Lost Words (20 page)

She didn't waste a minute. That night, we could finally unfold my bed springs without worrying that something was going to fall.

The D'Antonios and Malfitanos also returned.

Signora Vezzali explained that on the eve of their departure, the parrot, Leopoldo, had disappeared. At first Malfitano hadn't given it a second thought. Leopoldo would occasionally fly away, especially during vacations. But he would always reappear a few hours later. They waited for him that night, the next morning, and the rest of the week. Meanwhile Malfitano had reported the disappearance up and down Selinunte. They even put up the parrot's picture all over town. The search lasted for two weeks. Not a trace of Leopoldo. There was no way it could have been an escape (Leopoldo loved his master too much), or a bird-napping: with his pecking and his deafening shrieks, Leopoldo would have made life impossible for anyone who tried to capture him. So he must have been killed. There was no other explanation. Killed and thrown away. The master's suspicions inevitably fell on the person most interested in getting rid of him: his wife. Leopoldo hated her, as we'd seen on Christmas Eve. Had she, after years of being afraid, decided to kill him, with the complicity of her relatives? But she continued to protest her innocence. Leopoldo had chosen freedom, she kept saying. He had gone to a better place, finding some pine or eucalyptus tree near the sea.

*.

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!