Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  She was the same age as always in Bruce’s memories and dreams, a vague age similar to his own age now. She was wearing one of her flowered, slightly hippyish dresses, and she remained under the table as though she really were playing hide-and-seek, either waiting to be found or convinced that she could hide, forever, from whoever was trying to find her. She seemed to gesture for him to join her. Together, they might be able to hide more successfully. Her smile was small, complicit, and melancholy.

  “Mama, you can’t keep hiding under there. Come on out.” Bruce got up from the couch and stood there, watching her uncertainly. He could sense in his nostrils the scent of his mother’s hair, which looked wet and freshly washed. “You can’t stay under there.”

  “Bruce,” she said. “Bruce.”

  He grabbed her arm and tried to drag her out, but she seemed impossible to move. Her body was inexplicably heavy. His mother looked at him with sadness. He let go of her arm and took a step back, without understanding what had caused that sadness: whether the fact that he had tried to pull her from under the table, or the fact that he had failed to do so. He asked her to forgive him in a subdued voice.

  “Oh Bruce.” She hunkered down even more under the table and looked at him with more intense sadness. “Don’t feel bad for me. You have to go on, Bruce. You have to go on.”

  He staggered. He tried to brace himself against the wall but there were no walls around him and that’s when he awakened with a start.

  From the quality of the darkness and the silence out in the street, he understood that it was the middle of the night. The television was still on.

  On the screen, they were rerunning a movie from the Nineties, a teen comedy full of music from that time and characters who referred to the internet like it was something exotic and new.

  He shuffled into the kitchen, dizzy in his head, and drank a glass of iced water. He thought back to his dream about his mother and to the scent of her hair. While the city outside seemed to sleep and traffic barely wheezed past on the nearby highway, he stayed there drinking water, his back against the refrigerator door. A grown-up man in the dark of a New York night. A man in his mid-thirties, riven with memories and strange presentiments, two opposing streams of time meeting inside him, endlessly, like watery currents in the heart of the ocean.

  I WAS TWO YEARS OLD when my father managed to win the green card lottery, and we left aboard an old Alitalia jet plane, on an October day, flying across a steel-grey Atlantic. My brother hadn’t been born yet. I can practically see us: a father and a mother with Italian blood, a young son with an American name. My father had named me Bruce, the same first name as Batman, even though back then that’s not what he had in mind. That wasn’t why he chose it. All he wanted was a name that would sound American.

  My father had dreamed of America for years, and here’s something I’ve often wondered: where exactly does a dream begin? I suppose that it springs up in some distant, mysterious place, and it takes solid form in the consciousness with geological slowness, with dazzling speed, not unlike a kidney stone inside a human body. My father had dreamt of America ever since he was a boy, even though it was late for that dream, though it no longer seemed to make much sense, and the time when his compatriots left en masse for America had ended half a century before. In him, that dream still lived on. It continued, tenaciously, out of an excess of faith, or out of simple inertia. That dream picked us up and swept us away, like a foaming wave, to set us down in the womb of a new home.

  *

  The place was called Clifton, New Jersey. One of the dozens of Cliftons in America. It was a half-hour’s drive from New York City, a small town with no high buildings where the wind blew, in ragged gusts, through the space between one house and another. Like in any other American town, the sky seemed to hang low, spying on everyone, with no way to escape its gaze. The sky seemed like an immense sentinel. In a big city, people could hide from the eye of God, tucking themselves away in the secrecy of a thousand cement towers. But in a small town, there was no shelter. American small towns seemed designed to be flat, orderly, and exposed, so that an eye overhead could keep watch over them, at all times, the way a child might look down on a model city for dolls.

  The banks of the Hudson River were a handful of miles away. New York was there, both near and far, like an ambiguous beacon, an elusive promise. On Sundays my father would take us for walks in Manhattan or down to Coney Island, where the amusement park rides spun and the wind gusted with the scent of the ocean and smoke from hot dog stands.

