We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  “What? . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t understand . . . Would you mind saying it again, it’s my fault, I’m a little hard of hearing . . . Would you rather write it down? Do you want a sheet of paper?”

  The man pulls out a very short pencil and a notepad from his jacket pocket, writes something, then turns the sheet so Mamma can read it.

  “You bought a nice dog.”

  “It’s only a puppy,” says Mamma.

  “He must eat a lot.”

  “Not at all, seriously, and just imagine, he loves stale bread.”

  “This year I’m going to have to raise the rent.”

  “But why? We pay our rent on time, the apartment is in perfect shape, where else are you going to find such wonderful tenants as us?”

  Signor Tuzzi puts his notepad away in his pocket and turns on his electric device.

  “Ddddoooonnnn’ttt wwwwooorrryyyy . . . I-I-I-I-I cccaannn fffiiinnnddd ttthhheeemmm . . . bbbyyy tthhee ddooozzzzeeennn.”

  I put my hands over my ears and when Signor Tuzzi went away I started laughing. But Mamma had the wrong expression on her face, the one that’s neither angry nor cheerful and only makes me feel strange. I follow her around for a while, she does various things, she washes a clean glass, dusts a dresser that doesn’t need dusting, opens and closes a drawer without getting anything out of it, behaves as if I wasn’t there, keeps her back turned to me the whole time, and then shuts herself up in the bathroom without playing the game of the smile that vanishes behind the door. I wonder what’s going on. I go to see Vittoria. She’s sitting on the bed and brushing Ciccio with Grandma’s hairbrush.

  “Vittoria? Is this our home?”

  “Certainly it’s ours.”

  “So that means no one c-c-can kick us out?”

  “Why should they kick us out? As long as we pay, we can stay here forever.”

  “Wh-wh-what’s a rent? Signor Tuzzi says he wants to raise ours.”

  “Oh, really? What do you care? We have Papà’s salary and Grandma’s pension . . . ”

  “Are we rich?”

  “Rich people have Ferraris, television sets with lots of buttons, and wardrobes full of fur coats.”

  “Then are we poor?”

  “Poor people live under bridges and have yellow teeth.”

  “Then wh-wh-what are we?”

  “Al, give me a break, we’re just a so-so family.”

  9.

  The search for the promised home has become a lot less fun. Mamma and Papà are always in bad moods, we no longer sing in the car, the sardine game has been forbidden, and then nobody will explain to me why we keep looking at smaller and smaller apartments.

  “It’s a nice place,” Papà says.

  “The apartment house isn’t bad either,” says Mamma.

  We ring the buzzer, we tell them that we’re the Santa­maria family, we cross the courtyard, we say how nice it is, we step into the elevator but since it takes a ten-lire coin to make it work and none of us has one, we get back out. As we get out, we say how nice the elevator is, too. We climb the stairs to the fourth floor, and no one manages to like the rotten door and the piece of broken wall the doorbell hangs off of. The interior of the apartment unfortunately doesn’t resemble the neighborhood or the apartment house or even the elevator, it’s just as nasty and broken as the door. The owner of the apartment is a gentlemen you’d want to take a good long look at. He’s wearing a plum-colored suit, a sky-blue scarf around his neck, and he wears a pair of perforated fingerless leather gloves. He doesn’t touch anything, he opens the doors by pushing them with his elbow, and he ends every sentence with the recurrent phrase: “but after all . . . ”

  “The facilities are all fine, there might be some minor work to do, but after all . . . ” he says, looking at Mamma and Papà.

  He accompanies us into the living room, opens the door with his elbow, and stands in the middle of the room.

  “There’s plenty of space, it’s not a palace, but after all . . . ”

  The kitchen might need a little touching up, the bathroom is normal, the two bedrooms are the way they are, but after all . . . for a family like ours it’s fine, he makes up his mind to say at the end of the tour. While Mamma and Papà go back to look at the living room, the man goes out to dust off his elbows with a handkerchief made of sky-blue cloth.

  “This can’t be it, c-c-can it?” I ask Vittoria.

  “I certainly hope not. There’s no room here for a little room all my own.”

  I could gladly give up Vittoria’s bedroom, but not Mamma and Papà’s happiness. Where are the nice faces they had when we were looking at the apartment with soft floors? Mamma isn’t talking about walls to knock down and big mirrors to put up here and there, Papà isn’t talking about his little nook where he can play the guitar, he isn’t wandering from room to room trying to decide where to install his private bar. This place isn’t right.

  “So you’re the little genius . . . ”

  Everyone wants a genius for a son, but since I’m already Mamma and Papà’s son, Dottor Bernabei is acting all obnoxious. The son he got is Gianmaria, second-best student in the class and former teacher’s pet.

  “How old are you?” he asks me.

  “F-f-five years, two months, and a week. Eighteen hundred and ninety-five days.”

  “Oh, really? When were you born?”

  “March 14th.”

  His staring eye and quivering lip tell me that he’s multiplying three hundred and sixty-five by five. He was pretty quick, I have to admit. Now he squints and waves the fingers of his hand because he’s adding the two months, then the week. And he smiles.

