“Signora Perilli says to say hello,” I said at the end of the meal.
“Oh, her. She didn’t want me to leave school.”
“Actually she still thinks you should go back.”
“Yeah, sure! Now I have a beard I show up with a notebook and make the kids laugh.” He spoke with a swagger, but he blushed slightly.
“According to the teacher you’re very intelligent.”
“Well, I’m not going back, I have other stuff to do.” He got up to put the prosciutto away; there wasn’t much left.
“Now you’re working in the city, you sleep at your friends’?” I asked, sweeping the crumbs up off the floor.
“So? What’s the problem? The Gypsies I know live in houses, and they’re good people, not like everybody thinks. The carabiniere put a lot of stupid shit in your head.”
There was no moon at the window later, the room was in perfect darkness, and silent. I wasn’t sleeping, but, perhaps distracted by my own breath, I didn’t notice any movement, only, suddenly, the warm salty breath over me. He must have been kneeling on the floor. He moved the sheet aside and reached out his hand: I would never have imagined it so timid and light. But it was the beginning, or the fear that if he waked me abruptly I might cry out. I was immobile only in appearance, I had goose bumps on my skin, my heart was racing, parts of my body felt suddenly wet. From a distance I see myself again in my adolescent body, a battlefield between new desires and the prohibitions of those who had sent me back there. Vincenzo took my breast in his palm and found the nipple erect. I felt him move and the mattress yield beside me, but I didn’t have a precise idea of his position. When he pushed his fingers on my pubis, I gripped his wrist with my hand. He stopped, but barely, and even I didn’t know how long my resistance would last.
We weren’t used to being siblings and we didn’t believe it, completely. Maybe it wasn’t because of our same blood that I resisted, it was a defense I would have tried with any other. We were breathing hard, suspended on the edge of the irreparable.
A yawn from Adriana saved us. Like a cat she was coming sleepily down the ladder in the dark to spend the rest of the night next to me. Certainly she had wet the bed above. Vincenzo moved rapidly and silently, an animal caught by surprise. My sister didn’t notice him. I yielded to her a space warmed by energies she was ignorant of and she immediately started sweating. After a while she threw off the covers; I, too, continued to give off heat. I strained my ear toward Vincenzo’s bed, I heard him tossing, then silence. He must have reached alone the place he wished to take me.
As on the other days I got up at dawn, to study at the kitchen table. Sometimes in the afternoon it was impossible, in that house. He, too, came in early, turned on the tap behind me and waited for the cooler water to come out. I heard him take a long drink, with big noisy swallows. I kept my head down over some war in the history book, but I had lost my concentration. He stayed behind me for a few minutes, I heard no movement. Then he came over to my chair, kissed my forehead after pushing aside the hair. He disappeared without a word.
19.
The swirling script on the envelope that arrived in the morning belonged to Lidia, the sister of my father the carabiniere. On the side of the addressee she had written only my first name, the surname of the family to which it was to be delivered, and the town. She didn’t know the exact address, but she hadn’t put hers, either, where the sender’s would normally go. Even without the street, the mailman delivered the letter, and the mother gave it to me when I came home from school.
“Don’t think you’re going to read it now, set the table,” she ordered harshly.
She was irritated with me, in those days, after Signora Perilli had talked to her in the street. She had told her that I was a brilliant student and next year I would have to enroll in a high school in the city. She, the teacher, would supervise the decisions of the family in this matter and would go to the social workers if necessary. With that threat she had left her in front of the post office.
“She wants to come and take charge in this house, she says you mustn’t end up like the boys. Did I force them to leave school?” the mother burst out. “And then is it my fault if you’re too smart? You use up the light studying in the early morning and I say nothing.”
After lunch she wanted me to wash the dishes, even though it wasn’t my turn, and then she asked me to dry them. Usually they dried by themselves over the sink, but that day I was in a hurry to open the envelope and she made me waste time on purpose.
