Papà snaps his fingers and I start off from memory.
“NSU Prinz 4L! Five standard seats, price 750,000 lire plus 20,000 lire for the front disc brakes!”
“And what did the Santamaria family say about the front disc brakes?” Papà asks.
“Plthththth!” Vittoria and I reply.
“Go on, Al!”
“This is the price of the NSU’s comfort and safety. Just think: to travel from Milan to Rome in the Prinz 4L costs only 810 lire per passenger in fuel!”
Today the Santamaria family is celebrating the purchase of the new car. The Fiat 600 is broken and Papà decided to get a new car. That’s not all: as long as we’re spending money, he also decided to repair at his own expense the cellar door: from now on he’ll sleep at home like all the other Papàs on earth. Now he’ll be taking us to school, which means the car will run in third gear, and even in fourth, and it will last forever. Mario Elvis pretends to turn on the car radio he didn’t buy, Vittoria switches on the portable tape recorder, and he sings a song by his friend Donatello: “Like a rock tha-a-a-at, plunges into the de-e-epths, I get lost in the blu-u-ue, of your beau-u-u-tiful eyes!”
We’ve already started the second verse when Papà yanks the tape recorder out of Vittoria’s hand and turns it off.
“Hush, children, hush!”
He immediately pulls over and stops the car. Mamma is just getting into a taxi parked in front of the gate. As soon as she sees us she runs over to the window of our Prinz 4L.
“Armando is dead,” she says.
Then she strokes my hair and Vittoria’s with a sad expression on her face, as if telling us: yes, he’s dead, but it’s not serious, don’t worry about it. Mamma goes back to the taxi. I look at Papà, instinctively I try to figure out the scope of what’s happening. He heaves a sigh, he seems upset, he’s pale, he says nothing. It confuses me. I look through what I’ve written over the years in my human flesh diary, but I find out I’ve been very generic: “Separation between body and soul,” “Heaven,” “White clouds for good men and black clouds for bad men.” Where is heaven? What cloud? What’s a soul? Why is it separated from the body? Does it separate so it can go somewhere? Is Uncle Armando’s body going to become a seagull skeleton? Or a faded ball of light?
“Where’s Uncle Armando?”
“What do you mean where, didn’t you hear? He’s dead,” Vittoria tells me, her eyes glistening.
“I understand that he’s dead. What I meant to say is: Now that he’s dead, where has he gone?”
“To heaven.”
“Where’s heaven?”
“This isn’t the time, Al,” says Papà.
“It’s in the sky,” says Vittoria.
“Where, exactly?”
“This isn’t the time.”
“So you don’t know.”
“Yes, I know, it’s everywhere, the whole sky is heaven!”
In my human flesh diary I write that the whole sky is heaven, that heaven reaches all the way down to the earth, and so everything is heaven except for the earth, which is where we are.
20.
After the funeral, my thoughts become clearer. Not so much about what is gone, but about what has remained. To see Mamma with her eyes all red and wet is the clearest explanation about death that I could have hoped for. I like growing up, but sometimes I wish that Mamma and Papà would grow with me, because there’s nothing more reassuring than discovering the world from safe behind their legs.
They expect me to understand everything that they tell me, though I swear I’ve done my best. Grandma, Ciccio, the various Clays, and Uncle Armando are in heaven, which means that they’re dead, which means that we’ll never see them again. It also means that in some way the event must be connected to that disgusting dog carcass that I saw on the side of the road, with maggots crawling out of it, and therefore Uncle Armando must have maggots in his eyes and fragments of fur with bones jutting through it. That means that Uncle Armando and the dog carcass can be connected to those bodies I saw on the evening news, they said they were dead, but one was writhing on the ground and was clearly suffering. Therefore there’s some sort of transitional phase between life and death in which you writhe in pain and that’s very simply unacceptable. It’s already pretty ridiculous to take people and put them on clouds, I don’t see what good it does to make them suffer this way. How old is Donald Duck? Could he die of a heart attack like Uncle Armando did? And if he can die, who’s going to take his place in the next issue? So this means that Wile E. Coyote suffers too, suffers like a dog as he falls into the canyon and we laugh, that his bones are shattered as he hits the ground and we roll in our seats as we see the little cloud of dust rise. Does that mean someone rolled in their seats laughing at Uncle Armando’s death? And what about the Italian aviators hacked to death in the Congo, how badly must they have suffered? If a machete is twenty times bigger than the kitchen knife I cut my finger with, then I can establish the scale of the pain by multiplying that sharp hurt by twenty and then multiplying the product of that hurt by the number of machete blows received.
“Mamma?”
A heart attack is like a machete blow to the heart? So Uncle Armando suffered just like the Italian aviators and like me, only twenty times worse?
“Mamma! Look what Al’s doing!”
Sooner or later, we all have to die, Papà said so, but that’s not enough for me, I also want to know how. I want to know if my heart is going to be cut in half, if I’ll wind up crushed in an out-of-control elevator, or if I’ll die the same tragic death as the little girl in Carpi crushed by her grandfather’s tractor!
