“Aw, you’re such a drag.”
“Drag!” Betta echoes her father.
Gustavo Tullio dangles his youngest child on his knees. “My sister’s such a drag,” she says, laughing.
“Which one? Esther? Sara?”
“Ob-viously Sa-ra!”
“But I thought that you and Sara were BFFs.”
“Naaah.”
“Nope,” Sara says. She’s back in the living room after delivering a roll of Scotch tape to her brothers. “If she messes up our afternoon performance, that’s it. We’re not BFFs anymore.”
Gustavo Tullio can’t stand the thought that soon these girls will lose their spirit, just like Esther did, hates that the cost of entering adolescence is the dimming of their infectious liveliness.
Betta moves close to her father, her lips prone, her eyes puffy, ready to cry. But before she can feel hurt, he kisses the curls on her forehead, then buries his face in her hair and the top of her neck as he pats her shoulder with a single finger.
Sara watches them from below. She snorts and turns sharply, 360 degrees instead of 180, leaving her stuck in place despite her frustration. Gustavo Tullio begins to pity her, the second-youngest child, the little girl who only got to experience the joy of being the youngest for a single year, who is jealous of these kisses because she no longer has access to them: there’s a rule in the house that the parents will only kiss their children’s mouths until they’re in kindergarten. So Gustavo Tullio gives Betta a hug and one last kiss on her cheek, then puts her down and tells her to prepare for the performance.
A quiet Saturday: no one has the flu, no one’s pollen allergies are acting up. Alone in the living room, Tullius lies down on the floor. Unusually for him, he’s not hungry: no cookie cravings, no desperate longings for ice cream. The smell of basil and mint is wafting through the open windows. Last night in Brussels, around eleven, he searched for Ludovica’s name on Skype. LudovicaVozzi80 was online. Since the first lunch in Via Crispi, they’ve had more lunches, all clandestine but totally chaste, the only topic of conversation Ludovica’s troubles. Kissing Betta has made him feel open and free, and he wants to make the most of this sense of possibility: what he wants is to stare at the ceiling and think of Ludovica. Have I behaved? he asks himself. While Ludovica vented angrily about Fofi’s most recent act of rudeness (“Sure, Ludo, remind me to explain to you how warehousing works one day,” he said, in the presence of a client friend of her mother’s), Tullio was lying in bed in his hotel room in his underwear. In one corner of his laptop screen: a live stream of a Botafogo match; in another corner: a white couple going all-anal for half an hour in a seaside resort, with a view out onto the swimming pool. He hopes his presence gave Ludovica some solace, even though he was distracted by the porn, the game, and his own cock, which he held erect in front of the laptop and brandished from time to time when Ludovica’s whining made him think to himself that what she really needed was to spend some time with this.
Luca steps out of his room to tell his father to please come take his place, then changes his mind because Betta and Sara aren’t ready yet.
“Yessir,” says Tullius. He feels every muscle, bone, and tendon as he pulls himself up onto his knees. He ignores his own heaviness and his quickening heartbeat as he lifts his leg, secures his foot, and stands up.
“No, turn around! Wait, papo, they’re calling me.”
“Go, go.” Tullius is delighted by this sternness, by his children’s beautiful lack of irony.
“Sorry, papo, Betta’s just going to the bathroom.”
He sits on the floor with his legs crossed, just in front of the door to I Maschi’s room, under the open window. Luca and Marco are inside. They wear scarves over their mouths, and their ears are covered by headphones, the pose held emphatically, a perfect imitation of the photos of DJs they’ve seen online. The computer screen has been moved to a table overwhelmed by toys. The classical guitar is on its perch. Sara and Betta are clad in old white tablecloths draped over them like tunics, taped together with fluorescent yellow tape.
He stays silent, touches his aching back, waits for the music, nods, changes his posture. He’s no longer able to cross his legs for more than a few seconds at a time, the way he used to when he’d sit in a circle with the other scouts. He switches to a triclinium position, leaning on his side. Sara and Betta stand next to each other. They kneel down and lean forward, arms stretched along the floor.
