Twenty-three years have passed since that November 2nd. Two hundred and eighty menstrual cycles, and today I’m defenseless before the red box; it’s night and I’ve given up sleeping, I’ve put the pipe back, but the smell of tobacco lingers in the room. It’s the tape’s turn, who listens to cassettes anymore? Among the objects to keep or throw away is the stereo of my adolescence. Now, twenty-three years later, the stereo will restore my father’s voice.
I take the tape out of the case, “Ida at 11,” and put it in the player, PLAY. I wait.
It begins with a rustling, with my mother’s voice in the middle of a word: “. . . ing because we’re recording, Ida, speak here!” (What was the word? speak-ing, look-ing, sing-ing?) The voice scratches and exults from another era. I never heard it that way again, it was my father’s presence hidden amid the sharp sounds, the laughter, that made it strong: “Sebastiano, say something to us!” There was my mother just as I’d known her: a frightening and elusive woman who gives orders, who rules without ever getting her hands dirty. I never really thought of her suffering, I recognize it now by what’s been removed, while I seek to reconstruct what she had and no longer does. “Papa, talk here, talk”: what a grotesque child’s voice I had, the voice of a gnome or a creature of the understory, and a nasal laugh, like a dinosaur, a laugh bigger than me. It must have been the year when, skating near the sea without the encumbrance of my coat, I had been in danger of getting sick, and my mother had reproached my father for his rashness: You were supposed to put the scarf on her and instead you let her take off what she had on. She spoke to him in that very voice, the same one I hear now. The tape continues, and finally a man arrives, whispering. It’s very strange: I didn’t remember anyone else there, apart from my father.
“Sebastiano, come on, sing!” my mother interjects again.
I can’t believe it, I press STOP. For twenty-three years I’ve waited to hear my father’s voice again, and when I do I don’t recognize it.
I want to rewind and go back, but I’m afraid of damaging the tape, and if it breaks?
Maybe back just to that voice that I need to hear again, that I have to regain possession of. Better to wait, better to put it off, onward.
PLAY, again.
Tape, please: don’t break, don’t break off.
Meanwhile my father obeys and begins to sing softly, his thin voice grows large, powerful, luminous, and I start laughing, and I laugh and laugh.
He sings, and sings, and sings. The room fills with his name, his body, his voice, and his smell, and night envelops the Strait and the whole city of Messina, night envelops my father’s disappearance, my mother’s cassette, my laughter, tears, and whatever up to that moment has passed over the Earth.
The Unfinished Sadness
The iced coffee at the café mingled with the taste of the warm brioche, just out of the oven, and the spoonful of whipped cream on the coffee. My mother, with a mulberry and pistachio granita in front of her, was intent on dunking her brioche in it.
“You start with the hat?” I teased her. The hat was the top part of the brioche, the most fragrant piece, which she and my father had taught me to save for last, to enjoy in a single final mouthful, like a reward.
“You’re boring, Ida. Why do you always have to criticize everything?”
“I didn’t sleep well. Really I didn’t sleep at all.”
At seven I’d gone into the kitchen, my mother was making coffee, and I had proposed that we go out instead, have breakfast out.
I wanted to tell her about the night, tell her about my father’s voice, hers and mine that were blurred together, about that ridiculous detail: that I hadn’t recognized it right away. Share the discovery that the obsession that had taken shape in my head was so compact and autonomous that at some point it had become untethered from reality: my father’s voice didn’t resemble my memory of it at all.
“I, on the other hand, slept right through. You could have called me, I wouldn’t have heard you. Did you read?” she asked, distracted.
“More or less.”
I swallowed the last sip of coffee and licked the edge of the glass. Sicilian whipped cream had a special taste, a non-taste that distinguished it from whipped cream in the rest of Italy, always sugary or invasive. Here it wasn’t too sweet or too liquid or too artificial. I looked finally at the hat of my brioche, but my mother, playing a trick, stole it from me and bit into it right before my astonished eyes.
