The Memory Key (47 page)

‘Will he get away with it, do you think?’

‘Professor Ideo?’ Blume considered. ‘Maybe. You never can tell.’

‘That doesn’t bother you too much, does it?’

‘It’s how things work, or don’t work. We have the lousiest court system in the western world. Or the most inconclusive, which may be the same thing.’

‘Are you interested in that case you sabotaged?’

‘I had almost forgotten about it.’

‘The preliminary judge released the daughter and criticized the preventative arrest. Adelgardo Lambertini has been put under house arrest and ordered to sign in once a week. Medical certificates helped there. Are you pleased?’

‘Yes,’ said Blume.

‘Well, I am glad to get such a direct response from you for once. But you don’t have to look quite so pleased.’

‘That’s not it,’ said Blume. ‘I am smiling for a different reason. But I am waiting for you to tell me what it is.’

She glanced at the door, the way she did in the bedroom when she was nervously checking again that Elia was not home. Then she turned her face towards him, and he was unsure what to make of her expression, at once so bright and so sad.

‘What do you think you know, Alec?’

‘I think you are still pregnant. You did not have an abortion.’

He felt a lurch as her eyes filled with tears. Surely, he had not got that wrong.

She smiled at the teardrops that landed on her blouse.

‘You’re right.’

Quite of its own accord, Blume’s hand made a fist and thumped the armrest.

‘So you take this as a victory?’

‘Victory, triumph, fantastic news, call it what you will. We are going to have a son.’ He laughed.

She laughed, too, but with considerably less joy. ‘
I
am going to have a
child
.’

‘Fine. A girl’s fine. Girls are great. Probably better if it’s a girl. Is it?’

‘It’s too early to tell. And I probably won’t get amniocentesis. It’s less used now than – you don’t even know what that is, do you?’

‘Is it that thing where they give you a . . . they take a . . . they put you into a . . . no, I don’t know what it is.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. In most of the ways that count, you’re still basically an adolescent. The reason I called you here tonight is to tell you I do not want you to be the father.’

Blume felt the same wave of nausea and light-headedness the cigarettes had induced in him a few nights before, and he found his hand reaching for his pocket in search of them. Had he known she was going to say this? His muscles seemed to have seized up as in a dream. He was not sure if they would respond to his commands, so he simply sat there, immobile, considering the idea that he could be asleep and dreaming this moment.

Caterina had tilted her head and was looking at him the way she did sometimes, with curiosity as well as pity.

‘Poor Alec. I am sorry. What were you expecting, though? You abandoned me again in the car park this morning, then you phone me up to ask to come round for dinner. I don’t know where to begin. And you have started drinking and, I think, smoking, but that’s minor. You can give them up. You can’t give up being you.’

His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he did not seem to be able to produce saliva. He swallowed dry air, and tried to speak. ‘I think, legally speaking, I am allowed . . . Can I recognize her?’

Caterina stepped  across the space between them and sat on the armrest and stroked the side of his face with the back of her hand. ‘Yes, of course you may.’

‘Great.’ The voice that came out of his throat was an alien croak.

‘You can contribute, you can visit, and you can watch her grow up. But you can’t bring her – or him – up. You can’t live with me any more.’

‘Ah, you say that now.’

She ignored his effort to assume a bantering tone. ‘Yes, I say it now. I could have said it when I was angrier with you, and it would have been easier. I could have not said it to you, and left you adrift. But I chose this way because it is the hardest way, and the hardest way is always the right one.’

‘Well, if that were true, football would be quite a different–’

‘Alec!’

‘What?’

She put her finger to her lips. ‘It’s all right. Stop trying to talk your way out of your pain. I know you’re hurt.’ She took her finger off her lips, and touched his forehead.

‘Won’t Elia miss me? A bit?’

‘Yes, he will. Much more than a bit.’

‘I suppose he’s almost grown up now, and I came late on the scene.’

‘He’ll survive. He’ll miss you, but he’ll survive.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ll miss you too. I am transferring out of the department. It will effectively mean a demotion. I am going back to immigration affairs. At least I’ll know what I am doing.’

‘I can put in a good word for you.’

‘You! A good word.’ She bent down her head and made a sound like a long eeeee, then threw her head back and abandoned herself to laughter. He hadn’t seen her laugh so hard since they had watched a Peter Sellers movie. And it was infectious.

Elia appeared in the doorway in his pyjamas, a big expectant grin on his face, and demanded to know what was so funny, and his mother tried to explain, contextualize, and yet mitigate the implied insult to Blume. Elia tried to join in the laughter, but it was no longer all that funny.

Blume ran his hand through the child’s hair. ‘Your mother seems to think that having me on her side won’t necessarily advance her career. You had to be there,’ he added.

Elia wanted to hang around in case there were more sudden outbursts of merriment, but after a while his mother sent him to bed.