Lidia had written a simple note. From the folded paper some thousand-lire bills fell out. She had been told about my transfer, that’s what she called it, and she was sorry, but I was a very intelligent girl and she had confidence in my ability to adjust. Unfortunately she was far away and busy with job and family, otherwise she would come and see how I was doing with my real parents. They aren’t bad, she reassured me, they’re our distant cousins, mine and your father’s. I knew you were their daughter, but it wasn’t up to me to tell you. And then I was sure you’d stay with my brother and sister-in-law forever. Sometimes it doesn’t take much for life to change unexpectedly.
Some questions followed: perhaps she hadn’t realized that having omitted her address she couldn’t get an answer. She ended by saying that she looked forward to coming to see me in the summer, during the holidays. In the meantime the money might be useful for small personal expenses. She, too, was worried only about those, as if nothing else were missing where I was.
I stood with the page inert in my hands. An acid rage rose from my stomach, like a wave in reverse. The mother came over, attracted by the bills she had seen fall. She picked them up and handed them to me, and asked me to leave her a couple. I shrugged weakly, and she took that for a sign of assent. There was no one in the house at that hour. She leaned over to look for something in the area under the sink, among full or empty bottles, garbage can, cockroach dens. She closed the curtain over the odor of mold and turned. I was facing her, very close.
“Where’s my mother?”
“Are you blind?” she answered, with a gesture toward herself.
“The other one. Will you make up your mind to tell me what happened to her?” and I threw Lidia’s letter up in the air.
“How should I know where she is? I saw her once only, a little while before you returned. She came to talk to us, along with a friend of hers.” She was panting faintly, sweat dampened the hair on her face.
“She’s not dead?” I pressed her.
“Why would you think that? She’ll live a hundred years, with the comfortable life she has,” she said, laughing nervously.
“When she sent me to you she was sick.”
“So, maybe, I don’t know.” The two thousand-lire notes that she had shoved in her bra had shifted and were sticking out of the V neck of her shirt.
“Then do I have to stay here forever or later on will they come and get me?” I ventured.
“You’ll stay with us, that’s definite. But don’t ask me about Adalgisa, you’ll have to deal with her.”
“But when? And where? Will someone tell me?” I shouted at her face, so near mine.
I tore the rolled-up banknotes from her breast and ripped them to pieces. Astonished, she froze, and, unable to react immediately, couldn’t stop me in time. She looked at me with fixed black pupils. She bared teeth and jaw, like a dog preparing to fight. The slap came cold, powerful: I swayed. A step in one direction, so as not to lose balance. I knocked into the bottle of oil she had taken from under the sink and it broke over the floor. For a few seconds we followed, hypnotized, the transparent yellow stain that spread slowly over the tiles, beyond the glass and over the fragments of paper money.
“It was half full and it was the last. This year you’ll come, too, to pick olives. That way you’ll learn what it is to earn what you eat,” she said before starting to beat me around the he
ad, which had caused the whole disaster.
I protected myself with my hands over my ears while she sought the exposed places where hitting would cause more pain.
“No, no, not her!” The cry came from Adriana, who had just returned with Giuseppe, I hadn’t heard the door. “I’ll clean it up now, you can’t hit her, too,” she insisted, stopping her mother’s arm, in an attempt to defend my uniqueness, the difference between me and the other children, including her. I’ve never been able to explain the gesture of a child of ten who was beaten every day but wanted to preserve the privilege that I had, the untouchable sister who had just returned.
She got a shove that sent her to her knees on the oily glass. From the playpen Giuseppe joined her shrieks of pain. I helped her get up from the floor and sit, and I began to remove with my fingers the shards of glass sticking into her skin. Blood dripped along the downy hair that girls of that age sometimes have. We heard the door slam and the baby’s crying suddenly cease, the mother had carried him off. For the tiniest fragments I had to use eyebrow tweezers that for some reason Adriana possessed. Some “ow”s escaped her, every so often. I also had to sterilize the wounds.
