Lost Words

by Nicola Gardini

  I stood there staring at the water.

  When the sun descended behind the rock wall, I reached the spot where we had left our things. An older man getting ready to leave noticed that I was alone and asked the others for help. Some of the young men who’d been chatting with Ippolito offered to climb up the ridge, and from up there, try to see what had happened to my father. The man and I went back to where we had parked the car and waited.

  The sun was setting up there, as well. When the young men came back they had no news. There was nothing left to do except report his disappearance to the local police office. One of them accompanied me there and left me at the entrance.

  To simplify matters I told them I had lost my father, as the others had said. A policeman brought me home. My parents were waiting for me in front of the gate like two tormented souls. It was late at night.

  The policeman questioned my parents and made them show their identity cards—he didn’t believe dad was my real father until I admitted that I had lied. Once the policeman was finally convinced that Ippolito wasn’t my real father, he pelted my parents with insults: the beach where Ippolito Fochi had taken me was a shameful place!

  As soon as the policeman left, my father went wild. He yelled at my mother, accusing her of delivering me to a pederast—it was a miracle that I hadn’t drowned. From now on I could only go out with his permission . . . Stunned by the tragedy, she said nothing and didn’t move. She hugged Ippolito’s clothes to her chest while tears streamed down her face and neck.

  The next morning a taxi stopped in front of the gate. He wasn’t dead after all! He was covered with scratches and insect bites, but he was in one piece. The merciless current had dragged him along the rocky bottom, tossing him against the sharp cliffs until, when despair had almost got the better of him, he came back up, far, far away. Struggling, very slowly, also because he was exhausted from holding his breath underwater, he climbed up a steep bank and found shelter in the woods, where he spent the night, like Renzo in The Betrothed. In the morning, at dawn, cutting his feet on the harsh terrain, he made his way back to the beach, where someone came to his aid.

  My mother was also resuscitated. She could barely keep herself from throwing her arms around him, but, mentally, she covered him with kisses and loving caresses that healed each wound. She washed his clothes, over which she had cried all night, and hung them out to dry in the sun. That evening she took her finest skein of wool out of the basket and started to knit a sweater for him. It was time to start thinking about winter.

  V

  Here I am!” she announced, drumming her fingernails against the window. A second later Signorina Terzoli opened the door and came in. “Ah, I didn’t realize you had company,” she exclaimed upon seeing Ippolito.

  He continued eating his spaghetti.

  “Signorina Terzoli, do you remember Professor Foschi?” my mother asked her coldly.

  “Of course I do! Maybe he doesn’t remember me, but I remember him. Wilma Terzoli—pleased to meet you.”

  Ippolito stopped chewing and stood up as a sign of respect, but she forced him to sit back down with a friendly pat on the back.

  “Don’t mind me, please, continue with your meal! My goodness, what are those scratches on your face? . . . You should put some lotion on those . . . Are you visiting?”

  “No,” my mother answered for him, “the Professor moved here right before the August holidays.”

  “Who knows why I thought he would rent out his mother’s apartment—it must be so full of sad memories! . . . Anyway, I won’t be any bother, don’t worry. Here everyone knows I’m a peace-loving person, right Elvira? Why I’m even careful about flushing the toilet after ten o’clock at night . . . Sometimes, if all I’ve done is pee, I avoid flushing altogether. We shouldn’t waste water, you know. In Africa they really need it, poor things . . . Well, I’ll let you eat in peace, don’t mind me. Elvira, I’ll come back later. I have so many things to tell you! You can’t imagine everything that’s happened to me!”

  In the meantime she cast certain gazes in the direction of Ippolito, who had gone back to eating with gusto. “I’ll only tell you one more little thing, then I’ll go . . . I spent the summer trying to get rid of a rash. Isn’t that ridiculous? I call it a rash but who knows what it really was. At first I was scared to death. My neighbor at the beach knew a dermatologist in Savona. I made an appointment to see him and he gave me a lotion. It didn’t do a thing. I went back to him two more times, and each time he came up with a different diagnosis. What a waste of money! In the end he had to admit that the skin is a mystery, they know very little about it. I really like how he defined it. ‘The skin is a filter.’ Do you want to know what brought me some relief? . . . Cabbage. I read somewhere that it has therapeutic powers. Every night I applied some cabbage leaves to the infection and now, thank goodness, it’s getting a little better. Is Signora Dell’Uomo back from the mountains yet?”

  My mother shook her head. “You’re the first one back.”

  “Strange, she swore she would return by the beginning of September. I’ll have to ring her up later. Anyway, I’ll let you eat in peace. What did you cook, Elvira? Mmmm . . . What a nice ragu! Is it good, Professor? Please, don’t let me keep you from eating! My refrigerator is bare. I defrosted it before I left. Let’s hope I still have macaroni somewhere in the cupboard . . .”

  “No good home should be without pasta,” my mother concluded.

  Terzoli took the hint and finally went on her way.

  “Why didn’t you ask her to join us?” Ippolito asked my mother.

