“Like your neighbor’s dog, who barked when it was alone,” I interrupted her.
“What?”
“That’s what you always told me when you came to my house to do homework, the owner went out and the dog barked, so you couldn’t sleep.”
“I don’t remember. Anyway my mother goes to Attila, which breaks up his day, and she takes him out before I get home.”
We insist on considering memory a cake that can be shared, and we never resign ourselves to the fact that a fact isn’t a fact isn’t a fact—a rose isn’t a rose isn’t a rose, contrary to what our high school teacher taught us to write in our notebooks. No, a fact isn’t a fact: it’s perhaps a detail that we accentuate for a moment, through suffering or our solipsistic tendency to turn in on ourselves. A detail seen or heard, which immediately becomes material for our unconscious and for our drives, one element in a series of preceding and successive details. Had the dog that disturbed Sara’s peace as a girl really existed, the dog that, in the years after my father’s disappearance, I envied for the capacity to cry that I lacked? Sara—who became a vet and who, as a girl, was already attentive to the faintest signal from the animal world—didn’t even remember it.
“I missed you madly when we stopped hanging out together. Sometimes I think I went to live in Rome because it made no sense to stay in the same city as you if I couldn’t see you, listen to you. I said to myself that it was a glorious natural end, but the truth is that I suffered, I always had a million things to tell you, I still do. You were the only person my mother and I had over. I wasn’t comfortable in my house, it’s a damp house, suspended in time. I missed my father, I was afraid of people. I trust you, period; how many letters I wrote you, I have yours here, in the house in Messina, I wrote them in pen, you remember the green pen? Do you still have yours? I never again had a pen like that one. I still write stories for the radio—I make up stories about people who don’t exist. The program is on the air every day, I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to it. In the second year of university you had that tall friend, from Reggio Calabria. I saw you together in the city center, on Saturdays, and I envied her because she could spend time with you. I’ve been here for days, and no one knows me like you, my mother’s on my back, my husband’s in Rome.”
“Don’t apologize, Ida, but for me, really: nothing happened.”
“Maybe that’s the point, for me everything happened.”
“You know why we stopped seeing each other, Ida?”
Now we had descended too far, the sea was no longer visible. The smell of Sara’s hair pervaded the car, a citrus smell, the same shampoo she’d used in high school.
“Your problems don’t justify everything, you’re not the only one who exists in the world,” she continued, stopping the car at a red light.
Leaving Annunziata behind us, we had entered the flow of the city, the hum of stores, people, pedestrian strips. “I would have liked to say this to you and I’ll say it now: You never opened up, I know it was difficult, I mean the story of your father and the rest. But I had my problems, too, maybe they didn’t seem as important to you as yours. I loved you and I still do, but in our friendship there was only you. Other people’s suffering exists, too, Ida.”
I would have liked to plug up my ears, rewrite the conversation, putting different words in Sara’s mouth. I would have liked to shout that’s not true, but Sara had her view, which also explained precisely the way she behaved, not avoiding me but not encouraging closeness, not even to celebrate the past. A fact isn’t a fact but a gaze is a gaze: hers on me had been privileged. Whether I liked it or not, it was our closeness that produced her detachment.
I listened to Sara’s voice, a clear adult voice; it wasn’t a sandstorm unleashed by my mother or the hospitable bed with which Pietro had welcomed me on the telephone. A voice mindful of the words it chose.
“Ida, do you remember the day you came to the hospital?”
We were nineteen when Sara had an abortion. It hadn’t happened to me, it had happened to her: and that made the difference. If the most untruthful sentence in any dialogue is “I understand you,” that episode doomed any possibility of communication between us. It was her body, not mine. Not for an instant had Sara wanted to keep the baby, which wasn’t Fabio’s or that of the boyfriend after Fabio, it was the child of a stranger, of an encounter similar to the one I myself had had on the beach at Scylla, and, later, other times, single and occasional, sufficient to be sure that if it had happened to me, I wouldn’t have kept the child, either, and in fact we wouldn’t even have kept a child conceived during a lasting romance, because we ourselves were still children and at nineteen we wanted to be everything except mothers. But it hadn’t happened to me, it had happened to her.
“So, Ida, do you remember or not?”
If it happens to the body it didn’t really happen: I must have used my mantra that afternoon, too, sitting next to Sara, who was staring into space, and we talked a little and I read to her a little and she listened; I had with me some magazines and a book by Henri Alleg, The Question, because after Camus I was obsessed with the French, so I told her, saturating the silence with my nineteen-year-old student’s verbosity as I reflected on political power and the oppression of prisoners, on how many prison camps had the right to call themselves “place of command” and how it wasn’t simple to identify only one such place; and I talked, giving myself the illusion of diminishing the distance between us, between what had happened to her and what had not happened to me. But preparing to mark an abandonment means confirming that that abandonment has already taken place, and it had been a long time since Sara and I had been the same people who mirrored each other at the high school desk, we weren’t the girls who spent long afternoons studying together.
“When you came to see me. Don’t misunderstand, it was right for you to be there. I couldn’t have tolerated anyone else.”
