Involuntary Witness

“You want to change?”

“Yes, I think so. The Little Prince. It seems more appropriate, maybe. What does the fox say to the little prince when he wants to be tamed?”

“ ‘The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…’ ”

She turned and looked at me. In her eyes was a childlike wonder. She was very beautiful. “How do you manage to remember everything by heart?”

“I don’t know. It’s always been like that. If I like something, I only have to read it or hear it once and it sticks in my mind. But The Little Prince I’ve read lots of times. So it’s not really fair.”

“What do you think is the most important quality in a person?”

“A sense of humour. If you have a sense of humour – not irony or sarcasm, which are different things entirely – then you don’t take yourself seriously. So you can’t be catty, you can’t be stupid and you can’t be vulgar. If you think about it, it covers almost everything. Do you know any people who have a sense of humour?”

“Very few. On the other hand, I’ve met a lot of them – men especially – who take themselves a hell of a lot too seriously.”

She had a moment of hesitation, then added: “My boyfriend is one of them.”

“What does your boyfriend do?”

“He’s an engineer.”

“Pompous person?”

“No. He can make you laugh, he’s nice. What I mean is, he’s intelligent, he makes funny remarks and so on. But he can only joke about other people. About himself he’s always tremendously serious. No, he hasn’t got a sense of humour.”

Another pause, then she went on, “I’d like it if you had a sense of humour.”

“I’d like to have one too. To tell the truth, in view of what you’ve just said, I’d sell my mother and father to the cannibals just to have one. Without taking myself seriously, of course.”

She laughed again and we went on chatting like that, in the car that protected us from the wind and the world. For hours.

It was past four in the morning before we realized that we ought to get back.

When we arrived outside her place, in the centre of town, the sky was already beginning to lighten.

“If tomorrow you think you still want to come out with me, phone me. If you call, I’ll give you a book.”

Sara took my chin between finger and thumb and gave me a kiss on the lips. Then, without a word, she got out of the car. A few seconds later she had disappeared through a shiny wooden door.

I gave myself a couple of light punches in the face, on one side and the other. Then I started up the car and drove away, music playing full blast.

Ten years later there I was alone in my empty office, with my memories and their heart-rending melody.

It was a long time since I’d been able to memorize songs, passages in books or parts of films just by hearing or reading them once.

Among the many things gone down the drain there was also that.

So I had to go home at once, hoping that among the books I had brought away with me I would find The Little Prince. Because at that hour there were no bookshops open and I was in a hurry, I couldn’t wait till the next morning.

It was there. I turned to near the end, where the little prince is about to be bitten by the snake and is saying farewell to his airman friend.

“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night… You – only you – will have stars that can laugh! ” …

“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them ‘Yes the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy.”

18

I slept for exactly two hours.

I slipped between the sheets a few minutes before three, opened my eyes at five on the dot and got up feeling strangely refreshed.

I had no commitments that morning, so I thought I’d go for a walk. I had a shower, shaved, put on some comfortable old cotton trousers, a denim shirt and a sweatshirt. I wore gymshoes and a leather jacket.

Outside it was starting to get light.

I was already at the door when it occurred to me that I might take a book, stop and read somewhere. In a garden or a cafe, as I used to do years before. So I looked over the books that I’d never arranged but were there in my flat. All over the place, scattered provisionally.

I had a momentary thought that they were provisional there just as I was, but immediately I told myself that this was a banal, pathetic notion. I therefore stopped philosophizing and returned to simply choosing a book.

I picked up Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, in a cheap edition that fitted easily into the pocket of my leather jacket. I took some cigarettes, deliberately did not take my mobile, and left the house.

My flat was in Via Putignani, and immediately to the right as I went out I could see the Teatro Petruzzelli.

From the outside the theatre looked normal, with its dome and all the rest of it. Not so inside. One night nearly ten years ago it had been gutted by fire, and since then there it stood, waiting for someone to rebuild it. It was inhabited meanwhile by cats and ghosts.

It was towards the theatre that I turned, feeling on my face the cool, clean air of early morning. Very few cars and no pedestrians at all.

It reminded me of the time towards the end of my university days when I often used to come home at that hour.

At night I used to play poker, or go out with girls. Or simply stay drinking, smoking and chatting with my friends.

One morning at about six, after one of these nights, I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water before going to bed, when my father came in to make coffee.

“Why have you got up so early?”

“No, Dad, I’ve only just got home.”

He looked at me for only a second, measuring me up.

“It is beyond my comprehension how you get the urge to make idiotic jokes even at this time in the morning.”

He turned away and shrugged with resignation.

I reached Corso Cavour, right in front of the Teatro Petruzzelli, and continued on my way towards the sea. Two blocks later I stopped at a bar, had some breakfast and lit the first cigarette of the day.

I was in the part of Bari where the finest houses are. It was in that neighbourhood that Rossana used to live – my girlfriend in university days.

We had had a rather stormy relationship, all my fault. After only a few months it seemed to me that my freedom was, as they say, jeopardized by that relationship.

So every so often I stood her up, and if I didn’t stand her up I almost always arrived late. She got mad but I maintained that those were not the things that mattered. She said that good manners did matter and I began, with