That day, while Alyson and I were wandering through the halls of the Met, and flocks of visitors poured into and out of the museums of New York City, and ice cream vendors were doing big business along the edges of Central Park, and the hot breath of summer panted throughout the length of the northern hemisphere… While those things were happening, back in Clifton our father did something unexpected. He came home at an unusual time. We never did find out whether the reason he returned home in the middle of the afternoon was an upset stomach, as he had said before leaving work, or was an urge to find out, once and for all, exactly what his wife did when he wasn’t there. In recent times he had become suspicious.
I can see him in my mind as he enters quietly through the back door. He carries with him the scent of the slaughterhouse where he works, no doubt, and yet you can hardly blame him for that smell. When it comes to that, you can hardly blame him for the suspicions he is harbouring. He’s postponed this moment for years. Then who is to blame for this evil, for the long chill that is about to descend over us?
He moves in silence down the hallway. He proceeds cautiously, noiselessly, on his rubber-soled shoes.
Dennis wasn’t home. He was at practice. When he rode up on his bicycle, and saw what was happening from a distance, he began pumping harder, riding faster, until his heart was in his mouth, and then threw the bike down in front of the house. At that point he was completely breathless. Not even enough breath to shout for help.
Our father was dragging her out of the house. He gripped her by the hair. He seemed to be possessed by an impossible burst of fury, his mouth twisted, his eyes so narrow they appeared shut. In contrast, our mother’s eyes were wide open, her mouth gaping in an attempt to scream. Dennis told me that’s what paralysed him. Their mouths, their eyes. Their physiognomy had been distorted, almost dissolved, and our parents had practically vanished, replaced by those two figures. They were no longer a father and a mother. They were pure fury, pure terror.
“You whore,” our father was shouting. “You damned mutant bitch. After all these years, you and your bitch twin body. You thought you were so clever, didn’t you? Did you think you’d be able to get away with it for much longer?”
Dennis was even more shocked. He’d never heard our father shout like that. He thought that our mother was trying to answer, but he couldn’t swear that he had heard the words, or read them on her soundless lips. “I beg you. Don’t take me away from the house. I can’t go far. I’ve never gone far from the other body… This could kill me. I’m begging you.”
Dennis took a few steps, hesitantly at first. He started to run. In his memory, he felt like he had no respiration, no heartbeat, like he was moving absurdly slowly, as in the classic nightmare. He reached them. He tried to say something. Probably nothing came out but a wail, and he smacked our father with the palm of his hand, square in the face, causing a flaccid, almost comical sound. If the situation were different, you’d have been tempted to laugh at that sound. Hand on face. Flesh on flesh. Our father staggered. Dennis was strong, and he knew how to land a blow, but he’d failed to wind up for this one.
Perhaps a spark of astonishment lit up in our father’s eyes. Or perhaps his reaction was purely mechanical, an instinctive reflex, prompting him to take a wild, blind swing of the fist.
My brother collapsed. Perhaps our mother screamed. Dennis couldn’t say. He could tell they were moving away into the distance. He saw them struggling, against the screen of daylight, like incomprehensible Chinese shadow puppets. They were moving towards the waste ground on the opposite side of the street. He saw the silhouette of our mother falling to her knees, as our father kept dragging her, and he heard her sob and implore again. “I can’t go any further. I can’t be this far away from her.”
Dennis couldn’t remember anything else. A neighbour told me that he had seen my father crying, minutes later, cradling my mother’s body in his arms. I wonder where he meant to drag her. I wonder where on earth he thought he was taking her. Far away, some place far away. Maybe only over to the grassy strip, where we used to play with the neighbourhood kids, or maybe somewhere else, even further, far away from New Jersey. Maybe he wanted to take her into the city. Maybe to Coney Island. Maybe he wanted to take her back to Italy, maybe he wanted to drag her to the ocean and cross it like Moses, dragging his wife by the hair. The woman he had loved. The woman he had never fully possessed.
We never knew which of them died first. Our mother or her second body, left behind in the bedroom. When we found it, the second body was naked, sprawled across the window sill, where it must have witnessed the whole thing.
As for our mother, after dragging her for a few yards more, our father felt her become a dead weight. He turned around and saw her, ashen and senseless. The demon of fury left him instantly. A lock of hair had come away in his hand. He collapsed onto the moist grass, next to our mother, trying to shake her and staring at her in disbelief. My mother was so pale. Perfectly white. “Silvia,” he called. He went on saying her name. If I’d been there, I think I’d have been doing the same. Repeating her name. Repeating it over and over again, without end.
My father held her in his arms. The neighbours said that he just lay there, holding her. They said that he blew into her face, incessantly, tenderly, as if he were trying to infuse life into her.
