Vittoria hands me the sheets of paper. Second line, we miss you oodles.
“That must have been a suggestion from Papà,” I say, “those two are having the time of their lives, forget about them actually missing us!”
“I think you’re probably right.” Vittoria picks up the sheets of paper and starts reading again: “‘We miss you oodles but, if you don’t mind too much, we’d like to stay here a while longer. There are so many things to see, and who knows when we’ll ever have a chance to come back.’ What do you say?”
“Certainly they can stay, I don’t have any problem with that. Why, what about you?”
“As long as they have the money, they should stay. So we’ll write back and tell them that we’re fine with it.”
A few extra days is exactly what we need to give them a fitting welcome when they return. I want to do a plaster cast of the principality’s coat of arms to put over the door. Plus I need to think about the letterhead stationery for official communications, send out my request for UN recognition, and get down to work on drafting the constitution. So go on and enjoy Venice, the islands, the photographs with pigeons in St. Mark’s Square, high water and seafood feasts, and when you get back you’ll discover what a memorable exploit Al has undertaken!
“A-a-al, it’s six o’clock!” Vittoria shouts from the kitchen.
A new day shines its rays on the principality of Santamaria. I need to gather the courage to get out of bed, elbow my way onto the bus, and smile for the two hundred forty-fourth time at the wisecrack: “Look, it’s Al Santamaria, the human case of diarrhea!”
“Come on, there’s a surprise!” she tells me.
“What surprise?” I ask, jumping out of bed.
“Look here . . . ”
“A frittata?”
“It’s not a frittata, it’s Mamma’s chocolate ciambellone! It just turned out like this because I was in a hurry . . . ”
I immediately sample a slice. I can taste the butter, the eggs, the flour, and the sugar. It’s just that I taste each one separately.
“Not bad . . . ” I say, to keep from hurting her feelings, “but maybe you should have kneaded it a little more thoroughly, and given it more time for the yeast to rise.”
“The yeast! I’m such a mess.”
Behold Vittoria Santamaria, who got Papà’s eyes, nose, and hair, and Mamma’s sense of self-respect. Her eyes, which until just a moment ago were smiling, dim and turn opaque.
“Shoulders back, chest out, and pride up! You’re the future princess of Santamaria!”
Vittoria straightens her shoulders, takes a deep breath and puffs out her chest, and lifts her chin.
“Future Prince Al, the future princess is going to be running a little late today,” she says.
Well, that’s hardly a surprise. Princess Vittoria has had bags under her eyes like a scrubwoman for the past two weeks. When is she going to stop letting herself be tortured by that commoner Lorenzo?
50.
Dear UN, . . .
Friends at the UN, . . .
Esteemed Envoys, . . .
How the hell do you start a letter to the UN? If I were sending the application for recognition of the principality to an Italian state agency, I’d have no doubts, I’d begin with Most Illustrious Excellencies, but there in the Glass Palace on the East River, I’m assuming they are actually people with a certain degree of class, indifferent to the standard servile approach.
“A-a-al?”
Looking out the window, I see Vittoria standing motionless in the street. She came home on time today, just when what I need more than anything else is another hour of blessed peace. I don’t want to interrupt my work, I’d better just not answer.
“A-a-al!”
It’s no good, a future reigning prince can’t even have five minutes’ time to focus on a fundamental passage in the life of the principality. What the devil is she doing out there, why doesn’t she come in? Another lizard taken for a poisonous snake?
“What is it? I’m busy!” I shout.
“Come see!”
I’m coming! I’m coming! If this is about another baby bird we need to let die inside one of my socks rolled up for a nest, I swear that . . .
“You see?” she asks.
“What?”
She takes long strides toward me.
“One . . . two . . . three . . . almost four. Don’t you remember that when we first got here, you used to play at jumping from the door directly into the street to scare Mamma?”
“This thing with the street again? Anyway, yes, I remember, and I also remember that Mamma never got scared precisely because the street was so far away.”
It’s no good, she’s not convinced. I’ve already figured out that this is going to be her new fixation. For that matter, she’s the one who after the Seveso incident turned intermittently purple because she had decided only to breathe every once in a while, in order to avoid contamination. I’m tempted to laugh.
“Al, I’m serious!”
Unless I pretend to take some interest, this is going to be a long and drawn-out thing. I offer her a long glance to the right and another to the left, I scratch my chin, and I make an insignificant evaluation of the stretch of ground between street and door.
“No, Vittoria, I really don’t think that the road has moved.”
Since I’m eager to get back to the more urgent matter of foreign policy, I take the shopping bags out of her hand and take them to the kitchen table. I start rummaging through them.
“But you didn’t buy any of the things I wrote on the list!”
“‘Chocolate, popcorn, chocolate cookies, chocolate wafers, powdered cocoa, red pizza, whipped cream in a can, assorted chocolates . . . ’ Do you think that’s a shopping list? I’ll be in charge of these things, all right?”
I’ll have to give some ground to her, constitutional monarchies are in general opposed to the centralization of power and the ministry of shopping strikes me as an acceptable sacrifice.