The beat starts: a loud hip-hop track. Tullius refrains from asking them to lower the volume; he wants them to have fun. Sara and Betta wiggle their hips and lean forward while the keyboard plays a lone chord—first a drone, then a rhythmic na na naaa, na-na na naaa.
At lunch, Ludovica and Tullio eat bacon cheeseburgers or pork ribs with their hands. He usually eats as she vents and he doesn’t say much, but recently a new topic of conversation has emerged: his job.
She loves the grand words you use to describe it.
You watch the girls dance to the beat and hear the prerecorded guitar arpeggios come in, one chord and two interweaving arpeggios, free and weird and euphonic, but all you can think about are the lunches, where her armpits sweat under a light pink shirt as she bites into the bone, rips the meat off with her teeth, and asks you to tell her about your work: “So, the key thing you need to understand to get what I do is the idea of the commercial offset…It’s an international thing: when you get a big contract, let’s say from India, you can’t just send the goods and take the money. Because the money you’re earning basically comes from the Indian state, from India’s land, you are in effect taking stuff from them, so you have to give something back, something that will contribute to the technological growth of the country. And the amount and type of thing you give back is proportional to your contract. So, if you’re selling airplanes, you have to give back a certain percentage of the value of the jets you’re pushing to India.” Big words from the adult world get her excited: technological, development. “So let’s say we decide to bring over a technology that measures pollution. Now, I handle a project where we find drones and retrofit them for agricultural use…We might use them to spray herbicides or control production. So that there’s value in it.”
“You should totally come to Librici and do a presentation about your job, it’s so interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Totally. It’s amazing. And you’re basically turning evil into good.”
You tell her you’ve flown on a private Falcon jet. “There was a sexy flight attendant on board—she had a nose ring. It was like a lightning flash, this flight: just a hop from Rome to Trento. I could feel the sun burning through the windows. And when we landed, it was straight into the limo…to go develop Sustainable Valley…” You are, you admit to yourself, punishing her for leaving her husband back in America.
You allot a special pocket for the receipts, keep them separate from the gum and the candy and the gum and candy wrappers. When the two of you part ways, you always throw the receipts in the same place: the first trash can on the north side of Via Sicilia. (You tell Don Luca that a colleague is proving to be a distraction: she admires and flatters you, and you can’t avoid talking to her because you’re working together on a project.) Oh, her stupid questions:
“How does it feel wearing a tie to work?”
“When do you button the top button, before or after you put the tie on?”
“Are these tailor-made? I mean for your neck, it’s so big.”
And the way she sucks the fat from her teeth and then swallows…
After a couple of minutes of guitar and keyboard arpeggios, Sara and Betta try out a few splits, then stand back up and press their fists into their hips and push their elbows forward in an extravagant swagger. They nod their heads up and down, gasp for air with an unguarded inelegance, count to four. A prerecorded voice starts rapping: Esther, with a heavy Roman accent.
Che m’importa se c’avete il cash.
Voi siete trash, c’avete
le meches,
io rappo come un flash,
sul red carpet mi coprono di flash,
prima o poi c’avrò io più cash.
I don’t care if you’ve got cash.
You’re trash, you have mèches,
I rap like a flash,
on the red carpet they cover me with flash
sooner or later I’ll have more cash.
You’re shocked, but you can’t help but laugh at what you’re hearing. “What is this?”
Luca shushes you.
You weren’t expecting Esther’s voice. Did she record it for you? Or is this an act of rebellion, a protest against you? And does she know that they were planning on playing it? Luca and Marco only repeat the endings in -ash. More rhymes:
Sei ridicolo.
Il tuo flow è da cavernicolo.
Il mio flow
mette su uno show
che fa sembrare il tuo un ammennicolo.
Faccio rime che ti mandano in clinica,
non puoi dirmi che so’ cinica,
il rap è la palestra del successo,
col rap ti faccio fesso,
ci rimani di sasso,
ma io al tuo livello non mi abbasso”
“You’re ridiculous.
