“It means I could, rather quickly, get my degree in medicine, for example, or a PhD in liberal arts and philosophy.”
“You?”
“Don’t you believe me? It’s true. I did study medicine for three years. And I liked it. Ask—just ask Dida if she’d rather have her Gengè be a doctor or a professor. I’m such a smooth talker, I could also be a lawyer if I wanted.”
He shook his head violently. “But—but you’ve never wanted to do a thing before!”
“True, but not due to shallowness on my part, you know. Just the opposite! I got too wrapped up in things. Believe me, you can’t succeed in anything if you delve too deeply into everything. You make certain discoveries! But I can assure you that with just superficial study, I could easily become a doctor, lawyer, or, if Dida prefers, a professor. I just need to apply myself.”
He’d turned blue in the face from struggling to stand there listening to me, and suddenly dashed out of the room. He couldn’t take another second without exploding.
I ran after him, shouting: “No, wait, listen! Can you imagine how popular I’ll be when I give my father’s money away? They might even elect me to congress—imagine that! Dida would like that. You would too—a congressman son-in-law! Can’t you see me there? Can’t you just picture it?”
But he’d already run off, shouting at my every word: “Lunatic! Lunatic! Lunatic!”
5 ~ Then I Say “Why?”
I won’t deny it, it sounded like I was kidding, because of my damned sense of humor. And it probably seemed like I was babbling a lot of nonsense. I admit it. But even though the prospect of Gengè being a doctor, lawyer, professor, or even a congressman, was enough to make me chuckle, I still think my father-in-law should at least have shown that measure of consideration and respect that people in the region usually reserved for those noble professions, so often practiced by plenty of mediocre men who, all things considered, it wouldn’t have been hard to compete against.
The explanation, as I well know, was quite different. My father-in-law couldn’t see me as any of those things, but for reasons quite different from mine. He couldn’t accept I was removing his son-in-law (who knows what sort of Gengè he saw in me) from the situation he’d lived in up to now, that is, a comfortable existence as a marionette whose strings were pulled partially by him and partially by his daughter and partially by the bank partners. I needed to leave him just the way he was—that good little prodigal son called Gengè—let him carry on without a thought about that usurious interest charged by the bank that he didn’t manage.
And I swear to you I would’ve left Gengè alone to avoid upsetting my poor baby doll whose love was so precious to me, and to avoid causing such a huge commotion for so many fine people who really cared about me, if I could’ve left him there for everyone else while taking off on my own, somewhere else, with another body and another name.
6 ~ Stifling the Laughter
I also knew that totally changing my life by telling everyone tomorrow that I was a doctor, let’s say, or a lawyer, or a professor, and assuming the garb and the duties of any of those professions still wouldn’t turn me into one single individual to everyone else, or even to myself.
I’d already come to understand all too well the horror of locking myself in the prison of a single form, no matter which one.
Although I’d laughingly made those same remarks to my father-in-law, I repeated them in all seriousness to myself during the night, stifling the laughter provoked by the thought of myself as a lawyer, doctor, or professor. I’d basically decided I should take up and make the best of one of those professions (one or the other) out of necessity, if Dida returned to me as I’d hoped, demanding that I provide as best I could for a new lifestyle with her new Gengè.
But from the anger with which my father-in-law had run off, I could argue that, even for Dida, no new Gengè could be born from the old one. The old one had simply made it obvious that he’d gone hopelessly insane when, for no reason, he suddenly decided to give up the life he’d been happily living up to that point.
And I really must’ve been crazy to expect that a precious baby doll like my Dida would join in my insanity like that, for no reason.
BOOK SEVEN
1 ~ Complication
The following morning, a hand-delivered note invited me to come at once to the home of Anna Rosa, my wife’s friend that I mentioned once or twice in passing at the beginning of my story.
