“With the first money we get, we’ll build the inside walls!” Papà shouts in a vain attempt to involve Vittoria in the conversation.
One of the curtains we’ve used to partition the rooms only now realizes just how provisional it really is and slams to the floor. We don’t even have the strength to jump at the noise.
“First the kitchen, Mario, otherwise the odors . . . ” says Mamma.
“But that’s the fashion nowadays, open kitchens!”
“First the bathtub, Papà,” I suggest.
“Al, you’re obsessed with this bathtub . . . first we enclose the kitchen and then the bedrooms!” On “bedrooms,” he tries to drag Vittoria into the conversation by lightly elbowing her foot.
“Oooouch!” she complains, as if he’d clubbed her over the head.
“Do we know anything about getting the electricity hooked up?” asks Mamma.
We know nothing about getting the electricity hooked up, or for that matter the natural gas, or the phone service. No one can give us any answers. Maybe they just haven’t figured out that the Santamaria family is here. Luckily, we get a little light from the streetlamp outside, weak but more than sufficient for a family well trained in the rules of the curfew game. As for phone calls, there’s a booth right next to the house, if we built a little window into the wall next to the front door, we’d be able to stick our hands out and pick up the receiver. Mamma doesn’t like the phone booth, she says that people will stop to make a call and we’ll always have someone in our house, or maybe she just hopes so, because in the time we’ve been here, not a single car has gone by. I saw one the day I came here with Papà to deliver the first load of furniture. It came racing up at top speed, then we heard the screech of brakes, and a few seconds later, we heard it drive away. A half mile or so further along, the road comes to an abrupt end. From what we’ve been able to learn, the original intention was to build a large supermarket here, but then they must have run into trouble with their permits, because the plan was abandoned. Beyond the Santamaria home, no more light poles, no more road—after us, nothing. But what matters is that we’ve put an end to our long wandering in the wilderness and we’ve become members of the Italian elite of homeowners. For a few more days we’ll go on cooking with the propane tank, dining by candlelight, fantasizing about what the house will look like when it’s done. This is a new beginning, I’m so excited. “Al! Did you burn something?” asks Mamma, venomously.
“Me? No, no. I just lit the candles.”
“I smell the stink of burnt varnish!”
Does a person think they can go ahead and use a spray can as a flamethrower just because now they live in a thousand-square-foot house? Well, they’re wrong, even if it was ten thousand square feet, she’d still be able to smell the odor instantly.
“It must be coming from outside,” I say.
32.
“Stop staring at that lady,” Papà whispers to me.
“But did you see her? She has the longest earlobes in the world . . . ”
“Sssh!”
Doctor Livingstone used to do the same thing. The first time that he found himself face-to-face with the pygmies he stared at them one by one. There’s nothing strange about it. I stare at people because there’s always something to discover: the tribe of women with withered earlobes, the tribe of dyed hair and the acne tribe, the tribe of geometric moles, of little handbags, the tribe of eyeglasses with tinted lenses, the tribe of the mohawks and the tribe of white cotton socks. Papà tells me that at my age it’s not right, I ask him why, and he replies, just because. Therefore, I consider myself free to ignore his request.
“That structure doesn’t belong to this district,” the clerk tells my father, “you’re going to have to ask the people over in the nineteenth.”
“But it was the people in the nineteenth who told us to come here.”
“Well, they were wrong . . . that section of road doesn’t come under our jurisdiction.”
“They said that Via del Fossone comes under your jurisdiction, it’s in your district.”
“Listen, the districts have very precise boundaries, and Via del Fossone comes under our jurisdiction right up to number 123, but we don’t even show the existence of a number 125.”
“But the house is registered with the city real estate registry!”
“Then the people at the real estate registry made the mistake! We don’t see any sign of it, after street number 123 there’s nothing but countryside.”
“There’s some countryside and then right after a curve in the road, there’s my house, with a paved street and a light pole. Who’s in charge of the maintenance of that light pole, which district?”
“How should I know, it’s not like we take care of those things! You’d have to ask the road maintenance office.”
