I record the stories they share, then the two of us move to Piazza delle Muse to eat ice cream: two scoops of vanilla with shots of whipped cream both at the top and buried at the bottom of the cone. We laugh as we listen to the tape—the old ladies’ thin voices fill the dusty air.
“We used to walk to Piazza Ungheria, and we’d leave our boots there, at the coal merchant’s, and that’s where we’d slip on our city shoes.
“Before the war, Dad was a colonel. He liked fighting in wars—see, he also fought the war in Tripoli, right before World War I—but he majored in Italian. After a while, after the war, he left the army and entered Confindustria because he had a degree.” We kick the pebbles around with our Doc Martens and create a dust storm. “One of Mussolini’s children lived here, Bruno Mussolini, in that house you see over there, the one that’s so close to us, and we could all see Il Mussolini very clearly when he came to visit his son. He came twice, no more than that, and we were all Fascists, of course, so we all stretched out the windows as far as we could to see him. Bruno was a jet pilot, and he did some movies, too. But then he died.”
And now, on a bench in the piazza, Sergino lets out a single, sudden hiccup and begins to cry.
“What’s wrong, Sergino?” I say to him as I hug him. I look for the STOP button, rewind the tape, wrap my arms around his hips. “Let me go,” he says, wiggling out of my grasp.
Piazza delle Muse is quiet and dirty, the smell of dog shit a permanent ingredient, an unforgettable memory for the many lovers strolling through the park. A bus line terminates behind our backs, and the buses seem to shiver with great volume as they reach their final stop. The noise is something like haah, the sound of a soldier dying.
“Bruno Mussolini,” the recording continued, “had married a high-school friend of my sister’s, so we went and visited them. She’d invited us over, this lady, and we were in the gift room—she’d just married Bruno—and the room, well, it was a bit smaller than the room we’re in right now, but it had all these gifts spread out across the floor, gifts from all over the country, Italy’s gifts to Mussolini’s son.”
He switches the Walkman off. “Viva il Duce!” he says in a high voice. In response he gets two laughs from a far corner of the piazza and an “Oh my” from an old woman sitting right behind us. Nannies and babysitters stare at him. He switches the tape back on and lets out a melancholy sound through his teeth: “Duce, Duce, Duce.”
“Plenty of silver plates, a waterfall of plates—that’s what I recall: a lot of things. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was fifteen, sixteen. Mussolini’s wife must have been twenty-two, twenty-three, my sister’s age. They’d been in school together, in the same class with the same teacher. When we visited, Il Mussolini wasn’t there. We’d seen him from our windows: we leaned too far out the window and saw him going down the stairs. The building had this little armor-plated door that gave out onto the stoop. He came out in civilian clothes, wearing that crooked hat he often wore, and his car was there. We saw him get in. We saw him once, I’m sure. I remember him well, but I think he came a second time to visit his son, yes, the son who died. He died in a plane crash in Africa, his son. And then the daughter-in-law moved out.”
Sergio lowers the volume without switching off the tape. “What a life,” he says. “These were the Fascists—these good people were the Fascists, and little shits like my father had the guts to renounce them. What a jerk. Think of the shitty life my father leads now. And you, you’re shit, too. You’ve renounced me. And I loved you. I loved you with my entire being.”
My voice was as sweet as sugar: “But you’re not a Fascist, Sergino.”
“I am a Fascist. I hate the bourgeoisie and its vices. And you’re my Badoglio; you’ve betrayed me. Now that I’ve gotten to know you I’m even more of a Fascist.”
“Sergino, I hate the bourgeoisie and its vices, too.”
“No, you love the bourgeoisie.”
“Come on, Sergino, calm down. It’s not true. I don’t love the bourgeoisie.”
“You do love the bourgeoisie. Daria, you’re ruining your life, and you’ll have to pay for it. You call yourself a communist, but your cult is the bourgeoisie. You pray to the bourgeois god, you kneel down and worship the gigantic cock of the bourgeoisie.” He glides a hand over his face: “You won’t ever know real love, and you’ll remain a slave, because you love being a slave. You’ll never live free. You’ll be a slave, a slave to the bourgeoisie.”
