Ties

by Domenico Starnone

  —Where would they put all the stuff they have? he asks.

  —They need to toss out more than half of it. We’ve moved so many times, but Mom never threw anything away, and she made you and me hold on to every little thing, too. You might need it, she’d say, you might need it if only to remember when you were little. Remember? Who wants to remember? I hate my room, it stresses me out just to be in it, all the crap you can think of is in there, from when I was born to when I finally escaped.

  —Mine’s the same.

  —See? And if what I’m saying is true about our rooms, can you imagine what happens if we go through their stuff? For example: Did you know that Mom keeps all her shopping ledgers—bread, pasta, eggs, fruit—from the day she was married, 1962, till today? And Dad? He even hangs on to the junk he wrote when he was thirteen. Without factoring in the newspapers and magazines he published in, notes on the books he read, transcripts of his dreams, and so on. Fuck, he’s hardly Dante Alighieri. He wrote some lame stuff for television, that’s it. If anyone really cares about his thoughts—and I doubt it—you digitalize it and settle the matter.

  —It’s their way of leaving some trace.

  —A trace of what?

  —Of their lives.

  —Do I leave a trace? Do you? This mad drive to conserve is Mom’s thing, Dad couldn’t give a shit.

  He smiles, and I see, in his eyes, an unhappiness that, this time, looks genuine.

  —You think so?

  —Of course. If we convince them to sell, we give their lives a deep cleaning and do them both a favor.

  —I don’t think to.

  —Why not?

  —In this house there’s visible order, but a disorder that’s real.

  —Explain what you mean.

  —I won’t explain anything to you, I’ll show you.

  He gets up, motioning for me to follow. Labes runs behind us. We go into Dad’s study. Sandro points to the bookcase.

  —Ever looked in that cube up there?

  8.

  I pretend that I’m enjoying myself, but actually, crying hasn’t been a release. I feel a bitterness that’s making me tense. If my brother abruptly takes off his mask and decides to show me how he’s softened, it means I need to worry. I see him climb quickly up the ladder, and he comes back down with this blue cube, covered with dust. He wipes the dust off it with the sleeve of his shirt, and hands it to me.

  —Do you remember it?

  No, it’s never intrigued me, nothing in this house has ever intrigued me. I detest its thousands of tacky things. I detest every room, every window, every balcony, also the glint of the river, the oppressive sky. Sandro, meanwhile, says that he remembers that cube from forever, that we already had it in the house when we lived in Naples. Look what a pretty color it is—he says softly—and how it’s polished: To him it’s the most amazing geometric shape there is. When for some reason our parents were out—he tells me—I used to rummage everywhere. That was how he once discovered condoms in our father’s bedside table and vaginal cream in the one on our mother’s side. Oh, gross, I blurt out, but then I’m ashamed: I’m forty-five years old, I’ve been with an impressive number of men and women, and yet I still feel disgusted thinking of my parents having sex? Sandro looks, unsure, at my hands. He says: Enough, you’re trembling. I’m surprised by his tone, genuinely delicate. He takes back the cube and he’s already clambering with ease up the ladder to put it back in its place. I get angry. I say, don’t be an idiot, come back down, what do you want me to see? He stops up there, wavering. It’s a box—then he says—you open it by pressing against this side. And he presses, and indeed the box opens. He shakes it and causes a certain number of Polaroids fall out.

  I kneel down to collect them. They show a person both he and I know very well. It’s exactly the way we know her, with this happy face. She entered our consciousness one morning when we’d stopped—me, him, and Mom—on a quiet street in Rome. We’d come from Naples for this purpose. We felt dark dread inside, she was the one we were waiting for. Mom explained it to us: she said, let’s wait for her to come through that door with Dad. And in fact, when our father and this girl stepped out—they were so beautiful together, they sparkled—Mom told us: There, see how happy Dad is? That’s Lidia, the woman he left us for. Lidia: Even now the name feels like an animal’s bite. When Mom pronounced it her desperation became ours, the three of us inhabiting a single body. But on that occasion, as I watched that woman carefully, the single organism I belonged to broke apart. I thought: How pretty she is, how cheerful. When I grow up I want to be just like her. But this thought made me feel immediately guilty. I still feel guilty, I’ve felt guilty all my life. I realized I didn’t want to resemble my mother anymore, and that I was thus betraying her. Had I the courage I would have shouted, Dad, Lidia, I want to go for a walk with you. I don’t want to stay with Mom, she scares me. Instead, now, in this precise moment, I feel incredibly sorry for my mother, and also for myself. Lidia is naked, she’s glowing. The two of us aren’t like her, we never were. The secret presence of these pictures proves it. My dad never left Lidia, and how could he: He kept her hidden in his mind and in our house his whole life. While we were the ones, even though he came back, that he left. And now that I’m much older than the Lidia in these photos, also older than my mother in that time of unbearable pain, seeing her makes me feel even more humiliated.

