Chapter Nine
No One Can Be Saved If They Don’t Want to Be
One of Signora Vitagliano’s cats pays me a visit from time to time. The bloody mog goes out on to the balcony, circumnavigates the building and slips into my flat. I think it’s partly Emma’s fault, because she always leaves her window closed, so that the beast is forced to travel another few feet to find a pious soul who accepts its desire to escape Eleonora’s morbid affection. And if, as now, the shutters are closed, it stays outside scratching until I’m obliged to open up.
A bit of a problem, in short, but also company. I get up and pick it up by the neck to bring it to the bed. It’s half past three in the morning and getting any shut-eye is out of the question. The cat is called Fluffy, but I’ve nicknamed it Beelzebub. Fluffy is an appalling name; only a woman could have come up with it.
No one in the block can bear Eleonora Vitagliano because her stray cats follow her inside the building. The truth is that those cats would hurl themselves from the fifth floor for her. And what’s more, she stuffs them full of food from dawn till dusk! I’d be surprised if some of them didn’t suffer from cholesterol or diabetes.
And yet, at the end of the day, I like the cat lady; even as a girl she was pleasant and sunny by nature. Today she’s tetchier, less open to her fellow human beings, but she doesn’t cause much trouble, and she’s kind to animals. And if I had reached the age I am without realizing how much animals deserve our respect, it would mean I hadn’t acquired the slightest understanding of the way things are.
In any case, I’ve called the puss Beelzebub because it’s completely black and its eyes have dazzling red reflections. A devil, in fact, which wanders around the building in search of some stupid human to offer it a nice bowl of biscuits. I don’t have any to give, but the creature’s incessant miaowing in the silence of the night gets on my nerves. I go into the kitchen, and freeze at the desolate spectacle of the fridge, which contains only three eggs, a bit of cooked ham, a pack of processed cheese slices, a bottle of wine and some milk. The choice boils down to ham or milk.
I sit down at the kitchen table and throw the ham to my friend, who devours it in an instant and then stays there looking at me with pleading eyes.
‘I’m sorry, old pal, I have nothing else to give you. You’ll have to make do with that.’
I pour him a drop of milk and me a drop of wine, and begin to reflect on this fairly ridiculous scene: I’m sitting in the dead of night in the company of an animal, each of us with his nose in a drink. Luckily mine is a lot stronger.
But I wouldn’t mind being a cat, one that isn’t really tied to anyone, one that ‘decides’ to love because basically it doesn’t need to and can get by perfectly well on its own. I like people who get by without annoying anyone else. There, if I had to be reborn as an animal (which, given my many sins, is a possibility that should not be discounted), I would like to be a cat. I would find a cat lady to sponge off, and I’d go off all day looking for some little puss-cat to woo. I’d be one of those dirty cats with a big head and dark eyes who wander among the rubbish bins like cheetahs among the trees of the savannah. Marino, on the other hand, would be a Persian or a Siamese, one of those breeds which have adapted to domesticity over the centuries, becoming incapable of living in the streets. It has taken generations for a Persian to turn into a sybarite in need of others, while it’s only taken Marino a single lifetime.
A dull thud comes from the landing.
Beelzebub turns round just for a moment, and immediately comes back to his milk.
I get up and step into the corridor.
‘Open up, you whore!’
I look through the spyhole and see him, the wife beater, thumping his front door and ranting. ‘You lousy bitch, open up right now, or you’ll be sorry!’
He seems drunk. I’ve got to do something, but if I think about it too hard I won’t do anything.
I open the door.
He turns round and looks at me as if he’d just seen a Martian coming out of a flying saucer.
‘So? What way is that to speak to a young lady?’
I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m acting out of instinct. Sometimes you either act instinctively or you don’t do anything at all.
‘What the hell do you want?’
He reeks of alcohol and he seems pretty drunk to me. Perhaps I should shut the door and get back to my drink, but I’m too proud. And then, damn it, who would be brave enough to punch a poor old man?