  They said that the hot dog was invented on that beach. On the crowded beach of Coney Island. A century earlier, a German immigrant had come up with the idea of selling hot wurst sausages in a bun, an idea possessing the perfect naturalness that belonged, always, to successful ideas. That was the kind of story my father liked to tell. I was small, at the age when the mind absorbs everything. The first memory of my life would be a hot dog burning my tongue, and a T-shirt indelibly stained with mustard.

  *

  After about a year of American life, my brother was born, and with Dennis the family seemed to be complete: four people, four bodies. A big enough number to fill the house.

  Meanwhile, my father was trying to find his path. That was proving much more challenging than expected, a slippery path that seemed to lead, each time, to some hostile territory. Keeping a job seemed beyond his abilities. His terrible temper, limited patience, and little ability to relate to his bosses, didn’t qualify him for success. In Italy he’d worked for the post office. During our first few years in America, he changed jobs half a dozen times, each job less satisfying than the last, none of them lasting more than a couple of months. He was convinced that one day he’d be able to go into business on his own. The day would come when he would be the boss. My mother scanned the wanted ads, helping him to fill out job applications. “Do you promise that this time you won’t get yourself fired?”

  In the end, he was hired to work in a slaughterhouse ten miles or so from Clifton, where for some reason, by what seemed like a surprising miracle, he managed to keep his position.

  Of course, it must not have been an enjoyable job. He never told us exactly what he did all day, but I think it had something to do with the process of administering the electric shock. The phase in which the animals are stunned. He would grab electrodes and use them to stun four-hundred-pound veal calves, one after another, before they were hung up on a hook and butchered. Although he showered every evening before leaving the slaughterhouse, he didn’t always seem able to scrub that smell off himself. The smell of bled flesh. For the first two days he’d vomited at the end of his shift, then he’d got used to it. He used to say that they’d never fire him, because the work was too disgusting and they’d never find anyone to take his place. That was his theory, and I think it made him feel strong, like a martyr of some kind, a man capable of doing the dirty work.

  A few years later, when Reagan emerged onto the political stage, my father started watching him on TV and telling us that this man inspired confidence. This man would open new horizons. “I can tell that something’s about to happen.” My father believed that sooner or later his chance would come, and he’d be able to quit his job at the slaughterhouse, and that everything in our lives was on the verge of changing.

  Every Sunday morning he attended church, where he sang himself hoarse with psalms, prayers so filled with promise and mystery that he sometimes remained mute for the rest of the day. In Italy, the most Catholic country on earth, he’d never set foot in a church. In America he felt the judgement of God. I don’t know if he thought he’d made mistakes in his life, but I know he would never have easily confessed them. Whether as an Italian or an American, he was still the same proud, stubborn man as ever.

  *

  At first, practically no one noticed my passion. After school, I’d developed the habit of taking refuge in a public library, where a girl worked whose main activity seemed to be chewing cinnamon-flavoured gu
m, and where I had free access to the shelves. I was about eleven, old enough to leaf through newspapers and magazines like Newsweek, Time or else People or Vanity Fair.

  I always managed to find something. I would find accounts of the exploits of Reed Richards and his group. I would find reports on illegal smuggling rings that had been broken up by Daredevil or else on the controversial events involving the rebel mutant Mystique. I would find interviews with bad-tempered figures like Namor the Prince of Atlantis, interviews with Wonder Woman about her battles against both crime and male chauvinism, editorialists’ commentaries ranging from the outright hostile to the completely exalted. By that point, no one had much to say about Superman, who even then was already looking elderly and decrepit, but in back issues I found articles about him too. I would extract old magazines from the cardboard containers where they were stored, with the skill of an archivist, going back months and years in search of the articles that interested me. I reconstructed the stories of all those people. Superheroes. I read each article over and over again, studying each picture, so raptly that I caressed the razor-sharp edges of the pages, sometimes, until my fingertips bled.