“Alcohol is all there is,” she said, resigned.
When she cried because it burned, I cried, too, and asked her to forgive me, it was all my fault.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” she absolved me, “but now seven years of misfortunes are coming. This is the first. Oil is like a mirror.”
Finally I bandaged her knees with some men’s handkerchiefs, we didn’t have anything else. When she got up they fell to her ankles. She wanted to help me clean up, and we were careful not to cut ourselves. She saw the letter on the floor, and the torn bills, and I told her the story.
“You’re always so quiet, today all of a sudden you have a fit?” she asked looking around the kitchen. “Did you at least hide the money you had left?”
The mother had placed it on the table when she picked it up, but it was gone. She must have grabbed it before she went out, in payment for the damage I had caused. She came back later as if nothing had happened, she was like that. She ordered us to peel the potatoes for dinner.
“The woman downstairs says you’re the smartest in the school,” she reported with a moment of pride in her usually apathetic voice, but maybe I only imagined it. “Don’t ruin your sight with books, glasses are expensive,” she added.
She never hit me again, after that.
20.
We hadn’t seen him for days. Gossip in the town said that he was with a gang of thieves who roamed the countryside and struck farmhouses, in different places at the same time, the rumor went.
The prosciutto he had brought was soon finished. The mother had sawed the bone into several pieces while Adriana and I held the ends. She had boiled them one by one with beans, and the soups were fat and flavorful. Our diet was unvaried for a while and our stomachs were upset.
My sister had a stomachache and didn’t come to school that morning. The widow on the ground floor opened the door when she recognized my footsteps.
“Watch out, today something bad’s gonna happen,” she announced. “Last night two owls were singing outside the window of your mother’s room,” she responded to my questioning look.
When I came out of school the air was too hot for the season. I crossed the square between the market stalls that were being taken down. In front of the porchetta truck a gust of wind raised dust and paper, and the seller immediately covered the leftovers with a napkin. He saw me, as he did every Thursday.
“What are you doing here? You don’t know about your brother?”
I shook my head no.
“An accident, the big bend past the dredge.”
I stopped. I didn’t want to ask which brother he was talking about. He added that our parents were at the place. I don’t remember how I got there, who I asked to take me.
There were cars parked along the side of the road, behind the police car. Someone had called the police because of a robbery: people no longer trusted the carabinieri from the town, they never caught any of those troublemakers. The cops had chased the old motor scooter with the broken muffler, and at the bend, maybe on some of gravel or an oil slick, it had skidded off the road. The boy who was driving had held onto the handlebars and didn’t have serious injuries, he was being operated on in the hospital.
Vincenzo had lost his grip around his friend’s waist. He had flown over the autumn grass, as far as the cow pasture. Had he seen, in those few instants, what he was going to get caught on? He had landed with his neck on the barbed wire, like an angel too tired to beat his wings one last time, beyond the fatal line. The iron barbs had pierced his skin, cut open the trachea and severed the arteries. He was hanging with his head toward the grazing animals, his body limp on the other side, on his knees, one foot twisted. The cows had turned to look at him, then had lowered their muzzles and gone back to grazing. When I arrived, the farmer, inert, was supporting himself on the handle of his pitchfork, in the face of the death that had taken place in his field.
The police said they had to wait for the doctor. Leaning against a tree, I saw Vincenzo from a distance. I don’t know why they hadn’t covered him, he was exposed there to the curious, like a poorly made scarecrow. A light wind rose, now and then ruffling the edge of his shirt.
I crouched down, sliding my back along the roughness of the bark. From somewhere the mother’s cries, like daylight howls. Then silence, occupied by a low voice that tried to console her. The father’s curses rose to the sky, accompanied by arms threatening God. Other hands grasped his, attempting to calm him.
