Like Family

by Paolo Giordano

  ALSO BY PAOLO GIORDANO

  The Solitude of Prime Numbers

  The Human Body

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  A Pamela Dorman Book / Viking

  Copyright © 2014 by Paolo Giordano

  Translation copyright © 2015 by Anne Milano Appel

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in Italian as Il nero e l’argento by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino.

  ISBN 978-0-698-19136-5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  to the girl I’m seeing

  There really was a Mrs. A. in my life. She stayed in my house, shared life with my family for a few years, then she had to leave us. This book was inspired by her story. It was meant as a homage to her, a way to keep her with me a little longer. I’ve changed most of the names and I’ve changed several details, but not what I felt was the nature of Mrs. A. And, certainly, not what was my feeling toward her.

  What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s own [wolf] packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature.

  —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

  Contents

  Also by Paolo Giordano

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author Note

  Epigraph

  Mrs. A.

  Bird of Paradise (I)

  Orphans

  Insomnia

  La locandiera

  The Hall of Memorabilia

  Beirut

  The Seven-Times Table

  Winter

  The Scarecrow

  The Black and the Silver

  Bird of Paradise (II)

  Mrs. A.

  On my thirty-fifth birthday, Mrs. A. abruptly gave up the determination that in my eyes characterized her more than any other quality and, already laid out in a bed that by then seemed too big for her body, finally abandoned the world we all know.

  _____

  That morning I had gone to the airport to pick up Nora, back from a brief business trip. Though it was late December, winter was dragging its feet, and the monotonous stretches at the sides of the highway were whitened by a thin layer of fog, as if to suggest the snow that couldn’t make up its mind to fall. Nora answered the phone, after which she didn’t say much, just sat there listening. “I see,” she said, “all right, Tuesday,” and then she added one of those sentences that experience provides us with when there are no adequate words: “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  I pulled off into the first service area to allow her to get out of the car and pace aimlessly around the parking lot by herself. She wept quietly, her right hand clamped over her mouth and nose. Among the countless things I’ve learned about my wife in ten years of marriage is her habit of isolating herself in times of grief. She suddenly becomes unreachable and won’t allow anyone to console her, forcing me to remain a useless spectator to her suffering—a rejection that I sometimes interpreted as a lack of generosity.

  For the rest of the way, I drove more slowly; it seemed like a form of respect. We spoke about Mrs. A., recalling some anecdotes from the past, although for the most part they weren’t really anecdotes—we didn’t know much about her—just routines. Routines so rooted in our family life that to us they seemed almost legendary: the reliability with which she updated us each morning on the horoscope she’d heard on the radio while we were still asleep; her way of taking over certain rooms of the house, especially the kitchen, so that we felt we should ask her permission to open our own refrigerator; the proverbs with which she curtailed what to her were unnecessary complications created by us young people; her military, masculine step and her incorrigible tightfistedness—remember the time we forgot to leave her money for the shopping? She emptied the jar of pennies, scraping up each and every one of the coins.

  After a moment or two of silence, Nora added, “What a woman, though! Our Babette. Always there for us. Even this time she waited for me to get back.”

  I did not point out that she had just summarily excluded me from the overall picture. Nor did I dare confess what I’d been thinking that very same moment: that Mrs. A. had waited for my birthday to leave us. Each of us was thus fabricating a small, personal consolation. There is nothing more we can do when faced with someone’s death except devise some extenuating circumstances for it, attributing to the deceased one final gesture of thoughtfulness toward us and arranging the coincidences in some rational order. Yet today, with the inevitable detachment of distance, I have a hard time believing that it was really so. Her suffering had taken Mrs. A. far away from us, from anyone, long before that December morning, leading her to walk alone to a remote corner of the world—just as Nora had walked away from me in the service area on the highway—and from there she’d turned her back on us.

  We called her that, Babette. We liked the nickname because it suggested a sense of belonging, and she liked it because it was exclusively hers and sounded precious, with its French cadence. I don’t think Emanuele ever understood what it meant; maybe someday he’ll come across Karen Blixen’s story, or more likely the movie, and then he’ll make the connection. Nonetheless, he accepted that Mrs. A. had become Babette from a certain point on, his Babette, and I suspect that by assonance he associated that nickname with her babouches, the slippers that his nanny put on as soon as she entered our house and replaced side by side next to the chest at the end of the day. When Nora had noticed the worn-down condition of the soles and bought her a new pair, she’d confined them to the closet, never used. That’s how she was—she never changed anything. She genuinely opposed change body and soul, and though her obstinacy was funny, even foolish at times, I can’t deny we liked it. In our lives, my life and those of Nora and Emanuele—who at that time seemed to fluctuate each day, swaying precariously in the wind like a young plant—she was a steady element, a haven, an ancient tree with a trunk so massive that even three pairs of arms could not encircle it.

