Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  “I got ground meat for dinner,” my mother said. “I made it in white sauce, I remember you like it that way, in the bain-marie.”

  Her voice was gentle and sad, and I had no desire to torture her again with the past.

  Fifth Nocturne

  Before going to sleep I call my husband. The telephone rings in vain, and someone else might worry, but not me, I know everything about him, he’s never betrayed me, and then betrayal is nothing, half sentences and an excess of truths have already broken in two what we are, we loved each other and wounded each other and slept beside each other separate and wild, we showed ourselves vulnerable and incompatible, irrevocably, and discovered every time that you don’t die of the irrevocable. We’ve been married for ten years, we’d known each other for eight months when I asked him, Marry me, I’ve never wanted anything in life, it’s the first time I’ve wanted something with all my might, that’s what I said to him. Eight months was even too long, I already knew what he would offer: refuge for me, refuge and remedy for what I was, I wanted only that, I’d wanted it forever. But now I’m calling him and my husband doesn’t answer, the things we haven’t said assail me, knock at the windows. It’s stopped raining, it’s midnight, and my husband is sleeping. I push the telephone far away from the bed.

  I think of my father’s body and last night’s dream, tonight my mother brought meat and vegetables to the table, just as she did twenty-three years ago, as if I had to wake up tomorrow and go to school, as if the black-and-fuchsia backpack at the foot of the bed under a hill of biology, literature, Latin books had never been put down, as if the objects scattered in the room still occupied the place they occupied. If I don’t sleep I have to protect myself from the girl on the beach at Scylla, who enjoys tormenting me. My body is hers, I summon vertebrae, nails, hair, joints, but to no avail, I feel nothing.

  With one hand I pick up the telephone, the silent luminous screen says: three missed calls.

  “Good night,” my husband has finally written, and then: “I love you.”

  Tomorrow he’ll want to talk to me, and I don’t want the voices of others, not even his, I already regret having tried to call him; I’ll think up something, it’s not right to speak, not yet, not now. I’m in bed, I’m extremely tired, finally I fall asleep and I dream.

  My mother is laughing, lying down, turned on one side toward me, disheveled and happy as in the photo, I intuit the ochre-colored blanket in a tangle at her feet. She has just hugged me, she looks at me gratefully, she doesn’t have the smile proper for a daughter, my mother isn’t laughing at me, she hasn’t hugged me, my body isn’t me: in the dream I’m the body of my father.

  Terrible Things as if They Were Normal,

  and Perhaps the Reverse

  The damage, I reflected in the morning under the cold water of the shower—the increasing damage was contained in me in the form of good manners. While others reacted to suffering by becoming aggressive, for me it was better to hide aggression. The last trace of my father was hidden with cruel tenacity in an unflappable and proverbial cordiality much loved by strangers: the more remote they were, the more they loved it; the less they knew of me, the more they praised my courtesy, especially if they’d met me through my husband—his colleagues, his few friends, his modest relatives. Politeness protected me.

  The appearance of meekness I had upon arriving in Rome came from Sicily, I had watered and cared for my politeness in adolescence, when my mother and I wanted the world to stay away from us, as far away as possible, and we had understood that the simplest way to keep people away was to be very courteous toward them. By ourselves, within our walls, we succumbed to the house and the absence that pervaded it, but on the street, in the supermarkets, at school and at work, at the movies, in the shops, on the landing, at the windows of banks and post offices, we smiled often. We didn’t show wounds or appear defenseless, we didn’t ask for help; people were considerate about the void that had marked our existence and we repaid them by praising their full lives, to each we said the nice thing, and if someone insisted on looking for conflict we turned our backs and let him howl at the moon, incensed and incredulous, isolated, reluctant to accept being nothing in the face of our secret war. We didn’t fight with others, we didn’t have time. They passed before us: those who wished to cheat us on the change at the cash register, those who overtook us when we were slow to start up at the traffic signal, those who raised the neighboring terrace three centimeters higher than ours. And, before that damage was transmuted into dampness in our walls, even the evangelicals were unimportant. But the danger of others’ happiness was always lying in wait, could offend us continuously, we could never stop protecting ourselves: our cordiality guarded the wound like a sniper, defending with its weapons the border between us and the world. When, on the other hand, we were safe, my mother and I unceasingly covered up, and covering up we atoned; we had failed, but no one knew it, we were guilty, a depressed man had turned away from life because we hadn’t been able to hold on to him, we thought our guilt was a scarlet stain and unpunished.

  Two years after my father’s disappearance, we were at the beach, and a woman began calling her son: Sebastiano, Sebastiano. My mother and I, on our separate mats, stared at the water. That name wounded me, I prayed that the child would come out of the sea and the voice would stop calling him, that he would return to shore, I prayed that he would obey and she would not utter that name again, Sebastiano, Sebastiano—that was all you could hear in the whole bay, Sebastiano. My mother remained mute behind her sunglasses. It was our punishment: a name that we no longer uttered, repeated to wound our ears. The unconsciousness of others was our enemy, the dailiness of others was our enemy, the names of others were our enemies.

