I haven’t got my pills, I insist, speaking Italian obviously. Yelling Italian. I have often reflected on this switch of language whenever I move from thought to speech. My heart pills! I yell. The heparin. For Christ’s sake! You’re being ridiculous, I tell myself. I’m shaking. The heparin! I left it in the suitcase. And the charger for my mobile, it now occurs to me. In the suitcase. How am I going to charge my mobile? It has often occurred to me how ridiculous I make myself when I move from thought to speech. My marriage has been conducted in Italian, but I continue to think in English. I’m sorry, I tell Giorgio, sitting back. Something cuts against the grain. We’re so upset, I explain. I just realised I haven’t taken my pill. My medicine. It’s for preventing blood clots, I explain to Giorgio. Heparin. I’m so sorry, my nerves are on edge. The old heart. I’ll need a laxative too. This has all been so awful. It’s so good of you to come. My wife makes no comment, tight-lipped. You’ll be able to get some at the hospital, Giorgio says. My wife does not remark that it is not a hospital, but a closed community for chronic schizophrenics, most of whom are notoriously healthy. Physically. They won’t have heparin there. Give me the tickets and I’ll phone the airport about the suitcase, Giorgio offers. You can see he relishes these practical details, these little things he can do. My wife says absolutely nothing. Is she worried about my heart or not? And I’m back on my seat. I sink back. It was a mistake, I reflect, to imagine I had recovered my balance and composure. My lucidity. A big mistake. I would never have burst out like that if I had truly recovered my balance. My composure. Perhaps you are more upset than you give yourself credit for.

  Giorgio drives on. My wife says nothing. In only an hour or so we are to see Marco’s body. His physical body. Where will the marks of the screwdriver be? I watch the traffic. The headlights and rain. I wish I was driving. When you are driving, I suddenly reflect, exhausted by my ridiculous outburst, the mind is occupied in a narrow and sensible way. When you are driving the mind is an obvious ally in the straightforward business of survival. Gauging distances, gauging braking speeds. Whereas sitting on a plane or on the back seat of a car, it occurs to me, the body is trapped and disorientated. You are denied activity. The mind paces about like a predator. It talks to you incessantly. How incessant the words are, Marco told me once. One of his moments of clarity, they were the saddest. Words in English, words in Italian. But when you are driving, the mind joins forces with you. It rails and shouts at the other drivers. It caresses the car. It savours the elasticity of the wheel, the sensitivity of the pedals. It reads the lights, the speed, the temperature, the road. A world where everybody is always driving would be a happy world, I reflect. In the teeth of the environmentalists. A world of minds happily engaged, I reflect. In steering and accelerating and braking. Happily at home in their bodies. Happily railing at each other, without ever speaking. Separate and complicit. I never minded driving up to visit Marco, I remember, even when Vanoli insistently advised my wife to try a period without visits. I never minded the long hours at the wheel, her sombre presence beside me. When they locked him away in Turin. Even when I was ill, even when my chest was bursting with pain, I didn’t mind driving. Perhaps my happiest moments with my wife, I reflect, have been when she tells me where to drive and I have driven her there. She told me to drive to our son. She never learned to drive. Though it would have been nice to take the opportunity to go over to Paola’s. It was quite ridiculous to drive up from Rome to Turin without making the very small detour necessary to visit Paola in Novara. For two years we drove weekly from Rome to Turin without ever visiting Paola and Giorgio in Novara. Only half an hour away. And sitting in the back of Giorgio’s Mercedes now speeding up the autostrada towards Turin, it occurs to me that my relationship with Paola, dear Paola, is the one personal relationship in my life that has always worked. This waif of a girl picked up in the Ukraine, as ifin a market, or purchasing contraband cigarettes, this girl is the one and only person in all my life whose company has always brought me pleasure, and whom I have never let down. I must see her.

  Leaning forward I ask, quite unmistakably this time, even menacingly: How is Paola? How’s my girl? And knowing this will irritate my wife I ask, Is she going to meet us at the hospital?

  Giorgio stares at the road. He says, Paola and I have split up.

