The First True Lie

by Marina Mander

  “Not even gelato?”

  “What’s gelato got to do with it? Gelato doesn’t have fur.”

  Furry animals are my favorite. I want to have all kinds. In my opinion, people who like animals are nicer, and they understand people better too. It’d be great to be a vet and take care of the big animals, lions and leopards and cheetahs. That’s what I want to do when I grow up, be a vet for big cats. We have a movie about lions that Mama and I never get tired of watching. She says she likes lions because they’re strong and muscular, that when they roar they “give us an idea of infinite power,” that the lion’s roar is the sound of the center of the earth or of what we were before we became domesticated.

  She says she’ll take me to see them someday.

  “When you’re older, when we have more money.” When whatever.

  Africans say God created cats so that men could pet lions.

  For now I watch the documentary. For now I’ve got nothing else to do.

  Blue curls up near me and starts to purr.

  I feel like there’s too much silence in the apartment.

  When there’s too much silence, it makes more noise than noise does, like the deaf kids I meet on the tram sometimes. They’re going to the deaf school, where they can understand one another with hand gestures, but on the way there they make a ton of crazy sounds and you don’t have any choice but to listen. If one of them gets his ticket jammed in the machine, he might as well have a fish bone stuck in his throat.

  Silence, on the other hand, fills up your head like the blank notebook, and it’s too big to do anything about it.

  There’s a time just before dinner, before the day ends, when you feel the silence more strongly. At most there are cars going by and quickly zooming away. They’re inside the life that’s outside, beyond our window, beyond the television screen; they’re part of the noise of TV shows, of things that happen far away. Then usually Mama gets home and starts messing with dinner. Even if I’m in my room I can hear the noises coming from the kitchen, cupboards slamming, the mosquito buzz of the electric can opener, a metallic rumble through the silverware drawer. It’s over, I tell myself, it’s all over. We’re safe. I go to her. I circle around her like a tsetse fly. Tsetse flies are torture for lions too. Lions sleep two-thirds of the day and wake up in the evening to eat. Since it’s winter it gets dark early; it’s already pitch-black at five.

  Every two minutes I feel like going into her room to see if something’s happened, if Mama has tasted the baked apples, but I’m afraid of finding out that she hasn’t even touched them and being disappointed.

  Better to wait for evening; during the winter evening comes soon.

  Patience is a virtue, fine, I get it. I’ve got all the time in the world.

  Inside my eyes there’s nothing but blackness. When I open them everything is dark.

  I fell asleep, I feel cold; the movie’s finished. Rain taps on the window, otherwise it’s quiet. The shapes of the furniture are the backs of elephants in the savanna. The dark stain of the painting looms over my head.

  Even Blue is snoring. Every so often he makes a sucking sound. Maybe he’s dreaming about sucking milk, because in dreams milk doesn’t give him the runs; salami doesn’t cause spots, nostalgia, melancholy…The great thing about cats is that even when they grow up they stay kittens. Blue always tries to get some milk when I have breakfast, but I can’t give it to him because milk upsets his tummy. One time he threw up on Mama’s bed and she had to put everything in the washing machine.

  “I swear I’ll throw the cat in too.”

  She wasn’t being serious, though, just joking.

  I’ve got a nasty taste in my mouth, like I ate something rotten. Maybe I’m sick too, like Mama. And I won’t wake up again. I cross the room like a sleepwalker, shuffling with my arms out in front of me as I look for the light switch. I turn on all the lights. I turn the TV back on. I turn everything on, the stereo and the radio too; that way the apartment seems full of people.

  I go into Mama’s room; she’s still turned off.

  I look for a detail that will tell me she’s moved. I don’t know…maybe her hair. I don’t think so. I wonder if she was exactly like this before. I call her name, shout at her, pinch her. Nothing. I feel my face getting wet again, feel like I can’t swallow, feel my legs wobble, and my chin and my voice. I feel something hot in my stomach. She doesn’t feel anything anymore. I really think she is dead.

