The oranges of Dubai

by Quelli di ZEd

  Chapter 9

  I am suspended at the twenty-fifth floor of an imposing spiral of steel and glass, split in hundreds of boxes provided with every form of luxury and comfort, containing fragments of endless stories, as many as the customers who populate it. This point of observation changes the proportions of things, making the world appear infinitely small, unfocused in shapes and outlines, populated only by individuals and things that from this height shrink to indefinite, even meaningless dots. The height is so dizzying that even the walls around me and the floor under my feet seem unsubstantial. I am a boat with no mooring. But perhaps the cause of this suggestion is not the height as much as the feeling to be again in someone else’s house, having believed to be coming back to mine. Once these very places where the walls and floor of a world that I considered home. Beyond the large glass wall of our hotel room there is Palermo, plunged in the quiet of the night. At a distance the lights of the tourist port, where boats rest, cradled by the generous arms of a quiet sea. I like to look at it like this, where every detail is lost in the lack of features and the transformation it is imperceptible.

  The television is on. A show about the building of the mosques in Sicily, in the darkness of the night, is the only source of light in the room. It projects changing shadows on the walls, clear glares alternated to fractions of darkness. I look at the images without listening to the words; the volume is imperceptible and my mind is elsewhere. A thousand thoughts bring away the holiday atmosphere to which I was beginning to get accustomed.

  My mind makes fun of me in the sleepless nights, dragging me along a corridor full of half-open doors, that I am careful not to open during the day. But in the heat of the night, one after the other, they draw me to unknown places, winning my reticence. They are the places of my faults, of the complicated relationships, of the unresolved arguments, of the incomprehensions, of the worries, of the dead patients, of the unhappy children... easy to understand my adversity to such patrols. And if in the daytime I am good at holding such disorder under lock and key, some nights a gust opens the doors wide... it puts everything in the open.

  So I am wandering tonight, waiting for sleep to subtract me from so many forced reflections. In front of my eyes the images of a film, of which I am always the star. "The missed actions of doctor Manfredi" would be an appropriate title. Co-starring: once my wife, another time my children, my parents, my colleagues.

  There is also young Hussuf who maybe is dying, while I am here tossing in the bed. To Marco I said that it wasn’t serious, but I didn't really think that. The fact is that I don't want that every time an accident happens he makes of it an encore of Pierre’s death. It seems like he looks for them. I find him glued to the TV watching the news about road accidents, or skimming through the newspaper to devour the crime news. When he feels exposed he feigns indifference and walks away in silence, with his usual absent expression. In the room of my faults he is the main character, my worst sense of guilt. He makes me feel a wrong, totally inadequate father, and every time I try to make up for this I just add worse to the worst.

  Yet I had a great teacher in my father. He was the model from whom I would have liked to find inspiration... before something turned me into a selfish man. What I don't understand is when all this happened. When I was Marco’s age my parents did a lot for me, putting me before everything else, even themselves. I ransacked this extreme generosity, growing in the absolute conviction that it was normal that their world rotated around my demands, that I was the only gravity centre of their lives. I drunk from an overfilled glass leaving nothing for others, without generosity.

  The bed squeaks under the continuous dance of me turning from one side to the other, looking for a comfortable position that could defend me from the restlessness of this sleepless night. Teresa moved to the opposite part of the bed, in a niche sheltered from the storm that makes me whirl without pause. Tonight we are not alone; between us there are many shadows, changing like those the TV projects on the walls.

  There is one patient of mine, Jule Martin, a ten-year-old boy, blond, with a diaphanous complexion and a congenital cardiac malformation. He died a few hours ago, worn out by yet another crisis. The head nurse, Vivienne, informed me with an SMS, after several unanswered calls, since I had forgotten my phone at the hotel. The first time that I visited him, he was just a newborn. A small thing wrapped in a cotton sheet, held close to the chest of his mother, a little more than thirty year old at the time. Back then I was stricken by her, a cover woman, a beauty without imperfections, impeccable despite the recent labour. A fall of chestnut, soft and voluminous hair, covered her shoulders, closing around that little creature badly bound to life. His dad was the emblem of the sculptural body, shaped in hours and hours of training in some body building gym. They had seemed shallow people to me, too egotist, unprepared to face the path that the illness of their son would force upon them. I expected that sooner or later the woman would come alone to the visits, trying to justify the absences of her husband, until one day she would confess that he had left her. So many times I have seen couples shatter in the corridors of an hospital, crushed by the pressure of the pain, by the sacrifices that a serious illness irremediably imposes. And I met many of these. In their case I expected that it would happen even earlier than in others, but I was wrong. In these ten long years I saw them always united in front of every difficulty, of every critical moment, of every hope and every disappointment, firm like his strong muscles and her orderly locks, fluorescent roots coming out of a head that is everything but evanescent. Mother Emilie is strong and smart, stubborn as few; a porcelain face, apparently so fragile that it could crumble at a puff, but actually strong as granite. I never saw it marked by a tear, yet I gave her quite a lot of reasons to cry in these years.

