Malacqua

by Nicola Pugliese

  Salvatore Picozzi was now behind the bar by the espresso machine, looking out of the window, into the sky, and all he could see against the light were those thin threads of rain coming down and coming down, and sometimes in fact he wanted to shut up shop, oh yes, shut up the whole thing and go home, but he said to himself that you can’t do that, it’s not possible. People are used to finding Café Susan open all the time during its regular opening hours. What would people think if they turned up for a coffee and found nothing but a nice closed shutter? These are unproductive things from a commercial point of view. In short, he stood behind the bar now checking those threads of rain, following the pattern against the lights of the lamps on the other side of the street, on the lights of some of the windows on the opposite pavement. And yet it was clear that the traffic had now thinned out, and there were really very few cars around, and there were few people in the street, and yet they passed at a nimble pace, wrapped in hoods and various raincoats, with black umbrellas. The women often carried gaudy multicoloured umbrellas, a splash of colour in all that greyness. The girls walked with a light, skipping step, with little squeals, and pauses, and jumps. Older women proceeded with that slow, methodical tread they had, steady on their feet, they had lost the lightness of the girls, yes, they had lost it some time ago.

  And that was the third day of rain, 25 October, and no one had yet understood the matter of the voices hurled at the city from the arrow-slits of the Maschio Angioino. Nor was anything known about the dolls. There was only, for the moment, that vague memory of the memory of Sunday 5 August, and a vague foreboding, the curious hypothesis that would probably, with this rain coming down and coming down, change the very prospect of life. Some extraordinary event was bound to occur, somewhere in the city of Naples.

  Margherita Esposito sadly reflected that this evening her son Luigi would not be coming home. He wouldn’t be coming back, and this time wasn’t like the other times it had happened before, when maybe her son had been out all night for some encounter he had with a member of the opposite sex or perhaps he was out of Naples somewhere, no, this time it was all different, because an awareness had descended of the fact that he wouldn’t come home, he never would again. From that night onwards, and for all the nights to come, he would sleep with the girl he had married, and in short that piece of her heart had gone forever. The house was poorer and sadder now. Something was missing. Margherita Esposito wandered around the house, and checked, and checked, and without a doubt something was missing, she was aware of the absence, that was it, she was aware of it, and it was certainly the absence of that young son of hers who had gone. That night she didn’t feel sad, perhaps, but diminished, yes, diminished. Someone had taken away a part of her, and she found herself poorer, perhaps also more alone, thinking about it, but Margherita Esposito wanted to avoid thinking about it. So she went on wandering around the house with a duster in her hand. She ran it over the furniture, and over the mirrors, and over the windows, and to tell the truth there wasn’t much to dust, but what was left in that harsh moment but to wander and wander around the house?, what was left? The rain hit the windows of her house in Posillipo with a tender and sweetly melancholy sound. In some respects it was a caress, that rain that fell to obscure people’s feelings, that vague hubbub in the distance. Were the walls about to fall down?, would the house disappear?, what? The duster went around in a circle on the dining table, following the trace of a mark until deep into the night, a mark that won’t fade, a firm solid dry thought which this rain is dissolving and removing. Perhaps she might half-close her eyes, feel in her eyelids the start of tears that refuse to fall, were it not for that duster going round and round in a circle on the dinner table, and for the life that goes on. Because to tell the truth they can pull your arm off, they can mutilate your legs, and pull both your eyes from their bloody sockets, and they can burn the skin on your hands, and everything, but this life will go on as before. Your only option is to breathe hard, and stay calm, keep a strong grip on yourself and breathe right now in the silence of the night, and listen to your breath as it rises and falls, and the sound of the rain. Adding it up, it was the third day that this rain had been falling as it was falling, the third day in a row. If anyone wanted to believe in omens, let them. She could read her coffee grounds for portents, and find a meaning in the arrangement of a pack of cards. That ace of spades, why that ace of spades?