After she had an abortion and I didn’t, we separated forever. We were already distant, but after that episode we could no longer pretend or minimize. In the beginning, at fourteen, she had living parents and I the stump of a family, but at the time the difference had solidified our bond. So we had met, two bits of wreckage that wouldn’t sink.
“You were the only one who knew about the abortion. You were always the only one, Ida. I was flattered to be your friend, you were the most intelligent in the class, you must have been at the university, too, and I’m sure you are in your job as well. No, I don’t listen to your program. At that hour I’m at the clinic. But I imagine that you found peace getting away from here, being far away from your mother. Whereas I stayed, you know what that means, right? You’re too intelligent not to know.”
Before she went to the hospital Sara told her parents that she was going with me to Etna for a couple of days, we would go hiking and sleep in the hostel at Zafferana. I said nothing to my mother, she didn’t ask questions and didn’t talk to other mothers, it wouldn’t be a problem to spend the time at the hospital, occupy the visiting hours, hang around the waiting room and talk to the doctors to be sure that everything went well. At most, if I was late getting home, we’d find some pretext for fighting, blind behind our insults.
“Maybe you knew even better than I did how I felt before the abortion, how I would feel after. It’s true, a terrible thing had happened to you before we met, you were a child, your father shouldn’t have disappeared like that, I don’t have to tell you. He was a coward, weak, you don’t leave a wife and a daughter without explanation and with that burden. For years I said to myself that one can’t judge without taking account of others’ fragility, including his, and that basically he had left you this: your acuteness, you’re as sensitive as a seismograph. But also your blindness. We’re all fragile, Ida, you more than anyone. You allowed your suffering to devour you, and your wound became bigger than you. You live like a slave, you’re the slave of what happened to you—you
were like that at fourteen, too, and you made me your fellow slave. Suffering made you fascinating, but you didn’t realize it, you didn’t see anything, you never really saw me. But I was there, I was always beside you and I didn’t ask any questions, we never talked about your father. I didn’t even know his name, I didn’t dare ask you.”
Heedless and majestic, the city continued on its course outside the window.
“I endured your dictatorship for years, and not to say you knew it, I know you weren’t aware of it. But when I had the abortion I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had changed. I didn’t say anything to you, but after the operation the doctors explained that I couldn’t have children, something was wrong with my uterus. I had to wait to have the tumor removed, have tests and then the other operation, this time with my mother, and then it was me who decided not to talk to anyone about it, especially not you. Meanwhile we had already lost each other. When you came to see me in the hospital, and I repeat, I thank you because you were the only person I wanted, you started piling up words, burying the truth. You scared me. You seemed like your mother and I realized you’d become like her, a woman who lives around a bleeding cut, even when the blood has dried, the scab crumbled and fallen off. How could I share something with you, sitting there reading, talking to me nonstop about your books or the nonsense in the newspapers? Even my abortion was becoming a phobia of yours. I don’t know why you came today, there’s no need for us to spend time together anymore. What do you want from me? If you need something I’m here, if you need me I’ll help you, but I don’t need to see you again: I know who you are, Ida.”
It was a few blocks to my house, and with relief I thought: mine. Sara’s suffering had filled the car. And yet it hadn’t surprised me. Part of me knew: as long as she didn’t have suffering of her own she had been able to tolerate mine, then something had occupied the space, kicking me out. Her estrangement was a defense, the boundary on which she had built her adulthood, and there was no longer a place to welcome me, not even years later. So I stayed apart, not out of fear but because that suffering had no need of my presence.
“I would have liked you to meet my husband, Pietro. But he doesn’t like coming to Messina. He doesn’t like the sun, and then he doesn’t know how to swim.”
“You’re with someone who’s afraid of the water?” Sara laughed. “You, really you. You spent hours in the sea.”
“I must have gotten that habit from my father. He also liked it a lot.”
“Whereas your mother, never seen on a beach.”
“She did go. You remember when we took the ferry to Scylla with Fabio?”
“What was it, the summer we were sixteen? You had a really great two-piece bathing suit.”
“The beach was white, who knows what it’s like now. At some point you left me alone. I’d come with you, but I ended up alone all afternoon.”
“I’m sorry. Fabio was a shit, if I think what an idiot I was. What did you do?”
“Nothing. I went swimming.”
I lied to protect her, or to mark for myself the distance that now separated us, and perhaps had always been there.
We drove a few hundred meters, until she stopped the car in front of my building, double-parking without turning off the engine, so I obeyed her expectations and said goodbye. Sara went off to her job, hidden behind her explanations, and I understood what I had missed: learning to say goodbye. We love our obsessions, and we don’t love what makes us happy, on the contrary. We cling to each other, and none of us are made of noble substances.
