His eyesight was excellent: he saw everything Lola did, and if she did anything especially foolish or lovely, a smile sweetened his sour, very virile old face. He had been a cabinetmaker, and the business he had founded still operated on the ground floor of the building in which he lived; three of his great-grandchildren worked there.
One morning—it was the week before Christmas, almost a year to the day that Lola had entered my life—I filled Lola’s soup bowl with mineral water (she preferred to bathe in mineral water, the bubblier the better), carried it out to her on the balcony, waved at Signor Fioli (who, as usual, was settled at his window waiting to attend Lola’s toilette), then went inside, sat down at my desk and started to write letters.
Presently I heard the summoning tinkle of Signor Fioli’s supper bell: a well-known noise, one heard it twenty times a day; but it had never sounded just like this: a ringing rapid as the beat of an excited heart. I wondered why, and went to see, and saw: Lola, a stupefied sun worshiper squatting on the balustrade—and behind her an immense ginger cat, a cat that had crept across the rooftops and was now crawling on its belly along the balustrade, green eyes aglitter.
Signor Fioli shook his bell. I shouted. The cat leaped, claws unfurled. But it was as if at the last moment Lola sensed her peril. She jumped off the balustrade, fell outward into space. The disgruntled cat, Signor Fioli and I watched her extraordinary descent.
“Lola! Fly, Lola, fly!”
Her wings, though spread, remained motionless. Slowly, gravely, as though attached to a parachute, she drifted downward; down and down.
A small pickup truck was passing in the street below. At first I thought Lola would fall in front of it: that seemed dangerous enough. But what happened was worse, was eerie and awful: she landed on top of some sacks stacked on the back of the truck. And stayed there. And the truck kept going: turned the corner and drove out of the Via Margutta.
“Come back, Lola! Lola!”
I ran after her; skidded down the six flights of slippery stone stairs; fell; skinned my knees; lost my glasses (they flew off and smashed against a wall). Outside, I ran to the corner where the truck had turned. Far off, through a haze compounded of myopia plus tears of pain, I saw the little truck stopped at a traffic light. But before I could reach it, long before, the light changed and the truck, bearing Lola away, taking her forever from me, blurred into the traffic swirling about the Piazza di Spagna.
Not many minutes had elapsed since the cat had lunged, only four or five. Yet it took an hour to retrace my route, climb the stairs, pick up and pocket the broken glasses. And all the while Signor Fioli had been sitting at his window, waiting there with an expression of grieved astonishment. When he saw that I had returned he rang his bell, calling me to the balcony.
I told him, “She thought she was something else.”
He frowned.
“A dog.”
The frown thickened. “She’s gone.”
That he understood. He bowed his head. We both did.
1964
The End
