Troubling Love

9

The coffee was almost ready when I arrived at Uncle Filippo’s. With only one arm, he managed mysteriously to do everything. He had an antiquated coffee maker of the type in use before the moka espresso maker established itself in every house. It was a metal cylinder with a spout that, disassembled, was divided into four parts: a container for boiling the water, a compartment for the ground coffee, the perforated screw-on top, a pot. When I entered the kitchen, the hot water was already dripping into the pot and an intense smell of coffee was spreading through the apartment.

“How well you look,” he said, but I don’t think he was alluding to the makeup. He had never seemed to me capable of distinguishing between a made-up woman and one who was not. He meant only that I looked particularly good that morning. In fact, while he was sipping the boiling-hot coffee, he added: “Of the three of you, you look most like Amalia.”

I gave a hint of a smile. I didn’t want to alarm him by telling him what had happened to me during the night. Nor did I want to start discussing my resemblance to Amalia. It was seven in the morning and I was tired. Half an hour earlier I had cut across the half-deserted Via Foria, the sounds of the city still so faint that it was possible to hear the birds sing. There was a cool breeze, which seemed fresh, and a foggy light wavering between good weather and bad. But on Via Duomo the sounds intensified, along with the voices of women in their houses; the air became grayer and heavier. I had turned up at Uncle Filippo’s with a big plastic bag in which I had put the contents of my mother’s suitcase and purse, and had surprised him with his trousers unbuttoned and sagging, an undershirt on his bony torso, the stump of his arm bare. He had opened the windows and immediately tidied himself. Then he had begun to press me with offers of nourishment. Did I want fresh bread, did I want milk to dip it in?

I didn’t wait to be persuaded and began to nibble this and that. He had been a widower for six years, he lived alone like all old people without children, and didn’t sleep much. He was happy to have me there, in spite of the early morning hour, and I was happy myself to be there. I wanted a few moments of peace, the things I had left at his house for the past few days, a change of clothes. I intended to go right away to the Vossi sisters’ shop. But Uncle Filippo was eager for company and for talk. He threatened Caserta with horrible deaths. He hoped that he had died a painful death already, during the night. He regretted not having killed him in the past. And then, through a series of connections difficult to disentangle, he began to jump from one family story to another, in a thick dialect. He barely stopped to catch his breath.

After a few attempts I gave up interrupting him. He muttered, he got angry, his eyes became bright with tears, he sniffed. When the monologue turned to Amalia, he went in a few minutes from melancholy praise of his sister to pitiless criticism of the fact that she had abandoned my father. He even forgot to speak of her in the past and began to reproach her as if she were still alive and present or about to emerge from the other room. Amalia, he began to shout, never thinks of the consequences ahead of time: she was always like that, she should have sat down and reflected and waited; instead she woke up one morning and left the house along with you three girls. She shouldn’t have done it, according to Uncle Filippo. I soon realized that he wanted to trace back to that separation twenty-three years earlier his sister’s decision to drown herself.

Ridiculous. I was annoyed but let him go on, especially since every so often he paused and, changing his hostile tone to one of affection, eagerly took from the cupboard more tins: mint candies, old biscuits, some blackberry jam white with mold but according to him still good.

While I tried to refuse these offerings and then in resignation ate, he started off again, confusing dates and facts. Was it ’46 or ’47—he tried to remember. Then he changed his mind and concluded: after the war. It was Caserta who, after the war, had realized that my father’s talent could be used to improve life a little. Without Caserta, it had to be admitted, in all honesty, my father would have continued to paint, for almost nothing, mountains, moons, palm trees, and camels in the neighborhood shops. Instead, Caserta, who was a crafty fellow, black, black as a Moor but with the eyes of a devil, had begun to do business with the American sailors. Not selling women or other goods but in particular pursuing the sailors who were suffering from homesickness. And instead of showing them photographs of women for sale, he worked on them, urging them to take out of their wallets the photographs of the women they had left at home. Once he had transformed the sailors into abandoned and anxious children, he made a deal on the price and brought the photos to my father, who would make oil portraits from them.

I, too, remembered those images. My father had done them for years, even without Caserta. It seemed that the sailors, with their endless sighs, had nearly worn away the paper images of their women. They were pictures of mamas, of sisters, of fiancées, all blond, all smiling, all photographed with permanents, not a hair out of place, jewels at their necks and ears. They seemed to be dolls. And also, as in the picture of us that Amalia treasured, as in every photograph corroded by absence, the patina of the print was faded and the image often folded at the corners or disfigured by white creases that cut across faces, dresses, necklaces, hairdos. They were faces dying even in the fantasies of those who held on to them with desire and a sense of guilt. My father took them from Caserta’s hands and attached them to the easel with a thumbtack. In less than no time, a woman emerged on the canvas who seemed real, a mother-sister-wife who sighed instead of causing sighs. The creases disappeared, the black and white became color, flesh. And the makeup of that aid to memory was applied with a skill sufficient to satisfy men who were lost and unhappy. Caserta came by to pick up the goods, left some money, and went off.

