Gengè did have a reality for my wife Dida, though. But I couldn’t take any consolation in that whatsoever because it would certainly be tough to imagine any creature more inane than my wife’s dear Gengè.
Meanwhile, here’s the best part: in her eyes, her Gengè wasn’t even perfect—far from it! But she forgave all his faults! There were plenty of things she didn’t like about him, because she hadn’t entirely created him her way, to fit her tastes, to suit her whims, no.
So then whose way did she create him?
Certainly not my way, because (I repeat) I was honestly never able to recognize the thoughts, feelings, and tastes that she attributed to her Gengè as belonging to me. She clearly attributed them to him because, according to her, Gengè had those tastes and thought and felt that way, his way. There’s not much to say about it—it was literally his way, according to his reality, which wasn’t mine in the least.
Sometimes I would see her crying because he—Gengè—had upset her. Yes, my dear friends, him!
When I’d ask her: “Why are you crying, dear?”
She would reply: “Do you really have to ask? Don’t you remember what you just said?”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you, you!”
I was flabbergasted. “But when? What?”
It was obvious that the meaning she took from Gengè’s words was entirely different from the meaning I gave them when I spoke. Certain words that I or someone else might have said wouldn’t have upset her at all, but when Gengè said them, they took on some different, mysterious meaning and made her cry. Yes, my dear friends, they made her cry.
That meant I was speaking on behalf of just myself, while she was talking to her Gengè. And that guy was replying to her with my mouth in some way that remained a total mystery to me. And it was unbelievable how idiotic, false, and meaningless everything became when I said it to her and she repeated it back to me.
“Say what?” I would ask her. “Did I say that?”
“Yes, Gengè, dear, that’s exactly what you said!”
Here’s the thing: all that nonsense belonged to her Gengè, but it wasn’t nonsense—just the opposite! It was just the way Gengè’s mind worked!
And God, how I wanted to slap him silly, beat him with a stick, rip him to shreds! But I couldn’t touch him. Despite the grief he caused her, the nonsense he spouted, my wife Dida really loved her Gengè. He lived up to her ideal of a good husband just the way he was, and she could forgive a few tiny flaws in light of his many other fine qualities.
If I didn’t want my wife, Dida, to go looking for her ideal somewhere else, I couldn’t lay a finger on her Gengè.
Initially I thought my feelings might be too complicated, my thoughts too abstruse, my tastes too unusual, and that’s why my wife often didn’t understand them and ended up misinterpreting them. Basically, I thought my ideas and feelings needed to be simplified and pared down to be understood by her tiny brain and innocent heart, and that my tastes could never suit her naïve innocence.
But what was I thinking! She wasn’t the one misinterpreting and paring down my thoughts and feelings. No, no. They were already misinterpreted and pared down when they left Gengè’s mouth. And even my wife Dida thought they were idiotic—even her, do you understand?
So then who was misinterpreting and paring them down? Why, the reality that was Gengè, my friends! The way she created Gengè, he couldn’t help but have those thoughts, those feelings, those tastes. He was a goofball, but a sweet one. Oh, yes, she thought he was so sweet! She loved her sweet goofball just the way he was. And she really did love him.
I could cite a long list of evidence, but just one example—the first thing that comes to mind—will do.
Ever since she was a girl, Dida’s done her hair in a certain way which she liked, but which I liked a lot, too. As soon as she got married, she changed her hairstyle. I never told her I really disliked her new style, because I wanted to let her do it her way. One morning she suddenly appeared in her bathrobe, comb still in hand, hair done up the old way, face bright red.
“Gengè!” she hollered, flinging open the door, revealing herself, and bursting out in laughter.
I stood there in admiration, practically dazzled. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “Finally!”
But she immediately ran her hands through her hair, pulling the hairpins out, and a moment later had totally changed her hairstyle.
“C’mon!” she said. “I just wanted to play a trick on you. I know full well, Mister, that you don’t like that hairstyle!”
I abruptly protested: “But who told you that, my dear Dida? I swear that I actually—”
She covered my mouth with her hand.
