Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  So there, it’s over. I was lucky, and now he’s sitting on the floor. I look at my dress, hold up the hem. “Go get me a t-shirt.”

  “Take one of mine.”

  He resembles a dog when he tries to get up on his feet. He huffs as he slowly regains a vertical position, and I see an invisible knife entering his back. Even as I see him walking, shaken, toward the second closet, I imagine him facedown on the tile floor, dead, this knife going in and out of his big, chubby back.

  —

  I HAVE A panic attack that night, which makes me look bad in front of Gustavo, who didn’t know I suffer from them. I try to drink the water he brings me, but my throat feels damaged, paralyzed, so I can’t swallow. All the water I pour carefully into my mouth just drips out onto me and onto the sheets.

  We have breakfast very early. Again: orange juice, fig jam on sliced bread, American coffee. I can still see how much he likes having breakfast naked at the round table, a cool, Godly breeze coming in from the window, sexual desire seizing the air, but we don’t mention it, don’t act on it. We say silly things that lead us to the window he loves.

  I wish every day were the same, but then Gustavo doesn’t come back in the evening. He leaves behind two blue shirts.

  —

  I HAVE SOME gingerroot left, which I didn’t even notice when there was other food in the fridge, a handful of organic bouillon cubes. For carbs: 600 grams of pasta, assembled from different packs. I have some of it everyday. I have one meal a day. After the cramps, which usually last no longer than an hour, there’s a period of exhausted bliss. I linger in it on the bed upstairs or the couch on the ground floor. The shutters are down, and a bit of light filters in from the lamps and the sun. Once, after an early lunch, it was so hot and humid that I was certain nobody would be lurking around outside. I went out to the front yard, opened the toolshed, took a hammer out of the toolbox, placed every piece of Lorenzo’s equipment on the concrete and struck each piece. To keep them from forcing me to reimburse him, it is crucial that none of them—Maria, Lorenzo, my mother—ever gets past the metal door. Coming back inside, I bang my hip against the window frame and get a bruise. This last bruise joins a company of bruises Gustavo has given me. I take blood thinners in the afternoon, and I’ve stopped trying to cure my yeast infection, though it seems to have healed on its own. At night I close the shutters all the way because that’s when they stop by and spy on me. I take Xanax to help me sleep, pull out the wi-fi router cord. I don’t reply to phone calls or to Fofi’s messages. I’ve written one text to my mother: “I’m down with the flu. I’m not working this week.”

  I get a reply from my dad’s phone, not my mom’s: “Okay.”

  My brother texts: “Are you okay?”

  “You know how I am, brother.”

  “I love you. Can I drop by for a quick visit?”

  “No need.”

  Gustavo doesn’t reply to my occasional texts—“What did I do?” or “I’ve stopped eating,” or “I am the one who can give you what you want,” or “I sleep in your blue shirts.”

  I take baths and let the water boil my skin. I eat the skin around the nails on my fingers, and if they bleed I run cold water over them. The blood dissolves in the foam. Then I get scared, pull myself out of the tub, and put toilet paper strips on the little cuts for hours. If I’m not bleeding, I doze off in the bath. I jolt awake in the evening from the water, which has gotten so cold it feels like it’s slamming me in the face.

  If I’ve spent many hours locked in my room or in the bathroom, then they’ll muster the courage to enter the house, to lock themselves in the spare room. They say:

  “I knew she’d smash the cameras. I had insurance on everything, so I just need to take pictures of the damage, and they’ll give me new ones.”

  “So basically no harm done. Gustavo has come home, and he’s killed the ants. The girls greeted him like a hero who’d just come back from war, and I knew everything would be all right. All that’s left now is to figure out what she’s doing in that other room.”

  “The game changer was Gustavo making copies of the keys.”

  “How did he get the code?”

  “He knows his stuff. He has five children.”

  I spend long hours listening to these tedious conversations, which show me that they’re successful because they’re organized. And it’s true: I’m confined to my bedroom, and whenever I’m about to use the bathroom, I lock the bedroom and take the key with me. I’m halfway through the Xanax bottle, and when it’s done I won’t be able to get any sleep. They are simply waiting for me to go through all the pills.

