I STOPPED READING for a moment and went to drink a glass of water. There was something that didn’t add up, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I picked the pages of Max’s letter back up and examined them closely. There was nothing odd about them.
CAN I JUST GO ON CALLING HER VERA, rather than my mother? A woman like her, nowadays, isn’t on the market. She’s priceless, out of print. You can’t reproduce her with the name of “Mamma,” or at least I don’t seem able to do it. I know that you’ve written and published books, Edoardo, over the years, and I confess without shame that I haven’t read even one of them, but maybe you’d be capable, I mean to say, you’d be sufficiently skillful and detached to bring to life a beautiful woman like her, as if she were a character invented for a movie or a novel, with the trifling detail that you yourself had come out of her, out of her outspread thighs. A writer brought into the world by his own character . . . It’s thoughts like these that turn my stomach: where I emerged from, other men entered. Many others, before and after the Swiss: her screaming in pain, her moaning in pleasure. Vera’s shrieks and moans, her tears real and false, have always thrown me into a rage. They wore on my nerves. If I say that I wanted to kill her when she threw her tantrums, made her scenes, it’s no vulgar exaggeration. I really did feel that desire, deep down, a clear, simple wish, and entirely within my reach, eminently attainable.
When she hung up the phone, she seemed calm, almost indifferent. She wandered around the house, moving objects from here to there, tidying up. As if she were seriously considering whether that giant seashell looked better here or there, the lantern for when we ate outdoors in the garden after dark. She unfolded and hung out to dry the wet beach towels and blankets. She filled the ice trays with water and put them back in the freezer, as if by routine. I followed her from room to room. She was wearing a purple band that held her hair back from her forehead and behind her ears, and the blond wave bobbed on a line with her shoulders. Her movements were slightly rigid, and that was the only piece of evidence that she was sunk in other thoughts. In a provocative manner, I asked who that had been, just now, on the phone. With a contrived voice, she replied: “Oh, just a wrong number.” So, now she was trying to get my goat! It made a surge of rage rise up in me, different from usual. I was shaking. “Don’t spout bullshit!” As if she hadn’t even heard, she traipsed back to the kitchen in a series of small leaps and went to see if the ice was ready, which was impossible, of course, since she’d only just put the water in the freezer a minute before. “It doesn’t matter,” she said to herself, and went back into the living room and poured herself a glass of whiskey. One of those glasses that’s so wide and heavy that you practically can’t hold it in your hand. She did it constantly, several times a day, a glass at least two-thirds full. She threw back a gulp and immediately afterward smiled. “It’s delicious warm, too . . .”
“You disgust me,” I told her. She raised the glass as if to drink to my health. “I couldn’t agree with you more,” and down went another long swallow, “in full agreement. There are at least three of us who think so.” I walked over to her to take the glass out of her hand, but she started back to the kitchen with that same little series of leaps. I managed to grab hold of the strap of her dress, but she twisted out of my grasp, and as she did so, she tore it, and the dress opened up both in front and behind. Taking advantage of my disorientation, she got into the little utility room behind the kitchen and locked herself in. “What are you doing . . . what are you doing . . .” Then she started sobbing and shrieking.
To have to listen to her making all that ruckus from behind that door, and not be able to see her, was driving me crazy. “Get out of there,” I snarled, “open up. Open this fucking door, open up immediately!!”
It was no good, she just stayed holed up in there, shrieking through the door.
“Stop it!”
Once she’d drained the glass, what could she do? Her shrieks grew ever stronger, ever more resonant, deeper and deeper, like a wild animal. “Open this door, I swear I’ll knock it down!” But she wouldn’t listen to me. After a few minutes went by, the shrieks turned into a moaning, a sort of singsong. It was like listening to a little girl, sick and tired of sobbing, trying to console herself.
“Come on, Mamma, enough’s enough, please,” and I changed register, because I was scared at this point, that scene really terrified me, and maybe for the first time, it dawned on me that I was alone with her in that house, with no idea of what to do and no one I could turn to for help. “Open up, I’m begging you,” I implored. I heard my own voice saying things that I never would have dreamed of saying. It was really another person, another son speaking in my place.
“Come on, we’ll work this out.”
“We can do it, Mamma, you and me.”
I even went so far as to whisper words to her that, I swear, horrify me just to write them down: “Come on, Mamma, let’s talk.”
Let’s talk, sure . . . of course . . . Vera and me, me and Vera, me talking, her listening, me listening, listening to her anguish, her sorrow, me consoling her, and then maybe me confessing my own anguish to her . . . such a thing never happened once in our lives together!