  V

  DOTTOR VANOLI IS planning to leave his wife for a young and beautiful woman. He says. I have been invited to his home to discuss the matter. It is less sumptuous than I imagined. If I wasn’t shown in by Vanoli himself, I would say I was in Paola’s flat. The layout of the rooms is the same. Even the kitchenette. It is drab, but in the circumstances I couldn’t afford anything better. The wife is hovering behind him. We are so grateful you could come. She is fussing. My coat. My hat. Then I discover the girl on the sofa. The mistress. Isn’t this rather jumping the gun? I persuade the wife to leave the room while we talk. I have always found it useful to divide people up before talking to them. The girl’s presence has galvanised and disconcerted me. I am thinking fast, as when one used to come home to find Gregory on the sofa with a glass of gin and tonic in his hand. This is sheer provocation, I tell the doctor in a low voice. But Vanoli objects that on the contrary everything should be out in the open. His children have grown up. He owes it to his wife to bring his mistress along. I am perplexed. I was expecting to be consulted. If he has already decided, why invite me? The girl is less attractive than I imagined. Decidedly so. Vanoli is making a mistake, I tell myself. With all the pretty girls there are in Rome, this is madness. The short fashionable haircut frames a coarse face. Attractive only in youth, I tell myself. This is a familiar pattern of thought. The wife, on the contrary, has a noble face. Albeit scored by age and tears. I expected to be consulted, I tell Vanoli. I can’t understand why you invited me if not to consult me. I am paying five thousand a minute. But Vanoli protests that he hasn’t decided at all. Far from it. To bring things out in the open is not to decide, he says, just a necessary precursor of decision. We haven’t decided at all, Mr Burton. We wanted your opinion.

  Well, I’m on the sofa. I have a whisky in my hand. How pleasant, I reflect, crossing my legs on the sofa, a whisky in my hand, to be asked for an opinion! I haven’t felt so at ease in years. To think of Vanoli, rather than yourself, going through a crisis like this, leaving his pleasant wife of noble physiognomy for a chit of a girl. A girl with nothing on Karen, for example. Imagining he can bring things out in the open like this, humiliating his wife like this, without seriously prejudicing the outcome of events. Nowhere near as beautiful as Karen. Is he Italian or what? And I lean forward, swirling my whisky, and quote Samuel Johnson: If marriage partners were chosen at random from the public registrar, I quote, the overall level of weal and woe would not be greatly altered. Samuel Johnson, I tell him. An important figure in my chapter on British character types. I sit back. The girl still hasn’t spoken. Probably hasn’t understood. Younger than Karen was. Definitely less attractive. To think of Vanoli of all people, Italy’s foremost psychiatrist, making the mistake you didn’t. This is an illusion, I tell the man. Rather brutally. I’m leaning forward again. Your wife is your destiny, I tell him. Do you see? The important thing is to think of her as chosen. By the public registrar for example. Not your responsibility. By some other power. You are not responsible for your unhappiness, I tell Vanoli. Even God. His beard is as well trimmed as ever, his eyes as small and clear. This has always annoyed me. Even if you leave her, Doctor, which I predict you will not, you will continue to feel that she is your destiny. Vanoli shows no sign of emotional stress. How annoying that is. You are hurting your wife for nothing. Understand? You should never have told her. You could have enjoyed this young woman and she you without destroying your wife. I have learned enough from Italians to know that. I’m surprised at you. Vanoli keeps his faint air of superiority. You merely wish to force a crisis for your own psychological well-being, I elaborate. You love your wife, I’m shouting at him. You are a team! Understand? Understand the word team? Vanoli is unflinching. I am in love with Nadia, he says.

