But then I stopped to think: when had my brother seen his friend doing crossword puzzles? Because if anything was clear it was that they knew each other from the gym where my brother worked and the Bolognan worked and even the Libyan worked, mopping floors, scrubbing lockers and showers, sweeping the weight room or selling energy drinks, all tasks incompatible with a leisurely activity like solving crossword puzzles, which — as everybody knows — is something that’s done when you have nothing else to do.
That night, when I was in bed and the house was quiet, I imagined — or rather saw — my brother and his two friends at Rome’s Central Station sitting in the cafeteria waiting, my brother and the Libyan doing nothing, watching people come in and out, and the Bolognan working the crossword puzzle from the L’Osservatore Romano, a right-wing paper no matter how you look at it, though he claimed it was an anarchist paper, a superfluous and therefore futile explanation or excuse. Once I saw him with Tutto Calcio under his arm and I said “That’s what you read,” a simple statement of fact, not meaning anything else by it, and he said yes, I read Tutto Calcio, but it isn’t a right-wing paper the way people think it is, it’s an anarchist paper.
As if I cared what newspapers he read or didn’t read.
My father read Il Messagiero. My brother and I didn’t read anything (it was a luxury we couldn’t afford). I don’t know which papers are right-wing and which are left-wing. But the Bolognan was always justifying himself. It was part of who he was, and also part of his charm, or so he thought. But as I was saying, I was in bed with the lights out and the covers pulled up to my chin, in the silence of the night, a silence that looked yellow to me, and I saw my brother and his two friends in a bar at Central Station, sitting around a table with three glasses of beer and looking bored, because waiting is terrible and they were waiting for something that wasn’t coming, but was about to come, or at least that was what they were betting on, the three of them, and while they were sitting there the Bolognan had more than enough time to finish a crossword puzzle, from L’Osservatore Romano or La Repubblica or Il Messagiero. And imagining this scene, I was overcome by an infinite sadness. I felt a weight on my chest, a pain in my heart, a sense of anguish. As if a fog were rising from the underground tunnels and swamping the whole of Central Station, and I was the only one who could see it (but I wasn’t there). As if the fog was blurring my brother’s face and coming irrevocably between us. But then I fell asleep and I forgot or dismissed what I had seen — or what I had foreseen, because it really was a premonition.
And so the days went by.
IV
One morning the Bolognan and the Libyan left. I spent an hour, more or less, going through the drawers to see whether they’d stolen anything. Nothing was missing.
Even I couldn’t deny that their conduct had been impeccable for the five days they’d stayed with us. They always washed the dishes, three times they made dinner themselves, and they didn’t try anything with me, which was important. I could sense the interest in their eyes, in the way they moved, and the way they talked to me, but I also noted their self-control and found it flattering.
I’d only had one boyfriend in my life and we had broken up shortly before my parents’ car accident on that terrible southern highway.
My boyfriend lived nearby and was the same age as me, so it wasn’t long before I saw him with another girl, both of them looking happy, near the entrance to a club. I was on my way home from my job at the salon, it was a Saturday, and I was walking in a daze, staring up at the sky, which — as I’ve said — looked stranger every day. My ex-boyfriend was with his new girlfriend, propped on the wall outside the club, and when he saw me go by he said my name. I lowered my eyes and there he was. He was smiling a friendly smile. I smiled at him too. He asked if I had dropped out of school. I didn’t answer. I thought for a second that the logical thing would be to stop and talk to him and his new girlfriend, but instead I kept walking. When I had gone a little way I stared up at the sky again and I had the feeling that I was living on another planet.
So much for that.
You couldn’t say I’d gained much experience with my boyfriend. He was an ordinary guy and I liked him and then one day I stopped liking him. That was all. With the Bolognan (and the Libyan) it was different, because they shared meals with us, slept in my parents’ room, and watched me from up close in a way that no one (except my brother) ever had. What do they see? I wondered. What face, what eyes do they see? I didn’t wonder this very often, but once or twice I did. Now I know that there’s no such thing as closeness. One person’s eyes are always shut. The first person sees and the second doesn’t. Or the second person sees and the first doesn’t. Only a mother can be close, but that was unknown territory back then. A blank space. There was only the illusion of closeness.
And the closeness of my brother’s friends, a closeness built on the basis of glances and small gestures, among other things, wasn’t just flattering; I liked it, too. Let me explain: I was no one’s slave; I was the arbiter of them all. I was blind, but I was the yardstick by which they measured their freedom. It sounds stupid, but that’s how it felt and I’m sure they intended it that way. They didn’t swear in front of me, they weren’t like my brother, they took out the garbage, they always raised the toilet seat, unlike even my late father, a silent and considerate man.
But I don’t want to talk about my father. I want to talk about my brother’s friends and about the evening or night when I went through the drawers to see whether they had taken anything when they left. My brother saw me, I remember, and said with uncharacteristic certainty: “They didn’t take anything. They’re legal. They’re my friends.” But I still inspected the whole house, room by room, even searching the bathroom to see whether anything was gone, a bottle of cologne. Nothing. My brother was right.
