by Erri De Luca
“They can’t be real, Don Gaetano, this is a hallucination caused by the hot coffee.”
“No, they are real. They are the latest people invented by the world, the latecomers. They know how to make war and automobiles. They are a population of overgrown children. If you ask them where they are they answer: far from home. They exist. For them we are the ones who don’t exist. They cross our paths, pass in front of us, and don’t see us. They live here and don’t even see the volcano. I read in the newspaper that an American sailor fell into the mouth of Vesuvius. No surprise, he didn’t see it.”
Having left the waterfront, our own crowd, unruly and packed together, reappeared in the alleys. The elderly moved about unsteadily, looking for something to lean on, the children opened their arms to be carried by the bursts of wind. There were no clothes on the line, pulled in so as not to lose them to the gusts. Without sheets hanging you could see the sky above, patched with swollen clouds, smelling like fried panzarotti.
“Are you hungry?” asked Don Gaetano, casting an eye upward. He had heard my thought about the clouds. “It’s their fault, they’re fried masterfully.”
It was the day of convalescence from happiness. Don Gaetano and ’o vient’ had taken it upon themselves to help me recover from Sunday. They were succeeding. This is how I learned about the happiness that is forgotten the day after. I wasn’t thinking about Anna. The bruises on my body were enough to account for the oblique passage of happiness.
• • •
La Capa was at the loge, wanting to ask Don Gaetano for information.
“You that studied at the millenary.”
“At the seminary.”
“Like I was saying, you who studied there, did you know that in Rome they have cacatombs?”
La Capa’s latest remark caught us off guard. I made a run for the bathroom, Don Gaetano felt the same urge but remained composed.
“I was there with my signora and the little girl, the piccerella. Many years ago there used to be the Christians who had to hide. But if you ask me, Don Gaetano, it’s one thing to hide because you’re Christian saints and mastiffs.”
“Mastiffs?”
“You know, the ones masticated by the lions.”
“Martyrs?”
“Yeah. Like I was saying, it’s all well and good that your Christian saints and marbles.”
“So now they’re rocks? They’re not marbles or even granite, they’re martyrs.”
“Whatever you say, but why did they have to go do caca in the tombs? I was there with my family!”
“Did it stink?”
“Not really. My signora, excuse me for saying this, but she’s ignorant and didn’t understand a thing, but me, io me so’ mmiso scuorno e vergognaria—I was angry and embarrassed.”
“They must have installed some kind of sanitary facilities.”
“Of course, but why are they showing off a place like that, these Christian cacatombs.”
“With all the beautiful things in Rome, why did you go there of all places?”
“They took us in the pulmonary.”
“Was that the whole trip?”
“Nah, we went to St. Peter’s and saw the whole columbarium.”
“St. Peter’s has columbaria?”
“Nah, there were rows and of columbaria, one nearby and the other, too.”
“Colonnades?”
“Yeah. Like I was saying, they were so white and beautiful, like shoe cream. To make a long story short, I came down here to find out from you, wherever it is that you studied, at the millenary, if they told you there were cacatombs in Rome.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
And with that La Capa the cobbler went on his way, shaking his head, just back from his trip to Rome.
“Don Gaetano, you’ve got some stomach not to laugh in La Capa’s face, you’re a hero.”
“Just the opposite, he terrifies me. If he realizes someone is making fun of him, he’ll break his bones to smithereens. Be careful not to let a laugh escape in front of him, I wouldn’t be able to defend you.”
“That’s why I hide as soon as he appears, but I listen to everything, I put a dishrag over my mouth and I listen.”
• • •
We played scopa, finished the soup, I even drank a whole glass of Ischia wine. Don Gaetano was treating me differently, he hadn’t called me guaglio’ all day. After dinner he went back to telling stories about the war. “We had gotten used to hearing the fabrications of the radio, of the newspapers: the fatherland, the heroic defense of the borders, the empire. We had the empire: no bread, no coffee, but we had empire.
