Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  “How was work today?”

  Lawyers, Europe, commission. Pietro turned off the radio and didn’t consider it necessary to answer me.

  “I’ll come get you, I’ll take the highway, Ida, I knew you were making a mistake.”

  “No, no. I’m fine. I’m home.”

  “Is your mother with you?”

  “She’s in the other room. The workers are here.”

  “You’re in your room?”

  “It’s the usual story of my father, but my mother has piled up everything in here—you know, she’s emptying the house and I’m afraid of the objects, they’re giving me a mean look.”

  “You’re very strong, Ida. Stop brooding, you’re not your mother, remember that, you’re not her. I let you go because you had to give her a hand. Choose the things you want to keep, tell her what to throw away, in fact the two of you throw it away together, and then come home.”

  Without the English woman Pietro’s car was occupied by silence, he must have pulled over to talk to me more easily. I imagined him with his hand still on the wheel, my voice filling the space. I was silent, too.

  “Ida. You understand, you’re not your mother. I’m coming to you. I can’t today or tomorrow, because I’m substituting for a colleague, but I’ll leave in two days and be with you.”

  My husband’s voice caressed my hair, smoothed the folds in my neck, brushed the space between the nape and the ears. I ended the conversation, held the telephone in my hands, and thanked the technological miracle that allowed one to be invaded by another person hundreds of kilometers away, to have one’s mood altered by him, and to ask him to help one resist.

  I took an old pair of light jeans out of the closet and a white ribbed shirt that resembled the workers’.

  Lamps

  Happiness doesn’t exist but happy moments do. With Pietro’s warm voice still in my ears, I went up to see if I could get in advance that other moment I was entitled to.

  Nikos and his father were working quickly in the sun, overwhelmed by the din of metal and pipes and tools, shouting tersely from one end of the roof to the other in a mixture of dialect and Italian. As soon as they became aware of my presence they stopped talking but not working, and neither of them came toward me. I went over to Nikos, who was adjusting the base of a lamp. My mother had wanted eight lamps along the sides of the terrace, for when it got dark, maybe to have parties if she didn’t succeed in selling the house right away, and I had thought that even if she never sold it, even if I spent much more time there than usual, we would never have parties on the terrace, because we never did things like that together, and because nothing is more melancholy than a summer party.

  Once, Sara and I had been invited by a boy in our class to his birthday party. It was before the day at Scylla. Sara was already going out with Fabio but hadn’t brought him with her, and we arrived at a sumptuous apartment, with a long double living room, hanging lamps, and small crystal objects in display cabinets along the walls. On the tables were trays of Messinese focaccia (cut-up tomato, escarole, cheese, some with anchovies and others without) and lots of ice-cold beer. We weren’t many, since the majority had already left with their parents for their second houses at the beach, and we ate and drank and chattered. Then the boy’s mother came in, asking if everything was all right, without hiding a worried expression. And she told us what had just happened: a thief, trying to get in through the window of an apartment on the top floor, had slipped and fallen into the light well, and had died instantly. The mother, frightened, added that an ambulance had come to take away the thief, and, finishing her story, closed the door as if she wanted to protect us. For a moment the noise of us young people had been suspended, then it resumed as if nothing had happened, and I went out on the balcony, which faced the street. Leaving behind the heedless voices of my classmates, especially those of Sara and the birthday kid, I observed the street, dark in spite of the lights of the ships and smaller boats, feeling that nothing could be sadder than this: a summer evening in a city that has emptied out, a man who dies setting his foot in the wrong place, a group of teenagers continuing to celebrate a birthday. I went back into the living room, and the anguish passed, or maybe it was transformed into something else.

  888

  Nikos was fumbling with one of the lamps my mother wanted, he stopped and looked at me.

  “Shall we go?” I said.

  “Now I’m working.”

  “Come on, let’s go now,” I repeated, “it’s hot for work.”

  Signor De Salvo had stopped, too, and was looking at me with a questioning expression.

