Troubling Love

19

The sea had become a violet paste. The noise of the storm and the noise of the city made a furious commotion. I crossed the street, avoiding cars and puddles. More or less unharmed, I stopped to look at the façades of the great hotels lined up beside the fierce flow of vehicles. Every opening in those structures was spitefully shut against the din of the traffic and the sea.

I took the bus to Piazza Plebiscito. After a pilgrimage through damaged phone booths and bars with broken equipment, I finally found a telephone and dialed Uncle Filippo’s number. There was no answer. I set off on Via Toledo as the shops were pulling up their shutters, the swarm of pedestrians already dense. People stood in little groups at the entrances to the alleys, steep and black under strips of dark sky. Near Piazza Dante I bought some chocolate, just to breathe the sweet air of the shop. In fact I had no wish for anything: I was so distracted that I forgot to put the chocolate in my mouth and it melted in my fingers. I paid little attention to the insistent looks of men.

It was hot, and in Port’Alba there was neither air nor light. Near my mother’s house I was attracted by some fat, shiny cherries. I bought half a kilo, got on the elevator with no feeling of pleasure and went to knock on the door of the widow De Riso.

The woman opened it in her usual circumspect manner. I showed her the cherries, saying I had bought them for her. She widened her eyes. She released the door from the chain and invited me in, visibly pleased by that gift of unhoped-for sociability.

“No,” I said, “come to my house. I’m waiting for a phone call.” Then I added something about ghosts: I was certain — I assured her — that after a few hours they became less and less autonomous. “After a while they start doing and saying only what we order them to do. If we want them to be silent, finally they are silent.”

My proper Italian made Signora De Riso uneasy. To accept the invitation she tried for a formality equal to mine; then she locked the door of her apartment while I opened the door of my mother’s.

It was suffocating inside. I hurried to open the windows and put the cherries in a plastic container. I let the water run, while the old woman, after a suspicious look all around, sat down almost automatically at the kitchen table. She said, in explanation, that my mother always invited her in there.

I put the cherries down in front of her. She waited for me to ask her to take some, and, when I did, brought one to her mouth with a pleasing, childish gesture that I liked: she took it by the stalk and let it go in her mouth, rotating the fruit between tongue and palate without biting it, the green stalk dancing along her pale lips; then she grabbed the stem again with her fingers and pulled it off with a faint plop.

“Very good,” she said and, relaxing, began to praise the dress I was wearing. Then she added emphatically: “I said that this blue would be better for you than the other.”

I looked at the dress and then at her to be sure that she was referring to that dress. She had no doubts, she continued: it was very becoming. When Amalia had showed her the gifts for my birthday, she had immediately felt that that was the right dress for me. My mother, too, seemed certain. Signora De Riso told me that she was euphoric. There in the kitchen, at that very table, she had laid out the lingerie, the dresses, repeating, “They will look very good on her.” And she was very pleased with how she had got them.

“How?” I asked.

“That friend of hers,” said the widow De Riso. He had proposed an exchange: he wanted all her old lingerie in exchange for those new things. It cost him almost nothing, the swap. He was the proprietor of a very expensive shop on the Vomero. Amalia, who had known him since her youth and knew that he was very smart in business matters, suspected that he wanted to take those old underpants and mended slips as a starting point for some sort of new merchandise. But Signora De Riso was experienced in the world. She had said that, gentleman or not, old or young, rich or poor, with men it was always best to be wary. My mother was too happy to pay attention to her.

Noticing her deliberately equivocal tone, I felt like laughing but contained myself. I saw Caserta and Amalia, who, starting with her ancient rags, planned in that house together, night after night, a grand reintroduction of women’s lingerie of the fifties. I invented a persuasive Caserta, a suggestible Amalia, old and alone, both without any money, in that squalid kitchen, a few feet from the sharp ears of the widow, just as old, just as alone. The scene seemed to me plausible. But I said:

“Maybe it wasn’t a real exchange. Maybe her friend wanted to do her a favor and that was all. Don’t you think?”

The widow ate another cherry. She didn’t know what to do with the pits: she spit them into the palm of her hand and left them there.

“Maybe,” she admitted, but dubiously. “He was very respectable. He came almost every night and sometimes they dined together, sometimes they went to the cinema, sometimes for a walk. When I heard them on the landing, he was talking nonstop and your mother was always laughing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s nice to laugh.”

The old woman hesitated as she chewed her cherries.

“Your father had made me suspicious,” she said.

“My father?”

My father. I suppressed the sensation that he was already there, in the kitchen, and had been for a long time. Signora De Riso explained that he had come secretly to ask her to warn him if she noticed Amalia doing reckless things. It wasn’t the first time he had appeared suddenly with requests of that sort. But on this occasion he had been very insistent.

