Some of the most beautiful lines from English and American literature passed through my hands: descriptions, portraits of real or imagined people, thoughts, examples . . . Every page was struck through with lines of various lengths, crossing out entire passages. Because of space limitations, the dictionary required short citations, only a few crumbs of the best bread of writers, as if literature was forbidden from entering into the world of everyday language, and could only glimpse it through the bars of a deletion.
I enunciated out loud, like a teacher to a pupil, and the fun of dictating brought forth a pride that I had never felt, not even when the Maestra had paid me her first compliments. But there was a huge difference between the Maestra and Ippolito: she treated me like a child, he like a man. A compliment from the Maestra was an award; the trust of Ippolito a recognition.
*.
We would work all morning, and at one o’clock go downstairs for lunch. Unlike the Maestra, Ippolito ate heartily. He never refused a second helping. During lunch he liked asking my mother about her work, her interests, her opinions. And although the Professor never eased up his argumentative or teasing tone, she would answer cheerfully. Someone was finally taking her seriously and listening to her.
She was curious about his life, too, and she, too, had a lot of questions for him, but the Professor had an exceptional talent for always changing the subject to something else. He didn’t enjoy talking about himself, just like the Maestra. My mother tried anyway. We learned that he had stopped teaching a few years earlier, choosing to retire early so he could dedicate himself wholly to the dictionary. We also learned that he was fifty years old . . . My mother was amazed he was already so old—the exact word she used—and she immediately tried to make amends, saying that he still looked like a youth: he had all his hair, no signs of a belly, he moved with agility, dressed like a boy. She added that age didn’t matter—and, in fact, her husband was much older than her, too. Finally, after many questions that skirted the subject, she managed to ask him the one closest to her heart: “Ippolito, were you ever married?”
He didn’t answer. Without explanation, he dropped onto his plate the slice of watermelon into which he had been biting—leaving a pattern in the rind not unlike the decorative motif of a wood inlay—and stood up from the table. My mother felt awful. She stood up, too.
“Where are you going? . . . Don’t you want a coffee?” she proposed, in an attempt to salvage the situation.
“No thank you. It’s time for me to get back to my Olivetti typewriter. Mille grazie, I’ll return the favor . . .”
My mother came to the conclusion that the Professor had gotten burned when he was young. He was too good—women weren’t interested in men like him, so considerate and understanding . . . And they didn’t deserve him! With women, especially certain kinds of women, you need to take the upper hand . . . Women are witches!
She’d finally stopped acting like her life was over. The Vignolas’ apartment, the building, her husband—all was forgotten. With just a touch of make-up, she hid the last vestiges of disappointment, highlighting her charming and open facial features, and kept her hair gathered in a bun, exposing her pretty neck to the light of day. Rather than her usual faded cotton T-shirt, she put on a colorful sleeveless top that emphasized her breasts and hips, and on her finger she wore her diamond. I became aware of her beauty and even found myself worrying about her, as if she were a delicate flower that would fall apart at the first breeze.
Nor did my mother’s sudden transformation escape the notice of Ippolito. He noticed her diamond, too. How could he not, when she was always waving it under his nose?
“I hope you don’t think that it’s fake?” she teased.
“Of course I don’t. You’re so mean! Is it a present from your husband?”
“It’s a gift I made to myself! I’m still paying for it . . . My husband doesn’t appreciate certain things. In the evening, before he comes home, I have to take it off and hide it in the closet. Otherwise all hell will break loose.”
“You’re kidding . . .”
“That’s the way husbands are. What can we do? Paride has no love for the things I care about. In his opinion I just want to imitate the signore. I know, I’m not a signora. I’m a working woman. But why shouldn’t I have a ring, too? I work hard morning, noon, and night, I keep my household running—why, I keep a whole five-story building running! I don’t even go on vacation! I have the right to indulge myself every now and then, don’t I? But you understand certain things. I’ve never had anything. Look how shiny it is! Do you like it?”
“Very much . . . of course . . . you did the right thing, Elvira.”
Two seconds later he burst out laughing.
“What is it?” my mother asked, dismayed. “Don’t you like my ring? Were you lying to me just now?”
Ippolito shook his head. “No, it has nothing to do with the ring.” And he kept laughing. He couldn’t stop.
“So what is it, then? Why won’t you tell me? Now you’re starting to make me angry . . .”
He held his stomach, as if he were losing his mind. “I’m sorry, Elvira, I’m so sorry.” he said, when he finally calmed down. “Do you want to know why I was laughing? Do you really want to know? But you have to promise you won’t get upset, because you’re so touchy! I was laughing because you have the whole world.”
My mother glowered. “And you think it’s funny?”
“Very,” he reiterated, breaking into new fits of laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”
“If you want me to forgive you, you’ll have to accompany me to the market . . . This time of year they sell tomatoes for nothing . . . We can buy a whole lot and I’ll prepare enough sauce to last us all winter . . . And if you promise to stop teasing me, I’ll give a few jars to you, too . . .”
