Like Family

by Paolo Giordano

  Forming an empty circle with my thumb and index finger, I hold it up two inches from his nose; it’s clear that with that zero I’m describing him.

  “But it’s not in the multiplication table,” he defends himself.

  “The multiplication table has nothing to do with it! It’s that you’re dense!”

  At that point Nora intervenes and asks me to leave; she’ll continue with him. From the kitchen, where I try to regain my composure, I hear her doing the multiplications for him.

  Winter

  Sometimes, after years of living together, you see signs no matter where you turn: traces of the person with whom you’ve shared a space for so long. I often come across Nora in every corner of our house, as if her spirit had settled on the objects like a fine dust, while Mrs. A., even during her last year, would encounter Renato’s tenuous hologram everywhere she went. Whenever she paused at the window to look out at the steep driveway to the street, she remembered the day when, violating her husband’s orders, she had stolen the keys from the tray in the entry hall and taken the car out of the garage. He didn’t want her to drive, but he was sick and had to be brought to the hospital three times a week for dialysis, and who else could do it if she didn’t?

  “I scraped the right side against the corner,” she told me, “and then I went home and told him, ‘Prepare yourself!’”

  She often mentioned that timid, heroic undertaking; she considered it an important step, simultaneously encompassing the beginning of Renato’s decline and the dawn of her emancipation. Until then their union had been an orderly one, much more orderly than Nora’s and mine. We were continually trading the roles of husband and wife to the point where we could no longer tell who was responsible for what. Renato drove, Mrs. A. didn’t; Mrs. A. dusted the furniture, Renato didn’t—each task had been assigned to only one of them from the beginning. A marriage lived outside the preestablished roles was foreign to her. It may be that this contributed to the security her presence gave us, because through her we experienced a somewhat shameful nostalgia for an outmoded, simplified model of the family, a model in which everyone does not have to be everything at once—male and female, logical and emotional, submissive and strict, romantic and prosaic—a model that differs from the one that in our time saddles us with such broad, undifferentiated responsibilities and makes us feel constantly inadequate no matter what.

  For the most part, Mrs. A. was indulgent toward our domestic promiscuity, excusing it as a modern flaw, yet she instinctively opposed it. She couldn’t stand to see me fumbling with the laundry, nor could she conceive of Nora taking a drill and boring a hole in a wall (a job at which my wife is actually much more skillful than I am). At those times she found a way to shoo us out and do the task for us—she who was indeed capable of taking care of everything, since widowhood had turned her into a perfectly androgynous creature. In a sense her death was also a chance at salvation: had we relied on her perspective for too long, we might have found ourselves trapped in the roles of the intrepid husband and the submissive wife, in a rerun of marriage as conceived fifty years ago.

  She was a conventional woman, steeped in doctrine and inevitably chauvinistic, but she didn’t know it. It’s uncanny how her way of addressing me, slightly more deferential than the way she spoke to Nora, confirmed me as the boss of the house. She acted as if she had no choice but to give more credence to my opinions, more attention to my needs, more importance to my qualities than to those of my wife, despite the fact that her affection was all for Nora.

  One summer I persuaded Nora to take an early vacation with her mother and Emanuele. During that brief period of bachelorhood, Mrs. A. looked after me with more care than ever before. She indulged herself in preparing dishes that Nora would have forbidden and often stayed to eat dinner in the evening—something she’d never done—in order to keep me company. In the morning she arrived earlier than usual, bearing the daily harvest from her vegetable garden. By the time I got up, she had already set the table for breakfast and placed a bag with my lunch next to my backpack: I would eat it later at the university instead of the cafeteria’s sandwiches that, she said, would only weigh me down. She even brought a bunch of orange gerberas that she set in the center of the table. She played the role of the dutiful wife, and I did not stop her.

  It was a muggy July, and we had not yet installed the air conditioners, so I walked around the apartment in my underwear. I had the impression that her eyes followed me, that she liked to look at me. As absurd as it may seem, after a week a faint erotic charge hovered in the rooms.

