eyes again for a moment. Then she had walked out with a pride and dignity that Sofia had never seen in her before.

  Sofia had never paid for that visit or the tests that the lady’s cousin—a pleasant, tactful man—had carried out, and the lady had never again paid for a single blouse or a single mend, and their relationship had continued like that, as silent as it had always been, but without the question of money coming into it.

  Anyway, what had emerged from the tests was that Sofia couldn’t have children. That was what the lady’s cousin had told Sofia one morning at the beginning of October, when a cold late summer wind was blowing, bringing with it the first dead leaves and the first autumn rain. The lady’s cousin had told her the news with a mixture of sadness and embarrassment in his eyes, which Sofia had not understood immediately. But when she had found herself back out in the street, forced against her will to lift the collar of her coat, and surrounded by people hurrying about their own business, she had felt a kind of inert, nauseating emptiness she didn’t quite know how to take, an emptiness which, all things considered, she had never thought she would be able to feel.

  In all honesty, Sofia had never had what you might call an easy life. But she had come to the conclusion that that it was pointless crying about it, that life was already enough of a pain in the neck in itself and that you just had to accept it for what it was and not think too much about it. Consciously or unconsciously, she had told herself that she wasn’t in charge of the game, and that all she could do was throw the dice and hope she ended up in the right place on the board.

  That morning, though, had been different, that morning the cold wind that brought the first leaves of autumn with it seemed to have penetrated her bones and chilled her stomach. When she had got back home, Dino had had the momentary impression that he was looking at another woman, someone different who had put on his wife’s clothes.

  “It’s cold,” Sofia had said.

  Somehow Dino had realised something, something he couldn’t entirely grasp, although he knew in which area it lay. He had taken Sofia, put a thick woollen blanket around her, thrown two or three pieces of wood saved over from the previous winter into the fireplace, and sat his wife in front of the fire. He had decided not to go to work that day and he had started making soup as his aunt had taught him when he was a boy.

  “We could go to the Far East,” Dino had said a few days later, in the middle of the night.

  “What?” Sofia had muttered, thinking that Dino was talking in his sleep again.

  “I said, we could go to the Far East.”

  “The Far East?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what would we do there?”

  “I don’t know, see how it is. I heard some men talking about it the other day. They said there are entire cities on tops of mountains, and men who sit there all the time like statues, just thinking, and even a place where a king built an entire palace out of marble as white as snow when his wife died, and he wanted to make a black one for when he died, but he died too early. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that is funny,” Sofia had said, smiling in the dark.

  “We could go and see that palace. What’s to keep us here?”

  “It sounds like a very good idea,” Sofia had said, then they had fallen asleep again, and the next morning they had both gone to work as if everything was normal.

  It had become a kind of game—every now and again, one of them would come home with an idea for a new destination, and they would start to get excited about it, as if they were really leaving, and would start imagining the places they would visit and how they would get there and who they would meet. They had even bought a big notebook with a thick coloured cover, where they wrote down everything in preparation for when they left. They had called it The Travel Book, which wasn’t much of a name when you thought about it, and yet every time they mentioned it or took it in their hands there seemed to be something great about it. Occasionally, when they talked and thought about the places they would visit, Sofia would write something on a large sheet of paper or on a table napkin, then later or the next day you would see her there bent over the table in front of the kitchenette, moving her hand over that coloured notebook and writing down everything she and Dino had told each other. Or at least that was what Dino assumed she was doing—he had never opened the book, not that one or any of the others she had filled over the following years. At first he hadn’t opened them because he knew perfectly well what was written in them and remembered the journey they wanted to make to America or black Africa. Then one day, while Sofia was out buying a few things for dinner, he had decided to take a look at all the things that he and his wife had thought up and had taken down one of the notebooks, but, after putting it down on the table with a glass of wine next to it, he had changed his mind, because there seemed to be something bigger in those pages than he had anticipated.

  In the end, though, Dino and Sofia had never been to any of those places, and Dino had barely thought about it. From time to time, they would spend a few evenings or a few hours at night fantasising about desolate moors and age-old trees and people in silvery clothes, and the fact that they got up the next morning and everything went on the way it always had left them, all things considered, fairly indifferent. Sometimes, before going to work in the morning, Dino would find himself wondering how many stones he would have to lay before he could afford to go to the North Pole to see those strange white bears and those funny birds with short legs and no wings he had heard about one day from Franco. He would even wonder how many stones it would take to pave a road that would go all the way up there, and as he set off calmly for work his head would be filled with infinite, dizzying galaxies of stones and roads that never ended.

  Chapter Seven

  “HELLO, DINO,” Giani said, coming back into his office with a pile of papers in his hand.