Then a week went by and then another and my brother hardly mentioned his friends.
One night, as we were watching TV, he said that they were in Milan at a bodybuilding competition. Mr. Italy. I laughed.
“In Frosinone, maybe,” I said.
My brother looked at me, confused. What was I trying to say? That they might be able to make it in Frosinone, but not Milan? Maybe. I could imagine them anywhere else in Italy — Cosenza or Catanzaro, say — but not in Milan.
After that my brother stopped telling me things about them. I was someone — I realize now — who liked to face things head on, whereas my brother and his friends wandered real and imaginary places with their heads down. But facing things head on meant being consumed. I was being consumed.
I worked, did the shopping, cooked, watched TV, went with my brother to rent videos. Some nights I looked out the window and the night was as bright as day. Sometimes I thought that I was losing my mind, that it couldn’t be normal, such brightness, but deep down I knew I would never lose my mind.
I was waiting for something. A catastrophe. A visit from the police or the social worker. The approach of a meteorite, darkening the sky. My brother rented Tonya Waters movies and I washed heads and nothing happened.
One day they came back.
My brother didn’t mention it, maybe he didn’t know they were coming back either. They were there one night when I got home from work. The three of them were sitting on the couch watching TV. I looked them straight in the face and asked how things had gone in Milan. The Libyan got up and shook my hand. The Bolognan nodded irritably and didn’t get up from the couch. I could tell by their expressions that things hadn’t gone well. So I didn’t ask again. We ate together. We watched TV together. That night, while I was in bed thinking about them (or to be precise, thinking about their battered faces, shiny as if they’d been washed by force, as if a dark hand had dashed a bucket of water at them and then scoured them mercilessly, faces as wet and tired as if they’d returned from Frosinone on foot or in chains), while I was in bed, as I was saying, with the lights out and my eyes open, sure I would never fall asleep, one of them came into the room and m
ade love to me. I think it was the Bolognan.
Then I asked again:
“How was Milan?”
And he said, “Bad, it was bad,” as he put something on his penis and penetrated me. I think it was a condom but I can’t say for sure.
The next morning, before I went to work, I looked for the used condom and couldn’t find it. So maybe it was a condom that he put on and maybe it was something else. But what? I’ll never know and now I don’t care, but back then, that morning, as I was getting dressed and making the bed, I thought about that and about danger and love and all the seemingly strange things that turn up when you least expect them and that are actually pretexts for something different, something else (attainable things, not unattainable things), and then I went to work, the others were sleeping, my brother in his room, his two friends in my parents’ old room, and the streets I walked didn’t look like yesterday’s streets, though I knew they were the same, streets don’t change overnight, maybe in some places they do, but I’ve never been to those places, maybe in Africa, but not here, here I was the one who was changing, but when I got to the salon I realized that I hadn’t changed, that the streets had shifted slightly, to the left or to the right, up or down, but I was still the same.
In my defense I can say — if anything needs to be said, if the notion of defense is pertinent (which it isn’t) — that at no moment did I think that I was falling in love. I saw the shadowy negative of romantic situations. I saw the negative of passionate moments whose point of reference was always a TV series or the whispering of girls now forgotten. Sometimes I saw the negative of a whole life: a bigger house, a different neighborhood, children, a better job, time passing, old age, a grandchild, death in the public hospital or covered with a sheet in my parents’ bed, a bed that I would have liked to hear creak, like an ocean liner as it goes down, but that instead was silent as a tomb.
That night I made love again with one of my brother’s friends and the next night and the night after that too, and every night that week and the week after, until it began to show on my face that I was making love every night or that I wasn’t sleeping much, to the point that my friends at work asked what was wrong, whether I was sick or what.
Then I looked in the mirror and I saw that I had circles under my eyes, that my face was pale, as if the moon, which shone as brightly for me as the sun, was affecting me. And then I decided that I didn’t need to make love every night and I locked my door.
Life, despite what I expected, continued unchanged.
V
What did I expect? Back then I must not have been completely sane, because I expected tears.
That was what I expected. But there wasn’t a single tear. They knocked at my door, many times, night after night, but neither of them cried.
Sometimes, as I was washing hair or sweeping the hallway at the salon, I imagined them waiting for me at home, patient in a way that was not of this world or at least not of the world that I knew, doing nothing but watching TV while my brother and I worked and brought home food and paid the bills that had to be paid. I imagined them sitting silently on the couch or I saw them doing push-ups and all those exercises they did to keep in shape, on the rug or by the balcony that overlooked Piazza Sonnino, as the day slowly faded and the light of the moon grew more intense, until it flooded night’s farthest corners with a blinding light.
They’ll never leave, I thought then.
Other times I thought: they’ll leave without telling us, one day we’ll come home and they’ll be gone.