  I curl up next to her. The pillow gets flooded. I stay like this until I realize it’s not possible to stay like this forever. When I go into the bathroom, my eyes are red, my face looks like I’ve got the flu. I pick up the toothpaste and squirt some in my mouth, without the toothbrush, to get rid of the disgusting taste that’s all over my tongue. I feel sick, like I’ve just turned one hundred thousand corners in the car, hurtling down a Russian mountain that’s like a roller coaster.

  I’m still cold. Maybe I’ve got a temperature. In the living room everyone’s shouting: the guy on the news, the radio announcer, Jovanotti singing. It’s raining, really raining. When Mama wants to see if I have a temperature, she puts her lips to my forehead, but I can’t do that to myself. Fucking shit. I take the thermometer from the medicine cabinet, shake it up and down, and put it under my arm. Then I change my mind—there’s no point in having a fever now. I lean my forehead against the edge of the sink; it’s nice and cool. I stay bent over for another two or three centuries, until my back starts to hurt like an old person’s. Blue’s standing in the doorway. He looks at me but doesn’t understand. He tries to meow, but nothing comes out. Even he doesn’t know what to say.

  It was only a little while ago that I woke up, but I’m really tired. I should do my homework, but I don’t know if I’m up to it. Someone whose mother has just died can’t do homework, but that isn’t an excuse, because I can’t tell anyone about it. It has to stay a secret, a really big secret just between us. I don’t want to end up in an orphanage.

  When I was younger Mama used to read me a story about a little girl who was left in an orphanage. At night the girl would hide under the covers, even though they scratched her face. She was sad because nobody loved her. Then she was saved by a friendly giant who ate only snozzcumbers. He came through the window and carried her away. She stopped being just one orphan in a thousand and became the daughter of a big, strong man. But I stopped believing in giants—whether I liked it or lumped it, as Mama would say—a long time ago.

  I have to do my homework. I can’t risk them suspecting anything.

  There was one boy at school who told a story about how he hadn’t done his homework because his aunt had died—then they discovered it wasn’t true at all and made him go to a million appointments to figure out how he’d ended up telling such a whopper. He earned an unsatisfactory grade for behavior. His aunt was pretty upset about it, especially because she wasn’t decrepit at all.

  The telephone rings. I run to turn off the noise. It’s Giulia again.

  “My mother said she’ll call you tomorrow, she’s cooking.”

  “No worries, I’m leaving, going on vacation, God willing. I’m already at the airport. I’ll be back in a few weeks. Say good-bye to your mother and give her a kiss for me, and be good.”

  “I will. Send us a postcard.”

  Giulia says good-bye in a voice that’s so happy it’s gross. She doesn’t notice anything. She’s got other stuff on her mind.

  Eating is disgusting. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again. I don’t know what to do. It’s my first dinner without a good dinner, my first night without a good night. For the first time in so long, maybe ever. I’ll have to get used to doing without Mama. When she grazes my cheek it seems less like a kiss than a warmish breath of air, bringing me luck. I decide to sleep on the sofa. So long to my room, to the toys scattered across the floor, to the bears on the shelf secretly looking and laughing at me.

  “You’re nothing but a race of stupid, weak bipeds.”

  So
long to all the things I’m leaving behind.

  The only one I take is the koala.

  “What do you think?”

  Kolly doesn’t answer. He must be offended because ever since I got Blue I’ve stopped asking him for his opinion.

  Old Kolly is made from real koala fur, with a brown nose that’s always cold. Someone Grandma knew in Australia sent it to me.

  “I was very fond of this friend, you know. He was tremendously handsome when he was young, and an amazing dancer as well, but then he went away and I haven’t seen him since.”

  At that point Grandma was already off on a tangent that filled her mouth with the words fond, friend, Australia…Australia like Asturias or Austria-Hungary, strange places on a map that went out of date a hundred wars ago, the Australia of “My dear, dear boy, it’s on the other side of the world. When it’s dark here, the sun’s up there; when it’s winter here, it’s summer there.”

