A Little Lumpen Novelita

V

What did I expect? Back then I must not have been completely sane, because I expected tears.

That was what I expected. But there wasn’t a single tear. They knocked at my door, many times, night after night, but neither of them cried.

Sometimes, as I was washing hair or sweeping the hallway at the salon, I imagined them waiting for me at home, patient in a way that was not of this world or at least not of the world that I knew, doing nothing but watching TV while my brother and I worked and brought home food and paid the bills that had to be paid. I imagined them sitting silently on the couch or I saw them doing push-ups and all those exercises they did to keep in shape, on the rug or by the balcony that overlooked Piazza Sonnino, as the day slowly faded and the light of the moon grew more intense, until it flooded night’s farthest corners with a blinding light.

They’ll never leave, I thought then.

Other times I thought: they’ll leave without telling us, one day we’ll come home and they’ll be gone.

But when I got home they were always there, the house spotless, because they made it their job to cheerfully do everything that I used to do. Cheerfully, I say, and gladly, though I knew perfectly well that it was a fake cheer, as fake as mine, that their apparent good will hid feelings of emptiness, of sadness and grief in the face of the void. But they worked around the house. Dinner was always ready, the bathroom scoured with bleach, the rooms tidy. As if with these gestures they were saying to me: we aren’t shiftless, we seem shiftless but we aren’t, in fact if it was up to us we would do everything we could to make you happy.

Once a week, sometimes twice, I let them into my room. I didn’t need to say anything, I just had to be more talkative than usual or give them a meaningful look (or what at the time I imagined was a meaningful look) and they knew immediately that they could visit me that night and they would find the door open.

Other times I got home and found the table set for one — me — and a note from my brother saying that they would be home late, that they had urgent business to take care of on the other side of the city, that there was rice in the kitchen and chicken in the refrigerator. At the end there were always a few lines from the Bolognan (sometimes I thought the Libyan didn’t know how to write, not that it matters), repeating what my brother had said and promising to take care of him.

After eating and washing the dishes, I would sit down to watch some game show on TV and I tried to imagine where they might be, what kind of mess they had gotten themselves into. Sometimes, sick of the desperation and greed parading by on the screen, I reread the note and compared my brother’s handwriting to the Bolognan’s. My brother’s was fragile, clumsy, insecure. The Bolognan’s handwriting was like a convict’s handwriting. After studying it for a long time, I decided that it looked less like handwriting than like a tattoo. Sometimes I tried to remember the naked body of the Bolognan, I tried to remember whether he had tattooed anything on his own body — a letter, a word, or a picture — but I couldn’t remember.

Deep down, I think I was afraid something bad would happen. I think I sensed that it was coming soon and I worried about my brother, whose fate seemed so bound up with his friends’ fate. I didn’t care what happened to them. They were older and they were used to hard times, but my brother was innocent and I didn’t want anything to happen to him.

Every so often I had terrible dreams. I saw my parents walking along a southern highway, they didn’t recognize me, I kept going, happy to be so changed, then I thought better of it and turned around, but now my parents had turned into worms dragging themselves away, one after the other, torturously along the pavement, below a sign that read REGGIO CALABRIA 33 KILOMETERS, and though I called them by name, begging them to answer, warning them that they wouldn’t get far crawling like that, they didn’t even turn their worm heads to give me a final glance and they continued impassively along their way. Once in a while a late-model car would drive by with the windows rolled down and the kids inside shouting “Fascism or barbarism!”

In the dream I was crying, but when I woke up my eyes were dry and if I jumped out of bed and looked at myself in the mirror, the grim expression on my face frightened even me.

Sometimes my brother’s friends turned sullen. If I asked what was wrong, what the problem was, the answer was always the same: nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine, our luck is about to change. My brother listened and nodded. Sometimes their own words actually cheered them up, like a shot of some mood-boosting drug.

Then I would carry the dishes into the kitchen and ask whether they wanted coffee and they would say yes, we do, and I would make coffee and sit in the kitchen chewing mint gum, and I would contemplate the phrase “our luck is about to change,” a phrase that meant nothing to me, no matter how much I turned it over in my head, because luck can’t change, either it exists or it doesn’t, and if it exists there’s no way to change it, and if it doesn’t exist we’re like birds in a sandstorm, except that we don’t realize it, of course, like in the Luciano Marchetti song: “The wind blows, we’re birds in a storm, and nobody knows.” Though I think there are people — very sad or unlucky people — who do know.

It’s best not to think about these things. They’re here, they touch us, they’re gone, or they’re here, they touch us, they swallow us up, and it’s best — always — not to think about them. But I kept thinking, waiting for the coffee to be done, and I asked myself what my brother’s friends meant by saying that their luck would change, how exactly they planned to change their luck (their luck, not mine or my brother’s, though in a sense their luck would have an effect — any idiot could see that — on my brother’s luck and maybe even mine), what they were ready to try, how far they were prepared to go to get their luck and ours to turn around.

At the same time economic conditions were deteriorating. Not much, but on TV they said they were deteriorating. Something was wrong in Europe or Italy, I think. Or Rome. Or our neighborhood. What I do know is that we barely had enough money to eat and one day my brother approached me with his friends trailing a few feet behind, as if not wanting to intrude on anything as intimate as a conversation between a brother and a sister, but also as if they couldn’t resist the temptation to witness, even if at a prudent distance, my reaction to what my brother was going to say, which was already old news to them.

And what my brother said was that he wouldn’t be working at the gym anymore. I asked whether he had quit. He said yes, in a way.

“Did you quit or were you fired?”

He admitted that he had been fired. When I asked him why he had been fired he said that he didn’t know. Then he added that it wasn’t surprising, that lots of young people lost their jobs overnight.

“But those people aren’t orphans like us,” I yelled, “those people have parents and can afford to be out of work for a while.”

My brother said that when people started to get fired it didn’t matter whether they were orphans or not. The Bolognan and the Libyan nodded in agreement. The understanding look on their faces turned my stomach. I stared through them as if they didn’t exist. I asked my brother how we would manage on my salary alone. My brother shouted that it wasn’t his fault. I told him not to yell, just because he was unemployed didn’t mean he had to be rude, but my brother kept yelling and threatening people I had never heard of in my life and promising me that the situation was going to change, though he didn’t explain how, and anyway I can’t remember his promises because then I started to think about other things, and the Bolognan and the Libyan took a step forward, or three steps, or maybe four steps, and they grabbed my brother, who had gone pale as a sheet, by the shoulders and the belt, I can’t remember exactly, all I know is that the way they grabbed him gave me a bad feeling at the time, it’s all right to grab someone by the shoulders, but grabbing him by the belt seemed excessive, my brother was upset but he wasn’t out of control, he just kept yelling, probably so he wouldn’t cry, but they grabbed him by the belt and dragged him into the living room or my parents’ old room and I went into my room.