We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  “Papà wants to tell us some news,” says Mamma.

  Mario Elvis pours himself a glass of wine, drinks it, and looks at us.

  “We’ve decided that starting next month we’re going to go live in another apartment,” he says.

  “The promised home? Have you found it?” I ask.

  “No, we’re going to live in another place precisely so we can save up the money to buy the promised home, the minute we find it.”

  “The new place is smaller but it’s very nice,” says Mamma. “It won’t be for long, a year at the most, just long enough to save up some money.”

  “Will there be a little room just for me?” asks Vittoria.

  “No. When we find the home that we’re looking for, then maybe you can have your own little room.”

  “Maybe . . . ” repeats the complainer.

  “No one knows that the promised home is like. When we find it, we find it, and we’ll have to take it the way it is,” says Papà.

  17.

  It’s 1974, the year of messages. The Red Brigades send a message that they kidnapped a man named Mario but it’s not Papà because his last name is Sossi; the Turks try to communicate something by occupying part of the island of Cyprus without paying rent; the courts inform women that since they wanted the right to wear trousers, now if they go out after nine at night they should expect to be assaulted; the Pioneer probe is traveling into deep space with an aluminum plaque depicting the human race, which we want to describe as follows: men, who stand one step forward, waving in a friendly fashion; women without genitalia, who stand one step back and have a grumpy attitude.

  We, after celebrating, with fruit juice and chocolate ciambellone, the first anniversary of my liberation from the persistent stutter, are on our way to Torvaianica in our Fiat 600 loaded with an unbelievable amount of luggage, launching a controversial message to anyone who sees us: we are the average Italian family on our way to the beach, in February. The plan to save up money so we can buy our promised home is starting to drag out. In the time since we left our official residence on Via del Gazometro, we’ve rotated through a cellar apartment, abandoned after a few weeks because it was infested with mice; a tiny apartment across the way from Cinecittà, where we held out for a year even though Mamma and Papà slept in the kitchen; and six months in a garret apartment in the San Giovanni neighborhood with ceilings so low you could just reach up and touch them and where, in the summer, you could hard-boil eggs without need of boiling water. The promised home continues to elude us but Mario Elvis says that we’ve done it, this is the last move before finally moving into our final destination.

  In my human flesh diary I’ve written lots of things, including these: “Deposit monthly allowance in a numbered Swiss bank account. Ask for more information,” “Girls’ second butts have a scientific name: vagina,” “Giving the wrong answers to your classmates on quizzes only makes you happy for the moment,” “If you’re on the left or the right, there’s a good chance you won’t live to see age twenty-five, that’s why there are so many Christian Democrats,” “The most important thing in the world is a full-time job,” “Consider the hypothesis that the United States and the Soviet Union are just spoofing the rest of the world,” “There’s been an economic boom and the Santamaria family never even noticed. Look into this.” A separate section of the diary is dedicated to notes that may prove useful to my plan to save the world: “The theory about asphalt should not be dismissed out of hand,” “Parliamentary democracy is very nice but it doesn’t work,” “Is it enough to just go to America to become rich, or once you’re there do you actually have to do something? If it turns out that just going is enough, then let’s go.”

