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existed.
    This was when Maciste said:
    “My stage name was Franco Bruno.”
    And I thought: what?
    And he said:
    “These days, bodybuilding is considered a sport but when I practiced it, it was an art . . . Like magic . . . There was a time when it was an art and magicians were artists . . . Now it’s just a part of the show.”
    And after a long silence during which I thought about other things, I said:
    “I know what you mean.” Though in fact I hadn’t understood a thing, because as far as I knew Maciste had been an actor and a top bodybuilder, not a magician. Maybe he just felt a kinship with magicians.
    And when Maciste heard me he turned his face toward me and asked if I was naked. I said no, that I had only taken off my jacket.
    “Did they explain to you? . . . I need company . . . I don’t know whether they explained to you.”
    I said yes, that they had explained everything. “Don’t worry,” I said.
    Then he took off his robe and I saw him naked for the first time. He said: “Come here and turn out the light.”
    “The light isn’t on,” I said.
    “Can you see in the dark?”
    “More or less,” I said.
    “Strange — have you always?”
    No,” I said. “If this had happened to me when I was little, I would have gone crazy. It’s only been a little while. Since my parents died in a crash.”
    “A car crash?”
    “Yes. I don’t like to talk about it. They died.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Maciste.
    We were quiet, each of us sitting in our respective chairs. After a while he asked me whether I wanted something to drink. I said yes.
    Maciste left the gym, walking just like anyone. For a few seconds I wondered whether I’d been mistaken, though everybody knows that blind people get around with no trouble in a familiar place.
    He came back with a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola and two mini-whiskey bottles, like the kind I knew people got on planes or in hotel minibars. I thought he had forgotten to bring glasses and I waited. When I saw him drink straight from the bottle, I did too.
    “Were you driving the car when your parents died?”
    It bothered me that he would ask a question like that. I told him that I didn’t know how to drive and that when my parents died I was in Rome, at home, with my brother.
    “Interesting,” said Maciste. “And ever since then you can see in the dark?”
    “Yes, ever since, or after the second or third day . . .”
    “So it’s some kind of psychosomatic thing,” said Maciste.
    “I don’t know whether it’s psychosomatic or supernatural, and I don’t care either,” I said.
    Then, as I walked over to his chair, a ray of moonlight, fat as a wave, rolled into the gym. Maciste undressed me. He felt my face and my hips and my legs. Then he got up and went to get the bottles of lotion and liniment.

XI

 
    I started to go twice a week to his house on Via Germanico. Sometimes I had to wait a long time outside the door before he let me in. Sometimes we didn’t go straight to the gym, and instead he brought me into the kitchen, a kitchen twice as big as our living room, where Maciste made sandwiches for both of us — his specialty — American sandwiches which, according to him, he had been taught to make by an actress named Dolly Plimpton, from Oregon; she had been in the cast of one of his movies, and her recipe consisted of sandwich bread, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, sliced ham, sliced cheese, and various spreads that he could tell apart by the size and shape of the jars and that, mixed, often made the sandwiches taste strange — strong and strange, like the sandwiches you get in airports, he said, but good.
    The kitchen was big and it was dirty. Not because it got much use, which it didn’t, but because it needed someone to come and give it a deep cleaning, to sweep away the dust that had been gathering in the corners for months, maybe years, but Maciste didn’t want to hear it.
    The bathroom we used after fucking was the only place in the house that was