While the Shark is Sleeping

by Milena Agus

  Every day, before going out with her boyfriend, Zia phones for an update on the astrological situation and to check that Mamma is at the ready, rosary in hand, as she heads out.

  A little while ago I walked a short way with Mauro De Cortes and noticed that he walks under all the ladders and doesn’t worry about black cats; nor does he touch himself down there when a hearse goes by. I know he’d happily use yellow pegs to hang out his washing. At one point he talked to me about a problem he had and he wasn’t sure how it’d work out and I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell Mamma and Zia to say the rosary for you, or to check the stars.’

  He looked at me, half amused, half frightened: ‘Stop there, for heaven’s sake! I do everything alone, including praying!’

  ‘And what about Saturn?’ I asked him. ‘What’ll you do if it’s bad?’

  ‘I’ll shoot it down!’ And he looked up into the sky, aiming an imaginary rifle.

  Zia confided to me that she’s slept with him even when she’s been seeing other boyfriends and that it was beautiful. And the thing that struck her more than anything else was that Mauro’s lovemaking was just like everything else he does: natural and strong. After lighting a cigarette he looks at you all over and you feel shivers of desire. And to get aroused he doesn’t need any of that fancy lingerie; he undresses you completely without even looking at your new things. Or else he leaves all your clothes on and just lifts them up before taking you.

  If I was to be born again and beforehand they gave me the chance to choose who I was to marry and have children and spend my life with, I too would definitely choose Mauro De Cortes.

  It’s not that he’s so very handsome or charming or intelligent or anything like that, it’s just that God did a better job with him than with anyone else I know and I think he must give his Creator great satisfaction. Not because he does anything amazing, since Mauro works in a boring office from eight-thirty to five, has a plate of pasta for lunch at the canteen, goes home and spends ages finding a parking spot and it’s already seven in the evening. In the course of the day, I reckon he gives God satisfaction in the following way: he’s told me, for instance, that in the morning he never goes straight to the office, he goes to Calamosca. He parks his car and runs along the avenue that leads to the beach. When he gets there, if it’s winter it’s just growing light, and if it’s summer the sea is already sparkling and there’s always a perfect silence. Then Mauro goes to the bar at the hotel there, has a cappuccino with some pastries straight out of the oven, listens to the news and the weather forecast on the radio, and then after that he starts work; it’s boring, but he considers it useful, like any work that doesn’t involve robbing, or killing, or ruining the environment. Or alternatively, if he decides to skip breakfast, he can run to the end of the coastline down towards the left, beneath the Devil’s Seat. That’s where the fish farm is, and he can enjoy a Ligurian panorama, because agaves flower along the ridges and the sea is clear but bottle green and with big rocks that form an underwater mountain landscape inhabited by big shoals of fish.

  I’ve always thought of people who go running as freaks who wake up two hours early to do something completely pointless, but since I found out that Mauro does it, it doesn’t seem stupid at all and I reckon that before school I might park my Vespa at the start of the avenue too.

  Then on his way home from the office, Mauro stops by the little port to check his sailing boat and do whatever he needs to do so it’ll be ready on Saturday and Sunday, and if there are girlfriends, kids, friends to go with, fine, if not, he’ll happily go alone to Villasimius, or towards Chia, depending what the wind suggests, and he enjoys himself immensely.

  So: I think Mauro’s way of doing things gives God great satisfaction.

  13

  The world is ugly

  We’ve convinced Mamma to go to hospital. She’s not eating. She jokes that she’s on a hunger strike to protest against all that is ugly in the world. For example, my brother not defending himself, or Zia’s boyfriend, the jogging one, who cheated on her with a really ugly woman and Zia said, ‘Who does he think he is? He deserves a kick up the arse!’

