Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  Time, meanwhile, had made the two terraces more alike than they’d been in the past. The dividing fence was now fragile and rusted, I stuck my right hand into the lattice and pulled it out maroon with rust, impossible to get your whole wrist through a square. It wasn’t only my limbs that had grown; the entire roof seemed smaller. In memory our side was big, desolate, abandoned to the wind and the dust, the childhood toys piled up in the shed; the neighbors’ half was just as big but friendly and full of objects. Now that both had grown older, their terrace was like a middle-aged lady who had been beautiful in another decade, while ours, sunken and destroyed, was preparing for a possible rebirth.

  De Salvo stared at my mother, waiting for an answer.

  It doesn’t matter, we’ll take the water, I would have liked to say, we’ve always had it and we’ll have it as long as we live, it’s all that remains to us of my father, does that seem outlandish to you?

  In Sicily, the island without water, where you always have to reckon with drought, where there are fights over aqueducts and no one has yet found the solution to taps that dry up every evening, the water never left us in peace.

  “You’re right,” I said instead. “You’re absolutely right, Signor De Salvo, if we don’t resolve the question you can’t work. I’ll take care of talking to the neighbors, so we can be sure they won’t raise it again.”

  Third Nocturne (Afternoon)

  I’m seven, I never sleep during the day, I want to play and not waste time. My mother chases me up the stairs, even if I don’t sleep I have to go to bed—you’re not allowed to disturb the adults’ rest. In my entire childhood I fall asleep at most two or three afternoons, stomach down, head turned, mouth open, and drool on the pale cotton of the pillow. It happens to me again now, after lunch; after the promise I made to De Salvo, I’ll talk to the neighbors, encouraged by my mother’s icy eyes.

  I collapse, and dream.

  I get a telephone call while I’m driving the car, not on my phone but on an old walkie-talkie; in fact I’m following instructions from a distance, someone is leading me to the body of my father. I’m driving, yet I see the scene from the outside, as a map, a treasure island map; the car is moving with me inside and the walkie-talkie on the dashboard switched on.

  I park, get out, sink my feet in the sand, men are digging, we’re here not to bury but to exhume, the bust, the head come out, along with clods of earth like the ones that are thrown on a coffin, but there aren’t any coffins, and all the movements are backward, from the earth to the surface, until a body wrapped in a shroud is hauled up, is it the body of Christ?

  They’ve brought me here as a god, it looks like Palestine, they speak another language, they speak all together, but I don’t want to participate in this thing that appears to be a banquet, I don’t want to touch the bones of God, I don’t know what to do with the bones of God.

  I don’t want to dig up the body of Christ, I want to dig up the body of my father. I want to hug it, whisper to it, shout at it, touch it, hug it again.

  We’re here not to bury but to exhume.

  The Blue Hour

  In the coolness of the afternoon I decided to go out. The De Salvos had finished work and would return the next day, my mother was in her room listening to the radio as she rearranged the closets; she was taking out the linens and organizing them by color, putting them back in the drawers according to new criteria comprehensible to her alone. The voice of the host was announcing a suite, the sound of the cello was resting on objects that suddenly were not too many or too invasive. On the landing I stopped, I hadn’t yet closed the door, I went back and took the telephone out of my pocket, left it next to the alarm clock. Finally freed from time, I faced the city.

  It was the hour when, on the Calabrian coast, on the other side of the sea, the highways and the overpasses stand out clearly, while on this side Messina spreads and rises again, descends into small valleys, and opens at the corners to stairways; it points at the sky with fountains and steeples, bows down from Catalan cupolas to broken sidewalks, looks out the windows onto working-class courtyards. It must have been after the earthquake of 1908 that we stopped throwing things out, historical memory making us incapable of eliminating the old to make room for the new; after the trauma everything had to live together, pile up, we could demolish nothing, only construct to excess out of fear, shacks and apartment buildings, streets and streetlights: overnight the city was there and then it wasn’t, and if the disaster had happened it could happen again, infinite times. So it was better to train yourself to hold things together, put up a building right away to cast a shadow on the one before, then a third to take the view away from both, and so on until the architectural implosion became an inextricable tangle.