I pounded my fists against the door, loudly, to frighten her and make her desist from whatever it was she was getting up to in there. After that series of blows to the door, Vera really did stop her wailing. She was still crying, but almost soundlessly, I could just hear her sobbing. I continued talking to her through the door. And at last, the door swung open.
Vera was sitting on the cot in the utility room, as if she were the maid, exhausted at the end of a hard day’s work, so tired she didn’t even have the strength to get undressed. The torn strap was hanging down in front, leaving one of her breasts uncovered, white and separate from the tanned flesh above and below it. I felt aroused and ashamed of that arousal. Her face, twisted into a grimace and yet still very pretty, was a mess of tears, kohl, lipstick, and freckles. I had never seen her eyes glittering like that. She looked at me as if I were a perfect stranger. I got her to stand up and I reknotted her strap, covering up her nudity, then I led her into the living room. She didn’t say a word but just started sobbing again, as if a crashing wave of emotions had knocked her down where the last one had subsided. Sitting on the sofa, with her head thrown back and the thin clear stripes of her bronzed throat as it jerked up and down.
“No, nooo . . .” I murmured, and I seized her by the shoulders and shook her. “Let’s not start again.”
But she continued, louder and louder.
I shouted at her and threatened her, but her only reaction to my threats was to pump up the volume. Now her sobbing was a savage noise, full of gurgling and racking moans, with nothing human about it at all, sounding almost like a donkey’s braying. I swear, I couldn’t take it anymore. No one could have. Just when she seemed to be on the verge of quieting down, she’d start all over, and it seemed as if it was going to go on forever, exactly like the waves that never stop rolling up onto a beach, one after another. The devastated beauty of her grimaces rendered that woman utterly repugnant. I tried to out-bellow her roars, and I insulted her in the worst ways I could think of, but Vera, staring at me wide-eyed, while I called her nothing better than a stove-in whore, just responded by howling louder. I went into my bedroom and got my sword. I wanted to scare her, and I was more scared than anyone else by what I was doing. I doubted, once I was armed, whether I’d be able to control myself. I went back to where she was, raised the sword, still in its sheath, above her, as if it were a club, and shouted with all the breath I had in my body: “That’s enough!!!”
At that point, she let herself slide off the sofa, with her knees on the floor now. And finally slowing the pace of her gasping sobs, she looked me in the eyes, spoke, and, in the midst of her weeping, uttered an absurd statement.
“I never once cheated on him . . .”
I’ve already told you that I was beside myself with rage, despair, and a bloodcu
rdling sense of helplessness that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, I, who considered myself the strongest young man in the world. I was experiencing a misfortune that had no remedy and, rightly or wrongly, I felt that I was responsible for it. That was what was driving me crazy. But when Vera made that reference to her supposed faithfulness to my father, it was the last straw that made my fury break its bounds, the weightless snowflake that settles on a branch and finally breaks it off the tree. Faithful? You were faithful to him?! I thought, and that unassuming phrase sounded to my ears both ridiculous and offensive, whether it was false or it was true. Because if it was a lie it was deserving of punishment, and if it was the truth, I was even more profoundly disgusted by the idea that this unbelievable woman could have treasured and guarded for twenty long years this petty morality of hers, leaving exclusive rights to it to the Swiss, and it turned my stomach that she should drag it out now, in front of me, as she kneeled there, the last good reason he never should have left her . . .
I screamed and unsheathed my katana, assuming the stance, gripping the hilt with both hands.
Vera looked up at me towering over her and, through the layer of tears and saliva covering them, her gleaming lips took the shape of an ecstatic, demented smile.
“Yes,” she said.
Maybe that smile was ironic.
“Kill me.”
I STOPPED READING. I stuffed Max’s letter in my pocket and left my apartment. I tried to think of something else, but I couldn’t. At the bus stop I touched the folded sheets of paper in my jacket pocket. I started reading again, standing in the crowded bus. I wasn’t breathing, as if I’d been intubated.
WHEN YOU ARE ABOUT TO DELIVER a sword stroke, the muscles of your shoulders and arms relax, otherwise the blow will arrive, hindered by its own force, while instead it should sail whistling like a slashing razor that cuts through the air without any weight. Even though I couldn’t have any real intention of killing my mother, I could sense that my shoulders—entirely involuntarily—were releasing the energy that my rage had built up in them, my muscles were losing their stiffness, growing elastic, as if I actually were getting ready to release the blow. That’s how my masters had taught me, and this is what I had learned in thousands of hours of training. “Kill me,” she had just told me. I knew exactly how to do it, my well-trained body was preparing to do it. The nicely balanced katana, my fingers open wide and then clenched tight with the greatest possible adhesion to the hilt, the twisting of my torso against my legs, which were slightly spread and bent: I shut my eyes and let the sword fly.
