“Have the gentlemen already placed their orders?” he asked, raising his eyebrows and flaring his nostrils.
HE WAS FUNNY, but unnerving, Picchiatello. In class or at recess, everyone else would play and joke around with him, in part because he was likable and everyone liked him, or put up with him, in short, how can you really dislike someone like Picchiatello: but after school, in the afternoons or on Sundays or during the holidays, no one wanted anything more to do with him. Everyone had their friends, from school or otherwise, their soccer or basketball team or their tennis or swimming lessons, and then they had people they played guitar with and their cousins, male and female, and the movies, plus homework, getting help where possible on classics translations and math problems from some classmate who was better at them. Jervi went dancing every afternoon as soon as the discos opened. And in all this churn of activity, Picchiatello had simply not found a place for himself.
A number of times, Mr. Golgotha had put forth the idea of “doing something together” to “involve him” (yes, the verb “involve” was often trotted out in those years, to indicate a collective initiative, that might make everyone feel united and engaged . . .), but nothing had ever come of it. Picchiatello’s life outside of school therefore remained a mystery. People said of him and his family that they were rich, seriously rich: a gleaming black Mercedes came to pick him up at school, so long that the driver took ages to walk around it and open the back door for our classmate, who would wave back to us before getting in. He was laughing but it wasn’t hard to imagine him later, back home, lonely and sad.
Poor Pik, we’d think to ourselves or say to one another, shaking our heads. It was less work to pity him briefly than to spend any amount of time with him.
Perhaps it was because he saw that I was well disposed toward him, perhaps because I was among the few, or perhaps the only one, who never made fun of him with the usual wisecracks, wisecracks whose wicked cruelty surfaced almost unwittingly, in something approaching innocence, during the games among classmates, whom I can hardly blame for it, let me say it again, theirs was an all-too-natural cruelty, an automatism that went part and parcel with the very game we were playing, and if I never unleashed my cruelty upon Picchiatello, it was only because those amusing cruelties never came to mind, and therefore not because I was a better person than the others, but only because I wasn’t as quick-witted, I wasn’t as funny. And in fact I laughed at those wisecracks of theirs, I laughed as much as anyone . . . Perhaps that was why Pik started to ask me, at first sporadically, and then more insistently, five or ten times in a row, to come over to his house to do our homework together. “Will you come over, eh, will you come over?” “Well, actually . . .” “Tell me you’ll come over . . . Will you come over? Today? Eh? Today? This afternoon?” “Look, I really need to . . .” “So, we’re in agreement? At three o’clock? Three thirty? Three fifteen?”
I couldn’t seem to stem the rush of his requests. As he peppered me with them, interlarding them with his incessant refrain of “eh? eh?” he kept looking up at me with those bulbous eyes of his, a chilling blue, and at every “eh?” he’d squeeze me with his rigid fingers at the socket of my shoulder, which got to be pretty annoying.
YES, HE WAS FUN, and he was unnerving. Pik represented what you can’t really tell how to take, that which you don’t know what to do with. At school, in his family, with us classmates. He would often be targeted and surrounded by some small cluster of kids, molested, you might say, practically tortured, but then released because he wasn’t worth the trouble, at the very worst they might force him to swallow a few crumpled paper balls.
“HEY, PICCHIATELLO, why don’t you tell us what you think about things?”
“Picchiatello, who dressed you like that?”
“Who bought you those blue jeans that are too long?”
“You need to cuff them, but with two-inch cuffs, so they look funny. Just ridiculous!”
“Pik, hey, Pik, listen up: you’re never going to grow up, you’ll never have a woman, you’ll never have a fiancée or a wife.”
“Everyone smiles at you, everyone acts as if they’re happy to see you, they hug you and they’re nice to you because they have to be, because that’s the right thing to do. It would be disgusting to treat someone like you badly and people really want to show what good folks they are . . .”
“Hey, you have a butterfly on the tip of your nose. Did you notice that, Picchiate’?”
“Butterflies land on people who smell bad.”
