“That doll was too beautiful, the doll Silvana,” she sighed.
“You remember the names of your dolls?”
“Also of yours. Teresa, that’s the name of the one you still have in your room.”
“I’ve got a lot, and I don’t play with any of them anymore.”
“Choose what to keep—it’s why I asked you to come. Even if I’m not going to sell, it’s a chance to organize.”
“Go through my stuff, I give you permission. You want to know who your daughter is? Here’s your opportunity. Choose, throw away, scartafruscia, scafulía. You see, now that I’m leaving, dialect comes to me. You can read my diaries, assuming you haven’t already. The letters Sara wrote me. You can choose to read nothing and get rid of it all. Even the dolls, do what you want with them.”
My mother didn’t answer; besides, what I’d said to her wasn’t, this time, in the form of a question. I didn’t leave room for a response.
“Pietro’s coming to get me in Villa San Giovanni.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t have to. The crossing is mine, it’s the thing I have that’s most mine—I want to do it alone. Let’s go home, I’ll get my suitcase and go. Mamma, if you can’t sleep tonight call me.”
“All right,” she said, and the rest was lost in goodbyes.
There’s a final scene that repeats eternally in the present, at the end of nightmares, insomnias, obsessions, and a funeral. Even today I don’t know if it’s true or if I dreamed it, just as I don’t know if the objects that animate it existed or if Ida Laquidara is really the woman on the ferry that is heading away from the island, away from the house with the crumbling roof, away from the mother and the absence of the father, away from the despair and death of a young man of twenty.
It’s getting dark: the Sicilian coast is growing dim, the Madonna of the harbor blesses the sailors, the buildings fade, and in a corner of the view the house between the two seas is visible, too. I lean over the parapet for a last goodbye and another crossing comes to mind, made up of discussions of dolphins and first cigarettes and icy beers, the day of adolescence when I went to Scylla, and would return after losing my body or maybe after having exercised the greatest possible control over it.
At the time I talked nervously, eager to seem someone, while on this new crossing I do nothing: I observe, and the strangers appear to me as what they are, what we are, a group of survivors each of his own battle. I see a multitude of men and women and children all missing families, friends, lovers; I see crowds of people who have passed through death and emerged damaged, disturbed, but the same. We’re all coming from a funeral, not only I who was at one in fact; we’ve all lost someone and we know how long and unjust the time before us is, the time without that person. The time that we begin to count year by year, starting from the loss.
I don’t know much about the lives of others, but if I opened my solitude just a crack it would become crowded.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll be ready to open my door. Not now. Now I’m looking.
I look at people: some smoking, some eating rice balls, some watching out for their children and some thinking about the journey, whether it’s a return or a departure. Maybe, in order to know whether I’m returning or leaving on this crossing that I’ve made thousands of times, I have to ask myself if my back is turned or my eyes are on my house: there’s only one for every life, as in the wisdom of his twenty years Nikos pointed out to me. Many are the houses that we can inhabit, but only one lights up when we hear the word house. House, I repeat to myself, and I turn toward the continent and Rome, which awaits me; house, I repeat, now with my gaze on the island and Messina, which is saying farewell. My house is neither of the two, it’s in the middle of two seas and two lands. My house is here, now.
Decisively, and with quick fingers, I look for the zipper of my suitcase, open it, take out the red iron box. With both hands, as if it were the wine glass offered in front of the ruined castle of the Puparo, I hold it tight for a final farewell and throw it into the water, which welcomes it.
The voice and smell of my father, which I shut up and saved for twenty-three years, from this moment will have their tomb on the bottom of the Strait. They will be swallowed by the fish or by Charybdis rising to the surface for the occasion, or they’ll remain stuck in the scales of Homer’s Sirens: I will be far away, and my theater will remain empty.
Thus my father exits the scene.
So I laugh, turning toward both coasts like a two-faced goddess, between the island and the land, standing on the ship in the midst of people who don’t see me, because they’re bent over their telephones or distracted, their dim gaze on thoughts that don’t concern me.
I laugh and laugh. I laugh, and an epoch ends in the sound of a dive, in the sea that opens and swallows up without giving back. I laugh and laugh again, before a tomb that only I know; and at last the small watch on my wrist says six-seventeen.
About the Author
NADIA TERRANOVA (Messina, 1978) is the author of Gli anni al contrario (Italy: Einaudi Stile Libero), Casca il mondo (Mondadori, 2016) and Bruno, il bambino che imparò a volare (Orecchio Acerbo, 2012), She also writes for the Italian newspaper la Repubblica. This is her first book to be published in English.
About the Translator
Translator ANN GOLDSTEIN is a former editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elena Ferrante, Italo Calvino, and Alessandro Baricco, and is the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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