I’ll never forget my visits there, the afternoons with Arbus and his mamma, who treated him like a teddy bear, to be hugged and mistreated with the same vehemence. She always seemed to be on the verge of yanking his eyes out and then sewing them back on, weeping, the way slightly sadistic little girls will do with their dollies.
Speaking of eyes: whenever Arbus’s mother was around, provoking him, tormenting him, tickling him, his eyes, behind those thick, smudged lenses, narrowed until they became a pair of horizontal slits . . .
She would torture him, convinced that this was the right way to treat him, then she’d offer reparations in the form of a wave of love. But those reparations never reached him.
9
HER MOOD WAS INFINITELY CHANGEABLE. If she wasn’t playful, if she wasn’t kidding around, then she was pensive. One time I went over to their house, without calling ahead. I rang the doorbell.
“Is Arbus home?”
I always called him that. And I had discovered that at home his family called him by his surname as well.
“No. But I think he’ll be home soon. Come in.”
I followed her into the hallway. When I came even with my friend’s bedroom, the door was open, the desk was neat and tidy, the bed was made, and I turned to go on in, but Ilaria Arbus swiveled quickly and grabbed me by the arm.
“No, not here. Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.” And she continued to walk down the shadowy hallway. I followed behind her.
She ushered me into her bedroom. “Come in, come in.” I was embarrassed. The room was fairly small and almost entirely occupied by the bed, which appeared to me, perhaps for that reason, larger than a normal bed, a walnut dresser, and an armoire, from the knobs of which hung necklaces. I studied them, in the dim light that the curtains filtered into the room: they were costume jewelry.
“Sit down, Edoardo.” There was no place else to sit but on the bed. I looked up at her in consternation. She had turned away, had opened one of the bottom dresser drawers, and was looking for something in the drawer. She said it again, “Sit down,” still leaning over with her back turned to me, or really, with her derriere turned to me, swathed in the cotton dress beneath which I could make out the stripes of the elastic bands of her panties. I would have chosen to sit at the foot of the bed, but it was occupied by a massive wrought-iron structure, painted black, with a large ball perched atop each corner. For that reason, I had no alternative but to sit at the center of the bed, right behind Signora Arbus, who was still bent over, rummaging through the drawers, on the side of the bed where she slept, since I had noticed bottles of medicine and a pack of wax earplugs on the night table, along with a couple of a detective novels, while the other night table was empty, and the reading lamp was unplugged from the wall socket.
“Look here, look at this,” and she straightened up with a manila folder in one hand, then sat down next to me on the edge of the bed, which sank swaybacked beneath our weight. She pulled out of the folder a stack of paper, different-size sheets of varying weight, and started handing them to me, one by one.
The first few sheets must have been torn from a medium-size spiral notebook, and were lightweight and unlined. On each page, drawn with heavy blue marker, was a cityscape, but a depiction of an imaginary city, never glimpsed by human eyes, or seen only in dreams, with tall buildings, churches, towers, skyscrapers with daring shapes very similar to those with which, in the past thirty years or so, the most highly paid architects on earth have amused themselves by dotting the skylines of the world’s great cities, rendering them even more spectacular . . . and then there were parks, elevated highways, lakes, bunkers, fortifications . . . They were beautiful architectural projects, and each city—even though the line with which it was drawn remained the same in each case—was very different from the last, as if each one constituted an exact and very distinct model. Arbus’s mother would hand me one and at the same time take back the one I had just studied, putting it back at the bottom of the stack; then she’d look at me and smile in a way that I couldn’t quite categorize, unsure whether she was being ironic, or simply amused at my astonishment. “Wow, these are really nice . . .” were the only words I could manage to get out in return for that smile. She was so close to me that I actually couldn’t see her whole face, only the mouth but not the rest, or else the eyes and not the rest.
But it was not until she had handed me the last of these urban landscapes that I noticed a surprising detail, which had been hidden from my eyes precisely by the densely elaborate nature of their execution. That was when I realized that the drawings had been done without once lifting the marker from the paper. They consisted, in other words, of a single unbroken line that started at one point and, by way of scrollwork, zigzags, verticals and diagonals, returned to the starting point after having given shape to that astonishing mass of buildings. That, by the way, was what gave proof of the incredible conceptual consistency, the sheer compactness of the thing: because each of them was the result of a single thought, or perhaps I should say a single action, an uninterrupted movement of the hand, which had lifted the pen from the paper only once the whole drawing was complete.
“He did these when he was five years old.”
“They really are incredible . . .” I murmured, and I was tempted to ask Arbus’s mother to give me back the ones she’d already showed me, to see whether they were all drawn with that same extraordinary single line, but she’d already taken the last sheet out of my hand and was now giving me another.
“Five years old . . .”
