Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  “Mamma, those things in the black bags can be thrown out.”

  “Then come on, tie them up and we’ll throw them out together.”

  We hadn’t gone out together since I arrived. As I climbed into the car I felt like singing, as when we used to drive around, I a girl and she, too, a girl, and I remembered another trip in the car, other garbage.

  When my father signed me up for an extraordinary fate, foreseeing my prodigious feet, divine feet, when he saw in me something that wasn’t there, wasn’t it a declaration of love? In the skates I had trampled the city and its underground ruins, flying over the seabed of the Strait, taking off from the center of the Earth whenever I wanted. It didn’t much matter that the announcements of the competitions he mentioned never arrived and that my gifts weren’t at all special: I hadn’t managed to get beyond the simplest three-turn, barely a dance step, and even that often didn’t turn out well. Before our dreams, reality could crouch down on one side, inoffensive. But among the objects that filled my old room, there was no trace of the skates.

  Knowing they were in the house was too painful for me, and one day, before one of the drives with my mother, I had put them in a bag of garbage. It was I who stuck my arm out the window toward the trash can, I let go my grip and heard the thud in the container.

  A week later I had bought a second-class ticket for Rome, one-way.

  When my mother drove up next to a trash bin I felt a pang in my heart and at the same time the need to welcome that pain, tend to it, use it to move past myself and my memories. “I’ll get out and throw them in,” I offered, picking up the black bags, raising the bar of my resistance as high as I could. She relaxed, satisfied that I was working to help her, while the hard sound of those disused objects repeated a scene I’d already lived.

  I went back to the car, my mother turned on the radio, we lowered the windows and started singing.

  During the years when we lived by ourselves we had also been happy, in a pure and secret way. Ours was the happiness of the bits of polished glass that children find on the beach, a rare, luminous, and inoffensive happiness; we’d go out with no goal, to flee and cheat the house, we took the highways and the coast roads east toward the Ionian or west toward the Mediterranean, my mother drove and I looked out. When there was rain or sleet, the Strait was filled with waves and the city welcomed us: through the window families and couples went by, lunatics and office workers, people who were sheltering from the rain and people with no home quickening their pace pretending they had one. Every so often we stopped to fill the tank with gas, to check the oil, the tires, to eat the long, thin gelato called mattonella, which the baristas cut in slices and served on white plates covered by a tissue paper napkin. The only happiness we were capable of had the short breath of a parenthesis, of an unexpected pause. We never stopped at the sea but traveled alongside it on the highways, and I dreamed of waves long enough to lick the tires of the car, so that I seemed able to swim, to survive.

  “Mamma, watch out!” I sat up hard, distracted from my memories when she braked abruptly.

  “You want to drive, Ida?”

  “No, no. But just because I don’t want to drive, it doesn’t mean you can do what you want.”

  “If you want to drive, drive, otherwise be quiet and go along with it.”

  “Did you renew your license?”

  “No, I’m driving without papers. I was waiting for you to remind me, you know.”

  We continued to provoke each other until we got to our destination, and again in the store, because I found the boxes poorly made and the designs ugly. In the end I chose the least unacceptable, one with red and white stripes and one with big blue polka dots.

  “Choose some others, two aren’t enough for the things you want to keep.”

  “But if you sell the house, what does it matter to you?”

  “Exactly, say you have to take them to Rome.”

  On the threshold of indecision we were good. Pretending to discuss the aesthetics or usefulness of objects, we were at rest; we both knew that riling each other was a fiction and hid a peace agreement.

  We knew that from other, painful fights in the past.

  The year before I moved to Rome we yelled for any reason, and our scenes remained indelible. We argued morning, noon, and night, we fought as if we were invincible and would never die, we fought like eternal beings who could afford the luxury of wasting time; that episodic fight was soon transformed into our only dialogue. The empty refrigerator or the wet clothes neither of us wanted to take out of the washing machine became the pretext for an angry outburst, a game in which we said to each other worse and more, a more outrageous word, an unanswerable insult, a louder cry, a fist against the wall, kicks at the window. I shouted and my mother wept and each of us fielded our most destructive weapon, the most repugnant rage, a curse. One sign of that violence was left: the broken doorknob of my room, the mottled wall around the doorframe, the plaster flaked and fallen. We yelled before and after I’d closed the door, we shouted while I huddled behind it, we shouted and collapsed exhausted. The libation was over, the mutual cannibalism broke off; if it was night I fell asleep in the dark, if it was morning I stared out the window at the world that knew nothing of us.

  Of our quarrels there remained neither bones nor dust; I left the house ashamed. The neighbors, I was sure, had heard our shouts and perhaps prayed for us, for the salvation of our souls. The evangelicals never fought: the wall that divided us returned songs and hymns to remind us that unhappiness wasn’t the rule for all, but our house was the exception. Once we got home we started again. Tearing each other to pieces was a form of intimacy and for that reason we welcomed it, rather than not know intimacy at all. When we found ourselves alone and felt the itch that would cause us to explode, we experienced the intoxication of the transitory, like couples who go through dinner with the awareness that they will end the evening in bed. Whereas we awaited not love but the fight and, even though we were two, a complete two, covered by one roof, we weren’t a couple. We were mother and daughter, and wouldn’t have known any other way to mime the absence of my father.