  And beneath that rain that was coming down slowly, he quietly advanced, closed away inside his car. On the windscreen the wiper drew ellipses, greyish filaments and quivering lights. When he turned into Corso Vittorio Emanuele he knew that this time he would do it. He knew it in a flash of illumination, like a full headlight shone into the street. Then he changed gears and pulled over to the pavement on the right, so that anyone behind could easily overtake him. He felt in his chest that strange sensation like an unbidden emotion, and how would it end up he wondered, but there wasn’t much time now for those belated questions, because along the street in the headlights those unusual figures were emerging with their red-painted lips and their gaudy dresses. Their high heels, their densely drawn eyebrows, and their black and blonde and fire-red hair. It seemed to him that they had emerged as an interdiction, a prohibition. You can’t do this, you can’t do this, and yet it needed to be done, then, once and for all. Certainly with the requisite caution, but undoubtedly it needed to be done. In brief snatches Alfonso Amitrano ran through his own personal history, and this was the third day of rain in the city of Naples and through the windows he could make out the pattern, and it was possible to conjecture that from one moment to the next an unusual and in some respects a cruel event was bound inevitably to happen. Certainly an event out of the ordinary. And had the disaster on Via Tasso and Via Aniello Falcone had been an omen of what was to come?

  That precise awareness had reached the devotees of the Holy Face. Now, inside the Sanctuary, everything was being put back into his hands, in such a way as to provide for what was just, for what was truth, and in fact truth is always very difficult to attain, and when you have attained it someone always appears to give another, different version, and this new version undoubtedly also contains an element of truth. Sometimes you find yourself thinking that the truth has a thousand faces and is in every place and in every person. Within the Sanctuary the image of the Holy Face descended to take fear from the palm of your hand. There was this trust, and the meditative silence, those prayers, those people murmuring on their knees. Outside the Sanctuary they were selling the image of the Face in the form of a car sticker, and everyone had his own. In fact, some people had more than one, on the four corners of the rear window of the car there were four stickers neatly arranged, and then there was the reassuring image of him with his blond beard and his blue eyes. Once outside of the Sanctuary, let us put it this way, one felt at ease, with one’s mind more agile. He had delegated; yes, he had delegated. Now there’s nothing more to think about, nothing more to worry about. The Face had been appropriately filled with hidden fears, hopes and thoughts. And even if that unusual rain continued outside, even the rain was more bearable now. The dark foreboding remained, certainly it remained, but with no reason now to worry. Or perhaps there was, but anyway.

  It was on that third day of rain, 25 October, that the five-lira coins began to play music, and one might have thought at first that it was the result of a collective hallucination, of autosuggestion. But that would have been an impression that did not correspond to the truth, because in fact all possible and imaginable acoustic measurements had been made, and we know very well that if it is true that a brain can be rendered suggestible, the same does not hold for a recording device, and in fact every time a recording device was called upon to confirm the song that had just been heard, the reproduction corresponded to the reality in every single particular, and if the verification of such an unusual phenomenon was initially entrusted to devices which were not especially sophisticated, we must also say that highly sophisticated equipme
nt was used to address the problem, and each time a check was made the result was the same as the one before. Because in the end it was clear even to the most recalcitrant that this was not a matter of suggestion, nor of collective hallucination, but of actual, genuine music. Well, it would also be appropriate to point out that Sara Cipriani was nothing more than a ten-year-old child with long blonde hair whose mother washed it constantly because she wanted to make a good impression on her friends, and on her fellow tenants in the building at 324 Via Posillipo. Sara Cipriani was four foot seven inches tall and without overwhelmingly brilliant results attended the fifth-year class of the Alessandro Manzoni primary school. In short, she was a likeable little girl, sad by temperament but still always cheerful, already with a melancholy hint of adolescence in her eyes. She spent her days going to school in the morning, from half past eight until one o’clock, and then she came home for lunch, and before eating she brought down her cocker spaniel puppy and then she sat down at the table with her parents and her brother. Her mother was always saying to her don’t do this, don’t do this, and in fact she paid attention except that sometimes she was distracted by a fleeting thought, and then maybe she made a mistake, and if she made a mistake her mother was immediately ready with that