by André Aciman
6.
IN THE early days, to amuse me, Luciano had recourse to two equally inexhaustible repertoires: he told jokes in Bolognese dialect or he dredged up memories from his childhood. These were also comic. They were all centered on Lizzano in Belvedere and the mountain villages thereabout—Poretta, Vidiciatico, Madonna dell’Acero, Corno alle Scale: names which quickly became familiar to me, and invariably figured himself as the main character, including those stories which referred to his father, his mother or his brother Nando. The role he reserved for himself never changed. It was always that of the sly operator, the clever and quick-witted trickster, deft not only with his mind but also his hands and feet. Perhaps they were only pure inventions and fantasies, but I enjoyed them no less for that. I laughed as if I was watching a farce by Ridolini or Charlie Chaplin. Luciano, too, seemed happy enacting them and pleased by their success.
Later there was a change.
It happened by chance, I’d say, one evening in March when a violent storm broke out, and from then on, the nature of his talk completely altered.
At seven o’clock I saw him stand up.
“Are you going?”
“I think I ought to.”
“Don’t you want to stay for supper? If you’d like I’ll go and tell my mother.”
He stared at me. He was already tying up his books with his belt, but he paused.
“Thanks, thanks a lot . . . ” he stammered, shifting his lower jaw to the side more than ever. “But I don’t want to be any bother.”
“What d’you mean? I’ll go tell her now.”
I got up and rushed toward the door.
“Wait a moment!”
I turned. Standing up by the table lamp, he seemed paler than usual, with his blue eyes deeply in shadow in his little bony face, while the base of his aquiline nose and bulbous forehead stood out in the light.
“No, don’t bother. They’re expecting me at home.”
I argued that it wouldn’t take much to ring the chemist’s near his house.
“Alright, that’s fine, but after supper . . . ” he said in an unconvinced tone, still staring hard at me, “I won’t be able to stay overnight.”
I hesitated.
“Why not?” it cost me to ask, turning toward the table. “We could easily put up a camp bed in my room.”
He didn’t reply. He walked to the window and looked out.
“Is it still raining?” I asked.
“It’s eased off a bit.”
He moved back to the center of the room and sat down in the armchair.
“All things considered, it was much better when we were staying at the Hotel Tripoli,” he said. “Living in the Foro Boario area will be fine in summer, but in winter it’s worse than Lizzano. It must be the new built walls, but you’ve no idea how cold it gets, and how damp.”
I asked if they didn’t have radiators.
The question was unimportant. And yet when I was asking it, something warned me I was straying into a danger zone. I suddenly felt that we were sliding toward an intimacy which till then we’d kept at a distance, an intimacy which I had to avoid at any price.
But it was too late. Luciano was already explaining how his father, instead of the central heating whose installation remained beyond their financial possibilities for now, had bought two terracotta Becchi stoves. That kind of heater worked perfectly well, on condition, it’s clear, that the pipes go directly upward. Instead his father, “stubborn thickhead” that he’d always been, had decided one day that the pipes should be laid crossways from room to room, halfway up the wall. The result: you just had to light a piece of paper and the whole house immediately filled with smoke. So, you die of asphyxiation!
I was shocked by that “stubborn thickhead,” by the abandonment of every reserve and caution on his part. What had happened? I wondered, fearfully. What was happening?
Despite recalling the very negative impression Dr. Pulga had made on my father, I tried to take up his defence. Useless. Luciano only redoubled his attacks. Not only was his father a thickhead—he repeated—but a miser and violent to boot. I let him talk on. When he came home in a bad mood, his first instinct was to take it out on his family. He often ended up hitting every one of them.
Were these, too, inventions and fantasies? They might have been. On the other hand, it wasn’t the truth that mattered, even here. What mattered was the altered tone in which he spoke to me, the unexpected crudeness, without any tact, the ill mannered bitterness in his voice.
“Really?” I said breathlessly. “He hits your mother as well?”
