Enchantments

by Linda Ferri

  On the bus, the test of the gaze: to manage to keep looking into his eyes while he punches my ticket. At the restaurant, my hand resting lightly on the table, tilted a bit to hide the childish roundness so that when he comes back with the macé-doine he discovers it—a white butterfly with trembling wings. On my way to the corner where there’s a gas station I walk any old way, but when I get there—a few meters before—I slow down.

  Back straight, stomach in, eyes straight ahead. Above all not looking at him but checking to see if he’s there without looking (I already know how to do that quite well). Then feeling his look like a hot beam. Putting an indolent sway into my walk.

  It was only later that I tried riskier enterprises. A fifth-grade classmate—Giovanni Tini— chubby, shorter than I, with thick-lensed glasses. One day I found in my notebook a paper boat with a figurehead in the shape of a red heart, on which I read “G loves M as Romeo loved his Juliet.” There was another boy in my class whose name began with G, Gianluca, but it couldn’t be him, he was too engrossed in his revolutionary reclassifi-cation of beetles. It had to be Giovanni.

  At home I asked Mama who Romeo and Juliet were.

  “Two young lovers. Their families were enemies and they didn’t want the lovers to marry, so Romeo and Juliet could only be together in death.”

  “Have you and Papa quarreled with Giovanni Tini’s parents?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Nothing, I was just asking.”

  I went back to my room. I felt confused, and that story about dying so they could live together worried me.

  So I temporized, flirting with Giovanni just enough to enjoy his courtship. My notebook was the port where the white packet boats of his love dropped anchor. “You are my sweet Juliet.” “How beautiful and fair you were yesterday with your hair in long braids like Juliet’s.” “You have dark eyes like Juliet’s.”

  But his pomposity and the way I had to bend down when I spoke with him as short as he was, and the pathetic way he groped around when our classmates knocked his glasses off his nose—it didn’t take long for all this to become tiresome. And one Saturday afternoon at a party, without thinking about it beforehand, I found myself ferociously destroying his adoration.

  I tore up and down the hallway like a rocket and ended up throwing myself across a divan screaming all the dirty words I knew. And the more incredulous and shocked he became, the more I taunted him, sticking this desanctifying dagger in up to the hilt. Finally a look of contempt came over his face. Only when I left, exhausted, did I begin to feel ashamed. The next Monday, after recess, I found a ship in my notebook made of black paper. The heart-shaped figurehead had been replaced by a white cross on which was written, “Juliet is dead. She fell off the balcony like a tomboy.”

  For a while I felt bad about ending it—I was that vain—but I got over it when a new boy arrived: Lorenzo, from London. A sweater with holes in it, torn jeans with bell-bottoms, a purple velour pullover with the slogan “Make love, not war” sewed on the sleeve. All of it from Carnaby Street. A face with a constant play of feelings, cherry-red lips, and lively tender eyes. Infinitely more up-to-date than we were, he talked about taboos, the bourgeoisie, flower children, and rock groups I’d never heard of. One morning the teacher called on him to recite a poem we’d had to memorize.

  Standing beside the lectern, Lorenzo began. At first his eyes were on the teacher. “We buried on this battlefield our youngest and our strongest. His only badge of valor the wounds upon his chest.” Then, as he became more impassioned, he turned toward the class as if moved by a current: “Machine-gun fire has mowed him down like wheat before a scythe … “At last, his eyes filled with tears, he clenched his fists and held them out toward me—straight toward me. I was thrilled, trembling, captivated as he recited the last prayerful stanza: “And now the farmboy soldier’s soul is in Thy hands, O Lord. Grant his comrades’ prayer for him—a hero’s paradise!”

  From that moment I felt an awakening in my heart, which fluttered like a caught bird. I would run breathlessly up the stairs at school to catch a glimpse of him in the main room standing in line for class. When he arrived late, I agonized. When he was absent, I felt abandoned by the world.

  Then, one evening, I found out that he loved me too.

  At eight the phone rings. My mother answers. “It’s for you,” she says. “It’s Lorenzo.” I take the phone. My hand is trembling. I say, “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s Lorenzo. I wanted to ask you— tomorrow, for the arithmetic work in class, should I bring graph paper or lined?”

