Like Family (4 page)

M
rs. A. does not lose her hair during the first cycle of chemotherapy, nor during the second either. Instead she vomits continually, which is perhaps worse. She's placed three basins in strategic locations—beside the couch, under the bed and in the bathroom—and is not reluctant to talk about how she uses them regularly. Reticence about bodily functions has never been part of her nature. She's a woman who goes straight to the point: one of those people—as she would describe herself—who choose to tell it like it is. What she can't stand is having everyone in town ask her how she is. Who
cares?
She's lost thirteen pounds in a little over a month, she is visibly emaciated, so she's not too surprised that everyone asks about her health. To avoid it she goes out as seldom as possible and now prefers to do her shopping at the market in Almese, a few miles farther away; in any case, it's on her way back from the hospital.

The doctors have advised against raw vegetables, preserves packed in oil and sausages—everything with a potential bacterial content that might threaten her weakened immune system, a kind of pregnant-woman's diet that she has not experienced in better circumstances. And just like a pregnant woman, in the brief periods when she is unaffected by the treatment and its aftereffects, she indulges in sporadic yearnings for particular foods, which she perhaps ironically calls “my cravings.”

One day she gets into the car and drives for miles and miles, only because she's recalled the bread baked in a wood-burning oven in Giaveno. She's spent a lifetime denying herself such whims in the name of exemplary conduct, out of respect for . . . respect for what? She'd had a yen for that bread many times
before but had never ventured to go and get it because it seemed inconvenient to face that winding road just to satisfy an impulse. Now she clings to her desires, she invokes them, because each one corresponds to a burst of vitality that for a few minutes distracts her from the overwhelming thought of the illness.

Parmigiano cheese is the first to vanish from her refrigerator, followed by cheeses in general, then red and white meats. The nausea isn't to blame for the meat, she explains; it's that she can no longer taste or smell it, and chewing a piece of meat without tasting it is like having something dead in your mouth, aware the whole time that it's dead: in the end it's impossible to swallow it.

“Last night I felt like peas and eggs. I cooked them and ate them eagerly. Then I started coughing and threw it all up. That's it, no more eggs and peas either.”

Mrs. A., who never turned her nose up at even the most dubious traditional dishes—roasted frogs' legs, boiled snails, pigeon or tripe, fried brains and entrails—is now unable to consume an innocent plate of eggs and peas. “Water, too, can you believe it? Even
that nauseates me.” Starting in December, and for the entire year of life left to her, she will drink only carbonated beverages—Coke, aranciata and chinotto—and will eat mainly sweets, like an immoderate, incorrigible little girl.

I decide to go and see her. Informed of her absurd diet, I bring her a tray of small Baci di Dama cookies (observing their success, I show up with an identical tray at every future visit, until the end, until she refuses those, too). One sunny Sunday morning, I set out with Emanuele, who, to honor his defector-nanny has brought along an intensely colorful, almost psychedelic drawing, in which winged nymphs with pink, purple and blue hair float in a monster-infested sky.

“What are these?” I ask him.

“Delicate fairies.”

“And those?”

“Pokémon.”

“Oh.”

Too bad he then decides to wrap the drawing: he balls it up like a candy and loads it with Scotch tape. What he hands to Mrs. A. is a gob of crumpled, sticky
paper. She sets it aside, puzzled. She no longer has time to pursue Emanuele's creative excursions; she has her body to look after now, all those medicines to take and their side effects to be weighed against their benefits. I have the distinct feeling that the drawing will end up in the trash as soon as we leave.

Emanuele can't understand the self-centeredness the illness has forced on her. He can't conceive of Mrs. A. as a different person from the woman who took care of him, him and him alone, who followed him along his rambling fantasies wherever they were headed and spoiled him like a little prince. When he notices her unexpected remoteness, he becomes nervous and petulant. I can tell by the way his voice changes: he does that whenever he wants to be the center of attention. But Mrs. A. doesn't have the strength or the desire to understand what's going through the child's head. I find myself between two raging flames burning with expectations and resentment: on the one hand a sick elderly woman, on the other a schoolboy, each eager to have all eyes on him for fear of disappearing.

I send Emanuele out to play in the courtyard, even
though it's cold. He protests but in the end obeys. From the doorway he gives me one of his most withering looks.

_____

There was a room in Mrs. A.'s house where the radiators had been turned off for years, a room that looked not like either a living room or a study but rather a reliquary. Since in winter the temperature here was at least ten degrees lower than in the rest of the apartment, when you went in, you had the feeling you were entering a catacomb. The windows were shuttered with colored-glass panes depicting women's faces in profile—I don't recall the name of the stained-glass artist, but Mrs. A. always mentioned him very reverently—so the light that filtered through was also hushed, sepulchral. Everything in that room spoke of Renato.

A recessed wall had been fitted with shelves, and a different collection was displayed on each shelf. The mix of periods and styles suggested that the collector was an individual suffering from a peculiar incoherence or someone who was very open-minded: there were a dozen pre-Columbian statues, some bizarrely shaped
paperweights that I had never seen anywhere else, painted ceramic sculptures of dubious taste, plus assorted silver and brass containers. In the center of the room, a low table with a false bottom displayed twenty or so pocketwatches, arranged equidistantly from one another on a green felt lining, the hands of each stopped at twelve noon. The aspiration of a secondhand dealer like Renato to become an art expert—a goal he came close to but never actually achieved—was evident from the heterogeneous nature of the collection. Whether Mrs. A. was aware of it is impossible to say, but she would not have dishonored her husband's dubious talent for anything in the world. Of all the experiences in her life, assisting him in his business dealings was certainly the most unexpected and exciting; just the thought of it still filled her with pride.

