“Can we go or not?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one day. Now go to sleep.”
For a moment the nighttime silence descends over the room, as do the thousands of noises night brings with it: the owl with its steady and unvarying whistle, something moving among the junk piled up in the yard, probably a mouse. Ignore it.
“But I haven’t asked you the second question yet.”
“The statues were the second question.”
“No, the statues were the second part of the first question. The real second question is, in your opinion, what happens when you die?”
That’s what Luna asks, point-blank, then silence again. The owl, creatures roaming the yard, pieces of metal stirring in the wind. Nothing is sleeping tonight, everything tosses and turns, you included. Nights are the worst. At least during the day things occasionally happen to distract you for a second or two. At night Luca is all there is, so much so you can’t resist him, you feel your mind laboring and your thoughts become increasingly tangled, stitched together, until finally, rather than thoughts they’re just images, fragments of phrases, smells, colors that remind you of your son. You keep staring at them with your eyes closed, in a state that only looks like sleep from the outside.
That’s what your nights are like, revolving around Luca, clinging to someone who’s not there. Never mind when Luna asks you that sort of question.
“What sort of a question is that? Why are you thinking about that at this time of night?”
“I mean, in your opinion, Mom, what happens when you die? In your opinion, is it possible that we’re still around, that we can see what’s going on in the world . . . I mean, when you die do you die? Or are you maybe always partly alive?”
“I don’t know, Luna, how would I know? I don’t know, you don’t know, no one knows. We only know when we’re dead,” you say.
“True. I feel the same way. When we die we know a lot of things. At least I think so. I’m not sure. But if I were dead I’d know for sure.”
“Right, well, there’s no need to rush to find out. Remember, if you die you won’t be able to go to Pontremoli.”
“Exactly! But we’re alive, Mom, so shouldn’t we go while we’re alive? There are statues there with heads shaped like crescent moons. No one knows who made them or even why. They’re a mystery. How cool is that? Can we go see them?”
Now that she mentions crescent moon heads you realize you know what they are, these statues. You’re not sure where you first heard of them, but recently they’d rediscovered one. A farmer had been plowing his field for corn when he drove his tractor into it head-on and split it in two. Later it was pieced together and put in a museum. Maybe you heard about it or dreamed it, you don’t know. All you know is you don’t want to go to Pontremoli now, you can’t go, and you should respond to Luna’s “Can we go, Mom? Can we?” by saying, “Enough. Go to bed. It’s late.”
“But we have to go. We have to. Can we? Come on, tell me we’ll go.”
“One of these days.”
“Oh, Mom, I know when you say ‘one of these days’ you mean never. Well, why not? We’ll take a little trip, see some nice places—why don’t you want to?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to, Luna, it’s that . . . ” You pause for a moment, and as the words funnel out, they collide with something lodged in your throat that throws your voice. “It’s that I can’t. I can’t right now. Let the school take you. See if they’ll organize a trip. I can’t come.”
“But I want to go with you, Mom, what would that cost you? I’m asking you for a favor.”
“No, Luna, I said no. Don’t nag. Don’t push me. Have I ever pushed you?”
Luna doesn’t speak, but you can tell by her hair brushing your arm that she’s shaking her head.
“There. Now go to sleep, tomorrow you have school. And if you don’t want to go to school, I won’t force you to go. Say the word and I’ll turn the alarm off. Do you want to stay home?”
Again that brush of her hair that means No.
“All right then. Now go to sleep. Tomorrow you have to be up early.”
For a while it really seems as if she’s through. Silence returns, the owl, the mouse, night. But Luna isn’t through, you can tell by the way she’s breathing against your chest.
“But why, Mom? I don’t want to nag or force you, but tell me why. Because of Luca?”
His name. You think about Luca constantly. He’s always on your mind, burning under your skin. Your life is a blur behind him. And yet hearing his name still catches you by surprise. Whoever utters it drives you mad, as if they were using it up, ruining it, even Luna. You’d rather it were otherwise but that’s how it is.
