Lost Words (16 page)

The geography teacher, Signora Marelli, who'd never hidden her sympathies for neo-fascism, said seraphically, “Don't get so worked up, Salma. Ideas come and ideas go, but the good ones always stay!” And to me, before she started in with her questions on that year's curriculum: “Graziosi, just for the sake of it, how does your father vote?”

“That will be enough,” ruled Barro, the technical applications teacher, barely concealing his anger. “The boy wrote what he thinks. What are we going to do, put him on trial? Is the composition well written? It is? So we're going to pass him, and with a good grade. For my part I don't have to ask him anything. And he's right, Italian colonialism was shameful.”

I passed Italian, Latin, and English with distinction, and I did well in all the other subjects, too. I received compliments from the whole exam committee, including, at the end, Signorina Salma. But she gave me a strange look, as if she suddenly realized that she had been harboring a viper in her classroom for the past three years.

*.

Caselli, in a bathrobe, jittery as a junebug, kept repeating that she had only seen her in mid-air.

“So then tell me,” the police commissioner pressed on with the patience of a bureaucrat, “what did you see, in the exact order . . .”

And it was the same story.

“If I had seen her perched on the balcony I would have said something to her,” Caselli tried to justify herself. “I was smoking a cigarette. I couldn't sleep . . . at five o'clock in the morning it was already so hot I couldn't breathe.”

My mother was crying. She had been the first person to go down to the courtyard, after Caselli called her on the intercom.

“Poor Maestra!” she kept repeating.

I had made it just in time to notice, through the window blinds, the stretcher-bearers draping a sheet over the corpse and lifting it into the ambulance.

After Caselli came Terzoli, Miss Lynd's neighbor. She hadn't heard anything in particular, she said. Or rather yes, she did, the sound of the toilet being flushed, repeatedly. That's what had woken her up. The sound of water got on her nerves. Miss Lynd had never made so much noise at night. She was one of the quietest people she had ever met. Yes, of course, she was a little crazy, greeting everyone with strange, incomprehensible words and never confiding in anyone—if only all neighbors were like her!

“You couldn't tell whether she had any company?” the commissioner asked.

“I don't think so.”

“Another voice . . .”

“Do you mean someone pushed her?” the spinster was already letting her imagination run wild. “Good God! Why? . . . you don't think it was the gypsies, do you?”

“Signora, do you live with someone?”

“No, I'm single,” she replied, with her head held high.

“Thanks, you can go back home now . . .”

Disappointed that she hadn't been questioned more at length, she tightened the belt of her bathrobe and took the elevator.

My mother poured the officer a cup of coffee.

“What about all that blood?” she wondered. “We can't leave a stain like that where everyone passes by. Who knows how long before someone removes it. And it'll take a lot more than ten bucketfuls of water. What do you think—you, an expert in these things?”

He said she would need ammonia.

“So do you think she was murdered?” my mother suggested.

“To your knowledge did Miss Lynd suffer from nerves? Was she ill? I mean, do you have any reason to believe she didn't want to live anymore? . . . A reason to kill herself? . . . Why does everyone say she was crazy?”

“They're the ones who are crazy!” my mother corrected him. “Miss Lynd was a great lady, a real signora . . . but if she was ill—I wouldn't know . . .”

Now it was my turn.

I told him that Miss Lynd had taught me English, that she used to give me snacks, that she knew a lot of things . . .

“OK, that will do . . .” the policeman cut me short.

The next morning a letter arrived for me. It was postmarked five days earlier. Shaking, I folded the envelope in two and hid it in my pants pocket. I finished separating the rest of the mail, made three signs of the cross, and began to read:

