In January 2011, their relationship is blossoming, though it is not without its conflicts, which are usually resolved through wrestling matches that take place on the floor. Vera often wins. She is very strong, particularly when she is angry. Nico finds himself smothered by her hair, by her muscles, her body parts piling themselves onto him like rugs (dusty rugs, when Nico forgets to vacuum and their naked bodies roll around in hair and ash and crumbs and boogers and shreds of Kleenex). Vera fights Berengo because she is jealous of a British cook, another prominent member of the Corte Amorosa in the winter of 2011. When Berengo wins, he sits on her face and jacks off as he stares into her eyes, happy and short of breath. Sometimes, when he feels his heart skip a beat and when his chest begins to contract, he is afraid that he won’t make it to the end of the match. As he tries to slow down his breath after a fight, he sometimes manages to come on her cheek. Vera’s skin is very sensitive, and Berengo is happy knowing that he has caused her a rash that will last until the following day.
THE BODY
Deformed: six feet tall; nice ass; deflated, wrinkly breasts that collapse when you hold them. Annual Botox injections in the face, very few wrinkles: a face whose expressiveness is as yet uncompromised, thanks to large, dark blue eyes. Long, sturdy legs: “It’s like sticking it up a road,” he says, “or into the trunk of a tree. Her uprightness is the main thing. The roundness you associate with women—with the egg, the womb, the cocoon—it’s lost here; you enter a vertical space, not a circular one. And her tits make the whole thing especially absurd: they’re empty and ruined, so you lose that one last element of rotundity. It’s like fucking a man.” When he takes her from behind, “you watch her moving her back like the steel bar that pushes down on the wheel of a train—the longest back I have ever seen. I pull her hair to hold her close. Looking at her from behind, as she kneels down, she is to a woman what a limousine is to a sedan.” Her vagina is hard, though of this Berengo is less sure, because she forces him to use a condom during intercourse. Vera is very afraid of sexually transmitted diseases. She is horrified by the idea of the genitals rubbing up against each other. During their first encounter, she used the expression “mucosal contact.”
JOBS
Not taking into account the many waitressing jobs she had in Los Angeles while she was staying at her aunt and uncle’s when her parents were fighting too much, she worked as an intern at a casting agency (still in Los Angeles), then spent a year at a kibbutz in Israel, came back to study political science at Columbia, went back to the kibbutz, came back to Columbia for j-school. After graduating she started traveling around using her father’s money, stringing and writing wire stories she’d try to sell to the agencies. She started taking pictures while working for the wires and has now stopped writing. She has been through war, and so whenever he is with her, what Berengo thinks to himself is: “The fact that Vera is going out with me means that what she does is worthless. You can’t stare death in the eyes and then fuck me. I am the Untruth. I am Unimportance. And I’m not even your husband, in which case at least I’d understand that you needed stability to compensate for your adventurous lifestyle.” Maybe, I said to him, what she sees in you is a sense of death that’s similar to what she feels when she’s actually in the war zone. “That’s a very flattering reading,” Berengo said. “But my actual issue is: I think these photographers are posers. Their entire life is a pose. They have these conversations where they call each other bro. They look after each other. They host these beautiful dinners. There’s the one who’s great in the kitchen and the one who’s really, really terrible, and that’s just more reason to love him. You eat by candlelight. The people there always look like they just got back from a Vanity Fair party that they didn’t really care about going to or from a charity block party in Harlem. Or from Lebanon. They have the same attitude whether they’re coming back from Lebanon or the Vanity Fair party: it’s hell out there. Their conversations are uninteresting because they all say the right things. They’re intense. They pick up nice tans while they’re out taking pictures of torn-up bodies and piles of rubble. They dress well. Their coats, their shirts. They get along. Their walnut bread is delicious and homemade. And then when you’re busy hating on them, a friend suddenly calls, and you overhear the following exchange: ‘Hey, buddy, you dickless cunt,’ Vera says. She’s calling someone a faggot, then hands the phone over to another photographer who says: ‘Hey shithead, two months in the hospital doing nothing, you should be ashamed of yourself!’ All those around the table look at each other, sort of uncomfortably. Vera’s eyes well up, and she has this angry look on her face. Someone gets up to take the cheese board into the kitchen, all of this in candlelight, by the way, and someone says into the phone: ‘No, no, I’ll come over myself and stick it up your butt!’ When they hang up I find out it was a friend of theirs who lost a leg. I’m not sure where, some war zone. He’s gone through surgery over thirty times, and they even removed a flap of skin from his asshole to patch up another hole in his stomach or leg—again, I’m not sure, I didn’t totally follow. Talking to each other like that is their code, the way they show their brotherhood: they grieve, and they’re brave. And then Vera fucks me, which means her bravery is a pose. She should despise me. I mean, these people make you think that God has to be a hipster, because he allows people like that to see the truth. The affectionate gatherings, the perfect dinners, the perfectly formed sentences about how hard it is, actually, to be there on the front line, but oh the memories. The only possible escape from this is to think that if you fuck me, then maybe you’re a fraud. I mean, I’m sorry to go on about this. It’s just that they’re real people.”