“What’s this got to do with Luca?”
“Nothing. I mean, in my opinion Luca wouldn’t be happy about your always being here either, Mom. He liked doing lots of things. Do you remember the time he was at the newsstand and a truck bound for Germany braked and he hopped on board and hid in the back because he wanted to see what Germany was like?”
“Of course. I remember that clearly,” you say. The word “clearly” comes out sounding slightly bitter. Since what you mean is you’re the only one who remembers. Luna can’t, she was too young. She only knows because you told her. He made it all the way to Bolzano on that truck. He’d gotten off at a rest stop because of the cold. He asked a family headed to Bologna for a lift, a truck driver took him to Florence, and you went to pick him up there, after a day of panic and fear. You even tried to say something to him when he got in the car, to give him a talking-to for the length of the trip. But he went to hug you, and when he saw how angry you were, this look of surprise came over his face. He really didn’t get it. He flashed you a smile, sat back in his seat, and began telling you about the places up there, how cool they were, about the spotless rest stops in the middle of the woods, about the music that sounded a bit like Romagnol folk music except more aggressive, and, and—your anger didn’t stand a chance.
But now he’s not here and your anger is stronger than ever. Despite yourself, you feel it at the back of your throat tonight as you ask your daughter what the hell that truck has to do with anything.
“It has to do with his being happy if you got out sometimes, Mom. Luca doesn’t want you shut inside the house. Luca wants you to go to Pontremoli.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Luna? What are you talking about?”
“He told me himself, Mom. I swear. I didn’t believe it but it’s true. Luca talks to me. It sounds crazy but I swear it’s true.”
“Are you crazy? Have you lost it? When does he talk to you? How?”
Your anger fuses into a kind of evil and desperate laugh, and perhaps what you’d really like to ask her is, “Why doesn’t he talk to me?”
“He doesn’t actually talk to me. He sends me things. He sends things to the seashore and I interpret what he’s trying to tell me. Did you see the whalebone in my hair? That was a present from him. He was supposed to bring it to me from France. He also told me about the pan that broke and burnt your foot. Now he’s telling me you have to go to Pontremoli. And I’m coming with you. And Zot too. And Mr. Sandro, our catechist, has to come too, and . . . ”
Luna carries on like that, raining down words, each more unbelievable than the last. She unleashes them on you. You try to shield yourself but you’re overwhelmed. You bristle. Just as you do whenever someone wants to talk to you about Luca. Like your mother’s old friend—and like your mother, a total bitch—who waylaid you at the funeral, saying, “Don’t cry, Serena, don’t cry. Luca is a little angel now looking down on you from heaven.” And you told her to go fuck herself. What the hell did she know? Garbage, empty sentiments meant to make her feel good and wise, which she had simply tossed out there before turning around and putting it out of mind, which she offered to you, who think about him every second, every m
oment of your life.
Luna drives you mad too. Her words drive you mad, reaching your ears aslant now that she’s gotten out of bed and gone to fetch something. She moves ably in the dark, goes, comes back. “Look,” she says, “look what I found today.” But you don’t know what you’re supposed to look at because all you see is darkness, darkness broken by those ridiculous words, until by dint of thwacking your box-cum-nightstand you find the light switch, and in that suddenly illuminated room is your disheveled daughter, rushing to cover her eyes with one hand while in the other holding up a grimy piece of wood.
Flat. Shaped like a mushroom. A round head and two eyes. Whatever this thing is, it really shoddily put together, something a preschooler might make, with two dark strips tacked on made of something like rubber or leather. Luna holds one up to your face and says, “Read this, Mom. Read it.” You take it. It says SANDRO. “Wait, no, sorry. Read the other one.” The other says SERENA.
