Like Family (2 page)

I
t was her natural, nearly religious inclination to look after people that brought her to us in the beginning. When Nora's pregnancy had proved unlike the marvelous experience we had envisioned and the fetus had begun squirming to get out at twenty-four weeks, we asked for Mrs. A.'s help, having learned that she was free since the day my father-in-law realized he could get by without domestic assistance. With my wife confined to bed, I had to show Mrs. A. around the house myself, doing my best to explain details that I wasn't very familiar with: where to pour the fabric softener and the detergent, how to
replace the vacuum-cleaner bags and how often to water the plants on the balcony. Less than halfway through the tour, Mrs. A. interrupted me. “Go ahead, go! Go on, don't worry about a thing.”

In the evening, back from work, I'd find her sitting at Nora's bedside like a guard dog, ears pricked. They'd be chatting, but Mrs. A. had already slipped on her rings and pinned the brooch on her cardigan, and her coat was settled on her shoulders. When she saw me, she'd get up with the energy of someone who wasn't tired in the least, then lead me into the kitchen to explain what dishes she had cooked for dinner, how to reheat them so they wouldn't dry out and where to put the dirty pots and pans afterward. “Don't bother washing them. I'll do it tomorrow,” she'd always add. At the beginning I disobeyed her, but when I saw that in the morning she redid the dishes I'd washed anyway, I gave in to her command.

Such perfection could be irritating at times, and she herself hard to bear, with all her convictions and sensible but not-very-original pronouncements. Nora, having spent a good part of her day with Mrs. A., often vented her frustration at being trapped in bed for
weeks by taking it out on her. “She's an exasperating woman!” she complained. “Exasperating and especially pedantic!”

The period during which we put ourselves in the care of another person—care we doubted we'd ever encounter or deserve again—was also the period when we came up with the first subterfuges to evade it.

There was a restaurant where Nora and I went from time to time—not a real restaurant, actually, just a fish market that at night set some tightly packed tables with tablecloths and plastic forks and served fried fish in aluminum trays. We'd stumbled onto it when we were just married, and since then it had become our spot. Prior to venturing forth with my wife to that out-of-the-way corner, crustaceans and mollusks hadn't appealed to me at all (before Nora, I didn't like a lot of things), but I loved watching her eat them. I loved the concentration she applied to peeling the shrimp and then offering me half and insisting that I take it, I loved the way she dug the sea snails out of their shells and how she sucked her moist fingertips between one course and another. The fish market, until
it closed recently—leaving us deprived of another secondary but essential point of reference—was the scene of our most intimate, tribal rituals. Important discussions, momentous announcements, toasts to secret anniversaries—all took place there. Whenever we left, Nora's hair and our clothes would reek of grease; we carried that smell into the house with us, as if to seal decisions we'd made, truths we'd come to.

Mrs. A. wouldn't allow Nora, in her condition, to eat even just a mouthful of “that garbage,” as she called it, frowning like a customs officer as she inspected the contents of the take-out meal that I'd picked up at the fish market. “And you either,” she added, pointing her finger at me. “I already made a meat loaf.”

She bundled up forty euros' worth of fried fish and personally made sure that it ended up in the Dumpster down the street.

We learned to con her. When Nora showed an irresistible craving for batter-fried cuttlefish and calamari, I secretly visited our restaurant, then kept the package hidden in the car until Mrs. A. left. So as not
to arouse suspicion, we threw a suitable portion of the dinner she had prepared for us in the trash.

“Will she notice the fried-food smell?” Nora fretted, so I made the rounds of the rooms spraying citrus deodorizer, while she implored me not to make her laugh because she'd go into labor.

“Let me see if you have bits of shrimp between your teeth!” I ordered her.

“It's not like she checks my mouth!”

“That woman sees everything.”

Then I kissed her on the lips and slipped a hand into her neckline to feel the warmth under her nightgown. Together we searched out shadowy recesses where we could hide from Babette's omnipresent gaze, which from above lit up everything like the sun at its zenith.

_____

By the time Emanuele was born, we were too spoiled to give up her attentions. Mrs. A. went from being Nora's nurse to being our son's nanny, as if there were a natural continuity between the two occupations, and
although she had not cared for a newborn baby before that, she immediately proved to have very clear ideas—much clearer than ours—on what to do and what not to do.

Her pay cut into the family budget, but not as much as it could have: she did not keep an exact accounting of the time she devoted to us, nor did we ever agree on an hourly rate. On Fridays she accepted without protest a sum that we considered appropriate, which Nora calculated based on a mysterious, extremely flexible schedule. Every weekday morning for over eight years, Mrs. A. showed up at our door, ringing the bell before opening with her bunch of keys, lest she catch us in a private moment. Sometimes she'd already done the shopping and would immediately hand us the receipt, standing there, not moving, until we reimbursed her for the full amount.

