“She can barely read the headlines with a magnifier.”
“That’s an exaggeration. And these days things can get on a blog or a tweet and go all around the globe in a second. Someone might call her up.”
“Stop already. It’s very unlikely that anyone will read this. I’m not Proust.”
She laughs. “She might think I was egging you on because of that quarrel I had with Lucian.”
“That was twenty years ago. You should have made it up long ago. You both cared for each other and he loved you. He was upset about your talking to, who was it?”
“His niece.”
“That got him into trouble with his family.” Honestly I couldn’t remember what had been so important. But I knew that Hannah couldn’t keep a secret. All secrets were on the same plane with her. They had to be poured into someone’s ear like the poison in Hamlet. Maybe the habit of witnessing simply took over. I would have liked to see her run for mayor of Rome, running against corruption. Her friend Rina was a Roman senator. I remember one day I had lunch with Rina—a beautiful woman, by the way—and she introduced me to another senator, saying here is the only one who knows the difference between cultura and spazzatura. Culture and Garbage! She was some woman, that Rina! Her husband was a big publisher—I think Mondadori.
I was curious about why she lived separately. She cupped her breasts and laughed. “He wants my milk. I need my milk for myself.”
Her voice was like a lioness purring. Another day, I accompanied her to the palace. She’d been invited to dinner with the president and was bringing him her book. Like a real tourist, I took her picture with one of those handsome guards. Maybe I’m the only person who knows those things. Plump little moments to swell out a future biography. A researcher will be happy to find them. She did win the Strega, after all, and her memoir of the war years is brilliant.
Hannah is tapping her foot impatiently. “We weren’t talking about my quarrel with Lucian. We were talking about your airing your negative thoughts. And in any case, I couldn’t make up with Lucian because he and she joked to people about you and Claudia—La Dentista, Gabriella called her, and people would laugh. Listen, Caro, I don’t want to go on with this. Erminia is coming soon and I have to go to the market.”
“Vai con calma. Non ti preoccipi.”
After she goes, I think about what she said. I suppose I should suppress some of this. But not now. Some of what I am saying is libelous, no doubt. If I remember correctly libel is anything that gives a negative picture. Truth is no defense. I like the sound of that and roll it on my tongue. Truth is no defense.
Yesterday or maybe just some hours ago—time has gotten a funny way of compressing itself—I found an old shoe box in the storage space next to the couch in the entry to our apartment. Erminia uses the space to store the ironing board and we used to put our suitcases there between trips. I don’t suppose we’ll be going anywhere soon. But in all the jumble of things I found a box of my mother’s old letters from friends. I leafed through and read a couple.
They seemed to be from younger friends, mostly artists or writers she had invited to dinner, who had told her their problems. Reading them, I feel as if she were still alive. Her friends obviously don’t realize how troubled she is. They ask her what to do about getting a gallery, finding a publisher, dealing with a difficult child. I have a vague memory of people at her funeral talking about how wise she was, implying that we, the children—the comments were mostly addressed to my older brother—must be suffering from having lost such a mother.
The thing is, children miss their mothers terribly even if they are monsters, even if they beat them black and blue, tie them to the bedpost, starve them. Even if the children could run away, they don’t. My mother wasn’t like that, of course. If anything she left me alone too much. I had the idea that she hired a nanny when I was born. It would have been an English Nanny because she wanted us to be bilingual. And after that, she paid us no attention. But now I think that is wrong. It’s nice to know your memory can deceive you.
Did you know, by the way, that Maurice Sendak, the great writer of children’s books, said he never wanted to have children because it was too much trouble? That’s how I thought my mother felt. But yesterday—since I saw the sunrise in my window mirror, I know it’s a new day—I found a little leather notebook with “Baby’s Sayings and Doings” engraved on it in gold. And there it was with my name inside and the date of my birth, 1922, and my weight, five pounds. I hadn’t known that I was so small. It must have worried mother because she notes my weight week after week. She had a delicate script and used brown ink. She wrote in straight lines, ignoring the broader spaces provided by the notebook. It could almost be a work of art. Her words sculpt my living body. By nine weeks I weigh nine pounds. By three months I am twelve pounds. The jottings continue until I am five, long past the time when she might have been anxious about my weight, You see, don’t you, that this means she cared about me. Ruling off the tiny pages and writing in her careful artist’s script.
