The First True Lie

by Marina Mander

  It’s true, that’s how it is. The things that grow slowly always seem the same if you see them every day; if you don’t see them for a long time, they’re different.

  I never want to go into Mama’s room again.

  I hope the cold freezes her, like the mummy they found in the glacier. I search through my head to find something to compare this one with, but it’s not there. I hope that no worms come, like they do with zombies.

  Grandpa used to fish with worms.

  “Just look at my lovable larvae,” he would say, opening a plastic container, the kind used to keep leftovers in the refrigerator.

  “You see these? These are the Kennedy maggots. And these? Pope John. These other ones are my Marilyn maggots.”

  The worms of famous people who died in his day, that’s how he classified them. The biggest ones got the most important names. He was very proud of his worms.

  I don’t want to think about worms.

  I don’t want to think about anything anymore.

  I have to learn how not to think.

  There must be a system.

  If you don’t want to listen, all you have to do is put your fingers in your ears and sing loudly. What can you do in order not to think?

  My head is filled with ideas, stupid ones and not stupid ones; it does everything on its own. I can’t control it. There’s no switch to turn off the maggots moving in my head and then coming out my eyes, the brain with its wormy white spirals, like Grandpa’s maggots moving in the cranial container that was hidden on a shelf in the storage closet instead of in the kitchen.

  The TV stares at me with its giant shiny pupil like some Jurassic animal. I see my reflection in it. I’d like to be sucked through the screen to the other side, into the body of the television, like Alice going down the rabbit hole. Everything goes marvelously well for the kids inside the screen. Even if a story starts out with things being only so-so, it always has a happy ending: The adults make up, everyone’s problems disappear, the dogs wag their tails and slobber all over the people’s faces. It’s true that the TV news only shows sad stories, but that’s because the news takes the pictures from reality, things that really happened. Once they’re sucked into the TV, though, they seem less real; that is, they seem real but fake at the same time. You’re sorry, but not all that much, and mostly you just forget about it right away.

  Why doesn’t that work for me?

  I never behaved that badly, and still I couldn’t convince anyone to make things happen differently. Not even Mama took the trouble to live for me. Why?

  What do the others have that I don’t?

  I’m now holed up under the quilt, just like in an earthquake on TV, even though the ceiling is still there and the walls are there and even the furniture, and the whole building is still standing. Even though everything is in its place: the sofa with me on top, the table shiny with wax, the chest of drawers with the mirror, the piss-stained armchair, the painting full of yucky weather signed by one of the cat’s ancestors.

  The apartment seems naked. I feel like I should whisper, like in a museum, even though I don’t know whom to talk to.

  If people saw me on TV like this, a pig in a blanket, I’m sure their hearts would break: “Poor kid,” “What a beautiful child,” “Look what’s been done to him, my heart breaks just to see him.” If instead they saw me in the flesh, alive and kicking and not decrepit at all, I’m sure they’d send me straight to an orphanage, as soon as they’d exhausted me with questions to work out how disturbed I am, because they’d never believe me. They’d never believe that someone would stay with his dead mother in the apartment because he doesn’t want to go to an orphanage. It’s too simple an explanation, so of course they’d have to look for other ones.

  Saying that I don’t want to abandon Blue would never be enough.

  And yet sometimes the dogs that people abandon at highway rest stops travel miles and miles to return home. They show up at the door and say, Here I am.

  Because dogs don’t want to end up in kennels either.

  Better to go back to their owners, even if they’re bastards.

  I don’t know what I’ll do.

  But maybe I’ll get an idea.

  Nobody pays much attention to us anyway. Maybe that’s how things will stay.

  I go to pick up the shopping bag I left in the hallway. I put the cans of food away. I rinse Blue’s bowl and put a little food inside. I cover the open can with foil and put it in the fridge.

  At the same time I decide to start a new life.

  You can’t put groceries away and decide your future. You can’t do two things at once.