I was expecting someone to try to intervene in an attempt to get me and Dida to reconcile, but this hypothetical someone was supposed to come from the ranks of my father-in-law and the other partners in the bank, rather than directly from my wife, especially given that the only obstacle standing in the way of our reconciliation was my intention to liquidate the bank. Practically nothing had happened between me and my wife. I just needed to tell Anna Rosa that I sincerely regretted the incivility with which I’d shaken Dida and pushed her back down on the drawing room armchair, and then we’d certainly come to a swift reconciliation.
The possibility hadn’t even crossed my mind that Anna Rosa would try to get me to back down on my plans for the bank and make that a prerequisite for my wife to return home.
Dida had told me that in the past her friend had refused several so-called “advantageous” marriage offers out of her contempt for money, eliciting the disapproval of sensible people, including Dida, who by marrying me (I mean, the son of a loan shark), must certainly have led her girlfriends to believe she was doing it because, at the end of the day, it was an “advantageous” match.
So Anna Rosa could hardly be the most suitable spokesman for saving that “advantage” now.
In fact, just the opposite had to be the case: Dida had turned to her for help, to get word to me that her father, along with the other bank partners, was holding her at home and preventing her from coming back to me unless I backed down from my plans to liquidate the bank. But knowing my wife as well as I did, that didn’t seem plausible either.
So I accepted that invitation with intense curiosity. I couldn’t begin to guess why I’d been invited.
2 ~ First Inkling of Trouble
I didn’t know Anna Rosa very well. I’d seen her plenty of times at my house, but since I’d always kept my distance from my wife’s friends, more out of instinct than by design, I’d barely talked to her at all. A few faint smiles glimpsed by surprise on her lips as she covertly glanced my way had clearly seemed directed at that ridiculous image of Gengè that my wife Dida must have planted in her head, so I never had the slightest desire to engage in prolonged conversation with her.
I’d never been to her home.
An orphan after the death of both mother and father, she lived with an elderly aunt in that house that looked like it was squished up against the high, high walls of the Great Abbey, with its ancient castle walls whose windows had iron grates that jutted out at the bottom, and where the few remaining old nuns would peer out at sunset. One of those nuns, the least old, was another of Anna Rosa’s aunts, her father’s sister, and they said she was half crazy. But it doesn’t take much to drive a woman closed up in a convent crazy. My wife, who’d spent three years at boarding school at the San Vincenzo convent, told me that all the nuns, young and old, were half crazy in one way or another.
I didn’t find Anna Rosa at home. The old servant who’d brought me the invitation note spoke to me mysteriously, through a peep-hole without opening the door, telling me that the young lady of the house was up in the Abbey, visiting her aunt the nun, and I should go find her there, asking the doorkeeper to show me into Sister Celestina’s parlor. All this mystery was making my head spin. At first, rather than piquing my curiosity, it discouraged me from going. Despite my confused amazement, I took a moment to stop and reflect as best I could on how weird it was to meet up in the Abbey in some nun’s parlor.
Any connection between my trivial marital misadventure and that invitation seemed to be lost now, and I immediately left in a state o
f anxiety as if some unforeseen complication was about to bring who-knows-what consequences into my life.
As everyone in Richieri knows, it nearly cost me my life. But here I’d like to repeat what I told the judges, to permanently erase all suspicion from everyone’s mind that my deposition at the time was falsely given in an attempt to save Anna Rosa, exonerating her of all culpability. She truly was in no way to blame. It was my fault, or rather, the fault of my excruciating observations, that the sudden, unexpected adventure into which, almost against my will, I let myself be drawn into for one final desperate experiment, risked coming to such an end.
3 ~ The Revolver in the Flowers
Through the old part of Richieri, I made my way up one of the steep, slippery narrow alleyways, infested with the stench of garbage rotting in the sunlight, to the Abbey.
When you’ve gotten used to living in a certain way, going someplace unusual where a nagging feeling arises from the silence, signaling something mysterious is afoot, something our spirit is condemned to keep its distance from despite being part of us, provokes a vague anxiety because we think that if we could just get inside it, perhaps our life would open up to all sorts of unknown new feelings, as though we were living in another world.