The new series consisted of genuine drawing paper, thick, rough sheets. On it, drawn in pencil, were depictions of domestic interiors. The style was completely different from the one glimpsed in the cityscapes: every bit as much as the cityscapes were airy, abstract, stylized, and, so to speak, graphic, these were minutely detailed, hyperrealistic, and extraordinarily painstaking in their faithful depiction of every object present in the room that the artist had before his eyes as he began to fill up the sheet of paper. That’s right, “filling up” is the right phrase: because, in spite of the fact that the pencil line was in any case a faint dark track across the white of the paper, the whole space appeared to have been transformed into background, adorned, from top to bottom, from left to right, creating a singular effect of a photographic survey, or better, a digital scan: as if the eye of the observer had slowly rotated from one edge of the field of view to the opposite side, and then had transferred an identical reproduction to the paper. The only perceptible difference lay in a slight, barely detectable deformation, or fluctuation of the space, which here and there tightened or tilted as if the point of view had shifted by a degree or two or as if the object portrayed had been twisted ever so slightly on its axis.
Let me give an example that will help you to grasp what I’m talking about, taken from the first drawing that Arbus’s mother handed to me. It depicted a living room, or perhaps I should say, what was called a parlor in the apartments and houses of the bourgeoisie. I wouldn’t be capable of replicating with anything like the same minute attention to detail everything that appeared in the drawing, because what really astonished were certain very vivid and realistic details that gave it the casual quality of a snapshot. There were two sofas arranged in L shapes and two armchairs with high backrests, padded on the sides, whose flowered fabric was here reproduced with the exactitude of certain canvases by Vuillard, and there, draped over the backrest, another layer of fabric meant to protect the upholstery, and then carpets on the floor and paintings on the walls, which looked familiar to me. From the frame of one of those pictures, a man looked out into the parlor, arms crossed over his chest, a proud air about him, in an elegant smoking jacket, and the draftsman had also remembered to reproduce the embroidery just over the breast pocket, the mouthpiece of a pipe sticking out of the pocket, and a monogram just under the embroidery, L.A., as if this were evidently a significant detail. Atop an oval table with four Viennese canework chairs
turned, not inward toward the center of the table but, irregularly, facing away, as if whoever had been sitting in them had suddenly stood up and left the room without bothering to put them back where they belonged, there was a deck of cards, and cards had been dealt out, three per hand, to at least a couple of the players before that round of the game had been interrupted. Beside and below the armrest of one of the two sofas stood a trelliswork metal magazine holder, and through the holes in the metal it was possible to read some of the letters of the mastheads of at least three newsweeklies that had been rolled up and jammed in there by some cleaning woman or housewife, impatient but determined to restore some order, and beside or beneath those letters forming the name of the magazine, the illustrator had even gone so far as to reproduce the visible portions of the rolled-up covers: a woman’s leg, a hand loaded down with large rings, a lock of light-colored hair. The only title that could be reconstructed on the basis of the letters that could be read was L’Espresso.
A specially built piece of furniture that consisted of two stacked cubes housed the turntable and the amplifier of a stereo and a not particularly extensive collection of albums; because it was shown at an angle, it was possible to make out the cover of the first one, the famous Abbey Road, but only the two figures on the right could be seen, Lennon with a beard and long hair hanging over his shoulders, all in white, and Ringo in an elegant black suit, as they crossed the zebra stripes.
Now I could go on with my enumeration (against one wall, an upright piano with sheet music set askew, and a few loose sheets that had actually slipped down onto the keyboard . . . the back half of a black cat emerging from a door standing ajar on the right . . . the crystal drop chandelier hanging over the scene . . . and so on) but I stop instead to point out that these objects, the sofas, the piece of furniture with the stereo, the photographs, the paintings, were all as precisely depicted as they were faintly deformed, or else placed in space from an array of different vantage points, varying ever so slightly, so that for instance the table appeared to be inclined toward the observer so that all the cards threatened to slide toward him, whereas the arrangement of the paintings on the walls gave the impression that the angle where the walls met at the far end of the room was acute, suggesting that the entire parlor had been built in the prow of a ship.
“That’s the part of him that we lost. Forever.”
The smile on Ilaria Arbus’s lips had died, and her green eyes were full of inexplicable tears.
I couldn’t begin to imagine that roughly eight years later, I would be lying with her daughter Leda on that very same bed.
10
AH, IF I THINK of the enormous amount of energy that I’ve wasted over the years trying to justify myself . . . to give meaning in hindsight to my actions, so that what I did might be, or at least seem, or sound right, even if it wasn’t, especially if it wasn’t, or wasn’t entirely, and that what I didn’t do might seem right not to have done, right to have avoided, in short, that my refusal (ah, how often I refused, so often, too often) came not out of fear or laziness or snobbery, but rather out of some noble, albeit obscure, principle of consistency.
The daisy chain of my “I would prefer not to”s is so very long!
The truth, though, is that it would be better not to stoop to dig up reasons, and to illustrate the reasons for your reasons: if you avoid doing that, you just feel stronger. It sounds arrogant, but it’s actually honest, and it spares you a great deal of hypocrisy, and it spares your fellow man a great deal of illusions. If other people like what you do and who you are, fine, otherwise, why worry about it, and what good does it do you to justify it? If you’re in the right, then why waste time explaining it, and if you aren’t, it’s certainly not going to be your words or your poses that will put you there.
