by Umberto Saba
“You liked cod-liver oil?” The man was astonished.
“When I was a kid, I pretended I liked it to make my mother happy. I used to hope she’d say something nice to me. But I don’t want to take it anymore now, no matter that the doctor puts her up to it, and that she chases me around with it. It would make me throw up, I bet. What’s new in the office?”
“Nothin’ I know about,” the man answered. “Only”—and he dropped his voice—“that I miss you a lot.”
“I’m all better,” Ernesto responded, “and whether my mother wants me to or not, I’m getting out of bed. I’m going to take a bath, put on clean underclothes. And then I’ll be cleaned out and cleaned up, and tomorrow right after breakfast I’ll go directly to the warehouse and,” now he too lowered his voice, “you can do whatever you want with me. But—”
At that moment the mother re-entered the room holding a tray on which there was a glass of wine filled to the brim. Unlike his fat co-worker, the man didn’t care much for wine. Nevertheless he took the glass, thanked everyone, toasted their health, and drank the glass down in one swallow, wiping his mustache afterward with the back of his hand. In other words, he behaved in just the way both Ernesto and his mother expected a man of his class to behave. Then, saying that the boss was waiting for him to bring back the papers, he got up from his chair and took his leave. No one offered to shake his hand—Ernesto for his reasons, his mother for her own. The man was already at the door when Ernesto, now sitting upright in bed, raised his arms and laughingly shouted, bellowed (as if releasing a long-pent-up utterance), “But no cone!”
The man would have liked to disappear into the earth. He was certain, or what passes for certain, that as soon as he left, Ernesto’s mother would ask the boy the meaning of the strange shout, and that Ernesto (who couldn’t tell lies) wouldn’t have been able to answer without doing so. But his mother paid absolutely no attention to the shout. She was a thousand miles from any thought of the debauchery, if debauchery it was that had given rise to it. She thought the cone referred to office matters, gossip about their skinflint boss or something of that kind. So while the man didn’t sleep at all that night, Ernesto slept soundly. He awoke the following morning feeling completely well, and more than ever ready to resume his usual life. He had almost forgotten about the panic—God alone knows why—it had amused him to inflict upon the man.
Ernesto couldn’t stand having anyone stay angry at him for any length of time. Disposed to being forgiving, he wanted forgiveness for himself. But the man had spent a sleepless night and his morning was filled with anxiety. He was impatient for Ernesto to arrive—as much to regain some peace of mind, as to rebuke the boy who so thoughtlessly had terrified him.
As usual the boy arrived on time, in fact a few minutes early. He was holding the large warehouse keys in his hand (as if he were in a hurry to open the place) and appeared both reborn after his illness and softened as the result of having lingered happily in a warm bath. Seeing him, the man knew that despite his anger and anxiety, he loved him, loved him too much. But his love contained an edge of sadism, which, with Ernesto’s shout as pretext, escaped or tried to escape. As we will see, it went badly for him.
“How many?” he asked Ernesto, hardly persuaded by the boy’s assurance that his mother neither understood nor suspected anything. “How many do you think you deserve?”
“How many what?” Ernesto asked.
“How many lashes?” he replied while undoing Ernesto’s trousers, following the custom Ernesto had initially set, though now the boy’s hands remained at his sides.
“I thought pastries,” he replied. (The man had occasionally bought him pastries. They were the only present he could afford and the only one that left no traces. Ernesto would accept them casually and eat them right then and there.) “I’m asking you,” the boy went on. “Here, I haven’t given you anything but pleasure and you want to whip me—why?”
“Yeah, a little punishment.”
“You call it little! If I’m bad for doing this kind of thing, you certainly don’t have the right to punish me.”
“You know very well it’s not for that.”
“Then for what? For what I yelled?”
“Yeah, for that, but not only for that. You’re too good-looking, you’re a tease, you think it’s fun to drive me crazy.”
Being called a tease stung Ernesto. He never looked at mirrors. He didn’t think of himself as attractive. If he was teasing the man, he wasn’t conscious of it.
