But there was never a spider to be seen. No doubt there were plenty. Hidden under the sofas, behind the dark-blue curtains, concealed in the cracks in the walls. But faced with all that dust, they felt challenged. They sensed that their construction work would be somehow excessive, a pointless effort. They understood that the apartment itself was one huge spiderweb made up of many smaller ones, and they were afraid. My mother had already been caught in it. My mother was also the black widow. I was never anyone at all.
We never saw the cockroaches either.
Nor the ants.
But I knew they were there, somewhere. I sensed their presence. Hidden in the darkness of the doorjambs, lurking in the pasta and medicine drawers, in the kitchen. Lined up in the folds in things, in the dark recesses between one object and another. Along the black outline of the coffeemaker, in the bottoms of cups that were never used, of espresso pots whose lids were never lifted.
They were there, lying in wait, spiders, ants, and cockroaches. They waited, motionless, in their hiding places. After my death, they all came out into the open.
1990
My mother did children’s fashion photography.
This was before little girls started dressing like grown women affected by dwarfism. In those days you wouldn’t see five-year-old girls going around dressed in sand-colored trench coats and mini-jeans, with mini-Hogans on their feet. With my light-blue velvet baby-doll dresses with openwork lace collars and floral-patterned wool stockings I was a living porcelain figurine, covered with ribbons and tatting, buttons shaped like animals, red and fuchsia jackets. I posed for her often: overalls in sugar-candy hues, cartwheel skirts with appliqués of roses and violets, reassuring lace babydoll collars and patent-leather flats with straps.
She started taking pictures of me down in the cellar, outside the darkroom door. In the only interview she was ever asked to give, she said: “I want to reduce as much as possible the distance between where a picture is conceived and where it comes into the world. It’s like giving birth at home. That’s what I did with Dorotea.”
“And who do you use for models?”
“No one but her, my daughter, Dorotea. But I don’t do what Arturo Ghergo did, when he photographed his daughter completely naked, so you could see every inch of her . . . Quite the opposite, you see so little of Dorotea . . . I want to make her disappear entirely.”
Down in the cellar there was only enough room for her and me, me with my fingers clutching the door handle. The door was made of dark walnut, and it was very old, stripped bare around the doorjamb. A bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and the spotlights that my mother put there. That tiny space gave us a sense of peace.
She used low light and long exposure times. She would dodge the beam of the spotlight with her long fingers loaded with costume jewelry, faux stones in red, green, and yellow. In the pictures I was a dark, abstract presence, my facial features impossible to recognize. My face blended into the peeling wall to the right of the door, under the small high window with horizontal grating. I started from me and turned into the wall.
Outside the hours passed, the postman came, Aunt Clara called us for lunch and my mother hushed her. The eight o’clock news broadcast began on the neighbors’ television sets, along with the sound of barking on the balconies. The cats began to brawl. My pale legs were rivers that flowed into the wall, and so were my arms.
In the evening, I’d leaf through The Encyclopedia of Biology, whose volumes I kept on a shelf over the TV. At night, my nightmare of being trapped in the jar would wake me up: me in the darkness, me gasping for air. I’d go into my mother’s bedroom and she’d take me back to my bed or sometimes she’d just let me sleep with her. She never told me a nice bedtime story, because we already had too many stories inside us, and because bedtime was never going to be nice.
We spent both our summer and Christmas holidays in Trecastagni.
It was the house where my mother grew up with her sisters. It was the emptiest house I’d ever seen. My grandparents had left it to Clara, then they’d died but she hadn’t wanted it; she’d married a lawyer with two gold teeth and they’d moved to the beach. My mother had taken all the furniture and put it in our apartment. The house in Trecastagni had been left with nothing but a table and a dowry of spiderwebs covering the ceiling, including the hanging lamps, and even the dead lightbulbs.
There was plenty of silence and the pale yellow wall of the living room had four nail holes from nails that were no longer there. There was my mother who one night in early September was drinking limoncello with Aunt Clara in the courtyard, talking about an old romantic movie they’d just watched. Between my mother and my aunt stood an empty chair upon which twenty-five leaves and sixteen pine needles had accumulated over the years. There was also the broken-off trunk of a pine tree on which a black cat often slept, and a small twisted olive tree. There was me, sitting on the terra-cotta tile floor, leafing through the encyclopedia of biology that Aunt Clara had given me for Christmas, hot off the press from the publishing house where she worked. In the encyclopedia there were bacteria and insects and the human body. There was fog in the sky and red lipstick on all three of our mouths. There was a bedroom with the door locked but from the window you could see inside: three beds pushed together with no room between them.
Lidia the Other Sister died at age twenty-one during an excursion to the country.
Everyone could hear Lidia crying in the shower. It happened every morning. Little by little, her sobs became background noise, like traffic.
Lidia had left the university, where she’d been studying ancient Greek. Now she locked herself in her room for hours at a time, doing what, no one knew. My mother would knock and knock and knock at the door. Before that, on the nights my grandmother was just too depressed and had slept all day, while Clara was out with some boy, Greta and Lidia would talk for hours. They had a wonderful relationship, Aunt Clara told me so one day when we were swimming in the pool at Costa Saracena. They went clothes shopping together and sat under the pine tree singing cartoon theme songs. Now the pine tree has been uprooted by a cyclone, but the pine needles are still there on the empty chair.
