We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  43.

  Vittoria spends hours on end in the phone booth. A pile of phone tokens on top of the phone, her finger twisting the wire. Papà says that he can’t understand how she can stay in there for so long, it isn’t good for her, the telephone shouldn’t take the place of social relationships. In his day, they only used the phone for important calls.

  “But why don’t they just see each other and explain everything face-to-face?” he asks Agnese.

  “You’ll see, she’ll get over it . . . ”

  “This is what I don’t like about technology, it makes relationships so much colder . . . all these young people locked up in their rooms or in phone booths whispering—some progress.”

  “We would have done the same thing when we were young.”

  “Are you kidding, we saw each other, we’d walk hours just to meet. This generation, on the other hand, always attached to the telephone . . . if you ask me, they’re going to turn into morons. A young person should be out in the open air.”

  “That girl might even go out too much . . . Vittoria, that’s enough!” Mamma tells her.

  “Just another minu-u-ute.”

  This morning is one worth framing. Luckily, our moods aren’t timed to match the hours of the stores, so we aren’t the kind of people who find Sundays boring. Agnese is sunbathing, Mario Elvis mows the lawn, I work on processing toxic waste and the welfare of the planet.

  “Al, look what you’re doing to that hand . . . ” Papà says to me.

  “I’ll wash it later.”

  I’d be crazy to, this is precious stuff that needs to go straight to my brain. When the time is right, all these notes will prove fundamental. Addendum to the Plan for Salvation drawn up by Almerico Santamaria, age 14. Draft VIII. In order to guide the planet toward a more ethical and enlightened form of development, we must call for the adoption of the Regulatory Criterion by the legislative body of every government. The Regulatory Criterion is designed to determine the quality of all laws, proposals, initiatives, and projects, in the fields of finance, energy, society, and diplomacy, and it consists of three simple questions: 1) Does it contribute to the physical development of children? 2) Does it contribute to the mental development of children? 3) Does it contribute to the happiness of children? Any law, proposal, initiative, or project that fails to respond affirmatively to these questions will be considered contrary to the interests of mankind. I feel ready, the outlines of the undertaking are increasingly clearly defined, the money I have set aside is more than sufficient, now all I need is for Mamma and Papà to clear out and let me work uninterrupted for at least a day. In twenty-four hours I can get this done, it won’t be easy but there’s no point in hoping that the most homebody parents on earth will give me a broader margin to work with.

  Vittoria goes over to Mamma. They sit down face-to-face to paint each other’s toenails, near them is a table with four bottles of citron juice and a transistor radio that changes stations according to the whims of the wind, with me and Papà in the foreground: he’s amusing himself by whipping the electric lawnmower as if it were an ox harnessed to a plow, while I’m creatively incinerating the brushwood. If I wanted to send one of those postcards reading “Hello from . . . ” that are so fashionable these days, that’s the picture it would have.

  “Can we burn the brushwood without having to call the firemen?”

  “It’s all perfectly under control, Papà.” And I toss a balloon full of alcohol onto the burning grass. “Napalm effect!”

  Papà walks toward me, gives me a kiss on the forehead.

  “What would I do without you?” he says, while he pulls the old gag of the out-of-control lawnmower that drags him away.

  This is a hostile act. An unmistakable aggression. I had to call Casimiro because I couldn’t even believe it was really happening.

  “Casimiro, we need to react with resolve.”

  “Yes, Al, there’s a limit to everything!”

  It’s absurd, she had the nerve to go right past our house. She felt confident that no one would recognize her but she was wrong, I know who you are, you damned homewrecker. The worst thing was seeing Papà, who stopped mowing the lawn, got in the car, and told us he’d be right back.

  “You understand, Casimiro? Not half an hour after saying to me, ‘What would I do without you’!”

  “They’re a couple of filthy pigs . . . ”

  “Now I’m going to talk to Mamma and ask her to come take a walk with me!”

  “No, Al, you’d better not.”

