by Edoardo Nesi
That evening, Pasquale was once again the last one to return home after a spectacular sunset had celebrated the end of a tedious February day, leaving behind an immense Prussian-blue sky. Many of the other fathers had already gone out to the bar, where they would spend a few hours blowing off steam talking about all the trials and tribulations of their working day, and spending the last shred of energy left in their strong hearts. Later, Pasquale would go too. He would order a glass of wine and sip it while listening to the others, or watching them play cards.
That evening, however, Pasquale had parked away from the bar and hesitated for a few seconds before opening the door of his Ape. Even though there weren’t any thieves in the Green Zone — the only suspect had literally been kicked out a few months before, after a bicycle had disappeared — he had taken a suspicious look around before getting out and walking toward the house. So tightly was he holding the handles of a supermarket plastic bag from which the sleeve of a tartan shirt protruded that the knuckles on his right hand had turned white.
As he arrived at the three steps that led to the door of the house in the street’s half-light, Pasquale struggled to enter because he did not want to release his grip on the plastic bag, and so had to perform a partial, painful contortion of his body to get his left hand into his right-hand pocket, where he had his keys. When he finally managed to extract them, ripping his pocket in the process and peppering his efforts with a series of whispered curses, he failed to find the right key among all of those on the key ring, and had to clumsily try at least three of them with his left hand before finding the right one.
When the lock finally gave way and the door burst open, he closed the door behind him and allowed himself to smile. He took a deep breath to fill his lungs and let it go very slowly. Suddenly reenergized, he climbed the stairs two by two, went directly into the bedroom, and called out to his wife.
— Maria, come here!
— I can’t right now, Pasquale. I’ve got water on the stove!
— I said, come here now!
She grumbled under her breath, but within a minute she had calmly arrived from the kitchen, climbing the stairs with the economy of time and gestures of someone who has to climb them many times a day. Then she stopped on the threshold of the bedroom, her heart suddenly pounding, a hand over her mouth, unable to say a single word.
On the double bed they had just bought, on the lace blanket her mother had sewn for her as part of her wedding trousseau, was a mountain of money. Banknotes of all sizes: five thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand, even some of those large one-hundred-thousand-lire notes she had only seen in the movies. Her husband was plunging his hand into them and holding them up, then watching them float slowly down back onto the bed.
— Oh my goodness! What have you done, Pasquale?
— Maria, this is our money!
— What?
Maria couldn’t take her eyes off the pile.
— Where has it come from? Who gave it to you?
Pasquale didn’t reply. He was watching the falling money, mesmerized. He struggled to raise his gaze from the banknotes and looked at her for a few moments without saying a word, then smiled.
— It’s the down payment for the work on Barrocciai’s warehouse. Vezzosi gave it to me. We will build the biggest, most beautiful factory in the city. What am I saying, in the whole of Tuscany! Even the Milanese will be jealous of us, Maria!
— How much is there?
— One and a half million lire.
Maria, who could not even begin to imagine such an amount, ran her hands through her hair and left them there.
— What do you mean, Pasquale, a million and a half just for painting?
— Maria, I’m not just the painter. I’ve been made site manager.
— Site manager? Do you even know how to do that? You’re a painter, Pasquale!
— I’m a bricklayer, too.
— A bricklayer? Since when? Who taught you?
— I’ve seen them work, Maria. It’s not difficult. I know how it’s done. It’s not a problem, as Barrocciai always says.
— Pasquale…
— Maria, listen to me, don’t worry. It’s really no problem at all. And then I can learn on the job. You don’t have to be Brunelleschi…Come on, Maria. Touch it.
The woman shook her head, as if he had asked her to stroke the head of a vicious dog.
— Come on, Maria. Sit down.
Her eyes sparkled.
— Oh my goodness…
She sat on the bed.
— Touch them.
— Can I?
