“Handsome boy, do tell me,” she asked with a feigned nonchalance, while measuring a length of thread. “Does old Mantegazza visit you every day?”
Almost against my will, I answered yes. A part of me wanted to punish the seamstress. Another part wanted to compensate her for the zeppoles. I hated her maliciousness, but in that moment I was grateful to her for having prepared me one of the best snacks I had ever eaten.
“And she stays for a few hours, right? . . .”
“Yes.”
“Does the old woman like coffee? Does your mother make it for her?”
“Yes.”
“Does she have a cookie?”
“No . . . all she has is coffee . . .”
“And what does she talk about? . . .”
“She talks about when she was young . . . She was in love with Mussolini . . .”
“She doesn’t talk about her daughter?”
“No.”
“What else does she talk about? Come on, you can tell me . . .”
Sick of this line of questioning, I told her we couldn’t stand old Mantegazza, that we would be happy to get rid of her, but unfortunately she kept coming downstairs. The seamstress’s face lit up. She said if my Mom wanted to get rid of the old woman so much, she could. If she didn’t, it meant that she was getting something out of it . . . Yes, of course, I admitted after a brief reflection, while the seamstress held her breath, as alert as a cat watching a sparrow. “Yes, Mom is getting something out of it,” I admitted, “but we have also lost our freedom . . .” I wanted to see how far the seamstress’s curiosity would take her. She let out an exclamation as if to say, “So I wasn’t wrong after all!” And how much did she get for it? How much did my mother pocket? . . . Chewing the last zeppole, I said Mantegazza had promised to leave all her worldly possessions to my mother.
“Everything!” she shrieked. “What does the old woman own? I can’t believe it! The estate should go to the daughter . . .”
“Millions and millions,” I embellished, more and more amazed at the power of my words. “And a house on the Riviera. The daughter agrees . . .”
“A house on the Riviera . . .” she repeated.
She was flabbergasted by the news. She remained speechless, frozen in her chair, with the needle suspended in the air.
“But my mother isn’t asking for anything,” I added. “She doesn’t want anything from anyone. The only thing she wants is a little freedom . . .”
The conversation was coming to an end. I wiped my mouth and went back home triumphantly, certain that I had finally put her in her place.
My mother was crocheting, very slowly, since her wrists were still bothering her. I sat near her and told her the seamstress had asked me a lot of questions. She frowned. What kind of questions? What did she want to know? “She should be trying to keep her house clean rather than worrying about hiding money under the mattress!”
I told her that the seamstress wanted to know whether Mantegazza had given us any money. “I said that we’ve gotten something, but in exchange we’ve lost our freedom . . .” I tried to embellish my account as much as possible, using words like “victim,” “slavery,” and “prison,” so my mother would be overwhelmed with gratitude.
As soon as I finished my tidy little report, her whole expression changed. Her eyes narrowed into slits and her mouth hung open without uttering a sound. For a second I didn’t know how to interpret her transformation, but it soon became clear—a scream erupted from her mouth and her fists rose in the air. Her work fell from her hands, the yarn was pulled, and the crocheting began to unravel, row by row, devoured by an invisible set of teeth. I had never seen her so enraged. She jumped to her feet and tripped over the blanket. Terrified I would have to pick up the mess, I ran to lock myself in the bathroom. She kept on screaming: Why did I have to go sticking my nose into things? By now the seamstress had told half the world the doorwoman was making money off the flesh of that old woman! And they already had it in for doorwomen! The last thing she needed was for them to start accusing her of being a mercenary! . . .
I thought I had gotten the better of the seamstress, and instead she had gotten the better of me. All for a plate of zeppoles!
I was filled with loathing, an abyss opened beneath my feet. Amid my tears I wished death on the seamstress, on all the tenants . . . I wanted to die, too. My mother was right, this was no life. I bent over the toilet and stuck two fingers down my throat. At least I wouldn’t owe anything to the seamstress.
*.
