Money.'
You could always economize on your social life, thought Zen sourly, cut out the fancy dinners and the season ticket to the opera and the weekends ski-ing and skin-diving. He was rapidly going off Tania Biacis, he found. But he didn't say anything. Mauro Bevilacqua had been quite right. It was none of his business.
'So where's it to?' the driver asked as they neared Porta Maggiore.
Zen said nothing. He wanted Tania to decide, and he wanted her to have all the time she needed to do so.
Although Zen had aided and abetted her deception of her husband, he actually felt every bit as resentful of her behaviour as Mauro Bevilacqua, though of course he couldn't let it show. He was also aware that Tania would have to invent a different cover story for his consumption, since the one she had used with her husband clearly wouldn't do. He wanted it to be a good one, something convincing, something that would spare his feelings. He'd done the dirty work she'd requested. Now let her cover her tracks with him, too.
'Eh, oh, signori!' the driver exclaimed. 'A bit of information, that's all I need. This car isn't a mule, you know. It won't go by itself. You have to turn the wheel. So, which way?'
Tania gave an embarrassed laugh.
'To tell you the truth, I just wanted to go to the cinema.'
Well, it was better than saying outright that she was going to meet her lover, Zen supposed. But not much better. Not when she had been regaling him for months with her views of the latest films as they came out, flaunting the fact that she and her husband went to the cinema the way other people turned on the television.
To lie so crudely, so transparently, was tantamount to an insult. No wonder she sounded embarrassed. She couldn't have expected to be believed, not for a moment.
She must have done it deliberately, as a way of getting the truth across to her faithful, stupid, besotted admirer. Well, it had worked! He'd understood, finally! 'Did you have any particular film in mind?' he inquired sarcastically.
'Anything at all.'
She sounded dismissive, no doubt impatient with him, thinking that he'd missed the point. He'd soon put her right about that.
'Via Nazionale,' he told the driver. Turning to Tania, he added, 'I'm sure you'll be able to find what you want there. Whatever it happens to be.'
As their eyes met, he had the uneasy feeling that he'd somehow misunderstood. But how could he? What other explanation was there? 'Please stop,' Tania said to the driver.
'We're not there yet.'
'It doesn't matter! Just stop.'
The taxi cut across two lanes of traffic, unleashing a chorus of horns from behind. Tania handed the driver a ten thousand lire note.
'Deduct that from whatever he owes you.'
She got out, slammed the door and walked away.
'Where now?' queried the driver.
'Same place you picked me up,' Zen told him.
They drove down Via Nazionale and through Piazza Venezia. The driver jerked his thumb towards the white mass of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele.
'You know what I heard the other day? I had this city councillor in the back of the cab, we were going past here.
You know the Unknown Soldier they have buried up there? This councillor, he told me they were doing maintenance work a couple of years ago and they had to dig up the body. You know what they found? The poor bastard had been shot in the back! Must have been a deserter, they reckoned. Ran away during the battle and got shot by the military police. Isn't that the end? Fucking monument to military valour, with the two sentries on guard all the time, and it turns out the poor fucker buried there was a deserter! Makes you think, eh?'
Zen agreed that such things did indeed make you think, but in fact his thoughts were elsewhere. The history of his relationships with women was passing in review before his eyes like the life of a drowning man. And indeed Zen felt that he was drowning, in a pool of black indifference and icy inertia. His failed marriage could be written off to experience: he and Luisella had married too early and for all the wrong reasons. That was a common enough story.
It was what had happened since then that was so disturbing, or rather what had not happened. For Zen was acutely aware that in the fifteen years since his marriage broke up, he had failed to create a single lasting bond to take its place.
The final blow had been the departure of Ellen, the American divorcee he had been seeing on and off for over three years. The manner of her going had hurt as much as the fact. Ellen had made it clear that Zen had failed her in just about every conceivable way, and once he had got over his anger at being rejected he found this hard to deny. The opportunity had been there for the taking, but he had hesitated and dithered and messed about, using his mother as an excuse, until things had come to a crisis.
Then it had been a case of too much, too late, as he had blurted out an unconsidered offer of marriage which must have seemed like the final insult. It wasn't marriage for its own sake that Ellen had wanted but a sense of Zen's commitment to her. And he just hadn't been able to feel such a commitment.
It was no surprise, of course, at his age. With every year that passed the number of things he really cared about decreased, and Zen soon convinced himself that his failure with Ellen had been an indication that love was fast coming to seem more trouble than it was worth. Why else should he have let the opportunity slip? And why did he never get round to answering the postcards and letters Ellen sent him from New York7 The whole affair had been nothing but the self-delusion of an ageing man who couldn't accept that love, too, was something he must learn to give up gracefully.
Zen had just got all this nicely sorted out when Tania Biacis walked into his life. It was the first day of his new duties at the Ministry. Tania introduced herself as one of the administrative assistants and proceeded to explain the bureaucratic ins and outs of the department. Zen nodded, smiled, grunted and even managed to ask one or two relevant questions, but in fact he was on autopilot throughout, all his second-hand wisdom swept away by the living, breathing presence of this woman whom, to his delight and despair, he found that he desired in the old, familiar, raw, painful, hopeless way.
Unlike the Genoese couple who had featured in the paper that morniag, however, he and Tania ran no risk of being barbecued by an irate husband, for the simple reason that Mauro Bevilacqua had nothing whatever to feel jealous about, at least as far as Zen was concerned.
True, he and Tania had become very friendly, but nothing precludes the possibility of passion as surely as friendliness. Those long casual chats which had once seemed so promising to Zen now depressed him more than anything else. It was almost as if Tania was treating him as a surrogate female friend, as though for her he was so utterly unsexed that she could talk to him for ever without any risk of compromising herself.
Sometimes her tone became more personal, particularly when she talked about her father. He had been the village schoolteacher, an utterly impractical idealist who escaped into the mountains at every opportunity. Tania's name was not a diminutive of Stefania, as Zen had assumed, but of Tatania, her father having named her after Gramsci's sister-in-law, who stood by the communist thinker throughout the eleven years of his imprisonment by the Fascists. But despite this degree of intimacy, Tania had never given Zen the slightest hint that she had any personal interest in him, while he had of course been careful not to reveal his own feelings. He quailed at the thought of Tania's reaction if she guessed the truth. It was clear from what she said that she and her husband lived a rich, full, exciting life. What on earth could Zen offer her that she could possibly want or need?
It was therefore a sickening blow to discover that Tania apparently did want or need things that her marriage didn't provide. Not only hadn't she thought of turning to him to provide them, but she had treated him as someone she could use and then lie to.
This was so painful that it triggered a mechanism which had been created back in the mists of Zen's childhood, when his father had disappeared into an anonymous grave somewhere in Russia. That loss still ached like an old fracture on a damp day, but at the time the pain had been too fierce to bear. To survive, Zen had withdrawn totally into the present, denying the past all reality, taking refuge in the here and now. That was his response to Tania's betrayal, and it was so successful that when they arrived and the taxi driver told him how much