  She had become Babette one Saturday in April. Emanuele was already talking, but he was still sitting in the high chair, so it must have been maybe five or six years ago. For months Mrs. A. had been insisting that we go and visit her at her home, at least once, for dinner. Nora and I, experts at declining invitations that even vaguely hinted at family gatherings, had avoided it for quite some time, but Mrs. A. was not easily discouraged, and every Monday she was prepared to renew the invitation for the following weekend. We gave in. We drove up to Rubiana in a state of unusual concentration, as if gearing up to do something unnatural that would require a high degree of industry. We weren’t used to sitting down at the table with Mrs. A., not back then: despite
the constant time spent together, an implicitly hierarchical relationship existed between us by which, if anything, she was on her feet, busy, while we ate and talked about our own affairs.

  “Rubiana,” Nora said with a puzzled look, gazing at the densely wooded hill. “Imagine living here all your life.”

  We toured the three-room apartment where Mrs. A. spent her lonely widowhood, uttering excessive compliments. The information we had about her past was scant—Nora knew only a little more than I—and since we could not attribute a sentimental significance to what we saw, the setting seemed no more, no less than an unnecessarily pompous home, very clean and a little kitschy. Mrs. A. had set the round table in the living room impeccably, with silverware aligned on a floral tablecloth and heavy, gold-rimmed goblets. The dinner itself, I thought, seemed like a pretext to justify the existence of that good china, which obviously hadn’t been used in years.

  She seduced us with a menu designed to include a combination of our favorites: a farro and lentil soup, marinated cutlets, fennel au gratin in a very light béchamel sauce and a salad of sunflower leaves that she’d picked herself, very finely chopped and seasoned with mustard and vinegar. I still recall each and every course and the physical sensation of gradually relinquishing my initial rigidity and surrendering to that culinary indulgence.

  “Just like Babette!” Nora exclaimed.

  “Like who?”

  So we told her the story, and Mrs. A. was moved listening to it, envisioning herself as the chef who’d left the Café Anglais to serve the two spinsters and then spent all her money preparing an unforgettable feast for them. She dabbed at her eyes with the edge of her apron and quickly turned away, pretending to be doing something. Years passed before I saw her cry again, and then it was not out of joy but fear. By that time we were familiar enough so that I wasn’t embarrassed to take her hand and say, “You can do it. Many people let it beat them, but you know illness because you’ve already faced it once. You’re strong enough.”

  And I really believed it. Afterward I saw her fall apart so quickly that there wasn’t even time to say a proper good-bye, no chance to find the right words to express what she had meant to us.

  Bird of Paradise (I)

  The end came swiftly, but it had been heralded by an omen, or at least that is what Mrs. A. convinced herself of in the final months, as though a portent could give meaning to what was simply misfortune.

  At the tail end of summer, a year and a half prior to her funeral, she is working in the garden behind her apartment building. She is pulling up the now-useless green-bean plants to make room for the savoy cabbage when a bird alights just a few feet away from her, on one of the stones that border her rectangle of property.

  Mrs. A., bent over her vegetable plot despite her sixty-eight years, remains motionless so as not to scare it, while the bird peers at her inquisitively. She’s never seen one like it. Its size is roughly that of a magpie, but its colors are quite different. Below the head, lemon-yellow plumes extend from the breast, merging with the blue plumage of its back and wings, and it has long white tail feathers, the cottony threads curled at the tips like fishhooks. It does not seem disturbed by her presence; on the contrary, Mrs. A. has the impression that it perched there just so she can admire it. Her heart begins to pound—she can’t explain why; her knees nearly give way. She suspects that it may belong to a rare, precious tropical species and that it perhaps escaped from the cage of a collector: there are no specimens of its kind in the Rubiana area. Actually, as far as she knows, there aren’t even any bird collectors in Rubiana.

  Abruptly the bird tilts its head to one side and begins poking at a wing with its beak. Its movements have something cunning about them. No, not cunning, not really, what’s the word . . . ? Haughty, that’s it. When it’s done preening, its jet-black eyes bore straight into those of Mrs. A. Finally, lifting off the stone without a sound, it takes flight. Mrs. A. follows its trajectory, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand. She would like to keep watching it, but the bird soon disappears among the neighboring oaks.

  _____

  That night she’d dreamed about the encounter with that parrotlike bird. When she told me about it, she was already quite ill, and at that point it was impossible to distinguish factual elements from those that were imagined or the fruit of simple suggestion. But I think it is true that, in the morning, Mrs. A. looked for a picture of the bird in a book on the fauna of the Val di Susa that she had in her house, because she showed me the book. And it is undoubtedly true that, not finding a picture of it, she decided to go and see a friend, a painter keenly interested in ornithology, because she told me about that visit in detail.

