Then the door opened and we got a glimpse of a dark threshold where I seemed to see a shadow move very quickly, and a foyer, also dark, into which we stepped and out of which we backed like frightened children entrusted with a mysterious responsibility, and into which we stepped again, sheepishly, and out of which we inevitably backed again, until I took three steps inside, this time alone, and bumped into a piece of furniture and asked whether anyone was there.
A voice — Maciste’s — told me to stay where I was, not to move forward or back, and then he greeted my brother’s friends, hello, how are you? And in that brief how are you I sensed an incredible fragility, a fragility like a manta ray falling from the ceiling, the dark foyer the bottom of the sea and the manta ray watching us from above, halfway between the sea floor and the surface.
Then I heard the Bolognan and the Libyan saying they were fine, and how are you, Mr. Bruno? and Maciste, who wasn’t up above anymore and whose voice no longer echoed with infinite shades of fragility, replied:
“Plagued by ailments, my friends, that’s the way of it.”
And he said this in a voice in which there wasn’t a hint of ailing, a voice that boomed in the darkness as if it, the darkness, was a muzzle, and he was straining at it furiously, itching to come out on the porch and gobble up my brother’s friends, who just then, the cowards, were saying that their business here was done, they hoped everything would go well, and then they left, wishing us goodnight, Maciste and me, and as they were backing away almost at a run to the garden gate, the door to the house closed and since I didn’t see any shadow cross the threshold, I deduced that Maciste had closed the door with some kind of remote control.
Then, for the first time in a long time, I was plunged into total darkness.
What happened next is hard to describe. Maciste’s voice guided me to a room on the second floor, lit by a dim bulb half-hidden in a corner. I know I went up some stairs, but I know I went down some stairs too. Maciste’s voice was always ahead of me, guiding me. I wasn’t afraid. I crossed a dark room with a wall of windows that overlooked the back garden and the tall ivy-covered walls separating the house from the building next door. I felt calm. I opened a door. It wasn’t Maciste’s room, as I had imagined it would be, but a kind of gym. His private gym, the one my brother’s friends had told me about.
I turned on the light. On a wooden table there were several bottles of liniment and various lotions. I took off my jacket and waited. After a while the lights went out. Only then did the door open and I saw Maciste.
X
All of this is hard to describe, as I’ve said. What happened, what I felt, what I saw. What might have happened, what I might have seen, and what I might have felt. What he felt, I don’t know. I’ll never know.
He was big and fat. But that wasn’t really Maciste. He was big, yes. Tall, broad. He was also fat. He had been a world bodybuilding champion and a tiny part of that glory still lived on somewhere, not in his body, maybe, but in the way he moved. His body was the pallid color of bodies that never see the sun. Either his head was shaved or he had gone totally bald. He was polite. He was wearing an old black robe that fell to his ankles, and sunglasses that looked small on his big face.
I remember that he advanced toward the middle of the gym, where I was standing, his steps so slow that I could tell he was nervous or uncomfortable too.
He asked me how I was, and how old I was. I lied to him, as we had agreed I would, and in turn I asked him why he was called Maciste.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
“I’m fine and I’m nineteen. Why do people call you Maciste?”
He felt for a chair and then I knew, without a doubt, that he was blind.
He murmured that in his day he’d played a character called Maciste in a few movies.
I didn’t know what to say, not because of his response, but because I realized that I had a blind man in front of me. My brother’s friends hadn’t warned me about this. Assholes, I thought angrily, and I moved to grab my jacket and go running out of the house. But then I thought: what if they didn’t know? Was I going to spoil an ambitious plan, ambitious by our lights, I mean, just because of a mistake? Would my brother be left wandering the streets of Rome just because of a misunderstanding of no consequence in the end, anyway? And what if no one knew that he was blind, or hardly anyone? Because Maciste’s life was a mystery, or so I’d been told, and neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan could be said to be part of his inner circle, if such a circle existed.
This was when Maciste said:
“My stage name was Franco Bruno.”
And I thought: what?
And he said:
“These days, bodybuilding is considered a sport but when I practiced it, it was an art . . . Like magic . . . There was a time when it was an art and magicians were artists . . . Now it’s just a part of the show.”
And after a long silence during which I thought about other things, I said:
“I know what you mean.” Though in fact I hadn’t understood a thing, because as far as I knew Maciste had been an actor and a top bodybuilder, not a magician. Maybe he just felt a kinship with magicians.
And when Maciste heard me he turned his face toward me and asked if I was naked. I said no, that I had only taken off my jacket.
“Did they explain to you? . . . I need company . . . I don’t know whether they explained to you.”
I said yes, that they had explained everything. “Don’t worry,” I said.
Then he took off his robe and I saw him naked for the first time. He said: “Come here and turn out the light.”
“The light isn’t on,” I said.
“Can you see in the dark?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Strange — have you always?”
No,” I said. “If this had happened to me when I was little, I would have gone crazy. It’s only been a little while. Since my parents died in a crash.”
“A car crash?”
“Yes. I don’t like to talk about it. They died.”
“I’m sorry,” said Maciste.
We were quiet, each of us sitting in our respective chairs. After a while he asked me whether I wanted something to drink. I said yes.
Maciste left the gym, walking just like anyone. For a few seconds I wondered whether I’d been mistaken, though everybody knows that blind people get around with no trouble in a familiar place.
He came back with a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola and two mini-whiskey bottles, like the kind I knew people got on planes or in hotel minibars. I thought he had forgotten to bring glasses and I waited. When I saw him drink straight from the bottle, I did too.
“Were you driving the car when your parents died?”
It bothered me that he would ask a question like that. I told him that I didn’t know how to drive and that when my parents died I was in Rome, at home, with my brother.
“Interesting,” said Maciste. “And ever since then you can see in the dark?”
“Yes, ever since, or after the second or third day . . .”
“So it’s some kind of psychosomatic thing,” said Maciste.
“I don’t know whether it’s psychosomatic or supernatural, and I don’t care either,” I said.
Then, as I walked over to his chair, a ray of moonlight, fat as a wave, rolled into the gym. Maciste undressed me. He felt my face and my hips and my legs. Then he got up and went to get the bottles of lotion and liniment.
XI
I started to go twice a week to his house on Via Germanico. Sometimes I had to wait a long time outside the door before he let me in. Sometimes we didn’t go straight to the gym, and instead he brought me into the kitchen, a kitchen twice as big as our living room, where Maciste made sandwiches for both of us — his specialty — American sandwiches which, according to him, he had been taught to make by an actress named Dolly Plimpton, from Oregon; she had been in the cast of one of his movies, and her recipe consisted of sandwich bread, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, sliced ham, sliced cheese, and various spreads that he could tell apart by the size and shape of the jars and that, mixed, often made the sandwiches taste strange — strong and strange, like the sandwiches you get in airports, he said, but good.