“Oh, it’s mainly her that he hits, the scumbag!” Luciano replied. And yet—he added, grinning—it was obviously her, “wretch” that she was, who wanted to be hit. In essence, his mother liked to be beaten: that was the actual truth. And he, his father, who had understood that perfectly, he kept her happy. As best he could.
He burst out laughing.
“The mysteries of the human heart!” he exclaimed. “What d’you think, that it’s only men who are disgusting? Women are too, you can be sure of that, women too!”
Aside from the radiators chugging away at full throttle, the Hotel Tripoli—he went on—was better even in that respect because it offered an accurate picture of things, of life as it really was “without sugaring the pill.” Had I ever seen the owner, that pig with a German name, Müller, always sitting there, on the ground floor behind the restaurant till? The couples who came in to “have a little afternoon siesta” didn’t even have to stop to eat something. All they had to do was stride past the tables straight up to him, and he, without the slightest pause, would just hand over the key. What a laugh, though, to see some of the couples that turned up! Usually, country folk, with the “cheap whores” who had picked the yokels up in the square. But sometimes, it was a youngster from the city, who’d come in for a quick reconnaissance, take the key and disappear upstairs, to be followed a minute or so later by the girl, the “chick,” who would slip in “all guilty looking.” Chick? Hardly! Often enough it was more like a “fat old hen,” a forty year-old, a mother, perhaps even a grandmother, sweating sin from every pore of her leathery face. These were the “consorts” of engineers, of lawyers, of doctors—recognizable as such at first glance. Women from the best society, in short, who would be quite capable of displaying themselves from the height of their box in the town theater that very evening as if nothing had happened, or boldly prancing about for the crowd and swaying their backsides along Viale Cavour the day after. God’s truth, it was a total joke!
The alarm clock on the table showed it was seven thirty. The parquet in the adjoining room creaked. My mother leaned in at the door and observed us with satisfaction.
“Have you finished yet?” she asked.
Lost in reverie, I looked at her. Yes—I confirmed—we’ve just finished.
With his usual promptitude, Luciano had leaped to his feet.
“Poor thing!” my mother commiserated. “To have to go by foot all the way past the docks in all this rain. Do you have an umbrella? And galoshes? If you’d like to stay for supper, you only have to say.”
“Thanks a lot, Signora,” Luciano replied, “but as I was just saying to him”—he nodded at me—“I’d prefer not to. If my mother and father don’t see me come back . . . well, they’ll be annoyed, you know how it is.”
My mother insisted. It would be simple to phone to ask their permission. But Luciano wouldn’t be persuaded. They spoke, he standing beside the armchair, more suave and saccharine than ever, she in the doorway, enfolding him in the caress of her dark-eyed gaze. Remaining seated, I watched one and then the other. I followed the movements of their lips, but most of their words I couldn’t understand or hear.
At last my mother withdrew.
“I tell you it’s a total joke,” Luciano resumed in a lowered tone, as soon as he’d assured himself with a glance that the door was properly shut, “the way they behave—it’s fun to watch, mainly it’s a lau
gh.”
It’s like the sleaziest port, he continued, the Hotel Tripoli by night! He slept with his brother Nando, who fell so fast asleep, as soon as he was under the covers, not even a bombardment would wake him, because of which he heard nothing—the “poor innocent!”—neither the quarrels that broke out in the adjoining room between their parents every night before they went to bed—quarrels that ended often enough in furious blows—nor the noises of every kind that filtered through the paper-thin wall on the other side. They’d “go to work” flat out, over there. All night there’d be shudders, sighs, creaking springs—a complete disaster if you wanted a wink of sleep. But who even thought of sleeping? Only that meek little mouse of a Nando. As for him, it didn’t even cross his mind to go to sleep. He’d be there till the small hours in his nightshirt, his ear glued to the wall, wide awake and alert as could be, checking out when different voices announced “a changing of the guard.” Some nights in the next-door room there were as many as five different couples, one after another. Every now and then he’d get up and watch.
“And watch?”
“That’s right. Through the keyhole of the communicating door.”
“And what could you see?”
