by André Aciman
“It’s the young sir!” she exclaimed.
I had no other option. I pushed down on the door handle, went in and sat at my place beside my mother.
“But, dear, it’s nine-thirty!” My mother broke the silence around the table, smiling. “Where have you been?”
She was looking at my face, my hands, checking everything. And through her fearful glances, worried, and at the same time collusive, I understood how far she was an involved participant in the atrocious wound that had been dealt me such a short time ago. Who knows? Perhaps, by mysterious means, she too had suffered at the exact same moment that I had.
I replied that I’d been round at a friend’s house.
“At Cattolica’s?”
“Yes.”
“You two have now become inseparable, eh? I wonder what Pulga has to say about that. Was he there too?”
“What a way to behave!” my father intervened in an indignant tone. “You could have phoned, surely? It would have cost you no effort at all.”
“Yes, Pulga was there,” I murmured, without lifting my eyes from the empty soup bowl.
My father opened his mouth, but a furtive gesture of her ring-laden hand was at the ready to hush him.
“Would you like some cold soup?” she asked me.
I nodded.
But I wasn’t hungry. I ate slowly, with half-spoonfuls, feeling as if my stomach would reject the food. I imagined myself back in the bedroom of Cattolica’s parents, my shoulders pressed against the wall and my eyes fixed on the Jesus with that red heart, and could still hear the calm, indefatigable hum of Luciano’s voice through the partition. No, I didn’t step out, I didn’t make an appearance. After I heard Luciano say, with a laugh, “Such prodigious efforts to learn all that Latin and Greek, and what chance does he have of any career but that one?” I finally shook myself, stepped away from the wall, crossed the room, and walked out into the anteroom. In the thick darkness, I went down the stairs, found my bike in the small dining room, and then in the open air began pedaling rapidly with my head down. Via Cittadella, Viale Cavour, Corso Giovecca: onward, without ever stopping, as if down a dark straight endless tunnel . . .
“Aren’t you hungry, darling?”
I shook my head.
“He’ll have eaten something,” my father grumbled.
I got to my feet.
“I feel a bit sick. Best if I don’t eat supper.”
“What have you been eating”—my father pressed the point—“ice cream?”
“I haven’t eaten a thing.” I stared at him coldly, with hatred.
“Calm down!” he responded, intimidated. “Did you get out of bed on the wrong side?”
“Goodnight.”
Without giving either him or my mother the customary goodnight kiss on the cheek, I quickly left the room.
As soon as I was in my bedroom I stripped, got between the sheets, turned off the light and closed my eyes. I remained like that for some ten minutes. I couldn’t sleep. I was about to get up and dressed again when I heard my mother’s steps in the corridor.
She stopped before the door. I heard her call me in a low voice, then felt the room fill with her presence. What a bore! I thought to myself in fury, pretending to be asleep. I felt her beside me, tall and silent above my outstretched body, and I wanted to get up, insult her, slap her and chase her away. But then, as cool, as fresh and light as ever, I felt her hand descend through the dark to touch my forehead and rest there. That alone sufficed. Nothing else was needed for me, just a little later, alone again, to fall asleep, to fall once again into the deep curative sleep of a child.
The next morning, entering the classroom, I saw at once that everyone was there, seated at their own desks. Luciano quickly greeted me with a smile and with a festive wave. But from Boldini’s and Grassi’s behavior, leaning over an exercise book they had between them, and that of Cattolica in particular, whose gaze, as I drew closer to him, didn’t leave my face for a second, it was clear to me that even they realized the irreparable gravity of what had happened the evening before. Cattolica waited till I sat down and didn’t even greet me: he merely gave a faint grin. I knew him well enough to understand that he felt lost and worried. But why? I wondered. What was making him walk on eggshells? Was it perhaps the hope that I hadn’t stayed to the bitter end, and so hadn’t heard the worst? It could have been that. In any case, if that had been his hope, I would soon strip away any illusion he was under. Everything was over between us, over forever. And he should understand that as soon as possible.
He covered his mouth with his hand.
“You did the right thing to leave,” he said. “It really wasn’t worth your trouble staying.”
I lowered my head in assent and didn’t reply.
He sighed.
“He’s crazy. He’s a poor fool who can’t control himself.”
“Leave me alone, and stop bothering me.”
Guzzo was at the teacher’s desk. I had spoken without troubling to cover my mouth, and was immediately aware the teacher was scrutinizing me.
“Are we at it again?” he said threateningly.
As though inspired, I leaped to my feet and stared him in the face.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but could I ask you to let me change places?”
“And why ever should I do that, my dear fellow? Have you perhaps forgotten that there are fewer than ten days before the end of term?”
“I know. But it’s precisely because of that I want to change places. Here, with him”—I nodded toward Cattolica—“it always ends up with us continually distracting each other.”
My words were received with a prolonged whisper of consternation and disapproval.
“May I ask you all to stay absolutely silent?” Guzzo shouted.
He had the air of not believing what was happening. But there I was, in front of him, standing rigid and straight, determined to get what I was asking for.
He looked around, bewildered.
“And to which desk would you like to be transferred? It doesn’t look to me as if any are available.”