This clerk, like so many others that we’ve met, must have other plans in life. It’s clear from the bored expression he puts on when we come in, and he reiterates the point with his increasingly abrupt irritated replies. He didn’t graduate from high school, just scraping by with the lowest possible grades, and he didn’t procure a highly placed recommendation just so he could be a paper pusher, shut up in a hermetically sealed compartment walled off from the rest of the world. No, he has grandiose plans, and a desperate need for a tidy little pile of cash to achieve those dreams. His is the face of someone hoping for a punch in the nose as the great opportunity of a lifetime. A month convalescing, a lawsuit won from the outset with a million dollars in damages for a fracture of the mandibular condyle and an acute atlantoaxial subluxation. I know that, my father knows it, and so we walk out of the office leaving him unhurt.
As far as I can tell, the odds were a billion to one against me and Vittoria ever being born. When Agnese and Mario Elvis were young, they must have been so good-looking that it’s a miracle they weren’t just cut down by fulminating heart attacks the minute they laid eyes on each other.
Lying in the shade of the vase of geraniums, I look over at Papà, and I have to admit there are few men on earth who can be so striking as they dry their hair in the sunshine, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and a hairnet.
“It’s not as if I were asking to get them for free, electric power, gas, and a phone line!” he suddenly blurts out. “I’m just asking them to hook me up to the network, so I can enjoy the privilege of being plundered by the monopolistic regime, but there’s just no way!”
By now, I’m almost big enough to bump the top of my head against the bottom of his chin, which is why Papà starts talking to me about serious matters.
“If there were free market competition, everything would work perfectly, they’d be stepping all over each other!” he goes on.
“It’s not a question of monopoly, it’s a question of mentality,” I reply, “what the people who run this country lack is a long-term strategic vision. Even if there were no longer a monopoly, the result would be a series of companies competing to see who can rip off their customers in the cleverest fashion. The average Italian executive reasons like a shopkeeper.”
Vittoria says that I seem like a well-trained dog, I say and do intelligent things just I can hear the usual “good job” and get the occasional pat on the head.
“Good job, Al.”
It’s so irritating to realize that she’s right.
“It’s a good thing I have a beautiful family, I don’t give a damn about the gas,” says Mario Elvis, and he goes back to enjoying the sunshine.
That’s right, ignore all the rest, only think about us.
Behind the promised home there must be fifteen acres or so of untilled land enclosed by the road, which runs around it in a large horseshoe arc, picked out by plane trees. On the left is a very dense growth of underbrush, thornbushes, and low trees, and from there runs a row of holm oaks about a hundred yards into the field. This, along with the plane trees, creates a se
cond barrier separating us from the first apartment buildings; on the left is a small tuff-stone hill covered with brushwood and blackberry and laurel bushes; stretching out before us, on the other side of the road, is open countryside until you reach the first monstrosities of the outskirts of the city. In other words, there’s plenty of greenery around the promised home, but I insisted on the geraniums, I knew that in the long run they’d work. I looked at Papà, I thought about the words of the clerk in the city administration, and the idea just popped into my head, unannounced. Like Newton, I managed to transform an accidental event into a great intuition, the key that I was seeking to give meaning to all the random details that had emerged so far. In my biography, it will be written: “This is the story of Al Santamaria, the greatest genius of the twentieth century who, in 1981, his annus mirabilis, transformed the potentially disastrous neglect of the administrative bureaucracy into the beginning of a memorable enterprise for his family and for the world at large!”
But now I don’t want to spoil everything, I have to manage to keep the secret and spring a nice surprise. I’ll work in the shadows, no one will have the slightest idea of my mission, to all appearances I’ll be the same old Al, the good, altruistic son, the model student, mild-mannered and affable, but with every passing day I’ll spin the web of my project, I’ll honor the mission that History has assigned me. I scan the horizon, the line upon which my exploits will be indelibly impressed.
“Al, get down off the table,” orders the clueless father.
