Lost Words (14 page)

She wouldn't even consider the idea of abandoning Via Icaro, that godforsaken road out in the sticks. If she was going to become a homeowner, it had to be here. Here, where they had humiliated her, where they had treated her like a servant. So only
here
could her claim to freedom become a form of revenge.

“I'll have to speak with Alfio . . .” Gemma hesitated, “he's the one that keeps the books in the family . . . I don't know if we have a million. I really don't know . . . You were right when you wondered how the signore get their money! But we're not like that. Alfio works himself to death. And is it worth it in the end?”

My mother took her hands. “So you'll talk to him tonight? Promise?”

*.

Another long wait had begun, even harder than the others: all of a sudden our entire future, our happiness, depended on Gemma.

Still ignoring the situation, my father, at supper, told us the plot of the film
The Seduction of Mimi
, down to the smallest details. Then he started criticizing Bertolucci. Brando's monologue to his dead wife in
The Last Tango
was a joke . . . and so were the rape scene, the mumbled sentences, the finger in the ass—ridiculous! . . . And
The Canterbury Tales
of Pasolini? Even worse. The work of a pervert. Dicks everywhere you looked . . .

He did all the talking. My mother and I kept looking in the direction of the telephone.

“Would you mind telling me what the hell is wrong with you two tonight?” he yelled, exasperated.

Her nerves were on edge and she turned around in a flash.

“Nothing,” she seethed, “what do you think is wrong?”

“You're a couple of bores,” he said, the most offensive thing he could come up with.

By the following morning Gemma still hadn't given her answer. I went back to school and my mother kept waiting. She didn't dare telephone, fearing she would irritate her friend. But the clock was ticking. There was only one day left.

At two-thirty, with my encouragement, she decided to call. Her husband picked up. He said that Gemma had gone to Carmen's for a coffee.

We waited another hour. My mother tried again. Luckily Gemma was back.

“Did you talk to Alfio?” she asked, getting right to the point. “You haven't? . . . But Gemma, I told you I had to give my answer now—tomorrow, or I'll lose the apartment! For heaven's sake, put yourself in my shoes! . . . Listen, let's forget about it . . .”

She slammed the phone down, furious, and still wearing her clogs she hurried out the door.

“Where are you going?” I shouted at her from the window.

“To Carmen's!”

She came back a few minutes later, all red in the face and sweating.

“I came so close to slapping her across the face. What a fool I am! Of all people to ask for a favor! In my opinion they're in the cahoots. Fine friends they are . . . and who knows what they're going to say behind my back now!”

She got back on the phone.

“Gemma, I apologize for what I said earlier. I'm a bundle of nerves, try to understand. I've been waiting for this moment for years. So can you please let me know
by tonight
, don't forget!” And she added, a second before hanging up, “Thanks also on Paride's behalf.”

A little before seven the telephone rang. My mother was about to drain the pasta. She dropped everything in the sink—pasta, boiling water, kettle—and ran to answer it. The only thing we heard her say was, “I see.” She hung up the phone, went back to the sink, and started retrieving the macaroni.

We sat down to the table. Her eyes had become as big as two lakes. She looked at me and in her gaze I saw a last heroic glimmer of determination. She waited for me to close and lock the front door. My father sat down in the armchair to watch television—but she turned it off. Paying no heed to his protests, she said with no ifs, ands, or buts, that it would cost six million to buy the house: six, not five.

He had a bemused expression, then he jumped to his feet. With a sweep of the hand he knocked all the knickknacks off the fold-out bed and started kicking the chairs.

“You thought you were going to fuck me over?” he gasped, as if he were about to cough, circling her like a maniac. “Me? For Christ's sake . . .”

“Shut up! Do you want the whole building to hear you? Do you want us to become a laughing stock?”

He kept shaking his head and waving his arms around.

“Where did you think you were going to find the money, huh? Did you even think about what you were doing?
DID YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WERE DOING
? You wanted to ruin me! That's what you wanted! And like an idiot I followed you! Where did you think you were going to get the money—growing on trees?”