I wondered what, for my father, the difference was between something that was reckless and something that wasn’t. Signora De Riso seemed to realize this and in her way tried to explain it to me. Reckless was to carelessly expose oneself to the risks of existence. My father worried about his wife, even though they had been separated for twenty-three years. The poor man still loved her. He was so kind, so. . Signora De Riso searched carefully for the right Italian word. She said: “desolate.”

I knew it. He had tried as usual to make a good impression on the widow. He had been affectionate, he had said he was worried. But in fact — I thought — there was no barrier of the city that could keep him from hearing the echo of Amalia’s laugh. My father couldn’t bear her laugh. He thought that her laugh had a recycled, patently false resonance. Whenever there was a stranger in the house (for example the men who appeared at certain intervals to commission street urchins, Gypsies, or the classic Vesuvio with pine tree), he warned her: “Don’t laugh.” That laugh seemed to him added on purpose to humiliate him. In reality Amalia was only trying to give voices to the happy-looking women photographed or drawn on the posters and in the magazines of the forties: wide painted mouth, sparkling teeth, lively gaze. She imagined herself like that, and had found the appropriate laugh. It must have been difficult for her to choose the laugh, the voice, the gestures that her husband could tolerate. You never knew what was all right, what wasn’t. Someone who passes on the street and looks at you. A joking remark. A careless nod. See, they rang at the door. See, they were delivering roses to her. See, she didn’t reject them. She laughed instead, and chose a vase of blue glass, and arranged them in the container that she had filled with water. During the time when those mysterious gifts arrived regularly, those anonymous homages (but we all knew they were from Caserta: Amalia knew it), she had been young and seemed to be playing games with herself, without malice. She let the black curl fall over her forehead, she batted her eyelashes, she gave tips to the delivery boys, she allowed the things to remain in our house as if their remaining were permitted. Then my father would find out and destroy everything. He tried to destroy her, too, but he always managed to stop a step from stupidity. Yet the blood bore witness to the intention. While Signora De Riso was talking to me, I was telling myself about the blood. In the bathroom sink. It dripped from Amalia’s nose, thick, without stopping, and first it was red, then, when it touched the water from the tap, faded. It was also on her arm, up to the elbow. She tried to stanch it with one hand but it flowed out from under the palm, leaving red lines like scratches. It wasn’t innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn’t bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal. Not only sexual betrayal: I no longer believed that he feared only being betrayed by sex. I was certain, rather, that above all he feared abandonment, passage into the enemy camp, acceptance of the rationales, the lexicon, the taste of people like Caserta: faithless intriguers, without rules, crude seducers to whom he had to bow out of necessity. So he tried to impose on her a code of behavior intended to communicate distance if not hostility. But soon he exploded in insults. Amalia’s tone of voice, according to him, was too easily engaging; the gestures of her hands were too soft and slow; her gaze was eager to the point of shameless. Above all she could charm without effort and without the ambition to charm. It happened, even if she didn’t intend it. Oh yes: for that, for her charm he punished her with slaps and punches. He interpreted her gestures, her looks, as signs of dark dealings, of secret meetings, of allusive understandings meant to marginalize him. I had trouble removing him from my vision, so anguished, so violent. The force. He petrified me. The image of my father as he ravaged the roses, stripping off the petals, shouted and shouted down the decades in my head. Now he was burning the new dress that she hadn’t sent back, that she had worn in secret. I couldn’t bear the odor of burned fabric. Even though I had opened the window.

“He came back and beat her?” I asked.

The woman admitted reluctantly:

“He showed up here early one morning, not later than six, and threatened to kill her. He said really terrible things to her.”

“When was that?”

“Mid-May: a week before your mother left.”

“And Amalia had already got the dresses and the new lingerie?”

“Yes.”

“And she was pleased?”

“Yes.”

“How did she react?”

“The way she always reacted. She forgot about it as soon as he left. I saw him go out: he was white as a fish in flour. She, on the other hand, nothing. She said: he’s like that; not even old age has changed him. But I understood that things weren’t completely clear. Until she left, until the train, I kept saying to her: Amalia, be careful. Nothing. She seemed tranquil. But on the way she had trouble keeping up her normal pace. She slowed down on purpose. In the compartment she started laughing for no reason and began to fan herself with a hem of her skirt.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“It’s not done,” the widow answered.

