Nives

by Sacha Naspini

  “Who?”

  “Rosa.”

  “Rosa?”

  “She keeps a wide berth, but there are hundreds of bottles tied around her neck. You can’t see her, and maybe you can’t even hear her, though you should. But don’t worry, they’ll all come together.”

  For a moment, Loriano’s breath caught in his throat. He quickly tried to imagine all he’d drunk over the course of a lifetime—he already had one foot in the grave. But he instinctively rebelled against the idea. “Nonsense. There’s no ghost trying to get me to drink.” Then he felt a little foolish for saying such a thing.

  “You have a great job, an exceptional wife, your son Amedeo has a promising career at the bank, and you even had the grandchild of everyone’s dreams a few years ago. You own your house; you have vacations at the seaside . . . what else do you want?”

  Loriano hated being X-rayed like that. What did the insomniac widow want exactly? This was his reward for being a shoulder to cry on, as she vented all the trials of her solitude. He had his back against the wall. “I don’t want anything.”

  “So, what is it?”

  “How am I supposed to know—”

  “Rosa.”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “How else?”

  “She keeps me company.”

  “She’s killing you.”

  “As far as I know, I’m still here.”

  “For now.”

  This time the swipe was so strong that Loriano was nearly knocked sideways by it. “Can you stop this?”

  “She’s keeping a wide berth.”

  “You’re talking about a ghost that kills people out of revenge. After an entire lifetime? It’s a strange form of fury.”

  “The worst. She knows exactly the chains that bind us.”

  “She could take it out on Pagliuchi and that would be that. Anyway, I know what you’re trying to say.”

  “What am I trying to say?”

  “That Rosa is that thing we all have, which sometimes keeps us awake at night.”

  “And makes you drink.”

  Loriano smiled bitterly. “Okay, I have my Rosa, too. Happy now?”

  “What do you think of Renato’s situation, then, with no family despite his good looks?”

  “Rosa.”

  “Precisely.”

  Ultimately, it was a funny way to talk about things. A bit macabre, perhaps. Bottai wasn’t sure whether his friend saw the ghost as a metaphor or whether she really believed in it. He felt as though he’d reached a pause in the conversation when it would be acceptable to hang up. He thought about how his night would go. In the light of what they’d just said, uncorking a bottle and feeding his hangover was out of the question. It would be like casting the evil eye on himself. Maybe he’d pick up a book; he hadn’t done that for a long time. He had to plug his ears first.

  Nives incinerated every goodbye. “But with Donatella she’s been more devious.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the position she’s put her in.”

  “Who? What?”

  “Rosa, who else?”

  Bottai reneged all the doubts he’d harbored until one second before. “What do you think she’s done now?”

  “You’re right in there, shoes and all. How can you not see?”

  “Nives, either say something or—”

  “Just look up at the ceiling.”

  Goosebumps prickled Loriano’s skin. He imagined looking up and seeing the poor girl from his past lying up there. In the same unnatural position that he’d seen her on that terrible day in the piazza. After a long pause, he said, “I can’t see anything.”

  “If you were able to see through walls, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Only then did Bottai get it. “Do you mean Pagliuchi?”

  “There’s Donatella’s little gift.”

  “Nives, you’ve been speaking in riddles from the start—”

  “The chains had to go on clanging nice and loud.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Of course not. You drink like a fish.”

  “I’m really not following you.”

  “Answer this question.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Who lived upstairs in the old days?”

  Loriano had been born and raised in that building. He remembered old Ansano and his crazy wife, who was obsessed with black cats. Their house was full of them. There were two rumors going around. One was that they ate them. They coupled mothers with sons, and fathers with daughters, in a giant incestuous orgy, and then picked one out of the colony every now and again, without anyone noticing, and stuck it in the cooking pot. A custom left over from wartime, malicious tongue-waggers would say, when everyone had a taste of desperate hunger, the kind that makes you lick the walls. The other was that Norma was a witch. When Bottai was a kid, he preferred the latter theory, as did everyone else in his gang. Dazzled by these memories, he said, “We used to climb up here with our catapults. We were good at aiming stones. There were usually three of us: me, Paride De Lorenzi, and Ornello Pacchetti, a.k.a. Resisti. We would take up our positions on the side of the house and aim at the church bell.”

  “Fun.”

  “It was because in those days people didn’t have watches. Norma used the bell chimes to know when to get lunch ready; at midday she’d throw the pasta in the boiling water. We waited there on the corner with our catapults loaded. Eleven o’clock came around: ding, ding, ding . . . on the final ring, the first of us walloped the stone over. If it missed, the next boy was ready with his elastic pulled right back. Dong. We’d made it midday. Norma started readying the meal. Her husband was expected back any minute.”

  “You drove a poor old lady crazy?”