  The Australia of kangaroos and duck-billed platypuses.

  And then Mama, who never wants to go away anywhere, says, with a swoosh that sounds like a wingbeat: “And birds of paradise, can you imagine? It must be paradise on earth. Maybe we should all go off to Australia, every last one of us.”

  Who knows if Kolly would like to go back to his part of the world and climb eucalyptus trees.

  “What do you say, Kolly? Would you like to go visit your relatives on the other side of the world?”

  We could also go sleep with Mama, but if she’s really dead I’m not sure I want to be close to her. If she’s dead she’s already an angel. She’ll come and visit me without my even hearing her steps on the wooden floor, without running into the furniture, without hurting herself on the corners. She’ll come in her silk nightgown and, like a guardian angel, make it so that I dream in color. She’ll slide along without touching the ground, like a rapper. I don’t know anymore if guardian angels exist. They tell you so many whoppers with the excuse that you’ll like the stories, but you’re never completely sure if they’re true or not. Or maybe Mama’ll transform into a zombie. I feel like a zombie myself now, but Mama is too beautiful to become a monster. She’s never a monster, even when she gets mad and makes a nasty face. Eventually it passes and she goes back to being nice. She’s nice now too, it’s just that she forgot to wake up.

  Grown-ups forget so much. Especially among themselves. They’ll see each other for a while, they’ll call each other, they’ll chat, say “my dear,” “my darling,” and then forget each other.

  “Sometimes people just fall into oblivion.”

  Oblivion is like a long hallway but vertical, a hole like the one on the landing we throw trash down, with scratchy cement walls and a shiny gray hatch like a sulky mouth. People fall into the hole, plop, and then stay there, squashed one on top of the other, waiting until someone wonders whatever happened to them.

  “For example, do you remember that one guy, what was his name? Who knows whatever happened to him?”

  That one guy, like my father, or maybe it is my father.

  I think Mama and I have fallen into someone’s oblivion too, because people don’t seek us out so much, maybe because she’s sad, and when she’s sad she’s not much fun. You’ve really got to love her to put up with her then. Only if it’s your own mother can you be fine with it—you can’t do anything else, she’s the only one you’ve got.

  We’ve definitely fallen down the dads’ memory holes, my real dad’s and the other ones’ as well, the contenders’. Now it really seems like everyone has forgotten everything, that the world is far, far away, like in science-fiction movies where you see Earth from another planet.

  I’m sure there’s lots of life on other planets, it’s just that we’re light-years away here in the megagalaxy of the eighth floor. There are lights in the windows across the street, people carrying dishes from the dining room to the kitchen, TVs that flicker with a bluish light, but we’ve lost touch, even Mama says so.

  “You know how it is, in this city it’s so easy to lose touch.”

  It would take a super–remote control to beam yourself into those living rooms where big families eat popcorn in front of a good movie, where they celebrate real Christmases with great big Christmas trees that touch the ceiling with their golden tips.

  I hate Christmas because none of this ever happens. I hate the candied fruit in the panettone, I hate the crooked figurines in the nativity scene in the school lobby, and I hate the fat priest with the sticky hands who wants to bless me.

  “Go with God, my son.”

  “No, thanks, if you’re coming too.”

  It always turns out I get sadder because I’m supposed to be happier. I can’t wait for Christmas to be over so that I don’t have to think about it anymore.

  There are presents, of course, but they’re not always enough.

  “Aren’t you going to unwrap your gifts? That one with the red bow is from me; the lilac-colored one is from Grandma; that one with the airplane paper is from Giulia. Merry Christmas, my pet.”

  Already the day after Christmas is better.

  And tomorrow will already be better too. Maybe tomorrow things will be different, my pet. All I have to do is make tomorrow come soon.

  I bring the quilt with the clouds onto the sofa, along with Blue and the koala. The alarm clock quietly beams green Martian codes my way. I try to close my eyes.

