Something, but I couldn't understand what. People walking along level streets as if they were going uphill or down, lips and nostrils twitching like gills, then houses and doors in flight and the street corners sharper than usual. It was the wind: later on I realized.
Turin is a windless city. The streets are canals of motionless air fading into infinity like screaming sirens: motionless air, glassy with frost or soft with haze, stirred only by the trams skimming by on their rails. For months I forget there is such a thing as wind; all that's left is a vague need.
But all it takes is for a gust rising from the bottom of a street one day, rising and coming to meet me, and I remember my windblown village beside the sea, the houses ranged above and below each other, and the wind in the middle going up and down, and streets of steps and cobbles, and slashes of blue windy sky above the alleyways. And home with the shutters banging, the palm trees groaning at the windows, and my father's voice shouting on the hilltop.
I'm like that, a wind man, who needs friction and headway when he's walking, needs suddenly to shout and bite the air when he's speaking. When the wind lifts in town, spreading from suburb to suburb in tongues of colourless flame, the town opens up before me like a book, it's as though I could recognize everybody I see, I feel like yelling, 'Hey there!' to the girls, the cyclists, like shouting out what I'm thinking, waving my hands.
I can't stay in when there's wind. I live in a rented room on the fifth floor; beneath my window the trams roll in the narrow street day and night, as if rattling headlong across my room; night-time, trams far away shriek like owls. The landlady's daughter is a secretary, fat and hysterical: one day she smashed a plate of peas in the passageway and shut herself in her room screaming.
The toilet looks out on the courtyard; it's at the end of a narrow corridor, a cave almost, its walls damp and green and mouldy: maybe stalactites will form. Beyond the bars on the window the courtyard is one of those Turin courtyards trapped under layers of decay with iron balcony railings you can't lean on without getting rust all over you. One above the other, the protruding cages of the toilets make a sort of tower: toilets with mould-soft walls, marshy at the bottom.
And I think of my own house high above the sea amid the palm trees, my own house so different from all other houses. And the first difference that comes to mind is the number of toilets it had, toilets of every variety: in bathrooms gleaming with white tiles, in gloomy cubby-holes, Turkish toilets, ancient water-closets with blue friezes fabling round the bowls.
Remembering all this I was wandering round the city smelling the wind. When I go and run into a girl I know: Ada Ida.
'I'm happy: the wind!' I tell her.
'It gets on my nerves,' she answers. 'Walk with me a bit: just till there.'
Ada Ida is one of those girls who run into you and immediately start telling you their life stories and what they think about things, even though they hardly know you: girls with no secrets, except for things that are secrets to them too; and even for those secrets they'll find words, everyday words that sprout effortlessly, as if their thoughts budded ready-clothed in a tissue of words.
'The wind gets on my nerves,' she says. 'I shut myself in the house and kick off my shoes and wander round the rooms barefoot. Then I get a bottle of whisky an American friend gave me and drink. I've never managed to get drunk on my own. There's a point where I burst into tears and stop. I've been wandering about for a week not knowing what to do with myself.'
I don't know how she does it, Ada Ida, how any of them do it, all those men and women who manage to be intimate with everybody, who find something to say to everybody, who get involved in other people's affairs and let them get involved in theirs. I say: 'I'm in a room on the fifth floor with the trams like owls at night. The toilet is green with mould, with moss and stalactites, and a winter fog like over a marsh. I think up to a point people's characters depend on the toilets they have to shut themselves up in every day. You get home from the office and you find the toilet green with mould, marshy: so you smash a plate of peas in the passage and you shut yourself in your room and scream.'
I haven't been very clear, this isn't really how I had thought of it, Ada Ida certainly won't understand, but before my thoughts can turn into spoken words they have to go through an empty space and they come out false.
'I do more cleaning in the toilet than anywhere else in the house,' she says, 'every day I wash the floor; I polish everything. Every week I put a clean curtain on the window, white, with embroidery, and every year I have the walls repainted. I feel if I stopped cleaning the toilet one day it would be a bad sign, and I'd let myself go more and more till I was desperate. It's a small dark toilet, but I keep it like a church. I wonder what kind of toilet the managing director of Fiat has. Come on, walk with me a bit, till the tram.'
The great thing about Ada Ida is that she accepts everything you say, nothing surprises her, any subject you bring up, she'll go on with it, as if it had been her idea in the first place. And she wants me to walk with her as far as the tram.
'Okay, I'll come,' I tell her. 'So, the managing director of Fiat had them build him a toilet that was a big lounge with columns and drapes and carpets, aquariums in the walls. And big mirrors all round reflecting his body a thousand times. And the John had arms and a back to lean on and it was high as a throne; it even had a canopy over it. And the chain for flushing played a really delightful carillon. But the managing director of Fiat couldn't move his bowels. He felt intimidated by all those carpets and aquariums. The mirrors reflected his body a thousand times while he sat on that John, high as a throne. And the managing director of Fiat felt nostalgic for the toilet in his childhood home, with sawdust on the floor and sheets of newspaper skewered on a nail. And so he died: intestinal infection after months without moving his bowels.'
'So he died,' Ada Ida agrees. 'Just so, he died. Do you know any other stories like that? Here comes my tram. Get on with me and tell me another.'
'In the tram and then where?'
'In the tram. Do you mind?'
We get on the tram. 'I can't tell you any stories,' I say, 'because I've got this gap. There's an empty chasm between me and everybody else. I wave my arms about inside it but I can't get hold of anything, I shout into it but no one hears: it's total emptiness.'