  Mamma says these things with a light tone, not wanting to bring down the mood, but meanwhile, she’s unable to swallow a thing. She says she can feel a stone where she used to feel hunger. Zia’s ex-boyfriend, the South American doctor, was very upset when he phoned to see how we were and I told him about Mamma. He got angry, because he didn’t think we should take her to hospital. We should buy horse meat and get her to drink the juice of it and go for walks, because she spends too much time sitting down looking at the view and painting.

  He’s right because now Mamma’s day goes by like a little girl’s nightmare: in the morning she lines up to wash, then she waits for them to call her up for tests, which unfortunately are very painful, some are a real torture.

  When I go to the hospital I find her sitting on the perfectly made bed. She stretches out her legs, and as she talks she looks at her new shoes, which perfectly match her dress and the little suitcase containing her things. Her bedside table is the most admired by the other women in the hospital, because on theirs they have tissues, a bottle of water and the odd women’s magazine, whereas she has a blue folder where she keeps her sketches of panoramas and the wooden box with her paints in it. For water she has an old-fashioned flagon made of fine glass.

  When he comes to the house, I proudly show him Mamma’s things, but he doesn’t like them and says that they’re a whole load of nonsense.

  Papà once said that the only scandal is if we let God disappear from our words and our actions. There’s no scandal in my story.

  I’m just learning to endure. To resist even desire itself. He’s made me a chastity belt out of sailor’s rope. Part of the rope is tight around my waist and the other lightly strokes my pussy. When I move it’s as though he’s stroking me with his fingers. The instructions are that I even have to go to school like this, until he decides to screw me. Nor am I allowed to masturbate, I have to exercise patience and learn to endure uncertainty, because he might never screw me again.

  My friends think it’s strange that I don’t have a boyfriend, now that I look better – thinner and without hair falling in my eyes – and when a group of us go out to a pizzeria and all the little couples are kissing, I admit it’s difficult.

  Then I lock myself in the toilet and stroke the rope that ties me and torments me. I lift up my skirt in front of the mirror and look at all the bruises I have on my bottom. And I think to myself that I have my own secret, and that consoles me.

  One time I asked him, ‘Do you treat me so badly because I’m crap, a piece of shit?’

  ‘No. It’s because I love you. The greatest proof of love you can give a human being is to kill them.’

  14

  The postcard sea

  One day I discovered that Papà sells Mamma’s paintings to his one-night stands and makes them donate to his Third World volunteer project of the moment. They buy them without batting an eyelid. I yelled at him, ‘You make me sick!’ But I didn’t really think that.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he started yelling too. ‘Your mother’s been able to quit work and devote herself to shades of colour. Dozens of starving people can eat thanks to the money from her paintings. And she believed she was a painter. For years I watched her ominous skies as I tried to make her laugh. Have you ever wondered whether I was enjoying myself? You always just explained it away as “Papà’s a strange guy.” Fucked if I’m a strange guy.’

  Mamma collects postcards. Our favourites are Punta Is Molentis and the long series of the beaches of Chia. But even though they’re nearby, we can’t go there because we don’t know the way.

  We imagine the broom on the rocks, or the sea stock with the water as a backdrop. Or those yellows and purples all velvety and mossy in the silence. We imagine what it must be like to moor at a wooden pier and walk along the path to the lighthouse, with that strip of light passing across
you over and over again like a caress on your wounds.

  And they’re all things that God has made for us, so that we can enjoy them.

  15

  Nonna would have preferred Mauro De Cortes

  Zia has said that she can’t understand how it can be that each one of Mauro’s houses is simpler and yet lovelier than the last. Because he’s been married twice and had children from the first and the second wife, when he’s separated he’s always had to cut back a bit in order to maintain them as well as possible. He’s also lived with girlfriends and he’s always been the one to move out, sorting something else out for himself and leaving behind all his things, as a gift. These ever smaller houses have made him into a bigger man, and Zia says that it’s not as though he has anything really amazing, but the things he has work perfectly: for instance, the winter duvets are warm, the saucepans have the right lids – those ones with a hole in them – and the food comes out perfectly. She talks about them enchanted, and Mamma rushes out straight away to copy everything, but we can’t find duvets that are warm but don’t cost a fortune, or saucepan lids that don’t jump around when the water boils. Speaking of Mauro’s house, Zia said that one time, after a discussion of the latest world events followed by sex, she fell asleep in Mauro’s bed and forgot that it’s best if she leaves after an hour or two, and he actually had to wake her up and drag her out of bed because he had to go out.

