“If I do that, then Papà and Ezi will think that I’m just selfish . . .”
“So, what are you saying, that you’re not?” asked Rachele, grimacing in a way that was funny for her age, making the face of an adult saying something that’s taken for certain: eyebrows arched, corners of the mouth twisted downward in disdain.
“No. No . . .! Well, sure, I’m selfish, I’ll admit it.”
“And so?”
“I don’t want them to know,” she said, pointing to their father and Ezechiele, who were walking a little way ahead and talking as they walked. The architect Rummo was leaning on a stout branch, stripped of bark, that he had picked up during a previous hike, not because he needed any support, but because that improvised walking stick really was beautiful, and it was nice to spin it, twisting his wrist, before digging it into the ground and, afterward, slinging it forward for the next step. It helped him to set a rhythm as he hiked.
“But you think I am?” Rachele resumed; she knew Elisabetta’s weakness for their father and how important it was to her sister not to have him think any the less of her.
“What do I care about you? You’re selfish too. We’re even.”
“It’s not true that I’m selfish,” Rachele murmurs, and her voice cracks. “It’s not true one little bit,” and tears start to well up in her eyes.
They walk along in single file for a stretch.
Choking back her tears, Rachele suddenly says, “Lis, I’m thirsty,” and leaps, both feet planted, over next to her sister. “Let me have some water.”
“No.”
“Give me the canteen.”
“I’m not giving it to you.”
“Elisabetta! Give it to me.”
“Rather than give it to you, I’ll pour all the water onto the dirt,” and Lis unscrewed the cap and made the gesture, but only the gesture, of tipping the canteen.
“But then what if Papà tells you he’s thirsty?”
“He can just ask Ezechiele, he has a canteen too. Plus, it’s not hot out. Not one little bit.”
“No one would ever think you’re two years older than me. You’re acting like a little girl. And even though I am still a little girl, I wouldn’t act like that.”
“You’re not a little girl anymore, you’re already ten years old!” Elisabetta retorted, in utter conviction. “Whereas, in a certain sense, I’m still a little girl, I still haven’t turned twelve!”
They heard their father’s voice.
“Hey, you two! You’re not fighting, are you?”
“No, Papà, not at all. We were just talking,” his daughters explained.
“Good girls. But while you’re talking, look out for where you put your feet. And put your hats back on.”
Both Elisabetta and Rachele had their hats hanging down their backs by the chin strap.
The rocky ridge, bare of vegetation, along which they were walking, now that they were halfway to their destination, was at the highest point over the lake, and the stone was riddled with fissures and cracks.
“Have you had some water? Because it’s nice and hot out today.”
Elisabetta unslung the canteen from around her neck, the same canteen that she had previously threatened to pour out onto the ground. She handed it to her sister. Rachele gathered her long wheat-blond hair and tied it in a crude braid, while Elisabetta waited, arm extended. Then, unhurried, she took the canteen, drank off two long swigs, dried her mouth, and handed it back to her sister, who also took a careful, measured drink of water. Then she put the canteen back over her shoulder, “Oh, right,” said Elisabetta, and she put her floppy hat back on her head, covering her short hair, much darker than Rachele’s, with reddish shocks here and there. Rachele did the same.
“YOU HAVEN’T COLLECTED anything for Mamma.”
“Neither have you.”
“You want to bet that I can find more nice things than you can?”
“Look, I’ll just let you win that bet, I don’t much feel like it today, and Mamma has more than enough of that junk already. She doesn’t know where to put it anymore. The other day I saw her tossing a bag of it in the trash when she thought no one was looking!”
TO SEE THEM WALKING through the woods, Lea and her mother, Eleonora, look like two girls rambling aimlessly, even though one of them is forty-two years old and the other is surrounded by the bubble of parenthood carefully crafted by her mother, a bubble capable of withstanding any pressure, both from without and from within; nothing could shatter it. Both of them sense this bubble as an incomparable source of support and an impediment. Both are happy and unhappy in equal measure. Or perhaps we should say, in each of them, their sensations upend and reverse, first in one direction and then in the other, overturning their moods, like an hourglass being turned, from wretched to dreamy and enchanted . . .