  “Ansano would come back from his workshop to find his pasta glued to the plate. He would curse her, and we would be pissing ourselves. Like Norma, though, other women got caught up in our game. When my mother fell into the trap, I stopped. My buttered tagliolini tasted like chalk. In those days, nothing went to waste.” Loriano gave a deep sigh. “If they were here now, I’d give the old couple a big hug. All this to say, yes, I know perfectly well who lived upstairs.”

  Nives sharpened her tongue, unmoved. She had every intention of forging on. “As I remember it, the house was uninhabited for a long time.”

  “True.”

  “Then.”

  “Then Renato bought it. He sold the family house that was too big for a bachelor.”

  “And there he was suddenly, over your heads.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Him of all people.”

  “Him of all people.”

  “With Donatella downstairs.”

  “Where else would she have been?”

  “The same Donatella who—like many other girls at the time—used to go down to the gully. And she didn’t go to pick daisies. If anything, she was interested in another kind of stalk—”

  “I don’t want to know what kind.”

  “Nice and turgid, for a start.”

  “Nives, please.”

  “They were hard years.”

  “In what way?”

  “Of agony.”

  “What agony?”

  “Come on, you know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You are doing your rounds, sticking your hands up cows’ cooches. And she is there, alone in the house . . . The boredom of it! There’s the TV to cheer her up after her chores. Or there are the movements of a man of a certain age who’s made a pact with the devil: old age hasn’t even touched him. Years have gone by, but he looks the same as he did in ’66.

  “Donatella spies on Renato?”

  “You know how it works, don’t you?”

  “No.”


  “Yes, you do.”

  “You tell me.”

  “From one day to another, you realize you’ve aged. There’s the house, the family. In the early days, you had fire in your veins; you were ready to part the waters of the sea every step you took. When forty comes along, things are already different. At fifty, it’s worse. The days grind by, and they are all the same: it’s New Year’s Eve and, one breath later, it’s Christmas again. The only satisfaction in life is having paid all the bills.”

  “Thank goodness it’s still like that.”

  “It may happen that your brain starts ticking over. Everyone knows: when life’s waters are calm, anxieties sail. You start looking for a way to make up for that sense of waste. Thinking back to a fling is a way to wile the afternoon away. It’s a way to dive back into the past, when life wasn’t so deadly boring, and everything still lay ahead.”

  “Donatella thinks about Renato?” Loriano laughed out loud; this time it was sincere. “She doesn’t need to; she sees him every day.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What?”

  “She sees him every day.”

  “He lives upstairs. For twenty years, he’s been the first person I say good morning to when I leave the house.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Nives, you’re making me come out in a sweat. Can’t you just say it?”

  “Donatella was a doll when she was a girl.”

  “True.”

  “Now, she’s changed.”

  “We all have.”

  “She’s put on a lot of weight.”

  “After Amedeo, she lost her figure. It’s her constitution.”

  “It must be frustrating.”

  “What can I say? She doesn’t like to talk about it. I notice, though. She won’t look at any mirrors. Maybe she can’t stand seeing herself with all that extra flesh; she prefers an image of herself from when she was twenty. The same thing happens to me, too. Sometimes, I catch a reflection of myself in a store window and I’m shocked. “Who’s that?” I ask myself. It’s like a brick on your stomach. It’s the same for everyone.”

  “Not for Renato Pagliuchi.”

  “He was born under a lucky star. Bully for him.”

  “Just think of the agony.”

  “Not again?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  In fact, a second later, Loriano got it. But he didn’t say so. He waited for Nives to say it. From the other end of the line, he heard the sharp retort: “It’s the comparison.”

  “Ah, that.”

  “Condemned to living in the sights of that Adonis, who used to get your juices flowing when you were a girl. He’s the same as he was. You’ve turned into a battleship.”

  “Come on, don’t exaggerate now.”

  “It must be torture.”

  Bottai sighed. He glanced back at the bedroom; the light was still on and the nasal concert was in full flow. He felt a wave of tenderness for the woman sleeping there. On her side of the bed, the springs were flattened out. Donatella wore a nightdress to bed; even in the summer she never went without. Loriano hadn’t seen her naked for years. “She’s still a beautiful woman,” he said.

  “No doubt about that.”

  Bottai murmured with a smile on his lips, “Is Renato her Rosa?”

  “If that’s how you want to put it.”

  The conversation again fell into a deep well that would have allowed him to say, “Okay, thanks for calling, good night.” But there were too many worlds that had been unlocked, and Loriano was surprised to find that he felt a need for two minutes longer. Apart from sleep, he wasn’t missing anything else. “Nives, do you know what I was thinking?”

  “What?”

  “Donatella is my Rosa. At least, she’s one of the ghosts I see.”

  “I told you, she gives you a wide berth.”

  He sighed. “She’s a stupid old thing,” he said to himself. But he didn’t waste the momentum of that wave of melancholy that had unexpectedly washed over him, in his dressing gown by the telephone table. “She broke after Amedeo. She made all these scenes about her weight . . . she had it in for me, too. Maybe that’s when I took to the bottle.”

