Troubling Love

4

I asked for the keys from the neighbor, the widow De Riso. She gave them to me but refused definitively to go in with me. She was fat and suspicious, and had a big mole on her right cheek that was inhabited by two long gray whiskers. Her hair was parted in the middle and gathered at the back in a twist of braids. She was dressed in black: perhaps it was habitual, perhaps because she was still wearing her dress from the funeral. She stood on the threshold of her apartment and watched me choose the right keys. But the door hadn’t been carefully locked. Contrary to her usual habit, Amalia had used only one of the two locks, the one that took two turns of the key. The other, which took five, she hadn’t used.

“What’s happened?” I asked the neighbor, pushing open the door.

De Riso hesitated. “Her head was a little in the clouds,” she said, but she must have considered the expression disrespectful, because she added, “She was happy.” Then she hesitated again: it was clear that she would willingly have gossiped but she feared the ghost of my mother hovering over the stairwell, in the apartment, and certainly in her house as well. I invited her again to enter, hoping that she would keep me company with her chatter. She refused firmly, with a shudder, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Why was she happy?” I asked.

She hesitated again and then made up her mind.

“For some time a man had been coming to see her, a tall man, very respectable. . ”

I gave her a hostile glance. I decided that I didn’t want her to continue.

“He was her brother,” I said.

Signora De Riso narrowed her eyes, insulted: she and my mother had been friends for a long time and she knew perfectly well who Uncle Filippo was. He was neither tall nor very respectable.

“Her brother,” she pronounced with false compliance.

“No?” I asked, annoyed by her tone. She said goodbye to me coldly and closed the door.

When one enters the house of a person who has just died, it’s hard to believe that it’s deserted. Houses don’t have ghosts, but they contain the effects of life’s final gestures. First I heard the rush of water from the kitchen and for a fraction of a second, with an abrupt torsion of the true and the false, I thought that my mother wasn’t dead, that her death had been merely the subject of a long, painful fantasy that had begun in some long-ago time. I was sure that she was in the house, alive, standing at the sink, washing the dishes and murmuring to herself. But the shutters were closed, the apartment was dark. I turned on the light and saw that the water was streaming copiously into the empty sink from the old brass tap.

I turned it off. My mother belonged to a fading culture that could not conceive of waste. She wouldn’t throw away stale bread, she used the rind of the cheese, putting it in the soup to flavor it, she almost never bought meat but at the butcher asked for scrap bones to make broth, and then sucked on them as if they contained a miraculous substance. She would never have forgotten the tap. She used water with a frugality that was transformed into a reflex of gesture, ear, voice. If as a girl I left even a silent thread of water, extending to the bottom of the sink like a knitting needle, she would call to me an instant later, without reproach, “Delia, the tap.” I felt uneasy: she had wasted more water with that distraction in the last hours of life than in all her existence. I saw her floating face down, suspended in the middle of the kitchen, against the background of blue majolica tiles.

I moved on in a hurry. I went through the bedroom, throwing the few things she had cared about in a plastic bag: the album of family photographs, a bracelet, an old winter dress of hers from the fifties that I liked, too. The rest not even the junkmen would have wanted. The few pieces of furniture were old and ugly, her bed was only a mattress and box spring, the sheets and blankets had been mended with a care that, given their age, they didn’t deserve. It struck me, though, that the drawer where she usually kept her underwear was empty. I looked for the laundry bag and peered inside. There was nothing but a man’s shirt, of a good quality.

I examined it. It was a blue shirt, medium-sized, bought recently and chosen by a young man or a man of youthful tastes. The collar was dirty but the odor of the fabric was not unpleasant: the sweat was fused with an expensive brand of deodorant. I folded it carefully and put it in the plastic bag along with the other things. It was not a garment that Uncle Filippo would have worn.

I then went into the bathroom. There was neither toothbrush nor toothpaste. Her old blue bathrobe was hanging on the door. The toilet paper was nearly finished. Beside the toilet there was a half-full garbage bag. There was no garbage inside: instead there was the stink of a tired body preserved by clothes that are dirty or made of an old fabric, every fiber saturated with the humors of decades. I began to take out, piece by piece, with a slight disgust, all my mother’s intimate garments: pink and white underpants, much mended and with ancient elastic that showed here and there through the torn seams, like train tracks in the gap between one tunnel and the next; shapeless, threadbare bras; undershirts full of holes; garters of the sort that were used forty years ago and that she had kept for no reason; panty hose in a sorry state; faded slips, with yellowed lace, that had been out of fashion and obsolete for a long time.

Amalia, who had always dressed shabbily because she was poor but also because she was in the habit of not making herself attractive — a habit acquired many decades earlier to placate the jealousy of my father — seemed to have suddenly decided to get rid of her entire wardrobe. I remembered the only garment she had been wearing when they fished her out: the elegant brand-new bra, with the three “V”s that joined the cups. The image of her breasts wrapped in that lace increased my unease. I left the garments scattered on the floor, without the strength to touch them again; I closed the door and leaned against it.

But to no purpose: the entire bathroom jumped over me and recomposed itself in front of me, in the hall: Amalia now was sitting on the toilet and watching me closely while I removed the hair from my legs. I coated my ankles with hot wax and then, groaning, pulled it away from the skin, with a decisive gesture. She, meanwhile, was telling me that as a girl she had cut the black hair off her ankles with scissors. But it had grown back immediately, stiff as coils of barbed wire. At the beach, too, before putting on her bathing suit, she shortened her pubic hairs with scissors.

I put the waxing cream on her, although she tried to shield herself. I spread the wax carefully on her ankles, on the inside of her firm thin thighs, her groin, reproaching her meanwhile with unreasonable harshness for her mended slip. Then I peeled off the wax while she observed me impassively. I did it carelessly, as if I wanted to subject her to a painful trial, and she let me, without saying a word, as if she had agreed to the trial. But her skin didn’t resist. It turned fiery red and then immediately purple, revealing a network of broken capillaries. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “it will pass,” while I weakly reproached myself for what I’d done to her.

I reproached myself more intensely now, as with an effort of will I tried to send the bathroom back behind the door I was leaning against. To manage it, I moved away from the door, let the image of her purple legs fade into the hall, and went to the kitchen to get my purse. When I returned to the bathroom, I looked carefully among the underpants that were lying on the floor and chose the pair that seemed to me the least worn. I washed, and changed my tampax. I left my underpants on the floor, among Amalia’s. As I passed the mirror I smiled involuntarily, to calm myself.

I don’t know how long I sat beside the kitchen window, listening to the din in the alley, the traffic of motorbikes, the tramp of feet on the pavement. The street gave off an odor of stagnant water that rose through the scaffolding. I was exhausted but didn’t want to lie down on Amalia’s bed or ask Uncle Filippo for help or telephone my father or look again for Signora De Riso. I felt pity for that world of lost old people: confused by images of themselves that went back to bygone eras, they were sometimes in harmony, sometimes at odds with the shades of things and people of the past. Yet I had trouble keeping myself on the margins. I was tempted to link voice to voice, thing to thing, fact to fact. Already now I felt Amalia return, wanting to observe how I rubbed creams into my skin, how I put on my makeup and took it off. Already I began to imagine resentfully a secret old age in which she played with her body all day, as perhaps she would have done as a young woman if my father had not read in such games a desire to please others, a preparation for infidelity.