shrill voice and no gentleness at all. Then she bit her lip in silence, and accepted those reproaches, and lowered her head, and her father didn’t say anything to her, but then her father never said anything to anybody in that house, he just gave you those long looks sometimes that burrowed inside you, more than once she had thought that her father’s eyes were beautiful and gentle and deep and they reached you like a caress, like a tender smile. In short every day they came together around the table at about two in the afternoon, and her mother always had lots of things to say, especially to her husband, but her husband said not a word in reply, he listened, certainly, he listened carefully to every word and every syllable, but then in the end he said nothing at all, if there was a problem in the end he gave a nod of agreement to the solution already put forward by his wife and in short those family meetings at two in the afternoon passed wearily and were always the same and several times Sara Cipriani had reflected that perhaps everyone in that house lived for themselves, yes, for themselves, and there was no cheerful confusion or lively conversations, but the silence that fell was disheartening. Immediately after lunch her father left, he got up from the table and said well see you later and put on his raincoat in the hallway and at the very last moment just as he was about to leave she arrived in silence, she got up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, he stroked her long hair with his big hand and then opened the door and closed it behind him, and then he was gone, he was gone for another day, and she was about to stop for a moment and think about it, when her mother’s voice came from the kitchen saying that she had to give her a hand, didn’t she?, but she was always pretending to forget, she had no desire to help her mother, in the kitchen after lunch, even though she understood very well, of course, she understood: it was something that had to be done, and in the end she cleared up carefully slowly bringing the dishes to the kitchen and putting everything else in the drawers and took the bundled tablecloth and shook it in the air from the open window. When it was all over, she said do you still need me?, no I don’t need you, her mother replied, and then on tiptoe Sara Cipriani crossed the corridor of the flat and went and threw herself on the bed in her room, with her arms crossed behind her head and her feet crossed and her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling and after a while she heard vaguely through the corridor and the half-open door that her mother was on the phone to her friends. Then, so as not to hear the women’s chatter which was always the same and the same again, turned on her portable radio in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle and lay there listening to music, and with music the afternoon certainly became more bearable, dream images crowded into her eye, from the window overlooking Via Posillipo came voices and the sounds of cars and buses stopping right under the building, and generally speaking that’s how things were. Until one day her mother said wailing and red-eyed you’ve got to stop being annoying!, and let me show you what’s going to happen to that radio!, and she picked up the radio in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle, went to the window, looked out and hurled it into the street. She heard that faint sound of a frail thing being smashed. Sara Cipriani wanted to say, and wanted to do, but instead she stayed on the bed with that lump somewhere in her throat taking her breath away and after a while she felt two big tears running down her cheeks, silent and unseemly, and from the open door to the corridor came the words of her mother saying over and over how tired she was of having a daughter like that?, and what did she think?, with that other one who is never at home and never says a word even if you pay him!, can you believe the two of them?, was she their servant? Sara Cipriani got out of bed and tiptoed to the window, and down in the street she saw her radio in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle and there was nothing to be done now and silently she went back to bed and crossed her arms behind her head to take a deep breath and crossed her feet and lay still crying inside and showing nothing. She wouldn’t say a word, no. She wouldn’t say a single word. Her mother could break all her things if she liked, she would never say a single word. What did she expect?, that she would cry?, that she would go and ask for forgiveness?, that she would sweet-talk her into letting her have the things that were actually hers? Oh no. She could take everything away every single thing and throw everything down into the street and do whatever she wanted and she could even hit her in the end, but she wouldn’t say anything, not a word, her strong, hard silence would become an impregnable raised barrier. And she lay still reflecting that now the afternoon was really longer and more interminable, without music, without the songs of her radio in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle. She put her hands in her pockets and tightened her shoulders, and then she got up on one elbow and threw all her coins on to the bed. 225 lire: one hundred-lira coin, two fifties, two tens, one