“When the Americans arrived the same radio and the same newspapers switched sides. From one day to the next the enemy had become the liberator. The same newspaper, articles signed by the same reporters, were writing the opposite. You had the impression you were reading in reverse. The Turks had become Christians, no one was nor ever had been Fascist. Their rule was to hold on to their spot. But there were so many changes this was a drop in the bucket. White bread had arrived, the Americans distributed flour to the bakeries, there had been none for years. And together with the whiteness of the bread came the darkness of the Negroes, they had never been seen in the city. Elderly women on the street were forever making the sign of the cross.”
Don Gaetano’s stories opened my ears. His metallic voice pinched the nerves of the imagination. I could taste the bread of the first white flour baking, see the skyward eyes of the little old ladies baffled by the Negro soldier, feel between my fingers the printed paper of the new money that replaced the lira. Listening to Don Gaetano made me a secondary witness of his era. The story was a pied piper and my spellbound senses trailed behind it.
• • •
“In those days the city was freewheeling. Parties every night, hunger for life, to make up for lost time, to do business with the postwar. There were still bombings, this time by the Germans, lasting until spring, but we didn’t pay them any mind, we didn’t even go to the shelters when the sirens started up, which led to more losses. Before withdrawing the Germans had left time bombs in the city, one exploded at the central post office days later, a massacre. It was one of their techniques, I heard they did it in other places, too. They were sore losers.
“I guarded an abandoned arsenal that was still half full.” All by himself, a real ace, guns in hand, had managed to commandeer it, preventing it from being plundered. “I guarded it day and night, I was holding the arms of the uprising. I made good money, but it was the easy money of the postwar, it was called am-lire. American liras. They were the ones who printed it, but the typographers in the city already knew how to make it better. It was money to spend, not to save.”
“How did you end up becoming the doorman for this building?”
“It was your father.”
Don Gaetano’s answer came out of nowhere, so hard on the ears that my nose started bleeding. I brought my hands to my face to cover it and found it warm, wet. Don Gaetano led me to the sink to rinse myself with cold water. I couldn’t look him in the face. My father: it was the first time I had heard him mentioned, how was I supposed to know I even had one?
“Excuse me, Don Gaetano, I’m not feeling well, it would be better for me to go to sleep. Thank you for the day.” The need to spend some time with my thoughts drove me away.
• • •
In bed I stuck my head under the covers. The wind was beating through the courtyard, a dog on a chain. So there had been a father for me, Don Gaetano had known him. Why hadn’t I wanted to hear? Why did I feel like crying? At the third why I fell asleep. No dreams, I spent the nights in a submarine, where dreams do not descend. Dreams are fish of the surface. I woke up in time for school. I was bruised even where I had been all right the day before. My nose and capillaries were purple. I told Don Gaetano see you later, he said he would be expecting me at lunch.
At school my absence of the day before was justified by my face.
/> Visible wounds entitle you to respectability. I had gotten mine in the line of duty.
I started looking at adults from the strange possibility that one of them was my father. I didn’t think of my mother, Don Gaetano hadn’t mentioned her, so she continued not to exist. Until the day before my father had not existed, but no sooner had he been mentioned than he appeared in the faces on the street, at school. Many were odd, some were possible, I realized for the first time that I might resemble someone. I would clear up this story at lunch.
Somewhere in my head must have been the suspicion that Don Gaetano was my father. Now that I knew he was not, something was taken away from me without being replaced. Anna, the hiding place, the bed, were far away. If Don Gaetano had meant to clear them from my thoughts, he had succeeded. Now none of that happiness depended on me, nothing I could do would bring it back. If Anna returned she would find me ready, otherwise the happiness would expire. The nerve of expectation in my body did not tingle. So it’s only impassioned when it doesn’t know what to expect.