'In those situations I sing,' says Ada Ida, 'I sing in my mind. When I'm speaking to someone and I get to a point where I realize I can't go on, as if I'd got to the edge of a river, my thoughts running away to hide, I start singing in my mind the last words spoken or said, and putting them to a tune, any old tune. And the other words that come into my mind, I mean following the same tune, are the words of my thoughts. So I say them.'
'Try it.'
'So I say them. Like the time someone bothered me in the street thinking I was one of them.'
'But you aren't singing.'
'I'm singing in my mind, then I translate. Otherwise you wouldn't understand. I did the same that time with that man. I ended up telling him that I hadn't had any candies for three years. He bought me a bag. Then I really didn't know what to say to him. I mumbled something and ran off with the bag of candy.'
'I'll never manage to say anything, speaking,' I say, 'that's why I write.'
'Do what the beggars do,' Ada Ida says, pointing to one, at a tram-stop.
Turin is as full of beggars as a holy city in India. Even beggars have their special ways, when asking for money: one tries something and all the others copy. For a while now lots of the beggars have taken to writing their life stories in huge letters on the pavement, with pieces of coloured chalk: it's a good way of getting people interested enough to read and then they feel obliged to part with some change.
'Yes,' I say, 'maybe I should write my story in chalk on the pavement and sit down beside to hear what people would say. At least we'd look each other in the eyes a bit. But maybe no one would notice and they'd walk all over it and rub it out.'
'What would you write, on the pavement, if you were a beggar?' Ada Ida asks.
'I'd write, all in block capitals: I'm one of those who write because they can't handle speaking; sorry about this, folks. Once a paper published something I'd written. It's a paper that comes out early in the morning; the people who buy it are mainly workers on their way to the factory. That morning I was on the trams early and I saw people reading the things I had written, and I watched their faces, trying to understand what line they were up to. Everything you write there's always something you're sorry you put in, either because you're afraid of being misunderstood, or out of shame. And on the trams that morning I kept watching people's faces till they got to that bit, and then I wanted to say: 'Look, maybe I didn 't explain that very well, this is what I meant,' but I still sat there without saying anything and blushed.'
Meanwhile we've got off the tram and Ada Ida is waiting for another tram to come. I don't know which tram I should get now and I wait with her.
'I'd write this,' says Ada Ida, 'in blue and yellow chalk: Ladies and Gentlemen, there are people whose greatest pleasure is to have others urinate on them. D'Annunzio was one such, they say. I believe it. You should remember that every day, and remember that we are all the same race, and not act so superior. And what about this: my aunt gave birth to a son with the body of a cat. You should remember that things like that happen, never forget it. And that in Turin there are people who sleep on the pavements, over warm cellar gratings. I've seen them. You should think about all these things, every evening, instead of saying your prayers. And you should keep them in mind during the day. Then your heads won't be so full of plans and hypocrisy. That's what I'd write. Keep me company on this tram too, be sweet.'
I don't know why but I went on taking trams with Ada Ida. The tram went a long way through the poor suburbs. The people on the tram were grey and wrinkly, as though all grimed with the same dust.
Ada Ida insists on passing remarks: 'Look what a nervous tic that man has. And look how much powder that old woman's put on.'
I found it all upsetting and I wanted her to stop. 'So? So?' I said. 'Everything real is rational.' But deep down I wasn't convinced.
I'm real and rational too, I thought, not accepting, thinking up plans, meaning to change everything. But to change everything you have to start from there, from the man with the nervous tic, the old woman with the powder, and not from plans. And from Ada Ida too who's still saying, 'Keep me company just till there.'
'It's our stop,' says Ada Ida, and we get off. 'Keep me company just till there, do you mind?'
'Everything real is rational, Ada Ida,' I tell her. 'Any more trams to catch?'
'No, I live round that corner.'
We were at the end of town. Iron castles rose behind factory walls; the wind waved scraps of smoke at the lighting conductors of the smokestacks. And there was a river tucked in with grass: the Dora.
I remembered a windy night by the Dora, years ago, when I walked along biting a girl's cheek. She had long, really fine hair and it kept getting between my teeth.
'Once,' I say, 'I bit a girl's cheek, here, in the wind. And I spat out hair. It's a marvellous story.'
'Here,' Ada Ida says, 'I've arrived.'
'It's a marvellous story,' I tell her, 'but it takes a while to tell.'
'I've arrived,' says Ada Ida. 'He must be home already.'
'He who?'
'I'm with this guy who works at RIV. He's fishing mad. He's filled the flat with fishing rods and artificial flies.'
'Everything real is rational,' I say. 'It was a marvellous story. Tell me what trams I have to get to get back.'
'The twenty-two, the seventeen, the sixteen,' she says. 'Every Sunday we go to the Sangone. The other day, a trout this big.'
'Are you singing in your mind?'
'No. Why?'
'Just asking. Twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirteen.'
'Twenty-two, seventeen, sixteen. He likes to fry the fish himself. There, I can smell it. It's him frying.'
'And the oil? Are your rations enough? Twenty-six, seventeen, sixteen.'
'We do swaps with a friend. Twenty-two, seventeen.'
'Twenty-two, seventeen, fourteen?'
'No: eight, fifteen, forty-one.'
'Right: I'm so forgetful. Everything is rational. Bye, Ada Ida.'
I get home after an hour in the wind, getting all the trams wrong and arguing by numbers with the drivers. I go in and there are peas and broken bits of plate in the passage, the fat secretary has locked herself in her room, she's screaming.