Malavita (6 page)

“Don't worry,” Maggie said. “I'll go on taking care of you with my home cooking. We'll hold the line against butter and cream.”

Following a little ritual established two or three years earlier, Maggie broached the subject of the neighbours. For security reasons, the FBI had the records of almost all the residents of the Rue des Favorites and surrounding streets. Maggie couldn't resist asking questions about one or two of them – she was curious about the lives of the people she passed in the street every day; she wanted to get to know them without having to associate with them. Was it just the curiosity of a busybody? The fact was that no other busybody in the world had such technical expertise at her disposal.

“What's the family at number 12 like?” She asked, pointing a pair of binoculars towards their house.

“The mother's a kleptomaniac,” Di Cicco said. “She's not allowed into the shopping mall at Evreux. The father's having his third bypass. Nothing much to say about the children, except the little one's going to have to repeat his year.”

“Life has been hard for them,” she said, with a little sadness in her tone.

Fred, who was in the cellar looking through the window onto the street, could guess at the scene taking place opposite. It drove him mad, seeing his wife being so civil to those two dung beetles, and even feeding them. Despite all these years living alongside one another, those two would never be on the same side as him, and for as long as he lived he would make sure they were reminded of it, and keep them at a good distance.

“Tell them to get fucked, Maggie . . .”

Malavita, lying amongst her pillows, seemed to be wondering why her master was making such a racket in the basement. Fred was holding an adjustable spanner and experiencing one of those moments when a man finds his virility being put to the test. He had the preoccupied, pouting expression of someone obliged to peer into the engine of a car, or pretending to understand what he is looking at as he gazes at a fuse box. He was poking around the pipes and the water meter, trying to find some explanation to give his wife about the foul water that had been gushing into the kitchen sink. Like many others before him, he had hoped to solve the problem on his own, and thereby perform a small domestic miracle that would earn him the respect of his family. In the same way as one might kick a tyre, he banged the spanner against the pipe, scratched off a bit of rust, and tried to make some sense out of the spaghetti of pipes disappearing into the moss-covered stonework. He considered cooking as an activity to be a lot less degrading than DIY, even though he had spent a lot of time in hardware shops for other reasons – in the past he had found drills, saws and hammers a great deal more useful for destructive rather than constructive purposes. He returned to the kitchen, where Maggie was back at work, spoke the words he had dreaded having to say (“Have we got a number for a plumber?”), and then helped himself to a plate of peppers, which he took away with him to eat on his veranda.

As soon as the children got back from school, Maggie gave them jobs to do: the younger one chopped vegetables, and the older one took charge of the garden, the table setting and general decoration. She was expecting more than thirty people, which was about a third of the number of regular guests at the barbecues in the old days in Newark – one a month, from April to September, and nobody would dream of missing them. On the contrary, there, new faces kept turning up – people who saw an opportunity of getting their foot in the door.

“What do Normans put on their barbecues?” Warren asked.

“I'd say lamb chops,” his mother replied. “With potato, radish and
fromage blanc
salad on the side.”

“My favourite!” Belle said, as she passed through the kitchen.

“If you tried giving them that, it would be a disaster,” said Warren. “We have to give them the sort of American barbecue they expect.”

“What's that?”

“American swill. Big fat American swill. We mustn't disappoint them.”

“That sounds delicious, my son. Makes me really want to try it.”

“What they want is pornographic food.”

Maggie stopped dead with her cheese grating and, unable to think of a comeback, forbade him to use that word.

“Mom,” Belle said, “your son isn't using the word pornographic in the sense that you think.”

“The French are fed up with refinement and healthy eating,” Warren continued, “that's all they ever hear about. Steaming, boiled vegetables, grilled fish, fizzy water. We're going to free them from guilt, Mom, we're going to give them fat and sugar – that's what they expect from us. They're going to come and eat here as if they were going to a brothel.”

“Watch your language, boy! You wouldn't dare talk like that in front of your father.”

“Dad agrees with me. I caught him playing the stupid American in Cagnes, and people were begging for more, he made them feel so clever.”

