Farewell, Ghosts

by Nadia Terranova

  “You know there were other works here and to make room for a superstore parking lot they knocked them all down, right?” I started off by letting Nikos understand how close to my heart that place was. “He wanted to create a street of the Arts, with a capital A.”

  Between us there was an uneasy complicity. I thought of how much Cammarata, a bricklayer with an adventurous life, occupying land not his own and building his universe on it, might excite the mind of a boy who, growing up, had inherited his father’s trade and compared it with the Puparo’s: the same activity, building houses, took opposite directions—his father obeyed the rules, Cammarata invented them. In between that two-faced model was Nikos. And if by day he worked on the roof of my house, now he was ready to celebrate that achievement of living, anarchic art which constituted another house, ruined and uninhabited. My thoughts and his were so close that there was no need to exchange them.

  “I don’t know how to build anything beautiful, I’m completely incapable,” I said, squatting on the sidewalk at the foot of the motorbike, where Nikos joined me, taking a bag out of the trunk. It contained a plastic bottle filled with a red liquid and two glasses wrapped in newspaper.

  “Wine from Etna. You drink?”

  He knew that I would drink and that I would prefer a glass to plastic, or maybe he wanted to exhibit a refinement in his manners, make an impression. I crossed my legs, trying to assume a relaxed, casual position. The wine was good, strong: peasant wine.

  “I’m sorry about the question I asked yesterday. I usually don’t invade people’s lives like that.”

  I felt my knees loosen, the effect of the wine, or of my words.

  “It’s a terrible story.”

  “I have strong shoulders.”

  “It happened two years ago. You want some more?”

  We filled the glasses again. I thought it would be nice to have some French fries, something fresh and fragrant; meanwhile Cavaliere Cammarata’s dark creatures, their outlines obscured, stared at us in silence. Horses, princes, warriors in armor: we had summoned them all to our hearth.

  “Her name is Anna. She’s the only girl I’ve loved. We were coming back together from an afternoon at San Saba, where the mountains of sand are, you know it?”

  San Saba, Acqualadroni: they were places I knew well, villages where as a child I went swimming with my father and mother; the beach Nikos referred to was known for its hills of fine, shining sand.

  “We’d gone there to swim, that’s all. That afternoon we just wanted to talk. Anna had finished school and wanted to enroll in the university, but her parents were against it, they said they didn’t have the money, it was just a waste, and anyway she wasn’t good at anything, she didn’t like studying, and so what had she got it into her head to do.”

  “And was it true?”

  “She had graduated with a low grade and the teachers didn’t like her, because she was beautiful and then because she always had an answer. She was ’na rispustera, she’d talk back. She couldn’t sit still at a desk, she couldn’t be quiet even when she should be.”

  “She was your girl?”

  “She was the girl of a friend of mine,” he answered. “It happens.”

  I said nothing. I drank the second glass of Etna red, holding it tight with two hands as if it were a cup.

  “That afternoon we didn’t talk about that,” he continued. “It had been going on for four months and every day we asked ourselves what to do and how to tell him. She was unsure because she was with him, and was afraid that if she left him he’d kill himself.”

  “And was that true?”

  “I was worried, too. Marcello had a difficult situation at home, his father had died the year before, and he sold drugs. I hang around with people like that, not young ladies, I’m sorry.”

  “If anything I’m a lady, I’m married.”

  “You’re right.”

  Nikos poured the third glass of wine and lit a cigarette.

  “You’re not going to continue?” I urged him.

  “I wanted to see if you’re bored. I was saying, that day Anna and I hadn’t talked about our problems. Anyway they were always the same: we made love every time we saw each other, I wanted her all to myself, she was terrified of leaving him, I felt guilty, she felt guilty, we all felt guilty, except for Marcello, who didn’t know anything. That day we had decided not to talk about those things, partly because we’d end up shouting or fighting and there’s nothing worse after you’ve made love.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eighteen, and she twenty. We had decided to go swimming like a normal couple, as if we were together. We always saw each other secretly, never in a pizzeria, very seldom at the café, she had this nightmare that someone might see us and tell Marcello. So I proposed: Let’s do a normal thing. Let’s go out. Let’s go swimming. The sea helps you think.”