  “Ida, I want to tell you something.”

  “It worries me when you take that tone.”

  “Listen to me. I know you never listen to me. I also know you like to do the opposite of what I tell you, you have your own ideas, let’s not repeat what we’ve already said, but will you listen to one thing from your mother? You can’t make life out of remnants, with what you keep in reserve. You don’t have another life, a provisional one, where you can put the things you don’t do.”

  “So?”

  “When your father got sick, it’s true, I tried to stay away from him as much as I could. You think I neglected him. I’m not excusing myself. I was young, I had a job I liked, I had you, I was worried about you.”

  “And you entrusted him to me every day.”

  “I was wrong with you, not with him. His illness exasperated me, I would have covered your eyes with my own hands if I could. I didn’t want you to see him or us like that. But I didn’t know how, I couldn’t manage it. You don’t know what it means to have a child and be unable to protect her. Happiness is important, Ida.”

  “Don’t start again with what I can’t understand, talk about yourself, when you talk about yourself you’re less pathetic.”

  “Ida, how you speak to your mother. What?”

  “Shall we stop and get some mattonella?”

  At that moment I would have torn the seat belt to pieces, I needed air, my mother’s sincere words struck me more than her accusations.

  Happiness doesn’t exist but happy moments do: we had taken care of the box store early, it wasn’t even nine-thirty in the morning, and before going home, sitting outside at our favorite pasticceria, we stole another one.

  Here’s what I had been good at until that moment: not falling
. At thirteen, after my father’s disappearance, in order to live, I should have invented myself. The way others construct their body, muscle after muscle, with practice and athletics, or sculpt their mind and intelligence through psychoanalysis, culture, or meditation, the way they carve a triceps in the gym or unearth a tendon they didn’t even know they had, the way they find a job, the necessary salary, the safe seat, the degree, the pose for the passport photo, the posture that fits their character, the dress that seems sewed on—in other words, in the same way that all invent who they are and by inventing it assert themselves, in that same way it was up to me.

  But I didn’t know who I was. What had happened to me concerned me, but it had happened when I was too young for the world to recognize it in me. People wouldn’t stop time and their own habits, we would all go forward, because the planet is full of disasters, wars and hunger and rapes, and if a teacher comes down with sadness it’s his own fault, he failed to protect wife and daughter from external attacks and even from himself. What sort of man could a man like that be? He didn’t even care about the child, whispered the silence of the city; or maybe the city didn’t care about me, my father, or our family—that was the most likely hypothesis. My mother and I were two birth certificates and one day we would be two death certificates, and in the middle two votes, two wills, finally a distant legend: Look, two women lived in that house, the citizens would say to each other, passing under my balcony. Or we would be nothing, not even ghosts of a legend, and after us another family would buy the house and make it a different place. Then you’d open the door and breathe in a fresh normality, there would be sounds of children and toys, polished furniture and painted walls, an efficient washing machine, a calendar, a small blackboard and colored chalk in the kitchen, as the evangelicals had; my life and my mother’s would be covered over, would have died with us, because new, legitimate owners would buy our walls and the right to sweep us away.

  I thought of this on the last stretch of the way home, while from the window I looked for the sea of my childhood. If I wanted to live, I had to cross that sea and not stop: my place wasn’t Scylla or Charybdis and maybe it didn’t exist on any map, certainly it wasn’t a question of kilometers. That was why, years earlier, Rome had seemed to me the most suitable: the biggest city, the strongest, surrounded by walls. I had to flee, enter the Urbe on horseback like a conqueror and turn, look at Sicily with the distance of a telescope and the assurance of a refugee, and then forget myself and mingle with the tourists of Piazza Navona, with the tramps at Termini station, with the flower pots on the bourgeois balconies of the residential neighborhoods. Every atom of me was made of the air of the house in Messina, and for that reason I would have to leave it. Some things would follow me like dogs, tokens of misery and fate, but once safe I would tame them, make them harmless, far from the house I would be naked, light, and free. That’s what I thought at twenty.

  So I continued to wonder who I was, while my mother parked and we took the boxes we’d just bought out of the trunk.

  I was the child born of a man and a woman who had loved each other for a short time, the guardian of my father’s depression, my mother’s angry daughter, the patient and deserving student, the frightened young woman. Every day I learned to hide the shame and put on strength like a sailor, to command from a corner the way women command. My mother and I were a family as if nothing had happened, but we were also special because unspeakable things had happened to us.

  The passage of time remained for me a great hardship.

  Forever and Ever (Like a Nocturne)

  The telephone rings in the middle of the night, I get up sleepy and frightened, an unknown male voice is calling me: “Signorina Ida Laquidara? I have a message for you. Do you know a man by the name of Sebastiano?”

  “He’s my father,” I answer, opening my eyes.

  “He’s here with me, he’s asking for you, he’s lost his memory but today he remembered this telephone number and your name . . .”

  Repeat.

