by Nino Ricci
My father was working shifts at the canning factory then, on top of the hours he spent on the farm. To me it seemed only that he came and went like a spirit, his presence never certain but somehow lingering around us always, like the house’s strange smell. In my sleep I’d hear his truck starting up in the middle of the night, its lights flashing past the bedroom window a moment later like a dream, but then in the morning I might be awakened by the sound of his hammer and rise to see him already stooped on a catwalk atop one of the greenhouse roofs, home again though I hadn’t heard him return. Gelsomina, at least, seemed to make some sense of his movements: once a day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night, she’d fill a big silver lunchbox with sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and set it out on the back steps, from where it would disappear each time my father’s truck pulled out of the driveway and appear again, empty, several hours later. But then often at mealtimes Gelsomina would set a third place at the table that wouldn’t be filled. Sometimes a day passed when my father didn’t come into the house at all; and then at night we’d see the boiler-room light still burning when we went to bed.
The worst times were when my father was sleeping. He slept, as he worked, in erratic fits, without apparent pattern, perhaps asleep when Gelsomina and I awoke in the mornings, or coming suddenly into the house in the middle of the afternoon and disappearing almost at once into his room; and each time he closed himself behind his bedroom door he set the seal on a second order of silence. Gelsomina and I would take the baby out to the front porch then, which was separated from the living room by a thick door with a heavy latch we had to remember to click back so we didn’t lock ourselves out, and there we would sit out our exile on chairs we’d brought out from the kitchen, the baby set on a mattress of blankets on the wood floor. The porch had windows all around, pleasant and warm when the sun was shining, with an air of dreamy indolence that made me think of summer days out tending the sheep in Valle del Sole; but almost every day now was cloudy and wet, the April wind rattling through the windows then and our breaths hanging in the air with the damp cold. After a half hour or so the baby would begin to whimper, its little fists reddening and its nose beginning to run; but Gelsomina would merely wrap it more tightly in its blankets and rock it in her arms to silence it.
The baby didn’t have a name then, seemed too small somehow to merit one – at night, tucked between Gelsomina and me in bed, its body looked so tiny and frail I was afraid I’d roll over and crush it in my sleep. It hadn’t grown at all since it had been born, only its eyes showing any change, clearing slowly from murky grey to a pellucid blue till it seemed some spirit had crawled up inside it and was peering out now from its hollow sockets.
“It’s a bastard,” Gelsomina said. “My mother says your father should put her in an orphanage.”
But instead we merely kept up our careful avoidances, the baby closed away in the bedroom whenever my father was in the house, at meals Gelsomina sitting sideways in her chair to be ready to rise if it should begin to cry. A line seemed to divide the house in two at the living-room door, Gelsomina seldom bringing the baby into the kitchen and my father, for his part, seldom crossing beyond it. Every day I half expected that someone would come to take the baby away from us, and that our lives would assume then some more normal course; but the weeks passed and still the baby remained.
Then one night I was awakened by the baby’s cries, unusually insistent and loud. Beside me Gelsomina was already up, rocking the baby in her arms with a troubled urgency.
“Calmati,” Gelsomina hissed. “Calmati!”
But the baby only cried more fiercely, in the moonlight her face seeming gnarled like an old woman’s.
“Here,” Gelsomina whispered, setting the baby in my lap. Its thin hair was dank with sweat from the spring mugginess of the night, the first warm one we’d had since I’d arrived. “Hold her while I make a bottle. If she wakes your father he’ll break both our heads.”
So my father was asleep, then – Gelsomina must have heard him come in after we had gone to bed. I tried to silence the baby by rocking her, clutching her close to me hoping to smother her sound with my body; but her small fists hit out against me to push me away. I panicked and clamped a hand down hard against her mouth; but in an instant her chest had begun to heave so wildly that I pulled my hand away in fright.
Gelsomina returned now with the bottle. The baby resisted it at first, seeming too intent on her crying.