  I’m tired. I can’t get up from the bedroom to stick my left arm under the cold water, so I stay in bed. I cut my skin with the tip of the nail file. The cuts itch, but they’re just surface cuts. The sheet is wet, which is annoying, but I can’t move all that easily. The sheet is covered in bloodstains. I press it against my left arm because I remember that it won’t heal on its own. I’m fighting blood clots with blood thinners. So I grab the phone and dial my brother, say, “Fausto, I can’t get out of my room; Lorenzo and Maria and mom are outside, but I can’t stop my arm from bleeding, and I’m not in good shape. Could you maybe come over and bring Band-Aids? Gauze?”

  —

  I WAKE UP to the voice of my brother reassuring me. “Don’t worry about the door—it’s nothing. It’s just that nobody had your new keys, and you were resting.” He kisses my wet temple. “I’m taking care of everything”.

  “So you didn’t come with them?”

  “No, of course I didn’t come with them.”

  After talking to me, Fausto goes to the other room and talks to a man who has looked in for a second.

  “I don’t mind staying,” he tells the man.

  “What’s your schedule like?”

  “I’m a student.”

  “You go to class?”

  “I do. How long will it be?”

  “I can’t tell. It depends.”

  I’m listening in bed as a mosquito flutters around me. It lands on my forearm, and I wave it away. My legs twinge with mosquito stings.

  Mom is sedated in the other room. She won’t call me, so I don’t hear her voice, but I seem to be hearing her whisper all the time. “Sergio, Sergio, come here a second.” It’s not her, the nurse reassures me. I don’t allow my father to visit, and I never go out. After the last surgery she made up her mind not to overdo it, so she asked me to lend her €15,000 of my future money for palliative care at home. She was joking. This was one of the last exchanges we had while she was still alert. I don’t know when exactly she accepted her fate, but I hated when she made that joke. It’s not as if I burst into tears—I was sitting “at her bedside”—but some tears fell from my eyes, hidden by my eyelashes. Just a light jolt of tears, and then I collected myself. Since then, I’ve been looking for the perfect retort, and I’ve finally found it, though it requires a lot of guts and perfect timing: “Make sure you give it back, though.”

  The nurses, both men, take turns working twelve-hour shifts. The one on the night shift speaks with Roman slang and a Roman accent, and I’m happy that he only comes at night because he is a white-trash coatto, and I hate talking to him, with his rough, savvy, entitled manners and his curls and his bald patch. The one on the day shift is from le Marche, has great manners, and almost makes me feel happy. My mother lets them sedate her most of the time. She has asked if I would be annoyed if she left slowly; she wants to reach death as sweetly as possible, with plenty of rest on her way there. She’s said she likes it when I watch her, likes that she doesn’t feel alone. She hoped, she said, that things were going the right speed for me. Near her night table is the morphine pump, and the rubber tube connected to her arm. These have been ugly years. I can only lie on my bed and keep her company through the wall while she sleeps.

  I cannot stay in her room for long. I can’t bring myself to watch the basin with the sponges or the adult diaper. I can’t be around
the house, as the nurses’ stuff tends to spill over into the second bathroom and into my mother’s study, where they’re supposed to keep it all. They have two cots in the study: they sleep here, among the diapers and the special soaps and the white coats. They frequently change coats, and they’re tidy, but it’s hot, and we don’t have AC. They treat her carefully. They’re waiting for her to enter a coma. She’ll die due to respiratory complications, pneumonia, heart failure, pulmonary embolism. One day I’ll know what it’ll be (the third one), but for now she dies from all of them every night.

  I lie on my bed to keep her company. Yesterday I watched Midnight Express. I remember when I was a child, being a convict in a movie was a basic existential condition, a metaphor that kept on giving, like sailors or soldiers. I hadn’t watched a prison movie in years. So yesterday I was all piangiolino, weepy, and I felt so close to my mother’s cell. I knock on the door sometimes. When she goes, I’ll leave prison.

