Thirty-seven

The woman for whom he was waiting has not come to the appointment. He, all the same – the man attired more youthfully than suits him – does not feel offended. Indeed, it does not bother him at all. If he were more observant, he would have to admit to feeling a slight but indubitable pleasure. He can shape a number of hypotheses on the reasons why the woman has not appeared at their rendezvous. As he sounds out these reasons, he does not desert their meeting’s appointed place, but only steps off slightly to one side of it, as though it were a den in which some part of her, or the whole of her, sat concealed. Perhaps she has forgotten. Since he likes to think of himself as an insignificant person, he is pleased with such a hypothesis, which would mean that she too has identified him as exiguous, aleatory and thus of such a kind that forgetting him is the only way to remember him. She might have reached her decision in a moment of caprice – or perhaps of pique – since she is an impetuous woman; and in that case she will have recognized his function as a nuisance, as a minuscule bother, surely no longing of the heart, but something no longer removable from her life, or at least from a few of the days of it. She may have mistaken the hour of the appointment, and in that moment he realizes that he is not clear, he himself, as to what that hour may have been. But this realization does not disturb him: he finds it natural for the hour to be imprecise, since he sees himself as having a perpetual appointment with the woman who has not arrived. Or has there perhaps been an error of place? He smiles. Might that not mean that she has taken repair, gone into hiding in some secret place, and that her absence is therefore fear, flight or even a game, a summons? Or that the appointment was everywhere, so that neither one, in reality, could fail the other, for either the place or the time? So he might conclude that in fact the appointment has been not only respected, but obeyed with absolute precision, indeed has been interpreted, understood, consummated. His slight feeling of pleasure is beginning to transmute into an overture of joy. He decides, indeed, that the appointment has been so thoroughly experienced that now he has nothing higher or more total to give of himself. Brusquely, he turns his back on the meeting place and tenderly whispers ‘Adieu’ to the woman he is preparing to meet.

‘Sixteen’, ‘Twenty-one’, ‘Twenty-eight’ and ‘Thirty-seven’ from Centuria.

(Rizzoli, 1979).