  After a long ordeal, the situation recently became critical. Jule was hospitalized more than ten days ago. Without a new heart he would not get to enjoy the summer, and his family was aware of this. At the eve of my departure, before coming back home, I went there to greet him. To tell him goodbye, actually. His parents shook my hand without saying a word. Emilia could barely let it go, she almost wanted to hold me there. She always granted me blind trust. For a long time, when looking at the Martins, I have no longer seen cover faces, but human beings to whom the fate, after having granted them so much, presented too high a bill. The father fleetingly hugged me, his muscles shivering under the ice-coloured jacket.

  I imagine Emilie’s reaction to the death of Jule. She certainly was able to soldier on until she was home, and there, finally, drown in tears, porcelain dust dissolving in the rooms at every puff of her of pain, and her husband close to her, picking up with care that precious dust, reshaping it in the perfect features of his wife.

  I think about my parents swallowed in that icy grave of pearly marble, on which I have not brought a flower for quite a long time... after what they have givento me.

  Switch me off, I would just like to sleep.

  We are going around Palermo again today, also known as Madinat asSigilliah, the capital of Sicily, at the times of the first Arabic domination, when the city became the principal settlement of the island. Under the Byzantines it had been only a secondary fortress, while Lilibaeum, Marsala, was the capital of the western province, and Syracuse of the whole island.

  Today Vito is going to be our guide. He impressed our children because he still is the happy and ironic boy he was once, able to live in an easy-going way, which makes him more similar to a teenager that to a rigid fifty-year-old man like me. We have always been very different, and this united us because we completed each other. I was attracted by his way of seeing things, always at the antipodes of mine, original, nonconformist. He felt for me mixed feelings, the classical match of hate and love. He liked the air of family you breathed in my house, that had been lost in his since when his father had become depressed. He was a little more than a child when he had had to learn how to live with a faded family and without that serenity tha
t is the lifeblood of a child. Armouring himself with irony and the ability to put a beautiful laughter like a comma between one thought and another, Vito succeeded in growing anyway, although with a big regret. At times he accused me of being too spoiled, dependent in everything and for everything from the judgment of my parents, eternally worried about gratifying them. We quarrelled, but we forgot in a hurry, because one could not renounce the dream that the life of the other offered him. I made him dream of a serene life with a father who loved him, he made me hope that one day I would also achieve his ability to face life on my own.

  He reaches the hotel at nine o'clock with his shiny black minivan, judging from which I deduce that his economic condition has to be improved quite a bit in these years. He’s wearing a pair of white pants, a blue polo and matching moccasins. We look each other up and down and we can’t suffocate a laughter. It seems to be in front of a mirror. He shakes his hands up and down, joined like in prayer, as if he wanted to say "What are you doing?"

  «Did you agree on that?» Giuliana stresses.

  Vito tells to the children about all the times in which it already happened. We’ve always had similar tastes about clothes, therefore not rarely we got to school dressed the same. The difference was in the labels that made my clothes more prestigious than his, but none of us cared much about that.

  «I hope that you can stand the heat, because they say that today the temperature will be well above the averages of the season. They forecast thirty-two degrees at lunchtime.»

  «Encouraging words», Teresa laughs, taking place in the back seat of the car, close to the children.

  At the radio, a nasal voice sings a depressing song; the words come out like sobs, in a slow, too stretched rhythm. It’s an agony.

  «Raise the volume», Giuliana says, «I love this song.»

  «It’s a moan», I say, raising the volume just a bit.

  «Dad, do you knows who sings it?»

  Obviously I don't know, I am not very up to date about contemporary music.

  «It’s Nat Howen, the most famous pop singer of all times. His CDs are at the top of the lists worldwide right now.»

  In the expression of Giuliana I see some pity towards my musical ignorance. I would like to ask her if it’s a Nat or a Nathalie, since from the voice it’s not that clear, but the words get stuck in my throat, because they would worsen the consideration I have in the eyes of my children.

  I just say that the last king of the pop I know of is Michael Jackson and I watch the interrogative look with which Giuliana and Marco confer. It is clear that they don't know who he was, and this makes me understand how much I am growing old. He died when I was only a little boy, but I knew his music well thanks to my mother, who loved it. I was five years old when we danced in front of the mirror and mom tried to teach me moonwalking, a step in which the feet slipped lightly on the floor creating a fast and fluid backward movement, that in my embarrassed feet lost its lightness and turned into a heavy crawl.