The seamstress appeared in the morning, as usual, a few minutes before eight, holding her daughter by the hand. Sensing the approaching danger, she quickened her step. My mother blocked her path.
“Signora Bortolon,” she said, her voice emphasizing the “Signora.” “Can I have a word with you? . . . What in the world were you thinking? If you want to know my business, why don’t you ask me directly?”
The seamstress batted her eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about . . . What’d I do?”
“You know very well . . . Let’s not beat around the bush . . . He”—she pointed to me—“is a witness. You gave him the third degree, that’s what you did! . . . But if you must know, I don’t get one cent from Signora Armanda, so you can wipe that thought from your head.”
The seamstress dropped her act.
“That’s not what the boy told me.”
My mother was not about to be bullied.
“He lied to you,” she lied. “I don’t get money from anyone. My son was just playing games with you! How could you think I would take money from that poor old woman! My family gets by with the money we make—through our own hard work! Understood?”
Bortolon gave her a long, nasty, and skeptical look, as if to say, Do you really expect me to believe you?
“And besides, the loge isn’t supposed to be a café.”
“No. In fact, it’s my home. And I only let in the people I want.”
“Not during working hours.”
“Signora Bortolon, I think it’s fair to say I have never neglected my duties. Am I wrong? You tell me, when have I done a bad job?”
And with that she began a long litany of services, renunciations, and sacrifices that I’d heard a thousand times before.
That same afternoon, at the last minute, Mantegazza called on the intercom and said she’d rather stay home, with Bella. She didn’t feel too well, blame it on digestion.
The message couldn’t be clearer: from now on she would be drinking her afternoon coffee with someone else.
II
Come in, Signor Petillo. If there’s anyone you can trust, it’s me. Admit that you’re going back down south to find a nice girl from your hometown,” my mother teased him. “You men are always going on about us women, but in the end you can’t live without us! Right? Well, better late than never . . . I can see that a few white hairs have already sprouted on your temples. Of course, older men never lose their appeal . . . It’s we women who age too quickly . . .”
By way of saying goodbye, he shook his head and handed her an envelope: “For all that you’ve done for me.”
Two days later, Amelia Lynd finally arrived at Via Icaro 15.
For once the building manager wasn’t exaggerating. Miss Lynd was no old hen, as my mother had feared. Not in the least. She was a noble, multicolored bird with wings to fly.
What made her distinct wasn’t the clear signs of her superior breeding—apart from the two huge diamonds she wore on her left hand, as if to symbolize the excellence of her person, but without affect, without flaunting it—no, there was something superior about her, a light radiating from her skin. Her body was incredibly thin, her clothing a necessary if somewhat studied piece of fabric enveloping an almost immaterial physique. Without her diamonds, she was the embodiment of sobriety. No make-up, no e
mbellishments. Her fine gray hair was combed back tightly against her scalp, revealing her high cheekbones and two small unadorned ears. The shape of her head reminded me of the bust of Nefertiti I had seen in my history book. How old was she? It was hard to say . . . sixty-five, seventy . . . maybe eighty? Her forehead was smooth and unwrinkled but she had the transparent, fragile skin of the elderly, and the back of her hands were flecked with dark marks of various sizes. Her features were delicate, aristocratic, refined by age.
The moment my father saw her, he nicknamed her “la Maestra”—the schoolmistress.
My mother, not only to honor her promise to the manager, but out of an instinctive sympathy, gave her a warm welcome and invited her to dinner with us. Miss Lynd thanked her with a broad smile, but it meant she was declining the offer. She smiled easily, laughed easily, and her eyes sparkled, affected by a slight strabismus. Yet she accepted, reluctantly, only a cup of consommé that I brought up to her. She ate with extreme moderation, she told me. In practice she lived on water alone, which took the form of tea or consommé. Sometimes, “out of gluttony,” she allowed herself a glass of milk or shaddock—as she had been accustomed to calling grapefruit since childhood—or a piece of fruit. She spoke with a strange accent that was hard to identify. Her Italian was perfect but it did not sound like her native tongue.