In those days I did not have a watch, the precious gift my peers received on their First Communion day. I had done that ceremony, too, but without parents I couldn’t participate in the party and the reception. After church I went home. Without a watch I calculated time in city blocks. I only knew the time at school. There you didn’t need a watch but everyone wore one. I didn’t want one. I had no wants.
The oddest thing of all was the possessive: mine. Nothing was mine in this world, much less a father. I was using the possessive for the first time. It wasn’t worth much, it was needed to mention a father who had not been there.
That day in class I realized how many times the word “father” was said: of the homeland, of modern physics, of the church. A word resounded that had been inert until the day before. Until yesterday I had been nobody’s child, an expression I liked after reading in the Odyssey that Nobody was the name of Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus. Child of a false name, of nobody: I liked it. It excluded everybody. Now I was becoming the child of somebody, known to Don Gaetano, somebody from the city that at the right time had had a son and who knows whether he knew. Now somebody was cluttering my past. I had become his son. From a father you could go back to a grandfather and even further. The thought resembled the steps I had crawled up in the dark, after Anna.
The fathers I saw were awful. From them the children took slaps and kicks out of nowhere. Screams, blows, and sobbing came from the houses. None of that had happened to me. If an evening melancholy came over me when the mothers called to their children in the courtyard to come upstairs, I remembered the beatings that arrived all the way to my room and the score came out even. I plugged my ears, it wasn’t enough. Children’s screams of pain make it through anyway, they are conveyed from skin to skin.
There is one boy I can’t forget. He was scrawny like me, even if he was two years older. His father wasn’t ashamed to beat him even in the courtyard. The boy took the blows without a shout, without tears, but he made a move, a shudder of “no” with his head, a nervous twitch in his face that closed his eyes in resistance before us. I can’t shake him from my sight. He stays with me, sainted by the bruises and blood from his mouth. He didn’t defend himself and he didn’t cry. He trembled in his futile heroism. He died under his father, who didn’t even go to prison. Aniello, a diminutive for Gastano, a life diminished among the many that had ended early. I went to the funeral with Don Gaetano, his mother cried tearlessly for him. Aniello played goalie for the opposing team, we were the farthest apart, we exchanged glances. When his father found him in the courtyard playing and didn’t want him to, he would grab him by the hair and start kicking him. Once I threw a rock at him. He didn’t even notice. We weren’t worth anything. If another rock had been thrown with better aim and force, if many of us had thrown, Aniello could have been saved. His face closed to avoid surrendering to tears under the blows, he brought tears to my eyes, wiped away with the back of my hand to pretend it was sweat. The game started up again, briefly silent, without Aniello.
• • •
Don Gaetano had cooked pasta and potato soup, well rested, my favorite dish.
“I have to apologize for leaving like that last night.”
People were walking past the loge, Don Gaetano greeted them and to be polite he would say: “Fa-vo-ri-te, would you like to try some?” Between one favorite and another, he informed me of the history that had preceded me. My father was a career soldier. He was forty years old when the war broke out. He married my mother, who was fifteen years younger, before leaving for Africa. He came home on leave just in time to find himself in plain clothes on armistice day, September 8, 1943, when Italy surrendered and the king ran away. My father went into hiding, then he took part in the uprising. He and Don Gaetano met in the days of battles in the city. My father had commandeered the German arsenal, by himself, in a standoff against the crowd that wanted to plunder it. He positioned himself in front, in uniform and with two pistols, one in each hand. The crowd went away, looking for an easier opportunity. Then he put Don Gaetano there to guard it. They became friends but were formal with each other.
• • •
“The postwar was all hands on deck. The men threw themselves into making money and the women ran wild with the Americans.
“The women of Naples lost their heads and the rest. Every home hosted an American solider. They brought abundance, business, work. The girls went to their parties at Rest Camp. They had become more beautiful and more brazen. Not much public transportation circulated, the girls would ask the jeeps for a ride. They let themselves be picked up and they fell in love. There were crimes of jealousy. A husband found out that his wife was going with the Americans but he kept quiet, it was worth his while. Not just that, he would even accompany her. But once his wife said she enjoyed doing it with them and he went mad with jealousy. He killed her, his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, and her husband, four at once, in Piedigrotta.