“That’ll teach you to leave the best for last.”
“You and Papa taught me!”
“Children need to learn patience, for adults there’s no point in knowing how to wait.”
Life is ein Augenblick, the child my mother spoke of no longer existed, the new adult who had replaced her needed a new sentimental education. There were many things I would be able to get rid of, starting with that verb: “Wait.”
We got up to go home and decided to see how the De Salvos were doing on the roof, but my mother stopped downstairs to get the list of what was left to be done before the work could be considered finished. On the roof there was no one.
I took out of the pocket of my shorts a piece of paper I’d found in the drawer the night before, in the pile of papers that covered the red box. In the handwriting of my university days, I had copied down a poem by Amelia Rosselli.
If the weeping that yields to regret
yields to me its lute,
I can make these slow beaches
the imminent reach
of unfinished sadness**
I connected those words to Nikos.
The night before had left me with confused thoughts and violent emotions, a mixture of respect for and fear of his terrible story, and yet he had told it with simplicity. I wondered how he had found the strength to confront the suffering, and especially the impossibility of expressing it legitimately: Anna was someone else’s girlfriend, not his. He was only the witness of an accident that, no matter what the law said, he would continue to feel guilty for. He was the survivor of a secret love, and would have to carry its weight, counting the years to come without her. As for Anna, going with Nikos and Marcello at the same time, she must have put off the choice, imagining that she had before her an unlimited calendar, that she could enjoy the time she needed to put things in place; but life is ein Augenblick, irregularity is its only rule, events roll past us while we have the illusion that one day we’ll control them. That was why I took refuge in my fake true stories: over them I exercised absolute sovereignty. I was the ruler of what I wrote; I constructed characters and moved them around, I recorded their complaints, their priorities, their satisfactions, like a god or a despot. Writing, I had the illusion of being self-sufficient.
As in a game of crisscrossing memories, I went from the conversation with Nikos to the last phone call with Pietro, asking myself what I could have done to shift some of the omnipotence of my writing to choices I’d made, imagining myself and those around me as characters in one of my stories: Pietro and I had fallen, yes, but we had fallen together—maybe if we held each other by the hand we could rise again? But broken things, spasciate, the Messinese would have said in dialect, can’t be repaired.
I was relieved to hear heavy, rapid footsteps: the De Salvos, late, would begin a new day of work.
But my mother emerged from the stairway instead, agitated.
She ran toward me, hugged me, wept.
“Nikos is dead,” she said.
I thought it was a joke, that an intelligent adult woman like her shouldn’t believe it.
I thought there was a mistake, they were mistaken, who knows whom they were talking about, she had misunderstood.
I thought of a case of someone with the same name.
I thought that it couldn’t happen to me. That was how I thought of it: as a thing that had happened to me, not to him.
And my mothe
r and I became what we had always been: two women, dismayed, on the damaged roof of a house that was too big, lost amid an unfinished job and an unfinished sadness, one facing the other and both facing an abandonment.
Amelia Rosselli, Appunti sparsi e persi. 1966–1977. (Rome: Edizioni Empiria, 1997).
Farewell
Sitting among the people who filled the cathedral, I noticed that the bell tower didn’t sound, nothing sounded, not the Schubert “Ave Maria” or the roars of the mechanical clock, in the air was the hum of people crowding to a funeral. Only two days before I’d wanted to go to that square to recover memories of adolescence; now there were no more memories, they had been supplanted by a crowd that crushed and wept, a crowd that didn’t want to believe the unbelievable, a young man of twenty who had killed himself, and out of compassion it skipped over the details, but I knew that he had hanged himself, like my father in the first dream I’d had about him, with a sheet around the neck, and that no one had been able to prevent him. Looking at the scene now with the distance that time provides, I see my mother and me—in the midst of that crowd that talks and knows and doesn’t want to know—as lost figures, arms linked, and even today I struggle to focus on our first gestures; the tears, the condolences, the incredulity aren’t real; the priest who invites Nikos’s sister to the pulpit is real, and she, stumbling as she goes up, is real. The scene is in the present tense, the tense of nightmares, of insomnia, of obsessions, the eternal tense that the past crowds into.
