Troubling Love

23

I tried to orient myself as if the counter with the exotic scenes painted by my father so many years before were in front of me. I had felt it as huge, so high that it was at least two inches above my head. Then I realized that I had grown more than two feet since the time when I had lingered in front of that object loaded with licorice and sugared almonds. Immediately the wood and metal wall, which for a moment had been almost six feet high, slipped down and stopped at my hips. I walked around it cautiously. I even picked up my foot to climb onto the wooden platform behind the counter, but in vain: naturally, there was neither counter nor platform. I slid the soles of my shoes along the floor, groping my way, and encountered nothing, only debris and a few nails.

I decided to light a match. The place was empty and there existed no memory capable of filling it: only an overturned chair separated me from the opening that led into the space where Caserta’s father had kept the machines for making sweets and ice cream. I let the match fall to keep from burning myself and went into the former pasticceria. There, though the right wall was blank, the left had three rectangular openings high up, barred and screened with mesh. There was enough light so that I could distinguish clearly a cot and, on it, a dark body, lying as if it were asleep. I cleared my throat to make myself heard but nothing happened. I lighted another match, approached, and reached out a hand toward the shadow lying on the bed. As I did so one hip bumped against a crate of the kind used to pack fruit. Something tumbled onto the floor, but the outline didn’t move. I knelt down, with the flame grazing my fingertips. On all fours I hunted for the object I had heard falling. It was a metal flashlight. The match went out. With the beam of the flashlight I could discern a black plastic bag, left lying on the bed like a person sleeping. Some old underpants and an undershirt of Amalia’s were strewn on the bare mattress.

“Are you here?” I asked in a hoarse voice, barely controlled.

There was no answer. So I rotated the beam of the flashlight. In one corner a rope had been stretched between the two walls. From it hung plastic hangers holding two shirts, a gray jacket and matching pants carefully folded, a raincoat. I examined the shirts: they had the same label as the one I had found in my mother’s house. So I went on to search the pockets of the jacket, and there I found some change, seven telephone tokens, a second-class ticket from Naples to Rome via Formia, dated May 21st, three used bus tickets, two fruit candies, the receipt for a hotel in Formia, one bill for two single rooms, three receipts for three different bars, and the receipt for a restaurant in Minturno. The train ticket had been issued the same day my mother left Naples. The bill from the hotel, on the other hand, and the restaurant receipt, bore the date of the twenty-second. Caserta and Amalia’s dinner had been lavish: two covers, 6,000 lire; two seafood antipasti, 30,000; two gnocchetti with shrimp, 20,000; two mixed fish grills, 40,000; two vegetables, 8,000; two ice creams, 12,000; two bottles of wine, 30,000.

A lot of food, wine. In general my mother ate very little, and a sip of wine made her head spin. I thought again of the phone calls she had made, of the obscenities she had spoken to me: maybe she wasn’t frightened, maybe she was only happy; maybe she was happy and frightened. Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter, I couldn’t impose on her the prison of a single adjective. She had traveled with a man who had tormented her at least as much as her husband had and who continued subtly to torment her. With him she had left the line that went between Naples and Rome to slip sideways into a hotel room, a beach at night. She must not have been overly disturbed when Caserta’s fetishism emerged more decisively. I felt her there, in the half-light, as if she were in that sack on the bed, constricted and curious, but not suffering. Certainly she had been pained by the discovery that that man was continuing to pursue her with perverse constancy, as he had done years before, when he had sent his gifts, knowing that he was exposing her to the brutality of her husband. I imagined her disoriented, when she found out that Caserta had gone to my father to talk about her, about the time they spent together. I saw that she was surprised that my father hadn’t killed his presumed rival, as he had always threatened to do, but had listened to him calmly, in order then to spy on her, to beat her, to threaten her, to try to force his presence on her again. She had left in a great hurry, afraid, probably, of being followed by him. On the way, with Signora De Riso, she must have been certain of it. Once on the train she had sighed with relief and perhaps had expected Caserta to show up, to explain, to understand. I thought that she was confused and determined, anchored only to the suitcase in which she had the gifts for me. I roused myself and put back in Caserta’s jacket pockets all those signs of their journey. In the bottom, in the seams, there was sand.

When I returned to my reconnaissance, I gasped. The beam of the flashlight, rotating, had passed by the silhouette of a woman standing against the wall opposite the bed. I brought the light back to the silhouette I had glimpsed. On a hanger attached to the wall was, in perfect order, the suit my mother had worn when she left: jacket and skirt of a material so durable that Amalia for decades had managed to adapt it, with slight modifications, to all the occasions that she considered important. Both garments were arranged on the hanger as if the person who had worn them had stepped out of them just for a moment, promising to return immediately. Under the jacket was an old blue shirt, very familiar to me. Hesitantly I stuck one hand under the collar and found one of Amalia’s ancient bras attached with a diaper pin to the shirt. I felt inside the skirt: there were her mended underpants. On the floor I saw the worn and unfashionable low-heeled shoes, many times resoled, that had belonged to her, and the stockings that lay over them like a veil.

