My father, when he was alive, would often say that Mother specialized in crazies, that all her friends were crazy. And he was right, at least if you listened to her talk. Whenever she told anything about some friend or neighbor, it was to show how “crazy” she was. Her mealtime conversations would always start: “Today at Torres’ grocery store, I was chatting with X…” and we could already guess what would come next: “She’s crazy”; and throughout all the rest of the story, and in the stories that came after, she’d call her “Crazy X.” Her definition of “crazy” must have been much broader than the psychiatric one and included all those oddities that make people interesting, or interesting to her.
Returning to Crazy Allievi, the sister, and the only story I remember about her: when her dog died, she buried him and erected a gravestone with the inscription: “Here lies Reti” and the dates. That is, she definitely favored the nickname, not the name, and I suppose it was totally her right to do so, at least her right as a crazy person.
Remembering what had happened during the night, I thought that a name doesn’t only accompany us to the grave (Pringlesians often say, when they are trying to encourage someone to eat and drink heartily: “It’s the only thing you can take with you”; they’re wrong; you also take your name), but it also makes us return there in case of a breakout.
The story of her brother (that is, the anecdote about him that I remember) is more pathologicaclass="underline" he drove his car all the way from their house in town to their farm, in reverse. The family had a farm, called La Cambacita, near Pringles, but not that near, about twenty-five or thirty miles away. And what with the bad dirt roads at the time, and in one of those black cars, driving that distance in reverse must have put Crazy Allievi’s driving skills to the test. But this was precisely what showed how deranged he was, because crazy people often have extreme capabilities, which can seem magical, in very specific skill sets. For starters, of course, his craziness was already expressed in the decision to drive in reverse. He did it only because the car was parked in front of the house facing the opposite direction from La Cambacita, and since he was going to La Cambacita, it must have seemed natural to him to go in that direction, instead of doing something as complicated as starting off in the wrong direction and only afterwards taking the correct one. Craziness is more of an exacerbation of logic than its negation. Moreover, if the transmission included a reverse gear, there must have been a reason for it.
It wasn’t due to a mere accident of memory that I associated Crazy Allievi, the brother, with this anecdote; Mother did, too, and to prove it, whenever she remembered him it was to remember that he drove to La Cambacita in reverse. And spending an entire life harboring that image necessarily had to engender vague suggestions of magical journeys, or magical landscapes traversed backwards, a journey around the world in reverse, or the expanding universe turned toward its infinite contraction. An inordinately large atlas belongs to this genre of magic, so inordinate as to threaten to equate itself with the territories it mapped.
The distress she had felt in the nightmare was the distress of the impossibility that accompanied the premise. Psychiatrists don’t cure crazies, especially not a crazy who’s been dead for sixty years. Moreover, my mother, in her (oneiric) role as psychiatrist, was diminished by the “broadened definition” of craziness I alluded to. Perhaps as a child she had learned what a crazy was like, thanks to her best friend’s brother, and since then she’d used the word as an adjective — for it could also be used as a noun — to describe everybody, until the word had lost substance and precision. By applying it to my friend, and by insisting on applying it to him in order to rescue me from the disgrace of being a failure, she was terrified to discover that it didn’t work. Garrisoned in his house, with his collection, his museum of toys, dolls, and masks, my friend resisted being defined as “crazy,” and she had had to turn back to the original crazy, who was still driving in reverse in his black car in her desolate little theater of memory.
Be that as it may, for the rest of the morning I had to listen to her repeat all her complaints. To escape such melancholy, I stared out the window, and that made it worse, because outside prevailed the excruciating monotony of a Sunday morning in Pringles — white and empty. I asked myself if in the long run my personality was working against me. I had always congratulated myself for being calm and polite, for my complacency, my tolerance, my almost invariable smile. I had not inherited my mother’s depressive and confrontational character but rather my father’s, which generally included an acceptance of the world that approached indifference, an aversion to arguments and conflicts, neither optimist nor pessimist, all against a backdrop of melancholy that he never took completely seriously. I had reasons to congratulate myself because if I’d had any other personality, I wouldn’t have survived the successive catastrophes that had sunk my life into nothingness. On the other hand, that personality excluded passions, outbursts, possessions, which would have given color to my existence and made it more interesting.
I waited for her to leave (she said she was going to the bakery) to call my friend and thank him for dinner. I hadn’t wanted to call in front of her because she would have said that there was nothing to thank him for, and she was even capable of asking for the phone and saying something rude to him. That was the reason I didn’t go out all morning, in spite of my desire to see how the town looked after the invasion. She always went out in the mornings, to go shopping and chat with her friends, who also went out; but that morning she took forever to leave, so keen was she to complain about the dinner and the toys and everything else; it had been a long time since she’d had so much subject matter.
I ended up impatient and in a bad mood. It seemed like she did it to me on purpose, a possibility not to be dismissed out of hand, because living together had made us sensitive to even our most secret intentions. Finally, she left, and she hadn’t even finished closing the door when I was already on the phone. My intentions really were “secret” because they included — using politeness as an excuse — a backdrop of self-interest. I was planning to rekindle our friendship, turn it up a notch, set the stage to ask him to finance a project (I still didn’t know which) I could use to get back on my feet. I know, one should never mix business with friendship, but all my bridges had been burned, and out of desperation I was willing to take extreme measures, no longer caring if they were inappropriate or Machiavellian. Since he was the only friend I had left, and everything indicated that this would be my last chance, I planned to tread very carefully.
My first move had been to get myself invited over for dinner with Mother, so that he could gauge, without knowing that he was gauging, my situation. It’s not that I saw him as a prodigy of psychological or human insight, but seeing the two of us together he’d have to perceive the terrible straits my misfortune had put me in. Of course, he knew about my situation, he knew I’d had to go live with my mother and that I depended on her economically. But I also wanted him to see us, see us arrive, see us leave, feel our relationship. There are things that are impossible not to understand if you experience them, or at least if you inhale their atmosphere, because then, even if you don’t grasp them with your understanding, you grasp them with your being, and you register them deeply, which is what I wanted my friend to do, to prepare him for my request for help.