Troubling Love

20

I let it ring two or three times. Then I lifted the receiver: buzzing, distant voices, indecipherable sounds. I repeated “hello” without hope, just so that Caserta would know that I was there, that I wasn’t frightened. Finally I hung up. I sat down at the kitchen table, took the cherries off my ear, and ate them. By now I knew that all the calls that followed would have the pure function of a reminder, a sort of whistle like the one that in the past men used when they wanted to announce from the street that they were coming home and the women could put the pasta on.

I checked the clock: it was ten after six. To keep Caserta from forcing me again to listen to his silence, I picked up the receiver and dialed Uncle Filippo’s number. I was prepared for the long sound of the rings. Instead he answered, but without enthusiasm, as if annoyed by the fact that it was me. He said that he had just come in, that he was tired and cold, that he wanted to go to bed. He coughed artificially. He mentioned Caserta only when I asked, and then was irritated. He said they had talked for a long time but without quarreling. They had suddenly realized that there was no longer any reason for it. Amalia was dead, life had moved on.

He was silent for a moment, to let me speak: he expected some reaction. I had none. So he started muttering about old age, about solitude. He said that Caserta had been thrown out of the house by his son, had been left on his own, just like that, without a roof, worse than a dog. First the boy had stolen all the money he had saved and then had thrown him out. His only good fortune had been Amalia’s kindness. Caserta had confided to him that they had seen each other again after many years: she had helped him, they had kept each other company, but discreetly, with mutual respect. Now he lived like a tramp, a little here, a little there. These were things that not even someone like him deserved.

“A fine man,” I commented.

Filippo became even colder.

“There comes a time when one has to make peace with one’s neighbor.”

“And the girl on the funicular?” I asked.

My uncle was embarrassed.

“Sometimes it happens,” he said. I didn’t know it yet but I, too, would find out that old age is a brute, ferocious beast. Then he added: “There’s worse foolishness than that.” Finally he said, with uncontrolled bitterness:

“Between him and Amalia there was never anything.”

“Maybe it’s true,” I admitted.

He raised his voice.

“Then why did you tell us those things?”

I retorted:

“Why did you believe me?”

“You were five years old.”

“Exactly.”

My Uncle Filippo sniffed. He murmured:

“Go away. Forget it.”

“Take care of yourself,” I advised him and hung up.

I stared at the telephone for a few seconds. I knew that it would ring: somewhere Caserta was waiting for the line to be free. The first ring was not long in coming. I made up my mind and left quickly, without locking the door.

There were no more clouds, there was no more wind. A whitish light reduced the Arciconfraternita di Santa Maria delle Grazie, tiny between the transparent façades of ordinary buildings covered with advertisements. I headed toward the taxis, then changed my mind and went into the yellow building where the subway entrance was. The crowd rustled beside me as if it were made of paper cutouts intended to amuse children. The sound of obscenities uttered in dialect — the only obscenities that could fit together sound and sense in my head in such a way as to make concrete a sex that was troublesome in its aggressive, pleasure-seeking, and sticky realism: every other formula outside of that dialect seemed to me insignificant, often lighthearted, pronounceable without repulsion — softened in an unexpected way, becoming a kind of rustling against the roller of an old typewriter. As I descended into the underground at Piazza Cavour, a warm wind blew in, making the metallic walls sway and mixing the red and blue of the escalator, and I imagined I was a figure from Neapolitan cards: the eight of spades, the woman who, calm and armed, advances on foot ready to jump into the game of briscola. I bit my lips between my teeth until they hurt.

The whole way I kept looking behind me. I couldn’t see Caserta. To get a better view of the half-empty areas of the platform between the two black holes of the tunnel, I mingled where the crowd of waiting passengers was thickest. The train was full but emptied out soon afterward, in the neon half-light of the station at Piazza Garibaldi. I got out at the end of the line and, after a short set of steps, found myself beside the old cigarette factory, on the edge of the neighborhood where I had grown up.

The rural feeling it had had, with its four-story white buildings constructed in the middle of the dusty countryside, had been transformed over the years, and it had become a jaundiced neighborhood of the periphery, dominated by skyscrapers, choked by traffic and by the trains that, slowing down, snaked alongside the buildings. I turned immediately to the left, toward an overpass with three tunnels that went under it, the middle one closed by reconstruction work. I recalled a single endless passage, deserted and constantly shaken by the trains on the siding overhead. Instead I took no more than a hundred steps, slowly, in a shadowy light stinking of urine, squeezed between a wall that sweated large drops of water and a dusty guardrail that protected me from the crowded automobile lane.