Thus, my uncle recounted, in a short time life changed. Thanks to the women of the American sailors, we ate every day. And he did, too, because he had been unemployed at the time. My mother gave him some money, but with the consent of my father. Or perhaps secretly. Anyway, after years of privation, things were getting better. If Amalia had been more attentive to consequences, if she hadn’t gotten mixed up in it, who knows where it would have led. Very far, according to my uncle.

I thought of that money and of my mother as she appeared in the photographs in the family album: eighteen, her stomach already arced by my presence inside her, standing outside on a balcony; part of her Singer could always be seen in the background. She must have stopped pedaling the sewing machine only to be photographed; I was sure that then, after that moment, she had gone back to work, bending over the machine, with no photograph to record her in that misery of common labor, no smile, no sparkling eyes, no hair arranged to make her more beautiful. I think that Uncle Filippo had never thought of the contribution of Amalia’s work. I had never thought about it myself. I shook my head, unhappy with myself: I hated talk of the past. For that reason, as long as I lived with Amalia I had seen my father no more than ten times in all, forced to by her. And, since I had been living in Rome, only twice, or three times. He still lived in the house where I was born: two rooms and a kitchen. He spent the whole day sitting there, painting ugly scenes of the bay or crude stormy seas for country fairs. That was how he had always earned his living, getting a little money from middlemen like that Caserta; and I had never liked seeing him chained to the repetition of the same gestures, the same colors, the same shapes, the same odors that I had known since childhood. Above all I couldn’t bear him revealing to me his muddle of excuses, as, meanwhile, he piled insults on Amalia, without granting her any virtues.

No, I no longer liked anything about the past. I had made a clean break with all my relatives in order to avoid, at every encounter, hearing them lament in their dialect the evil misfortune of my mother and make vulgar threats toward my father. Only Uncle Filippo remained. I had seen him over the years not by choice but only because he would show up unexpectedly at our house and quarrel with his sister. He did it vehemently, in a loud voice, and then they made up. Amalia was very attached to her only brother, not good for much, the slave since he was a young man of her husband and Caserta. And in some ways she was happy that he continued to see my father and came and told her how he was, what he was doing, what he was working on. I, however — although I felt an ancient sympathy for that depleted body and that boastful, gangsterish aggressiveness, and although, if I had wanted, I could have knocked him to the ground with a fist — would have preferred that he, too, fade away, as so many uncles and great-aunts had. I had trouble accepting that he put my father in the right and her in the wrong. He was her brother, a hundred times he had seen her battered by slaps, punches, kicks; and yet he had never lifted a finger to help her. For forty years he had continued steadfastly to declare solidarity with his brother-in-law. Only in the past few years had I been able to listen to him without getting upset. As a girl I couldn’t bear that alliance. After a while I would put my fingers in my ears in order not to hear him. Maybe I couldn’t tolerate that the most secret part of myself used that solidarity to give weight to a hypothesis cultivated with equal secrecy: that my mother bore inscribed in her body a natural guilt, independent of her will and of what she really did, and yet readily appearing as needed in every gesture, in every breath. “Is this your shirt?” I asked him, to change the subject, taking from one of the plastic bags the blue shirt I had found in Amalia’s house. So I cut him off, and he was for a moment disoriented, eyes wide and lips half-closed. Then, annoyed, he examined the garment at length. But he saw little or nothing without his glasses: he looked at the shirt just to calm himself after his anger, and give an appearance of control.

“No,” he said. “Never owned a shirt like that.”

I told him I had found it in Amalia’s house among the dirty clothes. It was a mistake.

“Whose is it?” he asked, starting to get agitated again, as if I had not been trying to find out the same thing from him. I tried to explain that I didn’t know, but it was useless. He gave me back the shirt as if he considered it contagious and began again to criticize his sister remorselessly.

“She was always like that,” he said, returning to dialect and growing enraged. “You remember the business of the fruit that came to the house every day? It came out of the blue: she didn’t know how or when. And the book of poetry with the inscription? And the flowers? And the sfogliatelle every day at eight o’clock sharp? And the dress, do you remember that? Is it possible you don’t remember anything? Who bought her that dress, just her size? She said she didn’t know anything about it. But she put it on to go out, secretly, without saying anything to your father. Explain to me why she did that.”