  And yet now I can; I can do everything.

  So I decide to do the same things I did with Mama, just without her. It can’t be impossible.

  I tell myself: It’s just as if you’ve grown up.

  All of a sudden.

  I’m your typical single guy and I’m stuck at home because it’s very much winter outside. I just have to keep to myself. I have to make it work.

  How many times have I wanted to grow up sooner, right away? Now here we go. It’s happened. It could have happened better, but that’s how it is. That’s all.

  What do single people do when they’re home alone?

  All I can do is imagine and copy.

  I imagine that singles read the newspaper. Fine. That’s what I’ll do.

  I pick up a magazine and read it. I like reading, why shouldn’t I do it now? Mama’s newspaper has an article that says that single people make up 25 percent of our country’s population. Fine. Now there’s one more.

  I’m not an orphan. I’m single.

  It’s just a matter of words. Sometimes words can even change ideas and points of view. In order to be an adult, fuck, all you’ve got to do is use adult words. Like getting a driver’s license: You’ve got to be a certain age to express yourself in a certain way—before, you can’t. And yet there’s no exam to test your ability to drive words in the right direction.

  I can say all the dirty words I want, I can jump red lights now that I’m alone. I can also blaspheme, use the dirtiest dirty words of them all, because God hasn’t woken up Mama and so he deserves it. I just have to make sure nobody hears me.

  I have a go at God: Fuck you, God.

  I have trouble at first, like when I have to stick out my tongue as far as I can to see if I’ve got spots on my tonsils, but then I manage.

  It’s not that fun, but I say it.

  Fuck you, God; God, fuck you.

  I could light up a cigarette too, if I wanted, and smoke it at the window looking out at the smoking chimneys on the rooftops, like Mama, who looks out and the smoke seems to come out of her head because her thoughts are burning up.

  Mama’s cigarettes are right here, on the table, and so is the lighter with the word Love on it, inviting me to become big right away.

  I wonder if single people are happy to be single.

  Whether they don’t miss the good-night kiss and that face-cream smell that stays awhile on your cheek and on your pillow too, Mama’s protective cream, which fights wrinkles and also bad dreams.

  The good thing is that I don’t have to eat tonight, or wash, or force myself to be cheerful, not tonight.

  Tomorrow is Sunday, everyone’s day off.

  I wear myself out with comics. I’ve read almost all of them before. I crunch on cookies. There’s a surprise in the package, a toy clown who runs in zigzags on just one wheel.

  With cookie crumbs inside the quilt, on the sofa, between my teeth, I try to sleep. I dream about losing all my teeth, one by one. My teeth begin to wobble, then they slip out easily, without pain, without screams. The gums are left empty, like when you pull petals off daisies to play “She loves me, she loves me not.” I don’t know how I’ll be able to go to school without teeth. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t smile anymore.

  6

  Today’s Sunday. No school.

  It seems a lot like yester
day, and yet, school or no school, it’s today. The sun is out, though. It’s weak, but I can see it through a pane in the French door. I spot it curled up in the light blue clouds, with Blue beside me and my finger running over the sharp ridges of teeth that seem like mountain ranges inside my mouth.

  Single people get up late on Sundays because they don’t have anything to do, so I turn over and keep sleeping.

  This time I dream about my friend Davide. We’re riding bikes along a pier. Then a man shows up and says that bikes aren’t allowed on the pier, so we pedal harder, because if we pedal fast enough, we might lift off. Davide breaks away from earth first and begins to flutter like a butterfly. His mama sees us from far away and moves her arms like she’s swatting flies.

  “Come here, come here before you hurt yourself. You’ll burn if you stay out in the sun too long.”

