Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  Desire isn’t made to be patched up: if it’s cut off it doesn’t recover according to the rules of good manners and the right moment. That was how we lived, every day more fatigued: on the threshold of an elusive, lost desire.

  I looked around in the quiet of the afternoon and recognized the slender profile, with long pale curls, that was crossing the street not far from me, speaking cheerfully on the telephone.

  “Sara!” I shouted, going toward her happily.

  She turned, surprised, and with a nod signaled me to wait until she finished the conversation, then she said goodbye to her interlocutor, promising to call back as soon as possible.

  “Hi Ida, how are you?”

  “Fine, my mother’s doing some work on the house and she asked me to give her a hand, you know, it’s full of old stuff, she’s making an effort to throw things away.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “A few more days, my program doesn’t go on until October and I’m sort of on vacation. How are you? Do you live nearby?”

  “No, I’m up in Annunziata, I bought a place in a new complex, Le Giare. I’m making a house call to a pregnant cat, that’s how I end the day.”

  “You must be the best vet in the city. You live by yourself?”

  “I have a beautiful dachshund, Attila.”

  “Maybe I’ll come and see you, we’ll have something to eat—what do you say?”

  “It’s hard these days, Ida, there’s too much work, and I’m practically alone in the clinic. Give my best to your mother.”

  She hadn’t asked me any questions, she hadn’t talked about my work, she hadn’t mentioned the program: did she listen to it? Sometimes, writing, I had mined her life for what I knew. I hadn’t had any friends after her, and I realized how much I missed that. Her coldness left a void in my arms, as if I had embraced the air.

  A Filipino mother arrived with two little girls, one flung herself onto the swing, the other wanted to play; there was a hopscotch game drawn on the ground in an indelible yellow color. The mother sat on the bench opposite. The older child didn’t want to hear of getting off the swing, insistent on rising to challenge the sky, so it was up to me to fulfill the desire of the younger. After an exchange of smiles with the mother I felt authorized to throw the stone first. The child looked at me fearfully, but after seeing me stumble she gathered her courage. I jumped and clenched my teeth so as not to fall retrieving the stone, and I jumped again and again, and then she jumped, I won the first round and the second, I lost the third, and it seemed to me that the day was melting into that scene: two unacquainted girls, one thirty-six and one seven, hopping on one foot, careful not to go outside the lines but always free to laugh, to win, and to lose.

  Once I got home, and the heat became less aggressive, I went up to the terrace with my mother. Nikos and his father were working on the parapet.

  The sun was setting slightly earlier than the evening before, the days were getting shorter. Nikos gave me a cheerful look and came over.

  “So how’s the choosing going? Have you decided what to throw away?”

  “Actually there’s really only one thing that interests me,” I said, thinking of my red box.

  “Then done, go, go back to your husband, you left him alone for all this time. Didn’t you?”

  There was a sensual and provocative tone in his voice.

  “I’m keeping my mother company until you finish the work. And you said yourself that I ought to be acting like an owner.”

  “True. And then, best not to trust two men in the house,” he sneered.

  “Exactly.” I looked at the scar on his left cheekbone. Without even making the decision I asked him: “How did you get that?”

  He didn’t expect the question. He went back to work.

  “I’m sorry,” I tried to repair things, but he didn’t answer. “It’s that I don’t have friends, I don’t talk to anyone. In Rome at least there’s my husband, here it’s more complicated. Even my mother. Especially her.”

  My voice trembled and I felt stupid: I must be immensely lonely to be so intimate with a stranger, what could the moods of an older woman matter to him. Nikos examined me again as if I’d said something that concerned him, too.

  “It’s always complicated to talk to your parents. They’re not the right people to understand, and maybe it’s easier with someone you don’t know.”

  I thought it would be nice to talk, once, the two of us. Nikos was braver than me.

  “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

  “Nothing,” I said, seizing what seemed to me a promise. “I’m never doing anything.”

  “Then after work I’ll show you something,” he said aloud but not too loud, without hiding but still making sure that neither my mother nor his father could hear.

  Before going to sleep, before turning off the telephone and charging it, even though the battery was still half full, I read the good-night message from my husband.

  The flowered cloth case where I kept the charger was one of the few things I had taken out of the suitcase. I had put it in plain view in an old catchall tray, and when I grabbed it I grazed a carefully folded piece of paper. It was yellowed and creased, but the hand that unfolded it right away was the same as that of the girl who twenty-four years earlier had taken the patient information record out of the trash can, carried it off in her pocket, and shut herself in the school bathroom to read the evidence of her father’s illness. It was a novel, in its way: the chapters were the symptoms, the contraindications, and the dosage. Agoraphobia, social anxiety, generalized anxiety: the woman’s eyes are the same as the child’s, eyes that hadn’t needed to read to know.

  You take care of Papa’s lunch, were my mother’s words of goodbye in the morning before she went to the museum. At the time my father still had his job, and a very high-level one was entrusted to me: feeding him. The task of keeping him alive, which my mother, out of fear or incapacity, had already abdicated.

