So they never owned the house, after all, I thought, stunned. And yet Max had shown me around, pointing to each object in the villa and telling me the story behind it: the story of the old rifles hanging on the wall above the fireplace, collected by his father during his trips overseas, and then the rocking chair, the original Royal Navy hammock, the knife that was chipped by a baboon’s teeth, the canvases painted by his mother before alcohol had pickled her brain . . . still lifes, I have to admit, rather lovely, with pebbles, candles, necklaces, and bottles. I glanced at the walls to look for them, but they were no longer there.
“We really weren’t thinking of coming, but anyway, the house was empty . . .”
The woman handed me a glass and filled it from a pitcher in which the ice cubes, newly plunged into the lemonade, were still crackling and splitting.
“I never go to the beach. I hate lying in the sun. It’s bad for my skin. My husband, on the other hand, goes fishing. Maybe next week our daughter will join us. She’s married and she lives in France.”
The lemonade was unsugared. I took a couple of sips, thinking I’d leave now. “It’s a pity, because they had been coming five or six years in a row now . . . they seemed to like the place. We only came in the winter. It’s nice here in the winter, you know . . . there’s no one around. Some people don’t like the solitude . . .”
“Excuse me, though, what about the cat?”
“Oh, Lord . . . Certainly, the cat.”
“Melville.”
“Melville, right, poor thing . . . what a name, though, how on earth did they come up with it? With all the names to choose from. I say poor thing, but it’s not as if he’s particularly sociable, at least not with us. But what are we supposed to do, let him starve to death?”
Max and his mamma had been obliged to leave in a hurry, and they’d been unable to find the cat. He’d gone to ground in the pine forest. They’d been forced to abandon him there. When the owners of the house had come to take possession of the now empty house, they’d seen him wandering around in the vicinity, and as soon as they’d opened the door, the cat had darted inside. And since then, he’d refused to budge from the place.
AH, THAT UNSUGARED LEMONADE! I drank three glasses of it. The lady of the house was in the mood for a little conversation. From the pleasure she showed in entertaining me, I guessed she had no children, then I remembered the one who was about to arrive from France. The married daughter. In that case, what she missed was a son, or just anyone to make it worth the trouble to squeeze all those lemons. A son whose thirst she could quench, a son to watch as he put on a clean T-shirt, a son to scold for some trivial thing, a son to give chores to do, such as “We’re out of cat food, could you go and buy some for me? I’m so tired today . . .” knowing that he’ll complain about it, but in the end, he’ll do it. I’ve always gone along willingly with these sort of impromptu adoptions. Actually, I was waiting for her husband to arrive so I could talk to him. I would gladly have gone to buy several cans of cat food for Melville, in the meantime. But the fishing must have ended early, because the master of the house came home. My thoughts, which had wandered away from Max, turned back to him and remained there.
HE INTRODUCED HIMSELF with an edge of formality, as if I were an adult. “Marinucci,” he said, then he extended his free hand to shake. In his other hand he was carrying a plastic bucket.
Marinucci was a big man, with swollen gut and legs. He wore a faded canvas cap, a checkered shirt open on his chest, and eyeglasses with a pair of dark lenses clipped to the frame, the kind that you can flip up or down; they were pretty common in the seventies but you hardly ever see them anymore.
“How old are you?” he asked me, brusquely. I told him. He evidently decided that I was the right age for a man-to-man talk. He took my arm. “Ada, why don’t you go put these in the fridge?” and he handed her the bucket. Only then did I look inside: the bucket contained three fish. I don’t know why I remember it so clearly, and yet I’m certain of what I say now, forty years later: there were three fish in the bucket, one of which was still flailing. The clearest images are often these side views.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re a friend of the boy, I think it’s only right for you to know. I chose to keep my wife out of it. She’s easily upset. If she hears of such a thing, and what’s more, learns that it happened in our house, it will ruin her vacation. Which would consequently ruin mine.”
He had a strong Tuscan accent, which to my ears has always sounded brutal.
Yes, brutal, in spite of all the literature and all the water that has flowed under the old bridges: or maybe it’s exactly that original brutality, of ways and concepts, that made the literature that derived from it so powerful, who can say.
“The son phoned me, and told me that they were leaving. I believe they left late at night. They’d received bad news about the father. He was in Switzerland, very sick. Yeah, really sick. He’d checked into a hospital without telling them about it, neither his wife nor his son, but his condition had suddenly worsened. As soon as she received this news, Signora Vera tried to commit suicide.”
“What, she tried to kill herself? And how do you know that?”
“Max told me. That is, he didn’t actually tell me, but I could tell, all the same.”
And he gazed at me, with an eloquent glance.
“’Un so’ miha stupido, eh!” His Tuscan accent thickened, as he snorted that he was no fool.
I shook my head to indicate that I hadn’t thought anything of the sort about him.
“But the boy handled it well! Your friend. Who knows what someone else might have done instead . . .”
I thought that by talking about that hypothetical other person, Marinucci was referring to me. Well, I certainly would have gone into a state of panic: with my father on his deathbed on the one hand and my mother trying to kill herself. I asked him how she’d tried to do it. He glanced at me with a smirk of arrogance and practically burst out laughing.