With her back against the wall, my mother finally uttered the word that she had been struggling to avoid: “We could always apply for a mortgage. What's wrong with that? Not everyone buys with cash on the barrel. Not even Signora Dell'Uomo, I hear, who is hardly hurting for money. For that matter she doesn't even have children to take care of . . .”

At the sound of the word “mortgage” my father's face turned to ash.

“Mortgages are the ruin of the world,” he hollered at the top of his lungs. “What the fuck do I have to say to make you understand?”

He panted, placing his hand over his chest. We thought he was having a heart attack. My mother helped him sit in the armchair, fanned his face with her hand, and asked him fearfully whether she should call the doctor.

He stood up in a sweat and very slowly made his way to the bedroom.

I spent the night trying to overhear any words that might've come from their room. But not a word was said. The only thing I could hear was the ticking of the alarm clock.

*.

More than anything, even more than defeat, she was oppressed by the thought that she had become an object of ridicule. She had brought universal disdain on herself: everyone knew of her failure and relished it. Now she saw the curled lips in their customary greetings as an affront or even a reprimand.

“They're all laughing in my face! And they're right! I couldn't even buy my own house! They're right to laugh! Ha-ha-ha! Very funny!”

And she wept like a fountain, her hands balled into fists, her mouth drooling uncontrollably.

She stopped speaking to my father. What was left to say? Nothing. Instead of words, gasps and sobs came out of her mouth. She couldn't breathe. Out of the blue she would drop whatever she was doing and run to the window for air. Every day she became more listless—she wasted away.

Disappointment had aged her visibly and she suddenly looked ten years older. “What's wrong, Elvira?” the signore would ask. “Are you tired?” So as not to give them any satisfaction, she would reply, “What do I have to be tired about? Elvira is never tired! She's like a mule!”

Even my father asked her what was wrong, but she refused to answer him.

She would go out without telling me. She'd go to sit on a bench in the garden, under the willow tree, and stay there for fifteen minutes at a time. When people asked for her, I had to run and call her, and I'd find her motionless, in a daze. “Momma, they're looking for you,” I would whisper, trying not to startle her. Not even the name “Aldrovanti” was enough to shake her out of it—the same name that had struck the fear of God into her a few days earlier now left her completely indifferent. “Tell her I'll call back . . .” she would reply nonchalantly.

One day I ran almost all the way to the streetcar stop to get her. She'd decided to go to the Rinascente department store downtown to spend five hundred thousand liras in a single shot. What did she need the money for anymore? In the meantime, with no one keeping watch at the door, a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses had snuck up the stairs. But Terzoli stopped them immediately, threatening to call the police. “What a bunch of creeps!” she told my mother. “They'd rather let a child die than give it a blood transfusion! We'd better not let management find out about these little visits . . .” My mother didn't bat an eye. She didn't give a damn about appearing infallible anymore. Nor was she worried about criticism, complaints, and threatening insinuations.

She had lost all desire to work. She'd also lost the physical strength she needed to clean so many floors. What she used to finish in a morning now took her a whole week. The bucket and the scrub-brush would be left forgotten in the lobby for days on end.

I was mad at my father—he had been unfair and selfish. But he needed some sympathy, too. He was waiting for a sign of reconciliation from her, a sign that never came. During supper he would stare at her, smile at her, studying her movements lovingly, convinced that the simple insistence of his gaze would induce her to give in. But nothing. She ignored him with a demented obstinacy, made even more monstrous in that it conveyed no anger.

*.

Now the building was in the hands of twenty owners.

All of them adopted an insufferable haughtiness, morning, noon, and night. Even I could feel it. They would walk by the loge with a sneer, giving long, smug looks, as if to say, “Did you hear? I'm an owner.
I'M AN OWNER
!”