  Nonna says that Mauro never really considers Zia, even though he definitely likes her a lot, because she’s had too many love affairs and he – despite the two wives and the live-in girlfriends – is an upright man, that is, when he does something, he commits to it, whereas she has a different kind of romantic instability. But Zia says that’s not the way it is, that Mauro hardly knows anything about her affairs and she’s very careful not to tell him any details or do anything mad, in fact, basically she’s always perfect with him.

  Then Nonna says that Mauro’s women were too different from Zia, who’s always untidy, never goes to the hairdresser – she gets around with that cloud of unkempt hair – and dresses wildly. Zia replies that this isn’t true either, because the few times Mauro’s invited her somewhere, she’s worn clothes so elegant we wouldn’t believe it. Also, in order to conquer Mauro, she’s been consulting history books for the war plans of all the great strategists – Caesar, Napoleon, Kutuzov, Eisenhower – and she tries them all. She’s so tenacious, enthusiastic and passionate that each time life knocks her down she picks herself back up again. But I think Mauro would prefer simplicity and for you to be able to tell him things just as they are. That time we walked a short way together I would have liked to ask him, ‘Do you believe in the power of the moon squared by the other planets? And do you reckon using yellow pegs really brings despair? Will you say “Good night” to me a hundred times with the perfect tone? Would you show me the way to the place in the postcards?’

  16

  For a kiss, actually two

  ‘You have to dress in black with really fine knickers and keep me on a leash like a dog. Your uncontainable tits should be bursting out of the bodice you’re wearing. Then you put me over your knee and give me a hundred blows with the Japanese chopstick, and if I complain you have to hit me harder. You ask me to undress you and I have to do it using only my mouth, like a dog. With the laboured breathing of a dog I’ll wait there on all fours, suffering and whining as you stretch out on the bed naked, showing me everything. Then you’ll let me get up and I’ll ram it into you while you continue to hit me with the stick. I’ll fuck you till I’m dying from either pain or pleasure. Until I know which of the two is stronger.’

  Then one day, I was busting to pee and he ordered me to do it over him and it seemed to me a terrible thing. I was only going to follow this order on one condition: that he let me talk about my thoughts, about everything I have inside and can never tell anybody.

  ‘Cry away,’ he says, ‘There’s quite a bit of stuff you have to get out. Tears and piss are similar. Good girl. Let everything that’s inside you flow over me and submerge me. You’ll feel better.’

  And so it all goes away: the hostile moon and the yellow pegs, the loneliness in pizzeria toilets and the fact that no boy ever falls in love with me and that I don’t know if God truly exists.

  Then he tells me, ‘Now I’ll let myself unload on you. I’ll piss on you and you’ll lie there, stretched out, with your mouth open. And you have to drink it.’

  I stretch out in the bath and with my eyes closed and my hands folded, like a dead woman in the earth, I let the rain wet me all over, like in autumn.

  Little seed that I am, come springtime I’ll surely be unrecognisable, with so many leaves and flowers.

  17

  Together again

  Mamma has returned home and today she and my brother wandered about the rooms, beautiful and curved over and walking badly, as they always do when they’re sad: as usual he’d been hurt at school and she could see no alternative to him either ruining those beautiful hands or suffering the beatings. I too had a stabbing pain in my heart.

  He hasn’t phoned me in ages.

  Papà looked at the three of us and said, ‘All right, tell me what’s wrong. Let’s have a nice collective wank.’