  The apartment in Torvaianica is in a building far from the center of town. In February the atmosphere is spectral. Deserted streets, roller shutters lowered in front of shops, only a few scattered signs of life. It seems like one of those cities devastated by a virus that’s plummeted out of the sky on a meteorite or else hit by one of those bombs that disintegrate human beings but leave buildings intact. Intact, so to speak. Seen from up close our apartment house appears to be in a state of abandonment, the rust has vigorously begun that slow process of erosion that, over the coming centuries—though it actually may only take a few decades—will pulverize the structure, leaving in its place a canyon of reinforced concrete. The paint on the handle of the front gate crumbles onto my hand, the hinges creak and rattle, begging for a squirt of oil, while the stairs are covered with a veil of sand. We climb up to the second floor, never daring to take the elevator. The apartment itself isn’t bad, all the windows and the long balcony have views of the sea, which as the crow flies can’t be any further that two hundred yards. There’s a big room where Vittoria and I will sleep, a living room where Mamma and Papà will sleep, a spacious kitchen, and a tiny bathroom. The heat is electric, in each room there’s a metal panel with a grate and two buttons, each with a little red light next to it. They seem like the electronic calculators in a poorly made science fiction film. When we turn them on, a tepid waft of air comes out of the grates, smelling of dust and chestnuts. The furnishings, as Mamma says, are what someone somewhere ordered to put into all the beach apartments in the whole world: wooden furniture painted sky blue and scattered seemingly at random, each item with its own little defect that they meant to fix right away, but instead just accumulated with all the others, summer after summer. Democratically, there’s one defect for every piece of furniture. One lacks a leg, another lacks a knob, one cabinet door won’t shut properly, another has the key broken off in the keyhole. We put our own furniture in the cellar of one of Papà’s friends. A week ago, someone tried to force the door, and Mario Elvis decided to sleep there until they fix it, because he says we can’t afford to have all our possessions stolen.

  As usual, we spend the first few minutes telling ourselves that it’s not a bad place to live, that we’ll be alright there, that after all, we’re only going to live here for a few months. Vittoria doesn’t take part in this phase of bolstering morale because now she’s become a “young lady,” and eleven-year-old young ladies are always in a bad mood when they have to say goodbye to their friends. In contrast, I’m only seven, so I’m fine wherever I am, as long as I have my big box full of toys. The first thing Mamma does is turn on the refrigerator to keep the meat safe. The preservation of the meat has been her sole concern throughout the journey. No heating in the car, and windows rolled down the whole way. Once we have successfully completed the rescue operation for the few slices of beef, she extracts from the cooler a package wrapped in aluminum foil, containing the cadaver of Clay, which is actually Clay VI though Sister doesn’t know it. We take the little coffin and head down to the beach to give it a fitting burial. Aside from Clay IV and Clay V, who died of natural causes, the others fell victim to Vittoria’s loving distraction. Until Clay VI, we were able to conceal the deaths and replace the fish without Vittoria noticing a thing. Each time, Mamma limited herself to generic advice such as: “Even if it’s hot out, you probably shouldn’t put the fishbowl in the refrigerator.” The farce ended with this last imitator of Clay I who died right before her eyes. “Well, this time it was just bad luck,” we told ourselves, because it’s hard to accept the idea that a member of your family is an exterminator of pets. We put the blame on the new faucet in the kitchen of the last apartment, the one in the San Giovanni neighborhood, and the fact that no one had bothered to explain to my sister just how to use that mysterious lever, so different from the two faucets, one for hot and one for cold, that we were used to. It all unfolded under the eagle eyes of Mamma, who was pretending to stack dishes while Vittoria changed Clay’s water. She carefully caught the fish with the little net, she quickly popped into a basin, cleaned the fishbowl, and then picked Clay up again with sufficient care to persuade my mother that her fake dish-stacking could come to an end. And so my sister was all alone when she pulled that handle. It w
as just bad luck, she only realized that the water that was filling the bowl was hot when steam began to rise from the surface. Mamma was frantic, she tried everything to save Clay. The goldfish flapped his tail for the last time, his body completely covered with Prep medicated cream.

  18.