‘You’ve woken me up and you’re also upsetting your wife – that’s what I want to sort out!’
He comes over and stares right into my eyes. Then, with stinking breath, he puts his thoughts into words. ‘Go fuck yourself !’ he snaps.
Marino, in my place, would lower his eyes, apologize and retreat into his flat. But I’m me, and Cesare Annunziata is not like other old men. If someone steps on my toes I’ll react, even if it means getting my leg broken. So I stage one of my classic little scenes, those scenes that I’m really good at.
‘You jerk, you’re talking to a retired army general. Kindly moderate your tone or I will wipe that idiotic expression off your face!’
He steps back and I grin with satisfaction. The army general works every time.
The bastard is about to say something in reply, but at that moment the door opens and she appears in the doorway. The man packages all his accumulated rage into the expression that he turns on his wife, then he hurls himself into the house and disappears.
Emma, on the other hand, stays in the doorway and turns towards me.
I smile, proud of myself, but the lady doesn’t seem very happy.
‘And what do you want of me? Mind your own business. No one’s asked you to do anything!’ And she closes the door.
I stay on the landing, still with that half-smile stamped across my face, then I snort irritably and go to the bathroom. I have to pee, as always happens when I get angry or agitated. I sit down on the toilet and in comes Beelzebub to rub himself against my wrinkled calves. I turn to him, the only creature I have to talk to.
‘And there was I almost getting myself killed to defend her! I’m a stupid, romantic, old fool. No one can be saved if they don’t want to be. I haven’t worked that out in almost eighty years!’
Beelzebub looks at me with some alarm, then decides not to waste his time with a foolish old man who talks to himself, and stops to lick his paw. I’ve always found it a brilliant way of washing: economical, it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere and it doesn’t make you waste time. Except that we should have been made double-jointed with prehensile tongues. I often wonder why we were made so complex, what need there was for all those organs, capillaries, blood, intestines, nails, hair? Couldn’t we come up with a simpler alternative? And why do we need energy from outside, from food and water? Or oxygen? Why can’t we be self-sufficient? It’s a complex subject and if I sit here for much longer I won’t be able to feel my legs and I’ll have to call the emergency services to get back to bed.
The bell rings. Beelzebub runs for shelter under the sofa. I look at the time: it’s a quarter past four. Tonight’s busier than usual. It might be Emma wanting to apologize, or maybe her husband who’s had another think and wants to punch me. I stop half-way down the corridor and prick up my ears. The bell rings again, briefly. My tormentor wants to kill me but, at the same time, he’s worried about waking up the whole building. For a fraction of a second, I’m tempted to go back to bed and use the earplugs that I still keep in the bedside-table drawer, then I think about Marino’s moony face and open the door. If I’m going to die I’d rather do it while I’m still alive.
In front of me is the frail outline of Eleonora Vitagliano, in dressing gown and slippers.
‘Hello,’ I begin.
‘Hello. Forgive the time, but I need to talk to you.’
I’m not used to letting women into my flat, particularly when I’m in my pyjamas, but the word ‘woman’ isn’t appropriate for m
y neighbour.
As soon as I open the door, Beelzebub comes running.
‘Darling, this is where you’ve got to!’ she says, and picks up the thuggish cat which has already forgotten yours truly and the ham it cadged off me.
‘Cesare, I saw what happened a moment ago…’ She imagines she whispers, but because she’s deaf the volume of her voice is entirely out of kilter with her facial expression.
‘Ah,’ I observe, not knowing what else to say.
‘You did right to step in,’ she goes on. ‘That character needs someone to stand up to him.’
I nod and stay in the doorway, waiting for the old thing to understand and leave me alone. Instead she stays there, with Fluffy in her arms, staring me intently in the face.
‘Eleonora, it’s four in the morning…’ I try to say, but she isn’t even listening.
‘I think that man hits his wife!’