  I pedal lots and lots but stay lower down. In my dream I dream of soaring up into the sky and turning in circles on my outstretched wings, with the seagulls, above all the houses and everything. I dream of seeing the sea look small like the sparkly piece of mirror that’s the pond in a nativity scene, but I pedal like crazy and only seem like a bee, which moves superfast just to stay in place in the air. Then my legs can’t take it anymore: I get a cramp in one of my calf muscles. I come close to falling; maybe I do fall. I fall but don’t touch the bottom. I wake up first.

  I wake up again with Blue asleep on my right leg, which has fallen asleep. If I touch it, it’s like it’s someone else’s leg, as if they’ve put it in my bed in order to play another nasty trick on me.

  I’d like to keep sleeping, but I’m not sleepy anymore.

  I drag myself to the bathroom and sit down to pee like a girl. Mama says it’s better that way because I don’t leave drips on the seat, and to be honest it’s also comfortable. I can stay on the toilet as long as I want, without even having to poop on command.

  Today being Sunday, I’d like to celebrate and not take a poop and invent something new, but even if everything’s new, nothing original comes to mind. The only wants that come to me are old ones, used a million times, worn out and faded by the tumble dryer of everything that’s happened.

  I would really like to go on a bike ride like I did when we used to visit Grandma, before she lost her marbles and they carried her off to Villa Serena.

  “Mama, why don’t we go to Grandma’s anymore?”

  “Because she’s not doing so well.”

  Grandma lost her marbles—or, as we say, lost the tramontana—or maybe she gained it: the wind got into her brain and tangled up all her ideas.

  “Does the wind do that?”

  “Yes, sometimes the wind can drive people crazy.”

  The only things that come into my head are ideas so normal it’s crazy not to be able to make them happen. But maybe I couldn’t have even before, because Mama was tired and never wanted to do anything. For me nostalgia is only nostalgia for an idea, even if then nostalgia catches me in the stomach and it feels like hunger pains.

  Mama likes to spend hours looking out the window, and it’s clear that for her the outside is very far away. She’s looking out the window of an airplane, not our apartment.

  Not all that much has changed.

  Sometimes, sure, if I really insist, Mama goes along with my ideas, but it’s one thing to have someone doing things she doesn’t want to do just to make you happy, and totally another if someone is actually having fun.

  Now I’m a coat that’s missing both sleeves.

  When we’d go to the seaside to visit Grandma, who lived in a city with the sea right there, I could ride my bike every day. I’d swerve between the people in bathing suits who were in the street too. Then we’d stop to have a chocolate-and-pistachio gelato and sit in the sun, making fun of the chubby girls in the water with their life preservers made of chub around their bellies. We’d go back to Grandma’s house at lunchtime, and when I stepped into the house it felt for a minute like I’d gone blind, because outside there was so much light and inside it was so dark. The first time, I was frightened and really thought I had gone blind, like one of those guys with the German shepherds and white walking sticks and pimply-looking letters they have to feel on the pages. I burst out crying, until little by little my eyes became used to the dark and I stopped crying and being afraid.

  I also liked to lick the salt on my smooth tanned skin, like Blue when he grooms his fur. I liked the smell of the salt and the fact that by scratching the dry salt with my fingernail I could make doodles and tattoos on my skin like the ones Native American chiefs have. Then I’d have to take a shower, but I’d try to save at least an arm from washing so that I could lick it at night, under the heavy cotton sheets that smelled new even if they were the same ancient sheets from Grandma’s dresser.

  They’d say, “You’re not a goat. Goats like salt.”

  Or:

  “You’re a goat, because you’re ignorant.”

  But they didn’t really think that. They just said it to make fun of me.

  Cities by the sea are more beautiful because they’re half town and half sea. I live in an all-city city, a città tutto città. That’s what they call the street map: If you get lost, you can always check the all-city map, the Tuttocittà, even if you can’t take your bike and go to the sea.

  In the city we live in, everything is city.

  I don’t know what to do about this for now.

  I’m forced to invent something else.

  So I invent.