“What are Mamma and Papà’s covers doing on your bed?” she asks me.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing” is the most slothful word in the whole dictionary. At least until you get old. It comes out of your mouth with a meaning of approximately “no big thing,” “zero activity,” “absence of problems,” and it reaches the ear of your listener transformed into “reason to worry,” “shady business,” and “problems.” And in fact there she is, pulling the curtain aside and checking. Now she’s going to bust my chops, tell me that I shouldn’t be playing around with Mamma and Papà’s bedcover, that it cost a lot of money, that I’ve ruined it, and so on and so forth. She says nothing because she wants me to turn around and see how wide-eyed she is. I don’t fall for it, I keep rummaging through the grocery bags, myself.
“It looks like a nice thing, but what is it?” she asks in a faint, uncertain voice.
Here we go. She’s started using drugs.
“It’s a surprise for Mamma and Papà . . . ” I say.
I go over to her, her pupils look normal.
“They’re album covers, now . . . let me show you how it works.”
I carefully arrange the cover on the bed, I get under it in the proper position to read. Vittoria gets comfortable next to me.
“You wrote with a magic marker on the covers . . . ” she says.
There, now I recognize her.
“If you want, I can sew on some little labels,” she adds.
No, no, she’s definitely on drugs.
“You see?” I tell her. “For now there are only two strings. One of them ends where I wrote 1967 and one where I wrote 1968. Pull the string for 1967.”
Vittoria pulls the string and a line of silhouetted cardboard tabs pops up, just like in my favorite old book of fairy tales.
“Look,
there’s Mamma all pregnant, Papà looking at the moon, the car rushing to the hospital, and then there’s me,” I explain to her.
“How nice . . . you’re in the bright sunlight, everyone’s laughing, and then what are those two? A couple of big birds?”
“No, two angels . . . is it too much?”
“It’s perfect.”
Vittoria pulls the string for 1968. There’s the scene of her putting me in the trash can. She laughs, she sniffles, a tear rolls down her cheek, what kind of a fool sister do I even have?
“Shall we do 1969 together?” she asks me.
51.
I didn’t like this latest letter, not one bit. I’m miffed, terribly miffed. I don’t give a damn if someone my age isn’t supposed to do such a thing. I go over and stand in the corner and scratch the paint on the wall with one finger.
“Now they’re overdoing it,” I say.
“Why, Al?”
“Does this strike you as normal? What kind of honeymoon is this?”
“Al, it’s a honeymoon they’ve put off for years and years.”
“Sure, but do you think it’s right that they don’t miss us even a little bit?”
“What are you talking about?! They spent eighteen whole years with me and then with the two of us, day and night! So, even if they decided to spend the next eighteen years all by themselves, I wouldn’t see anything odd about it. And anyway, they only mentioned a couple of months.”
“But everything’s ready here! The flag, the coat of arms over the door, the drafting of the constitution is well under way, we have letterhead stationery, and our answer from the UN is bound to arrive any day now!”
“Al, try to understand, they’re not having fun. Papà found out that he’s been fired! Forget about a honeymoon trip, they’re really worried about paying the mortgage.”
“If they find jobs they’ll never come back.”
“Al, they’re looking for odd jobs until Papà can find another job back here. You know what they’re like, they can’t wait to get back here. And then we can make use of this extra time to do something exceptional for the principality. Just think of when Mamma and Papà come back and see the flag flying outside and all the rooms separated by wonderful walls!”
Sure, that’s right, I pay her my compliments, I’m no longer so terribly out of sorts. I’m sick of doing everything on my own and the fact that Vittoria too has entered into the spirit of the thing comes as a relief. She’s right, Mamma and Papà ought to find the principality completely finished. The next expenses we’ll have to undertake will be, in order of importance, the bathtub, the hot water heater, the electric stove, at least three heaters for the winter, walls and doors for the individual rooms.
“The bathtub isn’t urgent,” says Vittoria.
“It’s a gift for Mamma and Papà, they deserve it, think what a nice surprise if they can have a nice hot bath when they get back.”
“It costs too much, Al. We need to buy another scooter first thing.”
I can’t expect too much from her.
“You need to make an effort, Vittoria . . . we-are-an-independent-principality. No motor scooter, no car, nothing that can obligate us to sign contracts and get ripped off by the companies of the Italian republic!”
I cut off the conversation because it’s been an hour since Raimondo started playing the guitar and now, as per terms stipulated last week, an hour of playing together awaits us.
“Raimondo, it’s time!” I say.
“Just another five minutes! The last song!” he shouts from outside.
“No, right away! I’ve already got the plastic army men set up!”
Raimondo comes back inside, kisses the body of the Martin, and carefully sets it back in its case. As he walks toward me, his fingers are still playing arpeggios.
“Are your folks still away?” he asks me.
“Yes, for a while.”
“What incredible luck . . . your parents are legendary.”
Soon the sun will break over the horizon and bless the principality of Santamaria with its early beams. It’s time.
