Each of these old ladies had kept a personal shrine to Italy: her own album of photographs, dried flowers and grasses — and most cherished of all — the picture postcards, gone cloth-soft at the edges from being plucked so often from their paper brackets, held up to the closest light source for intense scrutiny and then pressed to the lips or to the heart. Together, these postcards made up a little map of paradise, eternally sunlit, sensuous, and above all, civilized to a degree I could hardly fathom.
At least once a week Mama would show Papa and Sophia and me the images she wanted us to take to heart: the piazzas of burnished cobbles; the marble fountains and statues. We looked together at the surging forms of Bernini’s muscular river gods who daily come to life in the Piazza Navona; the rearing horses with their wild eyes; the flawless dolphin. I studied in wonder yet again the slender human figures of Canova, all suspended in the act of love or adoration or the dance. These graceful beings spoke to my own yearning for an enthralling passion that was also innocent. I looked at the wings of Canova’s Cupid as he bent to caress Psyche and saw a substance like cloud vapour. I marvelled at how his delicate hand cupped Psyche’s right breast, his touch as light as air itself.
These picture postcards were all I knew of sculpture and the milky stone Mama called
bianchi marmi.
The marble statuary that once graced our City’s museums and public places was all locked away by the time I was eight years old. So for me, the greatest miracle was that these works of art were out in the open for everyone to see. They were a generous gift and testament to all that is worthy and yearning in humankind.
In this way, Mama helped us keep faith through the dark years of the EYE’s tyranny. I barely recognized my gracious, steadfast mother in this woman with the contorted face screaming shrilly at me now: “Get rid of them, Lucia! Take them away!” She beat furiously at the air.
“Idiot girl!”
I cringed. She had never before called me such a name.
“The bats. The hideous little bats. Their wings are sharp as glass. They are cutting my face. How many are there? Lucia? Why aren’t you helping me?”
She was shaking badly; her teeth were chattering. I tried putting my arms about her and she struck my face sharply, although I am sure she did not intend this. Even then I did not think “plague.” I assumed she was hallucinating because she was overburdened. We were both working as office cleaners.
At fifty-one, she found the job far harder and more draining than I. And then the night before when we were coming home from work, we’d had one of those confrontations that left you feeling despondent and polluted. Mama spotted her first: an old woman, hunched over, moaning and rocking on the curb-edge. It was pitiful to see how she ground her knuckles into her temples. She smelled of damp wool and mouldy tea. When I touched the old lady’s shoulder, I was surprised how hard it felt. Both Mama and I recoiled as the old woman stared up at us out of empty eye-sockets. Her wrinkled face dissolved. In its place was the tight flesh of a young man with fiendish eyes and a razored skull. I heard the ominous click of his flick knife and managed to pull Mama away after me, even before I saw the glint of the blade. I could hear Mama panting behind me. My legs are far longer and my lungs stronger than hers. But I kept tight hold of her wrist and she did her best to keep up, and so we escaped unharmed. Nevertheless, we both felt we had been touched by a contagion, as if his wickedness had seeped into our blood.
She sat heavily in her chair once we were home and began to cry. “Terrible,” she said over and over. “How can we be compassionate, Lucia, and reach out to help, when nothing is as it seems? When a frail old woman isn’t a woman at all, but just a cunning disguise a deranged young man puts on?”
I hated him even more then for making her weep. He had that semi-feral look, the eyes narrowed and set closer to the nose than is normal in the human face; the lips bloodless and no longer wide enough to cover his teeth.
Was it this incident that had made my mother break, or was it the EYE’s “hygiene vans” we saw driving around in the small hours, collecting the dead and the near-dead from the streets like so much litter? There were new rumours that the corpses they gathered go into the making of “charnel pies” for which the rich with unholy palates are willing to pay dearly.
Was what the EYE already did with human bodies not bad enough? Where did these unspeakable ideas come from? Sometimes I thought it must be the City itself that generated them, with its noxious air and heavy weight upon the earth.