I stand up. I smash my foot down on the pebbles. “All right, Sergio. Ciao.”
As I left the park, I understood that he had found out I was fucking Gustavo Tullio again. Sergino stayed on the bench and yelled, “You deserve the center left!” as I walked away.
I leave but I don’t go anywhere. I just sit in my car on Via Eleonora Duse. I try to force myself to cry, but the only thing I feel is a thick Plexiglas casting congealing around me. It becomes a transparent shrine where I’m on display, where my own thoughts try but cannot grasp me, they cannot know me.
—
I THREW THE tape out the driver’s side window.
—
BACK HOME, MY mother was sitting at the writing desk in the living room, as if on a throne. “You know,” she said when she saw me, “there aren’t many mothers lucky enough to have daughters who make faces like the one you’re making now when they come home.”
—
AN AFTERNOON ONE week earlier: Sergio walks toward Via Morgagni, where Tullio lives.
This must be Sergio’s head. To see it I have to push myself through the thin membrane that keeps his conscience in that moment in space and time separate from me.
His Doc Martens are worn down on the sides and at his toes. He walks toward Tullio’s apartment building, and he has bad news for me. He’s just spoken to his mother, who needs chemotherapy.
If he can spot me from the sidewalk, if he can see me coming down the stairs through the glass door, it’ll mean that I’m still seeing Tullio, and he won’t break the news to me. If he doesn’t spot me, he’ll go back home, and he’ll call me to tell me what his mother just told him. Which means that he’s only in Via Morgagni to not give me the piece of news.
—
AN HOUR EARLIER, Sergio’s mother: I see her preparing an afternoon snack, bread and butter and anchovies. I hear her start to say something and stop. She opens her mouth again, her eyebrows the shape of a pagoda roof.
—
SERGIO CAN SENSE when something is happening behind his back, when it’s not just his imagination. Years earlier, he realized that his father had a daughter he never talked about. His mother had scolded him: “Don’t be dumb,” she said persuasively. But a few months later his father confessed: it was true. Sergino’s paranoia and the fabric of the cosmos were in perfect harmony. The right hemisphere gathers all the necessary information, which it transmits to the conscience through misplaced thoughts, through insights that seem weird and absurd until they turn out to be true.
—
THEN HE CALLED both my home numbers to give me the catastrophic news. I didn’t pick up the phone, then my mother told him I wasn’t home: did she know I was at Tullio’s? Did she somewhat enjoy hearing Sergino’s disappointment? Anyway, he decided that my absence at that time meant I had to be at Tullio’s.
—
I DON’T WANT to see the moment when Sergino spots me from his hiding place behind a car, walking out of Tullio’s apartment building.
—
I SLIP THROUGH the membrane of words that carries me backward and end up inside Sergio’s eyes. He’s about to see me come down the stairs, ashamed, my ass broken in half. You can see the stairs from outside the glass door, from the sidewalk. I shouldn’t have told him so much about what went on inside Gustavo Tullio’s home when we had been a couple: for now Sergino could picture what must have just happened in torturous detail.
—
A LATE AFTERNOON in my youth: I emerge from that glass door onto the street, and I don’t wa
nt to find out that Sergino is hiding behind a car and keeping an eye on me.
—
DRIPPING DROPS OF Tullio between my legs while being watched from behind a car. Please take me out of here.
—
A BALDER VERSION of Sergino parks the scooter his friend has lent him by the building where he lived with his mother until her death. It’s what, fifteen years later? It’s after he met La Sposina at a party in New York; it’s in Rome. He gets off, hooks the helmet under the seat, and ends up sitting where he has often sat, on the marble base of the iron fence. The apartment building is yellow and bulky, healthy like a beloved son. Il Duce built it and his brother’s for the middle class. Now the neighborhood teems with Calabresi, the bourgeoisie from Crotone who have come all the way to Rome for a degree in law or Italian. He picks up his phone, tweets Roma ti amo ma mi butti giù as he listens to LCD Soundsystem’s sad song. Tears fill his eyes, and as he scrolls through his friends’ posts he hears his mother’s voice: “Are you a weepy pea, my love? Then weep.” He’s shaken, broken, and after he swallows the feeling he takes a stroll among the crippled ladies with their mall store shopping bags, the girls in their unhip jackets. The streets form a pentagon around the piazza Bologna and its elegant, rationalist post office. The springtime air is warm; the cars are double-parked; the slightest conflict provokes a salvo of horns. He wishes he could postpone his meeting with his father indefinitely, because even though Piazza Bologna is a source of discomfort, he’d gladly stay here and remember. Then Zio Gino appears to him outside the bar.
