Galway Review 8 - April 2020

Arbër Ahmetaj iii
The Dilemma
He called me half an hour after midnight.
‘I had dinner with an ant’, he said. ‘We had a wonderful
time’.
I prevented myself at the last second from laughing. His
voice seemed serious to me and a bit loud. I had the
impression that he had eagerly wanted to finish the
dinner to give me the news and I noticed that he was
looking forward to my reaction.
‘What did you drink? Wine or something else?’ I asked.
‘We started with an aperitif, a bottle of Chardonnay with
some toasted bread coated with olives and dry
tomatoes, some salmon. Then we had a Syrah with a
fillet of veal and vegetable garnish and rounded off the
dinner with a Fernet Branca and ice-cream’, he told me.
‘I hope you enjoyed it’ I said. ‘Did she stay with you after
the dinner or did you accompany her to the railway
station?’.
‘She stayed two hours more. Then I called a taxi’.
I realised that he wanted to close the conversation. I felt
that his voice was losing the certainty that it had in the
beginning. He is my son. He studied theatre in London,
excelling later in two or three performances and in a
film. Lately he collaborated with a TV channel in a
comedy series that had a pretty good echo. Then he fell
into a deep reclusion. It seemed that a girl was the
cause of this gloominess. Together with my wife we
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