We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  “My mother says that your father is a clown.”

  “No, he’s a top-ranking astronaut,” I tell her.

  “Ah, too bad.”

  “Hey, look, being a top-ranking astronaut is a very g-g-good job. He’ll go to the moon and to Mars, too!”

  Every time I happen to be close to Roberta at the front door, some parent will ask if we’re going steady. I don’t think I’m ready for that, even though I know everything there is to know about girls: when you choose up teams you always pick them last; better leave them alone because they’ll start crying at the drop of a hat and the nuns have giant hands; when they play with dolls they always make little voices, unpleasant ones for her and idiotic ones for him; they’re always looking for some excuse to kiss you and leave a wet patch on your cheeks.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks me.

  I’d almost forgotten: they always ask you: “What are you doing? Where are you going? What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m t-t-trying to find my way.”

  She puts her head between the bars of the gate. She looks outside.

  “Is that it?”

  “I d-d-don’t think so. My way must be really wide and lined with trees.”

  “Downstairs from where I live, there’s a way like that.”

  “Well, then, starting today, you and me are engaged. It must be destiny.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Destiny is the person who makes things happen, but how can you explain that to a girl?

  “It means that you have to g-g-give me your hand.”

  She looks at me.

  “And what are you going to give me in exchange?”

  6.

  If you want to go look at certain homes, you have to dress up. Why? Because they’re pretty and they’ll only sell them to well-dressed people. Why? Because if you’re dressed up nice everyone will think that you’re also important, reliable, and serious. Why? Just because. So Papà put on his Black Herringbone suit, the same suit that Elvis wore in 1969 to sing in the city they call Las Vegas, and Mamma put on her checkered overcoat with the fuzzy sleeves. Then she borrowed a couple of rings from Grandma, but Grandma has big hands so Mamma has to keep her fingers pressed together, otherwise the rings will fly off. Vittoria and I, on the other hand, put on our school uniforms, which are the fanciest things we own.

  The apartment that we’re seeing has soft floors. In every room there’s a big carpet that they can only have installed with a helicopter, after taking the roof off. We walk from room to room without making the slightest noise, something that makes me think of increasingly daring nighttime missions. On the furniture, which is all white and shiny, there are lots of colorful objects, a long-necked yellow telephone, smooth pink and sky-blue stone eggs, a sort of luminous torpedo in which large bubbles rise and fall. Mamma reads my mind.

  “Don’t touch a thing.”

  It’s not my fault that when I was little I must have swallowed a magnet. Papà says there’s no other explanation, if my fingers seem to stick to anything colorful I see, it must be because when I was little I swallowed a magnet which wound up in my stomach and then from there it went back and forth through my body until it got stuck in my fingertips. I feel a mysterious force emanate from that strange torpedo and reach my hand.

  “What did I just tell you, Al?”

  “This apartment is perfect for a family like yours,” the house man says, “it even has a nice big office . . . What kind of work do you do, sir?”

  “I’m in the transportation sector,” Papà replies.

  Mamma looks at me with a tight-lipped smile. The message in code is: you’re in trouble if you open your mouth. I’m not stupid enough to go around spilling the beans to some total stranger that Papà is an astronaut first class. First they tell you you’re a genius and then they treat you like a cretin.

  “Papà!” Vittoria shouts in delight. “The stop for the 170 bus is right downstairs . . . so we can wave at you when you go by!”

  I smile at Mamma Agnese and the coded message is this: sure, you do have an idiot child, but it’s not me.

  I tried to play with Vittoria and her girlfriend but we fought right away over a stupid matter of apparel. There was a dance and Ken showed up bare-chested, in bermuda shorts and with a rifle in one hand. The Barbies didn’t appreciate it.

  Mamma says that soon I’ll have lots of friends and I’ll be able to invite them home every day. Friends must be like the promised home and my way, they must be out there somewhere, we just don’t know where. The one thing I know for sure is that they aren’t here in our apartment house, since the youngest child who lives here is eleven and is some kind of technological pirate: he uses the phone in his house to play pranks on people he doesn’t even know and he goes from one apartment house to another, ringing doorbells. At school maybe, but not in my class: I don’t know how to play with people who mix up snipers, cowboys, and ancient Romans.

