“You miserable cannibal.” She pointed her index finger at me like a sword and threatened me with a laugh: “Beware. I shall carve the letter S on your forehead. I shall carve an S for Soy milk.”
Outside, the temperature was pleasant. The air was warm and vibrant. We headed off down the electric colours of Houston Street before cutting north. People sat idly on the front steps of buildings or on fire escapes, watching the comings and goings on the sidewalks. Bursts of laughter from somewhere. We walked along hand in hand. We detoured to make a small purchase in Washington Square Park, and that was when I recognised a couple of familiar faces among the passersby.
“Bruce De Villa! Look who’s here. Guys, isn’t this supposed to be a big city? It’s starting to seem smaller than the crapper in my house.” It was old Ralph, Danny, and Pete the Toad, so called because every time he smoked a joint his eyes would bug out. The old Clifton gang. Of all the people to run into.
It had been at least a year since I saw them last. “Jeez, guys. What are you doing here?”
“We’re just looking around. We’re in the right place, aren’t we?” Ralph said with a wink. He had a coarse-featured face with a flattened nose and small cunning eyes. We were classmates and for a number of years, I guess, we were something much like a pair of friends. Ralph glanced at Alyson and a smile spread across his face.
I made introductions, uneasily, aware that the minute we parted company the guys would start making appraising comments about her.
“So, how’s life treating you here in the city?”
“Living large,” I replied with insincere emphasis. We stood there looking at each other. Even though I’d spent hundreds of nights out with them, those evenings seemed like memories from another lifetime. And to tell the truth, that’s what they were. Memories from another lifetime. I crossed my arms and smiled a distant smile.
“Let us know the next time you’re in Clifton.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe we’ll run into each other.” Ralph sniggered for no apparent reason. We said goodbye and it was only at the last minute, when the other guys were already a few yards away, that he hurried back and in the tone of someone confiding a secret to his old friend he whispered: “Actually, you know, I was at your house just recently.”
“At my house?” I mumbled. My face stung as though it had been slapped. I felt short of breath. The scene suddenly seemed to shift colours and everything became more vivid and painful.
“Of course. I dropped by to say hello to your mom,” Ralph replied in a foxy tone. He lowered his voice still further to make sure Alyson couldn’t hear: “She introduced me to her little sister…” He lifted a finger and held it in front of his lips, as if to keep himself from saying anything else or perhaps to keep me from speaking. He shot me another wink and moved off to catch up with the others.
Nothing was left but the hum of the street. The void in the pit of my stomach.
“Don’t tell me you used to hang out with those losers,” was Alyson’s comment. “The leader of the gang’s breath was foul,” she added in a deliberately snobbish voice. We started walking. The silence between us dragged out. Alyson looked at me with concern and asked: “Is something wrong? What was that idiot talking about?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I lied. “Let’s go home.”
*
That night, it was impossible to get to sleep. I lay on the bed, eyes wide open, careful not to move for fear I’d awaken Alyson. The light of dawn took an endless time to arrive. Infinite hours made up of infinite minutes made up of seconds that stretched out, painfully slow, like drops hanging from the ceiling. I waited for the day’s first glow. It was almost morning when I got up. Moving silently, I shut myself in the bathroom. I splashed my face with cold water and brushed my teeth, for a long time, hoping to wash away the bitter taste in my throat.
I went out to get breakfast. Across the street was a 24-hour diner, where I ordered eggs, pancakes, and orange juice. Those flavours. That food. Then it was time to calculate the tip for the waitress, get up, trudge out of the place. I felt like a robot. The world was the same as ever, I was performing the same actions as ever: eat breakfast, leave a tip. Nothing much seemed to have changed. The difference was that now I knew. I knew even more than before. There is no limit to the number of things that a person can know: they accumulate one on top of another and they keep hurting, worse and worse.