“It’s the stink that attracts them, did you know that?”
“Hey, Picchiatello, you sweat like a horse, you’re a lake of sweat, your hands are all clammy.”
“You know, people say that you don’t have any feelings. That you’re like an animal, like a plant.”
“You don’t understand, you don’t suffer, you don’t have fun, in other words, you aren’t alive.”
“You’re useless and slobbery.”
“Hey, Picchiatello!”
“You don’t talk, you just drool.”
“String one streamer of drool after another and that would be a conversation with you.”
“All the same, Picchiatello, when you look in those big blue eyes of yours, sometimes it really seems like you’ve understood everything we say . . .”
“Hey, Pik? Does it hurt you if someone sticks a needle under your fingernail?”
“Come here, Pik. Kneel down. Right here, in front of me. No! Don’t look at me. Look at the ground. No, I said on your knees, you get it? Now start crying. That’s right, cry. Let me see if you know how to cry. If you can’t do it, think of something sad. Think about your parents not wanting you. That they didn’t want you before you were born, and afterward they wanted you even less, seeing what you’re like. There, now cry. And you still aren’t crying? Just think, Pik, how happy they’d be if they’d had a different son instead of you. I told you not to look at me. Cry, Pik. It would be better for you. Oh, at last, there you are. Good job. Bravo. Now dry your face. That’s enough. Dry your face. You’re getting my shoes wet. Stop it. Stop it, Pik. You’re pretending, aren’t you, Picchiatello? I’m sick of this. I know that you’re just making believe. Your sorrow is fake. I’ll give you something to cry about, if you don’t stop. You’ve cried enough and it’s time to stop.”
PERHAPS I WAS THE ONLY ONE who understood him. Or rather, I might not have understood him, but I accepted him. And even that’s not true. I didn’t accept Picchiatello, that was impossible, impossible for anyone to accept him: let’s just say then that I was studying him. I was studying his diversity. The nervous exhaustion that he provoked in anyone who spent more than fifteen minutes around him wasn’t enough to crowd out the interest I felt for him. I’m sorry I didn’t write down his better sayings, in detail, because now, collected along with his doings, no less surprising and unpredictable, they would constitute an opus comparable in genre to those of certain Chinese sages, or the whimsical Mittel-European aphorists of the early twentieth century. The Sayings of Pik.
FOR A LONG TIME, I resisted his invitations. Then, in view of an upcoming classroom assignment in Latin that promised to be decisive for the final, year-end grade (even though everyone knew that the priests were going to pass Picchiatello, no matter what), I gave in, and I went over to his house “to study together.”
PIK’S HOUSE WASN’T A HOUSE, it was a wonderful villa concealed by a high perimeter wall overflowing with plants and flowers. The garden, shaded by palms and strange trees, with stout twisted trunks and violet leaves, looked like it belonged to a colonial residence: the architect who must have designed it in the 1920s, or thereabouts, had stuffed into it nearly all the styles available to him, playing with turrets, round-arched and Gothic-arched windows, bow windows, pediments and aedicules, super-steep pitched roofs, majolica wall coverings crowded with young women dancing in skimpy skirts, and then there were swans, swans, and more swans.