I lay down on my side and curled up in a fetal position on the tiny people of the grass. Someone noticed me, came over. The arminuta, they said, or: the sister. I heard them, but as if through glass. They touched a shoulder, my hair, grabbed me by the armpits and hoisted me up to sitting. It was impossible to stay on the ground like that. They described the accident to one another, sparing no details, as if I weren’t there. They asked if the boys had been stealing. One swore they were, yes, but didn’t know where or what. The police had found only two fishing rods, sent flying off the scooter, along with a bag containing some pike, caught at the river on that sunny morning. Maybe my brother would have brought them home for dinner, like the prosciutto. Two men marveled, they’d never seen such big ones around here.
The light alternated with the shadow of clouds coming from the mountain and a sudden cold. They wanted to walk me to the farmhouse, for a glass of water. I refused. After a while the farmer’s wife came with a cup of milk from her cows.
“Take it,” she said.
I shook my head, then something about her, the thickness of the hand on my cheek, persuaded me to try it. I drank a mouthful, but it tasted of blood. I gave her back the cup while the rain began to fall into it.
Vincenzo didn’t come home: there wasn’t room for a wake. The parish church received the rough fir coffin that held him, wearing the shirt and bell-bottoms he had recently bought. Out of pity the local doctor sutured the broad cut on his neck. The stitches resembled the iron barbs that had pierced his flesh at the end of his flight. That cut would not have time to become a scar like the fish bone on his temple. In the half-light, with its heavy odor of incense, his face appeared swollen and livid, except for some unexpectedly pale patches, with almost greenish tones.
Adriana had been the last to find out. She flung herself on her brother’s empty bed, with a long outburst of tears.
“Now I can’t give you back the money you lent me,” she repeated to him in his absence.
Afterward she began to rummage through the rooms, feverish hands in drawers, in closets, in jars. I saw her hide something in a pocket, before she went out to join him in the church. The neighbors walked around the casket arranging next to his body objects that would be useful in Vincenzo’s afterlife: comb, razor, m
en’s handkerchiefs. Change to pay Charon for the crossing in the boat. Then Adriana went up to him, she touched the fingers crossed over his chest. She drew back suddenly, she wasn’t expecting them to be so cold and rigid. She took the Gypsies’ gift out of her pocket and wanted to put it on his middle finger, where he wore it. She couldn’t, she had to unbend the pinky finger and it got stuck halfway. She rotated the ring slightly, to the side with the decoration carved in the silver.
Not many came to say goodbye to him, relatives of the family and old women of the neighborhood, whose only entertainment was going to see the dead. The teacher came and, instead of making the sign of the cross, like the others, stood beside him for a few minutes and then kissed him on the forehead.
The paternal grandparents, who never went anywhere, arrived from their mountain village. They sat beside their grandson, laid out forever. I didn’t know them and I don’t know if they remembered me as a newborn. Adriana told them in a whisper who I was, and from their immobility they regarded me for a moment, like a foreigner. They shrank into themselves. My first mother had already lost her parents and they couldn’t comfort her.
Around eleven the priest began to put out the candles and sent us all away. Vincenzo remained alone for his last night on earth, under the fixed stares of the statues.
I made out only a few words of the sermon the next morning, references to those who get lost for lack of a sure and steady guide, sheep gone astray whom the Lord would receive in his merciful embrace thanks to our prayers. As we came out there was a downpour and a circle of black umbrellas rose around us, in condolence. A stranger who didn’t know what to say whispered good luck, kissing me on the cheeks. It must have been then that I felt I belonged to Vincenzo’s family.
It wasn’t raining at the cemetery. Few of us remained with him. At some point my father the carabiniere appeared on the other side of the grave, one hand holding the collar of his jacket up over his throat. He gave me a slight nod of greeting and then opened his mouth as if he wanted to speak to me from there. He closed it. He had a beard, as Nicola had told me, and looked a little scruffy. I barely reacted to that encounter, so long awaited: I didn’t go over to him—at that moment I wouldn’t have known what to ask. After a few minutes he’d already disappeared.
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