“I was about to go up and check the wall of the cistern, I want to see how far they’ve gotten.”
“And what do you want to say to them about the wall? They knocked it down, if only that were the problem, Ida.”
My mother’s voice was a wind rising, a sandstorm preparing to strike me in the face. Could the De Salvos, on the terrace, hear her? I feared her anger as once I had feared that the unrepeatable words of our fights would reach the neighbors’ ears. We were adults, I grown and she old, she couldn’t start treating me like a child again, forcing me into that monstrous old game. I didn’t want to be compelled to prove to myself that I would know how not to fall for it. But then would I in fact know?
“Nothing ever matters to you. You haven’t changed, you’re always the one who doesn’t give a damn about her mother. You’re the biggest egotist I know. And I gave birth to you.”
I was assailed by a confusion that I didn’t know how to take hold of, from which direction: I picked it up with open hands and organized a defense.
“Mamma, you know very well I came here for you.”
“For me! Ever since you got here I’ve been waiting for a gesture, the slightest gesture. Listen to what you’re saying: you came for me. As if it were a favor. You don’t condescend to give your mother a glance, you don’t even know what a mother is. I hope you have children one day, have a child as I had you, give that child everything as I did for you, and get nothing in return, like the nothing you give me. Why don’t you have children, Ida? Are you afraid the harm you’ve done me will be turned against you? Are you afraid of growing up? Is it your husband? Is he the one who doesn’t want children?”
I had been ingenuous enough to believe that we would be able to avoid the ferocity that had been silenced for years, but neither distance nor age had made a dent in the rage that bound us.
“What haven’t you told me, Ida? You come here and you don’t even know who your mother is, there you are in Rome writing your fantasy stories, with a husband who doesn’t deign to appear, I have to inform you that the ceiling is falling down here, and all day you’re looking at the past like an idiot. I have an idea you live like that, letting life go by as if it weren’t yours.”
The sandstorm blew through the holes. Spirals of wind whirled grains upon grains, they whipped my arms and calves.
“I would like to know who put it into your head to behave like this. Nothing, you will leave nothing after you, you sow nothing. I didn’t bring you up like that. My conscience is in order, I did my duty as a mother even by myself, even without your father: school, university, you lacked nothing, a mother’s love, you have your home. Why don’t you have children, Ida? Because you want to impress on me that what happened to us ruined our existence? If I managed to forget it, why shouldn’t you, who were a child? Why don’t you talk to me? If my mother were alive I would go down on my knees and kiss her hands.”
At that moment I understood what a mother really is: something from which there is no protection. It’s said that a mother gives everything and asks nothing; no one says that she asks everything and gives what we don’t ask to have.
In the years since my father’s disappearance, my mother had massed her personal storm: sometimes she would display it, sometimes not, sometimes she would let it out and at others shut it up. I was the object of her rage but not the cause, so my attempts to diminish it would always be insufficient. I would be able to defend myself from her with all my tricks and my experience, I could try to force her to stop and maybe I would succeed, but every stratagem would evaporate and we would finally be alone, facing one another. My failures would shatter against the walls. Why didn’t I have children? I didn’t know, I knew only that neither my husband nor I could accept the idea of bringing into the world a creature who might die before us, causing us intolerable pain and regret, or who would die after us but inexorably, thus making those who had borne him guilty. That’s what it seemed to me: a load of suffering without end and without a light, and if this meant that I had inherited from my father the tendency to be depressed, then so be it.
I should have answered my mother with what I knew.
I don’t want children because I’m afraid they’ll die, they’ll disappear, because I’m afraid that love will disintegrate between Pietro and me, I don’t have children because they didn’t come and we never went looking for them. I don’t have children because I don’t want a human being to be born inside me and live in me at its pleasure. I don’t have children because they pass through the body, the place I can control, even convince myself that if it happened to the body it didn’t really happen.
“I don’t have children because Pietro and I sleep at night. We’re not together. As a couple, I mean.”
The storm stopped.
“What is it, Mamma? Do I have to explain it to you? Now that I have the words they frighten you; we don’t make love anymore, we don’t use the bed for that. We sleep like the two of you in the last months, when Papa didn’t get up, and you said: Look what your father does in our bed, look what the bed has become. As if the bed were the problem, and not the suffering. You said: It doesn’t work anymore, as if it were an object, a kitchen utensil. You repeated it to me how many times, three, four, to make sure I understood that it was he who wasn’t doing his duty, not you, you must have told me that you, unlike him, were fine, a good wife, even if you forgot to clean the toothpaste off the sink. I, too, would have run away from a wife like that, who humiliated me in front of my daughter.”
“I never said it in front of him.”
“Only because we were in another room, separated by the hall? The walls in this house are made of butter. You know what I say to you? Sell it. You want to give it away? What do I care. It’s full of unhappiness, this place.”
When my mother left the room the luminous cone in which she’d moved remained empty, and I drank a cup of spoiled coffee.
Fourth Nocturne (Afternoon)
I sleep on my stomach, head crushing the left cheek, a circle of saliva on the pillow. Pietro arrives, he doesn’t speak, he’s in a good mood. He stops next to the bed, as if to watch over me, a sly light in his eyes.