  With you he eats willingly, he’ll only eat with you, she said, staring at me, and I remembered when, years before, we’d go to the passeggiatammare so that I could practice my skating. Before coming home, we always stopped at the same rosticceria. We bought a chicken on the spit and three orders of oven-roasted potatoes, sometimes four, because I couldn’t resist that delicious smell, and we ate the first order on a bench facing the sea. Sweaty, not even taking off my skates, I lay with my legs dangling and my head on my father’s knees while he put one potato after another in my mouth. Then I chewed and laughed and he laughed with me, and we imitated my mother, foreseeing the moment when, just getting home, she would reproach us for being late and for the suspicion that again, abetted by him, I had eaten outside mealtimes. Now the child is full, she won’t want the chicken! she thundered. I was very good at imitating her voice, so good that my father’s giant eyes asked for another round: to make fun of her better I got up, swayed on the wheels, put my hands on my hips, and started again.

  My father laughed, lit his pipe, asked for an encore.

  Only a couple of years later, the scene had changed. My father would return from the Juvarra school with his professor’s expression lying heavily on him. In the bedroom he’d take off his shoes and, keeping on pants, shirt, socks, get into his side of the bed. If I looked in to say hello, he answered barely moving his lips, so, in order to avoid not being tolerated, I had stopped even that homage. I stayed on my knees on the chair, leafed through the diary open on the desk, and counted the noises in the other room, which were always the same, soft and cruel: the rustle of clothes and sheets, the thud of shoes, the inescapable sound of aphasia. Those noises now were my father, they enveloped him entirely. He never entered the kitchen, so I got up my courage and went in, crossing the hall like a lizard. Every day, in the oven, in the refrigerator, and on the sink my mother scattered pots and notes with instructions for lunch,
it was up to me to carry them out because he wouldn’t even look at them.

  Papa will only eat with you, she repeated every morning.

  Passing his room, I spied through the half-closed door: my father covered up and huddled in the bed, over his ears a pair of headphones attached to the turned-off radio, in his pupils something similar to the water that dripped from the radiators. Meanwhile, outside on the balcony the furnace overheated in an attempt to send steam to the farthest pipes, it gurgled and blew and struggled but in spite of those efforts never managed to reach the rooms at the back of the house, which remained dry, and therefore cold. The driest and coldest was mine. To get warm I took refuge in the kitchen, the epicenter of the house; I put on the pasta water, took out the sauce that my mother had left in a covered casserole in the oven so that it wouldn’t attract ants, and after setting the table I sat down to wait for my father. I counted the minutes on the clock and already it was time to turn off the flame, I shook the colander so that the excess water would slide out the holes, I put the red sauce on the orecchiette or fusilli, filled the plates, ate for both, cleared the table, and left the dirty dishes in the sink to show my mother that it had all gone well.

  As for me, I had been very good at getting my father and bringing him back among us, a mission I didn’t have to give up, since it was so simple?

  I performed to the hilt what had to be performed.

  Never, not even once, did my father get out of bed to reward me. Never had the shell of unknown thoughts that had become his body considered interrupting the ritual and giving me, his guardian, a prize.

  Every day I absorbed the defeat, every day, after the completed performance, I turned back, crossed the hall again, found myself at my father’s door and again spied him lying motionless, the switched-off headphones over his ears, the eyes empty, two blankets too many on his thin body, the unperturbed gurgle of water in the radiators. I hurried away as fast as I could, away from the clock case in the hall, from the remains of lunch, from the leftover pasta and tomato in the garbage, away from the responsibility that my mother imposed on me, away from the void in which my father wanted to bury us: to live I had to get to the desk, the desk was salvation, homework a salvation, school and the obligations of the next day were salvation.

  My head hurt. I got up and shifted the weight of my body to my toes, I stretched toward the ceiling, my limbs responded unwillingly, my arms, reaching, hurt, my legs pulled. From the wall I heard a gurgle of water.

  The radiators were the same as when my father had lived in the house and when he no longer lived there; they had warmed my mother’s winters after I abandoned her and would warm the new winter. I didn’t know what to do with the objects, but I had no doubt what to do at that moment. Moving aside the wicker basket and a bundle of old magazines, I got down to observe the radiator attached to the wall between the desk and the window: between the narrow tubes dust balls proliferated, infinite nests of old dirt. It had to be cleaned thoroughly, sanitized by scraping away the dirt from the metal folds; it would take proper rags and slim fingers, time and care. I blew and the black cloud of my mother’s indolence rose into the air.

  I turned the knob on the left side and after a brief silence there was an explosion, as when you open a carbonated drink. The compressed air in the pipes made the water shoot up, and it dripped from the radiator onto my ankles and toes; I had to reclose it and run. Meeting my mother in the hall, I shouted at her with all the voice I had: What have you been doing all these years, what have you taken care of, you haven’t bothered with anything.

  In the bathroom I found, where it had always been, the purple basin in which I washed and soaped my hands as a child, when I was too short to reach the sink. I took it with me and patiently set to work.

  One by one I liberated all the radiators in the house.