Mama crumpled to the floor. At first I was relieved that her hallucinatory fit seemed to have passed. I knelt beside her and cradled her shoulders; put my cheek on hers and then instinctively retracted. She was burning and her breath smelled sickly. I managed to get her to her feet, and stumbling and awkward, we proceeded slowly to her and Papa’s bedroom. She fell across the bed in a rigid diagonal; then began to shake again. I lay down beside her and put my arms around her. “Hush,” I kept saying. “Hush.” Just as she had said to me when I had nightmares as a child after Aunt Giulietta read to us from Dante’s
Inferno
. Aunt Giulietta’s voice had an uncanny penetrating power and her bowed spine and shrivelled face intensified the authority of the telling.
At nine years of age, I had taken every word of Dante’s journey to the underworld as truth. I saw the damned in their torment, eternally suffocated, flayed, and eaten. In the nightmares a hundred devils stormed my bed, intent on roasting my girlish flesh and gnawing my heart. My mother comforted me, helping me to understand what allegory is and to grasp that in his
Inferno
Dante revealed to us the principles of conscience that prompt us to do good. Now, in the day-to-day life we witnessed in the City, the comforting notion of allegory had vanished. The squalid inhabitants of the Inferno had burst through the crust of Earth, so toxic and unregenerate that even to look at them imperilled one’s soul.
“Hush, hush,” I said to Mama, as she twisted on the bedcover. I wrung my hands helplessly and wished myself in her place so that she might suffer no longer. She began to scream, a sound curdled and unrecognizable as my mother’s voice. I put my hand on her mouth to try to quiet her. I was afraid that the neighbours would hear and guess she was sick and report us; that one of the EYE’s hygiene vans would come and that the disposal team, in their hermetic white overalls and goggle-helmets, would take her away.
Her lips were encrusted, and her teeth coated with a yellowish substance. She tried to bite me.
“Dirty slut,” she called me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My mother knew I was a virgin. She knew how revolting I found the crude sexual displays and public intercourse we came upon on our way to and from work. She knew how disgusting I found the pornographic films the EYE had begun to show daily on the sky-screens.
“Filthy slut,” she shouted at me again. Tears streamed down my face. I cursed the fact I had so few resources to help her: no potent painkillers or soporifics; no doctor on whom I could call. Only the wealthy had doctors. My sole chance of getting medical services would be to barter for them with one of my organs and I saw it was too late for that.
Whatever pathogen had taken hold inside my mother was working at demonic speed, consuming her from the inside out. She began to vomit up some putrid-smelling stuff. I held the basin for her, trying not to breathe in the stink. She asked for water. I ran to fetch it, but as soon as she drank she was immediately sick again.
She grew old and wizened before my eyes. I dreaded my father’s return. He was a strong man still, with formidable powers of endurance but I feared that when he saw her he would be undone. When at last I heard him at the door, my heart flew to my mouth and stopped my speech. I had no words for what he must be told.
At first I thought he might be drunk because his face sagged and he slumped heavily against the door frame. Yet this didn’t seem possible. My father always taught us that drunkenness is degrading. Then it occurred to me he already knew Mama was dying; that their infallible bond of love had given him a dire prescience. But he just went on staring at me glassily, and so at last I perceived the truth: that the plague had struck him too. He was too weak to get to the bedroom. With my help he managed to stagger to the couch where he lay down with his face turned away from me. Unlike Mama, he did not shake or cry out in his agony. It was as if he had willed himself to be granite-like and stoic, and to let death take him without a murmur of protest or rage.
I kept walking back and forth between Mama and Papa, checking to see if they moved or spoke. All the while, I prayed fervently for the kind of miracle the great Giotto painted: the omnipotent hand of God reaching out of the sky to heal them or the appearance of a blazing comet that would rewrite all our fates. I took from among the trove of postcards an image of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, which Brunelleschi and his artisans had laboured over three decades to raise into the air. I clutched it in my hands as a talisman. The thought of this astounding dome, topped by its stone lantern, summoned for me the very light of the
Rinascimento
and helped me to endure the worst hours of my life.
Sometimes I got down on my knees to pray. It was in that position that the functionaries of the EYE’s hygiene unit found me when they burst through the door. They looked like grotesque parodies of angels in their glistening white protective suits and head coverings. It was impossible to tell what sex they were.