You have the flow of a caveman.
My flow
puts on a show
makes your flow look trifling.
I make rhymes that send you to the clinic,
don’t tell me I’m a cynic,
rap is the gym of success,
I fool you with rap,
you’re shell-shocked,
but I won’t lower myself to your level.
Does her mother know about this? Does she know Esther is writing rhymes? That she knows obscure words like ammennicolo? When the chorus starts—“cash cash cash, / lo faccio in un flash, / cash cash cash, / io sono queen tu sei trash”—Tullio stands up and begins to clap. “So much talent in one house!” he says with persuasive enthusiasm, towering over his children.
“Wait!” shouts Luca as Tullius picks up the girls and carries them away. “Gelato!” he shouts back to I Maschi.
After Maria and Esther return home, the scheme is revealed: the entire performance, including Esther’s guest appearance, was a special surprise, choreographed just for him. Mother and daughter went out so that the four younger children could show off without the powerful constraint of Esther’s embarrassment. She’s offended whenever anyone likes what she does. Everything was arranged yesterday while Tullio was in Brussels—an epic welcome-back gift. While he was out of town, Maria bought Esther a rhyming dictionary. Tullio’s disgust spikes as husband and wife stand on the balcony. Maria tries to defend their oldest child’s “choices,” but he isn’t having any of it. “Don’t call them ‘choices.’ You liked hip-hop, and you forced it on her. Why should Esther listen to fucking hip-hop just because you do?”
“Well, maybe if you didn’t give me such a hard time about listening to what I want to, I’d be less interested in my daughter’s freedoms.”
“So that’s where we’re at, huh?”
“We’re at: you don’t let me listen to rap, and then you secretly stream football and God knows what else, and then, because you’re a hypocrite, you won’t buy your sons a PlayStation. You’re such an asshole.”
“God knows what else,” you ape her with a sneer. “I won’t even dignify that with a response. If I ever turned against you, I know that I’d end up sleeping on the street.”
She finds this satisfying or satisfying enough. “That’s right,” she says with a laugh.
The two of you start talking about the garden, and you feel such a violent sense of relief that a half hour later, you’ve got a painful headache.
—
ONLINE CHATS HAVE put an end to lunches. They are so intimate that meeting her in person again would be fatal. Ludovica’s husband sleeps in the living room most of the time—a man with no control over his household. Ludovica chats with Gustavo from the bedroom, alone in a bed denied to her husband. He was such a fool for not coming back to Rome when they first began to argue. He stayed in New York because he was supposed to be interning for this famous director, helping him out on set and bringing him coffee. But then the director said he didn’t want a thirty-year-old doing the kinds of lowly tasks more suited to someone a decade younger. So now Lorenzo has lost his wife’s respect. Ludovica and Gustavo discuss all of this online. Now that he knows that his wife knows about his secret football watching, Gustavo retreats into the kitchen at night without fear, making it seem like he’s hiding to stream games or to look at porn, which his wife thinks he’s doing, too.
Tullio has started going to a gym. One evening, he’s leaving the office on the way to his workout when he orders a female intern not to leave for the night before she finishes translating a document. He ends up scolding her, and he watches her sulk at her desk without saying anything. No response, no push back—she just takes it. Tullio suddenly imagines that right at that moment, Fofi is at the bookstore mistreating Ludovica. Tullio told her recently that they should come up with some kind of practical joke to ridicule him in front of the customers.
He arrives at Librici before sundown, his pale blue tie tight and his gym bag thrown carelessly over his left shoulder. His bathrobe is dry inside the bag. The sudden appearance of Fofi and Mrs. Vozzi, two people who have come to exist as literary characters in his online chats, transforms reality into a vague mist. Mrs. Vozzi sits behind the counter, like in her daughter’s stories. Fofi is in the middle of the dining area, between the tables and the bar. Tullio enters like the Lord, without attracting any attention. He knows that Ludovica, whom he’s ignoring, is standing behind the bar, startled and frozen, her spirit and her body jerked upward into a position of intense focus. He knows, too, that his skin looks better after three weeks of exercise. He sits at a table that lets him avoid eye contact with Ludovica, so she’ll know he’s not planning on saying hi. Two students sit at another table, drinking iced tea. Ladies browse books along the shelves closest to the entrance.