Maggie listened to her son holding forth as she continued to put the final touches to her Tex-Mex potato salad, toss the Caesar salad and drain the ziti before dropping them into the tomato sauce. Warren fished one out and tasted it, still boiling hot, from the giant transparent plastic salad bowl.

“The pasta is perfect, Mom, but it's going to betray us.”

“? . . .”

“They'll realize that we were Italians before we became American.”

Fred rolled into the kitchen with an air of abstraction. Warren and Maggie stopped talking. With the same gesture as his son, he picked at the pasta, chewed it carefully, nodded at his wife and asked her where the meat was that he was supposed to be cooking later. Not having chosen it himself, he half-heartedly inspected the merchandise, weighed up a few steaks and examined the mince. The fact was, he had left his study in order to give himself a little time to reflect on a passage he was finding particularly difficult.

The word I hate most in the world is “sorry.” Anyone thinks I'm sorry, I shoot them on sight. The day I took the oath and shopped everyone, all those lawyers and judges would like to have seen me bow my head and beg for forgiveness. They're worse than priests, those little judges. Me, regret anything about my life? If it was all to do again, I'd do everything – EVERYTHING – the same, just avoiding a couple of traps at the end. Apparently, for the French, regretting is when the painter repaints his canvas. Well, let's say that's what I've done, I've covered a masterpiece with a new layer and that's all the regretting I'm going to do. A guy who regrets his life – he's worse than an immigrant who doesn't feel any more at home in his new country than in the one he's left behind. Me, I'll never be at home again with my brother criminals, and honest folk won't make space for me anywhere. Believe me, regrets are worse than anything.

Fred was getting in a muddle with his definition of regrets. He could see how clumsily he was expressing himself, but was unable to change anything. The parallel with his life was all too clear.

“I'll start the grill about six,” he said. “I've got to finish my chapter.”

He went solemnly back to his veranda, which, tonight, would not be open to the public.

“His chapter? What does he mean, exactly?” asked Warren.

“No idea,” Maggie replied, “but just for the sake of the survival of the human race, it might be better if no one ever found out.”

*

Three hours later, the whole neighbourhood was crammed into the garden – no one would have missed it for anything. They came prepared to stay up late, taking advantage of the unseasonable warm weather, perfect for a garden party. And they had made sartorial efforts too, the women in white or brightly coloured summer dresses, the men opting for linen and short-sleeved shirts. The buffet was laid out at the end of the garden, loaded with salads and different sauces, with two little casks of red and white wine at each end. A few yards away, people gathered around the still-cold barbecue, impatient to see it lit. Maggie welcomed her guests with open arms, pointed them towards a pile of plates, answered all the expected questions with prepared answers, and expressed her great happiness to be living in this Normandy which had been so dear to the memory of her parents. She showed them round the house, introduced each new arrival to her two children, whose job it was to divide the guests between them and entertain them as much as possible. She accepted all invitations, including the suggestion that she join an association to protest against a local building threat. She took down a great many telephone numbers. How could they possibly have guessed that soon their private lives would have no secrets for Maggie?

Belle attracted more attention than her brother. Belle always attracted attention – from men and women, young and old, even from those who were suspicious of beauty, who had perhaps suffered from it at some time. She was good at reversing the roles, and playing at being the guest, allowing herself to be served, answering questions. All Belle had to do was be herself, and imagine that she was addressing her public. Warren, on the other hand, cornered by a small group of adults, was undergoing a grilling. Ever since he had arrived in France, he had been asked a million questions about American life and American culture, to such an extent that he had made a list of the most frequently asked: What's a home run? What's a quarterback? Do people really grill marshmallows over a flame? Do all the sinks have grinders? What does trick or treat mean? etc. Some of the questions were surprising, some not, and, according to his mood, he would either deny the clichés or reinforce them. That evening, against expectation, nobody asked him to play this role – on the contrary, he found himself obliged to listen to the interminable stories of those who had been over there. Starting with a neighbour who had just come back from a visit to New York for the marathon.