Her husband smiled, and she stretched a hand out toward the banknotes: at first she just stroked them, then, encouraged by his amused smile, she took two of the newest notes in her fingers and rubbed them together, and was taken aback by the consistency of the paper and the faint sound of friction.
She brought them to her nose, closed her eyes, and inhaled an odor she had never experienced before, one that was like no other. It was a strange smell, the sum of others, many others, and while the strongest was certainly a potent chemical scent, like acid, she could also make out a vague, far-off perfume.
That money smelled of damp, of ink, of plastic, of sweat. Of darkness. Of lost sleep and fatigue. Of recompense. Of merit. She told herself that it must be the smell of work: that immense and far-away world which, until that moment, she had never dared hope to come into contact with. But then she realized she was wrong. It wasn’t the smell of work. It was the smell of the new.
She opened her eyes and wanted to tell Pasquale, but he was so pleased with himself, batting his eyelids and playing his childish game of sinking his hands into the banknotes, that she decided to keep quiet.
— It’s not all ours. Some of it will have to go for tools. But it’s money, Maria. Real money, our first real money.
Dino and Tonino came in, beckoned by their parents’ voices, and reacted just as their mother had done, stopping still on the threshold with their hands over their mouths. Pasquale burst out laughing and his heart started to beat faster, and he was certain that he had never been so happy in his entire life. And then a bright white light suddenly shone in his eyes and he became entranced by the pinwheels circling inside that light, and he felt as if he was falling, and then found himself sitting in a cinema, all alone, watching a film, the film of his life.
There he is in 1959, at nineteen years old, newly discharged from military service, leaving the train station with a suitcase in his hand, whistling to himself like Buster Keaton. He makes his way toward the city center, where he sees a textile mill, walks inside, and asks if there is any work. He is hired on the spot. They tell him to put his suitcase in the corner and show him to a gigantic loom.
There he is just a few months later, he has a problem with his boss and resigns, leaves the mill and walks to the one next door. He asks if there is work and they hire him immediately too, and there he finds himself once again sitting by a loom.
There he is trying to earn a little more, learning how to paint from Michele Russo, who has also arrived from Ariano Irpino. He quickly realizes that he prefers painting to sitting at a loom, and so he resigns from the second textile factory and starts work as the assistant to old Russo, painting the rooms and warehouses and apartment blocks that spring up around him like mushrooms.
Maria arrives in 1964, and they manage to get married just before the arrival of Dino, and he moves from the attic he lived in with his parents and sisters to the attic of another house, bigger and more spacious. Tonino is born in July 1966, and Pasquale decides to work on his own, while she will start working from home. This means cycling up to the factory that produces blankets, loading the blankets onto the handlebars, taking them home to get rid of the knots and braid the fringes, being paid thirty lire per braid, and then taking them back to the factory and picking up more, every day but Sunday.
There he is, painting an apartment all by himself and dreaming of buying himself land and b
uilding a house on it when he meets Vezzosi, who hires him on the spot and offers to pay his overtime in the form of a work discount, which means sending over two builders on Saturdays and Sunday mornings to help him build his house in the Green Zone. There he is in February 1968, he is entering his own house with Maria and the children — it is a baiadera, the curious, inexplicably Spanish name that is given to a small, single-story house by the inhabitants of his ebullient city.
Pasquale is now twenty-eight, has a job and a house of his own, and can afford to go to the cinema with Maria once a week in his white shirt. And at the cinema he sees a world full of things he doesn’t have and he wants them so much, and when he goes home to his baiadera he no longer feels the relief of having left the attic or the pride of owning his own home. Instead he torments himself because his family doesn’t have a telephone or a car or a dishwasher, and now he pities the neon circle that hangs from the ceiling to light their minuscule kitchen, the Formica table, the fridge with its iron handle, the sofa in artificial brown leather, the doors with ribbed glass, and the tiny black-and-white Telefunken television! But he says nothing to Maria and doesn’t lose heart, and tells himself that it is neither a fault nor a sin to be born poor, but you have to do everything you can to get out of poverty, and so he accepts every job he is offered, and paints more than he has ever done before and never sleeps more than four hours a night, and is always the first person to arrive on site, which is just one of the hundreds and thousands of building sites throughout Italy where millions of people work because there is an Italy to be built — not to be restored or refurbished, built — and the air itself smells of paint, gasoline, plastic, and rubber.