I took two cherries with joined stems and hung them on my outstretched index finger, swinging them to the right and the left. Probably in the course of her existence Amalia had given up doing many things that, like every human being, she might legitimately or not legitimately have done. But perhaps she only pretended not to have done them. Or perhaps she had given the appearance of someone who pretends, so that my father would be constantly thinking of her unreliability and suffer for it. Perhaps that was her way of reacting. But she hadn’t taken into account that we, her daughters, might think that, too, and forever: I above all. I couldn’t remake her innocent. Not even now. It was possible that Caserta, looking for her companionship, had only been pursuing a fragment of his youth. But I was sure that Amalia was still playing the game with herself, opening the door with youthful mischief, pulling the curl over her eyebrows and batting her eyelashes. It was possible that with that nonsense of the businessman full of ideas the old man had only wanted to communicate his fetishism in a discreet way. But she hadn’t pulled back. She had immediately laughed knowingly at the exchange, and had supported it with her own and his senile impulses, using me and my birthday. No, yes. I realized that I was summarizing a woman without prudence and without the virtue of fear. I had memories of it. Even when my father raised his fists and struck her, to shape her like a stone or a log, she widened her eyes not in fear but in astonishment. She must have widened her eyes in the same way when Caserta proposed the exchange. With joyful astonishment. I, too, was astonished, as if watching a scene of violence, a game for two created from conventions: the scarecrow that doesn’t scare, the victim who isn’t annihilated. It occurred to me that ever since she was a girl Amalia had thought of hands as gloves, silhouettes first of paper, then of leather. She had sewed and sewed. Then, moving on, she had reduced widows of generals, wives of dentists, sisters of magistrates to measurements of bust and hips. Those measurements, taken by discreetly embracing, with her seamstress’s tape, female bodies of all ages, became paper patterns that, fastened to the fabric with pins, portrayed on it the shadows of breasts and hips. Now, intently, she cut the material, stretched tight, following the outline imposed by the pattern. For all the days of her life she had reduced the uneasiness of bodies to paper and fabric, and perhaps it had become a habit, and so, out of habit, she tacitly rethought what was out of proportion, giving it the proper measure. I had never thought about this, and now that I had I couldn’t ask her if it really had been like that. Everything was lost. But, in front of Signora De Riso as she ate cherries, I found that that final game of fabrics between her and Caserta, that reduction of their underground history to a conventional exchange of old garments for new, was a sort of ironic fulfillment. My mood abruptly changed. I was suddenly content to believe that her carelessness had been thought out. Unexpectedly, surprisingly, I liked that woman who in some way had completely invented her story, playing on her own with empty fabrics. I imagined that she hadn’t died unsatisfied, and I sighed with unexpected satisfaction. I took the cherries that I had been playing with and hung them over one ear. I laughed.

“How do I look?” I asked the old woman, who meanwhile had piled up in her cupped palm at least ten pits.

She scowled uncertainly.

“Good,” she said, without conviction.

“I know,” I declared, with, instead, an air of satisfaction. And I chose two more cherries with joined stems. I was about to put them on my other ear, but I changed my mind and held them out to Signora De Riso.

“No,” she defended herself, drawing back.

I got up, walked behind her, and, as she shook her head, laughing nervously, flushed, freed her right ear from the gray hair and placed the cherries on the auricle. Then I stood back to admire the sight.

“Beautiful!” I exclaimed.

“No,” the widow murmured, embarrassed.

I chose another pair of cherries and went back behind her to adorn the other ear. Afterward I embraced her, crossing her arms over her large bosom and hugging her hard.

“Mammina,” I said to her. “It was you who told my father everything, isn’t that true?”

Then I kissed her wrinkled neck, which was rapidly turning red. She squirmed in my arms, whether from uneasiness or the wish to free herself, I don’t know. She denied it, said that she would never do that: how could that occur to me?

She had, however, done it — I thought. She had played the spy, in order to hear him shout, slam doors, break dishes, enjoying it anxiously from within the nest of her apartment.

The telephone rang. I kissed her again, hard, on her gray head, before going to answer: it was already the third ring.

“Hello,” I said.

Silence.

“Hello,” I repeated, calmly, as I observed Signora De Riso staring at me hesitantly and meanwhile struggling to get up from her chair.

I hung up.

“Please, stay a little longer,” I invited her, becoming formal again. “Would you like to give me the pits? Eat the rest of the cherries. Just one more. Or take them with you.”

But I felt that my tone was not reassuring. The old woman was standing now and was heading toward the door, with the cherries astride her ears.

“Are you angry with me?” I asked her, in a placating voice.

She looked at me in amazement. She must suddenly have thought of something that stopped her in her tracks.

“That dress,” she said to me, in bewilderment, “how did you get it? You shouldn’t have. It was in the suitcase with the other things. And the suitcase was never found. Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?”

As she spoke, I saw that her pupils were switching rapidly from astonishment to fear. I wasn’t happy about that, I hadn’t intended to frighten her, I didn’t like causing alarm. I smoothed the dress with the palms of my hands as if to make myself taller; constricted by that short, close-fitting dress, too stylish, unsuitable for my age, I felt apprehensive.

“It’s only fabric without memory,” I murmured. I meant that it could do no harm to either me or her. But the widow De Riso hissed:

“It’s dirty.”

She opened the door and closed it behind her quickly. Just then the telephone rang again.