by Silvia Zucca
I cling to my suitcase like a crutch, a single thought reverberating through my mind: I. MUST. GET. HOME. IMMEDIATELY.
In front of my house everything seems to be okay. Perplexed, I stare at the intercom, trying to decide what to do. In theory, I am supposed to be an innocent party. Therefore, it’s only right that I go up and see what’s going on. The police might become suspicious if I changed my habits all of the sudden.
I put the key in the lock, feeling a bit like Judas.
Most likely, both of our phones are being monitored, but I didn’t think to warn Giorgio, especially out of fear that he would get the crazy idea for us to run away together. I would prefer a life sentence in isolation to spending the rest of my life with him doing a Bonnie and Clyde.
The apartment seems strangely quiet, except that . . .
I hear moans; a kind of lament in the background, like the cry of a wounded animal.
For a moment, I think they must have actually shot him and left him to bleed to death in my apartment.
Although I’m terrified, I force myself to move and find out what’s going on. One cautious step at a time, I reach the kitchen, where the noise seems to be coming from.
I stand at the door, petrified, with a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming.
Giorgio is completely naked except for my oven mitt, which is being used to spank a perfect stranger, who is on all fours on top of my kitchen table.
I shield my eyes with my hand to spare myself the embarrassment of all this nakedness.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“And who is this?” asks the stranger.
“My sister!” exclaims my ex-boyfriend.
Of course, coming back home, I would have expected anything other than finding two people having sex between the oven and the dishwasher. What about the police? Where the hell are the police?
“Your sister?” I repeat.
“Muffie, I can explain everything,” he says quietly, winking. “Let me work,” he whispers.
Let him work?
“Get dressed,” I say drily. “And then tell me what this woman is doing in my house. In fact, I can see exactly what she is doing . . . so get dressed!”
What happened to the police? Outside, I still hear sirens.
Did they get the wrong address? Should I call them?
What comes to mind, however, is that at this point, since I came home a day early, I will be here when they come to arrest him. In short, in one reckless move, I’ve blown the cover for my trip to Paris.
“Giorgio, listen . . .” The only thing that comes to mind is that, if I want to stay out of this, he should not be captured in my house. Nor anywhere near me. “Listen, you need to leave immediately.”
“OK, but you listen to me,” he says, pulling on his boxers. “I’m getting on a plane in less than three hours.”
“What?” Well, at least we agree on the fact that he needs to be through that door in no time flat.
“I’m afraid that the police are looking for me. A misunderstanding. Bureaucratic stuff. Insurance and so on. Just before you left, my lawyer called to warn me. And . . .” He gestures toward the hallway and, consequently, the kitchen. “I needed a lot of money for the flight. You didn’t have it . . .” I don’t know how he has the nerve, but he looks at me resentfully. “That’s why she’s here.”
“You fucked someone from the bank to get a loan?”
He shrugs, then lifts up the upper part of my bed to reveal the big drawer. His suitcase is in there, already packed.
I don’t realize right away, but after he has removed it and is about to close my bed again, I exclaim: “Where is all my stuff? Where . . . where are my videotapes?”
The drawer under my bed is empty. My survival kit has disappeared, along with the rest of my things.
Giorgio looks at me bewildered. “All that old stuff? I took it to the dump,” he says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I have to lean against the cabinet to prevent myself from fainting.
“But, Muffie, they were only some old VHS tapes. I got you a Blu-ray. You’ll see how much better it is with Dolby Surround.”
I’m not even listening to him anymore. “You threw out . . .” I can hardly breathe. “You threw out . . .” Oh god, I’m dying. My number one, the first videotape that I bought at thirteen years old. And Ghost, Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing . . . “How dare you!” I cry, pushing him toward the door.
“But, Muff, why are you acting like this?”
“Why am I acting like this? Because I can’t stand you anymore! You’ve been washed up on my couch for two months with the excuse that you don’t have a job and have to pay alimony to your ex-wife.”
“Ex . . . ?” I hear screaming from the kitchen.
“Wife! And two children!” I add.
I hear the sound of heels down the hall and the front door slamming.
Giorgio makes a pouty face, as if I had ruined his fun. “Are you jealous, little Pandora?”
“Yes, I am jealous! I’m jealous of my life, of my house, my things, and my time! Ah, but what good is it to try and explain this to a . . . a . . . an idiot for whom a fun evening is seeing how many vodka shots he can handle before spewing his guts out all over the carpet?”
I grab him by the neck and push him, just as he is, toward the hallway. I don’t give a damn that he is shirtless. I open the door and am about to throw him out, but out there are two frowning men staring at us.
“Hello . . . We’re looking for Mr. Giorgio Pifferetti.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “Are you the police?”
They look at each other, perplexed. “Well, yes.”
“You’re late!”
I push Giorgio into their arms, slamming the door without waiting for an answer.
40
* * *
What Ever Happened to Baby Libra?
