Lost Words (2 page)

“Old hens,” my mother used to call them. “You know what hens do when you toss them a crust of bread? They run to grab it. But if you toss another crust before they've finished the first, they drop it and go running for the second one. And if you toss them a third piece then they do the same thing again. You could cover them in pieces of bread and they'll always start pecking at the last one.”

She explained to the signore that she couldn't turn on the heat. It was too early in the season.

“This is just the beginning of October. We need authorization. Do you want us to get fined by the city? A little patience, ladies. We'll light the furnace this year like we do every other year . . . but please be patient. A little draft isn't going to kill you.”

The only one who didn't complain about the cold was Bortolon. She had no intention of spending money on fuel—all she needed to stay warm, she was proud to boast, was her husband. Didn't the rest of them have husbands? . . . In the meantime, she would light the oven—which was cheaper anyway—and bake a nice cake.

To console myself from all the hen-pecking, I started to fantasize about the person who was supposed to move into the Petillo's one-bedroom apartment, the woman with a “y” in her surname. Would she be different? Would she show more consideration for my mother? Or would she be just one more person tormenting her with stupid requests? Despite my mother's forebodings—all based on experience—I imagined Miss Lynd to be kind and respectful, even if I still couldn't picture her face or her voice . . . For me her essence was summarized in that strange surname, Lynd. Lynd, Lynd, Lynd—shimmers of music, tinkling of silver . . . All the others were coarse and ugly by comparison: Dell'Uomo, Bortolon, Mellone, Terzoli, Paolini, Mantegazza . . .

“Momma, when is Signor Petillo moving out?” I asked impatiently.

“What's it to you?” she replied, surprised I would care. “Sooner or later he'll leave, don't worry. He's waiting for his transfer to come through . . .”

Having been bombarded with complaints, the building manager ordered the heating to be turned on earlier than usual this year. It had been authorized by the municipality.

“Fine,” my mother conceded. “We'll turn it on. The signore want heat? They can have it. Let the whole bunch of them burn alive!”

The maintenance man came to check the furnace. He cleaned out the tank and the first fuel shipment was delivered. We turned it on and the water started boiling in the pipes, spreading warmth through the apartments. What a blessing! No more shivering. The laundry dried in a second. The older Mantegazza stopped coughing. You could lounge around the apartment in a T-shirt—even without socks, even bare-boot, since the marble floors were no longer ice-cold . . .

After dinner my father took me to the boiler room, down a steep and narrow iron staircase outside the building. In all these years I'd never been there before—it wasn't a place for children.

“This is disgusting!” he complained while unlocking the gate. “That damn cat comes down here to pee . . .”

In the basement's dim light, we could make out a small furry shape that recoiled and leapt behind the straw broom, sheltered from the autumn wind.

We went down the last flight of stairs, covered with ugly gray tiles. There the temperature rose because the burner was near and it was noisy. My father stood fearlessly in front of the bulky furnace. Swift and efficient, he showed me a black lever, next to the main thermostat, which was easy to make out against the body of the burner.

“Like this . . .”

All you had to do was turn it. In that very second, the sound of the flames quieted down. Now it was a whisper, a voice that had lost its terrible power.

A decision had been made: from now on turning off the furnace would be added to the list of my evening chores. I was thirteen, after all.

*.

“
HE DOES IT ON PURPOSE! HE DRAGS HIS FEET
!
AND THEN HIS WIFE, WITH HER DAMN HIGH HEELS, ADDS INSULT TO INJURY
!”

Vignola's voice over the intercom was so loud that my father and I could hear it from across the table, ten feet away. My mother wrinkled her nose. She hadn't even finished chewing her food.

“Malfitano told me to tell you, Signor Vignola, that if you have anything to say to him, you have to say it to his face. He doesn't want to hear about it from me.”

“
AH
!
SO THAT'S WHAT HE WANTS
!
WELL THEN TELL HIM, PLEASE, THAT IF HE FORCES ME TO GO UPSTAIRS I DON'T KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN. THIS COULD GET UGLY
!”