How can it be him? How can he still be there, in his usual pose, sitting in his idling car with his usual look of concentration? Zio Gino (not his uncle): a shabby, pudgy old man who continues to park his faded little car in front of the repair shop or in the handicapped parking spot just off to the right. He always appears early in the morning and opens the gate before anyone else is around, which leaves him sweaty and panting. (Sergio saw him do this a couple of times when he was rushing for an early train to Milan or heading back after a long night that didn’t end until dawn.) He spends the rest of his day either at the bar or sitting in his car without saying a word to anyone. And here he is, across the street. Sergino can see the back of his head. The man is proof that the neighborhood is in the hands of the ‘Ndrangheta. Sergio never says hello, and since he sold the apartment he has stopped coming to the bar where he used to drink uneven cappuccinos, the ever-changing levels of frothiness wholly dependent on who happened to be at the bar. Sergino’s apartment faced a smaller street that intersects this hermetic boulevard. He’s at his old corner now, hiding without putting in any effort, and he can see the alimentari shop, which used to change owners every two or three years. One time, on his way out of the store, the owner told him he was leaving, going back home to Calabria.
“So what are you going to do for work back home?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They’ll fix me up.” That they still haunts him.
There isn’t an obvious connection between the death of Sergio’s mother and the continued influence of the malavita, the mob, though as a loyal reader of Roberto Saviano’s books and articles, he finds it natural to link his emotional life to the drama and the tragedy of the tentacular hold the mafiosi have on Italy. He gave his friends and acquaintances several different reasons for his selling his apartment but never more than one at a time. The explanations all depended on his mood, but none of them was the truth: that his mother had died there.
He wanted a neighborhood—and a city—where he wouldn’t feel embarrassed whenever he took a man home, which he had started doing more and more when he was left alone.
Or the apartment was stifling hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. It was built in 1941 and lacked any kind of soundproofing. His great-grandmother Plinia, the widow of a railroad man, had lived there for years. She saved money on phone bills and received few visitors—a Fascist, aural panopticon.
Or when Sergino already had a job in Milan, a tenant of his once showed him some dead larvae he’d found on a high shelf in the kitchen. There it was, among the sawdust and the canned food, a whole society of white larvae in fetal position: deformed creatures, born dead, imagined into life out of nothingness and soon sent back into the void from which they’d come.
Or everyone in the neighborhood was depressed. One morning, he nearly ran over a thirty-year-old man in a tracksuit who was crossing the street looking the other way. Sergino managed to stop the scooter just in time. He stood in the middle of the solitary street and demanded an explanation. “Hey, no problem, man,” said the young man. “I’m sorry.” Then he left. The way Sergino put it to his American friends, in French or English, during their cocaine- or Five Hour Energy- or cosmopolitan-fueled conversations was that “For Romans, it’s like it isn’t even worth putting on clothes anymore.” The guy had almost died right there, in his tracksuit, and to Sergio his fatalistic attitude seemed like a terrible disease.
Or the traffic, which was as valid a reason as any other to leave Rome altogether. This afternoon he was riding his scooter through the area under the railroad bridges and the overpasses, between Via Prenestina and Via Tiburtina. And—this still bothers him—right in front of the big French mall, an SUV driver cut him off without signaling his left turn. A Chinese guy in a suit. At the intersection with Via Tiburtina, Sergio tweeted, “Kick the Italians out of China” and also “I’m lucky I’ve stopped arguing with people at traffic lights like I used to, otherwise this Chinese mafioso would have done me in.” And then, “Money is my only consolation.”