I dropped by to say hello to your mom. By now I knew where my money came from. The money I lived on came out of the wallets of people like Ralph. It came from the wallets of Ralph and other guys like him, overgrown boys from New Jersey who once went to the same school as I did. Or else out of the wallets of bigger men, grown-ups, with unremarkable faces and off-white skin, men who panted, grunted, and came, with a contented sigh, on my parents’ bed. My mother’s bed, my father’s bed.
The money I spent on breakfast wasn’t all I spent that morning. I had no real plan, I was just running on a dull throbbing anger. I could feel that anger moving through my body. I could feel it shift, like a bubble of heat, from my legs to my stomach and then to my head, where it seemed to burst without warning. Vertigo. Once I reached the Port Authority station, I decided that the bus would take too long, so I struck a deal with a gypsy cab to drive me to Clifton. He wanted fifty bucks. “Fine,” I said. Fifty filthy bucks. What did that amount to? I kept having bouts of vertigo. Fifty bucks, sure. Fifty of their sighs, fifty thrusts of their hips. Fifty drops of their sperm. “It’s my mother’s money,” I told the driver, and he shot me a furtive glance.
I had no idea what I had come all this way to tell her. When I got out of the car, I swayed like a drunk, weakened by my lack of sleep, my anger, and my disgust. I wanted it to come to an end. In whatever way, I just wanted that story to come to an end.
I approached the house. At that time, my father and my brother would have just left for the day. I found myself in the kitchen, breathless, staring at the relics of their breakfast on the table. Slices of toast. Dirty cups. A glass that bore, on the rim, the distinct traces of a pair of lips. Their relics on the table and the scent of coffee in the air. No sign of my mother. I walked upstairs, horrified at the sound of my own footsteps, at the acrid taste in my throat. I filled the hallway with the sound of my breathing. I reached the bedroom, threw open the door, and froze to the spot.
She was standing in front of me. It dawned on me straight away that this wasn’t my mother. There was something strange, not quite human, in her eyes, something that made me think of the gaze of a dog. It wasn’t hostile. There was a gleam of primitive wisdom, there was an absolute sorrow and passivity. This wasn’t a human gaze. Otherwise, she was just like her: the hair, the face, the proportions of the body. She was naked. I could see the rhythm of her respiration, the slight movement of belly and breasts. I had never seen my mother’s naked body. I wasn’t seeing it now either, technically speaking; what I was seeing was its twin body.
Her skin was damp. She must have taken a bath. Her hair looked freshly washed too, and I stood staring in amazement. I knew that hair. Those damp, dark locks. I stared at her hair until she noticed my gaze, and then she startled awake from her trance. She took a lock of hair in her fingers, slowly, caressing it cautiously, as if she herself were amazed at that hair, those wet strands of silk. I’ll never forget that gesture. She held the hair out to me and seemed to be asking me to touch it.
I took a step backwards. All of my anger had vanished, tumbled off me like a garment. When I recoiled, she grimaced in disappointment, almost in pain. I gulped. I stepped towards her again. There she was, her body, her rapt expression. Her docile smile. Now there was something inviting about her gaze. She opened her arms almost in surrender. Our heavy breathing. I reached out a hand and grazed her skin, feeling overwhelmed by its warmth. My fingers touched her neck, and slid down to her breasts. She moaned, her eyes still wide open. I could smell the scent of that body, a sweetish aroma, similar to some strange spice. My body a
dhered to hers like a magnet. It was an instant. Then I broke away, panting feverishly and with an urge to scream. I took to my heels, ran down the steps.
I found my mother in the kitchen. My chest was heaving, and I could neither calm my breathing nor conceal it. You can conceal a lot of things but not the violence of your own panting. She seemed surprised for an instant, then seemed to understand. She avoided my gaze and I avoided hers. I opened the door and left the house.