  Afterward it dawns on me. What sort of question is that? It’s an excuse. I shout, “It’s just an excuse!” and run into my room. It’s one of the May evenings in Paris when the day doesn’t really want to die and the twilight is glowing and still. I’m sitting on my bed, near the window. I look outside, and in my ecstasy, which I am holding the way the day is holding the light, I see nothing, I hear nothing, I don’t exist anymore, I’m not these arms, these legs, this head—all of me is in the frantic beating of my tiny chest.

  Some Sunday mornings Clara and I would get up before our parents. As quiet as mice, we’d go to the kitchen to make orange juice for them (the squeezer, unfortunately, made an infernal racket) and get the coffee machine ready. Then we’d run back to our room—still quietly, because waking them up would spoil everything. Remembering to take the key, fly down the stairs and gallop all the way to the bakery on Rue de Laos to buy chocolate rolls for Papa and croissants for Mama. The last stop was at the florist to get red carnations for Mama. That was her favorite flower—she said it had that faint faint odor of a newborn baby—and luckily they cost the least, one franc each, so we could give her a bunch of five and sometimes ten. Once we were back at the house we made as much noise as we could— everything was ready and we couldn’t wait to see their look of surprise and pleasure. (After a few times, of course, they weren’t so surprised, but I still delighted in the role of the perfect daughter.)

  Some Sunday mornings my father was the last one up. About eleven.

  In his baggy boxers and undershirt he makes his way to the living room and turns on the record player. He gives a huge yawn and starts leafing through records, humming a tune. Suddenly he stops, raises his eyebrows (his eyes are a little bit red, a little bit white, like a monster’s), and then turns toward me and produces an angelic smile. At last he chooses a record—Fred Buscaglione—which he adores because it makes him remember I don’t know what kind of good times. He puts it on and turns up the volume. He starts to dance, with spins and hops that are exaggerated and awkward. One of us always says, “Papa, you look like a gorilla.” He expects this, and it does nothing but make him wilder. And then there he is taking my hand so I’ll dance with him, and I’m blushing and laughing. I go along for a few steps. At the same time I take in the words of the song—”I saw you, I followed you, I stopped you, I kissed you, you were so young, so young …“and I happen to notice the record jacket on which there’s a photo of Buscaglione with a mustache and a croupier’s eyeshade. He looks dangerously like my father when he was young, when he too was a confirmed gambler, and it occurs to me that this is a part of his life that someone should be paying attention to. Every time my father plays a Buscaglione song I listen very carefully to the words, and I get an overwhelming impression of a murky red world where it’s always nighttime, and there’s kissing and fighting and a lot of platinum blondes who don’t look anything like my mother.

  It makes me nervous and worried, and I begin to keep an eye on my father, all the more attentively since my mother seems to be unpar-donably unaware.

  One evening he comes home from a business trip, and he tells us that at the airport in Nice he ran into Brigitte Bardot. He has a sly look, and as he’s talking he keeps glancing at my mother, as if he’s thrown down a gauntlet. She’s not really paying attention, isn’t the least bit interested in picking it up. Now Papa is saying that the actress smiled at him, and he imitates the way she w
alked, her head turned toward him, trailing a smile behind her like a long net. Then he opens his suitcase and takes out two pairs of sunglasses for my sister and me. They’re huge, with mod frames covered with fluorescent checks. My father says that Brigitte Bardot had glasses just like these. When he holds them out to me I throw them into the air, and I shout that they disgust me and Brigitte Bardot disgusts me, and once again I burst into tears and go shut myself in my room.

  For some time now I’ve been suffering from stomachaches, cramps that keep me in bed with my arms wrapped around my body. Mama takes me to the doctor and that is how I come to take medicine for the first time, brown pills, sweet on the outside and tasting like flour inside.

  Mama tells me that I mustn’t worry so much about school, and I say, yes, I’ll stop worrying. But it’s not school—it’s Teresa who’s giving me stomachaches.

