While the Shark is Sleeping

by Milena Agus

  The judge invited her to come and have a coffee one of these days, ten minutes at that bar under the Torre dell’Elefante, with the beautiful view, and as he invited her he observed her with great interest. It seemed to Zia to be a particular kind of interest, but you can’t be sure.

  And I wonder what man – even if he is rigid, a judge and possibly Austrian – could resist Zia’s long, long legs, her short, flimsy skirts, her narrow, narrow waist, her big, bulging, buttery tits that are always prominent in her disordered movements, and through badly buttoned blouses and tops that are too thin. Plus when she talks – and she doesn’t do it on purpose because it also happens when she’s with us and with Nonna – Zia leans over, bounces around, and her clothes move. I reckon no man can resist a curvy, buttery doll, with her unkempt curls in her eyes and her firm, soft, white tits and highly sensitive nipples, which as kids we’d always ask to squeeze, or at least touch, fabulous delicacies of marzipan, ice cream and cream. It’s obvious she’s made an impression on the judge.

  The ten-minute coffee one of these days, Zia told me, was not ten minutes but many more. Also the judge didn’t arrive at the meeting in an elegant blue car, as she’d expected, but on his scooter, and he told her to get on, handing her the helmet he’d brought specially for her. Zia had often seen couples going around on scooters together, but she’d never got on one and she said it felt like she was on the other side of the world and it was really strange, because it’s true that it was still her, but it was more like a memory of who she was. Also, on a scooter, there’s no need to talk to fill the silences, because all you have to do is keep quiet so as not to distract the person driving, and enjoy the view, with one cheek resting on his shoulder. I’d often offered her a ride on my scooter, and she’d never wanted to get on, but it’s pointless to try and explain it because that’s a completely different story.

  Then, outside the café under the Torre dell’Elefante, Zia started explaining to him what she was looking for, holding forth about certain historical events to impress him, but the judge stopped her and told her that his one hobby was reading history books when he has time and he was familiar with that issue. In other words: save your breath because there’s no point.

  So she relaxed, listened to what she needed to hear, laughed and made him laugh because he makes sophisticated jokes but luckily he’s easily amused and he doesn’t need such sophistication to be able to laugh.

  Between one area of study and the next, a few secrets slipped out, like that the judge has only recently stopped smoking joints and has had countless love affairs that all went to shit and he could never work out why, since he always gave of his best.

  So then Zia took a leap and revealed that she, too, had had a hundred relationships that had all gone to shit and she could never work out why either, since she always gave of her best.

  Suddenly, she got up from her chair and stood next to him and proposed what Papà would call one of those impossible, infantile ceremonies: that next time they fell in love, they would give of their worst and demand the same of the other person.

  She sat back down and started writing the pact on a paper napkin: Love only to those who can endure and if we can endure! They racked their brains trying to think what historical pact this might resemble, but nothing came to mind.

  When the judge got her to climb back on the scooter and promised to look into the topic she was studying, it was already dark.

  I imagine the snow on the Austrian mountains, a snow that hides the beauty of what will be revealed when it thaws, a beauty I know already exists. I imagine all the animals Zia can imitate; they are asleep up there in the mountains at the moment, but they will make their cries heard when they reawaken. I imagine an enchanted castle where immobility and death reign, but where the coffee pots will begin once more to boil and the washing machines to go through their different cycles. I imagine Zia dancing the first waltz of her life and she will neither tire, nor be tired of.

  21

  Zia becomes a wife

  Confidently thick, as Mamma’s snow poem put it, love arrived, and anyone could easily have recognised it. There is no definite reason for all this. In a completely casual way, that mysterious force that makes the world go around revealed itself over a cup of coffee.

  After that coffee nothing was ever the same for Zia. The other relationships hadn’t changed her life. Now she went often to the judge’s house, who never made her feel it was time to leave. She made pasta sauces and left them in the fridge for him, so that he wouldn’t eat rubbish when he was in a hurry. She called her love by an abbreviated name, like you do with family. She phoned him whenever she felt like it without ever wondering if it would be better not to, and he did the same, and often it was just about some silly little thing that made them laugh. Zia, who had never wanted to ride with me, even bought special trousers for going on the scooter, because the judge said he felt bad if he didn’t start his day on two wheels. He liked Zia’s embrace in the morning, her soft tits and her cheek on his back, her long legs alongside him. If the judge didn’t take Zia to work he said it was a bad start to the day. Zia told me she loved him, and I didn’t want to think about what Papà would have said: ‘What does it take for my sister-in-law to fall in love?’

  When Zia went to the judge’s house for the first time, to listen to the original version of ‘American Pie’ that Madonna now does a cover of, he asked her very genuinely to undress. He’d never had such a beautiful woman around the house, and it had never entered his head that it could happen to him. He’d seen women like that in the movies and in magazines, but nothing so real and above all so close. He knew he wouldn’t have a stroke of luck like that a second time in his life.

  Zia found the request tender and not at all vulgar, and she unbuttoned her blouse. She showed him her tits and her overwhelming body, then she sat next to him on the sofa and took his hands in hers.

  ‘Touch me. You can do anything.’