My mother even offered to clean her two-room apartment a couple times a week and to take care of acquiring the few things on which the Maestra sustained herself. Only after a laborious negotiation did she accept the proposal, and they agreed on a fee, which mother would have gladly foregone. For her it was a privilege to help a woman like that, especially after having debased herself by serving someone like old Mantegazza.
The appearance of the Maestra sent the signore into a tizzy. All of their fantasies were overwrought at the sight of such a pure and elegant reality. Look at her posture! A real duchess! Did you see those diamonds? And hear her manner of speaking—so distinguished! You could tell she was educated. Yes, but not every aspect was in keeping with the stature of such a personage. She dressed too simply, for example. “Obviously,” Signora Dell’Uomo intoned, “she’s a foreigner. Foreign women don’t care as much about fashion as we Italians. In that field, let’s face it, we’re unbeatable. Mind you, her skimpy little sweaters aren’t made out of wool: they’re pure cashmere!”
More than one of the signore tried to invite her over for coffee or sought to ingratiate themselves through small acts of kindness, hoping to learn a little bit about her life and get a peek inside her apartment. But she proved immune to their flattery, not to suggest that she was ever discourteous. To keep them at arm’s length, all she had to say, in English, was “No, thank you.” Not even the seamstress succeeded in gaining entry, though she was convinced she had won her over with an offering of her famous bread pudding. Miss Lynd uttered her kind refusal through an opening in the door. To the no, thank you’s by which she became known, the Maestra enjoyed adding a bizarre allusion, a literary quotation, in English or Latin. So in a very short time, one week at the most, she had been demoted from the rank of duchess to that of oddball, and indeed a genuine crackpot, who had something bizarre to say every time she opened her mouth.
“For me she’s the type that likes to have a sip . . .” Terzoli speculated.
*.
At my mother’s demand I offered to help Miss Lynd unpack the last of her boxes. For once, she accepted without protest.
“Thank you, my boy,” she said, “thank you, indeed! Otherwise, chi sa, who knows, how long they would have sat here unopened!”
Novels, poetry collections, dictionaries in different languages, colored-glass vases, ancient statuettes, and black-and-white photographs passed through my hands . . . How could I not compare that refined private museum—which condensed a lifetime of travels and encounters—to the knick-knacks that occupied the shelf of my foldaway bed, the horrendous souvenirs that the signore brought back to us from their annual vacations? The Tirolese baby-doll, the old man with the pipe, the gondola music box, the little chest covered with seashells, the Sicilian wagon, the Sardinian nuraghe, the plastic Alpine star: an Italian menagerie that shook every time I got into bed.
The Maestra described to me the provenance of a small Lalique vase, the life of Flaubert or Cicero, the travels of Herodotus, Bouvard et Pécuchet, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina . . . How the hours flew by! Never before had I spent such beautiful, wondrous afternoons . . .
Of the various photographs in her possession, I was most taken by the portrait of a very serious bearded man. I asked if he was her husband. “Oh, no,” she laughed, “that’s Sigmund Freud!” She explained that Dr. Freud was the father of psychoanalysis, and that he had been her neighbor in London many years earlier. They used to have tea together and converse about any number of subjects, although he was gravely ill and had to struggle to form words.
“He disliked his own face. That’s why you never saw him smile. But he had such an interesting face, don’t you agree?”
Before going back downstairs, I was rewarded with a nice bowl of custard. She didn’t even try a spoonful. It was an exquisite custard, saffron yellow, into which she’d crumbled a cinnamon stick with her bony fingers. I adored it. I adored her. Her every gesture, even the way she beat the milk and eggs and stirred the wooden spoon in the dented old pan, had something incomparable that transcended the act itself and elevated her above anyone I’d ever known. There was no one like her on any of the maps where I had lived my life till that day.
