Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  “We’ll take care of getting rid of everything,” Nikos said, pointing to the Monopoly set I’d loved in elementary school, and then: Clue, at which I often beat my mother, discovering a certain talent for suspecting the right people; Snakes and Ladders, in which I’d moved four pieces, imagining I was playing four different contestants; the puzzle of the Picasso painting depicting a girl with a dove in her hand; and, finally, my favorite game, Scarabeo, with the stands for the plastic letters that you then arranged on the board, composing new words. During the last Christmas with my father, we had all three played, forging ever longer words and trying impossible ones, and when we got to the final round the order was: me first, my mother second, my father third. Then my father had written “locomotion,” and when he won, beating us, his eyes lit up, a rapid blue wave raised by the wind.

  “I’ll take care of deciding what we throw away and what we don’t—you have to work, there’s a lot to do,” I said brusquely to Nikos.

  Meanwhile my mother and his father were agreeing on a schedule: every day from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon—if possible even later, they shouldn’t waste time as long as there was light, shouldn’t lose time when it wasn’t too hot for the heavy jobs. I noticed that Nikos had a long scar on his left cheekbone. Neither he nor I felt the need to add anything before saying goodbye. Children know how to be silent.

  Once we were alone, my mother and I had lunch, without much conversation. (“How is it that Dollface occurred to you yesterday?” “Who?” “Dollface, the neighbor.” “He liked you, Mamma.” “What are you talking about?” “He was out on the balcony for you.” “What do you mean?”) Then, as soon as the sun allowed, we went up to the roof and in the evening light I looked around.

  Here was what surrounded the house: the terraces of other buildings, old antennas, drying racks with sheets hanging on them, clouds stretched until they frayed, the archaeology of ships docked in the port, the military port coiled on itself and guarded as a pruning hook, the outlines the same as they had always been: faded, sleepy, distant. And me: the child who waited for Sunday to go up to the terrace with her father, opened the shed door, took out the little red car, and pushed on the pedals, whipping right and left between tables and swing. He stood still, hands in his pockets, my mother leaned out over the parapet, looking at the sea and waiting for the return of something we weren’t allowed to watch. There were no traces left of that world. The terrace was stripped of everything, and after the work was done even the last memory would be banished forever.

  “Nothing will change, only the floor,” my mother said, guessing my fear.

  I squatted down with my back against the outer wall of the shed. The roof was falling down, and it was still the most beautiful place in the whole house, in the entire city, in fact in the whole world. Maybe that’s why it was falling down: out of shame and shyness. The white light of the Strait was a marvel, more rarefied than the fog, touched by the September sea and by the palm leaves infected by the red palm weevil epidemic.

  “It’s got them all,” my mother said. “All, a damn disaster.”

  We stayed on the roof while the light changed from white to blue to darkness, we spent an hour, two, the voices rose from the street, sometimes insistent, sometimes faint, an entire symphony at our feet. They talked under us, they swarmed in the street that kept changing, they talked in our place; if there was an art in which my mother and I had become expert during my adolescence, that art was silence.

  Every night at dinner, vehemently putting a fork down next to a crisp burned chicken, a salad of tasteless tomatoes, soups too salty, carrots and soft processed cheese, chicken livers and canned meat, complaining because the refrigerator had frozen the drinking water and the oven hadn’t warmed the food, my mother and I wanted to demonstrate to my father that we had made it. Even today we don’t speak of you, we reminded him, with the napkin sliding under the chair out of weariness, and no wish to retrieve it. Then, having ordered him to stay outside the boundaries of the unspeakable at least for the night—exhausted, in our carelessly donned pajamas—we went to bed.

  We did the same as soon as we came down from the terrace, at the end of my first day at home: we said good night with a kiss on the cheek, like the girls we had been.

