She had no girlfriends. She’d left all her relatives behind in Italy. I might happen to come home unexpectedly, after school or after I’d been out somewhere, and find her sitting in silence at the small kitchen table, immersed in the dying light of afternoon. I might catch her off-guard, twirling a lock of hair around her finger, shrouded in an invisible cloak of melancholy. She seemed so distant. When she didn’t know she was being watched, she tended towards a rapt expression, like someone listening for a lost signal. Now I know that what she missed wasn’t her life on the other side of the ocean. She didn’t miss her relatives, or at least that wasn’t what her yearning was mainly for. What she was yearning for was literally herself, in a way that at the time I could not understand.
*
The first warning that strange things were happening in our home came to me when I was about twelve, one winter evening when I was supposed to go over to a friend’s house after school. It had been windy lately. The weather reports predicted snow. My classmate didn’t show up at school that day, the victim of a flu epidemic that had emptied several of the desks in my classroom, and so I had returned home unexpectedly, panting from the bike ride, my cheeks glowing from the chilly snap in the air. I thought my mother would be happy at my surprise arrival. I thought she’d welcome me home the way she always did.
I walked into the kitchen. It was instantly clear that something was wrong. My mother had heard me come in and was waiting for me, gripping the edge of the table, her face ashen and appalled. I would never forget the look on her face. We stayed there looking at each other in the greyish light. Neither of us spoke. I don’t know what I was thinking just then, I do know that I could feel her terror invade me, passing as if by contagion from her body to mine.
“Mama,” I said. That’s when I heard it. It came from upstairs, from her and my father’s bedroom. It was the sound of footsteps, I think, the unmistakable sound of someone else’s presence. “Mama,” I said again, my mouth going dry, feeling a sudden need of reassurance. I knew that my father was at work, and that my brother Dennis had to be at school. The sound of footsteps grew louder.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Listen to me, Bruce. You need to do something for me. You need to run over to the store to get some sugar. We don’t have a single grain left in the house. You’d better go right away, you’d better go now.” She seemed to have recovered, she was speaking with extraordinary calm. There was a shadow around her eyes. She ran a hand through her hair. “You’d better go right away, Bruce.”
I raised no objections. Outside, the wind had a bitter edge. The sky was a sterile white and the streets were almost deserted. I pedalled slowly, barely breathing. The fear had ebbed with the movement of a tide, leaving an icy void inside me. It took me a long time to run that errand. It took me half an hour, much longer than necessary, and when I got home everything seemed to have returned to normal. She was listening to the radio, a cup of tea in her hand. She took the grocery bag out of my hands and gave me one of her smiles. No more noise was coming from the bedroom.
It would take me years to realise the truth, even though I think I knew it all along. I suppose everyone always knows the truth. Everyone knows it from the beginning, they just have to decide to look at it. Over the years, I would glimpse scattered fragments, symptoms of something that was right there, before my eyes, something I was still too young to recognise entirely. There was the frequency with which my mother changed the sheets in her bedroom, the kind of detail that men tend to overlook, and which I registered one day unintentionally, as I watched her fold the laundry. All that freshly washed linen. There was the number of perfumed candles burning so often throughout the house, as if to cover up the scent of some intruder passing through. There were the dirty glasses that I noticed sometimes in the kitchen sink, as if we’d had guests, or my mother’s mysterious weariness, on certain evenings, even when she said that she’d had a quiet day. There was the episode when, as I was arriving from a distance, I could have sworn I’d seen a man leave our house and drive off in a grey Mercury. As far as I recalled, my father’s boss drove a Mercury that same colour.
I must have been the only one who noticed these doings. No word issued from either my father or my brother. Every night we sat around our square dining-room table, eating the dinners my mother made for us. The four of us, night after night. My father dominated the tone, depending on whether he’d come home from work in a good mood, angry, or merely depressed. There were times when he just sat at the table, eating without a word, ceding the floor to the television set’s monologues, and to the jingles that resounded throughout the room. At times like those, my mother might chance to stare at me. I was the elder son, the one who noticed odd things. The one who registered mysterious details. She must have known that, and that’s why we sat there looking at each other for a few seconds, like a pair of secret accomplices.
