Little misunderstandings of no importance : stories

ROOMS

Amelia looked at the light veil of mist, descending in the distance, over the roof of the house, and thought: it’s late, we’ve got to hurry. The path was steep and winding, paved with wide strips of granite; in the evening dampness it was like a petrified stream. There were clumps of rosemary and sage on either side; the air was cool and intensely fragrant and the hillside was carpeted with yellow splotches. October’s here again, thought Amelia; perhaps tomorrow we’ll have our first day of rain. Amelia always talked to herself in the first person plural; it was a habit she’d had for years, and if she had stopped to reflect, she wouldn’t have been able to say when it had begun. She had lingered longer than she should at the organ and this gave her a twinge of worry. But it was irresistible, so much did she enjoy practising Pergolesi in the deserted church. Vespers were over, the little old women had drifted away, and the priest always let her be the one to finally shut the small side door, which closed with a click behind her. In the adjacent rectory the windows were already lit up; over the countryside the light had taken on the deepening blue colour of approaching night. We played much too well, Amelia said to herself, and quickened her steps.

From the churchyard she could see nothing of her house but the roof and the top-floor windows. The vine that climbed its twisting way up to the window sills was already half bare in preparation for the autumn, and there was a dim light in Guido’s window from the shaded lamp on the bedside table. Beside the brass lamp, on the yellowed lace cloth, there were a Dante with a gilt binding like that of a Book of Hours, a crystal bottle marked off to indicate the dose of medicine for minor crises, an ivory box containing a mother-of-pearl rosary and a horn of red coral. As Amelia walked she reviewed these objects in her mind with the total recall born of long acquaintance with the detailed topography of a given room. A walnut cabinet occupied the far wall. In it her mother had kept the household linens and Amelia still used it for the heavy, yellowed sheets which had enveloped the sleep of preceding generations. Once upon a time the cabinet had had a key that stood out, for its large size, among the bunch hung from a nail in the wardrobe, with tags specifying, in brown ink, pantry, cupboard, clothes closet, storage room. To the right of the cabinet there was a small, marble-topped table where, when he was well enough to get up, Guido had sat to write, looking out of the window at the treetops and the slope of the hill. In a folding chessboard, in the right-hand drawer, Guido kept a diary, which, for years, Amelia had read every morning, comparing her impressions of the day before with those of her brother. She thought how bogus all writing really was — the implacable tyranny of circumscribing words, of verbs and adjectives that imprison things, hardening them into a glassy fixity, like a dragonfly caught for centuries in a rock, which keeps the appearance of a dragonfly but is one no longer. Such is writing, with its capacity to pin down the present and the recent past and distance them, by centuries, from us. But things are fuzzy-edged, thought Amelia; they are alive because they are fuzzy-edged, without borders, and do not let themselves be imprisoned by words.

The books of a lifetime were lined up on the table. Some were bound in old leather, others in cardboard processed to look like blue marble with ash-coloured veins running through it: the New Testament, an eighteenth-century Aeneid printed in Paris by the Freres Michaud, Tasso’s Aminta, Petrarch, Shelley, the lyrical poems of Goethe, Manzoni’s Adel-chi, Alfieri’s Vita. In the upper right-hand corner of the blank page before the frontispiece there was the owner’s bookplate: the sepia picture of a lighthouse throwing its beam over a night-time sea and beneath it, in italics, guido with a small g.

In the left-hand drawer, tied together with ribbons of various colours, were all the letters that Guido had received in the course of his life. Amelia had, for years, kept them organized, cataloguing them in order of importance: Academy, University, Italian and foreign writers, magazines, appeals for aid. Some began: Dear Master and Friend, others simply: Your Excellency, in a pompous and fluttery hand. During the recent months of his illness, there were only a few letters from tried-and-true friends and a formal one from the Academy, expressing concern for his health and wishing him a speedy recovery. To this Amelia had replied with a polite short note: “My brother is not able to answer you personally for the moment. I appreciate your generous thought.”