The most valuable objects were stacked behind a lacquered screen with Oriental motifs: about fifty canvases, all authenticated. I know for a fact that there were works by Aligi Sassu and Romano Gazzera, at least a couple from the school of Felice Casorati and some from the futurist period, though not by its most celebrated exponents. Mrs. A. also spoke to me about
an oil by Giuseppe Migneco,
Gli sposi
(
The Married Couple
), which Renato had never wanted to sell, despite the insistence of a doctor who increased his offer each year. That painting, she said, made her think of her and Renato, and of me and Nora.

Actually I've never seen even one of the paintings. Mrs. A. let me see only the paper packaging, all identical, and the one time I dared peek between the edges of a wrapper, she stepped forward to stop me. I didn't try it again.

“What are you planning to do with them?” I ask her on the day of the visit with Emanuele. It's an indelicate question that I have not considered properly, yet I feel it's my duty to warn her about the dissolution of her cherished collection that she has watched over for so long in an apartment that no one would ever suspect housed such treasure. Whoever comes later will not have the slightest regard for it, certainly not what she would expect, because there is no possible comparison with a devotion that's lasted a lifetime. Mrs. A. still has the luxury of preparing for her death—and to determine the fate of each of those objects exactly as she wishes.

“They're fine here,” she replies.

The question creates a momentary rift: I realize it when she quickly invites me to leave that hall of memorabilia and move to the living room; she feels cold, she says. I know what she's thinking, and I can't blame her. Although I don't think I had an ulterior motive, still, I must admit that I noticed the painting of the nude woman about to peel peaches, and for a moment I imagined it hanging in Nora's and my bedroom, something that might seem intimate enough to be up there watching us every night, awake or asleep.

_____

After that Sunday I found myself in Mrs. A.'s apartment one more time. She had been dead for four months. In the end she'd left us two matching pieces of furniture, a table and a credenza from the twenties, both cream-colored; I had to hurry and pick them up before the place was sold. Two pieces of furniture: Babette's only gift to us and all we have left of her. She had not provided for Emanuele.

Both cousins, Virna and Marcella, were waiting for me. The table and the credenza were the only
furnishings remaining, along with a series of cartons containing odds and ends: a pressure cooker, two plastic pitchers and a set of gold-rimmed glasses.

“Those we'll give to charity,” Virna said.

“A noble intention,” I remarked, without a hint of sarcasm.

Not a trace of the chandeliers, the collection of pocketwatches and the pre-Columbian statues, no sign of the paintings and the grandfather clock in the living room. Even the double panes of the windows were gone. Now the light of day invaded the room aggressively, as it had never been allowed to do before. It's an apartment that has been plundered, the swift demobilization of an entire lifetime devoted to preservation. Mrs. A. had had plenty of time, months and months, to ensure that those sacred objects be handed down and given some meaning, and she hadn't done anything. After the diagnosis she had focused on nothing but striving desperately each day to gain a few more futile hours for herself. There was not a sign left of her, or of all that she had watched over for a lifetime.

Poor, foolish Mrs. A.! You let yourself be duped—death tricked you, and the illness before that. Where
are the paintings that you kept hidden behind the screen? For years you didn't even look at them, afraid the dust would damage them. Even the screen has disappeared, probably abandoned in some damp storeroom, wrapped in plastic and raised off the ground by a pallet. We have to consider the future, Mrs. A., always. You often boasted about how smart you were, how you learned everything you knew from experience, but unfortunately it didn't turn out to be very useful. You would have been better off thinking about it more, because your common sense wasn't enough to save you or your possessions. The end does not pardon us even the slightest of faults, even the most innocent of failings.

_____

We placed the table in the kitchen. Emanuele recognized it and walked around it, not touching it, as if wondering what spatiotemporal channel had transported it from Mrs. A.'s house, from the past, to here. The first night eating at it was strange; none of us was used to the chill of the marble surface, to its smooth feel as our forearms rested on it. The artificial light
glared off the white tabletop into our eyes; the whole room was suddenly more brilliant.

“I'll have to get a lower-watt bulb,” I said.

“Right,” Nora replied, preoccupied. Then she added, “Don't you feel like we're eating with her?”

There was no room for the credenza: too wide, too bulky for our urban kitchen. We put it in the basement, to await a new spot that it is unlikely to be assigned. One morning when I went down to clean it and apply a product to protect it from termites, I noticed some fine wood particles piled up in the corners. Opening the upper doors, I saw that the interior walls were papered with various newspaper articles, each with a date written on it in ballpoint: 1975 or 1976. Those were years when Renato was still alive but already gravely incapacitated. As far as I know, the credenza had come to Mrs. A. from an aunt of his, perhaps on the occasion of their wedding.

I scanned the headlines of the clippings, trying to find a selection criterion that seemed to make sense to me:

DEATH PLOT, POLICE OFFI
CER ARRESTED

PENTAGO
N AND CIA CAUSED DRO
UGHT IN CUBA?

ITT CON
FIRMS IT FINANCED AN
TI-ALLENDE COUP

PUBL
IC HOUSING TO BE HEA
TED BY SOLAR ENERGY

BILLION-DOLLAR SALAR
Y FOR COSMETICS PRES
IDENT

SAN GIORIO: FOU
L-SMELLING LANDFILL