We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  “Do you like it?”

  “I don’t know, that’s like asking a train whether it likes going back and forth on the rails. I just try to get there on time and not to disappoint anyone.”

  “Do you live with your folks?”

  “I’ve been living on my own for a few months now. But don’t imagine anything romantic, I’m staying with a family friend, Papà pays the rent, and my landlady, who lives upstairs, keeps an eye on me day and night,” she tells me.

  “You ought to come live in the principality. There, you don’t have anyone keeping an eye on you.”

  “What principality?”

  “My house, me and my sister’s house . . . we declared independence five years ago.”

  “I talk plenty of bullshit, but you . . . ”

  “No, really, we even have our own coat of arms. I designed it. Do you want to see?”

  “Yes, show me.”

  “It’s at my house.”

  “I should have guessed . . . ”

  She smiles at me, twisting her mouth on one side, creating a delightful dimple in her left cheek. I wonder if she’ll let me stick my finger in it.

  “And that look on your face? What are you thinking about?” she asks me.

  “No, nothing . . . it’s just that the principality is big. Me and my sister are the prince and princess, but we could find you a position as duchess, if you like.”

  We reach our destination in Tiziana’s car, making time that would be very difficult to match if you obeyed the rules of the road. Vittoria isn’t home and, as usual, she’s forgotten to leave the front lights on. Luckily the moon is almost full and we reach the door, easily sidestepping potholes and projecting rocks. I show Roberta the coat of arms above the door, and she makes a funny face. She was convinced that it was all just a tall tale, but now something leaves her uneasy. She is immediately struck by the level of messiness that reigns inside the house. She says that it’s clear we’re living large, in complete freedom. Then she turns to look out the big living room window.

  “You’re very isolated . . . but you have a magnificent view,” she says.

  “Too bad about that monstrosity they’re building.”

  “Where?”

  “Over there.”

  But what I’m pointing at, right in front of us, is the hill.

  “Right next to it,” I correct myself.

  Roberta leans out, but given the rotation undertaken by the principality, in order to see the construction site she’d actually have to go outside and even then make a certain effort. I remain at her side, admiring the hill. My legs shake a little. Hypothesis A: the principality moved in a perfectly normal fashion and I only just noticed that we now overlook the hill because I’ve been trying for weeks to avoid looking at the construction site. Hypothesis B: the principality actually has a soul, and in order to keep me from looking like a fool with Roberta, it swung around hurriedly the minute it saw us arrive.

  In the meantime, she starts wandering around the house, and I take advantage of the opportunity to check and make sure there are no cracks in the walls.

  “Where do your parents live?” she asks me.

  “Here. In reality, we’re the prince and princess heirs apparent, they’re the real prince and princess, but since they’re traveling for the moment it’s all ours.”

  “And when are they coming back?”

  “I don’t know, maybe in a few months.”

  “Why, where have they gone?”

  “On their honeymoon. At first they were only supposed to go to Venice, but then they liked it and started traveling quite a lot.”

  “How long have they been away?”

  “Five years, one months, and twelve days.”

  “Wow, that is one long honeymoon!”

  “Well, just consider that they postponed it for twenty years . . . ”

  “I love your folks. Those are the kind of parents everyone should have!”

  I conclude the inspection in my bedroom, and the situation immediately becomes strange. I get the impression that she’s studying me. I show her the box with all the games, she asks to see my ID card. After all, I knew that we weren’t going to play anything, it was just an attempt, maybe when she saw the mini pinball machine she might have felt like a couple of rounds. We kiss, she never closes her eyes, I can’t figure out whether she’s keeping me under surveillance or just thinks I’m handsome. It must be the latter, so just as I did with Tiziana I raise my arms so she can take off my T-shirt. She doesn’t understand. Maybe I ought to offer her something in exchange, like in the old days.

  “Do you need notes on private law?”

  “What?”

  “Private law plus philosophy of law, last offer.”

  She coughs, she scratches her nose. She seems to be about to ask me something, but then not a word emerges from her parted lips. She takes me by the hand, she leads me outside. She stops for a moment to look at the hill, then she kisses me on the forehead and leaves. I felt much better years ago, when I just avoided girls, when I’d recoil and dodge anytime they tried to kiss me. Now I’m always in a state of tension, it’s the whole body that needs it and the thought that once we get out of bed there aren’t any other games I can play with them doesn’t give me the slightest relief, that one game is more than enough. A new article is needed for the constitution of the principality: “The reigning prince has a right to one or more consorts.” The issuance of an annual competition might prove to be a solution. I’m confused and, as always when that happens, I miss Mamma, the feel of her hand in my hair, her reassuring gaze. She knows that, it’s why she made Vittoria come back.

  “Who was that pretty girl I passed coming back?” she asks me.

  “Roberta, we went to kindergarten together, she went to the same high school as us, too.”

  “I don’t remember her.”

  Maybe I took the wrong approach, I shouldn’t have taken her into my room. It would have been more romantic if we’d stayed out here on the lounge chairs to look at the hill. Luckily, there’s Agnese’s messenger, spending a few minutes with her will make me feel better.