THE ARCHITECT RUMMO is a woman who is just now beginning to consider the immense effort made to arrive where she is now. She hadn’t sensed it while she was accomplishing it, but she senses it now that the burden is decidedly lighter. Only a few years ago, she had her professional obligations plus six children who looked to her for everything, her and her eager and willing, loving and enterprising spouse, who however could perhaps be categorized in certain ways as the seventh of the children she cared for, if it hadn’t been for the fact that an actual seventh child was on the way, the unplanned-for Giaele. And yet it is this very same exhaustion that lets her slide forward now, without friction against things and people, without the spasmodic attachment that had once held sway. She’s afraid that she might have to attribute to early aging this serenity, so similar to indifference, and the serenity barely savored is immediately converted into anguish and fear. Another few years, and she will be done with it all, with all this, and she’ll have to find new reasons for living that are planted on this earth and not in the realms of hope or faith—and the good things about those are that they help you to get through difficulties, projected as they are into the future, a limitless and glorious future, but they’re not enough to fill the present, they aren’t designed to fill the present, if the present is empty, but only to tolerate it, if it’s a present made up of hard work or sorrow. For Eleonora, and perhaps for everyone, religion has always been a bet placed on the future. Now that she is midway through her life, gluing together artworks with bark and clusters of juniper berries collected on vigorous hikes gives her a sense of time, frees her of her anxieties; when it becomes an occupation, and she needs to fill the time instead of emptying it, then she’ll have to confer weight and substance to it instead of lightening it, then those cheery and picturesque collages promise to strike anguish into her heart.
GIOACCHINO HAD LONG since run through the story of Joseph and Pharaoh, enriching it with the further adventures in Egypt of Moses and Aaron, the plagues, and the parting of the Red Sea, as well as Baby Jesus taking refuge there while King Herod slaughtered all the newborns in Israel. Giaele didn’t seem particularly horrified by his account of the massacre, and in fact she had just continued to ask for more specific details.
“But did the soldiers cut the children’s heads off?”
“Well, yes, I think so, that, too . . .”
“And did they poke holes in their tummies with their swords?”
“Yes, yes . . .”
“And did their mommies cry?”
“All the tears they had in their eyes.”
My classmate Rummo is starting to get worried about the little girl’s morbid and unquenchable curiosity. “Poor little children, but what had they done wrong? And did they hang them by the neck? The little girls too?”
“Now, enough is enough, Giaele. Anyway, no, not the little girls. There was no need.”
He wished that Lea might intervene now, and help to break the taut span of Giaele’s attention with a wisecrack, or by pretending to trip her and make her fall, or by picking her up with both hands under her arms and swooping her through the air. “Fly, fly, fly . . .”
“YES,�
� Lea thinks, “he’s a very good-looking boy, but he is the way he is. I doubt it will last.” It just so happens that the boy she’s developed a crush on for the past couple of weeks is Stefano Jervi, I don’t know if anyone remembers him, a classmate of both Gioacchino and your author, a charming character, in effect, capable of making a big impression on anyone, boys and girls and adult women. Luckily, Lea’s is nothing but a passing infatuation, though right now it fills every last fiber of her mind and her skinny, elongated body, devoid of any feminine curves. Sooner or later, it will wane. Stefano has managed to take her to bed twice, but that’s not actually an accurate description of what happened with Lea, because the girl was an active participant, in fact, more active than him, and certainly not unaware that those encounters were fleeting and unlikely to lead to anything more.
