Temporary Perfections Read Free

possible, but he failed the written exams. He sat for the exams a second time, and then even a third, the maximum number the law allowed. We were no longer close by the time I heard that he had failed the third and final time, but I stopped to think about the devastating feelings of defeat and failure he must have experienced. Then he met a girl whose father was a manufacturer from the Veneto region, got married, and went to live somewhere around Rovigo, where he worked for his father-in-law and drowned his bitterness and broken dreams in the northern fog. Or maybe that’s just how I imagined it; maybe he’s actually rich and happy. Maybe not becoming a magistrate was the best thing that ever happened to him.
    I stayed in Rome, after withdrawing from the civil service exam. My room in the
pensione
was paid up for three nights, that is, for the entire period of the written examinations. And so, while my friends were struggling with criminal law and civil law, I enjoyed, to my own surprise, the most wonderful Roman holiday of my life. With nothing I had to do and nowhere I had to be, I strolled for hours, bought half-price books, stretched out comfortably on the park benches in Villa Borghese, read, and even wrote. I wrote horrifying poems that, fortunately, have been lost over the years. On the Spanish Steps, I made friends with two overweight American girls. We went out for pizza together, but I politely declined an invitation to continue the eveningback in their apartment, because I thought I’d glimpsed a conspiratorial glance passing between them. Reckoning that they tipped the scales at one hundred seventy-five to two hundred pounds each, I decided that, as the saying goes, to trust is good, but not to trust is better.
    The world was teeming with endless possibilities in that warm and unexpected Roman February, as I teetered between the no-longer of my life as a child and the not-yet of my life as a man. It was a brief, euphoric, temporary moment in time. It was wonderful to stand, poised, in that moment. And only what is temporary can be perfect.
    I remembered these things during the course of an hour that, by some strange alchemy, seemed as timeless and sweet as the days I had enjoyed twenty years earlier. I had the irrational, exhilarating sensation that the tape was about to rewind, and that I was about to be offered a new beginning. I felt a shiver, a vibration. It was beautiful.
    Then it dawned on me that it was ten o’clock, and I realized that if I didn’t get moving I’d be late. I turned and walked briskly back toward Piazza dei Tribunali.

3.
    When you argue before the Court of Cassation, the first thing you do is rent a black robe.
    The dress code of Italy’s highest court requires that all lawyers wear a black robe, but—except for lawyers who practice in Rome—almost no one actually owns one. And so you have to rent one, as if you were acting in a play or attending a Carnival masquerade party.
    As usual, there was a short line at the robe rental room. I looked around in search of familiar faces, but there was no one I knew. Instead, standing in line ahead of me was a guy who was, to judge from his appearance, the product of repeated, passionate couplings between close blood relatives. His eyebrows were very bushy and jet black. His hair was dyed an unnatural blond with red highlights. He had a jaw that jutted out in front of him, and he was wearing a forest green jacket that looked vaguely Tyrolean in style. I imagined his mug shot in the newspaper under the headline “Police Break Up Ring of Child Molesters,” or proudly posing on a political campaign poster alongside a virulently racist slogan.
    I took my rented robe and forced myself to refrain from sniffing it; doing so would have resulted in suffering a queasy sense of disgust for the rest of the morning. Asusual, I mused for a few seconds about how many lawyers had worn it before me and the stories they could tell. Then, also as usual, I told