Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  “But of course, yes, congratulations.” I hurried to camouflage my distraction, or, rather, my repression. I reread the whole dialogue in a different key, I began to cover my failure with compliments, questions, when will it be born, is it a boy or a girl, what do the other children say, there wasn’t even the time for me to hear an answer before, immediately, the next question was ready. Meanwhile I picked up two rigatoni from the plate, a mouthful of eggplant, another piece of pasta. The tomato was barely cooked, the way children like it, and had the fragrance of basil even though there was no trace of leaves: most children avoid green in food, children have a chromatic appetite, greens disturb the red, the taste has to be homogeneous, sugary, compact. It wasn’t a pasta for adults but a pasta cooked for the children. It was a dish thought up for them in the supermarket, like the plastic spoon with a yellow bear drawn on it, the calendar decorated with cartoon characters, and scribbles next to the dates: first day of nursery school, checkup at pediatrician, orthodontist, the baby tooth is replaced, the chicken pox comes and goes. It was the life of people who weren’t afraid of transformation: children who become adults who become parents, couples who become families, desires that become writing on a calendar and walls repainted in inoffensive colors, pale but not neutral, because the passing of the years is never neutral, the generations rest on choices that aren’t choices, one child then another, one house then another, the dislocated wrist of a parent who’s getting old, you welcome an old acquaintance, show off a living room, move to another city, taking with you something that isn’t only yourself.

  Finally free of the demands of the children, who were distracted by the cartoon credits, and of the tension that had preceded the explanation for my visit, Giuliana’s husband asked about my work. He loved the program I wrote for, he loved the people’s stories, and we always chose stories he could identify with, he said. He asked me if they were all really true and I said yes, silencing a certain uneasiness. He added that he had written to us, sending in episodes from his life, but we had never chosen them, and he went on recounting his experiences, in detail. I couldn’t concentrate, but I laughed when I had to laugh and nodded understandingly when I felt that my concern would be useful to him. I encouraged him to write again to the editors, I wasn’t the one involved in choosing the proposals, I said, but I would put in a good word. Then I noted that it was late, and my mother was expecting me; I thanked them for their kindness (what kindness? I gave the eggplant all the credit). Once I got up I realized that, sitting down, pressing with hips and thighs, I had stretched out the dress: it was no longer tight. Giuliana went with me to the door and said goodbye with a hug, her stomach protruding against my mother’s dress. On the landing, as I turned the key in the lock, I noticed a spiderweb neglected in the branches of a fake plant under the light switch.

  In the kitchen another lunch had been prepared for me and was waiting: breaded cutlets. The bread crumbs mixed with tiny bits of garlic, cheese, and parsley covered wide tender slices. My mother had added cut-up potatoes sautéed in a frying pan: when I was a child she made them like that for frittata, but before putting them in the beaten eggs she saved some pieces for me on a secret plate in the oven, protected by a napkin, I took it out and ate them all, then I licked my fingers, greasy with oil and salt.

  “No problem,” I reported. “The De Salvos can raise our floor, they won’t raise theirs again and will tell the next owners not to repeat the mistake.”

  “What? They’re selling?”

  “They’re going to live in Palermo. You didn’t tell me that Giuliana was pregnant again.”

  We hadn’t talked about her or our neighbors, and in none of our phone calls had there ever been an opening for news of the evangelicals. My mother looked past the halo of a stain on the blind, speared two potatoes and a piece of meat and smeared the forkful in the oil, pursed her lips in the vexed expression she had whenever something unexpected inserted itself between her and the things she had chosen to ignore, concentrated on that intrusion, and we both chewed it away.

  Two Black Plastic Bags

  After lunch I shut myself in my room with two bags full of stuff that my mother had piled up in the study because I was supposed to consider it first: what to keep, what to throw away, what was important and what wasn’t—what to get rid of and what moved us. She couldn’t know that I was interested in saving only the contents of a red box at the bottom of a drawer, and yet I was curious to see what objects she had set aside for me.