  The evenings with all of us together at the dinner table seem like a distant memory now, something to talk about with a sigh, like the races to reach Mamma and Papà’s big bed when there was a bad thunderstorm, or else the poop that you could carry around proudly in the little potty so everyone could tell you how proud they were of you. By now we only see Papà on Sunday, on account of the blockade of the Suez Canal and the austerity policies, he has to walk the whole way from the train station. When he gets home, we throw a huge party for him, but by then he’s so exhausted that all he wants is to go to bed. Every time we hear a noise from outside we rush to where he’s sleeping, in the hopes he might have woken up and could be in the mood to play. We tiptoe to the door of his room, but he’s asleep, he’s always asleep, until Agnese goes to wake him up and tell him: “It’s time to go.” The days have grown shorter. There’s not much time for breakfast because it takes Mamma an hour to get us to school, then she spends the rest of the morning looking for work, until it’s two in the afternoon, time to come pick us up. We sit down to lunch around three, we eat quickly and without appetite, we tell her what we did at school today, even though it’s obvious that she’s left her thoughts in some office, in a shop, in the waiting room of the employment office. There was a time when it seemed as if she couldn’t live without news of our school days, now there’s always something, far away, outside the window, that interests her more. When Papà is away, Agnese is terribly afraid. One night she called the Carabinieri and said that someone had tried to break into the apartment. They squad car showed up twenty minutes later, my mother showed them scratch marks on the door, and the officers reassured her, it must have been an amateur because he had used a screwdriver and hadn’t done any real damage. The “amateur” had been my mother. She told us so herself: “That way, the next time I call them they’ll know the way and get here quicker,” she told us. That’s why today I’m angry and I have no intention of running away from Ezio.

  Papà says that people who are intelligent like me don’t need to resort to violence, they can defeat their enemies by the sheer force of thought. That’s why, Ezio, I am going to vanquish you! The sheer force of that miracle of nature that is my mind is focusing itself into a single overwhelmingly powerful ray that will defeat you. Stop, Ezio!

  “That’s enough, Al. Keep it up and you could disintegrate him!”

  “We need to stop him right away, Casimiro. A guy like him would be capable of stabbing somebody when he grows up, or planting a bomb, or bringing down the government over a disagreement on ministerial positions!”

  I’m focusing the sheer force of my thoughts upon you, stop in your tra-a-a-acks!

  “Your snack mine now,” Ezio says.

  Wandering through the deserted streets gives me a sense of omnipotence. I can throw rocks at the shutters, chase cats, and shout that I’m the king of the neighborhood without getting so much as a raspberry in response. I have permission to stay out until four in the afternoon, then as soon as the sun touches the sea, I have to come home. Since all the apartments and houses are empty, I can go without interference into the backyards, the gardens, and even the buildings, just to come up with a first, summary selection of possible promised homes. I’ll have to complete this exploration before the end of March, when the killer virus will attenuate its effects and the apartments will fill up again on the weekends.

  This place, for instance, isn’t bad. You can’t see the water from here, but the view over the countryside must be nice, there in the distance is the military airport of Pratica di Mare, and I can already picture myself looking out the window with Papà to see the Fiat G-91 fighter jets taking off. In order to inspect the place, I have to climb over a gate. The toes of my shoes are empty so I can’t get a foothold, the hems of my trousers get caught on a jagged edge, and my wool sweater snags relentlessly on all the patches of rust. This is no way to work. Everything I wear is two sizes too big for me because Mamma says I grow like a weed. Actually, I’m growing at a perfectly average pace, and the result is that by the time sweaters, trousers, and shoes all start to fit me perfectly, they’re so ragged they’re not worth keeping anymore. The family specialty is sweaters. Mamma started making them at home after the fraud of the “woolf” label. She thought it was an indication of pure wool, but instead it was a trick and they got all matted after being washed just once. I don’t understand why she took it so hard, it wasn’t her fault that no one had thought to require factories to declare the actual materials and ingredients in their products. One day or another she’ll realize that the cans of creamed salmon that she buys every Christmas are nothing but a concoction of second-rate fish, full of artificial color and fake aromas. The real problem with homemade sweaters, though, aside from the inevitable embroidered reindeer, is that Mamma gets the wool from old clothing, which she unstitches, obtaining nice big balls of yarn that she skillfully knits into sweaters that are matted from the get-go.

  Once I get over the gate, I have no difficulty getting into the building because the front door is broken. On the second-story landing, I identify the apartment door. It hangs ajar. I go over to it and I realize that it’s been forced open, either kicked open or crowbarred. Better run away. Or maybe I can run up to the door, take a quick look, and then take to my heels. I choose the option that entails more fear. I take a nice deep breath and go for it.