“Naples had been consumed by the tears of war, it let loose with the Americans, celebrated carnival every day. That’s when I understood the city: monarchist and anarchist. It wanted a king but no government. It was a Spanish city. In Spain there has always been a monarchy but also the strongest anarchist movement. Naples is Spanish, it’s in Italy by mistake.”
• • •
“You had just been born when your mother fell in love with an American officer.
“Your father found out about it. He came to see me when I was already the doorman here.
“He had found me the job, in his building, after selling the rest of the German arsenal to the Americans. He came to me one morning and told me solemnly: ‘Don Gaetano, you look after the child.’ He went upstairs and shot your mother at home. That same night he boarded a boat to America and I heard nothing more about him. His name was …”
“Don’t tell me, Don Gaetano, don’t put in my head a name I can never remove. What use would it be, I can’t carry it, I’m named after the woman who adopted me.”
“In the early years I kept you with me.”
“Why am I finding out this story today rather than yesterday or never?”
“Because you have to know. Yesterday you turned eighteen.”
And now a birthday, another day that was good for others, like Christmas and Easter. But I know when Christmas and Easter arrive, it’s written on the stores. I know that my birthday is in November. “When my mother died what day was it, do you remember?”
“No, not the day, it was spring, it was May.”
• • •
I remained hovering over the pasta and potato soup. There was a place where she was in the ground. I imagined I should go with flowers. No. I’m a stranger, I don’t even know her name if I have to ask. No, she is gone, too. They lived in this building, I don’t want to know where. I came back from the wanderings of my thoughts.
“Don Gaetano, your pasta and potato soup has no rival.”
“It’s n
ice to see you’ve got an appetite, have some more, there’s plenty. Help yourself.”
The widow passed by in a white dress. She was about to speak to me, noticed my swollen face, and went to Don Gaetano, asking him to come up.
“At your service,” he replied. He had lost hope.
“Do you mind clearing the table? Leave the dishes in the sink, I’ll wash them later. And stay here in the loge till I get back.”
“No need to worry.”
• • •
Child of: good-bye Nobody, good-bye false papers of Ulysses. They had trapped me between a murderous father and an unfaithful mother, between someone who had escaped overseas and another who had descended underground. I had no choice but to resemble them. I wasn’t free to resemble nobody. The whole rest of the world was no longer there to be my origin. Was it because of my mother that I hadn’t defended myself from Anna’s grip around my throat? Was it her readiness to die for love? I cleared the table and brooded.
What had I taken from my father? Not jealousy. Over the widow who needed embraces or over an Anna who wasn’t for me? I didn’t have the military spirit either, the boys in the academy uniform to me were prison inmates.
I forced myself to imagine figures of jealousy: Anna writes to her boyfriend, she goes to visit him in prison, they embrace, who knows whether they can embrace in prison. Nothing, not a single nerve shifted. What reason did I have to be jealous? She had done the happiness thing with me while her boyfriend was locked up. He was the one who had the right to be jealous. Dear father, I don’t take after you. I take after Don Gaetano, you were friends anyway. I take after Don Gaetano every day. He teaches me skills, he tells me history stories, for no reason, in your place. Dear father, they’re knocking on the window, I’m going to go see what it is. When I come back don’t be hanging around in my thoughts.
• • •
I dried my hands, went to the window. Anna. “See you Sunday,” she said, and disappeared. I was dumbfounded. I sat in Don Gaetano’s chair to stare at the empty window. Climbing up my back was a shiver from my sacrum, which here they call the osso pezzillo, the tip bone, all the way up to my neck. A tenant passed by, asked for his mail, I gave him the wrong bundle, realized it, and chased up the stairs after him with the right one.