“Oh, come on!” she repeated. “You’re just saying that to make me feel good. But I don’t fix my hair to please myself, my dear. Do you think I don’t know what hairstyle my Gengè likes best on me?” Then she darted off.
Do you get it? She was one hundred percent certain that her Gengè liked that other hairstyle, so she fixed her hair that way even though neither one of us liked it. But her Gengè liked it, so she made the sacrifice. Does that sound trivial to you? Isn’t something like that a really big sacrifice for a woman?
That’s how much she loved him!
And now that everything was finally making sense to me, I started getting incredibly jealous. Not of myself, please believe me, even though I know you’ll think it’s funny. No, I wasn’t jealous of myself, my friends, but of someone who wasn’t me, some idiot who’d come between me and my wife, not like some phantom, no—please believe me—because he was actually turning me into a phantom, me, usurping my body to win her love.
Really give it some thought. Wasn’t my wife kissing someone who wasn’t me on my lips? On my lips? No! How could they be mine? To what extent were they mine, really mine, those lips she was kissing? Wasn’t it my body in her arms? But to what extent was it really mine, that body? How much did it really belong to me, if I wasn’t the one she was hugging and the one she loved?
Really give it some thought. Wouldn’t you feel like your wife had betrayed you with the most subtle sort of treachery, if you came to learn that she, while holding you in her arms, was using your body to savor and enjoy the embrace of someone else she kept in her mind and heart?
Well then, how was my case any different? My case was even worse! Because in the case of your wife—sorry—while she’s embracing you, she’s only imagining the embrace of another man. In my case, my wife was actually holding someone in her arms who wasn’t me!
And that guy was so real that when I finally, out of exasperation, decided to destroy him by imposing my reality in place of his, my wife, who had never been my wife, but his, suddenly, and to her horror, found herself in the arms of a stranger, someone she didn’t know. And she declared that she couldn’t love me anymore and couldn’t live with me even one more minute and ran off.
Yes, my friends, as you’ll see, she ran off and left me.
BOOK THREE
1 ~ Unavoidable Madness
But first I want to tell you, at least briefly, the crazy things I started doing to uncover all those other Moscardas who were living in my closest acquaintances, so I could destroy them one by one.
Unavoidable madness. Since up to that point I’d never thought about building myself a Moscarda who would, in my eyes and my opinion, embody a distinctive existence belonging to me and me alone, you can understand how it was impossible for me to behave with any sort of logical consistency. Again and again I had to demonstrate that I was the opposite of what I was—or what I imagined I was to this or that acquaintance—after having struggled to comprehend the reality they’d assigned me: trivial, imposed, fleeting, fickle, and all but insubstantial.
But here’s the thing: I still must have had a certain appearance, a certain meaning, a certain value to others, beyond physical features I couldn’t see or critically evaluate, but also based on numerous other qualities I’d never even considered before.
Just thinking about it gave me a rush of savage rebellion.
2 ~ Discoveries
My name—it’s ugly to the point of cruelty. Moscarda. In my Italian, mosca is a housefly with its grating, annoying buzz. My inner essence didn’t even have its own name or any official status. What it did have was a whole world of its own deep inside. And I didn’t bother labeling everything I saw in and around me with my name, which I honestly didn’t even think about. Anyway, as far as others were concerned, I wasn’t that nameless world I carried around inside me, complete in every way, undivided, yet richly diverse. Instead, from the perspective of their outside world, I was a single, detached individual called Moscarda—a small, particular element of a reality that wasn’t mine, but was part of others’ exterior reality, a part called Moscarda.
I was talking with a friend. Nothing strange. He was responding to something I said. I watched his gestures. His voice was completely normal. I recognized his habitual movements. Then as he stood there listening to me talking to him, he recognized my voice and my gestures. Like I said, nothing strange. That is, until it occurred to me that the way I perceived the sound of my friend’s voice was entirely different from the way he knew it, possibly because he wasn’t even familiar with the sound of his own voice, since it was his own voice, after all. Likewise, his appearance was the one I saw—that is, the one I assigned to him from my external point of view. Meanwhile, as he spoke, he certainly didn’t have an image of himself front and center in his mind, not even the one he attributed to himself, the one he recognized in a mirror.
