Michele watches her lift the Amatori Volley gym bag. His sister raises her other hand, torso rigid, backlit by the September light.
She turns her back and leaves the room.
What really counts, in that autumn of 1989, is the industrially reproduced artwork on the covers of certain records, comics, books, and art catalogues, affordably priced at five thousand lire apiece. The lovely oil painting, a landscape, that appeared in the De Agostini offprint that Clara purchased, swayed by the institutional authoritativeness of the title (The Masters of Modernity), and which Michele peruses passionately during the afternoons that follow, when she isn’t home.
He’s impressed by what he sees in those low quality reproductions on cheap paper. The paintings done by this Pierre Bonnard are magnificent. He feels as if he’s arriving at a party to which he was invited years earlier. Everything moves dizzyingly. You need only open a window and the shadowy part of an interior in the Midi of France thins out, revealing a comb, a cup of tea, all the way up to a bathtub inside which a girl starts to disintegrate, hit by the too-strong light. If Michele hadn’t spent the summer getting lost in the fields, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt such intense joy in these sensations. But if, when looking at the images, he hadn’t undergone the incredible experience of passing from perceptible reality to its rethinking, nature would have remained to him merely a brute force without purpose.
Michele closes the catalogue. He goes downstairs to get a glass of water. Gioia is on the carpet playing with her Legos. She sees him go by, she sticks her tongue out at him. Again on the stairs. Annamaria. They brush past each other. Then each of them on different steps. A different density in the air.
For the past few weeks, the woman has started looking at him in an odd way. As if he, for the first time since his mother’s death, were the potential danger forever lurking on the other side of the curve.
Terrace at Vernon. Spring Landscape. Nude in the Bath and Small Dog.
Pleasure sharpens the senses and demands more pleasure. And so, the more time that Clara spends with him, the more she chats with him, the more she showers him with attention, the more clearly Michele can reflect on the state of things. Only those who have never had anything are willing to settle.
On certain afternoons, coming back from her German lessons, Clara gets out of her overcoat, takes off her sneakers, and makes an effort to throttle her joy. She walks cautiously through the living room. But once she’s upstairs, she starts running. Last stretch of hallway. She plunges into her brother’s room as if it were a tree house.
Michele’s pupils dart from right to left to hook onto the next line. The door is thrown open, a dense autumnal shadow interrupts his reading. “Ciao.” He finds her curled up on the other side of the bed, fists clenched, legs tucked up to her neck, smelling of rain.
“There was a girl who couldn’t pronounce the word Karfreitagskind. She was spitting everywhere,” she snickers.
Michele doesn’t respond. He looks at her harshly, and then he conceals that same gaze to keep the message from becoming explicit. Clara is disoriented. She’s the one who brought him back to life, but by so doing she has exposed herself to what happens when a seal is broken. So she tries to change the subject. “Did you see the ridiculous girl that Ruggero brought home the other night?” Her hand reaches out for his. Michele recoils. Clara’s feelings are hurt. Now the blow has been delivered clearly. After all, what does his sister want? Does she fool herself into thinking that she can go on visiting him as if he only sprang into being when that door was thrown open? Is it possible that she doesn’t look around? Open your eyes good and wide. Count the differences.
Because they’re there, the differences, Michele thinks as he sits on the bed after Clara leaves, his gaze veiled with sorrow. He knows that now the bite is hurting her. Slow-release venom. He imagines her in the days that follow, burdened by a grief that wasn’t there before. He feels he can see her as she comes home from school in a fine drizzle, Clara’s eyes in just a few weeks, as though they were his, which burn right now with anger.