“How do you think she attempted it? With a handful of pills, of course!”
I THOUGHT BACK TO VERA, Max’s mother. I couldn’t manage to separate her from the summer dresses she wore in a spectacular manner, naïve and brazen, as if at a fashion runway presentation or, rather, in the glossy photos in magazines, which depict in unreal poses the gestures and movements that are supposed to appear spontaneous, a greeting, a farewell, a leap for joy, the hand shading the eyes, hugging knees to chest, sweeping back hair, a pensive moment; nor could I remember her gaze hidden behind the big sunglasses with red or white frames, overwhelming her lovely triangular face, shrinking it to the size of a little girl’s face, playing in front of the bathroom mirror, dressing up with her mother’s accessories. She wore them indoors, too, those sunglasses, so similar to the multifaceted compound eyes of a fly viewed through a microscope, she even wore them to cook or leaf through magazines while sprawled out on the sofa, dangling her wooden clog with the progressive flexing of her enameled toes, from pinky to big toe. I managed to see them only once or twice, her eyes: and they were immense, vain and filled with anxiety, emerald green, but the iris ringed in black, like the eyes of a big cat in the adventure books that I had devoured until just a few years earlier, reading them in close succession, books that in fact told of enormous panthers, fabulous emeralds and rubies, guarded by sects of assassins in their subterranean temples. But at that instant I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye, couldn’t remember them, struck as I was by an anxiety similar to hers. The news had upset me. What came to mind instead were her dresses, her clothing. Her rumpled gauzy blouses. Her shorts. And then the scarf wrapped tight over her forehead, her heavy necklaces, the spaghetti shoulder straps of skimpy summer dresses, dotted with garish flowers, over her bronzed shoulders, her bronzed back, the neckline that revealed freckled flesh, because Max’s mother was fair, with light-colored hair, light complected, but with that special blond complexion that dark
ens in the sun until it turns into a sort of golden leather, oily. Described in these words, it might seem that she was trying to be seductive and alluring, beautiful as she was and virtually nude, aside from the few square inches of almost impalpable fabric, the hooks, the interwoven knit rings of the bodice, the oversized belts that girded her waist: but instead that exhibition was put on, so to speak, in a void, for no one’s benefit. Max had another opinion and was certain that his mother had a lover, or several lovers, there at the sea, and back in Milan. He had told me so more than once and he confirmed it with the insults that he spewed at her through clenched teeth. I personally recoiled from that thought in utter horror, indeed, to tell the truth, I couldn’t even bring myself to contemplate it. It was my mind that rejected the thought, a priori, as if it were being asked to make a superhuman effort, or to contradict basic logic, the kind that told you that two plus two makes four, and there are no alternatives to that fact. Max’s mother couldn’t possibly betray her husband, whom I had never met, for that matter—she just couldn’t, period. Adultery was a thought beyond my intellectual scope. On account of that, the first time I read Anna Karenina, during my time as a draftee, I didn’t understand, that is, I simply didn’t grasp what the novel was about: I literally didn’t understand where the problem was.
And in any case, the idea that it was all true seemed to worry and scandalize me far more than her son.
If you ask me, Max was a Fascist in part because of it. Hold on a second, I’m not trying to say that he was a Fascist because his mother had broken the marriage bond, but rather because confidently, bitterly, Max could think and accept as established fact that she had, be more than certain of it, that is, that she was cheating on her husband, his father, for the simple reason that he couldn’t conceive of the slightest possibility that his mother wasn’t cheating on his father. That his mother was a slut was something that Max simply took for granted. In that sort of ribald generalization which takes the form of what we call witticisms, it is customary to say that Italian males are convinced that all women are sluts, except for their own mother. They assume that she alone is a saint. Well, that’s not true: that is, it isn’t true that they believe it. Maybe they pay lip service to the notion, maybe they even tell themselves that it’s true, but deep down they don’t believe it in the slightest. Quite the contrary—the poor opinion that Italian males have (or had) about the respectability of women is something they originally formed with respect to their own mother. That opinion concerns her. Out of jealousy or resentment. When it all comes down to it, your mamma is that slut who denied you her breast. Not always, but at some point, and in a capricious manner, which is even worse, it only sharpens the sting. Dear reader, if there’s a woman on earth whose faithfulness you should have doubts about, that’s your mother . . .
Max despised his mother, despised her unsettling beauty, her weakness, her madness. The way she dressed (“like a slut”), the cocktails she drank, the puddles of tears she wept. If she had been less wealthy, or if she had been homely, her son might have felt some understanding toward her; but as the poet puts it, it’s hard to feel pity for beautiful women, you have to be particularly intelligent and sensitive to do it, while Max had first crushed his sensitivity with his karate chops, and then conveyed it all into the fingertips with which he strummed his shoulderless Cremona guitar. This was just one more reason he was a Fascist. To lose all illusions about life, about the world, a place populated only by wolves and swine, to cultivate like a hothouse flower his fanatical faith in something capable of leading him out of that world, canceling it, draining his swamp. His mother was that swamp. I imagined her vomiting up those pills with the same vehemence with which she’d gulped them down . . . and while her son upbraided her, insulting her before trundling her into the car, along with the modicum of luggage he’d managed to assemble. That was certainly no time to be thinking about Melville. And then the drive, through the night, to Milan, and on to Switzerland . . .