  “I’m taking Nikos for a walk,” I shouted, forcing myself to be friendly.

  “Signora, I’m sorry, but without my son I can’t finish putting up the lamps and the work will come to a halt.”

  “We’ll never use them. We won’t have any parties on this terrace, I don’t live here and my mother doesn’t invite people over—these lamps are useless, no one will ever light them.”

  “This afternoon I have to set them up again. And then, if I may: you don’t know what your mother will do on this terrace, you children think you know everything.”

  We are also responsible for what we didn’t want to see, I thought. I was, too. What did others see in my mother’s life, beyond and after my father? Who was that small-boned, severe-looking woman, sensual in her harshness? I remembered the months of the Miser, a man my mother had gone out with for a short time six years after my father’s disappearance, a store owner whom I immediately hated, and I had fed that hatred by concentrating on his flaws, the worst of which was stinginess. I couldn’t tolerate his tense face the moment the bill arrived, I couldn’t tolerate the calculations he made about the price of everything. I was nineteen, and stinginess seemed to me the worst quality in a man. I imagined my mother calling the Miser again and welcoming him to the terrace in the light of the lamps that had just been set up: on a swing, or under a gazebo, they would drink coffee and talk about old times, looking at the ferries docking and departing and at Calabria cloud-covered or clear, always too near or too far.

  “Come on, it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference if you continue the work this afternoon,” I insisted.

  The Miser and my mother had gone out for a few months, during which I adopted small stratagems of attack. When they came to pick me up at my university classes, or gave me a ride from one part of the city to another, when I saw them together, sitting in our car—ours: mine and my mother’s—I felt a mounting rage for the violated triangle: my mother, my father, me; or: my mother, the house, me; or: my mother, the car, me. I dismissed the fact that new ones could be born, or that the triangle could become a quadrilateral. What did the Miser have to do with us, sitting on the throne in front, which pushed me to the rear again, forcing me into the back seat? He got out to welcome me and greet me, because the car didn’t have four doors, and to get in I had to slide behind the front seat, lifted up and leaning toward the windshield. The Miser got out, accommodating, to let me get in, and for him it was a triumph, whereas for me—who had to bend my back, crouch down, and crawl through the door—there was shame and humiliation, expulsion from the kingdom. Our car—without a doubt: ours—then became an occupied territory, and, huddled behind him, in a sign of protest I pushed my knees against his seat back to annoy him. My mother wasn’t aware of it, the Miser took it and adjusted his position, but there was nothing he could do: my legs, ready for the fight, aimed at his spinal column, went on pressing, and pressing, and pressing against the seat at the height of his bones. I would have pierced them if I could, boring into his sternum; for my enemy there was no salvation. I pushed and pushed, angrily, and it seemed to me that I saw him sweat, defending his position with a show of indifference; he would never allow himself to scold the daughter of his lover, and even to complain would have been a serious mistake: if he had reported
that my knees were sticking into his back like bayonets, he would have lost forever the possibility of an alliance. When he finally got out of the car, because we had arrived or because I had arrived, I read in his face a tortured relief. The battle was over and I had won; losing the war no longer mattered to me. But I won that, too; at a certain point the romance was over and he disappeared from our days. He had asked her to live with him, but my mother had ruled out that possibility, either in our house or elsewhere, making it in fact a story without a future. It had been her most effective form of care for me.

  “Anyway, this house is mine, too,” I said to Nikos and his father, resigning myself to going down the stairs alone, and yet not wanting to give up on a late-morning walk.

