My brother said that when people started to get fired it didn’t matter whether they were orphans or not. The Bolognan and the Libyan nodded in agreement. The understanding look on their faces turned my stomach. I stared through them as if they didn’t exist. I asked my brother how we would manage on my salary alone. My brother shouted that it wasn’t his fault. I told him not to yell, just because he was unemployed didn’t mean he had to be rude, but my brother kept yelling and threatening people I had never heard of in my life and promising me that the situation was going to change, though he didn’t explain how, and anyway I can’t remember his promises because then I started to think about other things, and the Bolognan and the Libyan took a step forward, or three steps, or maybe four steps, and they grabbed my brother, who had gone pale as a sheet, by the shoulders and the belt, I can’t remember exactly, all I know is that the way they grabbed him gave me a bad feeling at the time, it’s all right to grab someone by the shoulders, but grabbing him by the belt seemed excessive, my brother was upset but he wasn’t out of control, he just kept yelling, probably so he wouldn’t cry, but they grabbed him by the belt and dragged him into the living room or my parents’ old room and I went into my room.
VI
To make a long story short: economic conditions deteriorated.
My salary wasn’t enough to support four people and on top of that to cover the household expenses. One night I got home and the electricity had been turned off. It didn’t matter to me, but we had to pawn my mother’s wedding ring and several other things (that we never got back) to pay the bill and have electricity again so that we could at least watch TV.
One afternoon at the salon when there was nothing to do, I was flipping through a magazine and I found a quiz. It seemed to have been written just for me. The magazine was called Donna Moderna and it was the first time I had seen it. When I went home I took it with me and answered the questions.
“What do you think about men in their teens?”
They’re like my brother, I guess. They don’t have jobs. I like them.
“What do you think about men in their 20s?”
I don’t know.
“What’s a good age to die?”
Thirty-six, maybe. Before I turn forty.
“What actor would you date?”
Brad Pitt.
“What actor would you marry?”
Edward Norton.
“What actor would you choose as your lover?”
Antonio Banderas.
“What actor would you choose as your father?”
Robert De Niro.
“What actress would you choose as your best friend?”
Maria Grazia Cucinotta. (Surprising answer, because I always thought Maria Grazia Cucinotta looked superficial and egotistical, like someone who only cared about herself.)
“What actress would you be?”
Maria Grazia Cucinotta.
“Do you know anyone who would risk his life for you?”
No, I don’t. And if I did, I’d do everything I could to change his mind. I’d tell him it wasn’t worth risking his life for me. I’d reveal my true self and then he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me.
“If you were a bird, what kind of bird would you be?”
An owl.
“If you were a mammal, what kind of mammal would you be?”
A mole. Or a rat. In fact, I already live like a rat.
“If you were a fish, what kind of fish would you be?”
The kind that’s used as bait. Once, when I was little, I saw a fisherman on Lake Albano, near Castel Gandolfo, where the Pope lives. He was fishing with a giant fishing rod and next to him he had a bucket and a little box. In the bucket were the fish he had just caught, three, I think, horrible, half dead, sandy black, and in the little box were the fish that the fisherman used as bait. They were tiny fish, translucent and silvery. When I asked the fisherman if he had caught all of them, he answered that he hadn’t, that some of them, the big ones, were the parents, and the little ones were the children. And that he had caught the big ones, and bought the little ones at a fishmonger’s in Frascati. And that they weren’t good to eat, they were only good as bait.
“What kind of geological feature would you be?”
A deep-sea trench.
“If you were a car, what kind of car would you be?”
A Fiat of flesh. (Not a good answer. What I’d really like to be is a vintage car, a Lamborghini. And I’d only leave the garage two or three times a year. I’d also like to be a Los Angeles taxi, the seats stained with semen and blood. Actually, I don’t know how to drive and I couldn’t care less about cars.)
“If you were a movie, what movie would you be?”
I’d be War and Peace, with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. I saw it a while ago on TV. And a strange thing happened: my brother and the Bolognan fell asleep. But the Libyan made it to the end and he said that he thought it was an amazing movie. I think so too, I said. Yes, I could tell, he said.
“If you had to kill someone, who would you kill?”
Whoever. I’d go over to the window and kill whoever.
“If you were a country, what country would you be?”
Algeria.
“Would you call yourself attractive?”
Yes.
“Would you call yourself intelligent?”
No.
“If you had to kill someone, what weapon would you choose?”
A gun. I had a friend at school who said she’d like to blow up her boyfriend with an atomic bomb. I remember I thought that was really funny, because it wouldn’t be just my friend’s boyfriend who’d die, I would die too, and so would everyone in and around Rome, maybe even the fishermen of Frascati.
“How many children would you like to have?”
Zero.
VII
Saturdays and Sundays were the worst, because the four of us were home together and we had nothing to do. The rest of the week my brother and his friends went out to look for work (or so they said when I got home), but they never found anything, not even seasonal work, or the occasional odd job that might bring in a little money to help us get by.