  I sat on the bed and began.

  I thought I’d find in those bags the beating heart of her request, a scale of recollections and priorities, the sign of our shared memory, a hand reaching to draw me out of the silence of the years. Eagerly I began to rummage, remove, drop on the floor what didn’t interest me: spare parts for a bicycle, unused cartridges for a printer thrown away before I moved.

  That’s it?

  The more I rummaged, the greater my disappointment, and dismay: my mother had assembled the objects that in her view would be useful to me, not those she imagined contained a memory. Her choice had nothing to do with memory, only with usefulness. The objects were all fairly new, brought into the house after my father’s disappearance, going back to the period of his vengeful reappearance in the form of water and the following years; they were contemporary things, empty and already shriveled, they were dusty, ugly things, above all ugly. In the bags considered important by my mother there was no trace of the time when we were three, there was no memory of when that number meant me, my father, my mother. That was the original triangle, but life, for her, started from another epoch, from another number three: me, my mother, the house. And that triangle broke up, too, because the relations between us functioned like an obsessive dyad, a constant duel: my father and me, my mother and me, the house and me, mother and father. And now, in the bags on account of which she had summoned me to return immediately to what she insisted on calling our house, my mother had accumulated an undifferentiated jumble of things, united by a presumption of usefulness.

  She might be able to use that, she had thought about each of those pieces of junk. She had continued to save objects that would mold a future, mine; she had stopped with the ones that were no longer useful (baby clothes, trousseau), to start again with new bits of junk that in her view were suitable for my new life and that husband she barely knew, for the new city I hadn’t moved away from, for choices she felt she wanted to make less sad and precarious.

  Last, I pulled out a blue metal stapler and a pen with a crowd of butterflies drawn on it, and then I stretched my feet out on the mattress, exhausted. My dirty heels made two black spots on the white sheet.

  A familiar pain arrived from far away, not the greedy languor of melancholy that needs to be fed but the clear cry of sadness that asks simply to surrender, a Siren I gave in to helplessly. From the bags rose the same unstoppable force I had found in my father’s eyes, in the passivity with which he endured our false joy when we pretended that he might get better, fearing that the depression would emerge from his gaze and brush against us, like an infection. If it was an epidemic, then my father was the plague-spreader, and we couldn’t protect ourselves. On an ordinary summer evening, the trauma over and winter gone—the mosquitoes tormenting our legs, the undercooked fillet on the platter, the hum of the neon and the dust on the plastic of the light fixture, the television on, with the worst summer songs—my mother and I should simply have put down our forks and said to each other: He’s gone. Not talked about the dampness, not discussed the centimeters raised by the neighbors, not scratched our hands on the ice in the freezer getting out the meat, not burned our palms or forearms when we turned it on the grill, not wounded our bodies just to silence the words. Rather: we should have mixed our tears with the oil and fat of the meat, named the body of my father, created a tomb made of sentences and even tears, if necessary.

  We hadn’t done it, and his coffin remained everywhere.r />
  Supine, the bags at my feet, my hands grimed by the sweaty patina of time, I struggled toward the porthole through which I could get out, take off toward the water or the light, free myself, not keep spinning in circles. But none of my thoughts moved aside to make room for my mother: you can’t subject a ceremony to a transformation, a ceremony is handed down inviolable from year to year, from day to day. As always I should have acted by myself. I stretched out my arms, spread my palms, and resigned myself. Then that perfect actor who had been my father came onstage: darkness, light, a bell, the alarm clock, no more alarm clock, three numbers: six one six. My father stretched, got up, opened the closet, chose the shirt, stared at the image of himself in the mirror, chose the tie, left the wrong one on the chair, tied his shoes, looked back, and so away, out of the room, out the door, down the stairway. Curtain.