Later, in bed, I would lie in the dark listening to the silence that was interrupted only by a passing car or the voice of some drunk down in the street. Dennis slept in the bed next to mine. He rarely slept peacefully. He tossed and turned all night, engaged in furious wrestling bouts with the bedclothes. The next morning, he would say he couldn’t remember his dreams. He did pretty well in school, even though his teachers considered him to be something of an introvert. Sometimes he’d wake up and fire a question at me, without preamble, certain that I was listening. If what superheroes did was save ordinary people, who was in charge of saving superheroes? Would any superhero ever come to our house? And if he, Dennis, ever decided to leave one day with a superhero, would I feel lonely? “Go to sleep,” is all I would say, embarrassed by those childish questions. I don’t know whether he was conscious at those times, or if it was a sort of somnambulism.
One night he asked me whether I would marry our mother when I grew up. I felt like getting up and slapping him in the face. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I snarled. Half a minute passed, then I heard him start breathing deeply again and tossing and turning, lost in some dream that he wouldn’t remember.
*
We weren’t a well-to-do family. We lived just above the threshold of what at that time, in that part of the world and for that portion of mankind, was considered the basic standard for a dignified lifestyle. A roof over our heads, a car, a television set. Basic health care. We may not have scrimped on our groceries, but we sure did on clothing. We never travelled. My father’s pay cheque was reliable, and covered the bare necessities, but it left us vulnerable to unexpected expenses. And over the years, there was no lack of unexpected expenses.
When Dennis needed braces, the money arrived from our Italian grandparents. When the engine of our car coughed and died once and for all in a shopping mall parking lot, my mother inherited a small sum from another relative. When the slaughterhouse hit hard times and my father’s pay cheque stopped coming for two months, it was another inheritance from distant relatives of hers that kept us afloat. We seemed to be lucky. Some benevolent star was shining down on us. My father wasn’t happy to scrape by on these windfalls, it made him feel less independent. Still, what other choice did he have? As for Dennis and me, we joked about feeling like heirs to some age-old dynasty. All hail those unknown relatives. All hail to the ageing uncles and aunts back in Italy, who died off one after another, at the right moment, thinking on their deathbed of their distant niece.
A similar thing happened with my studies. When I was seventeen I found myself at a critical point. I couldn’t see many possibilities. I was a pretty good student, but not enough of an academic star, nor of a sports star for that matter, to hope for a scholarship that would get me through college. I’d have to try to get a loan. Everything seemed so complicated, and things were quite foggy in my own mind. One night my father came home with a piece of paper in his hand; he held onto it for a moment and then, at last, he handed it to me with an awkward gesture. “When you’re done with school this year, you might think about this.” It was a photocopied form for me to fill o
ut. An application for a job at the slaughterhouse where he worked. It was an off-white sheet of paper, paper that stuck to my fingertips, making me think, for some reason, of the sticky wafers that people swallowed in church. I felt like gulping down that sheet of paper, so that I could make it vanish forever.
A few days later, it was my mother who resolved the situation. She told me she needed to take me somewhere. Where she took me was to a bank, where we sat down, side by side, in a small office that reminded me of a doctor’s waiting room. When the bank officer came in, my mother told him that she wanted to open an account. “In my son’s name. In the name of Bruce De Villa.”
Her first deposit was one thousand dollars, which she pulled out of a crumpled paper bag. I can still see those bills. I can hear the rustling as the banker counted them, and recognise their smell, the pained odour of money, as it wafted over to my nostrils.
Outside the bank, my mother didn’t have much to say. “I’ll deposit more money into this account. It’s for your college education. There’s no need to mention this to your father.”