The overpass had been there since Amalia was sixteen. She had had to walk through those cool shady tunnels when she went to deliver the gloves. I had always imagined that she carried them into the space I was leaving behind me, to an old factory with a tile roof that now displayed a Peugeot sign. But surely it wasn’t like that. But what was like that? There was no longer any gesture or step there that, though the stones and the shadows were the same, could help me. Amalia had been followed in the tunnel by peddlers, railway workers, idlers, stonemasons chewing on rolls stuffed with broccoli and sausage or drinking wine from flasks. She told us, when she felt like telling us, that they stayed close, at her side, often breathing in her ear. They tried to touch her hair, her shoulder, her arm. Some tried to take her hand while making obscene remarks. She kept her eyes down and walked faster. Sometimes she burst out laughing, unable to contain herself. Then she would start running faster than her pursuer. How she ran: as if she were playing. She ran in my head. Was it possible that I, passing through there, carried her in my aging, unsuitably dressed body? Was it possible that her sixteen-year-old body, in a homemade flowered dress, was passing through the shadowy light by means of mine, nimbly avoiding the puddles, as she hurried toward the arc of yellow light that contained the anachronism of a Mobil gas pump?

Maybe, in the end, all that mattered of these two days without respite was the transplanting of the story from one head to the other, like a healthy organ that my mother had given up to me out of affection. My father, too, barely twenty, had chased her on that stretch of road. Amalia told us that, hearing him behind her, she was frightened. He wasn’t like the others, who talked about her, trying to win her over. He talked about himself: he boasted of the extraordinary things he was capable of: he said he wanted to make a portrait of her, perhaps to prove to her how beautiful she was and how talented he was. He alluded to the colors she wore. How many words vanished who could say where. My mother, who never looked any of her pursuers in the face and while they talked made an effort not to laugh, told us that she had glanced at him sideways just once and had immediately understood. We, her daughters, did not understand. We couldn’t understand why she liked him. Our father did not appear to us at all exceptional, slovenly as he was, fat, bald, unwashed, his sagging pants smeared with paint, always grumbling about the miseries of every day, about the money that he earned and that — he yelled at us — Amalia threw out the window. Yet it was that man without a job whom our mother had asked to come to her house if he wanted to talk to her: she wouldn’t make love in secret; she had never done so. And when she uttered the words “make love” I listened openmouthed, I liked the story of that moment so much, without its sequel, stopped before it could continue and be ruined. I preserved the sounds and images. Maybe now I had come to that underpass so that the sounds and images would coalesce again among the rocks and shadows, and again my mother, before she became my mother, was followed by the man with whom she would make love, who would cover her with his name, who would annihilate her with his alphabet.

I walked faster, after making sure yet again that Caserta hadn’t followed me. The neighborhood, in spite of the disappearance of a number of details (on the yellow-green pond where I used to play an eight-story building had risen), seemed to me still recognizable. Children shouted in the potholed streets as they always had at the start of summer. The same cries in dialect came from the houses, with their open windows. The layout of the buildings followed the same unimaginative geometry. Even some impoverished commercial enterprises of that time had lasted over the decades: for example, the shop underground, where I had gone to buy soap and lye for my mother, was still open in the same crumbling structure of so many years earlier. Now it displayed on the threshold brooms of every type, plastic containers, and drums of detergent. I looked in for a moment, thinking I would find there the broad cavern of my memory. Instead it closed on me like a broken umbrella.

The building where my father lived was a few meters away. I had been born in that house. I went through the gate and made my way securely among the low, poor structures. I entered through a dusty doorway: the tiles of the entrance were broken, there was no elevator, the marble of the stairs was cracked and yellowed. The apartment was on the third floor and I hadn’t been there for about ten years. As I went up I tried to redraw the map of it in such a way that the impact with that space wouldn’t be too disturbing. The door opened onto a corridor without windows. There were two rooms and a kitchen. At the back on the left was the dining room, irregularly shaped, with a silverware cupboard for silverware that we had never had, a table used for some festive lunches, and a double bed where I and my sisters slept, after nightly quarrels to decide who of the three was to sacrifice and sleep in the middle. Next to that was the toilet, a long room with a narrow window, containing the toilet and a movable bidet of enameled metal. After that came the kitchen: the sink where in the morning we took turns washing, a hearth of white majolica that had fallen quickly into disuse, a copper boiler full of pots that Amalia polished carefully. Finally there was my parents’ bedroom, and, next to it, a storeroom with no light, suffocating, crammed with useless objects.