My dear Luca,

I'm leaving. I was lucky to meet you. Thanks to you I was able to fool myself into thinking I had rediscovered my youth. I hope you will continue on your own what we started together. You definitely have the energy and the conviction. You once asked me what had happened to my English dictionary. When I told you that I had grown tired of working on it, I was lying. The truth is I had stopped believing in the possibility of giving precise meanings to words. That's why I abandoned it. What a disaster! My whole life had been spent defining things. And all of a sudden . . . something in me stopped working, or maybe it finally started working properly. Who knows? I'd been so unhappy since the day my dictionary died. But you made me want to give it another try. Our lessons made it suddenly seem possible again. I could pretend that everything had a meaning and a purpose. To define! But it doesn't—it isn't like that. At least not for me. I wanted to instill in you a confidence that had forsaken me a long time ago. Please don't accuse me of inconsistency or hypocrisy. With you I started to believe in language again. Or rather, I fooled myself into thinking I had started to believe again. But that wasn't the case . . . Now all I see are the lies inside me. And when I remember what I used to be like as a girl! The faith I had in meanings, which I collected, just the way you do in your notebooks! Keep them close to you, these notebooks! And when, perhaps, you are tempted by doubts, take them out, reread them, don't hide them the way I hid my own work.

Farewell,

Amelia

IV

M
y mother came looking for me under the wisteria tree.

“Miss Lynd had a son!”

She was huffing and puffing as if she'd gone up and down the staircase ten times.

My Latin book fell down off my knees and the letter from the Maestra, which I kept hidden between the pages, slipped out of the book and onto the gravel. Luckily my mother didn't notice. I bent down to pick it up and hide it again.

“Did you hear? A son! He just called on the telephone. He's coming by this afternoon. He's the one who bought her apartment! His name is Ippolito Foschi! . . . Ippolito . . . What the heck kind of name is that? . . . She certainly was a strange one, that Lynd! Are you sure she never told you anything about him?”

He was tall and thin, with his mother's fine features—and while in her they hinted at the remnants of a former beauty, in him they revealed a protracted, indelible adolescence. He, too, smiled with a certain ease. Yes, he did look a lot like her. But there was also something in him of the Foschi who had given him his surname. I strained to recognize that other part. I felt as if I could identify it in the narrowing of his jaw, the quivering of his wide nostrils, the sudden iciness of his stare. (While she, even when she was railing against the world, conserved a warm light in her eyes.) Before him I felt as if I were in the presence of a Christ-like figure, in whom I had to distinguish between the godly and the human parts: the father and the mother.

Ippolito Foschi, the secret son, was the living, tangible symbol of the great mystery hidden in the life of Maestra Lynd. I looked at him with religious awe, as if the dead woman had decided to be reincarnated through him, to give me the extreme proof of her unimaginable, unquantifiable power, subjugating me, once and for all, to her dominion.

“Miss Lynd was such a good woman, such a civil woman . . .” my mother said to cheer him up.

“Really? I'm pleased to hear it . . .” he replied absently.

“She was the one who caused me the least amount of trouble . . .”

“Well, she didn't cause me much trouble, either, to tell you the truth. We hadn't seen each other for twenty years.”

My mother and I were paralyzed with dismay. On her creased forehead I could read a host of questions that were not transfigured into words. Foschi's manner didn't encourage questions or comments.

The three of us went up to the fifth floor. He only stayed for ten minutes.

My mother reported that he had looked around the apartment incuriously, gone to the balcony, and stuck his head out, without uttering a word or shedding a tear the whole time.

“He must be in shock, poor thing! We should put ourselves in his shoes . . .”

*.

Signora Dell'Uomo, in her role as the condominium representative, descended the stairs to interrogate the doorwoman. My mother cut her no slack, limiting herself to saying that the Professor—that's the title she came up with—was a
very proper
person.

“Very
smiley
,” Signora Dell'Uomo specified, “a little too smiley, wouldn't you say? As if the tragedy had nothing to do with him . . . what does he say about his mother? I mean, she fell from the fifth floor. I'm sure she had her reasons!”

“The Professor is very reserved. Besides, why should he have to say anything? It was a tragedy. The time for words is over. What's needed now is silence . . .”

“Of course, of course . . . but I think it's absurd that the son had no comment about the
suicide
of his mother!”—she shuddered as she said the word—“What I mean is that she died right before our eyes. In the courtyard there's a bloodstain that will disappear god knows when. We have a right to know, don't we? If you ask me she had something weighing on her conscience . . . There was no sight or sound of him until yesterday. Why is it that he's only now making an appearance? Where has he been till now? What kind of a son is he!”

