TE22 Potpourri

Manuel Baixauli

UNKNOWN

BOLOGNA December, 1965. The owner of the penthouse on number 49 Via Broccaindosso, smack-dab in the middle of the student neighborhood, was no longer the little old lady he’d had dealings with twenty years back, when he had come there to do his doctorate. Paola, the woman who answered the door now, must have been her daughter, twenty years were plenty of time for that charming old lady, wrinkled like an accordion, to have died from some cancer, stroke, heart attack. Would she have recognized Artur Bosch, if she were still alive? Would she have seen, in the squinty eyes of that adult, the timid and uptight young man who could barely stammer out a few words in Italian but aspired to take on the world? Artur would never know, and certainly didn’t want to pose the question to her presumed daughter. What he wanted was the penthouse apartment, and he wanted to keep it forever, which put a crimp in Paola’s plans, as she was used to renting it out temporarily to students just passing through. Arturwanted thepenthouseand he wanted it empty, without furniture, with just a bed, a table, and a refrigerator. Paola found the circumspection with which Artur—sienna brown suit jacket and black tie—demanded that disconcerting. She was having trouble accepting she would finally be rid of that cyclical problem: having to show the apartment all the time, negotiate the price, go through it and check every time some guests left, maintain it in good condition. She had lived there too, with her mother, before they bought 102

their little house with a yard. She knew that place down to the last millimeter; every object had to be in its place in order to move through it without tripping, it was so narrow. There were still some things of hers there, a couple of records, a few photos, some decorative artwork she’d made at school and hadn’t brought to her new home, objects that had also become familiar, over the course of a few months, to young Artur, who still remembered them and wanted to get rid of them. What would Paola do with them now? She didn’t even have time to think about it, because Artur accepted the first price she offered him and the deal was closed so quickly that Paola was left thinking she’d asked for too little, even though she’d quoted him a high figure, expecting a long, hard haggling session. Artur Bosch settled in and spent a fewdays wandering beneath the arcades that webbed the city, without speaking to anyone, observing strangers, contemplating store windows, drinking in the silence of churches, eating small portions at the most discreet tables in restaurants. Every once in a while his heart leapt when he thought he saw her, his wife, at a distance, from behind or in profile. Artur thought about her and also thought of Edmund, their baby, whom neither he nor she had ever thought of along those streets, beneath those arcades, because then,whentheywouldspendChristmas inBologna, theyhadn’t even considered the possibility of procreating. Now Artur had left Edmund, who was only two years old, at his grandparents’ house. He wondered if some day he would stroll and converse with him under those very arcades, those same streets, if he would be able to tell him things about his mother, or if some 103