  In the years of his depression, my father had lost more and more of his friends, until he didn’t have any. He and my mother, both orphaned, had enclosed themselves in a sticky cocoon, and my father’s illness had done the rest; the days following his disappearance had been days of fruitless searching and questioning, was it really possible that no one had seen him, no shopkeeper, no fisherman along the shore? In those days only one of my father’s few acquaintances who had visited the house turned out to be useful to me: not because he had news or because he could really bring me any comfort but because he suggested what would become my truth. We were in the living room, a room usually closed, my mother had removed the sheets that normally covered the couches, and this man—white beard and hair, kind eyes, chubby hands—whom I had seen sometimes next to my father in the class photos from the Juvarra school, had asked if I liked to swim. I nodded. Like your father, he responded. I was thirteen, an age when one believes only in details. I had gone to sleep devastated and confused by the mourning without a corpse that shadowed our house, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that man’s words: my father liked the sea. I remembered long summers spent swimming together, and I remembered the day that routine ended, because of a terrible fear in my mother’s gaze when my father, already depressed and thinner, didn’t emerge from a long swim. How did that man know that my father loved to swim, had he told him, had they gone to the beach together? My mother had introduced me, he was the principal of the Juvarra school, then why, if he seemed so kind, had he agreed that my father should leave his job? Pondering, I learned two things: that people don’t have a single face, and that my father must, of necessity, have returned to the water.

  In the days that followed I began to be resigned. If my father had chosen the sea, that was the element through which he would speak to us, and it hardly mattered that the search recovered no trace of his remains, that on no beach had he been seen alive. From that moment on, I would listen to the water.

  You went through terrible things as if they were normal, and perhaps the reverse, Pietro had said to me once. He knew about me without ever having asked, in the only way we need to know the facts of those we love, because we know them, period.

  Other Peop
le’s Houses

  “So weren’t you supposed to go and talk to the neighbors?”

  My mother was right, I had promised. I had to deal with the floor and those three arrogant centimeters; I had put it off and there had been the storm, but the sun was shining again.

  Standing in front of the closet, I chose a light dress in autumnal colors that had belonged to my mother. The background was ochre, like the blanket that enveloped her in the photo with my father, and it had a pattern of intertwined leaves and a mandarin collar fastened by two white buttons. I buttoned them, in spite of the heat. Since I returned I hadn’t worn any of the clothes I’d brought from Rome: just as in past years the suitcase sat on the floor half open and entirely full, nothing it held would be useful to me, in none of the beloved everyday clothes of the other life—mine, I said to myself insistently—would I feel comfortable. I crossed the hall and went into the bedroom to see myself in the only full-length mirror in the house; my mother was shorter than me, the dress that grazed her knees pulled up on my hips, I loosened my hair, stole a comb from the night table to hold it in place and a silver bracelet with an enameled clasp, pinched my cheeks so that I’d look less pale, and, finally, accoutered like a knight, I slipped out onto the landing.

  After I rang, there were sounds of plates and children’s voices, quick, cautious steps and a pause behind the door; it was opened by a woman with long brown hair held back by a hair band, wearing shorts, sandals, and a dark cotton tank top, a young mother. I recognized the third of the five children of the evangelicals; so the apartment had gone to her, hers the pile of problems, the holes in the plaster, the crumbling outside walls, the partitions to knock down and the load-bearing walls to circumvent, the choice of furniture and new objects to shelter, hers the refloorings and repaintings, the avalanche of memories and innovations, hers a world parallel to mine, in fact worse: she also had to endure the weight of fights with her siblings, of the division among equals. I, an only child, was spared at least that burden.

  “Ida?!”

  “You remember me?”

  “I hear you on the radio.”

  “Oh, the texts, not the voice.”

  “It’s my husband’s favorite show.”

  “Thank you, really. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the time, you were probably having lunch.”

  “How are you? Did you just get here from Rome?”

  “More or less,” I explained, as if not having called her before had been a failure on my part and not the norm between two people who had never been friends but happened to share a landing. I followed as she led the way into her house.

  She had eliminated the hall, an old-fashioned space, considered useless by the majority of our contemporaries, and we entered a big room: the husband and children sitting at the table, the television on, the window open to let in the air, on the high chair a colored plastic book for infants, the kind that make cries and sounds when you put your fingers on the buttons. The little girl pressed, her brother complained about the noise, the father intervened to quiet them; on the plates was pasta in tomato sauce with eggplant and basil on the side—children don’t want intrusions on simple flavors.

  “Carlo, look who it is, let me introduce Ida Laquidara, she came just now from Rome.”

  A solid young man with dark eyes and thinning hair clipped short got up to offer me his hand, a born father.

