She shook her head hard; I saw her from behind, I saw my father in profile as I stood still in the doorway, breathing heavily, maybe because I had run up the stairs — even though, before getting to my father’s office, I must have gone to the office of Martino the accountant, a mysterious man who was always enveloped in the smoke from his two daily packs of cigarettes, buried amid his ledgers and invoices, flanked by his adding machine and his typewriter, his magical, monumental, musical instruments. He had an address book that snapped open to the right page after you slid the pointer to the letter you wanted. He had a sharpener with a spinning handle that could devour a whole pencil in just a few seconds. He had a paper-collating machine. He always gave me some kind of gift — the stump of a green eraser, a two-inch stub of pencil — or, when he had time, he would draft me a whole battalion of soldiers using three rows of letters on his typewriter:
I don’t remember whether Martino was in his office that day, whether I couldn’t find him or whether I stayed with him a while, as I usually did, in his little room next to my father’s room, and therefore whether my impression that I was panting when I got to my father’s door is just an imaginary detail that got tacked on to the memory later. Maybe I had gotten my breath back but lost it again as a result of the tension emanating from that scene: the simple arrangement of the players; the postures of their bodies — one spine bent forward (my father, in his shirtsleeves), one spine ramrod straight (my mother, with her coat and purse on her arm); the tone of my father’s words; my mother’s disapproval so vigorously expressed.
My father put the receiver back in the cradle and, without looking at my mother, walked around the desk and crossed the room and stopped in front of an open gray metal cabinet. For a few seconds he pretended to file away a folder that he’d carried from the cabinet to his desk, pretended to look for something else, and then, because my mother gave no sign of giving up and leaving, and because my father sensed that her outrage was increasing, and he didn’t want her to see him cry (I don’t think he had noticed me), he dropped all pretense and just stood there with his back to her, immobile before the cabinet.
That was when my mother said, “And thanking him, to boot!”
Without turning around, he responded feebly, “Yes — thanking him, to boot.”
Then he began banging his head against the cabinet, not very hard but making a huge noise (they’re really shoddy quality, those cabinets — every time you slide the door open the whole thing shudders as if it’s about to fall apart; they’re all in my basement now, holding my old files), doing it not to hurt himself but to drive my mother out, to present her with something embarrassing and new and too intimate, to frighten her into thinking he was going crazy (though it was really a very controlled craziness). Or maybe he simply felt like banging his head against the cabinet because he was in despair, he was finished, he was washed up: no more work, no more factory, failure, shame.
At that point my mother turned to go, and when she saw me she wasn’t at all annoyed, as I had feared (had she asked me to wait for her in the courtyard?) — she was too annoyed with my father; she took my hand, and we went down the stairs and outside. I didn’t expect any explanation, and I don’t think she had any intention of giving me an explanation, but when we were at the gate of the little furniture factory, when she realized what our family was losing, she bent down and said softly but angrily, “Conti. Remember that name.” At first her tone made me think she was scolding me, but then I understood that she was talking about the person Papa had been speaking to on the phone.
And we went home. I don’t remember if I asked for any explanation, if I wanted to know why I should remember that name. I probably said nothing, I probably thought that Mamma and Papa had simply had a fight, and that was a curious novelty (I was most curious about my father’s reaction, his hitting his head against the cabinet; I thought about it a lot, and it often made me laugh), but the fight didn’t worry me — it couldn’t last; and I was right, it didn’t last.
Two things about that scene strike me now: the fluke that put me there to witness it, and my mother’s agitation, which made me into the keeper of a memory.
We rarely went to see my father at the office; even though the plant wasn’t far from home, we weren’t supposed to disturb him, which is why Carlo was so obsessed with Papa’s work that he forced me and Fabio to play in a pretend factory where he was the boss (I threw it back at him later when he tried to indoctrinate us with his revolutionary rhetoric), and I was Martino the accountant (I had gotten myself a datebook and an address book, and I smoked fake cigarettes made of paper), and Fabio was supposed to be the workman, but really he just kept on playing his own games: making long lines of toy cars (Carlo called this “the assembly line”) or Lego buildings (“the construction site”). Fabio didn’t explicitly refuse to take on the job that Carlo assigned to him; he just ignored the boss’s orders and went on doing whatever he wanted to do, and Carlo (I now see) was intimidated by this attitude and tried to turn it to his advantage by reinterpreting and renaming Fabio’s games, annexing them to his own. I’m still envious nowadays when I think about Fabio and his extraordinary ability to isolate himself, thus making other people create justifications for him and invent a useful role for him in the common game. (One day I had the amazing thought that maybe I believe I’m doing the same thing with my gardens, but I’m not sure.)
And even when my mother stopped by the furniture factory to tell my father something urgent, it didn’t mean we were allowed to go up to the offices; in good weather she left us in the courtyard to play with the two German shepherds, and in bad weather she entrusted us to one of the workmen, and we’d spend half an hour hypnotized by a piece of wood turning in the lathe. But kids take unpredictable and mysterious turns when they’re playing, and the flukes that lead them in one direction rather than another are completely random (Filippo and Momo buzz around like flies), and who knows why on that day I turned up at that moment in that point in space, who knows what I’d been thinking just a moment earlier, who knows what I was doing, what I was planning to do, what had happened to me two hours before, how I spent the following day, what I was doing two months later at the same time, what I thought when I heard that the factory was bankrupt, that my father had failed and was bankrupt, that he was “a failure”? It’s a mystery; I’ll never know: the telephone scene, the scene of my father’s despair, my mother’s words going home — these memories have erased all the rest. But I was there, I was a person, I tell myself occasionally, I was thinking about other things: about comics with Mickey Mouse and superheroes, about the toys I wished I had (a Gung-Ho rifle, a Lima train set, a Graziella leopard), about Carlo bossing me around, about Fabio not being our brother, about the piano that I didn’t want to learn to play because it was sad — I was there, I was a person with my own life, and I recall almost nothing about that life because everything was erased by my father’s crying; but I do recall, as I’ve said, that later when I thought about him hitting his head I laughed hard, and I never told my brothers about what I’d seen.
I didn’t even tell them about what I’d heard when my mother spoke to me. I never said that I had to remember the name Conti, I never shared my mission with them. It was a name for me, not others, to remember. I was the keeper of the memory. And I kept it welclass="underline" I remembered the name, even though I never heard it spoken again by anyone, and never saw it in print until at least twenty-five years later.