We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  “No, she said that Grandma is l-l-looking down on us from up there!”

  “Yes, and then she said that she’s d-d-dead.”

  “H-h-how can she look down on us from up there when it’s cloudy?”

  “Will the two of you just cut it out? Al, Grandma’s dead, period!” the radio communications officer breaks in.

  “I g-g-got it, she’s dead! But will she come back now and then, or is she dead forever?”

  Mamma gave Vittoria a diary. I personally have never much cared for diaries but the minute I saw it in my sister’s hands, it became the thing I wished for most in all my life. On the cover there’s a nice little padlock because it’s a secret diary, Vittoria can write whatever she wants in it and no one will ever be able to read it. When she misses her, she can even write to Grandma Concetta, who when she lived here at home couldn’t see a foot past the tip of her nose but, now that she’s in heaven, can apparently read words from miles and miles away, even with clouds in the way. The padlock has a key, in the store all the diaries had two but when I mentioned that to Mamma, she replied: “No, no . . . really? . . . It must have gotten lost.”

  In bed, Vittoria has permission to keep the light on for ten minutes so she can write in her diary. I start coloring in the book full of drawings with numbers in them. According to the coloring book factory I ought to use blue where it says 1, yellow where there’s a 2, and green where it says 3. But I don’t take orders from someone I’ve never met, not me.

  “Wh-wh-what are you writing?” I ask Vittoria.

  “None of your business.”

  “Can I read it when you’re done?”

  “No, Al, ask them to give you one of your own.”

  “If you let me read it, I’ll let you c-c-color in my coloring book.”

  “Look what you’ve done with those felt-tip markers . . . your hands are all dirty!”

  “I’ll wash them later.”

  “Wash your hands right away, the ink is bad for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Your skin has pores, your pores absorb the ink, the ink winds up in your blood . . . and from there it goes into your heart and brain!”

  “Really?”

  Please say yes, please say it’s not a fairy tale.

  “Certainly, Al, everyone knows that. Where do you think sweat comes from? From the pores, so if your skin is perforated then it means that things can come out and go in, too.”

  It’s not a fairy tale, pores exist, I know that, I’m on page 579 of the dictionary. That means that you can write things on your heart and your brain. My right hand is the most secret diary in the world, and the only one in human flesh!

  14.

  “Santamaria residence? Signora Agnese? . . . Just a moment, let me pass you your son.”

  “Mamma! C-c-come quick, I’ve found the promised home!”

  “Al, where on earth are you?”

  “I’m right here, c-c-come quick!”

  “Where? Give me the address! Put the lady back on the line!”

  “The address is on Via delle C-c-conce . . . number eleven . . . apartment two. I’ve found it, Mamma, there’s an old lady in it, but this is it!”

  “Al! Stay there, I’ll be right over . . . ” Mamma tells me. “Stay there with the lady, understood?”

  “I’ll stay here with the old l-l-lady, over and out!”

  Adults are designed to ruin your happiness. There are always rules to be respected. But why don’t they say something beforehand! Instead, no, they wait for the last minute to tell you that this is how the game works: 1) the promised home can’t already be inhabited; 2) the promised home can’t have five rooms and a yard as big as a soccer field; 3) the promised home can only and exclusively be found among those that have a sign out front reading “For Sale.” I had decided to keep a long face all evening long but when the curfew game started, I just couldn’t resist. The curfew is something that they had during the war to make cities invisible so the enemy bombers would get lost and bomb their own homes. The rules of this game are that as soon as your homework is finished, you have to turn out the lights and do everything with just two candles lit. At dinner, Papà and Mamma, who are living on a diet of tea and melba toast, tell us all about the war and how they used to race for the bomb shelters, they’re stories that strike fear into your heart, much more than the fear you feel when you watch the movies I secretly watch from under the sofa bed. Agnese gets scared too sometimes, like the time that an ambulance went by and Papà shouted that it was the air raid siren.

