She had chosen a rainy day. She was wearing a lot of clothes. Under everything she had put on a pair of her brother’s underpants. Then she had continued with T-shirts, sweaters, and a skirt over pants. Also gloves. A hat and two coats, a lighter one, and then a heavy one on top. She had put on rubber boots—green rubber boots. Like that she had left, and gone to the bridge over the river. Since it was night, no one was there. A few cars, unwilling to stop. Andre had started walking in the rain; what she wanted was to get completely soaked and become as heavy as a piece of wreckage. She walked for a long time, back and forth, until she felt the weight of all that sopping-wet stuff. Then she climbed up on the iron railing and jumped into the water, which at that hour was black—the water of the black river.
Someone saved her.
But those who begin to die never stop, and now we know why Andre attracts us beyond any common sense, and in spite of our every conviction. We see her laugh, or do things like ride on a motor scooter, and pat a dog—some afternoons she goes around with a girlfriend, holding her by the hand, and she has a purse that she puts useful things in. Yet we no longer believe in it, because we’re thinking of how she suddenly turns her head, eyes terrified, searching for something—oxygen. Even the habit she has—her neck bent back, chin raised—the habit of standing like that. On the invisible surface of the water. And each of her disappearances, including those which are unmentionable and shameless, which we don’t know how to describe. They’re like flashes, and we understand them.
It’s that she’s dying. Andre—dying.
Then Bobby asked his mother why Andre had done it, but his mother got a little difficult there, he guessed that she didn’t really want to tell the rest of the story, she closed a drawer suddenly, with more force than necessary: our mothers waste nothing, not even the pressure of a wrist on a drawer handle—but she did it, and that was to say that she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore.
Once we went to the bridge, at night, because we wanted to see the black water—that black water. Me, Bobby, the Saint, and Luca, who is my best friend. We went on our bicycles, we wanted to see what Andre’s eyes had seen, so to speak. And how high the air really was, if we were to consider jumping it. We also had half an idea of climbing up on the railing, or maybe leaning forward a little, over the void. Holding on tight, though, because we are all boys who get home in time for dinner—our families believe in routines and schedules. So we went: but the water was so black it seemed thick and heavy—mud, oil. It was horrible, and there was nothing else to say. We looked down, leaning on the icy iron of the railing, staring at the fat veins of the current, and the bottomless black.
If there was a force that could compel you to jump, we weren’t acquainted with it. We are full of words whose true meaning we haven’t been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don’t know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery. It also happens with less solemn words. Bobby once told me that when he was young, fourteen, he happened to go to a meeting at the church devoted to the subject of masturbation, and the odd thing was that he, at the time, didn’t in fact know the meaning of the word masturbation—the truth was that he didn’t understand what it was. But he had gone, and had said his bit and had a lively discussion, this he remembered well. He said that, thinking back, he wasn’t even sure that the others knew what they were talking about. Possible that the only one there who actually jerked off was the priest, he said. Then, as he was telling this story, a doubt must have crossed his mind, and so he added, You know what I’m talking about, right?
Yes, I know. Masturbation, I know what it is.
Well, I didn’t know, he said. I had in mind certain times when I rubbed against a pillow, at night, because I couldn’t sleep. I put it between my legs and rubbed against it. Just that. And I had a discussion about it, that stuff, can you imagine?