  I was fascinated with Batman more than with anyone else. I loved the deep, enveloping black colour of his cape, which flowed behind him like a kind of shadow. I remember the infamous case of the serial dog killer, that maniac who had dognapped and decapitated thousands of dogs in the New York area before the Dark Knight caught him. I remember the reports on his spectacular incursions into the scenes of gang wars. In the pictures that appeared in the newspapers, Batman was barely visible in the distance, often blurred. In those days, he was an elusive figure; he never gave interviews, he steered clear of the spotlight, and played on his own aura of mystery.

  According to what I read in the newspapers, there were quite a few eyewitnesses who had met Batman in person. Unfortunately, I wasn’t lucky enough to know any of them. As a consolation for that, I knew people who had seen other superheroes: my classmate Ralph, for instance, had seen Wonder Woman at the opening of a shopping centre. I envied him that sighting for years. Too bad that Ralph was an idiot. All he could seem to say about it was how disappointed he had been. “Buddy, you won’t believe this. That woman has small tits.”

  Eventually, the girl in the library started noticing me, and telling me that I should spend my afternoons outdoors. “That’s enough reading. You’re not going to meet any superheroes in the library. Why don’t you go outside and run around with the other kids?” Maybe she was right. Sometimes I did go out and run around with the other kids, of course, but all things considered I preferred magazines with razor-edged pages. I preferred interviews with superheroes and photographs of the enigmatic Batman. I was a twelve-year-old who lived in Clifton, and for the moment my only opportunity to meet superheroes was in the pages of those publications.

  I started to plunder the library. I tore out pages or cut out the articles that interested me, when no one was looking, when the girl was busy with another borrower or chatting on the phone or chewing her gum.

  As for my father, as soon as he found out that I liked Batman, he assured me that one day I’d be disappointed. “That man,” he said in a contemptuous tone. “A faggot with a cape.”

  I don’t know where all that scorn came from. Back then, no one knew anything about Batman’s life. I don’t even know whether my father’s scorn came from the hypothesis that Batman really was a faggot, or rather from a deeper, crueller hunch. The hunch that superheroes would never save a thing. Never save anyone. “Someday you’ll be disappointed.” Or maybe it all boiled down to something much simpler, that is, the fact that my passion hurt him. To some extent, my father wanted to take Batman’s place. He would have liked to be a superhero, or maybe just a hero to his son.

  As time passed, he started changing the channel whenever a news report about one of the superheroes appeared on TV. He was increasingly reluctant to talk about them. People with superpowers. People who were too free, too ambiguous, people that somehow, I believe, triggered an intimate sense of crisis in him. In contrast, my mother seemed untroubled by them. She was the one who started slipping me a few dollars, now and then, on the sly, so that I could go and buy the magazines I wanted, instead of ripping the pages out of the ones at the library. “We all need our heroes.”

  My brother Dennis, too, was looking for heroes. It didn’t take him long to find them in my collection of news clippings. He didn’t love any of them in particular: he’d take a fancy to one superhero, then another, and he’d sit there studying pictures of them with a kind of solemn intensity, sometimes greater than my own. We’d spend late afternoons in our bedroom reading my newspaper clippings, while our mother was in the kitchen making dinner, and that, for years, would be the perfect composition, the idyllic scene of our lives: two brothers reading accounts of their heroes’ exploits, a mother preparing a meal alone, while a father finished his shift at work, some miles away, applying electrodes to the head of a terrified beast.

  Then, one night we heard them arguing. They were speaking in a rapid Italian, as dense and intertwined as a close-knit fabric, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. The girl at the library had phoned to protest about my devastation of the library’s collection. There was even a risk that the library might demand reimbursement. Obviously, I’d never be able to set foot in the place again. Not only that, but my father insisted that I discard a certain object. It was the worst imaginable punishment. I would have to get rid of the box where we boys kept our news clippings.

