“Do you really like the idea of being cursed by your daughter?”
The widow trembled. “Why should she?”
“I would, if I were her. My mother dies and at the lawyer’s office throws a hand-grenade from the grave. Nice gift, eh? To obtain what? The boundary between truth and punishment is very fine indeed.”
“Now you’ve become a philosopher.”
“Even a child would understand.”
“There you are; I’m an idiot now.”
“Certain things are best left as they are.”
“One day, Banda will come with my usual two bags of shopping, he’ll knock at the door, and there’ll be no answer. He’ll have a shock and call the fire station. The fields and the property will be sold to whoever offers the most, and that’s it, arrivederci, everything is erased. My only daughter will have no reason to set foot in this shit-hole. The only gossip that will fly around will be that, after her husband’s death, Nives went a little soft in the head and even started talking to her hens . . . But I was here, for God’s sake! I had a little happiness in my lifetime. I want people to know!”
“Nobody’s saying you didn’t.”
“Everybody else has had a romance they can talk about, or that people still gossip about years later. I haven’t. The only affair I’d like to shout out to the world is a fire cracker that would set at least two houses on fire, if not three. It’s a nice story, with a sad ending. It’s about a lover abandoned on the side of the road at midnight.”
“You sound as if the rest of your life has been worthless—”
“Don’t put any other words in my mouth.”
“Is that what I was doing?”
“I didn’t give a damn the day Laura was born.”
Nives could lob cannonballs like that with no warning. Loriano instinctively took a step back, batting his eyelids repeatedly. “I may not have gotten what you just said.”
“I’ve never said it out loud.”
He cleared his throat. “Some advice: don’t do it again. It’s a blasphemous thing to say.”
“And yet, it’s true. Even today I pity her, poor thing. Not only did she have a father who wasn’t her father, she also had a mother who had fallen out of love with her when she was still in her belly. That must be why she was born two months early. She could feel things were not right, so she got moving.”
Loriano didn’t know what to say. His arms were full of goosebumps. He saw himself in the past; his first thought was, ‘Whose arms was I about to throw myself into?’ Then he put things back into focus. On the other end of the line was a person who’d been hurt. In the meantime, Nives went on; a new channel for her grievances had been opened up. “To begin with, there was no problem. In fact, finding out I was pregnant felt like a seal of love that would lead in a certain direction. There was nothing on paper yet, but the idea that Anteo might somehow have been involved didn’t even cross my mind: he always came back from the fields a wreck; he could hardly stop himself nodding off during supper. Three or four glasses of wine did the rest. For the love of God, once in a blue moon he’d consecrate our marriage. But he would always be half-asleep, all limp, his eyeballs rolling back into his head. All the while, a Fiat 127 the color of diarrhea would park near the cane thicket practically every day at a certain time. We used to keep an eye on my husband, as clouds of dust were thrown up against the horizon by his tractor. The little car creaked. After our acrobatics, we would promise each other the world, our hearts in our mouths. Dripping with sweat and as beautiful as a summer’s day. You may have an image of me printed on your retina after the donkey kick, but I have one of you, too: a bronze god, in the rear-view mirror of that tin can. I didn’t need a scientist to help me weigh the relative probabilities of one or the other of you having doused me.”
Put this way, Bottai felt sick to the stomach. Nonetheless, a memory came back to him in a flash: one day in particular that summer, when he’d been as thin as an anchovy with all that humping in the triple heat of the car. He could almost smell it. He could see her pale white breasts. Just as she did back then, Nives rode on. “One morning, I caught Anteo and ruined his barley coffee. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘There’s been nothing for three months.’ He was dipping a cookie; I can see him right here as if it were yesterday. He sat there, the cookie suspended mid-air between the cup and his mouth for a while, as if he were exploring the consequences of my words and knowing full well where the confines of his responsibility lay. His comment was succinct. If I were to think of the precise moment when the earth shifted under the feet of several people, it would be that one. He muttered, “At least we know how much to ask Bandini.” He was already thinking of renting out the fields he couldn’t manage; Anteo wasn’t the type to hire work-hands. It’s funny to think that the rent money goes straight to the Languedoc, to a country I’ve never seen and never want to see.”
Bottai’s eyelids were beginning to sag. He was in bad shape from all that reliving of the past; he tried to move the conversation forward. “In any case . . .”
