Troubling Love

8

I sat down on the floor and started with the suitcase. I opened it but found nothing that I could recognize as belonging to my mother. Everything was brand-new: a pair of pink slippers, a robe of ivory satin, two dresses that had never been worn, one of a rusty red too tight for her and too youthful, one quieter, blue, but quite short, five pairs of expensive underpants, a brown leather beauty case full of perfumes, deodorants, creams, makeup, cleansers — she had never used makeup in her life.

I went on to the purse. The first thing I took out was a pair of white lace underpants. I was convinced immediately by the three “V”s clearly visible on the right and from the stylish design that they were the companion of the bra that Amalia was wearing when she drowned. I examined them carefully: they had a little tear on the left side, as if they had been put on even though they were clearly a size too small. I felt my stomach contract and I held my breath. Then I rummaged in the purse again, looking first for the house keys. Naturally I didn’t find them. I found instead her reading glasses, nine telephone tokens, and her wallet. In the wallet were two hundred and twenty thousand lire (a sizable amount for her: she lived on the little money that we three sisters sent her every month), the receipt for the electricity bill, her identity card in a plastic case, an old photograph of my sisters and me with our father. The photograph was ruined. Those images of us from so long ago were yellowed, cracked, like the figures of winged demons in certain altarpieces that the faithful have defaced with pointed objects.

I left the photograph on the floor and got up, fighting a growing nausea. I looked through the house for a telephone book and, when I found it, turned quickly to Caserta. I didn’t want to telephone him: I wanted the address. When I discovered that there were three densely printed pages of Casertas I realized that I didn’t even know what his name was: no one, in the course of my childhood, had ever called him anything but Caserta. So I threw the phone book in a corner and went into the bathroom. I couldn’t hold back the retching, and for a few seconds I was afraid that my whole body would be unleashed against me, with a self-destructive fury that as a child I had always feared and, growing up, had tried to control. Then I calmed down. I rinsed out my mouth and washed my face carefully. Seeing it pale and un-made-up in the mirror tilted over the sink I decided to put on makeup.

It was an unusual reaction. I didn’t wear makeup often or willingly. I had worn it as a girl but for a long time I hadn’t used any: it didn’t seem to me that makeup improved me. But just then I seemed to need it. I took the beauty case from my mother’s suitcase, went back to the bathroom, opened it, took out a jar of moisturizing cream whose surface bore the timid imprint of Amalia’s finger. I erased the trace of hers with my own and used it generously. I rubbed the cream into the skin energetically, smoothing my cheeks. Then, with the powder, I meticulously covered my face.

“You’re a ghost,” I said to the woman in the mirror. She had the face of a person in her forties, she closed first one eye, then the other, drawing a black pencil over each. She was thin, angular, with prominent cheekbones, the skin miraculously unlined. Her hair was cut very short in order to display as little of its black color as possible, although, to my relief, the black was finally fading to gray and preparing to disappear forever. I put on the mascara.

“I don’t look like you,” I whispered as I put on some blusher. And in order not to be contradicted, I tried not to look at her. So, in the mirror, I caught sight of the bidet. I turned to see what was missing from that old-fashioned object, with its giant, encrusted taps, and when I realized it I felt like laughing. Caserta had taken even the blood-stained underpants that I had left on the floor.