When dinner was over Polidori asked me if I wanted to get some air; we went out under the loggia without putting our coats on, walking on the snow to the far end of the garden. The two giant, white dogs came with us, running back and forth as we walked.
Polidori said to me, “Another terrible dinner, Roberto. I’m sorry.”
“It was delicious,” I said, trying not to make anything of it.
“I didn’t mean the food,” he said dryly. He was examining the overcast sky; he said, “We put together this perfect scene like it’s from a postcard, with everything exactly in place, and underneath there is so much exasperation that we’re no longer able to talk to each other.”
I said to him, “It happens to every family, especially around the holidays. You should have seen my parents’ house on Christmas Day.”
He didn’t answer me; he said, “My older son hates me, each time we see each other it gets worse. He has never forgiven me for leaving his mother, he thinks I’m some kind of assassin.”
I asked him, “When did you separate from your first wife?” We were headed toward the darkness of the forest, and because he brought the topic up I didn’t have any qualms about being direct.
He said, “I left when Roberto was five years old. Twelve years ago, now.” He pulled a stick out of the snow and threw it for the dogs to chase, but the dogs weren’t able to find it and they came back, looking at us expectantly. He continued, “It must not have been easy growing up with a ghost for a father: he calls every night but only shows up every two or three months, and you see him on television and in the newspapers but he’s never there when you need him.”
The big, white dogs continued to run around, their paws crunching on the frozen snow. I imagined Polidori’s past life in many different ways, scattered and transformed by the stories from his novels that I had read recently.
Polidori said, “And before I left it was probably worse, because I spent my time fighting fiercely with his mother. I don’t think he has great memories of that.” He laughed in the darkness, walking with long strides. He said, “Good God, the compressed anger there was between us. I remember one time when we fought in a hotel in Paris: at a certain point I grabbed her by the neck and wanted to strangle her for how inflexible her reasoning seemed to be. I could have done it. I realized in that moment exactly how it can happen, how one does not have to be a criminal. And Roberto was there in the room with us; he was crying like crazy.”
“Do you think he remembers?” I asked him, trying to imagine him in such a violent situation.
Polidori replied, “Maybe he doesn’t remember that particular time, but all of the episodes together influenced his behavior toward me. Every time he looks at me it seems he wants to blame me for something, even if he never talks about anything specific. He has this way of acting, as if he considers me directly responsible for everything that he doesn’t like about himself, his life and the world.”
“But it’s always that way, isn’t it?” I said to him. “I mean, at his age.”
“Maybe,” replied Polidori. “But it doesn’t make me feel any less guilty. I know for certain that he would probably find something to hold against me even if I had remained in the family home, as a model husband and father. But then all I need to do is see him again, and I am reminded of everything I made the three of us go through. The evasions and lies and the multi-layered thoughts that tormented me every minute of every day when I was with them. The time I stole from him to give to other people, people I don’t even remember anymore.”
I said to him, “Still there are many ways not to be present. For example my father never left home but he had no idea how to communicate with me, or he never really tried. If I think about it, I realize that we never talked about anything important, even though he was always there, I saw him every day.”
“I know, I know,” replied Polidori. “And your father would probably have a lot of things to blame his father for, seeing that it’s his fault if your father was never able to talk to you. It’s an infinite chain of unresolved affections and wrong circumstances and impossibility to communicate, but it doesn’t make you feel any less remorse about it all.”
“I can imagine,” I said to him, and I wondered which of his novels told the story of a childhood that corresponded to his actual childhood.
Polidori said, “Children don’t grow up in a linear fashion. They move ahead in fits, in ways you can’t predict. You go away for a month or two and when you return they’re different people, with capabilities and attitudes completely different from those you knew. All of a sudden you have no idea how to approach them. They see things they had no interest in before, and they’ve lost interest in what used to excite them. With Roberto I missed everything, and I realized it the entire time. I tried to concentrate into two days what I hadn’t done in months, but I knew it was useless. And still I couldn’t do anything about it; I needed to be out and about, and to be free.”
“On the other hand, you’re close to your younger children,” I added. I was cold without my coat; I was wondering how much farther he would want to walk.
“No,” said Polidori. “Maybe it’s the resentment that my oldest son feels for them that latches on to me like a virus, but sometimes I feel as if I don’t love them at all. It makes me angry that they take everything for granted; having a family, an organized home, constant attention and objects and toys and presents and clothes and food and everything they need and don’t need. Sometimes I look at them, and they are so disgustingly spoiled. I feel like grabbing everything from their hands and kicking them out in the cold for a little while. They seem to have slow reflexes, lulled by the ease of their lives. Every so often I imagine them grown up, three more stupid children of a famous parent.”
I said to him, “Doesn’t it seem a little early to say that, poor things?” But it was true that there was something irritating in the way they seemed to have stepped out of an ad for biscotti and milk.
“It’s not early,” said Polidori. “If you had seen Roberto at their age, he was another species altogether. Even if now he won’t talk unless you twist his arm, you should see his drawings. Hardship is what develops intelligence, and ease produces only a lack of motivation and slow reflexes. The children belong to Christine much more than they do to me, in any case. I am just their financial sponsor and the engine behind it all, for the most part they get along fine without me. There is a kind of unwritten contract between us, an agreement about a certain level of performance with respect to the rest of the world, and roles to fulfill.”