The man could no longer control himself. He let loose a smack on the part of Ernesto’s body he had just exposed. It didn’t hurt the boy, but the imprint of five fingers were visible in red on his skin.
“Stop it!” Ernesto said, angrily. And to fend off any new attack put his own hand where he felt a slight warmth. Then, realizing that the man, almost as if to show his regret, was prolonging his caresses, he said, “Oh go ahead and do it.”
The man experienced intense pleasure that day—of a kind he had never before felt in his life. But Ernesto, who was bored with it all, decided that it had been the last time.
When they were dressed again the man left the warehouse briefly. He returned with a package that contained three pastries—three pastry horns oozing yellowish cream that cost only four cents each. They were Ernesto’s favorites, and he didn’t demur on seeing them. As a courtesy he offered one to the man, who as usual refused it, then ate them all himself. When he was done, he sat down next to the man on their customary sacks. Neither felt like working. The man didn’t want to stitch up torn sacks. Ernesto didn’t want to return to the small room next to the boss’s, where a backlog of work awaited him.
“What are you thinking about?” the man asked.
Ernesto laughed. “The boss.”
“Forget him,” said the man.
“But I can’t understand him,” replied Ernesto, who although he had decided to no longer submit to the man’s desires, felt no rancor towards him and enjoyed talking to him. Years later, when enthralled reading Monti’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, he would endow Ulysses with the man’s physical characteristics. As for the man himself, if instead of being an impoverished day laborer he had been a cultured person of the same class as the boy, at least spiritually—if in other words, he could have educated him, helped him to self-understanding, it wouldn’t have gone for nothing. And their relationship might have lasted longer. But this way. . . .
“I can’t understand how he puts up with me and doesn’t throw me out,” Ernesto went on. “To tell you the truth, I wish he would. You don’t know the dirty tricks I play on him.”
“What kinda tricks?” the man asked, appalled by Ernesto’s desire to be fired by Signor Wilder. Not knowing of the boy’s earlier decision he was already thinking of where he could meet him should that really come to pass. Maybe evenings in the countryside. But the boy couldn’t or didn’t want to do that. And what could be better than the warehouse? Ernesto knows what he’s doing, he thought, remembering that it was he who had suggested the warehouse. To stay close to him, the man would have loaded and unloaded every one of Signor Wilder’s carts for even less money.
“The boss can’t deal with the smell of naphthalene—says it gives him headaches. So I toss it all over the office, every corner, even under the furniture. He goes around complaining, and then goes out for a walk to get some fresh air. He thinks it’s the cleaning woman who does it, so the next morning he yells at her for using too much of it and not opening the windows. But that’s not all I do. No sir!”
“What else?” asked the man, as usual completely captivated by Ernesto’s chatter, although he suspected him of inventing some of it, or at least of exaggerating.
“Lots of stuff,” Ernesto said. “For example, you don’t know this, but he’s got a habit of writing four-, five-page letters in German—I do the Italian ones. That’s no way to do business—with such long letters. But he’s nuts, specially when he writes to Louisen-Muhle, that’s hi
s biggest supplier. It takes him a whole afternoon to write one of them. Then about five o’clock he gets tired and goes out for a cup of coffee. That’s my cue to wet a finger with spit and smear up the first or second page of the letter, so there’s a big ink stain. When he comes back and sees the mess, he curses like crazy and has to recopy the whole thing. Me, next door, I’m laughing my head off.”
“And he don’t suspect you?” The man was incredulous.
“No. At least he never said anything. Here’s another. He can’t stand young boys (the kind you like too much). They’re as bad as naphthalene to him. So I pay a bunch of them” (he really did pay them, though not with money—with stamps that he cut from envelopes, which passed for currency among them) “and I get them to run in one door and out the other.” (The office’s two doors opened onto different streets.) “The boss comes storming out of his office and wants me to chase them. The idiot doesn’t know that I set them up to it and threatens to call the police. As if cops could help him! But this next one is even better. It just came to me one day.”
