The Day Before Happiness

by Erri De Luca

  “Here we are, this is how I imagined it. You climbed the balcony to see me, I descended the stairs to meet you halfway. You had a secret in a tower where we would dance. The desires of children command the future. The future is a servant who’s slow, but faithful.”

  Anna spoke without a sliver of accent, a language of books. Her breath cherished each line. She stopped as if to start a new paragraph. It was my turn.

  “I waited for you until I forgot why. What remained was an expectation in my awakenings, leaping from bed to greet the day. I open the door not to go out but to let the day in.”

  I leaned my temple against hers.

  “Anna, it’s been an eternity.”

  “It’s over. Now begins time, which only lasts a few moments.”

  “Every day I used to hope that the ball would land on the closed-off balcony. I climbed it with the support of your looking at me. And then from the terrace, after I threw the ball down to get their eyes off me,

  I had to reach your face in the windows. We should have gotten married then, as children. How did you recognize me?”

  She moved her head away, looked at me by the profile of the candle.

  “I need to kiss to respond.”

  With my dry lips I went toward her smooth, slightly parted lips. First my nose inhaled a liter of drunken oxygen, then Anna’s breath entered mine. When holding its breath the body races to the lips for the most perfect bond.

  “Do you feel the same thing, too, a wax sealing the edges of a letter?”

  I sensed Anna’s words in my nose. They did not pass from her voice or to my ears. Can you hear thoughts with the nose? And you, Anna, can you hear mine? The reply was her lips, which broke away and said yes.

  • • •

  Nothing more happened with our bodies. The climax of our lips, the breath swallowed by the nose, mixed with thoughts, was enough for us. We had fulfilled the childhood desire, the dance in the dungeon and the kiss. The exhaustion of the final stretch overcame us. We sat down on the cot, next to each other, illuminated by the burning light of the flame. I stood up to bring it lower, setting it on the ground, and sat down again.

  “I am not by your side, Anna, I am your side.”

  “You are the missing part returning from abroad to rejoin.”

  The light rose from our feet and spread warmth over our faces.

  “It’s not a candle, it’s a forest in flames,” I said.

  Anna took my hand and placed it in her lap.

  “We don’t have time, it’s expired, we’re stealing another extension.”

  “So shall I exchange the end for the beginning, the first kiss for the last?”

  “Kisses are not for counting, my side, this was not the first kiss but maybe the thousandth of the kisses I awaited. No kiss is ever the first, they are all the second. The first I gave you from behind the windows the day of your climb to the balcony. For me you were climbing the cliff. It was then I granted you my first time.”

  Her hand squeezed my fingers, where my blisters still stung.

  “And this is another second kiss because the hands also kiss and embrace.”

  “Your eyelids are curved like the keel of a boat, Anna.”

  “I have eyelids that do not sleep and do not weep.”

  • • •

  What separates us, what age is about to end? The thought finds its answer.

  “The thief I’m engaged to will be getting out of prison soon. He wants to marry me and leave for South America.”

  “I have no right to know. If I could, I’d ask why I didn’t see you outside the windows.”

  Anna replied by breaking away, her hands on her knees.

  “I was a closed girl, closed from inside myself. Unable to cry even after a beating. Today someone like that is called autistic. I’m crazy, my side, a girl who gives orders to dreams and desires. I am the queen of witches’ blood, of the women burned at the stake. Do you see how this candle desires me? They brought me away from here, to a clinic on the hills. I never saw my parents again. I inherited from them. At eighteen I left the clinic and came back here. I didn’t remember where the building was. I’m living in a hotel. For a year I’ve been looking for this place and for the window. I wanted to remember what I had seen. And instead I remembered what I’d never heard, my name uttered by you. My name uttered by a boy who was making coffee in a loge, a sound I remembered without ever having heard it before. I’m made of leaves like a tree and I recognize a wind even if it has never blown. After that it was easy to look out from behind the windows and rediscover you there. It was you, a little tree all grown in the spot where it had been left. You are made of wood, too, to burn and to navigate.”

