Troubling Love (3 page)

“For some time a man had been coming to see her, a tall man, very respectable . . . ”

I gave her a hostile glance. I decided that I didn’t want her to continue.

“He was her brother,” I said.

Signora De Riso narrowed her eyes, insulted: she and my mother had been friends for a long time and she knew perfectly well who Uncle Filippo was. He was neither tall nor very respectable.

“Her brother,” she pronounced with false compliance.

“No?” I asked, annoyed by her tone. She said goodbye to me coldly and closed the door.

When one enters the house of a person who has just died, it’s hard to believe that it’s deserted. Houses don’t have ghosts, but they contain the effects of life’s final gestures. First I heard the rush of water from the kitchen and for a fraction of a second, with an abrupt torsion of the true and the false, I thought that my mother wasn’t dead, that her death had been merely the subject of a long, painful fantasy that had begun in some long-ago time. I was sure that she was in the house, alive, standing at the sink, washing the dishes and murmuring to herself. But the shutters were closed, the apartment was dark. I turned on the light and saw that the water was streaming copiously into the empty sink from the old brass tap.

I turned it off. My mother belonged to a fading culture that could not conceive of waste. She wouldn’t throw away stale bread, she used the rind of the cheese, putting it in the soup to flavor it, she almost never bought meat but at the butcher asked for scrap bones to make broth, and then sucked on them as if they contained a miraculous substance. She would never have forgotten the tap. She used water with a frugality that was transformed into a reflex of gesture, ear, voice. If as a girl I left even a silent thread of water, extending to the bottom of the sink like a knitting needle, she would call to me an instant later, without reproach, “Delia, the tap.” I felt uneasy: she had wasted more water with that distraction in the last hours of life than in all her existence. I saw her floating face down, suspended in the middle of the kitchen, against the background of blue majolica tiles.

I moved on in a hurry. I went through the bedroom, throwing the few things she had cared about in a plastic bag: the album of family photographs, a bracelet, an old winter dress of hers from the fifties that I liked, too. The rest not even the junkmen would have wanted. The few pieces of furniture were old and ugly, her bed was only a mattress and box spring, the sheets and blankets had been mended with a care that, given their age, they didn’t deserve. It struck me, though, that the drawer where she usually kept her underwear was empty. I looked for the laundry bag and peered inside. There was nothing but a man’s shirt, of a good quality.

I examined it. It was a blue shirt, medium-sized, bought recently and chosen by a young man or a man of youthful tastes. The collar was dirty but the odor of the fabric was not unpleasant: the sweat was fused with an expensive brand of deodorant. I folded it carefully and put it in the plastic bag along with the other things. It was not a garment that Uncle Filippo would have worn.

I then went into the bathroom. There was neither toothbrush nor toothpaste. Her old blue bathrobe was hanging on the door. The toilet paper was nearly finished. Beside the toilet there was a half-full garbage bag. There was no garbage inside: instead there was the stink of a tired body preserved by clothes that are dirty or made of an old fabric, every fiber saturated with the humors of decades. I began to take out, piece by piece, with a slight disgust, all my mother’s intimate garments: pink and white underpants, much mended and with ancient elastic that showed here and there through the torn seams, like train tracks in the gap between one tunnel and the next; shapeless, threadbare bras; undershirts full of holes; garters of the sort that were used forty years ago and that she had kept for no reason; panty hose in a sorry state; faded slips, with yellowed lace, that had been out of fashion and obsolete for a long time.

Amalia, who had always dressed shabbily because she was poor but also because she was in the habit of not making herself attractive—a habit acquired many decades earlier to placate the jealousy of my father—seemed to have suddenly decided to get rid of her entire wardrobe. I remembered the only garment she had been wearing when they fished her out: the elegant brand-new bra, with the three “V”s that joined the cups. The image of her breasts wrapped in that lace increased my unease. I left the garments scattered on the floor, without the strength to touch them again; I closed the door and leaned against it.