  Then I’m overwhelmed by the folly of it. This is folly, I tell myself. All around me people are committing the gravest of follies. Paola, Paola, Paola. Even the bathroom is like hers. I am just about to explain to Vanoli, who should know better, the nature of his madness, my reasons for prescribing Thorazine, that will do the trick, even if he will be sleepy for much of the day, when the guests begin to arrive. One two three four. They arrange themselves on rows of chairs. There’s a crowd and music is playing. A hoarse voice. Non posso non ricordarmi di te. I have been invited to speak on the subject of national character and destiny. A decidedly hoarse singing voice. Non posso pensare che l’amore non c’è. How I love public speaking. Though nervous to start with. Montesquieu insisted on the importance of climate. The hoarse voice strains on. A radio presumably. And likewise Leopardi. I should ask them to turn it off. How is it, Leopardi asked, that the warmest and most vivacious of national characters, the Mediterranean Italian, is also the coldest and most calculating? Produced the likes of Machiavelli. The most calculating and cynical? These were Leopardi’s words, I told my wife, not mine. More or less. I liked Machiavelli. A man much maligned. Paradox ties the knot at the heart of character. But what I am going to insist on today, I sip my whisky to make my audience wait, is the importance of language. Take this song for example. Non posso non, etc. – ‘Can’t help remembering you’. This false song, with its hoarse voice and tortured tribute to the great god love. Non posso credere . . . This fake song – ‘Can’t believe that love is gone’. Suddenly I am in a dark space, people are coming and going, the music coming and going. Footsteps approach along the corridor. A long, long corridor. Non posso non ricordarmi di te. Every time I return to Italy, I tell myself, I tell my audience, every single time, there is always a hoarse voice on a radio somewhere singing a hoarse and tortured tribute to love. Lost love. A fake tribute. Always. A voice that strains to strain. Every nation endlessly sings itself the same song, I tell the hospital staff arranged on a huddle of seats in Vanoli’s front room. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? The momentum of national character is in the language, I tell these doctors. They are laughing. It surfaces, flowers, in certain songs, certain cadences. These hoarse and irretrievably false love songs – I am obliged to raise my voice – are entirely typical of the Italian mentality. Every time I am in Italy, I am immediately aware of these songs. Lost warmth cynically retrieved as merest rhetoric. Lost passion redeployed for merest self-interest. I am struggling in the dark with the words of the song coming and going along the corridor. This will be the burden of my second chapter. Language is of its nature a closed system, I tell the sniggering public. The same way the minds of each of your patients present so many closed systems. Do they not? Talking to themselves. Marco was forever talking to himself. Or rather: being talked to by themselves. Languages talk to themselves, I insist. Through us the language talks to itself. To explain Italian in English, for example, is always to have an English explanation. That is the folly of Gregory’s book. Of all travel books. We are surrounded by folly. English elaborates Englishness, I struggle to explain. How can a man ever explain his wife, his foreign wife, or vice versa for that matter? But all wives are foreign. Or son? You cannot marry a woman in one language and think in another, I told Vanoli once. But we all do. Globalisation is meaningless, I insist. And I told Vanoli how the only affair I ever had that ever meant anything was with an English girl. We spoke English. Karen was much prettier than your blonde. Half black, I boast to Vanoli. Incredible skin. English mind, foreign smell. Whereas my wife spoke to her lover in French. A very Italian thing to do. A sort of ultimate rhetorical flourish, to speak to your lover in another language. Where the words are fresher even if the sentiment isn’t. Gregory fell in love with her because he was speaking to an Italian woman in French, or so he told me. So he told me. Gregory actually told me. His French was better than his Italian. In a hotel bar in Palermo. A hundred paces from where a prominent politician was gunned down in cold blood. Andreotti may have been involved. I’m in love with your wife, he told me. The essence of Andreotti is that he may or may not have been involved in everything. A mystery. A closed system. You will be aware, Signor Presidente, that you are surrounded by a veil of mystery. But did you actively cultivate this? Your notorious secret files, for example. My wife kept a diary in French. Their love language. No, a proper knowledge of language, I insist to the doctors gathered in Vanoli’s front room, is essential in the study of national character and national destiny. Psychiatrists should be linguists. Politicians should be linguists. The language is the national destiny, I shout. Its evolution, the future. I am yelling now. The doctors laughing. And with an overwhelming sense of frustration, a huge pain in my chest, I realise at last that I am speaking to my audience in English. Somehow my Italian – I had imagined it was Italian – is English. They are laughing among themselves, uncomprehending. Vanoli is cuddling his girl. I’m furious. My chest is bursting. And suddenly I am wide awake.

  I am wide awake on the lower bunk bed in my granddaughters’ room, and my first thought on returning to myself from this strange and strangely vivid dream is that Marco was always praised for being everything I was not. My heart is beating fast. I need to breathe. I have not taken my heparin. Marco was always praised for being in every way different from yourself, I remember, immediately upon waking from this vivid dream. By your wife that is. As if his birth, I told Vanoli, were a question of parthenogenesis. My wife always spoke of his birth as a miracle. My wife bought an ex voto and placed it beside the Madonna in Santa Maria degli Angeli. A small heart-shaped shield with Marco’s date of birth engraved in silver. That was understandable. I come to see you alone, I told Vanoli, because otherwise I would have to watch my wife seducing you. So you seduce me instead, he laughed. She would light a candle there, on his birthday. Every birthday. But why this thought after this dream? Parthenogenesis. Conception without fertilisation. And why this dream when it is the opposite of the truth: why Vanoli leaving his wife when it is I who have left mine? You have left your wife, I remind myself, amazed, lying on a child’s bed in the dark. Left your wife after all these years. The shutters are closed behind a curtainless window, but in the socket by the door a nightlight spreads a red glow. From the bed above comes the sound of soft, even breathing. A child’s gentle breathing. I am in my granddaughters’ room. Why that thought, I ask myself, after that dream? The thought as vivid as the dream: Marco always praised for being everything you were not. Where are the connections here? The famous bandhu. And this the very morning after leaving your wife. I have left my wife. At least you didn’t dream of your wife, I tell myself. At least you didn’t dream of your son.