  “I also do that, but I have to be alone. If you swim with someone it’s not the same.”

  “That day it worked. Anna was gorgeous in her bathing suit. Dressed or naked, yes, but I’d never seen her in a bathing suit. She’d put on a black bathing suit, she was all white, with hair blacker than yours, wet after swimming. Everybody looked at her. If I had been her boyfriend I would have been proud, and I did feel proud, because I was her boyfriend. She didn’t love Marcello anymore.”

  I would have liked to tell him none of us know whom we really love, and there are so many different things inside the word “love” that at twenty you shouldn’t name it, but this was the thought of an old woman and I kept it to myself.

  “She hadn’t brought another suit to change into. So she put her shirt on over the wet one and took it off underneath, then she put on her pants, and she got on the motorbike, pants and shirt and naked underneath.”

  “You’d been swimming?”

  “Far out, and I had kissed her, in the water and out of the water, I was mad for Anna. We practically did it on the beach in front of everyone.”

  “When did it happen?” I asked in a faint voice.

  “Coming home. A car passed us on a curve. I watched her die in front of me.”

  The Puparo’s warriors stared at us, with their mixture of magic and seduction. That was what Nikos wanted to show me: not a physical place but the terrible place that was his life.

  “I dream about her as if she were still with me, she looks at me, she says nothing, in the shadow there’s only her figure. Sometimes she moves her mouth to talk to me but her voice doesn’t come out. But I know what she would say: she won’t forgive me because I killed her.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault,” I said right away, to protect him.

  “According to the law, no, but I don’t give a shit about the law, even though she was wearing a helmet, even though I was going slowly, and even though we were in the right. At the funeral Marcello was crying; because I’m no one, I couldn’t even go to the church. Anna’s parents hated him, they knew he sold drugs, what sort of life he had, but death changes things, after the accident he became the best guy in the world, while who’d want to see me, even if it wasn’t my fault. Then Marcello also changed for real, poor guy, he’s not on the street now, and works in a computer store. He’s not a bad kid. Whereas I had broken my ribs and they wouldn’t let me out of the hospital, I cursed the nurses to their faces and the more I yelled the more they forced me to sleep. You know how I lived? Think of this sensation: as if I’d been tied up in a garbage bag. A black bag, thrown into a bin. I deserved it.” He put out the cigarette. “I deserve it.”

  I knew that bag. The bag in which the body of a woman or a mannequin had been cut into pieces in one of my latest nightmares. The plastic bag around my neck that might strangle me any day, tighten over me, cutting off the air, that bag full of old things I had just thrown away. I squeezed Nikos’s arm, he placed a hand on mine. I couldn’t read the block lette
rs above a scene drawn by the Puparo; time had erased some of the lines, and I didn’t feel like getting up, moving away from the warmth of the shoulder of that young man overwhelmed by unhappiness and regret. We sat close together and talked, not looking at each other, both staring at the creatures before us.

  “It was the greatest love in the world. There won’t ever be another love like that. I would have married her. I would never have left her. If only she could have convinced herself, right now we’d be happy. I’ve been with a lot of girls but no one was Anna, I felt at home with her, we were equals, two strong people who didn’t want to yield.”

  “But even if you and she had been together, she still would have died.”

  I, too, got stuck in his hypotheses: if Anna had left Marcello, if on that day they had been engaged, not secret lovers, if their bond had been official . . . It was absurd, senseless. But these hypotheses were all he had; he had brought me there to tell them to me, in a place that was dear to him and dear to me, a place that few Messinese knew and still fewer frequented: at night it became a rough, criminal alleyway, by day the customers of the superstore never suspected how much beauty might radiate from this place, maybe they even took the liberty of a vulgar gibe, mocking the project of a man who couldn’t be categorized. Whereas Nikos and I, very different in age and experience, had nourished ourselves on the folly of the Puparo, had accepted it as our frame.

