Troubling Love

2

During the funeral I was surprised to find myself thinking that at last I no longer had any obligation to worry about her. Right afterward I was aware of a warm flow and felt wet between my legs.

I was at the head of a long procession of relatives, friends, acquaintances. My two sisters were close beside me. I was supporting one by the arm because I was afraid she might faint. The other was holding on to me as if her swollen eyes prevented her from seeing. That involuntary dissolving of my body frightened me like a threat of punishment. I had been unable to shed a tear: I couldn’t cry, or maybe I hadn’t wanted to cry. Furthermore, I was the only one who had expended any words of excuse for my father, who hadn’t come to the funeral or sent flowers. My sisters hadn’t concealed their disapproval, and now seemed intent on demonstrating publicly that they had enough tears to make up for those which neither I nor my father was shedding. I felt accused. When the procession was accompanied for a short stretch by a colored man who was carrying on his back some paintings mounted in frames, the first of which (the one visible on his back) showed a crude portrayal of a half-naked Gypsy, I hoped that neither they nor the relatives would notice. The maker of those paintings was my father. Maybe he was working on one of his trashy canvases at that very moment. He had made, for decades, and continued to make innumerable copies of that hateful Gypsy, sold on the streets and at country fairs, supplying for a few lire the constant demand of petit-bourgeois living rooms for ugly pictures. The irony of the lines that connect moments to meetings, to separations, to old rancors had sent to my mother’s funeral not him but that elemental painting of his, detested by his daughters even more than we detested its author.

I felt tired of everything. I hadn’t stopped for a moment since arriving in the city. For days I had been making the rounds with my Uncle Filippo, my mother’s brother, through a chaos of offices, visiting small-time brokers who might be able to speed the bureaucratic procedures, or, after waiting in long lines at windows, testing the willingness of clerks to overcome insurmountable obstacles in exchange for generous gratuities. At times my uncle succeeded in obtaining results by showing the empty sleeve of his jacket. He had lost his right arm at an advanced age, fifty-six, working at a lathe in a workshop on the outskirts of the city, and, ever since, he had used his disability to ask favors, or to wish the same bad luck on those who refused him. But we got the best results by handing out a lot of undeserved money. By that means we had procured the necessary documents, permissions from I don’t know how many proper authorities, true or invented, a first-class funeral, and, hardest of all, a place in the cemetery.

Meanwhile the dead body of Amalia, my mother, butchered by the autopsy, had grown heavier and heavier as we dragged it, along with name and surname, date of birth and date of death, before bureaucrats who were sometimes rude, sometimes ingratiating. I felt the urgency of getting rid of it and yet, still not sufficiently exhausted, I wanted to help carry the casket. They had given in to me after a lot of resistance: women do not carry caskets. It had been a terrible idea. Since the men who were carrying the casket with me (a cousin and my two brothers-in-law) were taller, I was afraid during the entire journey that the wooden box might slide into me, between the collarbone and the neck, along with the body it contained. When the coffin was set down in the hearse, and it had started off, a few steps and a guilty relief were enough for the tension to release that hidden stream from my womb.