  “The little genius is going to have to study his mathematics a little harder,” says Bernabei. “Five years, two months, and a week makes eighteen hundred and ninety-three days, not eighteen hundred and ninety-five.”

  Following the advice of the editor in chief of Cronaca Vera, in reply to the letter from Piero A. in Foggia who asked how he should behave when dealing with rude and arrogant people, I act as if he didn’t exist.

  “Papà, both 1968 and 1972 are leap years, so the exact number of days is eighteen hundred and ninety-five,” I say.

  “Two days more, two days less . . . what difference does it make,” Mario Elvis says to me.

  “And then we’d have to check to see if those are leap years, I don’t remember offhand . . . ” Bernabei replies, somehow convinced he still exists.

  “There’s nothing t-t-to remember, Papà, if the last two numbers of the year are divisible by four, then . . . ”

  “That’s enough, Al, we’ll check later,” Papà says.

  “Yeah, yeah, kid, I’d really be interested in knowing if it’s true . . . ” Bernabei snickers, doing his best to end with a tie.

  Unfortunately for me, the Santamarias are very sociable people. Living in a family of sociable people means that your parents try never to fight with anyone and especially that they always take you to parties, even if you don’t want to go. I hate birthday parties because I always wind up in a corner watching the others play and waiting for my turn, which never comes. The most odious things are parties at a park, because Papà stays there the whole time telling me over and over again: “Come on, go play with them,” “Come on, go tell them it’s your turn now,” and I run back and forth after that band of kids who are too fast and never pass me the ball. Agnese and Mario Elvis were so hoping that I’d get along with the older kids, and to keep from upsetting them, I try to get involved. I do pretty well at hide-and-seek. I’ve been behind a bush for ten minutes. I have branches and twigs sticking out of the neck of my T-shirt and the waist of my pants, I’ve blackened my face with mud, and all around me, hidden behind benches, water fountains, trees, and, I swear it, pages of newspapers, the others are dropping like flies. From my hiding place I see Mario Elvis off on his own. H
e’s wearing leather pants, pointy boots, and a black shirt with the long collar, the Black Suit, the special outfit that Elvis wore in 1968 for his concerts on TV. The other parents are all looking at him, a few of them tilt their head in his direction and laugh, one of the mothers brings him something to drink and then immediately turns to go. Maybe they’re just shy because he’s too good looking. I like it when Papà worries about me: until just a moment ago, he seemed distracted, but now he’s pacing back and forth, looking around, trying to find me. If an astronaut first class can’t see me, it means that I’m really hidden well.

  “I found you all!” Michele shouts.

  Loser, you haven’t found me.

  “No . . . ” I say, with my mouth all twisted so it sends the voice far from my hiding place.

  “Now let’s play dodgeball!” says Michele, and I try speaking a little louder: “You still haven’t . . . found Al!”

  All the children run to the middle of the lawn. Michele, who already has the ball under his arm, starts dividing up the teams. Inside me I feel something bad that I haven’t encountered before, it grows in my stomach, it reaches my throat, and it heats up my cheeks. There must be a name for this feeling, like there is for everything else in the world, what do you call it when you don’t want to come out of your hiding place because if you do everyone is going to look at you and realize that you’d been forgotten? Maybe this thing that’s freezing me in place is so bad that it doesn’t even have a name, or else maybe it doesn’t have one because it’s never happened to anyone else before. Luckily it doesn’t last long. Papà saw me, he’s not mad at me. He walks over to the bush, takes me by the hand, smiles at me, and picks the twigs and branches off of my T-shirt.

  “You even blackened your face . . . ” he says to me, “you’re just too good, Al.” I know, Casimiro always tells me the same thing.

  10.

  I read that a famous gentleman named Isaac Newton made a very major discovery while lying under an apple tree. That’s because brilliant ideas don’t just happen anywhere, you have to make an appointment to meet in a specific place. I don’t have a lot of choices, here on the balcony there’s just a vase of geraniums that are decidedly much less powerful than apple trees because after half an hour the only idea that’s showed up for the appointment is this: I need to help my parents. Vittoria says that it’s normal, you can’t be happy every single day, no one is. To me it seems crazy not to at least try, maybe the problem with the world is that everyone else thinks the way she does. But I’m different. What good is it to possess an extraordinary brain if you don’t use it to make yourself happy, along with your family and therefore, by extension, yourself?

  Vittoria can leave the courtyard and walk all the way around the apartment house, Mamma said so, and I can too but since no one has said so, I’ll have to sneak out to do it. For today I’ll settle for looking at the other buildings here along the street, if I’m fast enough and my mother doesn’t start leaning out the window and calling me, I can make it all the way to the intersection. I’ll have to spend a couple of days exploring this area, because maybe the promised home has always been here, just a stone’s throw away, and we just never noticed. Crossing the courtyard and getting out the front door onto the street won’t be a problem. I just have to make up my mind whether to use my superspeed or one of my supercamouflages instead. If I come home covered with mud again, though, Mamma will kill me, so I opt for the superspeed. To the naked eye, there’s nothing the red blur of my T-shirt, and maybe you’ll hear a boom when I break the sound barrier. Ready, set, go!

