Lost Words

by Nicola Gardini

  *.

  Summer was over. So was the peace and quiet, the magical enchantment, listening to the splashing of the fountain and the chirping of the birds, talking and joking freely with Ippolito, no intrusions, sitting down to tasty meals of spaghetti or rice salad—now it was all just a memory.

  Lunch with Ippolito was reduced to a pathetic ritual. Every time we sat down at the table, one of the old hens would stop by with some excuse to stare at what we were eating.

  My mother became grumpy, curt, irritable. On my birthday she even avoided placing the ritual gift in my hand. She could feel all the eyes in the building staring down at her and she took it out on Ippolito, as if it were his fault, as if she were expecting him to find a solution. She was itching for a fight, going on and on about how he needed a wife, someone who would take care of him, iron his shirts, cook for him, keep his house in order.

  “The world is full of unmarried men—bachelors,” he argued defensively. “Do you think they all live in squalor, on empty stomachs, in messy houses?”

  “If that were the problem, all you’d need would be a cleaning lady! A house isn’t just a hole you live in. Big or small it’s still a hole . . . A woman, in other words, is a home.”

  “I have a home.”

  She didn’t want to hear it. “A person gets older . . . you need companionship. Otherwise what kind of a life is that? Life is already hard enough. Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  Ippolito’s jaw tightened. “Of course I have.”

  “And you never thought of starting a family?”

  “It wasn’t possible. You should’ve understood by now, Elvira.”

  But no, she hadn’t understood, and if she had, it didn’t matter: “I don’t believe you. Anything is possible if you want it enough. Obviously you’ve never met the right woman. Me, when I saw my husband I fell in love right away. Right away I knew he was the one for me. We smiled at each other . . . Can you imagine? We fell in love at the factory, where I was serving him soup. And you know there was no room for fooling around in the factory! We were there to work! I sweated inside my uniform. He would bring home his overalls stained with grease—you could never get rid of the stains . . . But if love arrives . . .”

  “Well, your husband obviously liked women,” Ippolito said.

  It was the first time he had made explicit reference to his sexual proclivities, but not even this stopped my mother. “My husband was only interested in the movies! Starting a family was the last thing on his mind!”

  “Elvira, listen to me carefully,” he begged her, forcing himself to stay calm. “I don’t need a wife. You’re convinced that I’m unhappy because I’m not married. You’re wrong. I’m happy with my life, as crazy as that might sound to you—and please, can we change the subject and not talk about this anymore?”

  But she refused to budge. “What is life without love?” she insisted, as if the argumentative role that Ippolito usually played had been miraculously handed over to her.

  “Nothing.”

  “You see? So you agree with me!”

  “Of course I agree with you!”

  “But you are giving up . . .”

  Ippolito was flabbergasted. “My life has been filled with love and still is! You have a strange idea of love, Elvira.”

  “Love is like a fever,” she started to theorize.

  “Now you’re a philosopher?”

  Not even his sarcasm could stop her. “Love is a fever,” she repeated, convinced of her intuition.

  “Then it must be wrong,” Ippolito contradicted her. “Fever is a symptom of disease.”

  “No,” she retorted, “I mean that it warms you, it changes you. Fever colors your cheeks and makes you beautiful. The few times it has come to me I’ve felt as if I was wearing makeup.”

  “But a fever doesn’t last.”

  “You’re right. Love can end, too, just like a fever, or like makeup when you wash it away. What I meant to say is that when you’re in love you see everything differently. You see the other person and feel happy.”

  “For me love is not for a single person but for the people, for all the people I have around me.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “All I do is receive and give love because I feel surrounded by others. Am I making sense?”

  But she didn’t want to be one of the others! “What about sex?”

  Ippolito was caught off guard.

  “Sex?” he repeated, “what does sex have to do with it?”

  “It has everything to do with it! Love is sex, kisses, embraces, tenderness, which is so important for a woman.”

  “And in your opinion there is no tenderness in simple co-existence? In being together, close, the way we are in this building, where we all take some part in the lives of others. For me this is love, or tenderness, as you call it.” And he added, in a whisper, between his teeth, “Sex is something else. You can find it wherever you want.”

  “You’re not making any sense! You call this hell tenderness? Open your eyes, Ippolito! The others couldn’t care less about you or me. That’s the plain truth. No one loves us!”

  *.

  He abandoned us. The situation we had enjoyed that summer obviously couldn’t continue, but I was expecting he would at least stay friends with me, asking me to help him copy down the last definitions or simply to accompany him on his afternoon walks. But he didn’t. His excuse was that now I needed to think of school. The first year of high school was very difficult. Better that I put my energy into studying.

  Now I spent my afternoons trying to memorize long lists of Greek words, transcribing their meanings in a special notebook, as I had done with English. Rita called to me from the garden, but I had no wish to spend time with her. “I have a lot of studying to do for tomorrow,” I told her. The compiling and memorizing of such beautiful Greek words afforded me a new pleasure, which made up in part for the loss of Ippolito and, in some ways, reconnected me to the Maestra. On my first test in Greek, a translation of a passage on the roundness of the Earth, I got a perfect grade.