I realized that he continued to think that Amalia’s behavior was subtly ambiguous, even when my father had grabbed her by the neck and the livid marks of his fingers remained on her skin. She’d say to us, her daughters: “He’s like that. He doesn’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know what to tell him.” We, on the other hand, thought that our father, because of everything he did to her, should leave the house one morning and be burned to death or crushed or drowned. We thought it and hated her, because she was the linchpin of these thoughts. About this we had no doubts and I had not forgotten it.

I had forgotten nothing but I didn’t want to remember. If necessary, I could have told myself everything, in every detail; but why do it? I told myself only what was useful, according to the situation, deciding from moment to moment on the wave of necessity. Now, for example, I saw the peaches trampled on the floor, the roses slammed ten, twenty times against the kitchen table, the red petals scattering everywhere through the air, the thorny stems still wrapped in silver paper, the pastries dumped out the window, the dress burned on the kitchen stove. I smelled the sickening odor that fabric gives off when one absentmindedly leaves the hot iron on it, and I was afraid.

“No, you don’t remember, any of you, you don’t know anything,” said my uncle, as if I represented, at that moment, my two sisters as well. And he wanted to force me to remember: didn’t we know that my father began to beat her only when he wanted to give up Caserta and the portraits for the Americans, and she opposed him? It wasn’t something Amalia should have interfered in. But she had the vice of meddling in everything, without thinking. My father had invented a Gypsy woman who danced naked. He had shown her to the head of a network of peddlers who worked the city streets and the countryside selling landscapes and seascapes. The man was called Migliaro, and always brought along his son, who had crooked teeth, and he had judged that it would be successful in doctors’ and dentists’ offices. He had said that he was willing to give a much higher percentage for those Gypsies than what Caserta was giving him. But Amalia was against it, she didn’t want him to leave Caserta, she didn’t want him to paint the Gypsies, she didn’t even want him to show them to Migliaro.

“You don’t remember and you don’t know,” Uncle Filippo repeated, bitterly, because those times had vanished which had seemed to him good, and they had gone without bearing the promised fruit.

Then I asked him what had happened to Caserta after the break with my father. Many possible furious answers passed through his eyes. Then he decided to abandon the most violent, and asserted proudly that they had given Caserta what he deserved.

“You told your father everything. Your father called me and we went to murder him. If he had tried to react, we really would have killed him.”

Everything. Me. I didn’t like that suggestion and didn’t want to know what “you” he was talking about. I cancelled out every sound that stood in for my name as if it were not possible to allude to me in any way. He looked at me questioningly and, seeing me impassive, shook his head again in disapproval.

“You remember nothing,” he repeated, discouraged. And he went on to tell me about Caserta. Afterward, he was frightened and had understood. He had sold a half-failing bar-pasticceria that was his father’s and left the neighborhood with his wife and son. After a while a rumor had surfaced that he was a receiver of stolen medicines. Then it was said that he had invested the money from that trafficking in a print shop. Strange, because he wasn’t a printer. The hypothesis of Uncle Filippo was that he printed covers for pirated records. Anyway, at some point a fire had destroyed the print shop and Caserta had been in the hospital for a while because of burns he had suffered on his legs. From that time on, Filippo didn’t know anything about him. Some thought that he had gotten rich thanks to the money from the insurance, and so had gone to live in another city. Others said that after he was burned he had gone from doctor to doctor, and had never been cured: not because of the injury to his legs but because he had a screw loose. He had always been a strange man: it was said that as he grew old he became even stranger. That was it. Uncle Filippo didn’t know anything else about Caserta.

I asked him what his name was: I had looked in the phone book but there were too many Casertas.

“Don’t you dare look for him,” he said, growling again.

“I’m not looking for Caserta,” I lied. “I want to see Antonio, his son. We used to play together as children.”

“It’s not true. You want to see Caserta.”

“I’ll ask my father,” it occurred to me to say.

He looked at me in amazement, as if I were Amalia.

“You do it on purpose,” he muttered. And said in a low voice: “Nicola. His name was Nicola. But it’s pointless to look in the phone book: Caserta is a nickname. His actual last name I have here in my head but I don’t remember it.”

He seemed really to concentrate, to please me, but then he gave up, depressed: “Forget it, go back to Rome. If you really intend to see your father, at least don’t tell him about this shirt. Even today for a thing like that he would kill your mother.”

“He can’t do anything to her anymore,” I reminded him. But, as if he hadn’t heard, he asked:

“Do you want more coffee?”