“Calm down. Signor Vignola. These walls are made of paper.” And after giving me a complicit look, she pointed a finger at the ceiling, indicating that we could hear both him and his wife peeing in the toilet and even worse, fooling around in bed. “We learn to live with each other . . .”

Vignola was beside himself. In the background there was a high-pitched chatter, the shrill voice of his wife egging him on.

My mother was having trouble swallowing her food.

“What a mess! We have to do something. Do you remember that guy, here in Milan, who shot his neighbor because she used to vacuum all night?”

“If you ask me they can all go kill each other,” my father cut her off. “They're nothing but a bunch of Christian Democrats anyway!”

“What are you talking about? Don't you realize we're stuck in the middle of this? We can't pretend nothing is happening! Vignola is going crazy!”

“Shut up already, I'm trying to listen to the news.”

The IRA had planted another bomb.

“Now
that's
what I call killing each other,” my father commented with a crooked smile.

The intercom buzzed again.

“
DO YOU HEAR THEM
?
DO YOU HEAR THEM
?” Vignola shouted, “
THEY'RE TRYING TO DRIVE ME CRAZY
!”

“Yes, I can hear them,” my mother admitted, almost in tears. “What are they doing? Are they moving furniture around?”

“
DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW OR I'M CALLING THE COPS
!”

My father went out to lock the gate and change the trash bags. My mother put the dishes in the sink to soak. In a daze, she stared at an invisible horizon that blended into the powerful gush of the faucet. Then, while I was getting ready to go out for my usual evening chores, she told me:

“Chino, can you please stop by the Malfitanos' and tell them that the whole building is complaining.”

I went up to the second floor. From the Malfitanos' apartment you could hear the sound of furniture being dragged across the floor and the scraping of metal. A shadow broke away from a corner of the landing and came toward me. For a second I thought I was going to scream. It was Vignola gnawing on his fists. He stared at me, his eyes popping out of his face, begging for help and vowing revenge. We both stood there listening. The noise was endless . . . Fearing the feverish stare of Vignola more than the wrath of the Malfitanos, I rang the bell. The noise stopped immediately and the door opened. The first thing I saw was the parrot, perched on Malfitano's shoulder.

“
Our father who art in heaven . . .
” the bird recited.

Malfitano appeared to be disappointed. Obviously he was expecting to find Vignola at the door.

“
Our father who art in heaven
. . .
”

His wife, in the background, was pushing a big checked sofa toward the back of the corridor and sweating profusely. “Who is it?”

“The doorwoman's son,” he replied.

“
Our father who art in heaven
. . .” the parrot continued.

Malfitano stuck a finger in its beak and the bird started to chew on it. Then it focused on his right ear. It pecked at the inside of his auricle methodically, scrupulously cleaning the inside of his ear. The lady of the house, blue in the face from her efforts, collapsed onto the sofa. From what I could see in the doorway, the living room was in complete disarray: the chairs were upside down, the table out of place, the Magritte posters askew.

“Tell your mother we're done for the night,” the woman gasped.

Convinced I had done my duty, I headed for the upper floors. Vignola was standing and waiting. From the balcony I could see that he had lit a cigarette and was smiling like an idiot, triumphant.

On the fifth floor I looked for the door to Petillo's apartment and stood there for a while, filled with a strange and wonderful sense of expectation.

*.

A beam of light penetrated my closed eyelids—it forced them open and I could see an arm moving just above my head, wriggling its way through a hole in the glass. (Now that everyone had stopped worrying about them . . .) I got up, careful not to make any noise, and ran to the bedroom. My father and mother were still sleeping. The glowing clock-face said that it was one o'clock in the morning. I shook my parents. They both immediately noticed the stream of light bouncing between the floor and the ceiling. My father leapt to his feet and ran into the other room. My mother held me. “Quiet, hush,” she whispered in my ear.