Most of the building showed up at the Maestra's funeral. At the mortuary in the Niguarda Hospital there were neither priests nor flowers, except a spindly wreath from the condominium. The coffin was closed, since there was so little left to see of Amelia Lynd.

The seamstress offered to accompany him to the cemetery, but the Professor refused: the coffin was going straight to the crematorium.

The malice began the second he got into the car. They had something to say about everything: there was no mass, the coffin was cheap, the body was cremated! What they disapproved of most of all was his composure. He didn't shed a tear! Scandalous!

For days and days my mother repeated, as the commissioner himself had asserted, that the death of Miss Lynd had been an accident of the kind that happens to the elderly. She couldn't sleep, she got up to get a breath of fresh air on the balcony, she lost her balance . . .

But they weren't satisfied with this version of the incident. It failed to explain too many things. For example, why didn't the Professor want a religious funeral for his mother? “Nowadays the church also accepts suicides, if indeed it was suicide,” Terzoli observed. And Vezzali, “Of course he shipped the body straight to the oven: what better way to get rid of the proof than a nice bonfire? . . .” And why hadn't he wept? Why did he have nothing to say there, in front of the mortuary? Why didn't he bother to thank the attendees and apologize? And those smiles? Who did he think he was fooling? And above all, if Lynd was washing the windows, why didn't the police find a damp cloth or Windex? Not to mention there was plenty of space between the windows and the railings of the balcony. The Maestra would've needed to take a flying leap, which was impossible for a woman of her age.

*.

The summer smothered all this malice beneath its muggy dome. Now the hens had something else to keep their minds occupied. They complained that they were broke, although they were still unwilling to give up their vacations. Some were going to the seaside, some to the mountains, others to the countryside. The doorwoman had better keep an eye on their property! They even expected her, in their absence, to inspect—around the clock, on a daily basis—every lock, floor by floor, from cellar to roof.

“They've got me confused with a night watchman . . .” my mother grumbled.

As for tips, they were a lot more meager than in years gone by.

By the end of July we were the only people left in the building, apart from the Biondo's, who hadn't traveled for years because of her illness. Poor woman! So she might enjoy at least a little bit of summer, her husband would move her to the balcony after lunch, leaving her there for hours, propped up by mounds of cushions and sheltered from the sun by a straw hat with a brim as wide as a beach umbrella. I could see her from the courtyard through the foliage of the plane tree. More than once, even if I knew that paralysis prevented her from moving, I had the distinct sensation that she was wiggling her numb hand toward me in a vague signal of warning.

My father continued to go to the factory. He preferred to be a scab rather than deal with my mother's moods.

“Can you feel the peace and quiet? This is better than the Riviera,” she would say. “I don't envy the folks who are going away—no, not at all. What kind of a vacation is that, with all the noise and traffic? Everyone in cars like idiots! Beaches so crowded you can't even walk . . . Now this is what I call a vacation. No one around, no more ‘yes signora, of course signora, right away, signora . . . Feel how peaceful it is! Smell the fragrance!”

In the morning and afternoon we would sit on the shaded steps, spending long hours—she observing, me reading. When it got too muggy we would stay inside. I would've been happy reading under the plane tree but she always wanted me by her side, using the same old excuse that it was too hot outside. “With this heat,” she would say, “the crazies sprout like mushrooms. It would be better not to be outside by yourself in the courtyard . . . With all the awful things we hear on the television . . . you don't want to wind up like Paul Getty, do you?”

Inside or out, it was all the same to me. I read all day, without stopping. I even forgot to breathe, and when my eyes were too tired I would imagine what would happen in another month: I would soon be starting the Classical Lyceum, where I'd meet new people, learn ancient Greek, go downtown every day . . .

On the eve of the Feast of the Assumption, the Professor moved to Via Icaro. Unlike his mother, he brought a lot of stuff with him. Out of the moving van came an avalanche of boxes and suitcases of every size. The movers were two black men who spoke with him in English. My mother was mesmerized by them. She had only ever seen dark-skinned people on television.