  When it’s time to go to sleep I’m so agitated that they have to say goodnight three times, bring me a glass of water, give me a little back massage and two kisses with loud smacks to get me under the covers. How does Vittoria manage to lie there, so still and good?

  “H-h-how much fun it is to play blackout, right?” I ask her.

  “You really are a cretin.”

  “N-n-no, you are.”

  “This isn’t a game, we’ve become poor!”

  I mean, is this really the life that awaits me? Games, surprises, inventions, and candlelit evenings? I’m so happy I could set my mattress on fire. In the other room, Mamma and Papà are whispering, I’ve run out of excuses, I ought to go to sleep but I’m just too curious. If I want to go into their room to see what’s so much fun in there, all I need to do is show up with my hand on my forehead. Or would it maybe be better to show up with a frightened face and tell them I had a bad dream about bombardments? No, hand on the forehead, I’ll tell them I don’t feel good and then I’ll get coddled. I start acting about halfway down the hallway, and when I open the door I seem like a genuine invalid. In the darkness I see one black figure sitting on the bed, Papà, and another black figure down on her knees in front of him, Mamma.

  “I don’t feel good,” I say in the voice of someone with their hand on their forehead.

  “Al!” Papà shouts.

  There’s something odd. Maybe they didn’t see the hand on my forehead, because what they usually do is turn on the light and get out of bed, instead they just stayed perfectly still, my mother didn’t even turn around.

  “Go to bed, Al!” Papà shouts again.

  Maybe they didn’t hear me.

  “I don’t feel good,” I say again.

  “Go straight to bed or Papà will come in there and tell you why!” he says.

  What about Mamma? Doesn’t she have anything to say?

  “Get going!”

  I’m going, I’m going. I go back to bed, but now I’m upset. I hate it when things don’t go the way they usually do. Now I’m going to have to think over and over again about what I’ve seen, about why they didn’t worry about my health one bit and why Mamma didn’t even open her mouth. With all the worries I have! With the promised home, my way, saving the world, and all the rest! Ah, at last he’s here. Papà comes into the room, sits on my bed, and puts a hand on my forehead.

  “Your forehead isn’t hot, how do you feel?” he whispers.

  “Wh-wh-what were you doing?”

  “Nothing, Al, just tell me how you feel.”

  “I just didn’t feel very good . . . why was Mamma on her knees?”

  “Mamma on her knees?” asks Vittoria.

  “Why doesn’t anybody get any sleep in this house?”

  15.

  Sometimes Mamma kneels down for no good reason, other times she says that she has a headache, she lies down on the sofa, and she puts a cotton ball under her nose, a cottonball that’s soaked in that liquid they use to remove fingernail polish. She’s been doing it every now and then, since Grandma passed away. The cotton ball treatment works, she falls asleep for a few minutes, then she gets up and comes over to see us, walking all off-kilter, to tell us that we’re the lights of her life. The way she talks, it’s impossible not to believe her, as if she were one of those wo
oden Russian dolls and the words were coming straight out of the very littlest doll, the one that’s solid wood, with nothing hidden inside of it. Today, she used the cotton ball, so it’s easy to tell her that Ciccio is lying in the middle of the street with his tongue sticking out.

  Vittoria wanted to take him for a walk in the park without the leash, because on Sunday there are practically no cars around. Ciccio is very lazy, he never wants to get out of our shadow, and in fact we had a colored tennis ball that seems to be the only thing that he cares about in life. Just a short distance from the park, as we were crossing the street and I was thinking about all the things that a mother can do on her knees, my sister took the ball, waved it in front of Ciccio’s snout, and got ready to throw it onto the grass. Vittoria is pretty but she’s no athlete. In her case, the athletic action is merely a facial grimace accompanied by pointless, ill-timed movements of the rest of the body. In other words, she stuck her tongue between her teeth, she furrowed her brow, she stretched out her left leg and wound back her right arm. Out of all this preparation there emerged a very slow toss, a throw straight out of a cartoon that, instead of winding up on the grass, ran smack into the rearview mirror of a parked car not even a yard away from her. The tennis ball bounced into the street, Ciccio went streaking after it, and so did a fast-moving Alfa Romeo Alfasud.