Because my big sister goes to one of the most famous private high schools in the city. Why was it that Ruggero was, in his time, enrolled in an elementary school where the fees were higher than the worker’s compensation checks received by the laborers for their injuries while employed by our father. Because Clara had braces. Because they shower Gioia with gifts. Aside from playing volleyball, Clara takes swimming lessons, studies German. My brother did swimming, too. National junior championships. Gioia knows what the word tournesol means, what the word Sonnenblume means. Experimental school. Sunflower. In the mantelpiece in the living room are the trophies marking Ruggero’s triumphs. Third place, backstroke. First prize, butterfly. I have slumping shoulders. I could call myself fat, for that matter. Levi’s, Calvin Klein, Emporio Armani. I’ve never seen myself dressed in an article of designer clothing. And yet everywhere I look in this house, I see nothing but Levi’s, Calvin Klein, Emporio Armani.
Middle of the night. Eleven days since his sister’s death. Standing motionless in front of the window. Those who weep don’t listen, now he was listening. The cat leapt up onto the windowsill, rubbed against his arm. She sneezed. Bothered by the smoke. She shook her head again, turned to go. Michele petted her. A mewing. He petted again, his hands ever heavier. He was forcing her to stay.
On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, stretched out in the bed side by side, together they read Oscar Wilde’s fairytales. The nightingale and the rose. The happy prince. During the tragic parts, Michele bursts out laughing to keep a tear from appearing on her cheek. Meeting her halfway. Increasing the credit due.
Then suddenly reversing course.
The following Wednesday they’re reading a biography of Maradona when the doorbell rings. Engineer Ranieri. Down in the courtyard, the car is running. She doesn’t even have time to get down out of bed.
“Don’t go to volleyball today,” Michele says out of the blue.
“What did you say?” Clara asks, stupefied.
“No practice,” he insists, “let’s just go for a walk downtown.”
“But he’s waiting!” Clara replies, dropping into a squat.
“Tell him to leave.”
His sister stiffens. Michele is unfazed. Even though Engineer Ranieri is only Engineer De Palo’s deputy, Clara acknowledges his importance. Michele watches her struggle against a principle of authority that evidently still means something to her.
“Go downstairs and tell him to beat it.”
“Listen . . . ”
He sees her hesitate, uncertain, he senses her suffering before she catches her breath: “Listen,” his sister says again, “I’ll see you later.”
Michele looks at her with contempt. Clara disappears timidly through the door, taking care not to close it entirely hoping that at the very last second he’ll say something. Michele doesn’t speak. When he hears the station wagon driving off, he hurtles himself off the bed. He smiles with satisfaction. The part of him that Clara now has inside of her is too big for a certain thing that’s rolling downhill to stop.
December twenty-fifth, after Christmas dinner. Michele is unwrapping his gift. Annamaria is sitting on the sofa with Clara. Vittorio is in the kitchen, on the phone. The dark green of the box containing foot soldiers, cavalrymen, and cannons placed one after the other in horizontal sequence. The boxed game of Risk that he’d requested. Michele lifts his eyes to Annamaria: “Fantastic . . . ” He smiles, sincerely grateful. Ruggero is standing with a glass of wine in his hand. The Rolex Daytona with the stainless steel case glitters on his wrist. Clara shivered while her older brother extracted the watch from the inner box embossed with the tiny gold crown. But Ruggero is almost fifteen years older than Michele. Clara seeks clues in the black hole of previous Christmases. The rule of proportions. It is then that Gioia calls her. Sitting under the tree that is bedecked with col
orful balls, she repeats the name on the card. Clara smiles. She reaches forward, takes the present from her sister’s hands. Annamaria uncrosses her legs on the sofa. But it’s Michele that Clara watches as she unties the satin ribbon. He’s reading the instructions for Risk. Suddenly he seems defenseless again, as if the presence of all the others intimidated him, made him plunge back into last year.
Clara finishes unwrapping her gift. She opens the box slowly, in a way that—she will realize later—will serve to delay acknowledgment. She pulls out the first earring, remains open-mouthed. This doesn’t come from a costume jewelry shop. A miniature candelabrum encrusted with diamonds with five tanzanites for contrast. The beauty of the jewelry disconcerts her. Clara bites her lip. She’s filled with shame for being happy to hold it in her hands. Desiring that object as the expression of hebetude with which Michele looks at her enflames the other part of him within her.