He ended up selling the apartment to a Calabrese family who bought it for their children, who were in Rome for school. He left his job at Universal in Milan and moved to New York for an unpaid internship at a literary agency. (Berengo had made the introduction.) He was traveling at his mother’s expense, investing his inheritance into his plan to change professions. He became a literary scout—a consultant to publishers in Brazil, Ukraine, Indonesia…He advised them on which books to acquire: pop psychology, cookbooks, literary novels, vampire novels. Fourteen parallel salaries ranging from $200 to $1,400 a month, which he spent on first-class airfare and $3,000-a-month rent for the East River apartment he split with an older friend who was never home.
He used part of the inheritance on the down payment on a house in Pigneto, which he rented out to a gay couple. On the way over, as he rode from his old neighborhood to his father’s, he felt anguish at the thought that his father might tell him that the house in Pigneto was gradually losing value. Sergino is staying nearby, with a girlfriend who lets him use her scooter and her car. She lives in a cozy two-story house that faces a communal courtyard. It’s an enchanted kingdom, and he’s happy to be staying there, though his Americanized eye sees that she’s paid too much for it. Then again, there are all the pedestrians on the street to contend with, and the house keeps its distance from them with two gates and a short driveway in between. At dawn the gutter punks piss onto the outer gate before they retreat into the daylight: the rich ones, who will eventually return home to their families; and the poor ones, who will die young because they didn’t have money for their dental hygiene, forgot to file their hardening skin.
There’s a pedestrian street in the neighborhood: a small rambla for readers of Artaud and Jodorowsky, trust fund cheapskates who refuse to give any change to the mime who panhandles by the sidewalk tables. “Bro,” they tell him, “I’m worse off than you are.” The gentrification of Pigneto was never completed, even after years of real estate speculation that pushed out the local stores and replaced them with bars. There are a few fancy restaurants in the area, with the occasional actor or politician or cluster of drug dealers stationed in front, the second-rate aperitivo bars with prix-fixe menus dispersed nearby. Sergio’s girlfriend’s house is depreciating, and his father might tell him that the ninety square meters he bought from a taxi driver are, too.
The thought distracted him earlier this morning as he tr
ied to read book proposals slipped to him by literary agents and publishers. The inspiring memoir of a vegan marathon runner who ran the Gold Rush trails of the Sierra Nevada. From “his Midwestern childhood hunting and fishing to his gradual immersion in the worlds of ultrarunning and veganism…” The advance a big American publisher had offered felt more ridiculous than usual. Time had passed unsteadily as he waited for his meeting with his dad. Confessions of a Guidette by Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi from Jersey Shore: “Can she help it if she was born to love fake tans and juiceheads?” During a break from reading he went to the bathroom and found some bright crimson blood on the toilet paper: his hemorrhoids flare up every time he comes back to Italy. Blood settled in the grooves of his middle fingertip. Sergio comes to Italy once a year: he went to London in the middle of April and came to Rome for two weeks. After Rome, Turin, and Milan. His immune system is so weakened that a mosquito bite on his elbow filled with pus just from resting his arm on the armrest on the train. There’s also the Sichuan food he ate in London and the stress of having to see his father. Bruno collects rent on his son’s behalf, pays his son’s mortgage, checks on his son’s investments. Sergio didn’t have to choose him as his accountant and he knows it.
He rides from piazza Bologna to Quartiere Tiburtino. The sun begins to set over the off-ramps that lure traffic off the Tangenziale Freeway, over the sleepy, dusty construction site that will one day reveal a more refined, more perfect Tiburtina Station. Quartiere Tiburtino sits just south of the station, beyond the bridge over the Tiburtina railroad. In low light, the massive bridge is blinding and disorienting. Sergino thinks about his father’s abasement. His divorce has declassed Bruno, and he has no choice but to live near the station on the wrong side of the tracks. The roadway is a threshold, a drawbridge that shuts down at night, leaving Bruno out in the cold. Sergio’s grandma is alive and healthy, so her Communist son can’t move to Parioli and take over her villa. Grandma can’t move and she barely speaks, but she pays the Filipino couple who take care of her a good wage, and she never sends her son any money. A few weeks ago she was diagnosed with ischemia, but after three days at the Quisisana clinic, she had the couple bring her home.
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