  The only way was to walk along the sea. Walking, I would fight my battle, as when I tightened the straps of my backpack to go to school or to my friend Sara’s. Away from home and objects, away from the front door and the usual street, away from memory and the empty grandfather-clock case, away from the alarm clock that had stopped twenty-three years earlier.

  Now, on the street along the sea, I had to choose my direction.

  To the left: the shore and the museum; that is, the water and the place where my mother had worked for years. To the right: the cathedral and the entrance to the highway; that is, a historic center touched up like an amusement park, and the possibility of flight. But I wanted only to take advantage of an hour of invisibility, an hour without the telephone, without the clock, without pockets, without anything. I could go up toward the panoramic neighborhoods, choosing one of the streets called torrente, because the city had originally been traversed by rivers, which were then silted up to make roads that wound from the coast up into the hills. Torrente Trapani, Torrente Giostra, Torrente Boccetta . . . With my eyes closed I smelled the odor of fresh water poking a hole up through the asphalt, Messina was a city with a muddy foundation. I chose to go to the right, toward the passeggiatammare, the sea so mixed with the city you can forget it exists, like the rivers buried beneath the streets.

  It was no longer day and not yet evening but, rather, the blue hour: no boundary between sky and water, the line of the horizon vanished, countless gradations of a single carpet of color. Clouds above the statue of the Madonna in the harbor, a couple of addicts quarreling near a bench: he shouts, You’re a bitch, you’re a real bitch, she shouts louder, Stop it, lower your voice, people will hear us. A few horns, waves against the cliffs. You’re a bitch, you stole my soul; you’re a shit, you still owe me the money from last year. There’s something vital in the desperation of people who yell at each other, even chase each other, pursue a word, beg for a response; I envied that relationship, that attachment to life which I had had, and which then must have disappeared into the depths of the sea, along with the king’s ring that Colapesce is charged with recovering. The myths of the Strait had been my fairy tales as a child, Cola who grows fins because of the time he’s spent in the water, Morgana who charms swimmers when the air is too clear, Scylla and Charybdis, nymphs transformed into monsters; the sea that separates the island from the continent, that thin liquid strip crowded with ships and, once, feluccas for fishing for swordfish—an insatiable sea, made fierce by the apparent calm of its limits. It’s not open, tourists and visitors think, seeing it imprisoned between two tongues of land; it’s not open, and so it’s safe and protected, they think. But what can’t extend outward sinks down to infinite depths, and the myths are there to remind you.

  Of course, to a superficial glance, that water is only a rectangle.

  Alongside me a tram passed, a relative novelty for Messina. But two decades before, when the sidewalk was still free of tracks, I had walked that stretch countless times in my gym uniform, hair bound in a braid, with the anxiety about running and sweating typical of slender adolescents. Even earlier, in childhood, I had gone back and forth on that sidewalk, from the day my father gave me a pair o
f roller skates until the day I fell while he was distracted by one of his mute thoughts, which wasn’t unusual in the year before he disappeared. Stumbling, I had skinned a knee, an elbow, and half my chin, and my upper lip was swollen. My father got up from the bench, shaken out of the apathy in which he now passed his days, and said, Let’s go, come on, what are we doing here, these things aren’t for us. I had unlaced the skates and put them over my shoulder, setting off on the sidewalk behind him. The cars passed us in the opposite direction, my father didn’t turn, he didn’t hold my hand, he didn’t admonish me to be careful. I would have liked to admonish him to look out for the cars and stay near the sidewalk, but I could no longer tell him anything and so had kept it to myself: Let’s hope he doesn’t die. I must have thought it so strongly that, soon afterward, the gods had punished me by fulfilling that wish: my father hadn’t died and never would.