“Oh, basta!” Gelsomina whispered.
Then finally she took the nipple and grew quiet again, instantly transformed by her silence, made suddenly toy-like and harmless again when a moment before she had seemed so monstrous.
Gelsomina’s eyes flashed to mine.
“Go back to sleep. Anyway it’s not our fault.”
But it seemed some demon had got into the baby now: over the next days she grew more and more unmanageable, sleeping fitfully, crying at all hours, as if she had only just overcome the shock of her early birth and was suddenly bursting on the world with all the energy and rage of a newborn. My father said nothing, only grew more shadowy, more elusive, sleeping less often, coming in less often for meals.
“She must be sick,” Gelsomina said. “My sister cried like this when she had the colic.”
“Do we have to take her to a doctor?”
“A doctor! Who’ll pay to send her to a doctor? If she dies it’ll be better for everyone.”
But the baby did not die, only continued for days her incessant crying. Gelsomina kept placing a palm on her forehead but could feel no fever there – except for her crying the baby seemed normal, her limbs beginning to thicken, her hair filling in, her cheeks puffed out with what looked like ruddy health.
My father had stopped coming in for meals entirely now. Then one night, while Gelsomina and I sat wide-eyed in bed trying to quiet the baby, we heard the back door slam, saw my father’s shadow pass outside our bedroom window, saw the boiler-room light go on, then off again; but my father didn’t return. The next day was Sunday, when we usually had lunch at Gelsomina’s house; but well past noon my father still hadn’t come in from the fields. Finally Tsi’Alfredo called on the phone.
“Tsi’Mario said I should tell you we can’t come today,” Gelsomina said. “He has to get the field ready to plant.”
Tsi’Alfredo’s voice crackled loud an instant from the other end.
“He told me to call,” Gelsomina said, “but I forgot.”
But she was making things up – she hadn’t spoken to my father at all.
“Why did you say that?” I said afterwards.
“Mind your own business. Do you think I want to go back to the factory again?”
My father switched back to the night shift at the factory that week. But he didn’t come into the house any more to sleep, the rotations of his lunchbox on the back steps the only evidence that he had come into the house at all, at night his footsteps sounding from the boiler room when he came to collect it. Then one afternoon Gelsomina made me go out there with her while my father was in the back field.
“I just want to see,” she said.
“See what?” I said.
“Never mind what, just come.”
It was the first time I’d been out to the boiler room. I had thought it must be a kind of house, with its glass windows and false-brick walls, but it seemed merely a storage place where so many odds and ends had been heaped haphazardly over the years. A boiler rose up near the entrance like an outsized bull, a tangled web of pipes and shafts and cables leading away from it; then beyond it the room was all dark clutter and filth, wooden storage niches along the walls crammed with strange implements, switches and fittings, lengths of pipe, coils of wire, a workbench littered with oily tools and tin cans and with a mess of gears and metal shafts that looked like the remains of some great engine. A film of coal dust covered everything like a pall, the windows so powdered over with it they let in only an eerie twilight. Along one w
all, though, was a bank of niches that looked newly built, unpainted and fresh, its tidy slots seeming hopeful somehow in their empty newness.
Gelsomina led me to the back of the building toward a room whose walls rose up only part way to the ceiling, its roof forming a loft. An old calendar, 1957, was tacked outside the door, yellowed with its four years’ lingering, a few dates circled in red and cryptic messages written beneath in a foreign hand. Inside the room, a small mullioned window looked out from a dimness that smelt of mould and something else, a faint animal scent like the smell of a stable. A massive wood desk, its surface blotched and pitted, filled most of the space; but on the floor against the inside wall, spread out as far as the foot of the door, was a narrow stretch of straw, a blanket heaped at one end of it. A rawboned cat raised its head from the blanket’s folds as we came in, yellow eyes shining; it stared for an instant, stiffly alert, then sprang up suddenly and disappeared through the doorway into the boiler room’s shadows.