  Ken was taken from me and, while the Barbies’ big evening begins, I start leafing through Grandma’s magazines, which are full of photographs, have big headlines and lots and lots of exclamation points.

  “So delightful, this party, don’t you think, darling? Certainly, darling. Shall we dance some more? Certainly, darling,” says Vittoria.

  “Doesn’t Ken know how to say anything else? Only ‘C-c-certainly, darling’?” I ask.

  “Mind your own business!”

  “C-c-certainly, darling,” I say.

  “Mamma! Al’s being a pain in the neck!”

  “That’s not true!”

  You can tell an angry mother by her footsteps. When the floor shakes, trouble is coming.

  “Grandma isn’t feeling well! You’d both better be good!” she shouts at us.

  “It’s his fault!”

  “It’s her fault!”

  “It’s his fault,” says Vittoria’s friend.

  Two against one. Mamma’s next word is going to be: “Al.”

  “Al, cut it out! How many times do I have to tell you . . . but what are you doing?”

  “Nothing, I’m just reading the papers. A d-d-dog that got lost on holiday found his family after two years.”

  Actually, I was reading: “Witnesses in the Manson trial speak out: HOW I BECAME A SEX SLAVE OF SATAN!” and “Charming indiscretions from the housekeeper in the Onassis home: JACQUELINE’S SECRET LIFE!” but I can’t tell her that, because I only have permission to read the pages with pictures of animals. Mamma believes me and makes the face I like so much. That face of someone who’s in love with me that so irritates Vittoria.

  I spoke my first word at five months, I started reading at age two, and when I was three I was already writing. I can do mathematical calculations in my mind that are challenging for a fourteen-year-old, I have a gigantic memory, and I read publications for grown-ups with names like Cronaca Vera, Stop, and Novella 2000. Also, I very much enjoy reading the dictionary, which is a book where all the words in the world are collected. I learned that collections are made in order to save things from universal deluges, people build arks of wood or paper so that the survivors will be able to go on enjoying animals and words forever, because these are happy things. To me, what I do seems perfectly normal, but I understand that this isn’t the case when I find myself with other children my own age. If someone asks us how old we are, the best they can do, after a good half hour of sitting there with their mouths hanging open, is to hold up their hands and waggle their fingers. In contrast, I immediately reply that I’m four years and seven months old. And then, if I want to make a good impression, I tell them my age in the total number of days. As far as I can tell, that means I’m a genius, so I’m all right and my life is going to be very easy. Agnese and Mario Elvis have decided to put me right into first grade. They say that I’ll get along with older children much better and I’ll be
able to make lots of friends. I can’t wait I want to have someone I can invite home too, so I don’t have to listen anymore to all the nonsense the Barbies spout.

  “Now, that’s enough dancing. I’d like some champagne . . . ”

  “C-c-certainly, darling.”

  7.

  The days go by and I still haven’t saved a single thing, I can’t even seem to save Vittoria from the suppositories that prickle. I go and poop without complications: hot milk with a triple helping of cocoa, cookies, and then I’m off to the bathroom. Not my sister, though, she’s lazy inside and out, nothing will convince her to go, not even the fear of the homemade suppository constructed out of scraps of bar soap. I tried it once, I was just too curious, I figured that after I put it in, I’d just extrude lots of soap bubbles. Instead, the skin in there started burning really badly and there wasn’t so much as a single bubble. Grandma Concetta is a peasant, but that doesn’t mean that she tills the soil, it just means that she’s stubborn and she’s obsessed with poop. You have to poop every day. Right after breakfast, while I’m thinking about ways to find and worlds to save, she asks us: “Have you gone to the bathroom?”

  “Yes, yes,” I reply. I always say yes twice, because Grandma is a little hard of hearing.

  “Well, sort of . . . ” Vittoria replies.