  I wake up and go to the kitchen. I’m still sleepy. My mother is waiting there for me. She just got back from the supermarket, the bags are still on the table, and she’s making me slices of toast. She is the usual healthy mom, and then her mouth opens to talk and she’s suddenly not healthy anymore; she never will be again. “My love, I have to tell you something bad. They’ve found a little thing, I have to do chemotherapy.” Two jolts of water from my eyes, warped by eyelashes.

  Afterward, in my room, still warm from her hug, miserable, I wonder how I could have forgotten about “Marcello”‘s death so quickly. When I’m not thinking of him, of his car crash, of his ugly death on Via dei Prati Fiscali on that easy bend, long and well paved, it’s as if he’s still alive. He’s only alive when I’m not thinking of him. When I do think of him he’s suddenly dead. More dead than his career, which had been dead for a while, in my opinion, though I didn’t want to let him know because I liked his smugness, and I was wrong to tell him he was wasting his success so far with his determination to rap in English. I fall asleep with this ugly thought.

  —

  I WAKE TO the sound of Ludovica gasping for air. She sits up, she isn’t breathing. This creature, daughter of man and daughter of God, is sleeping naked. Her skin smells like plastic, and it’s an unbecoming smell. I’ve always thought that, ever since the first time, when we had breakfast at Berengo’s, when I was only a father of five, a bigot, and she was the girl who’d lost her way. The plastic smell of her skin blends with the smell of bodily fluids drenching the sheets. I sit up to help, and she’s rattling on: “Help me, I don’t feel well, I can’t breathe.”

  “Allergies?” I ask, now alert, maybe a little wary, too used to the way one has to navigate a child’s nightly crises, calmly but with determination. Sara’s convulsions, the ambulance, the car ride the second time. Esther shoving one of I Maschi against the corner of a night stand right before bedtime. And now, Ludovica. I’m sleeping here, I’m not at my children’s, at night I fuck an ex-child with an awful father. Am I an awful father?

  “No, it’s a panic attack,” she answers spitting on her lap, panting.

  Has she been possessed by the devil? She keeps drooling on the sheet, her back stooped over, the rrrrhaaaaah voice, some coughing. It’s scary.

  Once I rode in a helicopter with a man from work—he was a Milanese— who told me about the time he was possessed. One night, coked out of his mind, he was in a field outside a country mansion. Suddenly he had the feeling that he was being watched by the coldest eyes in the world. He didn’t know what it was, what it had been, but from then on, he totally lost it, would just do blow and fuck and work his ass off, argue with people. He came down with serious digestion problems and had a fever all the time. Three months later, when medical reports failed to explain why he’d stopped sleeping and why his skin was starting to glow gray, he decided to have an exorcism, and then everything went away.

  I need to leave. The Devil has prepared this drifting ship for me; he has given me this poor, possessed creature. He leaves me with it all night, so I do as I like and he comes back to inhabit her as soon as I’m asleep. The poor thing is suffocating. The hand I place on her back won’t save her. The Devil, the Lord of this world, is looking at us with his cold stare and penetrating Ludovica. Don’t take me. Get behind me, I tell him. Oh Lord, take his stare away from me; I’m scared.

  I get up—“stay, please”—go downstairs, take a glass into the kitchen and fill it with water, go back up and see her try to drink from my hand. She thanks me and lets go of the glass. She trusts me, though what I really am is a buyer, and Satan is the seller, and she’s the trinket.

  She’s having a hard time swallowing, she’s spitting out the water, making terrible noises. She irons my shirts during the day, and I have blisters from her yeast infection. I feel it pulsing in my underwear, painless, but it’s as if there were a copper wire inside it. She spits water onto the back of my hand. We’ve continued to do it, with a condom, and the itching is driving me crazy. The pleasure I begged for was awarded to me. Lord, I wanted her; it was me. I wanted the creature’s body against mine.

  She spits water onto the drenched, filthy sheets again.

  “I can’t swallow the water down. I’m scared.” She pushes two fingers against her neck, apparently to activate manual swallowing. “I’m scared.” She pushes with her hand, it contracts, the neck is a monster with a hump on its back, and it contains the muscle.

