A Little Lumpen Novelita

III

One evening my brother came home with two men.

They weren’t his friends, though my brother chose to think they were. One was from Bologna, the other from Libya or Morocco. But they looked like twins. Same head, same nose, same eyes. They reminded me of a clay bust I had seen recently in a magazine at the salon. They spent the night.

“But where will they sleep?” I said to my brother, “There’s no room,”

He gave me a haughty look, as if to say he had the situation under control.

“In our parents’ bedroom,” he said.

He was right, there was room. The men slept there.

I went to bed early. I didn’t feel like watching my favorite shows.

I hardly slept a wink. When I got up at six in the morning, the kitchen was clean. The men had washed the pots, the dishes, and the silverware and left it all on the rack to dry. The ashtrays were empty and clean. I think they even swept before they went to bed. I thought about that as I ate breakfast and then I went to work, though it was very early and I spent almost two hours wandering around the neighborhood.

When I got back they were still there. They had made a spinach purée and a spicy tomato sauce. The table was set. In the refrigerator were two big bottles of beer. It was only then, as we ate, that I learned their names. They introduced themselves. But I don’t remember the names anymore and I’d rather not make an effort to remember them. My brother looked nervous and happy. The two men looked relaxed. The Bolognan even pulled out a chair for me.

That night I realized how alike they were, and that night, too, they told me that they weren’t brothers, though many people thought they were. The Libyan said something that at the time I found mysterious. In a way, he said, those people weren’t wrong. Silly as it may seem, people are never wrong. Even if we look down on them, and sometimes rightly so, people are never wrong. That’s our curse, he said.

“Are you brothers or not?” I asked.

The Libyan said that they were blood brothers.

“Did you swear a blood oath, did you cut your palms and rub the blood together? Is that what you mean?”

That’s what they meant. My brother thought it was great that there were still people who swore blood oaths. I thought it was childish. The Libyan said he agreed with me, but I think he only agreed to be polite, since if he thought it was childish, why had he done it? Unless they’d known each other since they were children, which they hadn’t.

That night I watched TV with them for a while.

My brother had met them at the gym, where they did some kind of work that was never clear to me. Sometimes I got the impression that they were trainers, a job with a certain prestige, and other times that they were just sweepers and errand boys, like my brother. Either way, they were always talking about the gym, like people who come home and can’t stop going on about work. They talked about the gym — and so did my brother, with a fervor new to me — and about protein diets and meals with names that had the ring of science fiction, like Fuel Tank 3000 or Weider energy bars (all the nutrients you need for the body of a champion!).

This went on until I told them that if they wanted to keep talking they should do it in the kitchen because I couldn’t hear my game show. I liked (I still like) to listen carefully to the questions and answers because that way while I’m being entertained I learn something that probably won’t help me in any way but that seems worth knowing. Sometimes I get an answer right. When that happens I start to think that maybe I could go on TV and be a contestant. But then more questions come and I don’t know any of the answers, which is when I realize that I’m better off here, on this side of the screen, because if I were there, in front of the cameras, I’d probably just make an ass of myself.

The surprising thing, though, was that when I asked them to stop talking, they stopped. And then we were all quiet watching the show, which was at the most exciting part: there were only two contestants left, an older man, maybe forty or fifty, and a girl with little glasses and a face that was too serious, kind of scrunched up. She had incredible hair, shoulder-length and shiny, all silky black. For a minute I imagined her sitting in the salon. Ugly thoughts. I tried to wipe them from my mind.

Then the girl was asked to define the word nimbus. And the Bolognan, next to me, said that it was a halo, the circle of light around a saint’s head. And before the girl could open her mouth, he added that it was also a low cloud formation, a cluster of cumulous clouds.

I stared at the Bolognan and I stared at the TV. My brother smiled, as if he knew the answer too, though I knew he didn’t. And time ticked away and the girl lost her turn and it was the older man’s turn and he said that a nimbus was, in fact, a low cloud. And when the host, to give the old guy a hard time, asked “And what else, sir?,” the man was silent and couldn’t think of anything else.

And then came more contestants and more questions and the Bolognan answered almost all of them, some of them wrong, admittedly, but most of them right, and my brother — and even I — said that he should try out for the show, he could make a shitload of money (though I didn’t use that word), and then my brother told me that his friend was always doing crossword puzzles and he actually finished them, unlike the average person, who would start a puzzle and leave it half-done, and it seemed to me that it was one thing to be able to finish crossword puzzles and another thing to be a game-show winner, but I kept my mouth shut, because clearly the Bolognan could win any quiz show he signed up for.

But then I stopped to think: when had my brother seen his friend doing crossword puzzles? Because if anything was clear it was that they knew each other from the gym where my brother worked and the Bolognan worked and even the Libyan worked, mopping floors, scrubbing lockers and showers, sweeping the weight room or selling energy drinks, all tasks incompatible with a leisurely activity like solving crossword puzzles, which — as everybody knows — is something that’s done when you have nothing else to do.

That night, when I was in bed and the house was quiet, I imagined — or rather saw — my brother and his two friends at Rome’s Central Station sitting in the cafeteria waiting, my brother and the Libyan doing nothing, watching people come in and out, and the Bolognan working the crossword puzzle from the L’Osservatore Romano, a right-wing paper no matter how you look at it, though he claimed it was an anarchist paper, a superfluous and therefore futile explanation or excuse. Once I saw him with Tutto Calcio under his arm and I said “That’s what you read,” a simple statement of fact, not meaning anything else by it, and he said yes, I read Tutto Calcio, but it isn’t a right-wing paper the way people think it is, it’s an anarchist paper.

As if I cared what newspapers he read or didn’t read.

My father read Il Messagiero. My brother and I didn’t read anything (it was a luxury we couldn’t afford). I don’t know which papers are right-wing and which are left-wing. But the Bolognan was always justifying himself. It was part of who he was, and also part of his charm, or so he thought. But as I was saying, I was in bed with the lights out and the covers pulled up to my chin, in the silence of the night, a silence that looked yellow to me, and I saw my brother and his two friends in a bar at Central Station, sitting around a table with three glasses of beer and looking bored, because waiting is terrible and they were waiting for something that wasn’t coming, but was about to come, or at least that was what they were betting on, the three of them, and while they were sitting there the Bolognan had more than enough time to finish a crossword puzzle, from L’Osservatore Romano or La Repubblica or Il Messagiero. And imagining this scene, I was overcome by an infinite sadness. I felt a weight on my chest, a pain in my heart, a sense of anguish. As if a fog were rising from the underground tunnels and swamping the whole of Central Station, and I was the only one who could see it (but I wasn’t there). As if the fog was blurring my brother’s face and coming irrevocably between us. But then I fell asleep and I forgot or dismissed what I had seen — or what I had foreseen, because it really was a premonition.

And so the days went by.