“What could I see? Oh . . . sadly, I wasn’t always able to because the bed was placed right behind the keyhole and besides, it was really high, you know that type of double bed. But I glimpsed something, you can be sure of that.”
For example, once, he continued, he had seen someone’s back looming up above the headboard. It was a woman’s, moving up and down, “Hup! Hup!” just as if she were riding a trotting horse. Another time he’d seen a couple walking around the room stark naked, so that every so often they’d be in range of the keyhole showing “their fronts and their backsides.” On another occasion, a couple, instead of using the bed, had preferred to make love on the floor, very close to the door. And if that time, however desperately he’d strained his eye to look down, he hadn’t managed to see a thing, as a recompense he’d been able to hear, which was perhaps even better.
“Better?”
“You bet it was! More than the sighs, the stifled cries, you should have heard the words they said to each other. Juicy stuff! It went on and on.”
At that moment, the maid entered. She told us dinner was on the table, so Luciano was forced to interrupt his tale and leave.
But in the following days, taking more and more time off from our homework, it was he who kept returning to this kind of talk. I was weak, passive, unable to react, and he made the most of it.
He told me, among other things, that he was reading an amazing book, Aphrodite, by Pierre Louÿs: doubly amazing, he explained, for its literary achievement and its “highly instructive” contents. He recounted how he’d had to read it, just a few pages at a time, mainly at night, with one hand ready to turn the page and the other no less ready to accompany the salient points of the story with “a vigorous royal wave.”
“Will you lend it to me?” I asked.
“What?” he replied with a grin. “The book?”
I nodded.
“I don’t know . . . if we’re talking of the book,” he went on, looking hard at me with his enamel-blue eyes, “I’m not sure I can. My father guards his tomes jealously. It’s a passion of his!”
To get his “paws on” this or any other book of equal interest which his father kept on a special shelf in his study, under surveillance—he continued—he would generally have to wait until night time, when everyone was asleep, taking great care to put everything back as it was. With this “trick” he had been able to read nearly all of Pigrilli’s novels, The Garden of Punishments by a French author whose name he’d forgotten, Weininger’s Sex and Character, and The Betrothed, not obviously the one by Manzoni, which in the fourth and fifth year we’d already had up to here, but those other betrotheds written about by my “co-religionist,” Da Verona, who were infinitely more worthwhile in his opinion. In any case, he added, raising a hand to forestall any possible protest on my part, in any case Aphrodite by the “said” Louÿs beat every one of those other books hands down. Did I want to know what was described in the first part of the novel? It described a garden, the one that surrounded the goddess’s temple, where scores of women coupled “in every imaginable way both with men and with each other.” And they invented innumerable ways and positions for doing this, so that even he, who, all modesty aside, had a fair knowledge of such things, was left with his mouth agape.
Till then I had never masturbated. When Luciano learned this, he was astonished. How’s that possible? At my age! Since he was ten he’d always masturbated at least once a day.
“But doesn’t it do any harm?”
“Harm!? On the contrary, it does you nothing but good. It’s possible,” he said smilingly, “that doing it too much might wear out the memory a bit. But conversely, it broadens the mind incredibly.”
In his view, there was nothing better to develop the “intellectual faculties.” Of course, one shouldn’t go overboard, the same way you shouldn’t drink to excess or, say, overindulge in sports. And yet it was good for you. It was a normal and natural “practice,” and Nature, if one knew how to interpret “scientifically” the impulses it instilled in us, wouldn’t give us such impulses to harm us. But was it possible circumcision had blunted my “sexual proclivities”? Had I ever had any erections? And at night had I ever had any “wet dreams”?
I replied as best I could, admitting everything, even when I hadn’t properly understood: which was to say that yes, often in the most unexpected moments, my “thing” got hard, and that one or two mornings I’d woken with my nightshirt covered with wet patches.
One afternoon Luciano unbuttoned his short trousers and showed me his member. He presumed that I would then do the same. I had always been extremely shy and so refused. But he insisted and I ended up doing as he asked.