I open my eyes wide. So the old dear is less senile than I thought.
‘What do you know about it?’
‘What?’
I turn my voice up a notch. ‘I said…Are you sure?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m sure. You know, I don’t hear very well, but those two have been making such a racket recently…’
‘Yes…’
‘Only the other night I saw them coming home and she had a cloth over her mouth.’
‘Anyway, the girl told me not to get involved, so I’m not going to,’ I answer brusquely.
‘And what if something happens?’
‘It won’t be my fault.’
‘We could call the police.’
‘You call them! I was about to be attacked, and I got an earful too. However, Eleonora, I understand your concern, I really do, but you know what it’s like. It’s late…’
‘Yes, forgive me. You’re right. The fact is that I can’t get to sleep at night these days.’
‘Yes, I understand.’
Life is strange. When you are young and strong you always get to sleep; when you become spineless and idling about seems a good way of passing the time, shutting your eyes is out of the question.
‘But if those two argue again I’ll call you,’ she says as she steps back on to the landing.
‘Fine,’ I reply.
I’d be capable of promising her anything at all at that moment.
I say goodbye to her and that two-faced cat and shut the door behind them.
I glance at the clock again: it’s half past four in the morning. There’s no point trying to get to sleep now – it makes more sense to put the coffee on to boil.
What a great night! A drink with an admiring cat, an argument in the course of which I nearly got myself killed, a scolding from a disagreeable neighbour who I was trying to defend and a chat with Eleonora Vitagliano. It’s a good thing the sun will be up shortly. In the meantime, I think I should have a shower. The people in the building are right: the cat lady might well be nice, but, God, she stinks.
Chapter Ten
The First of Three Unattainable Women
When you reach my age, inevitably you start drawing up a balance of your own life: the things you’ve done and the things you’ve lost, the bad deals you’ve made, the opportunities you’ve missed. But since I’ve never liked drawing up balances I’ve avoiding doing it and still do. Whatever you want to say, if I were to land on the planet another ten times, I’d still travel the same journey and crash into the same rocks along the way. Most of us are like ants: we follow a trail that has already been laid for us. So, don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with a list of complaints; instead I will talk about women, who remain, in my opinion, one of the chief reasons for living.
I’ve had lots: pretty, ugly, nice and nasty, kind and mean. And I have never loved any of them as much as the only three I couldn’t have. You know, a thing you’ve enjoyed, whether it’s a car, a house, a job, even a woman, is consumed like wax in a flame. But you do get used to what you don’t have. So, even now that I’m an old buffer whose sole hope lies in the altruism (so to speak) of Rossana, the only ladies who come in search of me in the silence of the night, apart from my wife, are those three harpies who refused to lie by my side.
Anna was a schoolmate of mine. Fair hair, green eyes, big bazumbas. I fell in love as soon as I saw her. Even then, in fact, I had an unfashionable enthusiasm for curvaceous figures. The problem was that she was older than me, albeit by only a year. And yet for children those three hundred and sixty-five extra days make all the difference; in the period of time it takes the earth to rotate around the sun, a woman has already understood that you, a small and insignificant creature from the class below, are worth about as much as the gum stuck under her desk.
A moment comes in everyone’s life when we work out that the romantic stories of impossible love affairs that grandparents and old aunts told us are simply nonsense. Love is much cruder than an old relative serving up the ‘truth’ to you, which means that you can have a lovely smile, write love poems to your princess or serenade her below her balcony, but if your face is a sea of pimples and your breath stinks she’s going to go out with someone else. So you have to wait for your last year of school to launch your assault. And, thinking about it, that’s how it was. The time spent secretly tailing her (or, in the toilet, devoting to her brief and fleeting moments of passion) taught me that if you really desire something, then waiting turns into hope and makes time worth living.