“A-a-al . . . please turn it down . . . turn it do-o-own,” Vittoria mutters from her room.
“What do you think of thi-i-i-is o-o-o-one?” I ask her.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she shouts at me.
“How on earth am I supposed to sleep! History is made by the waking! And after all, it’s five thirty, you would have been awake in half an hour anyway.”
She must have inherited her personality from Grandma Concetta. Mamma and Papà don’t jump in the air for every little thing, but she has that foul peasant personality. She stumbles over to the table, smells the coffee and then, when I turn down the volume, looks at me with a wrinkled grimace in the shape of a smile.
“Well, what do you think of it?” I ask her.
“Of what?”
“Of the song, as the anthem of the principality!”
“No, Al. Not ‘Galactica’ by the Rockets, please, no.”
I put another cassette in the tape recorder.
“Well, it was a tribute to Papà. How about this instead? It’s a little softer, right? Meteor, meteor, meteor ma-a-an . . . ”
“I think that the anthem ought to be an Elvis song, like say ‘Mystery Train’ or ‘Suspicious Minds.’”
“Of course, we’ll choose the final anthem with Mamma and Papà when they come back, but for now we need a temporary one, something to play while we raise the flag at daybreak.”
“Come here . . . ”
“No, stop laughing . . . and don’t hug me! You aren’t taking this seriously! That’s enough, you’re suffocating me! Seriously? Never an intermediate attitude, either irritable or all sugary!”
There’s no middle ground with Vittoria, but the ground that’s covered with hugs, kisses on both cheeks, and raspberries on the back of my neck is by far the one I prefer. We listen to other songs as we have breakfast. We choose them at random, we pull out Mamma and Papà’s old cassettes, we take turns sticking them into the tape recorder, and we rewind the tape a little to hear the last song they listened to. We skip over “Parole” by Nico e i Gabbiani, “Resterai” by the Corvi, and “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison. During “Forever and Ever” by Demis Roussos it gets late, we need to make a decision. We solemnly unfurl the flag at dawn and, as the sun blesses the principality with its first rays, we put on the last song we can remember dancing to with the old folks. Hands on our hearts, we sing “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge.
52.
We read the long letter from Agnese and Mario Elvis like good siblings, grabbing the sheets of paper out of each other’s hands and fighting over whose turn it was. They write us every day but they only mail the letters every so often to save on stamps, and maybe to keep from boring us, I’d guess. They were angry that I forced open the token box of the phone booth. It seemed to me like a good idea, by getting all those tokens we’d be able to call them free of charge whenever we wanted. Vittoria was happy about it, too, and in fact she told me to write our folks about it immediately. It didn’t turn out well, they wrote back that the Santamaria family has always played by the rules and that the fact that the law isn’t protecting our rights isn’t enough of a reason to just break it. Obviously, living outside the country, they aren’t getting a clear idea of how things are going in Italy, they don’t realize that we’d be freeloading on the phone company of the only country on earth where the oil companies have taken to peddling contraband and have defrauded the state of 2 trillion lire, no less. Since I’m going to have to mention the electric hookup on the light pole sooner or later, I decided not to press my point too heavily, for the moment, it’s probably best to let it slide. We concentrate on the good news: Mario Elvis has found a position as a singer, Agnese is still looking for new pastry shops, they’ve rented a small but cozy room
near the club where Papà is performing. Then there are a bunch of questions, and we’re answering them now.
“‘Did you set fire to anything, Al?’”
“Say no,” I tell her.
“You set fire to the curtains.”
“That was a controlled fire, it doesn’t count. And after all, I only burned a little bit of the fringe. I don’t like curtains with fringes.”
“What about the fire in the garden?”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do, Vittoria: you pile up the brushwood and then you burn it.”
“But you’re not supposed to throw balloons of alcohol without Papà’s supervision. All right, let’s do this, I won’t say anything, but you cut it out with the fires, I don’t like lying.”
“Right, good idea, so let’s write them that four evenings out of seven you don’t come home to sleep!”
“I’m all grown up, I can come home when I want.”
We avoid discussing fires and late-night escapades, and we shift over to more innocent subjects: my grades at school are excellent, Vittoria already has lots of friends at the university, the house is in fine shape.
“Speaking of the house, we ought to deal with this matter of the . . . ” says Vittoria.
“I’m not talking about it.”
“Mamma and Papà wrote that they thought it would be the best solution.”
“It’s out of the question, this is our promised home! Are you kidding? They leave for a couple of months and we sell the house . . . ”
“We could take away all the furniture, all our memorabilia, it’s just four walls.”
“We had an understanding, Vittoria. Mamma and Papà are going to come home and they’ll find their house transformed into a principality.”
“I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to pay the mortgage, and I’m positive we can’t go on living hooked up to a light pole.”
“My how bourgeois you’ve become . . . ”
“Al, try to be reasonable, it’s not our fault, there’s the economic crisis, inflation, there are no jobs . . . Mamma and Papà know it perfectly well.”
We Are Family Page 18