The vet’s attempts to stall her were ignored completely. Nives was steaming ahead on her own train of thought and had every intention of getting to the end of it, however many cars were hooked onto the locomotive. “After being abandoned by the side of the road, I started to feel the weight of being pregnant, in every sense. It no longer felt like a blessing; that glob of anxiety came to life. It grew week after week, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Everything exasperated me, even poor Anteo’s devotion; he’d gone the other way, sticking to me like a tick, crazy about me. Months went by with Laura macerating in my womb, that sea of woe. She ate what I ate, and in addition she had to absorb the stinkweed of my days. I carried on to the bitter end, on my hands and knees. After you bought that fancy car and had your face kicked in by the donkey, things got even worse. I felt as though I was nursing the biggest turd of the century. My only comfort was that it was a girl; if it had been a boy, I think I would have hanged myself from the apricot tree. I really couldn’t bear the idea of bringing up a miniature vet whose damned buccaneering spirit might blossom one day. A little girl would be better camouflaged. Anyway, it meant being satisfied with very little. The message I read was this: I’d been repudiated, with the bonus of a baby to bring up, who would remind me every single day of the foolishness I’d imagined I could undertake. In the midst of that seaquake, news of the happy event in the Bottai household reached my ears. The first thing I thought was to kill myself for real, take a pair of scissors to my belly. The situation was clear, after all: you’d used me to unload yourself, then you went back home and unloaded again with your wife. In the end, I was the injured party. Adding insult to injury, as the saying goes. Worse than injury: slaughter.”
Loriano felt it was his duty to strike a blow. “Nives, I explained in detail how—” Again, the widow side-stepped him, like a bullet traveling a thousand miles an hour whizzing past his ear. “I gave birth to her on the first of May. Anteo stuck a pink rosette up on the door. It felt like a funeral wreath in my memory. I stared at Laura a lot, but I hardly ever touched her. I was looking for details that would make my hair stand on end: the shape of her hands, or her nose. I had to swallow the nausea that I felt when I latched her to my teat. She was a voracious little frog; she suckled like the devil, until my nipples bled. And the emotion that dictated my life surfaced: my milk had dried up, but she still demanded tons of it. I started feeding her formula. When we went into town on Sundays, we bumped into you, the happy family . . . you’d perfected your disappearing act whenever you smelled our presence in the air.”
“I thought the same about you.”
“Meaning?”
“You were just as ready to give it out in the cane thicket as you were in your bedroom.”
“Take that back, now!”
“That’s what it looked like from my side of things.”
“You were u
sing a yardstick that had nothing to do with me.”
“The night after our appointment on the road, you show up pregnant. That fact answered all my questions. Of course, I disappeared: the idea of meeting your eyes was enough to send me straight to the bottle. I’d been at it, by the way, the day Anteo called me to tend to that devil of a donkey.”
“We got used to it over time.”
“Time does that: it sends everything down.”
“At the nursery school gate, we would say good morning to one another like acquaintances who never take the plunge and actually become friends.”
“It was the same at the door of the elementary school.”
“I used to put on my makeup with palpitations. ‘Please let him not be there,’ I begged to myself. ‘Let him not be there.’”
“Whenever Donatella had a cold, I wanted to shrivel up and die: it became my job to take Amedeo to school and pick him up at the last bell. When I saw you coming, I felt as though my hair was being pulled out, but I pretended nothing was going on.”
“Homework, school trips. I spied on you through these events. I heard Laura’s stories about the class—”
“Me too. Birthday parties were a test of our character. By the evening I was panting for a drink.”
“Those interminable summers . . . then the kids grew up.”
“After middle school, they went about on their own.”
“Then there was high school.”
“That was hard.”
“School itself was not the problem, Loriano.”
“True.”
“When Laura came home with the news, I had to sit myself down.”
“It was a shock for me, too. That was probably when my hair started dropping out.”
“Brother and sister!”
“I couldn’t have known that. But I thought of all the rest, and it made me feel ill.”
“Brother and sister, going on eighteen, start looking at one another in that way. Amedeo would drive here to pick her up, and I stopped eating. I lost pounds and pounds. My poor husband kept saying, ‘Come on, it’s not such a big deal. She’ll have to go out into the world at some point . . . I imagined them in the cane thicket, just like us twenty-odd years before. I felt like retching all the time. But there’s more: what if a squirt got in by mistake? Everybody knows that close relatives shouldn’t get into each other’s pants; mutants are born. I couldn’t do anything. Say anything. I was all skin and bones, I was up all night. Amedeo even gave her a little ring, and I asked the doctor to prescribe me some strong drops. Laura was looking gorgeous . . . Listen, talking about it gives me shivers, even now.”
“Maybe part of their attraction was because of that fact, their common blood—”
“Of course it was. They were knocked sideways by their abnormal love; Laura never wanted to leave his side. Then there were the phone calls . . . the bills that came were like a slap in the face. I had to put up with having her little boyfriend in the living room. I couldn’t stand listening to their lovey-dovey talk! The last thing I needed was for them to be in the bedroom, doing what they couldn’t do outside, for lack of time or somewhere decent.”
“At that age a board full of nails is enough.”
“I certainly didn’t encourage the affair. I had to put up with her hysterical outbursts; I’d suddenly become the wicked witch. If it’d been for me, I’d have kept her locked in a room, chained to the wall. One evening she started raving, talking about getting married. That was when I really lost it.”
“Amedeo marched into the room like a soldier and said, ‘I need to tell you something.’ When he’d communicated his intention, Donatella reacted like a hyena. ‘That’s complete nonsense,’ she shrieked. ‘First, you need to focus on school.’”