Book Four
Mystique
May 2006
Vladimir Putin was irresistible. Vladimir Putin was sexy. Vladimir Putin had steel-coloured eyes and wore a skintight T-shirt that showed off his biceps, thick and rounded like a rugby ball. The sexiest head of state on the planet. When he came in, men and women got to their feet. Every week he received a standing ovation. Vladimir Putin walked to the centre of the stage, trailing a cluster of photographers, posing with intense expressions and a steely gaze. He raised his arms in the direction of the cheering audience. He was the man of the moment. He raved some nonsense about the muscles of Great Russia, asking the audience if they wanted to see those muscles and then triumphantly hiking his T-shirt. He’d show off his abdominals at the slightest excuse. The audience laughed and new bursts of applause rang out. Vladimir Putin repeated the routine with the abdominals several times, looking around with a conceited expression, a little funnier each time, dragging louder and louder laughs out of the studio audience. The muscles of Great Russia. That routine never failed to get a laugh.
Commercial break.
After the pause, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s turn, a classic of the show, and then a number by Madonna who, just like Putin, never missed a chance to show off her athletic abilities. Madonna put on a steamy dance production. Surrounded by male dancers twenty-five years her junior, she swivelled her hips until, without warning, she froze, locked in place by a treacherous shoulder cramp. The audience started laughing again. The laughter came in warm waves, like the jets of water from a health-giving shower.
The pace of the show accelerated as the finale approached. The lights of the cameras glowed at the sides of the studio. Mel Gibson appeared, a frenzied glare in his eyes, reciting random lines from his most cringe-making movies, shouting like a man possessed while the sidekick of the various numbers, Chad, tried to get him back on the track of reason. Last of all came Oprah Winfrey, striding on with a royal gait, radiant, dressed in white, showering benedictions befitting a pontiff, and beginning to recommend books that didn’t exist, narrating fragments of absurd and funny plots. This was another classic of the show.
The notes of the closing theme song came up. The applause became louder and even warmer, verging on the emotional, while the last guest left the stage and finally she herself appeared, acclaimed, adored, the real star, the only actual character on the show. She stood there for a moment, in her real appearance, looking out at the studio audience and the cameras. She, who had turned herself into all those characters. She, who could become anyone, literally become them, taking on the semblance of the guests she chose for the show. She wh
o made the whole country laugh. The most famous mutant in America, the unrivalled star of the Celebrity Mystique Show.
*
The lights of the cameras died out, in a single instant, like an interrupted dream. The theme music faded, and with it the extended applause. One last time Mystique thanked the studio audience, the technical crew, the walk-ons, and the dancers before heading to the dressing rooms with Chad. “My God,” she sighed. “I am so exhausted.”
“Don’t even say it,” Chad whined. “These shoes are killing me.” He was wearing a pair of loafers that looked far too small, and was bundled into a red-sequined tuxedo that also looked too tight for his considerable girth. “Why does that costumier hate me so much?!”
“Mel Gibson was a bit overstated,” Mystique thought out loud. Her perfectionism pushed her to find a shortcoming in every show the minute it was over. “I had to overdo him a little. I was having a hard time maintaining his shape, and that was the only way I could stay in character.”
“I think it went fine the way you did it,” Chad replied. “A crazy Mel Gibson bouncing around the studio. I thought I would have a heart attack chasing after you. To say nothing of my aching feet… Ouch!” he complained as he stumbled. “Could there be anything worse than a fatty with sore feet?”
“Oh yes, there is,” Mystique answered. “A mutant who’s so tired she can’t even feel her feet any more.”
They walked a little further and reached the dressing rooms. Before parting ways, they exchanged an exhausted but basically satisfied smile, the smile of two people who had finished a job, and had worked together to create, once again, the atmosphere of a hit television show. They’d done it. Another episode had gone on air.
As soon as she walked into her dressing room, Mystique collapsed on the sofa. She shut her eyes and savoured the moment. Far from the cameras, far from prying eyes, far from the spotlights of the studio. Far, far away. “Peace,” she whispered gratefully in the solitude of the room.
She could feel herself breathing hard and a sense of painful excitement in her stomach. That’s how it was after every show. She knew she couldn’t have faced one more transformation, and yet her body seemed to demand exactly that, it seemed to want to go on transforming itself, from one shape to another, faster and faster, at a frantic pace. Her body was like an overexcited child. Like some sort of crazed animal. Now she had to find a way of calming it down, and she began breathing deeply, slowly, inhaling air, exhaling, breathing in, breathing out, closing her eyes and losing herself in that rhythm, that profoundly simple rhythm, a rhythm that was so elementary, therapeutic, and arcane. My breathing. Nothing else.
That was when a sound wormed its way into her ears, forcing her to open her eyes. The phone on the side table. It was an inside call. “What is it?” she sighed.
“Sorry,” said a voice. It was her production assistant. “I just wanted to let you know that Gary called just before the show. It was too late to transfer the call to you, and he left a message…”
“Please,” Mystique interrupted her. “I don’t want messages from Gary. I don’t want messages from anyone right now. I just want to relax and do my breathing exercises.”
“I understand. He just asked me to tell you…”
“Hey. What do you say we talk about it later?” Mystique laughed briefly, the kind of nervous laughter she often used when she wanted to cut off a discussion.