But we’re like that, we use a lot of words whose meaning we don’t know, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. That’s why it wasn’t possible for us to have Andre’s eyes, and see the black water, from the bridge, as she had seen it. She who comes, rather, from a world without caution, in which the human adventure isn’t protected by normality, but veers widely, until it touches the edge of every distant word, no matter how sharp—and first of all the one that means death. In their families, they often die without waiting for old age, as if impatient, and so familiar is the word death that not infrequently their recent past includes the case of an uncle, a sister, a cousin who was killed—or who has killed. We die, every so often; they are murderers and murdered. If I try to explain the rift in caste that separates us from them, nothing seems to me more exact than to go back to what makes them irremediably different and apparently superior—the availability of tragic destinies. A capacity for destiny, and in particular a tragic destiny. Whereas we—it would be correct to say that we can’t afford the tragic, maybe not even a destiny—our fathers and our mothers would say We can’t afford it. That’s why we have aunts in wheelchairs, who’ve had a stroke—they watch television, drooling politely. Meanwhile, in the families of those other people, grandfathers wearing custom-made suits swing tragically from beams, having hanged themselves because of financial ruin. So it might happen that a cousin was found one day with his head bashed in by a blow inflicted from above, in the setting of a Florentine apartment: the physical evidence is a Hellenistic statuette representing Temperance. We, on the other hand, have grandfathers who live forever: every Sunday, including the one before their death, they go to the same pastry shop, at the same time, to buy the same pastries. Our fates are measured, as if the result of a mysterious precept of domestic economy. So, cut off from the tragic, we receive in inheritance the costume jewels of the drama—along with the pure gold of fantasy.
This will make us forever lesser, private—and elusive.
But Andre comes from there, and when she looked at the dark water she saw a river flowing whose sources she had learned in childhood. As we are beginning to understand, a whole web of deaths weaves hers, and into hers extends the warp of a unique death, generated by the loom of their privileges. So she had climbed up on the iron railing, when we barely managed to lean forward a little, over the black mud. She let herself fall. She must have felt the slap of cold, then the slow sinking.
So we went to the bridge, and were frightened by it. On the way home, on our bicycles, we realized that it was late, and we pedaled hard. We didn’t exchange a word. Bobby turned off to his house, then the Saint. Luca and I were left. We rode beside one another, still mute.
I’ve said that of them all he is my best friend. We can understand each other with a gesture; sometimes just a smile is enough. Before girls arrived, we spent all the afternoons of our lives together—or at least so it seems to us. I know when he’s about to leave, and at times I can tell the moment before he starts speaking. I would find him in a crowd, at first glance, just by the way he walks—his shoulders. I seem older than him, we all do, because there’s still something of the child about him, in his small bones, his white skin, in the features of his face, which are delicate and very handsome. Like his hands, and his slender neck, and his thin legs. But he doesn’t know it, we barely know it—as I said, physical beauty is something we don’t pay attention to. It’s not necessary for the building of the Kingdom. So Luca wears it without using it—an appointment postponed. Most people find him distant, and girls adore that distance, which they call sadness. But, along with everyone else, he would simply like to be happy.
A couple of years ago, when we were fifteen, we were at my house, on one of those afternoons, lying on the bed reading some Formula 1 magazines—we were in my room. Just next to the bed was a window, and it was open—it overlooked the garden. And in the garden were my parents: they were talking, it was Sunday. We weren’t listening, we were reading, but at a certain point we started listening, because my parents had started talking about Luca’s mother. They didn’t realize that he was there, o
bviously, and were talking about his mother. They were saying that she was a wonderful woman and it was a pity that she was so unfortunate. They said something about the fact that God had given her a terrible cross to bear. I looked at Luca; he smiled and made a sign to me to sit still, to not make a noise. He seemed amused by the thing. So we went on listening. Outside, in the garden, my mother was saying that it must be something terrible to live with a husband so ill, it must be an agonizing solitude. Then she asked my father if he knew how the treatment was going. My father said they had tried everything but the truth is that one is never really cured of those troubles. You just have to hope, he said, that he doesn’t decide to do away with himself, sooner or later. He was talking about Luca’s father. I began to be ashamed of what they were saying, I looked again at Luca; he made a gesture as if to say that he didn’t understand, he didn’t know what they were talking about. He placed a hand on my leg, he didn’t want me to move, to make any noise. He wanted to listen. Outside, in the garden, my father was talking about a thing called depression, which evidently was a sickness, because it had to do with drugs and doctors. At a certain point he said, It must be terrible, for the wife and also for the son. Poor things, my mother said. She was silent for a bit and then she repeated, Poor things, meaning Luca and his mother, because they had to live with that sick man. She said that one could only pray, and that she would. Then my father got up; they both got up and went inside. We instinctively lowered our eyes onto the Formula 1 magazines, we were terrified that the door would open. But it didn’t. We heard my parents’ footsteps, in the hall, as they went toward the living room. We sat there, immobile, our hearts pounding.