  Annunziata

  Messina’s cool morning air was giving way to the heat of the sun as it grew stronger. At first I thought of going to the cathedral, where every day at noon the clock spectacle starts up: the lion roars, Dina and Clarenza, the protectors of the city, ring the bells, the rooster crows, Death, with his scythe, marks the four stages of life: childhood, youth, maturity, old age. I liked the idea of returning to the square and half closing my eyes while the Schubert “Ave Maria” began. In high school the teacher would open the window and we students sat still and quiet, ears straining: on days when the wind was favorable, the noon sounds and music from the cathedral reached the school and our developing minds. At the university I’d kept up the habit, looking out between classes, waiting for the notes of the toy clock; if I was out walking, I’d manage to end up in front of the cathedral, I’d mingle with the tourists and impatiently observe the bell tower until the short and long hands were superimposed. Midday could then release its magic.

  I headed toward the center anticipating a renewal of that solitary joy, but everywhere, in the cars and at the tables of the cafés, I saw mothers and fathers, couples and single parents who, having taken their children to school, were stealing, with one coffee and another, a shred of late-morning freedom before going to work. Again I saw my father when he took me to elementary school and then went on to the Juvarra, and my mother the rare times she brought me and continued on to the museum; I felt such nostalgia, regret for a time that couldn’t return, that I turned my eyes toward the sea.

  But the water didn’t respond. And I was seized by a great desire to react, to be born again, to pummel life, immerse myself in the present if only to resolve at least one of my disrupted stories. Maybe my mother was right, it didn’t make sense to spend all day reversing course toward the past. No matter how much power we attribute to our thoughts, they won’t alter what happened. I would go to the coast, choose a modest beach, and go swimming. A swim. Long, liberating, purifying. By myself, though, I wouldn’t make it, the memory of the dream of the night before leaving was too vivid, the fear too present. I would be able to swim if someone was on the shore waiting for me, and there was one person in the city I would have liked to play that role: Sara.

  Gathering my courage, I climbed up the vertical line of the torrenti, headed for the neighborhood of Annunziata. It was a risk: climbing up and not finding her, because she was at work. Or, worse, finding her and feeling again the chill she’d shown at the playground. Part of me knew that Sara was certainly not dying to see me. But I was dying to see her, and I relied on what I needed.

  I took the risk.

  To the right and left I passed the tall apartment blocks built some decades ago, new homes that claimed to dominate the city. Going up higher, I observed houses with gardens that would never be seen in the center, houses where you could sit peacefully outside on summer evenings, in tranquility after sunset, and the city, seen and imagined, began to look tiny: the sickle-shaped harbor and the Strait, the top of the bell tower, the small boats and the Caronte ferries, the light of Scylla and the shadows of Charybdis, the line of cars stopped at the intersections, the scattered gardens of dry green, the hazy curtain of Torrente Boccetta, carrying the trucks that supplied the island with imported goods and exported as many when they left—from above the whole made up an alien relief map, a reduction in scale of the place where I had lived. I knew the city by heart, but I never looked at it like that; was that how Sara saw and imagined it, from above?

  Arriving at the gate of the Le Giare complex, I looked for her name among the buzzers, and reading it I felt an uncontrollable turmoil. We were no longer friends, Sara and I.

  Our relationship had ended on the threshold of twenty, summed up in the mutual gaze of two involuntary witnesses who no longer wanted that role. Each looking onto the other’s life, we had been girls as best we could, or, rather, we had passed through the worst age, adolescence, on parallel paths from which every so often we held out a hand to each other.

  “Who is it?”

  “Hi, Sara. Am I disturbing you?”

  We were now two adult voices talking through an intercom.

  It would have been ridiculous to make an excuse, to say that I was passing by; no one wanders randomly through the complexes of Annunziata.

  “Ida. I’m on my way to work, wait a second, I’m coming down.”

  Sara had recognized me immediately, but she wouldn’t let me enter her house. The chill in her voice reminded me of what I had suspected: while I had recovered memories of tenderness, she offered me a polite but firm distance.

  The front door opened. Sara, in a purple cotton dress, her feet in a pair of flat leather sandals, came toward me. She stopped between the entrance and the gate, smoothed her hair, looked for something in her purse, and, raising her head, clenched her teeth while I couldn’t restrain an expression of victory. I would have liked to go through the bars, rush up to her and hug her tight, wrinkle her dress, muss her hair, tell her she was beautiful and together find a way back, for both of us, into our shared history; but from her came a distinct coolness.