On Emanuele's first day of kindergarten, Nora and I were present, and so was Mrs. A. On the first day of elementary school, however, only two relatives per child were allowed, and I had to stay outside. When someone mistakenly referred to Babette as his
“grandmother,” Emanuele did not correct her. Mrs. A. felt she held our child's delicate heart in her hands, and indeed she did.

You can imagine our disappointment, therefore, our bewilderment, when in early September of 2011, when we needed her more than ever to plan for the return to school, Mrs. A. announced her firm intention not to come anymore.

“May I ask why?” Nora asked her, more annoyed than sorry to hear it at that moment. There are rules, after all, to be followed regarding work: giving notice, letters of resignation sent by mail, keeping one's word.

“Because I'm tired,” Mrs. A. said, but from her tone she seemed bitter if anything.

The call ended very quickly: eight years of working together—one might almost say living together—dismissed with the vague excuse of being tired.

_____

She really doesn't show up anymore. Of the three of us, Emanuele is the only one who has not yet learned that nothing lasts forever when it comes to human relationships. He is also the only one who doesn't know that
this is not necessarily a disadvantage. Still, in this specific situation, having to tell him that, out of the blue, his nanny has decided not to look after him anymore, it's hard to see the advantageous aspects, so Nora and I stall for time. After a week it's he who asks, “When is Babette coming?”

“For the moment she can't come. Go put your pajamas on now.”

Yet we, too, hurt and terrified at the thought that running the household has suddenly fallen upon us, ask ourselves what really happened, where we could have gone wrong. We talk about it endlessly, like a couple of orphans. Finally we pinpoint what we see as the most likely cause of Mrs. A.'s mutiny. About ten days prior to her notice, a handwritten note in block letters had appeared on our building's buzzer panel. The woman who rents the garage space next to ours was asking the careless driver who had nearly bashed in the electric door to step forward and give himself up. The sign had been left there to curl up in the wind, ignored. Nora had sworn to me that she'd had nothing to do with it, knowing full well she was high on the list of suspects, not only because of the
arrangement of the parking spaces but because of her irreverent, often out-of-control driving. The only one who used the parking garage besides us was Mrs. A. So as not to waste piles of coins in the parking meter each day, she took advantage of the space that I left vacant in the morning. I had asked her if by chance she had been the one to crash into our neighbor's garage door—it could have happened, it certainly wasn't anything serious, and in any case I would take care of the damage. She had barely turned around. “Of course it wasn't me. She must have done it herself, that one. With that big car she drives around in.”

“That must be it!” Nora says, convincing herself and me both about the version we just came up with. We're lying in bed, eleven o'clock at night. “Naturally that's what happened. You know how touchy she is.”

“This suggests that she really was the one who bashed in the garage door.”

But Nora silences me. “What do we care about the door? We have to call her.”

So the next morning, during a break in the group-theory exercise in which, judging by my students' glazed looks, I was more confusing than usual, I call
Mrs. A. I extend an apology for the accusatory, indelicate way in which I addressed her, assuring her that if that's the reason she doesn't want to work for us anymore, I understand, but that we are all eager to make amends. I refer to Emanuele and how much he misses her.

“The garage has nothing to do with it,” she cuts me short. “I'm worn out, I already told you.”

It is toward the end of that phone call, when we are about to say good-bye somewhat sullenly, that I hear her cough for the first time. She coughs in a way that's different from how you cough when the seasons change. She coughs sharply, gasping for breath, as if someone were playing around, snapping his fingers at the mouth of her trachea.

“What's wrong?” I ask her.

“This cough. It won't go away.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No, but I will. I will.”

M
rs. A.'s defection is soon visible in our house, made clear by multiple signs of neglect, in particular on Nora's desk. The stacks of paper whose loftiness had already been defying the height of medieval towers now reach alarming altitudes, toppling over one another to form a single disordered heap. Some important ones must certainly be hidden in there: bills to pay, notices from Emanuele's school, phone numbers that Nora insists on jotting on Post-its and decorating plans that will cause her to have a mild nervous breakdown when the clients call for them and they can't be found. Not that
Mrs. A. ever laid a hand on the documents—better yet, she pretended not to—but often, after she had straightened out the piles so that she could clean, the envelope that my wife had spent days looking for miraculously reappeared: Mrs. A. would leave it on top of the others, as if it just happened to be there.

“They've contacted me about fixing up a chalet in Chamois,” Nora says one Sunday afternoon. She's talking loudly to be heard above the roar of the vacuum cleaner she's angrily pushing over an area that doesn't seem to need it. “It's a good job. It would be a good job. Too bad I'll have to turn it down.”

“Turn it down? Why?”