Many of them stopped saying hello, and the signore started to expect the most absurd things from the doorwoman—like sweeping their doormats or polishing their doors. They all wanted an impeccable,
refined
building, and each of them, as an owner, felt they had the right to demand whatever they pleased, no matter how outrageous, and had no respect for either the doorwoman or their neighbors. Some didn't even bother to throw their garbage bags down the chute, leaving their trash sitting on the landing.

Misbehavior doubled, as did complaints and fights. Rovigo and Paolini, old buddies, came to blows over a parking spot, even though in front of the apartment complex there were miles of empty land. Tension between the soccer fans was exacerbated, and on the balconies—despite a strict prohibition by the management—the flags of Milan's rival clubs started to appear.

Dell'Uomo, who hadn't been able to have children, told Vezzali that she had only been able to give birth after two miscarriages. Mortally offended, Vezzali spread the word that Dell'Uomo did indeed have a son, but she kept him hidden at the Asylum for the Disabled, with the armless and legless creatures.

An endless circuit of gossip brought to light the true ages of the various signore. It became known that Terzoli, for example, was only four years younger than my father. But she looked the same age as Mantegazza.

*.

My mother didn't want to hear another word about letting the kittens loose in the field. This year we had to kill them, and quickly, before they strayed into the courtyard—otherwise we'd never hear the end of it from the building manager.

I went downstairs to look for them in the basement, but no luck.

Rita had noticed that the cat, after it licked the plate of leftovers, would run behind the building. We went looking for her there, where no one dared to venture because of the loose wall tiles, and found her at the foot of the magnolia tree.

“Here, kitty, kitty. Show me and Chino where you hid your little babies,” Rita sweet-talked her. “Take us to them . . . Come on!”

The cat, as if enchanted by the sound of the girl's voice, turned to gaze at the wall of ivy marking the end of the garden.

I brushed aside the leaves and saw them.

The cat picked them up one by one in her mouth—there were six—and put them in a row. Then she lay down on her side to nurse them.

With the same naturalness as the animal who had stretched out to nurse her newborns, Rita pulled up her T-shirt.

“Do you want to touch them?” she asked me. “If you like, I'll let you suckle them, like a kitty.”

She grabbed my hand and placed it over her breast. Her nipples were hard.

“Now we're engaged,” she announced.

At sunset, after using a bowl of milk to entice the cat to go down to the cellar, I led my mother to the secret lair. The kittens were awake and mewling softly, one after the other. My mother picked them up with one hand, two at a time, and stuffed them into a plastic bag from the supermarket.

“What're you looking at?” she scolded me. “If I start feeling sorry for cats, then I'm really pathetic. Does anyone ever feel sorry for me?”

She tied the bag shut with a tight knot and slammed it hard against the corner of the building. One, two, three, four times, until the translucent white of the plastic bag had turned ruby red.

To keep the cat from recognizing the smell, we buried the bodies under three feet of garbage.

*.

An unknown man appeared at the window. He was bald, his red cheeks riddled with purple veins, and wearing winter clothing.

“I'm Baioni,” he introduced himself. “May I speak with the doorwoman?”

Hearing his voice, my mother rose from the bed and came out to see.

“And who might you be?”

Her eyes were swollen with sleep and her hair was glued to the nape of her neck.

Once she would have corrected him, to say that she was the
custodian
. But not anymore: now she was indifferent to everything, even to things that used to infuriate her.

To identify himself, the unknown man lifted a leather suitcase up to the window. She opened it. This was also new: when had she ever, before the sale of the building, allowed a traveling salesman to come in? Exposing herself to the risk of being attacked? Neglecting her errands, not to mention her personal security and the general order of the building? But there was something about Signor Baioni that inspired trust. He had gentle manners and a kind face, like a friar. My mother unlocked the door and invited him to follow her into her room.

Within a few seconds the large double-bed had turned into a jewelry display case. I had never seen so much gold before. I was bedazzled. My mother, instead, feigned perfect equanimity. Among the many precious items, she claimed not a single one was any good. The salesman raised his index finger to implore her to be patient. From an inside pocket of his heavy checked coat he fished out a sachet.