In the Catholic religion as it was shaped and practiced so fervidly by Lea, sexual relations are sparks cast off by the great bonfire of universal love. “My own private Jesus,” she would describe her Savior with candid irony. With the very same casual offhandedness she handled religious images, the way they do in India, shuffling them carelessly. She drew pictures of Christ completely naked, she hung dozens of little images of Mexican Madonnas, dressed to the nines and made up and crowned, on the back of the door of the armoire in her bedroom, in place of a mirror, and she would dress in front of them every day, gazing at herself in their reflection. As she walks listlessly through the woods, she keeps both hands in the pockets of her shorts, which belonged to Ezechiele when he was thirteen, and which now fit her because she has no hips, clutching tight in her right fist a tiny crucifix fastened with a fine chain to a serpent biting its tail. She often fantasizes about seeing small animals crucified, such as fox cubs or dormice, or little girls, or old men with long white beards, and as she imagines these things she feels impetuous transports of love toward those tortured figures.
“Do you remember, Mamma?”
“Yes? Remember what, Lea?” Eleonora Rummo replies, torn from her vague thoughts.
“That time when I was a little girl and I dreamed I had stabbed Jesus with a pitchfork and hoisted Him on high.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Lea?!”
“Sure, come on, I woke up in a cold sweat . . . and He was twisting and writhing, like a lizard . . .”
“No, I don’t remember any such thing.”
She shakes her head. She decides that Lea has just made up that traumatic memory, perhaps in perfectly good faith, the way you might remember a dream, taking it for something that had actually happened. Lea had dreamed that she had dreamed. When she was born, her parents had been about to add an “h” to the end of her very short name, like in English, but then they had decided not to gild the lily.
IT MUST BE THE WOODS with its shadows that is generating this refraction effect among the members of the team that Gioacchino is walking with, giving the impression that each of them is walking on their own. Only Giaele keeps moving around from one sibling to the other.
Unlike the biblical heroine from whom she takes her unwieldy name—a name about which she has never complained or felt ashamed, the way children with odd names so often do—Giaele doesn’t use nails, but instead a tiny pin that she plants in the brains of her brothers and sisters: and that pin is her insatiable and intrusive curiosity.
“What is this?”
“And what is this other thing?”
“And who does this belong to?”
“Listen, Giaele, why don’t you gather a few berries or some little rocks for our artworks?”
TOBIA SHOUTS AND WAVES his arms: “Hurry up, Mamma!”
“We’re not in any hurry at all,” she replies, pensively. Oh, gosh, what children I have. Each one different from the last. All of them special. “Tobia, did you see how nice these woods are? Did you notice all the lovely trees?”
“Sure, they’re beautiful, but they all look the same to me . . . Mamma, come on!”
“No, it’s not true, look closely. Look at them from up close.”
Asking Tobia to do such a thing is nonsensical. To him, they are all just so many wooden cylinders with leaves. Stakes driven into the ground, to swerve around in a slalom. His desire to compete sweeps away all details. He’d burn that whole forest to the ground just to light a torch to carry up to a mountaintop.
WHEN THE TWO GROUPS spotted each other, they were both about the same distance from the agreed-upon meeting point, on the opposite shore of the Lago dell’Angelo, a little restaurant built entirely out of wood that had been closed for months. That meant that whether you went around the lake on the western side or the eastern side, it took the same amount of time: roughly an hour and a half. On the restaurant’s deserted terrace, the two teams of the Rummo family greeted each other as if it had been who knows how long since the last time, they crossed themselves, they hastily gobbled down the snacks that Davide had carried for them all on his own shoulders, and then they split up again to head back. “I wanted to go with her . . .” Rachele complained under her breath, pointing to her mother. Ezi pointed out to her that there was no changing the teams that had been drawn by lots at the beginning. “But why not?” Ezechiele hesitated, he didn’t know what answer to give. “Will you come with me, then?” Giaele asked, taking her hand, but Rachele replied, “No, I can’t,” and brusquely shook her hand free from her little sister’s grasp, turned on her heels, and went running toward the woods, to ensure that no one else could witness her disappointment and her stifled tears, choked back for the second time in the back of her throat. Her father laughed when he saw how eager she was to resume the hike. “Those girls just never get tired,” he said to his wife, as he slung his rucksack onto his shoulders. The tie between the two teams in their circuit around the lake had embittered Tobia, who now had no desire to run, or even really to walk. He got back to his feet and began trudging along, all hunched over, kicking to the side with each step.