  For my mother, however, there were no compensations or pleasures. Not even my perfect grade cheered her up. All she said, with an uncharacteristic blandness, was: “I thought they only gave such high grades in elementary school.” She had never been so depressed, not even when my father had prohibited her from buying the apartment.

  Once again suffering had stripped away her beauty. She looked at least forty years old. The pearl necklace that Ippolito had given her ended up in a drawer. The diamond was returned to the back of the closet and then to the man who had sold it to her.

  While grief drove her to love Ippolito more intensely, it also made her detest him. She felt rejected, and criticized herself for showing hospitality to an ingrate. At school we were assigned to read and summarize the fourth book of the Aeneid, and in Dido’s suffering I recognized my mother’s own torment, and also in her regret and passion, which had become indistinguishable from bitterness. In reality, her Aeneas was still there, on the fifth floor, intent on recreating a miniature Troy built from words. She still harbored some hopes: sooner or later he would return, sooner or later her love would be requited. It was this hope that kept her from insulting him and, who knows, from maybe committing an ill-advised act.

  In her affliction, she neglected her daily chores. At the same time, she became a particularly good guard, never leaving the window. Sooner or later he would have to appear. And when he did, she behaved strangely. Walking toward him with an excess of good cheer, she asked, “How are you doing, Professor? Are you going out grocery-shopping? You should go out more often. Why do you stay at home all day? What’s to stop you from going out? . . . If only I had wings!”

  He gave her a concerned look. “Elvira, you look tired. Be careful not to get sick. You need some rest.”

  And she, jokingly, “Oh
, I got all the rest I needed this summer. It was nice here, wasn’t it? Better than the Riviera—isn’t it true we had a really nice time?”

  That simple reference to the happiness she’d felt those last days of August with him alleviated her anguish, however briefly. She wanted to say so much more, but the words caught in her throat and by the time she got them out it was too late. He was already gone. Pazienza, she told herself. Wait till tomorrow . . . Tomorrow she would speak to him a little more, tomorrow she would get him to linger a little longer.

  *.

  In the lobby Terzoli and Dell’Uomo were raking him over the coals. Evidently, the fact that he’d stopped coming by to see us wasn’t enough for them.

  “He’s so grumpy. Who does he think he is?” the spinster brayed. Dell’Uomo, not be outdone, added, “I know! He puts on so many airs!”

  “When I saw him there in the loge for the first time, like I told you, he didn’t even get up, the slob! And why should he? He’s a ‘professor’!”

  “That’s the way handsome men always act. And it’s worse when they’re also professors!”

  “Have you noticed? He says hello and immediately dashes away. He never stops to say a word or two. Is he afraid we might bite?”

  “He must have something to hide. Have you seen the smirk he always has on his face? It’s as if he’s making fun of us. No one can convince me that he’s not feeling guilty about his mother’s death.”

  And Terzoli, raising her voice, “I wonder why he never got married.”

  “The seamstress says he’s . . .” she replied in a voice mimicking Dell’Uomo, and rather than finish her sentence, she made a limp gesture with her right hand.

  Terzoli’s mouth dropped open. “Good heavens! So why was he going downstairs to the loge every day?”

  “For convenience. Why else? Who wouldn’t want to find their lunch all ready for them on the table. Even men like that get hungry.” And Dell’Uomo gave another flick of her wrist.

  The Professor had turned into the building’s latest scandal. Every detail of his life was cause for alarm. Why did he wear white trousers? Why didn’t he iron his shirts? Couldn’t his dear friend the doorwoman iron them for him? Why did he buy chicken from the supermarket and not beef? Why did he drink Barbera wine? Where did he go in the late afternoon? And those scratches, how did he really get them? And how did he get by without a job?

  One night, after hearing another malicious exchange between Dell’Uomo and a couple of other women a few yards away from the window, my mother couldn’t take it anymore.

  “The Professor,” she exploded, making her way into the lobby, “is the most noble person who has ever set foot in this building, together with his mother, poor Maestra Lynd. Remember that! There are people in here who aren’t worthy to kiss the ground he walks on!”

  Dell’Uomo placed a hand over her breast, as if she were having a heart attack. “My how you exaggerate, Elvira, don’t you think you’re a little biased? There’s nothing the least bit noble about him!”

  “The Professor is a saint! He’ll go to Heaven, while the people I’m talking about will go straight to Hell, every last one of them. And they know who they are.”

  She spent the evening in self-reproach. She should have been even harder on Dell’Uomo. She had turned into a coward. Even when she knew she was right, she no longer knew how to raise her voice.

  *.

  A long time went by before he returned to us. He looked so distinguished when he came in, a little thinner, with longer hair. He saw my copy of the Aeneid open on the table and lit up. He browsed through the first few pages, looked up at me, and, clearly articulating dactyls and spondees, recited from memory the entire scene of the shipwreck. My mother, spellbound, forgot all about the coffee on the stove as it boiled over and splattered onto the floor.

