As we walked across the Piazza del Duomo I told her what I remembered about the history of the cathedral, pointing up to the gold statue of the Madonna suspended in the Milanese sky. She started to sing “O mia bela Madunina,” but stopped after the first words. For a second we remembered the old lady’s visit.
“Is it really pure gold?” she asked me incredulously. Then, she sighed: “If only I could’ve had just the head. . .”
*.
It was time to let the rest of the building know about the diamond—then they would stop thinking that the doorwoman hadn’t bought an apartment because she was short of money. They had to understand once and for all that she hadn’t bought one because she didn’t want to live in that building . . .
She invited the seamstress down for a cup of coffee: if you wanted a secret to get out as quickly as possible, who better to start with?
Nowadays the seamstress was acting like a grand capitalist. Indeed, she was the only one who had bought two apartments, her own and the one next door, the Vignolas’ one-bedroom . . . She told us that in a year she’d knock down the wall, turning it into a five-room apartment. With two bathrooms! And four balconies! Two attics! And two front doors! She would have the biggest place on the block!
“We also have plenty of money,” my mother said, when the seamstress finally stopped long enough to take a breath. “But there were no more two-bedrooms left, so what was I supposed to buy? A one-bedroom? Where would we put the boy? The day we leave Via Icaro, we’re going to get a house with at least two-bedrooms. Chino can’t keep going without his own room. Especially now that he’s attending the Classical Lyceum . . .”
“If you move,” the seamstress said, “you’re gonna have bills to pay . . .”
“Signora Bortolon,” my mother reassured her, “it’ll take a lot more than an electric bill to ruin us! We’ve got so much money squirreled away that we don’t know what to do with it . . . You know just the other day, on a whim—it’s not like I needed it!—I bought myself the diamond . . .”
That’s how she said it, the diamond, the way she said the Classical Lyceum, like the Maestra.
The seamstress’s face turned bright red.
“You got yourself the diamond!”
And my mother: “A setting of fourteen little stones with a big rock in the middle . . .”
Letting her envy get the better of her, the seamstress shrieked: “You’re not scared someone’s gonna steal it?”
And my mother, growing more aloof by the minute: “What can I say? It is what it is. In the meantime, I’ll keep it well hidden. Oh, and please, don’t breathe a word to anyone, I know I can trust you.”
The seamstress was shaking with the urge to see the diamond, but she didn’t want to stoop to asking.
“What good’s a diamond if you’re scared someone’s gonna steal it all the time? It’s like you didn’t even have it.”
“There you’re wrong, my dear Signora Bortolon! There’s a big difference between having the diamond and not having it! I look at it, every now and then I try it on. I didn’t buy it to show off . . . the diamond is personal . . . if you could only see how shiny it is!”
“So show me the damn diamond already!”
With magnanimous reserve, as if she were granting an exclusive privilege, my mother invited the seamstress to follow her into the bedroom. She reached to the back of the armoire, rummaged through the winter clothes, and after a minute emerged somewhat ruffled, wearing her trophy.
“Ooooh, how pretty,” the seamstress murmured, and immediately followed in a higher-pitched tone, “Give it here so I can try it on.”
My mother removed the ring and handed it to her.
“It really is pretty . . .” she concluded, after regaining her sour expression. “But what good is a ring like that? I like simple things . . .”
Within two days, all of 15 Via Icaro knew that the doorwoman had bought a diamond. The diamond! Dell’Uomo tried to spread the rumor that we had won the lottery. But it didn’t take long for everyone to realize that, if that were the case, we wouldn’t still be living there.
*.