I sat on the edge of the bed. I had to try to keep the suit from detaching itself from the wall. I wanted each of those garments to stay put, motionless, and use up the rest of the energy that Amalia had left there. I let each stitch become unsewed, the blue material become again the uncut fabric, smelling like new, not even touched by Amalia, who, a young girl in a red-and-blue flowered American dress, was still choosing among the bolts of material, in a shop that smelled intensely of fabric. She discussed happily. She was still planning to sew it herself, she was still touching the selvage, she was lifting an edge to calculate the bias. But I wasn’t able to contain her for long. Amalia was already working eagerly. She spread over the material the paper that reproduced the parts of her body. She attached it with pins, piece to piece. She cut it, holding the fabric with the thumb and middle finger of her left hand. She basted. She was sparing with her stitches. She measured, she took out stitches, she restitched. She lined. Oh, I was fascinated by her art of constructing a double. I saw the dress growing like another body, a more accessible body. How many times had I sneaked into the armoire in the bedroom, closed the door, sat in the dark among her clothes, under the redolent skirt of that suit, breathing in her body, clothing myself in it? I was enthralled by her ability to extract a person from the woof and warp of the fabric, a mask that was nourished on warmth and scent, which seemed character, theater, story. Even if she had never let me touch it, that silhouette of hers had certainly been, up to the threshold of my adolescence, generous with suggestions, images, pleasures. The suit was alive.

Caserta, too, must have thought so. On that dress his body had surely lain, when in the course of the last year a senile understanding had grown up between them, which I had failed to value in all its intensity and all its implications. In that dress she had left in a hurry, agitated after my father’s revelations, suspicious, fearful of being watched still. In that dress Amalia’s body had touched Caserta, when he sat down beside her suddenly, in the train. Had they arranged to meet? Now I saw them together, as they met in the compartment, just outside the view of Signora De Riso. Amalia still graceful, slender, with that old-fashioned hair; him tall, lean, neat: a handsome old couple. But perhaps there was no agreement between them: Caserta had followed her onto the train on his own initiative, had sat down beside her, had begun to talk to her, appealing, as it appeared he was able to be. Yet, however things had gone, I doubted that Amalia intended to arrive at my house with him: maybe Caserta had merely offered to keep her company during the journey, maybe on the way she had begun to tell him about our summer vacations, maybe, as had happened to her in recent months, she had begun to lose her sense of things, to forget my father, to forget that the man sitting beside her was obsessed with her, with her person, her body, her way of being, but also with a revenge that was more and more abstract, less and less concrete, pure fantasy among the many fantasies of old age.

Or no: she still had him in mind and was already planning, as she did with clothes, the turn she would give to the last events of her existence. Anyway, the destination had suddenly changed, not by the will of Caserta. Surely it had been Amalia who urged him to get out at Formia. He could have had no interest in returning to the places where we (my father, her, me, my sisters) had gone swimming in the fifties. It was possible, however, that Amalia, convinced that my father, hiding somewhere, had persisted in secretly spying on them, had decided to lead that spy on a journey that might petrify him.

They had eaten in cafés, had drunk: certainly a new game had begun, which Amalia had not foreseen but which had seduced her. The first telephone call she had made to me bore witness to a confusion that excited her and at the same time disoriented her. And although they had taken separate rooms in the hotel, the second phone call made me doubt that Amalia had been locked in her room. In that old outfit for important occasions I felt the force that was pushing her out of the house, away from me, and the risk that she would never return. I saw in the blue fabric the dark night of the storeroom next to her bedroom, where I shut myself up to fight with terror the terror of losing her forever. No, Amalia had not stayed in her room.

The next day, they had arrived together in Minturno, probably on the train, maybe by bus. In the evening they had had dinner heedless of the expense, gaily, even ordering two bottles of wine. Then they had walked on the beach at night. I knew that, on the beach, my mother had put on the clothes that she had earlier intended to give me. Maybe it was Caserta who had induced her to undress and put on the clothes, the lingerie, the bathrobe that he had stolen for her from the Vossi sisters’ shop. Maybe Amalia had done it spontaneously, made uninhibited by the wine, obsessed by the neurotic vigilance of her former husband. Violence could be ruled out: violence that the autopsy would have verified had not been verified.

I saw her step out of her old suit, and I had the impression that it stood stiff and desolate, suspended over the cold sand as it was suspended now against the wall. I saw her staggering, drunk, as she tried to put on that luxurious lingerie, garments too youthful. I saw her until, exhausted, she had wrapped herself in the satin dressing gown. She must have seen that something had in a sense slipped away forever: with my father, with Caserta, maybe even with me, when she had decided to change her itinerary. She herself had slipped away: the telephone calls she had made to me, probably in the company of Caserta, were, with their happy desperation, perhaps meant to indicate only the confusion of the situation she found herself in, the disorientation she was experiencing. Certainly when she had gone naked into the water, she had done it by choice. I felt that she imagined herself caught between two sets of pupils, expropriated by two gazes. And I felt her discover, worn out, that my father wasn’t there, that Caserta was pursuing the fantasies of a witless old man — that the spectators of that scene were absent. She had abandoned the satin bathrobe, she had kept on only the Vossi bra. Probably Caserta was there, looking without seeing. But I wasn’t sure. Maybe he had already gone off with Amalia’s clothes. Or maybe she herself had ordered him to go. I doubted that he had taken away dresses and lingerie on his own. But I was certain that Amalia had insisted that he deliver the gifts to me, and that he had promised he would: a final exchange, in order to obtain the old lingerie that was dear to him. They must have talked about me, of what I had done as a little child. Or maybe I had long ago entered into the small-time sadistic game that Caserta was leading. Certainly I was a part of his senile fantasies, and he wanted to take revenge on me as if I were the child of forty years earlier. I imagined Caserta on the sand, stunned by the sound of the tide and by the dampness, as disoriented as Amalia, drunk as she was, and incapable of understanding how far the game had gone. I was afraid he hadn’t even realized that the mouse with which he had amused himself for a good part of his life was fleeing, to go and drown herself.