But to no purpose: the entire bathroom jumped over me and recomposed itself in front of me, in the hall: Amalia now was sitting on the toilet and watching me closely while I removed the hair from my legs. I coated my ankles with hot wax and then, groaning, pulled it away from the skin, with a decisive gesture. She, meanwhile, was telling me that as a girl she had cut the black hair off her ankles with scissors. But it had grown back immediately, stiff as coils of barbed wire. At the beach, too, before putting on her bathing suit, she shortened her pubic hairs with scissors. 

I put the waxing cream on her, although she tried to shield herself. I spread the wax carefully on her ankles, on the inside of her firm thin thighs, her groin, reproaching her meanwhile with unreasonable harshness for her mended slip. Then I peeled off the wax while she observed me impassively. I did it carelessly, as if I wanted to subject her to a painful trial, and she let me, without saying a word, as if she had agreed to the trial. But her skin didn’t resist. It turned fiery red and then immediately purple, revealing a network of broken capillaries. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “it will pass,” while I weakly reproached myself for what I’d done to her.

I reproached myself more intensely now, as with an effort of will I tried to send the bathroom back behind the door I was leaning against. To manage it, I moved away from the door, let the image of her purple legs fade into the hall, and went to the kitchen to get my purse. When I returned to the bathroom, I looked carefully among the underpants that were lying on the floor and chose the pair that seemed to me the least worn. I washed, and changed my tampax. I left my underpants on the floor, among Amalia’s. As I passed the mirror I smiled involuntarily, to calm myself.

I don’t know how long I sat beside the kitchen window, listening to the din in the alley, the traffic of motorbikes, the tramp of feet on the pavement. The street gave off an odor of stagnant water that rose through the scaffolding. I was exhausted but didn’t want to lie down on Amalia’s bed or ask Uncle Filippo for help or telephone my father or look again for Signora De Riso. I felt pity for that world of lost old people: confused by images of themselves that went back to bygone eras, they were sometimes in harmony, sometimes at odds with the shades of things and people of the past. Yet I had trouble keeping myself on the margins. I was tempted to link voice to voice, thing to thing, fact to fact. Already now I felt Amalia return, wanting to observe how I rubbed creams into my skin, how I put on my makeup and took it off. Already I began to imagine resentfully a secret old age in which she played with her body all day, as perhaps she would have done as a young woman if my father had not read in such games a desire to please others, a preparation for infidelity.

I slept no more than a couple of hours, without dreams. When I opened my eyes, the room was dark and from the open window came only the nebulous glow of the streetlamps, diffused over a segment of the ceiling. Amalia was up there like a nocturnal butterfly, young, perhaps twenty, wrapped in a green bathrobe, her stomach swelled by advanced pregnancy. She lay on her back, and although her face was serene, her body, caught in a painful spasm, twisted convulsively. I closed my eyes to give her time to detach herself from the ceiling and return to death; then I reopened them and looked at the clock. It was two-thirty. I slept again but only for a few minutes. Then I fell into a torpor crowded with images, in which, without wanting to, I began to tell myself about my mother.

Amalia, in my waking sleep, was an olive-skinned, hairy woman. Her hair, even when she was old, even when it was faded by the salt air, gleamed like the skin of a panther, and it was thick, so thick that no wind could penetrate. It smelled of laundry soap, but not the dry kind, with a ladder printed on the package. It smelled of a brown liquid soap that was bought in a basement: I remembered the tickle of dust in my nostrils and throat.

The soap was sold by a fat, hairless man. He scooped it up with a trowel and stuck it on thick yellow paper, depositing with it a stench of sweat and DDT. I ran to Amalia breathlessly, holding the package and, with puffed cheeks, blowing on it, to get rid of the odors of the basement and of that man; I’m running the same way now, even though so much time has passed, with my cheek on my mother’s pillow. And she, seeing me arrive, is already loosening her hair, and it comes undone as if she had sculpted it in spirals above her forehead and the blackness of the hairdo were changing molecular structure under her hands.

Her hair was long. Amalia was always undoing it, and washing it took not just soap but the entire container of the man in the cellar at the foot of steps that were white with ashes or lye. I suspected that at times my mother, escaping my surveillance, went and dipped her hair straight into the barrel, with the consent of the man in the shop. Then she would turn toward me gaily with her face wet, the water streaming down her neck from the tap in our kitchen, eyelashes and pupils black, eyebrows drawn with charcoal, lightly whitened by the suds that, arching over her forehead, fragmented into drops of soap and water. The drops slid down over her nose, toward her mouth, until she caught them with her red tongue, and it seemed to me that she was saying: “Good.”

