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  ONE MORE DAY

  Translated by

  Gianluca Rizzo and Dominic Siracusa

  Fabio Volo

  For her

  The only love that dies is the one we stop dreaming of.

  Pedro Salinas

  When you were here before,

  Couldn’t look you in the eye

  You’re just like an angel,

  Your skin makes me cry

  You float like a feather

  In a beautiful world

  I wish I was special

  You’re so very special

  Radiohead, Creep

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. The Girl on the Tram

  2. “Un-shopping”

  3. Silvia

  4. A Dad Who Wasn’t There

  5. Exes

  6. Women and Trouble

  7. A Night in the Emergency Room

  8. Who Knows Where You Are

  9. Waiting for Michela

  10. The Journal

  11. Romantic Dinner

  12. The Next Day

  13. First Shower (and First Night) Together

  14. The Game

  15. The Rules

  16. Getting to Know Each Other

  17. Brunch

  18. Sexy Manhattan

  19. Picnic

  20. The Wedding

  21. Snow and Children

  22. The Bathroom

  23. Game Over

  24. Grandma

  25. Mom

  26. A Chat with Silvia

  27. At My Height

  28. Paris

  About the Author

  Prologue

  In my dream, I wake up in a house by the sea where I spent the whole night with the woman I love, experiencing moments of complete happiness. The sound of the waves lulled us to sleep as we lay embracing our warm, naked bodies.

  But now I wake up in a hotel in Paris. I can still hear the soft sound of the waves, even though…

  There’s no sea in Paris!

  In the face of this inescapable truth, I hear the noise of traffic rising from the streets of the metropolis.

  It’s seven twenty. The alarm is set for eight, but lately I’ve been waking up early. Today the reason for my waking before the alarm is no mystery. Last night when I got in, I was tired from the long day and traveling so I went to bed at ten, skipping dinner and falling asleep immediately. Skipping dinner makes waking up easier, because I'm ready for breakfast.

  Perhaps the reason I woke up early is because of today’s meeting. It’s the most important one of my life. I still don’t know what’ll happen, but the excitement I’m feeling is so mysteriously fascinating that it takes me back to those early mornings, when it was still dark outside, and I would wake up to find that my Christmas presents had suddenly appeared overnight. I stay in bed with these thoughts that surround and envelop me. I get up to open the curtains, and then I immediately slide back under the blanket. I like basking in the warmth of early mornings. It helps me slowly get in the groove of what the day has in store for me. I look out the window and I admire the sky and the roofs of Paris. There are a few rapidly moving clouds. I reshuffle my thoughts and take a good look at my life. I’m very intimate with myself in the early hours of the day. Much more than at night. Often, when I go to bed, I think about things, but over the years I have discovered that I’m much more tolerant with myself in the mornings. More serene. When I wake up early, I stay in bed to listen to all the little noises. The ones inside me, too. I listen to the sounds of the house, sometimes those made by the neighbors, or those from the street. Today all the noises are new. Slamming doors, faucets opening and closing in the adjacent rooms, chats in foreign languages coming from the hallway. What I dreamed was the sea is, in reality, a street sweeper. The hotel is an early riser.

  The alarm goes off. I decide to get up. I shower and get dressed. It’s September. September 16th, to be precise. Looking out my window I can’t tell whether it’s going to rain or not. In the past, if I needed to get a feel for the weather, I would ask my grandmother. She never got it wrong. She would say, “My legs hurt: it’ll rain tomorrow.” And the next day it would rain. As a kid, I had a little statue of the Madonna that would change color depending on the weather; my grandma’s legs were much more reliable than the Madonna.

  I open the window. It’s not too cold, but I’ll take a sweater just in case.

  My mother bought me a dryer a few months ago, so I don’t hang-dry my clothes anymore. Unfortunately, all my clothes have shrunk since I started using it. The t-shirt I slept in barely covers my belly button, and the underwear I just put on are uncomfortable. It dries and shrinks, but I’m glad she bought it for me because my previous method was the worst. I would pile all my laundry onto the drying rack, and they would dry slowly, one part at a time, over the week: first the sleeves, then the collars, and finally the rest. The worst thing about this method is that if you start to sweat, your clothes release a horrible smell. Like wet dog.

  Instead of having breakfast in the hotel, I decide to go to one of my favorite spots: Le Pain Quotidien. I’m staying close to the Centre Pompidou and so I decide to take a stroll down to Rue des Archives, where the café is. Le Pain Quotidien is a chain that can be found everywhere in the world. All the restaurants are the same, everything is made out of wood: the floor, the tables, the chairs, the shelves, the bar. The light-colored wood typical of Northern Europe. As you eat, you feel like a squirrel in the forest. Caffe latte, cappuccino, americano, everything’s served in large bowls, the way my grandma used to do it.

  I order an orange juice, an americano and a croissant. If there is one single thing that tells you you’re in Paris, it’s the way your hands smell of butter after eating a croissant for breakfast.