“Good woman.”
“But it wasn’t enough. Our son had made his mind up. He’s always been stubborn. All I could think about was you on the bride’s side of the aisle on their wedding day . . . From star-crossed lovers to co-parents-in-law. I said to myself, ‘What kind of curse is this?’ And yet, I could see there was something poetic there, some essence of life: they were carrying on our work; they were completing what we didn’t have the courage to do.”
“What poetry? It wasn’t poetry! It was incest between half-brother and sister; that’s what it was!”
“I didn’t know that. You could have confided in me.”
“And risk starting the third world war?”
“Luckily it fizzled out in the end, as many love affairs at that age do. Amedeo wanted to kill himself.”
“I’m the one you should thank for that.”
“How come?”
“I couldn’t allow them to sink into the quagmire we’d created without their knowing it. Between them, they could have given life to an abomination. Even aside from that, imagining them hand in hand was enough to make me shudder.”
“So?”
“Putting a spoke in the wheel for two eighteen-year-olds is not that difficult.”
“Nives, I can’t believe it.”
“You’d better believe it. I went to see a specialist.”
“A specialist?”
“I paid with something that never goes out of currency.”
“What?”
“The flesh of a young girl in bloom.”
“Who?”
“Laura.”
Loriano wondered whether he was ready for yet another turn of events. He could feel another bomb ready to go off? The answer was no; he wasn’t ready. But he could no longer avoid it. “Did you use your daughter?”
“Our daughter.”
“Well, her. Yes.”
“She was a bouncy little rabbit, craving love.”
“Careful. You’re talking about the person you gave birth to.”
“She was itching with desire, and other hormonal calamities. I knew someone who was unparalleled in navigating the territory.”
“Who?”
“Look up at the ceiling.”
“What?”
“If you look up at the ceiling, there’s a clue.”
Bottai did her bidding: he looked up. He saw there was mold in the corners of the plastered ceiling. That was when he got the hint. He said quickly, “Renato?”
“Who better than him?”
Loriano had to fight off dizziness, not for the first time. After three hours on the phone, there was Pagliuchi tumbling down on his head again. He asked himself whether the person on the other end of the line hadn’t planned the whole thing from the beginning, laying a trail to a place they were now getting to. The idea crushed him. A simple, countryside vet like him was like a speck of dust compared to a mind as sophisticated as hers. Discouraged, he said, “My friend, what did you do this time?”
“We were talking about it earlier. Renato still chases twenty-year-olds today. He was more popular back in the day, but since when has the old seducer lost his touch?”
“So?”
“I asked him.”
“What?”
“To play the lovesick Romeo.”
“Wait, let me be clear here. You asked Renato Pagliuchi to court a girl who had just turned eighteen?” A shiver of horror ran from his head to his toes as he said this.
“If I were to tell you about the flings the old sailor has had in every port, we’d be on the phone forever.”
“I’m not interested.”
“A pureblood that—”
“Nives, move on please.”
“Laura was pining from morning till night for that young trickster who wasn’t even old enough to have a beard.”
“Hey, go easy. That’s my boy you’re talking about.”
“A professional like Pagliuchi could brush away an ant like him just like that.”
“You’re making me angry now. Let m
e tell you, my Amedeo is—”
“Girls fell in love with Renato’s good looks, for sure, but there was all his other magic, too. His gaze, for example. They’d drop into that well with no hesitation. His words, his touch. Try lying down on a bed with that old fox. He was a war dog who could strip the panties off the Virgin Mar—”
“Stop! I won’t allow this!”
“Whatever. I could see the effect he would have on a young grasshopper with hardly any experience.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“A man of experience, do you know what I mean?”
“Disgusting.”
“He accepted without reservation.”
“When I see him, I’ll punch his face in.”
“It took him a week.”
“He’d better not knock on my door ever again!”
“I watched Laura. She’d come home with a hooded look, but it wasn’t sadness. She’d suddenly found herself up in the clouds, on her way to Mars. During dinner, she’d go off for minutes at a time, a cunning look on her face. The same we used to have when we were girls. Including Donatella.”
“That’s enough, please.”
“I knew it was a terrible thing I was doing; I’m not evil.”
“Please excuse me if I harbor some doubts.”
“It was anyway better than her committing incest without knowing it. Another notable feature of Pagliuchi’s is his hunger.”
“So, you needed to feed him bread, too.”
“No, no, he had plenty of that. Though he was as thin as a rake—”
“I really don’t care.”
“Hunger for women. It wasn’t his fault, in the end; he was just made that way. He was a big shot with the amorous arts engraved in his body and soul.”
“To my eyes, he’s just a poor bastard obsessed with filling every hole he comes across because he can’t satisfy his own. I’m going to have a chat with him one of these days.”
“You stay there and philosophize away. Renato beds young girls without saying much at all. Which is what happened to Laura. She was so young, it only took him twenty minutes to woo her with his turbine engine. When she came out of it, she didn’t even know what her name was.”
Nives Page 9