  “You can breathe, right?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t swallow and I’m scared.”

  She’s gagging: this is the work of Satan, whose eye looks over this sophisticated house, its valuable furniture. Oh Lord, please forgive me for attracting Satan’s eye to this creature you put on this earth so that she could love and be loved. I was the one who made her stumble.

  When she was born, Maria carried her out of the delivery room on her own two feet. At the time I loved her more than anything. She was my first child. I hadn’t been able to stay in the room—I had left halfway through labor—admitted it was too much for me, and Maria had agreed; she didn’t want any anxiety around her. Maria is so strong that she came out of the room by herself in a fresh nightgown only moments after screaming the most awful sounds I’d ever heard. Her hair was stuck to her forehead.

  Maria lay on the bed and put Esther next to her. She started chatting with my mother and a friend and seemed to forget our child altogether. She was snubbing her: she’d left her there like a little, self-sufficient thing. And so Estherina, so small, the size of an old phone, she was there, newly minted, lying against Maria, while Maria faced the other side of the room. Esther’s tininess broke me in half. When everyone finally left us alone, I bit and sucked on Maria’s neck, and then I stuck my firstborn’s foot in my mouth.

  I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet bowl, which was sweaty and warm from my mother using it. I came back and stuck Esther’s little foot in my mouth again. It was salty and delicious, a foot that hadn’t touched the earth yet. Its toes were pink peas in invisible pods. On the walls of the corridor, there were pictures of babies with heartfelt acknowledgments to the obstetricians: “I will always be grateful to you for the life you gave me.”

  Maria’s mother was forced to stay home through the whole delivery, and now she can’t muster the courage to join us. She’s too melancholy, too hurt and panicked. My mother puts a flower behind Maria’s ear and presses another against Esther’s cheek. In a few hours, Maria’s mother will tell her “Maybe your milk isn’t good,” and in a year, “You’re going to make her ill,” because Maria lets her pick things off the floor and put them in her mouth, especially the remote control. Maria will cry, daughter and mother. At age three, Esther will be healthy and more than good-looking, and she’ll make friends with everybody and complain when kids don’t play with her. She’ll scream to the other preschoolers, “Friends! Why won’t you play with me?” She has the same amusing, round face as her mother. When she’s three, she has black hair and is flirty. She looks at men with he
r wide eyes, blushes, and tosses them a coy “ciao,” and when the boys refuse to play hide-and-seek with her she calls them mascanzoncelli—the cutest possible way to call someone a rascal—an old word she got from my mother. And now here she is, all grown up and possessed, unable to swallow, naked in bed next to me. I have sodomized her, and she’s scared to death.

  The Devil’s stare can paralyze, but I beseech You, Lord, don’t let it swallow us. I think he’s watching me, but I have faith in You, Lord. I want Maria because that’s your will. I’ll go back to my family. Like the saint who ate the lepers’ phlegm, I’ll get Maria back in Your name, in charity. Ludovica has calmed down and is resting. “It’s passed, thank you, my love.”

  I get up, go downstairs. I look at the wall where we fuck, and I touch the glass in an effort to figure out whether You’ve given me the strength to leave. You have, thank You. The window watches over the blackness of the garden, the lamps by the train depot. I climb up the stairs, stop at the toilet, where I wash my ass, which I didn’t do earlier because I was afraid of making too much noise in the bathroom. I brush my teeth. Then I go back downstairs and stand between the table and the window and wait for dawn. I’ll have breakfast and leave for good. Tears from lack of sleep gather under the elastic skin of my eyelids.

  Mom and Dad also wake early and, since I’ve left New York and come to live with them and have stopped seeing Daria, we end up having early breakfast together every morning, the three of us. I have acid reflux now, like James Murphy, so I’ve stopped drinking coffee. They haven’t touched coffee in fifteen years. We drink barley water. They swallow down pills, and I do, too. At night we’d rather skip dinner, so we just have a few fette biscottate with herbal tea. Then I go out, but I’m not using recreational drugs these days, so at the end of the concerts I go home.