  “Yes, instead, I better had. Enough is enough!”

  “Al . . . what are you muttering about?” Mamma asks me.

  Mamma, stop lying in the sun and come with me, we need to go get Mario Elvis back. It’s a miserable story, you’re going to be upset because you’re going to feel betrayed, and I don’t blame you because that’s how I feel myself, but it’s not his fault, the one who’s at fault is that woman who isn’t satisfied with having a marvelous secret bachelor lover, she wants a married one too, with children, now let’s go and fetch him back, then we’ll deal with the situation like grown-ups, calmly and rationally, we’ll brood and sulk for a few days, we’ll get him to swear that he’ll never do it again, and then, don’t worry, I’ll take care of making sure that chesty glutton ceases and desists once and for all.

  “Nothing, Mamma, everything’s fine.”

  44.

  Next to the table we’ve set up the folding ladder, its top covered with a sheet. It looks like a monument to the bricklayers, awaiting its inauguration. Papà know that he’s not supposed to ask us any more questions because a surprise is a surprise, we won’t tell him anything until Mamma brings the food to the table. While we’re waiting, he tries to take his mind off it.

  “Let me tell you, you can’t guess what happened yesterday . . . ” he tells us. “Agnese, do you remember Sandra, the one from the personnel office? The one who’s a little zaftig?”

  “Maybe so . . . Sandra? I don’t think we ever met though.”

  “Well, last night she came home and the street was full of people, police, firemen . . . a fire had destroyed her house.”

  “Oh my God, that poor thing, what happened?”

  “Well, this is the interesting part. The firemen said that it wasn’t an accident, that this was a case of professional arson . . . Al, there’s nothing to laugh about! . . . That poor thing doesn’t have a place to live, and she was so scared that she went home to her mother in Campobasso.”

  “But wasn’t she supposed to be a terrible loan shark?” Mamma asks.

  “I don’t know, there were rumors. Anyway, if it’s true then that means she went up against the wrong person . . . Al, what’s gotten into you tonight?”

  Mamma goes into the kitchen to sample the chicken, she’s not entirely satisfied so she asks my advice. I taste it, I taste it again, and I’m not entirely satisfied either. I ask Vittoria what she thinks of it, and she nibbles at the bite of chicken and stalls before finally giving her approval. Since Papà makes us suffer every time he has a surprise, we’ve decided to make him pay. These five minutes of supplementary waiting have the desired effect: as soon as Mamma sets the pan down on the table, he snaps.

  “All right, will you explain to me just what that catafalque is?!”

  “It’s an idea of mine, Papà,” I say, “mine and Vittoria’s some, too . . . We decided that, along with Elvis Day, we’re going to celebrate,” and here I whip the sheet off the ladder, “Santamaria Day!”

  There was a very good reason that King Arthur and his knights gathered around a table. Sitting side by side they’d tell each other: “Do you remember how much we laughed in that one battle?” and memory after memory gave them the feeling that they belonged to a single family. That is how they became invincible. On the top of the ladder we fastened the Super 8 projector with the lens pointing downward. W
hen I turn it on, the beam of white light hits the table at an almost perpendicular angle. I move the bottle of mineral water so that Mario Elvis can have a perfect view of Agnese’s face. Look at how beautiful she is as she poses on the beach, pretending not to know that you were filming her. Unless this really is a world of lunatics, VHS cassettes will soon be forgotten, their inexplicable popularity at an end, and we’ll all go back to using film projectors. The sound of the film as it runs, pulled headlong by the toothed sprocket, the heat of the lamp, the image that every so often bounces and blurs: nothing that so closely resembles memory can ever be forgotten. Vittoria runs over the cups and plates wearing the crocheted swimsuit that Mamma made her, she comes over to me as if to play with sand on the bread basket. She talks to me, I talk to Casimiro. Then Papà arrives, glances toward the lovely director, takes us both by the hand, and does the routine of the circus strongman. An instant later we’re both in the air, we kick our feet, holding tight to his hands. Now we push aside the roasting pan with the chicken to get a better view of Papà playing his guitar, little Vittoria holds out her hands, she wants the movie camera, Mamma lets her have it, the picture jerks and swerves, then it spins dizzyingly and stops on a blurry extreme close-up of the sand. End of the reel. The sprockets continue to spin, the tail of the film slaps at the projector as it whirrs. Mario Elvis wants more.

