Like Family

by Paolo Giordano

  The play, in fact, turns out to be very different from its domestic prelude. The unexpected attendance of all the members of Nora’s family creates an emotional snarl-up during the long wait for the thing to start. The grandparents have gotten all dressed up as if for a gala evening—Nora’s mother in a showy evening gown, her first husband and the current one in two curiously similar herringbone jackets—and now they all seem annoyed to find themselves in the bare foyer of an elementary school, among dozens of parents in jeans and short sleeves. They expect me and Nora to do something, find them chairs appropriate to their clothing, get them something to drink or at least come up with some way to entertain them.

  Further, the gym where the show is staged turns out to be too small to accommodate this unruly crowd of relatives. Antonio, the second husband, wanting to impress everyone with his photographic equipment, complete with tripod and white reflective panel, argues heatedly with a man who, he maintains, is in his frame and who eventually tells him rudely what he can do with his panel. Mrs. A., being short, has her view blocked by a solid wall of backs and jackets. She, too, gives us disappointed looks, but we ourselves can hardly see the stage, which is not the least bit elevated off the floor, and we can’t help her. The oppressive, stale air and the waiting on her feet make her dizzy. A woman holds her up, then fans her with a sheet of paper. Before the end of the play, even before her adopted grandson has appeared onstage, Mrs. A. elbows her way through the crowd and leaves.

  On the way out, Emanuele immediately asks for her. “Where’s Babette?”

  “She didn’t feel well, but she saw the whole thing, and she said you did a great job.”

  His shoulders curve and his face takes on such a dejected expression that I wonder if he’s still acting a little or if a tiny piece of his heart has indeed just been ripped off.

  The exaggerated praise of his various grandparents is not enough to raise his spirits. On the streaked linoleum of the gym, Emanuele had performed especially for Mrs. A. and for the two of us, but his happiness is not equivalent to two-thirds of that hoped-for total, because her absence counts more than our presence.

  We quickly extricate ourselves from the good-byes and walk home, just the three of us: two parents and a small, sad scarecrow who doesn’t let go of our hands until we reach the door; as if to say he gets it, he understands that people leave, people just go away, forever, but not us, he won’t allow us to, not so long as he keeps us together like that.

  The Black and the Silver

  Every child is also an extraordinary seismograph. Emanuele understood it before we did; he felt the shock wave that was approaching, and that’s why he clung to our hands the evening of the performance. After Mrs. A.’s desertion, there had been a subterranean quake, a silent slippage of water tables and groundwater levels, and over the summer we would discover that the hypocenter of the disturbance was located in Nora’s womb.

  One morning, already dressed to go out, she announced that she was two weeks late. It didn’t seem like news you would tell someone in a hurry like that, standing up, car keys in hand.

  “Have you done the test?” I asked her, mainly to stall for time and transform my reaction into something preferable to confusion.

  “No. I’d rather we first decide what to do about it.”

  “What to do about it?”

  Nora sat down at the table where I had stopped sipping my coffee. She did not lean toward me, nor did she show any emotion when she recited the words she spoke right after that; she reeled them off like a paragraph committed to memory. “It’s best if we talk about it now. I don’t feel ready. I don’t have the energy. I can barely manage the work I have to do and look after Emanuele. There is no one to help us, and you’re always at the university. Plus, I don’t think we’ll have enough money, and to tell the truth . . .” Only then did she hesitate, almost as if the last words had slipped out of her mouth unintentionally.

  “To tell the truth?”

  “Things aren’t going so well between us either.”

  I pushed away the place mat with the remains of breakfast. I had not had time to question how I felt about the news, but that wasn’t the point: the point was how casually I was excluded from any real possibility of having a say in the decision, the abruptness with which Nora affirmed that our lives were, after all, separate. I tried to appear calm. “Nora, one chooses whether or not to have a first child, not the second. We’re young, we’re in good health, what would justify such an action?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “That we’re afraid. Too afraid. I am.”

  “It seems to me you’ve already made your decision. I don’t know why you’re even bothering to tell me about it,” I said, and now my words sounded sarcastic, full of indignation.

  She nodded without looking at me, then stood up and walked out. She kept her face hidden from me. I’m almost certain that her endurance had been exhausted and that by then she was crying.

  _____

  Oh, if Mrs. A. could have seen us in the weeks that followed! How disappointed she would have been. When Emanuele was nearly three years old, she had launched a personal campaign for us to give him a baby sister (she never even considered the possibility of a boy): a series of inconsequential pedagogical opinions suggested to her that there was a precise window of time within which to plan for another child.

  “You have the room,” she said, as if that were the main obstacle.

  We’d tease her. “Isn’t one enough for you, Babette? In a while, maybe. Who knows?” In the meantime we procrastinated, disappointing her. Never would she have expected, however, that, faced with a fait accompli, Nora would dream of backing out.