  A shiver ran through me before the candle.

  “Are you afraid? Yes, tremble, my side, your shiver is just a down payment. Tremble all you want, here in the dungeon you can tremble safely.”

  She gave a cool caress to my burning forehead. Her gesture took away my fear, a cloth removing the dust.

  The candle wick was shedding sparks. Anna picked one up and brought it to her tongue.

  “What do you think, do the stars taste more like sugarloaf or salt?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never tasted them.”

  “I have, I spent many nights on the balcony of the house of the enclosed children. In the summer the stars shed crumbs that fall in your mouth.”

  “And what are they like?”

  “Salty, the flavor of bitter almond.”

  “I used to prefer them sweet.”

  “No, there’d be so many the soil would be destroyed. Some nights there were storms of crumbling stars. The earth is seeded with them, it receives without being able to give back. So from below the prayers rise up to be forgiven of debt, from trees and animals that give thanks.”

  “Do you pray, Anna?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I come from there, from a seed that traveled in the icy tail of a comet.”

  “And you came to be born here, amid the narrowest and loudest alleyways in the world?”

  “Yes, the lost train of the comet ends up in the mouth of volcanoes. My seed fell into the crater. The eruption of 1944 spat it out. The matter from which I was made breathes in the tufo of this dungeon.”

  “I am also a child of the volcanic rock of this place, Anna. I don’t come from space, like you, but from the enclosure of a courtyard. I used to lift my eyes not to the heavens but to your window, which was the step of heaven descended to earth. My breath rose to your windows and formed a mist over them. You dried it with your sleeve. I love the glass of windows. I could see the elbows that held your head. The glass windows on the courtyard carried the reflection of your figure all the way down to my room. They were a relay team, if one was missing your figure was lost in the air. I thank the glass of the courtyard. And what am I supposed to do with happiness now that you’ve come down from the windows? What can I do, Anna?”

  She was shaken.

  “Do? What a strange thought, you think there is ‘to do’ between us? Here there are no verbs, just our names, nothing to add. Here there is a bed on which we neither lay nor embraced, dry as an altar before the sacrifice.”

  “Do you want to lie down?”

  “Not now, my side, this bed is a wound, it should be covered with bandages. I will bring sheets.” She stood up and so did I. She held my hand and took a step toward the stairway. I picked up the candle and followed her. In place of my feet was a swallow’s tail, beating from happiness to go out into the open air. I accompanied her to the main door. It was solid and needed a push from the shoulders. I didn’t have the strength to open it and separate us. She opened it with a single arm, effortlessly. From her slight body came a violent burst of compressed energy. The door swung open like a curtain. My face was struck by the noise of hinges and the breath of Anna, already turning away: “See you Sunday.”

  • • •

  I remained behind the closed
door. The child had been fulfilled. Of all the things I had missed I focused on the most fantastic one, Anna’s kiss. I didn’t miss what belonged to childhood, a family. I had done without, like so many in the postwar years. No melancholy but rather the freedom to set the time for my days without a clock. I had my room, the school, the courtyard. I had the soup brought over by the maid of my foster mother. She had saved me from the orphanage to which I was destined. Out of that whole childhood, the missing thing I chose was the girl in the window. When she disappeared, life shrank to little cages. I had to live without the freedom of lifting my eyes. Ten years later Anna had descended from the third floor all the way down to the dungeon for our childhood wedding. Time was a letter and had been sealed with a kiss.

  Anna was crazy, what did this mean? Don Gaetano arrived while I was still in a daze behind the main door. I told him right away I had misused the loge and even opened the door to the descending stairs. I had no other place to take Anna.

  “You did the right thing, guaglio’, forget about it.”

  “Don Gaetano, did you know Anna was crazy?”

  “They treated her like she was. She didn’t want to speak, she didn’t want contact with anyone. They sent her to a clinic, they were ashamed of her. The whole time she was here she never went out.”