  “You were great . . . what a great job . . . ”

  Agnese sighs, Vittoria asks me to run the other film, the one of her gymnastic tryouts, Papà stares at his plate as he toys with his fork. He seems to have lost something among the pieces of chicken with red peppers. I climb the stepladder, make sure that the projector is still solidly battened down, and rewind the film.

  “What else could the Santamaria family ask for?” I say.

  “Nothing!”

  45.

  The Santamaria family is once again discussing Vittoria’s bad luck. Mario Elvis laughs and shakes his head, Agnese says that bad luck has nothing to do with it, that girl just doesn’t have an ounce of gracefulness. I limit myself to commenting that with the money we spent on six years of gymnastics, we could have put in a jacuzzi. In other words, she’s pulled another one of her classic stunts, this time on the road. Vittoria is really good at English, and in order to take her mastery of the language to another level, since they couldn’t afford to send her to boarding school, Mamma and Papà sent her to work as an au pair with a family in Manchester. The evening she got there she called us, she told us the house was beautiful, extremely nice and well cared for. The mother had done it all with her own hands, she spent hours stitching curtains, decorating the walls with stencils, and caring for the plants. In this home-sweet-home, my sister, having noticed the absence of a bidet, decided the right thing to do was climb up onto the sink. It was obvious it wasn’t going to support her weight but I know my sister well, and even if I wasn’t there, I know exactly what happened next. She decided: “If I’m very careful I can do this. Here, I’ll climb up on this stool and then I’ll just lightly rest my weight . . . gently, ever so gently.” The way I imagine the scene, a second later my sister lost her grip, fell full-force onto the sink, and knocked it to the floor where it shattered into a thousand pieces. And this was only the appetizer. The mother, who of course loved that sink as if it were one of her children, went into a full-blown hysterical fit. After a day of chilly distance during which she stayed in the garden, pruning the hedges, and my sister stayed in her room, burning with shame, the woman took a step toward détente and invited the toilet acrobat down for a cup of tea. According to Vittoria’s account, there are two armchairs in the living room upholstered in hand-sewn fabrics, carefully pleated, covered with exceedingly intricate floral patterns with colors ranging from gray to dark brown. Hues that are damned close to the colors of the woman’s Yorkshire terrier. My sister went down to the living room, apologized for the hundredth time, and in her portrayal of the role of the young woman at her wits’ end, she let herself flop backwards into one of the armchairs. The Yorkie’s favorite armchair. The Yorkie the woman loved as if it were another one of her children, a brother to the sink.

  Papà went to get her at the airport, my sister landed at 6:50, about an hour late, but twenty-six days earlier than the day she was expected back.

  After dinner, while Agnese and Mario Elvis try to resolve a difference of nine hundred twenty lire between the total predicted by Mamma’s pocket calculator and the numbers printed out by the cash register at the supermarket, I try to distract Vittoria with a game of Scrabble. Vittoria writes “dance,” “university,” “boyfriend,” “travel,” and “television.” I write “trauma,” “thoracic,” “neck,” “broken,” “quadruped,” and “English.”

  “Al, in your opinion, am I a beautiful woman?”

  “You’re not a woman, you’re my sister . . . anyway, yes, you just become prettier all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “Casimiro says so, too.”

  “Do you think I’ll ever be famous?”

  “Famous how?”

  “Well, famous like I take my degree, I publish a bunch of papers, and maybe I even make an important discovery, and so they interview me and invite me to appear on TV.”