Oh, God, so what was happening with me? Was the same thing happening with my voice? With my appearance? I was no longer some vague me talking to and looking at others, but rather someone that others were looking out, outside themselves, someone whose voice and appearance I didn’t recognize as mine. My friend saw me the way I saw him—an inscrutable body standing in front of him, a body he pictured with traits quite familiar to him, but which didn’t mean a thing to me. This was so true that I didn’t even think about it as I spoke, nor could I see these traits of mine or know what they were like. Meanwhile, for him those same traits were the total package since they represented who I was to him, one out of a crowd: Moscarda. Was that possible? And this Moscarda was the sum total of everything his image of me said and did in that world I knew nothing about. Moscarda was also my shadow: the Moscarda people saw eating, the Moscarda people saw smoking, the Moscarda out taking a stroll, the Moscarda blowing his nose.
I didn’t realize it, nor did I even think about it, but my appearance, I mean the one they attributed to me, and my every word that they heard in a voice I couldn’t know, and my every gesture that everyone interpreted their own particular way—it all implicitly involved my name and my body from their point of view.
The thing was, that by this point, no matter how stupid and loathsome it might have seemed to me to be forever saddled with that label, with no possibility of ever giving myself another name, as many other names as I’d like, ones more suited to my varying emotions and behaviors—since I was now, I repeat, accustomed since birth to bearing that one name, I managed to not make a big deal about it, thinking that I wasn’t really that name, after all. That name was just a way for others to address me—not great, but it still could’ve been a lot worse. For example, wasn’t there a Sardinian in Richieri named Porcu, which was the local word for pig? Yes, there was.
“Mr. Porcu?”
And he didn’t even grunt his reply.
“Here I am, at your service…” he would answer, neat and tidy, with a smile. It almost made you embarrassed for having to call him by that name.
Anyway, let’s set aside the matter of names as well as the matter of appearance, although now—now that I was in front of the mirror, it’s become painfully clear the necessity of being unable to give myself a different self-image from the one I saw reflected there. I even felt like these features had nothing to do with my willpower and were irritatingly opposed to any desire that might crop up in me to have different features from these: that is, hair like this, this color; eyes like this, greenish; this nose; this mouth. Yes, I say let’s also set aside the matter of features, because, at the end of the day, I had to admit that they really could’ve been monstrous and I still would’ve had to keep them and resign myself to them if I wanted to go on living. But they weren’t, so, moving on. I could settle for what I had, after all.
But what about my environment? I mean environmental conditions I had no control over. Outside factors, outside my control, that shaped me? My birth and family circumstances? I’d never taken a close look to evaluate them the way others might, each in his own way, obviously, using his own criteria, through a filter of envy, hatred, contempt, whatever.
Up to now, I’d considered myself an ordinary man living his life. Just a man, period. Living his life as if I were completely self-made. But I hadn’t made my own body or given myself my name. I’d been given life by others with no say in the matter, just like I had no say in all sorts of things others had thrown at me from all directions. Others had done so much for me, given me so much, things I’d basically never even considered before, never pictured concretely. It was a strange, hostile image they’d saddled me with now.
My family history! My family’s history in the region. I never really thought much about it, but when others saw me, this history was in me. I was an individual, the last of my family, and I bore its mark in me, in my body, and in who knows how many habitual actions and thoughts, ones I’d never reflected on, but ones that others clearly recognized in me, in the way I walked, laughed, said hello. I considered myself a man living his life, an unexceptional man living a basically idle day-to-day life, despite a head full of curious, passing thoughts. But no, no, I could be some random individual to myself, but not to others, no. Others saw too many superficial characteristics that I’d neither created nor given myself. Then there was my ability to consider myself an ordinary individual, which was another way to describe that idleness which I believed truly belonged to me but actually wasn’t even mine as far as other were concerned—it had been passed onto me by my father thanks to his wealth, and it was a ruthless idleness, because my father…
Oh, what a discovery! My father… My father’s life…
3 ~ Roots
I can picture him. Tall, fat, bald. And in his clear, practically glassy, sky-blue eyes, his customary smile was beaming at me, strangely tender with a hint of compassion and a trace of derision as well, but affectionate, as though deep down he was pleased I was the type to deserve it, that derision of his, as if he considered me practically an excessive indulgence he could safely afford.
