Happiness, as Such
Page 13
Ada didn’t care about the money, Angelica said. She couldn’t care less because she had so much. The pelican didn’t care about money either because he had so much. No one understood why he had bought the tower. He was never going to go there. He hadn’t even seen it. Ada must have persuaded him that it was a good investment. Ada wanted to transform the tower into something, it wasn’t clear what, maybe a restaurant or retirement home. “Sublimely restful,” said Viola. “The tower is hard to get to. You never saw it but I went there,” she said. “But I’m telling you that Ada can transform it,” said Angelica. “She’ll put in a road. A swimming pool. Bungalows. And I don’t know what else.” What brought Ada and the pelican together, observed Angelica, was their fascination with money and the transformative powers of money, along with a profound indifference to spending it and having it, while also having a great quantity of it. What made them different was that Ada couldn’t imagine herself poor and she didn’t even try. Instead the pelican spent his life imagining himself poor in a way that sent shivers up his spine and made him shake with horror and desire.
“That’s the end of our tower,” said Viola.
“It was never ours,” said Angelica.
“It wasn’t even that pretty,” said Viola.
“I don’t imagine it was,” said Angelica.
“From the outside, it’s a pile of stones with a window way up high. It’s shaped vaguely like a tower, but you can call any pile of stones a tower if that’s the name it wants to go by. Inside it smells like shit, and there is shit everywhere. I remember that more than anything else, the shit.”
“But he doesn’t smell,” said Angelica.
“Who?”
“The pelican. He has that nose but can’t smell anything.”
“Anyway, we don’t know why he bought it. And we don’t know why our father bought it.”
“If Ada told him it was a good investment, no doubt Ada is right.”
“Then I don’t understand why we sold it,” said Viola.
“Because Lillino advised us to.”
“What if he gave us bad advice?”
“We’ll manage.”
“I didn’t know what to do with a tower of shit. On the other hand, our father bought it. I’m sorry I called it a tower of shit. I wasn’t thinking. But we can’t do anything about it now. The matter of the tower is closed.”
“As if the matter were ever open,” said Angelica.
“It’s so upsetting to be alone with Mamma in that lonely house,” said Viola. “I don’t like lonely places. That’s another reason I didn’t like the tower.”
“Matilde is there,” said Angelica.
“Matilde’s presence doesn’t give me any relief at all.”
“There’s a telephone. Remember, there’s a phone now. It’s been there a week. Thanks to Ada. And Ada’s dog will be there too. Osvaldo is bringing it.”
“I can’t stand dogs,” said Viola. “I’ll have to look after the dog, the rabbits, the twins’ goat that needs feeding from a bottle. They should have at least taken the goat with them.”
“To overnight camp?”
“I’m worried I’m pregnant,” said Viola. “I’m very late.”
“That’s a good thing. You’re always saying you want a baby.”
“I’m worried about being in that remote house with no doctor nearby.”
“You can call Doctor Bobo. He’ll come right over. What’s the alternative anyway? Mamma can’t stay there alone. Matilde sleeps very deeply. An earthquake wouldn’t wake her. Cloti is on vacation. I have to go away for a few days. I promised the baby. I’ll come back soon though and then you can leave.”
“I know. I’m not arguing with that. I just wanted to tell you that I was worried. I wanted to say it. I don’t know why you have to get on my case. I just wanted to say it. Elio left for Holland yesterday. He was dying to go by himself.”
“He could’ve stayed with you.”
“He wanted to see Holland. He needed a distraction. Poor Elio, Michele’s death really got him. He’s sorry we didn’t go to Leeds when Michele got married. He says he could have given him good advice.”
“What kind of advice?”
“I don’t know. Advice. Elio is very human.”
“Michele was murdered. I wonder what kind of advice he could have possibly gotten that would have protected him from the fascists who killed him.”
“If he’d just stayed safe and sound in Leeds they wouldn’t have killed him.”
“It’s possible that he found it hard to stay safe and sound.”
“The last time I saw him was in Largo Argentina,” said Viola. “He was coming out of the rotisserie. He said ‘hello’ to me and then turned away. I asked him what he’d gotten and he said, ‘a roast chicken.’ Those are the last words he said to me. Such nothing words. I watched him walk away with his paperback. A stranger.”