By now I could not understand how much he might be exaggerating, or how much he might be influenced by the darkness and the cold all around us.
He was quiet for a moment, then he stopped and said to me in a different tone, “Poor Roberto, not only was it a terrible dinner, but then I drive you crazy with my conversation.”
I said to Polidori, “It’s not true, this is interesting to me.” A slight breeze was picking up, my food was becoming frozen in my stomach.
Polidori replied, “You’re polite, but as a writer you should never be. A writer should never put up with any kind of boredom. He should shout, ‘Enough!’ as soon as he feels harassed and tell everybody to go to hell.”
I laughed, my arms wrapped tightly around my chest as I looked at the monastery-house illuminated in the dark night.
“Race you?” Polidori said, and we took off running, back toward the light and the warmth and the tensions of his family, with the great, white dogs galloping beside us.
1991
THE GOLDEN CROSS
Grazia Deledda
It was nearly Christmas Eve, I was supposed to write a story for a foreign newspaper for the occasion, and I still hadn’t found my subject.
Then it occurred to me to go gathering folktales (I still lived in Sardinia at the time).
I knew an old man who had a good store of them: he was a sharecropper on one of our parcels in the valley. In summer and in fall he
would walk uphill, bent over his cane, a saddlebag filled to bursting and slung over his back, his beard tucked into the saddlebag’s pocket. He almost always came late in the afternoon, as the stars smiled down on us children from the lilac sky at twilight. The old man seemed to us like one of the Magi who had lost his way and strayed from his companions. The saddlebag was filled with things more precious to us than gold and myrrh: fruits and children’s stories.
But in winter he didn’t come, or came only rarely, and these visits didn’t interest us, because he brought olives, and olives are bitter.
And I went down to find him: in the winter, the valley is pleasant, sheltered as it is. The clouds stretch out over it like a veil over a crib, the water recedes, and the cliffsides are dry. If the weather is fine, it feels like spring, and the almond trees blossom, in thrall like dreamers to the warmth, and the olives gleam amid the grasses like purple pearls.
The old man lived in a quaint hut built against an embankment, looking down on the olive grove, sheltered by brush and rock. He also had a primitive beehive, and the wild cats used to mount its hollow cork trunks, beautiful as miniature tigers.
There we were: the sun scorching the grounds, the olives silver, and the afternoon so luminous you could see rivulets glimmer on the mountainside and women picking up acorns in the grass.
The old man had laid out the olives to dry in the yard and was throwing out those that looked off. He didn’t feel like talking; solitude and silence had rusted his tongue.
But the servant had brought a good medicine to loosen the knotted words, and the old man took a drink and started to complain.
“What stories do you want me to tell you? I’m old, and nowadays should only talk with the earth, which is already calling me. If you want stories, best to look for them in books, you know how to read.”
“Drink a little more,” the servant said, bending over, like him, to sort through the olives, “and then tell us about the time you were supposed to get married!”
“That’s a true story, not some tall tale; yeah, I’ll tell you that one, because it was right around now, at Christmastime, when it happened.
“I was twenty at the time, I was engaged. I was a bit young to be taking a wife, but things were bad, I had lost my father, and my mother was always ill; she was heartsick, but she was tranquil and God-fearing and used to tell me: ‘Get married, so when I die, you won’t have to bear life’s cross all on your own, and you won’t fall into the hands of the first girl who comes along.’ We wondered: Who should I choose? I wasn’t rich, and didn’t have a mind to be so; it was enough for me if the woman was honest and God-fearing, too. And I thought and thought: Who will it be?
“There was a very respectable family, a father, a mother, seven hardworking children who all went to Mass and confession as God commands. Three of the seven were girls, beautiful, tall, slender, with thin waists, and they walked with lowered eyes, corsets laced up, hands tucked under their aprons, not like you all, the girls of today, who seem to eat everyone up with your stares. My mother asked for the youngest one for me, the offer was well taken, and at Christmas I was to give her a present. According to custom, that meant I was marrying her, and that she had agreed to marry me. And we thought and thought, my mother and I, about what this present should be: seated face-to-face in front of the fire, we argued long and hard: Should it be a gold coin, an embroidered scarf, or a ring?
“Finally, my mother said: ‘Listen, boy, my days are numbered, and each step I take pulls me further from the things of this earth. Take my golden cross and give it to her.’ And she gave it to me, with the nacre rosary it hung from. But when she did, her eyes welled with tears and her mouth fell open from heartache; I pitied her, and made to give it back, but she reached out to push back my hand, unable to say a word.
“I wrapped the cross and the rosary in a kerchief, then in a second kerchief, and kept it in my pocket for three days, like a relic. Now and then I would touch it, afraid to lose it, and I don’t know why, I felt my heart swell with love, but also with a mysterious foreboding.
