Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  That half-Greek boy should have put on a hat to shade his scar; I was worried, even if it was no longer new. He and his father were above my head demolishing and destroying and later, perhaps, would reconstruct the cover of the house; I would see them trample my tiles, stick their hands in my things—that “my” surprised me. My things, I thought, while I knew I would lose them, some or all.

  I looked at the drawer where, under a pile of diaries, I had saved the red box, the only thing I was interested in keeping. I would deal with it at the right moment: opening it could hurt me, I wasn’t ready yet.

  Meanwhile, I would feel the breath of those two men, the alien closeness, the smell. If for Nikos I felt an instinctive sympathy, I couldn’t say the same for his father: he was only slightly younger than my mother, and the way he looked at her hadn’t escaped me. I covered my chin with another edge of the sheet, and that gesture left my feet uncovered; the cotton protected me from the mosquitoes and the heat, from the sticky duties of daughter, heir, owner, and from every role that fate had chosen for me. I concentrated on the red box, as if its existence could expel the rest, and imagined for an instant, only an instant, the moment when I would reopen it.

  “Don’t worry, it’s fine like that, call me if you need me.”

  “We’ll be making noise on the kitchen side, I’m sorry for your daughter.”

  “She has to get up anyway, sooner or later.”

  My mother’s footsteps stopped in the doorway. She knocked. I imagined her opening her mouth to call me, instead she had the wisdom to say nothing; when I heard her go away I looked at the clock that had long stood on my father’s night table and now emerged between a modern lamp and a knot of electrical wires. It always displayed the same time.

  That morning twenty-three years earlier my father had opened his eyes at six-sixteen, and the numbers remained on the alarm clock, switched off with a sharp stroke, six hundred and sixteen, six one six, and for days his blue toothbrush had sat on the sink, lying outside the glass where we all kept ours, trailing a wake of toothpaste like a snail’s slime. My mother had already gone out, as she often did, to treat herself to a long walk at dawn, before going to work.

  Before it was six-sixteen forever my mother would walk for hours every morning along the coast and then return to open the regional museum, where she sat at a narrow desk, like a nursery school desk, welcoming the tourists who disembarked from the cruise ships. Messina didn’t deserve a stop of more than half a day: French, English, and Americans passed through with sandals on their feet and cameras around their necks. Few ventured as far as the museum. My mother, at night, told us their stories, described what they were like, what sort of couples they formed, how many children they carried on their shoulders or in the stroller, what part of Europe they came from. My father taught Latin and Greek at a private school where rich kids who were repeating grades got a diploma bought by their parents. The school was named for an architect and set designer from Messina: “Filippo Juvarra Remedial School” said the plaque; my father, incapable of remediating himself, remediated others. Every so often a student who was more diligent or less rich came to our house in the afternoon because he needed an extra lesson, specific drills to avoid the second or third failure. My hair tied in two perfect pigtails, I hurried to welcome gangly adolescents (“the beanpoles,” my mother called them with resigned detachment) before skating back to my room. Skating in the hall was allowed, skating was always allowed; my father wanted me to take part in certain regional contests and watched my progress with satisfaction, praising it excessively. Whenever he could he trained me, saying that I was almost ready, almost perfect.

  Then the days had been transformed into a single day.

  My father had left his job, my mother had extended hers infinitely; he stayed in bed sleeping, she invented any excuse to go to the museum.

  The bed where once my parents had loved each other, had conceived me, had been happy and young, had become, with my father’s depression, his room.

  My mother had begun to place my father in my care, along with countless orders: Cook the pasta, don’t overcook it, make the coffee, no more than a cup, don’t fill it, like that it’s not enough, take it to him in bed, try to make him get up. No student rang the bell anymore. All the rooms stayed open so that, suffering from sadness, he was never alone, and in the silence I could converse with the small sounds, the rustle of his pillowcases, the pen I dropped on the floor, the ring of the telephone—so I tried to inhabit the day, a land increasingly bereft of human voices.

  Our world (might there exist another one?) had gotten stuck.

  The last months my father spent with us were a lava-like and muddy material, a toneless mood that enveloped everything. I was thirteen and didn’t know how young you are at thirteen, how grown-up you think you are; the fairy tales you leave behind don’t warn you, don’t deliver a legacy of tools. What are the warnings that a kingdom is about to end? My father got out of bed only to go to the bathroom, he had stopped eating, speaking, smoking his pipe.

  When he finally disappeared, sleep went with him. I arrived exhausted at school in the morning, horns honking in my ears, yawning, too; families were packed into SUVs stopped at a traffic signal, standing in the bakeries buying pizzas, adults saying goodbye to kids in the school courtyards, parents enduring the abandonment of children like a private exorcism: See you at one, we’re only pretending to leave each other. The same game, the same courtyards where my father came to get me when I was in elementary school. At that time I knew that after the sound of the bell I would find him outside, one hand in his pocket and the other drumming four nervous fingers on the unmoving thumb. His name, alive in the mouths of friends, was uttered, followed by a greeting, and my father turned and picked it up like a thing fallen from somebody else’s pocket; he exchanged the greeting and, spinning around, took the school bag from my back and shifted it to his. Then, lightened, I grew a pair of wings, and all the way home I’d have my back covered.