But when I got home they were always there, the house spotless, because they made it their job to cheerfully do everything that I used to do. Cheerfully, I say, and gladly, though I knew perfectly well that it was a fake cheer, as fake as mine, that their apparent good will hid feelings of emptiness, of sadness and grief in the face of the void. But they worked around the house. Dinner was always ready, the bathroom scoured with bleach, the rooms tidy. As if with these gestures they were saying to me: we aren’t shiftless, we seem shiftless but we aren’t, in fact if it was up to us we would do everything we could to make you happy.
Once a week, sometimes twice, I let them into my room. I didn’t need to say anything, I just had to be more talkative than usual or give them a meaningful look (or what at the time I imagined was a meaningful look) and they knew immediately that they could visit me that night and they would find the door open.
Other times I got home and found the table set for one — me — and a note from my brother saying that they would be home late, that they had urgent business to take care of on the other side of the city, that there was rice in the kitchen and chicken in the refrigerator. At the end there were always a few lines from the Bolognan (sometimes I thought the Libyan didn’t know how to write, not that it matters), repeating what my brother had said and promising to take care of him.
After eating and washing the dishes, I would sit down to watch some game show on TV and I tried to imagine where they might be, what kind of mess they had gotten themselves into. Sometimes, sick of the desperation and greed parading by on the screen, I reread the note and compared my brother’s handwriting to the Bolognan’s. My brother’s was fragile, clumsy, insecure. The Bolognan’s handwriting was like a convict’s handwriting. After studying it for a long time, I decided that it looked less like handwriting than like a tattoo. Sometimes I tried to remember the naked body of the Bolognan, I tried to remember whether he had tattooed anything on his own body — a letter, a word, or a picture — but I couldn’t remember.
Deep down, I think I was afraid something bad would happen. I think I sensed that it was coming soon and I worried about my brother, whose fate seemed so bound up with his friends’ fate. I didn’t care what happened to them. They were older and they were used to hard times, but my brother was innocent and I didn’t want anything to happen to him.
Every so often I had terrible dreams. I saw my parents walking along a southern highway, they didn’t recognize me, I kept going, happy to be so changed, then I thought better of it and turned around, but now my parents had turned into worms dragging themselves away, one after the other, torturously along the pavement, below a sign that read REGGIO CALABRIA 33 KILOMETERS, and though I called them by name, begging them to answer, warning them that they wouldn’t get far crawling like that, they didn’t even turn their worm heads to give me a final glance and they continued impassively along their way. Once in a while a late-model car would drive by with the windows rolled down and the kids inside shouting “Fascism or barbarism!”
In the dream I was crying, but when I woke up my eyes were dry and if I jumped out of bed and looked at myself in the mirror, the grim expression on my face frightened even me.
Sometimes my brother’s friends turned sullen. If I asked what was wrong, what the problem was, the answer was always the same: nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine, our luck is about to change. My brother listened and nodded. Sometimes their own words actually cheered them up, like a shot of some mood-boosting drug.
Then I would carry the dishes into the kitchen and ask whether they wanted coffee and they would say yes, we do, and I would make coffee and sit in the kitchen chewing mint gum, and I would contemplate the phrase “our luck is about to change,” a phrase that meant nothing to me, no matter how much I turned it over in my head, because luck can’t change, either it exists or it doesn’t, and if it exists there’s no way to change it, and if it doesn’t exist we’re like birds in a sandstorm, except that we don’t realize it, of course, like in the Luciano Marchetti song: “The wind blows, we’re birds in a storm, and nobody knows.” Though I think there are people — very sad or unlucky people — who do know.
It’s best not to think about these things. They’re here, they touch us, they’re gone, or they’re here, they touch us, they swallow us up, and it’s best — always — not to think about them. But I kept thinking, waiting for the coffee to be done, and I asked myself what my brother’s friends meant by saying t
hat their luck would change, how exactly they planned to change their luck (their luck, not mine or my brother’s, though in a sense their luck would have an effect — any idiot could see that — on my brother’s luck and maybe even mine), what they were ready to try, how far they were prepared to go to get their luck and ours to turn around.
At the same time economic conditions were deteriorating. Not much, but on TV they said they were deteriorating. Something was wrong in Europe or Italy, I think. Or Rome. Or our neighborhood. What I do know is that we barely had enough money to eat and one day my brother approached me with his friends trailing a few feet behind, as if not wanting to intrude on anything as intimate as a conversation between a brother and a sister, but also as if they couldn’t resist the temptation to witness, even if at a prudent distance, my reaction to what my brother was going to say, which was already old news to them.
And what my brother said was that he wouldn’t be working at the gym anymore. I asked whether he had quit. He said yes, in a way.
“Did you quit or were you fired?”
He admitted that he had been fired. When I asked him why he had been fired he said that he didn’t know. Then he added that it wasn’t surprising, that lots of young people lost their jobs overnight.
“But those people aren’t orphans like us,” I yelled, “those people have parents and can afford to be out of work for a while.”
A Little Lumpen Novelita Page 2