“Mario, hurry. Al isn’t well!”
Apparently when you speak deliriously and fall to the ground clenching your teeth, then you have to go see the calm lady doctor. We talk for an hour, just the two of us. I feel like those days when as soon as you’re done with your homework you go out to play and it’s pouring rain. I have a nice fat soccer ball under my arm and I don’t know what to do with it, that’s what I feel like. As if I knew that now it’s going to rain for the rest of my life.
“What do you like to watch on TV? Do you like Laurel and Hardy?” the lady doctor asks me.
“No.”
“Don’t they make you laugh?”
“They’re dead. They shouldn’t broadcast the movies of dead actors, otherwise you’ll think they’re still alive. Then when you find out they’re dead, you’ll think that all dead people wind up on TV and then you’ll spend hours and hours in front of the screen, waiting to see Grandma Concetta again.”
The calm lady doctor listens to me, then she asks me to draw something. I know what it means but I don’t have any fake messages to send her. I draw Papà and Uncle Armando having a contest to see who can eat more meatballs. Then I think that maybe it was all those meatballs that killed him, so I take my eraser and erase my picture. I draw Mamma kneeling in front of Papà while Vittoria and I play with a kite. Then I think of Benjamin Franklin’s kite and since I don’t want a thunderbolt to strike Mamma while she gives Papà the Prince of Wales Treatment, I take my eraser and erase the picture. I draw a mushroom cloud sweeping away houses, then an African dictator eating a child, an airplane falling apart, and every time, I erase the picture. I give the lady doctor the sheet of paper, and all it has is a big hole in the middle of it.
When Mamma and Papà come in, the lady doctor gives me two lollipops and tells me to wait outside. I thank her, I shut the door, and with Vittoria I press my ear against the door and start listening.
“Just listen to that . . . the young master is stressed out . . . ” the radio communications officer informs me.
“What’s that mean?”
“That you’re crazy.”
“That’s not true!”
“It is so!”
“Shut up, let me listen . . . There, I knew it, if you d
o something once, then they say you ‘always’ do it!”
“You always do it.”
“No, just once I got up at five in the morning to go steal the newspapers from the newsdealer, just once!”
“What about that time that you started reading them in the trash can?”
“The newspapers were in the trash can, I got them out, and I read them outside of the trash can. Not in the trash can!”
“Mmm-hmmm, when she starts behaving like a fanatic, I just can’t stand it!” says Vittoria.
She goes back and sits down with a pout. In there, Mamma is talking about how I read the encyclopedia and that I secretly bought a transistor radio so I could listen to the news broadcasts.
My chat with the calm lady doctor did Mamma and Papà a lot of good. At dinner, they were very cheerful, and instead of the TV, Mario Elvis turned on the Super 8 projector that we haven’t used in such a long time, and we watched a short documentary about the animals of the savanna. The goodnight was fantastic, instead of a kiss on the forehead, Mamma gave me the lioness’s lick on the cheek. There was one all ready for Vittoria but she didn’t want it because young ladies are fussy that way.
The darkness in the bedroom has brightened, all around me I start to be able to make out the houses on the outskirts of Saigon. But tonight there’s not going to be any raid on the enemy base.
“So all of a sudden, Uncle Armando up and died. Apparently it was a heart attack.”
“What’s a heart attack?”
“It’s when your heart breaks. You know, like a sudden fright, a piece of bad news, and it can break.”
“And why did his heart break? Was he sad?”
“No, quite the contrary, before dying he thanked us all, because he was very happy as long as it lasted.”
“How old was Uncle Armando?”
“Forty-four.”
“And how old is Mamma?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“So in a few years . . . ”
“Will you just cut it out?” Vittoria tells us.
“Casimiro can’t sleep,” I explain to her.
“Casimiro, go to sleep, everything’s all right,” she says.
She turns over on her side, her back to me. Then she takes my foot and braces it against her butt.
“You go to sleep too,” she tells me.
She mutters something, then she does that wonderful thing, she strokes my foot, up and down, from the big toe to the heel.
21.
In my human flesh diary I jotted down Mamma’s expression and I wrote that looking for work is bad for you, it ought to be work that looks for you, otherwise your face goes all wrong. These days she needs the cotton ball every day. Vittoria and I spy on her while she’s sleeping on the sofa and the minute we see that she’s about to wake up, we run into our room and pretend to study. Mamma comes right in to see us. We can hear her slippers dragging on the floor. She sticks her head in the door, she smiles at us, she goes over to Vittoria.
“Look at my Vittoria’s hair, so nice and thin and fine . . . ”
Vittoria smiles, Mamma strokes her head. She sinks her fingers into Vittoria’s hair, runs them the length of that hair. She does it once. Twice. A third time. A fourth time. A fifth time. Vittoria smiles at her again. A sixth time. A seventh time. An eighth time. Signorina Vittoria starts to get irritated. A ninth time. A tenth time. An eleventh time. I slam a book shut loudly, Mamma stops, startled, turns to look at me, and I savor my ration in advance.
