While the Shark is Sleeping

by Milena Agus

  And so I linger and I ask for more and more food, and I give him more and more food, until he gets indigestion, until he’s exhausted and slaps me on the back like he’d do with his brothers.

  ‘Relax, relax . . .’ And it seems to me that he can’t wait for me to leave and inside I feel only desperation.

  One of these days I’ll leave the Island and when the vet returns he’ll no longer find the sixth puppy, or the cow, or the rabbit, or the bitch in heat, and he’ll forever think of us with regret and he’ll keep looking for us and he’ll wonder why, why, what did he do wrong, how did he fail to make us happy. And we’ll look for him too, and this zoo will be the only place we’ll want to go back to. All because we’re too hungry and no food can possibly be enough for us.

  I’m sitting in my little armchair. Biagio is watching over me with his ears at rest. Through there is the vet with a friend of his who fell in the stream during the trip we took to Monte Arcosu. Now her clothes are all wet and he’s giving her some men’s things to change into. I suppose they’re keeping the bedroom door shut so the heat won’t escape. It couldn’t be any other way. The vet didn’t want us to always be on our own in that isolated world of the zoo and invited his friends to come for a walk with us. However, as bad luck would have it, the only one to turn up was this girl and of course it wasn’t possible to say to her, ‘Well we won’t go after all.’ So we went and I convinced myself that there was nothing to be afraid of, that my vet can’t go around with a blindfold over his eyes to stop him seeing other women. And everything was going fine, the sky was that still-wintry blue and the water of the river was a mirror so perfect that the woods were doubled. As we went up the mountain through the undergrowth of brambles, the river became more and more of a stream and when it became impossible to push our way through we had to cross the stream and the vet went ahead and made little bridges out of stones for us girls. I’m chubby and didn’t fall, whereas the other girl – who’s a ballerina and light and delicate as a feather – did. She fell in the icy February water and had to undress completely because she didn’t have a single thing on that wasn’t drenched. She lay down naked on a flat rock and looked like a princess from a storybook. The vet hung all her clothes from the trees to drip and they laughed and laughed together. And then my idea about the storybook must have occurred to him too, because he knelt down at her feet bowing like a prince. And I tried to take something off too, like my windcheater and then my thick jumper and for a while I was in my bra as well with my big tits and it wasn’t all out of altruism, it was also to catch my boyfriend’s attention and distract him from the ballerina. But in that enchanted frame the two of them were alone and my tits were meat from the butcher’s that has no effect on anyone and can just be sliced up, and the same with my arse. When the ballerina had warmed up, ages later, and her clothes had stopped dripping, we followed the path back, and the evening gave the stream and the woods a beautiful golden shimmer. But instead of seeing in this beauty the proof that God exists, I realised that he doesn’t. Because if God is God and was clever enough to create this mountain and these woods and this stream and this sky, he can’t be so stupid as to let her fall in the water instead of me, or neither of us. And now they’re shut up in there so as not to let the heat escape and no one from this big family is home today and in that coincidence, too, God’s not proving himself to be all that clever.

  So I decide that I won’t be around. Biagio realises that I’m crying and pricks up his ears, lifts his head and puts his two front paws in my lap.

  ‘Biagio,’ I say through tears, ‘even though I was never interested in animals, even though I’d have turned up my nose in disgust if, as a girl, they’d given me a book about dogs instead of a little love story, I was really fond of you, and all the other animals in the family. Biagio, this is the last time we’ll see each other. Farewell. Don’t follow me to the gate, I beg you, don’t make it any harder for me.’

  Biagio didn’t follow me and neither did my vet. Not to the gate, nor anywhere else.

  I rush home and I’m so cold that all the blankets are still not enough for me and Zia gives me her dressing gowns and gets Mamma’s out of the cupboard too as well as Nonno’s bed jacket, which still inspires a bit of his strength. Nonna says she told me so: I’d thrown myself headlong into this love less than fifteen minutes after meeting him. I’d gorged myself like I did when she cooked ravioli, or meatballs, and I’d eaten quickly, in a big rush. With no class. With no logic. With no sense. And now I was vomiting from the pain. Love, too, needs time to be digested properly.

  Through the window I see Death, with her badly cut, coarse black cowl. She’s knocking with her twisted hands and looking at me, expressionless. I smile at her.

  ‘Come,’ I say to her. ‘Eat my flesh, it’s wasted on me.’

  Death enters and takes my tits and my arse and squeezes and devours them and eats all the rest with that indifferent air. And what strikes me is how, behind her, the calm horizon shines brightly and the rocking of the port cradles you like when, as a child, you go on a boat trip protected by your parents. Death eats what’s there to be eaten, but she doesn’t want it all and she flies off into the blue night, beyond the carnations and geraniums in the red and lilac pots, beyond the ships and the cars that come and go like silent fireflies along the Scaffa bridge.

  And so I phoned him, not having heard from him for months.

  ‘You said that the greatest proof of love you can give a human being is to kill them.’

  24

  So is the world beautiful?

  In spite of the tight black suit and very sheer stockings held up by suspenders, I spring out of the Jeep and make my way through the tall grass and the scrub and the prickly pears and the low dry stone walls. His grandmother left him an olive grove with a dilapidated villa in the middle.