Did I tell you she was a painter? Never a very successful one, but a painter nonetheless. And now I have established that she cared. A little further on, she records my feeding schedule, seven feedings a day. She didn’t nurse me—I know that. She told me she couldn’t because my father thought nursing caused breast cancer.
I was standing up in my playpen at twelve months, waving goodbye, saying Mama, Nana, Dada. By then I was eating a variety of things, including custard and mashed vegetables. Wouldn’t you say that shows …? Or maybe if you were unbiased it wouldn’t show anything. By fourteen months I’m walking and listening to music. I like Au claire de la Lune and Italian and American nursery songs. When my nurse sings them, I bounce up and down rhythmically. Ah, so already I am a little artist, or perhaps a musician. My mother notes that her friend Margaret came over one day and played on the piano—it must have been the grand piano at Todi. She told my mother that I listened and tried to sing. Also for the first time I played with a little boy, Pietro.
And at around fifteen months I submitted to toilet training. That would be young, I think, by today’s standards and of course I don’t remember it. Then comes something I do remember: my first accident. I fell into a cactus plant and she had to pick out the spines one by one. When I think of it I see an enormous jade-green cactus, or maybe a garden of them, and me dressed only in my diaper, coming nearer and nearer. Mother used to remind me how long it took to pluck out the spines with a tweezer and how miserable I was.
But most of her observations in the baby book were positive or neutral. I liked to look people over before making friends, and so mother directs visitors to play with my panda or a toy until I come over. That usually happens sooner rather than later, for I am very inquisitive. That is underlined in red. And then there is a tiny portrait of a baby’s head surrounded by a wreath of flowers. Could you guess that such a mother would later kill herself? Doesn’t she sound both caring and sane, or have I missed something? I read a little more. The pediatrician pronounces me anemic, prescribes iron, beef juice, liver. My mother is upset to think that this could happen; she had felt sure, she says, that I was getting every care and was “perfectly normal.” Well, maybe she’s a little controlling, anxious, but still, I am fascinated by her looking at me, watching me. She faithfully records my first cold, my response to commands, my trying and not succeeding to eat with a spoon, how she lets me push the food around. I like this young mother. She notices everything. True, she is on the alert for signs of talent. But so are a lot of mothers. She is enchanted by my reactions to sophisticated music. I love jazz and Mozart or Schoenberg. I now like to look at picture books. Mother records my increasing vocabulary, also my sunbaths with an ultraviolet lamp. Oh, that’s not a good one; I guess I’m a candidate for melanoma.
By sixteen months I look at myself in the mirror, then look at my mother, bemused. Already a young Derrida, or was it Lacan with all the mirror business? There is one note that makes me sligh
tly uncomfortable. She says I follow her from room to room. Where was my nanny? Maybe on her day off. I sense there is something else going on. But what? The surprise of finding this little diary is wearing off. I am almost finished. Tired.
Then on the next page I see that she takes a two-week vacation and says I am almost hysterical when she gets back. After that, Mother says she is feeding me herself and she continues to let me play with the food, something my new German Nanny, no doubt obsessed with cleanliness, didn’t permit. Even if Mother does this to compensate for finding me undone by her absence, her doing it is the important thing. So it isn’t true, the story I told myself for years, that she saw me only before I went to sleep. She couldn’t have observed all these things if she’d just looked in on me once a day. No, she seems to have been truly engrossed in my progress.
But still something seems to me to be glossed over. When she mentions that I am less hysterical when the second nanny is fired than when the first was, suddenly I remember. The first one was fired after she let me fall on my head, going headfirst down a slide. Mother used to tell me about it. It must have been traumatic. I know she told me that I had to stay in bed so long that I forgot how to walk. Could she have been censoring her journal? I don’t want to think that. And she does note my hysteria after she goes away for a two week vacation. Did I say that already? I’d love to know what she means by “hysterical” exactly. She only notes that I forgot my toilet training and was off my feed. Whatever my infant state, it seemed to her that I made less fuss the second time she changed my caretaker. A Freudian might say this set up lifelong problems with separation, perhaps later making Hannah suffer what I’d suffered. That’s the kind of thing they like to speculate about. But I’m tired now. I go out on the terrace to lie down in the sun.