  Soon after my father left, when the outline of his body was still fresh in the bed, I dreamed about him for the first time, twice in the same night. He was climbing up the pipes in the courtyard to the kitchen balcony, disheveled and in his pajamas, having just gotten out of bed in another house from which he’d escaped with the light of remorse in his eyes. I opened the shutters, breathed the morning air. Get up, let me in, he laughed, forcing me to welcome him back; I woke up screaming. My mother was sleeping in what had been their room, careful to keep me and the rest of the world outside the door. I had gone back to sleep and my father appeared again, he was swinging, legs dangling, in the empty space of the courtyard, tied to the grille by a sheet around his neck, hanged, as in the game we played devotedly, with paper and pen, in the hot afternoons: either you guessed the secret word or you died. He was wheezing and, in a murmur, asked me to help him or let him go. For the second time I opened my eyes with my hair stuck to my forehead and the fear of not breathing, in the limbo of insomniacs there was no escape. It was still dark, but for me the night ended there.

  Later, some acts of force by which I held on to my father’s name. At night I waited for the clock to display our time, six one six, to find his odor of tobacco and talcum powder. In the morning I walked the streets of the city with my neck tense, eyes low on the cracks between the bricks, small white squares squeezed together to form new ones, a field of luminous squares turned gray by the shoes of the passersby. I looked up and concentrated on the people, I recorded their features and wrinkles, weight and lightness of pace, the speed with which they got in and out of cars, I spied on the neurosis of greeting, shoving, purposely ignoring, I unearthed feelings suffocated by habit or repressed by convention. I knew every centimeter, every person, without recognizing anyone, because to recognize is to feel at peace, to fit into the city like an appliance in the kitchen, while I was never at peace and in the middle of that army of faces I saw only the absence of one.
To go to my friend Sara’s I had to pass near the cemetery and on the way I held on to my father with greater arrogance. I crossed outside the stripes, dodging moving cars and the barricade that separated the graves from the city, I tightened the straps of my backpack, I skirted the kingdom of the dead where my father didn’t live and walked like a stranger on the streets of the living, because he didn’t live there, either. I arrayed my line of defense around the perimeter of the cemetery without fearing the counterattack of ghosts, I strengthened my legs and nurtured thoughts of revolt. One day, I said to myself, my father would return and show the world who we were.

  But when I started high school, I had a short journey in the morning: I cut through Villa Mazzini and greeted the Ficus macrophylla, the witches’ tree; there was one in Piazza Marina in Palermo, which I’d seen and photographed during a school trip—it was older and bigger than the one in Messina, but it wasn’t mine. Finally, at the end of a back street, on the façade of the high school, was a saying from the Fascist era: “Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines that are preached beyond the Alps.” A hundred centuries of nothing fell on me, the load of books, notebooks, pens dumped into the backpack from elementary school to adolescence with no one helping to lighten my load anymore; I wondered what sense there was in urging us to be sad and superior, to remain entrenched in pity. Why should I have to take refuge in history when, at fourteen, I wanted only to free myself from it? Since I could no longer have wings, I was owed a free, unencumbered future. But the black strokes of Fascist calligraphy on the wall were contemptuous, and didn’t answer.

  When it rained, it rained in my shoes. My father’s name, decomposing into watery exhalations, coincided with the annoyance of wet socks and soaked my feet with mud, fine cotton surrendered to the apocalypse. A few drops aren’t enough to stay home, thundered the teacher, equal parts cruel and friendly, whom I struggled not to call mamma, she knew so well how to mix authority and dignity, and so great was my need to have more than one. Because of a few drops of rain we have seven absent, does that seem normal to you, she insisted, roaring, and at least I was proud of being there, after crossing the city like a hero, whereas Sara’s half of the desk was empty: she had dry socks and both parents, I had a desperate victory over the fury of winter. But I couldn’t hide the gullies in my family, they appeared in hair made frizzy by the storm, I dried the lenses of my glasses on the edge of my shirt, I lowered my gaze to the teacher’s mauve boots, damp at the back, her pale stockings, the tip of the umbrella left to dry next to the desk. My father’s name pounded on the windowpanes, from Dante’s Inferno came Acheron, Styx, and Flegethon, the rivers of the damned, in silence I prayed that no one would discover the true cause of that flood, I, I and my damaged family.

  My mother and I didn’t know how to repair the damage and so we lived it.

  My father’s disappearance had become the funnel of our guilt, the headache of choices to avoid.

  Our family, lined up and mutilated, was forced to go forward until it was torn apart by a platoon of white soldiers. It was the black pieces, always the blacks, that I hid behind after dinner, placing the wooden chessboard on my father’s side of the bed; my mother moved the first pawn two squares, I came up with weak strategies, we continued to play, without an hourglass, until my eyes closed, until I took underwear and pajamas off the radiator where we’d put them so they’d warm up and protect us from winter, clothes burning like armor for colorless nights—finally, undressed from the day and armed with flannel, I cleared the painful half of the bed and, arms overflowing with towers and knights, went back to my room.