And if, in the end, everything you do is completely wrong, then you will be the one who pays the consequences, or reaps the benefits, so at least with yourself, there’s no point cooking the books, now, is there?
OH, OH, talking about yourself . . .
It isn’t easy. It is by no means easy to talk about your own misdeeds, your infamy, and, even worse, your own normality: it’s like having a knife and using it to kill someone, but it won’t cut, it’s dull, the blade lacks an edge and won’t slice into the flesh, try as you might, press down on it with all your strength . . . And the deeper you carve, the farther away this stranger moves.
Who are you? Halt. Let me get my hands on you.
Hee, hee. Let who get whose hands on who?
Let me!
But you can’t, you know. I am you.
You’re me?!
That’s right.
But I can’t see you . . .
And you never will!
THERE ARE NO SINCERE PHRASES, none of them are ever sincere enough, and there are no revealing accounts in all this talking of yourself, shuffling, shuffling, and reshuffling until you have gotten the deck completely drunk and, with it, the figures printed on each card . . .
One of those figures, as far as I was concerned, was Arbus.
Another was a woman, or actually a girl, but at first I didn’t recognize her. Will I know who she is, at the end of this book? How many important girls have there been in your life, how many decisive women? The ones that you love, the ones that you dream of, the ones that you marry . . . will the ones that make you suffer be more or less important in the end than the ones you made suffer?
Shall we draw up a list? Who has never made a list of all the lovers they’ve had? And how many they never had, either because the other person didn’t want to, or because the list maker didn’t, or else because something went sideways, the taxi never came, the room was taken, the look wasn’t caught or it was but misunderstood—of course, I had a fever of 104 and a plane to catch early the next morning.
How haphazard, how random it all is! No literature will ever be able to recapture this chance series of events. And even if it could, it wouldn’t want to! It won’t! A novel is the exact opposite of chaos, it is the natural enemy of disorder. That is why talking about yourself or about others is nothing but a waste of time.
All right, then, shut the book.
Put the cap on your pen.
Turn off your computer or your iPad.
Turn off the light, too.
Throw the windows open wide and let in the evening air. It’s dense, heavy with the perfume of flowers and exhaust. The evening is out there, and it’s immense and wide open.
11
A GOOD TEN YEARS HAVE GONE BY, perhaps even more, since the episode I’m going to tell you about here. My calculations of the date are pretty certain, a fixed point, what in historical research is called (I believe) a terminus ante quem, being 2005, the year I played my last soccer match, or really, just a friendly little game at home in my yard with some kids: when, in order to gain control of a ball that was descending in a high arc, and to prevent a twelve-year-old from taking possession, I leapt vigorously, lifting and stretching my right leg, and just as it made contact with the ball I heard a noise behind my thigh, inside my thigh, a sort of snapping sound, and I fell to the ground, my leg still stretched out, the way male Russian dancers do at the conclusion of their acrobatic performances.
That tear in my biceps femoris marked the end of my soccer career, which, for that matter, I had been dragging along behind me only in five-a-side games, and even then, not as often as I ought to have.
And so it was certainly before 2005 that I met—at a sports club where the fields are wedged between the hillside made up of fluvial detritus and the Tiber, over which hovers a mist that makes the synthetic grass sparkle with humidity beneath the floodlights—my old classmate Rummo.
I can’t imagine how he managed to recognize me in the locker rooms, thirty years later.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you Albinati?”
We were both in our underwear and both in a hurry, the hour we had reserved began in just three or four minutes, and in fact the other players had
already left the locker room, reminding the last of us who took the field to remember to lock the door.
“Yes . . . and you. I’m sorry . . .?”
“Rummo. Don’t you remember? We both went to . . .”
“Rummo . . .? To SLM! Of course. You’ve—”
“I’ve changed a lot, eh?”
And with a smile he ran his hand over his bald head where, back in the time when the most important chapter of our history was unfolding, a mane of beautiful wheat-blond hair had once grown, fine and abundant.
I reassured him that all of us had changed considerably.
“Are you a psychiatrist, too?” Rummo asked me.
That question might strike the reader as odd, but those Tuesday evening soccer games were in fact organized by a psychiatrist, and the other players were generally his colleagues and a few male nurses from the mental health centers: all of them rather particular individuals, not full-fledged lunatics, let me be clear, like in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” but still, some genuine oddballs, and in fact more than one of the games had been broken off because of the eccentricities of the players. There were those who were ready for a brawl, others got their feelings hurt, others still, for no apparent reason, would simply stop playing. I was one of the few players who didn’t work in the mental health sector, and I went every Tuesday evening for two or three years, since psychiatrists are pretty poor soccer players, sufficiently unskilled and untrained that I could keep up, and disorganized enough that someone like me could venture to dictate the geometries of the plays on the field.
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