  She came into class one day with her darting eyes. The school year had already begun, and the principal brought her in to introduce her to the teacher and her new schoolmates. While the principal was speaking, Teresa’s eyes never stopped moving from one face to another. I thought of the pellets of mercury that run out of a broken thermometer, and I didn’t notice anything else about her, just those restless eyes. After yet another frantic tour of the room, her eyes suddenly stopped at my face, examining my cheeks, mouth, and nose and at last fastening on my eyes and not letting go.

  By the third day we were inseparable.

  We saw each other after school almost every day, usually at her house since Teresa was an only child and her parents were always out. That way there was no one to distract us when we wrote our novel about a queen of heaven named Aurora Borealis, or to spy on us when we planned our crimes. We were going to steal four rings, three hatpins, and a rhinestone necklace from a department store. It was a robbery that we prepared meticulously, but right in the middle of it she bolted, leaving me standing in front of the display case with the open shopping bag in my hands. Of course I ran too, dropping the empty bag. I didn’t speak to her for two weeks.

  We were both good at schoolwork. And we made a pretty picture when we stood cheek to cheek and looked at ourselves in the mirror, though, to tell the truth, I saw that her eyes shone more brightly than mine, as if they were lit up by the constant whirring of her mind.

  Right out loud, Teresa mimicked the teacher, who pronounced the p in Champs-Elysées. Then she turned and stabbed me with a dazzling glance, while I felt envious and bewildered because just then I’d been feeling sorry for the teacher. Teresa’s sassiness electrified me. And I was electrified by the way she pulled off her blue kneesocks in the school bathroom and flipped them into the air and then, with loving care, almost a caress, slipped on her fishnet stockings with the seam in back.

  There were two things I couldn’t stand: her way of pointing her nose in the air as if communing with who-knew-what lofty realm and then deigning to let her judgment descend. And there was the fact that she always liked the same boy I liked, so that if I said, “You know, I like so-and-so,” she would invariably reply, “Actually, I like him too.”

  One afternoon—by now we were in middle school—we shut ourselves in her mother’s bathroom to put on makeup, enough makeup so heads would turn. Then we went to take pictures of ourselves in a photo booth. The next day we gave the photo to a classmate whom we used as a go-between. We enclosed a note that asked, “Who of the two do you like more?” and ordered the boy to give everything to Marco, whom we were both crazy about. But this go-between was such a dolt that he delivered the answer to us in the middle of Latin class. The teacher, who was an old spinster, confiscated everything including our photo, sent the two of us to the principal’s office, and put a black mark in the class roll. As soon as I set foot in the office, I felt a knot in my stomach, and the whole time the principal was giving me a lecture all I could think of was that “Jezebel” rhymes with “Go to hell.” Teresa had dropped her great-lady act and was standing there with her head hanging down. The principal called our homes, but Teresa’s parents were out and mine were away on a trip. That evening she and I phoned each other and, in the midst of tears, made a pact—we would both go to school the next day no matter what.

  But Teresa didn’t come—she left me to face the second part of the trial by myself. The principal stood up in front of the class and called me to the teacher’s desk to shame me in front of all my classmates. I despised Teresa for not having come. But she did something even worse— another theft. This time she stole my best friend, Anna—Anna who lived on the fifth floor of our apartment building.

  One morning at school I see the two of them huddled together. They’re giggling, having great fun together. When I go to join them, they barely say hello. I can tell they got together the day before, behind my back, and that my exile has just begun. That afternoon my stomachaches begin in earnest. I hardly sleep, with dreams that only add new pain or false hopes to my forlorn waking hours. This torment lasts an eternity. Then it abruptly comes to an end. One day I get on the elevator with Anna, and I get her back on my side. Without even saying hello, I start in. “Everybody says you like Paolo.”

  “Who, everybody?” she asks, alarmed.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Maddalena, Silvia … They told me that by now even Paolo knows.”

  Anna grows pale, and that’s when I tell a lie, releasing the poisoned arrow. “They heard it from Teresa.”

  I know Anna very well, and I can see I’ve hit the target.

  “It’s not true that I like Paolo, it’s not true at all. That’s just some lie Teresa made up.” And indeed, she says this with bitter resentment.