  By the time Nora came back, I had grown used to that strange intimacy. The first time my wife saw me appear in my underwear in front of Mrs. A., she asked me to follow her into the bedroom, where she ordered me to put on some pants.

  “So now you’re even jealous of Babette?” I teased. “I don’t think she has any particular designs on me, you know.”

  “She’s still a woman,” Nora said very seriously. “Don’t forget that.”

  _____

  The window from which Renato watched Mrs. A. tackle the ramp with the car, his heart in his mouth, is the same one from which she, in February, looks out at a blank scene. A disturbance in the Atlantic has settled over the northern part of the peninsula and all told has dumped more snow than we’ve seen in the last ten years. Temperatures haven’t risen above zero, not even in the middle of the day, and adamantine corridors of ice cover the streets, causing people to fracture wrists, ankles and sacra. Given the overcrowding in the emergency rooms, Civil Defense has recommended that everyone stay home, and Mrs. A. is among the few to obey.

  None of the tenants has bothered to shovel the snow from the courtyard; rather than exert themselves, they prefer to park along the street. She was the only one who shoveled as long as she had the strength, as long as there was a good reason to go out, and that good reason was us. When it snowed, we tried to persuade her to stay over for the night—a folding cot was ready and waiting in Emanuele’s room—but Mrs. A. wanted to go back to her own home, maybe because Renato’s spirit awaited her for dinner, so she braved the slippery roads to Rubiana in her minuscule car. “She comes to us despite the storm,” Nora would remark, surprised each time by such dedication. “My mother, on the other hand, won’t drive if there’s a trace of fog. When I was little, she wouldn’t take me to the dentist because of the fog, so now all my teeth are in bad shape. What a witch.”

  Anyone outside who glimpsed Mrs. A.’s silhouette at the window would wonder if it was a man or a woman. Her gauntness has obliterated her feminine attributes: on her bald, seemingly shrunken head, she sports the mint green nightcap—during the third cycle of chemotherapy she suddenly lost all her hair—and by this time she routinely wears a dark sweater and slacks that are loose on her, like a prison uniform. That’s exactly what she is: a prisoner. The soft layer of snow on the ground, a sight that has always enchanted her, now seems like an insuperable impediment.

  Bad weather has kept her trapped in the apartment for fourteen consecutive days. Twice Giulietta’s husband has done her shopping for her, a basic list very different from what she would have bought for herself. People who take care of us are almost never able to do things the way we’d like, but we have to make do: they’ve already done enough. A little clump of snow falls off the man’s boots as he asks her the obvious questions, then melts on the floor of the entryway, going no further, a thin puddle that she doesn’t bother to wipe up.

  Her visits are limited to this. Her hermitage is difficult to reach. Cancer, her worst enemy, is the only company still left to her. She no longer cares about anything except the clinical schedule that marks the days, weeks, months. By now she spends entire afternoons in bed, with the TV on, dozing in front of images of glowing girls talking about their numerous boyfriends—to her, a woman who has remained faithful to the same man all her life. Mrs. A. doesn’t judge them harshly, she doesn’t envy them. Th
ey simply belong to a new breed; they’re extraterrestrials, and their adventures leave her indifferent.

  _____

  The truth is that the PET scan and the second CT scan reveal a complete failure. The cancerous tumor has grown three millimeters in diameter, as if the toxins had scattered everywhere except where they were needed. The hair she’d sacrificed, the nearly thirty pounds she’d lost and the disgusting vomiting were all in vain. The oncologist who has been in charge of her case from the beginning doesn’t show the slightest emotion as she pronounces all this; she never shows emotion, and it’s an aspect of her character that Mrs. A. has come to appreciate, though earlier it seriously bothered her. The doctor has the Teutonic iciness of a military strategist, a coldness that goes well with her thick, wavy, auburn hair. She can’t worry about the emotional fallout of every report she provides, or otherwise, with thirty patients hovering on the brink of survival or death, her frame of mind would be a constantly spinning centrifuge. “But there’s a positive side,” she added, “for the moment no other metastases have appeared. The tumor seems . . . frozen.”