I observe my last day in Messina from a distant point.
In the girl with proud eyes who struggles to read from a piece of paper full of memories and words of love written in pen I perceive Nikos’s voice, when he told me about her, about his mother, about Crete and sadness, and I hear him silent about his scar. His little sister wears eyeglasses and weeps as she reads, her cheeks are newly furrowed, she wears a black shirt, a black skirt, black shoes. She has words of love and torment for her brother that I can’t take in. The time of a funeral is removed from real time: when it takes place the person is still there, the imprint of what he was is so recent, and our mind struggles to understand. I keep my eyes fixed on the wooden coffin because Nikos might wake, knock, and legitimately demand to come out: You’re crazy to have closed me up in here, I’m suffocating, what did you think, what have you done. I can’t take my eyes off the flower-covered coffin even for an instant, it will be up to me to register the thud, the fist beating from within, the muffled cries and the desire for air and justice, I’ll have to rush to open it when Nikos returns.
My mother next to me is crying. “He was such a handsome boy, he was a boy,” she sobs. “It’s not just, it’s not right,” she insists, and looks for my hand. I would like to say something, but I don’t know how. At least give her some support, but I don’t even know how to do that, while in a single sentence she talks about Nikos, whom she knew for a few days, and my father, whom she slept with for two decades, making no distinction between them: she speaks the way my mother speaks, not getting to the heart of things but spinning beside them in a rage.
We’re close, finally at a funeral.
My mother and I can now say farewell to someone, and by means of a boy we also say goodbye to that other who was once a boy; but there is no trace of my father in the church or outside, in the bells or the sound of the organ, he’s absent from the naves, from among Nikos’s schoolmates, from among his family, the Sicilians who live here and the Greeks who’ve come from the other side of the sea, summoned by the catastrophe. My father is set aside: it’s not him we weep for today, if anything we weep for not having wept for him and we steal a piece of suffering that has nothing to do with us, awkward in our dark dresses.
Where was I the other night, after saying goodbye to Nikos? Could I have kept him from killing himself? Perceived in his confession in front of the house of the Puparo the trace of a will? No answer can soothe the survivors. There’s a closet full of answers that the living try on depending on the day, there is the answer that Nikos couldn’t give himself, persecuted by the idea that he’d lost salvation around a bend in a road: in the life that didn’t happen, Anna would have found the strength to leave Marcello, she would have returned to him to put on a hundred black bathing suits, and they would have kissed each other on a hundred thousand beaches with mountains of sand behind them. But there is no parallel life, anywhere, nothing exists except what has existed, and surely countless times Nikos’s mind had been deluded and got stuck on the same scene: kisses, swims, shorts, motorcycle. He had become a survivor and would remain one until death: impatient, he had wanted to shorten the time that separated him from the end. No one is alive: all of us are only—still alive. We live in the time of “for now.”
The young men who carry the coffin on their shoulders walk with cold composure, I understand they are undertakers when I hear the whisper of two men in the square: We should have done it. Then I seem to recognize in them a cousin, an uncle; the faces of relatives always seem a rough copy of the person we knew, touched. I recall my father’s mother, who died when I was a small child, the grandmother who kept me with her in the big bed and urged me to recount my nightmares: hearing my father say Mamma to that woman with the complexion similar to his, the same nose, elongated eyes gave me the impression of a distorting mirror (it was partly the effect of seeing the father become a son again: five letters, his first word, “mamma”).