“Can you help them?” I cried. “Can I go with them?” They did not answer me. The peculiar nausea came upon me I always feel in the presence of the inhuman. I had clung to the hope I might reason with them or stir them to pity. I struggled to hold off the thick panic that began to coil round my brain. I had to keep my wits about me and do all I could to halt the “hygiene procedure.” I could no longer delude myself about their intention. In the unconscionable inverted language of the EYE, “hygiene” always means extermination.
The three officers each produced a long zippered bag from an invisible pocket in their protective suits. These bags of olive green had the same repellent sheen as their white garb. I pictured each of these bags filled with a human body, like a horrific overblown pupa. I began to pull at my hair in a frenzy. I knew nothing would ever re-emerge from this accursed casing.
Two of the officers wrenched my father from the couch. I hurled myself at them and began to beat furiously at their backs and arms. But as soon as I touched the glistening material of their suits, an electric shock jolted my spine and I was flung back across the room. I saw them thrust Papa feet first into the zippered sack. I thought I heard him moan. I got to my feet and went at them again. Through a haze of tears and hot rage, I saw a white form looming over me. Something cold and steely pricked my forearm. Then I was plunging into a blackness so thick and wet and fretted with red veins, it seemed a thing alive.
When I came to, I was alone. I sat upon the floor in the thin morning light and rocked myself. A little child inside me wailed for her Mama and Papa who had been so cruelly torn away. I bit my own hand to quiet her.
I could not understand why the hygiene unit had not also taken me. I thought it would be better had they done so. When I struggled to stand, I saw a plastic disk dangling from a cord about my neck. I took it to the window to hold it to the light. Stamped on the disk was the sing word “Clean” above the EYE’s imprimatur. So I came to understand that the needle they put in my arm was a viral check and not just a drug to knock me out.
“Why?” the child in me kept asking. “Why have I been spared? How am I to keep going alone, in this unbearable place?”
My survival seemed to me so totally undeserved, I felt I had committed a crime. The EYE, ever-brutal in its efficiency, soon obliterated any lingering hope I harboured that my parents might be cured and return home. Within an hour of my regaining consciousness I heard a sharply repetitive knock at the door. My first thought was that the hygiene unit had come back for me. Although I despised myself for the naked instinct, my flesh tightened in fear.
The functionary at the door was one of the EYE’s messenger fleet. He was dressed in dull black and his face was obscured by a balaclava with slits for eyes and mouth. As he handed me a grainy grey envelope, I saw the truncheon swaying on his belt. He disappeared immediately into the gloom of the corridor. I glimpsed a neighbour’s white face peering at me from behind her door. Her eyes were hard.
I could not bring myself to open the envelope right away. I set it on the table and then sat in Mama’s chair so that I might draw on some of her strength. At last I tore the envelope open. How blunt the words were, and heartless. Only their names, the hour and minute of their respective deaths and the fact their bodies had been burned to control the infection. I was grateful for that small mercy: because they had died of plague, they were spared the crude violation of the “harvesting procedure.” The communiqué also warned me I would soon be evicted because the size of the apartment exceeded my needs.
I lost track of time then. I let grief do with me what it would. Sometimes it made me dull and heavy as stone. Sometimes it tore at me with teeth so sharp, I had to put my fist in my mouth to stop myself screaming. Grief, I began to understand, has a killing power that can consume you whole. One morning I caught sight of my own image in the bathroom mirror and was appalled. My hair hung loose and tangled. My mouth was open in a silent howl. My skin was dry and salt-laden from the tears.
I heard my mother’s voice then, as clearly as if she stood beside me. “
Laborare est orare,
Lucia. To work is to pray.”
It was one of her favourite sayings, especially after the EYE’s policies stripped her and Papa of their professions. “To work is to have dignity. Remember this, Lucia.” In this way she imbued our toil as cleaners with a kind of nobility. Manual labour kept us human, Mama said. It was better to endure the petty humiliations of the itinerant cleaner than to live off the EYE’s “support package” and enter the despicable Chrysalis State.
Laborare est orare
. I washed my face and brushed my hair until it gleamed. Then I plaited it carefully, ply over ply, as my mother had taught me when I was a girl.