For my Italian finals I decided to write about freedom. While I was filling the exam sheet with words, I thought about my mother, who’d never had a taste of freedom. I thought about what I had learned from Miss Lynd: that the Italians didn’t know freedom because they’d almost always been dominated. I compared them to the Russians. Like the Russians, Italians were inclined to entrust everything to a leader, whether a king, dictator, or pope—anyone who knew how to raise his voice and promise happiness for the future. I wrote that Italians didn’t understand the concept of the present, at least not as well as other nations, for example the French. Italians postpone everything until tomorrow, and the next day they do the same thing, infinitely, and meanwhile they make do and try to manage with what they have. They wouldn’t know what to do with real freedom because it would require hard work, dedication, constant vigilance—and Italians are lazy, a little selfish, and concerned only with themselves and their families. They don’t care too much about their rights: they would rather break the law than fight to protect what was owed to them.
I wrote how true freedom gets attacked over nothing. True freedom cannot be partial, it can only be perfect. All it takes is one person, just one single member of our government, to misbehave—to disrespect the people—for freedom to become a travesty, a puppet that can be manipulated at will. I quoted a sentence by Gandhi that the Maestra had taught me: “No tyrant can govern without the active support of the people,” because when there is a dictator, freedom is trampled by everyone, not just the dictator. I wrote about South Africa, Palestine, Italian colonialism . . .
At my oral exam Signorina Salma took me to task.
“Where did this boy get all these crazy ideas?” she asked her colleagues indignantly. “You wouldn’t believe the idiocies he wrote about Italian colonialism! Well he didn’t hear them from me! We helped the countries we colonized—and that’s the truth! We were much—and I mean much—better than the English! And comparing us to the Russians! We Italians aren’t communists!”
She started in on a passionate defense of the greatness of the Italian people. She continued with a speech about the beauty of patriotism, the sweetness of our language, which forces us to turn around when we hear it echoed in a foreign country, prompting us to search for an unknown fellow Italian, unknown but not foreign, like the time that she, in Paris, during her honeymoon, overheard, in the midst of a crowd, a short sentence uttered in Italian—and she couldn’t identify where it had come from. But for the rest of the day the sound stayed with her, or rather in her, as if it had slipped under her skin, making that foreign city feel less foreign, where no one knew her, and where they ate the most absurd things, like pasta as a side dish instead of a first course! . . .
The geography teacher, Signora Marelli, who’d never hidden her sympathies for neo-fascism, said seraphically, “Don’t get so worked up, Salma. Ideas come and ideas go, but the good ones always stay!” And to me, before she started in with her questions on that year’s curriculum: “Graziosi, just for the sake of it, how does your father vote?”
“That will be enough,” ruled Barro, the technical applications teacher, barely concealing his anger. “The boy wrote what he thinks. What are we going to do, put him on trial? Is the composition well written? It is? So we’re going to pass him, and with a good grade. For my part I don’t have to ask him anything. And he’s right, Italian colonialism was shameful.”
I passed Italian, Latin, and English with distinction, and I did well in all the other subjects, too. I received compliments from the whole exam committee, including, at the end, Signorina Salma. But she gave me a strange look, as if she suddenly realized that she had been harboring a viper in her classroom for the past three years.
*.
Caselli, in a ba
throbe, jittery as a junebug, kept repeating that she had only seen her in mid-air.
“So then tell me,” the police commissioner pressed on with the patience of a bureaucrat, “what did you see, in the exact order . . .”
And it was the same story.
“If I had seen her perched on the balcony I would have said something to her,” Caselli tried to justify herself. “I was smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t sleep . . . at five o’clock in the morning it was already so hot I couldn’t breathe.”
My mother was crying. She had been the first person to go down to the courtyard, after Caselli called her on the intercom.
“Poor Maestra!” she kept repeating.
I had made it just in time to notice, through the window blinds, the stretcher-bearers draping a sheet over the corpse and lifting it into the ambulance.
After Caselli came Terzoli, Miss Lynd’s neighbor. She hadn’t heard anything in particular, she said. Or rather yes, she did, the sound of the toilet being flushed, repeatedly. That’s what had woken her up. The sound of water got on her nerves. Miss Lynd had never made so much noise at night. She was one of the quietest people she had ever met. Yes, of course, she was a little crazy, greeting everyone with strange, incomprehensible words and never confiding in anyone—if only all neighbors were like her!