  As for the game, she always won.

  I raised myself on both elbows, and the bed got smaller; I would die devoured by objects, the alarm clock said six-sixteen, would say six-sixteen forever. I grabbed the phone, no message. Telephone time is real, only telephone time is real. Nine-forty-eight.

  I wrote to Pietro: “How are you?”

  And also: “I miss you.”

  Finally, prudently: “We’re dying of heat, not a good idea for you to come.”

  Nine-fifty, minimal intrusions of air.

  Three Centimeters

  On the terrace my mother stared, frowning, at the workmen on the job, father and son unstoppable, she leaning on the parapet in a daisy-printed dress that left her back uncovered, the skin darkened and thickened by summer. She glanced at my legs to make sure they were covered to a respectable length; a laugh escaped me, did she really think I was still an adolescent who would go around half naked even if there were men in the house? “You’re so pale,” she noted, coming toward me. “You never go to the beach?”

  “I cover myself—the sun’s dangerous,” I said, excluding my husband from the answer.

  The silence between us was filled with endless summers made up of carrot lotions, bottles of lager poured on arms, necks, calves, chamomile in the hair, and every herbal trick that I, in particular, adopted to make my complexion less milky and my hair less dark. As I got older I had begun, instead, to protect my complexion, my natural colors. Denying what you were, becoming something different and then forgetting you had wished it—there was no other way to become adult, or if there was I didn’t know it. Thinking of the past as a line composed of various segments, each piece representing a girl who no longer existed but had once existed undeniably, a daughter who had left and had married a man and new habits, in another house and another city.

  “Signora, what to say, the problem remains the same,” De Salvo said aloud.

  “They insist they won’t make the second drain, and here with a drop of rain we’ll be flooded again,” my mother whispered.

  Then I realized I had interrupted a mute dialogue between her severe gaze and the back of an exasperated Signor De Salvo, who, with his hairy belly sticking out below the T-shirt pulled over his navel, was bent over the floor, sweating in search of a possibility only my mother saw clearly.

  “It really can’t be done. You would have to ask your neighbor to remove those three centimeters—believe me, with the second drainpipe we wouldn’t fix anything. Or we raise the level, but at that point we’d have to be sure that they won’t raise theirs more, otherwise we’re back to where we started.”

  Three centimeters.

  In that difference in level between our terrace and the neighboring one the story of our family was imprisoned, in that step the story of how my mother and I had survived, with an ostentatious superiority, Sicilian to the bone, a stubborn pretense that nothing was wrong, in the face of snubs, insults, pettiness, even more than injustices. So, rather than yield, it was better to go along with the misinterpretation of gentility, passing for a superior class of people who don’t get mixed up in brawls, don’t wish to be confused with trash. From then on I would always display my detachment, like a moat to protect the turmoil inside. But, to stick with the story of things, things had gone like this: one dull winter morning after my father’s disappearance an injustice had erupted on the roof. It wasn’t so much the three centimeters of reflooring, which suddenly made the evangelical family’s terrace higher than ours, but the informal and welcoming aspect of the whole, a direct offense to us. In the space of a few nights and a few days the evangelical papa must have labored to create on the roof a second house for his nest of children, the double of a dollhouse: he had enlarged the shed, giving it doors, windows, and shutters, put up a water-resistant metal gazebo, covered the new tiles with succulents that would never die, encouraged an ivy to climb the fence that divided his property from ours, a slender young ivy that would let us glimpse the lightness of their days. Come and see, my mother had growled, leading me up the stairs, and, following her, I had left my Italian notebooks open on the desk. On the roof, facing our dilapidation, I had seen: a new colored plastic tricycle, pails, shovels, and an inflatable pool that would be filled with summer shouts, pottery vases, and tidy curtains ready to shut
out winter. Do you realize? my mother fumed, they’ve raised it five centimeters, so when it rains the water will flow toward us and we’ll flood. Five centimeters, she repeated with assurance: she had already gone up once to the terrace to measure. I saw, I tried to calm her, looking away from the whiteness of their blinds; I couldn’t smell the odor but I was sure it was detergent, bread at breakfast, the scent of newborns and evening songs of praise. Happiness always occurs in other people’s faces, the evangelicals wanted to be happy in ours.

  From that day on, we talked only about the difference in level.

  She was no longer at peace. Discovering that the centimeters were not five but three didn’t soothe her, the water still flowed, a little more slowly but it flowed. Three centimeters measured my mother’s hatred for other families, indifferent to what had happened to us. My father’s absence had been transferred above, to the roof, while below a unique litany was performed: when the air became dark and electric, when the dogs barked and the palms rustled, the threat of rain made my mother nervous. She walked back and forth in the hall without looking at that single wall, I silently counted the first thunderclaps, and if with the first downpour the neighbors’ youngest child began to cry, she opened the refrigerator and took out a yogurt or a cutlet that immediately slid out of her hand and infuriated her, because we couldn’t go on like this.

  “Signora, are you listening to me? I’ll repeat it now that your daughter is here, the only way to keep the rain out of the house is to raise it three centimeters and make it level.”