“Why? Just look at how things are! I don't have time to breathe, let alone be able to carry out a project in Valle d'Aosta. You see those magazines on the couch? They've been sitting there all morning. I intended to read them, but I won't be able to.” She ventures too far from the wall—with a snap the vacuum cleaner's cord detaches from the outlet. The sudden silence startles her. She goes on staring at the magazines. “And there are articles in them that interest me,” she says. “They really interest me.”

_____

We ask her mother to help out. She comes a few times, grudgingly. When she enters the house, she goes through a series of propitiatory rituals: she makes a cup of coffee that she then sips drifting between the balcony and the kitchen, insisting someone keep her company, meanwhile sucking on a cigarette; then she pins up her hair, takes a pair of gloves and a clean apron and puts them on in front of the mirror, studying the effect. Transformed into the perfect domestic helper, she turns to her daughter. “So . . . what needs to be done?”

At that point Nora loses her patience. “
Everything
needs to be done, can't you see?”

They argue so heatedly that her mother quickly leaves the house, offended. After less than a month, we stop asking her to come, and she doesn't offer to return.

A brief experience with an au pair doesn't work out any better. Nora finds her slow and apathetic; she complains that the girl doesn't know Italian well enough to understand her instructions and that she has no sense of order.

“And she looks at you.”

“She looks at me?”

“She's got a crush on you, it's obvious.”

“You're crazy.”

“That's why she does those things to spite me, like when she broke the teapot. She knew I was particularly fond of it. I'm not saying that she did it on purpose. Not really. It was a kind of subliminal disrespect.”

I keep telling her that we'll find someone eventually, we just have to keep looking, but Nora is hardly listening.

“No. We won't find anyone,” she murmurs to herself, “no one decent. No one like her.”

_____

While my wife vents her dismay during the day, in increasingly bitter and erratic ways, I hold back until night—another difference that has always distinguished us (since I've known her, Nora's ability to sleep is a perpetual miracle). My insomnia has not been so acute since the days of my doctorate, when I accepted the fact that there was a four- or five-hour difference between the rest of the city's biorhythms and mine, as
if I lived alone on a meridian in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or had a job that involved night shifts. In recent years the disorder had moderated to little more than a nuisance to be managed judiciously, worsening slightly between seasons. Now, however, I reach a new alarming regularity: every night I wake up at exactly three o'clock and lie there for hours, sometimes until dawn, staring at the subtle play of light on the windows. Whereas at the time of my doctorate I could make up for some of the lost sleep, now, with Emanuele and my classes, the alarm is set for seven-thirty; the sleep deficit builds up, and that's that.

To keep my anxieties at bay, I mentally continue the calculations that I'd left in midstream that afternoon. I'd like to get up, look for a piece of paper and a pencil to jot down my ideas, but I don't dare. Nora forbade me to work at night ever since I confessed that if I do, numbers, letters and functions continue to dance before my eyes, making things worse. During my enforced vigils, I caress my wife's hip in the hope that she will open her eyes for a moment at least. These are also times when I happen to think of Mrs. A. and feel a sense of loss, of sadness.

As a child I, too, had a nanny. Her name was Teresa, “Teresina” to us, and she lived across the river. I don't remember much about her; I don't recall, for example, ever having touched her or hugged her, nor do I recall her smell. People have lots of sensory memories, comforting, warm memories to return to, but not me: I easily erase whatever isn't visual. I can call to mind only a few fragments about Teresa, like the way she cut up the potatoes she fried, in wedges, without peeling them first. I can also remember her stockings, opaque brownish hose whose thickness did not vary from one season to another. But the clearest episode concerning her, the one that displaced the others, goes back to the last time I saw her. By then I was in high school, and my mother decided that we had to give up the afternoon to go and call on my nanny. We went to see her at her row-house flat that I had visited many years earlier and of which I had no distinct recollection. It now seemed shabby, vaguely seedy to me. Teresina shared the four rooms with her son's family and spent her days in an armchair from which she kept an eye on her hyperactive granddaughter, who cavorted around and sometimes jumped on her, like a macaque.
So my parents had chosen someone poor to look after me: I don't know why, but at that moment the revelation left me indignant. After exchanging pleasantries, we sat for a while, listening to her rasping breath. When we were about to leave, Teresina drew a bill out of her wallet, as if adhering to an old automatic reflex, and insisted that I take it. I was appalled, but, correctly interpreting my mother's look, I accepted it.

I wonder what train of memories Emanuele will have of Mrs. A. when he is grown. There will be a lot fewer of them than I imagine, most likely. In any case, I mull it over, kicking off the covers for the umpteenth time and finally settling on a compromise (one leg in and the other out); I'm certainly not going to suggest he see her. When a relationship is severed, it's best if it's severed cleanly and permanently.