“You couldn’t tell whether she had any company?” the commissioner asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Another voice . . .”
“Do you mean someone pushed her?” the spinster was already letting her imagination run wild. “Good God! Why? . . . you don’t think it was the gypsies, do you?”
“Signora, do you live with someone?”
“No, I’m single,” she replied, with her head held high.
“Thanks, you can go back home now . . .”
Disappointed that she hadn’t been questioned more at length, she tightened the belt of her bathrobe and took the elevator.
My mother poured the officer a cup of coffee.
“What about all that blood?” she wondered. “We can’t leave a stain like that where everyone passes by. Who knows how long before someone removes it. And it’ll take a lot more than ten bucketfuls of water. What do you think—you, an expert in these things?”
He said she would need ammonia.
“So do you think she was murdered?” my mother suggested.
“To your knowledge did Miss Lynd suffer from nerves? Was she ill? I mean, do you have any reason to believe she didn’t want to live anymore? . . . A reason to kill herself? . . . Why does everyone say she was crazy?”
“They’re the ones who are crazy!” my mother corrected him. “Miss Lynd was a great lady, a real signora . . . but if she was ill—I wouldn’t know . . .”
Now it was my turn.
I told him that Miss Lynd had taught me English, that she used to give me snacks, that she knew a lot of things . . .
“OK, that will do . . .” the policeman cut me short.
The next morning a letter arrived for me. It was postmarked five days earlier. Shaking, I folded the envelope in two and hid it in my pants pocket. I finished separating the rest of the mail, made three signs of the cross, and began to read:
My dear Luca,
I’m leaving. I was lucky to meet you. Thanks to you I was able to fool myself into thinking I had rediscovered my youth. I hope you will continue on your own what we started together. You definitely have the energy and the conviction. You once asked me what had happened to my English dictionary. When I told you that I had grown tired of working on it, I was lying. The truth is I had stopped believing in the possibility of giving precise meanings to words. That’s why I abandoned it. What a disaster! My whole life had been spent defining things. And all of a sudden . . . something in me stopped working, or maybe it finally started working properly. Who knows? I’d been so unhappy since the day my dictionary died. But you made me want to give it another try. Our lessons made it suddenly seem possible again. I could pretend that everything had a meaning and a purpose. To define! But it doesn’t—it isn’t like that. At least not for me. I wanted to instill in you a confidence that had forsaken me a long time ago. Please don’t accuse me of inconsistency or hypocrisy. With you I started to believe in language again. Or rather, I fooled myself into thinking I had started to believe again. But that wasn’t the case . . . Now all I see are the lies inside me. And when I remember what I used to be like as a girl! The faith I had in meanings, which I collected, just the way you do in your notebooks! Keep them close to you, these notebooks! And when, perhaps, you are tempted by doubts, take them out, reread them, don’t hide them the way I hid my own work.
Farewell,
Amelia
IV
My mother came looking for me under the wisteria tree.
“Miss Lynd had a son!”
She was huffing and puffing as if she’d gone up and down the staircase ten times.
My Latin book fell down off my knees and the letter from the Maestra, which I kept hidden between the pages, slipped out of the book and onto the gravel. Luckily my mother didn’t notice. I bent down to pick it up and hide it again.
“Did you hear? A son! He just called on the telephone. He’s coming by this afternoon. He’s the one who bought her apartment! His name is Ippolito Foschi! . . . Ippolito . . . What the heck kind of name is that? . . . She certainly was a strange one, that Lynd! Are you sure she never told you anything about him?”