  “She’s the one who says she’s crazy.”

  “Crazy people don’t know it and they don’t say it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  We had entered the loge and Don Gaetano started slicing vegetables.

  “In the age of commotion it’s not enough to have heart to withstand the surge of the blood. The surrounding world is small next to the grandeur that fills the chest. It’s the age in which a woman has to shrink to the small size of the world. An impulse inside her makes her think she won’t manage, it takes too much violence to diminish herself.

  “It’s the age of risk. Women have a physical exaltation that we can never know. We can be exalted by a woman, they are exalted because of the force inside them. It is the ancient energy of the holy priestesses who guarded the fire.”

  • • •

  I helped him peel the potatoes. His words about Anna fit perfectly, but around her feet, no higher.

  “What should I do?”

  “Go lighter on the peeling, no part of the potato should be thrown away. It should be like the wood shaving lifted up by a planer.”

  “What should I do about Anna?”

  “You have to see her, get to know her to be able to chase her from your thoughts. She’s not for you. But you won’t be free until you get to know her.”

  “I don’t want to be free. With her I want to be locked inside a room.”

  We put the vegetables on to boil and played scopa. At the end of every hand the odd cards came back even. Scopa was a game that instilled peace.

  With Anna the swelling in my pants hadn’t happened. In the summer it had become swift, the widow enticed me down there. With Anna it hadn’t happened. The kiss had brought blood to my lips, I had the smell in my mouth. Anna gave me a buzzing in my ears, a dry nose, burnt lips, thirst. During the day a burst of fever rose and fell. I had to drink water to keep from drying out.

  • • •

  I studied at night as usual. I enjoyed Latin, a language devised by a puzzle master. To translate it was to seek a solution. I didn’t like the accusative case, it had an ugly name. The dative was nice, the vocative theatrical, the ablative essential. Italian was lazy for leaving the cases behind. In history the three little wars of independence bored me, but I was intrigued by the resistance of the South, swept under the rug with the label “banditry.” The victors need to denigrate the vanquished. The South had remained fond of its defeats. It was a much bloodier military epic than the Risorgimento skirmishes, like the bizarre twin battles of Custoza, lost twice over a distance of years. Cavour didn’t appeal to me, Mazzini was the founder of an armed gang, Garibaldi had arrived at a lucky moment, Pisacane at the wrong one. History was a kitchen full of ingredients, change the measurements and a completely different dish comes out.

  I couldn’t play the same game with chemistry and physics. The atoms had divided up the world peacefully, but there had been an era of war between oxygen and hydrogen before reaching concord through the formula of water. Water is a peace treaty. Chemistry was the study of the balance achieved by earthly matter.

  • • •

  I didn’t have much to do with my classmates. I lent a hand during tests, but without the urge to speak to them or the teachers. I answered and left it at that. Saturday afternoons I was summoned for the soccer game.

  The goalie is a point of view. He has to predict and be ready for the shot from his station. When forced by a play in the penalty box, he has to dive into a thicket of feet, paying dearly for the advantage of using his hands. I had the secondary advantage of not giving a damn about myself. They assigned me the noblest position, defense, and I honored it. To allow a goal was to fail. There are no unblockable shots. There are errors of position in predicting the shot. I blocked penalty kicks, but not the ones kicked by the left foot, lefties are less predictable. In their foot they have an instinct that depends not on the brain but on the foot. I’m a leftie, too.

  Between school and soccer my relations were a free throw. I threw the ball and questions back into play. I was a little autistic myself, without Anna’s extremism. She was made to stay inside a fortress and repel sieges.

  • • •

  I kept losing at scopa, zero for three. Even if I was dealt a lucky hand and was holding the trump card, took all four sevens, Don Gaetano would still end up compensating by playing the cards he’d seen. He didn’t read my mind, he didn’t exploit his advantage, he calculated the probabilities.

  “Don Gaetano, when will you pay me the honor of a game of scopa?”

  The count made an appearance at the loge and invited himself to our table.