five. The five-lire coin was absolutely tiny and teeny and light in the palm of her hand and for some reason she brought it to her ear, perhaps coins were like shells, and you could hear the sea if you listened very carefully in silence. It wasn’t the sea that came, not the faraway swish of an echo of the sea but music, music that she could clearly make out, yes, she could make it out, and she immediately recognised the song, which was the song about Lily, the girl who takes drugs and dies and they should have stopped her in time and treated her and instead none of that had happened and Lily was gone, gone forever, and a playful smile appeared on her lips, and her eyes opened wide at the discovery. The five-lire coin repeated in her ear the song about Lily and all the other songs she liked, and in the end she had only to think about a song and immediately the coin repeated it to her and now she had all her personal music, her truly personal music, and no one could take it away from her no, really no one. To check she took the coin away from her ear and as she had predicted the coin stopped playing, and then she brought it back and again she was listening to a few songs and then she gripped it in her fist and put it back in her pocket being careful to put the other coins in her pocket on the other side. Because the other coins didn’t do a thing, they were just ordinary normal coins, one hundred, two fifties, two tens. And in short she put that five-lire coin in her right pocket and touched the velvet of her trousers, and that same day, at that same moment, in all of the houses in all of the city ten-year-old girls found that their coins were playing music and there was an incredible crowd of parents who wanted to know and wanted to hear, but in fact when they picked up the coins and brought them to their ears they couldn’t hear anything at all, only little girls heard the music. In fact, as we have said, at first this phenomenon was considered rather suspicious, and people thought it was something to do with auto-suggestion, with a collective auditory hallucination, and then proofs and counter-proofs were necessary, but in the end when all the tape recorders supplied the same identical response it was clear even to the most sceptical and recalcitrant that it had
nothing to do with suggestion and everything to do with music, which the tapes faithfully reproduced, and which no one could then deny with a shrug or by saying but anyway you know what little girls are like, always daydreaming, because in fact all the little girls all over the city weren’t actually dreaming at all, and nor would they dream in the future. They just brought the five-lire coins to their ears and out came music and songs. Every afternoon throughout that whole period all the little girls all over the city were rich in that music that came out ceaselessly, and at school from desk to desk they started exchanging coins and one girl already had the idea of buying them up, of collecting as many coins as possible, but after a while it was clear that buying up coins was completely pointless, you could have ten or a hundred but the one that played music was the one and one only, and in short even the most recalcitrant saw very clearly that there was nothing to be done but give them to girls who didn’t have any. Violent disputes broke out among the mothers about the quality of the music, because some of them were convinced that their daughters’ coins played much better music than the coins of the other little girls, so those stories circulated around the city about the previous evening with every detail about the music that had been played and the songs, and everyone emphasised the beauty of a tune, the cadence of a phrase, and furious debates raged among the mothers about the superiority of this or that kind of music and in some cases these arguments actually became physical, women were seen scratching each other’s faces, pulling each other’s hair out and even rolling around in their sagging nylon stockings and fake eyelashes and girdles and bras and big black lace knickers and in short it was quite a confused time altogether. In the streets of La Torretta and Ferrovia street vendors appeared, dealing in counterfeit five-lire coins because they had immediately come up with the idea of exploiting the situation, but however hard the operators of these makeshift clandestine mints might have tried, it was clear to even the most spendthrift buyers that there was really nothing to buy, because without exception those coins did not play music and they never would. In the meantime the local academic authority of the City of Naples along with the Office of Public Education decided to launch a series of promotional demonstrations encouraging the dissemination of musical culture among the school population, and at the Polytechnic Artistic Circle a series of highly learned meetings was held in the course of which long discourses were delivered concerning the advisability of stepping up and defining pedagogical musical interventions in schools, and this seemed to be a necessity that could be put off no longer even for those people who were least responsive to music, so much so that the school year was interrupted from one day to the next and in effect resumed from the beginning only seven days later, when the programmes concerning what would in