  We stopped going to the passeggiatammare: it wasn’t I who had made a mistake but my father, who had discovered that concentrating on something other than himself was a luxury he could no longer afford. In the morning he pretended to open his eyes but he didn’t really look at anything, my mother put the tray with coffee and a plate of sesame biscotti next to the bed, she went to walk along the sea and then to the museum, I left for school calling out bye at the door. What material my father’s days were made of was a subject to avoid.

  Things were the same only in my memory, and the same as they followed me out of the house; memory has sturdy shoes and implacable patience. I tried to leave the sea behind me, advancing into the city. On Via Santa Caterina dei Bottegai the windows of the apartments on the second and third floors were closed. No one lives there anymore, I thought, and right away: No, they must have gone out for dinner. Staying home at night at the end of summer was a mortal sin, they’d all gone somewhere or other to enjoy the cool air, they’d return later, families with children and couples in love, opening the windows to let in the September night, ready for bed or a last discussion in the kitchen. Imagining them, I managed to tolerate the deserted street.

  Finally the contours of my high school appeared. Out of the last window on the lower left, our classroom, the teacher had hurled a trot found under a desk: it’s better to know nothing than to have half-baked notions. I paused on the saying high up on the wall: “Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines that are preached beyond the Alps.” Instinctively I glanced at my feet, but no: this time my shoes were dry, shiny, a pair of anonymous dark flats. A condensation of dampness in the air entered my bones. The blue hour had turned gray. But before going home I had an ultimate goal: the small square near the courthouse.

  In the afternoon, when we finished our homework, Sara and I would go and sit at the Fonte dell’Acquario. Dusk descended on cars idling, bored, at the traffic light, and we sat on a bench with paper cones of smoking-hot crocchette bought at the nearby rosticceria. Sometimes we sang. Behind me I felt the breath of the marble boy astride the globe, sometimes he blew harder and warmed my neck with a palliative warmth, water never spurted from his fountain and I never felt like crying. Sara was like me, but intact, her house was light and ordinary, her thoughts free to coincide with her history. When we were together I, too, could be fourteen, so I held on to her like a shipwrecked person, I who had hated all ages since my father stopped having one and who knew that his every birthday would be celebrated against me.

  The name of that place came from the god Janus, later Aquarius, or, for the people of Messina, Gennaro.

  Now he was before me again. A familiar god, covered by weeds, small and more anonymous than the giant of my memories, not the boy who blew on me on the noisy afternoons of adolescence but a mute piece of marble without importance.

  I lay on the bench, hands interlaced under my neck, knees pulled up, in the midst of the pierced hearts and quotations written with a felt-tipped pen on the iron back. The streetlights came on, and I no longer thought of anything. The past was a distant region, things are motionless only in my memory, the same memory repeats countless times like a theatrical début, my father wakes at six-sixteen, flicks off the alarm, and magically that clock doesn’t go forward; he chooses a tie, puts down the tie, brushes his teeth, leaves a trail of toothpaste like a snail’s slime, goes out of the house in the blue shirt, turns to look at the door, has a flash of melancholy satisfaction. Curtain, darkness, no applause. My eyes hadn’t seen that memory and yet it had been playing inside me for twenty-three years.

  I turned on my side. I took out of my pocket the only object I had brought from the house: a green pen with which I did my homework and wrote Sara passionate letters of friendship. On the iron back of the bench, among the names of lovers and vulgar, obscene drawings, I begged for the peace of a corpse and wrote the words that real orphans can afford to mock and survivors of a disappearance yearn for like tranquility: “Here lies Sebastiano Laquidara, his daughter Ida weeps for him.”

  When I finished writing my father’s obituary, the fury of his name subsided.

  PART II

  The Body

  Life Is the Blink of an Eye

  My whole life I had been the daughter of the absence of Sebastiano Laquidara. While I was becoming an adolescent the house was damp, the winters windy and the summers dry: the driest one was the fourth after his disappearance. I had turned sixteen that winter. You’ll be the prettiest sixteen-year-old in the city, my mother had promised when I was a skinny, scrawny child, and to honor that promise, or that anguished blackmail, my face became less hard, small but well defined, soft breasts developed. I wasn’t pretty, but I was something else, my body had listened to my mother, or, simply, she had known because she had already gone through it: sooner or later everyone comes out of childhood, my mother had received the instructions before me, she knew how it worked. I emerged with difficulty from a compendium of protuberances—bony nose, teeth straightened with metal braces, pointy knees and elbows—and the mirror gave back a new image, the polished version of a possible aspect: mine. My mother had predicted it.

