To the Wedding (11 page)

Luciano, the
pizzaiolo
, works in his vest. Most of the men eating are also bare-shouldered. Jean Ferrero has hung his helmet, jacket, gloves, shirt on a hat stand. Some of the men have the newspaper hats of building workers on their heads, others wear red and yellow peaked caps
with the names of petrol companies printed on them. Like this, the gathering looks like a party. Every day each of them at the big table takes the same place and so everyone knows his neighbour’s sore points and how much or how little wine or water to pour for him. It’s the younger ones who do the pouring. The older ones explain what’s happening in the world.

Luciano is pummelling an armful of dough like a trainer punches his boxer to tease him. At one moment he leans over the counter covered with flour, away from the ovens, to shout at Jean: In a pizzeria without laughter the ovens cook badly—no doubt you’ve heard that!

One waitress, Elisa, serves all the men. Jean observes the confidence with which she carries the plates and carafes, and the skill with which she avoids their fondling and grasping hands. She is about the same age as Ninon.

Who ordered the Siciliana?

Here Lisetta, it’s for Otello, here.

Why are you so serious today, Lisetta, didn’t you sleep well?

Did he keep you awake all night, Lisetta?

And the Quattro Stagioni, she sings out, who ordered the Quattro Stagioni?

Elisa’s wrists are thin like Ninon’s, too.

Lisetta! Give us a smile and some more water!

I started with a mule, interrupts Federico, today my dump is the largest in Lombardy. Fifteen hectares of scrap. I can’t sleep and I’m thinking about Gino, so I walk around my stacks and they give off a kind of peace. It comes from their stillness. Every precious thing I’ve brought here was once manufactured for movement, for turning, as they say. (Laughter) Now each one is still, so still, surrounded by hundreds and thousands of almost identical ones who are still. It must be below freezing. In some of the stacks the metals are talking. I’m not hard of hearing yet. They zing in the cold, icy air. If I stop walking and listen, they zing out whole sentences. In below-zero temperatures metals sometimes do this. Just as on stifling summer nights the thinner metals chirp with accumulated heat, like cicadas. I’m already explaining to you, Counsel, so you’ll be fully prepared for defending me. I’m explaining to you how I made up my mind. Very calmly, Counsel. The sounds my stacks are making don’t disturb the stillness of the night.

And their wisdom isn’t violent. This is why I come back to the office at peace with myself and sure, sure of what has to be done tomorrow. She’ll be spared a lot of suffering, she’s condemned anyway. And like this Gino will be saved. When they put me on trial, I’ll lay out, with your help, Counsel, the whole godforsaken situation and every father in the country will support me. The Scrap Man of Asola will be called a national hero. But I’m doing it for their sakes, both of them. Which gun would be best? I’m wondering about my Beretta 921 which I bought off a Sardinian
lawyer. Perhaps you even know him, Counsel? Agostino, he was called. He said he bought it to protect himself in Cagliari. Lawyers need guns there, and he sold it to me with a box of ammunition.

You’re my daily happiness, says one of the men in newspaper hats, to Elisa.

You want to pay now? Elisa asks Jean Ferrero, who is staring like a deaf man into the open oven from which Luciano has just slid out another pizza.

I got too close, Gino, I saw the pain in her eyes, so much pain there was no room for more. Then she started to laugh and I couldn’t do it. I drank my coffee and left. I couldn’t do it.

You want to pay now? Elisa asks Jean Ferrero a second time.

See that heap of spark plugs there? Big enough to fill a railway truck. In principle, Gino, their porcelain can be recycled.
Everything has to be sorted out. Putting the same things together, separating like from unlike. It’s what I’ve done all my life. People mix up everything. They throw everything away in the same place. That’s how they make trash. There’s no such thing as trash. Trash is the confusion we make throwing things out.

You can’t give her up, you tell me. You want to, but you can’t. That’s already trash, Gino. You don’t want to give her up and you know very well you could. She has told you to leave her many times. There’s nobody who would say a word if you left her. There’s no future for you. There’s more future for those radiators there than for you and her. Anyway
leave
is the wrong word. To leave you have to share a front door and you’ve never lived in the same place together. There’s no question of leaving. It’s a question of not going further, of stopping. And you, you want to go further. I don’t ask why. Any more than I ask why there’s a metal called tungsten. Tungsten exists. (Laughter)

So does love. In your case, love’s as heavy as tungsten. You want to give this Frenchwoman everything you can. Then separate things out. You love her. She’s going to die. So are we all. She’s going to die soon. Then be quick. You can’t have children, you can’t risk passing that abomination on to another generation.