We had to get out of there, and it didn’t end well. When we got to the garden, my mother came out to ask when I would be back, and so she saw Luca. Then she said his name, in a kind of greeting, but animated by surprise and dismay—unable to add something, as she would have, on an ordinary day. Luca turned to her and said, Good evening, signora. He said it politely, in the most normal tone there is. We are very good at pretending. We left while my mother was still there, in the doorway, motionless, a magazine in her hand, her index finger holding her place.
For a while as we walked, one beside the other, we said nothing. Entrenched in our thoughts, both of us. When we had to cross a street, I raised my head, and as I was looking at the cars go by, I looked at Luca, too, for a moment. His eyes were red, his head bent.
The fact is that it had never occurred to me that his father was sick—and the truth, however strange, is that Luca hadn’t thought anything like that, either: this gives an idea of how we’re made. We have a blind faith in our parents; what we see at home is the just, well-balanced way of things, the protocol of what we consider mental health. We adore our parents for that reason—they keep us sheltered from any anomaly. So the hypothesis doesn’t exist that they, first of all, can be an anomaly—an illness. Sick mothers do not exist, only tired ones. Fathers never fail, at times they are irritable. A certain unhappiness, which we prefer not to register, occasionally assumes the form of pathologies that must have names, but at home we don’t say them. Resorting to doctors is unpleasant and, when it happens, moderated by the choice of doctor friends, familiars of the household, little more than confidants. Where the aggression of a psychiatrist might be useful, we prefer the good-humored friendship of doctors we’ve known all our lives.
To us this seems normal.
So, without knowing it, we inherit an incapacity for tragedy, and a predestination to a lesser form of drama: because in our houses the reality of evil is not accepted, and this puts off forever any tragic development by triggering the long swell of a measured and permanent drama—the swamp in which we have grown up. It’s an absurd habitat, made up of repressed suffering and daily censorships. But we can’t see how absurd, because we’re swamp reptiles, and it’s the only world we know: the swamp for us is normality. That’s why we’re able to metabolize incredible doses of unhappiness, mistaking it for the proper course of things: the suspicion does not arise that it hides wounds to be healed, and fractures to be pieced together. Similarly, we are ignorant of what scandal is, because we instinctively accept every possible deviation betrayed by those around us simply as an unexpected supplement to the protocol of normality. So, for example, when, in the darkness of the parish cinema, we felt the priest’s hand resting on the inside of our thigh, we weren’t angry but quickly deduced that evidently things were like that, priests put their hands there—it wasn’t something you needed to mention at home. We were twelve, thirteen. We didn’t push the priest’s hand away. We took the Eucharist from the same hand, the following Sunday. We were capable of doing that, we are still capable of it—why should we not be capable of mistaking depression for a form of elegance, and unhappiness for an appropriate coloration of life? Luca’s father never goes to the stadium, because he can’t bear to be in the midst of so many people: it’s something we know and interpret as a kind of distinction. We are used to considering him vaguely aristocratic, because of his silence, even when we go to the park. He walks slowly and his laughter comes in bursts, as if he were making a concession. He doesn’t drive. As far as we remember, he has never raised his voice. All this seems a manifestation of a superior dignity. Nor are we alerted by the fact that everyone around him displays a particular cheerfulness. The exact word would be forced, but it never occurs to us, because it’s a particular cheerfulness, which we interpret as a form of respect—in fact he’s an official at the Ministry. Ultimately we consider him a father like the others, only perhaps more opaque—foreign.