  The following morning she came into our bedroom, sat down on my brother’s bed, and started fiddling idly with the hem of a blanket. “I told you not to damage the magazines in that library,” she tried to scold me. Then she addressed the two of us in a soft voice, slightly scratched by a note of melancholy: “He doesn’t hate your heroes. He’s just worried about your well-being.” She paused, gripping more firmly the edge of the blanket, and her eyes caressed us in the light of the bedroom. “Hide that box somewhere safe. And don’t let your father see you reading that stuff again.”

  She had this small childlike smile that would vanish just as fast as it appeared. At the time, she must have been in her early thirties, and in my memory she seems to be no particular age, beautiful with an eternal and elusive beauty. “It’ll be our secret,” she whispered, and we both nodded our heads, ecstatically, like allies of a mysterious queen.

  *

  She really was beautiful. I know that lots of people think the same of their mothers, but I know for sure that she was beautiful. My male teachers would stiffen self-consciously when she turned up at a school event, and men would turn to watch her go by on the street. I have no idea how my father managed to win her heart, stealing her away from the admirers who no doubt had trailed behind her. She had a delicate nose, small ears, and dark eyes whose shape I had inherited, but which in her seemed to emanate a dense, almost solid reflection. Her teeth flashed a spontaneous whiteness. Her chestnut hair tumbled over her shoulders in waves. Dennis and I would stand and admire her when she washed her hair, in the bathroom lined with ceramic tiles, hypnotised by those dark, wet locks, until she burst out laughing and snapped at us: “What are the two of you staring at? Are you trying to make me blush?!”

  She wore flowered dresses, vaguely hippyish, a little out of fashion. By then, we were into the Eighties. Our mother couldn’t stand the ridiculous way people decked themselves out in that period, the padded shoulders, the shiny fabrics, and all the far too ostentatious stuff. She got no thrill from that kind of dressing up, and after all, even if she had possessed show-offy clothes, she would hardly have needed them. She didn’t socialise much. Our father was less and less interested in going out and rarely took her anywhere. When she put on one of her flowered dresses, or fixed up her hair, she seemed to do it just for my brother and me. For our admiring eyes. Or perhaps just for herself. She dressed up to remain in the realm of the kitchen, the room in the house where s
he spent her time, alone, burning scented candles, listening to the radio, and making food.

  She had brought just one book with her from Italy. It was a book of recipes. When dinner time rolled around, intense aromas spread through the house, exquisite, floating in the air like a magic spell, scents that seemed to come all the way from the Old Country, from that distant homeland, as if the wind had blown them across the ocean. She cooked crunchy square pizzas in the electric oven, brimming over with tomato sauce, oregano, and round olive slices. The spaghetti on our dining table was al dente, wholly substantial, very far from the overcooked, practically disintegrating worms that I’d sometimes happened to eat at a classmate’s house. On other evenings there was a dense, almost creamy risotto, made with mushrooms or with asparagus, basil, or artichokes. On Sundays it was time for ravioli, floating in a mirror of clear broth, over which we would sprinkle a mantle of ground parmesan. There were roasts cooked in red wine. Potato gnocchi sprinkled with butter. She couldn’t always find the ingredients she needed, or sometimes she’d decide to experiment, so she’d add an American touch. Maple syrup would garnish some traditional pastry from northern Italy, or peanut butter would give its aroma to a sage focaccia. She’d spread cream cheese on a pizza. Tiramisu went through a series of evolutions, changing and transmogrifying, losing one ingredient, acquiring another, until it turned into a fluffy cheesecake.

  Our mother’s food had an intimate flavour. It had a complete warmth, it penetrated both stomach and spirit the way any good food will do. I wonder whether that’s exactly what good food is for. To make the people who eat it feel less lonely. Her food had the same effect as a hug; it never left us feeling lonely, and yet she, the woman who made it for us, spent much of her life in solitude.