“I’d like to go again to the back of the class”—pointing at Luciano’s desk without turning round—“where Pulga is. But on my own.”
“And Signor Pulga?”
“Pulga can easily come and sit here.”
“I see. You are proposing a double transfer!” Guzzo exclaimed in amusement. “Do ut des!§§ . . . Very well, I shall permit it. Have you been following, Luciano Pulga? Up, shift, get a move on. Assemble your splendid chattels and betake yourself up here beside the great Cattolica, who I’m sure will be honored!”
And while Luciano, laden with his books, went past me along the aisle between the second and the third row of desks—brushing against me, he gave me a look full of bafflement and fear—a dry, imperious, sibilant “Ssh!” served to strangle a fresh crop of murmuring at birth.
To return to the complete solitude of the preceding autumn, I had still to manage one further step: to break with Luciano.
Yet at midday, after the end of school bell, when I noticed him walking all alone along the sidewalk of Via Borgoleone in front of me, painfully at a tilt because of the pile of books he carried balanced on his angular hip, I felt a moment of hesitation. It was true: I had treated him harshly and coldly all that morning in class. And yet, how come, now, I hadn’t foreseen this? I even felt I could surmise from the speed of his steps, from the neat precision with which he set down one foot after the other, that he’d guessed everything and wanted to flee. And if he did? All the better.
“Hey!” I cried out. “Wait up!”
He stopped with a jolt and turned his head back. He was very composed, the corners of his thin lips raised in a smile tinged with slightly woeful benevolence.
“Oh! It’s you.”
We walked on side by side. He said nothing to me, making no reproach, and this began to disconcert me. Where the street met Corso Giovecca, I crossed over determinedly, leaving him some
yards behind.
He caught up with me on the opposite sidewalk.
“What’s wrong?” he asked in confusion. “Aren’t you going home?”
I replied that I was fed up with always taking the same route along the same streets. Today I wanted to walk with him partway to his house.
It was a Friday, market day. Corso Roma and Piazza Cattedrale were thronged with farm workers. We made our way through with difficulty, occasionally losing one another in the bustle, still without speaking a word. He doesn’t know—I thought. If I were only to allow him, at four o’clock, there he’d be, sitting beside me at my table.
Before the turning for Porta Reno, right under the clock tower on the square, I stopped.
“Goodbye,” I said.
He swallowed, then murmured, “Bye.”
Pale as a corpse, he stared at me, the sparse whiskers on his upper lip damp with sweat and his Adam’s apple in nervous agitation.
“We’ll see each other later today?” he risked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you busy?”
“Just my homework, that’s all.”
“What . . . what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. And you?”
He widened his blue eyes.
“Me?”
But I’d already turned my back on him.
14.
THE VERY morning when, in the vestibule of the Guarini School, the marks for the end of year were due to be posted, Otello Forti phoned me.
He had arrived back the evening before—he told me. He had finished his last oral exams at five-thirty in the afternoon, just in time to return to college, pack his suitcase and run to catch the train that left from Padua at seven.
I asked him how he’d done.
“Quite well, I’d say. And you?”
I replied that I didn’t know, that I was just then leaving to check the grades.
“Why not stop by at my place?” he suggested. “If you’d like we could go along together.”
He was friendly, talkative even, having acquired a light trace of a Veneto accent. But even toward him I now felt only indifference.
“Why don’t you stop by at mine and pick me up,” I said.
He tried to argue. He said that as his house was halfway between mine and the Guarini it seemed to him more “logical” that I should come round to his. And he was already less friendly, already en route to readopting his ever grumbling, despotic persona, always ready to throw himself into the most stubborn arguments when he got it into his head to get something.
“Fine. Listen,” I cut him short, “let’s meet in front of the main entrance of the Guarini in half an hour. Would that suit you?”
“Alright, alright . . . ”
Naturally I’d passed. With eights in all literary subjects, and with two sixes: in science and in math and physics. But where was I placed? First? Second? Third?
It was eleven-thirty. In the big vestibule, there was no one but ourselves. Otello only needed a glance to work out that battling for first place were me, Cattolica and Grassi. Sure, against my eight in Italian, Cattolica could only boast of a seven, and Grassi a mere six. But Cattolica had an eight in math and physics, and Grassi a nine in science . . .
“You must be second,” he concluded, “behind Cattolica by one point. Grassi’s third, also just by one point.”
Unusually solicitous and helpful, he took a pencil from his pocket and began writing on the wall beside the lists. Luciano had passed, I noted in the meantime. All sixes, but a pass just the same.
“I was right,” Otello announced at last with a flourish of triumph in his voice. “Cattolica first, and you second.”
We went out into the open air.
“Aren’t you going to phone home?”
I said it wasn’t worth the trouble. With one hand on the bicycle saddle, the other on the handlebars, I looked him up and down. If, at Christmas, he had seemed so much taller and more grown-up than me, now he appeared small, a kind of child.
“D’you want me to take you on the bike back to your house?” I proposed. “Go on, get on the crossbar.”
And in fact, like a child, he obeyed immediately.