TASTES
She wears long robes indoors—a look that’s subsequently copied and improved on by Nat, another member of the Corte Amorosa. When she goes out she wears practical clothes that are a bit butch but expensive. She’s rarely without her survival pack: folding knife, pumpkin seeds, ultraslim hoodie, K-Way, flashlight, tampons. Expensive bicycle.
PARENTS
Upper West Side Jewish mother, lives alone, three spaniels, a member of a number of charitable organizations, fund-raises for The Nation. Her father, a former UN official, is a diplomat currently under investigation in Israel. The parents are separated by two continents, but they’re not breaking up.
PRECAUTIONS
“Drink antioxidant kombucha tea. Avoid any contact between the vagina and the penis, not even any pornographic rubbing, which is so on-trend in the U.S., where, as foreplay, the man aggressively strikes the vagina and you get a kind of slapping sound. Condoms are to be worn from the first moment of intercourse, though not during oral sex, which shows that her approach to sex isn’t entirely rational.”
NIGHT TERRORS
At night, Nico gets restless. In his sleep he experiences something that feels like seeing his father’s true face. He says that his father’s face—though rarely his mother’s— often appears in his mind’s eye and that in that moment he feels he can understand it, his real face, as if he were meeting his father for the first time. He suddenly sees his wrinkles, the depth of his cheeks—the whole visage in total clarity as if it were cast in rubber.
Sometimes he dreams about his parents, and he wakes up crying. He dreams that they’ve “lost their strength” or that they’ve died. He dreams that he “finally understands them.” Then he wakes up, and when he realizes that he’s crying he tells himself that by crying for mortality itself, he has finally accomplished his duty as a human being. “The mortality of others generates in them a deep and total melancholy, which they’re almost never able to communicate and which you can only access through the intimacy of a dream.” Why does he call his parents others?
If he has company while he sleeps, the sadness doesn’t come. When he falls asleep in a woman’s arms he is able to “sense her absolute sanctity, her absolute preciousness.” He feels “these really strong outbursts of tenderness, outbursts that won’t do me any harm.”
When he dines alone he eats too quickly; reclines too far back in his sofa; stains his t-shirts, his sweaters, his button-downs. He’s scared that he will begin to choke and die alone on his sofa. The pain he feels under his sternum when he eats too quickly only exacerbates his fear of dying. He is on Facebook constantly but especially during meals.
THE PURCHASE OF THE HOUSE
The house in New York was purchased in 2008. The mortgage signing took place on a cold fall day. Berengo’s parents were there and two lawyers.
—
NICOLA SAW THREE missed calls on his mobile from his father. Nicola was in Rome, in his house in Pigneto, stabbing an icon on his desktop with his pointer. The file contained an audio interview with Lenny Kravitz, which he had recorded the day before and saved on iTunes but couldn’t be bothered to transcribe. The ring tone on his iPhone (one of the first iPhones to be spotted in Rome) was set on silent, and he’d left it on the magazine rack next to the bathtub. When he returned to the bathroom—when he worked at home he would pee every half hour (he is de facto incontinent, since he never needs to suppress any of his bodily functions—not urination, or evacuation, or the release of sexual tension accumulated while researching the latest news about Jessica Alba)—he noticed the missed calls and immediately called his father back on Skype. He was deeply distressed. His father answered the phone: “It’s nothing, don’t worry, good luck with work, goodbye.”
“What do you mean ‘goodbye,’ dad? Tell me what’s going on, or I won’t be able to do any writing.” But his father had already hung up.
The son pleaded with him via text: Dad, I can’t keep working on my piece if you act like this. What’s going on? I am worried about you.
His father called back: “I just wanted to tell you…We bought the house. I wanted to speak to you, darling.”
“That’s great! Dad, are you crying?”
His mother came onto the phone. “No, he isn’t crying, Ciccio. We bought the house. Are you happy?”
“Mom, he’s crying. I know he is. If you’re not able to handle the implications of making a grand gesture, then don’t make any grand gestures! I’d rather you didn’t!”
“What are you talking about, Ciccio? Stop this.”
“You know what I mean. He gets so upset thinking about the continents, the ocean, time passing, intercontinental flights. I know it and you know it.”
“Calm down, Nico.”
“Come on, Mom. I love you. Please don’t make me worry so much. I have a deadline on this piece.”
“Oh, that’s great. What’s the piece?”