  Sitting in the first row in my theater, I had ordered that scene to repeat itself a million times: not just an obsession but a compulsory ritual, the way hand-washing is for some people, or not passing between lampposts before an appointment, or dividing the objects in a room by shape and color. Rituals, only rituals: they allow us to get through a dark and threatening time by promising safety after the repetition. To each his own: mine was my father’s departure from the house. Safe inside my narcotic, I could find the truth I preferred, always the same: his was a rebellion, not a surrender. My father had reacted to the fear of death and the depressive illness by cutting off my mother, me, work, the ochre-colored blanket, shirts, jackets, pots, alarm clocks, beetles, a dangerous roof, photographs that no longer resembled him, a long hall like a gallery, all those books, all that life. To death, which had checkmated him and nailed him to the bed, he had uttered the magic formula: Nothing belongs to me anymore.

  Sixth Nocturne (Afternoon)

  My mother and Sara and I are hiding in the bathrooms of a ship, we ended up there by mistake, or by chance, without tickets, jumping through a hatch; the hold is empty, we divide up the toilets, Sara and I in the women’s, my mother in the men’s. We hear voices, footsteps, they’re looking for us, they discover us. Dragged out, Sara defends herself by displaying a big black bag: we found it, she swears, it wasn’t us. She’s right, it wasn’t us, but I know that we should have kept it hidden, not talked about it with anyone, discarded it before we got on the ship. My mother brushes her hair: it’s late, she says, and then we were barefoot, she adds, as if it were a sin to go around without shoes. The sailors stand in a circle around the bag and empty it cautiously, as if it contained a bomb; they pull out two legs, a wig, an arm, a stump, I don’t know who that woman is, it wasn’t us who tore her to pieces or stuck her in there, they’ll think it was us but it wasn’t, the men are angry, they shout and threaten us. The bed rejects me, the bed hates me, I wake up, the bags are still there.

  Leaking

  My mother wasn’t sleeping. I went in to her, I sat on the chair next to the bed and spoke first.

  I didn’t say: It’s the same bedroom where you slept with my father.

  I said instead: “The film we saw that night, where a little girl goes to stay for two weeks with her grandmother, whom she’s never met, you remember it?”

  My mother shifted the sheet. “The one with that blond goggle-eyed American actress?”

  I didn’t say: There was the scene with the tree.

  My mother drank some water from the night table. “I remember, it was a good movie.”

  It was a March evening, the second year after my father disappeared. I had the remote and was flipping through the channels seeking refuge from the news and its commentators, when I stopped on Channel 4. A little girl had arrived at her grandmother’s house in the country. She was sad because her parents were going on a long trip and wouldn’t take her with them; she lived in the city and barely knew the woman with blond braids and the expression of a witch. Little by little the girl is sucked into the world of jams, cupboards, goat’s milk, and nighttime screech owls. At that point in the story my mother had awakened from after-dinner dozing, pulled the blanket up over her knees, and we watched together, in the dark, an innocent film. As the day of departure approached, grandmother and granddaughter decided to plant a tree that would grow, together with their bond, summer after summer.

  The camera had framed the chosen rectangle of a field, their emotion-filled faces, and then the earth again. The two shovels were lowered one after the other to dig the hole. The grandmother’s shovel. Clods upturned. The granddaughter’s shovel. New clods.

  Incapable of changing the channel, I had waited for my mother to say something first. In the silence her eyes reflected the scene, the shade of green, the brown, the gray of the shovel. My father’s body couldn’t be found anywhere and I couldn’t move, the forgiveness we could have allowed ourselves seemed so far away, the hope we should have relied on so impossible.

  I said: “So you remember?”

  My mother said it was an entertaining film, for children.

  “They were digging a grave.”

  “I don’t remember that scene.”

  “They were supposed to plant a tree, I thought they were getting a place ready for a coffin.”

  My mother got up from the bed. “It’s twenty years ago, why do you still think about it?”

  “I always think of the things I remember and also the ones I don’t remember: I have space for them, too.”

  “And you’re proud of it? You’ll poison yourself, it’s not good for you.”