*
To forget was an impossible verb. In the following weeks, I tried my best. To forget that gaze, the sweetish aroma of that body. I did my best not to think about it in class at the university, as I struggled to grasp the nuanced poetics of some European man of letters. As I sipped from a scalding cup in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on conversations at neighbouring tables, about some unforgettable party or the tits of some classmate. I did my best not to think about it as I climbed the steps of the Public Library on 42nd Street, passing between the two huge stone lions, or sitting at a table in the reading room where, it was said, Leon Trotsky had once worked. As I sat with my eyes lost in the middle distance, lulled by the rocking movement of a subway train, or in the early morning, when those same eyes shot open after a night of dense dreams. I tried not to think about it. To think about European men of letters instead, to think of Leon Trotsky, to think of anything at all except for that gaze, and that sweetish aroma. That was the resolution I had made. Unfortunately, I was unable to stick to it. Each time, the image of that body wormed its way into my consciousness, her second body, that body as it breathed, that body with its scent, warm and defenceless.
I asked myself so many questions. I wondered what its voice would sound like if it ever tried to speak. I wondered what language it would speak, Italian or English. When it had moments of consciousness, fleeting, out of the blue, did it realise where it was? Did it have time to realise it was alive at all, before some guy walked into the room and started taking off his clothes?
Even when I was with Alyson, I couldn’t bring myself to forget. I made love keeping my eyes closed, squeezed shut, pointlessly concentrating on the importance of concentrating. My attention scattered in a thousand directions. Alyson would stop and take my face in her hands. “Where are you? Look at me.” Then I’d smile, tentatively. She was with me, young, intense, my girlfriend. Her eyes glowed in the semi-darkness of the bedroom. It would have been so nice to abandon myself to her. I apologised, kissed her with tenderness, and never told her about my real obsessions.
One night we climbed up to the roof of our building. It was late spring, the night was warm. We gazed over the panorama of roofs, the vast expanse of fairly low, half-lit buildings. The old East Village was all around us, silent, listening, almost surprised. A car alarm wailed somewhere. The sky was criss-crossed by whitish clouds, which reflected the light of the city and stood out, like phosphorescent jellyfish, against the dark background. Off in the distance, beyond the urban agglomeration, an aeroplane lifted slowly into the air, emitting a series of intermittent flashing lights. Its roar didn’t reach us. It seemed suspended in an enchanted silence. “Look,” I sighed. “There was a time when I wondered where every aeroplane I saw was going. I wished I was aboard, no matter what the destination.”
“Oh,” Alyson reasoned. “This is New York, kid. Where else would you want to go?”
I nodded, feeling weary. I leaned against the parapet and studied the panorama. “I was thinking,” I said. “Maybe I should get a job.”
“You already have a job,” she replied, laying out a blanket that she’d brought up from the apartment. She sat down, pulled a small package from her pocket, and started rolling a joint.
I sat down next to her. “Not that stupid thing at the bar. I mean something a little more demanding. Something that would earn me proper money.” I let a few seconds go by. “I’d like to be independent,” I concluded.
Alyson went on breaking up the marijuana. “We’d all like that. Or at least, that’s what we claim.” She looked up and added: “I don’t get it. You’ve always told me that your family gives you enough to get by.”
“My family…” I echoed her, awkwardly. “I’d like to be independent,” I limited myself to repeating.
“I can’t see the point of that now. Every time you have to turn a project in to one of your professors, I see how you struggle. If you had a more demanding job, you wouldn’t be able to keep up. You wouldn’t be able to meet the deadlines for the coursework.”
I let myself fall back, listless, looking up at the sky overhead. The whitish clouds continued to streak across it. A group of enigmatic phosphorescent jellyfish. “I could try to get a loan, like many do. I can’t go on like this. Every time I withdraw money from the bank…” I broke off, sensing I was just a fraction away from confessing the whole thing to her.
“What are you talking about?” The flame of her lighter flickered between her hands, illuminating her face, and for an instant I imagined someone watching us from above, from the dappled sky, the two of us down there, alone, a boy and a girl on the roof of an apartment house, in the night, at the tail end of the twentieth century, with nothing between us but the tiny flame of a lighter. The ember of the joint glowed in the darkness and a puff of smoke wafted over to me. “You shouldn’t feel guilty. If a family has the resources, it’s perfectly normal to send the children to college.”