What I was left with, apart from the tears of rage and despair, was a house turned upside down, an empty and broken heart, and not even the possibility of drowning myself in the oblivion of Pretty Woman.
In the absence of my usual cinematic support, I tried to anesthetize myself to the sound of Lysol spray, tidying and cleaning up my house down to the most forgotten corner. And now that I’m done and have a beautiful “single woman” apartment, I allow myself to sit down and cry.
I cry out of relief.
I feel strangely free and light. I have a good feeling that, from here on out, I’m really going to be able to start over, without Giorgio, without Davide . . . And yes, of course, even without my precious survival kit.
Every new beginning starts with the end of something, right?
No more tears, Alice. From now on, you are growing up, and that’s that.
I am dabbing my eyes with cold water when I hear the doorbell ringing.
Oh no, I think, disheartened. I didn’t answer Paola’s last telephone call and she must have rushed over here again. But it’s not the face of my friend that I find in the doorway.
“I need your help!”
Cristina is staring at me with sparkling eyes and trembling lips.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, she throws herself into my arms, sobbing, and says, “Carlo is looking for me . . . You have to hide me!”
• • •
“Her problem is the Moon in the twelfth house. When you have a Moon in the twelfth house, you always have trouble in love. And emotional instability,” I say, blowing on a cup of tea.
“Her problem is that your ex-boyfriend, her future husband, is a total bastard. That’s her problem,” replies Paola.
The problem is that Cristina found out what she was not supposed to: that Carlo, the Aquarius and tireless lover of freedom, has gotten a crush on another woman the moment he’s about to become a father. So Cristina, upset even though she is a Virgo with Mercury in Libra, has turned up at my house seeking asylum, indefinitely.
“Yes, but it is also my problem,”
I hiss softly, moving Paola away from the couch where Cristina is dozing.
Maybe I’m a bad person, but I’ve never been a big fan of movies about female friendships and helping your sisters in need. My life is already messed up enough as it is.
“We have to understand how we can fix the situation, not immediately think of the worst.”
And that’s exactly why I called her: Paola is the friend that everyone would like to have. She is a Cancer with Cancer Ascendant, which explains her deep humanity, and with Pluto in the third house it’s obvious that she is able to feel empathy for people.
Not knowing which way to turn when Cristina landed in my house in tears, I did what anyone who knew Paola would have done: I picked up the phone and called her.
In keeping with her astrological chart, in just five minutes, she was able to obtain three things from Cristina: she made her stop crying, tell us word for word what had happened, and sleep.
We will be getting a patent on this technique immediately so we can sell it to the world.
Then Paola raises an eyebrow, bringing the cup of tea to her lips. “And Davide?” she says, throwing down the gauntlet a moment later. Well, yes, it’s only natural that I told her about Davide and what happened between us in Paris.
“Davide is . . . the exception that proves the rule,” I answer, getting up to pretend to look for something in the closet as an excuse not to make eye contact. “That is, even if you know that your chart is completely incompatible with his . . . you bang your head against the brick wall anyway and go against the stars.”
“It’s called attraction,” replies Paola calmly. “And I would do a statistical survey to see how many successful marriages are based on a pair of winning astrological combinations. Shall we try?”
“Um . . .” I am about to respond when the noise of the vacuum cleaner kills the conversation and sends us running into the living room. I must have infected Cristina with the cleansing bug, because now she is the one who wants to do a big spring cleaning.
After a moment of bewilderment, Paola and I register that there is a woman who is more than six months pregnant standing on tiptoe on my couch, with the rod of the vacuum cleaner raised over her head like a javelin, hell-bent on removing the stubborn dirt particles from the top of my bookcases.
“Cris, stop!” I cry.
Again, Paola proves herself useful in disarming the pregnant woman. However, in doing so, she ended up bumping into the box that has been sitting on my bookcase for months, the one that my parents foisted on me when they were repainting the house and that still needs to be sorted through.
“Careful!” I make the heroic gesture of sticking out my wrist to save both of them from being hit by a shower of books, papers, and various trinkets.
“Damn . . . is anything broken?” asks Paola, immediately coming to my aid.
“I have no idea,” I tell her, going over to Cristina who, in the meantime, has returned to crying on the couch. “Calm down, please. Come on.”
On the floor are my university notebooks and even one of the dolls I was really fond of as a child, pens, and papers. Mom must have emptied some old drawer directly into the box.
“And this?” exclaims Paola, lifting something from the floor as if she had found treasure. “What is a spoon doing in the midst of all these papers and notebooks?”
I snort and take it from her. “This is not just any spoon. This is a lucky spoon—a gift from my uncle when I was born,” I explain with considerable pride. “Don’t you see? There’s my date of birth, time of birth, the length . . .”
I start to get up from the couch.
I sit back down on the couch.
I stare directly in front of me for a couple of seconds.
Paola gets up from the ground. “Is everything OK?”
I continue staring in front of me. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean? Do you feel sick?” She runs up to me to put a hand on my forehead.