Despite the weight, the encumbrance and the cobblestones of Via Mascheraio, I pedalled fast. I looked at the back of Otello’s neck. Beneath his blond hair, cut short, I could make out the plump, pink, tender skin. I breathed in the odor of good soap he gave off, and remembered, by contrast, Luciano’s scrawny neck, greasy with brilliantine, his big, pale, translucent, wafery ears, a bit like an old man’s. I hadn’t carried Luciano on the crossbar of my bike more than two or three times in all, Otello hundreds. And yet I understood now that there was no remedy. Even if I had forced myself to re-establish my old relations with Otello, as when we were at primary and then at the ginnasio, beneath his good, honest smell I would always sense the other, that revolting, oppressive reek of brilliantine.
As if he too had intuited that in the future we would only see each other rarely, and that from now on the clock of our friendship was ticking away, Otello didn’t stop talking for a moment. He pumped me for all kinds of information: who I’d shared a desk with during these months, whose house I’d gone to study at, who I’d become friends with. And I answered him sketchily: referring to Cattolica and to Luciano, but without informing him of anything else. His back was there in front of me, stocky and childlike. To confide in him! I felt as if I was facing a huge, steep, impervious mountain. The very idea of having to scale such a mountain of obtuseness was enough to fill me with nausea and powerlessness.
“Luciano Pulga?” asked Otello. “So who would he be? He’s not from around here?”
“No.”
“Where?”
I explained.
“And what’s he like? How does he do at school?”
“He gets by.”
“Did he pass?”
“Yes. All his marks sixes.”
On the topic of Cattolica I was less laconic. I told how it came about that we shared a desk. I even said that despite sitting next to each other we’d never really become friends.
“If nothing else he has to be clever,” Otello observed at this point. “Did you see how many eights he managed?”
We had arrived. I braked, put one foot on the ground and swiftly, as soon as he’d dismounted, Otello looked me in the eyes.
“Come in for a moment.”
I replied that I couldn’t, that I had to be going. And saying so, I pressed down on the pedals and left him.
In five minutes, I had reached my house, and having passed through the street entrance I immediately saw my mother seated in the garden under the magnolia. The sudden change from the heat outside to the cool of the entrance made me sneeze. I saw her raise her head. If I’d gone up to my room by crossing the garden—I thought—I would have had to stop to talk. It was just midday. We had plenty of time. And yet what would we have had to talk about?
I sneezed again and blew my nose. From the depths of the entrance, with my bike resting on my hip, I watched my mother half-closing her eyes. Immersed in the sun-speckled shade which gathered around the base of the magnolia, she was nothing but a remote, brightly lit spot.
She raised her arm.
“Oo-hoo!” she cried out, modulating her lovely singer’s voice in her preferred call.
I disappeared to the side to put my bike in its usual place under the stairs, turned back and said that I had to rush off to make a phone call.
“Did you pass?”
“Yes.”
“What were your marks?”
“I have to make a phone call,” I repeated.
Upstairs, I passed through one room after another until I reached my bedroom. I had only just entered when I heard my mother’s voice resound once again. She was now talking to the cook who was leaning out of the office window. When I had finished on the phone—she was saying—please ask him to come down here for a moment. And as the cook replied that I wasn’t in
fact on the phone, but she thought I was in my room, my mother began to call me again. She called out my name two or three times, lingering melodiously on the vowels. Between one call and the next I heard her grumbling.
I lifted the blinds.
“I’m here.”
“Will you or won’t you, strange fellow that you are, honor us by coming down here for a moment? Go on, hurry up and do as you’re told.”
She wasn’t annoyed, far from it, not even impatient. At the heart of her realm, center-stage, surrounded by her “blessed creatures,” the poodle, Lulù, the two smoke-colored Persian cats and the tortoise Filomena, she watched me and smiled. She was sewing the hem of a sheet or a tablecloth. The needle glinted on her lap. The garden, lush as a little jungle, glowed around her.
“I got all eights,” I said, “except from Signora Krauss and Signora Fabiana. Six in science and six in physics and math.”
“Well done, darling! I can imagine how happy your father will be . . . Come down now and give me a kiss.”
She kept staring at me, gracefully tilting her head, her lips shaped in her sweetest and most alluring smile. When I showed no sign of moving from the window, she lamented, “Oh, d’you think it’s kind to make your mother beg this much for a little kiss?”
A short while before, as I was walking through one of the drawing rooms, I had stopped to look at an old, silver-framed photograph which was on top of a small table along with many other family photos. It portrayed me and my mother in 1918, during the last summer of the war. Skinny as a girl, dressed in white, my mother was kneeling beside me against the background of the vegetable garden of my grandparent’s country house at Masi Torello, where she and I had gone to stay shortly after my father had left for the Front. While she hugged me passionately to her breast, she turned in the direction of the lens an intensely joyous smile, in stark contrast to the severe and scowling expression on my chubby face, framed by long, straight hair cut in a fringe. The photo was taken by my father on one of his brief leaves from the Front—it was his masterpiece, he often said, and my mother would nod in agreement every time. Yet only a minute ago, I had understood the real meaning of that smile of my mother’s, a bride of barely three years: what it promised, what it offered, and to whom . . .