At night, when I went to my room (they stayed up all hours watching TV), I thought about my parents, the accident, the winding southern highways, and everything seemed so far away that it made me weep with rage.
When that happened I jumped up, went back to the living room, motioned to one of my brother’s friends (not caring whether my brother saw) and led him to my room, where we made love until I fell asleep and I could dream about other things, at least.
I didn’t like my life. The nights were still crystal clear, but I had become less of an orphan and I was moving into an even more precarious realm where I would soon lead a life of crime.
What kind of crime? It didn’t matter. It was all the same to me, though of course I knew that in the kingdom of crime there were many stages and levels and no matter how hard I tried, I would never reach the top.
I was afraid of becoming a prostitute. I didn’t like the idea of it. But I sensed that it was all a matter of getting used to it. Sometimes while I was working at the salon, I clenched my fists and tried to imagine my future. Thief, assassin, drug dealer, black marketeer, con artist. No, probably not con artist, because con artists always have mentors and who would mine be? And I didn’t like the idea of being a drug dealer either. I don’t like drug addicts. I don’t have anything against them, but dealing with drug addicts all day seemed unbearable (not anymore, now it doesn’t seem so bad, now I think that in a way people who work with drug addicts are saints, and drug addicts are saints too). At moments of great exaltation I saw myself as a thief or an assassin. Deep down I knew it made most sense to be a prostitute.
Be that as it may, at the time I sensed that I was heading inexorably into the realm of crime and its nearness made me dizzy, intoxicated me, I slept badly, I had dreams in which nothing meant anything, unfettered dreams in which I ha
d the courage to do what I wanted, though the things I did in dreams weren’t exactly the things I would have done in real life, the things that appealed to me in real life.
Deep down I’ve always been an innocent. I’m an innocent now, and back then, when the nights were as bright as day, I was too. I didn’t realize it, but I was. I looked at myself and I was blinded by the light from the mirror. My soul could find no repose. But I was an innocent, because if I hadn’t been I would have been out of there like a shot and everything would be different now.
From here on my story gets even fuzzier.
VIII
For a few days I lived on tiptoe, I think. I went back and forth from work to home trying not to call attention to myself, and at night I watched some TV, not much, since I was gradually losing interest in the shows I used to see.
Sometimes the house was empty when I got home. Then I would eat in the kitchen, sitting on a white stool, staring at the white-tiled wall, counting the tiles from top to bottom, then counting the rows, then losing my place and starting over. I can say without irony that I was bored.
Sometimes I went into my parents’ old bedroom. It still looked the same, and if by some miracle the ghosts (or zombies) of my parents had come through the door, they wouldn’t have found a thing out of place.
But a few items provided evidence to the contrary.
There was a suitcase half-hidden behind a chair, and the frame of a backpack just visible on top of the wardrobe. The suitcase was well made, of leather, and inside it were clean clothes that might have belonged to either the Bolognan or the Libyan. In the backpack were dirty clothes, just a small bundle, because if there was one thing that could be said about my brother’s friends, it was that they had an undeniable predilection for cleaning. I couldn’t find a single personal item among their belongings. Not a letter or an address book or a photocopy of their Social Security papers. I guessed that they always carried their important documents around with them. Or they didn’t have any. Or they didn’t exist.
Around this time I remember a conversation with one of my friends at work. She was the same age as me, but she had a boyfriend, and one evening before we closed up the salon she started to talk about her future. For a second I thought I was losing my mind. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Are you serious? Are you making this up?”
She was serious, but when she saw how upset I was she stopped talking and went over to the other end of the room, where she said something to a stylist who was taking a break, sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunset. There was an expression of deep melancholy on the stylist’s face. But the look on the other girl’s face was malevolent, I thought. I was breathing hard, as if I’d run from one point to another in record time, and though the other girl laughed a few times, as if she couldn’t believe her own words, she seemed afraid. The stylist listened without getting up from her chair. It was as if the girl’s words were sliding off her face, a hard face without a hint of indulgence. That’s what I remember. And I remember the sunset, a sunset of rose and ocher that crept all the way to the back of the salon, but never touched me.
That night I didn’t cry on the way home, which was something I’d been doing for a while. It was as if when I left work I walked straight into a wind tunnel that made me cry for no reason. A tunnel that at first seemed to have only a physical effect, bringing on tears and nothing else, but rather than getting used to it, over the last few days I had been struck by a feeling of enormous sadness, a sadness that I could only handle by crying.
But that day, as if I glimpsed that my life was about to take a sharp turn, I didn’t cry. I put on my sunglasses, left the salon, stepped into the tunnel, and didn’t cry. Not a single tear.
My brother and the two men who lived in our house were waiting for me. I saw them from outside. The three of them were standing in the window, like fish in a fishbowl, watching the street. It took them a while to spot me there on the sidewalk, watching them.