He inspected it carefully, leaning a little forward, with the dispassionate air of a doctor. “So that’s all a circumcision is?”—he burst out laughing. He’d always believed it was a fairly serious operation. It was really nothing, he could now see well enough. In the end, what was the big difference between his and mine?
He unbuttoned himself again to verify.
It went on like this until Easter, with the continual feeling on my part of being impelled step by step toward something unknown and threatening, but without anything in particular ever happening. Luciano talked and talked. His voice held me suspended; shut me up in its low, resonant spirals.
I have few precise memories of that period. I lived as though in an underground tunnel—unable to see the end of it, but fearing that I would suddenly find myself up against it. I recall a sense of abject complicity, which rose in me every time my mother came in. And I also recall one afternoon during the Easter holidays, perhaps not even an actual afternoon, but only one that I dreamed.
I had gone to play soccer on the Spianata behind the Aquaduct with half of the class. We began around two o’clock, happy to run on the dry grass burnt by the winter frosts till we were out of breath, and happy to have shed our heavy clothes. The lovely sunlight lit up even the dark bell towers of the military storehouses, gave a shine to the mossy marble of the statue of Pope Clement, usually so melancholic and lonesome-looking, and gilded the blue distance of the first houses on Via Ripagrande and Via Piangipane. Around three, Luciano came along as well, on foot, of course. Like Cattolica, he wasn’t particularly keen to play, and besides he was too skinny, too puny, and no one wanted him on their team. Stamping his feet to warm them up, he was left on the sidelines as a spectator. While we were playing, every now and then we’d hear his commentary—applause, or hissing and jeering. Every time I looked at him, he seemed to be smiling—I guessed at, rather than saw, the grin on his pallid little mug. And I knew why he was staying there. For me. After the match finished he’d want to perch on the handlebars of my bike and to steer it as far as Via Garibaldi, to the corner of Via Garibaldi and Vi
a Colomba, where with perfect ease we could spy on the men who entered and left through the little nailed doors of the brothels.
It was almost dusk. And then, just as we were about to pack in the game, I fell and hurt my knee. Nothing serious, I knew that perfectly well, but still I took some time to get up, in short, making “a bit of a scene,” I lay there with my eyes shut, my aching limbs suffused, little by little, with an extraordinary sense of wellbeing, glad that the match had ended because of this accident, and glad that three or four friends gathered round me were making gentle attempts to set me on my feet. In the pungent evening air, above my outstretched body, I could hear their lulled voices, and I wanted never to get up.
“Give over, it’s not as if he’s dead,” someone finally said. “Can’t you see he’s just hamming it up? Come on, let’s go and get changed.” I heard their steps moving away and half opened my eyes. I peeked through lowered lashes. Standing in silence beside me—and huge when seen from below, coldly observing me from head to toe as if I was a mere thing—no one remained but Luciano.
7.
THE DAY before term began I fell ill with tonsillitis.
I had suffered from that from earliest childhood—that was why my Aunt Malvina was so keen to take me on visits to the Church of San Biagio, protector of the weak-throated. But that year the inflammation seemed more acute than usual. It was caused by an abscess, my father declared, and my Uncle Giacomo, immediately called in by my mother, was of the same opinion.
To operate or not to operate?
Often in agreement as far as the diagnosis was concerned, my father and my uncle always quarrelled about the treatment. And so, to resolve the eternal dispute at my bedside between the two doctors of the family (my father favored intervening, my uncle not), my mother thought it best to telephone the throat specialist, Dr. Fadigati. It had been Fadigati who had operated on my tonsils when I was a baby. To placate my uncle, they had only been partly removed. No one, then, was better placed than he to decide on the best treatment . . .
Fadigati arrived, examined my throat, confirmed the diagnosis. As for the treatment, he too, like my uncle, held the view that, for now, with this temperature I had, a “little incision” might be dangerous. We needed to wait. Around the seventh or eighth day, we’d have a better idea whether to make the most of the occasion—here, the doctor, who was already smiling at me, stretched out his hand and stroked my cheek—finally to be rid of “the whole works.”