“After the shopping, I went to have dinner at the Old Homestead Steak House, at the corner of fifty-sixth and nineth Avenue. Do you know it?”

Warren had, between the ages of nought and six, been to New York fewer than a dozen times, to a skating rink or a toy shop, and of course that visit to the hospital to consult an asthma specialist, but he had certainly never been to a restaurant, and definitely not this steak house he'd never heard of. So he didn't answer, but the man wasn't waiting for an answer.

“There were just two dishes on the menu – steak weighing less than a pound, and steak weighing more than a pound. I was being asked to choose between a piece of meat of less than five hundred grams, and one of more than five hundred grams. I was pretty hungry after running about twenty-six miles, but still I just took the ‘less than a pound' and I had to leave half of that.”

The other man leaped on the story in order to cap it with his own, about a lunch in Orlando.

“I had just got in from the airport, I was on my own, I went into a pizzeria and saw on the menu that there are three sizes – large, small and medium. Well, I was so hungry that I ordered the large one. The waiter asked how many people it was for and I said I was alone. He burst out laughing. Take a small one, he said, you won't finish it. And he was right – it was like the wheel of a truck!”

Warren smiled, exasperated at not being able to answer back. The size of the dishes, that was all they remembered about his country. Just to confirm this, the third man brought them back to New York, to Grand Central Terminal.

“They told me the seafood there was wonderful. I went to John Fancy's, which I'd been told was the best fish restaurant in town. Terribly disappointing – totally dull, you find much better seafood at the Taverne d'Evreux. I went to the station to catch a train to Boston, where I was supposed to meet my company's sales manager. It was one o'clock, I had an hour until my train, so I wandered around belowground in the huge station and chanced on the Oyster Bar. Oysters as big as steaks! The shells were like ashtrays! I never saw such a thing! And in a station! Warren, do you know the Oyster Bar?”

Warren was tempted to say what was in his mind: “I was eight years old when my family was hounded out of the United States of America.” He was finding it less and less bearable to be treated like a future case of obesity with an IQ lower than that of an oyster in the Oyster Bar, someone ready to sacrifice everything to the God of the dollar, an uncultivated being who felt entitled to rule over the rest of the world. He longed to tell them how much he missed his childhood home, the neighbourhood, his local friends and the star-spangled flag which his father had trampled upon all those years ago. Warren found himself caught in a strange paradox: he was moved to tears by the American national anthem while simultaneously imagining himself building a Mafia state within the state, and then settling various problems that politicians could not deal with, and – who knows? – eventually getting himself invited to the White House.

To escape from this conversation, Warren found himself reduced to joining the others in awaiting the only event capable of causing a diversion – the arrival of his father. But the great man was biding his time, shut away on the veranda with the blinds down. Maggie felt her temper rising. Fred had left her to do all the work, and the barbecue wasn't even lit. Only the guests understood his absence, knowing as they did that writers, whether American or not, always planned their entrances carefully.

They were all wrong.

Fred Blake, in the pose of The Thinker, was rereading, deeply moved, a paragraph that he had struggled with for several hours. He now felt so close to those memories that the need to recount them had made him completely forget that forty-five people were waiting impatiently to meet him.

In 1931 my grandfather drove one of the two hundred Cadillacs chartered by the legendary Vito Genovese to follow his wife's funeral procession. In 1957 my father, Cesare Manzoni, was summoned, along with one hundred and seven
capi
from all over the country for the Apalachin meeting, which ended in a manhunt. Quite frankly, was I really going to grow up strumming guitars with the hippies? Could you see me in front of the jig-borers in a cardboard factory? Was I about to start keeping my retirement coupons in a shoebox? Was I going to rebel against tradition and become an honest man just to enrage my father? No, I joined the family firm, and what's more I did it of my own free will, nobody forced me, I was proud to. “You only have one life,” Uncle Paulie had said when he gave me my first gun. I know now that he was wrong: you can have a second one. I just hope he can't see me from wherever he is, sad fucker that I've become.