The room is crammed with objects: drinking glasses, bottles of water, a kettle, mugs, tea bags, ugly leather folders, magazines, information about the hotel and about the city written on various pieces of folded paper. There’s not an empty surface, no place to set anything down. I can’t locate my own things in this confusion. At least the closet, apart from the iron and the white bathrobe, is empty. I open my suitcase and hang up a few dresses.
I just want to get to the other side of these three days, these three awful nights. During the days I’ll be busy, in some conference room or another listening to speeches and panels. I’ll just follow the schedule. At night, on the other hand, I already know that I’m not going to get any sleep in this room they’ve stuck me in. It’s the kind of room that makes me hate the world. I’d toss all this stuff out the window, if I could. I might even toss myself out. I’m on the twelfth floor. But these windows don’t open.
The only consolation during the next few days is a gentleman who occupies the room next door. He’s a scholar of some sort: circumspect, detached from his surroundings, absorbed by something else. He’s thin with a head full of curly white hair. He strikes me as a man at peace with himself but at odds with the world, the type that dwells on things too much. But his large eyes are tender, tinged with sadness.
When he sees me he smiles instead of saying hello. He looks at me kindly, never crossing the line, while we wait for the elevator and wait to face the day together. But his watchful gaze seems to say, Signora, I know you’re having a hard time. He doesn’t try to cheer me up, he just conveys a certain understanding.
I’m curious about him, enough to leaf through the conference brochure to learn his name. He’s a well-known philosopher who has written several books, a refugee from a country whose brutal regime persecuted him many years ago. I wish I could have gone to his event but I can’t get out of attending my own. Something tells me that the quiet philosopher is really a lively soul, and that hidden beneath that shy exterior is a man who appreciates a good joke.
What does he think of me? A middle-aged woman, slightly on edge, annoyed to find herself at an academic conference?
In the evenings we ride up together in the elevator and he says good night, always courteously but sincerely, always looking me in the eye and then saluting me with a nod of his head before opening the door to his room. I hear his footsteps while he gets undressed and relaxes after a hectic day, while he brushes his teeth. I picture him as he throws himself onto a bed identical to mine, in a room just as hideous. It’s only at this time of night that he reveals another aspect of himself: he has long talks on the telephone, speaking rapidly and heatedly in another language. With whom? His wife? A friend? His publisher? His company reassures me though he doesn’t interest me sexually, it’s not about that. I think of the melancholy in his eyes, that wanting look. Eyes, bright but distant, that are about to close for six or seven hours.
The next day we open our doors and exit at the same time, riding down in the elevator together before going our separate ways. Without planning to, we wait for each other every morning and every evening, and for three days our tacit bond puts me obscurely at peace with the world.
At the Ticket Counter
One rainy afternoon I walk down a long street lined with shops. I pass groups of people who’ve decided to loiter at the storefronts for a few minutes: families, husbands and wives, teenage couples, tourists. I see some elegant women who behave as if they’ve been friends for decades and are having fun in spite of the rain. They succumb to a few pastries even though they’re always on a diet, and they take advantage of the sales. Years ago this used to be a stylish commercial street, but now cheap chain stores have taken it over, the same ones found in airports all over the world.
I feel like the only one with a specific goal this afternoon. I keep walking under my large, taut umbrella. There’s no wind.
At the end of the street there’s a magnificent theater built in the 1800s: one of the few remaining jewels in this run-down city. There’s no one waiting in line at the box office. I ask for the program, newly printed, for the next season, and I’m given a thin booklet with smooth pages. Instead of returning home to read it at my leisure I stand there in front of the ticket window. I read about the shows coming in autumn, in winter. The young person behind the window lets me study things at my own pace.
I take out a pen and mark a series of operas, symphonies, and dance performances I’d like to see. I recognize a few of the actors and musicians. I study the map of the theater, the arrangement of the seats in relation to the stage. I don’t have a fixed spot. I like to choose a different one each time and enjoy the concerts and performances from various points of view. I peruse all the options and feel drawn to certain shows both before and after dinner. That way, I’ll vary the routine. I know that the tickets, once purchased, are not refundable. Buying them is always a gamble, a leap of faith. It makes me anxious, and also makes me feel intrepid.
This is how I fill up the pages of my agenda, the one I buy at the end of every year at the same stationery store, always the same size and number of pages. Little notebooks in various colors that, with the passing of years, inevitably repeat: blue, red, black, brown, red, blue, black, and so on. A set of matching editions that sum up my life.
I make a list of the performances I’d like to attend.
“Just one ticket?” the person behind the window asks.
“Just one.”
But how will I be feeling at eight-thirty at night on May 16 next year? There’s no way of knowing. I proceed with the hope that I’ll be back, with the ticket in hand, wearing a nice dress, occupying a comfortable seat.
It was my father, who worked behind the window of a post office, who introduced me to the theater. He loved this world. My mother never went.
One time he’d booked tickets for a play running in a city just across the border. He’d wanted to take me, he’d wanted to treat me, early, for one of my birthdays.
“It’s bad luck to celebrate a birthday before it comes,” my mother said. But on the day of my birthday—I was turning fifteen—the show would have already ended. So we booked the train, packed our suitcases, and organized our passports.
The night before leaving, my father didn’t feel well. He came down with a high fever. It looked like he had the flu but he couldn’t lift his head from the pillow. He was admitted to the hospital for a few days. Bacteria had entered his bloodstream, and in the end, instead of going to see a play with him, I sat at his wake. The long train trip and the hotel and the actors onstage were replaced by the pageant of mourning. At the funeral one of my aunts, a little drunk, said: “There’s no escaping the unforeseen. We live day by day.”
I pay in cash and the person behind the window hands me my change. A coin falls, but it doesn’t hit the ground. It’s ended up inside my umbrella. The umbrella’s deep, also wet. I don’t want to stick my arm down there and search among the ribs.