We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  For the first time, his facial features seem to relax. He takes off his shoes, lies down, and turns his back to us. Smiling courteously, we go into the kitchen to each get a knife.

  “Who the hell did Adele send us?” I ask Vittoria.

  “She’s crazy! I told her that after Dario we only wanted reliable people!”

  With a six-token phone call we learn that he’s a very respectable individual, a highly placed executive at a bank that’s in the midst of a major scandal, and that all he needs is a temporary change of scenery. In spite of all those reassurances, we still decide to sleep in the same room, with knives conveniently close at hand. While we try to decide whether it would be wise to go right to sleep or whether it might not be better to wait for the banker to drop off, we hear the sound of knocking on the wall.

  “Excuse me? . . . It’s me, excuse me . . . ”

  “Yes? How can I help you?” I reply.

  The man sticks his head in the door, shyly.

  “I need to make a phone call, but I don’t have any phone tokens.”

  “You can have three in exchange for one Elvis.”

  He looks at me.

  “We don’t use lire here,” I explain. “Now that you’re here, you ought to exchange your money and purchase Elvises.”

  Now, instead of looking at me, he turns to my sister. Having obtained a certification of the authenticity of my words, he swivels back to stare at me.

  “Would you be so kind as to exchange some for me?” he asks.

  “The exchange office opens tomorrow morning at nine.”

  “Jesus Christ, Al, would you just give the man his phone tokens?” Vittoria hisses at my back.

  You just don’t seem to be able to enforce any rules around here. What’s the good of founding an independent principality if in the end you just wind up doing everything Italian-style? Well, really, the office ought to be closed but for you, such an important person, I’d be glad to open it special. The cashier and the customer go into the living room, the cashier gets the strongbox out of the cabinet with the locked door, and the customer pulls a giant wad of hundred-thousand-lire bills out of his pocket. The cashier remains cool and composed, stifling a surge of understanding for the servile attitudes of the inhabitants of the Italian republic toward the rich and powerful. The customer says that he’s sorry, he has nothing smaller, the cashier says that unfortunately, if he wants phone tokens, he’s going to have to exchange the hundred thousand lire for Elvises. The customer says that that’s not a problem. The cashier hands over the Elvises and the phone tokens and skillfully conceals his gratitude by whistling a little tune he’s just invented then and there.

  The banker goes to make a phone call and as soon as he turns his back on me, I run straight to Vittoria. I can’t wait to wave the banknote in her face, forget about the suppository box, the principality is soon going to need a strongbox, then a full-fledged safe.

  I hurtle into the room and smash into Vittoria lurking in the shadows. I feel a shiver, a strange cold burning, sharp and sudden. I still wave the banknote under her nose.

  “We’re rich,” I tell her, and then faint in my joy.

  I remain flat on the floor because now I feel pretty much the way I did that night after playing with Tiziana: my arms hang slack, I’d like to keep waving the banknote in the air but Vittoria is screaming, I raise my hand, but the hundred-thousand lire note is no longer in my fingers, it must have slipped out of my hand, I reach around for it and my arm knocks against a plastic handle projecting from my side. Forget about joy, the reason I fainted is because she stabbed four inches of fish filleting knife into my spleen.

  “It’s not in the spleen, it’s just a flesh wound,” says the banker.

  “I’m calling an ambulance anyway,” says Vittoria, her voice quavering.

  “Why would you do that, we don’t need an ambulance! It’s just superficial, you can see the shape of the blade . . . we’ll get it out right now . . . How the hell did you do this?”

  “She’s been trying for years . . . ” I say, in search of sympathy.

  I need to stop staring down at the handle sticking out of my side. I close my eyes and I abandon myself into the arms of the Creator. Let Him decide whether it’s a good idea to let a genius die for such a trifle.

  “Do you know how to do it?” my sister asks.

  “At the bank, we’ve done dozens of these little operations . . . here . . . here . . . you see? He doesn’t even need stitches.”

  “No?” Vittoria asks.

  “He just needs a Band-Aid and he’ll be fine.”

  “But what if he gets tetanus?” she asks.

  “Dream on . . . ” I reply. “You’re going to have to kill me with your bare hands!”

  71.

  “This month again the balance sheet of the principality is positive, we have 640,000 lire in the treasury and our projected expenses are 550,000 lire. Considering that at the end of the month, my salary will be added to yours, we can definitely start work on the walls,” I tell Vittoria.

  “Al, I think it’s best to give precedence to the work of shoring up the house . . . ”

  “Vittoria, do you realize what that means? We’re talking about 4 million lire at the very least. It means delaying Mamma and Papà’s return for another year, maybe a year and a half. They weren’t here for my eighteenth birthday, or for my twentieth birthday, and this means they won’t be here for my graduation party either . . . It’s out of the question.”

  “I know . . . you’re right . . . ”

  “In fact, we’ve waited too long.”

  “It’s just that I wouldn’t want to spend all our money on the other projects and then risk having the principality collapse the next time it rains.”

  “But there’s not even a crack in the structure, and after all it’s not like we move all that much.”