Parked under an awning that was made more
modestly of corrugated sheet metal, although it was covered with a dense carpet of Virginia creeper, there were two antiquated automobiles impeccably buffed to a high gleam, the black Mercedes that used to take him to and from school, and a bottle-green Fiat 500 “Topolino,” a model of car that flickers among my earliest memories, when we’d cram into its narrow interior and my grandfather would hunker over the steering wheel, Borsalino on his head. But I’m not going to linger on these details which, later in the book, I’ll explore at greater length in order to give a little color and shape to this blessed QT. By so doing, I hope I’ll help you understand the mentality of its inhabitants, which has been so shaped as to fit with great exactitude into those spaces, like those panels on which small children work industriously to find the right hole into which they can insert stars, triangles, hexagons, squares, and thus receive the praise of their parents. Because the most alluring element of Pik’s home was without a doubt the figure of his mother, of whom until that day I had only seen half, the upper half, when she would roll down the window of the Mercedes in front of the school and wave to Pik to climb in. Dark glasses, dark dress, black hair, it wasn’t as if much of her could be seen in that hasty glance, but still I saw enough to notice that she was gorgeous. At school, in the conversations that sprang up around the both unfortunate and comical personality of our classmate, it was said of her that she was an actress, or rather that she had been one, in the fifties, until Picchiatello was born. I had actually never seen any of her movies, not even on TV, and so that mythology remained intact, and I had no desire to subject it to any further investigation, for fear that might spoil it. It was, however, a common occurrence in those days that a woman’s film-acting career would be suspended or terminated entirely upon her first pregnancy, which in fact producers and press offices did their best to keep secret as long as possible; nevertheless, the arrival of Pik must have been something quite different from the usual family incident. A meteorite, rather, hurtling to earth from an intricate stellar nebula: the beautiful young starlet, with such a startling resemblance to Lucia Bosè, till then considered her rival, giving birth to a mentally handicapped son.
IT WAS SHE WHO ANSWERED the door and let me in. There are people who know how to reconstruct every single item of apparel worn by the people they met in certain situations, whereas I never pay the slightest attention, even if they’re decisive meetings, meetings that change your life. And yet I remember with extreme precision, with a clarity and resolution befitting the grain of a photograph, exactly how Coralla Martirolo, Pik’s mamma, was dressed: a black knee-length skirt that fit her very snugly and a white blouse with the cuffs bias-cut, fastened at the throat with a ruby brooch, and high heels. I’d never seen anyone, no mother, no girl, no woman dressed like that at home in the afternoon.
I WOULD HAVE LIKED to hear her voice, but as if she had taken a vow of silence, she led me without a word through the villa’s maze of hallways, to my classmate’s bedroom. Before opening the door, she turned to give me what on the face of another person would have been called a perfunctory polite smile: but which Coralla gave such a melancholy interpretation that you might think she was on the verge of tears. Her eyes studied me with an intensity and sadness so profound that it shook me to my foundations, and I was tempted to lay my hand on hers as it already gripped the doorknob, and help her to complete, together, that rotary movement, which seemed to be costing her an unheard-of effort, and by so doing, inform her: “Signora, I understand you. I’m with you, I’m at your side. I’d gladly change places with your son. I’d like to do something, something more, and believe me I’d do it for you, and not for that nutty woodpecker of a son that fate bestowed upon you. What injustice! No doubt, he’s a young man deserving of our pity, but the person who really deserves our sympathy is you, signora, you are the victim here. Please allow me to help you to turn this door handle in order to enter the room. Let’s do it together. Then I promise I’ll look after your boy Pik for the rest of the afternoon and you can occupy yourself with other, more enjoyable things. Put your mind at peace. You can’t? It’s impossible to do? You can’t seem to rid your mind of this affliction, this cross that is yours to bear? I can just imagine. I know so very many things about you, signora, things that I learned from your son. If I promise to be kind to him from now on, if I promise to help him, to protect him from the bullshit of his other classmates, will you take that into consideration? Will you repay me? And how could you repay me? Why, it’s simple. By embracing me. By throwing your arms around me and holding me tight.”
She opened the door and I found myself doing Latin homework next to Pik, who kept giving me annoying little taps on the shoulder.
I CAME BACK ANOTHER TIME. Coralla Martirolo wasn’t at home. A maid answered the door. My frustration rocketed to the stars. I hated Picchiatello.
BUT THE NEXT TIME, she was there. As soon as I saw her I abandoned myself once again to my fantasies. My heart was brimming over with joy. I don’t know why. I had immediately gone back to nurturing a feeling toward Pik that was a mix of fondness and pity, and he amused me with his various tics and his eccentricities. Staring me right in the eye, he dared to ask: “My mamma’s pretty, isn’t she?” and I nodded, unable to lie, with downcast gaze. The boy had read my mind. I said it before, Pik was magic. “Mamma!” he called. “Mamma, come here, come here now!” he shouted even louder, and I was afraid that he was about to spill the beans, telling Signora Martirolo something about me, something along the lines of “Did you know, Mamma, that he likes you?” pointing at me, “Did you know that he’s fallen in love with you?” with a singsong chant, “Edo loves my mamma . . . Edo loves my mamma . . .” Instead, luckily he just wanted a snack.