  I never understood much about the nature of her relationship with the painter. She was not inclined to talk about it, perhaps out of reserve, because he was a well-known artist—unquestionably the most distinguished person she still saw after Renato passed away—or maybe she was just possessive. I know that she occasionally cooked for him or ran errands for him, but basically she was a kind of lady friend, a companion with whom he could spend time platonically. I have the impression that they saw each other more than she let on. Every Sunday, after Mass, Mrs. A. went to visit him and stayed until dinnertime. The painter’s house, its deep red façade hidden behind tall beech trees, was just three minutes away from her apartment by car or ten minutes on foot, along a curved, paved road.

  The painter was a midget: she had no qualms about calling him that; indeed she spoke that word with a hint of cruel satisfaction. After so many years, she confessed, she had not stopped having stupid thoughts about him. For example, she had never stopped wondering how it felt never to touch the floor with your feet when sitting down. And she was always looking at his hands, those stubby, somewhat ridiculous fingers, capable of producing wonders. He was the only man whom Mrs. A., barely five foot six, could surpass in height, yet he had such abundant, intense appeal that it was always she who felt surpassed. Spending time with him, sitting in the living room that served as a studio, among the paintings and the picture frames, reminded her of the days when Renato wanted her with him to rummage through cellars and attics in search of some rare, overlooked piece.

  “It must have been a hoopoe,” he’d guessed that morning in late August.

  He was gruff, and lately he’d gotten much worse, but Mrs. A. was used to it and didn’t take any notice. At one time, she told me, the house had been a beehive of activity, with gallery owners, friends and models who posed naked coming and going. Now there were only four women who took turns looking after him; they were foreigners, and none of them was beautiful enough to be immortalized on canvas. Mrs. A. knew that the painter spent almost all his time thinking about earlier days, that he hardly painted anymore, that he was alone. Just like her.

  “I know very well what a hoopoe looks like. That wasn’t what it was,” she retorted, annoyed.

  With a little hop, the painter got down from his chair and disappeared into the next room. Mrs. A. started looking around the studio, as if she weren’t already familiar enough with it. Her favorite painting was there on the floor, unfinished. It depicted a nude woman sitting at a table, her full breasts slightly spread apart, the large nipples a much deeper pink than the surrounding skin. In front of her, four bright rosy peaches and a knife with which she perhaps intends to peel them. But she doesn’t. She remains static forever, waiting for the right moment.

  “It was his most beautiful painting. And that day he finished it right before my eyes, in half an hour. He said to me, ‘You came by car? Then you can take it with you.’ He did it out of compassion, I’m sure. If I had asked him for it, he wouldn’t have given it to me. But he understood how things were. Before anyone, before the doctors. He knew it because of the bird. He came back into the living room with a leather portfolio and placed it on my lap. ‘Is this the one?’ he asked. I recognized it immediately, with those long white feathers looped behind.
He hadn’t seen one in years, since ’71 at least. He thought they’d disappeared. But the bird of paradise had come just for me. They call it that, bird of paradise, but it brings bad luck. I told him, ‘We’re old now, the two of us. What can bad luck do to us?’ Just think, I had broken a mirror only a few days before. Oh, but the painter became furious. ‘Never mind the mirror!’ he shouted. ‘That bird brings death!’”

  _____

  Once I asked Nora if she had ever seriously believed the story about the omen. She turned the question back to me:

  “Did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, obviously I did. I imagine that will always be a difference between the two of us.”

  It was late evening, Emanuele was asleep, and we were quietly cleaning up in the kitchen. We had left a bottle of wine open on the table, almost half full.

  “What do you miss most about her?” I asked.

  Nora didn’t need time to think about it; clearly she had already considered the question herself. “I miss the way she encouraged us. People are so stingy with their encouragement. They just want to be sure you’re more needy than they are.” There was a lingering silence. I can’t make up my mind whether her pauses are natural or if she metes them out one by one, like an actress. “Not her,” she added, “she was always rooting for us.”

  “You never told me what you two talked about all the time you spent in bed.”

  “Did we talk a lot?”

  “You sure did.”

  Nora took a sip of wine from the bottle. She lets herself forget her manners only in the evening, when we’re alone, as if exhaustion and intimacy relaxed her inhibitions. A dark red stain remained on her lips.

  “She was the one who did the talking,” she said. “I listened. She told me about Renato. She made him central to every conversation, as if he were still alive. I’m sure she talked out loud to him when she was home alone. She confessed that she still set the table for him after all those years. I always thought it was very romantic. Romantic and a little pathetic. But everything that’s very romantic is also pathetic, isn’t it?”