Listening happily, the man was still incredulous. He didn’t believe, couldn’t get himself to believe the things Ernesto was telling him were really true. After all, Ernesto was such a nice kid. Then he remembered the “cone outburst” and felt more inclined to believe.
“Yeah, what?”
“Thought it up! And did it! I don’t know if you ever saw those canary-yellow gloves he used to wear a while ago, until just before we. . . . Well, those gloves really got to me. I didn’t like the color or the way he used to put them on. They were awful. So I made a deal with a kid I went to school with who lives around here, and I got a lot of tamarind. You know the color—looks like something else! So before opening the place, I smeared it over both doorknobs, the one he always uses and the other one, too. The minute I saw him open the door to get in, I came in through my door. I pretended I was smelling my hand (I made sure to stand where he could see me) and began yelling, ‘Shit, shit—the lousy kids put shit on the doorknobs!’ Right away the old man looked down at his gloves and saw they were filthy. It was only tamarind, but he couldn’t know it. He couldn’t figure out what happened—almost took it out on me. But then he took off the gloves and, tightwad that he is, threw them in the garbage. I think he fished them out later to wash them. But he’s never worn them since. Anyway, I haven’t seen ’em.”
The man was laughing—enjoying himself more and more.
“But the business with the lamps—that’s probably the best ever. One great and glorious evening last winter I bought a box of those caps kids use to shoot in toy guns when they play war. I think they’ve got a special name. They only cost a few cents. When they go off they sound like a shot, but they don’t hurt anyone. I put one under the mantle of his desk lamp and waited around to see what would happen. When the idiot lit the gas there was a pop and sure enough, the mantle exploded and fell apart. Naturally, he cursed, then he had to send out for another one, because he never buys more than one at a time. Meanwhile, I put another one under my own lamp and that exploded too. So then he began storming at the guys who sell mantles—said they caused that on purpose so we’d have to buy more. Naturally I agreed and acted like I was angry. I said the people who sell mantles were all crooks.
“Luck was with me all the way, because the guy he sent out to buy a new one (you didn’t meet him yet) came back empty-handed. Just that day the store that sells them didn’t have any—completely sold out. It meant a long trip and God knows how long a wait to get another one. So now the boss, who wanted to finish a letter he’d started to his Louisen-Muhle, was so fed up that he ordered the guy to go to his own house, I mean the boss’s house, to get a lamp and some oil from his wife. Meanwhile, he went out for his usual coffee and German newspaper. He never reads the local Italian paper. It’s the Frankfurter Zeitung or nothing. I know because I saw him reading it when I had to get him at the café one day when some mill owner came up to see him. Anyway, that wonderful evening, just before he came back (I watched for him from behind a door), I soaked that lamp glass in water. Of course it shattered, too. He didn’t even get mad. He didn’t have the strength. He just gave in to fate. The dope still doesn’t know that I’m his fate.”
“See?” The man spoke tenderly. “You really deserve a spanking.”
“Forget it! That’s something you only do to babies. What I still don’t get, is how come he didn’t figure out who’s guilty of all that stuff.”
“He’s gotta be in love with you.” The man was quick to assume that others felt as he did. “He’s only making believe he don’t know so he won’t have to fire you.”
Ernesto grimaced in disgust. “Don’t think that I’d do the things I do with you with anyone else. Besides he’s old and married.” (Actually, he wasn’t old at all, but as far as Ernesto was concerned, every man and woman over thirty-five was ancient and ready for the grave.) “Haven’t you seen his gorgeous wife? A wife with a mustache—almost like yours.”
“I can’t believe he never caught on to who’s behind all those nasty tricks,” the man repeated.
“Not only didn’t he catch on,” said Ernesto, “but one day when he met me in the street he gave me a present—a cane with the silver handle, the one he was using that day. I didn’t know what to say. Sure, I thanked him as if he’d given me something I really liked. What else could I do?”