That Abbey, once upon a time a feudal castle belonging to the Chiaramonte family of Sicily, with its low, worm-eaten portal and the wide courtyard with the cistern in the middle, and the run-down grand staircase, dark and reverberating, with a cavern-like chill, and that long, wide corridor with numerous doors on either side, and the sagging, timeworn brick floor, shining in the light of the enormous window at the far end, open to a silent sky—that Abbey had absorbed so many chance events and facets of life, watching them pass by, that now, in the protracted death throes of those few nuns who still wandered inside it, lost, the Abbey seemed to have lost all self-awareness. Everything inside now seemed to have slipped into a state of amnesia in the interminable wait for those final nuns to die, one by one, and the reason that baronial castle had been constructed in the first place had been forgotten ages ago, after centuries of life as an abbey.
The nun who had been minding the portal opened one of those hallway doors and ushered me into the modest parlor. A gloomy bell had already sounded below, perhaps to summon Sister Celestina.
The parlor was so dark that initially I couldn’t make out a thing except for the grille in the back, barely visible in the scant light that had come through when the door was opened. I stood there waiting, and who knows how long that would’ve lasted if a faint voice from the grille hadn’t finally invited me to take a seat because Anna Rosa was coming right up from the garden.
I won’t even try to express the effect that unexpected voice in the dark, from behind that grille, had on me. In that darkness I was struck by the thought of the sunlight that must’ve been flooding the Abbey garden. I didn’t know where the garden was, but it surely must’ve been impossibly green. And suddenly, in the middle of that greenery, the radiant figure of Anna Rosa appeared, but in a way I’d never seen her before, all aquiver with grace and mischievousness. It was a flash. Darkness returned. Actually, not darkness, because now I could make out the grille, and in front of it, a small table and two chairs. In that grille, silence. I listened for the voice that had spoken to me, faint but fresh, almost youthful. No one was there now. Still, it must’ve been the voice of an old woman.
Anna Rosa, that voice, this little parlor, the sunlight in the darkness, the green of the garden—my head was swimming.
A short time later, Anna Rosa flung the door open and called me out of the parlor into the corridor. Her face was totally flushed, her hair a mess, her eyes sparkling, her white knit woolen blouse was unbuttoned in front, as if from the heat, and she was carrying an enormous bunch of flowers with a spray of ivy draped over her shoulder, bouncing along behind her. Inviting me to follow, she dashed off to the end of the hallway and climbed up on the step beneath the great window, but as she stepped up, perhaps as one hand moved to secure some of the flowers that were about to slip away, the other hand dropped her purse, and suddenly the roar of a detonation was followed by a piercing scream that thundered up and down the entire corridor.
I barely managed to hold onto Anna Rosa as she collapsed on top of me. I was stunned, and before I could figure out what had happened, I saw seven frightened old nuns clucking around me. Despite having rushed to the sound of the gunshot in the hall, and despite seeing a wounded Anna Rosa in my arms, they were alarmed about something entirely different, something I couldn’t initially fathom, as it seemed impossible for them not to be worried about the same thing that made me yell out for a bed to lay the wounded woman down in.
They replied “Monsignor.” The Monsignor was about to arrive.
Then Anna Rosa, still in my arms, began shouting: “The revolver! The revolver!” She was asking me to retrieve the revolver from her bag because it was a memento of her father.
The fact that there was a revolver in the handbag she’d dropped, which then fired, wounding her foot, was immediately obvious to me. Less obvious was the reason she’d been carrying it with her to start with, especially that particular morning when she’d arranged to meet me at the Abbey. It seemed beyond bizarre, but the thought never so much as crossed my mind that she’d brought the gun for me.
More befuddled than ever, seeing that no one was lifting a finger to help the wounded woman, I lifted her in my arms and carried her out of the Abbey, down the little alley, home. A bit later, I had to climb back up to the Abbey, to the corridor below the great window, to collect that revolver that would come in handy for me later.