In response, I lift up the spoon, as if exhibiting a piece of evidence.
She, obviously, doesn’t understand.
“The time . . .” I mutter. “Look at the time.”
“Alice Bassi, born at 11:45 p.m. OK? And?”
“My mother always told me that I was born at eleven.”
Paola raises an eyebrow and looks at me as if she were deciding whether to call 9-1-1. “So? You were born at 11:45.”
“Yes, but at night!” I exclaim. And this time I tear myself from the couch to run to the telephone and call my parents.
“Sweetie, how are you?” asks my father at the other end of the line.
“Dad, when was I born?” I exclaim, skipping the formalities, my voice trembling in my throat.
“What happened, little one?” asks Dad.
“Daddy, I need to know what time I was born. The exact time.”
“Adalgisa, what time was Alice born?”
I can almost see my mother sticking her head out of the kitchen and looking at him with a frown. I hear her mutter something, but I can’t make out what.
“Your mother says eleven o’clock,” he says.
“Yes, but eleven in the morning or at night?” And then, can we specify that it was eleven forty-five? Is time such a relative concept?
“At night.” I hear my mother’s voice, and I sink to my knees.
“Alice? Alice, hello?”
When I turn around, Cristina has stopped crying and offers me a glass of water that I gulp down without a moment’s hesitation.
“So?” Paola presses, with her arms crossed over her chest.
I ignore her, and I drag myself toward the computer, where I open the astrology program and enter my information for the new calculation.
Some things haven’t changed. The position of the planets is almost the same, but the planets in the houses, and the houses in relation to the sign as well as the aspects of the planets, and even the Ascendant, are not what they were before.
They never were what they were before.
Oh Lord, I have to sit down.
I’m already sitting down.
I barely manage to open my mouth, and only a wisp of a voice comes out: “Who am I? Who am I?”
41
* * *
Lost in Astrology
There are too many people. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I open the door to the loft and the hustle and bustle assaults me. Someone turns toward me and greets me, “Hi, Alice!”
“Good morning, Alice.”
“Hey, Alice.”
“Alice . . .”
Alice. Alice. Alice.
All they do is repeat a name, which has never before felt so removed from my person.
“Good morning,” says my boss, with a smile as wide as an interstate highway. “I brought brioches for everyone, don’t you want some?”
I open my mouth, but I am unable to say anything. How would Alice behave? The Alice who is a Libra with Leo Ascendant with the Sun in the fourth house, Mars in the second, the sixth house in Capricorn, and so on and so forth with all the planets, Trines, Conjunctions, and Oppositions?
After contemplating my muteness for a second, he shrugs, turns around, and walks away. “If you change your mind soon, there could still be one left. But in a half hour, I can’t guarantee anything.”
I take advantage of a moment of quiet to reread my new birth chart. My stomach churns.
How can I be me—with my longing for a real love story, a family, and stability—when the Square between the Moon and Neptune says that I’m unable to put down roots? Elsewhere, I am even described as an individualist . . . Apparently, I’m also energetic, authoritarian, and egocentric. But what if I don’t even know where I’m most at home? In terms of the energies, I definitely need someone to shake me up.
And I know exactly who.
Tio still hasn’t replied to my messages, which is strange, because he is usually so quick to come to my aid.
Suddenly, something comes to m
ind, and I skim through the five-page printout.
Eleventh house in Taurus: your friends might get close to you for their personal economic benefit.
Oh my god. What if I’ve been conned?
How stupid; what would Tio have gotten out of it?
Well, he became a television star. Hmm . . .
Then I spot him. He’s made it through the unruly line for Enrico the Brioche Man, and with his Jamaican pirate hairstyle and his arms lifted above his head to protect his trophies—a brioche and a cannolo—it is practically impossible to miss him.
“Alice, my little one!” he exclaims as he lunges toward me.
If he thinks he can placate me with an IV of saturated fats, he really has no idea what I am made of.
“Tio!” I yell. I am frustrated, yes, but I can’t help but throw my arms around his neck.
“Hey, calm down . . .” he says, winking. “You could have come and celebrated with Enrico. It seems like his wife has come back home, at last.”
I look up and catch Enrico laughing heartily. And I am happy for him. We needed some good news, a little happy ending—at least for someone.
But how can Tio think about food when the entire planet is in danger?!
Maybe I’m exaggerating, but try to understand, it’s as if at almost forty years old you are told that you were switched at birth, adopted, or stolen as a child by your parents. Well, more or less.
“Did you read the e-mail? And the attachment?”
Tio, however, does not seem to have grasped the seriousness of the situation and brings his hand to his mouth to hide a yawn.
“I had a look. I was out late with Andrea. I need another coffee.”
OK, if this is the price for paying attention to me, I’ll go to Brazil and gather and toast the beans myself.
“So?” I ask him, ten minutes and one coffee from the café later.
“Alice, this is wonderful.”