  Day by day, as my skin stretched and my body lengthened, as I grew rounder, the climate became drier, and the vengeful absence of my father threatened to leave the people of Messina without water. It hadn’t rained for weeks, the newspapers reported the water crisis, and the walls oppressed us; in the suffocating heat my mother and I hurried to buy two floor fans, placing one in each bedroom, mine and hers. All day, with my legs stretched out and tickled by the moving air, I read my books, not the ones on the improvised shelf where my father’s handbooks were piled. At a bookstore in the city center I had chosen Albert Camus’s The Plague because it talked about dead mice, and in the house I had flushed out the mice and defeated them when my mother was afraid; Camus’s mice could be a metaphor for whatever they wanted, but for me they were real, period, they reminded me of my struggle and my triumph. My mother would never have had the courage to set a trap, move the couch away from the wall to get at the hidden rodent, shout to frighten it, make it hesitate and fall onto the cardboard smeared with glue. Nor would she have had the courage to finish it off with a blow from the broom: these actions I had performed.

  At night, sweating, I crossed the dark hall to the kitchen, opened the freezer, detached the few slender excess stalactites from the frozen food, and took that solid water to bed. I rubbed the pillow with ice and, having re-created an illusion of coolness, fell asleep again, struggling to turn over because the few extra kilos of my new femininity, compared with how thin I’d been in childhood, were weighty and burdensome; if I turned on my side I felt them, if I was on my stomach I noticed. I was no longer androgynous and so: Who was I, what was I going to be? My mother had known in advance that I would change, I had to admit. I said to myself that it was a simple and common experience, I didn’t recognize in her a maternal instinct, we were two trees planted at different times and she had grown first, that didn’t make her a parent, just as being born l
ater didn’t make me a daughter, on the contrary: the more we grew, the more we were plants that happened to share the same terrain, if the small one wanted to observe the large one she had to raise herself up a little and twist, exposing branches and leaves to the risk of rain or sun.

  While an entire region suffered from the heat because of me, while water drained from the houses of my classmates and was dumped on me by the name of my father, that summer I grew up.

  Overnight I had begun to display what Sebastiano Laquidara no longer had: a body. I wore stretch shorts, cut-off flowered shirts, bras that hooked in front, canvas sneakers, fluorescent rubber bracelets. I no longer wore glasses but soft contact lenses, of a new generation; I had gone to the optometrist with my mother, who, not content to sit in the waiting room, had followed me into the doctor’s office and pulled out a fan along with complaints about the early heat. He listened to her while I practiced in front of a mirror in the corner: wash your hands, soap them carefully, dry them well, place the lens on the index finger, widen the right eye with the left hand. I had gotten good at it right away, which happens in the disciplines we learn on the margins, in a solitude far from the distraction of others; as soon as that alien thing had hit the center of the iris my gaze opened up. No more blurred outlines, no dim, dirty view; but, standing up with nothing on my nose, I was afraid of losing my balance, I felt exposed. My mother had paid the doctor and saved the receipt in her wallet, satisfied that the destiny of normality she had established for me was complete.

  For some time she had been pursuing only that: bury my childhood and our misfortune, open me up to summer, to the impertinent light, to sweat and an unrestrained adolescence, sweep away ugliness and affliction. And if my father had decided to miss all this, if he hadn’t wanted to be present at the initiation of my life as a woman, so much the worse for him. So said every new gesture of my mother’s, intended to convince me that it was worth the trouble to live and to forget, and I, with my suddenly naked eyes, after a few days had learned to put on makeup to hide small blue veins in my eye sockets that I didn’t even know I had.