A Little Lumpen Novelita

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All of this is hard to describe, as I’ve said. What happened, what I felt, what I saw. What might have happened, what I might have seen, and what I might have felt. What he felt, I don’t know. I’ll never know.

He was big and fat. But that wasn’t really Maciste. He was big, yes. Tall, broad. He was also fat. He had been a world bodybuilding champion and a tiny part of that glory still lived on somewhere, not in his body, maybe, but in the way he moved. His body was the pallid color of bodies that never see the sun. Either his head was shaved or he had gone totally bald. He was polite. He was wearing an old black robe that fell to his ankles, and sunglasses that looked small on his big face.

I remember that he advanced toward the middle of the gym, where I was standing, his steps so slow that I could tell he was nervous or uncomfortable too.

He asked me how I was, and how old I was. I lied to him, as we had agreed I would, and in turn I asked him why he was called Maciste.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“I’m fine and I’m nineteen. Why do people call you Maciste?”

He felt for a chair and then I knew, without a doubt, that he was blind.

He murmured that in his day he’d played a character called Maciste in a few movies.

I didn’t know what to say, not because of his response, but because I realized that I had a blind man in front of me. My brother’s friends hadn’t warned me about this. Assholes, I thought angrily, and I moved to grab my jacket and go running out of the house. But then I thought: what if they didn’t know? Was I going to spoil an ambitious plan, ambitious by our lights, I mean, just because of a mistake? Would my brother be left wandering the streets of Rome just because of a misunderstanding of no consequence in the end, anyway? And what if no one knew that he was blind, or hardly anyone? Because Maciste’s life was a mystery, or so I’d been told, and neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan could be said to be part of his inner circle, if such a circle 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.