‘Finished?’ I ask.
She doesn’t look at me, but I know she would like to tell me to sod off again. But she doesn’t reply.
My turn.
‘OK. Refuge, I grant you. I admit that I wasn’t one of those fathers who are prepared to sort out their children’s lives, even if on the few occasions when I tried to do so I had all kinds of accusations thrown in my face. Passion, I grant you too. I know from personal experience that an old man still has a lot to give in that respect. And last of all, strength, I grant you. Yes, it’s true that I’ve never been very strong, or at least that’s what I like to think. But affection, understanding and security, no: I’m not letting you have those.’
‘How can you be facetious at a time like this?’
‘It comes naturally to me,’ I reply with a smile. Unlike hugs, I can still dole out smiles without shilly-shallying. I give the odd one to Sveva, even though she barely gives me one back. I should be complaining too, but I realize it isn’t the moment.
‘Great, you always behave like an idiot. An old man of almost eighty who’s still acting like a little boy. You’re pathetic!’
‘That’s a big word!’
‘You think you’re beyond criticism, is that it?’ she asks. ‘You couldn’t care less about what I’m telling you!’
If I had woken Federico when I got up from the sofa I wouldn’t be in this situation – he’d be here now and would stop us accusing each other of failure. How I would like to be the child sleeping in the other room. In fact, if I could, I’d choose to be an orc, a monster with no purpose in life except to play, for ever and ever.
‘No, I just think you like playing the part of the victim. I’ve made my mistakes. Your husband must have made his too, even though, knowing him as I do, I really don’t know what he could have done that was so serious. But you can’t say you haven’t received affection and understanding. You’ve had affection – you just need to rummage around in your hatred a bit to find it. Understanding…well, you won’t believe it, but you’re getting some even now.’
She snorts down her nose. The conversation has left her shattered. Children make superhuman efforts to reveal a great truth to a parent, unaware that the parent knows everything already. And pretends not to see.
‘You think you know everything about me, about Dante, even about Mum!’ she says after a brief silence. She is still clutching her handkerchief, drenched with rage and frustration.
The salad on the plates is starting to rot, and soon the two waitresses will be coming back.
‘I try to do my best.’
‘And yet you know absolutely bugger all. You’ve never known anything at all, you know that? You know nothing about me, about Dante, who told me and Mum that he was homosexual over ten years ago. And you didn’t know anything even about her either!’
My lips seem to be sticking together, and my heart is pounding. Caterina knew that our son was gay and never told me, even on her deathbed. I would have done so, at least before I breathed my last. I look at my arm and see that it’s covered with gooseflesh. I don’t know why, but I think something important is about to happen.
‘What should I have known about your mother?’ I ask in a thin voice, my fists clenched.
‘Forget it…’ she says, and gets up to leave.
I instinctively grip her wrist and stare her straight in the eyes.
She sits back down, her eyes fixed on her plate again.
‘Mum had someone else. She was with him for five years!’ she announces at last, in an icy voice.
If you get a punch in the face, the first thing you do is to touch it. It’s an instinctive gesture. Your body is concerned to check that everything’s all right, whether your jaw has been damaged, for example; whether you’re missing a tooth. So my first reaction to Sveva’s words is to bring my hands to my face and rub my jaw, as if someone actually had given me a thump. The sensation is the same. I feel groggy, and if there were some wine on that heavy glass table I’d glug it down straight from the bottle.
Noticing my silence, Sveva goes on. ‘You’re not saying anything?’
I haven’t enough saliva to talk.
‘Did you understand what I said?’
‘Have you always known?’ I manage to ask hoarsely, at last.
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve never mentioned it to me…’
‘Well, when it comes to that, I didn’t tell Mum about your little adventures either!’
‘Fine. They were exactly that: little adventures. But now we’re talking about a five-year affair!’
‘She didn’t have the courage to leave you. She loved you —’
‘Fuck off!’ I shout, and leap to my feet.
Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I feel I actually hate my family. I hate Caterina, who duped me more effectively than I duped her, but particularly with Sveva. And Dante.
‘Does Dante know too?’
‘Mum never told him, but I think he worked it out eventually.’
‘How long ago did it happen?’
‘She left him just before she fell ill. One evening she told me she’d decided she wanted to spend her old age with you.’
‘Great! So her lover got her best years, and I got her old age!’
‘Don’t you dare speak ill of Mum. At least she tried to love you for a whole lifetime! What was she supposed to do, spend her time with a man who didn’t even look at her? And then, unlike you, she never had an old age. If you want to pick a fight with her, don’t do it in front of me!’
I no longer know what to say. I feel confused and it’s as if I can’t breathe, so I head towards the door.
My grandson, perhaps woken by my daughter’s rage, comes towards me holding that famous orc, the one I envy him so much. He looks at me, his face puffy with sleep, and raises his arms to be picked up. I hold him and give him a kiss. At that moment he seems like the only member of the family who isn’t completely fake.
When I turn round, Sveva is sitting down again.
‘Where is he now?’ I ask harshly.
‘He died last year.’
I feel the blood pulsating in my temples and a warm flush colouring my cheeks. I say goodbye to Federico, open the door and call the lift.