future constitute the musical education of the population were prepared in detail. We should add that alongside public education during those days a series of private institutions of musical instruction were also set up at very short notice, and unfortunately after a certain amount of time had passed it had to be admitted that the music teaching at private institutions was both more profound and more practical than the teaching carried out in the state schools, and on the other hand you know how it is, certain tasks cannot be accomplished from one day to the next, but in short a great step forward had been taken, and some private institutions were already planning to restore the Scholae Cantorum of the seventeenth century, along with the inevitable castration of boys and young men interested in following the courses, when fortunately a memo was circulated by the Ministry of Public Musical Education in which the practice of castration was condemned once and for all as a barbaric, medieval practice, most severely prohibited save in exceptional instances which had to be authorised on a case-by-case basis by the relevant authorities, but on the civic level it would have to be added straightaway that the harmful phenomenon of castration remained limited to a very few regrettable episodes, and in short the bulk of the population, in spite of the obvious advantages that could derive from such a practice, remained calm and peaceful, without giving rise to a resurgence of seventeenth-century practice. More than anything they were in fact impassioned about the great variety of singerly events which from that point onwards were authorised and put into effect at increasingly frequent intervals, and of course you will all remember the famous Day of Song, at least in its first, monumental version, when the stadium of San Paolo di Fuorigrotta was filled by a hundred thousand children truly belonging to every social class, all dressed in white, delivering a huge and admirable interpretation of ‘Funiculì, Funiculà’ in the presence of the Head of State himself, who attended with all the members of the Council of Ministers in the central circle of the pitch, at the precise spot where every game kicks off, and on that occasion Naples was literally invaded by the special envoys of the national and international press, and a British broadcasting channel somehow managed to acquire exclusive rights to the show, which it then sold at an increased cost to other broadcasting channels within the western bloc. In short, that Day of Song, in its first and monumental version at least, was a truly unforgettable day. Key rings and banners had been manufactured in the shape of treble clefs and the City Council had authorised the installation of two thousand kiosks for the impromptu sale of souvenirs, and there was a packed press conference by the Mayor, a poor, flabby, perennially sweaty man who stressed in a suspicious voice that, through this tangible trial of strength, Naples had regained its pre-eminence in the field of the world’s music, a pre-eminence that had for too long been the prerogative of barbarian populations worthy of branding with the mark of the most reprehensible musical superficiality, and in short this was truly a great day for the city which lingered indelibly in everyone’s memories, and at the end of the performance of ‘Funiculì, Funiculà’ the same Head of State, assisted by the Ministry of Musical Heritage, pinned to Sara Cipriani’s white pinafore a gold medal with a treble clef on one side and on the other the words Naples – First Day of Song. Had it not been for the rain that was still coming down, it would have been a perfect day, and instead because of the rain an awkward question remained and something like a sense of unease that even music could not totally erase. In short, everyone understood that beyond the essential fact of these musical coins there was still something that was inexpressible yet concrete, extremely concrete, and it was precisely in that clash of lucky presentiments and embarrassed uncertainty that the third day of rain, 25 October, came to an end at last, and when people later recalled it what remained was mostly confusion, something like an accentuated disarticulation of the city, which felt it had lost its peaceful tranquillity and which still did not feel it inhabited this tremendous event that was yet to come, oh quite certainly, it was yet to come, everyone was willing to swear, and it would alter all perspectives on everything. Along these damp hidden streets of the city nothing survived but waiting, and a treacherous disconcerting provisionality descended to weigh heavily upon everyone’s thoughts and nothing survived, nothing apart from that sad and desperate thought that probably everything was about to change. Ships might drift and women in love would bleed from their nails and the geraniums on our grey balconies and terraces would shed leaves of their own accord. How, in the end, do we tell the story of that distorted anxiety that climbs, and pants, and groans, and that voice that sails and flies across the asphalt: on his hands now it descended to press on the provisionality of an inconclusive gloomy and unbreakable presentiment which still drags glowing decorations down into the mud of anxiety. It goes on now, it goes on drawing assents to shame, to uncertain fear.