On the chest of drawers, with a mirror, next to the window, there were photographs, mostly of Guido and herself, with one of their mother as a child. Amelia had chosen to keep those of their father and mother together on the chest in her own room. As she walked, Amelia looked at the photographs and thought about how time goes by. Time goes by. In the first photograph Guido was twelve years old, wearing a grown-man’s jacket and short velveteen trousers, buttoned at the knee. His feet were enclosed in high-buckled boots, the right one propped up on a tree stump intended by the photographer to produce a rustic air. On the backdrop there was an incongruous balcony giving onto something like the bay of Naples, without the pine trees or Vesuvius. In the lower right-hand corner was the handwritten signature: Savinelli, Photo Studio.

Amelia looked at the photograph beside it, where already ten years had gone by. It was in a silver frame with a winding mark around the edges from the humidity, like the line left by a wave on the shore. Guido was at Amelia’s left, offering her his right arm, on which she leaned lightly, like a bride. He was wearing a dark suit and a wide tie and his left hand was holding his hat, by the rim, against his thigh. She was wearing a white, slightly fluffy dress with a ribbon around the waist. A straw hat shaded her forehead all the way down to the barely visible eyes, but the rest of her face was flooded with light and an ingenuous, perhaps happy smile revealed a row of white teeth. It was summer and behind them the pergola, overgrown with grapevines, outlined puddles of shade in the courtyard. On the wrought-iron table there was a pitcher, which someone had filled with flowers. Brother and sister seemed like a bride and groom immediately after the ceremony. Yes, on the day when Guido received his university degree, there was a party under the pergola; Amelia remembered it perfectly. Father and mother weren’t yet dead; father had overdone it with the food and drink and now he was sitting in the shade of the porch, his face shiny and his waistcoat unbuttoned so that his big paunch could be seen rising and falling under his shirt as he drew breath. Father, thought Amelia, overcome by nostalgia. She had no such nostalgia for her mother; she thought of her with little or no sorrow, only with a faint regret faded by memory. She was a pale, slight, silent woman, who tiptoed through the house and through life. She had died early, before Amelia knew what real sorrow was, leaving almost imperceptible traces: the memory of her rustling skirt and pale hands, of the way she brushed her long hair, which she camouflaged in a braid rolled up at the nape of her neck. Father, on the other hand, had a loud voice, his footsteps rang out through the house and he filled it with his presence. He gave her big hugs which made for a feeling of safety and for a strange warmth, which caused her to blush.

Amelia was aware of hating this photograph. She learned to hate it years later, when hatred no longer made sense. She knew and preferred not to know the real reason. In that faraway moment captured by the lens she preferred to think that what annoyed her were insignificant details: her own infantile, almost stupid smile, the slope of Guido’s right shoulder, indicative, perhaps, of embarrassment, yes, insignificant things. And then there were two other photographs beside it, which she didn’t hate; they were part of her real life, after the choices had been made. Yes, the choices.

What choices? Amelia asked as she walked along, pushing away the shoot of a blackberry bush which had fallen across the path. For some time now she had carried a cane; not that she was so old, she walked perfectly well without support, but she liked to go out on Sunday afternoons with the cane that had belonged to her father, a slender, elegant bamboo cane, with a silver knob in the shape of a small dog’s head. What choices?

In the third photograph Guido had a solemn, ceremonious expression. He was wearing an academic gown and holding a rolled-up parchment in one hand while with the other he leaned on the edge of a dry fountain in the University cloisters. The last photograph had been taken at an official dinner where Guido, as guest of honour, was seated at the head of the table. It had been snapped when the dinner was nearly over and wine had dissolved the artificial solemnity of the participants’ faces, leaving them relaxed and defenceless. There were writers and artists; the scrawny little man at the end of the table was a famous musician whom she had always found as insipid as his compositions. She was at her brother’s right hand; her eyes reflected satisfaction and contentment, but her lips had narrowed in comparison with those in her eighteen-year-old image. They had lost their openness and generosity, they were tight, cautious, watchful of words, thoughts, and life.

