When I Was Mortal Read Online Free Page A

out and met writers in cafés, in cinemas, sometimes for supper. As for me, despite being a foreigner to them and a foreigner in the city, Silvia would meet me somewhere and Giulia would invite me home. When Giulia invited me home, her husband used to go out for a few hours because he hated all things Spanish. He was an older man, twenty years older than his wife, and a writer himself (albeit of treatises on engineering), in possession of a precarious fortune of which Giulia made only moderate use. Then one summer, her husband had to go away for a considerable period, for professional reasons. From the kitchen window, Giulia began to notice a young man who lived a few floors below. She always saw him sitting down, with his glasses on, but without his shirt, apparently studying. Later, they passed on the stairs, and by the time her husband returned they had become lovers, they would leave letters in each other’s mail boxes, with no return address on the back. Only a month later, her husband asked for a divorce and left the apartment. The neighbour came and went up and down the stairs.
    It was then that my other friend, Silvia, announced to me that she was getting married. One of those older writers with whom she used to go out to the café or to the cinema had become so much a part of her life that she couldn’t do without him. He was twenty years older than her, very intelligent (she said), he wrote treatises on Islam, he had something of a reputation and a personal fortune inherited from his first wife, who had diedten years before. The only thing that alerted me then was the fact that, as Silvia laughingly told me, he hated all things Spanish, and so, when I visited Paris, she would perhaps have to continue meeting me in cafés and cinemas. It occurred to me that his hatred might have Moorish roots.
    Meanwhile, Giulia, the first friend, devoted herself to leading the kind of life with the false student (his glasses made him look younger, he was a man of thirty-something, the same age as her, and had a good job as a psychologist with a big multinational) which, given his age and character, her husband had never wanted or been able to lead: not only in summer, like a large part of the world’s population, but during every vacation period, they set off on complicated journeys to far-away places: in the space of nine months they visited Bali, Malaysia and, finally, Thailand. It was in Thailand that, for no known reason, the psychologist or false student fell ill, and his case provoked such interest amongst the hospital doctors that even the Queen’s doctor dropped in to have a look at him. No one knew what he had, but after fifteen anxious days, he recovered and was able to return to Paris.
    It was more or less then, that, unexpectedly (only months, not years, had passed since her marriage), Silvia, during a time when her Islamic husband was immobilized due to a fall down the stairs in their new conjugal home (so many houses in Paris still do not have a lift), she happened to meet in a cinema (to which this time she went alone) a young man of her own age for whom, after a few more weeks of cinemas and cafés and marital immobility, she had conceived such a passion that she had no option but to propose a quickie divorce and to acknowledge her mistake (that is, her impatience or her weakness or her submission to habit, or her resignation). The young man was rather richer than the old writer: he was deputy director of a canning factory for mussels and tuna and was constantly visiting far-off countries inorder to make acquisitions or to carry out murky deals. Silvia went with him to China and then Korea and later to Vietnam. It was in this latter country that, for no known reason, the deputy director of the canning factory fell gravely ill and had to postpone his many deals during the two unplanned-for weeks that it took him to recover.
    I had never spoken to Giulia about Silvia or to Silvia about Giulia, because neither of