“See,” Gelsomina whispered, jutting her chin toward the straw as if it were the final proof of some argument she’d been making. “That’s why he isn’t coming inside any more.”
I made out now the hollows and contours there – they followed the shape of a human body like a mould, as if the body still lay there, invisible, silently impressing its weight into the straw.
There was an oily bag on the desk. Gelsomina found cheese inside, a half loaf of stale bread, then a half jug of wine on the floor between the desk and the wall.
“I told you,” she said, though to me it seemed that whatever mystery it was we were solving only loomed larger now.
She had begun to try the drawers of the desk. The three on one side were jammed or locked, but the top one on the other opened easily. Inside was a handful of shotgun cartridges, and then, at the back, a pile of old photographs. Gelsomina began to leaf through them.
“God, look how big he was then,” she said. “He looks like an ox in those clothes.”
“You shouldn’t look in there,” I whispered. “We should go.”
But I’d edged closer to her to see the photograph she held – it showed a group of soldiers scattered pell-mell across a hillside as if caught in mid-action. But they were playing a game: one in the forefront had his hand drawn like a pistol while another a few feet away was pretending to die as in a child’s game, his knees buckling and his hands clutched over his heart.
“That was before your father was married,” Gelsomina said. But it took me an instant to realize that he was the man in the centre of the picture, the one pretending to die – it was a kind of shock to think of him like that, playing like a schoolboy, to see the smile urging itself like a ghostly afterthought just beneath his look of mock pain.
That night my father returned from work well before the end of his shift. We heard his truck door slam, his footsteps outside our window; then in the morning there was no lunchbox on the back steps, and no sign of my father in the greenhouses or the fields. Gelsomina went out to the porch once or twice to stare toward the boiler room, then finally went out to the garage to my father’s truck. She came back with his lunchbox – inside it his sandwiches sat still intact in their folds of wax paper.
The sandwiches seemed an accusation, a final evidence that the fragile normalcy of our household had been shattered. All day we were silent as if awaiting some threat to overtake us, whatever doom it was that had been stalking us since we’d first come to the house. The spring sounds through the window screens, the birds, the rustle of leaves, seemed magnified, unnaturally loud; way off in the distance some neighbour’s tractor churned steadily on, a small quiet hum in the afternoon stillness.
There wasn’t much food left in the house. Ordinarily my father bought groceries once a week, supplemented by the vegetables and preserves Gelsomina’s mother gave us on Sundays; but it had been a long time now since we’d got any new supplies. Gelsomina began to ration out what was left as if preparing for some lengthy dearth – for supper that night we had only an egg apiece and fried onions. Then afterwards she discovered we’d run out of the red tokens she put out every night for the milkman. After rummaging a dozen times through the kitchen drawers she turned finally to where I sat watching her from the kitchen table.
“You’ll have to go get some money from your father,” she said.
But I pretended not to have heard.
“Are you listening to me?” She’d come to stand over me. “You’ll have to go, there’s no other way.”
I didn’t dare look up at her.
“I don’t know where he is,” I said finally.
“Don’t be an idiot, he’s in the boiler room, he’s been there all day.”
“The light wasn’t on when I looked before.”
I caught a flicker of movement and flinched, thinking she was about to strike me; but at the last instant she seemed to check herself.
“Go on,” she said, more gently, leaning closer, “it’ll only take a minute. If you go I’ll give you five cents from the change the milkman gives me.”
But I hunched away from her, inching toward the edge of my chair.
“It’s your fault he’s angry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have looked in his desk.”
“Ma ’stu stronz’ –”
She’d raised her hand against me in earnest now, but before she could strike I slipped from my chair and ran toward the bathroom.
“Scimunit’!” she shouted, coming after me. I slammed the door against her, fumbling in the dark for the key and turning it hard. Gelsomina began to pound against the door’s thin panels.
