Involuntary Witness

made me realize that it was one in the morning, so I went to bed.

I don’t know when I got to sleep and I don’t know when Sara came in, because I didn’t hear her.

When I woke next morning she was already up. I took my sleepy face into the kitchen and she, without a word, poured me a cup of American coffee. Both of us have always liked American coffee, really weak.

I took two sips and was just about to ask her what time she had got back the night before when she told me she wanted a separation.

She said it just like that: “Guido, I want a separation.”

After a long, deafening silence I was forced to ask the most banal of questions.

Why?

She told me why. She was perfectly calm and implacable. Maybe I thought she hadn’t noticed how my life had been in the last… let’s say two years. She, on the other hand, had noticed and she hadn’t liked it. What had humiliated her most was not my infidelity – and the word struck me in the face like spittle – but the fact that I had shown real disrespect by treating her like a fool. She didn’t know if I had always been like this or had become so. She didn’t know which alternative she preferred and perhaps she didn’t even care.

She was telling me that I had become a mediocrity and may have been one all along. And she had no wish to live with a mediocrity. Not any longer.

Like a real mediocrity, I found nothing better to do than ask her if there was someone else. She simply said no and that in any case, from that moment on, it was no business of mine.

Quite.

This conversation didn’t last long after that, and ten days later I was out of the house.

2

So, I was – politely – given the push, and my life changed. Not for the better either, though I didn’t realize this at once.

On the contrary, for the first few months I had a feeling of relief and, towards Sara, one that almost amounted to gratitude. For the courage that she had shown and I had always lacked.

In short, she had pulled my chestnuts out of the fire, as the saying goes.

I had so often thought that we couldn’t go on in that situation, that I ought to do something. I ought to take the initiative, find a solution, speak out honestly. Do something.

However, being a coward, I had done nothing, apart from grasping whatever clandestine chances had come my way.

Thinking it over, of course, the things she had said that morning stung me badly. She had treated me as a mediocrity and, like a little coward, I had taken it all lying down.

Actually, in the days that followed that Saturday, and in fact when I had already gone to live in my new home, I thought more than once of what I might have answered, just to keep some shred of dignity.

I thought of things such as “I don’t wish to deny my responsibility, but remember that the blame is never all on one side.” Things like that.

Luckily this happened only, as I say, some days later. That Saturday morning I kept my mouth shut and at least avoided making myself ridiculous.

In any case, after a while I dropped all that and was left only with a few pangs, inside. Whenever I wondered where Sara might be at that moment, what she was doing and with whom she was doing it.

I was very good at anaesthetizing these pangs, quelling them quickly. I forced them back inside where they had come from, pushing them down, hiding them deeper.

For several months I lived a wild life, that of a born-again single. What they call life in the fast lane.

I kept outlandish company, went to fatuous parties, drank too much, smoked too much and all that.

I went out every evening. The idea of staying at home alone was intolerable.

Naturally, I had a few girlfriends.

I don’t remember a single conversation I had with any one of those girls.

In the midst of all this came the hearing to legalize our separation by mutual consent. There were no problems. Sara had stayed on in the flat, which was hers. I had tried to maintain a dignified attitude by refusing to remove any furniture, household appliances, and in fact anything except my books, and not all of those.

We met in the anteroom of the judge appointed by the court dealing with separations. It was the first time I had seen her since leaving home. She had cut her hair and had a slight tan, and I wondered where she might have gone to acquire her tan and with whom she might have gone to acquire it.

These weren’t pleasant thoughts.

Before I could say a word she came up and gave me a peck on the cheek. This, more than anything else, gave me a sense of the irremediable. Just after my thirty-eighth birthday I was discovering for the first time that things really do come to an end.

The judge tried to persuade us to make it up, as he is obliged to by law. We were extremely polite and civil. Only Sara spoke, and even then very little. We had made up our minds, she said. It was a step we were taking calmly and with mutual respect.

I kept silent, nodded, and felt I was definitely playing a supporting role in the movie. It was all over very quickly, since there were no problems with money, property or children.

As soon as we left the judge’s room she gave me another kiss, this time almost at the corner of my mouth. “Ciao,” she said.

“Ciao,” said I, when she had already turned and was walking away.

“Ciao,” I said again to the air, after smoking a cigarette while slouching against the wall.

I left the law courts when I noticed the looks I was getting from passing clerks.

Outside it was spring.

3

Spring rapidly turned to summer, but the days still ran by all exactly the same.

The nights too were all the same. Dark.

Until one morning in June.

I was in the lift, just back from the law courts and on my way up to my office on the eighth floor when suddenly, and for no reason, I was seized by panic.

Once out of the lift I stood on the landing for God knows how long, panting, in a cold sweat, feeling sick, eyes riveted on a fire extinguisher. And full of terror.

“Are you all right, Avvocato?” The voice of Signor Strisciuglio, a former clerk in the Inland Revenue and tenant of the other apartment on my floor, was a little puzzled, a little worried.

“I’m all right, thank you. I’m completely out of my mind, but I don’t think this is a problem. And how are you?”

That’s a lie. I said I’d had a slight dizzy spell but that now everything was fine, thank you, good day.

Naturally, everything was not fine, as I would come to realize all too well in the days and months that followed.

In the first place, not knowing what had happened to me that morning in the lift, I began to be obsessed with the idea that it might happen again.

So I stopped using the lift. It was a stupid decision that only made matters worse.

A few days later, instead of recovering, I began to fear that I might be seized by panic anywhere, at any time.

When I had worried myself enough, I managed to bring on another attack, this time in the street. It was less violent than the first but the after-effects were even more devastating.