  “You’re lousy at scopa, no offense. Play with the guaglione and if you win we can play a game.”

  The count was happy to play a qualifying round with me, the first to score eleven, and he lost.

  “The cards don’t like me,” “What a spiteful game,” “I can’t do a sweep when he’s got the cards.” He became irritated and left, saying good-bye only to Don Gaetano.

  His aftershave made me sneeze. When the count left, Don Gaetano opened the window and chased the air out, fanning it with a dish towel. “Living inside that cloud of cologne turns him into an idiot, no wonder he loses at scopa.”

  • • •

  Don Gaetano was humming a song he had learned on the ship that took him to Argentina.

  Me ne vogl’i’ lontano tanto tanto

  che nun m’ha da truva’ manco lo viento

  che nun m’ha da truva’ manco lo viento

  manco lo sole che cammina tanto.

  I want to go far far away

  where not even the wind can find me

  where not even the wind can find me

  or even the sun who travels all day.

  It was the nursery rhyme of a young peasant from the Marches region who occupied the neighboring bunk in the hold. What he remembered from his twenty years in Argentina was the voyage, the ocean. It was the wish fulfilled of the little boy who had climbed over the gates of the orphanage to see the ships lit up at anchor in the bay.

  “Voyages are the ones you take by sea, on ships, not on trains. The horizon has to be empty and divide the sky from the water. Nothing should be around and immensity should bear down from above. Then it’s a voyage. Despite the misery that had driven them, some were weeping, loss was gnawing at them. Except for the few and the worst, no one had a spirit of adventure. The money for the ticket had been collected from the savings of different families, their investment in the future, which would be repaid by their relative’s success. The crushing duty, the obligation to find fortune, was as daunting as the vastness of the sea. To those who were weeping I used to say their salt wate
r was making the ocean even wider. The voyage was supposed to help forget the point of departure. It lasted almost a month and at the end the men disembarked ready, their noses to the air.”

  • • •

  That Saturday I broke my nose. I dived between feet to grab the ball, I was early but in the heat of the run the other guy kicked anyway and caught me in the face. I didn’t let go, the referee called a foul, bringing my hand to my nose I found it had shifted. I must have been a sight, the other guy looked at me in shock. A medical student took my nose between his fingers and straightened it with a sharp move. The cartilage had derailed and he put it back on track. He told me there was an indentation in the bone, an infraction. They put in another guy for me, I held ice to my nose to slow the loss of blood.

  At the end of the game my adversary came over to apologize. I remembered a sentence from Don Gaetano’s stories, I answered, “Some things happen the day before.”

  “The day before what?”

  “The day before happiness.”

  He went on his way, shaking his head. I went home with my eyes swollen purple. Don Gaetano made me a compress of salt and water.

  • • •

  I slept aching all over in a swirl of dreams. When I woke it was dark. In my nose I felt nothing, a plug of dried blood was obstructing it. I didn’t want to give up my nose before Anna. I wrapped a little toilet paper around the cartridge of a ballpoint pen and used it to open a passage in my nostrils. The pain squeezed teardrops from me. I tried to dissolve the clot with warm water, it came out rose-colored. Is this what they meant by rose water?

  I tricked the pain with thoughts of Anna, I exhaled through my nostrils but it came out in my throat. The pushing and rinsing made the plug give way all at once and I started bleeding again. The smells could rise, the smell of sugared chestnuts, that’s what I had wanted to achieve. The rest of the day I rinsed my nostrils in warm water to prevent clotting.

  “Don Gaetano, I’m a chimney sweep.”

  “Leave that poor nose of yours alone.”

  I insisted on doing the job we had planned. “My face is bruised, not my arms.” It was an easy job, a new electrical setup, wires to be passed through cable ducts and connected on the other end. We were finished at noon. The soup fumes surprised me, they smelled like blood. I chewed on some bread with olives. Don Gaetano insisted on my drinking a glass of wine. “For the blood you’ve lost, wine evens the score.”