  “How many people know this story?” was my last question.

  “Only strangers. The only ones you can tell things to.”

  When Nikos brought me home, I simply felt grateful.

  Eighth Nocturne

  Nothing to do about it, impossible to sleep.

  I have to wait for dawn, guided by the clamor of horses like the ones in the clandestine races that kept me awake as a child and still take place: just a few months ago my husband pointed out that there are videos on the Internet—proud bettors, mafiosi shouts and cheers, animals cut down by a sudden collapse on the asphalt. The inferno, a few steps from my house.

  No, impossible to sleep.

  Concentric circles of stories hold me in a false embrace. Sleep is impossible when memory is an open storehouse and every detail is looking for a place in a story.

  My mind needs to rest, but it can’t, because today other people’s suffering displaced mine, and while I’m used to mine, this I don’t know how to handle, and first of all I would like to ask if it has always existed or decided to visit me all at once just now. Sara’s cancer operation after the abortion, the sentence she received, to be unable to choose whether to have a biological child or not, her coldness toward me because growing up means knowing whom you can do without. Nikos’s scar, Nikos who carries on his shoulders the death of the beloved the way the old mules of Pantelleria carried travelers’ suitcases across the island. Impossible to sleep, because the scenes are strung together and now it’s up to me to be silent and observe that assembly line. “I deserve it,” Nikos said of his sense of guilt. I understand, I know what it means; “I don’t deserve it,” I say of the sleep of the just, which doesn’t arrive and which I’m not entitled to. Impossible to sleep, because I’ve wasted time, a prisoner of myself, barricaded by fear. Yes, my obsessions, yes, the alarm clock stopped at six-sixteen, the trail of toothpaste like the slimy trail of a snail, yes, all right: but while my father performed for me, other suffering played in other places, all at the same time, evil continues to exist while we’re busy thinking of ourselves; people die, get sick, suffer, seek, seek you, don’t find.

  Impossible to sleep, and it’s better to get up and look for an answer to the voices that assail me. “Subsume” would be the right verb: take upon myself the lives of others. I’m not capable of doing it with the living, maybe I can succeed with the dead, but what’s truly urgent is to think of the survivors. How does Nikos live, who loved Anna until a moment before her last breath? He still does, he continued, to stop loving someone is not among the collateral effects of death. One goes on feeling desire: not affection but pure yearning: Nikos carried it in his gaze as he spoke and recounted, desire deposited in the details he insistently paused on, the bathing suit, the shorts, the wet hair. No, one doesn’t stop loving someone because she’s not there: if it’s valid for parents, siblings, friends, why shouldn’t it be the same for boy- or girlfriends, spouses, lovers? Desire doesn’t succumb.

  Nikos desired Anna, we all desire someone who has left us, would we like to have a glass of wine with him one last time at a table on a narrow street, ask again the questions we’ve already asked, give in to the warmth, the embraces, a lost fragrance, spiky and familiar, just as it appears to us in dreams because it couldn’t happen in reality? Once, just once.

  Impossible to sleep, my head is bursting.

  I get up: I know exactly what I’m looking for: my red iron box.

  For twenty-three years it’s been shut in a drawer, not even my mother suspects its existence. I’ve kept it secret, thinking that one day I would be ready to open it, and in order to put that box in a safe place I crossed Italy and the Strait, endured the September smog and the plaster dust; when my mother said on the telephone that I had to choose what to keep and what to throw away I was afraid it would be thrown away, when she said she had rummaged among the objects I was afraid she’d found it, tossed it away carelessly, as a thing without importance, or with determination, so that the past wouldn’t return to infect her hands. No, one doesn’t stop loving someone when his name and his body are removed: we carry the voice and odor of the absent one, the two most unstable traces; we’d recognize them anywhere, and every so often we seem to hear them, and then we’re affectionate toward what has reminded us of them, a space or a person or a sound. My father’s odor of tobacco and his nasal and imperious voice had accompanied me everywhere I went in the past twenty-three years, and sometimes it seemed to me that I grasped them, but that was always followed by a sense of defeat.