  He’s promised to kill me one day or another with an overdose of torture, but for the moment I have to live. Inside the house he’s set up the torture room, all for me. I have to go in there as soon as I arrive. He closes the funereal velvet curtains and turns on a lamp and I have to lift up my skirt and bend over holding my ankles to show him my bottom. He caresses it and compliments me on how nice it is, he pulls my knickers between my buttocks and starts hitting me with the riding crop his grandfather used to use to whip the horses when they didn’t want to gallop. Until I fall to the ground.

  ‘Do I deserve it because I can’t get anyone to fall in love with me?’ I ask him.

  ‘For whatever you like. Get up off the floor and back into position.’

  He takes off my knickers and goes to get the tub of water. He wets my bottom to make it hurt more. He’ll lash me until I bleed and when I beg him to stop he’ll just move on to another torture. He’ll make me take off my suit jacket and he’ll want me to stick my chest out to show off my big tits and all the rest of my meat. He’ll tie my wrists to the rope that hangs from a hook in the ceiling and he’ll start squeezing my breasts and biting them like he’s going to devour them and this will be unbearably painful.

  ‘You know what you have to do to make me stop.’ So I go and lie down on the tall, rickety iron bed and open my legs to show myself to him completely and I prepare myself for the torture of the strap between the thighs.

  In this dark room you can have no privacy. We do everything in a bucket and then, holding me by the hair, he makes me look inside and eat. But I’ve understood one thing: that this doesn’t hurt more than my vet and the ballerina reflected in the stream, more than Mamma lying in the rubbish down below, more than the postcards from Mauro De Cortes. More than my brother who won’t say a word to anyone. Or more than my father who’s not around.

  25

  Nonna really does have a soft spot for Mauro De Cortes

  Yesterday at lunchtime there was a ring at the door and when Zia goes to open it she cries, ‘My God! It’s impossible! We’d given up on you!’

  ‘Have I ruined the party?’ I hear Mauro De Cortes reply, laughi
ng.

  I rush to hug him too. Big slaps on the back with my brother. We throw ourselves on him and we don’t care that he went away without saying goodbye and that he didn’t go out with Zia, it’s just lovely that he’s here.

  ‘When did you guys reach land?’

  ‘We didn’t. I came back by plane just now. I haven’t even told my children yet.’

  ‘What happened to the boat?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s in excellent shape. It’s sailing around the Mediterranean with my ex.’

  ‘You left her the boat?’

  ‘You know I don’t like to make an issue of things like that.’

  ‘So now no boat and no girlfriend?’

  ‘And no house. That is, I’ll have to find a smaller one, because I spent too much over the last few months.’

  When he left Zia said, ‘This is another Valmy miracle, kids! A small ragtag army beating an enemy alliance!’

  And she started singing the Marseillaise.

  After the strain of his long journey, Mauro lies down on Zia’s large soft bosom, on her Mediterranean hips, on her long and perfect legs, on her eternally unkempt hair. He destroys whole drawerfuls of her lingerie as he tears it off her and when Zia has to come home to help me with my final-year History essay, he says to her, ‘Stop there!’

  Zia tells us about Mauro’s new house, about how it’s much smaller, but so much lovelier than the other one. She says that there’s indirect light, that the bathroom is the epitome of organisation in a small space, that book and CD shelves are built into the walls. Food goes from the cooking area to the table through a little door that gives a wondrous quality to everything you eat. And the bedroom is like a monk’s cell in a monastery by the sea, with the bed under a little window with a grating through which the light seems to come from far away, along with the sound of bells and the salt sea air.

  Plus at Mauro’s house you really enjoy music. Not that there’s any lack of music at our house but – no offence to my brother, who’s brilliant – it’s one thing to hear the same exercises or the same passage for hours and hours until they’re perfect, and another to lie back in an armchair and listen to whatever you like most. Zia’s afraid all this will end. She’s afraid of not feeling Mauro’s body weigh intimately and marvellously upon her own. And this time she doesn’t know which war plan to take inspiration from, because no strategy would be able to hold out against an enemy offensive taking the form of a sudden departure, another sea, another love. When she told him ‘I love you’ Mauro got angry and even gave her a smack on the bum, instinctively, and begged her not to use big words, because the two of them screw, laugh and talk infinitely well. That’s all. And I know what bombs are preparing to fall on Zia’s head. And on Nonna’s, too, who seems reborn now that her daughter’s with Mauro, and says, ‘Finally, a normal man.’

  But I haven’t forgotten that for Mauro, screwing, laughing and talking represent a greatly diminished idea of love.

  A refuge. That’s the only possible solution: to fit out a refuge so that it’s possible to endure all this.

  Because it’s become clear by now that none of the surviving Sevilla Mendozas can afford to nick off quietly just like that, the way Mamma and Papà did.

  We have to stay. We’ve made one another an unspoken promise that we’ll stick around.