They were in front of their mother’s house. Viola parked the car between the two dwarf spruces, withered and drooping in the heat. Angelica pulled her suitcase down from the roof rack. “How much stuff did you bring?” said Angelica. “A roast chicken,” said Viola. “I can still hear the words coming out of his mouth. We loved each other so much when we were little. We played dolls, mommy and baby. I played the mother and he played the daughter. He wanted to be the little girl. He wanted to be just like me. Then we got older and he didn’t like it anymore. He resented me. He said I was bourgeois. But what else am I supposed to be. He loved you best. I was so jealous. You have so many more memories with him. You used to see him all the time. You were friends with his friends. All I knew were their names. Gianni. Anselmo. Oliviero. Osvaldo. I never liked his friendship with Osvaldo. It was a homosexual friendship. There’s no use trying to hide it. You can tell just by looking at him. And Elio told me that he’d seen them together. I still don’t know how I feel about Michele becoming a homosexual. Michele would call me a conformist. It’s unnerving to see Osvaldo. He’s sweet and everything but it upsets me to see him. He comes over here a lot so I’m going to see him a lot. Why does he come here? Who knows. And here he is, driving up. I recognize the sound of his Fiat. But Mamma likes it. Or maybe she never thought about it. Or maybe she thought about it and got used to it. You can get used to anything, probably.”
“You can get used to anything when there’s nothing else left,” said Angelica.
42
September 8, 1971 — Leeds
Dear Angelica,
I got to Leeds yesterday morning. I stayed in a boardinghouse called the Hong-Kong. You can’t imagine anything sadder than the Hong-Kong boardinghouse in Leeds.
Ada and Elisabetta stayed on in London because there was no reason for them to come along.
I tracked down that boy who wrote you, Ermanno Giustiniani. He’s at the same address he gave you. He’s a nice boy, sharp face, pale, almost sickly. He told me that his mother has Asiatic origins.
He told me that Eileen and the children have gone back to America. He doesn’t have their address. He told me that Eileen is a very intelligent woman and a drunk. Michele married her with the idea that he would save her from alcohol. That sounds just like him. He loved to be called on to help his neighbor. But his generosity was useless because he couldn’t stick it out. Their marriage was in ruins by the eighth day. They were happy for eight days. Ermanno didn’t know them during those days, he met them after, when the marriage was practically over. But friends told him that for eight days Eileen had stopped drinking and seemed like a different person.
Ermanno took me to the house on Nelson Road where Eileen and Michele lived. There was a “For Sale” sign on the house. I asked the estate agents if I could see it. A little English house with three floors, a piano room furnished with sordid, faux-liberty furniture. I went through every room. There was an apron in the kitchen that might have been Eileen’s
. There was a tomato and carrot pattern on it, and there was a raincoat that might have been hers too, shiny black with a rip in the sleeve. But I’m just guessing. In one room there was a bowl with sour milk in it on the ground, obviously left for a cat, and pictures on the walls of Snow White and the seven dwarfs. I’m describing all of this in such detail because I think you’ll want to know. I couldn’t find anything of Michele’s except a wool undershirt for winter weather, the label says it’s from Anticoli on Via della Vita. I felt uncertain for a moment and then left it where it was. I don’t think there’s any point in preserving things that used to belong to the dead once they’ve been handled by strangers and the identity has evaporated.
Visiting this house, I feel like I’m drowning in endless melancholy. Now I’m back in my room at the boardinghouse and can see the city of Leeds through the window, one of the last cities Michele walked through. I’m having dinner with Ermanno Giustiniani tonight and he’s a nice boy but he can’t tell me much about Michele because he didn’t know him for that long and doesn’t remember much, or perhaps it makes him sad to talk about it with me. He’s a boy. Boys today don’t have big memories, and more importantly, they don’t cultivate their memories. You know Michele didn’t have much in the way of memories, maybe he never went out of his way to cultivate them. You and your mother have a stronger inclination to preserve memories. This life now has nothing to equal to the places and moments we passed through to get here. I’ve lived things and observed things, knowing all the while that each moment had extraordinary splendor. I had to make myself remember. It was always so painful to me that Michele didn’t want to, or couldn’t, understand such splendor, that he moved forward without ever turning back. But I believe he sensed my splendor. A number of times I have thought that maybe while he was dying he had a flash of understanding and he traveled all the paths of his memory and I am consoled by this thought because nothing brings consolation when there is nothing left, and even seeing that dusty undershirt in that kitchen, and then leaving it behind, was a strange, icy, lonely consolation.
Osvaldo