  Ippolito declared that the most beautiful hexameter in all Latin poetry was in that passage: Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto—Scattered men appear, swimming in the vast swell. He repeated it various times. Did I hear the alliteration? Did I hear the rhyme? And the scene? Magnificent! But if you thought about it carefully, that scene was hardly possible. Who could have seen them, those poor floundering men? To whom might they appear? Certainly not to the poet, who was not present at the event. Nor to anyone else, since there were no witnesses, except maybe the shipwrecked men, who hardly had the time or the desire to contemplate their sublime desolation. What did Virgil really mean when he used the verb apparent? Had I thought about it? Well, they appeared to the gods, that’s whom they appeared to! Whom else? The gods were the witnesses—they were watching!

  “Ippolito,” said my mother gravely, interrupting his improvised lesson on Latin literature and forcing herself to step down from her ecstasy. “I have to tell you something. It’s important . . . the other tenants have taken a dislike to you. Excuse me for speaking so frankly, but this is no time for joking around. I told you they were horrible people.”

  Ippolito shrugged his shoulders. “What do you mean they’ve taken a dislike to me?”

  “They think you’re strange.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  My mother started to get worked up. “Come now, please try to understand. Don’t be so hard-headed! For once you need to take me seriously. Nasty rumors are circulating about you.” She hesitated for a moment. “They think you’re conceited, arrogant.”

  “Maybe I’ve become that way lately . . .”

  “They hate you!”

  “Not everyone is capable of love.”

  “Ippolito, I’m not joking! These people can’t stand you!”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because that’s the way they are. There’s no rhyme or reason. You live alone, and no one knows what you do for a living or how you pay the bills. You’re an oddball to them. There are only families here: the husbands work, the wives take care of the house, and the children go to school.”

  “But there are a few spinsters here, too.”

  “No one is worried about the spinsters, my dear Professor! At most, people feel sorry for them, because no one wants them. But a man, that’s another question . . . For the other tenants you’re a mystery. Can you get that into your head? They don’t know you, and since you’re always in your own world, inside your own house, they all come up with the wildest ideas. That’s the way people are. We all have people who dislike us. We have to be on our guard. Otherwise people will destroy us!”

  “I would never have imagined my life could be the subject of so much interest. Besides, every person is a mystery, to himself and to others.”

  “These monsters don’t care about your reasons! A word to the wise: if you don’t get them to stop immediately, they won’t give you a moment’s peace. Do something, please. That way they’ll stop talking about you.”

  “Elvira, you underestimate me,” Ippolito observed with a hint of resentment. “Do you really think they can take away my peace and quiet so easily? I can’t believe the opinion you have of me! Do you really think I’m so weak?”

  His words did little to reassure her. “Listen to me, Professor. With everything I’ve seen, I know what I’m talking about.”

  To put an end to the discussion, he finally gave in. “Alright, I’ll try to do something. But what do you suggest I do, you, who are so wise?”

  She was too jealous to advise him to talk with the signore of the building. “Why don’t you invite Signora Dell’Uomo’s husband to the stadium?” she suggested, half-heartedly.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. And please don’t tell me to invite him to lunch. I don’t know how to cook.”

  “Well, promise me that you’ll do something. Something nice, that will show everyone how good you are, how kind . . . how normal!”

  *.

  “Children! Children!” he started calling from the balcony.

  Since
no one paid him any mind, he called on the intercom to ask me how to get them to come upstairs. He went down to the courtyard and managed to recruit only Rita, Rosi, and the Cavallo’s son, Mirko. Everyone else said no. Signora Vezzali’s son, Andrea, said the Professor was a pervert.

  “A what?” asked Rita, wrinkling her nose.

  In the end, Andrea came along, too.

  The Professor cleared his table, and in the spot where I was used to seeing his Olivetti, he had placed a layer cake. What was the cake doing there? What were the others doing there, in my house? What did they know about the Maestra, about the Professor, about the dictionary? And why was Mirko sitting in the Maestra’s armchair? Why was that little idiot Rosi leaving dirty fingerprints where I—and I alone—had the privilege and the right to lay my hands?

  “You can sit there on the ground,” the Professor said to Rita, who was giggling like a ninny. “Unfortunately I don’t have any more chairs. You can take turns. I’ve never had so many guests at once . . . Well now, here we are, all settled in. I’m happy that you came. Thank you. I’m sorry if I interrupted your games, but I wanted to meet you. My name is Ippolito.”

  He shook everyone’s hand and repeated his name. Then he cut five slices of the cake and served it. No one dared to speak. The only thing you could hear was the sound of mouths chewing.

  “There’s plenty more, if you like,” he encouraged them. “Andrea, hand me your plate and I’ll give you another helping. You, too, Mirko. Don’t be shy. Tell me about your vacations.”

  Andrea said that he had been in Puglia, at summer camp. He said that he’d kissed three girls in one night. Mirko boasted that he’d touched his cousin’s breasts.

  “Enough of that!” Ippolito interrupted them. “This is getting too personal. Certain secrets shouldn’t be told. Let’s hear from the girls.”

  Rita had visited the mother of Father Aldo in the mountains. Rosi had gone to Venice. Her aunt took her to Jesolo, on the seaside, and they ate on the beach.