‘ ’Night, Alec.’

‘ ’Night, Elia.’

Half an hour later, just as Elia was falling asleep, Blume slipped quietly out the door.

Chapter 51

A house of contemplation should be built in open space where the air is pure. It should be as far as possible from the haunts of women, the noise of the market, the rumble of horses, the sight and sound of ships, the baying of dogs, all noises that are offensive to the ear, the groaning of stinking carts. In length and width, it should be of equal measure, and the windows shall be disposed so that neither more nor less light enters than nature herself requires. The roof should not be too low, nor slope too steeply, for that way it will close off your mind and memory. It should be free of dust and blemishes, nor should it contain images or paintings. The walls should be white, there should be but one single entrance and the stairs leading to it should not be tiring. It should afford a view of outdoor areas, trees, gardens, and whatnot, because through the sight of delightful things is our memory strengthened.

(Boncompagno da Signa, 1215)

‘Isn’t that a magnificent view?’

‘The IKEA that is set on the hill cannot be hidden.’

‘From up here, you can choose what to look at. You don’t have to look at the IKEA.’

‘And yet somehow I do,’ said Blume. ‘But eventually they’ll build another high-rise tower in front of me and then I’ll have to look at that instead.’

‘The consortium went bankrupt. The building work is finished.’

‘Unlike the roads,’ said Blume.

‘The City of Rome is legally obliged to pay for them. I am telling you, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Top floor, too. That view of the hills . . .’

‘And of the IKEA.’

‘From this side you can look back to the city. In a few years this place could be worth two million.’

‘Once Italy returns to the lira,’ said Blume.

‘I’ll leave you to look around on your own, shall I?’

Blume walked around the empty apartment. The windows on one side looked out towards the natural park of Veio, home of the Etruscans. The windows on the other looked out at a building development that had taken a huge bite of a hillside. In the distance, the rising heat from Rome made the cold air shimmer. The neighbourhood looked and felt like an airport without any planes, and he was in a watchtower looking out. They had cemented over the past and left it without soul or without memory. No one walked on the half-finished streets below. No one else lived in the high-rise apartment block, no one else had turned up for the showing.

He walked out of the apartment. Then back in.

The estate agent, who was looking with admiration at his own reflection in the gleam of the brand-new metal lift doors, caught the movement, and rolled his eyes. For the past half hour, he had had to scrape and bow and smile as the tall, sarcastic bastard in the suit who had arrived an hour late with the improbable excuse that he had been at a friend’s funeral, walked around the apartment, a look of loathing on his face, criticizing every aspect of it and the landscape below.

He had not had a commission in 40 weeks. The estate agency paid him a paltry €550 a month, yet were still considering letting him go. No one was buying in this climate, and the criminals who had built this block were asking a stupid amount for such a lonely godforsaken place. His boss said he might as well learn the trade, practise his spiel, and test his patience on awkward customers like this. Nothing to lose. Except an evening he would prefer to be spending warm in the company of his girl, even just sitting together on a sofa, snuggling, and watching something stupid on TV.

‘Excuse me?’

He set his face to smile and turned round.

‘I’ll take it,’ said Blume.

Appendix

Memory Key 1 – The Major/Phonetic System (from
The Memory Key: Expand your mental capacity by 27
, Profile Books, Los Angeles, 2009)

William James (
The Principles of Psychology
, vol. I, p. 668) calls it a ‘figure-alphabet’ and one of the ‘ingenious’ methods of ‘technical memory’. As he explains, ‘whatever is to be remembered is deliberately associated by some fanciful analogy … Each numerical digit is represented by one or more letters. The number is then translated into such letters as will best make a word.’

Other writers have used many other names for this memory key which, remember, is for learning off numbers, playing cards and dates, but not facts or poetry or faces (see Appendices B and C for these).

Key words can be constructed by placing vowels before or after the consonants listed above. Thus, to remember the digit 1, you might think of a tie, tea, oat or tee and so on. It must contain only the consonant t or d (die, aid, doe – or ‘dough’ since the gh is silent). Remember also that ‘h’, ‘w’ and ‘y’ may also be treated as vowels. So the number 7 might be coo, key, cow, quay, wake, yak or ache.

Here is a list of key words for the numbers 0–20.

I trust to your inventiveness to continue up to 100 (which might be daisies, thesis, disease) and then to 999. When you get there (it will take about three months of studying), my advice is to re-use the same images but recontextualise them with a strong enveloping theme. For 1,000–2,000, encase the same images in ice, for 2,000–3,000, surround them with fire, and so on until 10,000. So that if 14 is a door, 1,014 is a door in a block of ice, 2,014 is a door on fire. Choose your own. Personally, I use ice, fire, amber, hair, grass and flowers, honey, plastic bubble-wrap, dirt, tar and molasses, coloured glass and blood.