“I barely noticed the move,” she started to tell my father at supper. “Every time someone else moved I had to clean for days and days after, fixing tears in the runners, rubbing out scratches on the walls and in the elevator, skid marks on the floor . . . Do you remember Signor Puxeddu, Paride? What a mess! He was moving back to Sardinia because Milan made him sick to his stomach. You were still little, Chino . . . Well, the morning that he finally moved out—I still hadn't opened the loge—he left this huge turd in the middle of the lobby! I slipped on it and almost killed myself! . . . But those two negroes swept everything up, dusted the walls, and wiped them down. They could teach the people who live here a thing or two about manners! And they weren't bad-looking! On the contrary. Two handsome young men—tall, well-built. And the arms on them! . . .”

“Negroes are big down there, too . . .” my father muttered under his breath.

She continued to extol the polite manners of the Professor and his movers. She talked and talked more than she had in months.

*.

“You can hear the water fountain . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“And the streetcar, too . . . Listen, Professor Foschi. It's so peaceful! Another coffee?”

“No thank you.”

“It seems ridiculous to keep the loge open in this wasteland . . . What's the difference between a weekday like today and a holiday like the Feast of the Assumption? . . . None! But the rules say that the loge can only be closed on the fifteenth—fine, keep it open, for heaven's sake. The burglars won't even have to trouble themselves by sneaking over the gate and climbing up to the balconies by the trash chute . . . Free entry!”

“So you should close, Signora Elvira . . .”

She placed her hand over her mouth, as if she had just heard a dirty word.

“Close! . . .”

“Who'd stop you from doing it? Besides you and your family I'm the only one here . . . Right?”

“The Biondos are also here, on the fourth floor. She's been paralyzed for years. At some point she came down with a strange illness, I don't know what it was . . . a rare disease . . .”

The Professor lowered his gaze. He wasn't interested in gossip.

“So call Signor Biondo and ask him if he would mind if the loge was closed for a few days.”

“Basically it's about security.”

“Security?”

“Yes, of course. There've been a few burglaries here. They wanted to break into the loge one night. What a scare! And they almost succeeded. But my husband chased them away. Every now and then he rises to the occasion . . . And the burglars had already robbed two apartments at 18 Via Icaro.”

“I never lock my door . . .”

“Not even at night?”

“No, not even at night. If someone has evil intentions, one way or another they'll find a way in. Someone who wants to ransack your apartment is obviously not going to check whether your doors are locked. So there's no difference between a closed and an open door. The difference lies in the intentions of the person outside. And what can we do about the intentions of other people?”

His argument was too subtle for my mother.

“So, with your authorization, I'm going to call Signor Biondo and tell him that I'm thinking of closing.”

“With my
authorization
?”

“Yes. Did I say something wrong?”

“Well. You did get one thing right. I have no authority . . .”

“Yes, you do, you represent the condominium.”

The Professor's face darkened. “Signora, who do you think I am?”

My mother didn't know where to turn. She took a deep breath and forced herself to remain calm. “Alright. Please, not another word. It would be much easier to stay open.”

“Signora,” he pressed on, determined to be completely clear. “I don't represent
anyone
. I can barely represent myself. And that word, ‘condominium,' please stop using it, at least with me. It makes my skin crawl . . . The last thing I wanted to say is that you don't need my permission. Go ahead, take the day off, leave . . .”

The last part of the speech almost sounded sweet.

“If it were up to me, I'd already be an
apartment owner
,” my mother said, slightly reassured. “Be that as it may, if you don't mind, I've never found the word so awful. There are words that are worse. ‘Doorwoman,' for instance. Do you think it's been nice for me all these years to hear myself called a
doorwoman
? People can't say that word without adding a little venom. I wish they'd call me an apartment owner . . . Did you know that before your arrival I was about to buy myself a home? I really wanted to leave, you can't imagine how badly. But in a family, in the end, it's the husband who decides.”

“I'm sorry,” the Professor said.

That was all. He didn't ask a single question. The private affairs of other people made him feel uncomfortable.

“You keep telling me to leave . . .” my mother resumed, forcing herself to sound cheerful and friendly, “but why aren't you going anywhere?”

“I have to work. I have to finish something that I've been dragging out for a long time. Otherwise, of course I'd go away.”