Troubling Love

6

Afterward I went back to the bathroom. With one foot I kicked my dirty underpants behind the bidet, and then picked up Amalia’s lingerie, which I had scattered over the floor, and put it back in the garbage bag. Then I went out to the landing. I was no longer either depressed or uneasy. I carefully closed the door, using both locks, and pushed the button for the elevator.

Once inside, I pressed the button for the sixth floor. At the top, I left the doors of the elevator open so that the dark space was at least partly illuminated. I discovered that the man had lied: my mother’s suitcase wasn’t there. I thought of going back down but changed my mind. I placed the garbage bag in the rectangle of light left by the elevator and then closed the doors. In the dark I settled myself in a corner of the landing from which I could see clearly anyone who came out of the elevator or arrived by the stairs. I sat on the floor.

For decades, Caserta had been for me a city of haste, a restless place where everything went faster than in other places. Not the royal city to whose eighteenth-century park with its cascading waterfalls I had gone as a child the Monday after Easter, and where, amid hordes of day-trippers, lost in a vast clan of relatives, I ate salami from Secondigliano and hardboiled eggs inside an oily, peppery dough. Of the city and the park memory could put into words only the rapid streams of water and the terrifying pleasure of getting lost as the shouts calling me back grew more and more distant. But what my less easily verbalized emotions recorded under the word Caserta was a spinning nausea, vertigo, and a lack of air. Sometimes that place, which belonged to a less reliable memory, consisted of a dimly lighted staircase and a wrought-iron banister. At other times it was a patch of light striped by bars and covered by a fine screen, which I observed crouching underground, in the company of a child named Antonio, who held me tightly by the hand. The sounds that accompanied it, like the soundtrack of a film, were pure commotion, sudden banging, as of things formerly in order that abruptly collapse. The odor was of lunchtime or dinnertime, when, coming from every doorway, the smells of the various dishes mingle in the stairwell but are ruined by a stink of mold and cobwebs. Caserta was a place where I wasn’t supposed to go, a bar with a sign: a dark woman, palm trees, lions, camels. It had the taste of sugared almonds in an exquisite candy box, but you were forbidden to enter. If little girls went in they never came out again. Not even my mother was supposed to go there, or my father would kill her. Caserta was a man, a silhouette of dark fabric. The silhouette, hanging on a thread, rotated, turning first one way, then the other. We were not allowed to mention him. Amalia was often chased through the house, caught, struck in the face first with the back of the hand, then the palm, only because she had said: “Caserta.”

This in my less datable memories. In the clearer ones there was Amalia herself who spoke of him secretly, of that man-city of waterfalls and hedges and stone statues and pictures of palm trees and camels. She didn’t speak of him to me, who perhaps was playing under the table with my sisters. She spoke of him to others, to the women who were making gloves with her at home. Somewhere in my brain I preserved echoes of phrases. One remained very clear in my mind. It was not even words, or no longer was, but sounds compacted and made concrete in an image. That Caserta, my mother said in a whisper, had pushed her into a corner and tried to kiss her. I, hearing her, saw the man’s open mouth, with bright white teeth and a long red tongue. The tongue shot out from the lips and retracted at a velocity that hypnotized me. As an adolescent I would close my eyes on purpose to reproduce that scene, and would contemplate it with a mixture of attraction and repulsion. But I felt guilty, as if I were doing something forbidden. By then I knew that in that image of fantasy there was a secret that could not be revealed, not because one part of me didn’t know how to get to it but because, if I did, the other part would have refused to name it and would have driven me out.

On the telephone, just before, Uncle Filippo had said to me some things that I already knew in a confused way: he spoke of them and I knew. They could be summed up thus: Caserta was a contemptible man. As a boy he had been a friend of his and of my father. After the war, they had had some profitable business dealings: he had seemed a clear-headed, sincere young man. But he had eyed my mother. And not only her: he was already married, he had a son, but he bothered all the women in the neighborhood. When he went too far, my uncle and my father had taught him a lesson. And Caserta with his wife and child had gone to live in another place. My uncle had concluded in a threatening dialect: “He wouldn’t get her out of his head. So we made the desire get out forever.”

Silence. I had seen blood between cries and insults. Ghosts upon ghosts. Antonio, the child who held my hand, had gone down into the darkest part of the basement. For an instant I felt the domestic violence of my childhood and adolescence return to my eyes and ears as if it were oozing along a thread that joined us. But I realized for the first time that now, after so many years, it was what I wanted.

“I’m coming over,” Uncle Filippo had suggested.

“What do you think a man of seventy can do to me?”

He was confused. Before hanging up I had promised that I would call him back if I heard from Caserta again.

Now I was waiting on the landing. At least an hour passed. The glow of lights in the stairwell from the other floors allowed me to check, once I got used to the dark, the whole area. Nothing happened. Finally around four in the morning the elevator jerked abruptly and the light went from green to red. The car slid down.

With a leap I was at the railing: I saw it glide past the fifth floor and stop at the fourth. The doors opened and closed. Then silence again. Even the echo of the vibrations emitted by the steel cables disappeared.

I waited a little, maybe five minutes; then I went cautiously down one flight. There was a dim yellow light: the three doors that faced the landing led to the offices of an insurance company. I went down another flight, slipping around the dark, still elevator car. I wanted to look inside but I didn’t, taken by surprise: the door of my mother’s house was wide open, the lights were on. Right on the threshold was Amalia’s suitcase and beside it her black leather purse. I was about to rush instinctively toward those objects when behind me I heard the click of the elevator’s glass doors. The light illumined the car, revealing an old man, well groomed, his dark, fleshless face handsome in its way beneath a mass of white hair. He was sitting on one of the wooden benches and was so still that he seemed like an enlargement of an old photograph. He stared at me for a second with a friendly, slightly melancholy look. Then the car rose upward with a rumble.

I had no doubts. The man was the same one who had reeled off the litany of obscenities during Amalia’s funeral. But I hesitated to follow him up the stairs: I thought I should but I felt as if attached to the floor, like a statue. I stared at the elevator cables until the car stopped with a clatter of the doors as they rapidly opened and closed. A few seconds later the car slid past me again. Before it disappeared toward the ground floor the man showed me, with a smile, the garbage bag that contained my mother’s underwear.