  26

  Inside the shark

  Unfortunately the refuge proved necessary. Very much so. You couldn’t hear anything from in there, because there was a great silence after Mauro De Cortes stopped inviting Zia over and I learnt that my vet had now taken in that other puppy. This time Zia didn’t lie down on the floor and she didn’t run around the house hitting her head against the walls. She washed, ate and went to her university classes. She didn’t make reference to any battles, nor did she compare us to the victors or the defeated. After the atomic war, we were simply wiped from the face of the earth.

  The refuge, a kind of shark’s belly, contained all the things the sea had brought after millennia of history; the only thing was, the life of a survivor brought no satisfaction. And above all, we couldn’t understand what had caused the atomic bomb to explode.

  Nonna would come to see us and keep asking, ‘But what did you do to him?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  So Nonna would try to understand it, speaking aloud in long soliloquies. She said maybe Zia had behaved like a madwoman. Or maybe Mauro De Cortes didn’t want to go out with a woman who’d been with so many men and Zia had then confirmed this perception by giving herself to him too quickly, without ever making him work for her. Or maybe she hadn’t been sufficiently clear and he hadn’t understood that she truly loved him and instead he had thought that since she played around, so could anyone. Or maybe she had been all too clear and had ended up giving him her whole life story and he’d got bored because there was nothing more for him to discover. Well, she must have done something. Because Mauro De Cortes is a good, delightful, normal person and he doesn’t do things for no reason.

  I thought that in the end it wasn’t Mauro’s fault if for him, having sex, laughing and talking weren’t love. And didn’t he have the right and the duty to look for it elsewhere? He surely wasn’t causing all this hurt on purpose and he certainly hadn’t been the one to press the button on the atomic bomb. And nor had my vet, or the ballerina. I reckon no one pushed it, not them, not us. Maybe some object had fallen on it and the bomb had exploded, or maybe it was God who had organised things badly and now there was nothing left, just the belly of this shark, all full of junk.

  Nothing left. It got to the point where my brother realised one day that his trousers were torn and full of holes, his belt had no buckle, and his watch had no batteries and always showed the same time, so he went out to see what he could find. Even the Upim store in via Manno, where he’d always shopped, was gone. He came home empty-handed and began to cry, for the first time since he was a child. He cried and said he wanted his mother and father. And maybe a mysterious God felt compassion, because a letter arrived from Papà, the first since he’d left.

  27

  Like Jonah and Job

  He gave us his address, he told us he was in South America trying to help the poor wretches, as he’d always planned to do, except that Mamma had been such a poor wretch herself that she’d kept him here. He talked about the cafetaleros, the coffee growers, who had nothing. Nothing. He told us that for one reason or another he hadn’t been able to free himself from his trade as a mechanic, for one reason or another he often found himself referring to the Bible and all in all there hadn’t been any great changes in his life.

  I wrote back to him at once: full of emotion and hope. I imagined him sitting at a table, his legs stretched out with his feet poking out the other side and an ashtray filling up with cigarette butts, as he read about the vet, about the girls that wouldn’t pay any attention to my brother, about Zia who had bought us a house and had been a good mother even though no one had made her do it, and about Mauro De Cortes, about the judge, about the atomic bomb and about the refuge that seemed like the belly of a shark.

  He replied at once asking me to read his letter aloud, maybe after dinner, as long as we were all together, including Nonna. He related the story of Job, who was a rich and fortunate man, but also good and upright and wise. But Satan said to God that it was easy for Job to have all those qualities because he was so fortunate. So God allowed Satan to take it all away from him. And Job couldn’t understand why and he didn’t know what he’d done wrong. Three friends went to visit him, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, and they sincerely wanted to help him and to look for the reasons behind his unhappiness, just as Nonna did with us. But there was no truly plausible reason and these guys kept coming up with all sorts of bullshit, just like Nonna does, and Job kept on being unable to understand it all. And he continues not understanding the reason for his own unhappiness even when the Lord reveals himself to him in all of Creation, but at that point Job no longer cares because for him it’s en
ough just to know that God exists. Then the story ends well and Job gets everything back again and dies wise and full of years.

  So his advice was this: to leave the shark’s belly, maybe while it was sleeping. To try and swim to the places in Mamma’s postcards and see whether the atomic war had left anything alive on the earth, whether you could still see the divine wisdom of Creation with which God reveals himself to Job. And to be reborn from there, from where Mamma died.

  A new Genesis. A Promised Land. Then my brother would become a great musician with a whole crowd of girls around him. But maybe with their trousers pulled up, at least until the right moment, and he shouldn’t be choosing those prickteasers who never put out. Zia would get married, it didn’t matter whether it was to the judge, or to Doctor Salevsky. Or to Mauro De Cortes on his return from his latest trip undertaken without saying goodbye to us, because he sure was – as Nonna always put it – a delightful man, shit he was delightful! Or to someone no one expected, after all it didn’t seem to make much difference to Zia. Did it? And she’d have a son, even though she was by now getting on in years, and she would name him Isaac. And God would forgive Nonna Zophar, but only thanks to our intercession.

  This ending made us all burst out laughing and Nonna said that Papà was still good at twisting people’s words and she reckoned he was going to come back soon. He’d only left because he didn’t feel sufficiently sorry for us, but now . . .