The weapon hurtled down at an oblique angle. It wasn’t me who was controlling it. It fell of its own volition, free to execute the stroke. When I felt the blow come to a halt, I opened my eyes, and I saw that the blade had stopped right between my mother’s jaw and neck, and that it was glittering just beneath the earring that dangled from her left lobe, but not in time to keep the flesh from opening with a scratch the length of a finger: tiny though it was, blood began to flow from it immediately. I couldn’t say what force had opposed its counterthrust to make the sword stop right there, a few fractions of an inch from the choke point where blood, breath, and thought all crowd together. The sword had halted at the very edge of Vera’s own life. She who was still my mother.
THE THING THAT MOST ANGERED ME was the doubt that Max might have kept me breathless even though it was all invented. Why would he have done that? I had a knot in my throat as I went on reading.
2
WHY ARE YOU ANSWERING THE PHONE? Where’s your mother?”
“In the bathroom.”
“Doing what?”
“Putting on her makeup.”
“Oh . . . that’s right. She’s putting on her makeup. Is she planning to go out later on?”
“I don’t think so. Her mascara ran down her cheeks. You know, from the tears.”
“Oh, no, please, not the waterworks. What a prima donna.”
“Not a chance. I hate music when there are all those singers standing around.”
“What singers? What are you talking about?”
“All those fat prima donnas. I hate them.”
“Does this strike you as the time to start rambling on about musical genres?”
“No. Not now.”
“Then tell me if she’s calmed down.”
“Do you really want to know? Are you seriously interested in knowing?”
“Well, at least if she has calmed down a little.”
“Maybe so. Frozen solid. All credit goes to me, Papi.”
“She needs to accept it. Unfortunately, that’s just the way things go.”
“It’s the honest truth, by Zeus.”
“Are you trying to make fun of me, Max? Trust me, it’s not a good idea.”
“Actually, if you ask me, it’s an ideal situation for it.”
“What’s the matter with you? It sounds like you’re having trouble breathing.”
“It must be the heat.”
“Is it very hot there?”
“Hot enough. Listen, so are you planning to come back?”
“Come back where?”
“I don’t know. Back home. To Milan.”
“Not anytime soon.”
“Got it.”
“Now put her on.”
“No.”
“I said, put your mother on.”
“That’s not a good idea, by Zeus.”
“Cut it out, Max. I want to talk to her.”
“You already talked to her once. Wasn’t that enough for you?”
“I need to clarify a couple of points.”
“It seems to me that you’re no longer in any position to express your own wishes.”
“What is all this? Have you suddenly gone over to her side?”
“Just one second after picking up the receiver and hearing your voice. ‘Who is it?’ ‘The Swiss . . .’”
“Ha! Very funny. None of this concerns you, it’s between your mother and me. You’re a big boy, you ought to understand.”
“I understand, Papi, I understand, believe me, I understand.”
“It seems to me that you don’t understand a fucking thing.”
“And yet you ask me to understand.”
“It’s not that hard to grasp.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m hanging up now.”
“Hold on a minute: Is it about the money, is that what you’re worried about? Is it for the money?”
“For the money?”
“You’re not going to have any problems with money.”
“What money?”
“My money.”
“You can keep it.”
“Massimiliano . . .”
“How strange. You never call me by my full name.”
MAX’S LETTER, which had previously been so detailed in its account of that “last day of vacation,” resurfaced toward the end, becoming almost hasty, strictly informative, as if it were a normal thing for him to get back into touch after all those years. He returned to his initial theme, which was clearly dear to his heart, his devotion to the cause that was supposed to bring laymen to live once again in accordance with religious precepts.
But I didn’t care much about that stuff.
3
AND JUST AS HE’D VANISHED, he returned.
You don’t stay offstage for long, as long as you don’t die. And Arbus was still alive, somewhere out there. He found my number and called me. “I’d like to resume relations with you,” he said, making me think how little he had changed, at least in the way he spoke.
“Wait, are you in Rome?”
“No. I come every so often to see my mother. I’ll be there next week.”
“How is your mother?”
“Depends on the day.”
“Well, then, come by and pay a call, one afternoon, if you like.”
“Just any old afternoon?”
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