There he is one evening, going home and saying to Maria that the baiadera is too small and that they need to add another floor, and she raises her eyes from the blanket and tells him he is right, and seeing her in agreement with him, full of desire and hope just as he is, Pasquale gets all fired up, and the next day calls Moreno Barbugli and Franchino di Oste to tell them they must build another floor, but it needs to be done right away because it has to be finished by September, or it’ll be raining on Maria and the children, and so they call Claudione and Claudino, and here they are, all five men, working like demons all through August, and when they finally finish it is only mid-September and it hasn’t rained even once, and Pasquale Citarella has a two-story baiadera!
They celebrate with the rabbit stew that Maria cooks so perfectly, then open a flask of red Chianti given to him by Vezzosi, and some of the wine ends up even in the children’s water, and they chirp excitedly and run up and down the stairs over and over, and Pasquale is so moved by their joy that he must make up an excuse, get in the Ape, and go for a drive so that nobody sees him cry, and while he travels through the dirt roads of the Green Zone, tears running down his unshaved cheeks, he starts to tell himself that perhaps there is a real hope of making something important for his family now, thanks to his work, but when he reaches the new ring road and all the cars and trucks and motorbikes overtake him because no matter how hard he presses on the accelerator, the Ape cannot go faster than forty kilometers an hour, Pasquale decides — he actually shouts it in the cab — that the time has come to buy himself a car, because he has dreamed of it since forever and now it is time to stop dreaming, because dreams grow old and die if you don’t make them real.
There he is in 1971, on his pale green Fiat 128, celebrating with the family with a trip to Montecatini to taste ice cream.
There he is in 1974, giving his father the contract for the small apartment he bought for him from Vezzosi on the promise of paying it off in work over the next few years, and there he is in 1976, doing the same thing for Maria’s father, who was also living in an attic, but that was yesterday…
Then he heard Maria calling him from afar and the film suddenly ended and he found himself again in his room, sitting on the bed, with his alarmed wife holding his face in her hands and telling him something he couldn’t understand, and next to her the boys were looking at him too, their eyes wide, and they also were telling him something he could not understand, and at that moment Pasquale knew that this was how he would die: all of a sudden he would detach from life and would never say or hear anything again — he would just float in the same mute, distant peace in which he was floating now, and then he would close his eyes.
But then he smiled, said hello, and the three of them threw themselves around his neck, embracing and suffocating him, then they all fell onto the bed and the money, laughing like madmen. When the boys had finally calmed down and returned to their room, Pasquale said to his wife, “Okay, put it away now.”
Maria turned to look at him and was about to ask him how and where, but as she saw him counting the notes, carefully dividing them into three piles and then tying them with elastic bands, she realized she didn’t have to ask. She had to know how and where to hide the money from thieves.
Then Pasquale told her he needed to call home down south right away because he needed help, and would get her two brothers and even his cousins to come up, because there was plenty of work for all of them. Upon hearing the best news she could ever wish for — she was very close to her brothers and couldn’t bear anymore the thought of them spending their days at Panni’s Bar Centrale — her eyes filled with tears, and Pasquale saw her standing in the middle of the room, wearing her tomato-flecked apron and crying with her hands full of money.
— If only you could see how beautiful you are, Maria. You look like the Queen of Sheba!
HE LOSES HIS HEAD
AFTER MAKING LOVE, they slowly get into the car. It is a beautiful spring evening, and the breeze blowing through the open windows carries the intoxicating scent of flowering jasmine.