  But Mrs. A. was more unreachable than ever. Since the illness had advanced swiftly and steadily, around the middle of July she had moved to her cousin Marcella’s house, where for the most part she would live out her last five months, lying on the right side of a double bed that wasn’t hers. The cancer had breached another rampart and seized control of her brain as well. Talking on the phone had become difficult—her voice was gone; to communicate with her, we had to go through the extraneous filter of Marcella, while to see her we had to ask permission and then be watched the whole time.

  Nora wouldn’t admit it, nor would she do so later on, but she was scared, terrified of the possibility of spending a second pregnancy in bed. The months of immobility with Emanuele had marked her more deeply than I had realized, and this time there would be no Mrs. A. by her side, only a harried husband in whom, I understood that summer, she did not have enough faith. From that day on, neither of us held anything back, baring resentments that had long been concealed, in a painful, relentless crescendo.

  _____

  In the end Nora’s lateness turned out to be a false alarm, but at that point it didn’t matter much; the effects had already been felt. Outwardly our married life went along unchanged, structured around a sequence of commitments, yet as if its heart had been drained. I had seen Nora sad, upset, angry but never listless or indifferent. Without the intercession of her exuberance, the world went back to being the cold shell that I had inhabited before I met her. Even Emanuele, at times, appeared alien to me.

  “We could eat at the fish place tonight, talk a little.”

  “If you want. Though I’m not very hungry.”

  “Let’s go anyway.”

  And then we sat there eating dinner like strangers, no different from those couples who have nothing to say to each other, whom we had often pitied from the pedestal of our rapt enthrallment.

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You look sad.”

  “I’m not sad, I’m just thinking.”

  “About what, then?”

  “About nothing!”

  “You’re scaring me. Are you doing it on purpose?”

  We continued needling each other
, anything to break a silence for which we were unpracticed. Nothing seemed to come to our rescue: considering how foolishly we behaved, ours might have been the first marital crisis in the history of mankind.

  A young couple can also fall ill, from insecurity, from routine, from isolation. Metastases flourish unseen, and ours soon reached the bed. For eleven weeks, the same period in which Mrs. A. was losing the elementary functions of her body one by one, Nora and I didn’t touch or reach out to each other. Lying at a safe distance, our bodies seemed like impregnable slabs of marble.

  Dozing lightly, I tortured myself thinking about the time when her body was available to me and mine to her, when I could caress her without asking permission, anywhere—on the neck, her breasts, between the curved notches of her spine, along the cleft of her buttocks—when I was free to slip my fingers under the elastic without worrying about annoying her and she, drowsy, would return my attentions with an instinctive shiver. Neither one of us refused sex, ever; we might neglect it for long periods of time due to lack of opportunity and energy, but we did not withhold it. No matter how things were going, we knew that an untarnished space awaited us in our bedroom, a refuge of furtive embraces and caresses.

  If our cancer had also aimed to affect the brain, then it had succeeded: with my wife lying a few inches away, I no longer knew how to approach her. My memory of those days and nights is sketchy and contradictory, riddled with rancor and appalling fantasies in which Nora betrayed me with someone, anyone.

  _____

  What Galen does not explain clearly is whether humors can be mixed together like paints or whether they coexist separately, like oil and water; he does not explain whether yellow produced by the liver combined with the red of blood creates a new orange-colored temperament, nor whether an exchange between individuals is possible, through contact, effusions or even pure sentiment. For a long time, I thought it was. I was sure that Nora’s silver and my black were slowly blending together and that the same burnished metallic fluid would eventually course through both of us. Then, too, we were both convinced that Mrs. A.’s glowing lymph would add another nuance to our own, making us stronger.

  I was wrong. We were wrong. Life sometimes narrows like a funnel, and the initial emulsion of the humors produces layers. Nora’s exuberance and my melancholy; Mrs. A.’s viscous stability and my wife’s ethereal disorder; the lucid mathematical reasoning that I had cultivated for years and Babette’s intuitive way of thinking: each element, despite assiduousness and affection, remained discrete from the others. Mrs. A.’s cancer, a single, infinitesimal clot of unruly cells that had multiplied relentlessly before becoming evident, had called attention to our separateness. We were, in spite of our hopes, insoluble in one another.

  Bird of Paradise (II)

  There are progressions whose epilogue is written in the prologue. Did anyone, including Mrs. A., even for a minute think that things could go any differently than they did? Did anyone ever mention the word “cure” to her? No, never. At most we said that things would get better, but we didn’t believe that either. Her decline was wholly inscribed in the pulmonary shadow etched on the first thoracic plate. All these cancer stories are the same. Maybe. That doesn’t mean that her life wasn’t unique, deserving of a story all its own; until the very last moment, her life was worthy of the hope that fate might make an exception for her: special treatment in exchange for the services she had rendered to so many.

  The way things were between us after the summer, Nora and I had no thought for anyone else. It was one of Mrs. A.’s cousins who called us on a day in late November. “She wants to see you. I don’t think she will last much longer.”

