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“That was quite a coincidence,” she says. “Right?”
“No,” I reply, “it seriously was.” I watch the waitress place two capuccios on the table. I do up the top button of my coat, raise my collar and sink into its warmth. She looks at me with those eyes of hers and I ask, “Why were you there?”
“Where?”
“At—” I sip my cappuccino and watch my breath turn to mist. “We playing games again?”
“You first.”
“I don’t think I need to explain.”
She looks down at her steaming cappuccino. “I’m sorry,” she says.
I shrug. But I don’t trust myself to speak. Not for a long while. “Your turn.”
Cigarette between her fingers and a thumbnail between her teeth, she gazes at me as if searching for something that I know she’ll never find. It’s a strange sensation, to be seen. Then she crushes the cigarette into the ashtray, and I watch the smoke rise nervously into the cold. “Do you believe in destiny?” she asks me.
“Maybe, yes,” I tell her. “Maybe now more than ever.”
“Why?”
“Because I need it to make sense,” I reply before I can self-censor and glance down at the ring on her finger. “You’re married.”
“Yes,” she glances down at her wedding band and then my naked fingers. “Happily married. You?”
“Married,” I reply, but my mind is distracted by a thought that has just occurred to me. I’m about to ask when she says, “Come. Let’s take a walk,” and standing, she slips a five euro note under the ashtray and leads me up toward the Duomo casting its pompous shadow over the ornate Piazza Rossi. She turns left, down the hill past the Benetton store and the Palladio- designed façade of the Palazzo Schio. The shadows here, between the buildings, are dense, and the cold penetrates my coat.
“I was hoping you’d call,” I tell her.
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“I was going to send you a message tomorrow, actually.”
“Really?”
“Really, yes.”
“About?”
“The confession.”
“Yours?”
She smiles. I can almost picture my father as a young man walking these streets. He was born in the house down there on the left, just past the Due Spade. Nothing has changed much since back then; even the house, he’d told me once, still has the same front door. “Il freddo,” my father would say, as if it were a monster, “the cold, Sandro, always the cold.” Just there by the Due Spade, he told me, before the Nazis had left that April morning in 1945, he’d come across a dead German soldier in an alley with a set of binoculars around his neck and he’d had the desire to steal them.
I can’t understand why he’d come back here.
Sofia slows in front of a tiny piazza laid-out before a red stucco building. “The library,” she says. “This is where it happened.”
It takes me a moment. “Wait, this was—this was the jail?”
“Once a hospital, then a jail, and now a library,” she says. “Life compressed, no?”
There’s a tree that stands sentry before the building, a lone tree that rises in a stump from a vague round hole cut into the cobbles of the piazzetta. Circling the tree are two concentric, curved metal benches aiming at one another but never quite meeting. The tree stands fragile and cold, custodian to voices that have shared forgotten secrets on those benches, but I suspect that’s not our destiny, Sofia’s and mine.
“Come on.” Sofia leads me through a narrow door and into the yellow-lit library and down a long hallway flanked on one side by broad windows beyond which is a murky courtyard. I think of my father in Malo. I should be with him now, not here, not doing this. Whatever this is.
“Here and upstairs,” she says,
“is where the shooting happened. Offices now.” There’s a reading room to our
right, and behind the long communal tables, kids flick through pages under
lights invisible in the sun, and people shuffle about in the silence of heavy
carpets. There’s no link with this place and the past. It’s just bricks. And a
place where things have always come to die—people first and now their words.
History is memory and objects deflect memory. Who’d told me that?
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