Before going home, I decided to walk some more; I had in my nostrils the clean, orange smell of Sara’s hair when I arrived at the Caronte bar. I ordered a coffee and sat near the windows, observing the ferries that docked and set out. That foreign land called the suffering of others really did exist; that suffering was equal to ours and at the same time completely unknown. What Sara felt had exiled her from me; I would have liked to go back and remove that weight from her future, take away the curse of an impossibility. Neither she nor I had had children, but I had been able to choose and she hadn’t, and that detail made the difference. As for the words she had used to describe me, they concerned me up to a certain point; our friendship was extinct, dried out like the edges of towels that succumb to salt water and the August sun, while Sara needed to make them into a theory of my character. Her words contained a truth, but she had neglected to say that our bond would probably have dissolved anyway. Maybe from that torrent of sentences I would extract the ingredients for one of my radio stories, because she was right, I could tolerate suffering only by writing about it, and by transforming it into an invention I could find the peace that was absent from daily life. I put down the cup and continued to stare outside until my father appeared again.
This time he had his back to me and went into the water toward the deeper sea, toward the Calabrian coast that seduced him like a song. He returned to his element; feet, knees, hips were submerged, and then his whole self, in the unfashionable jacket, and walking toward the peninsula, he sank down deeper and deeper, until nothing remained of his body, his back, his neck, and the water closed over the last lock of his hair. In his place a long stain formed and the whirlpool slowed, replaced by a group of bubbles that became sparser until they vanished.
The sea was smooth again.
I looked frantically for the phone in my purse, I found three calls from Pietro, and again I felt like hearing his voice.
“I saw Sara,” I started off, walking toward home.
“How are you? Your voice is strange.”
I thought: I saw my father.
“She explained why our friendship broke off”—the cars were flowing on one side of me, the sea on the other. “From her point of view, I mean.”
“OK. Was it useful to you?”
“I don’t know. Pietro?”
“What is it, Ida? Why are you feeling so bad?”
“It must be the confusion in the house, or the work, or the heat, but I see my father everywhere.”
“I know. And you know something, I don’t know what to do. I feel useless, so far away.”
He didn’t understand, and that, too, basically calmed me.
“Come soon. If you’re here it’ll be better.”
Before going home I stopped at a takeout food shop and ordered eggplant and pepper involtini stuffed with bread, garlic, and cheese, two servings of cooked greens, and one of roasted potatoes. I pointed with my finger to a whole wheat baguette made according to an ancient recipe, and didn’t refuse when the girl behind the counter offered to stick napkins and plastic utensils in the bag, as if I were going to eat outside, on a bench. I let her think it, because to explain the pointless always has a flavor of discourtesy. I thanked her, paid what I had to pay, and went home.
“Ida?” my mother’s voice met me.
“I brought lunch,” I answered, soothing her anxiety and anticipating the question about where I had been.
We had an almost lighthearted meal, comforted by the television, tuned to the news of the day, and by our scattered comments: the problem of garbage disposal in Rome, the death of a beloved singer of the seventies, the return to Italy of a chef who had become famous in the United States. More than once I had the temptation to stop and tell her that I had met Sara or that Pietro would arrive in a few days, but I didn’t want to open between us pathways that I wouldn’t have the courage to pursue to the end.
The House of the Puparo
A little before five I began to wonder how Nikos and I would be able to keep our appointment; he would never come down—ringing the bell would mean violating an implicit pact of reserve in front of my mother. I hadn’t shown the same tact going up to the roof to demand his presence in front of his father. What to do, then? Go up and once more display the urge to see him, extort my promise?
I looked at myself in the mirror again and saw the same
face as in the morning, worn out and slightly depleted, but if I merely thought ahead to the moment when we would be alone my expression lit up. I put a cotton sweater on over the tank top, anticipating the cool of the evening, grabbed my purse, and as soon as I went out ran into Nikos, coming down the stairs to my door. Surprised by that unplanned encounter, we both laughed naturally.
“All right?” he asked me, and we had already gone down the stairs, we had already gone out the entrance door, we were already in front of his motorbike; so I fastened the helmet under my chin and held onto his back to steady myself, hoping that he would take me to the coast. Instead he headed toward the center, and I was disappointed.
We went along the streets parallel to the harbor, following the outline of a cruise ship that looked as if it had been parked amid the buildings of the fortifications, passed by the center, and turned onto Via Industriale, entering the area called Maregrosso. Then I guessed where he wanted to take me and a secure happiness arose inside me, because I, too, loved that place. I’d been there twice in high school, with Sara, and the second time it was dark: we’d gone on a motorbike, and, defying fear, had smoked some grass and gotten lost in the fantasies of that narrow alleyway.
When Nikos and I stopped in front of the house of the man who had been known in the city as Cavaliere Cammarata, or the Puparo, I wondered why, proposing this meeting, he had used the verb “show”: “I’ll show you something,” he had said. Did he really think I had never been there—was I, in his view, so little acquainted with the city? Before us, sparkling and archaic, rose the illegal shanty that Giovanni Cammarata had transformed into a castle, anticipating the art of recycling. He had created mosaics, sculptures, and artistic stained-glass windows using pieces of glass and stone in every shade of every color, alternating figures and abstract designs. This man had made his house a sanctuary or a museum, and until his death had devoted himself to producing beauty on the worst strip of a disintegrating neighborhood.
Farewell, Ghosts Page 13