Sveva appears in the doorway with her son in her arms and her eyes glistening. As I wait for the cabin to come and save me, I instinctively bring my hands to my throat in a desperate attempt to get a bit of air. I’ve got to get out of here. I need to breathe, walk, think, forgive.
‘How come I never noticed?’
‘Dad, you couldn’t even see her. We were invisible to you…’
We stare at each other for a long time, then, just before her tears turn into mine, I slip into the lift and press the button. By the time I’ve reached the street, I’ve understood one thing: if you get the seed wrong, you can’t predict what crop you’ll harvest.
Chapter Eighteen
The Second of Three Unattainable Women
We think life never ends and there’s always something around the next corner that will change everything. It’s a kind of deception that we practise on ourselves, so that we don’t get too cross with ourselves for failures, lost opportunities, missed trains. For example, I spent forty years waiting to get close to Daria, a great flame of my youth that flickered alive after an evening talking politics in an old basement where we young people came together with the insalubrious notion of changing the world. The encounter didn’t change the world, but it did change our lives. At the time I was a boy full of ideas and with great self-esteem (which, in truth, I’ve never lost with the passing years), thanks to which I managed to win the trust of Daria, a woman with a sound head on her shoulders and a slightly posh family behind her. She was more cultivated and more elegant than me, but she lacked a fundamental requirement that I had: confidence. She wrote stories and was about to finish a novel about a group of young people fighting to make Italy a better country. A kind of autobiography. It certainly was
n’t an original idea, nor was it particularly well written, but I inspired her to believe in herself and finish the novel as soon as possible.
They say that only a real love has the power to change the course of people’s lives. Mine, after meeting Daria, underwent remarkable changes. She was the one who persuaded me to accept the job with Volpe, which would later lead me to bump into Caterina. I have her to thank for everything that happened later. Or to blame, perhaps. Either way, Daria gave me a bit of her common sense, and I swapped it for my tireless optimism and enthusiasm, two qualities which, unlike self-esteem, I have squandered away in the course of my life. Of those months that we spent together, I still carry within me her loud, infectious laughter, her cold little fingers that were easily clutched, her mandarin-orange perfume that I found on my clothes in the evening. We were happy, and yet – I don’t know why – we never kissed, perhaps convinced that we would be able to do it some time or other, or perhaps wishing to prolong the pleasure of waiting. In the end, we were savouring the best phase of a relationship, when you just have to touch the other person’s skin to feel your heart beating.
To cut a long story short, Daria finished her novel and went in search of a publisher. I remember that after the first few refusals she told me she was going to give up, and for a few days I tried to persuade her not to give up, and not to be put off by difficulties. It’s funny to think about it today, but I was just repeating to her what I said to myself in bed every night: not to stop wanting a different life, to go on pursuing her dreams, not to stop at the first setback, even if it seemed easier to do so. The difference between me and her, unfortunately, is that she alone fully believed my words, and she alone put them to the test.
And in the course of a few months she found a publisher willing to publish her novel. The funny thing was that by the time it came out we were far away from one another. I remember that I bought a copy and read it in a single night. The next morning I was absolutely convinced that the book was worthless. Like our story, incidentally. It went like this. One night she stopped for a beer with her ex. I was only ever a friend, and yet I couldn’t conceal my disappointment, even though I was, among other things, at the start of an era in which being jealous and possessive was considered fascist and backward-looking. The fact was that I noticed I was still very backward-looking and I moved away from her, hoping that Daria would come and get me. She didn’t, unfortunately, and a fortnight later I was going out with someone whose name I don’t even remember, who smoked a lot and drew comic books. Daria suffered from my sudden, incomprehensible detachment from her, and she didn’t forgive me, not even when, having left the horny-handed cartoonist with the yellow fingers, I turned on my heels. At that point, another of my conservative feelings, honour, forbade me from pressing the point. I said goodbye to her and returned to my life and my unflagging courtship of Caterina, even though I couldn’t sleep at night because Daria was so far away. Over the next few months we hooked up several times, but neither of us had the courage to make the crucial move, until one day she got engaged to the one who would become her husband.
There you have it. If I had suspected that day that the guy with the Elvis quiff would be the last man in her life, I would have set my conservative feelings aside and fought to hold on to her. Instead I thought in my heart that sooner or later the two of us would be together. I believed it for forty years. Not even both our marriages, not even my children and hers, ever distracted me from the basic idea: our bodies would not be united, not even for a single night.
Every time I met her in the park, on the Metro, in a cinema, in a cafe, at the launch of one of her books, after three months or two years, I always greeted her affectionately and went away thinking that she would be mine in the end. Of course, if I claimed I stayed in love with her I would be lying. Love fades with time, like the colours in a photograph, but luckily you’re left with the outlines that remind you of the moment that once was. For forty years I haven’t loved Daria – I’ve loved the idea of being able to love her again. She gave me the opportunity to think that there’s always an opportunity, that the things you wish for really happen, you just have to know how to wait.