  “Her? You must be kidding! Did you see her? Didn’t you hear how she treated you? Terzoli is vicious! Keep your distance from her! Do you know what she’s going to do as soon as she gets home? She’s going to pick up the phone and tell everything to Dell’Uomo. ‘The doorwoman had Miss Lynd’s son over for lunch!’ . . . You don’t know how nasty those two can be. But I couldn’t care less about them—forgive me for speaking this way—and she’s also going to talk about how your forehead is covered with scratches, and that you gave me a pearl necklace. They’ll even start saying that my diamond came from you!”

  “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating, Elvira?”

  “Not at all. There’s certain things you don’t know. You can’t imagine how many nasty rumors are already circulating about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Forget I said anything. I don’t want to upset you.”

  “But I find it amusing.”

  “In the past few years they’ve made my life impossible. I couldn’t even offer a coffee to a poor old lady on the third floor! It bothered the signore! The loge is not a café, they said. So in the end I had to tell the poor thing to stop coming downstairs—can you imagine! And you’re telling me to invite Terzoli to eat with us?”

  “Then maybe it would be better if I didn’t come downstairs, either.”

  My mother blanched. “It has nothing to do with you,” she hastened to make light of what she had just said, “This is my home and I can invite whoever I want.”

  She knew that sooner or later Ippolito would have to stop coming, but for the moment she didn’t want to think about it. Raising her voice made her feel a little more courageous.

  “Let them report me to the building manager. If Signora Aldrovanti even tries to complain, I’ll eat her alive!” Her cheeks became as red as fire. “How could they think I’m not allowed to have guests? What’s wrong with that? No one has the right to criticize me. They’re all envious, that’s what they are: a pack of envious old hens!”

  *.

  He was distracted, uninterested. I had to repeat each word to him two or three times. He would hit the wrong keys, moaning and groaning.

  “Let’s drop everything. This morning I don’t have the head for it. Let’s go out on the balcony for a breath of fresh air.”

  W
e sat in front of the pots of geraniums, side by side, looking out over the countryside, which from up there, in the clear air, seemed boundless. The sun was out, but in my shaded corner I felt cold.

  “Do we have much left to do?” I asked.

  “No, not very much . . . We should be done by Christmas.”

  He noticed I was shivering, so he pulled the curtain to one side so I would get some sunlight.

  “And after that?”

  “Luca, did my mother ever speak to you about me?”

  My heart skipped a beat. The silence was broken. Finally he was introducing himself as the son of Amelia Lynd! How should I answer him? How could I answer him? If I told the truth, I would only hurt him.

  “The Maestra was very reserved,” I replied. “She didn’t like talking about the past.”

  He didn’t seem to mind. Deep down it was the answer he was expecting.

  “Were you fond of her?”

  “Yes, very,” I admitted.

  “Me, too . . . But she didn’t love me, otherwise she wouldn’t have shut me out of her life. She could have dropped me a line, at least before she died. I looked everywhere for a letter. I found nothing . . . She didn’t even have a photo of me.”

  I remembered the letter she had written to me, the letter I cherished, hidden in my Latin book, and for the first time I suspected that it had been addressed to someone else, to her real son. I should’ve run home to get it, I should’ve reread it there with him, but at that moment I couldn’t move. I was in a state of shock. Even dead, the Maestra hadn’t lost her ability to be evasive. Who had I really been to her? And who was I to Ippolito? A stand-in for both? A go-between? By what criteria, for what purpose, had she, the dictionary devotee, attributed meanings to individual human beings?

  Now I could clearly see to what extent I was Ippolito and he was me. We were two words that exchanged meanings, and not because we wanted to—as we had presumed to believe—but because she had wanted it to happen that way.

  But hadn’t I done the same with him? Hadn’t I started to love him as a surrogate?

  For me the time had also come to break the silence. Liberated from the fear of hearing “no,” I asked him to tell me the story of Amelia Lynd.

  *.

  I took mental note of everything, careful not to interrupt him even once, and when I got home later that night, I started to write down the gist of the story in my English notebook, the right place to conserve these revelations. Who knows, maybe one day I would write a whole book about her . . .

  Her father was English, her mother Italian. They met on a cruise ship while visiting Greece and Turkey. Amelia was born a few months later, in 1897, in Rome, the city of her mother, where she grew up as an only child. Her father later managed to get a transfer from the newspaper where he was working and became the Italian correspondent for many years. Amelia studied in Rome and received her degree in classics. Every now and then she would go to England, to London, to visit her father’s family. They were Jewish, but her father wasn’t religious. The exact opposite. To Amelia he transmitted a strong antipathy toward any form of religion. Her mother, however, was Catholic, relatively observant, but enough of a non-conformist to marry an atheist. They still had a church wedding, but without the Eucharist, out of respect for the husband.

  Ippolito, her first and only child, was also born in Rome, the same year that Mussolini came to power. His father died shortly after of tuberculosis. Widowed (in reality, they had never married, but she loved calling herself a widow), she moved to England, leaving the child to be raised by his grandparents. The only time he saw his mother was when his grandfather took him to see her in London.