“On Christmas Eve, I went to the home of my bride to be. The other two daughters’ suitors were there, and with all those people, the kitchen felt like a fairground. But everyone was serious, because the mother and father, with their serene but imposing faces, demanded respect, like saints on an altar; and the girls came and went, with lowered eyes, serving wine and sweets to their suitors and responding plainly, without smiling, to their compliments.
“I felt at ease, because I was a serious boy, an orphan, and took a stern view of life; all I needed was to look up now and again at my wife-to-be, and if, turning her back to her father and mother, she gave me a quick glance, for me it was as if heaven had opened up, and the kitchen with her parents, the suitors, the brides, and the brothers carving the lambs for dinner were like the celestial court with God, the saints, and the angels. How happy I was that evening! Never in my life have I been so happy. I was anxious for Mass to be over, so I could give my gift to my bride, and in that way bind myself to her. Then someone outside knocked at the door to the courtyard. One of the brothers went to open, and returned with a tall man in tow: a stranger with a small satchel slung around his neck and a goad in his hand that he used for a cane.
“I took a good look at him as he walked forward slowly, in light, flat shoes like they wear in Oliena. At first he struck me as ancient, with his short, white beard and his pale eyes; but then I saw he was young and blond, and weary, as if he’d come from far away.
“None of us knew him, and even the girls observed him with curiosity; but everyone figured he was a friend of the father, who greeted him warmly, though without much emotion. ‘Have a seat,’ he said, ‘where are you coming from?’
“The unknown man joined us, not removing his bag, laying the goad across his knees and stretching his feet out toward the fire: he looked at each of us vaguely and smiled, as if we were old acquaintances. ‘I’ve come from afar; I’m just passing through,’ he said, his voice calmer than the father’s had been. ‘Since you’re celebrating, I thought I’d stop in.’ ‘Yes, we’re celebrating, as you can see: the girls are engaged, and look at their men here, strong and handsome as lions. You couldn’t ask for more,’ the father said. ‘Not a thing more,’ the boys shouted, nudging one another with their elbows, and then they all laughed.
“The girls, too, after all that seriousness, seemed overcome by a fulsome sense of joy; they laughed and laughed, and I laughed, too, and their mother and father laughed along with us: it was like a sickness passed from one to the others. Only the stranger stayed calm, looking at me like a child, unsurprised and unbothered.
“Finally, when everyone was serious again, he said, turning to the women: ‘Many years ago, I passed through this country, and I entered a house with a couple engaged, just as I am doing now. The people were just as happy; but the bride-to-be gazed at me, and when I was leaving she followed me to the door, and said: You are my true bridegroom, I was waiting for you, stay and give me your gift. I did, and though I left and she married the other, I was forever her true husband, and her son will give to you young brides the gift I gave to her, and you will give it to your sons, and they in turn will give it to their brides.’ We looked at one another, neither smiling nor laughing: the man struck us as strange, almost mad, and after our revelry, inspired suspicion, almost fear.
“My mother-in-law asked him: ‘Do tell then, what was your gift?’ ‘A cross of gold.’ Then I felt a shiver up my spine. The son of the stranger’s lover could only be me. For I alone had brought my bride-to-be a golden cross, the one that belonged to my mother. I didn’t say a word, but from then on, a thick veil seemed to be covering my head: I could see, but confusedly, and my ears were ringing, and I no longer understood the words the stranger, the mother, and the boys exchanged.
“I felt a deep pain, a heavy weight, a weight that crushed my kidneys, as though the golden cross in my pocket had suddenly grown massive and was bearin
g down on my back.
“Then the stranger, having warmed his feet, departed, tall and silent, with his pack around his neck and the goad in hand. ‘Who was that?’ the mother asked. ‘Who knows?’ the father replied. ‘I’ve never met him, but he looks familiar. I must have seen him, years back, perhaps when he came in secret to visit his beloved.’ I said nothing.
“Again, everyone was composed, serious, grave: the girls came and went, serving the dinner, but my bride, now pale, kept her eyes lowered, and would no longer look at me. My heart pounded, and through the veil I spoke of that enveloped my head, I seemed to see the eyes of young and old turn toward me with misgivings.
“And so it was, till the time for Mass came. We stood, but I felt worse, buckled beneath my weight, and staggered forward like a drunk. We walked in a line, the women in front, the men behind. Once in the church, we mingled with the crowd, and slowly, I pulled away, withdrawing to the stoup, then to the door, and finally outside … and there, I turned my back to the house of God and fled as though chased by demons.
“I walked like a madman, turning this way and that, until dawn; at dawn, I returned home. My mother was already awake. She was lighting the fire and looked tranquil but pale, as if she hadn’t slept all night. Seeing me distraught, she assumed I was drunk, and laid out the straw mat to put me to bed. All she said was: ‘Some impression you made, my poor boy!’
“I lay down, gnawed the straw mat; then I got on my knees, took out the golden cross, twisted it, and the beads bounced on the floor and rolled away: they seemed to be afraid of me. My mother, too, began to gasp.
“I took pity on her, and told her everything. ‘What could I have done?’ I shouted. ‘The visitor’s lover, the stranger’s lover, was you—and I was supposed to give that cross to my bride? They all looked at me, they had guessed it: I ran away in shame.
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