We were forbidden to enter my father and mother’s room: it was tiny. Opposite the bed was an armoire with a mirrored central panel. On the right-hand wall was a dressing table with a rectangular mirror. On the opposite side, between the edge of the bed and the window, my father had set up the easel, a tall, massive object, with thick feet, gnawed by woodworms, from which hung dirty rags for drying the brushes. A few inches from the edge of the bed was a chest where the tubes of paint were thrown randomly: the white was the biggest and the most easily identifiable, even when it had been squeezed and rolled up to the threaded neck; but many of the tubes were remarkable, sometimes for a name that recalled the prince in a fairy tale, like Prussian blue, sometimes for the aura of devastating fire, like burnt sienna. The cover of the chest was of plywood, and movable, and on it stood a carafe that held brushes and another that held turpentine, and a gulf of colors mixed by the brushes in a many-colored sea. The octagonal tiles of the floor there had disappeared under a gray crust that had dripped down from the brushes over the years. There were rolls of prepared canvases, provided by the men who commissioned the work; the same who later, having given him a few lire, took care of delivering the finished product to the traveling peddlers, offering their wares on the city sidewalks, in the neighborhood markets, at village fairs. The house was pervaded by the odor of oil paints and turpentine but none of us noticed it any longer. Amalia had slept with my father for almost two decades without ever complaining.

On the other hand she did complain when he stopped making portraits of women for the American sailors and scenes of the bay and began to work on the half-naked dancing Gypsy. I had only a confused memory of that time, based more on Amalia’s stories than on direct experience: I was no more than four. The bedroom walls were crowded with exotic women in bright colors, interspersed with sketches of nudes drawn with a blood-red pastel. Often the poses of the Gypsy were rough copies of some photographs of women that my father kept hidden in a box in the closet and that I peeked at in secret. At other times the shapes of the blood-red nudes appeared in oil paintings.

I had no doubt that the pastel sketches reproduced my mother’s body. I imagined that at night, when they closed the door of their bedroom, Amalia took off her clothes, posed like the naked women in the photographs in the closet, and said: “Draw.” He took a roll of yellow paper, tore off a piece, and drew. What he did best was the hair. He would leave those women without features but above the empty oval of the face he would skillfully draw a majestic construction, unmistakably similar to the beautiful creation that Amalia knew how to make with her long hair. I tossed and turned in the bed, unable to sleep.

When our father finished the Gypsy, I was sure of it and so was Amalia: the Gypsy was her: less beautiful, the proportions wrong, the colors smudged; but her. Caserta saw it and said it was no good, it wouldn’t sell. He seemed annoyed. Amalia intervened, she said she agreed. She and Caserta teamed up against my father. There was a discussion. I heard their voices streaming down the stairs. When Caserta left, my father without warning hit Amalia twice in the face with his right hand, first with the palm and then the back. I remembered that gesture precisely, with its wavelike motion, going and coming: I was seeing it for the first time. She fled to the end of the hall, to the storeroom, and tried to lock herself in. She was dragged out and kicked. One blow struck her in the hip and hurled her against the armoire in the bedroom. Amalia got up and tore all the drawings off the walls. He caught her, grabbed her by the hair, pounded her head against the mirror of the armoire, which broke.

People liked the Gypsy, especially at the country fairs. Forty years had passed and my father was still doing it. In time he had become very quick. He attached the blank canvas to the easel and sketched the outlines with an expert hand. Then the body became bronze with reddish highlights. The belly curved, the breasts swelled, the nipples rose. Meanwhile sparkling eyes emerged, red lips, raven hair, masses of it, combed in Amalia’s style, which over time had become old-fashioned but evocative. In a few hours the canvas was finished. He took out the thumbtacks that held it in place, pinned it to the wall to dry, and arranged another blank canvas on the easel. Then he began again.

During adolescence I saw those figures of a woman leave the house in the hands of strangers who were not sparing with their crude comments. I didn’t understand and perhaps there was nothing to understand. How was it possible that my father could hand over, to vulgar men, bold and seductive versions of that body which if necessary he would defend with a murderous rage? How could he place it in lewd poses when for an immodest smile or look he became a wild beast, without pity? Why did he abandon it on the streets and in the houses of strangers, by the tens and hundreds of copies, when he was so jealous of the original? I looked at Amalia bent over her sewing machine until late at night. I thought that, as she worked like that, silent and preoccupied, she, too, asked herself those questions.