Things are bursting into bloom here and buds are everywhere. Even my recalcitrant olive is flourishing. I think about going for a walk but Hannah would be angry that I went without her. I wish she didn’t worry so much. The back streets of Rome are like a village, particularly in this neighborhood. But they are not. Maybe they just seem that way. I imagine going to the fruit and vegetable store. I can almost see it from our front door. I don’t think I’d get lost. I’d go in and feel the melons, go next door and buy some prosciutto. But no, she’d be angry. Instead I start thinking about Primo in Auschwitz. It comes into my mind without being asked. At the same time I see a seagull catch an air current and soar by me, coming down on the chimney and looking around with its red eye. Strange things bubble up in my memory, like the old men Primo describes, going to the toilet and having no paper to wipe themselves. How they suffered from the humiliation. Old men like me now.
It was all about dirt. The old men were “dirty Jews.” Their shit ran down their scrawny legs like brown water. Everything was made as humiliating as possible, the dirty rags they—I almost said we—were forced to wear, the clogs with broken soles, the shaving of hair to destroy the lice. All to humiliate them, disgusting Jews in their second childhood, weak as babies, dropping dead from exhaustion during roll call. Hannah suffered those things too. My Hannah, and she was just a child, but she never wanted to kill herself, though of course the thought of it must have crossed her mind.
One of her friends there ran into the electric fence. Another tried to escape and was hung in front of all of them. Actually, she—I think her name was Ella—defied the hangman by putting her own head in the noose and stepping off the platform. Robbing them of a victory. How different from the poet who put her head in an oven after turning on the gas, with her children in the next room—or my mother in her bed. I want so much to understand, but the suicides still make me sick. Worse than sick; furious, in a rage. Anne Sexton, for instance. Didn’t she go out to the car in which she planned to gas herself with nothing on but a luxurious fur coat? Such a coat might have saved a prisoner’s life. Her daughter had to cope with that display every day of her life. I can’t manage, I can’t do it, can’t forgive.
The sun rose so gradually this morning I was almost afraid it wasn’t going to come up. It was dark when I got up, with the moon hanging in a corner of the sky, still quite bright. La lune ne garde aucune rancune.
One thing that is good about geriatric sex is its delicious slowness. It would be good to die that way, like going to sleep after. But I’m afraid I won’t be so lucky. That’s why people make suicide pacts, I suppose, to be sure—like coming together. It’s not the dying that frightens me so much. It’s the thought of…of what? In the night I saw shadows in our room and heard something gnawing and skittering inside the wall. It frightened me to the point of wanting to scream. Instead I called Hannah. I felt as though some Eldritch horror was positively coming to get me.
Just before morning is the worst time for my hallucinations—as Hannah calls them. Her doctor told her they’re common in cases of dementia. Sometimes I see a shadowy figure approaching the bed. I try to remember that it’s probably Hannah getting up to go to the bathroom, but I can’t shake off the fear that it’s a murderer. If you want to know how it feels, think of Tony Perkins in Psycho, approaching the shower. Or the Mother with the knife. How strange for that to come to mind. Little bits of it surface slowly. At first I only remembered that Tony was living with his old mother. Then I recalled with a sick feeling in my stomach, that he had become his mother, that she inhabited half of his mind! My romantic vision of a suicide pact turned into murder. Tony, insanely jealous of his mother’s lover, had poisoned them both. No, that was not at all the double suicide I was thinking about but still, two dead—mother and lover.
Am I jealous of the lovers Hannah might have after I die? Yes, I’m afraid I am. I hate to think of her bringing them here where we started out as young lovers. Maybe I should talk to her about it. Tell her that of course I’ll leave her the apartment with the stipulation that she won’t bring any future husband or lovers here. Would she honor that? I doubt it. And who am I to ask her anything like that after my years with Claudia?