After hanging up, she closed her eyes and went back to concentrating, doing her best to find the rhythm she had lost. She was trying to exhale all traces of agitation: out of her lungs, out of her body. Trying to expel the sense of instability that clung to her, to her limbs, in the pit of her stomach. To convince her body that there would be no more transformations, no more shapes to assume. Not any more, not now. Expel the flavour of the bodies into which she had transformed herself. Expel Vladimir Putin, expel Mel Gibson. Male bodies were the hardest. She had to expel the sensation of their weight, their scratchy chins, expel the sensation of their body hair, their chest muscles, their tight buttocks, and that small fundamental protuberance that dangled between their legs.
She started to feel a new sense of calm. A warm calm, dense as foam, gradually expanding inside her. Vladimir Putin and Mel Gibson faded away. They all eventually faded away. She was starting to feel like herself again, on that sofa, in that peaceful dressing room, whatever herself might mean. Herself, with her faintly bluish skin, her slender yet vigorous arms. Her mature face and her dark hair. She kept her eyes closed, floating in that peace, in the found-again flavour of her own body.
*
After relaxing for ten minutes or so she shook herself and decided it was time to get moving. She changed clothes, putting on a blouse and a trouser suit. She tidied her hair and applied lipstick. There I am. Good as new. At last, she swung open the door of her dressing room and at that point she gave a start, frightened by the sight of a human figure lurking in ambush. “My God, Susie,” she said, bringing her hand to her chest. “I nearly tripped over you. You almost made me have a stroke.”
Susie, the production assistant, gave her a worried smile. “I’m sorry,” she hastened to say. She was in her early twenties and was still a girl, looking more petite than she actually was, with her fair white skin always on the verge of blushing.
“All right,” said Mystique, regaining a semblance of control. “Besides taking a few years off my life, was there a reason why you were waiting for me?”
“Um… complicated situation,” Susie began cautiously. “Gary… What I mean is, like I said, Gary called just before the show. He wanted to let you know… Um…” The girl stopped short, red in the face.
“All right,” Mystique said again. She gave a smile, trying to reassure her that whatever it was, she wouldn’t get mad. “Okay, let’s hear it. To let me know about what?”
The girl opened her eyes wide, in no way reassured, before she made up her mind to talk. “To let you know that someone would be coming here to the studio.”
“Okay,” said Mystique in a patient voice. “Who?”
“A man. An officer. A policeman, I guess.” That word, policeman, hung in mid-air like a puff of dust in the atmosphere of the hallway. Susie took a breath and then fired off her news: “The thing is that he’s already here… Upstairs, I mean. He’s waiting for you in your office.”
This time it was Mystique’s eyes that opened wide. “A policeman? Now?” She couldn’t believe that Gary would play such a prank on her. “But I’m busy right now. We’re busy, we have our production meeting.”
All Susie did was to lower her eyes. Now that she had managed to deliver the news, she was breathing more freely.
There wasn’t much more to say. Mystique certainly couldn’t take it out on the girl. She started walking, incredulous and irritated, pounding her heels into the floor of the hallway. Gary, thanks a lot. In the elevator she nervously looked at herself in the mirrored wall, checking her hair and adjusting the collar of her blouse. My God. Meeting a policeman. She hadn’t had any reason to deal with a police officer for the last six years, and she would gladly have done without it now. She was glad she’d worn that suit, because it gave her a determined, almost masculine look. To hell with it, she finally decided. I don’t have to make an impression on anyone. I don’t see why I should. I don’t see why I should feel nervous at all.
*
The man was sitting in her office, and when Mystique came through the door behind him, the first thing that she saw was his back. The nape of his neck, close-shaven. The square line at the base of his hair. The man turned around and promptly got to his feet. He produced a smile and held out his hand. “Detective Dennis De Villa,” he introduced himself.
Mystique shook his hand. She held it a second longer as if to judge its weight. She guessed that the detective must be thirty-something. Regular features. A slightly enigmatic gaze. He was in plain clothes; he wore a grey suit made of a light fabric, and at a glance he seemed to be fit. She didn’t rem
ember policemen being so fit. On the whole, he looked more like an ex-model or something of the sort than a detective. A policeman. I’m shaking hands with a policeman.
She sat down at her desk, across from the detective, maintaining an expression of distrust. “I’m sorry you went to the trouble of coming here,” she said. “I’m afraid it really wasn’t necessary.”
Detective De Villa crossed his legs and nodded slightly, acknowledging the ungracious welcome. “I do hope you’re right,” he said. “I certainly hope there’s no need for my visit. All the same, I understand that you’ve received some strange anonymous messages. The producer of your show…”
“Gary,” she broke in. “I know Gary gave you a call. To tell the truth, I had asked him not to. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing at all to worry about.” She too crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t see anything threatening about these messages.”
De Villa went on nodding thoughtfully. Mystique noticed that his eyes were red as if he were, somehow, deeply moved. She wondered if the detective suffered from an allergy. That signal of vulnerability made her feel less hostile towards the man in front of her. And yet, that visit still struck her as an annoyance. It was late, she had a production meeting to get through, and she had no interest in spending time with a lawman.
“I saw a bit of the show,” the detective said. “On the monitors in the control booth.”
“Oh,” Mystique replied with obvious sarcasm. “In the control booth? How lucky to be a policeman. I guess you manage to sneak in everywhere,” she said.
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