  We discussed whether we should bring Emanuele with us. I argued yes, that it made no sense to deprive a child of the sight of suffering, and besides, he was big enough to handle it. But Nora didn’t want the image of Mrs. A. dying to wipe out all the other memories.

  She was right. All that remained of Babette, under the many layers of blankets in the strange bed, was a shrunken, gray form. The room was permeated with a sickly-sweet medicinal odor and something indefinable that, when I bent down to brush the skin of her cheek in a hesitant imitation of a kiss, I found was coming from her lips: a whiff of fermentation, as if her body had already started dying from inside, one organ at a time. There was a strange light, shimmering and somewhat otherworldly, perhaps because of the gleaming elements that reflected it: the gold-embroidered bedspread and translucent curtains, the gilt wardrobe handles and brass fixtures.

  As soon as she sat down on the edge of the bed, Nora burst into tears. I saw them again then, after nine years, in the same roles as before but reversed: Mrs. A. lying down and my wife at her bedside. She was trying to fasten a bracelet around Babette’s skeletal wrist, one we had bought her so that she might have a sign of us to accompany her on her upcoming journey, but Nora’s fingers were trembling and she kept missing the clasp. Even in their reversed roles, it was Mrs. A. who tried to console. “Don’t cry, Nora,” she said, “don’t cry. For a while we were good company for each other.”

  I left the room, closing the door behind me. Nora’s tears had melted something inside me, unlocked a tenderness that had never gone away, and despite the tragic nature of the moment I felt an incongruous relief. We had bought some white tulips because they were Mrs. A.’s favorite flower and because showing up with assorted gifts seemed like an effective defense against the circumstances. Marcella looked for a vase, and I busied myself arranging the flowers in it after trimming the stems. I made an effort to keep up a conversation to prevent her from returning to the room where, I sensed, she would have liked to keep an eye on the situation, lest her cousin indulge in inappropriate confidences with my wife. I wanted to make sure Nora had all the private time she deserved.

  When I went back to the bedroom, I placed the vase on the nightstand. There was a photo of Renato that I had seen elsewhere, taken in winter on the seaside promenade in Sanremo. Maybe thinking that he was waiting for her was enough to give Mrs. A. renewed strength, a strength that did not require flesh and bones or a voice.

  “So, then, take care,” I said to her.

  She smiled at me. There was no need to pretend anymore. Death was already there among us, occupying the empty half of the bed, waiting quietly.

  Mrs. A. was still gripping Nora’s hand, or vice versa. “Look after her, always,” she urged me.

  “Of course. Always,” I promised.

  Nora turned slightly toward me, as if to say, “See how easy it is? Why couldn’t you do it sooner?” I leaned over and kissed my wife on the temple.

  “Now we’ll let you rest,” I said to Mrs. A., though she was already half asleep. Who knows where she found the energy to stay awake for those few minutes, which painkillers and tranquilizers she had struggled against, just to make sure that Nora and I swore we would go on taking care of each other.

  We left her sleeping soundly. As I walked away from the room, I glanced toward the window. Through the lace curtains and double panes, I would not have been surprised to see an exotic bird with yellow and blue feathers and a long white cottony tail perched on the windowsill, its dark eyes, serious and compassionate, trained on all of us.

  _____

  A few days later, Nora bought a perforated pan for roasting chestnuts. The metal was shiny and untarnished, very different from Mrs. A.’s battered, rust-covered one. Every autumn Babette had performed that ritual. She went looking for chestnuts in the woods behind her house, gathered them when they were still in the husk, then appeared at our place to roast them. I’d help her score them one by one, and that evening we would dine on chestnuts and milk sweetened with honey.

  “They won’t be as good as hers,” Nora says. “They’re from the supermarket. But let’s give them a try.”

  As we eye the golden meats somewhat dubiously, she asks me to pour her some wine. “I thought I would switch schools for Emanuele,
” she announces.

  “Oh?”

  “Next year. They aren’t doing enough for him where he is now. They don’t understand him. She always said that. Besides, it’s not right to tear up a child’s paper.”

  “Teachers tear up papers. They always have.”

  “Not today. Today they don’t do that anymore.” She pauses to take a sip from the glass, then passes it to me. “I also thought that if they didn’t renew your contract, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “I think it would.”

  “It might be a good opportunity to try something different. Maybe elsewhere, for a while. I don’t know.” She puts a hand on my hip. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. It seems like such a lot of new things all at once.”

  “No. Here, take a look. Do you think they’re done?”

  _____

  One night during her illness, Mrs. A. dreamed about Renato. It seldom happened that he came to her in her sleep. But that time he was standing in front of her, elegant as always, but with an incongruous felt hat pulled down over his head. He kept his hands shoved into his jacket and, not taking them out, gently invited her to follow him. “Come, it’s time.”

  Mrs. A. was afraid he might be hiding something dangerous in his pockets, so she asked him to show her his palms. He ignored her. “Let’s go, it’s late,” he repeated.

  “I don’t want to, not yet. Go away!”