We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  “How did it go?” Roberta asks me, with no idea of who she’s talking to.

  “Excellent, top grades in all subjects. How about you?”

  “Fine, except for philosophy. I’m going to have to do a makeup class in the second quarter.”

  “How hard could it be . . . ”

  “It could be plenty hard, seeing that I haven’t even cracked the book yet.”

  “Wait, you have Balestra, too, right? Don’t worry, he always asks the same things, at the very most you’ll only have to study twenty pages or so.”

  “Sure, but which pages? Will you help me? Can we make the usual trade?”

  “E-e-eh, I don’t think that’ll be enough . . . I have to reread the whole book, type up the important passages, make a well-thought-out summary.”

  “I’ll let you lift my skirt.”

  “If this were the first quarter, that would be a reasonable exchange, but since this is the second quarter, at least two oral exams, both of them crucial . . . ”

  The amiable Al was cold, pitiless, calculating.

  Now what should I write in my human flesh diary? “Never pull surprises on adults”? What’s the lesson? If the Santamaria family really lacks nothing, then why did Papà feel the need to kiss that woman? There shouldn’t be people in the world with tits bigger than Mamma’s.

  “Mario Elvis is tired.”

  “I know that he’s tired! But what’s that supposed to mean? Mamma and I are tired too, but we don’t go around kissing women with mega-tits!”

  “Mario Elvis isn’t to blame, it’s that woman’s fault. She wants to break up our family.”

  “You’re right, Casimiro, it’s her fault. But now what do we do?”

  “You could try explaining it to Agnese. Not directly . . . the way you know how to do, in other words.”

  “Maybe I could try telling Vittoria first.”

  “Vittoria is going through one of her bad moments.”

  “Right, so as usual I’m going to have to take care of it myself.”

  “It’s the curse of all geniuses.”

  I need to act with great cunning. What I need is a sophisticated plan, something subtle and psychological that can make that woman cease and desist immediately. The tip of my nose is starting to itch, mucus is collecting in my throat, my eyesight is turning watery, I put a hand on Casimiro’s shoulder because this was the last thing he expected, he’d gone to the garage to show his report card to Mario Elvis and talk over a few changes in the schedule of the 170. Witnessing a scene like that was too hard a blow, but crying won’t do any good.

  “Hey, youngster . . . everything all right?” asks a gentleman.

  Wait, now what’s going on? Is there a youngster in trouble? But where? Ah, he was talking to me.

  40.

  Casimiro is right. He does his best when he’s around us, he acts more and more confident, with a beaming smile, but Papà is exhausted. The idea that his son is a genius must be very comforting, but then you need to take into consideration Vittoria’s idiotic escapades, and the effect is neutralized. A tired man can make a mistake, he might feel the need for a distraction, I get that, it’s just that everything always happens at the same time, the coup d’état of Antonio Tejero, the P2 Masonic lodge, the decision to find everyone innocent of the Piazza Fontana bombing, the attempted assassination of the pope, Rino Gaetano’s poor driving, the Israelis’ Operation Babylon, and the collapse of the stock market. And then this overwhelming impulse to tell Mamma that I’d seen Papà kiss the woman with the huge tits, but the point is, I really wouldn’t know exactly how to do it. “You know, she had a really prominent bosom, she was quite pneumatic around the chest area, there was quite an imposing accumulation of fatty tissue, you know the solar X-ray photon fluxes around Venus?”

  “Mamma! Al isn’t feeling good!”

  “Bobby Sands and Bob Marley are dead . . . The Grey Wolves on the other hand are alive and well and so is General Jaruzelski and the women with all those . . . ”

  “Al, what’s happening to you? Speak to me!” Agnese shouts at me.

  “We’re in danger. The world is full of bad people, Gelli, Moretti, Ali Aˇgca, the women who have . . . ”

  “Have what, Al?”

  “The hidden powers that lurk in the Italian parliament, in the senate, under the scanty blouses . . . ”

  “Tell Mamma, what is it?”

  “THERE’S A GLOBAL THREAT OF LESS THAN AGILE WOMEN!”

  Papà says that choruses are killing good music. The same thing goes for people’s lives. The endless refrain of crisis/calm lady doctor is killing me. I’d hoped that as I grew up, I’d get rid of her, but here I am, back again. The hallway with the hardwood floor, the darker parquet that always creaks, the painting with the basket full of grapes and the dead fish, the little black leather armchairs, the lady doctor with the cigarette in one hand smiling at us from the door. An elbow pokes me in the ribs.

  “Al, get your hand out of your pants,” Mamma whispers to me.

  Al, don’t do this, Al, don’t do that. Now what is it!

  “Stop touching your peepee . . . ”

  Oh, is that what I was doing? I hadn’t even noticed. So I can’t even give myself a little squeeze in front of other people, heaven forbid. My nose, fine, my ears, sure, but not that, it’s not a good thing to remind other people that you’ve got exactly the same equipment as every other male on the planet. God, I’m so out of sorts today.