  “Then she does it on purpose,” I think to myself. All she needed to say was, “Yes, yes,” to save her ass, and instead the big whiner said, “Well, sort of,” and Grandma Concetta starts moving like my little toy robot after it’s just been wound up. She turns around, goes over to the cabinet, takes a small pan, turns around, goes over to the sink, pulls open a drawer, and gets out some scrap chunks of bar soap, she turns around, she turns around, she turns around, she finds the matches and goes over to the stove top. Nothing’s going to be able to stop her until her granddaughter’s taken the suppository.

  “Errrrgh,” my sister sighs as the kitchen begins to smell of Camay bar soap.

  The mush is ready, and Grandma starts shaping it into a bullet shape. Vittoria watches every movement of her fingers, I’m happy because in the pan there’s also a piece of yellow soap, the kind they use to wash laundry, and that really burns. Then the phone rings and Grandma leaves the suppository in Vittoria’s hands.

  “You can put it in yourself. And push down good and hard,” she tells her.

  My sister is a very obedient little girl, anything they tell her to do, she does. So I set aside my bowl of milk, I turn my chair around and, with both elbows on the table, I get ready to enjoy the scene. She pulls down her pajama pants and her underpants, then she starts touching herself here and there between her butt cheeks. Her gaze focused up on the ceiling lamp resembles that of a couple of the protagonists of Sister Taddea’s stories.

  “D-d-does it have to take you so long?” I ask after a while.

  “Listen, it’s not as easy for me as it is for you, you know?” she tells me. “At least there’s no risk of you putting it in the wrong hole!”

  That’s exactly what she said: “At least there’s no risk of you putting it in the wrong hole.” That’s right, I heard her loud and clear. There’s no doubt about the meaning, she has more than one. Now I understand those strange words: “We’re different, you and me,” “You have a peepee, I don’t.” I can’t seem to think about anything else, this story about how girls have two butts is driving me crazy.

  “And just who would this little angel be?”

  The picture of Vittoria naked with a couple of butt cheeks in front and another pair in back makes way for a face full of wrinkles, with two lines drawn by a felt-tip pen in place of the eyebrows and a cigarette that’s been stuck to the lips for centuries.

  “Al, answer the lady,” Mamma tells me.

  “The little angel is shy! How old is he?”

  After which she does the three things I hate most: she gives me a pinch on the cheek, uses the idiot voice people use with puppies, and says the words slowly because she’s afraid I won’t understand her. Okay, she asked for it.

  “I’m f-f-four ears old,” I say, holding up all five fingers.

  “‘Four ears’?” she repeats, amused.

  With a glance, my mother begs me to stop.

  “Yeth, four ears and . . . and . . . a widdow bit moah!”

  “Why, what a little love . . . what a sweetheart,” and at last we can start looking around the apartment. The lady tells us not to pay the condition the place is in any mind, it’s been unoccupied for two years, and that before deciding whether or not we like it, we should try to imagine it repainted and furnished the way we’d like it. I look down the hallway and I imagine it furnished with a really long electric racetrack and little Formula 1 model race cars that zip back and forth; I imagine the children’s room with just a single bed, my own, and on the floor a huge army of toy soldiers, so densely ranked that I can walk on top of them; I imagine the master bedroom with the trundle bed for Vittoria in a corner; I imagine the bathroom with a giant bathtub always full of water so I can get a running start from the hallway and do cannonballs right into it; the kitchen should be Mamma’s pride and joy and I imagine it with a nice little fireplace where I can do my experiments with matches. Yes, I like this place just fine, and Mario Elvis and Agnese must like it too, because they wander from room to room with dreamy looks on their faces.

  In the elevator Mamma and Papà let go of our hands, which means that now Vittoria and I have permission to speak.

  “Is that the place?” we ask immediately.

  “I’m afraid not,” says Papà.

  “It seemed like a happy house to me!” I say.

  “No, Al. It seemed like it, but that’s not the place.”

  Mamma leans her head on Papà’s shoulder.

  “But it really was beautiful.”

  8.