  Those were Zia’s happy days. A girlfriend who was loved and in love, she smiled all the time. She was truly beautiful. Not like before: a nicely turned out mixture of meat and bone that was nothing compared to the delicacy that was Mamma. Because Mamma, walking like a beaten dog, like humanity’s poorest, was beautiful to me, and I’m happy that she was for Doctor Salevsky too. Mamma had a love of life. She was indifferent to nothing. A sponge soaking up all the gifts of God. During those days, Zia and the judge were two sponges saturated with everything that is beautiful in the world. With the judge she tasted things she’d never tasted, things that are completely normal for who knows how many people, but for Zia, accustomed to crumbs, this was a feast she had only ever gazed at hungrily through the window. She related to me the splendour of a hot shower together, she had enjoyed herself so much under the water and was terribly happy. And then the judge had said to her, ‘I love you,’ and no one, ever, in the years and years Zia had been having sex, had ever said such a thing. Powerful. Terrible. Marvellous. ‘Love me. I want to make love with every single part of your body. I want to have sex with your brain. I want to have sex with your heart.’

  Zia would have liked to die of happiness and not stay to see what happened. All the men in her life had left her, why would this time be any different?

  ‘Because maybe one time everything is different,’ I said to her, without anything specific to base this on, but quite sure. And I found her so beautiful, as she looked at me, hopeful for this future that her eighteen-year-old niece said was a certainty. But it ended. Simply and suddenly. One day, as Zia was coming home from university, the judge passed on his scooter and on the back, in Zia’s spot, there was another woman embracing him and resting her head against his shoulder.

  So Zia went and sat on the stairs of the judge’s house and waited for him for hours, staring at a spot in the air.

  ‘Why?’ she asked him, bursting into tears. ‘Why?’

  The judge didn’t defend himself. He didn’t invite her up. He sat down with her on the s
teps and begged her to stop crying because he, too, had a lump in his throat. He put an arm around her shoulders. That was the worst part. He’d always given of his best to all the women in his life and had felt himself vanish into nothing like a soap bubble. How many women had left him? He could no longer remember. But all of them, that’s for sure. A pain he never wanted to feel again.

  This time, if Zia were to leave him, he would fall on his feet. Because he loved the other woman, too, and thanks to her, Zia saw him as strong and loved him, and thanks to Zia, the other woman saw him as strong and loved him. The world belongs to the strong, as she well knew, having seen her sister die.

  ‘Stay. I beg you. Accept me, my love. Even this worst aspect. Take me in. You promised. We drank to this.’

  But Zia ran off and when she reached our place she began dashing around the house hitting her head against the walls and saying she didn’t want to live any longer and she wanted, once and for all, to crack open her head and her body that were no use to anyone and that no one wanted and no one ever would. Then she threw herself onto the floor and didn’t wash and wouldn’t eat for days and days.

  Nonna would come over to our place to see her daughter; gasping from the walk up the stairs, she seemed to get older every day. She would pull up a chair and sit down to look at Zia curled up on the floor and she would list all the good things to eat that she’d brought for her. She said yes, these were terrible times and you couldn’t make sense of anything any more. The hunger she’d experienced back in her day was better than Zia’s hunger now. War was better, because at least then you knew who to blame it on. First the Americans. Then the Germans. Even if the bad guys changed, at least you knew who they were at any given moment. Whereas now, who could you blame? It was obvious that the judge was a poor fool too, immature, just like Zia; after a day they’d thought they were in love, when actually they didn’t even know where love begins or where it ends. Like our father, who knew all about God, love, good and evil and had abandoned his children without a penny. Like Mamma – a frightened rabbit, she, too, was without a conscience. Falling stupidly from the balcony when she knew full well how weak she was and how often she got dizzy spells. Now there were no good guys or bad guys. You didn’t know what to expect, how to live. Even God seemed confused, and she would not be going to church any more, she wasn’t even going to pray. War had saved her fiancé and peace was killing her daughters. Back then they’d fled into the country to survive the hunger, but there was no escape from the hunger of her daughter.

  But in that prison of hers, without water or food, Zia didn’t say, ‘That judge deserves a kick up the arse,’ nor did she ever say it after she got up off the floor. She had truly loved him and had been grateful for those days spent as a wife.

  Now that nearly a year has gone by, she often says that it doesn’t take much to be a wife and it’s not true that she’s not cut out for it: ‘You get taken around on the scooter, you cook some pasta sauces, you make love and you get under a nice hot shower with your husband. A lot of people complain about marriage but I thought it was beautiful. The happiest period of my life.’

  22

  Zia becomes a mother

  ‘It doesn’t take much to be a mother either. A lot of women complain constantly about their children, look at Nonna. But I never have anything to complain about with you two. Being a mother is beautiful. The happiest period of my life.’

  That’s how it happened, Zia didn’t want to get up off the floor and days had gone by and we knew very well that if something didn’t happen she’d never get up again. In desperation I went to Mauro who said he reckoned Zia couldn’t go on as before, she had to get a hold of herself and show some balls, and he was certain she would. He told me to relax, Zia would not die and she would no doubt manage to fall in love again and to imitate the Normandy landing if the kitchen flooded, or General Kutuzov’s tactics walking backwards down the hallway. He didn’t believe in God, but the force of nature was a definite reality and Zia was an equally definite part of that.