Cesare Vezzosi is happily exhausted, his body invaded by endorphins, his muscles finally relaxed, as he has just left between the sheets all he had. Every so often he looks at her. Satisfied, voluptuous, softened by sex, she keeps her eyes closed while the wind ruffles her hair as if in a caress, and he couldn’t be any happier or more proud that she is his girlfriend and his lover, his little hairdresser, his one and only Historic Baby Doll.
Cesare smiles as he catches the pine scent of the shower gel they just washed themselves with, stroking one another, free from the wild urgency that had governed them just an hour before.
He is comforted by the quiet, subdued rumble of the silver Alfetta 1.8 he has just bought: it suggests that a vast and radiant reserve of energy is ready for him, but even if speed is for Cesare a synonym of life itself, this is not the right time to accelerate anything.
He takes a deep breath and tells himself that it might even be possible to live a life better than his, yes, but he just can’t imagine how. He looks at her. She has opened her eyes and stretches out a hand toward his oversized right arm.
Infinitely confident, Cesare asks, “So how’s your sex life, baby?”
— Perfect. With you it’s always perfect.
— No, not with me, with the others. Your sex life without me.
— Ah, she says, turning her gaze away from him and toward the road ahead. That one…Well, it’s okay. Not like with you, of course, but it’s full enough…
A slap. No, a punch. No, a hammer blow. A shot. His lungs and his stomach melt, and a void opens inside him. The gentle breeze from the car windows becomes an arctic wind that cuts his skin, and he can no longer smell anything. Cesare takes his foot off the accelerator and the engine hiccups, unable to sustain fifth gear with the motor running so low. It would have turned itself off if he had not automatically pushed the clutch.
The suddenly stuttering motor causes her to turn and look at him, and all she sees is Cesare staring at the emptiness in front of him, his hands gripping the steering wheel, his mouth half open, his hair ruffled by the wind, the neck of his shirt suddenly slipped back onto his shoulders.
— Full? Cesare manages to ask, his heartbeat pounding, his face contorted in a ridiculous grimace. How is it full? What
does that mean?
— You asked me a question and I answered…
— Yes, but what…what did you say?
She looks him straight in the eyes, until he has to shift his gaze to check the road ahead. Then she says, “I have a boyfriend.”
— I don’t believe you, he announces immediately, and smiles, because it’s not true and it can’t be true. But then he turns to look at her face — surprised and worried and sincere and young, suddenly way too young — and he stops smiling.
— No. I can’t believe it. It’s not possible. It’s not true. I can’t believe it and I don’t believe it.
She continues to stare at him.
— It’s not true. You would have told me, I know…I’m sure…No, I’m not going to believe that.
Then he remembers to change gear, and when he turns to look at her again, he finds her pressed up against the door, as if to distance herself as much as possible from that moment, that conversation. Maybe even from him.
— Really, I don’t believe it.
— Cesare, I’ve got something going with one guy, okay? But it’s nothing serious, really. There’s no need to worry…
Dozens of responses start to amass in his head. Dozens of wrong and useless responses, because everything has already happened behind his back, and who knows how long it has been going on. Weeks? Months?
— But why didn’t you tell me? Why…how…why should I find out like this, by accident, just because I asked that stupid question?
— I didn’t tell you because it’s not important, Cesare, and it’s probably going to end soon. And I’m sorry, but it was you who told me to find myself a boyfriend…What’s wrong now, Cesare? Are you angry?
At that moment he realizes he will never, ever get used to sharing her with someone else; that from now on he will say and do a lot of stupid things; that this is just the beginning of a shitty time and it’s going to be a very long shitty time; that he will have to start talking to her differently now, and that will be a mistake; that he will have to start behaving differently toward her now, and that will be another mistake; that he will only make mistakes with her from now on, one after the other, and he will promise her things he never promised before, and it won’t work, and he will beg her, and that won’t work either.