The warm liquid that was coming out of me against my will gave me the impression of an agreed-upon signal among aliens inside my body. The funeral procession advanced toward Piazza Carlo III. The yellowish façade of the Reclusorio seemed barely able to contain the pressure of the Incis neighborhood that weighed on it. The streets of topographic memory seemed to me unstable, like a carbonated drink that, if shaken, bubbles up and overflows. I felt the city coming apart in the heat, in the dusty gray light, and I went over in my mind the story of childhood and adolescence that impelled me to wander along the Veterinaria to the Botanic Gardens, or over the cobbles of the market of Sant’Antonio Abate, which were always damp and strewn with rotting vegetables. I had the impression that my mother was carrying off the places, too, and the names of the streets. I stared at the image of my sisters and me in the glass, among the wreaths of flowers, like a photograph taken in dim light, useless for future memory. I anchored myself to the paving stones of the piazza with the soles of my shoes, I isolated the scent of the flowers arranged on the hearse, which was already putrid. At a certain point I was afraid that the blood would start running down my ankles, and I tried to get free of my sisters. It was impossible. I had to wait until the procession wound through the piazza, ascended via Don Bosco, and broke up in a crush of cars and people. Aunts and uncles, great-aunts and uncles, in-laws, cousins began to embrace us in turn: people vaguely known, changed by the years, seen only in childhood or perhaps never. The few people I recalled clearly hadn’t shown up. Or maybe they were there, but I didn’t recognize them because I could recall only details from my childhood: a crossed eye, a lame leg, the olive color of the skin. To make up for it, people whose names I didn’t even know drew me aside to recite old wrongs done to them by my father. Unknown but affectionate young men, adept at social conversation, asked me how I was, how things were going, what kind of work I did. I answered: well, it was going well, I drew comic strips, and how were things going for them? Many wrinkled old women, completely in black except for the pallor of their faces, praised the extraordinary beauty and goodness of Amalia. Some embraced me with such force and shed such copious tears that I wavered between a feeling of suffocation and an unbearable sensation of wetness that extended from their sweat and tears to my groin, to where my thighs joined. For the first time I was glad about the dark dress I was wearing. I was about to leave when Uncle Filippo went off on one of his rants. In his seventy-year-old head, which often confused past and present, a detail must have knocked down barriers that were already shaky. To everyone’s astonishment, he began cursing loudly in dialect, and frantically waving the only arm he had.

“Did you see Caserta?” he asked, turning to me and my sisters, barely able to breathe. And again and again he repeated that well-known name, a threatening sound from childhood that made me apprehensive. Then, turning livid, he added, “No shame. At Amalia’s funeral. If your father had been there, he would have murdered him.”

I didn’t want to hear about Caserta, a pure agglomerate of childhood fear. I pretended it was nothing and tried to calm him down, but he didn’t even hear me. Rather, in his agitation he squeezed me with his one arm, as if he wished to console me for the insult of that name. So I pulled myself away rudely, promised my sisters that I would get to the cemetery in time for the burial ceremony, and returned to the piazza. Quickly I looked for a bar. I asked for the bathroom and went toward the back, into a tiny stinking room with a dirty toilet and a yellow-stained sink.

The flow of blood was heavy. I felt nauseous and slightly dizzy. In the shadows I saw my mother, her legs spread, as she unhooked a safety pin and, as if they were pasted on, removed some bloody linen rags from her sex; without surprise she turned and said to me, calmly, “Go on, what are you doing here?” I burst into tears for the first time in many years. I wept, banging one hand at almost regular intervals on the sink, as if to impose a rhythm on my tears. When I realized it, I stopped, cleaned myself as well as I could with some Kleenex, and went out in search of a drugstore.

It was then that I saw him for the first time. “May I be of help?” he asked when I bumped into him: an instant, time to feel against my face the material of his shirt, notice the blue cap of the pen that stuck out of his jacket pocket, and meanwhile register the uncertain tone of voice, a pleasant odor, the sagging skin of his neck, a thick mass of white hair, neatly combed.

“Do you know where there’s a drugstore?” I asked without even looking at him, engaged as I was in a rapid swerve intended to cancel out that contact.

“On Corso Garibaldi,” he answered as I re-established a minimum of distance between the compact smear of his bony body and me. Now, in his white shirt and dark jacket, he was as if pasted to the façade of the Albergo dei Poveri. I saw him pale, carefully shaved, without wonder in a gaze that I disliked. I thanked him almost in a whisper, and went in the direction he had indicated.

He followed me with his voice, which changed from courteous to a threatening hiss of words that became more and more vulgar. I was hit by a stream of obscenities in dialect, a soft river of sound that involved me, my sisters, my mother in a concoction of semen, saliva, feces, urine, in every possible orifice.

I turned suddenly, all the more astonished as the insults were unmotivated. But the man was no longer there. Maybe he had crossed the street and disappeared among the cars, maybe he had turned the corner toward Sant’Antonio Abate. Slowly I let the pounding of my heart become normal and an ugly homicidal impulse evaporate. I went into the drugstore, bought a package of tampons, and went back to the bar.