  “Hello, Giani,” Dino said, sitting on the chair in front of the desk, with his hands placed firmly on the armrests. Dino always sat like that on these chairs, as if he was constantly on the verge of leaping to his feet and running away.

  “Paper, nothing but paper,” Giani said, dropping the pile of papers on the desk with a great thud. “I’m going to end up drowning in paper.”

  He sat down, quickly passed his hands through his hair, heaved a deep sigh, let his shoulders droop slightly and looked Dino straight in the eyes. There was something about Giani this morning, a mixture of sadness and restlessness. Dino didn’t think he had ever seen him like that before.

  “So, Dino, how’s it going?” Giani asked with a slight smile.

  “Fine, thanks,” Dino said, also making an effort to smile.

  “I hear you’re expecting a baby,” Giani said, still with that strange hesitant smile on his face.

  “Yes,” Dino said with a nod, not quite sure what else to say.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “No reason,” Dino said, shrugging his shoulders and almost imperceptibly spreading his hands. “It just slipped my mind.”

  Giani nodded, looking at Dino for another moment, then dropped his eyes to the desk and turned a paper clip round and round between his fingers. “Listen,” he said. “How’s the street coming along?” He didn’t sound very convincing.

  “Fine,” Dino said, looking closely at Giani. “We’re almost there. We’ll be finished either tomorrow evening or the following morning. By the way, a lady told me we have to redo the stretch along the river.”

  Giani tapped the paper clip on the table a few times, then shot Dino a brief glance. “That’s just it. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Dino didn’t like Giani’s tone. He had no idea why, but thinking about that moment later he would remember it as an actual shoc
k, which had frozen his spine and turned his stomach, like the first time you realise, from something your wife says, that she might be leaving you.

  “Go on,” Dino said, looking Giani straight in the eyes and trying not to be too defensive.

  Giani threw another glance at Dino, then again tapped the paper clip on the desk, a bit louder this time. “Listen, Dino,” he said, sighing slightly, “I need to tell you the way things are. They’re going to use asphalt.”

  For a moment, all Dino could hear was his own heart beating in his chest like a train and in his ears a deep, diffuse sound like the skin of a drum being hit hard.

  “What you do mean, they’re going to use asphalt?” Dino asked after a while, gripping the arms of the chair tighter and continuing to look Giani in the face.

  “Just that,” Giani said. “I mean, they’re going to use asphalt. No more stones, Dino. The council have decided they cost too much and take a lot of maintenance, and they need the money for other things.”

  “Like what?” Dino asked sharply, as hard as a block of marble.

  Giani looked at Dino for a moment, in the grip of conflicting emotions he couldn’t quite sort out. “I don’t know, Dino,” he said, shaking his head and lowering his eyes. “All I know is that there’s nothing I can do about it. No more stones, I’m sorry.” He quickly glanced up at Dino then looked down again.

  “What about us?” Dino asked after a while, with a determination that would not normally have been expected from him.

  Giani straightened the end of the paper clip and let his eyes come to rest on Dino. “Well, Dino, I don’t know what to say. The thing is, you’re all experts at surfacing streets, not at laying stones. As far as the council are concerned, once you’ve learnt how it’s done, you can keep your jobs, laying asphalt.”

  Dino was silent for a few seconds, trying to find a way to say what he was thinking without making poor Giani feel guilty, because, when you came down to it, this probably wasn’t anything to do with him.

  “Fuck off,” he said, then stood up and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  “Dino!” Giani shouted from inside his office, while Dino was walking through the outer room with all the secretaries looking at him.

  “Shit,” Giani said to himself, jerking his head back and throwing the half-twisted paper clip on the desk.

  Chapter Eight

  THE EVENING CIRILLO had asked him if he succeeded every time, Dino had wondered, as he was on his way home, if life really had to be this way. For the past two months, he had been trying to get that damned ball back to the exact same point it had started from. Every evening for two fucking months, he had been made fun of by all his friends because all he ever did was make one break shot after another, like an idiot, senselessly, hour after hour. One evening, Lorenzo had even come and asked him what was going through his head.

  “Go away,” Dino had said. He felt strong, almost one of the elect, someone who was fighting for something absurd but greater than himself.

  “But what are you doing?” Lorenzo had asked with a frown. “Have you gone mad or something? Come and have a game.”

  “Go away,” Dino had said again, shooting yet another ball from the opening position. The ball had bounced off the cushion and ended up a few centimetres from where it had started.

  “Shit,” Dino had said between his teeth, jerking his head forward slightly.

  Lorenzo had watched him for another moment or two as he bent to make another break shot.

  “OK,” Lorenzo had said. “Do what you like.” And as he went back to his friends, he had made a gesture to them that meant Dino must be completely crazy.