  In the early 1930s, when he was already a teenager, she decided to bring him back with her. So he joined her in England, where he continued the education he had begun in Italy. She was absolutely opposed to her son growing up surrounded by fascists. They lived in England, and other far-away places, for long periods, during which she herself took charge of his education. They spent some time in Palestine. She was interested in living in areas where populations were being formed. Although she sympathized with the Jews, she was very critical of their territorial claims. She slowly broke away from all of her Zionist friends, leaving Ippolito and her to fend for themselves.

  At one point they moved to India, where their lives were much easier. There were quite a few Englishmen who wanted to give the country back its independence. New friendships were formed. Ippolito was also better off in India than he had been in England or Palestine. He was becoming a man. He no longer depended entirely on his mother.

  When the war broke out they returned to Europe, to Rome. His grandparents fell sick and died in 1940. Amelia sold the house in Rome and emigrated to America, like some of her Oxford friends. Ippolito remained in Rome, but he immediately regretted his decision not to follow her. Without his grandparents he felt like a stranger in the city. The atmosphere was awful. He enrolled at the university, in mathematics, and completed his degree quickly. Then he joined his mother in New York. She wasn’t at all happy there. She hated American materialism. A true Englishwoman, she said there were no secrets in America: everything took place in the light of day—how boring.

  Once the war was over, they returned to Italy. This time they found a house in Milan, on Via Manzoni. Amelia was in seventh heaven. She was in love with the country. She was in love with the city. She said that in Milan they were finally living a real life, they were lucky to be witnessing the birth of Italy, or rather of the Italians. She believed in the people—in the factory workers, the housewives, the young people. She believed in the revival and the renewal. She even managed not to despise the Church, which was working so hard to resurrect a demoralized society. For a while they received visits at home from a priest, Father Stefani, whom Ippolito greatly admired.

  But Amelia’s enthusiasm did not last long. As on their previous travels, she quickly started criticizing everything and everyone. Even the reconstruction of Italy was proving to be a disappointment. The priests were back in charge of civic life. The Italians were losers, not only because they had not won the war, but also because they did not know how to become the masters of their future.

  In 1952, to the great surprise of everyone who knew him, Ippolito entered the seminary. As far as his mother was concerned, he couldn’t have committed a greater error. Their relationship frayed and all communication between them ended after he took his vows. Every now and then he would try to contact her, but his overtures were always rejected. He had betrayed her. She didn’t forgive him even after he left the Church, in 1962. “You’re unforgivable,” she wrote. Fifteen years would go by without another word from her. She wanted nothing more to do with him.

  Once in a while she would go back to London, where she still had a house. At one point she sold that, too, because she needed money. She had used up most of her enormous inheritance—traveling, maintaining herself and her child, buying an endless amount of books, paying porters and copyists, donating money to causes that she believed in . . .

  Knowing that she had been reduced to almost total poverty, and was elderly, Ippolito tried to help her. He would send her money, which she never accepted. One evening, on his way home from the Home for the Disabled, he saw the “For Sale” sign on the gate of Via Icaro 15. He decided to buy the apartment where she lived, hoping she would be grateful for this gift, hoping she would forgive him.

  *.

  In the space of a week almost everyone was back: Signorina Mantegazza with her dog Bella, the Casellis, the Zarchis, the Bortolons, the Paolinis, the Dell’Uomos, the Cavallos, the Di Lorenzos, the Vezzalis, the Lojaconos, Signor Vignola (alone, because his wife and child had gone from the mountains to the seaside).

  The only ones missing were the D’Antonios, who were stuck in Naples because of the cholera epidemic, which the television was going on and on about, and the Malfitanos, who
for some unknown reason were still in Sicily.

  Their suntans, extra weight, rest, and rediscovered contact with their places of origin had changed them. Their voices were clearer, their accents had regained their original fullness, their movements seemed more natural.

  But in two or three days they were already back to the way they used to be.

  My mother, who’d already seen a drastic reduction in tips from previous years, now noticed that no one had brought her back a souvenir. “It’s better this way,” she said, “I only put that junk on display out of kindness. You know what I’m going to do now? I’m going to throw everything out.”

  She didn’t waste a minute. That night, we could finally unfold my bed springs without worrying that something was going to fall.

  The D’Antonios and Malfitanos also returned.

  Signora Vezzali explained that on the eve of their departure, the parrot, Leopoldo, had disappeared. At first Malfitano hadn’t given it a second thought. Leopoldo would occasionally fly away, especially during vacations. But he would always reappear a few hours later. They waited for him that night, the next morning, and the rest of the week. Meanwhile Malfitano had reported the disappearance up and down Selinunte. They even put up the parrot’s picture all over town. The search lasted for two weeks. Not a trace of Leopoldo. There was no way it could have been an escape (Leopoldo loved his master too much), or a bird-napping: with his pecking and his deafening shrieks, Leopoldo would have made life impossible for anyone who tried to capture him. So he must have been killed. There was no other explanation. Killed and thrown away. The master’s suspicions inevitably fell on the person most interested in getting rid of him: his wife. Leopoldo hated her, as we’d seen on Christmas Eve. Had she, after years of being afraid, decided to kill him, with the complicity of her relatives? But she continued to protest her innocence. Leopoldo had chosen freedom, she kept saying. He had gone to a better place, finding some pine or eucalyptus tree near the sea.