  “Could be—who knows? Maybe it just slipped out. I certainly haven’t told anyone.” I say this lightly not wanting to put salt on her wound. I’m satisfied for now, but I’m savoring the revenge that’s still to come. Because this is just the beginning. Teresa will pay. She’ll pay for everything. She’ll pay for all those things that I would like to do but don’t dare.

  The road is white and the fields are yellow, speckled here and there with bloodred poppies. At night there are fireflies, hundreds, maybe thousands, but now it’s daytime, and what I see are Gonda’s black ears, bobbing up and down across the line between Earth and sky.

  Papa and I are in the buggy on our way to the Cecchinis’—the tenant farmers at Civitella, my father’s best farm. But first we’ll stop in the town square, where we have an appointment with the farm manager.

  Gonda’s hooves echo in the main street. People look at us. They’re curious and admiring, but they keep clear. A mother, misinterpreting Gonda’s whinny, grabs the hand of her child— it’s actually the horse’s greeting—but the mare is too black, too alarming a creature. I can’t help feeling a shiver of pride.

  My father knows everybody, and people come up to him to say hello and compliment Gonda. Some of them pat her neck, which is shiny with sweat. There’s also a brother of Papa’s, Alfio, but they don’t get along, they’re still arguing over Grandfather’s estate, even though he died years ago. Papa always pokes fun at Alfio, says that he’s spiteful, greedy, and stingy, that he’s not as handsome as Papa is, not as nice, and that’s why no woman wanted to marry him.

  And today too, after they greet each other, Papa starts poking at him: Is it true that Alfio’s farm equipment was wrecked when the roof of the Montesca shed fell in because Alfio cut corners on repairs? Is it true that the farm at San Biagio will yield only a few tons because it rained too much? Strange—because on his own fields it rained just enough and now the wheat is waist high, shining, soft and golden. Is it true that at the club no one wants Alfio at the poker table because he always spoils the game, peeking at everyone’s hand, whereas they’ve asked Papa to be president? Would Alfio like to see, here and now, which of the two of them can attract more people around him?

  My father proposes that they each go to a corner of the square, and I’m to count how many people come up to talk with him and how many with Alfio.

 
“That’s not fair,” Alfio says. “You have the horse, of course you’ll win.”

  “Fine. Then we’ll have the girl and Gonda wait in the middle.”

  So there I am in the middle of the square halfway between Papa and my uncle with Gonda’s bridle tight in my hands. I’m very anxious, partly because Gonda is restless and is making the wheels of the buggy clatter back and forth, and partly because I really want Papa to win, but I don’t want Alfio’s losing to be a total defeat. I see Alfio’s thin little body, his nervous tic. On the other side of the square I see Papa’s imposing figure. I see the gleam of Alfio’s bald spot. On the other side I see Papa’s full head of hair. And at that moment, even though I know I should be on Papa’s side, I suffer for Alfio, so much that I want to shout, “Stop! That’s enough—no game!” Gonda is becoming more impatient and starts pawing the pavement with her hoof. Meanwhile people are gathering around Papa, more and more of them, while a few nod to Alfio and walk on by.

  By now it’s useless for me to pay attention, useless for me to keep score. The only thing I can do is hang on to Gonda’s bridle as she rears, lifting me into the air to celebrate Papa’s triumph.

  Before the September storms, there always came a Sunday afternoon when our vacation seemed too long, when Clara and I would be sitting in the cool front hall of the villa to escape the heavy air outside, paying attention to the relentless buzzing of a fly against the window-pane, an unmistakable sign of our boredom. One of us would lazily ask, “What’ll we do now?” a bit irritated at seeing the other one in the same state of listlessness. We’d pretend to think about it for an instant. And then we’d give up with a sigh and end up sitting there, doing nothing for hours.

  On afternoons like that, back home after a month at Versilia on the Tuscan coast, it would sometimes happen that some of my father’s cousins would come for a visit. Mariapia was a widow, and she came with her old-maid sister, Elisabetta, and almost always with her eighteen-year-old daughter, Grazia. They came in their tiny sky blue car, the daughter at the wheel beside her enormous mother, who took up most of the space in front, and in the back, surprisingly skinny and swaying like a pendulum, was Elisabetta.