AROUND SEVEN, when Coralla Martirolo walked me back to the door (Pik had been forced by the maid to take a bath, and at that moment, he was already naked in the tub, loudly protesting, while she inundated him with water), she finally opened her mouth, and she not only spoke, she actually caressed my head.
“You have nice hair,” she told me.
13
WHEN PICCHIATELLO PRETENDED to be a waiter, there, in the pizzeria, he surprised the rest of us, his classmates, but not a bit the other waiters, the real ones: in fact, they just played along, treating him as if he really were the youngster who had just started working there and was a little lost, in dire need of gruff advice. When he had finished jotting down our orders on his notepad (we’d each gone for a margherita pizza and a fountain Coke: the cheapest items on the menu), an older mustachioed waiter came up behind him and pulled the order pad out of his hand, dressing him down the way you do with a new hire, a green beginner. “How the devil did you write these orders? The pizzaiolo isn’t going to be able to make heads or tails of this!” and with a rapid shorthand he transcribed the orders onto a scrap of paper that he then impaled on the long spike that stood on the counter next to the wood-fired pizza oven.
This seemed to demonstrate only one thing, but in a very clear, precise manner: that the only way to deal with Pik was to take his buffoonery seriously. Not to unmask it. One had to be neither indulgent nor consolatory (after all, poor thing, you see the way he is?), instead one had to act on the plane of reality. Sure, fair enough, that’s the only plane there is: everything is real, even our dreams, even monsters.
TIME WENT BY and he remained unchanged. I want to tell the story of the time that we went out together, Pik, two girls, and me. Maybe it was the year before I left SLM. It was the riskiest and most decisive experiment, and once it had been run it would become possible to issue a definitive judgment on the case of Pik, a question that had so interested psychologists, professors, and therapists, namely, whether he could be salvaged. I realized that deep down I was almost wishing for a full-blown disaster, a catastrophe, with the girls scandalized offended disgusted etc., after which I could just be done with Pik entirely, like so many others before me.
I HAD MET ONE OF THE GIRLS Pik and I were supposed to squire out and about that ev
ening at the beach, the previous summer. Her name was Monica. Back then, many, many girls, in numbers that defied belief, at least in Rome, were named Monica, and I couldn’t guess the reason: toward the end of the fifties and at the start of the following decade, the name of St. Augustine’s mother had influenced pregnant women, both in the bourgeoisie and the working classes. Now, this Monica had become very fond of me over the course of the summer, she’d call me, talk to me, laugh at my efforts to get her to like me, so much so that I was tempted (and at the same time concerned, of two minds) to try to see whether her interest in me was strictly in the vein of friendship, or whether, instead, she liked me, that is, if she’d go so far as to consider me a potential boyfriend. It wasn’t easy and it still isn’t, even though the signals they send have become more explicit, to read women’s minds, and it is true that they can wind up taking offense either at having their openness misinterpreted as emotional and sexual availability, or at it not being taken that way: I believe that the reason is first and foremost because what reigns in their heads is confusion, that is, about whether being desired represents an ambition or a burden to them. With a view to clarifying this doubt, and making it clear to myself whether, in the final analysis, I really liked Monica after all, that is, whether I liked her, aside from any question of her potential availability, I had phoned her after finding her phone number on a sheet of graph paper that had survived being washed in the back pocket of a pair of jeans where I had tucked it away two months earlier, outside a gelato shop at Monte Circeo, with the promise that I’d call her. I hadn’t given her my number because of a stupid shamefacedness, inexplicable, unless you adduce the factor of my shyness back then.
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