“Open the door or I’ll break it!”
And afraid that she would I leaned my back into it, could feel the weight of her fists reverberating down my spine.
“Do you want the baby to die, is that what you want? You’re just a mama’s boy, that’s all you are. But your mother’s dead, don’t you know that? She’s dead!”
The baby, asleep before, had begun to cry. I heard Gelsomina move away from the bathroom door, heard the back door slam, then her footsteps on the driveway beneath the bathroom window. Still in darkness I climbed onto the toilet seat and made out her silhouette moving down the driveway in the evening gloom. At the boiler-room door she stood blankly for a moment as if waiting for someone to answer a knock, then moved toward a high window nearby, gripped her fingers on the sill, raised herself up to peer inside. But in the end she turned away and started back up the drive. I ducked.
“Don’t think I can’t see you there, idiot.”
I heard her footsteps in the house, kitchen sounds; then finally the baby’s crying died down. When the silence had stretched on for several minutes I reached into the cupboard at the end of the tub where we put our dirty laundry and pulled the laundry onto the floor in a heap, spreading it along the edge of the tub to make a bed and then stretching out there to sleep. For a few minutes I seemed to float in the room’s comforting darkness as in some tiny windowless vessel, invulnerable, lost to the world; but then Gelsomina was at the door.
“Vittorio, you can come out now.”
But I lay perfectly still, thought that if I stayed quiet enough, inconspicuous enough, she would go away.
“Don’t be a fool, you can’t stay there all night. I’m not going to hit you.”
Silence, then a sound of metal against metal. I remembered suddenly that all the keys in the house were the same, Gelsomina forcing out the one on my side now with one of the others. The bolt clicked back and the door swung open, Gelsomina haloed an instant against the kitchen’s light like an apparition.
“Look at you!” she said, laughing. “Like a cat!” And she bent to take me up from my bed, hugging me to her with such force that I burst into tears.
“Dai, what’s the matter now, what kind of a little man are you?” But she was crying too.
“He’s angry because we looked at his pictures,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid, he’s angry because of your mother, it’s not our
fault. Because she went with another man. You’re too small to understand.”
But in the morning there was no milk on the back steps, only my father’s lunchbox, which Gelsomina had set out as usual the night before, though when we opened it we found the old sandwiches from the previous day still untouched there. Not wanting to waste them Gelsomina had us eat them for breakfast, though by now the bread was stale and the meat had a metallic aftertaste. Afterwards Gelsomina said we shouldn’t have eaten any meat at all because it was Friday. But it didn’t seem like Friday or any day to me, every day the same, with no way to tell one from any other.
Gelsomina made up the last of the milk for the baby’s feeding.
“I’m going to call my father,” she said.
But she seemed unable to get the number right, painstakingly dialling several times but then each time hanging up as soon as a voice came on at the other end.
“Damn him! Doesn’t he know we have to eat? God knows what he’s doing in there, probably picking fleas off the cats.”
Well before midday the baby began to cry. Only a few fingers of milk remained now from her first feeding, Gelsomina mixing what was left with a few cupfuls of boiled sugar water. The baby took to the cloudy liquid without complaint but Gelsomina sat grim-faced during the feeding, holding the baby with a stiff carefulness as if she had become something dangerous.
Gelsomina gathered together what food we had left from the cellar and cupboards. There was sauce but no pasta; for lunch Gelsomina made up a thin soup from it that we dipped stale pieces of bread into. Afterwards Gelsomina retreated into the bathroom to do laundry, her back and shoulders working with a restrained violence as she scrubbed. I followed behind her to hand her clothespins when she went outside to hang it, the clothes billowing on the lines like a strange portrait, each of us represented in odd fragments. On a back line, behind the cover of sheets, Gelsomina hung a long row of newly white diapers, perfect squares of cloth that slanted and warped in the wind like gliding birds.