4 ~ The Explanation
The news of that strange accident at the Great Abbey and how I’d bolted out, carrying a wounded Anna Rosa in my arms, spread through Richieri like wildfire, immediately giving rise to gossip so absurd it seemed absolutely ludicrous to me at first. It was a stretch just imagining these wild notions would even be remotely plausible, let alone accepted as true—not only by those individuals who had something to gain by stirring them up and spreading them around, but even by the injured woman I was carrying in my arms.
But that’s exactly how it was.
Because, my good friends, my wife Dida’s supremely stupid Gengè harbored, without my having the faintest idea, a burning desire for Anna Rosa. Dida had gotten this idea into her head, having noticed it for herself. She’d never mentioned it to Gengè, but she’d confided it with a smile to her friend, to please her and perhaps also to explain that Gengè avoided her when she would visit because he was afraid of falling in love with her.
I feel like I have no right to deny Gengè’s fondness for Anna Rosa. At most, I could maintain that it wasn’t true for me, but even that wouldn’t be wholly accurate, because, basically, I’d never bothered to find out what sort of feelings—positive or negative—I had for my wife’s friend.
I think I’ve sufficiently demonstrated that Gengè’s reality didn’t belong to me, but to my wife Dida, who’d given it to him.
So then if Dida attributed that secret fondness to her Gengè, it hardly mattered whether it was true for me or not—it was so totally real for Dida that she used it to explain why I kept my distance from Anna Rosa. And it was so real for Anna as well, that she interpreted the occasional glances I’d briefly cast her way as something more, altering me from that sweet little idiot my wife pictured me as, to a supremely unhappy Mr. Gengè who must be suffering untold physical suffering at being thought of and loved by his own wife like that.
Because, giving it some thought, this is the least that could result from all the unsuspected realities everyone gives us. Superficially, we generally call them false suppositions, erroneous judgments, unfounded attributions. Yet everything that can be imagined about us is actually possible, even if it isn’t true for us. Not true for us? They laugh. It’s true for them. So true in fact that if you don’t cling to your own reality, they can actually persuade you to accept that their version is more rea
l than your own. No one knows this from experience better than I.
So I found myself totally oblivious to being madly in love with Anna Rosa, and that’s why I got all tangled up in that accidental shooting at the Abbey, something I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams.
After carrying Anna Rosa home in my arms and settling her on her bed, running to get a doctor and a nurse, and providing appropriate first aid, I was fussing over her and suddenly realized that not only what she’d imagined about me following Dida’s revelation was in fact possible, but it was actually true—I did have feelings for her. And sitting there at the foot of her bed in her pink-hued bedroom, its intimacy marred by a foul medicinal odor, I could get the full story directly from her lips. First, I wanted to know about the gun in the handbag which had caused the accident.
She laughed out loud at the thought that someone might assume she’d brought the gun for me after setting up our meeting at the Abbey!
She always carried that little revolver with her, in her bag, ever since she’d found it in her father’s vest pocket when he unexpectedly died six years ago. To her, the tiny gun looked like a lovely trinket, with its mother-of-pearl handle, all bright and shiny, and all the more attractive because its gorgeous apparatus concealed the power to bring death. She confided in me that, more than once, at certain not-rare moments when the world around her, for some strange deep emotional dismay, left her feeling dazed and hollow, she’d been tempted to test her little toy and had run her fingers over the smooth, shiny steel and the mother-of-pearl, all so delightful to the touch. Now, instead of in the temple or her heart as she’d wanted, it had happened to bite her foot, possibly—so she feared—leaving her permanently lame, the gun provoked a strange displeasure in her. She felt like she’d absorbed so much of it, that the gun no longer possessed any power over her. Now she considered it naughty. Pulling it out of the drawer of the bedside table, she looked at it and said: “Naughty!”
One, No One & 100,000 Page 14