  Nora was also present at the consultation, having insisted on accompanying Mrs. A.; maybe she had a presentiment that it would go badly. Later she would tell me how the doctor had chosen a metaphor in tune with the weather conditions to lie to Babette. While Mrs. A. was in the bathroom recomposing her tear-ravaged face, Nora had asked, “How much time does she have?”

  The doctor sighed, displaying a certain impatience with that kind of question, since sooner or later in cancer situations someone always came along wanting to know a date, to trivialize the sense of the treatment, and in this case it was Nora.

  “Six months. Maybe.”

  In retrospect one might say that she was too harsh, that she had not taken into account Mrs. A.’s exceptional mettle: in the end she underestimated it by almost fifty percent.

  On the fifteenth day of being shut in, Mrs. A. wakes up with a pain in her hand so acute that she starts screaming. She calls the medical responders. From behind their windows, the building’s tenants watch the ambulance slipping and sliding dangerously on the ramp, its flashing lights tinting the blanket of snow blue and orange. Finally they see Mrs. A., wrapped up in an aluminum blanket, bundled into the rear door.

  After that morning she will never again get into her sky blue Fiat Seicento. This was the end of her emancipation. All it took was one surrender to find out she no longer had the necessary courage; now the sole thought of driving a vehicle, even just a tricycle, of simultaneously managing the steering wheel, the pedals, the gearshift, of looking in the mirrors and keeping an eye on the host of other vehicles that pass her or come at her from the opposite direction, terrifies her, as if those actions, taken together, which until a moment ago had been interrelated, had now lost their cohesion. The car stays put for the rest of the winter, its battery discharging minute by minute, until a cousin—I don’t know which one—goes to pick it up, to give it to a nephew or sell it.

  Mrs. A. fills out the application forms to request transportation to and from the hospital. The immediate positive response she receives contains the words “permanent disability” and the adjective “critical,” two terms she would complain about at length.

  _____

  It must have been more or less at that time that I spoke to my therapist about Mrs. A. As he listened to me, he jiggled his right leg impatiently and smoked more than usual. During one session he said something that at the moment sounded gratuitous and scornful: “All these cancer stories are the same.”

  We discussed whether it was reasonable to think that the circumstances of a person’s death reflect in part what that person had been in life. Did Mrs. A. deserve what was happening to her, had she at any rate contributed to bringing it upon herself? Because what she could not seem to accept was first and foremost how unfair that punishment appeared.

  I had a grandfather who had been a petty man, who didn’t like anybody long before the onset of his dementia, so irascible that he instilled in me a profound animosity against the elderly and old age in general. For him, falling from a ladder propped against a cherry tree and lying there, dying, on the ground all night, unnoticed, as the rain drenched him, was indeed a fitting end. But Mrs. A., what sins did she have to atone for? And if it made sense to look for a correlation between the dynamics of death and the failures of life, then what end could I expect for myself?

  The therapist, who is generally overcome with enthusiasm when it comes to analogies, interrupted me coldly. “There’s not too much difference between one death and another,” he said. “Nearly all of us end up suffocated.” Then he straightened up in the chair that was a little too small for his size, as if reinvigorated. “Now let’s forget about the housekeeper. Let’s talk about your wife instead.”

  “About Nora? Why?”

  The Scarecrow

  If it weren’t for my wife’s aptitude for phone conversations, the heroic methodicalness with which she makes the rounds, each week, of friends and acquaintances, giving each one the time and attention he deserves, we would not have heard much about Mrs. A. starting that spring. In fact, if it weren’t for Nora and her devotion to the telephone, a lot of things would not have happened: we two, for example, would not have fallen in love.