  Seeing that it was Vittoria’s fault but the woman with the knees wants to pretend it’s not, she has decided to buy her another animal right away. She picked one that you can’t find on the page of animal noises, one of those animals that since they don’t lick your hand, you’re allowed to think that they’re stupid, and they don’t suffer even if they get hit straight on by an Alfasud. As soon as Papà gets off his Sunday shift, he takes Vittoria to play in the courtyard, so Mamma and I can sneak out to the amusement park. There’s a stand there with lots of glass bowls, with a goldfish in each one. For a hundred lire, they give you ten white ping-pong balls and a goldfish for everytime you get a ball in the target.

  “Pick the one you want and throw a ping-pong ball into its bowl,” Mamma tells me. She sure has some nice knees.

  “What are you looking at, Al? Look at the goldfish and pick one!”

  “That one, Mamma! It’s the goldest one of them all!”

  “Go on, throw a ball.”

  “Just one? Look at how big the ball is and how little the opening of the bowl is in comparison . . . ” I say.

  I throw all the balls at the same time, and in the swarm of bouncing balls one of them winds up in the bowl.

  “I won!”

  “Aaah, you’re a clever little boy, aren’t you?” says the goldfish lady.

  “I’m a genius,” I say before Mamma has a chance to clap her hand over my mouth.

  “A genius! So what do you want to be when you grow up? A scientist?”

  “I don’t know, I’m still trying to f-f-find my way.”

  On the way home, I pester her until she lets me carry the plastic bag with the goldfish inside. My mother is happy, the lady at the amusement park laughed and laughed and said lots of nice things to her. I like seeing my mother on her feet and happy, I like the idea that I’m what’s making her so happy. I’ve got her in the palm of my hand, the old woman.

  While Vittoria does everything she can to forget that she killed Ciccio, Mamma and I put the goldfish in a glass salad bowl. Since there’s no way to suggest a name to a goldfish because goldfish don’t have ears, without even asking him what he thinks of it we decide to name him Clay, like the Ferrari race driver. This is because he’s certainly going to be a fast goldfish, who’ll race through the water and leap in the air on my command. And after all, he’s gold. While Mamma tells Papà the story about the big balls and the little fishbowl mouths, I have permission to give the fish a little bread. But my plan fails to meet with their approval.

  “No, Al, we have to give the fish a little bit every day . . . A whole bread roll all at once and then another a year from now won’t work, understood?”

  “Now we’ll hide it and at dinner we’ll spring the nice surprise on Vittoria,” says Papà.

  “Can I give her the goldfish?” I ask.

  “Certainly, but it has to be a surprise, you can’t tell her anything about it until the last minute, understood?” Mamma warns me.

  The plan seemed perfect to me but when my sister came back from the courtyard, I started to feel all agitated. The present is a wonderful thing, you can smell it in the air, it’s here, right now. Why can’t everything just happen all at once? Why is there always something that has to be done later, and why is that something always something nice?

  “Th-th-there’s a surprise for you!” I tell Vittoria the minute I see her.

  “Al!” my mother shouts from the kitchen.

  “What is it? What’s wrong, Mamma?” she asks.

  “Al . . . ” says the woman with nice knees, appearing in the hallway.

  “Not now, Vittoria. Later,” I tell her.

  “What surprise?”

  “Mamma, can I just t-t-tell her that it’s a gift?”

  “Al, preparing a surprise mean surprising people, not keeping them in the dark until the last second.”

  Of course, it’s just like my album of stickers about the planet Earth: “When a volcano’s magma chamber is full of lava, it seeks a natural outlet toward the exterior.” And by now my head is a magma chamber full of the words “gold” and “fish.” No living creature will be able to stop them.

  “Vittoria, it’s a surprise, so it’s not a goldfish.”

  16.