  It’s not my sister’s fault that she asks so many stupid questions. It’s a result of the proliferation of television networks, of cameras, and of the exponential increase in the number of people who, almost invariably unjustifiably, are allowed to enjoy a few minutes of fame. Even scientists no longer dream of being published in specialized journals and the recognition of the scientific community, they prefer to appear on the small screen and to receive the canned applause of the television audience. They’ll get over it, in no more than a decade everyone will get over it.

  “We’re all going to be famous,” I reply.

  “Why?”

  “When Papà becomes an astronaut . . . ”

  Vittoria toys for a few seconds with the plastic letters.

  “I’m perfectly happy with Papà as a bus driver,” she says.

  “So am I, but he shouldn’t give up his dreams.”

  “I don’t think he really ever dreamed those dreams. I think it was only a joke he played on us when we were little.”

  I have better plans for him, better than he can even imagine. But I’m certainly not going to stand in his way if he wants to take part in the space program.

  “I thought it was true myself until just a few years ago, but then I understood,” Vittoria continues.

  Mamma will take a chocolate ciambellone to the technicians at the NASA control room. It will turn into a regular thing. Everyone waits eagerly for the arrival of Signora Agnese and her good-luck cake.

  “You can only write one word at a time!” Vittoria complains.

  All right, all right, I’ll take away “Yorkshire,” and I’ll leave “dead.”

  46.

  Good News, I adore you. I cut a meatball in two and there’s almost no bread inside, so this must be really big news. What can it be? Are we about to start construction on the interior walls? Or maybe the bathtub? Of course, they must have decided to give precedence to the tub!

  “Mario, let’s tell them right away, otherwise these two are going to choke on their food.”

  “We said after dinner. After the espresso, and after the grappa . . . ”

  “No-o-o!”

  “Okay, okay. Well then . . . Mamma and Papà have made a decision. We’ve spent a few challenging years, we’ve waited so long for everything to be settled once and for all, but seeing that there are always going to be problems, we just told ourselves: enough is enough. It’s now or never.”

  “What’s now or never?” Vittoria asks.

  “Mamma and Papà are leaving, we’re going to have our honeymoon, in Venice.”

  “Bravo!” Vittoria shouts.

  “Yes-s-s-s!” I yell.

 
; “When are you leaving?” Vittoria asks.

  “In a few days, we’ve found a little pensione in Mestre and we want to take advantage of the opportunity.”

  “And how long will you stay away?” I inquire.

  “We’re leaving on an open-ended basis, as long as our money holds out.”

  “Ten days at the very most, then . . . ” Mamma jokes.

  Perfect. I was ready to put the plan into effect in twenty-four hours, but instead now I’ll have plenty of time and I’ll even be able to devote myself to refining the details.

  “Maybe we’ll win something at the Venice casino and we’ll be able to stay longer,” says Papà.

  “If you set foot anywhere near that casino, I’ll head straight home, this is a honeymoon!”

  “Right, it’s a honeymoon, having fun is out of the question.”

  “Mamma, remember to take a ciambellone with you, the northeastern Italian market is an important one,” I say.

  “Certainly, Al . . . But here’s an important point, I’m going to need a phone number to reach you. Tiziana’s number?” Agnese asks Vittoria.

  “Yes, that’s good.”

  “Wouldn’t Lorenzo’s be better?” I ask my sister.

  “What does Lorenzo have to do with anything?”

  “No, I was just saying. On account of you always go over to his house. Even when you say you’re going over to Tiziana’s.”

  The gazes of Mario Elvis and Agnese, perfectly synchronized, swivel to focus on Vittoria’s bright blush.

  “That’s not true! I sometimes go over to Lorenzo’s just because we’re studying together for an exam!”

  “Come on, you two, don’t fight. Let us go on our honeymoon without worries,” says Agnese. “You’re big kids now, Vittoria is legally an adult . . . Understood, Al? While we’re gone, you’re going to have to do as your sister tells you.”