  This is the year they call 1972 and things are happening that I can’t understand: a woman from Messina woke up one morning with holes in her hands and instead of taking her to the hospital, everyone started to pray; an old actress in her seventies married an old man in his thirties and the whole thing made Grandma grumble for two days; Nicola di Bari won the Festival of Sanremo even if he’s not friends with Papà; the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth was destroyed by flames, in a harbor, with all the water they have in harbors.

  The experiment I was doing in the sink to prove that you’d have to be a fool not to be able to put out a fire in the middle of the water cost me a week’s punishment, luckily interrupted after four days thanks to Vittoria’s birthday and a word you can find on page 109 of the dictionary, “amnesty.” Seeing that my sister also has good grades on her report card, Mamma and Papà have decided to give her a puppy, a little mutt, which was the item that led the wish list for Father Christmas for the last three years, something that however he never brought her because he’s allergic to dog hair. Vittoria and I are both thrilled, the puppy sleeps on a pillow under the radiator but we’re not allowed to start playing with him until we’ve listened patiently to all of Mamma’s advice and shown how mature we are and, more in general, that we’re not actually two children aged five and nine.

  “Having a dog is an important test,” Mamma tells us, “a dog is a very sensitive animal, you need to take good care of it, just as if it was a person, otherwise it suffers. Is that clear?”

  “Certainly,” Vittoria replies.

  “C-c-certainly,” I say as I think of the best way to harness a cart to the dog and get him to haul me at top speed back and forth in the park.

  “You’re going to have to take care of him, it won’t be easy but I trust you, I’m sure that you’ll show me what big kids you are, and that this experience will help you to grow up even more.”

  “Yes, Mamma,” says Vittoria.

  “Yes, Mamma,” I say, having in the meantime solved the problem: I’ll use Papà’s suspenders and one of Grandma�
��s girdles.

  “You’ll feed him in the morning and you’ll feed him at night. You’ll always take him out for a walk together as soon as you get home from school, and you’ll never cross the street, is that clear?”

  “Certainly, that’s clear.”

  “Perfectly c-c-clear,” I say as I think about where to find a riding crop.

  “Very good, good children, now you can go and play with Ciccio.”

  About the name, it’s the puppy’s own fault, he screwed himself with his own paws. Papà says that dogs choose their own names, all we can do is suggest options. And so while he was sitting there we started taking turns calling him. Grandma: “Lampo,” Mamma: “Rex,” Papà: “Aaron,” me: “Onassis,” Vittoria: “Ciccio!” and the idiot turned around.

  Grown-ups write fairy tales. That much I understand. They write them to help children get to sleep, and also to earn a little money. Okay, that’s clear. They invent fantastic worlds where a skinny kid can easily pull out a sword stuck in a stone and a white knight can kill a dragon as tall as an apartment house, and you’d better believe them or the grown-ups will get their feelings hurt. But that’s only at night. Because during the day, if you try to pull out the knife stuck in the watermelon or shoot at the neighbor lady’s vicious dog with your slingshot, then they’ll tell you not to, that it’s dangerous, that it’s not right, that it’s against the law, and that you shouldn’t believe in fairy tales. This game of making you dream and then yanking you back to reality makes all my thoughts turn strange, it makes me angry, and that’s why the parents of the Santamaria family no longer tell fairy tales. Now they just tell us that if we want to know what witches and various monsters are like, we only need to take a stroll around the apartment building. There’s the old man who rides the elevator up and down all night long, the lady who never comes out of her apartment—no one knows how she can survive without buying groceries—and a gentleman who always reeks of wine, and another one you should never say “Buongiorno” to, otherwise he’ll reply, “Buongiorno my . . . ” followed by a word you’re not supposed to say. And then there’s Signor Tuzzi, the man on the top floor. He’s tall, super-skinny, and capable of staring at you for twenty minutes at a time without uttering a word, the same way I do. But the reason he doesn’t talk is that his throat is dead and he can’t get the words out without the assistance of an electric device. He presses it against his neck, his neck vibrates, and the words come out in little fragments, with a strange sound that gives you goose bumps. Signor Tuzzi comes to our front door at the end of every month, always at night, because Papà has the white envelopes. His arrival in the afternoon is an odd occurrence, so I go to the door and hide behind Mamma’s legs.