  The morning my father left the house and didn’t return wasn’t over yet: inside me the clock had never signaled afternoon. At lunch I followed the border between life in the midst of others, at school desks, and life at home, and that border was: roulades of meat in the oven, packaged lettuce, yogurt, and mozzarella. After I cleared the table, time inverted its direction, and in the afternoon the rooms became a forest, the hall a canyon, the study an ocean. I arrived at the desk, opened the Greek dictionary, climbed up on the chair on my knees, and began to translate.

  Only my friend Sara violated the house. She came over to study as soon as her neighbor went out, leaving the dog unattended, an old female who barked out of nostalgia; that whine crashed through walls and ears, Sara said, while at my house silence reigned. She sat next to me and we did homework until it was late. Someone, therefore, found refuge in our house, considered it welcoming, that it had its charms, although my father had once described it as the worst place he had ever lived, and I was convinced of that, too, an apartment out of scale, an excrescence sheltering furniture accumulated at different times, the pale-blue paint peeling in the corners. The long hall ended in a grandfather-clock case; no one had had the time or will to install the clock machinery. Then, a year after my father disappeared, my mother stopped to look at it and said: The clock, we should have put the machinery in before. It was the thing most like the name of my father that she had uttered, and I envied her for getting so close, closer than me, closer than I was then capable of. In what had been my father’s study, four plywood boards resting on red bricks, like a bookshelf, were still occupied by Hebrew, German, French dictionaries—there was no language whose alphabet and phonetics my father hadn’t begun to study, only to abandon it right away. And then the books on information technology, medicine, mineralogy, every branch of knowledge he had intended to learn in the last years in which, as a concession, he had continued living with us: the reflections of Seneca, the folly of Erasmus, South American poetry, essays on Soviet politics, an illustrated book on the earthquake in Messina in 1908. After he left his job, and before he disappeared, my father read in order not to hear the sound of his unhappiness, until the effort must have become insupportable to him.

  His absence watched over us on afternoons of studying; Sara and I didn’t touch his books, we would rather have bought new ones. We were girls who were blindly trying out a friendship: I wasn’t anyone else’s friend and never could have been; I revealed no hint of the nightmares that infested my sleep, my eyes were dry, enlisted in a rigid form of resistance. I was guilty of my father’s disappearance, because, I thought, it was with me he no longer wanted to live. I was the one who had taken care of him in the last period, when my mother left the house to go to work (we can’t afford to lose my salary, too, she said), and every day she departed with the same phrase: I’m not worried, because you’re with Papa. I was the guardian of my father, therefore guilty of his flight.

  The first day of high school Sara sat next to me. My father had been gone for eight months, and, exiled from the middle school class where I’d felt like someone with the plague, I thought my guilt was so enormous that it had been transmuted into a deformity, a repulsive physical defect.

  Right after my father’s disappearance I didn’t go to school for several days. When I returned, none of my classmates named him and no one asked questions; besides, no one had ever been to my house: with him depressed and always in bed, I didn’t have friends and I never talked about my family. In high school there weren’t the old classmates, there weren’t witnesses, but still the other students all had a father and a mother, living or dead. Maybe some of them had read in the newspaper the st
ory of my father’s disappearance: there is nothing more frightening for a teenager than entering a new class and suspecting that someone may know something about her and won’t speak to her about it.

  Sara came toward me smiling, with her freckles and her long blond curls, and asked: Is this free? As if anyone else would really have been able to occupy the place next to me. I had been grateful to her, as ten years later I would be grateful to my husband: I formed my bonds out of gratitude toward those who perceived my abyss. At the start of my friendship with Sara, I imagined I heard her neighbor’s dog crying at night, and I would have liked to imitate it, if someone had taught me how to do it, if my father had died, like others, and my mother had been able, like a widow, to teach me the gestures of mourning.

  That didn’t happen, and every day my father disappeared a little more.