“It’s an interview with a singer.”
“Oh, that’s great. Is he American? When are we coming to New York together?”
“Soon, Mom. Soon.”
“Oh, that’s great. You’ll be able to interview him here next time. Did you interview him over the phone? Is he in Italy? Which singer is it?”
“Lenny Kravitz.”
“Oh, is that the black Jew?”
“Yeah, the black Jew. How do you know that? Where did you hear about him?”
“Oh I don’t know, Vanity Fair? Or maybe D.? Were you nice to him?”
“What? Listen. Tell Daddy to stop crying. Otherwise I’ll keep worrying about him, and if I’m worrying about him I can’t get any work done. I interviewed the guy over the phone.”
“I’m telling you, he’s not crying. Your English must be so good if you can do an interview over the phone.”
“And I’m telling you I know he’s crying! Why do you have to lie to me? He’s thinking about the house as if it’s on a different planet somewhere, as if you can only get to it on a spaceship, like there’s no coming back. He’s probably thinking about time and doing all the math in his head!” (The reverential fear with which he treats the subjects of time and death kept him back from saying to her that what his father was really doing was calculating how many times he would go there with him before he died.)
“Stop it, Ciccio. You’re talking nonsense,” said his mother, who knew exactly what he was talking about.
“I don’t think so. What I need to do right now is focus, and you’ve gotten me all riled up and angry.”
“Don’t be angry, love. We’re happy; we’ve just bought the house! Come on, please, don’t be angry. You’re making Daddy sad.”
IL DELICATINO
He is very much his father’s son, and he often cries in front of his parents, which causes his mother great distress. When his parents are in New York and he ends up sleeping on the sofa, there is always at least one evening when Nicolino can no longer keep it together. He ends up spending the evening crying in front of them, his seventy-year-old parents, as he tells them about his life in New York. He doesn’t manage to say more than “it’s very hard” before breaking down, and even that he can barely pronounce, as huge tears roll down his wrinkled, yellowing cheeks.
“It’s hard everywhere,” responds his mother. Yet she spends the night after each of these crises unable to fall asleep. “I couldn’t sleep,” she says to her son the following day. “I was too worried.” Berengo, meanwhile, spends an hour at the gym after he wakes up, and he always emerges feeling fresh and calm, baffled by his mother’s worries about his so-called “physiological breakdowns.”
According to his father, Nicolino is a “prophet of our time.” His father was a Benedictine monk who quit the convent for love, and he says that Nico has found the only emotional outlook appropriate to a world that is “regulated by secret societies that have managed to impose too much progress, too quickly. Societies that have tried to enforce a world of free exchange and laws that are reasonable in theory, but which in practice are deeply unfair to the very soul itself. We are all forced to consume, and abstinence is no longer a virtue.”
Like the son, the father has long been engaged in the project of formulating his own personal interpretation of the Christian faith. “We have to consume all that is consumable, all the products of Western civilizations and those of other civilizations that are now imitating us. We have to consume as we deny the self, as we avoid thinking about the future, because the future is now unthinkable. We have to bring the cycle to a close. It’s like knowing how to die.”
Nico swears that this is how his father actually he talks, that these are direct quotations. All of this sounds like something Berengo himself would say, and so they could be his father’s words, too. (I can’t imagine having a conversation like this with anyone, especially not with my father. Not before his strokes, and certainly not after.) According to his mother, this approach is something of a lost cause, and the philosophical understanding between father and son only serves as an impediment to the healthy development of Nicolino. His mother—and Daria and others—calls him “Il Delicatino.” But how can a son escape his father’s melancholy?
PLAGIO
He always uses the word plagio. He says that it means something different from “brainwashing,” but I don’t think it does. Plagio, he says, has a more intimate connotation—it’s less cultlike. He describes a number of relationships that matter to him with the word plagio. Daria has been plagiata by Gustavo Tullio. Nico, in turn, has been plagiato by Daria. He explains that the Italian tradition of kids forming very steady couples from the age of sixteen throughout their youth—until the age of, say, twenty-six or thirty—is the implicit explanation for most of the psychological breakdowns experienced later in life by many members of the bourgeoisie. By getting engaged at such a young age, a boy never learns to be on his own. The fidanzatini in casa maintain very strong relationships throughout college, usually with the support of their parents, which leads to a pattern of domination: the stronger personalities over the weaker ones. This, he says, impedes the full psychological development of male Italians. “It’s like a fontanelle that never closes.”
“THE RESURRECTION OF THINGS”
“If the spirit can be resurrected, then the body can also be resurrected, because here I am missing Daria, who is in another cont
inent, and my body perceives the ocean between Rome and New York much more than my mind does. Which must mean the body retains important memories and also deserves to be resurrected.
Class Page 28