But that smile—behind his thick beard, so red and so thoroughly entrenched that it overwhelmed his cheeks, that smile beneath his bushy mustache, slightly yellowish in the middle—now betrayed a sort of mute, frigid sneer, hidden there, one I’d never noticed before. And that tenderness towards me that appeared and shone in his eyes, part of that hidden sneer, now seemed terribly malicious. It suddenly revealed so much to me, things that sent shivers up and down my spine. Still, the expression in those glassy eyes latched onto me, holding me in their thrall, preventing me from thinking about all those things that went into his tenderness for me, but were still horrible.
“But you were and still are an idiot—yes, a poor, naïve, impulsive simpleton, running around following your every fancy without ever stopping to properly seize onto any of them. And never does a notion pop into your head that you don’t spin your wheels on, obsessed with until you drop off to sleep, and the next day you open your eyes and see it there in front of you and no longer have any idea how it could have occurred to you if yesterday’s air and sun were anything like today’s. You see, I couldn’t help but love you. My hands? What are you looking at? Oh, those red hairs here, even on the back of my fingers? My rings? Too many? This large tie pin? And the pocket watch chain too? Too much gold? Why are you looking at me like that?”
It was strange as I watched my uneasiness struggle to pull away from those eyes, away from all that gold, and fix upon a network of bluish veins that appeared on his pale forehead, laboriously snaking their way up, up to his shiny pate outlined with reddish hair. Red like mine—or should I say mine was like his? How could they even be mine when I’d clearly gotten them from him? And that shiny pate gradually disappeared right in front of my eyes, as if swallowed up into thin air.
My father! Swallowed up in the void that was now a terrified silence, laden with all the meaningless, shapeless things that linger in the inertia of the soul, voiceless and impenetrable.
It was an instant, but an eternity. Inside I felt all the dismay of blind necessity of things that couldn’t change: the prison of time; of being born now and not earlier or later; the name and body that’s given to us; the chain of causality; the seed which that man, my father, cast without planning it; my coming into the world from that seed, his unintentional fruit, attached to that branch, a product of those roots.
4 ~ The Seed
Then I saw my father for the first time, like I’d never seen him before: outside, in his life. But I wasn’t seeing him the way he saw himself, nor the way he felt inside, which I had no way of knowing about, but as a complete stranger to me. I was seeing him in the reality I imagined others had given him.
I imagine it’s happened to all sons—noticing something appalling that mortifies us where our fathers are concerned. I mean, noticing that others don’t ascribe and can’t ascribe the same reality that we give our fathers. We discover how he lives as a man outside of us, independent, relating with others, when those others talk to him, encouraging him to talk, to laugh, to look, momentarily forgetting we’re present, thus affording us a glimpse of the man they know him to be, the man that he is to them. Someone else. How is that possible? There’s no way to find out. Suddenly our father gives a sign, with his hand or his eyes, that we’re there. And there you go—that tiny, furtive sign that in one second flat hollows out an abyss in us. The man who’d been so close to us has now darted so far away that we can only catch a glimpse of him now, like a stranger. And it feels like our life has been totally shredded, save for one spot that still remains attached to that man. And it’s a shameful spot. Our birth has detached us, severed us from him like a common accident, perhaps foreseen, but an unintentional occurrence in that stranger’s life, the proof of a gesture, the fruit of an action, basically something that now, sure, we’re ashamed of, that provokes scorn and practically hatred. And if not actually hatred, then it’s at least a certain sharp annoyance we catch in our father’s eyes when in that second they crash into ours. As we stand on our own two feet there, with our two hostile, watchful eyes, he sees us as the thing that he didn’t expect as a result of venting his fleeting need or pleasure: seed he had unknowingly cast, now standing before him with a pair of bulging snail eyes, gropingly watching him and judging him and preventing him from completely and freely being the way he wanted, being someone else, even in our eyes.
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