  It’s strange to sleep with the light on, but I don’t feel like turning it off tonight; it’s better this way. On the inside of my eyelids I see swarms of microbes crazily moving about, like when you look into a microscope and spot the ones responsible for who knows what disease; or when you stare at a clear sky when it’s really, really clear, inhabited only by millions of quote marks without words, without explanations, without motives.

  At Grandma’s house, where it’s dark even during the day, when the sun comes through the shutters, the dust particles do a dance in the air, glittering like metallic paint. A ray of cosmic dust, penetrating the lazy half light of the afternoon, a sword that shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow and grants special powers, makes me a secret knight of the great disorder’s higher order, a master cherry-stone spitter.

  Deep in darkness, there was also the music room, with its armchairs covered with ghost sheets, the coatrack covered in ghosts’ overcoats, and the forgotten instruments that no one used anymore but that absolutely no one was allowed to touch.

  “Practice on this,” Grandma would say, handing me a mandoline so that I could slice the hard-boiled eggs.

  The piano was opened only for my grandfather’s funeral. Grandma sat down on the upholstered stool, stiffly erect, her eyes bright from crying or from too many toasts in her husband’s honor: “A good man after all.”

  She began to play military marches, bobbing her purple hair from side to side, maybe in celebration of finally having become the supreme commander of the whole shebang. My grandmother has purple hair, a detail that has always really made me laugh.

  2

  I hear an ambulance siren, coming closer and closer. It’s here. It’s parked in the living room or under the bed. It’s deafening me. I stick my fingers in my ears, but it’s no use, the noise continues. I wake up in a sweat. The alarm clock bores into my sleep like the drill they used to break up the street down below. I fling a heavy arm out of bed to turn it off. It was only a bad dream. Everything’s all right. Then I remember. Nothing’s all right. Not one single thing. What am I doing here on the sofa?

  Mama didn’t get up this morning either.

  There’s too much silence now that I’ve turned off the siren and the jackhammer that were hollowing out my head.

  Mama’s not getting up anymore.

  Now I remember everything.

  I sit up to think about my new situation. I look at the living-room furniture; it’s familiar and strange at the same time, like being in a hotel or at someone else’s house. Blue gets his purr motor running.

  I have to find some courage.


  I don’t have any.

  I’m in a daze, sitting on the sofa with my legs and arms open wide, waiting for another pair of arms to pick me up, to pose me like she used to for baby pictures, a naked, confused newborn in the middle of the bed, like the picture of Grandpa when he was young, a chubby little grandfather dressed up in frills, looking nothing like the bony old man I knew.

  I tell my feet to shake off this daze, tell my legs to carry me down the hall to see how things are going, tell my head to be a bit more positive. But they’re not listening.

  At times like these it’s usually Mama who comes to get me moving.

  Now I have to get myself moving. I tell myself I have to get used to it: “You’ve got to get used to it. You’ve got to manage. You can’t be afraid of going down the hall.”

  I argue with myself out loud.

  “Mama’s never frightened you before; she can’t frighten you now. Can’t you see she can’t even move?”

  She is still still.

  Extremely still.

  Nothing can be done. There’s only one hope—that she’ll be resurrected, like Jesus. After three days. We’ve just begun the second, and who knows if it’s true that Jesus was resurrected. They say he was, but I don’t know if I believe it. Even Grandpa didn’t really believe it was possible to go into and rise back out of graves, and anyway, when he died, he wasn’t resurrected; he just died, and that was that. He wanted a glass of wine on his grave instead of flowers. Mama said he’d been in the war and seen so many dead people that he stopped believing in God and all those religious stories, because in this world there is no religion. Looking at all the people who die for no reason—I’m not just talking about bad people but good ones too—it’s hard to believe that there’s an invisible someone protecting us. I’m not particularly interested in these things, even if now I could really use a God or some such thing to give me a hand. If there was one, this would really be the time to prove it.

  He could tell me what to wear to school. It has to be a clean shirt, because Mama would never send me to school with yesterday’s shirt—actually, he could wake up Mama, if he can. I can’t. But God probably has more important things to do.