I wish I had a piercing searchlight that could see into her brain, the way those new machines do, and spy on her thoughts. I could pronounce the names of her boyfriends—she’d had plenty when I was with Claudia—girlfriends too for that matter, and see what parts lit up. But now? The one time I mentioned my painful thoughts, she laughed, reminding me that she’d had one heart attack and might very well have another. Didn’t I ask her to take me back so I could care for her?
Elders is what they call us now, anziani. As in “respect your elders.” It seems instead of respect we are now the chosen targets for all sorts of crimes. Hannah came back from lunch with her friend Arianne with a particularly egregious example.
Arianne’s grandson had called her on the phone late at night and saluted her with “grandma,” a word that makes her quiver with pleasure. She worships all her grandchildren. But she couldn’t quite tell if it was Guido or Jacobo. When she asked if this was Guido, the boy said yes. Guido’s’s voice had been changing for several months so she attributed his slight hoarseness to that or possibly a cold.
They chatted for a few minutes. Arianne thought he might be fishing for a birthday present although she had already given him an anticipatory one, a guitar. Quite expensive too. They chatted for a few minutes—Oh, I already said that and it probably didn’t matter that they chatted, except that when she asked about it, he was comfortable talking about the guitar and how he was enjoying the touring band.
Then out of the blue in a tiny voice he told her he’d had an accident. He’d been coming home from a party on the outskirts of Rome with some friends, and the driver had had too much to drink, so he took over. He had himself had two beers but he assured her he felt perfectly alert and what happened wasn’t his fault. The car in front of them stopped short and he rear-ended it. Then the police arrived and gave him a breath test. He failed it by a fraction, but when they took him to the station and let him take it again, he passed.
“What? You’re at the police station?”Arianne w
as aghast. “Did you call your parents?”
“They told me that I have only one call. So I thought…”
“Of course,” Arianne said, secretly thrilled that the boy would trust her to help him. “But I don’t understand; why aren’t they letting you go?”
“It’s complicated, Grandma, the people in the Audi were foreigners. Their insurance will cover the damages, but the Hertz company insists on being paid back before they leave the country. The judge said he won’t release me until they receive the money, and if I don’t get it, they’ll have to keep me overnight with the common prisoners.”
Arianne felt she was out of her depth, so she called her husband who asked to speak to someone at the station. Michelle, a well-spoken man who said he was the public defender got on the phone and patiently confirmed what the boy had said. The public defender said he was making every effort to keep the accident and the “impaired judgment” off Guido’s record. He thought that the experience had already “taught him a lesson.” He concluded by asking who would be taking care of this; the money, $2,400, was needed immediately. Could they manage?
“Of course,” Arianne’s husband said, and the public defender told them step-by-step how to wire money from a store in centro. In the center. He gave them the name, spelling it out carefully, “E as in Edgar, D as in Dan, G as in …” Then the last name and the number. “Be sure not to mention what it is for,” the public defender said. “Don’t mention the impairment, just say it is a loan to a friend.” He ended by leaving the number where he could be reached and promised to call back promptly. He promised that Guido would be released that afternoon.
Oh no, this is no good. I can’t expect you to get excited about people you don’t know. And besides, it is all a lie. It wasn’t Arianne who answered the phone, it was me, though Hannah had told me to let the answering machine pick up. I answered the phone because I was bored and couldn’t think of anything to write in my journal. The “boy” that called was pretending to be Hannah’s nephew, Guido. He was visiting from Florence or was it America? From the moment I heard his voice, I was confused. It didn’t sound like anyone I knew. But I often forget what people sound like now, and I wanted to manage this conversation really well to show Hannah I was still capable. So I chatted enthusiastically about Guido’s music with him. When he told me about his accident, rear ending some tourists from Lebanon, I was first in shock and then lost in the flurry of detail. The main thing I gathered was that it wasn’t his fault, that he was in jail, and that he needed money quickly.
After Auschwitz: A Love Story Page 11