Free The Silence of the Wave by Gianrico Carofiglio

Pirandello, and that play, the title of which he had memorized:
As You Desire Me
.
    “The kind of things that come up when you meet someone by chance,” she said at last. Mentally, Roberto sighed in relief.
    “Now I really must dash. Actually, I always have to dash. Next time you could tell me what kind of work you do. Bye.”
    She passed in front of him, wrapping her scarf around her neck and leaving behind her a slight smell of perfume. Roberto watched until she had disappeared around the corner and then went inside the building.

10
    Climbing the stairs, he told himself there could be no doubt: Emma, too, was one of the doctor’s patients. When a coincidence is repeated, it constitutes first a clue and then evidence. It was a prosecutor Roberto had often worked with who had loved repeating that sentence, but now that he came to think about it, it wasn’t as profound or original as all that. Not at all, in fact.
    For some obscure reason, this thought put him in a bad mood.
    “Is there something wrong today, Roberto?”
    Obviously, the doctor had noticed. Roberto had the childish impulse to contradict him.
    “No, no. It’s only that last night I had a dream that made an impression on me and I was just thinking about it.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    That was it. He had no dream to tell.
    “I dreamed that I met a woman. She was someone I’d seen before, and the encounter happened in a familiar place, but I can’t quite pin down where it was. We talked, she told me her name, and then she rushed off. And as she rushed off I could smell her perfume, which is strange for a dream, isn’t it?”
    He was surprised at himself for how he had concocted the story. It was all true and all false, he told himself. Like lots of other things, come to think of it.
    “Actually, smells in dreams are an unusual experience. But it does happen. What name did this woman give you in the dream?”
    “I don’t remember. I don’t remember what she said, but it was as if we were introducing ourselves and then she had to run because she was in a hurry.”
    “And can you identify the smell? Did you like it?”
    “I couldn’t say exactly. It was a light perfume, and in the dream it struck me that she probably only put on a little. But I liked it, yes.”
    Why was he getting all tangled up in this nonsense? He had never before lied to the doctor, and now he was trying to interpret a nonexistent dream. What does it mean to dream about a smell? Or a meeting with a woman who runs away? He felt guilty.
    Immediately, though, and for a few long, disconcerting seconds, he wondered if that encounter a little while earlier had really taken place. The experience, brief as it was, made him feel dizzy.
    “Has that ever happened to you before? I mean: to have dreams that involved smells?”
    “If I have, I don’t remember.”
    Now please let’s change the subject, he thought.
    “If dreaming about a perfume is a novelty for you, then I’d say we have a piece of good news. Another sign of development.”
    The human mind works in a surprising way. There was no dream and so this whole discussion ought to have been meaningless. And yet when the doctor told him that it was good news, that the smell meant things were changing for the better, Roberto believed it. The light perfume that Emma had left behind her was good news for him.
    “I realized something this weekend. I’ve been dreaming a lot more over the past ten days. Really a lot. I never used to dream before. All right, I know, a statement like that doesn’t mean anything. We all dream every night, you told me that.”
    “You did dream, but you couldn’t remember. In a way, though, the phrase ‘I didn’t dream’ is correct.”
    Roberto looked at him, waiting for an explanation.
    “Do you know the story of the tree that falls in the deserted forest, where there’s nobody to hear it crash to the ground?”
    “No.”
    “Imagine an old tree, with its trunk all rotten and eaten away by