  I even swallowed my pride and phoned all her ex-boyfriends whose numbers I could find.

  ‘What’s wrong with my Zia?’

  Some got worried and thought I was some kind of vengeful niece. They hung up in fright. Others replied, ‘She’s perfect, but not for me.’

  It was my brother who came up with the idea.

  ‘I need you,’ he told her. ‘Don’t die. Don’t be selfish. I’ve always thought I’d have preferred you as a mother, and as a father, and as a grandmother. And I don’t know what I’d give for a girlfriend as hot as you. Everything, apart from my piano.’

  So Zia got up and went to have a cold shower, as she always had before the judge, and then she threw herself on the pot of meatballs Nonna had left for us all.

  I got angry with my brother. ‘You shouldn’t have done that to our parents.’

  ‘It’s not true that I prefer Zia. But nor is it true that the dead can hear us or that people far away can have a sense of what we’re thinking, or other bullshit like that. The dead are empty sacks and Mamma is ashes in an urn and if Papà could hear our thoughts he’d come back. Wouldn’t he?’

  The fact is Zia got up off the damn floor.

  So Zia said goodbye to Nonna, brought her history books and her low-cut dresses over to our place and started her new life with no boyfriends and no money, because she wanted to maintain the two of us without having to ask Nonna for help and she wanted to buy our house, which we were renting, and give it to us, with the money she’d been saving for her marital home, plus a mortgage.

  If we hadn’t been so sad, we’d even have enjoyed ourselves with Zia, because when we were all together, feeling abandoned and defeated, she’d always pull out some tragic historical event and compare it to our situation.

  Leaving behind the era of the Bible, my brother said, now was the time for history. We were the Carthaginians at Zama, the Persians at Marathon, Napoleon at Waterloo. We faced the battles of the Somme and Verdun, and capitulated at Caporetto. We suffered the cold of Stalingrad. We were the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Palestinian refugees driven out by the Jews. But Zia said we would pick ourselves up again, just like the Japanese.

  She’d often cook something special and invite Mauro De Cortes to come and eat with us. Not wanting to be impolite, he would say, ‘Thank you, but I’ve got something else on, maybe another day.’

  Zia would wait for another day and send him funny text messages pretending to be the owner of a restaurant advising him of the menu. Mauro would reply just as nicely, but he’d still never come. When she finally decided to release her specialities, because the only real client was never going to turn up, they were no longer all that special: soft vegetables, watery sauces, dry sweets and stale bread.

  And if we screwed up our noses, Zia would say, ‘If they had it in Afghanistan, or Palestine, or Nicaragua, where your father’s no doubt gone! If your Nonno had had it in the concentration camp, or Londoners during the bombings of September 1944!’

  ‘Zia,’ my brother finally burst out, pushing away his plate, ‘we’re not at war. We’re just waiting for Mauro De Cortes to do us the honour of eating with us.’

  We looked at him open-mouthed. How could someone who was always locked away practising, who certainly never inspired anyone to confide in him, have worked everything out? That day Zia closed the restaurant, and from then on, when there were specialities, they were for the Sevilla Mendoza family.

  The most difficult moment was when Mauro De Cortes, who hadn’t been answering the phone, sent us a postcard from Greece in which he said he’d taken a year’s unpaid leave and bought, with his girlfriend, another sailing boat. He’d headed off and was travelling the deep dark ocean of the postcard, beyond a little white terrace with red and lilac pots of carnations and geraniums under a little Greek-blue window. Next it was a nighttime terrace, the moon illuminating a yellow chair and a little table with an empty glass. He just said that he was well and hoped the same
was true of us.

  We got the idea that God either doesn’t exist or is unjust, because we never won in any of those ill-fated battles and were always playing the role of the dead.

  We didn’t pray and I didn’t write this or any other story. My brother decided to give up school and stay at home alone practising the piano, because he just couldn’t handle his schoolmates any more. Zia decided she was through with men. Definitively. I thought regretfully of him, of those periods when all I’d had to do to be happy was follow orders and take myself off into the world of dreams. And when he phoned me to arrange to see me again and swore to me that he’d tried to carry me away that time at the beach in the postcard but it was like I was made of stone, and he’d waited hours for my phone call, it was hard not to believe it was love. But love had to be something else.

  23

  The vet

  One of those sad days I go down to take out the rubbish and in the big dumpster next to the Capuchin Convent I hear something whining. Having learnt not to be squeamish, I stand on an old brick and look in and I see a litter of puppies of no particular breed, wet, sticky and smelly. I wonder if it’s better to leave them to die. What kind of a life awaits them? One full of suffering. I’m not going to be able to find homes for five dogs and Zia wouldn’t want them at our place. So I call out to the first person that comes by and that looks right, to ask him for help, or his opinion.

  ‘Excuse me!’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘There are five puppies in here. I don’t know if it’s better for them to live or die. I can’t keep them.’