“Clara!”
Annamaria has leapt forward on the sofa. Her legs are bent in an x while her arms form the half-swastika that in cartoons mean that a character is running as fast as they can. This, immediately after the box containing the earrings grazes her head and hits the wall.
The woman flops onto the cushion and immediately regains self-control, but she doesn’t have time to lift a finger before Clara starts shouting at her.
“Filthy pigs,” she says.
Red-faced, hands shaking. They’ll never see her like that again. Gioia, sitting under the tree, slams together two large blocks of wood, over and over again. Michele awakens from his torpor. It seems to him that his sister’s slim, straight body, filled with rage, is casting a terrifying reddish shadow beyond the visible surface of the wall.
You’re a bunch of filthy pigs.
Vittorio sticks his head out of the kitchen with the telephone receiver clamped to his ear: “Who’s that shouting?”
Now Clara is at the front door. She opens it. She walks through. She slams it behind her so loudly that for a moment her mother clenches her fists and closes her eyes the way kids do when they’re frightened.
(It’s past midnight when, after searching for five hours, Engineer De Palo spots her on state route 16. Alone. She walks along, with her back to the oncoming traffic. She’s not clutching herself. She’s not hunched over. Admirable the way she tolerates the cold, if you take into account the fact that in her fury to be gone she didn’t even think to put on a pair of tights. When the station wagon pulls up next to her, Clara raises her head. She gets into the car without a word. “You should have seen how he looked at me,” she’ll tell Michele the next day. “He was waiting for me to talk but I just stared at the windshield. I kept my eyes on the road to keep from giving him the satisfaction. Maybe he expected me to start objecting, or thought that I was going to cry.” Then something else happened. It was clear from the way his jawbone protruded on his cheek as he drove. Unload onto her the disgust that belongs to him, a sea of filth that, if Clara only believed in it for an instant, she would make the mistake of attributing to herself. “Engineer De Palo isn’t Engineer Ranieri,” laughter, “Engineer De Palo is some kind of pervert.”)
When she comes home at a quarter to two in the morning, escorted by Engineer De Palo, it’s a different girl that passes under the eyes of Vittorio and Annamaria.
“Ciao,” she greets her parents with a smile that’s about to fall apart.
Her face slapped by the cold. Her legs purple under the woolen skirt. She looks like the mug shots of certain movie stars immortalized in police stations, triumphant in the immediate aftermath of arrest. Embarrassment. That’s the feeling Vittorio experiences when his daughter walks past him. “I’m going to sleep.” They ought to scold her. They’d be within their rights if they slapped her. The problem (as suggested by the weakness of the electric interaction running through her) is that right now Clara could do or say something that would prove unbearable for them. As if she’d come into possession of some terrible secret concerning them, but about which Vittorio and Annamaria—aside from the knowledge that the secret exists—no longer remember a thing. She strides past her mother, too. She heads up the stairs, lifts her hands to her mouth. She blows into them to warm up.
“Get dressed. And try to hurry.”
“All the great minds, wherever they’re seen . . . ”
“. . . none can explain the mysteries of the nineteen.”
After finishing this idiotic nursery rhyme that they’d invented, Clara lifts her gym bag to her shoulder to emphasize her point.
For the past several weeks she’s started dragging him with her to the gym. With the confidence of a grownup, she’s informed Engineer Ranieri that she no longer requires his services.
“You’ve been too kind. You’ve given me so many of those rides that I’ll be forever grateful to you.”
(The engineer searched the girl’s face for the slightest hint of sarcasm that would give him leverage for a retort, found nothing.)
They take the bus to practice. When they head out (she in sweats and leggings, Michele more bundled up than if he were heading out to walk through a snowy wood), even when there’s no one in the house, they feel a small sea of habit open up, a space free of the intrusions of Vittorio and Annamaria, as if they’d scored that point once and for all.