But at night Luca sits beside him on the sofa, in front of the television. His father places a hand on his knee. He says nothing. They say nothing. Every so often the father squeezes his son’s knee hard.
What does it mean that it’s an illness? Luca asked me that day, as we walked.
I don’t know, I don’t have the slightest idea, I said. It was the truth.
It seemed pointless to go on talking about it, and for a very long time we didn’t mention it again. Until that night, when we were coming home from Andre’s bridge, and were alone. In front of my house, with our bikes stopped, one foot on the ground, the other on the pedal. My parents were waiting for me, we always have dinner at seven thirty, I don’t know why. I should have gone in, but it was clear that Luca had something to say. He shifted his weight onto the other leg, tilting the bike slightly. Then he said that leaning on the railing of the bridge he had understood a memory—he had remembered something and understood it. He waited a moment to see if I had to go. I stayed. At our house, he said, we eat almost in silence. At your house it’s different, also at Bobby’s or the Saint’s, but we always eat in silence. You can hear all the sounds, the forks on the plates, the water in the glasses. My father, especially, is silent. It’s always been like that. Then I remembered that many times my father—I remembered that he often gets up, at a certain point, it often happens that he gets up, without saying anything, before we’ve finished, he gets up, opens the door to the balcony, and goes out on the balcony, pulling the door closed behind him, and then stands there, leaning on the railing. For years I’ve seen him do that. Mamma and I take advantage of it—we talk, Mamma jokes, she goes to get a plate, a bottle, asks me a question, like that. Through the window there is my father, back to us, a bit bent, leaning on the railing. For years I haven’t thought about it, but tonight, on the bridge, it occurred to me what he goes there to do. I think my father goes there to jump off. Then he doesn’t have the courage to do it, but every time he gets up and goes there with that idea.
He raised his eyes, because he wanted to look at me.
It’s like Andre, he said.
So Luca was the first of us to cross the border. He didn’t do it on purpose—he’s not a restless kid or anything. He found himself next to an open window while adults were talking incautiously. And, from a distance, he learned about Andre’s dying. They are two indiscretions that damaged his—ou
r—homeland. For the first time one of us pushed beyond the inherited borders, in the suspicion that there are no borders, in reality, no mother house untouched. Timidly he began to walk a no-man’s-land where the words suffering and death have a precise meaning—dictated by Andre and written in our language in the handwriting of our parents. From that land he looks at us, waiting for us to follow.
Since Andre is insoluble, in her family they often cite her grandmother, who is dead now. According to their version of human destiny, the worms are eating her. We know, however, that the Judgment Day is waiting, and the end of time. The grandmother was an artist—you can find her in the encyclopedias. Nothing special, but at sixteen she had crossed the ocean with a great English writer: he dictated and she typed, on a Remington Portable. Letters, or parts of books, stories. In America she discovered photography, now she turns up in encyclopedias as a photographer. She liked to photograph derelicts and iron bridges. She did it well, in black and white. She had Hungarian and Spanish blood in her veins, but she married Andre’s grandfather in Switzerland—thus becoming very wealthy. We never saw her. She was known for her beauty. Andre resembles her, they say. Also in character.
At a certain point the grandmother stopped taking photographs—she devoted herself to keeping the family together, becoming its gracious tyrant. Her son suffered from this, her only son, and the woman he married, an Italian model: Andre’s parents. They were young and insecure, so the grandmother broke them regularly, because she was old and had an inexplicable power. She lived with them and sat at the head of the table—a servant handed her the plates, saying the name of each course in French. Until she died. The grandfather had departed years earlier, it should be said, to complete the picture. Died, to be precise.
Before Andre, Andre’s parents had had twins. A boy and a girl. To the grandmother it had seemed rather vulgar—she was convinced that having twins was something poor people did. In particular she couldn’t bear the girl, whose name was Lucia. She couldn’t see the use of her. Three years later, Andre’s mother became pregnant with Andre. The grandmother said that, obviously, she should have an abortion. But she didn’t. And here’s exactly what happened next.
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