  In the morning, dawn illuminated the peeling paint of the old wood shutters, my mother said we needed different ones, aluminum, more durable and shiny. She repeated it, and meanwhile we kept the old ones, which were superior and needed to be maintained, she and I who knew no conjugation of the verb “maintain.” It must have been because of our untidiness that my father had left, it must have been because of those days when he was fading and we didn’t know how to hold on to him, because of those blankets that never seemed to protect him sufficiently from the cold, our incapacity to make him accept the doctors’ prescriptions; meanwhile, my father’s name was hidden in the water, in the leaks and mold on the roof, and at fourteen I spied from the windows the sea, the ships, the traffic, the outline of the palm tree drooping in the rain.

  Afterward, my mother and I had lived alone in the damp house and had never been successful at being alone.

  My father’s name remained on the dinner plate, was hidden in the fruit rotting on the sideboard, on the wall a gecko slid by, my mother cried that the mice had returned, the tablecloth danced and the forks and knives banged into one another, I stopped up my ears until the noise passed. My father’s name tyrannized us: when we gave it respect, it mocked us, departing for weeks, and leaving us enclosed in despair and fear, but if we applied ourselves to forgetting, it came out of the refrigerator, out of the drawer where his medicines had expired, planted itself in front of the table set for a meal; the man who had been my father looked at our life and would continue to do so forever. He had infiltrated the pipes that we hadn’t repaired, sat in his place so as not to leave it empty, laughed at the shame with which we ate our lunch. My father monitored the house like a guard and had abandoned it like a coward: both things continued to happen every day, a tired afternoon rite, and evening was used for finishing homework, turning on the television, and staring vacantly at the commercials.

  Do you think he’s dead? my mother asked, and beyond the walls the balconies flooded, while not a word came out of her mouth or mine. We said instead: The edges of this frittata are overcooked; Mamma, remember the Latin translation: I got a seven-minus; Tomorrow I have to buy new seat covers. We also said: Killing geckos brings bad luck, are there more? And we meant mice. One gecko, one alone, hid behind the cherrywood cabinet in the kitchen, it came out on hot evenings, paying no attention to us, and we paid no attention to it. Sara had told me that she’d found a nest of mice under her sink, they preferred damp areas, nothing odd if they had invaded my house along with the water. At her house, her father had killed them. At mine, I had.

  Between sunset and dinner, my father’s absence came back to visit me. I opened the door to the balcony hoping that the storm would seep through the ceilings and tear open the cracks in the wall, I begged the north wind to become a hurricane and overturn the clock and the chairs onto the floor, toss the bed, the pillows, the sheets in the air. Don’t you want to know that I grew up, doesn’t it interest you? I asked, and no one answered. My period stained sheets that in the morning I hurried to scrub with white, fragrant laundry soap, spread on the back of the dish sponge.

  Little by little, my father had habituated us to his coming departure; like everyone he had begun to die the day he was born, but at a certain point he had decided to cheat that disintegration, and he must have felt omnipotent going down the stairs that day, closing the door behind him with a cordial goodbye to me, to my mother, and to the smell of moldy water that arrived in his place, in the form of steam and gusts of wind. Disappear, choose a point in time and close the trapdoor behind you, forget people and things, since the west wind would erode memories as violently as it persisted in cracking the walls.

  Papa returned today, too. My posture at the table confessed as much to my mother: the bent back, the weary gaze that girls shouldn’t have had dropped into the kitchen from the mistaken universe of existence that goes on. He was here a moment ago, did you also see him? shouted the speed with which I finished dinner, in order to get out of his sight as soon as possible. Instead: No, thank you, I don’t want anything else, Wednesday they always show the same film, I wouldn’t be late for school if you’d buy me a motorbike.

