“Didn’t I think at that point that I could make a move?”
“Sure, and your promise to Don Renato?”
“So except when I was selling her tickets, I never spoke to her?”
“A few times. For instance, they used to take the whole school to Asti to see Alfieri’s tragedies, the matinee was just for us, and four of us managed to commandeer a box. You looked for her in the other boxes and in the orchestra, and you saw that she had ended up in overflow seating in the back, where she couldn’t see anything. So during the intermission you contrived to cross her path, said hi, asked her if she liked the play, and when she lamented that she couldn’t see very well, you told her that we had a lovely box with one seat still empty, if she wanted to join us. She did, and she watched the remaining acts leaning forward, while you sat behind her on one of those little sofas. You couldn’t see the stage anymore, but you stared at the back of her neck for two hours. Almost an orgasm.”
“And then?”
“And then she thanked you and rejoined her friends. You had been nice and she was thanking you. As I said, they were already women, they didn’t give a crap about us.”
“Even though I had been the star of the big show at school?”
“Right, and do you think women fell in love with Jerry Lewis? They thought he was clever, and that’s it.”
Okay, Gianni was telling me the banal story of a high school romance. But it was in telling me the rest of the story that he helped me understand something. I had spent my third year of high school in a state of delirium. Then summer vacation came, and I suffered like a dog because I did not know where she was. When she returned in the fall, I continued my silent rituals of adoration (and meanwhile, as I now knew and Gianni did not, I continued to write my poems). It was like being with her day by day, and by night, too, I would guess.
But in the middle of our second year Lila Saba vanished. She left the school and, as I later learned from Ninetta Foppa, the city too, with her whole family. It was a murky affair, even Ninetta knew little about it, just scraps of gossip. Her father was in some trouble, fraudulent bankruptcy or something. He had left everything in the lawyers’ hands, and while waiting for things to get straightened out had taken a job overseas-and things never got straightened out, because the family never came back.
No one knew where they had fetched up, some said Argentina, some Brazil. South America, in a period when for us Lugano was the ultima Thule.
Gianni made an effort: it seemed that Lila’s best friend was a certain Sandrina, but this Sandrina, out of loyalty, was not talking. We were sure she was in correspondence with Lila, but she was a tomb-and after all, who were we that she should tell us anything.
I spent the year and a half before graduation constantly on edge- and sad-I was a mess. I thought only about Lila Saba, and where she might be.
Then, Gianni said, I seemed to forget about it completely when I went off to college; between my freshman year and the time I finished my degree I had two girlfriends, and after that I met Paola. Lila should have remained a nice adolescent memory, the sort everyone has. Instead, I had looked for her the rest of my life. I even thought of going to South America, hoping to meet her on the streets of, who knows, Tierra del Fuego or Pernambuco. In a moment of weakness I had confessed to Gianni that in every woman I had an affair with I was always looking for Lila’s face. I wanted to see her again at least once before I died, no matter how she had turned out. You would spoil your memories, Gianni would say. That did not matter, I was unable to leave that account unsettled.
“You spent your life looking for Lila Saba. I used to say it was just an excuse to meet other women. I didn’t take you very seriously. I realized it was serious only in April.”
“What happened in April?”
“Yambo, that’s what I don’t want to tell you, because that’s what I told you a few days before your incident. I’m not saying there was any direct connection, but just to be on the safe side let’s drop it, besides, I don’t think it’s a big deal…”
“No, now you have to tell me everything, otherwise my blood pressure will go up. Spit it out.”
“Well, I went back home at the beginning of April, to take flowers to the cemetery, as I sometimes do, and because I felt a little nostalgic for our old city. Nothing has changed since we left it, so it makes me feel young to go back. While there I ran into Sandrina, like us she’s pushing sixty, but she hasn’t really changed much. We went for a coffee and talked about the old days. We talked and talked, and I asked her about Lila Saba. Didn’t you know, she said-and how the hell could I have known?-didn’t you know Lila died right after we graduated? Don’t ask how or why, she said, I sent letters to her in Brazil, and her mother sent them back and told me what had happened, imagine, the poor thing, dead at eighteen. And that was it. Basically, even for Sandrina it was ancient history.”
For forty years I had been all worked up over a ghost. I had made a clean break with my past at the beginning of college; of all my memories, hers was the only one I had been unable to put behind me, and without knowing it I had been spinning my wheels in a tomb. How poetic. And excruciating. “But what was Lila Saba like?” I asked, persisting. “At least tell me what she was like.”
“What do you want me to say? She was pretty, I liked her, too, and when I’d tell you that you’d act all proud, the way a man gets when someone tells him what a pretty wife he has. She had blond hair almost down to her waist, a face somewhere between angelic and devilish, and when she laughed you could see her two front teeth…”
“There must be some photograph of her around, our class photos!”
“Yambo, the high school, our old high school, burned down in the sixties, walls, desks, files, and all. There’s a new one now, it’s hideous.”
“Her friends, Sandrina, someone must have photos…”
“Could be, I’ll check if you want, though I’m not really sure how to go about asking. Beyond that, what can you do? Not even Sandrina after nearly fifty years remembers what city she moved to, said it had some weird name, wasn’t one of the famous ones like Rio-you want to lick your finger and go through every Brazilian phone book looking for Sabas? You might find a thousand. Or maybe the father changed his name when they fled. And say you go there, who will you find? Her parents must be dead, too, by now, or else addlebrained, as they would no doubt be past ninety. You’re going to say, Excuse me I was just passing by and I’d like to see a photo of your daughter Lila?”
“Why not?”
“Come on, why keep chasing after these fantasies? Let the dead bury their dead. You don’t even know what cemetery her headstone’s in. And besides, her name wasn’t even Lila.”
“What was her name?”
“Oops, I should have shut up. Sandrina mentioned it to me in April, and I told you right away because it was such an odd coincidence, but I immediately saw that the news hit you harder than it should have. Much too hard, if I may say, because it truly is only a coincidence. But fine, I’ll spit this out too. Lila was a nickname for Sibilla.”
A profile I had seen in a French magazine when I was a child, a face I encountered on the school stairs as a boy, and then other faces that perhaps all had some common thread, Paola, Vanna, the pretty Dutchwoman, and so on, all the way to Sibilla, the living one, who is getting married soon, and so I will lose her too. A relay race across the years, a quest for something that had ceased to exist even before I had stopped writing my poems.
I recited:
I am alone, leaning in the fog against an avenue’s trunk… And nothing in my heart except your memory, pallid and colossal and lost in the cold lights and far away from every place among the trees.
This is beautiful because it is not mine. A colossal but pallid memory. Among all the treasures of Solara, not a single photo of Lila Saba. Gianni can call her face to mind as if it were yesterday and I-the only one with the right-cannot.
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- The Hotel of the Three Roses
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Does anything remain for me to do in Solara? It is now clear that the most important episode of my adolescence played out elsewhere, in the city in the late forties, and in Brazil. Some of those places (the house I grew up in,