He was tall and thin, with his mother’s fine features—and while in her they hinted at the remnants of a former beauty, in him they revealed a protracted, indelible adolescence. He, too, smiled with a certain ease. Yes, he did look a lot like her. But there was also something in him of the Foschi who had given him his surname. I strained to recognize that other part. I felt as if I could identify it in the narrowing of his jaw, the quivering of his wide nostrils, the sudden iciness of his stare. (While she, even when she was railing against the world, conserved a warm light in her eyes.) Before him I felt as if I were in the presence of a Christ-like figure, in whom I had to distinguish between the godly and the human parts: the father and the mother.
Ippolito Foschi, the secret son, was the living, tangible symbol of the great mystery hidden in the life of Maestra Lynd. I looked at him with religious awe, as if the dead woman had decided to be reincarnated through him, to give me the extreme proof of her unimaginable, unquantifiable power, subjugating me, once and for all, to her dominion.
“Miss Lynd was such a good woman, such a civil woman . . .” my mother said to cheer him up.
“Really? I’m pleased to hear it . . .” he replied absently.
“She was the one who caused me the least amount of trouble . . .”
“Well, she didn’t cause me much trouble, either, to tell you the truth. We hadn’t seen each other for twenty years.”
My mother and I were paralyzed with dismay. On her creased forehead I could read a host of questions that were not transfigured into words. Foschi’s manner didn’t encourage questions or comments.
The three of us went up to the fifth floor. He only stayed for ten minutes.
My mother reported that he had looked around the apartment incuriously, gone to the balcony, and stuck his head out, without uttering a word or shedding a tear the whole time.
“He must be in shock, poor thing! We should put ourselves in his shoes . . .”
*.
Signora Dell’Uomo, in her role as the condominium representative, descended the stairs to interrogate the doorwoman. My mother cut her no slack, limiting herself to saying that the Professor—that’s the title she came up with—was a very proper person.
“Very smiley,” Signora Dell’Uomo specified, “a little too smiley, wouldn’t you say? As if the tragedy had nothing to do with him . . . what does he say about his mother? I mean, she fell from
the fifth floor. I’m sure she had her reasons!”
“The Professor is very reserved. Besides, why should he have to say anything? It was a tragedy. The time for words is over. What’s needed now is silence . . .”
“Of course, of course . . . but I think it’s absurd that the son had no comment about the suicide of his mother!”—she shuddered as she said the word—“What I mean is that she died right before our eyes. In the courtyard there’s a bloodstain that will disappear god knows when. We have a right to know, don’t we? If you ask me she had something weighing on her conscience . . . There was no sight or sound of him until yesterday. Why is it that he’s only now making an appearance? Where has he been till now? What kind of a son is he!”
Most of the building showed up at the Maestra’s funeral. At the mortuary in the Niguarda Hospital there were neither priests nor flowers, except a spindly wreath from the condominium. The coffin was closed, since there was so little left to see of Amelia Lynd.
The seamstress offered to accompany him to the cemetery, but the Professor refused: the coffin was going straight to the crematorium.
The malice began the second he got into the car. They had something to say about everything: there was no mass, the coffin was cheap, the body was cremated! What they disapproved of most of all was his composure. He didn’t shed a tear! Scandalous!
For days and days my mother repeated, as the commissioner himself had asserted, that the death of Miss Lynd had been an accident of the kind that happens to the elderly. She couldn’t sleep, she got up to get a breath of fresh air on the balcony, she lost her balance . . .
But they weren’t satisfied with this version of the incident. It failed to explain too many things. For example, why didn’t the Professor want a religious funeral for his mother? “Nowadays the church also accepts suicides, if indeed it was suicide,” Terzoli observed. And Vezzali, “Of course he shipped the body straight to the oven: what better way to get rid of the proof than a nice bonfire? . . .” And why hadn’t he wept? Why did he have nothing to say there, in front of the mortuary? Why didn’t he bother to thank the attendees and apologize? And those smiles? Who did he think he was fooling? And above all, if Lynd was washing the windows, why didn’t the police find a damp cloth or Windex? Not to mention there was plenty of space between the windows and the railings of the balcony. The Maestra would’ve needed to take a flying leap, which was impossible for a woman of her age.
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