Without wasting a second, my father grabbed a ceramic vase and slammed it against the arm. A shout rang out and the flashlight fell to the ground. My mother rushed to the kitchen. He kept squeezing the vase, which hadn't even cracked, as if he wanted to strangle it. We heard someone running down the driveway. My mother rolled up the blinds and saw two men rushing through the gate, but she couldn't recognize them in the nighttime mist. A moment later you could hear the sound of a car taking the road through the fields.

For once, my father was not so sure of himself.

“What if they have a gun?”

My mother tried to calm him down, but she, too, was upset, and she, too, was afraid that the thieves would come back soon for their revenge. She pushed the armchair against the door, but it was only as tall as the doorknob, leaving the hole in the glass uncovered. She leaned the table-top against the window, leaving two legs sticking out. Then she put the coffee pot on the fire.

“What are you doing? Call Cavallo's husband on the intercom,” Dad ordered her. “He's big. Call everyone before the burglars come back. Wake everyone up, for Christ's sake! Those guys will be back with reinforcements and all hell will break loose!”

“You're crazy! I'm not calling anyone. You want a revolution? Let's call the police, instead.”

Dad didn't want to have anything to do with the police—the only thing they were good for, as far as he was concerned, was killing innocent bystanders.

“You'll see, first they'll beat me up then they'll throw you in jail.”

After a long wait, during which the criminals had all the time in the world to take their revenge on us, a squad car finally arrived. First, the cops requisitioned the burglar's flashlight, which had rolled under the table and was stuck between the foot of a chair and the stove. One cop stayed outside to inspect the lock on the gate and reconstruct the movements of the thieves. The other, an older man, sat comfortably on my bed, and told my dad, in a mocking tone: “You're a brave man.”

My Dad, standing by the window, shrugged his shoulders.

“What was I supposed to do? Welcome them in? Hand my son over to them?”

“You're lucky they ran away. One time there was a burglar who started shooting at a tenant who caught him in the act . . . Play the hero and you'll end up with a bullet in the head!”

“Maybe they learned from you . . .”

The policeman didn't take the bait—he gulped down his coffee.

Although my dad couldn't provide any information that would help identify the criminals—the dialect they spoke, the accent they used, or the clothes they wore—it was determined that they must have been gypsies.

“Well, what did they want from us?” Mom asked. “What were they looking for in a doorman's loge? We've got nothing worth stealing.”

But she was thinking about the checkbook and the pocket change—my pocket change!—that she kept hidden in the toolbox.

“The usual things you find in any loge,” the policeman explained laconically. “The keys to all the apartments.”

Everyone's eyes turned toward the white wooden cabinet on the wall above my bed, next to the circuit breakers.

Before leaving, the policeman advised us to replace the window as soon as possible and also to reinforce the door.

“Will they be back?” Mom asked.

“What do you want me to say, signora? Let's hope not . . .”

To avoid a fight, my father withdrew to the bedroom.

“What an asshole,” he repeated, “like all policemen.”

We waited for daybreak in front of the glass door, staring into the hole. Between one coffee and another my parents decided not to tell anyone what had happened. The demands for protection would only increase—and what more could we do?

“We have to move away from here as soon as possible,” was Mom's suggestion.

At seven Dad left for the factory as usual. One hour later, without taking her eyes off the door, Mom called the building manager and told her what had happened. Signora Aldrovanti made no comment. She didn't say she was worried or that she was sorry. Luckily the break-in had taken place at night, or the doorwoman would have had to put up with all kinds of criticism. But given the circumstances, no one could blame her for anything.

“I don't feel safe anymore, Signora Aldrovanti,” she whined. “Our boy actually sleeps in the front room of the loge. He was the one who gave the alarm, imagine how much courage that took. Another couple of inches and the intruder's arm would have touched his face . . . The very thought makes me . . .”

Aldrovanti was not one to let herself be swayed by emotions. What did we expect? For her to hire a bodyguard? For someone else to do our job? . . .