“I guess that’s true,” I said, gloomily. Alyson came from a family that didn’t have any particular problems, it was natural for her to think that way. I reached out an arm and pulled her towards me. Beneath the silent sky we embraced, the two of us joined, strangers, one body against the other, breathing together.
“Bruce,” she uttered, as if my name contained within itself every imaginable sentence, as if it contained worlds. When I kissed her, I found the flavour of the joint in her mouth.
Later, when we went back downstairs to the apartment, the telephone was ringing. “Who the hell…” It was the middle of the night. I picked up the receiver. Funny how even before I heard who was calling, I clearly knew that something had happened to my mother.
“Bruce…” said the voice of my brother Dennis. “You need to come, Bruce. They had a fight. Dad put her in the hospital.”
*
I slipped some coins into the coffee vending machine. The dispenser emitted a prolonged sound, gurgling, spraying the hot liquid into a plastic cup. I repeated the operation and walked back to the waiting room with the two steaming cups in my hands. I handed one to Dennis and took a seat next to him.
It was daytime by now. We’d had to wait a long time until a doctor could see our mother. There was a woman ahead of her who had been stabbed in the leg, and also a man in his mid-fifties who seemed to have taken a spill on roller skates in the middle of the night—who knows how, who knows why—smashing up his face and chipping four of his upper teeth.
Now our mother was in there, on the other side of a faded blue door, being tended to by a bespectacled physician. She had a bloody lip, a cut on her cheekbone, a black eye. Nothing too serious. At least not physically. She had walked into the emergency room with a rigid gait, dazed, like a fragile ice sculpture. I don’t think she was in pain, I think she was more in a state of shock. As was I. My father had always been a temperamental man, but I’d never seen him turn violent. He’d busted her lip. He’d lacerated her cheekbone with the knuckles of his fist.
My brother had woken up in the night when he heard screams from their bedroom. Our father and our mother were having a fight. According to Dennis, a strange watchfulness had reigned in the house for the past few days. Our father, as far as Dennis could figure out, was convinced that she was having an affair with someone.
I sat there mulling over what my brother had told me. I concluded that our father hadn’t figured out the whole truth but was probably getting closer. The truth about my mother’s double body. That must be it. Now that I knew the truth, it was starting to loom over the others, increasingly inexora
ble, like an enormous mass of water. It pressed as if against the wall of a dam. Even though I was keeping the secret, by now there was a crack in the dam and it was spreading.
I blew into the cup and took a sip. “Do you think it’ll take her long to get back to normal?” I asked in a worried tone.
My brother was sitting on the edge of his seat with the cup in his hand. He was wearing an old sweatshirt that he usually slept in and he had a pair of beat-up Adidas on his feet, the untied laces trailing out on the floor, inert, like lifeless arms. “Her face? A couple of weeks, I think.”
I was surprised at my brother’s voice. It was a grown-up voice, soft and somewhat scratchy, almost a masculine version of our mother’s voice, and it stood out clearly against the background noise of the emergency room.
The voices of a couple of nurses and of other people waiting around merged with the echo of a radio that was playing, somewhere, an old blues song. I heard someone else dropping coins into the slot of the coffee machine, a metallic sound that reverberated at length, as though those coins were dropping endlessly. “That eye was so puffy and swollen,” I said. “I do hope it will be as good as before.”
We kept sitting side by side, two brothers, breathing slowly. There didn’t seem to be any well-defined sensations inside us. He and I, alone, suspended in the void of an early morning, in the odour of disinfectant that filled the chair-lined waiting area of an emergency room.
I seized his hand. It was warm and strong. I held it for a few moments. His hand seemed to vibrate slightly, as if a secret tension were running through it. I wondered how long it would be until he too found out the truth about our mother. In my memory, his hand rests in mine. In my memory, his hand possesses a melancholy toughness, even though it is still the hand of a boy. I grip that hand. I continue to grip it. I want to tell him that I’m sorry about what happened and about what’s going to happen, what neither of us know yet.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 30