  But now sleep is impossible, the moment has arrived.

  I get up from the bed and go to the desk, I open the fourth drawer, the bottom, the lowest. I move a packet of letters, Sara’s letters, from the time when we wrote to each other with a green pen and in the morning exchanged densely written sheets of perfumed paper. I also move aside a notebook and two diaries: the red metal box is where it’s always been.

  I hold it, I observe it, I study it, and I recognize it. Twenty-three years ago I put in here the proofs of the existence of a man named Sebastiano Laquidara, in this red box I buried the smell and the voice of my father.

  With a small snap I force the opening. The tobacco in the pipe nestled on the bottom rises to my nostrils, goes down my throat; I close my eyes and enjoy as an adult the scent of my childhood. There it is, the aroma that followed my father when he went in and out of rooms, that remained stuck to cheeks and neck after kisses and cuddles. I sniff the air and find who I was, sniff and know who I am. I move the pipe from one hand to the other, hold it in my fingers, caress it and bring it to my nostrils, I let that smell release its power, exerting absolute control over me until the feeling becomes too much, and I have to get away; as I move toward the balcony the smell fades and almost vanishes, I go back, I’m crying, finally I cry.

  I cry as long as I have tears, while I’m waiting to move on to the second object placed on the bottom of the box, a cassette in its plastic case, my mother’s handwriting on lined paper: “Ida at 11.” I can’t keep the memories in order, one prevails: the day of my birthday I had an outfit—flowered sweater and skirt, pale wool stockings, black shoes tied with a small loop, why should a child wear black shoes, what evil omen is that heel of a future Achilles?—I blew out eleven pink candles right there, in the living room, the cake was a profiterole (in our house we called it “white and black,” good and evil). I had had eleven candles and a few presents, a pair of new skates from my father, my hair pulled back in a braid by my mother, children around, childhood fr
iends whose names I don’t remember, but I remember the three of us: my father my mother and me, the original triangle. I blow out the candles, the children leave, my mother urges, Let’s sing, I dance, I jump on the couch with my shoes, no one scolds me, my parents have drunk spumante, they’ve drunk too much. My mother doesn’t sing, she leaves the room, returns with the stereo, takes the wrapping off a new cassette, presses the key REC, the memory breaks off. Darkness.

  Two years passed, and in that time my father’s body disappeared, while his imprint remained in the house, his absence the first damp stain on the ceiling, and my mother and I are alone, nothing but alone. My father has left us, we didn’t fight hard enough, we’re unworthy of him and a good fate, we made a mistake, we failed, we’re condemned, we’re rejected. My father’s name has disappeared, I’m about to be defeated, I squeeze my palms and no longer find anything to squeeze. It’s November 2nd when I reckon with my blood: my first period arrives the morning of the Day of the Dead. It was late and here it is, my father disappeared and I have to grow up, menstruation says I’ve already grown up. I come out of the bathroom frightened by a transformation I can’t oppose, at all costs I have to hold on to my father, how can I hold on to my father who’s leaving? His body disappears from the shirts hanging on the hangers, his hands disappear from mine, my father’s no longer here, my mother’s at the museum, I run to his room, to their room, I open the drawers of the night table, in the first my mother’s things, in the second my father’s, I steal the pipe from among the objects belonging to him, I steal the tape from hers, I carry them off to safety in my room, those two objects alone matter to me, I choose a box to put them in, I choose a drawer to bury them in. The pipe and the tape recording, and that’s all. Everywhere, inside and outside the house, my father’s name is disappearing, along with his body, but thanks to me his smell and his voice are safe.