  “By now we’re a hundred yards away from the road . . . ”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, must be fifty, tops!”

  The truth is somewhere in the middle, tending toward Vittoria’s side. In fact, completely on Vittoria’s side if we consider that recently the principality had been following an L-shaped trajectory. A matter of a few more yards and we’ll wind up completely behind the line of holm oaks.

  “Now the door overlooks the countryside again,” she tells me.

  “So the principality has rotated slightly, so what?”

  “Al, it’s dangerous,” Vittoria continues. “You decide, you’re the prince, but just keep in mind that there’s a risk we’ll be throwing out all the work we’ve put into it.”

  I’m the prince. Why did she say that? Now I feel a surge of the magnanimity of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

  “And after all, Papà wrote that he’ll be on tour for six months, so there’s no big rush,” she concludes.

  “On tour? When did he write that? And didn’t you say anything about it?”

  “The letter arrived this morning.”

  “I thought we’d decided to always read them together!”

  “Sorry, Al, I couldn’t resist, but I swear I only read the first page.”

  “I’m going to fill the tub!” I say.

  Enough is enough. I understand the worry, I understand the way that distance amplifies anxiety, but we can’t go on like this. I’ve become a man by now.

  “Now write: ‘Dear Mamma and Papà’!” I tell Vittoria.

  “I’m writing, I’m writing . . . ”

  “‘I’m happy to know that you’re well and before telling you a little about us, I’d like to clarify a few things: A) it’s not true that I only eat french fries and chocolate cookies . . . ’”

  “Al . . . ” the little gossip comments.

  “Would you rather write them about the condom in your purse?”

  “What’s in my purse is none of your
business. And anyway it belonged to Tiziana.”

  “The condom belonged to Tiziana and I don’t only eat french fries and chocolate cookies. Write: ‘By now I’m a grown-up and my diet regularly includes portions of fruit . . . ’”

  “Fruit gelato isn’t the same thing as fruit.”

  “‘ . . . fish . . .’”

  “Only fried.”

  “‘ . . . and legumes.’”

  “When have we ever even bought any?”

  “At Christmas, for bingo, quit busting my chops! ‘B) I haven’t burnt the fringe on the curtains and carpets in years now . . . ’”

  “Weeks, maybe.”

  “‘C) I always obey Vittoria because she works so hard to keep the house clean . . . to cook . . . and iron . . . so it strikes me as the least I can do.’ No quibbles on that point, am I right? ‘D) I don’t know how you found about the disgusting habit of selling thesis papers, but you can rest assured that I’d never get involved in any suspicious business. E) No, we didn’t hear anything about a house that collapsed in Avellino, and anyway you have no reason to worry because the promised home is solid as a rock. You’ll find the place intact, just as you left it.’”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes, right before ‘just as you left it,’ put in: ‘more or less.’”

  72.

  Our guest Carlo has begun to loosen up, at night we spend hours talking about economics and life in general. He’s not a bad person, it’s just that he was a child so many years ago that now, he hardly even remembers that he even had a childhood. While we’re in the garden playing volleyball, he sticks his head out the door.

  “Sorry . . . I just wanted to know what time the Olympics course begins.”

  He’s embarrassed by the sight of Vittoria and Roberta in their underclothes so he turns his back to us as he speaks.

  “Carlo, why don’t you come play, too,” Vittoria suggests.

  “We could make it boys against girls!” I say.

  “Just a couple of kicks, I haven’t played in years,” he replies.

  For the volleyball game, we groom the field properly. We stretch out the clothesline and hang towels for the net. We gallantly let the women have the ball. Roberta serves, the ball lands a yard in front of Carlo.

  “We just handed them a point . . . why didn’t you go for it?” I ask him.

  “Go for it? How could I, I would have gotten all dirty . . . ”

  The day you play while taking care not to sweat, not to get your pants dirty, not to tear up your shoes, well, that’s the day you’ve started getting old. There’s a lot of work still to do on this man. Vittoria and Roberta at this point no longer dare, if you’re going to play you have to play for real, otherwise you do like the old folks and you sit down in an armchair and watch yourself an episode of Dallas, that way you can be sure you won’t get dirty. Yesterday my sister skinned her knee while we were playing dodgeball, and she looked at me and said: “Look . . . now I’m going to get a scab. I haven’t had one since elementary school!” Carlo, on the other hand, has just remembered that he possesses secondary internal organs. He chased after the ball and then yelled at me: “My spleen hurts! It’s ridiculous, it’s been a good thirty-five years since I last felt this pain.”

  The discovery of the spleen has put an end to our volleyball game. We move onto the sofa where we boot up the Commodore 64, we insert the Olympics cartridge, and we start the twelfth lesson: “Losing with Style.”

  “How’m I doing?” Carlo asks me as he furiously manipulates the joystick.

  “No good, Carlo. You’re being way too much of a loser . . . you’re not supposed to let him cream you, you’re supposed to let him win after a long head-to-head battle.”

  “I’m never supposed to win?”

  “Just one game out of three. The important thing is never to win the tiebreaker, just remember that.”

  “Never? Then he’ll realize I’m letting him win and get bored.”