That morning Aunt Clara was sixteen years old and had stayed home with her father. They both had the flu. It was the twenty-eighth of April and it was already hot out. My grandmother Dorotea had driven all the way out to Cavagrande, where two old girlfriends from high school were waiting for her, along with lakes as still as glass. It was a perfect day for swimming. The rocky cliffs arched up over deep gorges, full of crabs and little black fish. My grandmother stretched out next to her girlfriends. I don’t know what my grandmother looks like because I’ve never met her. No one was there. The sun was hidden behind long gray clouds. Greta and Lidia walked off. The sounds of the wind and the water could be heard. Lidia suggested they play hide-and-seek.
“Why are you putting rocks in your pockets?”
“Because I’m collecting them.”
In the pictures that my mother took of me, my body was no longer a box, it was just water. My dark hair blended into the texture of the wall, the balloon dress cut through the air like a wave. I posed with my back to the wall.
I never stopped disappearing, never stopped emerging from myself as if from a swimming pool. The lens was the mouth of a dangerous, ravening beast: the maw of the diaphragm, gaping wide, cut away my contours like so much bread crust. They created in the core of matter a secret alcove of muscles and plaster. The lens was the anxious mouth of a shark.
Afterward, in the darkroom, I watched my image being born out of the reddish darkness of the chemical bath.
The pictures were rejected by Lulù Bimbi. Instead they published ordinary pictures of little girls with cheeks where their cheeks should be and arms where their arms should be.
Aunt Clara wouldn’t speak to us for a month. She would come to lunch, she would cook, she would say o
ver and over: “But if it goes on like this, how will you pay your rent? You can’t just rely on the money I give you.”
Until finally my mother gave in. She embraced with disgust the aesthetic compromises that the market demanded. She started photographing me outdoors, not far from our building, in the little piazza off Largo Pascoli: it was summer, I was sweating in the heavy cotton of my bonbon box of an outfit, decorated with embroidered cherries and brightly colored ribbons. The florist there had gone to high school with my mother, and he gave her permission to take my picture surrounded by his flowers. The air reeked of gasoline, instead of carrying the magical scent of old wood in the cellar room.
It’s been four years since my death. I drown in the ooze like a broken ship without a captain. Again today, empty tubes of toothpaste will be tossed out, and millions of obedient muscles will activate smiles.
1991
Every Christmas and every summer we’d go to the house in Trecastagni: me, my mother, and sometimes Aunt Clara, who in the meantime had begun proceedings for her divorce. I would do my holiday homework sitting at the kitchen table. My mother would wander around taking pictures and come home with groceries; the times that Aunt Clara came with us she’d work at her typewriter. We socialized with my mother’s childhood friends, with their husbands and their children and their dogs. Every day I asked her to show me the pictures of Lidia that were locked in a drawer in the bedroom that was itself under lock and key, but she would always move on to another topic or another room. I’d beg her every night, when she went to bed: “Please, please, open up the locked room for me,” but she’d just shut her eyes and her mouth. She’d fall asleep.
At night we’d watch TV, she’d have something to drink, and she’d go to bed. Aunt Clara slept on the couch, my mother and I would sleep together in my grandparents’ bed. She’d put on a nightgown. She’d close her eyes, I’d close my eyes.
She never took my picture again.
One day she opened the white envelope with my pictures and said:
“Hey, come here. Pick one.”
I picked the one that showed the least of my face.
“Good.”
The next day she told me that she’d sent it to my father; she said that he’d asked for it, and she never mentioned it again.
Twenty-one days later it was July 23, 1991, and we drove all the way to Costa Saracena.
The sun was baking hot, the temperature had climbed by ten degrees in just a few hours. Aunt Clara was at the beach with her new boyfriend, a skinny guy with a tattooed back. I’d just come back from the apartment house pool, and I was still in my swimsuit: a yellow bikini dotted with red cherries. My mother was out on the balcony smoking a cigarette in a gray-and-blue sarong covered with sea turtles. Sitting on the wicker lounge chair, eyes half open, legs crossed.
I saw a car go by, I saw a man from behind. A powerful, terrifying sensation swept over me.
The car vanished. The sensation didn’t. That man was my father. I hadn’t seen his face. And even if I had, I’d have had no way to recognize him: I didn’t know what my father looked like. But that man was my father. A thought so powerful that it had no need for any logical tripod.
I stood there, in the middle of the walkway.
A family was heading down to the water, dragging their feet, loaded down with inflatable mattresses, water wings, and pails, their bodies glistening with sweat, yellow-and-red baseball caps on their heads. The two little boys stopped to look at me. The mother was fat and she said: “Gabriele, Giorgio, come along.” She had bulging eyes and the straps of her golden swimsuit had fallen off her shoulders. I was sweating down to my chest, to my belly button, to the backs of my knees. The little boys weren’t moving, the younger one had a rub-on tattoo that was half rubbed off on his left shoulder. A dragon? A skeleton?