I didn’t know how she managed to be in two different spaces at the same time, in the soap barrel in the cellar, in her blue slip, the straps falling off her shoulders and down her arms; and meanwhile abandoning herself to the water in our kitchen, which was giving her hair a liquid sheen. Certainly I had dreamed it that way countless times with my eyes open, as I did now yet again, and yet again felt a painful embarrassment. 

The fat man in fact was not content with standing and watching. In summer he dragged the barrel outside. He was bare-chested, bronzed by the sun, and wore a white handkerchief tied tight around his forehead. He poked around in the container with a long stick and, sweating, twisted the shining mass of Amalia’s hair. Meanwhile, down the street, a steamroller crackled, advancing slowly with its big cylinder of gray stone. Another man drove it, thickset and muscular, also bare-chested, the hair in his armpits curly with sweat. He wore a type of khaki trousers unbuttoned in such a way as to show, at the level of his stomach, a frightening hollow, and, settled on the seat of the machine, he surveyed the dense and shiny tar of Amalia’s hair as it slid out from the tilted drum and extended over the crushed stone, steaming, and rippling the air. My mother’s hair was pitch and it spread out into a luxuriant down that thickened in the prohibited places of the body. Prohibited to me: she wouldn’t let me touch her. She hid her face, tossing the curtain of hair over it, and offered her neck to the sun to dry.

When the telephone rang, she pulled her head up suddenly, so that the wet hair flew from the floor through the air, grazing the ceiling and falling on her back with a slap that woke me completely. I turned on the light. I couldn’t remember where the telephone was, and meanwhile it kept ringing. I found it in the hall, an old telephone of the sixties that I knew well, attached to the wall. When I answered a male voice called me Amalia.

“I’m not Amalia,” I said. “Who is it?”

I had the impression that the man on the telephone struggled to repress a laugh. He repeated, “I’m not Amalia,” in falsetto, and then resumed, in the purest dialect: “Leave the bag with the dirty clothes on the top floor. You promised it to me. And look carefully: you’ll find the suitcase with your things. I put it there for you.”

“Amalia is dead,” I said in a calm voice. “Who are you?”

“Caserta,” said the man.

The name sounded like the name of the bogeyman in a fable.

“I’m Delia,” I answered. “What is on the top floor? What do you have of hers?”

“I, nothing. It’s you who have something of mine,” the man said, again in falsetto, distorting my Italian in an affected manner.

“You come here,” I said to him in a persuasive tone. “We can talk about it and you can take what you need.”

There was a long silence. I waited for an answer but there was none. The man had not hung up: he had simply let go of the receiver and walked away.

I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water; the water was dense and had a terrible smell. Then I returned to the telephone and dialed Uncle Filippo’s number. He answered after five rings and before I could even say hello, began shouting into the telephone insults of every sort.

“It’s Delia,” I said harshly. I felt that he was having trouble identifying me. When he remembered me, he began to mutter excuses, calling me “my child,” and asking again and again if I was all right, where I was, what had happened.

“Caserta called me,” I said. Then, before he could start again on the rosary of curses, I ordered him, “Calm down.”

Afterward I went back to the bathroom. With one foot I kicked my dirty underpants behind the bidet, and then picked up Amalia’s lingerie, which I had scattered over the floor, and put it back in the garbage bag. Then I went out to the landing. I was no longer either depressed or uneasy. I carefully closed the door, using both locks, and pushed the button for the elevator.

Once inside, I pressed the button for the sixth floor. At the top, I left the doors of the elevator open so that the dark space was at least partly illuminated. I discovered that the man had lied: my mother’s suitcase wasn’t there. I thought of going back down but changed my mind. I placed the garbage bag in the rectangle of light left by the elevator and then closed the doors. In the dark I settled myself in a corner of the landing from which I could see clearly anyone who came out of the elevator or arrived by the stairs. I sat on the floor.