  “Congratulations, I always listen to you. Eat with us, we’ve just begun.” They said something about the children, introducing them by their names, they poured sparkling water in a glass and put a serving of pasta on another plate. I wasn’t good at refusing; I hadn’t said a word and already I was avoiding an excess of eggplant: “Thank you, that’s fine,” I resigned myself. I slid onto the chair and began to wonder about the name of the girl whose face I had met on the landing, in the doorway, whose voice I had heard dozens of times, on summer and winter evenings, when with the rest of the family she sang hymns and songs of praise to a god neither my mother nor I was concerned with because we didn’t have time for him, because that god couldn’t help us any more than we could help ourselves. It would have been good and useful now to start the conversation calling her by name, Marta or Stefania, a detail that would itself be the bearer of friendship, meaning: Of course, I remember, too, I’ve always remembered you.

  “So it was here that you sang,” I said instead.

  She looked at me in surprise.

  “At night you prayed, with your parents. In this room. This wall”—I pointed to the wall—“is shared with our living room.”

  “It was the living room, the kitchen was over there, I changed a few things when I got married. Did we bother you? My parents wanted to invite you, we rang the doorbell once, but you weren’t there, I said: Surely they’re busy . . .”

  “It seems like yesterday, doesn’t it?”

  My question was banal, my question was false. It didn’t seem like yesterday or today; rather, it was the era that I hadn’t forgotten, whereas one who becomes an adult justly forgets. It wasn’t yesterday or today, it was forever: even though the roof of my house was collapsing, and the walls of the house next door had been knocked down and new ones put up, even though the evangelical family had experienced its natural diaspora and beside me sat a survivor who had saved herself in whatever way she could, as I had tried to do and as everyone tries to do. I envied her the dailiness of the stove, the smell of cleanliness, the future she had gone to meet, the tablecloth that had drawings of American desserts on it and recipes in English, maybe bought on a honeymoon—there must be photos of it on the walls and in an album or on a computer, posted on the Internet, sent in a chat. And in that life that was the opposite of mine I found a life the same as mine.

  “My mother,” I started off at a distance. “Years ago my mother noticed that your father must have done—by himself, I imagine, because your father is the type to do these things by himself—he must have raised the floor up there, on the terrace, by five centimeters. By the way, how is he?”

  In the normal world fathers grew old, they got sick, they died. Outside my house, fathers were not frightening entities made of nothing.

  “He broke his wrist last week, falling in the bath—luckily my mother was with him. They moved closer to the center.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s true, we did some work on the terrace, but that business of the centimeters I don’t remember. My mother didn’t like the color of the old tiles, she chose the new ones with my sister, how long has it been? Twenty years? We were all still here.”

  “It wasn’t five but three, the centimeters. My mother always exaggerates.”

  “Giuliana, your father must have put down a new floor, as Ida says, he does things his own way, doesn’t listen to anyone, plus he always makes a mess of these jobs, remember what shape we found the bathroom in.”

  The husband’s intervention came to my aid. Giuliana. The bathroom. Proper names, common names, dialogues, floors, mistakes, small real facts, footholds.

  “For years we’ve had problems with dampness, there are cracks in the ceiling, the paint started flaking, then the plaster. Last month there was another collapse and my mother decided to redo the roof.”

  “Oh Lord, Ida, I’m so sorry, I saw the workers, but why didn’t you tell us? We could have figured out a solution together. Look, my father always causes disasters . . .”

  The boy threw his fork on the floor, whining in a loud voice; there was a commercial on the TV. I looked down, staring at the leaf pattern on the hem of my mother’s dress, which recalled the neck that I couldn’t see; my eyes were burning, my ears stinging. I wanted to cry. It would have been simple, authentic, and natural. Why hadn’t we told them, what had kept us from ringing the bell and explaining? What could I say now to Giuliana, that we had ruined our life because we didn’t know how to say the word “remedy”? That we were paralyzed by my
father, who returned, furious, to visit us through the water that the obsessive disfigurement of those centimeters had poured insistently, more and more insistently, onto our ceiling?

  What was true was the confused rattle of a child, the child I had been and was still, who had passed through a body that was adolescent and then adult. Or I should have said: I’m sorry, Giuliana, but my mother and I were absorbed in protecting ourselves; from what, she would have asked; from you, I would have had to answer, and she rightly wouldn’t have understood.

  “Now we have to put in a new floor, and the contractor asked us to agree on the height of the floor: we can’t stay lower, but I don’t want to be higher than you and cause you damage, I want the levels to be the same, but we have to specify, be sure that later, I don’t know—tomorrow for some reason or other—you won’t raise the floor again.”

  Giuliana and her husband smiled, my words had set off in both the same conspiratorial, shared thought.

  “We’ve given the apartment to an agency to sell, my husband has been transferred to Palermo.”

  “It’s not the moment to commute,” he added, and I thought he was talking about school and the children’s routines, until finally I observed my neighbor, the shirt pulled over the protruding stomach, five months, or maybe six, that secure and trusting gaze was pregnancy, the serenity of one who has nothing to lose, because she’s playing at a different table.