  “You see? Did you notice that now we’re pointed toward the hill?” I ask her.

  “Al! Please, stop!” She covers her eyes with one hand and goes inside. “Don’t tell me these things, I’m doing my best not to think about them! Just let me know if any fissures open in the ground, okay?” she shouts at me.

  Thanks all the same, Mamma.

  61.

  Anthem of the principality, flag fluttering, Casimiro standing to attention. Resigned sister who emerges from behind the curtain around her bedroom.

  “Try and guess,” I tell her.

  “Al, please! I already told you not to talk to me about the principality’s movements, because it makes me . . . ”

  “Oh, cut it out! It’s better, much better than that!”

  She needs to see it with her own eyes. I take her by the hand and drag her outside. We cross the field, arguing about the wisdom of going outside in our pajamas and the risk of running into someone in a place where you never see a soul in the middle of the day, much less at dawn, and then we walk up the street analyzing the pros and cons of how late I’m making her for work. We fetch up in front of the back door of the abandoned semitrailer, fighting like a couple of cats.

  “Would you stop whining?” I shout at her. “Close your eyes a-a-and . . . look at the gift they gave us!”

  “Toys?”

  “Yes! They’re boxes of LEGO bricks!”

  “Nice, but they’re not ours.”

  “There are thousands of them, if we snag just one box, who do you think’ll ever notice?”

  “Al, this isn’t our property.”

  “But the trailer’s been sitting here for months, it’s abandoned!”

  “Okay
, take one box, shut the trailer back up, and forget about all this. Hey, I said one box!”

  “This second box is for you. One apiece, and that’s it . . . ”

  There, that’s something I would have loved to invent: LEGO building blocks. They’re simple, brilliant, suitable for all ages, educational. When I was one year old, I had fun stacking them up, and the structure would collapse immediately. I immediately discovered the benefits of the asymmetrical stringcourse, and when I was eighteen months old, I built my first earthquake-proof unit of modular housing, capable of withstanding the vibrations of our washing machine on spin cycle. I had a box of a hundred pieces, I used them up almost immediately. Now I have Vittoria’s box, too, and a whole semi-trailer full outside. I’m not supposed to touch it, I know, but if I slip a few empty boxes into the stacks, I’d love to see who would ever notice.

  Here she comes now. Exhausted from a long day at work, from the walk home, nearly a mile, from the whole day away from home without me. But her exhaustion is going to dissolve in an instant.

  “Al! You didn’t even put a pot of water on the stove to boil!”

  Just stop complaining and turn around. Come on, turn around turn around turn arou-ou-ou-ound!

  “Oh, my God . . . ”

  “It’s nice to have a man in the house, isn’t it? He may not put the water on to boil, but still . . . ”

  Having completed the visual experience, behold, she steps closer in amazement for the tactile experience. She touches it gingerly with the tip of her forefinger, followed by further exploration with the palm of her hand. It’s all true, Vittoria, believe it.

  “What do you think?” I ask her.

  “How on earth did you do it?”

  “So you like it?”

  “It’s nice . . . but . . . will it hold up?”

  “Eh-eh-eh . . . no, actually it won’t. For the moment I’ve braced it up with furniture on either side. But I called Raul, he’s going to come fix it in place tomorrow. He says that, if he’s understood clearly ‘exactly what the frick I’ve gone and dreamed up this time,’ all we should need is some concrete, some industrial adhesive, and a dozen or so anchoring points.” We turned the sofa around and ate there, with our eyes locked on the first partition wall ever built out of plastic construction blocks. To work more quickly, I paid no attention to the assortment of colors, and the final effect resembles the staticky snow that you see on our television set when you unplug the antenna, only in full color. If you wanted to, you could try to introduce geometric motifs, say, polka dots, or pinstripes.

  “I wonder what kind of sentence they’d give you for grand theft LEGO blocks . . . ” Vittoria wonders aloud.

  “At the very worst, misappropriation of abandoned property. It’s not as if we hijacked the truck. And after all, semitrailer freight is always fully insured, so don’t start freaking out about toy factories going bankrupt or truck drivers losing their livelihoods.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “You understand? Now we can tell Mamma and Papà to come home!”

  Vittoria smiles at me. She sighs.

  “No, Al, we’ll tell them to come back when we finally have some real walls.”

  “Why, what’s wrong with these?”

  “What’s wrong with these? Well, for starters, you can’t hang pictures on them, much less put up shelving. And you know how Mamma adores shelves.”

  “They’re beautiful walls, colorful, what do we need pictures and shelves for?”

  “Al, the work you’ve done here is magnificent . . . in fact, now I’ll help you to build another wall, that way we’ll finally have all the rooms separated, and we can raise the rent on them.”

  The young lady’s sharp as a tack. Hanging out with me isn’t doing her any harm.

  “Right. And with the rent money, we can build real walls, and then we can send for the old folks.”

  “Certainly! Let’s go get some more boxes.”