I was as head over heels in love with Anna as only a young pup who knows nothing of life’s snares could be. And that is, in fact, the right age to lose your head over a girl: if you don’t learn to love at fifteen, you never will. When I approached her that day, I had already desired her for three years, I knew where she lived, who her best friends were, even her exes. But she knew nothing about me.
I don’t think I’m mistaken when I say that what I later became was due to that fateful moment. A simple act changed the rest of my life. Because by the time I came home I was convinced that I was engaged. I even told my mother, who smiled and went back to the stove. At the time I placed no importance on her shrug, when I should really have asked the reason for her scepticism. The next day I went over to Anna and hugged her. She looked at me in alarm, pulled away and asked me what I was doing. A kiss was just a kiss; we certainly wouldn’t have had to get married to have one of those. The problem was that for me it was the first time. First times should be exclusively for neophytes, otherwise the party who has already been through the experience extinguishes, without meaning to, the wonder in the other. Anna ruined my first kiss. Then I thought that in order to conquer her I would really have to do something much more difficult: share the ‘first time’ with her. In short, I had to take her to bed.
It took me eleven months to put the plan into action, months in which I assumed the role of the friend who could be trusted, the friend who accompanied her wherever she went, the friend who gave her advice, who was always there if he was needed, a bit like a little lapdog. In every respect I was perfect. Except that you don’t get engaged to a friend and, in fact, she went around with other boys, certainly not with me. But then her father died, and I admit that it was a great coup for me, because Anna needed me even more. In the end, one day, we were amusing ourselves more than usual on my bed, talking about her father. If it had been up to me, I would have spent the rest of the evening listening to the thousand anecdotes about her father, which didn’t interest me at all, but at some point she hugged me and turned to face me. She was still talking, except that her mouth was very close to mine; even if I’d wanted to I couldn’t have pursued the conversation as if nothing was happening. So we kissed again and, in a few moments, we found ourselves half naked under the covers.
I still remember the sensation; my skin can relive the moment to infinity. It’s true that the things we guard passionately never die, a bit like my grandparents’ house, which I can still revisit even now if I close my eyes.
The fact remains that I was there. A few moments lon
ger and I would have given her a ‘first time’ too; I would have become for ever one of the things that she would guard with jealousy. But, as we know, love doesn’t deceive us – if anything, it prefers to strike us right in the face with a well-aimed slap. At the crucial moment she stopped me, took my face in her hands and said, ‘Cesare, I’m sorry. I’m fond of you, but I’m only going to do that with the man of my life!’
I would be really curious to know if she kept her promise. I would like to meet her and ask her: ‘You see? Your noble principle was a load of nonsense! Couldn’t you have made an exception that evening? And who says I couldn’t have been the man of your life?’
Instead I said nothing, I got dressed, I kissed her chastely on the cheek and walked her home. We never saw each other again, she got engaged a short time later and I went off on military service. After a few years I discovered that she had moved north with her husband. I never met her again; as far as I know she might even be dead.
Anna was my first experience of unrequited love – a pointless invention, thinking about it. There are so many lonely people in the world who could meet, love, be happy, have children, betray and then leave each other, while instead many waste time pursuing someone who is barely aware of their existence.
And yet this story has taught me one lesson: people who are bad-tempered, sulky and suspicious aren’t really bad; it’s just that, unlike everyone else, they haven’t been able to work out the truth, that the world is no place for the good.
I was good. Then along came Anna, with her kick up the arse.
I should tell the story to my children, explain to Sveva that I too was a better man before life taught me to look around warily, like a hare leaving its form to look for food. The animal has a sense of danger in its DNA – it is born ready to defend itself from predators – while I wasted my first twenty years learning how to protect myself against my fellows.
Life on Earth should be like a journey to the East, an experience that opens the mind and turns us into special beings. Instead the precise opposite happens: they drag us out of the black hole when we are snow-white and put us in a box after we have tried on all the colours. I think that something, in the scrap of time that we have down here, isn’t working as it should.
The Temptation to Be Happy Page 5