  —How long have you known about these? I ask my brother, who’s come down from the ladder.

  —About thirty years.

  —And why didn’t you ever show them to our mother?

  —I don’t know.

  —And to me?

  He shrugs. It means he can no longer be bothered trying to convince me of his good intentions. I whine:

  —You’re so good. You’re all so good with women. You have three big goals in life: fuck us, protect us, screw us up.

  9.

  Sandro shakes his head, saying something about the state of my health. I tell him I’m fine, rather, that I feel great. It’s also great that I told him about Labes’s name, and that he told me the story about the blue cube. Now we know a little more about our father. What a man, never protests, always yes, yes. He was and remains Mom’s slave. I hated so much that she ruled with an iron rod, and that he let himself be tortured, never rebelling. And I hated him so much for never lifting a finger to protect us from her. Dad, I need this. Ask Mom. She says no. Well then, no.

  I examine the photos, and one by one I let them fall to the floor.

  —What else do you know that I don’t? I ask my brother.

  Sandro patiently gathers up the photos.

  —I don’t know anything else about Dad, but you just need to poke around to learn more.

  —And about Mom?

  He admits reluctantly to having various suspicions. He’s convinced that our mother had lovers. Proof, I said, not speculation. You have to want to find the proof, he replies. And he confesses that for years he thought that she’d had an affair with Nadar. Nadar? I exclaim, laughing: I don’t even want to think about it, Mom with that eyesore, Nadar, what a ridiculous name. Sandro insists. Maybe it happened in 1985, you were sixteen and I was twenty. I ask: And Mom? I never knew how to do math in my head. He answers: Forty-seven, two years less than I am today, two more than you. And Nadar? No idea, sixty-two? Oh my God, I exclaim, forty-seven and sixty-two. Then I laugh again and shake my head, incredulous: How disgusting, I don’t believe it.

  But my brother believes it, I realize he’s always believed it. Looking around, he says: Something emerges sooner or later. If it’s not Nadar it’s someone else, you just need to check inside a flower vase or in the pages of a book or on the computer. He lists a number of possible objects. I look at them for the first time, curious. I feel my mother and father. I feel them in the silent rooms, together and apart. Sandro says: They hid from each other, but
not without the threat of discovering each other at any moment. At this point, for no apparent reason, his eyes start to shine. He’s one of those men who flaunt knowing how to cry. He reads a novel, you ask him how it is, and he says: I cried. He sees a film, ditto. Now he bursts into tears and cries more than I cried a little while ago. He always tends to overdo it. To calm him I hug him and stay close, while Labes mews, disoriented. Maybe I was unfair to Sandro. He was the older one, he remembered more. Our parents’ troubles fell onto him first and then—maybe they really were filtered by his zeal to protect—onto me. I say, come on, enough, let’s have little fun, let’s throw a little light on things.

  10.

  They were carefree hours, perhaps the most lighthearted ever spent in this house. We rummaged everywhere, room after room. In the beginning we limited ourselves to upending our parents’ order, trailed cheerfully by the cat. Then we got our hands dirty and went on to dismantle everything. It was getting hotter, I was sweaty, and before long I got tired. I told Sandro: That’s enough. But he kept going, with increasing fervor. So I brought a chair onto the balcony off the living room, and I was pleased to see that the cat was taking refuge beside me. I gathered him into my arms, talking to him for a while. My mind had cleared, even my fixation with convincing our parents to sell the apartment had vanished. What an insane idea. Sandro reappeared, he’d taken his shirt off. Just like Dad, I thought. He looked at me, laughing:

  —Well?

  —I’ve had my fill.

  —Should we go?

  —Yes. Labes wants to come with me.

  He frowned.

  —No, that’s going too far.

  —Actually, yes, I’m taking him away with me.

  —Leave Mom a note.

  —No.

  —Then call her as soon as she’s back.

  —What for?

  —She’ll suffer.

  —The cat won’t. See how happy he is?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including First Execution (Europa 2009) and Via Gemito, winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.