Where that money came from was a question I didn’t dare to ask. She offered no explanations, nor did she try to pawn off the usual story on me. There was too much awareness, too great a complicity between the two of us for her to drag out, yet again, that ridiculous old chestnut about her distant relatives.
This was no ordinary day. My mother was giving me the gift of a future, ironically enough, on the very day when I ought to be giving her a gift. It was her birthday. She was thirty-eight that day, and she was still a dazzling beauty. With the passing years, her features had remained delicate, clearly etched, with only a few wrinkles above her cheekbones, like scratches left by the finest of needles, revealed here in the street by the sunlight hitting her face. As we walked home together, passersby shot her the usual glances, arousing in me a blend of pride and ill-defined disquiet.
That night we celebrated her birthday with a cake she had baked herself, on which she had written her own name with a drizzle of melted chocolate:
SILVIA
My father had come home with a present, a bouquet of tiny scarlet roses that he laid in her lap, without a word, as if it were a puppy that she could care for. My mother caressed the flowers. That bunch of roses didn’t strike me as much, puny and commonplace, just like all the presents my father gave her, at least that was how it looked to me. And yet she seemed genuinely touched. They embraced and for a moment something seemed to pass between them, some kind of warmth, a flow of attraction so deep it seemed almost painful. I wondered if that’s what being married meant. That heartbreaking attraction, that unbridgeable distance.
I hadn’t bought anything for her. After our visit to the bank, I’d been too stunned. I felt a chilling amazement at the thought. My destiny was taking shape. I’d emerged from the fog of uncertainty, I could contemplate what would become of me: I’d escaped a future as a slaughterhouse worker. I would be going to college. For me, that night should have been a double party. I should have been overjoyed. And yet all I felt was a trace of some emotion that then and there I couldn’t identify, a heavy feeling that seemed to press down on the pit of my stomach. I guess it was a sense of guilt. Over the passing years, I would become quite the expert.
Before falling asleep that night, I told Dennis about college. He greeted my news with a long silence, then he asked whether that meant that I would be leaving home. “Huh,” I replied nonchalantly, pretending the thought had never occurred to me. “I guess it does. Maybe I’ll try to get a college room.”
His silence stretched out. The sensation of something pressing down on my stomach intensified, and I realised I hadn’t been very tactful in the way I’d broken the news to him. “One day, you’ll go to college too,” I said, trying to make up for it.
From his bed, I continued to hear a wall of silence. The darkness of the room enveloped us, only partly relieved by the faint glow that filtered in through the window. Long after I’d assumed he’d slipped into a slumber, Dennis’ voice suddenly reached me: “Will you take the old box of newspaper clippings when you go?”
I wasn’t sure what answer he was looking for. “No,” I ventured. “I’ll leave it here with you for safe keeping.”
Silence again. I couldn’t tell whether he was pleased with that bequest. In fact, for some time now we’d both lost interest in news about the superheroes. And by now there wasn’t much news to be had, anyway. Many of them were retiring, while others were migrating from the news sections to the gossip and show business sections. Everyone knew that Batman no longer fought crime, that he was leading a leisurely existence, living on his money and with his boyfriend.
Believing in those people had been great. It had all been intense and wonderful, but now what was left of it?
So long, superheroes. The superheroes could go and live their own lives. I would live mine. And in time, Dennis would find his path too. We lay there on our sagging mattresses, two brothers in the darkened bedroom, eyes open wide, staring at the vague striations of light projected by the window on the ceiling, unsuspecting of everything that was going to happen to us, the experiences that would face us, the men that we would become, and the way that each of us would accept—each in his own way—the ambiguous gifts of the future.