  I began with my room, collecting the water that was dirty at first and eventually cleaner, jets, and then weaker streams. Then I went to the others: the study, the living room, the hall, the kitchen; when the basin filled up I went to the bathroom, emptied it into the toilet, and flushed, making sure that the dirt of the pipes went down, and disinfecting the bowl every time, as if I had finished, as if I were not about to start again in a new room. My mother followed me in amazement and silence, stunned. “Does it seem normal to you never to have done it?” I couldn’t keep myself from attacking her. “Does it seem right to have neglected it?” and I meant the house.

  Like a busy cockroach I carried my frenzy to finish from room to room and finally I reached the bedroom, the room closest to the furnace, the room that had suffered the cold least and least needed to be drained, because air hadn’t accumulated and the water didn’t come out in a torrent as soon as I touched the knob.

  I managed to collect only a few drops, so I went to the bathroom for the last time. I put the basin under the open tap, tilting it right and left, I let the running water circulate, cleaning it thoroughly, and I emptied it of the last speck of dirt. It seemed to me that the walls resumed their normal breathing and the house became a body with freed, healed lungs. I went back to bed.

  Exhausted, sleepless, I tossed and turned and felt like laughing convulsively. I turned on the phone again and called Pietro. He answered right away: he wasn’t sleeping, either. I didn’t mention the radiators or my visit to the neighbors, I said I was tired and he told me that in Rome it had rained, he described the beginning of an American film he was watching on television and said for dinner he’d had two rice balls from the pizzeria near work. “Yes, but don’t go all these days without cooking something, it’s not good for you to always eat takeout food,” I told him. He didn’t answer. If I appeared worried about his health my husband changed the subject, he wouldn’t accept even the possibility that our roles could be reversed: it was he who took care of me; in reality the contrary could also happen, but it remained in the shadows, in mutual silence. It was he, between us, who was supposed to present himself as mother and father. I could accept or reject his care.

  I closed my eyes and imagined him.

  We were both in bed, each of us alone, in a dark room, half enveloped in warm sheets. We tried to show each other, in words, the day just passed, because we missed each other, but the path between us was interrupted and the sentences couldn’t be put in order. I felt worn out and a little dirty, I had skipped dinner with my mother, preferring a chocolate bar, and the tinfoil wrapping and an open bottle of water were near me, lost in the dust and disorder.

  “Where are you?” I asked. He, too, must be lying down, with the white T-shirt and blue shorts he always slept in. I sighed, I moaned something intimate and felt I had gained ground. I noticed that our voices changed together, and in the space of a few minutes we began to touch and caress each other, murmuring sweetly, obscenely, on the phone.

  In the end we burst out laughing. “Now I have your smell on me,” said Pietro. We had never done that, at a distance, on the phone, even though in the first months, after making love, we sometimes spoke about masturbating, as if to let the excitement drain in the thought of a solitary elsewhere, of expectation.

  We felt close through a telephone held tight between cheek and shoulder, describing to each other, expressing and allowing intuitions, whispering orders, while when we were in bed together we could no longer cross the few centimeters that separated us. Putting all those kilometers between us had had the opposite effect: the distance had reassured us, creating a new opening.

  I heard the volume of the television in our bedroom rise again. Neither Pietro nor I needed to prolong that moment, he wanted to go back to his film and I to my thoughts. We could treat what had happened as a dream; we said goodbye like conspirators and I slid into a light sleep.

  Seventh Nocturne

  I’m holding a small black kitten in my hands. If you look carefully you see it’s not a kitten but a smooth animal without a snout. It has eyes and a nose, and nothing els
e, it stares at me and would like to speak, if only it could. I caress its head, poor mute kitten, I caress its neck and ears. I caress its smooth, hairless stomach, and realize that it doesn’t have genitals. Frightened, I push it away and it leaps but doesn’t meow, it bounces off the walls, multiplies infinitely, fills the house, but maybe it’s not my house, it’s not a nice place, the place where I am.

  PART III

  The Voice

  Unhappiness Wasn’t the Rule for All, but

  Our House Was the Exception

  The next morning I turned on the phone again, stared at the battery charging, and waited for the notifications to fill the screen.

  The messages that my husband had sent me during the night said this: “I’ll join you, Ida. I can’t stand it anymore.”

  Three minutes later: “You’re already asleep?”

  Six minutes later: “I didn’t tell you that water and light arrived today, everything’s fine.”

  I didn’t know if I wanted to see Pietro, precisely because sex at a distance had made the night before so unexpected. You can’t desire what you already have, while my entire life demonstrated how easy it is to love someone who is absent.

  I answered that we had to be patient for just a few more days, and I treasured his messages, postcards from a place where water and light were bills, and to pacify them all you had to do was pay.

  888

  “Will you come with me to buy boxes for the stuff you want to save? There’s a shop in Tremestieri, it has cardboard or plastic, you can choose.”

  My mother’s voice broke in cheerfully on my breakfast, or maybe it was I who felt happy, after the clandestine and rather dreamlike sex with my husband, like someone who’s found a secret in the night and can keep it during the day.