  The telephone rings in the middle of the night, I get up sleepy and frightened and a voice with a foreign accent speaks in a hurry: “Signorina Ida Laquidara? Excuse the time, I’m calling from Lebanon. Do you know that your father, a man of forty-seven by the name of Sebastiano Laquidara, made a journey here alone?”

  The voice stops to let me absorb the blow, my father left, he died from a sudden illness, the body has to return to Italy.

  Repeat.

  I come home from school in the afternoon, my mother is waiting for me in the doorway in tears, with her coat and purse, standing next to the blue stool. They’ve called from the police station, my father’s body has been washed up by the sea, a fisherman from Torre Faro found it on the beach. Mamma, Mamma, I cry, hugging her, we get in the car, I drive. “At least I can say goodbye to the body of the man I love,” my mother whispers, or maybe my thoughts are speaking, I clutch her hand, I turn on the windshield wipers to wash away the rain, I change gears, I look for parking, I support my mother, I support the world, I don’t collapse, I never collapse.

  Repeat.

  I come out of school with my backpack on, the way I did in elementary school, and, as I did then, I turn and see my father whole, standing near the entrance, he’s drumming his fingers and he smiles at me in that slightly mad way of his, what a trick he played on us! He’d been there all along, hadn’t we seen him, how could we believe that he had really gone away? Had we really worried so much?

  Everything is true in my fantasies, everything is absolutely present. My father killed himself in the sea, my father died while trying to remake a life for himself in a foreign country, my father is alive right before our eyes, my father was seized against his will, he went out to take a walk but would have come back, my father had a heart attack, an aneurysm, a traffic accident, my father had another woman, also another child, my father returns after a year, two years, five years. Living or dead, my father comes home, he has a voice again, a body, a name. I construct other existences and new stories, I carve out a parallel world in which voices, bodies, and names are in motion, well articulated, divided into syllables, and concrete. My imagination has no limits: it’s not true. My imagination is an alert dictator, and if there’s a contradiction it brakes, shies, Correct it! It orders me, Correct it! It shouts, Correct it! Everything has to be perfect, everything, correct! For years I obey every night, every night I submit, I add details, I eliminate inconsistencies, I blur what doesn’t work, I add what I know, even during the day I am employed by my nighttime dictator: What sort of government is there in Lebanon? What color is the boat of that fisherman on the beach at Torre Faro? An instant, an instant.

  Every night, for years, I tell myself the story, I tell it better. Because my father is alive and wants to return, my father was kidnapped, my father died by mistake, my father went to die in the place that most belonged to him: the water. My father hugs me, holds me tight, asks my forgiveness, doesn’t ask me anything and is presumptuous, amazed: were we really worried by his absence? My mother weeps, suffers, broods, hugs my father’s body, the living body, the dead body, finally in a mortuary chapel, lying on marble, wrapped in a sheet, put in a sack. My mother looks at me with love, with anger, with attention: she looks at me with eyes that let me exist. Every night I take advantage of my insomnia to elaborate a more effective, more realistic story; but imagination doesn’t fire up, nor do memories. Imagining is of no use, except to make the waiting time pass, my father may return, he will return to this house and no other, but did a man really exist whom I called father? Why were we resigned to his disappearance, why didn’t we fight, why didn’t we sense that he was alive, without memory or confused, lost or isolated, but alive? The relatives of people who disappear usually have premonitions, certainties, strong sensations of presence—not us. I was used to staying in my shadow and in my father’s, occasionally receiving an object, a feeling, a caress, a testimonial of the world outside
; but nothing, not even objects, not even evidence—a receipt, a letter, a diary, a pack of cigarettes, a pair of skates—can prove that an event staged in the mind really happened. My father turns off the alarm clock, chooses the tie, looks at the toothpaste on the sink like the slimy trail of a snail—that, at least, happened?

  Objects aren’t reliable, memories don’t exist, only obsessions. We use them to keep the crack open and we tell ourselves that memory is important, that we alone are its guardians. We keep the wound wide so that our troubles and our fears fit in it, we make sure it’s deep enough to contain our suffering, you mustn’t let that get away.

  Only obsessions exist, and meanwhile time has made them truer than we are.

  “Ida?”

  My husband, the voice I was looking for, answered right away.

  “Ida, are you all right?”

  “Pietro, please, listen to me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m not well. I made a mistake. Too many things . . . With my mother, nothing is solved. She put all the stuff in my room. I don’t know how to explain it to you, it gives me the impression of death, it’s a nightmare.”

  “Ida, where are you?”

  My husband’s voice was strong and warm, it was curative thermal water, in the background was a foreign woman speaking English, I couldn’t catch the phrases, only words like economy and buildings and politics; my husband was improving his English in the car, on the way to work, the recorded voice read articles and asked him questions, urging him to comment. It pretended to ask his opinion as if it were really important that he have an idea on the subject, as if he weren’t simply making an effort to express some opinion, because it was the exercise that counted. I listened to the woman speaking, and felt affectionate toward my husband: English was of no use to him, was of no use for anything, but the commute in the car could be unbearable, no one wants to be stuck with his thoughts all that time.