By the end of the week the Maestra’s one-bedroom apartment was ready, but that didn’t end my visits upstairs to see her. She wanted to have me there regularly for afternoon tea, she said. When I arrived, the kettle would already be on the stove, the smell of cookies filling the air. Sometimes I might even find the delicious custard again, steaming in the blue and white bowl from India.
At home I talked about her all the time, like someone in love: the Maestra knew everything, had read everything, had original opinions about everything . . . “Lies!” is how she would rail against the false truths spread by “clerics,” the generic term she used to indicate politicians, teachers, and priests. “All lies!”
She had her own ideas about the books Signorina Salma assigned us to read. The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis was a patriotic manifesto, according to my teacher—but it was just the opposite for the Maestra. She saw it as an attack on false faiths, and thus one of the few Italian novels really worth the trouble of reading. Manzoni made her sick to her stomach. His Adelchi? Nonsense! The Betrothed? Bad, if not worse. But the sanctimonious prig was right about one thing: a dictionary was needed to create the Italians. Luckily he was not the one to write it. Otherwise can you imagine the definitions that might have come from the pen of a man who would dare to interpret the plague as a form of divine providence? The nineteenth-century Minister of Education who made The Betrothed required reading was a disgrace. The only part of the novel she would save was Renzo’s vineyard (“a slip of the pen by an addled mind”), because it expressed a negative vision of human history and demonstrated a rare lexical competence.
When she learned that Silvio Pellico’s My Prisons was on the reading list for my exams, she flew into a rage. “What a revolting book! . . . It doesn’t even mention imprisonment! . . . All I can see in it is an account of daily sacrifices that concludes with a hymn to providence. Every page wallows in Catholicism! Unbelievable! Pellico had a grudge against Voltaire, the man who would have erased torturers from the face of the earth. And the style! Let’s not even talk about the style! All those exclamation points! All those prayers! . . . the writing of Luigi Settembrini is far superior!”
I didn’t have the courage to tell her that, under the influence of Signorina Salma, I actually loved Pellico’s book. But she and I loved it for different reasons: she for its patriotism, I because I identified with the author’s suffering, which was so similar to m
y mother’s. I loved the pages where Pellico wrote about how in his isolation he fraternized with the ants that appeared on his windowsill: like him, I had once fed sugar to ants on the windowsill of the loge.
Of all the books I had to read for my middle-school exams, the only one the Maestra liked was Verga’s The House by the Medlar Tree. But that, too, she read in her own way. She couldn’t have cared less about the family’s misfortunes, over which Signorina Salma shed tears of compassion. No, Miss Lynd was looking for something else, the drama of language. “Poor Verga!” she would exclaim, as if she were grieving for an unfortunate friend. “I’ve never seen a writer who placed so much trust in his technique and so little in his words. A tragedy, don’t you think?” Among the Italians, her favorite authors were the ones who plundered the dictionary, like Pascoli, Gadda, or Landolfi. She also liked Leopardi immensely, for his powerful brilliant criticism. Thanks to the Maestra I discovered his Zibaldone and its pages on the garden of diseased plants. Out of love for her I learned these passages by heart. Among the non-Italians her favorites were Flaubert and a few English writers—she often spoke of Hazlitt, Stevenson, and Henry James. The masterpiece of English prose, for her, was Doctor Johnson’s introduction to his Dictionary. Among the ancients, to whom she owed her education, her favorites were the orators and the historians. She read and reread Herodotus and Thucydides.
When I told her that in history class I was studying Italian unification she burst into laughter. “But my dear, there is no such thing! . . . Let me explain, Chino. Now listen carefully.” She took a deep breath, searching for the right words. “The Italians never did unite! Ci hanno provato—They tried but failed! And the signs of their failure are everywhere. Can’t you see them? The only people who talk about unification are priests and fascists. If there really were an Italy, would the Italians be so divisive, so egotistical, so deplorably vain? Dov’è il popolo—Where is il popolo? The Italians have no idea what they’re doing! They have no idea where they’re going!”
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