THEY HADN’T BEEN WALKING ten minutes before Giaele asked Gioacchino to pick her up and carry her. “All right, but only for a little way, then you’ll have to walk.” He let her climb up onto his back and wrap her little legs around the back of his neck. But from that moment on he had to take great care not to trip and fall: the rock he was walking on was crumbly and riven with sudden cracks and fissures. After he had walked a hundred yards or so, Giaele began kicking her heels against Gioacchino’s chest, rocking from side to side like a cowboy breaking a wild horse in a rodeo. “Cut it out, or I’ll put you down,” he threatened her, but she wouldn’t stop and instead started singing aimlessly. “Stop it, Giaele, that’s bothering me,” and he clenched both ankles tight to hold her little feet still. “Ouch! No, you’re the one who’s hurting me!” the little girl complained.
“All right, that’s enough, now get down.”
Giaele showed no sign of climbing down from up there.
“Get down!”
Their mother hurried up and pulled the little girl down off her brother’s shoulders, lowered her to the ground, and gave her a little smack on the bottom to encourage her to walk. Lea finally realized it might be time to weigh in and suggested to Giaele that they sing together the nonsense song that the little girl had been singing while riding on Gioacchino’s shoulders.
“No, because you don’t know the words.”
“Oh, yes I do.”
“Then sing it.”
Cecco Rivolta
Hurt himself when he bolted
Slid all the way downstairs
Laughing like he had no cares
Like a human slinky
Only to break his pinky.
Almost offended, Giaele ran on ahead.
NOW SHE’S CLIMBING and hopping on the rocks, like a goat . . .
She leans out over the lake. She runs back because the height makes her head spin, then she ventures close to the rocky edge again. She looks down and sees herself in the lake. Then she poses with her arms at right angles, like an ancient Egyptian, so that
the others will notice her.
Freed of the burden, Gioacchino whistles the chorus of “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull under his breath. He can’t wait to get home so he can listen to it again. Our classmate Arbus let him borrow the record. Rummo has to make a tape of it and then give it back. Duration of the loan: three days. It’s already been two days.
THE LITTLE GIRL rummaged in her pocket. She pulled out a small red berry that she had picked on the way out. She ran to her older sister to show it to her, hand raised.
“Look, Lea.”
“What is it?”
“It’s for Mamma, but don’t tell her.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a surprise.” She opened her hand.
Eleonora had lagged behind, on the far side of a rocky outcropping. As always, running late, but she would catch up.
“Did you find it?” Gioacchino asked, also bending over to take a look.
“Yes,” the little one replied proudly.
Lea wanted to get a closer look at it and tried to take it, but Giaele withdrew her arm and shut her fist tight.
“It’s very pretty, but . . .”
At that very moment, they heard their mother let out a yell. Lea and my old classmate ran back.
Eleonora Rummo had set her foot wrong and had caught her hiking boot in a crack in the rock. With a delicate operation, her children helped her to get free, but once she was able to move the foot, their mother burst out in a genuine scream of pain. Her eyes welled over with tears of rage. And she began to curse.
“Fuuuuck! Fucking damn it to hell!”
“Come on, Mamma . . .”
Lea’s fright was due to the fact that she had never heard her mother curse before. She had used a different voice, this sounded more like a roar.
“Ahhhrrr!”
“Please, Mamma . . .”
“Nooo! Not this, not now!! Goddamn it all!! Goddamn it all to hell!!”
“Enough! That’s enough!!” Gioacchino yells at her, trying to shut her up.
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