  It’s already crowded. I can hear languages other than French coming from the surrounding tables: German, Portuguese, English.

  I put on my sweater. It’s a bit chilly out.

  On the other side of the road there’s a Starbucks with the usual sofas and chairs in the window. I’ve sat on those chairs and read a book or typed on my computer a million times all over the world. Especially when I had a late flight and had to check out of the hotel at 11 in the morning. The café would basically become my house for the day: I would sleep on those chairs.

  My meeting is at 11 at the Jardin du Luxembourg. It’s not even 10, and since I’m close, I go visit one of my favorite spots in Paris: Place des Vosges. Every time I see it I almost feel like crying. I walk around the Marais. September is one of my favorite months. I like the seasons when you search for the sun while taking a stroll, when you cross the street to be on the sunny side. It’s much better than the opposite, in summer, when you cross the street to avoid it. In Rue des Francs Bourgeois the sun is hitting the right side of the street.

  I reach the gardens in Place des Vosges and I sit on a bench under a tree, next to one of the four fountains. The air feels fresh. I stretch my arms across the back of the bench, I close my eyes and I look up, lifting my face to be kissed by the tepid rays of the sun. Then I hear the sound of footsteps on the gravel. I open my eyes. It’s a girl. She sits down on a bench next to mine, opens her laptop and begins to type. It’s not uncommon to see people bring their laptop to the park; you can access the Internet through Wi-Fi, so many come outside to work, as long as the weather is good.

  There’s something different about the women strolling through the streets of Paris. I never really understood what makes them look so beautiful to my eye
s. It seems as if their nature has sheltered them from the vulgarity of the world. Perhaps it’s their way of dressing:it always reveals something intimate. Their clothes tell their story; they help define them. Sometimes it’s a pin, sometimes a hat, or gloves, a scarf, a necklace, a color if nothing else. There are certain dresses that fit only beautiful women, others that fit only women with a beautiful personality. What the girl next to me is wearing says many things about her. It makes you think she lives in a world all her own, where she’s happy, and by looking at her, you want to be part of it, too.

  She looks like the kind of woman that might go to the market to shop for cheap clothes and, through her imagination and ability to match different things, creates an original style. Those women don’t need to spend too much to dress up: it’s one of their talents; they buy a few rags, put them together, and they look sophisticated and sexy. These women usually smell like apples.

  In every city I’ve lived, I’ve always managed to find a spot that would become ‘my’ spot. The one I go to when I need to think, the one that gives off a familiar vibe of intimacy. Often it’s just the first place I see when I get to a new city. In Paris it’s Place des Vosges. I used to come here often when I lived in Paris, especially on Sundays, because musicians used to play under the arches.Mostly classical music.

  Walking here was a good idea. It helped me diffuse the tension that’s been building while I wait for the meeting. Regardless, I’m still a bit nervous. Perhaps I’m just scared. I move around as if I were a bit disorientated, as if I weren’t able to control the excitement. It’s growing and becoming almost unstoppable. I’ve always been a melancholic type with a strong desire to become a cheerful person. I think my excitement is understandable: if the meeting goes the way I hope, my life will change forever.

  1

  The Girl on the Tram

  Every time I’ve seen a girl I liked, I’ve always tried to get to know her, but most of all, I’ve always tried to make love to her. I’ve left alone very few of those I’ve liked. And why should I?

  The girl on the tram was one of those. I’ve always saved her from myself. It wasn’t a choice; it just happened like that. I never understood if she was the one influencing my behavior or if it was me who was changing. For about two months we met every morning on the tram. It was almost a date.

  I’m the co-owner of a print shop with Alessandro. We print catalogues, short-run books, brochures, flyers, and for the latest elections, we’ve also printed electoral materials for both parties: we just switched the colors, the rest was exactly the same. Politicians always talk about a better future. Perhaps they’re referring to paradise.

  I began working for Alessandro a few years back. Later, I became his partner. It sounds bad to say, but I’m the kind of person who succeeds at everything. If I focus on a goal, I rarely fail to accomplish it. And the reason for it is simple: all those things that impair my personal relationships work to my advantage in my professional life. Come to think of it, I succeed because of a shortcoming instead of a special talent.My inability to manage my fragile emotive state has forced me to dedicate all my time to my job. I’ve always been defective emotionally. My job was my escape. My trick is to never be distracted by a love affair. I’ve always been in total control of my life and my feelings, and I’ve always thought I’d be that way forever.

  I’ve worked abroad. Especially when I was young. It was in London where I started taking public transportation to work.

  The daily encounter with the girl on the tram was one of the most exciting moments of my day. The rest would go on as usual. Those minutes on the tram were crystal clear, a window into another world. A colorful date.

  None of the people in my life, or even in my phone book, for that matter, were capable of exciting me like that mysterious stranger. I was attracted to her. And, although I was genuinely curious about her, I never got any closer.