  Your son has been taken to the policlinico, Mr Burton.

  The rain had eased somewhat. My wife has this way of sending me on ahead, as though acknowledging that I am the more practical, only to storm in later when I fail to achieve whatever it is I should. There were storm clouds over low hills, a rolling mist. In staring twilight I hurried across a few yards of asphalt to the main steps. A seventeenth-century villa with a finely landscaped park is now a closed community for chronic schizophrenics. There is even a bell pull. I told the nurse I didn’t understand.

  For the post-mortem, Mr Burton. We don’t have the facilities here.

  The patients were eating their dinners. My wife has sent you ahead, I remember thinking in the stone-flagged entrance to this beautiful but unrenovated villa, precisely in order to storm in a few minutes later. You announce your wife, I thought. You go before her, like John the Baptist. This is part of her way of moving heaven and earth. Her relationship with you is part of her strength. And what greater telluric movement could there be, I reflect, lying here in the strangest of moods in my granddaughters’ room, the soft red glow and slow gentle breathing imposing a fragile calm on an otherwise frantic mind, what greater movement than birth by parthenogenesis? Or raising a boy from the dead? Was Christ’s birth a case of parthenogenesis? Conception without fertilisation. Certainly it required sending someone ahead. Most likely it pointed to his resurrection. But these are facile connections, I tell myself. No, it is quite facile to go on generating connections that don’t mean anything at all. To look for analogies that don’t mean anything at all. And isn’t it shameful that even your dreams contain no sign of grieving for your son? In your dream, I suddenly reflect, lying quite still in my granddaughters’ room and at the same time intensely aware that in all likelihood my wife is still at his side, still at this very moment sitting in the mortuary in the policlinico in Turin, beside his body, weeping over our son’s body, praying over his body, as once other women planned to weep over Christ’s – but such connections are quite ridiculous, if not pernicious – in your dream there is no sign at all of your son – you could have dreamed this dream any night, I tell myself, any night you want – and above all no sign of his body, your son’s body, which was so athletic, your wife always said, so unlike your own she meant. Did my wife, I am suddenly reflecting, miss even one of his basketball games? Ever? Did she ever miss lighting that candle? In Santa Maria degli Angeli. On his birthday. The miracle of his birthday. Basketball is a sport I never understood. Paola was hopeless at sport. Marco was everything you could never be, my wife said. Marco is obese, I told her.

  He isn’t here then? I asked. Voices echoed along the corridor. At any moment, I predicted, my wife would come storming in. Why had she stayed in the car, thinking as she did that the body was here, if not to storm in after the shortest of intervals?

  Would you like to talk to Dottor Busi? the nurse asked. I’m worried about my wife, I said. My wife doesn’t know it was suicide. Dottor Busi mustn’t tell my wife it was suicide. Then my wife stormed in. Where was her son? There is a payphone in the entrance to this once noble villa, now a closed community for chronic schizophrenics. Its orange casing is clamped to the wall beside a radiator. I have frequently called Paola from here – the line is better than from the mobile – while my wife walks arm in arm with Marco in the ample grounds. The grounds are very beautiful, Vanoli said. She always walked arm in arm with Marco, rested her head on his tall shoulder, caressed his hands. A number of my patients have made big improvements there, Vanoli said, though later I realised his intention had been to get the boy as far away from his parents as possible. I looked at the phone. Why on earth were Paola and Giorgio splitting up? I wondered as my wife came rushing in and demanded to know where our son’s body was. Vanoli had reckoned without our travelling eight hundred miles in the car every week. Four hundred there, four hundred back. We saw him every week, I remind myself. Overcoming considerable obstacles. And how is it that others split up so easily and we do not? How many times have friends, colleagues, relatives, even strangers told me: My wife and I have just split up, My husband and I have just split up, as if this were the most natural thing in the world? And immediately I ask myself, And us? We stayed together to visit Marco, I tell myself, lying here in the red glow of a child’s nightlight. To drive eight hundred miles a week. She walked arm in arm with him in the grounds, like a lover I often thought, while I made phone-calls from the hospital. There can be no point in our staying together now that Marco is dead.