‘No, I’m awake,’ I answer curtly.
I can’t hide my rage against her eternal silences. Caterina was the same, capable of saying nothing for hours, days and weeks, waiting for the resentment to fade. At first I’d thought I would go mad at the idea of not being able to release the tension and having to go on living together, then I also learned to ignore her rages. I wouldn’t say they were nonsense, but I think her developing illness fed on that repressed energy. Every day my wife swallowed down her rancour.
Sveva sits on the edge of the sofa and stares at me. Even from such a short distance away I can’t read her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I know I turned up at your house without giving an explanation but the truth is that I’m scared of your judgement.’
The first thing that occurs to me is to stretch my hand out towards her face, as I haven’t done for an eternity. Sveva flinches uneasily before offering me her cheek. And then a moment later my hand finds her tears, as used to happen when she was a child and I wiped her tears away with my thumb before they could roll down her face.
‘I don’t know when you last did that.’
‘I’m not really touching you,’ I reply. ‘The nuclei of our atoms never meet – they couldn’t. Nothing touches nothing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I don’t know. I once heard it in a documentary, but I didn’t really understand it.’
She smiles and says, ‘You watch too many documentaries.’
‘Maybe, but they’re the only thing that still stirs my curiosity. And curiosity allows me to feed my outmoded vanity!’
Sveva smiles broadly and so do I.
Then we turn serious and silent again, until she says, ‘Diego and I argued. I think he suspects something…’
I sigh. Suspicion is the last step in the destruction of a relationship; by the time it comes, much has already been lost.
‘Don’t you love him any more?’
‘I don’t know…’
‘So, no.’
‘You don’t believe in middle ways, do you?’
‘Middle ways mean not taking the right road, the one that takes you straight where you want and need to go. Human beings are masters at idling to keep from reaching the goal they’re scared of.’
‘You’ve been given to philosophizing lately,’ she replies sarcastically.
‘It’s not about philosophy; it’s more that old age helps you to accept some uncomfortable truths. If you don’t love your husband any more, you should leave him. Not for you – for Federico. Otherwise he will spend his childhood witnessing your rows and your frustrations. I’m sorry, I’ve tried to keep out of it, but now I feel the need to have my say. Make your choice. Don’t be like me and the rest of the world. You don’t know how many couples have stayed together just because they didn’t choose.’
She pulls away from me, puts her elbows on her thighs and brings her hands to her face. Then she begins to swing back and forth, as Caterina did when she felt she’d been rapped. I can’t help giggling.
Sveva turns around and gives me a puzzled look.
‘No, it’s just that you look like your mother. She often used to rock from side to side like that.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘Well, a mother usually conceals her problems from her children.’
My words wipe away the hint of cheerfulness that was beginning to appear on her face.
‘You think I’m making a mistake with Federico. Is that right?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ I admit, ‘but I also think that’s normal and no one can do anything about it. I made mistakes with you; you will with him; he will make mistakes with his children.’
She seems to have calmed down a little, so we sit there in silence for a while, with our breath interweaving and alternating in the night, as happened many years ago.
Again, she is the first to speak: ‘Why don’t you come and sleep in there?’
‘Where?’
‘In the bed.’
‘There’s not much room.’
‘Who cares?’
‘I’m fine here. Don’t worry about me.’
‘It was me I was worried about.’
I look at her curiously.
She frowns and goes on, ‘It’s because sleeping in that bed makes me feel sad…’
Hmm, I hadn’t thought about that. People always linger in the objects that have accompanied them through their lives. Sveva has found her mother under the covers.
‘OK then, I’ll come and help you get through your melancholy,’ I reply. ‘But I warn you: I move all the time and snore like a pig.’
She laughs as she helps me to stand up.
We slip under the sheets, with Federico sleeping in between us.
Sveva, before turning out the light, stares at me and whispers, ‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘My pleasure. And anyway, thanks for what?’
When the darkness takes hold of the room again, I’m left alone with my thoughts as I study the ceiling, dappled here and there with specks of light from the cracks in the shutters. And for the first time in I don’t know how long, I feel a sense of profound well-being. I turn around and look at Federico, who is sleeping facing up with his mouth open. Sveva has turned to face the other way, but I can still hear her breathing. So it’s quite natural for my thoughts to return to the days when she was in the middle of the bed and her mother was the one with her back to me. Forty years have passed and yet history seems to be repeating itself, like an unstoppable flow.
What we are vanishes with our bodies, while what we have been is preserved in our loved ones. In Sveva I think I still see a little of Caterina, just as I used sometimes to see my grandfather’s face in my mother’s face. Who knows, perhaps one day I too will rise to the surface again with a movement, an expression, a smile from my daughter? And who knows whose eyes will notice?