  Every morning that winter, I would find her seated there when I stepped onto the tram to go to work. She looked like a cloud. She must have been about 35. When the tram would get to my stop, I would stand on the tips of my feet and stretch my neck to make sure she was on. If I didn’t see her, I would wait for the next tram. In spite of this little trick, sometimes I had to travel without her.

  That's about the time I started waking up before my alarm went off. If I didn’t see her on the tram, I didn’t want to spend the day wondering if she had passed before I got there, so I'd always show up early.

  Often, during the day, I would fantasize about her, but mostly about us. It’s nice to have a person to fantasize about during the day. Even if it is a stranger. I don’t know why, but anytime I would think about her my thoughts lacked periods. Only commas. They were an avalanche of words and images without any punctuation.

  She kept me company. And yet, our relationship was based on fleeting little smiles and silent looks.

  She got off two stops after mine. I’ve often felt the urge to follow her, to find out something more about her, but I never did. I never even sat next to her. I would keep a certain distance, depending on the seats available and the rules of perspective. Day after day, I trained my eyes to look sideways. Sometimes, when she was far away and I didn’t want to turn my head in her direction, I would follow her with my peripheral vision, and after a while my eyes would hurt. Sometimes the tram would get really full, and someone would stand right between us, blocking my view. I didn’t spend the entire commute staring at her, I simply liked looking at her, I would be distracted by something else and then my gaze would return to her. Knowing that she was there gave me a sense of safety. The best seat to have was the one next to the exit. When that seat was available, it was a lucky day, because when she got up to get off, she had to walk by me and said hi with a smile. If I didn’t sit down it was even better: in that case we would stay close, one next to the other for a few moments. I would breathe her in. She was like a mountain breeze when you open the window in the morning. I would breathe her in from up close, without touching her. Maybe someday, I would think. One day there was a little touch. One morning, as she was waiting for the door to open, the tram came to a sudden stop and she swayed in my direction. Her coat and my hand touched for a moment, and I clenched it as if I were biting it. If it were up to me, I would have never let her go. Sometimes she would look at me, too, from her seat.

  We would often lock eyes; our intimacy was a mutual and silent understanding. I often feared the looks and smiles she gave me were just her being polite.

  She wrote a lot. She would do it often. She wrote in an orange notebook with a hard cover.

  “I wonder what she’s writing. I wonder if she’s ever written anything about me,” I would say to myself.

  I liked looking at her while she wrote. First of all because she would take off her gloves to do it, but also because you could tell she was completely absorbed in what she was doing. So much so that it would make me a bit jealous. When she wrote she wouldn’t even lift her head from the page the whole commute. But looking at her so taken with what she was writing made her even more intriguing. I would have liked to be part of her world.

  She wasn’t easily distracted when she read, either. When she did it she wore glasses. They suited her. I liked to look at the way she would run her finger under the right page, separating it from the rest of the book. It was a very natural gesture, but it caught my attention, it was filled with all her grace.

  Sometimes she would use her right finger to curl a lock of her hair.

  The girl on the tram was beautiful. I liked her face. I liked her hair, straight, dark, thick. Her neck, her wrists, her hands. She only wore a small wedding band on her finger. No rings, no bracelets. Only a small wedding band. But the thing I liked the most about her was her eyes. What you could see inside them even if you looked only for a moment. Dark, deep, inescapable.

  At the time I would ask myself, “Is it possible to fall in love with someone you don’t know, someone you only see during your daily commu
te on the tram?” I didn’t know then. I don’t know now. I wasn’t in love. I was attracted to her. However I can say with absolute certainty that somehow I felt a bond with her, and that it was easy to fantasize that destiny had something in store for me. Or for us, even.

  I got close to the girl on the tram once because there were no seats left. I stood in front of her, but I was facing the opposite direction. That morning I saw her gaze reflected in the window. She was looking at me. We met there, on the glass which captured our images in its transparency. That’s where, in the encounter of our reflected faces, I discovered that a side look is much more intimate than a direct one. As if someone caught you stealing. As if that surface had made transparent a desire that until then had been kept silent. That time, as soon as she got off and the tram pulled away, I turned to look at her. She did the same.

  Twice a week she had a gym bag with her, almost always on Mondays and Thursdays. “I should do that, too,” I thought. “I should take my bag to the office, even though the gym is by my house, and then go straight there after work.Then I would actually manage to exercise more.” Instead, after work, I’d usually go home to grab my things, and I’d never make it out to the gym in the end. When I get home after a long day at work, the idea of going out again and facing physical exertion is too much of a battle. Besides, as soon as I’m home I get hungry and I snack on something. At the end of every day, I tell myself I’ll go tomorrow. I have a weird relationship with my gym bag. As I pack it the night before, I'll feel like jumping in it to sleep on the folded bathrobe. I should really learn to unpack it as soon as I get home, too. Sometimes I forget and I won’t remember until I’m already in bed. I imagine my sweaty shirt and the wet bathrobe next to the swimsuit that I wear in the sauna and I’ll have to get up and unpack it. If I wait until the next day, I’m afraid I’ll find mushrooms growing in it.