  “A twelve-year-old? I can guarantee that won’t happen.”

  A few evenings ago, while chatting about the model of Luxembourg banks and offshore partnerships, Carlo told me that one day he’d like to talk to his son about these things. Why not, I said to him, and he replied that his son is growing up all wrong, all he’s interested in are computer games, one time he even yelled at the boy to cut it out with that nonsense, but it didn’t do any good. Nice move. If he’s not interested in the things his son cares about, then he can hardly expect the reverse. I told him that his situation struck me as more worrisome—fifty years old, and there he is spending the day in front of a computer monitor obsessing over the fluctuations of the stock exchange, poisoning his mood because of a 0.2 percent drop in the textile sector. He got all offended.

  “Look! I’m getting a blister on my hand . . . ” he tells me.

  “If you want to win the hundred-yard dash, you’re just going to have to live with the blister. All Olympic champions have them, so stop whining!”

  73.

  Before going home, Roberta gave me an envelope closed with a rubber band. Inside were lots of sheets of paper and stacks of banknotes separated by rusty paper clips. I asked her what all that stuff was and she told me that it was all the money and exams and papers that she’d been given in exchange for a peek at her tits. Stacks of thousand-lire banknotes, some of them no longer legal tender, with the picture of Giuseppe Verdi. It was a lot of money, I told her that she was quite sought after, and she told me that all of that was my money, she’d spent all the rest. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked her. “Try to guess,” she told me. This must be one of those things you only understand when you’re grown up, so now I ought to understand it. She kept the money because she was already in love with me. Strange, because even if she was in love with me, she would only date older boys. When she was a junior, she dated a guy who came to pick her up every day in a VW Golf Cabrio. When she was a freshman, rumors went around that she was dating a divorced forty-year-old. No, she probably just kept that stack of bills for the fun of showing it to her girlfriends and saying: “Look here, all the money that fool Al spends on me.” I don’t understand and I never will. Can resignation be a sufficiently powerful weapon to conquer a woman? If only that were my one doubt. There’s an underlying error at the foundation of the planetary economic model that I just don’t seem able to understand. Of course unemployment is high: you either slave away or you stay home, there’s no compromise. Dedicating your life to your job ought to be a choice, not a requirement for keeping your family from starving. Vittoria, with her part-time job, really lucked out.

  “But how do people do it?” I blurt out.

  “You have to be really motivated, and we just aren’t, right?”

  “I don’t know, Casimiro. Do you realize that we have to go every single day, every single blessed day?”

  “It’s just like school.”

  “No, it’s worse. At school you got out at one, here you’re nailed to your desk until five thirty. I absolutely need to address the matter in the constitution. ‘The principality is founded on part-time labor.’”

  “What a complainer. Everyone else does it, we can do it too.”

  “In fact, it’s a clear case of collective madness! What with work, getting ready for work, commuting to work, you waste nearly twelve hours a day, then you spend eight hours sleeping, and you’re left with just four hours to enjoy yourself. I don’t want to live four hours a day!”

  “If we’d chosen ourselves a more interesting job, then you wouldn’t think those twelve hours a day were wasted.”

  “If we’d chosen ourselves a more interesting job, then the hours we’re talking about would have become fourteen, without mentioning the possiblity that you’d be tempted to work on Saturday and Sunday too! Shall we call in sick?”

  “We were just hired, that’s out of the question!�
��

  “We’ll just pop by the amusement park . . . ”

  “I’m not listening to you.”

  “One ride on the Tagada, a doughnut, and then we’ll go to work!”

  74.

  First she was ashamed and now she’s rolling on the ground laughing. Whoever understands her is better than me. The whole time the movie was playing, she kept telling me: “Sssh!” “Don’t make the gunshot sound!” “Don’t repeat the things they say aloud!” And now she’s sprawled on the sofa with tears in her eyes.

  “Vittoria, you should have been there!” says Roberta, between one gasp and the next.

  “What did he do?”

  “Well, at a certain point, he shouted at Batman to hit Joker in the no-o-ose!”

  “Al . . . ”

  “I didn’t shout it . . . I just said it.”

  “He even stood up! I swear, I felt like I was at the parish movie night . . . ”

  I walk over to the window, because the two of them, once they start backing each other up? There’s nothing you can do but ignore them. Outside, in the darkness, a van leaves the road and plunges across the meadow.

  “Did you call Raul?” I ask Vittoria.

  “No, why?”

  The van stops behind the phone booth, Raul jumps out and runs toward the door. He runs along hunched over, maybe to protect himself from the strong wind that’s gusting. I open the door a crack and he slips through, where even a sheet of paper wouldn’t have fit.

  “Come on, you gotta come away with me, Dario broke out of prison!”

  “Dario? Dario the tenant? What was he doing in prison?” Vittoria asks.

  Raul looks at me.

  “She didn’t know a fuckin’ thing, did she?”

  “Al! Raul! What’s this all about?”

  “Listen, the two of you, you can explain it all later, we’ve got to get going because that guy’s on his way here now, to make you guys pay!”

  “Pay for what?” Roberta shouts.