She kept being bellicose. Everything about our dinner had been bad for her, and the food couldn’t be an exception, but in reality it was an excuse to speak badly of what really seemed bad to her, which was my friend himself, his house, his collections, his life, his existence (in contrast to mine). The topic filled her to the brim, and gave her a lot to say. In that sense, and only in that one, the dinner had been good for her, because it allowed her to relaunch her newly inspired and persuasive discourse.
Her idée fixe was that I was not a failure, that I had no reason to be dissatisfied with my life, that I could be happy, and that in fact I was. According to her, I had always done the right thing, and I continued to do so; I was an exemplary man, a role model, and, moreover, I was young, good-looking, and intelligent. The objective facts contradicted her categorically: I was approaching sixty; I was fat, wrinkled, stooped; I was alone, without any family (except her), or money, or work, or a future. Mother overcame this discrepancy by closing her eyes to reality, and since this didn’t suffice, she blamed the rest of humanity. In other words, she didn’t “blame” but rather limited herself to criticizing, to finding defects, to seeing everything bad about everybody; the comparison to me was implicit, as it was implicit that I couldn’t hope for anything good to come out of the contrast, and if anything bad had happened to me, the fault lay in those degenerate and evil others who surrounded us. But she also didn’t admit that anything bad had happened to me: I was just fine where I was, things in my life had turned out well and would get even better in the future. In short, a complete denial of reality was in play. And her life was reduced to that denial; I had reduced her to that. Her maternal instincts had always been strong; the years and the horrendous unreality of my life had twisted her into this caricature.
She returned to the same topics as the night before. What did my friend want with all that junk he’d collected? He was broke, he had nothing but debts. And that useless garbage must be very expensive, it must have cost him an arm and a leg… She looked at me, seeking affirmation. That was the worst part for me: being part of a dialogue that wasn’t a dialogue, participating in a conversation that had no room for me. I told her that he would have bought some of those objects more cheaply, others more dearly. And I added that in any case, they were an investment. They had value. He could sell them if he wanted to.
Then came the sneer I knew so well. Who was he going to sell them to!? Who would want such atrocities!?
It was typical. One of the contradictions I had to get used to: I was always right except when I talked to her, and then I wasn’t, no matter what I said.
In this case, Mother was being guided by the mind-set of the town, the people she knew, her world, in which nobody would ever spend a single cent on an antique or a curio. A practical, concrete, reasonable, anti-aesthetic, wholesome world.
She returned to the subject of the atlas. Before she returned to it, I realized she was returning to it, from the glance she threw into a corner of the apartment where she kept her own atlases, the ones she consulted when she did crossword puzzles; there were two or three old, shabby ones (one of them she’d bought for me when I was in school), but of a reasonable “normal” size. It was the abnormality of my friend’s inordinately large atlas that had impressed her, not its antiquity. Curiously, it was the antiquity that could have impressed me, for a very specific reason. Without being an intellectual, or anything of the sort, or having the least interest in politics, I kept myself up-to-date on the names of countries and their disintegration; it was a kind of loyalty to my childhood pleasure of drawing maps at school, and making each country a different color. If I’d told Mother that her maps were out-of-date, she would have answered that my friend’s inordinately hefty volume should be even more so; and it wasn’t worth telling her that seeing as how all countries were now returning to their old borders, that antique atlas might end up being more up-to-date than hers, which were simply out-of-date.
But the fact was, she didn’t talk about the atlas, though I’m certain she intended to; she was distracted by an association of ideas wherein she found a more dramatic thread: she said she’d had nightmares all night long. It was so obvious, the least one could expect, after a visit to my friend’s house, that museum of horrors. I immediately thought of the elephant mask, and I almost thought I saw that beastly image floating in the blackness, a vengeful Ganesha, soon transformed into a monster (I was also making my own associations, but I didn’t realize it at the moment).
She told me about one of the nightmares she’d had, or the only one, which she’d had repeatedly. She didn’t, at least, tell me any others. She said she’d had a dream about Crazy Allievi, that she was trying to cure him of his craziness and couldn’t… and she tried again, and still couldn’t… I don’t think she told me anything else, unless she did and I’ve forgotten, though actually I think I was the one who added something about a mountainous landscape, dusty and vast, under the perennial light of midday that shone on two lost explorers, or better yet, fugitives — running, tripping, on the verge of falling over a cliff: Mother and Crazy Allievi, dressed in old-fashioned black garments among those stones of despair, a hectic scene, but at the same time always at a standstill, like in comic strips.
In a way, my mother and I could read each other’s minds. So, if she didn’t recount any concrete images from her nightmare, and I saw them anyway, it didn’t mean that I’d invented them or that she hadn’t had them. In any case, they were momentary visions, like those that appear and disappear in the course of a conversation. Otherwise, I couldn’t have had a clear image of Crazy Allievi, because I’d never met him. How could I have met him when he was a character out of my mother’s childhood? I knew him from the stories I’d been hearing since I was a child. My mother’s best friend from childhood was a girl whom everybody called “Crazy Allievi.” They remained friends as they grew up. Crazy Allievi had a brother, who, logically, was also called Crazy Allievi. It was a kind of family problem. The difference is that Crazy Allievi, the sister, was called crazy for being wild, extravagant, “wacky,” as we often say casually. Her brother, on the other hand, was really crazy.
Of all the many stories my mother would tell about these siblings, I remember only two, one about the crazy sister and one about the crazy brother. The story about the crazy sister is the story of her dog. She had a dog, whom she adored, who was very important to her. She named it Rin Tin Tin, but she called him Reti, or, according to how Mother imitated her pronunciation: Rrreti. When I heard this as a child, it must have set me onto a certain train of thought, which was surely why it had stuck in my memory: you can name a dog whatever you want; it’s not that the dog “has” a name, that gets deformed or abbreviated by the family’s usage; nothing prevents this deformation or abbreviation from “being” the name. But Crazy Allievi would say (Mother always imitated her pronunciation): “My dog is named Rrrin Tin Tin, but I call him Rrreti.” This fact alone showed that she was crazy, though, I repeat, only sort of crazy, inoffensively and picturesquely crazy, nothing more.