But Nikos’s mother doesn’t resemble him, she’s short and round, she has curly hair, flabby arms. I get in the line for condolences and when it’s my turn I hug Signor De Salvo, I turn to the wife, I take her hands, I’m Ida Laquidara, I say, and she nods her head yes, Nikos was working on the roof of my house, I add, and holding her it seems to me I’m holding her son and I don’t want to stop, I raise her forearms, kiss her hands in an ancient gesture.
The last person I see is the sister, standing still in the square, in the center of a million people, small and solid as a lemon tree; then the coffin is in the car and the De Salvo family is gone.
My mother and I don’t linger. When the car with Nikos’s body disappears, we go back to being strangers to ourselves and the crowd, the rite is over, the present time is over; turning our backs to the cathedral, we leave the dream that we never wanted to have, and the outlines of the houses assume the features of reality.
Then my mother and I walked along Via Cavour, and without saying a word we passed shops and food stores, cafés and the classical high school, where she had gone, and the perpendicular street that leads to the other high school, where I had gone, and, still silent, we crossed Torrente Boccetta and entered Villa Mazzini: the pond where swans once swam was full of floating cigarette butts and wet leaves. And again we passed by the Ficus macrophylla, the witches’ tree that I had seen the same and different in Palermo, in Piazza Marina: I greeted it with a nod of the head and a leap of the heart, as I would have greeted an old friend who had come to bring me comfort after a stormy night.
Finally, outside the villa, in front of the fountain of Neptune that welcomed sailors, I asked my mother a question.
“What will you do about the roof?”
“The important thing is that the De Salvos had installed the insulation. Maybe it will fall on my head, never mind. I still have in my ears Nikos’s voice, every time I had a doubt: Signora, I know you want to sell, but let’s say you don’t sell, at least you’ll find the lamps in place. He didn’t believe I would sell, and so, well, all right: I’ll keep it like that, as I’ve always kept it. And when I die you can decide.”
A hint of sirocco was blowing, and I felt the sweat on my back; in my mind were the words of the priest in the cathedral, eternal life and union with the Father, the angels, and the family, for whom, he said, the boy would continue to live, as he would in the hearts of good people. I didn’t have faith. I didn’t want people to live in the hearts of others—I wanted them to live in the world with me, and
so I would miss Nikos, whom I’d just met, forever.
“You were alike: vagabond children, never content. But he was so young compared to you, and weren’t you fond of him? I thought right away you’d be friends.”
“He’s sixteen years younger. Was, I mean,” I concluded, as if that past tense were important. I would never talk to my mother about the evening at the Puparo, would never tell her that I knew the story of the scar on his left cheekbone, which even she might have noticed. I would never recount the lives of Anna and Nikos to her or to my husband: that country boy’s candid, wine-washed dialogue was like another red box that I would keep for myself. I had become a witness, a survivor in my turn: Anna and Nikos would die with me.
“Shall we have lunch at that new place, in Muricello?” I suggested. A blue-and-white restaurant had opened, with a marine décor reminiscent of boats; I was curious to go there, and didn’t want to go home right away. I didn’t feel like cooking or bothering with setting the table and clearing it. My mother agreed. A polite host welcomed us, and we ordered calamari and caponata, mussels and spaghetti in a stockfish sauce a’ ghiotta, with tomatoes, olives, and capers; I had a glass of red wine, which she looked at disapprovingly.
“Since when do you drink at lunch?”
“Just today.”
It was a lunch with some laughter, as lunches tend to be after funerals, when we laugh with the chill of death still upon us, imagining that the deceased would have laughed with us, and maybe at us. I thought that Nikos would have tugged on the sleeve of the shirt I was wearing and ordered me to stop being sad. I cried a little, as nervously as I’d laughed, and my mother held my hand on the table, as I had been unable to hold hers. Then she recounted anecdotes from her childhood: a doll she had loved very much but had had to throw away because another girl, the child of neighbors, had carried it up on a high sofa and gouged out its eyes to spite her.
Farewell, Ghosts Page 15