THINGS WERE NEVER GOING to be the same as before. Of course not. It’s a deeply moving thing to say and, at the same time, a stupid platitude that you could apply to any given point in life.
But here the doubt is even more powerful, and it shakes me from head to foot.
Things were never going to be the same as before.
But here’s the thing, and the suspicion that goes with it, maybe things weren’t the same before, either; they hadn’t been the way we thought before, and they wouldn’t be afterward: quite simply, that is, those things never had been.
MARINUCCI INSISTED ON SHOWING ME how to load the rifles that were hanging over the fireplace. An ingenious system for the times in which they had been manufactured. There was everything you could care to name in those rifles: chemistry, physics, goldsmithery, art, industry, courage, expertise, precision, and the instinct to kill. He took them down off the wall hooks, let me feel their weight, then he loaded them, aimed into the air, fired them, and hung them back up on the wall. Perhaps he, too, missed a son to whom he could impart some technical or moral notions concerning the world. It was no accident that the daughter had married a Frenchman, placing at least five or six départements, and a number of mountain ranges, between her new nuclear family and her original one. In vain Signora Marinucci tried to create a preprandial simulacrum with the invitation to stay for dinner. It wouldn’t be long, already you could catch a whiff of oil and rosemary from the kitchen. But when I was a boy, I didn’t like fish.
4
BACK THEN, time had been greatly foreshortened. Nowadays things last longer, life lasts longer, youth lasts longer, we have children later, at age fifty, women show off their breasts and they’re still fabulous. Things don’t end, even wars go on endlessly, smoldering, like in the Middle Ages. There’s space and time between one event and another.
I think of the music of that period, and I list some examples here.
EXAMPLE A
1969, In the Court of the Crimson King
1970, In the Wake of Poseidon
1970, Lizard
1971, Islands
1973, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic
EXAMPLE B
1970, Trespass
1971, Nursery Cryme
1972, Foxtrot
1973, Selling England by the Pound
1974, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
EXAMPLE C
1970, Atom Heart Mother
1971, Meddle
1972, Obscured by Clouds
1973, The Dark Side of the Moon
1975, Wish You Were Here
There, in the course of four or five years, it all began and ended, from discovery to abandonment, at a feverish, red-hot pace, you counted the months, the weeks until a new record came out.
I GOT THERE LATE, out of breath and panicky at the front door of the Piper Club, there had been something . . . there had been something at home . . . I can’t remember what it was, something must have happened at home, something in my family, which is why I got there late . . . Probably some stupid minor thing, some trivial detail, but families attribute the greatest importance to minor things and trivial details, they turn into matters of life or death. Like when they warn you: “This is the last time I’m going to warn you.” Clean up your room, get your helmet out of the front hall, take the pliers (the drill, the wrench, the stepladder) back to the doorman, it’s almost always things that have been in the wrong place for months now, and that need to be straightened up, put back, returned, after countless requests, it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back, that suddenly makes their patience snap . . . and this unfailingly happens when you’re heading out the door, when you’re already on the landing but they call you back.
Which is why I crept out stealthily, without a word to anyone, to avoid being summoned back and given warnings, repeated “for the very last time.”
Before becoming world-famous, Genesis was popular in Italy. For some reason, they were largely overlooked back in England, but in Italy they already had
hordes of passionate fans, after just their first two records, or make that three, although the first album is largely skipped entirely in most discographies, no one includes it, even the band members have forgotten it or disavowed it. I myself start their history with Trespass, which is actually their second album, and in those days Nursery Cryme had just come out, an absolute masterpiece that I must have listened to, and I’m not kidding about this, at least a hundred times, and the single track “The Musical Box” twice as many.
THE SONG TELLS A STORY that I never fully grasped, but I don’t want to go looking for the lyrics now and study them, I’m happy to settle for the residue that remains in my memory, to conclude what I had understood from the very first listen, and that is, that the song is about a rape. Rape, that’s right, it seems that that’s what it’s about . . . In the song by Genesis, a fairy tale (a dark fairy tale, but after all, aren’t they all?), it’s a little girl who is raped by a jack-in-the-box, or by someone who, like the spring-loaded puppet, pops unexpectedly out of the box, slips out unexpectedly—Old King Cole. And after a great many arpeggios and flute solos . . .
Brush back your hair . . .
And let me get to know your flesh
Your flesh, your body, that is.
Why don’t you touch me,
touch me, touch me
In a spectacular crescendo.
Now, now, now, now!
I MISSED ALL THIS by arriving late at Piper, the famous club on Via Tagliamento, made famous, in fact, by countless miles of footage and thousands of photographs, but which in that period had become the venue for performances by cult groups (I saw Soft Machine play there, for example, and Amazing Blondel). Arbus was there, with a look on his face you’d see at a funeral, which was actually his usual face: the curtain of long greasy hair as always framing his expressionless face.
The Catholic School Page 93