For two days crates of tomatoes were boiling in every pot and pan in the house. My mother puréed them and, after the sauce started to cool down, poured them into glass bottles she had saved. In the bathroom one of them exploded because of fermentation and imprinted a blood-red stain on the wall next to the mirror. Not even soap could wash it away.
The warm scent of the sauce saturated our two tiny rooms, stuck to our skins, and wafted throughout the building, making it all the way to the nostrils of Signor Biondo—and poor paralytic’s.
“Mmmm, it smells so good!” my mother said.
*.
A second before getting up from the table, the Professor took a small oblong packet from the back pocket of his jeans, and with a sly smile he pushed it toward her.
“What is it?”
“A little something for you . . . Go on, see if you like it.”
My mother tore open the tissue paper.
“But what is it?”
“Open it!”
She opened the velvet box and let out a cry.
“It belonged to my grandmother,” Ippolito explained.
“Your grandmother? No, I couldn’t possibly accept it . . . Thank you so much but . . . I swear to God . . . Thank you so much, but I couldn’t . . . A necklace like this is worth a lot of money. It’s a family heirloom and family heirlooms are supposed to go to your fiancée. What’s this got to do with me? What did I do to deserve such a gift?”
“Do you always have to do something to receive a gift? Put it on, otherwise the necklace will remain in the drawer for another hundred years.”
My mother hesitated. First she wanted to make sure she really was the intended recipient: “You could always give it to some lovely lady . . .”
“What do you think I’m doing now? Am I not giving it to a lovely lady?”
“Stop making fun of me! I can never be sure whether you’re telling the truth!”
She pretended to make a joke of it, but she was filled with emotion. Her hands were shaking so badly that I had to help her with the clasp.
“I always tell the truth.”
She didn’t notice his peremptory tone.
“What would the Maestra say if she knew that the family jewels would end up around the neck of someone like me, a . . . doorwoman?”
Ippolito furrowed his brow. He didn’t like the conversation shifting to his mother. My mother tried to remedy the situation.
“Your shirt is missing a button . . .”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I know. I’m always telling myself that I should fix it and then I forget.”
“I’ll sew it back on. Bring it to me tomorrow and we’ll also touch it up with the iron. I bet you never iron.”
“And why should I? I don’t see the point of it. All you have to do is hang your clothes up right. It’s almost the same as ironing—and that way you don’t waste time or energy.”
“Just like the Maestra,” I thought to myself.
My mother thought the same thing, but out loud. Once again Ippolito stood up suddenly and left.
“He’s really fond of you,” my mother said while she was washing the dishes. “It’s understandable . . . A shame that he doesn’t have any children. Who knows how much he misses having a family. At least I have you. But who does he have? . . . That man has never received any love, not even from his mother. Life is so unfair! It’s so sad! Would you have liked to have a father like Ippolito?”
I didn’t answer, because the answer was yes. Realizing she’d asked a question that was too bold, that could get us both in trouble, she quickly retracted it: “I was only joking, don’t misunderstand me! What’s done is done, we can’t change the past. Besides, where do you think we could have met, Ippolito and me? Maybe on the train or in a pastry shop, if it was our destiny.” Wiping her hand over her reddened eyes she expelled the daydreams. “I can’t believe the stupid ideas I come up with sometimes! As if Ippolito would go out with someone like me! Such an educated man . . . a genius!”
She struggled to dismiss a feeling that she had neither the courage nor the ability to call by its true name. That feeling would never last anyway, so why give it a name? Why let it grow? Just to kill it when it got bigger?
*.
We were walking by the church. The sun had already descended behind low clouds, but the air was still warm, spreading a golden halo over the deserted neighborhood. In the glare of the last beams of light, the glass on the telephone booth shimmered like a mirror.
“Do you go to mass?” Ippolito asked me.
I replied without hesitating: “I don’t believe in God.”
He stopped walking, shocked. “You don’t believe in God? . . . Everyone believes in God at your age! What made you stop believing? Something must have made you change your mind! Or someone! No one stops believing in God like that, from one minute to the next.”
It hadn’t taken him long to realize that my proud atheism—I myself was only becoming aware of it in that moment—was a product of his mother’s lessons. He would have liked to hear me talk about her, but he was afraid to ask. He tiptoed around the question, testing me, testing the ground with shy allusions and indirect encouragement. I was no different. We were implicitly prohibited from comparing our memories, of composing them into a single image. Maybe we were afraid of disappointment or becoming jealous or even simply of not being able to tell the truth. She had become ineffable to us, although every day we celebrated her through our devoted commitment to complete her work.
“Let’s go through the fields,” I proposed, out of fear that our afternoon walk would end earlier than usual. In the underbrush, Ippolito was able to identify and name herbs and flowers, which he gathered into bouquets for my mother. He wandered, losing track of time. As we walked along the ditch he recited from memory the passage about Renzo’s vineyard in Manzoni and the diseased garden in Leopardi—the Maestra’s favorite passages!
We climbed over the low gate that separated the city from the countryside and started to make our way through the dusty fields. The sunset inspired him to recite French poetry. When he finished he gave me an amused look: “Do you know who that was? Charles Baudelaire.”