Then one day seven years ago, her last book came out. I didn’t even know about it when I bumped into her by chance in a pharmacy. Caterina had already fallen ill, and Daria hadn’t been in my thoughts for years. She told me there was something about me in her novel. The next day I went to the bookshop and bought a copy. On the second page I found the dedication: To Cesare, my unattainable love, for his courage, for his passion for life. With gratitude.
I had to take refuge in the bookshop bathroom to hide my tears from the world, and I spent the night immersed in the novel, the story of two lovers who watch each other from a distance for the whole of their lives. In the end I put the book in the drawer of my desk and spent two hours staring at the blank screen of the television. It took me days to get back to normal life, given Caterina’s illness and my last working days. In those pages I had found myself looking at a different Cesare, almost a stranger. Thanks to Daria, I had been able to see myself from a different perspective: hers. Books can do that too.
I absolutely needed to meet her. I promised myself I would write to her, then find her number and call her, invite her to dinner, send her a bouquet of flowers. But in that way I fell into the same error, thinking I had all my time ahead of me. Not even her big gesture of love gave me the necessary push to do what needed to be done. Forty years wasn’t enough to work it out. By the time I did, it was too late.
I managed to get her phone number from a mutual friend, and for a month I held in my hands the little piece of paper with the anonymous figures written in biro. I didn’t have the courage.
Then one morning I opened the paper and discovered that she had died of a stroke.
You spend your life believing that one day what you hope for will happen, but then you grasp that reality is much less romantic than you think. It’s true that dreams sometimes turn up at your door, but only if you’ve taken the trouble to invite them. Otherwise you can be sure you’ll be spending the evening on your own.
Chapter Nineteen
A Box Room Full of Memories
The phone has been ringing constantly for a minute. I’m lying on the sofa and I have no desire to get up to answer it. If Caterina were here with me she would do it, after snorting and cursing about my sly little smile. But she isn’t here. I’m alone, really alone, perhaps for the first time in my life. I have to be sincere: I thought I was better at coping with the knocks of life. In old age you understand that few things are really worth getting worked up about: the betrayal and contempt of your family might be rightly listed among them.
For two days I’ve been stuck at home, a record for me. I’d like to go out, not least because I’m finding it hard to breathe. I don’t know how Marino watches the days go by on his own from the perspective of his sitting room. And yet there’s something holding me back, a little voice that’s kept me company since I finished that sublime chat with my daughter and keeps repeating Sveva’s last delicate phrase: ‘We were invisible to you.’
I shouldn’t have run away. I should have spent the whole day there with her, in that horrible conference room, and the night too, if necessary, perhaps lying on the carpet with some sheets of A4 as a blanket. I should have made her explain everything, every tiny detail of the story of Caterina and the life she hid from me. I would have been able, once and for all, to listen to everything that Sveva had to say to me. But seventy-seven years are too many to change – if I’d really wanted to I certainly wouldn’t have waited for the most interesting part of my life.
When I left my daughter’s office I was furious. I felt humiliated and betrayed, and I tried to build my days around that rage, the last slap in the face. But eventually it too – my rage – turned its back on me, weary of spending time with an old man shuffling from the sofa to the kitchen, and it flew away as soon as I opened the window. So I’ve been left
on my own, without even that manipulative cat to keep me company.
You think you don’t need anyone until you notice, one day, that you don’t have anyone any more. And when it happens it’s a right mess. I have my children, but it’s as if I didn’t. It isn’t their fault, and it isn’t Caterina’s. Feeling jealous about someone who’s no longer alive is idiotic, and yet that’s how it is. Curiously, my wife is better able to capture my attention now that she’s dead than when she was alive. I remember that one evening in bed she asked me, ‘What would you do if I died?’ I was too gripped by the book I was reading to get involved in a semi-serious discussion about our crisis that had been going on for ages. So I said, ‘I’d sleep without earplugs.’ She snored – loudly. When you’re young you think that snoring is the prerogative of grannies and grandpas, that your wife will sleep angelically for ever among scented rose petals. Then you notice that at a certain age she starts turning into a pig, and it’s at that precise moment that you understand that your youth has fled for ever. Anyway, she turned over and turned out the light. It was the only time we spoke about our crisis. Or rather, that she spoke. Or rather, that she tried.
I get up and go to the box room, a little room three feet square full of stuff that’s no longer of any use to anyone. Storerooms are hostile places filled with a strange melancholy. Objects that have been set aside are nothing but memories that have been set aside, to be kept, but not always right in front of you. So, one afternoon when you push open the door of the box room, as you have done so many times before, you almost feel as if all those memories are cascading down on your head, your grief is so great.
I open a box and start rummaging around among the old photographs: travels, marriages, degrees, birthday parties, dinners, New Year parties and Christmases. If only there were a picture of one particular day in there. Nothing. And yet all I remember is getting up, shaving, getting dressed, making breakfast, then taking Sveva to school, and after a day’s work, coming home, kissing my wife, having dinner, putting my children to bed and slumping on the sofa with Caterina. Nothing remains of all those parties but bleached photographs. In one of them Sveva is laughing, missing a tooth. I’m smiling too, and in the silence of the house my wail seems to echo like the sound of the photographs rustling in my hands.
The Temptation to Be Happy Page 12