Chapter Twenty-four
Like Clouds
This morning I got up earlier than usual. I gently slipped out from under the covers and went to the kitchen. Sveva and Federico were still asleep, lucky them. I spent the whole night being careful not to move a muscle so as not to wake my grandson. After a while my shoulder froze and my arm went to sleep, and yet that wasn’t the worst sensation running through my body. About two hours after I fell asleep, in fact, I felt, regular as clockwork, the urge to urinate, which after a further sixty minutes became an irresistible impulse. My bladder was begging me to help it and free myself of all the useless liquid I had accumulated during the day. And I had actually overdone the wine at dinner somewhat. It is worth explaining (to the bladder, I mean) that a carafe of wine has the miraculous gift of rendering bearable even a melancholy and solitary evening in front of a pointless variety show.
The fact was that I needed the bathroom. The problem was that to get there I needed to turn on the light, put on my glasses and my slippers and shuffle along the corridor. It was impossible to do all that without waking Sveva and Federico. So I stayed motionless for the remaining four hours, lying on one side, because with a bladder swollen like a hot-air balloon lying on your back requires a superhuman pain threshold.
In short, the night had not been one of the most restful, but the day started off even worse, if that were possible. Over breakfast Sveva told me she would be going home that evening. I smiled, although I’m sure she could read the disappointment in my face. Not so much because she was deciding, once again, not to choose, as because her brief and unexpected visit had made me happier than I could have imagined. You get used to solitude, and forget that the night is less frightening if there’s someone breathing beside you. And yet the decision had been taken and there was nothing I could do about it, so I merely drank my coffee in silence until she asked me if I would very kindly take Federico to school. In the past her request would have made me frown, but this morning I’m surprised to find myself smiling with satisfaction.
Less than an hour later, I was standing outside the school wi
th Federico. I stopped there and gazed at the sky, clear but for a few funny-looking clouds drifting wearily towards Vesuvius. It wasn’t a day to be locked up in a classroom. So I turned towards my grandson and said, ‘Do you know what we’re going to do now?’
He shook his head.
‘We’re not going to go in. You’ll go to school tomorrow. This morning you’re staying with grandpa!’
Federico smiled and opened his eyes wide, allowing a crabby old sod like me to feel, at least once, like a better person.
‘And what are we doing?’ he asked.
Indeed, what could we do? Where would Sveva have taken him? Then it came to me in a flash: Edenlandia, the amusement park that has welcomed all the children in Naples.
‘Come with me,’ I said, and headed towards the bus stop.
And so, incredibly, one Tuesday morning, I suddenly found myself in a theme park that I hadn’t visited for over thirty years. When Federico worked out where we were going he started shouting, and for the whole journey he couldn’t stop kicking his legs. The body always betrays our emotions, whether it be rocking back and forth, prey to indecision and fear, or happiness and excitement. In fact, the latter is much harder to conceal.
Unfortunately the smile with which I entered the park along with Federico faded from my face as soon as we had passed through the gate. He began to run from one attraction to the next, filled with joy, and I had no option but to join in with his enthusiasm, in spite of the listless melancholy that was running through me. Yes, because I’m like a guitar string, at peace with myself until someone plucks me: from that moment onwards I begin to vibrate ad infinitum. The sight of the place had taken me back in time. And at my age it’s very dangerous to walk backwards.
It was the early 1970s and boom time for Edenlandia. Sveva was very young, and Caterina and I decided to take her to see for the first time the big theme park that was the pride of Naples and the whole peninsula. Caterina was keen, and our daughter was beside herself; the only one who couldn’t really feel the same enthusiasm was me. At least, until I met someone – I think her name was Debora – a girl of about twenty who was standing with two other friends by a shooting range that gave away dolls as prizes. Caterina and Sveva were stuck in the House of Mirrors, so I approached the three and began my not very discreet flirtation with them. Soon I managed to win the teddy bear that Debora craved and won her heart. She thanked me and walked away with her friends, giggling and fluttering her eyelashes. I spent the rest of the day thinking of Debora’s smile rather than the one on the face of my daughter, who by now seemed to have been driven crazy by the spectacle that was going on all around her.
It could have been the perfect day. I could and should have felt at peace with life, with my wife giving me loving glances, my daughter laughing gaily and clutching my hand, my city wanting to give me a day that I could frame and put on the mantelpiece. But I had met Debora, with her intoxicating body, her slightly childish giggle, her sensual eyes. So I pretended to be as happy as my family, even if I wasn’t happy – not so much because my young muse had gone away as because she, a girl like many others, had made me lose sight of the beauty of the day.
By the exit I bumped into her again and, seeing me holding Sveva’s hand and with Caterina beside me, she gave me a sarcastic look, possibly with a hint of contempt.
I looked at the ground in shame and took refuge in a clumsy smile directed at my daughter.
Federico and I passed by the Jumbo roller coaster and the Old America Far West village on our way to the famous Chinese Dragon, a kind of train that has been running round in a circle for half a century so that old fools like me can catch a stupid tassel dangling in the air as we go by. Well, we went round three times just to try and grab that stupid tassel, and the third time Federico said he was getting bored and wanted to go and buy some popcorn, but I wouldn’t listen to reason: we weren’t leaving until I had attained my goal. I joined the queue once again to buy yet another ticket, but a man in his forties, with his chubby son beside him eating candyfloss, nimbly slipped among the people and reached the till ahead of us.