“You don’t like getting presents?” The man was dumbfounded.
“Sure I do! But what do I want with a cane with a silver handle? I’m not some old geezer or a fop. I never used it. It’s home. My mother acts as if it’s some kind of treasure—like it’s a big honor for her son. If she only knew.”
“Knew what?”
“The tricks I played on the boss. Well, that I used to play. I haven’t felt like doing anything for a while now. He’s really too dumb. It’s no fun getting him mad anymore.”
After all his laughter a light shadow of unhappiness fell upon Ernesto’s young face.
“Besides,” he said, “I’m going to be seventeen in a couple of days. Getting older. I’m gonna have to think about supporting myself and my mother soon. And the day after tomorrow is my nanny’s birthday. I’ve got to think about getting her a present.”
“You had a nanny, too?” the man asked.
“Sure I did, and I still love her. I’m not the only person to love his nanny. There’s a famous poet, his name’s D’Annunzio—he’s still alive—and he had a nanny. He’s got to be old by now, but anyway, he wrote a poem about her. It’s called “To My Nursemaid.” My cousin lent me the book it’s in. It’s really beautiful. At least I like it a lot. I practically know it by heart.”
There was a short silence. The man didn’t know what to say. He appeared to be . . . he was intimidated.
“Maybe I never told you,” Ernesto continued, “that I lived in my nanny’s house in the country until I was four or five years old. At first because my mother had no milk on account of all her troubles. Then later because she had to run a furniture store. She says she’s never had a minute of happiness from the day I was born. And she was sick, too, so she was glad to leave me with the nursemaid.”
“What do you wanna give her?” the man asked.
“Half a kilo of coffee and a kilo of sugar,” replied Ernesto, who was not only a serious youth but a practical one. “She’s poor, and I think that it’d be nice for her to get them. But I don’t have enough money.”
It would have made the man happy to offer Ernesto the money, but even if he’d had it, he wouldn’t have dared. The boy might have been offended, might think he had offered it in exchange for his compliance.
“I thought of my nanny after you said I deserved a spanking for the cone yell and my mean tricks, and then I said that spankings are only for babies,” Ernesto went on.
“Your nanny spanked you?”
“I really don’t remember, or just vaguely. But she says there were times she spanked me and hard. But then she says t
hat as soon as I started to cry, she eased up. Maybe I deserved it from her, but definitely not from you.” Ernesto looked sternly at the man.
The man had risen while Ernesto spoke and was now hurrying to undo the chain at the warehouse door. It was time to open up. He didn’t want the boss, or anyone else, to find them locked in there together. Likely, no one would have had any evil thoughts, but the man didn’t have a clear conscience, so he was more or less jumpy all the time.
“I brought it,” the man said the next day.
“What?” Ernesto asked without interest.
“The whip.”
“For who?”
“For you,” the man dared.
Ernesto’s eyed widened. “Show it to me,” he said.
The man took it out from behind a sack and showed it to the boy. It was a freshly cut branch of birch or some other tree. The man had deliberately walked through the woods early that day and had chosen the branch with loving care. Flexible, and newly cut, it would sting hellishly on bare flesh.
“Give it to me,” said Ernesto.
“Only if you promise to give it back.”
“I’m not promising anything. Give it to me.”
Overcome by the boy’s imperious tone, the man handed it over.
“Now, give me your hand,” said Ernesto. “Like this,” and he extended the palm of his left hand as he’d done in elementary school when the teacher wanted to punish him for inattention.
Once more the man obeyed. Ernesto grasped his hand at the fingertips to hold it still and level. He whipped the branch around (as if to test it) and then without much concern, let loose a fierce blow. The man’s face contracted into a grimace of pain. He withdrew his hand as if it had been scalded, then shook it in the air to cool it.
Ernesto laughed. “How many did you want to give me?”
“Five,” the man answered candidly.
Ernesto reached both his own hands around to his buttocks and rubbed them, as if they had really been lashed.