I climbed slowly up the stairs. I closed the door and paused in the hallway. All of a sudden there they were, talking. I listened. What else could I do? Though I’ve forgotten what they said. They had a plan. That much I do remember. A hazy plan on which each of them, my brother included, had gambled his future, and to which each had added his bit, his personal touch, his vision of fate and the turns of fate.
I remember I listened to them and then I pushed past them into the living room and sat down, tired of taking in so much information at once. They followed me and were silent, expectant.
I said:
“Don’t stop, it’s a good idea, keep talking.”
Maybe I didn’t say it was a good idea. Maybe I said that I wanted to hear them out. (I thought we were all going to end up in jail, but I didn’t tell them that — I’m not a killjoy.)
They smiled and obeyed. My brother seemed the most enthusiastic, as if it had been his idea, though I knew it hadn’t. The Libyan seemed the most skeptical. But the three of them were committed to the plan and they clung to it like shipwrecked sailors, laying it all out for me and presenting it in the best possible light. It was something that would require only the tiniest sacrifice, a plan in which cleverness was key. It was the perfect coup, a scheme that would open the doors of a new life to us, that would get us a house on the beach, or a restaurant in Tangiers, or a gym up north.
When they were done talking I said that it sounded good to me. Then I got up and went to bed and fell asleep without eating dinner.
At five in the morning I woke up. I turned on the light, I leafed through old magazines, and for a while I mulled over what they had explained. So this is the life of crime, I thought without fear.
The next morning I didn’t go to work, I got up early, went out, bought bread, and called in sick from a payphone. I don’t know whether they believed me or not. I didn’t care.
At midday, the Libyan and the Bolognan brought me to Maciste’s house. That wasn’t his name, but it was what everyone called him. To some he was Maciste, to others Mr. Maciste or Mr. Bruno, to others Mr. Universe. It depended. Most didn’t call him anything because Maciste never left the house and no one knew him and many of those who had known him, personally or by name, had forgotten him.
The house was on Via Germanico. It was a two-story house, with a small, overgrown garden in front, flanked by two six- or seven-story buildings. There was a tall metal gate. The shutters were closed, as if no one lived there. The paint on the façade was peeling in places, which made the place look even more neglected, if possible. And yet as we walked up to the door, we didn’t see mail on the ground or trash in the garden, which meant that someone did come occasionally to clean. Sometimes Maciste made an appearance at a gym on Via Palladio, according to the Bolognan, and sometimes someone was sent from the gym to fix a piece of Maciste’s exercise equipment.
“In there,” said the Bolognan as we were leaving, “he has a huge private gym set up just for him. Once I came with another guy to fix a weight rack and we got to be friendly. I came back twice, but I couldn’t get past the door. Maciste doesn’t trust anybody.”
Then, as we talked that afternoon about what we would do, they told me that for a while, probably before my brother and I were born, Maciste had been a movie star and his movies were seen all over the world. Then he’d had the accident and retired, and after that he’d gradually been forgotten.
But Maciste wasn’t the kind of person who’s easy to forget. I, for one, know I’ll never forget him. No matter what happens, I’ll never forget him.
IX
His real name was Giovanni Dellacroce. This was something that neither the Bolognan nor the Libyan knew (let alone my brother, who because of his age and lack of skills plays a marginal role here, I’m afraid). His stage name was Franco Bruno. People called him Mr. Universe, because he had won the title twice in the early sixties, or Maciste, which was the name of the character he played in four or maybe five movies, all huge hits in It
aly and around the world. He was born in Pescara, but had lived in Rome since he was fifteen, in Santa Loreto, a suburb that he thought of as home and for which he was sometimes nostalgic, though when luck was on his side, he bought the big house on Via Germanico where I met him the night I was brought there.
A night that was like high noon in August and was one of the strangest nights in my life.
The Bolognan rang the bell several times. A voice over an intercom asked who was there.
“Friends,” said the Bolognan. No answer. The intercom might as well have been broken. After a while he rang again and said the name of the gym and the name — or so I thought I understood — of a mutual friend, and as if this weren’t enough, he announced our full names, mine included.
Then the gate opened and we were let into the little garden where even at night the plants struggled for scarce living space. More than a garden, it was like a cemetery.
There were three stone steps up to the porch. For a long time we stood there waiting for someone to open the door.
The tension on the faces of my brother’s friends, the tension and at the same time the joy, a primordial joy, pure and unwavering, is one of the things that comes back to me whenever I remember that night, and each time it does I try to brush it away, because it’s a joy that I want neither for myself nor anywhere near me. It’s a joy that comes too close to beggarliness, an explosion of beggarliness, and also to cruelty, indifference.
Then the door opened and we got a glimpse of a dark threshold where I seemed to see a shadow move very quickly, and a foyer, also dark, into which we stepped and out of which we backed like frightened children entrusted with a mysterious responsibility, and into which we stepped again, sheepishly, and out of which we inevitably backed again, until I took three steps inside, this time alone, and bumped into a piece of furniture and asked whether anyone was there.
A Little Lumpen Novelita Page 3
