The White Dress by Nathalie Léger

Author:Nathalie Léger [Léger, Nathalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-948980-06-7
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

At the station a friend of a friend, a journalist at Corriere della Sera, was waiting with the keys to a small studio that he was generously lending me for the duration of my stay. He was there when the train arrived, a tiny figure beneath the station’s oppressive arches, on time and where he said he would be, between the Burger King and the Juice Bar, and the ease with which we found each other in the colossal entrance hall briefly gave me confidence in my ability to organize this trip and perhaps to carry out these interviews. We were sitting having a coffee, both slightly uncomfortable, since we were essentially completely uninterested in meeting each other. We smiled. Everything echoed so violently in this chasm of stone and iron that any attempt at conversation sounded like we were on a demolition site. Around us entire walls of words were collapsing, revealing traces of rooms where one might once have been able to have an enjoyable stay, but it was too late. Laconic and pale, he bore a resemblance to the hero of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia: he would definitely have been capable of risking everything to fulfil a promise to a dead person to walk across an empty swimming pool carrying a flickering candle. I was expecting him to hand me the keys, I would thank him and we would go our separate ways. Of course he’d heard of Pippa Bacca, everyone here had heard of Pippa Bacca. His newspaper’s editorial team had followed the case, but he hadn’t really been paying close attention to it, he was the “Science and Technology correspondent,” he dropped this into the conversation with an amused little pout that fleetingly transformed his wan expression, and from a distance it seemed to him nothing more than, how can I put it, the story of a do-gooder wanting to right the wrongs of the bad guys, trying to bring about world peace in a white dress, he sighed and threw me a baleful glance as if I myself were sitting listening to him from beneath a wedding veil, “It’s a ghastly way to want to do good, too many pious sentiments, it’s nauseating.” A silence followed. Over the foam of my cappuccino, I asked him if he thought that all pious sentiments were pointless. He sat up very straight and adjusted his coat and began reciting a little ode to science and technology, Darwin, natural selection, the development of moral understanding, group cohesion, the evaluation not only of acts but of intentions, temporal-parietal lobe function, which he emphasized by placing his index finger on his hair above his right ear. It felt like the explanation went on for a while, but my coffee had barely cooled down. He downed his in one swallow and banged his cup on the metal table, there are so many ways to make it clear that one is about to leave, then he drew an envelope from his pocket and said

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