  “I’m not boasting, I’m saying what I’m like.”

  “But forget it, Ida, for the love of God, what’s the use? It was a good film, a nice evening. And it was so long ago. There was no coffin. You spent an evening watching television with your mother. Is it so difficult for you to have normal memories?”

  In front of her I was a defendant who has sworn that he’s innocent but acknowledges in himself a vague, unequivocal sense of guilt.

  “If you forget, I have to remember doubly. You force me to make a double effort.”

  “You say you remember everything, but you learn from nothing. I don’t forget, Ida. We’ve already lived like that, with the suffering that you always want to drag out; but everything ends, even suffering. The past is never the same, you can recount it differently after so many years, you know? Maybe you would have liked to see me mourn a man who didn’t want us, you would have liked to see me deathly sad. Your father ruined me, but you don’t consider that, you care only about yourself, not how I went on, alone. He left, and we’ll never know where he went. What people experience in the early days of a relationship has nothing to do with what happens later. Marriage begins when that thing ends. Why did you get married, if you didn’t want a child? If you wanted one you should have done it right away. Now you say you don’t want one, you’ve forgotten when you used to say you would call him Sebastiano, like your father.”

  This, too, was true. In another time, I had been a child hugged by a father, caressing his beard. I had cradled dolls dreaming of a child who would have his name. My mother had held on to that memory and now restored it to me, bright and shiny, just arrived from a time when my father was strong, healthy, and still with us. I would have liked to answer that there would be no Sebastiano, but it wouldn’t have been true: a Sebastiano, living or dead, there was and always would be, hidden somewhere or other, his truth unassailable and at the same time defective, like my crumbling certainties.

  “So I should have a child, and give him the name of a father who disappeared, a child who will never know if he carries the name of a living man or a dead man. I won’t give him a name or even an existence, because as long as the body of my father has no peace, I won’t, either,” I said all in one breath, bold as a character in a Greek tragedy.

  Maybe my mother would have liked to answer, but she had the wit to say nothing. Victorious, I filled the silence by offering to go and get something for dinner, and sh
e said that we had all we needed in the pantry. But I felt like having a beer, the light foamy beer that’s made in my city, I wanted to get one directly from the refrigerator of the shop near the house. I needed air, a lot of air, and on the street I breathed oxygen and salt. The shop owner recognized me and greeted me by name, an exaggerated gesture of affection, considering that it came from a coarse old woman so self-satisfied that she had been unable to leave the shop to any of her children, and remained to preside over her kingdom, a kingdom created before I was born. She was exactly the way I remembered her, only with a softer chin and a few more wrinkles. Coming out of her store, I sat on a bench in the old square of Torrente Trapani, recently given over to a playground, drank the first swallow, and thought of Pietro.

  A few nights before I left for Messina, we had gone to dinner at our usual restaurant to celebrate the end of my program’s summer season. I had ordered fillet and chicory, he a dish of fettuccini, and rather than the usual half bottle of house red, a whole bottle of a Friulian wine. With the first glass I had felt my tiredness relax: I had worked all of August, denying myself beach and vacation, enduring the heat and summer discomforts of Rome, from the mugginess of the subway to the pulled-down shutters. Pietro was talking to me but I wasn’t listening, he was complaining about his job and the car that was giving him trouble, he said he wanted to trade it in. Already by the second glass I was more lighthearted, and had extended one foot under the table to poke my husband, trying to play with him as I had during the early days of our acquaintance. He had lowered a hand and tickled one of my ankles; then he stopped and went to the bathroom and I understood that he had gone to wash his hands. His caresses had been affectionate and fun, but the duty of hygiene had called him: we were still at the table, there was still food to touch. I had drowned my disappointment in the third glass, and after dinner in a digestif accompanied by ciambelline. Once we were home, in bed, it was he who approached, trying to kiss me without conviction, while I stayed on my side until, almost immediately, he stopped.