The ancients believed that metals were engendered underground, all of them, engendered by the coupling of mercury with sulphur. Use a
capote
, Gino, and marry her. You’ll be marrying a woman, not a virus. Scrap isn’t trash, Gino. Marry her.

T
he wheels screech against the rails as the tram corners. It is the No. 11 beneath the windows of Zdena’s flat. Zdena is ironing a blouse in the room with the tiled stove. On the floor lies an open suitcase already packed.

I used to help Tante Claire hang out the washing. We went out to the garden together carrying a plastic basin—a thing just large enough to bath a baby in. That is something I shall never do. The basin was blue. The geese were there in the grass. Piece by piece we picked out the wet laundry and hung it on the line with pegs. I carried
the pegs in my apron. They were made in plastic, coloured red and yellow like baby’s toys. All my babies have been killed.

When everything was on the line, flapping in the wind which blew down the valley, it always surprised me how much Tante Claire and I had carried out in the basin! Enough to fill a whole garden! I have the same surprise when I watch Gino unloading his van. It’s hard to believe so much gear can be fitted into a Mercedes D320. Under his sunshades, which have wooden spokes like giant parasol mushrooms, Gino starts to arrange jeans, waistcoats, hunters’ jackets, caps, swimming trunks, shirts, sweaters, shorts, headbands, neck rags, suits, macs, sandals, bathrobes, kimonos. He doesn’t let me help him unload. You can chat up the clients, he says, they’ll buy to make you smile! He’s selling a kind of bathrobe which I called an Egyptian Tunic and that’s what he’s written on the piece of cardboard above the rail where they hang: TUNICHE EGIZIE. 99,000 lire.

The other day he sent me into the van to find a jumbo shirt for a client who was so fat he looked as if he’d need a bell-tent for a shirt. And there, behind a pile of slips, I noticed what looked like a letter in Gino’s handwriting, stuck with scotchtape to the metal side of the van. Who’s he writing to? I ask myself, and why does he stick it there? I could see it wasn’t a stock list.

So I squat down and read it and it says something like: You’re beautiful, love, there’s no spot on you. Your lips, beloved, taste like a honeycomb: honey and milk are
under your tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home. You, my wife, are my garden, a secret spring, a fountain that nobody knows. The smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home. And underneath in capital letters is written my name: NINON.

I come straight out of the van, I scream at him in front of everybody who’s there. I call him a liar and a cheat.

It’s from the Bible, he says.

Fuck it, I tell him, you know what I have …

There appeared before my blind eyes something which was part of the story, yet I could not say how.

The cross is not made of a noble wood like cedar. It’s a common wood, like that used for shuttering concrete. Christ’s hair with his head slumped forward hides one of his eyes and falls over half his face. The nails nailed through his feet, and the thorns of the crown tugged over his head by hands wearing gloves, show forever the cruelty of men. This cruelty can use anything. This is why the Christ has a body. His body is also loved. He was betrayed, abandoned, forsaken and he was loved. His body—pallid, fragile, doomed—shows this love. Don’t ask me how. Ask the criminals, ask children, ask the Magdalen, ask mothers …

Zdena places her ironed, folded blouse on top of the other clothes and packets and toilet articles in the suitcase. She kneels on the floor to close the case and she looks at the acacia tree through the window. What has she forgotten?

Tante Claire loves birds. Her geese with red beaks recognise me as soon as I come home from school, as soon as I turn into our little road. She hears them squawking and she comes out to talk to me. They are always there, the geese, they wake up every morning, they guard the house, they lay eggs, they never forget to look up twice every minute to see who’s coming next and to quack, and if the grass is too tall and they can’t see over it, they flatten the grass down with their feet which are like flatirons. If one of her feet is hurting, a goose limps like I do when my foot hurts.

A
long the Po there is such a heaviness in the air that the swallows are flying at knee level to collect the weighed-down insects. In the villages along the SS 343 the dust and the hens wait, one leg raised, beaks open. Everywhere there is electricity. The bar of a level crossing slowly descends, its bell ringing and its red light flashing. Jean Ferrero slows to a halt, puts both his feet on the ground and straightens his back.

Okay, Papa, why not? Take me to Athens for Easter. If I could, I’d take a trip round the world. Like that I’d know what I was leaving. You have enough money for Athens?