_____

Nora attributes the return of my insomnia to my work and only that. My contract with the university expires in a little over a year, and as of now there's been no talk of renewing it. When I inquired, asking my
supervisor about the position that the department has been promising to offer for years, he spread his arms. “What can I tell you? We're waiting for one of the old ones to die. But those guys are hardy.”

He did not add anything more, nor was he sensibly tempted, being sixty-six himself, to include himself in the “hardy” group. He doesn't care to dwell too much on the matter of my professional advancement; he finds it more pleasurable to ramble on about departmental intrigues and from there shift to politics in general. Sometimes he goes on like that until nine or ten o'clock at night, when the corridors empty out and the guards lock the doors, except for one side door that opens with a magnetic key card (and if by chance you've forgotten it, you're in big trouble). For the most part, I nod, scribbling out a page of calculations. I'm his personal audience, and I have no choice. I don't think he's happy for us to spend so many hours together either—he always goes away irritated—but he likes to exercise the authority he has over me, and sequestering me in his office is still better than what's waiting for him at home. He's never explained why, but when talking about marriage he becomes more
caustic than usual. When I told him that I was getting married, his comment was nearly as callous as what Nora's father said to her: “The important thing is to keep separate accounts, because love is love, but money is money.” What my supervisor told me was, “It's still a few months off. You have time to reconsider.” He came to the reception alone, stationed himself near the buffet table to make sure he didn't miss any goodies and was among the last to leave, somewhat tipsy. I was told he didn't say a word about the wedding the following morning; instead he complained about something in the food that made him sick.

His ironic statement about the elderly professors will have to be enough for me to defer, for a few months, my fear of finding myself unemployed. Nevertheless, I record the variation in the probability distribution of my academic future, the standing altered by a few decimals in favor of a move to another city, another country—or maybe a dignified surrender, to finally undertake a less noble plan.

_____

The hypothesis involving a foreign move has the ability to upset the family's equilibrium. Every time I tell Nora about a research center where a group of young scientists are working in a field related to mine and producing “something really interesting,” whenever I reveal to her how working with my supervisor is eroding invisible parts of me and describe the benefit I would gain from getting out from under his influence (being able to sleep again at night, I'm sure of it), her face darkens. She offers a distracted murmur of assent while the silence she counters with immediately afterward implores me not to go any further.

The period in which we learned of her pregnancy was also the time when the move to Zurich, where I had won a four-year research grant, seemed like a definite decision. I was to precede Nora by a few months to allow her to give birth in Italy, and as soon as the baby's documents were obtained, we would all three of us settle in the most alien canton of alien Switzerland. We made an on-site visit together to look for an apartment. We visited three in the same district, the area where the majority of physicists land because it guarantees an acceptable balance between the new salary
and the rent, and because there is a movie theater. Nora barely entered the houses. She nodded mechanically to the real-estate agent and stroked an as-yet-invisible baby bump.

Caught between her strange apathy and my own insecurity, I began pressing her once we'd completed the rounds. So which one did she prefer? Wasn't it better to give up some square footage for a small courtyard, in anticipation of when the child would begin walking? I listed the pros and cons of each option. She listened to me without saying a word. When she spoke, she did so calmly. “I can't live with the smell of Indian food permeating the stairs. I can't live on that carpet, nor on those marbleized floors. And I don't want to go walking through these streets with our child. By myself.”

Her eyes filled up, but she didn't cry. “I'm spoiled, I know. And I'm very sorry.”

Nonetheless, the plan remained standing for a few weeks, even after Nora was confined to bed and as Mrs. A. was already busying herself around our house, tactfully imposing her new order on our rooms and routines. “Who knows what garbage they eat up
there?” she would comment whenever I dared bring up life in Zurich (many of Mrs. A.'s considerations began and ended with food; she viewed meals as the culmination of her days). I'm certain that she and Nora had discussed the move in detail and had already rejected it, though they merely hinted at it with a cunning that was totally feminine. Nora often exercises that kind of forcefulness in matters that concern us, consisting of a firm but gentle opposition: she enacts her will, bit by bit. With a spirit not unlike that with which she furnishes other people's homes, she has also furnished my life, which before her was bare and unadorned.

Both women waited for me to grasp their decision, and then they granted me the benefit of formally making my own. One morning I wrote an e-mail in which I explained in just a few lines that due to complications in my wife's pregnancy I was forced to give up my grant. My supervisor was scornful of such surrender. “Scientific discoveries are not fond of convenient lives, much less inconvenient wives,” he said. In actuality he was glad about my renunciation, since no one else would have quickly taken over the work that I did
for him (the development of dozens of Feynman diagrams, substituting for him in the group-theory course, drafting clean copies of his notes, the numerical simulations that I had to run in the evening and check in the middle of the night—all the things that enabled him to poke around on the Internet most of the time and only rarely show off at the blackboard in his office, displaying how smoothly the algebra, in all its brazen beauty, flowed from the chalk he held).