During my eighty years in Naples, everyone has observed one very simple rule: never pick a fight with a fellow who is well built and covered with tattoos, and who speaks with a strong dialect. It isn’t a city where you want to indulge in nitpicking. And yet I went over to this fellow and said, ‘Excuse me, kind sir, have you noticed that there’s a queue?’
He gave me a bored look and replied, ‘Yep, I have.’
I saw red. ‘Perhaps I didn’t explain myself very well. You have to go to the back!’
At that moment I had his full attention. ‘What do you want?’ he said in a tone that was confidential but still far from friendly.
‘You to go to the back!’ I said vehemently.
A man behind me tugged me by the arm and whispered, ‘Leave it be.’
If I had had time, I would have turned and raged at him too, even though he was just trying to save me. I would have slapped him in the face with the truth: that it’s because everyone leaves things be that people around here go on being insolent. But I didn’t have time, because the big guy seemed quite irritated by my words and was advancing threateningly towards me. I was about to turn myself into a retired colonel, and would have done so had it not been for the arrival of the security man, who handed the tickets to my interlocutor and, unbelievably, asked him to let it go. And he did: he let it go, like all the other people in Naples who are masters in letting things go, apart from yours truly. I would have liked to press the point, but Federico, standing beside me, was staring at me in terror, so I paid and we sat down in the coach for the umpteenth circuit.
A moment before the train set off, I turned towards my grandson and said, ‘If you really want to live in this city, don’t be like your grandad. Learn the sad and desperate art of “letting things go”.’
I thought the amusement park would allow me to tick all the remaining empty boxes I hadn’t filled for the function of grandfather, but when we left Federico demanded that we go to the zoo opposite, confirming my thesis that you should always give as little of yourself as possible in order to avoid creating excessive expectations in others. The fact was that after having absorbed pirates, spaceships, horses and dragons, I also had to witness the melancholy spectacle of animals in cages, another experience that I would happily have done without.
I learned that the flamingo owes its pink colour to the pigment of a microcrustacean on which it feeds, that only fifteen per cent of newborn ostriches reach their first year because of all the predators, and that black swans are monogamous and spend their whole lives with a single companion. It would be quite funny if we turned the same colour as the things we eat as well, and what a tragedy it would be if only a small percentage of babies reached adulthood. Imagine if human beings were monogamous and spent the whole of their lives with one single person. Only a few animals can do that.
Anyway, I came out of there satisfied that I had given my grandson a memory which might stay with him for the rest of his life. So I was walking along calmly and smugly with Federico beside me, when I bumped into my terrible neighbour. In fact, he was on the opposite pavement and hadn’t noticed me. He had just emerged from a bank with two other people, with whom he was smiling and joking. Seeing him so calm and secure in his nice dark jacket, I doubted for a moment that he was the same person who had put Emma in that dreadful state. I stopped to watch those well-dressed individuals chattering and gesticulating, figures like any others and therefore invisible; three outlines which, if he hadn’t been one of them, would have passed in front of my eyes for just a moment before being erased by the day, a bit like morning clouds.
At first glance there was nothing wrong with my neighbour: smartly dressed, clean and smiling face, reassuring appearance. However, the mere sight of him made me shiver. How can a man have two different appearances? How can he make sure that one doesn’t contaminate the other? And why is evil so often impercept
ible to other people? Perhaps because it’s in the darkness that lies beneath the surface. Like clouds whose heads are lit by the rays of the sun while their bodies are filled with rage.
‘Who is that?’ Federico suddenly asked.
‘A friend,’ I said without hesitation.
I went on staring at the enemy until he noticed me. It was only then that the smile disappeared from his face. I’m not a coward – or at least, I fight every day not to be one – and yet at the sight of his predatory eyes I felt something very like fear. But then I told myself that he was the one who should be afraid of me rather than the other way round, so I held his gaze until the sleazeball turned away and vanished. After that I walked on, holding Federico by the hand.
‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’ he asked.
‘Another time,’ I said.
Then I slipped into the nearest bar and made straight for the toilets. Another few moments and I would have disgraced myself.
Chapter Twenty-five
The Glass Bowl
Plates being shattered. A cry, then a thump. Another cry. I turn on the light, sit up on my mattress and wait. After a while I hear some more commotion, perhaps furniture being moved around and chairs dragged, then the sound of broken crockery. More shouting.
I get up and put on my clothes. I’m in the corridor when my neighbour’s door opens. I hear running feet on the stairs, then hurry to the window. After a few seconds he comes out of the door and gets straight into his car. I run out on to the landing, where I find Eleonora Vitagliano waiting for me. She’s motionless, and staring at Emma’s half-open door.
The Temptation to Be Happy Page 17