  There’s a rotting corpse in my apartment, so I teleport it to the emergency room. The forensics expert confirms that its anatomical-functional capacities are damaged beyond repair and says it’s a fine mess. The vet, however, who’s secretly in love with Mama, doesn’t want to give up, so he asks himself if there’s not something he can do for her. The vet consults with lots and lots of doctors from all over the world, and each one offers his or her own opinion about how to solve the problem. One says there are ghosts capable of bringing corpses back to life, that Mama can be reanimated if we find the right ghost or some good ectoplasm. In that case Mama could live with me, but only in the evenings and at night. Another says it’s possible to resuscitate at least a part of Mama, the part where she’s my mama and not just any person. Yet another says we could create an android mama, a kind of babysitter who’s a bit stupid but who can do the job. A doctor from Egypt says we need to call a certain scientist who knows how to mammify mamas by wrapping them in bandages in such a way that mamas stay mamas even when they die, and wake up when it’s really necessary. I tell him I’m trying to freeze Mama, to preserve her for as long as possible, while we wait for someone to invent some colored pills that, if you take lots and lots of them, will make you live instead of die. The vet says that’s a good idea, that he’ll start studying it, that we’ll find a way.

  Then the vet takes me out for pizza. Looking at me with his big eyes, made bigger by his glasses, he tells me I shouldn’t worry, that he’ll take care of it. On a Sunday the restaurant is full of people: There are couples, families, and us. I like that they see me with the vet and also the fact that he’s a doctor—not that people know it, but it’s easy to tell. He’s nice to the waiters too, who are going crazy because it’s Sunday and everyone is so hungry it’s like they haven’t eaten for a week. I try to cut my pizza with a knife and fork because I don’t feel like eating it with my hands. I want to show him that I have good manners like he does. We talk a lot, not just about Mama, and it’s not like meeting with the school doctors who want to dig into your business just to keep you under their thumb. He asks me about stuff like it really matters to him, and then he pretends what I tell him isn’t a big deal. That’s what he does when we take Blue to him too. I know Blue’s not his cat, but he treats him the same as if he were his; that’s what I like about him. We also talk about lions. The vet explains to me how it’s the lionesses that go out hunting and bring back food for their cubs. He says that the hunt is successful one out of
every seven attempts, that sometimes it’s hard for them too, even though they’re such strong animals. He also tells me about how one time a group of lionesses adopted a gazelle instead of eating it, and it was an incredible event because nobody had ever seen anything like it between such different species. Even the newspapers wrote about it. He tells me that, if I want, until they find the medicine to wake up Mama, he could adopt me, even though we belong to such different species. I’m happy because that way I won’t end up in an orphanage, and Blue will have his own doctor all to himself. I imagine my new life with the vet who knows everything about animals. It seems so wonderful that I’m almost not sad anymore that Mama’s frozen, and orphan-orphans seem just like poor creatures, a whole other category.

  I’m wearing a white coat and standing next to him. I’ve got the sleeves rolled up because it’s his coat. I’m helping him treat dogs and cats.

  “Here we are, now hold him steady, carefully. Pet him softly and tell him how good he is. You’ll see how he calms down.”

  And that’s how it is. When the vet talks with the cats, the cats relax. The dogs accept the situation and become less scared.

  At the end of office hours the patients go away wagging their tails, thanking us, and smiling. We wash our hands, swiping the soap from each other, and then we head to the laboratory to study; time passes and we don’t even notice. We swap opinions like scientists do and pat each other on the back when we have a good idea. We’re so smart, the smartest of them all. We’ll figure it out for sure. Eventually we say good-bye to Mama, who is hibernating in a special capsule made all of silver behind a secret door in the laboratory, and we go home in Muddy Waters’s Jeep, which is all dirty with mud from the savanna. When we open the door, Blue comes up and greets us.

  “Hi, guys, how are you?”

  Because the vet is so smart he’s also managed to teach Blue our language.

  I say to Blue now, “Hey, what do you think, Blue? Wouldn’t that be great?”