  “Well, Al, how are you doing? Is it going better with your classmates?” the lady doctor asks me the minute I sit down.

  “Na.”

  “Why not?”

  “Whan Ah’m wath tham I faal laka Ah’m all alana.”

  “And when you’re alone, on the other hand, how do you feel?”

  “A hava lats af naca thangs ta thank abaat. Tama flaas.”

  “And exactly what nice things do you think about?”

  “How much will you pay me if I tell you?” I ask.

  “You want to be paid? Wouldn’t you rather just tell me because we’re friends?”

  “Wha af caarsa . . . ”

  41.

  “Al, how are you?” I’m not like Vittoria myself, if everyone expresses interest in me, I enjoy it immensely. But I keep from saying it, instead I say: “A little better,” “oh all right I guess,” because the family has adhered again around my minor malaise. Mario Elvis and Agnese smile constantly, we play together, at the dinner table we talk about the world, about life, and about how magnificently harmonious and astonishing everything is. I’ll be “all right I guess” for at least the next ten years. I’m really just fine, the role of shadow paterfamilias is a burden but I can’t complain. I think about what my life would be like if I were the shadow paterfamilias of Raimondo’s family. A brother who doesn’t know how to put together firecrackers, a pair of parents who care only about how to increase sales of sandwiches. Or of Flaminia’s family, which we call the “Oh, Well, We” family, people who gauge the quality of life according to engine displacement or linear inches. Mario Elvis and Agnese take it as a game, they talk with the parents and they say: “We bought a Prinz,” and the parents say: “Oh, well, we bought a Simca 1100”; “We had mussels for dinner,” “Oh, well, we had mussels, and they were THIS big!” Things wouldn’t be much better for me with Roberta’s family, all her parents talk about are the Lions Club dinners, the Lions Club meetings, and the people they’ve met at the Lions Club dinners and Lions Club meetings. If I think about it, I realize how miserable the foundation is that we’re starting off from, and just how long my plan might take.

  Even if I’ve taken great care not to talk about matters of politics, domestic and international, with the calm lady doctor, Agnese and Mario Elvis have once again banished television, magazines, and newspapers from my diet. In order to satisfy my thirst for knowledge
and prevent nocturnal raids on the newsstand or the local dumpsters, we watch the evening news together. A speech by Reagan offers a demonstration of the greatness of a nation where any citizen, I mean literally any citizen, can reach the highest office in the land; the recovery of John Paul II is a startling demonstration of the triumph of good over evil. Even Vittoria, who is forming her own political ideas on the general principle of I Hate Everyone, goes along with the game, nods, reassures me, tells me about how kind an old gentleman was, how he followed her for half a mile to give her back the wallet that she dropped on the metro. I pretend to believe the stories they tell me and to accept the lady doctor’s recommendations. I feel almost sorry for them because of how antiquated they are, they prevent me from reading the newspapers when we’re in the 1980s and all I need is a couple of phone tokens to make use of modern technology and listen to the news report over the telephone.

  Now I have to operate on two separate fronts. First: get the woman with the overabundance of tits out of the way; second: distract Mamma and Papà from my passing malaises by introducing them to a girlfriend. I had no difficulty solving point one. I wrote the homewrecker a nice love letter, all in block capital letters to make it look more grown-up, and in it I deployed my cunning by praising the beauty of her eyes. That ought to work on someone like her, who must have a hard time even getting her oculist to look her in the face. I signed the letter “A bachelor admirer” and, just to convey the point that I’m not a bachelor because of any lack of expertise, I scented the paper with two strokes of my stick deodorant as a crowning touch. If I mail one of these letters every week, her relationship with Papà ought to break down in the course of a couple of months, tops, and then we’ll be united just like before. For the second point I’ve enlisted Roberta, with whom I already have a well established commercial relationship. In exchange for a weekly house call from her, I’ve indebted myself until graduation.

  We stroll hand in hand in the backyard, talking about this and that as we proceed toward the living room window. I don’t need to look inside. I can just imagine my folks, they must be peeking out from behind the curtains, in the shadows, modestly proud of their son’s success. Roberta smiles and waves with one hand toward the slightly overestimulated parents: they’re in front of the curtains, in full daylight, giggling and gesticulating without so much as a crumb of style.

  “Don’t you think we ought to kiss?” she whispers to me.

  “You think?”

  “If you ask me, if we don’t, your folks won’t fall for it.”

  “All right then.”

  “But keep your hands to yourself or your mother will think I’m a slut.”

  She takes me under the tree. She waits. I wait.

  “Wait, what is this, your first kiss?” she asks me.

  “What do you think?”