My husband has a quality that explodes when I’m half asleep: with him you’re comfortable, really comfortable. His presence always brings something warm, invisible, and essential. That Pietro is indispensable I realize when he’s not there, I can tell from how much I miss him, from the disquiet I feel with others; in his absence I learn to love his presence. Without him the uneasiness I feel among people is exaggerated. If he died I’d want to die, too, and certainly I would die of solitude.
In sleep there’s Pietro, and with him events and people are less frightening to me.
The Things We Don’t Do
As soon as I woke up I thought again of the last exchange—I couldn’t call it a conversation—with my mother. I would have said I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you, I would have apologized, taking a step back: I didn’t want to destroy the cardboard crèche she had struggled to erect over the years, calling it family without distinguishing between affection and biology, between fate and choice. I thought of my father, depressed and a slave to drugs, with no more sexual desire; I thought of my mother, a woman who, still young, had endured the negation of her body, suffered the irreversibility of spent drives. In the mirror of their marriage I saw mine and all the marriages of the world run aground, imprisoned in the claim of having beside us a unique person whom we’ve asked to be lover, companion, family, friend, only to witness, devastated, the inevitable collapse of one of these definitions or all of them together. I at least had had the courage to remove one bar from the cage: my husband wouldn’t be a father, not of my children. And yet not even that had saved our marriage from turning into a lame creature.
With my father still present but now incapable of playing a role, my mother must have floundered in the cage: she could no longer be
a wife, being a mother in the abstract didn’t interest her, whereas being my mother did, because she possessed the capacity to desire nothing but her own fate, and this I called conservation, and feared above all else. So it had happened that she loved me and only me, and that love wounded me rather than taking care of me. In her way she had accepted the silence I imposed on her, in return for the silence she had imposed on me: concerning our marriages a prudent and mutual code of silence was in force. For a long time she had walked on the edge without asking, and I had grown used to not getting questions about the children I didn’t have, about my work, about my man; in the early years, when I returned to Messina for the holidays, always in a hurry and for the few necessary nights, I would put my suitcase down on the floor and end up not wearing the clothes I had brought from Rome. I opened the closet and pulled out shapeless sweaters, plain colored socks, blue pajamas, shawls, tight shiny skirts; I chose what I could wear and put the rest back. Five drawers were full of children’s clothes, a small striped waterproof coverall, the bottle warmer, leather children’s shoes, a sea-green plastic die with two loud bells inside—things saved so that one day I could dress and entertain my children. Those things had become funny and immediately old, then sad and finally useless; soon they would be grotesque. In the first drawer my mother had also saved photos of us as adults, letters, documents, yellowed clippings from the local newspaper: the two scholarships I’d won in high school, the obituaries of my grandparents, the short article on my father’s disappearance. Birth, death, disappearance, all in the same drawer, the pacifier and mourning, childhood and old age, school and my merits, and then the day without time that had split our life, a few lines on the disappearance of Sebastiano Laquidara, esteemed high school teacher, for me the proof that it had really happened, the evidence that that was the way things had gone: a man, a body, had been my father, and then had disappeared. And your children, you won’t bring me any? My mother didn’t ask then, and I wasn’t compelled to answer.
Outside of here, in the new city, the things we didn’t do held my husband and me together: we didn’t have a child, we didn’t buy an apartment, we didn’t plan a trip to the other side of the world. We’ll go next year, we said of the journey; as for the apartments we visited with the agents, they were never our size, one too small, another didn’t have balconies, another would have forced us to change neighborhoods, whereas renting is convenient, renting doesn’t tie us down, we said, winding like climbing plants around the house we didn’t buy. We built castles in the air only to knock them down into a useless drift. Children didn’t come, and neither of us talked about looking for them, going to get them, I was used to absences and my husband got used to them with me; we would grow old beside each other, we would grow old under the gaze of our contemporaries who became parents and parents again, still reproducing at the age our father and mother were when as children we looked at them, the age of ochre-colored blankets, the age when Mamma and Papa were adults but still young and fertile. I had fixed my parents at that age forever, an age clear in memory, an age that my husband and I were about to reach and pass.
Now my mother had demanded to enter into my marriage, to know what happened between Pietro and me. I hadn’t been able to prevent her, and so I had also entered into hers.
I decided to join her; she must have gone to the place where the aspect of the house was changing—above our heads. But she wasn’t on the roof. In her stead was a hood formed of heat and clouds, a roof over the roof, the air excited and wild, saturated with dampness, and Nikos by himself, lying on the floor with his arms folded, while the wind shook the television antennas and cables.
He rose onto his elbows. “Your mother went back down.”
Was it possible that I hadn’t seen her? I was alarmed, maybe she was in the kitchen, why hadn’t she heard me go out? Maybe she didn’t feel like talking to me, after the fight. Another more definite and angrier thought pushed that one out: Nikos was making himself master of my terrace, comfortable and peaceful as if it were his, but it was mine, I repeated again: mine. I couldn’t take my eyes off his scar. I squatted down next to him, so that I, too, was on the floor. The sky thundered, I wound my fingers around my legs pulled up to my chest, Nikos stared at my hands.