  Mamma laughed that tinkling laugh she has when Papà pays her some attention.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he went on. And he lit a cigarette.

  But what’s to tell? Obviously I don’t say anything. According to Papà we’re too ashamed to express ourselves. Speaking is a bit like pissing or shitting. It gets everything out. What’s wrong with that? God made us with piss and shit in us too, but we’re still beautiful. Sometimes I think about how much I’d like to give my father my stories to read, or maybe I could manage to give them to Mauro De Cortes, if he ever became my uncle.

  When Mamma was young, Nonna always insisted that she mustn’t stay out after a certain hour.

  ‘I’ve waited too much in my life,’ she would say. ‘Waiting for Nonno for the whole of the war and then for the wedding that seemed like it would never come and then for a house of our own. I can’t do any more waiting.’

  So Mamma had to phone Nonna from all the houses she went to. For example: ‘I’m at Martina’s and we’re about to go over to Gianluigi’s. It’ll take twenty minutes.’

  And then from Gianluigi’s place: ‘Now Martina and I are at Gianluigi’s and we’re heading to Carlotta’s house. It’ll take fifteen minutes.’

  She was obedient and when someone in a family wouldn’t get off the phone – back then there were no mobile phones – the poor thing would shake with anxiety and run back home.

  In spite of all her good will, there were a few times when she was late, and then Nonna would call the police, the carabinieri and the hospitals. One time she even called the morgue, where a nice fellow replied,

  ‘No. Your daughter’s not here. But if you leave your number, signora, I’ll give you a call as soon as she comes in!’

  Papà tells us these things – and others from when Mamma was young – to cheer us up. Like for instance how she had no sense of direction and when she got lost she’d call him so as not to alarm her parents.

  ‘Where are you, gorgeous? I’ll explain which way you need to go.’

  ‘The thing is I’m not sure where I am.’

  ‘Have a look at the name of the street, gorgeous.’

  ‘It doesn’t have one.’

  ‘Shit, gorgeous! Describe where you are.’

  Papà says that Mamma was so brilliant at descriptions that he’d immediately recognise the area she was lost in and from one public telephone to the next he’d guide her to salvation.

  They were friends for a long time and here’s how they ended up going out.

  One day my father had to go away. He did something he’d never done: he phoned Mamma to say goodbye. At the end of this short conversation during which he said where he was going and how and why, he signed off saying, ‘Bye, dear.’

  Mamm
a replied, ‘I love you.’

  One time, over dinner with friends, my father said, ‘Who knows why one gets married. Really, you could marry anyone. Or no one.’

  ‘Where’s Papà?’

  ‘Where’s my son-in-law?’

  ‘Where’s my brother-in-law?’

  ‘Where’s my friend?’

  They ask after him and he’s not around. Papà says we have the wrong idea about stability. That we think stability means staying still. Whereas being stable means being stable in motion. Like the earth – I’ve always thought that if it didn’t turn it would disintegrate and we’d all fall off. Papà says that if they made him a nice offer on the other side of the world, he’d have no trouble turning out the light, lowering the roller doors of his garage and heading off.

  Now I understand why, when Mamma would take us out as little children, on our return home she’d always smile and look like a weight had been lifted off her when there was a light on up there.

  ‘Papà’s home,’ she’d say.

  And I thought she was happy because Papà was home already. That is, before us three. But it was because Papà was still home.

  I like how in autumn or spring the sun beats on Mamma’s postcard collection. I like how it lights up the foaming waves, or the white sand, or the blue of the shiny card. My brother and I can go and talk to her whenever we like, even if she’s painting. She will always stop whatever she’s doing for us. My brother comes in to tell her Sardinia makes him sick and he wants to leave. I curl up on the bed and stay there. It’s crazy but I feel protected by this fragile creature and by that whole load of nonsense.

  ‘Maybe one day we can go to those places on my Vespa,’ I say, pointing out the marvels on the postcards.