What you are experiencing is a stream of thought. Mario-o-o . . . don’t try to put up any resistance, the supremacy of my brain cells is establishing direct contact with you-ou-ou . . . Did you hear the message of the thought stream? Everything . . . is . . . under . . . contro-o-ol, I repeat: Everything . . . is . . . under . . . contro-o-ol. This is the promised ho-o-ome. Even if it doesn’t belong in any particular district, even if we don’t have electric power, gas, or telepho-o-one. When I count to three, you’ll no longer have any doubts . . . one . . . two . . .
“A-a-al . . . ”
“I didn’t say ‘three’ yet.”
“Huh?”
Sleep . . . put up no resistance . . . sle-e-e-e-ep. It’s Al ordering you to sleep, it’s History-y-y-y itse-e-elf. One . . . two . . . three-ee-ee-ee.
33.
The imposing body mass of American Marines makes their incursions into enemy territory much more complicated. It’s easy to slip past enemy sentinels when you’re a slight Viet Minh, but if you’re forced to scamper on all fours between curtains and packing boxes with all those muscles on your frame, then you must really be good at it. The extremely muscular Sergeant Al creeps furtively through the forest right up under the enemy HQ, bound and determined to find out what has been upsetting the opposing generals since this morning. Private Casimiro holds his breath, for now all we can hear are sighs and the rustling of sheets.
“Poor little thing . . . that kind of permanent damage from a dumb stunt,” says the Generaless.
“Sssh! Don’t talk so loud!” orders the General.
Too late. The commando raider Al is already poised in ambush under their bed, and thanks to a secret technological device, he’s able to pick up even a whisper from half a mile away.
“Agnese, no one could have known, kids hit their heads all the time and are none the worse for it . . . ”
“And instead he hits his head once and . . . what did the lady doctor say?”
“Arrested development of his personality at the age of the trauma. But, you know, that lady doctor always exaggerates.”
“No, she doesn’t exaggerate. She said that he’s still the seven-year-old kid that she saw last time! I know there was something wrong, poor Al . . .”
Poor Al? Casimiro! They’re talking about me, about the knock on the head I got when I was dancing with Vittoria! Well, aren’t they happy now? I don’t understand them, they’ve just had full confirmation that nothing’s changed, that I’m a genius just the same as when I was seven, and these two are practically in tears?
“He should have been taken to the emergency room.”
“Agnese, it’s no one’s fault, and after all, she was only talking about his personality, nothing about his intelligence or his ability to learn. Don’t be like this, come on.”
More rustling in the sheets. Lots of rustling. Let’s head back to the base, Casimiro. It’s all just a false alarm, the enemy generals were just looking for an excuse to kiss and hug.
Every day I go with Papà to the grocery store. Since for the moment, the promised home doesn’t even exist as far as the postman is concerned, the grocer has let us put a label with our name on his mailbox. Unbeknownst to him, Mario Elvis acts under the guidance of my cerebral force: the other day, after noticing that, for what must have been the tenth day in a row, no one had replied to any of his certified letters, he believes that he had the idea of purchasing a diesel-powered electric generator. Thanks to Raul, who obtained it for us second hand, we now have sufficient power for lighting and for the refrigerator. At night, we have to turn it off because it’s a little noisy, but all in all, we can consider the problem solved. Now that the promised home is starting to take shape, the family seems to have benefited from the change. For the past few days, we’ve spent much more time together, everyone’s more affectionate, and they all make a great show of curiosity about my intelligence.
“Say, tell me something, Al . . . ” Papà asks me, “if a man has a car that gets 47 miles to the gallon and he decides to drive around the world along the equator, how much would he spend if the price of gasoline is 3,400 lire a gallon?”
All right, let’s say the man starts in Ecuador. He drives across South America. Then, Africa, from Libreville to the mouth of the Jubba River. Then Indonesia. I’ll rule out Micronesia, but toss in 60 miles just to be sure.
“Approximately 337,000 lire, give or take 5,000 lire.”
He takes a sheet of paper out of his pocket. He reads it. He seems worried.