  “A-a-ah!” I shout in front of the door, and then I turn and run down the stairs.

  I hide behind a low wall. No noise except for my shout, which echoes down the stairs

  “If you’re brave, you’ll do it again,” Casimiro tells me.

  “It’s not so hard to do. . . . ”

  “Then this time if you’re not afraid, you’ll even put a foot inside the door.”

  I take a nice deep breath, run up, open the door, and jump inside.

  “A-a-ah!”

  “Fu-u-u-uck!” shouts a figure in front of me.

  I just jumped in front of an old man, not as old as my parents, but he must certainly be at least twenty-five if he’s a day. He is carrying a black bag in one hand, and he’s wearing a sweater that looks like it was made by my mother and a wool hat on his head. I say the first thing that pops into my head: “Is this apartment for sale?”

  The man is having a hard time breathing and he’s all red. The first thing he manages to do is lean out onto the landing. The hand holding the bag is trembling.

  “Are you alone?” he asks me.

  “Yes.”

  “So what do you think, is that the way to enter someone else’s home? Get out of here, I’ve got work to do, go on!”

  “I didn’t think it was occupied. Are you the owner, sir?”

  “Sure . . . I mean, no . . . I’m the guy in charge of doors.”

  “Can I see how you fix a door?”

  “No, you can’t see how I fix a door, I’m not here for my amusement! I’ve got a lot of work to do, around here there’s lots of two-bit doors . . . and lots of thieves.”

  “Yes, there are lots and lots of doors like this one. In the apartment house at number 54 on Via Albania they’re all like this, except for apartment 7 which has a door that’s all metal. And there’s a very similar model in the apartment houses at 71 and 73. On Via Romania they’re the same as this one, but they have two locks instead of one, with the exception of the little house at number . . . ”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “I’ve seen them. I know all the apartments around here.”

  “Oh, really? Hold on a sec.” He pulls a sheet of paper and a pen out of his trousers pocket. “So, now, you were saying . . . ”

>   19.

  We find ourselves in the teacher’s lounge in the following formation: the teacher in the center, me and Ezio standing facing her, the respective Papàs sitting next to us. For the minor problems, they call the Mammas, but when they want the spankings and face slaps to come with some force behind them, they call the Papàs.

  “Your son headbutted Ezio!” the father of the future criminal begins.

  We each tell our version of what happened. Due to a set of factors, my version proves more convincing. Ezio’s limited vocabulary and wobbly grammar make his account as difficult to tolerate as a set of fingernails scraping along a chalkboard. His rehearsal of the mysterious phrases that I was muttering as he drew closer proves absolutely incomprehensible. The teacher half-shuts her eyes and compresses her lips as if each solecism were a knife being plunged into her back. Her hand quivers, she’d like to scrawl a nice fat red F, but she doesn’t know where. When it’s my turn, in practically perfect Italian I tell the story of how Ezio came nearly every day to steal my snack. “Your snack mine,” I quote him, obtaining the disconsolate confirmation of the teacher when she is summoned to identify the corpse of Italian grammar. I then declare that it was Ezio who gave me the head butt, only he aimed poorly and his nose smashed into my frontal bone causing me abrasions with subcutaneous bleeding, healable in four days. I conclude my account with a reference to Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations concerning the inherent right of collective self-defense. As we leave the teacher’s lounge, I write in my human flesh diary: “A well-told lie works better than the truth poorly told.” In addition to the head butt, Ezio also received a sharp smack from his father, accompanied by a liberatory movement of the teacher’s hand. Papà kept a stern expression on his face until he reached the front gate, then he told me that he already knew everything, that his duty as a father would be to tell me that “I shouldn’t do this, it’s not right, it’s not proper, the value of dialogue here, the pointlessness of violence there,” but seeing that we’re talking about Ezio, he doesn’t want to ruin what ought to be a day of celebration for the Santamaria family.