Near the barracks, standing in the light of the streetlamps, they bet on how late the number nineteen is going to be. In the winter haze, the streets seem even more deserted because of a sandwich stand where there are never more than two customers sitting. Their breath forms clouds that quickly disappear. The box that is the bus appears jolting in the black of night.
In the gym, Michele watches her practice. The spikes with the jumps are nice. He’s fascinated by the synchronization with which the players switch places after the defender responds to a spike. But it’s when his sister is smashing a spike that Michele seeks an alternative time within which to spread out those instants. The jump. And then the smash. A high-pitched shout resounds, after the thud of the ball slamming into the floor.
“Sco-o-o-ore!”
There’s a violence, in the successful shots, that seems all the more surprising given the fact that Clara seems alien to any vindictive impulse. There with her, Michele is at peace. She’s not one of those stupid girls who score the winning point just so she can dedicate it to her little brother who’s come to watch. In the fractions of a second that extend from the set to the spike, he and Clara are like those little temples that have stood face to face for millennia in certain Mediterranean valleys, motionless, gazing at one another without ever having felt the slightest need to come together.
Then Michele finds himself in some guy’s car, an older boy who works in an auto repair shop and who’s asked his sister if he can take her home.
Michele is in the back seat and the two of them are separated by nothing but the handle of the handbrake. He realizes it the second time he gets in, a sign that he’s not entirely healed. The car is an old khaki green Fiat Panda with a sticker reading CHANNEL FOUR? YES, PLEASE! next to the license plate. He realizes it while he’s staring at the backs of the necks of the two people in the front seat—which necessarily means that he’s remembering the other time he’s been here. He’s on edge. But he got over that anxiety, too, the last time, when his sister had smiled in the dark, admonishing him on the uselessness of an emotion as stupid as jealousy.
Then why does he mix up the chronology? Why does he feel the disappointment he already filed away days ago? His head isn’t working the way it ought to. The progress made isn’t enough to forestall backsliding. The girls vanish into the showers after practice. He might be remembering it while he’s in the Panda. Or else he really is in the gym. Michele feels bewildered. The axis of time spins out of control in his head. At certain moments he finds himself in places where he and Clara are by no means at peace. They’re unhappy. They’re in a terrible mess. She’s crying. He climb
s the steps of the National Gallery of Modern Art. He’s in a notary’s office signing papers. He enters into a woman’s body, and this woman later runs her hands through her hair and says: “Clearly the child buried under the rubble was you.” Michele goes off for his military service and five days later thinks of killing himself. He looks at the painting of a tiger. In Avellino, he’s sitting on a pile of old phone books, hunched over his typewriter, in a tiny room where the light beats down like the sun on the tiles of certain public latrines, clack clack clack clack, if the poet, describing ravens and tree branches, illustrates the emotion of the Great War without ever having to name it, and we, looking at real ravens and real trees, take from his verse not a sense of relief at the narrowly averted danger but rather the pain of an occasion lost, clack clack clack clack, if we understood, before forgetting it, if we grasped something in these verses dedicated to Grete that is trees and ravens and war together, greater than war, more luminous and dark than the passing of the years, clack clack clack clack. Michele sees the future in the past, will send the sheets of paper to his sister who promised him that she would take them to the newspaper. Gone completely crazy. Hospitalized. He’s getting better in Rome. He looks out over the San Lorenzo station, drags on his cigarette until he reaches the filter, observes the traffic, and feels within himself the trace of an opposing movement. Out of nowhere. An overcrowded space is now completely empty. The din has stopped. The orchestra has stopped playing. Healed. Suddenly he’s aware of it. As it retreats, the tide takes with it something precious. Then he’s holding a pet carrier and in it a cat with no name.
So every time that one of these things actually does happen, Michele will feel a stabbing sensation. An object whose shape and purpose he’d identified years earlier (a blind man who says “knife” as he runs his finger over the blade) will come to light in its ultimate meaning at the very moment it finds the place it’s to be plunged into.
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