“No, Al, he’d spend more than 1.8 million . . . ”
“One point eight million? A-a-ah, I see what you did. You meant the whole distance around the equator, including the ocean. You should have told me that this was an amphibious vehicle because in my calculations I took into account that you’d ship the car, and therefore spend nothing on gas, so that on dry land it would barely cover 4,700 miles, starting out from Quito, Ecuador, by way of Macapá, Brazil . . . ”
“Okay, okay, that’s perfect, good job.”
As we’re heading home, Papà seems overjoyed. The table is set and, as usual over the past few days, I catch a whiff of one of my favorite foods. Today it’s tortellini. Vittoria pours me some water, Mamma fills my plate and then turns to look at Papà who gives her a wink.
“Listen, Al . . . ” he says to me, “I just can’t seem to finish the crossword puzzle because I can’t remember the name of the pope of the Great Refus . . . ”
“Celestine V. Dante mentions him in the third canto of the Inferno,” I reply.
Vittoria, Mamma, and Papà all exchange a glance, forget to say: “Good job, Al,” and start eating with expressions of relief.
“Papà, the TV news,” I say.
“No news broadcasts during dinner, we won’t digest our food.”
“But we never watch it.”
“Just eat, Al.”
“The truth is that you’re all worried about me!”
Goodness, I managed to attract a lot of attention with that sentence. So I say it again.
“You’re all worried . . . but I’m a big boy now, I know the way the world works! And I can process information just fine! That will be clear, as long as we interpret the results of the exams correctly! When they get here . . .” I add, vaguely.
Mamma and Papà exchange a quick glance.
“And after all, what kind of atrocitie
s can you imagine me finding out about that I haven’t already encountered while studying the World Wars, eh?”
“You’re already studying the World Wars?” Mamma asks me.
“No, I just went ahead on my own . . . I mean it’s not like I can spend a whole month on the Eastern Roman Empire!”
“Al, we’re not worried about you,” says Mamma. “How can you worry about a son who’s getting straight As?”
“In fact! I don’t know what else I can do to keep you from worrying . . . Hey! Hey! Mamma!”
“What is it?”
“Gre-e-e-en beans, you know that Casimiro never eats them . . . ”
34.
Out here everyone’s crazy, it took me a while to figure it out because the Santamaria family is a wonderful place to grow up in, but for that very reason it fails to educate you in the slightest about the dangers of the outside world. After years of study and collecting data, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is possible to summarize the world as follows: it works just like a high school class year. There are the leaders, groups form, the groups compete, the competition is almost always unfair. In each group there are spies, traitors, double agents, diplomats, and the loyalists willing to subscribe to even the worst causes. Then there are the neutrals, like me, who are held in the lowest esteem but, since they’re useful, they’re able to prosper in blessed peace. It’s a cold war climate, full of false smiles and angry glares by turns, creating an atmosphere of instability that systematically degenerates into periods of crisis marked by small-scale acts of intimidation and the occasional test of strength for trivial reasons. The fact that the maneuverings of a community of adolescents in the throes of hormone storms should so closely resemble the maneuverings of international politics and the ploys of the most refined minds on the planet is dismaying, to say the least. Day by day, I’m increasingly convinced that my undertaking is not only memorable, it’s above all necessary, because the discovery that things don’t work as well out there as they do in the Santamaria household would even be acceptable if it weren’t for the fact that the outside world just won’t stop undermining our happiness. We’re running headfirst up against a coalition of powers that seem to have it in for us even though we haven’t done anything wrong, aside from failing to be rich. We have blindingly obvious evidence, in the fact that after years of searching for a home, we are being told that responsibility for its proper functioning falls under no one’s jurisdiction, and the fact that a candy company copied the idea of the chocolate meteorite and now Mamma’s chocolate ciambellone is stocked in only two cafés, to say nothing of the fact that Papà’s office manager has it in for his hair, as if the image of the bus company depended on that, rather than the buses which are at least twenty years old. There’s no more time to waste, the plan is ready. I just need to put aside a little money to finance the undertaking and then hope for a miracle: Mamma and Papà going away for a few days.
We Are Family Page 12