  The principality preserves things, keeps them intact, here you can forget that you’re the secretary to a powerful man or a genius bent on saving the world, and instead remember that at the origin of everything you may have eventually become, there always and in any case was a child. In no other home in the Italian republic and in the whole world are there two young people in their twenties playing with LEGO blocks in their underwear. I didn’t have hair on my legs, she didn’t have tits, but we were just sitting there, up on our knees, our butts perched on our heels, side by side. We were playing with Mamma’s hair rollers, we’d build walls with the small ones, towers and bastions with the big ones, without realizing it we had begun that long spiraling path that brings the moments of life into repetition, never perfectly identical each time. This game gives me a profound and all-encompassing sensation of well-being. Brick upon brick, building the first yard or so of wall, I rebuild something even more important that I don’t understand. I barely perceive it, in the frenzied confusion of acts, in the happy desperation of our fingers.

  62.

  After bracing up the last wall, Raul insisted on taking a picture of us with his Polaroid camera, he says that we absolutely have to send it to Mamma and Papà. We watch as the greenish emulsion turns light brown, the whites and blacks come to the surface, the facial features gradually swim into view like a distant memory of something that happened a minute ago. A faint stirring of uneasiness, the images that appear look like Agnese and Mario Elvis. Then there we are, Vittoria and Al, hugging in front of the wall, without a great deal of imagination, giving two thumbs up. We leave the picture on the table and follow Raul outside. He’s beside himself with joy, he keeps jumping from one foot to the other.

  “Well? What do you think of her?” he asks, slapping his hand on the roof of his little van.

  “Nice, really nice, it hardly even seems used,” says Vittoria.

  Given his enthusiasm, we feel obliged to take a nice guided tour around the vehicle. On the sides the following words appear: “Call Raul. I Clean Out Apartments and Cellars.”

  “‘Clean out’? Wouldn’t ‘declutter’ have been better? Or ‘empty’?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, that’s just what popped into my mind . . . ”

  I’m happy that he’s taken my advice. Because of the work he does, Raul knows all the junkmen and antiques dealers in the city. So I told him: Why don’t you set up emptying cellars, with all the contacts that you have, you’ll make twice as much money, from the people who hire you to clear out the cellar and from the junkmen and antiquarians. The idea worked, when the economy is going well, prosperity distorts reality, it attributes value only to what’s new, which means that in every single cellar there’s a treasure in old phonograph records, paintings, books, bicycles, and furniture. One lady paid him to haul away a motorcycle. It turned out to be a 1949 MV Agusta, and even though it was missing some parts, a collector bought it from him for almost a million lire.

  “Oh, kids, I don’t need to tell you that in a couple of months at the very most I’ll pay you back every cent.”

  “Don’t worry about it . . . ” Vittoria tells him.

  “Believe me, I know that you need it, I’ll pay you back with full interest. Hey, who the frick is that?”

  Raul points to a Citroën Dyane that comes to a halt in the field, lurching and bouncing like a water bed.

  “That’s our guest,” I tell Raul.

  Dario, a reserved sort of guy, in his early thirties, greets us as usual with a nod of the head. He puts the strap of his black shoulder bag over his neck and walks toward us, head bowed, ambiguous look in his eyes, hands in his pockets. Someone must once have made the mistake of telling him that he looks like the male lead in 9½ Weeks.

  “Ah, so that’s him. I feel like I might have met him somewhere sometime . . . who knows,” says Raul.

  “Ciao, Dario,” says Vittoria.

  There’s a
glance between the two of them that kindles my hopes. Could it be that she’s finally fed up with her crazy standard boyfriends and it’s dawned on her that a remote, quiet type might just be the perfect fiancé for us all?

  “Come on, I’ll show you your new bedroom,” I tell Dario.

  “Have your folks come back?” he asks me.

  “No, just new in the sense that there’s something new about it.”

  Dario stops in front of the door to the house. He looks around.

  “Wait, has the door always been right here? I remember that I used to drive from that direction and . . . ”

  “Dario, you say the same thing every time . . . it’s just that you don’t come very often, and almost always at night, so you lose your sense of orientation . . . one thing I can tell you for sure is that the house hasn’t moved.”

  To keep him from mentally taking note of certain points of reference, I drag him inside and show him my masterpiece.

  “Impossible. Don’t tell me that . . . I mean, they must sell them in blocks and then you . . . ” says Dario.

  “No, we built the wall, tiny brick by tiny brick.”

  Dario goes into his room, looks around, touches the walls in disbelief. His tough-guy pose dissolves into a goofy smile.

  “They’re beautiful, I’m speechless.”

  “But now the price of the room is fifteen Elvises,” I tell him.

  “I expected as much . . . but how much does that add up to in Italian lire?”

  “At today’s rate of exchange: 23,710 lire.”

  “You’re quoting one Elvis at almost sixteen hundred lire? You’re just a ruthless speculator.”

  “The term is inaccurate, we’re not in Italy here, this is the principality of Santamaria. ‘The principality does not recognize the mechanisms of international finance and is free to assign to its currency the value that it deems appropriate,’ Article 117 of the constitution. And in any case, you’re in luck, until yesterday we were aligned with the British pound sterling.”