  What does this girl think, to talk like that? I must have kissed at least a dozen girls. Nicoletta, Claudia, Giovanna, Paola, Serena, Isabella, who can even remember the names? I have problems with the subsequent steps, all right, but where the courtship and kissing are concerned, I’m unbeatable. We sit down on the grass because Roberta thinks that’s more romantic, I pop a mint into my mouth because she says that’s what you’re supposed to do, I put my hands around her back but I don’t squeeze her too close on account of that whole slut thing.

  “You’re supposed to say something nice to me first,” she adds, as a last observation.

  “You’re my favorite business partner.”

  She seems resigned, and I make a mental note of this aspect, which must be the distinctive expression of female mammals about to agree to intercourse. She shuts her eyes, I keep mine just slightly open because I don’t want to miss so much as a single instant of everything that’s happening. Our lips touch, everything is going fine until I feel something pressing against my teeth. Roberta is pushing with the tip of her tongue, trying to pry my mouth open. Instinctively, it strikes me that the right thing to do is fight back, so I clamp my lips shut and push her tongue away, but then I have a flash of intuition: this is a kiss like in the movies! I decide to open my mouth, but I’m just a second too late, and her voice echoes through my cheeks: “Hey, idiot, are you going to open your mouth or not?”

  42.

  There has to be a good reason that Galileo Galilei took forty years to perfect his telescope, and in fact he was no doubt distracted continuously by his family problems. I was feeling fine out in the backyard, stretched out in the shade of the geraniums, when Vittoria showed up and told me to go to my room because she had to have a talk with Giancarlo. To get ready for her little chat she spent an hour and a half in the bathroom, because when she wants to fight with a boyfriend she needs to feel pretty, it gives her an added layer of confidence. Unfortunately the Eighties have gotten off on the wrong foot, to see that we only need listen to the words of the designers. An actual quote: “Clothing is a symbol of daring and revolt with which women give themselves the gift of a break in which to amuse and enjoy themselves, to don the costume of the character they like best. Clothing is the joy of inventing oneself.” And so, with red ballet flats on her feet, pastel pink trousers, and a blouse that matches the shoes, Vittoria has just stepped into the costume of a character afflicted with red-green color blindness whom I’ve never met, and has invented herself with glitter on her cheeks and curly hair. The very minimum required for an argument that’s with it.

  I wanted to eavesdrop on the conversation but the voices are so loud that I can perfectly overhear everything they’re talking about from the desk in my bedroom, while with the left lobe of my brain I study, with the right lobe I think about my memorable exploit, and with the frontal lobe I plan a launching ramp for my toy cars. Vittoria has a decisive attitude, a firm and authoritarian tone that, since it’s completely alien to her, requires an excessively elevated outlay of energy. I’m willing to bet money, in two minutes she’s going to burst into tears.

  “You told me this would be forever!” she says.

  “I never said any such thing, I told you over and over again that I don’t want anything serious!” Giancarlo answers her.

  Did he say that over and over again? No.

  “Wrong, handsome!” I shout from my room. “What you said is: ‘I’ve never wanted to be tied down before but now I sense that something has changed, when I’m with you it’s as if I was . . . ’—using the wrong form of the verb, your trademark—‘on another planet.’ That’s what you said, handsome!”

  “Mind your own business, retard!” he shouts at me.

  I run to the window because that sound of a wet rag slammed onto the floor can only be a slap in the face. Hidden behind the curtain, I peek out to see Giancarlo walking briskly away, hand on his cheek, Vittoria standing with her right arm still extended. The super-cool puma just took a smack in the face from a duck. My sister came to my defense! Well, after that, what do you want, regrets are just part of her nature, and after begging him to come back, she returns home in a fury.

  “You need to mind your own business!”

  “This is my business.”

  “No, Al. Things between me and Giancarlo don’t concern you!”

  “Yes, they do, they concern me, because the two of you fight every day, you’re always on edge, you’re rude to me, and we haven’t played in months!”

  “I’m sick and tired, you’re all on me constantly! I can’t stand you anymore, I can’t stand this house without walls . . . I’m going to get a job and go and live in a real house!”

  “This is the real house, the promised home . . . ”

  “There is no promised home! That was just a game! This is the only house we could afford, it’s certainly not our dream house! Why don’t you get it?”

  Actually, though, I understand perfectly. Exactly as I was just trying to explain to her, Giancarlo isn’t the right guy for her, he makes her too intractable. Vittoria is still too
young to find a boyfriend all on her own, she likes extravagant, unpredictable types, and then she complains that they behave extravagantly and unpredictably. On the other hand, I can understand that taking my advice makes her dismiss lots of young men who, no matter how dumb they might be, are still perfectly nice people. Here’s what she needs, a calm, mature young man who knows how to restore her love of play. In the meantime, I’m going to have to bring back her secret admirer because I can’t stand looking at her by the window waiting for the return of the antisocial feline.