The Pace

The Pace is the third and final volume of the High Fidelity trilogy, and it can be read on its own, without having read the first two.

Anyone who wishes to know the full stories of Alberto, Mapi, Luz and Vespa, before they met here, can look for The Walkman Method and The Conductor, the two volumes that precede this one.

The train from Geneva arrived ten minutes late, a delay that in Brussels no one ever apologised for announcing, as if punctuality were a luxury reserved for other stations in Europe. Alberto stepped off under the canopy of the Gare Centrale with his backpack on one shoulder only, the same mechanical gesture as always, the gesture of a man who for fifteen years had earned his living sitting at the tables of European family businesses at the most fragile moment in their history, when the founder who had built them stepped aside for whoever came next, and he looked through the crowd for the face he had not seen for months, Raffaele's, not the one that was, in fact, truly waiting for him.

Mapi was standing beside a pillar, away from where the taxis were jostling, in a dark blue coat that would have been of no use to her in Getafe and with an expression Alberto knew well, the expression of someone who has already decided the order of the things she wants to say, and has no intention of letting a ten-minute delay throw it out of sequence.

“Alberto.” — “Mapi.” They did not embrace. Between them there remained, for a moment longer than necessary, that kind of silence two people grant each other only when they know they have something real behind them to measure, and no hurry to measure it at once.

They walked in a silence that had nothing awkward about it, crossing a city that alternated a slightly weary nineteenth-century elegance with the windows of small Ethiopian restaurants and translation agencies, until the street opened onto a minor square, almost forgotten, where two bronze statues dominated a space that the rest of the city seemed to have stopped looking at long ago. A man on horseback, thin to excess, with a lance raised against an enemy that did not exist. Behind him, on a lower and more patient donkey, a stocky man who was not looking up at the sky but straight ahead, at the road.

“Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,” said Mapi, stopping a few steps from the sculptural group. “Madrid gave it to Brussels in eighty-nine, when Spain held the presidency of the European Community. I discovered it a year ago, coming back from a meeting that had gone badly, and I sat on that bench for more than an hour, still not knowing why it mattered so much to me.”