Caserta, I said to my father. I said to him that Caserta had done and said to Amalia, with her consent, in the basement of the pastry shop, all the things that in reality Antonio’s grandfather had said and perhaps done to me. He stopped working and waited for my mother to return home.
To speak is to link together lost times and spaces. I sat on the top step, believing it was the same step as then. One by one, I whispered to myself the obscene formulas that Caserta’s father had repeated with growing agitation forty years earlier. And I realized that, in substance, they were the same that my mother had cried to me, giggling, over the telephone, before going to drown herself. Words for being lost or for being found. Maybe she wanted to communicate to me that she, too, hated me for what I had done to her forty years earlier. Maybe in that way she wished to make me understand who the man was who was there with her. Maybe she wanted to tell me to watch out for myself, to beware of Caserta’s senile ravings. Or maybe she simply wanted to show me that those words, too, could be uttered, and that, contrary to what I had believed my whole life, they couldn’t hurt me.
I seized on that last hypothesis. I was there, curled up on the threshold of tormented fantasies, to see Caserta and tell him that I had never wanted to hurt him. The story between him and my mother no longer interested me: I wished only to confess aloud that, then and later, I had hated not him, perhaps not even his father: only Amalia. It was she I wanted to hurt. Because she had left me in the world to play alone with the words of a lie, without limits, without truth.
25
But Caserta didn’t appear. In the basement there were only empty cardboard boxes and old carbonated water or beer bottles. I crawled out, dusty, irritated by the light touch of spiderwebs, and returned to the cot. On the floor I saw my bloodstained underpants and kicked them under the bed with the toe of my shoe. Now it bothered me more to find them in that place, like a purloined part of myself, than to imagine the use that Caserta had made of them.
I went back to the wall where Amalia’s blue suit was hanging. I took down the hanger, I laid the garment delicately on the bed, I removed the jacket: the lining was threadbare, the pockets were empty. I held it against me as if I wanted to see how it looked. Then I made up my mind: I put the flashlight down on the cot, I took off my dress and left it on the floor; then I dressed again, carefully, without haste. I used the safety pin that Caserta had used to attach the bra to the shirt to take in the waist: it was too big. The jacket, too, was large and yet I arranged it to my satisfaction. I felt that that old garment was the final narrative that my mother had left me, and that now, with all the necessary adjustments, it fit me like a glove.
The story might be more fragile or more interesting than the one I had told myself. It was enough to pull out a single thread and follow it in its simplifying linearity. For example, Amalia had left with her old lover and with him had spent a final secret vacation, laughing loudly, eating and drinking, stripping on the beach, putting on and taking off the clothes that she intended to give me. The game of an old woman pretending to be young, to please another old person. Finally, she had decided to go swimming naked. But, bright as it was, she had gone too far from the shore and had drowned. Caserta had been afraid, had picked up everything and left. Or she was running naked along the water’s edge and he was following, both of them panting, both terrified, she by the discovery of his desires, he by her rejection. Until Amalia thought that she could escape into the water.
Yes, it was enough to pull one thread to go on playing with the mysterious figure of my mother, now enriching it, now humiliating it. But I realized that I no longer felt the need, and I moved in the ray of light just as it seemed to me that she had moved. I turned off the flashlight and leaned toward the bluish triangle of the shutter to stick my head out. The streetlamps were on, but there was still light. The children were no longer running and shouting. They were gathered around a man who was crouching, his face at the height of their faces, his hands on his knees. The man was Caserta. He had thick white hair and an engaging look. They were all standing, the little ones, the big one, with their shoes in a puddle that shone in the light. The children had begun to unwrap the candies that he had just handed out.
I looked at that lean old man, carefully shaved, well dressed, his face pale and tense, and I no longer felt the need to speak to him, to know, to let him know. I decided to steal away along the sidewalk, around the corner, but he turned and saw me. His astonishment was such that he didn’t realize what was happening behind him. The man in the undershirt had leaned the bar against the wall carefully, had thrown away his cigar, and now was approaching, looking straight ahead, chest erect, short legs taking rational, calm steps. The children backed away, retreating from the puddle. Caserta remained alone in the mirror of the violet water, mouth open, eyes staring at me without anxiety. That tranquility helped me breathe. I went back into the Coloniali of forty years earlier, I was careful not to bump into the counter with its palm trees and camels, I climbed onto the wooden platform, crossed the pasticceria, expertly skirting the oven, the machines, the counters, the pans, went out the door that opened onto the courtyard. Once in the open I searched for the proper pace of a grownup person who is not in a hurry.
26
The gas burned in the night on the tops of the refineries. I was traveling on a local train slow as a death, having looked for and found a lighted compartment, without sleeping passengers. I wanted if not the entire train at least my seat to maintain its solidity. I found a place with some boys in their twenties, recruits returning from a short leave. Speaking an almost incomprehensible dialect, they displayed in every phrase a frightened aggressiveness. They had missed the train that would have got them to the barracks on time. They knew they would be punished and were afraid. But they wouldn’t confess it. Instead, with shouts and sneers, they imagined subjecting the officers who would punish them to sexual humiliations of every type. They placed these in an indeterminate future and, in the meantime, described them exhaustively. They declared, addressing me, but obliquely, that they weren’t afraid of anyone. Every time, their glances became bolder. One of them began to speak to me directly and offered me beer from the can he had been drinking from. I drank some. The others, their bodies contracted by stifled laughter, pressed together, and then, turning purple, pushed each other away.
I left them at Minturno. I walked to the Appian highway, through deserted streets, among empty ordinary bungalows. It was still dark when I succeeded in finding the house of our holidays, a two-story structure with a sloping roof, locked up and silent in the dew. As soon as it was light I set off on a sandy path, populated only by beetles and motionless lizards, waiting for the early warmth. The reeds with which I had made kite frames for my sisters and me wet the suit as I grazed them.
I took off my shoes and sank my aching feet into the fine sand, which was cold and dirty, strewn with debris of every sort. I sat on the trunk of a tree near the shore, waiting for the sun to warm me, but also to attach my presence to some object solidly rooted in the sand. The sea now was calm and blue under the sun, but the rays came just to the water’s edge, leaving the sand in a gray shadow. A thin mist that would soon evaporate was still hiding the stubble fields, the hills, the mountains. I had already returned to that place, after my mother’s death. I had seen neither the sea nor the beach. I had seen only details: the white shell of a conch, with its regular striations; a crab with sections of its abdomen turned to the sun, the green plastic of a detergent bottle; that trunk I was sitting on. I had asked myself why my mother had decided to die in that place. I would never know. I was the only possible source of the story: I couldn’t nor did I want to search outside myself.