  To find out why mothers get down on their knees and all the other things that the old folks don’t want to tell me, there’s one infallible method. At school they assigned us to write a little essay: “My Favorite Animal.” I handed my essay in to the teacher, she read it, she thought it over a little, then she reread it and called me to her desk. Under the essay, on which as usual she’d only been able to add a comma and take off an extra swirly loop from the capital T, she wrote: “Good job but you strayed off topic.” Then she told me to get Mamma and Papà to sign it. Which is why I’m now here walking with Mario Elvis.

  “It’s nothing, Al, I was just tired, I was on edge about work, you know how it is . . . ”

  “No, h-h-how is it?”

  “It’s like when Mamma is tired and we give her the Princess of Monaco Treatment.”

  “A-a-ah, g-g-got it.”

  “Grown-up things . . . nothing in particular.”

  “And wh-wh-what does the treatment involve?”

  “Nothing in particular, Al! I told you, like for Mamma . . . massages . . . things . . . ”

  “What things?”

  “It’s just a manner of speech . . . ‘massages,’ ‘things,’ meaning massages and that’s it!”

  Well, you tell me, what kind of an explanation is that? It’s useless, worse than useless: until I’m tall enough to touch his chin with my finger, I’ll never be able to have a serious discussion with him. It’s all just a succession of “you’ll understand later”s, “when you’re a grown-up the same thing will happen to you”s, and “tomorrow it’ll make perfect sense”s. Nothing ever happens today in the world of kids.

  “Would you at least mind telling me what this treatment is called?”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all. It’s not like it’s a secret. Why would I mind? It’s called . . . the . . . Prince of Wales Treatment.”

  O-o-oh, well, that was a lot of work! So now I know. Mothers on their knees are giving the Prince of Wales Treatment! Nice, good to know, now I’ll write it down in my human flesh diary.

  Mamma and Papà have been in the kitchen talking for hours. They left the television set on and when the evening news broadcast starts I take advantage. I lie down on the carpet with my felt-tip markers and pretend to draw. The news is being read by a sad man that maybe they p
ut on TV when the news isn’t good. The news must always be a complete disaster because I haven’t seen the happy man, the one who reads the good news, even once. He always has the same look on his face, he sits as stiff as if the Mother Superior were there to keep an eye on him, and his voice always sounds bored. Half of the things he says are incomprehensible. He talks about disorder in the streets and the need for law and order. I think that must mean that the police came out to tidy up and sweep the streets nice and clean, but the pictures I see on the screen show lots of smoke and policemen clubbing other people who seem angry. I don’t get it.

  “What are you doing, Al?” asks Mamma from the kitchen.

  Five minutes of silence and sure enough she starts to get worried.

  “I’m drawing.”

  Before two minutes are up, she’ll stick her head in to see if it’s true, so I start drawing the sky. The blue marker is always the first one to run out because I used to draw the sky by just coloring the strip on top, but then Vittoria told me that the whole background of the drawing has to be blue because the sky is everywhere, it reaches all the way down to the ground, just stick your head out the window and you’ll see it’s true. After that, blue everywhere, even it that means it’s harder to figure out where Grandma and Ciccio wound up. The sad man on TV uses lots of words I don’t know: inflation, devaluation, corruption, Cee Dee, Eye Cee Pee. I need to read even more, I need to do a better job of studying the ark of words otherwise I’ll never be able to figure out what’s needed to save the world.

  “Everyone at the table, because Papà needs to talk to us!” says Mamma.

  “Co-o-o-oming,” I say.

  “Right away, Al.”

  “Just a minu-u-u-te.”

  “Now!”

  I turn off the television set. A click and the sad man becomes a small luminous ball at the center of the screen that fades until everything turns black. Is that what death is like?

  “Al!”

  I go into the bathroom, I turn on the faucet, because after all I know perfectly well that unless I let a little water run, there’s no chance of sitting down to eat. When Mamma sets the table in the kitchen there’s always some important piece of news, and we have to talk it over far from the television set, so the sad man and the young lady with the puffy hair can’t hear it.