Big deal. What the hell did that prove, that you’re not the only one who has to endure the name Serena? What does Luca have to do with junk like this? Luca only made wonderful things. What does this piece of shit have to do with your son? The thought makes your hands tremble with anger. You tighten your grip on the wood, you squeeze it harder, you hear it creaking as if it were about to break. “No,” screams Luna. But you persist. You grit your teeth and tighten your grip around the wood. Not that you have anything against this junk, or against your daughter; your anger is blind and aimless and has nowhere to escape, so it spills out everywhere, trying to pounce and tug and break and destroy until there’s nothing left, not a thing.
Not even your daughter, who’s still here. She grabs onto the wood and tries to pull it away but is blinded by the glare of the lamp. She loses her footing, slips off the bed, and falls backward, and as she falls she opens her eyes to see what’s happening, yet she continues to see nothing, she tries to latch onto something but there’s only air around her, then the hard thunk of her head hitting the floor. You hear it too, while Luna disappears for what feels like forever, far longer than this miserable night.
You dive on top of her. Your child’s eyes are closed. You hold her head up and hug her with all your strength. You hug her and ask for forgiveness. You hug her and cry.
“I’m sorry, Lunetta, I’m sorry. Your mother’s a cretin. Your mother is a stupid dumb idiot. How on earth a mother this stupid and dumb and idiotic could have two such amazing kids I don’t know. I swear I don’t. We’re going to go to Pontremoli, okay? We’re going to go together and look at the statues and do whatever you feel like. And we’ll bring blankets from the house and picnic in a park. Did you hear that, Luna? Would that make you happy? Tell me it would. Answer me. Tell me you’re happy. Say it, Luna. Say it!”
Then you stop talking. You try to stop crying, too, since all you want is to hear your daughter. But she doesn’t move. She doesn’t open her eyes and she doesn’t talk. The silence of the night has subsided into real silence, no more owls and mice and things moving in the dark. Everything has stopped to listen.
Finally there comes the voice of Luna, held tightly in your arms, saying, “Yes, Mom, I’m happy, very happy. But if the catechist comes, would you please not beat him up this time?”
CAIN’S DOG
Sandro and Rambo hoof it to the ninth floor of the skyscraper, bowed by shopping bags. They’d stopped by Eurospin and picked up frozen pizza, potato chips, generic beer, a square of ham big as a shoebox, cartons of milk, peeled tomatoes and beans and anchovies and four different kinds of cheese, cornflakes and chocolate cookies and a five-liter plastic bottle of white wine.
They’d fished out a ton of money from the common pot, savings for moving in together they weren’t supposed to touch, but Marino was about to be discharged from the hospital, and he can’t stay here by himself, so they’re all moving into his apartment together. The money had to be spent, no harm done.
Aside from Marino’s mom’s cold dead body in the freezer.
“I’m serious. This thing doesn’t make the slightest impression on me,” Rambo says, entering the house. “Do you know how much those sons of bitches at funeral parlors make? They exploit people’s pain and take them for a ride. The coffin, transportation, flowers, a whole song and dance just to slide you down a hole. Besides, what’s the big difference between being underground or in a freezer?”
Sandro nods.
“There was this story in last week’s Tirreno. A guy from Poggibonsi electrocuted himself in his house. They found out a month later cause he hadn’t paid his rent. They went in and he was dead in the bathtub, and in the freezer was his old man, a disabled vet.”
“Figures, given the cost of funerals. Plus, yo, you know how much money a disabled vet makes a month? Once you’re dead they turn off that tap, you know, goodbye and god bless. Nah, Sandro, nowadays if someone dies on you, you’re better off keeping him in the house. I know it still feels weird to us, but it’ll become the norm. This recession changed how we live, don’t think it won’t change how we die.”
Sandro nods and places his bags on the living room table. Rambo drops his on the couch. For now neither has any desire to carry them into the kitchen.
“So, where we going to put the frozen pizzas?”
“Beats me,” says Rambo. “In the fridge. There must be a freezer in the fridge, right?”
“I hope so, cause I’m not putting them in the freezer with Marino’s mom.”
