A Little Lumpen Novelita

XV

A week without seeing Maciste was like an eternity. But when I tried to imagine an entire life with him I saw nothing: a blank image, the wall of an empty room, amnesia, a lobotomy, my body broken and split into pieces.

At home, meanwhile, things weren’t good. My brother seemed dazed, scattered, too thin, and all his friends talked about was the safe.

One morning I said to my brother:

“You’re looking more and more messed up.”

“Look who’s talking,” was his answer.

Another day I examined his arms, looking for needle tracks or whatever, just as my boss at the salon had done to me, and all I got was his laugh, a hollow laugh, as if the laughter of our dead parents on that forgotten southern highway was issuing from his throat.

Then I started to be afraid.

“Don’t laugh,” I said.

“Then don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

I think we didn’t even have the strength to fight anymore.

I asked him another day: “What are you afraid of?”

He didn’t answer, but his face said that he was scared of everything, of his friends, of them living with us, of a future that seemed to hold little, of his sad life as an orphan and a kid without a job.

Another time I heard him crying, locked in the bathroom, as the Bolognan and the Libyan watched TV and made fun of people. Applause, laughter, the Bolognan’s sarcastic commentary, and my brother crying quietly in the bathroom, like a humiliated animal seized by cold and fear, which (cold and fear) for him were essentially the same thing. When he came out I asked him discreetly what was wrong. He said nothing, but that night he locked himself in the bathroom again and though this time I didn’t hear him crying I sensed that he was on the verge of a breakdown.

But it was hard for me to feel sorry for him, caught as I was between Maciste and the scheming of my brother’s friends, who could think of nothing but the safe in the house on Via Germanico. So I can’t say I was sorry for him. And that’s what I told Maciste, not thinking about what I was saying. I told him that I had found my brother crying and I hadn’t felt anything. We had just made love and when I finished saying what I had to say, Maciste turned his huge white face toward me and once again I had the impression that he was looking at me.

“You’re going crazy,” he said.

I asked him whether he thought that was good or bad. He said it was always bad, except in extreme cases, when going crazy was a way of escaping unbearable pain. And then I told him that maybe I was in unbearable pain, but before he could answer I took it back.

“I’m fine. There’s no such thing as unbearable pain. I haven’t gone crazy.”

One afternoon Maciste got sick and I spent the night taking care of him. He had a fever, but he didn’t want the doctor to come. He ordered me to make him a liter of chamomile tea with lemon, which he drank with big spoonfuls of honey, and he went to bed to sweat it out.

When he fell asleep I realized that I would never have another chance like this to look for the safe. So I went in search of it again, room by room. I can’t remember when I got the idea that the safe was behind the paintings of Maciste or behind the painting of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles. I took them down one by one, my heart racing. Behind the paintings there was nothing, just the wall in varying stages of deterioration. I also looked in the gym and the bathroom of the gym, checking the tiles (to see if there were any that could be pried up), in the kitchen, under the rugs in the living room and the foyer, behind some useless curtains.

The rest of the night I spent in the living room, sitting in an armchair next to one of the few working lamps in the house, reading magazines and dozing off.

At four in the morning I was woken by the sound of a voice. I went into Maciste’s room. He was talking in his sleep. He said something about a street. He said the word trapeze. Then he was quiet again. I felt his forehead. He was sweating. That seemed to be a good sign.

For a while I stood there by the door looking at him, deciding whether to go back to the living room. It was then that I knew for sure that I wasn’t in love with him. Everything seemed as clear as could be and as entertaining as a TV show and still I was close to tears.

I didn’t go back to the living room, but to the gym, where I smoked and stared into the darkness. Then I got up (I was sitting on the floor of the gym) and walked all around the house, room by room, armed with a flashlight, searching in every corner.

By eight that morning, when the flashlight was no longer necessary, I was sure that there was no safe. Maciste’s money, if he had any, was in the bank, not here. That was the end of everything for me.