*
I lived in a student residence of City College for a few months, until I met a girl on the journalism course. Alyson had a place in the East Village and it wasn’t long before I moved in with her. It was a studio apartment perched upstairs from a second-hand clothes store, regularly invaded by tiny cockroaches that she swept out every day, with a broom, refusing to exterminate them with insecticides. She was unwilling to kill animals, whatever the species. So, of course, she wasn’t about to eat them. Alyson belonged to a student vegan association and took part in lengthy seminars on subjects such as the concentration camp ideology of intensive animal breeding or how to control humanity’s aggressive impulses through a meatless diet. “To say nothing of the fact,” she would confess, “that animal toxins are terrible for the skin.”
Back then, she wore a pair of black Bakelite glasses, which she’d bought who knows where. I suspected she didn’t need them at all and that she wore them to give herself an intellectual appearance, but to my eyes they just gave her an extra touch of provocative appeal. She wore her hair pretty long. It was black hair, darker than my mother’s, and it contrasted nicely with her milk-white complexion. In bed, her breasts barely quivered when she breathed. I can still see us, our bodies naked and light against the backdrop of the sheets, after sex or floating in the sweet laziness that comes before sleep, as she expounded her nutritional theories for me.
I didn’t mind going along with her dietary regimen, even though my motivation had less to do with any real support than an effort to economise on meat. At lunch, I’d compensate with the occasional hamburger at the student cafeteria. Apart from groceries, expenses included my share of rent, college tuition, my subway pass, and miscellaneous items. Officially, as far as my father knew, I supported myself by working part-time in a bar. I actually did spend a few hours every week behind the counter of a bar on the Bowery, a noisy place that held concerts, poetry readings, and meetings of obscure squads of artists. But that work wasn’t enough to support me. The lion’s share of my income came from my mother, through the bank account in my name. We’d never mentioned that bank account again since that day. You could almost question whether something that never gets mentioned even actually exists, but that bank account definitely existed, I withdrew cash from it often, and every time I did, I found that a new deposit had been made.
I called home a couple of times every week. My brother would ask me how things were in New York City as though he were asking about a place on the far side of the planet. Whenever I tried to tell him anything about my life, he’d sink into a resentful silence. “I’ll come back to visit you soon,” I assured him. “Do whatever you want, Bruce.” “How’s Mama?” “Why don’t you
ask her yourself?”
He’d never forgiven me for leaving home. By then, my brother Dennis was fifteen, he’d grown to be as tall as me and even stronger, and he smiled just the way our mother did. A smile as fleeting as a falling star. He was no longer the kid who tagged around after his big brother. He was no longer, either, the kid who dreamt of running away who knows where with some superhero. In the end, I was the one who had left home, and after I did, his introverted personality blossomed like a strange flower, revealing unexpected sharp angles, a blend of intense emotions, reserve, and a surprising rigorous strength. He didn’t seem to have many friends or, as far as I knew, girlfriends, but he seemed to get by and his grades at school were quite good. After getting over his mania for superheroes, he’d started training, becoming involved in a form of martial arts with an unpronounceable name, a sport that demanded long periods of preparation without resulting in a direct clash with the opponent, a sport that made me think of a solitary, ambiguous, solemn battle against oneself.
Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, filled with homesickness and a mysterious uneasiness. And sometimes Alyson would wake up with me. “Did you have a dream?” “I don’t know. My brother. My family,” was as much of an explanation as I could provide. Alyson wrapped her arms around me, and before falling back to sleep she’d whisper in the darkness: “Why don’t you do the easiest thing? Go to see them.”
Ever since classes started, I’d made fewer and fewer visits to Clifton. It was hard to go back there. It wasn’t until I left that I understood, consciously, how grim the atmosphere was in my family’s home. Back home, there was my father, with his unpredictable temperament. Back home, there was my brother with his air of a too-serious teenager. Most of all, back home there was my mother with her loneliness, her beauty, and her secrets, the mysterious provenance of the money with which she supported me. Back home, there was a truth, and whatever that truth might be, it sucked the oxygen out of the air like a relentless, invisible fire.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 28