I was sweating all the way down to my elbows, down to my fingers hardened into fists. I was sweating at the porous intersection of fingertips and palms. Only then did I see the cat.
It had been hit by a car and then moved to the side of the walkway, next to a chipped yellow beach bucket and a dented empty box of Magnum ice cream bars. Guts squished out, head facing backward, one eye torn out of its socket like a porcelain button. The dried blood was already brown, and across it marched a dotted line of ants.
There wasn’t so much as a breath of wind.
The scalding asphalt, the enflamed low terra-cotta wall covered with ivy, like new skin growing over a wound: everything was far too exposed. The faces of the two little boys and their mother, motionless, calcinated by the light and the sweat, were bits of prehistoric statues, brought into the light of this moment that was not for them.
The family started moving again. They headed toward the water. I looked at my hands. Fingers. Legs. Low wall. Stomach. Cat. My knees were trembling. Should I take its body away? Bury it in my garden? Give it a funeral, recite prayers over it? At least push the protruding bone of the sternum back in with my fingers? Or, at the very least, push it away from there, from the dirty edge of that walkway, and conceal it behind a tree? I broke out in a cold sweat. Those shivers—were they the same ones I’d feel from age twenty-three on, under the blankets, with the pills in my stomach, every night? And what about me? Am I the same person?
I looked at the cat.
The cat wasn’t an act of cruelty. The cat wasn’t an act of cruelty and that man wasn’t my father. The cat wasn’t an act of cruelty and that man wasn’t my father and the cat wasn’t me. Aunt Clara found us together, on the low wall, an hour later.
First grade began.
Aunt Clara gave me the books I needed. Then she took me to the mall to buy notebooks, pencils, colored markers, and a pencil sharpener. I chose a light-blue backpack with an illustration of a mermaid. I really liked it. When we got home I ran, beside myself with excitement, all the way to my mother’s bedroom to show her everything, but she was lying down and had a fixed stare, her cigarette motionless in her mouth. She said: “Go away, leave me alone.”
I didn’t like the backpack anymore.
One October morning I remember I had a canker sore behind my upper molars. I ran my tongue over the ridge of my palate as I was leaving my bedroom. The backpack was terribly heavy on my back, I was six years old, I had the taste of milk in my mouth, it was dark in the living room, and my mother was standing by the window, looking out, clutching Lidia’s teddy bear to her chest.
“What are you looking at, Mama?”
“Nothing, now get going. The school bus will be here soon.”
“You look sad. What happened?”
“Everything’s fine. I’m just tired. Don’t worry.”
Outside I heard the chimes of the ice cream man, like the movie score that suggests the appropriate emotion. But inside the radio was tuned to a raspy voice: it was Radio Maria broadcasting the Mass in Latin.
Regina angelorum . . .
Regina patriarcharum . . .
Regina prophetarum . . .
Regina apostolorum . . .
“Mama, if you’re tired you should go get some sleep.”
“Did I ever tell you that when I was a girl I was a sleepwalker? Every night, Grandma opened the window at three in the morning. She’d set her alarm because it always happened, without fail. She’d see me in the yard, by the pine tree, standing or else sitting in the chair. She’d come get me, without waking me up. I kept it up for a while in this house too. I’d go off right there, look, where the recycling bin for glass is now. More or less until you were a year old. Your grandmother would sleep over quite often to help me take care of you.”
“I don’t remember it. What was I like when I was little?”
“You were clingy. You always wanted me to carry you, to hold you in my arms, like a little lapdog. If I put you down for a second you’d burst into tears. You wouldn’t let me sleep. And you’d never stop looking at m
e, you’d look at me in this particular way, as if . . .”
She turned to look at me.
Regina martyrum . . .
Regina confessorum . . .
Regina sine labe originali concepta . . .
“Now go to school, it’s late, hurry up.”
“You should go to bed if you’re so tired.”
“Yes, you’re right, but now get going.”
“No. I’m going to sleep with you.”
“Do as you please.”
She went to bed. I lay down next to her. She turned over on her side, one hand under her right cheek. I turned over on my side, one hand under my right cheek.
Two hours later the phone rang.
“Ciao, sweetheart, it’s Aunt Clara, can I talk to your mama?”
“Ciao. No, you can’t, she’s sleeping.”
“Why didn’t you go to school today?”
“I have to stay here to make sure that Mama doesn’t die.”
She decided to come over.
I hadn’t seen her in a while. She’d dyed her hair dark red. And maybe she was a little thinner than she used to be, but it was hard to say: both she and my mother had always been very skinny. Like me. Maybe like Lidia. Maybe like my grandmother. My mother was the skinniest one. Clara was the prettiest one. I was the palest one. Lidia was the deadest one, though not always.
Clara cooked for both of us and told me about the 1992 catalog for her publishing house, about all the updated school textbooks that would be coming out in January. Even my encyclopedia of biology had been reissued in an updated edition, but she assured me that everything that was written in my encyclopedia was still true. She made a cutlet for me. She and my mother didn’t talk much, like always.
“It’s so yummy, Aunt Clara, it’s the yummiest cutlet in the world.”
Hollow Heart Page 3