Troubling Love

5

I slept no more than a couple of hours, without dreams. When I opened my eyes, the room was dark and from the open window came only the nebulous glow of the streetlamps, diffused over a segment of the ceiling. Amalia was up there like a nocturnal butterfly, young, perhaps twenty, wrapped in a green bathrobe, her stomach swelled by advanced pregnancy. She lay on her back, and although her face was serene, her body, caught in a painful spasm, twisted convulsively. I closed my eyes to give her time to detach herself from the ceiling and return to death; then I reopened them and looked at the clock. It was two-thirty. I slept again but only for a few minutes. Then I fell into a torpor crowded with images, in which, without wanting to, I began to tell myself about my mother.

Amalia, in my waking sleep, was an olive-skinned, hairy woman. Her hair, even when she was old, even when it was faded by the salt air, gleamed like the skin of a panther, and it was thick, so thick that no wind could penetrate. It smelled of laundry soap, but not the dry kind, with a ladder printed on the package. It smelled of a brown liquid soap that was bought in a basement: I remembered the tickle of dust in my nostrils and throat.

The soap was sold by a fat, hairless man. He scooped it up with a trowel and stuck it on thick yellow paper, depositing with it a stench of sweat and DDT. I ran to Amalia breathlessly, holding the package and, with puffed cheeks, blowing on it, to get rid of the odors of the basement and of that man; I’m running the same way now, even though so much time has passed, with my cheek on my mother’s pillow. And she, seeing me arrive, is already loosening her hair, and it comes undone as if she had sculpted it in spirals above her forehead and the blackness of the hairdo were changing molecular structure under her hands.

Her hair was long. Amalia was always undoing it, and washing it took not just soap but the entire container of the man in the cellar at the foot of steps that were white with ashes or lye. I suspected that at times my mother, escaping my surveillance, went and dipped her hair straight into the barrel, with the consent of the man in the shop. Then she would turn toward me gaily with her face wet, the water streaming down her neck from the tap in our kitchen, eyelashes and pupils black, eyebrows drawn with charcoal, lightly whitened by the suds that, arching over her forehead, fragmented into drops of soap and water. The drops slid down over her nose, toward her mouth, until she caught them with her red tongue, and it seemed to me that she was saying: “Good.”

I didn’t know how she managed to be in two different spaces at the same time, in the soap barrel in the cellar, in her blue slip, the straps falling off her shoulders and down her arms; and meanwhile abandoning herself to the water in our kitchen, which was giving her hair a liquid sheen. Certainly I had dreamed it that way countless times with my eyes open, as I did now yet again, and yet again felt a painful embarrassment.

The fat man in fact was not content with standing and watching. In summer he dragged the barrel outside. He was bare-chested, bronzed by the sun, and wore a white handkerchief tied tight around his forehead. He poked around in the container with a long stick and, sweating, twisted the shining mass of Amalia’s hair. Meanwhile, down the street, a steamroller crackled, advancing slowly with its big cylinder of gray stone. Another man drove it, thickset and muscular, also bare-chested, the hair in his armpits curly with sweat. He wore a type of khaki trousers unbuttoned in such a way as to show, at the level of his stomach, a frightening hollow, and, settled on the seat of the machine, he surveyed the dense and shiny tar of Amalia’s hair as it slid out from the tilted drum and extended over the crushed stone, steaming, and rippling the air. My mother’s hair was pitch and it spread out into a luxuriant down that thickened in the prohibited places of the body. Prohibited to me: she wouldn’t let me touch her. She hid her face, tossing the curtain of hair over it, and offered her neck to the sun to dry.

When the telephone rang, she pulled her head up suddenly, so that the wet hair flew from the floor through the air, grazing the ceiling and falling on her back with a slap that woke me completely. I turned on the light. I couldn’t remember where the telephone was, and meanwhile it kept ringing. I found it in the hall, an old telephone of the sixties that I knew well, attached to the wall. When I answered a male voice called me Amalia.

“I’m not Amalia,” I said. “Who is it?”

I had the impression that the man on the telephone struggled to repress a laugh. He repeated, “I’m not Amalia,” in falsetto, and then resumed, in the purest dialect: “Leave the bag with the dirty clothes on the top floor. You promised it to me. And look carefully: you’ll find the suitcase with your things. I put it there for you.”

“Amalia is dead,” I said in a calm voice. “Who are you?”

“Caserta,” said the man.

The name sounded like the name of the bogeyman in a fable.

“I’m Delia,” I answered. “What is on the top floor? What do you have of hers?”

“I, nothing. It’s you who have something of mine,” the man said, again in falsetto, distorting my Italian in an affected manner.

“You come here,” I said to him in a persuasive tone. “We can talk about it and you can take what you need.”

There was a long silence. I waited for an answer but there was none. The man had not hung up: he had simply let go of the receiver and walked away.

I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water; the water was dense and had a terrible smell. Then I returned to the telephone and dialed Uncle Filippo’s number. He answered after five rings and before I could even say hello, began shouting into the telephone insults of every sort.

“It’s Delia,” I said harshly. I felt that he was having trouble identifying me. When he remembered me, he began to mutter excuses, calling me “my child,” and asking again and again if I was all right, where I was, what had happened.

“Caserta called me,” I said. Then, before he could start again on the rosary of curses, I ordered him, “Calm down.”