Fofi’s hair is curly, like Tullio’s, and red, with a matching beard that creases beneath his double chin and suggests animal fur and a kind of creepy dignity. He looks disheveled, with his argyle pants and his shabby sneakers deformed by his fat. But his body language is confident: he holds his ground as if the place were his. He rearranges books compulsively, but with a manic elegance. He calls some of the female customers by their first names, though with others he’s more formal.
Tullio, the stranger, is greeted by Fofi but not by Mrs. Vozzi, who is absorbed by the computer on the counter. She’s not as old as her daughter made her out to be. They must hate each other, like Maria and her mother, but she doesn’t look especially angry or reactive, at least not from this perspective, where she’s mostly hidden from sight by the counter and a support column in the middle of the store.
From the bar, Ludovica can see the knot of the tie, the sucked in stomach, the carriage of a real man. And yet Berengo is right when he says that losing your faith doesn’t happen easily or simply. A fair and good God looks upon him here, keeps him from doing irreversible things, melts his heart a little. The pity he feels for Ludovica has endowed him with pity for his own mother. He lets her invite him over for lunch once a week when his father has his postural regimen at the physiotherapist, the only time mother and son can be alone. Sometimes Tullio doesn’t even tell Maria that he’s there, even though she’s just nearby, cooking for the children in their new kitchen. As he races back to the office, he prays for his mother, a prayer provoked by Ludovica. How horrible it is to be a mother, thrown atop society’s waste heap. Please, have mercy on her, Lord. Please bless her, be by her side. And the Lord is there that evening, at Librici, because wherever there’s an aging mother, God is there, too.
Ludovica takes his order, and Tullius asks for a Coke Zero without raising his gaze. She retreats to the bar, her stride tentative and unnatural. Gustavo heads to
the bathroom; he wants to know if this place resembles the vision he’s concocted in the midst of his erotic fantasies, but it’s breathtakingly mundane: spacious, handicapped accessible.
His Coke arrives as he sits down, and he pulls out a legal pad and a day planner from his briefcase to take some notes for an upcoming meeting. He needs to figure out what he can say to upset Fofi. He tries to relax and glean the man’s personality.
A middle-aged woman: “I’m looking for a book that’s like The Name of the Rose? Could you suggest something similar? It’s my favorite book!”
“Ma’am, if there were other books as good as The Name of the Rose, you’d know about them already, and their authors would be super famous and super popular.”
To a young father, clean-shaven with a fanny pack over a Korean shirt: “We’re obviously not France, you know. Children’s books aren’t an art form here…”
It’s not hard to find reasons to despise this hairy little bear and his scratchy, prickly voice. He must have the saddest, tiniest cock. It probably hungers for that part of Ludovica’s belly where the flesh sinks down and flips over like plowed earth. Ludovica is the only valuable thing in this entire bookstore, this ridiculous place with its orange walls and its overlapping identity crises. Fofi’s petty, high-pitched voice is bad enough, but the fact that he keeps the music this loud is truly detestable; it’s impossible to take any notes when you’re being bombarded by Italian prog rock from the seventies.
Gustavo Tullio glances at Mrs. Vozzi, still at the counter, and at Ludovica, who stands at the bar looking miserable, chewing a carrot and returning his eye contact with a kind of half-smile/half-frown. She looks captive, broken down. And then Gustavo Tullio’s off: “Excuse me, sir, are you the manager…”
“Beg your pardon?” Fofi is ready for combat. “No, sir, I’m not in charge. That’d be the lady over there.” He rearranges a few books on the shelves without turning away from him, the whole exercise performed in a single, fluid motion.
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