  “Hi, Al!”

  “Where are you running to, Al?”

  “Careful not to fall and hurt yourself, Al.”

  “Have a good day, Al.”

  It went well. Aside from the usual old pains in the neck, everyone else must be asking themselves whether what they saw go racing past was a missile or a lightning bolt.

  This is the first time that Casimiro and I have gone out alone, we’re very excited. Walking without holding hands with Mamma or Papà is so special, it makes everything seem brand new. Just a few short steps and already we’re looking at a very nice building. When I walk this way with Mario Elvis, I always just watch our shadows, I run ahead to make them the same height or else, if I understand that he’s in a hurry, I make him drag me, I tell him that I’m tired and ask him if he’ll pick me up and carry me. That’s why I’d never noticed this building before. It has a lovely yard, there’s a lemon tree and lots of dirt to dig holes in. Maybe this is it, maybe we wandered around in vain for months while the whole time the promised home was waiting for us just a slingshot’s throw away from our front door. I try to see what’s behind the windows but they’re all dark. The iron bars on the low garden wall are so widely spaced I should have no problem getting through them.

  “Let’s go into action,” I say to Casimiro.

  I insert a leg, it gets through right away, then the belly, the chest too, now the other leg . . . and the head. Sideways, maybe, because it’s not getting through like this. Ouch, it hurts. My head is bigger than my chest, how can that be? My ears are ripping off. My brain is so big it won’t pass through the bars!

  “Holy Christ! Who on earth are you?” a lady asks me from the window.

  “Al Santamaria . . . I come in peace . . . ”

  The lady did just like Tarzan that time he freed Jane from the carnivorous plant. With the strength of her hands alone, she managed to widen the bars just enough to set me free. She told me never to try that again, that it’s dangerous and lots of those kind of things, where once you’ve listened to the first two all you need to do is keeping saying: “Yes,” with a sorrowful look. The apartment was nice enough, but it certainly wasn’t the promised home. When I went inside, I didn’t feel that certain I-don’t-know-what that Mamma and Papà always talk about, just a bad smell of soup made with stinky vegetables. I could have taken a look at the apartment next door, but Vittoria tells me that I always overdo it, and so I decided to just go back home at a velocity that leaves nothing but a red blur. This mission is too important for me to let myself be found out on my first excursion.

  It’s nice to get home after being out in the world. Everything says hello to me. The steps on my staircase. My window on my landing. My carpet in front of my door. My doorbell.

  “At last!”

  My mother.

  “When I call you, you have to come straight home, understood? . . . What’s that smile, Al?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What have you gotten up to?”

  “Noth-ing.”

  “I’m going out for five minutes,” Mamma says, “don’t make Grandma mad.”

  When would I ever do such a thing? In fact, I steer well clear of her, because I have no desire to spend the afternoon rolling balls of woolen yarn and answering: “Yes yes, I went to the bathroom already.” The minute the apartment door closes, I go into the kitchen, I get the matches out, and I start scorching the edges of the trash bag. It’s too bad I’m destined to do great things because it really would have been nice to become a fireman. I like to set fire to things. I look at the flames, the way things crumple up and change color, then I say that the blaze is out of control, I call the firemen, and I put out the fire. Little yellow flames start growing on the trash bag. Nothing much. I keep it up. Plastic burns nicely, I think to myself, it’s not like carpet fringes. Wow, it’s really burning now. Niiiice, the plastic sack has burst into a fireball.

  “Hurry, c-c-call the firemen!”

  I’m not allowed to go get the water unless first I make the sound of the siren.

  “Weee-woooo-weee-woooo!”

  I pour a glass of water on the flames, but they’ve already consumed the handles. The bag collapses on the kitchen mat.

  “Weee-woooo-weee-woooo! Hurry, more water!”

  The second glass hits the target too, but by now the
flames are raging high and are consuming the carpet.

  “Weee-woooo-weee-woooo! Hurry, c-c-call the reinforcements! . . . Grandmaaaa!”

  “Al, it won’t do you any good to put on a captivating smile!” Mamma shouts.

  “Captivating” is a very nice word, what it means is that I shrug my shoulders, I tilt my head to one side, I show all my little teeth, I make my eyes look sweet, and I get out of trouble. Usually. “Do you know that you’re a very smart little dead kid? You could have burnt our house to the ground stuck living out on the street because you’re little in America!” Being shouted at by two grown-ups at the same time is no fun at all. At first you can’t understand a thing. But then, thanks to my superintelligence and the fact that they’ve started taking turns talking, I understand that I’m too smart of a little kid to do such dumb things, that a kid my age is dead now because of this kind of foolishness, that another kid set his apartment on fire and now his family is stuck living out on the street, to say nothing of the shoe repair man’s son who got bad burns and is now having an operation in America.