  The impatient guy I used to be couldn’t keep up any dialogue that wasn’t face-to-face for more than a few minutes: I was dismissive, not inclined to chat, and I always had something in front of me that demanded my attention, usually a page of notes. My friends knew this, being programmed approximately the same way, so communication between us usually took place via brief text messages or a few lines via e-mail. By age twenty I had gained a questionable reputation for being rude to a classmate who had a crush on me, a girl I even liked. Every afternoon she called me on the phone for no particular reason, just to chat, she said. One day I had the guts to tell her not to call me anymore, because, unlike her, maybe, I had more important things to do. Wouldn’t it be better to see each other at the university or when we had a date? Couldn’t she do me a favor and hold whatever interesting thing she had to tell me until break time the next morning?

  Nora had managed to turn all this around. The amount of time I spent on the phone with her had quickly aroused the suspicion—scary and disturbing—that something unprecedented was happening: to me, to her, to the two of us together. No matter where I was or with whom, I managed to find time to talk with her, unceremoniously leaving other people and obligations behind. At the end of every call, I checked the usage counter on the screen and was amazed at the lack of remorse I felt and, on the contrary, at the urge I had to redial her number. I have a sequence of recollections of myself walking around in circles, looking down at my feet, mostly listening to Nora and her pauses, while my earlobe overheated, pressed against the device’s tiny speaker, and the palm of my hand sweated a little. She still teases me about how I was before I met her, and I doubt she will ever stop. “When I think about where I found you,” she says, “in that hidey-hole where you’d retreated, all rigid and terrified, together with your quarks.” For me, I suppose, falling in love will always be something akin to being flushed out.

  In May, Nora, in a voice that’s bright and chirpy (though too loud, exasperating me and making me ask her to lower it), uses the same Socratic skill she used with me to draw our unsociable, battered Mrs. A. into the futile conversations like those of the past. The remission period has arrived punctually for her, like every other codified stage of the illness. The magical disappearance of symptoms, all symptoms, including those related to the toxicity of the chemotherapy, has revived her interest in the world that still exists outside her body. And so here come the horoscopes again, the pearls of wisdom summarized into pithy proverbs, the in-depth dissertations on how best to cook the zucchini that are just starting to flood the market stalls (yes, that’s right, even her appetite has reawakened, what joy!)—in short, here is Babette
, the woman we know and love, the rock we all lean on, who has no one to lean on in turn.

  Occasionally dozing off, I listen to Nora, who is listening to Mrs. A. It’s Saturday morning, past ten, but we’re still lingering in bed as Emanuele busies himself in his room, making more noise than necessary to attract our attention. Getting some rest has put us in an easygoing, generous mood, appropriately sympathetic. While Mrs. A. fills Nora in on the cancer’s remission, the hair that is growing back faster than expected (a little thinner than before and surprisingly darker, some of it actually brown), I wonder if she knows that her refound paradise is a classic stage, a temporary reprieve, ephemeral and somewhat sadistic, which represents nothing more than the classic approach to the final abyss.

  She betrays some awareness of it only toward the end of the conversation, when, in a burst of enthusiasm, Nora asks her if she feels ready to resume caring for the vegetable garden now that she has her strength back.

  “Oh, no, not the garden,” she backpedals quickly. “I’m too weak for that.”

  They hang up after a moment, the sour aftertaste of misgiving in their mouths.

  Nevertheless, the deeply rooted good sense with which Mrs. A. is equipped dictates that she live the final period of well-being as if it will never end. Fortunately, Emanuele’s performance falls right within those two months or so of improvement. He has been chosen to play the somewhat unseemly role of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, a leading role that Nora takes more pride in than he does; he would have preferred the part of the lion with the regal red mane.

  We leave the making of the costume to Mrs. A. She still has admirable dexterity, and her hand is steady when she searches for the eye of the needle with the saliva-moistened thread. The result of an afternoon’s work is impressive: she sewed patches on a pair of torn overalls, made one of my shirts into a jacket, and embellished them—along with a pair of boots that we had to buy—with strands of yellow yarn, to simulate bits of straw. When he puts on the costume, Emanuele hops around her, hands on his hips, like a sprightly imp, and for a few minutes they are again lost in each other. That will be our son’s last private performance for his adoring nanny, who is captivated. I’m tempted to reach for my phone and take a picture, but I know that the balance of the moment is fragile and I don’t want to disturb it.