“Obviously not! That freezer is sacred. We’ve got to treat it like a tomb. No way we’re putting pizzas on top of Marino’s mom. See now that would be wrong. That’d be like going from perfectly rational to twisted.”
Sandro looks at Rambo, Rambo looks at Sandro, and they both nod as if to convince each other that, as long as they find another space for the pizzas, all will be well.
But that isn’t even what’s bothering Sandro. Marino’s mom is dead, packed in ice in the kitchen with a blanket wrapped around her—that’s life. What’s really weighing on him is this business of the statuette that he left for the kids to find on the beach; the more he thinks about his master plan, the shittier he feels. First he helped Luca, a wonderful kid with a bright future, squander that future in one fell swoop. Now he’s exploiting his death to dupe two little kids and get close to the woman he likes. In short: first I kill you, then I come find you beyond the grave and use you to sleep with your mom. That’s the truth, no excuses this time, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The situation is cold, stiff, irreversible—like Marino’s mom inside the freezer.
Thinking about it sets Sandro on edge. His throat tightens and his heart beats faster than when he was climbing nine flights of stairs. Even if deep down he knows perfectly well that his real problem isn’t that he duped those two kids. His real problem is that Zot and Luna haven’t called him yet.
Perhaps they’re not so gullible after all and figured out his piece of wood was junk. Or maybe they know another Sandro—an uncle, a neighbor, worse yet some idiot courting Serena—and hadn’t thought of him. Writing SANDRO on the bracelet wasn’t explicit enough. He should have written SANDRO THE CATECHIST. He’d mulled that over but it had seemed excessive. So he asked for a cross after his name, but that moron who makes the bracelets told him it was impossible, best he could do was put an X at the end. Yep, that there is the root of the problem: disorganization plus perfunctoriness plus a lack of means. It’s the story of Italy, the story of Sandro’s life. Poor motherland. Poor me.
“Poor motherland,” he says aloud, trying to buck himself up and heading for the kitchen to find a place to store the pizzas.
Rambo trails him. “You said it,” he adds, “the motherland’s really taking it in the ass.”
And for some reason, actually for no logical reason at all, Sandro and Rambo briefly exchange glances then burst out laughing. A lot. And loudly. They can’t stop. They stand in the kitchen, holding their frozen pi
zzas, laughing. They take down two glasses to get a drink. The tap makes a weird noise and the water comes out all brown, and there are only two or three things in the fridge which haven’t gone bad, and what keeps best is a dead lady in the freezer, and Sandro and Rambo do the one thing they can: keep laughing. They laugh so hard they cry. They could carry on like this all day, all night, until the neighbors come complain about the racket, but were they to enter, they would immediately start laughing and crying for no reason and every reason in the world, and never stop.
But Sandro and Rambo, they do stop, they stop on a dime at the sound of the doorbell.
The noise is hysterical and jarring, like a bomb going off in the empty afternoon. Rambo ducks behind the wall and signals to Sandro to keep quiet. They both stop breathing.
A moment later the bell rings again. And again. It’s not a bomb; it’s a bombardment. And when they hope that it’s all over, that this pain in the ass at the door has finally given up, there comes the only sound more terrible than the doorbell: the sound of a human voice shouting, “I know you’re in there! I heard you laughing! I know you’re in there!”
It’s a man’s voice. He begins knocking harder. At a certain point they can no longer tell whether he’s knocking or trying to break down the door.
They have to come up with something fast before this idiot attracts the attention of the whole building. They run to the living room. Rambo points toward the door, stations himself in the middle of the room with his fists up, and whispers, “Go on. Open it. I’ve got your back.”
Sandro tries to look through the peephole but can’t see anything. He opens the door a crack, plugs it with his foot, and sticks his head through the chink. And there, a speck on the dark landing, is a short, skinny, seventy-something wearing a striped apron, bug-eyed, with a wispy comb-over.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hello,” replies the man.
“May I help you?”
“I—I don’t—sorry, who are you?”
The Breaking of a Wave Page 30