  “That’s when the vendetta started.”

  “I feel like I’m talking to the wall.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just had to blow off steam sometimes. I remember it as if it were yesterday.”

  “Donatella?”

  “No, Renato. You should have seen him: with no shirt on, down the gully on the banks of the stream, in the middle of July, the crickets humming around him. He was like a bronze statue.”

  Bottai put a stop to the cloud-burst of emotions. In Nives’ place, he pictured his wife when she was a girl, about to put her panties back on. He would never have thought it, but all of a sudden, he felt jealous, just like that, on a random Tuesday night. He felt a wave of resentment; and yet, he rather enjoyed diving back into the assortment of surprises Nives had served up. “What did he say?”

  “Rosaltea wouldn’t let him go. She would follow him around. He would bump into her everywhere. She sent him letters that he never even read. One afternoon, after we’d done it, he said, ‘She might be here right now.’ My breasts were still bare. A shiver came over me. After that, something changed. It was hard to refuse Renato. Once you’d unstopped that bottle, there was only one thing on your mind—you don’t find wine like that in every cellar. Minutes after quashing a glass, you want another flask of the stuff, if you get my meaning.”

  “I get your meaning alright, Nives. I get your meaning.”

  “Anyway, the idea of being spied on by a love-sick crazy woman poisoned us. It wasn’t enough to change our assignations. Whether we were at the gully, or at the end of an alleyway, Rosa’s dark eyes were a constant presence. Maybe Renato liked the feeling of being watched. He was a talented lover, and had quite a few little fixations. If a girl fell into his hands, there was no way to resist him. And we girls were hungry for knowledge then . . .”

  “Please go on.”

  “At one point, she was always number two on our list of things to talk about. Number one was the games we’d gotten up to, and then we’d always end up talking about Rosaltea. The madwoman had started targeting us, too. Donatella was particularly shocked by her spiteful pranks.”

  “We’re still taking about my Donatella, right?”

  “Who else?”

  Loriano sighed. “Who else, indeed.”

  “We found little dishes by our front doors.”

  “Little dishes?”

  “Little dishes of piss.”

  “I don’t know anything about this.”

  “And braided string on our windowsills, with stones tied up inside.”

  “It sounds like witchcraft.”

  “Demaria had a cold that lasted all winter.”

  “That can happen with the change of season.”

  “She coughed up phlegm for months.”

  “In those days, you were sick for much longer.”

  “Tucci, on the other hand, started itching. First her elbows, then behind her ears. She scratched her skin until it bled.”

  “It’s called psoriasis. It’s usually stress that causes it.”

  “Donatella was the worst off.”

  “My Donatella?”

  “Her pussy smelled like a dead body.”

  “What?”

  “She couldn’t get rid of the stench. It made you retch from twenty yards away. She walked into a store and everyone ran a mile. She got to the point that she never went out.”

  Loriano glanced at the bedroom again. That was why he’d never heard about her youthful experiences: they’d ended with the shame of vaginal infections. He for
gave his wife everything, if there was something to forgive. “Didn’t anything happen to you?” he asked with a hint of irony.

  “I stopped sleeping.”

  “That’s still a problem now, I hear.”

  “After a week without any sleep, I couldn’t even remember my home address. Mom sent me to bed with giant cups of chamomile and valerian tea, but it didn’t help.”

  “The power of suggestion can play nasty tricks.”

  Nives spoke as if she were reliving her past. “One of us with distemper and another with lesions. Donatella shut in her room, branded by the stench of a carcass. Then there was me, reduced to a shadow of myself.”

  “A lovely invasion of bacteria, viruses, and other disturbances.”

  “It was clear to us that it was a curse. Messing around with Renato had been fun, but afterwards even hearing his name gave us goosebumps.

  “Better late than never.”

  “One morning, they took Frida Bonelli to the hospital. We heard that she’d started having massive nose bleeds. After soaking a bed sheet, there seemed to be no way to stem the flow . . . she calmed down, too. Soon after, she decided to toe the line, and she only had eyes for her husband after that.”

  “The germs were spread around the group. Together with the paranoia.”

  “For Renato, it made no difference; he went and looked elsewhere. He’d already started hanging out in the city.”

  “I remember him then. We sometimes met on the bus. I was loaded with books, and he was wearing this leather bomber jacket, like a US Air Force pilot. I really wanted one, but they were so expensive. We traveled together, me furiously taking notes and him staring out the window.”

  “He’d already started.”

  “To do what?”

  “He used to go and see sprightly old ladies.”

  “Ah, you mean that.”

  “Yes, that. He would vanish from Monday to Saturday. Some wives went mad waiting for him, but the curse had already calmed the ardors of most of them. The hard part was staying firm when he was right there within slapping distance of you. He’d fix you with those green eyes, and you were already wet.”

  “He used to go to his workshop.”

  “What?”

  “He liked painting. He told me about an artist that had taken a shine to him. He became his assistant. And learned something meanwhile.”