  Meanwhile the telephone, placed on a pile of trousseau linens, informed me: four messages. Not enough to mean that my husband was so alarmed that he would break his habit of not calling me, but enough for me not to delay writing to him. I thought again about our habit: we lived according to the idea that two distinct people existed within a marriage, one plus one, near or far, stuck together or separated, but always two, never one alone. We’d lived that way from our first day together, avoiding fusion: two columns that bore the same weight. We believed that separating without questions was a way to stay together longer than passion or symbiosis would allow; in our marriage, endurance, duration were an end, not simply a means. We wanted to be together forever, and for that reason were careful not to become sated with one another. I thought back to our last night: both my dream of water and the bed where our marriage was drowning in the absence of desire were far from Messina. When we were apart Pietro and I became two monads again, two jellyfish, each pushed by its own current. Traveling, we respected the life of the other, without jealousy or bad thoughts: crossing the border would have meant failing, and we didn’t want to fail. During the day we managed not to collapse, but every night we failed. In one of my fake true stories for the radio I’d written about a couple who had stopped having sex: they were young and were alarmed; I had given him a physical problem and her a nervous complaint, and I had managed to come up with a happy ending. I knew that Pietro would listen to it, he always listened to my program. Two nights later he came over to me as if to collect a reward, as if he had arranged that encounter; he had lowered my pajama bottoms and we had made love like strangers, silent and vengeful.

  I looked at the screen.

  My husband had written: “Everything OK?”

  And also: “A registered letter arrived, I opened it, it was what they owed you for last year.”

  And also: “Sure you’re all right?”

  And also: “Don’t make me worry.”

  This time the monads were not completely detached, the jellyfish weren’t swimming in opposite currents. My husband had felt that this trip was different, he knocked, he asked. I thought instead that it would be better not to let him exist during the time I would spend in the house, I thought that no one should have to exist outside my nightmares or my memory.

  Before going to sleep I apologized in a hundred and fourteen characters: “I’m sorry, the house is in worse shape than I thought, it will take me a while, but I’m fine, and so is my mother.”

  Second Nocturne

  I’m walking through whiteness, and not far away is my mother, her head hidden by a red hat and scarf, walking with a woman I don’t recognize. Half sunk in the snow, in a pastel T-shirt that leaves my arms bare, I greet both of them and laugh, I laugh loudly, until I run my tongue over my teeth and they fall out, one after the other. Confused, I look at myself from the outside and see the mouth of an old woman, with no more defenses, a mouth emptied out and inhabit
ed by scars. With an implant, solid and artificial, in place of the premolar. And also, the mush of decayed incisors, canines, premolars, and molars, smells of saliva and medicine, there must be blood. I look at myself reflected in the report of my orthopantomogram. Teeth: misfortune. Cats: gossips. I have to wake up. Teeth or snow? Wake up, wake up. I wake up in a tired light.

  I’ve been wearing the same shirt for an entire day, I wad it up and throw it away, it lands near the balcony. I get up and put on a clean one and go back to bed.

  Six-Sixteen Forever

  “Yes, wait, do you need water? And for the boy, I’ll get it cold from the refrigerator.”

  “No, signora, we have water, but could you come up for a moment, we need you to look at a piece of wall near the cistern, because we can’t knock it down without your permission.”

  “I’m coming, I’d like to bring my daughter, but she’s sleeping.”

  “You know the saying: A father provides for a hundred sons and a hundred sons don’t provide for a father.”

  Eyes open, burrowed in the bed. My new day in the house began with the sound of the bell, the voices of my mother and Signor De Salvo.

  I would relinquish the respect earned for getting up early, and not seem a reliable and present daughter, but I wanted to be alone and no one would prevent me, the house and I had been apart for a long time and I couldn’t predict how much longer we’d spend studying each other. Besides, my mother had summoned me not to help her out with the work but to sort through the objects: that was the task I was responsible for.

  Nikos must be on the terrace, already at work, with his clinging T-shirt, sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, calf-length pants plaster-stained, calves in work boots. It was eight o’clock, and soon the sun would give us no escape; the sun of September is a misery, it’s egotistical, mournful, and outsized. People who know nothing about Sicily think that the light brings good humor and spread that misconception about cheerfulness, but Sicilians avoid the light and endure it, like insomnia and illness, unless it’s a choice, and no one can choose light every day of the year. It would blind us, disable us. Even light can be an enemy.