Unsent Letters #19

A towel not thrown in

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

Dear S.,

Yesterday, I suddenly remembered that time I saw you hiding behind a parked car, crouched on the sidewalk, eye in the viewfinder of a camera with a telephoto lens pointed at the front door of a building across the street. Before I could open my mouth to ask a classic what the heck are you doing here, you brought your index finger to your nose to signal a shush, don’t you dare. Days later, you told me that you’d been there to check on someone’s wife, whose name you couldn’t reveal for deontological reasons, as you’d been hired by the lady’s husband based on his rather vague suspicions that she was cheating on him. 

I had no idea you were a private eye, and instinctively laughed at it. Here was someone I went to school with, barely out of his teens, embarking on a path of intrusion into other people’s lives. You had started a practice a few months prior, you said, and had secured some initial clients via word of mouth referrals. Things were going okay. All you had to do was tail, take photos, and report back. Occasionally, you would retrieve information to put together the pieces of the puzzle yourself, and deliver a finished product that contained the whats, the hows, and the whys of a certain story. It’s fun, you said; you’d always been attracted to mystery, secrets, unknowns, and you’d always wanted to investigate, do sleuth work.

The summer you offered me a chance to give you a hand, I was looking for something to do after I finished my final exams, and gladly accepted. I, too, had always been attracted to mysterious situations, and I was thrilled at the prospect of connecting the dots on real-world cases. Right then, you said something I still remember verbatim: Every life has blanks, white spaces; some of them are irremediably blank, you could dig and dig, but they will remain blank; others are written on with invisible ink, and our aim is to make that ink turn visible.        

And so we did some tailing and some photographing, and some reporting back to clients. Bad news, for the most part. Which, in truth, was never completely unexpected, or else they wouldn’t have hired us in the first place. Then summer ended, and I had to go back to college. On my last day, after saying goodbye, I slid a light green folder into my backpack. The words ‘Anna Gigli’ were written in large blue block letters across the middle. It wasn’t in the metal file cabinet next to the window in your room; instead, it sat abandoned on your desk. I never told you about this. You thought Ms. Gigli’s was a dead case, one of those where the blanks stay irremediably blank. I didn’t think so -- we discussed, but you resolved that we shouldn’t continue to waste time on it. We did try, in all fairness, but couldn’t get anything out of it. And we had more urgent and promising situations to devote our energies to. I never stopped believing that Anna Gigli’s case could be solved, given enough time, patience, and imagination.

The folder contained only two items: a case sheet, which compiled all the available information on the subject, and a country club card with her name, address, and photo on it. The sheet had just a couple of paragraphs. In the first one was a summary description of the case, stating that we had been approached by a gentleman who declared to be her husband, and that she suddenly disappeared. It also stated that we received the country club card from him, and it was dated October 10, 1986. In the second paragraph was what appeared to be a conclusion, dated July 31, 1987, where you wrote that -- I’m paraphrasing -- all leads had proven fruitless, and no progress had been made. The country club card had been issued to Anna Gigli, via Dante Alighieri 19, Roma. The photo on the card was in black and white, but you could tell she had light eyes, high cheekbones, a small straight nose, full lips, and blond hair. She wasn’t smiling. Remember that photo? We joked that she resembled Eva Kant.

She was missing, but at the end of those nine and a half months, only the last two of which I was on the case helping you out, we came to doubt her true identity. The country club never had a member with her name, and no one there could recognize her in that photo. The address on the card didn’t exist. Each time we called her alleged husband to inform him of our progress, or lack thereof, he sounded increasingly distant and uncaring. Until one day, when we called to say that we would end it there, he simply responded okay, and hung up. Yet, the more unsolvable Ms. Gigli's case appeared, the more I believed there must be a solution. And I remember I even tried to convey this paradox to you. You laughed and went back to work on something else.

Every year afterwards, on every summer break from college or work, I picked up Anna Gigli’s case again to tackle the enigma. Maybe I’m a little smarter this year, maybe I can now see things that were invisible to me before, I’d say to myself. It happens all the time, right? How many times have I stood in front of a shelf in the supermarket, looking for a specific product, only to realize -- after some time of gazing straight ahead -- that the product was right in front of my eyes, where it had always been? I’m sure I’m depicting a familiar situation. Every year, however, nothing new emerged. I was slowly and reluctantly reaching the point where I would conclusively declare Anna Gigli as non-existent. 

On Tuesday of last week -- and this is what prompted me to write this letter to you -- my concierge handed me an envelope. A tall woman wearing black and shades delivered this while you were out, he said. A white, plain, nondescript envelope, my name handwritten on the back in neat calligraphy. Inside, a photo of a group of people seated around a table, all looking at the camera, was printed on high-quality paper with jagged edges. Instinctively, I turned it around and saw a date scribbled on the back: August 6, 1987. How curious, I thought, August 6 is my birthday. 

The five people posing for the photo were spread out around one side of the table in a crescent or semi-circle, so that each of them could be seen clearly. The table appeared to be in a café, as other people seemed to be moving in the background. There were two women and three men at the table. I closely inspected each of them, and one of the two women had blond hair parted in the middle and gathered into a bun at the back, icy blue eyes, a small straight nose, high cheekbones, and full lips. She was smiling a faint smile, without parting her lips. She possessed all the traits that I’d been looking for in every single woman I have ever passed by since that summer of 1987. 

My head started spinning so fast that I had to collapse on the couch, close my eyes, and breathe slowly. On the first hint of a recovery, I rushed back downstairs. Didn’t she leave a name, or telephone number? Did she say who the envelope was for? Did she clearly say my name? I asked the concierge. No, yes, and yes. And as if it wasn’t enough, that very night, while I was awake as an owl, the phone rang. It rang twice, then stopped, as if whoever called wanted to be called back, or leave their number visible for me. I wrote it down.

Is this you? I texted. Yes, was the answer. 

What’s the meaning of these occurrences? I don’t know, but will keep you posted as I discover more.

Anna Gigli exists, and the case is not closed. 

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"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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