Time is very strange.

“Signor Guido has had an attack,” Cesarina told her in a low voice. “The pain must have been unbearable, because he bit his hands so that he wouldn’t cry out, then he moaned like an animal. Now he’s dozed off; he couldn’t stand it any longer.”

Cesarina was a young, married woman with a peaches-and-cream complexion and enormous breasts, a creature of milk and blood. She had brought her last-born baby with her and laid him to sleep in a straw basket on a shelf on the kitchen cabinet. He was a quiet child, who woke up only when he was hungry, and she nursed him, perching on a high stool. She had taken her mother’s place in the household. Her mother’s name was Fanny, and she had spent her whole life in the family’s service. Fanny was the same age as Amelia and, as children, they had played together. If Amelia had married she might now have a daughter of Cesarina’s age — this thought occasionally crossed her mind — and a couple of grandchildren.

Now she told Cesarina thanks; she would take over. This had become a regular thing. The girl should go home; it was late and the road to the village was dark and riddled with holes. She answered the girl’s goodnight and picked up the pitcher of water. “The soup’s ready,” Cesarina added. “I made a light beef broth.” As Amelia went up the stairs she heard the sound of the garden gate opening and closing. After that there was only the faint sound of her own footsteps. A ray of dim light filtered through the crack of the door to Guido’s room; as she went by she heard his laboured, lugubrious breathing. Gingerly she opened the adjacent door of her own room and gingerly shut it, with the old wood barely creaking behind her. She took off her coat in the darkness and hung it on the three-legged coat-stand beside the door. On the chest of drawers a perpetual light burned before the photograph of her father and mother, two ancient faces against a faded background, smiling at nothingness. In the semi-darkness she reached for her dressing gown and opened the window. The air was sharp and the moon, rising over the hill, cast a halo, broken only by the trees. Amelia stretched out on the bed, still looking out into the night. This was her parents’ bed; here, many years ago, two people had conceived her. The bed stood against the wall which divided it from Guido’s bed. Just so, they had been divided by a wall for so long a time. Amelia thought of this and then, again, of time. She could almost hear it glide by, now that the countryside lay sleeping in silence; it hummed with the sound of a subterranean river. She thought of how many nights she had slept in this bed, thinking of the person asleep on the other side of the wall. And she thought of hate. Hate, too, is a fuzzy-edged, elusive thing, it refuses to be imprisoned by words, it has multiple shapes, shadings, fringes, paces, fluxes and refluxes and imperceptible shifts between light and darkness. Hate can make you wish somebody would die. For a long time, in secret, she had nursed such a wish. She couldn’t say when it had started, for hate has a strange way of taking concrete shape. Before it becomes definite and definable it has already been born within us, it silently pre-existed, hidden in some recess of the mind. And then, perhaps it wasn’t hate after all. Amelia thought of the expression: recesses of the mind. How very apt it was, for the mind has many recesses.

A sharp wail, almost a whistle, came through the wall. This was how Guido woke up when the pain was upon him. Then the wail turned into something heartrending, a whine, punctuated by massive and fearful outcries in the night. Amelia got up and lit the lamp. On the linen cloth covering the toilet table the metal box containing the sterilized syringe, the alcohol and the vials was ready. Now Guido was awake and scratching the wall with a finger; the nail had dug out a furrow in the plaster above his bed. With a small metal saw Amelia opened a vial. She took the syringe from the box and squirted out the water left in the needle. Then she sucked up the contents of the vial, before pointing the syringe upward and pumping out the last air bubbles. Finally she dipped a wad of cotton into the bottle of alcohol and squeezed it out. “I’m coming, Guido,” she called out. She thought of the meaning of pity and knew that her hands were administering it. There was an emptiness in her breast, like an icy tunnel. But the hands holding the syringe were steady, without a shiver, without a tremor.