  "It seems that you’re cleaning the sole of your shoes, Paolo", my mother used to say, shaking her head, then she added that hardly in life I would become a ballet dancer.

  I smile thinking about the cyclical path of life, the eternal resurfacing of the conversations between parents and children, each standing for their own generation, their own music, their own ephemeral certainties, mistrustful toward what comes later.

  As a passenger I bathe in the sight of the landscape without other distractions. To our right the sea of the Foro Italico, the long expanse of lawn on which children run cheerfully after one another while their mothers watch them sitting on iron benches as green as the fresh grass that extends on a large area. To our left Palazzo Butera and the splendid panoramic terrace known as Walk of the Captive Women.

  «Why does it have this curious name? Who were the captive women?» Giuliana asks.

  «The term comes from the Latin word for imprisoned», Vito says, «the prisoners that once walked on that terrace were the widows, to which participation to normal social life was not granted because of their mourning. So during the day they were closed in their houses, but after sunset, when the city was empty, they could indulge in a solitary walk, distant from other people's eyes».

  «How terrible», Teresa sighs, «we are lucky not to have known such barbaric customs».

  In several places along our journey we cross groups of tourists carefully immortalizing the splendour of the old and new city. In the air, the lukewarm scent of the spring flutters.

  The Palermo I remember was smothered by a level of pollution inexplicably higher than that of the much more industrialized and populous cities of the north of Italy, in the hands of a population forgetful of an acceptable civic culture. Yet it was the pride of its people, who loved to lie to themselves, basking in the exaltation of an ancient splendour.

  «My mother compared the people of Palermo to the characters of a Neapolitan comedian of the post-war period», Teresa says. «He enacted poor characters who knew how to camouflage their indigence with cunning. A sort of emblem of an impoverished nobility that knew how to live of expedients and memories of better times, camouflaging the present with shrewdness. But it just took a little more careful glance to reveal the trick... What was that comedian name again, darn... do you remember?»

  Although we understood who she’s referring to, neither Vito nor I remember his name, agreeing upon the fact that time is an unmerciful duster.

  «Obviously we were careful not to move such a critic to someone of Palermo at the time», my wife goes on. «Shame on who made them face the sheer truth. It was a city very proud of itself, of its own way of living and being, able to celebrate itself beyond all evidence.»

  The words of Teresa sound too hard for Vito, who on this matter, today as before, is on the other side of the barricade.

  «Palermo has always been a marvellous city, my dear. We boast a unique artistic patrimony, not to speak of the climate, the sea, the good kitchen, the generous and hospitable heart of the people.»

  Teresa doesn't let him continue.

  «Please! Don’t list the usual obviousness, Vito! I heard such talks thirty years ago and if you propose them again now it means that after all the city hasn’t changed as much as they say», she presses on.

  «How wrong you are my friend. When you left, the situation was not the best, but this, if you think about it, was true for every other Italian city. Italy was crumbling, not Palermo or Sicily. And what happened afterward? While Italy kept living dark years, the sale of Sicily allowed us to finally take our deserved revenge. Here everything blossomed again, transforming a forgotten bud into the most beautiful flower of the garden. Until that moment what possibilities had ever been granted to us? Ignorant and subdued, so they wanted Sicily to stay for their benefit, for sure not for that of the people. Never any investment, never a modernization plan. How do you think that any place on Earth can grow if no project is made let it? If a culture oriented to welfare rather than the autonomy is cultivated? But don’t tell me that Sicilians wanted this, because I will never accept this. It is obvious that if you grow in a place where this way of thinking is rooted, you unconsciously start thinking like this too. But if only you are given a possibility... We all did a lot when investments arrived.»

  «I don't want to judge what happened after the sale. I am certain that there was an unbelievable improvement; I wonder however whether the price paid wasn’t too high.»

  «We paid the price before, and without having anything in return. We have been part of a State that never really wanted us. We were no-man’s land right when we thought we belonged to something bigger. Have you forgotten how the people of the north considered us? We are Mediterranean, this has always been our belonging. You cannot deny that we have a way of living life, of feeling things, that was always closer to southern countries than to the cold lands of the north of Italy. It’s history that proves this, and also geography. It’s an intrinsic fact, and denying it damaged us for too lo
ng a time. Now put prejudices aside, and enjoy the new Palermo. Later we will talk about it again.»

  And with the smile of who is preparing to win a challenge, Vito raises the volume of the radio, and humming he drives toward Mondello.