We were approaching the rubble heap, a pile of crumbled cinderblock and crooked pipes, when I saw my father. He was helping a woman up from the ground about twenty yards from us. Ippolito took me by the shoulders, turned me away from my father and said, “Come on, let’s go.”
Through the corner of my eye I recognized Gemma, who was dusting off her skirt. Without speaking, we retraced our steps. We climbed back over the gate, walked past the church again, and reached the home for the severely disabled. “I want to introduce you to someone,” he said, “if it’s not too late.”
He was looking for a way to distract me. Indeed, he was trying to erase from my mind the scene we had just witnessed. Yes, Ippolito was very fond of me. It hurt him to see me suffering. But was I suffering? It wasn’t clear to me . . . maybe not. My father’s betrayal gave my mother the freedom to love Ippolito without guilt.
At the end of the long avenue that started at the gate, we came to a small park behind the office building. Amid the plants, in the fragrant air of the freshly-watered loam, two men in shirtsleeves were shouting at a group of teenagers and children to line up. Some were in wheelchairs, others were walking with crutches or standing up with the aid of complicated steel armatures.
“Here she is!”
A tiny figure broke away from the group. She moved like a robot. Ippolito went toward her and I followed him like a sleep-walker.
“Forgive me for not visiting sooner. I’ve had so much to do . . . I’ve brought a new friend with me. Luca, let me introduce you to Tilit.”
This creature, of indeterminate sex, dark-skinned, where there was indeed skin, extended her slender hand to me and smiled through half a mouth. The other half had disappeared. It had been replaced with a repellant bright pink plastic mouth. Her left arm and leg had also been completely destroyed.
“Hello,” Tilit greeted me, “What’s your name?” Her voice emerged limpidly.
“Luca,” I heard myself reply.
Tilit told me that she was sixteen years old—but her body, in the parts that had developed naturally, was that of a ten-year-old girl. Abandoned by her mother in the forest, she had been attacked by a wild animal and reduced to this, a scrap of chewed-up flesh.
“Tilit!” called one of the men in white shirts, while waving to Ippolito with one hand. “Come on, it’s suppertime!”
“Can I give you a kiss?” she asked.
Ippolito gave me a look that meant, “Get closer to her.” I brought my cheek close to what remained of her lips and absorbed its warmth. Ippolito leaned in, giving her a gentle hug, and said, “Enjoy your meal!”
“Come back soon!”
She took a step backward and, leaping from one foot to the other, as if she were walking on stilts, she reached the group with the dry sound of scrap iron.
*.
I was leaving Milan for the first time.
To justify our trip, Ippolito said we’d been working too much recently. He didn’t want to overdo it—every now and then the mind needs a break.
He was careful not to allude to the scene by the pile of rubble. It would’ve made no sense, considering the effort he was putting into erasing it from my memory.
He drove very slowly. Cars, he said, should be at the service of men—not the other way around—and if it had been up to him, we would have gone by bicycle. On the bicycle, a splendid invention, you could go anywhere. He had traveled half the world on two wheels, and had only gotten his driver’s license ten years ago, at the insistence of his friends. The beat-up Fiat 128 he was driving had been a gift from one of them. A car was the last thing he wanted, but at this point he was starting to get used to it.
“I’m getting older, Luca . . .”
After an hour of driving he parked next to a
country church. From there we walked along a steep and rocky path, winding through the woods down to a riverbed. He was almost running, happier than I’d ever seen him, perfectly at ease.
After walking for half an hour, we rolled out our towels on a rocky beach, between the trees, deep in the gorge. “Isn’t this splendid?” he repeated, “and we’re only a few miles from the city!”
At first the area seemed deserted. But then, immersed in the green, I was able to make out quite a few other people. All men. All naked. Ippolito got undressed, too. He saw a couple of guys he knew and started up a conversation with them. You could tell he was a regular, like the others. I kept my shorts on.
I’d been so happy when he proposed that day of vacation, but now all I wanted to do was escape! We ate sandwiches that my mother had prepared and fell asleep in the shade.
When I woke up, he was gone. He came back a little while later, covered with sweat and dust. I took out my Latin book and tried to read a few lines. “What are you doing?” he teased. “Put down your books! Here, you need to take a nice dip in the cool water. Come on! We’ll go for a swim in the Adda, the ‘River of Providence.’”
I stood up reluctantly and followed him down to the riverbanks. The water swirled and foamed, even where it was shallow. Reciting a passage from The Betrothed, he climbed up a tall boulder and, ignoring the menacing look of the surface of the water, dove in. He reemerged a few feet away, where the water was churning with foam. He went under again. I happened to notice a sign: “DANGER: No Swimming Allowed.” I raced along the bank as far as I could, following the path of the river. I wanted to shout his name, but when I opened my mouth only the faintest sound came out, covered by the roar of the current. I couldn’t hear my own voice. In the distance, I saw Ippolito’s head come back to the surface, and then disappear for good.
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