  “Sara, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” she answered impatiently, passing through the gate. “I’m late, I should have started early today. It’s hot—did you walk up?”

  “Yes, sorry. The name of the complex struck me, Le Giare. It’s a sort of melancholy day and I thought: maybe you’d feel like going to the beach, we could stop at my house, I’ll get my bathing suit . . .”

  “No, Ida, it’s impossible, I have to go to work. I don’t have time to relax, today will be a crazy day at the clinic. But if you want I’ll take you home, I have to go down that way, too.”

  I followed her to the garage; she had taken the keys out of her purse. She warmed up the engine, brought out one of those small fashionable cars my husband called “tunafish cans,” and opened the door, apologizing for its untidiness.

  “I never have time to clean it,” she explained, more to herself than to me, and getting in I felt something familiar: we nest only in dirty places, I recalled.

  Inside her car Sara seemed more relaxed, she felt protected, as I’d once felt in my mother’s and my car; but she placed her hands on the steering wheel skillfully and I couldn’t stop admiring her, grateful to the fate that had led her to find me as the friend of adolescence. Sara’s voice, aspect, closeness were a gift, even at the cost of the cold bark I had to tolerate to enjoy it. Driving with the assurance of someone performing a daily ritual, she guided the car out of the garage and through the gate, and turned onto the steep descent that would take us back to the flat neighborhoods.

  While I was spellbound by the confidence with which Sara handled her car, my father stood out before me with a new clarity. Not his ghost in the form of water but an almost real creature.

  My father came up from the sea and walked, barefoot, in the middle of the street, in the opposite direction from ours, wearing clothes tattered by the waves and encrusted with salt, the blue jacket that would be fashionable throughout the decade following his disappearance, and which he—already broken and battered but attached to his own bursts of vanity—had bought before going to bed and
not getting up again. It was that detail that inspired a sudden new fear: the jacket hadn’t changed, it was the same, with slightly rounded sleeves and elastic wristbands, elastic at the neck. Fashions changed, but not the jacket.

  She doesn’t get older, I repeated to myself, referring to the girl living inside me who had stopped at thirteen.

  She doesn’t change, said my father’s jacket.

  What isn’t transformed isn’t real; nothing, in my life, was transformed.

  I looked at Sara. Absorbed in driving, she had turned on the radio and was listening to the news.

  “Sara . . .”

  I thought: Did you see him, too? Did you, too, always see him when you came to study at my house and my father was still there, in the form of damp stains on the ceiling, water that wouldn’t go away?

  “What, Ida.”

  I thought: I can’t make it. I’m in Sicily, it’s September, it’s as hot as midsummer, but I don’t have the strength to go in the water without you nearby. What’s happening to me?

  “I don’t feel like going to the beach. Not by myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Ida, I really can’t.”

  I thought: So it seems like a whim, and Sara will move even farther away from me, but she doesn’t want to listen to me, she wants to go to work. And I just saw my father, I saw him.

  To emerge from the stupor that vision had put me in, I asked: “How’s it going at the clinic?”

  My voice was shaking, but Sara didn’t notice. She complained about her inexpert and inadequate colleagues, their reckless arrogance that endangered the lives of the animals, the unhygienic conditions she had to reproach them for, about cats, dogs, canaries, the absurd egocentric pretensions of owners of exotic animals. Oozing from every phrase was how superior she felt to her surroundings, how wasted she felt in the provincial clinic. All those words at least had the effect of calming me. The university, she said, hadn’t been able to guarantee her a job in spite of her top grades, and she had had to abandon research to get locked into a job that wasn’t satisfying. Luckily there was Attila, the dachshund, who waited for her every day, but he was a problem, too, because Sara got home late and never had time to take him out—