  And for what? Why, for two whole months, had he looked like someone who’d gone soft in the head? That was something he had asked himself more than once during all that time, and the only thing that came into his mind was Cirillo’s cue, that way he had of cradling it and kissing the ball with it. He knew he had to succeed in getting the ball back to the exact same point from which it had started. That had been something greater than him, something wider and thicker, something Dino couldn’t really decipher, let alone understand, but it was a tremor that rose up like a fountain from somewhere inside his stomach. Many years later, a bookseller would give Dino a funny little book of Japanese stories in which young monks, for no very clear reason, were struck by some reply their master gave them, and from that moment their lives were illuminated with a new light. Dino had found it rather an irritating book and had wondered why that funny little bookseller with the protruding ears had given it to him. But then he had remembered that moment when, as a young man himself, he had succeeded for the first time in getting the ball back to the exact same place from which it had started, and he had wondered if it was basically the same thing that those young Japanese monks had felt. In fact, for a few minutes, from the moment the ball had stopped as if by magic in the same spot from which it had started, until the moment Cirillo had stood up and smashed everything into millions of fragments with that terrible “Every time?”, Dino had entered an unknown region of the world, illuminated by a new, clearer light, in which things seemed to fit perfectly and to be made of some strange crystalline material. It had been a moment when the world had really seemed to have a meaning, be less distant, however incomprehensible.

  But then everything had come crashing down, and Cirillo’s hammer blow had made that crystalline patina explode into millions of pieces, and the world had gone back to being the way it always had been—dirty and stinking and heavy as lead, only now even heavier than ever, with sacks of sand hanging on all sides like ballast.

  Every time. There was a terrifying feeling of eternity about those simple words, capable of cutting off the strongest man at the knees. Every time. Dino had been practising for two months, two horrible, ridiculous, agonising months, and in all that time the ball had only ever returned once to its exact opening position, and now that he thought about it there was a strong possibility that had been a stroke of luck. How long would it take him to succeed every time? As he walked home with tears starting to well up in his eyes, disconsolately kicking a piece of cardboard, Dino had seen himself as an old, grey-haired man, bent over a billiard table with his back broken and his legs shaky, still playing break shots, one after the other, like a halfwit. The funny thing was, and he couldn’t quite figure out why, he had also seen a whole lot of people gathered round that table and that old man, watching his every move almost admiringly. But in the end he hadn’t paid much attention to that—all he had seen had been that infinite expanse of hours spent making break shots, one after the other, like a moron.

  That evening, when he had got back home, he had gone straight to his room, saying that he felt sick and didn’t want anything to eat. He had stayed awake until dawn, convinced that it was pointless, that he would never succeed, that there wasn’t any sense in playing billiards at all, and, trying to imagine what life would be like without the music of those balls hitting each other or those perfect geometries that seemed to put things in their rightful place, he had finally fallen asleep.

  In the morning, he had gone to work with his father, and had spent that day, as always, fitting stones into the earth, and for every stone that he hammered into the sand he told himself that this would be his life—laying stones, one after the other, millions of stones, until he grew old. He would pave his own life with stones, and that endless road towards old age suddenly didn’t even seem so terrible, tempered by that inevitability which, all things considered, even seems to set the world straight. By the time he had taken off his overalls in the evening and Giorgone had asked him why he had been so quiet all day and he had answered with a shrug of the shoulders, he had become almost serenely resigned to that life. He had thought of himself as some kind of honest modern hero, the hero of little things, with a dignity and an honour that might not be so showy but was no less noble. He had set off for home, then turned right onto the street that led to the river, which they had only recently
finished paving, come to the entrance to the billiard parlour, gone downstairs to the tables, taken off his jacket, got the balls out of the little drawer, taken a cue from the wall, stroked it with the chalk, leant across the table and, thinking about that road covered in stones that would take him a long way, played a break shot in which the ball had ended up quite some distance from where it had started.

  One evening a few months later, as it was getting towards closing time and Dino had already decided that he didn’t really much want to go home, there had been a little incident. Everyone had gone home, and Cirillo was having a last, relaxed game with a guy called Gigetto Aspirina. All at once, there had been a kind of explosion on the other side of the room. Cirillo and Gigetto Aspirina had stepped quickly away from the table to see what was happening. At the table right at the back of the room Dino was standing holding the cue tightly in both hands and hacking away with it, hitting the wall and the nearby tables, cursing all the saints and Madonnas he could think of, smashing the cue into a shower of fragments.

  “What the hell!” Gigetto had yelled.

  Gigetto Aspirina wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to cross—even though some of the rumours about him might have been far-fetched, his tiny body was capable of a surprising strength and aggressiveness, which had more than once landed him in prison.

  Without taking his eyes off Dino, who was still smashing the cue and cursing back there at the far end of the room, Cirillo had put a hand in front of Gigetto. “Stop,” he had said.