Troubling Love

25

But Caserta didn’t appear. In the basement there were only empty cardboard boxes and old carbonated water or beer bottles. I crawled out, dusty, irritated by the light touch of spiderwebs, and returned to the cot. On the floor I saw my bloodstained underpants and kicked them under the bed with the toe of my shoe. Now it bothered me more to find them in that place, like a purloined part of myself, than to imagine the use that Caserta had made of them.

I went back to the wall where Amalia’s blue suit was hanging. I took down the hanger, I laid the garment delicately on the bed, I removed the jacket: the lining was threadbare, the pockets were empty. I held it against me as if I wanted to see how it looked. Then I made up my mind: I put the flashlight down on the cot, I took off my dress and left it on the floor; then I dressed again, carefully, without haste. I used the safety pin that Caserta had used to attach the bra to the shirt to take in the waist: it was too big. The jacket, too, was large and yet I arranged it to my satisfaction. I felt that that old garment was the final narrative that my mother had left me, and that now, with all the necessary adjustments, it fit me like a glove.

The story might be more fragile or more interesting than the one I had told myself. It was enough to pull out a single thread and follow it in its simplifying linearity. For example, Amalia had left with her old lover and with him had spent a final secret vacation, laughing loudly, eating and drinking, stripping on the beach, putting on and taking off the clothes that she intended to give me. The game of an old woman pretending to be young, to please another old person. Finally, she had decided to go swimming naked. But, bright as it was, she had gone too far from the shore and had drowned. Caserta had been afraid, had picked up everything and left. Or she was running naked along the water’s edge and he was following, both of them panting, both terrified, she by the discovery of his desires, he by her rejection. Until Amalia thought that she could escape into the water.

Yes, it was enough to pull one thread to go on playing with the mysterious figure of my mother, now enriching it, now humiliating it. But I realized that I no longer felt the need, and I moved in the ray of light just as it seemed to me that she had moved. I turned off the flashlight and leaned toward the bluish triangle of the shutter to stick my head out. The streetlamps were on, but there was still light. The children were no longer running and shouting. They were gathered around a man who was crouching, his face at the height of their faces, his hands on his knees. The man was Caserta. He had thick white hair and an engaging look. They were all standing, the little ones, the big one, with their shoes in a puddle that shone in the light. The children had begun to unwrap the candies that he had just handed out.

I looked at that lean old man, carefully shaved, well dressed, his face pale and tense, and I no longer felt the need to speak to him, to know, to let him know. I decided to steal away along the sidewalk, around the corner, but he turned and saw me. His astonishment was such that he didn’t realize what was happening behind him. The man in the undershirt had leaned the bar against the wall carefully, had thrown away his cigar, and now was approaching, looking straight ahead, chest erect, short legs taking rational, calm steps. The children backed away, retreating from the puddle. Caserta remained alone in the mirror of the violet water, mouth open, eyes staring at me without anxiety. That tranquility helped me breathe. I went back into the Coloniali of forty years earlier, I was careful not to bump into the counter with its palm trees and camels, I climbed onto the wooden platform, crossed the pasticceria, expertly skirting the oven, the machines, the counters, the pans, went out the door that opened onto the courtyard. Once in the open I searched for the proper pace of a grownup person who is not in a hurry.