A Little Lumpen Novelita

XVI

Maciste was sick for a week. I took his temperature at night and the fever lingered on endlessly in his massive white body. Once I told him I was going to the pharmacy to buy him aspirin and antibiotics. I asked him to give me the key, because I didn’t want him to get up to open the door for me, but he refused, at first tactfully, trying not to hurt my feelings, and then vehemently, as if I didn’t know who I was talking to. But I knew very well.

“I just need herbal tea,” he said.

I brought him a teapot full of hot water and I left. It was Sunday and there were hardly any people on the train. When I got home, everyone was asleep. I made coffee and then I drank a cup of coffee with milk and I smoked the last cigarette. That night I had a strange dream, though thinking about it now, it wasn’t so strange.

I dreamed that Maciste was my boyfriend and we were taking a walk around Campo de’ Fiori. At first I was madly in love with him, but as we walked, he didn’t seem like such an interesting person to me anymore. He was too fat, too old, too clumsy, the two of us walking arm in arm as kids circled the statue of Giordano Bruno or streamed toward Via dei Giubbonari or Piazza Farnese, and the crowds in Campo de’ Fiori were growing thicker regardless. And then I told Maciste that I couldn’t be his girlfriend anymore. And he turned his head toward me and said: all right, all right, so be it, in a whisper that at first seemed to betray a kind of sadness, the faintest hint of despair, but despair nonetheless, which was unusual for him, though later I thought it might have been pride, as if Maciste, deep down, were proud of me.

And then he said goodbye to me. And I was confused, I didn’t know what to do, I was afraid to leave him there, in the middle of the Campo de’ Fiori crowds, alone and blind, and then I walked away, feeling guilty, but I went, and when I had gone about thirty feet I stopped and watched him, and then Maciste set off, wobbling (because he really was very fat and very big), and was lost among the crowds, though because of his height this took a while to happen, and only after a while did I lose sight of his huge round head.

And that was all. Maciste was gone and I was left alone and I saw myself crying as I crossed Garibaldi Bridge, on my way home. By the time I got to Piazza Sonnino, I was thinking that I had to find a place to go, a place to live, a new job, I had to do things and not die.

And then I woke up and that night I talked to my brother’s friends and I told them that Maciste had money but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I talked about the nonexistent safe. I told them that it did exist. I told them that no one except Maciste could open it, and the only way they could make him open it was by torturing him, and even that was no sure thing, because Maciste could stand worse pain than anything they — pathetic petty criminals — had ever known. Maciste

could stand the pain, could live a whole life sunk in pain.

My brother’s friends listened to me in silence, shaken by the path I was revealing to them. Or by the terrible path they could see for themselves.

And then the sun began to come up and I had breakfast, took a shower, and went out. I went walking to Via Germanico. Maciste wasn’t in bed yet. If he was surprised to see me at that time of day, I don’t know. I told him I had come to visit him for the last time. In fact, I hadn’t come to visit, because that in some sense presumed nudity, sex, long hours of silence in the dark house, but to say goodbye, because I didn’t plan to come back ever again.

“Are you going on a trip?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to start a new life.”

He didn’t ask me where I planned to go. He told me to wait for a minute. When he came back he gave me an envelope full of money.

“Thank you,” I said as I left the envelope on a shelf, trying not to make the slightest noise. I knew that Maciste wouldn’t be surprised when he found it there.

Then I went to the salon and, after talking to the boss, I took the day off and wandered around the city. At dusk I went home. The Bolognan and the Libyan were watching TV, but anyone observing them carefully would have realized that they were far away. Not in our living room, but in a bus station or at an airport. Not under our light, but bathed in a red glow that seemed to emanate from another planet.

My brother was watching TV too, sitting in a chair, behind the couch. I made coffee for the four of us and served it to them, then I told them that they had to leave. They acted as if they hadn’t heard. But my brother didn’t argue either and then I knew I had won.

After a while I told them again to leave. They could watch the end of the show and then they had to pack their suitcases and get out.

“Where are we supposed to go?” asked the Bolognan.

I stared at him as if my face was raw flesh and his was raw flesh too.

“To Maciste’s house,” I answered. “Everything is over. As soon as the show ends I want you to go.”

And when the show had ended — I watched it all the way through, not even missing the commercial breaks — I planted myself in the middle of the living room and turned off the TV and they looked at me without getting up from the couch and I said that I was going out for a walk around the neighborhood and that I might pass by the police station, and when I came back I didn’t want to see them here.

And then I told my brother to come with me and surprisingly my brother got up and came. We walked around Trastevere until late into the night.

“Are we going to the police?” asked my brother.

I said that I didn’t think it would be necessary. We went into a bar and ordered sandwiches and coffee. We talked about any old thing.

When we got back home his friends were gone.

“I hope I never see them again in my life,” said my brother, then he shut himself in his room and cried.

That night, for the first time in a long time, night was really night, dark and fragile and edged with fears, and it was the weak and the weary who sat up awake, eager to see the dawn again, the shimmering light of Piazza Sonnino.

For days, though, I was on the alert for bad news. I read the paper (not every day, because we didn’t have enough money to buy the paper every day), I watched TV, I listened to the news on the radio at the salon, afraid of coming across a final shot of Maciste sprawled on the ground, in a pool of blood (his cold blood), and alongside it ID photos of the Bolognan and the Libyan, staring at me nostalgically from the page or from the screen of our TV set (which was really ours now, not our dead parents’), as if these pictures — of killers and victim, killer and victims — were evidence that outside the storm still raged, a storm not located in the skies of Rome, but in the European night or the space between planets, a noiseless, eyeless storm from another world, a world that not even the satellites in orbit around the Earth could capture, a world where there was a place that was my place, a shadow that was my shadow.