“Look at your poor knees, my darling,” she tells me, “all filthy black and covered with scabs . . . ”
A minute later I’m sitting on the kitchen table while she, sitting on the chair in front of me, tries to make them glisten with the rough rag that she uses to wash dishes. They certainly are black and scabby. There’s not a single game that doesn’t leave its marks on the knees. I recognize all my scabs: the two big ones in the middle are from when I fell off my bicycle while riding with no hands, the long and narrow one on my left knee is from when I made a spectacular dive to block a penalty kick by Rocca, the other two that look more like scratches are the work of a tuff-stone wall that I climbed in a hurry because I had thrown a rock at a stray dog who took it the wrong way. I don’t have any real alternatives to these games, because of the calm lady doctor I’m not allowed to watch TV, listen to the radio, or read newspapers, magazines, or even the encyclopedia. The only positive aspect is that now I have a ton of free time that I can spend lying under the vase of geraniums and devoting myself to the purpose for which I was put here on earth. Today, for instance, I leafed back through the notes I jotted down in my human flesh diary and I started off from the observation that gathering around the dinner table with the television turned off at least once a day is the best way to iron out any international controversy. At the UN, there are plenty of tables but not a sign of food, and that’s almost certainly why it doesn’t work very well. There’s no two ways about it, in front of a plate of french fries or a slice of chocolate cake, you can think more clearly. Therefore, this could be a preliminary solution: the delegate who has a proposal has to make something for everyone to eat before he can set it forth. A second solution to improve the quality of life on the planet could be the application of the Criterion of Direct Assumption of Responsibility: every delegate who announces an initiative to the council must specify in whose name he is speaking. In the name of the president of the republic? The king? The minister of defense? And what is the matter at hand? An armed intervention? An embargo? An air raid? Whatever it is, the UN Security Council will ensure that behind the wheel of the first jeep to enter enemy territory, on the bridge of the first cruiser to intercept the supply ships, or in the cockpit of the first fighter plane to drop a missile, will be the president, the king, or the minister who first introduced the idea. No more cowards like Mauro, who encourages us to steal colored chalk from the janitor’s closet and then sits safe and sound in class while we do it! It will be hard to talk them into doing it because there’s a basic problem upstream: the old men in suits and ties who make those decisions. Maybe it would be a good idea to force these gentlemen to do a year of voluntary service before taking office. Six months at a hospital and six months at an insane asylum. The first six months so that they’ll always remember what it means to be hurt or sick and in the future will always only make decisions that make people well and happy; the second six months so that they can immediately recognize madness, and then when one of their bosses wakes up one morning talking about a thermonuclear attack or “making war for peace,” they’ll know how to intervene.
Excellent, there’s more than enough here to win not one but two Nobel Prizes. Have they ever given two to the same person before me? As I observe the contrast between my right knee, by now gleaming white and redolent of Comet cleansing powder, and the left knee, ruggedly handsome and looking lived in, I decide that the real problem is persuading the world to put these ideas into practice. I am reminded of a note I jotted down years ago, one of Papà’s sayings: “Revolutions always begin from below.” He said it the time that we convinced Grandma to move the scheduled Sunday breakfast from 8 A.M. to 9:30. An invaluable note, nice work, Papà. The changes have to come from below, it needs to start from one cell and then contaminate the others with an effect that might be slow but remains continuous and unstoppable. Everything needs to come at the initiative of a superior creature, capable of becoming a guide to mankind at large. Now it’s all much clearer, my way is no longer an unknown place, it starts here and runs straight down there, toward the horizon. The dawn of a new day for the human race will spring from the hand of the chosen one!
“Al, sweetheart, get down off the table . . . ” my unsuspecting mother tells me.
22.
This is the time for action. My plan for the salvation of the world certainly needs a major planning phase but also a solid base of departure that
must be constructed by resolving various practical problems. I can’t limit myself to the secret search for our promised home, and unless I want to go down in history as nothing more than a brilliant theoretician, I’m going to have to get busy.
“Well, what did your customers tell you?” I ask.
“That it’s better than the one I usually sell . . . you can tell that it’s homemade. How much should I charge?”
“My mother says twenty percent less for the first six months, then the same price as the one you sell now. Plus free breakfast for me and my sister every Monday morning. Minimum order of three a week.”
I secretly took one of Mamma’s chocolate ciambelloni to the owner of the café outside the school because, if you ask me, the prepackaged ones that he sells can’t even begin to compare. I even gave him the whole morning to test the product and gather impressions from his clientele. The result was a foregone conclusion. My mother’s chocolate ciambellone is not only better, it’s from another planet, and that fact makes me reflect. She buys the cheapest flour, butter, eggs, and chocolate she can find, she’d walk two or three miles just to save fifty lire, so I ask myself, what the hell kind of ingredients are the major pastry and baked goods manufacturers using? Of course, before shaking hands the old man tried to bargain with me: “Twenty-five percent discount for the first year,” and I promptly put him in his place, telling him that: “My mother already has other offers and isn’t interested in dropping her price.” And now I can’t wait for Mamma and Papà to come and get me.
We Are Family Page 8
