Troubling Love

24

I got up from the bed mainly so that I would no longer see the blue silhouette hanging on the opposite wall. I could make out the steps that led to the door to the building’s courtyard. There were five, I remembered clearly: I used to play with Antonio, jumping up and down them while his grandfather was making pastries. I counted them as I went up. Arriving at the top, I realized with surprise that the door wasn’t locked but pulled to; the lock was broken. Evidently the old man came and went that way. I opened it and looked out: on one side was the doorway that opened to the courtyard, on the other the flight of stairs going up to what had once upon a time been Caserta’s apartment. Filippo and my father had followed him up those stairs to murder him. At first he had tried to fight back; then he had stopped.

I looked up from the bottom of the stairs, and my neck ached. I had a view decades old that wanted to show me more than I could now see. The story, shattered into a thousand incoherent images, struggled to correspond to stone and iron. But the violence came to an end now, wrapped around the railing of the stairway, and it seemed to me that it had been here — here and not there — for forty years, screaming. Caserta had stopped fighting not for lack of strength or admission of guilt or cowardice but because Uncle Filippo, on the fifth floor, had grabbed Antonio and — yes, that was it — dangled him by the ankles, cursing in a hostile dialect, the language of my mother. My uncle was young, and had both his arms, and threatened to drop the child if Caserta made so much as a hint of a movement. My father’s work was easy.

Leaving the door open I went back into the cellar. With the flashlight I looked for the little door that led to the lower level. I remembered that it was iron, and painted, perhaps brown. I found a wooden door, no more than a foot and a half high: a window more than a door, half closed, with a little hole in the panel and one in the frame: an open padlock was hanging in the latter.

Seeing it I had to admit immediately that the image of Caserta and Amalia going in and out through that door upright and radiant, at times arm in arm, at times holding hands, she in her suit, he in the camelhair coat, was a lie of memory. Even Antonio and I had to bend down to get through. Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense: at least, mine was like that. But I heard the cries of the children in the street and it seemed to me that they were not dissimilar from the way I had been: they shouted in the same dialect; each imagined something else. They were invention, while they spent the evening on the dirty sidewalk under the eye of the man in the undershirt. They rushed around on tricycles and yelled insults punctuated by piercing cries of joy. Insults with a sexual basis: at times into their obscene jargon the voice of the man with the iron bar inserted even harsher obscenities.

I let out a faint groan. I heard myself repeating to Antonio words no different from those I was listening to, behind that door, in the black subterranean space; and he repeated them to me. But I was lying when I said them. I was pretending not to be me. I didn’t want to be “I,” unless it was the I of Amalia. I did what I imagined Amalia did in secret. And, lacking journeys of hers that I could be part of, I imposed on her my journeys from home to the Coloniali, the shop of the old man Caserta. She left the house, turned the corner, pushed open the glass door, tasted creams, waited for her playmate. I was I and I was her. I-her met each other with Caserta. In fact I saw not the face of Antonio, when Antonio appeared in the doorway from the courtyard, but what there was in his face of the adult face of his father.

I loved Caserta with the intensity with which I imagined my mother loved him. And I loathed him, because the fantasy of that secret love was so vivid and concrete that I felt I could never be loved in the same way: not by him but by her, Amalia. Caserta had taken what was rightfully mine. As I moved around the painted counter, I moved like her, I talked to myself re-creating her voice, I batted my eyelashes, I laughed the way my father didn’t want her to laugh. Then I went up on the wooden platform and entered the pasticceria with the movements of a woman. Antonio’s grandfather was squeezing out waves of cream from the cloth bag and he looked at me with deep-set eyes, veiled by the heat of the ovens.

I pulled open the little door and shone the beam of the flashlight inside. I squatted down, knees against my chest, head tilted. Bent over like this, I slid down three slippery steps. I agreed, on the way, to tell myself everything: whatever truth the lies preserved.

I was surely Amalia when, one day, I found the pasticceria empty and the little door open. I was Amalia, who, naked as the Gypsy painted by my father, around whom insults, oaths, threats had been flying for weeks, slipped into the dark cellar with Caserta. I was, in the past tense. I felt I was her, with her thoughts, free and happy, having escaped from the sewing machine, the gloves, the needle and thread, my father, his paintings, the yellow paper on which she ended up in blood-red scrawls. I was identical to her and yet I suffered because of the incompleteness of that identity. We succeeded in being “I” only in the game now, and I knew it.

But Caserta, stooping at the bottom of the three steps beyond the door, looked at me obliquely and said, “Come.” While I invented his voice giving sound to “Amalia,” along with the verb, he ran a knotty finger, dirty with cream, lightly up one leg, under the dress my mother had sewed for me. At that touch I felt pleasure. And I realized that the obscene things that the man was mumbling hoarsely, as he touched me, were happening in detail in my head. I memorized them and it seemed to me that he said them with a long red tongue that spoke not from his mouth but from his pants. I was breathless. I felt pleasure and fear at the same time. I tried to contain both, but I realized resentfully that the game wasn’t going well. It was Amalia who felt all the pleasure: only fear was left for me. The more things happened, the more irritated I became, because I couldn’t be “I” in her pleasure, and I could only shudder.

Besides, even Caserta wasn’t convincing. Sometimes he managed to be Caserta, sometimes his features faded. This alarmed me more and more. It was happening the way it did with Antonio: during our games, I was Amalia with conviction, he was his father fleetingly, maybe for lack of imagination. I hated him then. If he was Antonio, then I was merely Delia, down in the cellar, with one hand on his sex; and meanwhile, somewhere, Amalia was playing at being really Amalia, excluding me from her game just as the girls in the courtyard sometimes did.

So at a certain point I had to give in and admit that the man who said to me “Come” at the bottom of the three cellar steps was the seller of coloniali, the dark old man who made ice cream and sweets, the grandfather of little Antonio, the father of Caserta. But Caserta no: Caserta was certainly somewhere else, with my mother. So I pushed him off and ran away crying. I jumped onto the fragment of floor where my father was, the easel, the bedroom. I reported to him, in the coarse dialect of the courtyard, the obscene things that man had done and said to me. I wept. I had clear in my mind the old man’s face disfigured by the flush of his skin and by fear.

Caserta, I said to my father. I said to him that Caserta had done and said to Amalia, with her consent, in the basement of the pastry shop, all the things that in reality Antonio’s grandfather had said and perhaps done to me. He stopped working and waited for my mother to return home.

To speak is to link together lost times and spaces. I sat on the top step, believing it was the same step as then. One by one, I whispered to myself the obscene formulas that Caserta’s father had repeated with growing agitation forty years earlier. And I realized that, in substance, they were the same that my mother had cried to me, giggling, over the telephone, before going to drown herself. Words for being lost or for being found. Maybe she wanted to communicate to me that she, too, hated me for what I had done to her forty years earlier. Maybe in that way she wished to make me understand who the man was who was there with her. Maybe she wanted to tell me to watch out for myself, to beware of Caserta’s senile ravings. Or maybe she simply wanted to show me that those words, too, could be uttered, and that, contrary to what I had believed my whole life, they couldn’t hurt me.

I seized on that last hypothesis. I was there, curled up on the threshold of tormented fantasies, to see Caserta and tell him that I had never wanted to hurt him. The story between him and my mother no longer interested me: I wished only to confess aloud that, then and later, I had hated not him, perhaps not even his father: only Amalia. It was she I wanted to hurt. Because she had left me in the world to play alone with the words of a lie, without limits, without truth.