I felt then a possible intimacy and was tempted to tell him about the red box. There’s a reason I came here, I would say, and I’m the only one who knows it, I haven’t yet told anyone: not even myself. You see my fingers, I would insist, lowering my gaze to follow his: What’s in the box I put there with these hands.
“My left hand,” I began instead, “did you see my left hand?” I extended the arm and spread the fingers. “It’s no good, I had a problem when I was born, see?” I squeezed together the pinkie and the ring finger. “They were attached when I was born, I had to have an operation as a child, I had palms like a duck’s.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight,” I replied seriously. “It was very sad, especially before—my classmates made fun of me.”
Nikos didn’t answer right away, the air darkened.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally.
I shrugged. Two hornets buzzed around us, uncertain whether to chase each other or fight. I started laughing. “It’s nonsense, it’s not true, nothing’s true.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
“No reason. I told that once to a boyfriend, he was worried, embarrassed, he didn’t know what to do.”
“Then you told him the truth?”
“Right away. I wanted to seem interesting, we were twenty. At your age you experiment, try things out, whereas I didn’t do anything.”
“It was better then, not like now.” Nikos showed no doubts. No one knows how to be reactionary and old-fogeyish like a twenty-year-old, only certain proud, wayward kids seek that type of comfort in the myth of values, condemning the disastrous corruption of the present.
“Why, how is it now, do you think?”
“There’s too much freedom, it was better before when things were clearer and you couldn’t do what you wanted.”
“Apart from the fact that I’m not two hundred years old, look, the era you’re talking about never existed: everyone has always done everything, secretly or in front of others.”
I hadn’t convinced him.
“Before, women would choose a man and keep him for a lifetime.”
“Did your mother do that?”
“Like all women.”
“She’s from Crete, right?”
He nodded.
“Do you like it? Do you all ever go back there?”
“Of course, have you been?”
I kept the memory for myself. I had been there with my husband the summer after we were married; neither of us had felt like calling it a honeymoon, but early one morning it had been precisely that. The colors of dawn lingered without fading, we had bought a bougatsa just out of the oven and had gone to eat it up at the fortress on the peninsula of Paleochora, the sea on the sides and us in the middle. We had sat close together for a long time, suspended and raised up over the rest, a perspective not so different from what Nikos and I had on the roof.
“Yes, I’ve been there. Anyway Sicily is Greek land, your mother’s happy here, isn’t she?”
“She’s unhappy.”
“Does she have other children?”
“I have a sister who’s seventeen. Are you happy?”
“No one is.”
A louder thunderclap arrived, this time more than a warning, and I turned toward the cistern next to us: every night in summer when, after sunset, the city closed the aqueduct, that supply came to the aid of my mother and me. The autoclave was the divinity of our earth, silent and favorable over our heads. Thanks to it we had never suffered drought.
“How’s it going with my mother?”
“She’s nice, she checks everything.”
“She’s demanding with her family’s house.”
“It’s your house, too.”
“I live in Rome.”
“Each of us has only one house, in life. My mother in her mind lives in Chania, the city where she was born.”
It was one of the places I’d loved most on Crete. I remembered the Venetian profile of the harbor and two glasses of raki my husband and I had drunk at sunset.
It started raining.
The first drops fell, thickened, and caught us while we stood up and decided to run, before I could guess how to answer Nikos, what chinks to open for him, what to show him of my existence outside the house. But I liked the rain, I slowed down purposely so I would get wet, not be spared invasion to the farthest corners of material and skin, until the storm really shook the sky. Nikos sheltered in the empty shed, while I gave a last glance at the wild flashes of lightning on the leaden horizon, wrung out the wet ends of my hair and fled down the stairs.
Entering, I found my mother near the door.
She was wearing a long short-sleeved cotton bathrobe with small patches of embroidery, and she was sitting on a blue velvet stool no one ever sat on: a stool at the front door isn’t for sitting on but for putting down coats, bags, rain-soaked purses when you’ve just come in from outside, and we had always used it like that. Once my father, complaining about the oddities of the house—“the ugliest I’ve ever lived in”—had enumerated the ridiculous objects, leaving out the boards of his bookshelf, the only piece of furniture that for him was untouchable, cloaked in useful objects, books. The most unpresentable of all for him was the stool. Have you ever seen a stool at the door? he had asked, speaking more to himself than to me, and I had giggled, to confirm that I was on his side. My father didn’t look for my complicity, but I was quick to supply it, in order not to damage even a moment of our afternoons. I winked to let him know that I was on his side, that life began when, once my homework was finished and his beanpoles disposed of, he and I could go by ourselves to the passeggiatammare to train together for my imminent competitions. I hadn’t told him that, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom, I leaned on the stool to lace up my skates. I had kept to myself its usefulness, but starting the next day I laced up the skates in my room, sitting on the bed or the floor.
Farewell, Ghosts Page 7