Troubling Love (4 page)

For decades, Caserta had been for me a city of haste, a restless place where everything went faster than in other places. Not the royal city to whose eighteenth-century park with its cascading waterfalls I had gone as a child the Monday after Easter, and where, amid hordes of day-trippers, lost in a vast clan of relatives, I ate salami from Secondigliano and hardboiled eggs inside an oily, peppery dough. Of the city and the park memory could put into words only the rapid streams of water and the terrifying pleasure of getting lost as the shouts calling me back grew more and more distant. But what my less easily verbalized emotions recorded under the word Caserta was a spinning nausea, vertigo, and a lack of air. Sometimes that place, which belonged to a less reliable memory, consisted of a dimly lighted staircase and a wrought-iron banister. At other times it was a patch of light striped by bars and covered by a fine screen, which I observed crouching underground, in the company of a child named Antonio, who held me tightly by the hand. The sounds that accompanied it, like the soundtrack of a film, were pure commotion, sudden banging, as of things formerly in order that abruptly collapse. The odor was of lunchtime or dinnertime, when, coming from every doorway, the smells of the various dishes mingle in the stairwell but are ruined by a stink of mold and cobwebs. Caserta was a place where I wasn’t supposed to go, a bar with a sign: a dark woman, palm trees, lions, camels. It had the taste of sugared almonds in an exquisite candy box, but you were forbidden to enter. If little girls went in they never came out again. Not even my mother was supposed to go there, or my father would kill her. Caserta was a man, a silhouette of dark fabric. The silhouette, hanging on a thread, rotated, turning first one way, then the other. We were not allowed to mention him. Amalia was often chased through the house, caught, struck in the face first with the back of the hand, then the palm, only because she had said: “Caserta.”

This in my less datable memories. In the clearer ones there was Amalia herself who spoke of him secretly, of that man-city of waterfalls and hedges and stone statues and pictures of palm trees and camels. She didn’t speak of him to me, who perhaps was playing under the table with my sisters. She spoke of him to others, to the women who were making gloves with her at home. Somewhere in my brain I preserved echoes of phrases. One remained very clear in my mind. It was not even words, or no longer was, but sounds compacted and made concrete in an image. That Caserta, my mother said in a whisper, had pushed her into a corner and tried to kiss her. I, hearing her, saw the man’s open mouth, with bright white teeth and a long red tongue. The tongue shot out from the lips and retracted at a velocity that hypnotized me. As an adolescent I would close my eyes on purpose to reproduce that scene, and would contemplate it with a mixture of attraction and repulsion. But I felt guilty, as if I were doing something forbidden. By then I knew that in that image of fantasy there was a secret that could not be revealed, not because one part of me didn’t know how to get to it but because, if I did, the other part would have refused to name it and would have driven me out.

On the telephone, just before, Uncle Filippo had said to me some things that I already knew in a confused way: he spoke of them and I knew. They could be summed up thus: Caserta was a contemptible man. As a boy he had been a friend of his and of my father. After the war, they had had some profitable business dealings: he had seemed a clear-headed, sincere young man. But he had eyed my mother. And not only her: he was already married, he had a son, but he bothered all the women in the neighborhood. When he went too far, my uncle and my father had taught him a lesson. And Caserta with his wife and child had gone to live in another place. My uncle had concluded in a threatening dialect: “He wouldn’t get her out of his head. So we made the desire get out forever.”

Silence. I had seen blood between cries and insults. Ghosts upon ghosts. Antonio, the child who held my hand, had gone down into the darkest part of the basement. For an instant I felt the domestic violence of my childhood and adolescence return to my eyes and ears as if it were oozing along a thread that joined us. But I realized for the first time that now, after so many years, it was what I wanted.

“I’m coming over,” Uncle Filippo had suggested.

“What do you think a man of seventy can do to me?”

He was confused. Before hanging up I had promised that I would call him back if I heard from Caserta again.

Now I was waiting on the landing. At least an hour passed. The glow of lights in the stairwell from the other floors allowed me to check, once I got used to the dark, the whole area. Nothing happened. Finally around four in the morning the elevator jerked abruptly and the light went from green to red. The car slid down. 

With a leap I was at the railing: I saw it glide past the fifth floor and stop at the fourth. The doors opened and closed. Then silence again. Even the echo of the vibrations emitted by the steel cables disappeared.

I waited a little, maybe five minutes; then I went cautiously down one flight. There was a dim yellow light: the three doors that faced the landing led to the offices of an insurance company. I went down another flight, slipping around the dark, still elevator car. I wanted to look inside but I didn’t, taken by surprise: the door of my mother’s house was wide open, the lights were on. Right on the threshold was Amalia’s suitcase and beside it her black leather purse. I was about to rush instinctively toward those objects when behind me I heard the click of the elevator’s glass doors. The light illumined the car, revealing an old man, well groomed, his dark, fleshless face handsome in its way beneath a mass of white hair. He was sitting on one of the wooden benches and was so still that he seemed like an enlargement of an old photograph. He stared at me for a second with a friendly, slightly melancholy look. Then the car rose upward with a rumble.

I had no doubts. The man was the same one who had reeled off the litany of obscenities during Amalia’s funeral. But I hesitated to follow him up the stairs: I thought I should but I felt as if attached to the floor, like a statue. I stared at the elevator cables until the car stopped with a clatter of the doors as they rapidly opened and closed. A few seconds later the car slid past me again. Before it disappeared toward the ground floor the man showed me, with a smile, the garbage bag that contained my mother’s underwear.

I was strong, lean, quick, and decisive; not only that, I liked being confident of being so. But I don’t know what happened in that situation. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the shock of finding open that door that I had diligently closed. Maybe I was dazed by the house with the lights on, by my mother’s suitcase and purse in full view in the doorway. Or maybe it was something else. It was the repulsion I felt at perceiving that the image of that old man beyond the arabesqued glass of the elevator had seemed for a moment to have a dark beauty. So, instead of following him, I stood motionless, trying to fix in my mind the details, even after the elevator disappeared into the stairwell. 

When I came to myself, I felt drained, depressed by the sensation of being humiliated in front of the part of myself that watched over every possible yielding of the other. I went to the window in time to see the man going off along the alley in the light of the streetlamps, his body erect, at a slow but not labored pace, the bag in his right hand with the arm held stiffly down, the black plastic grazing the pavement. I went back to the door and was about to rush down the stairs. But I realized that the neighbor, Signora De Riso, had appeared in a vertical strip of light cautiously opening between the door and the frame.

She was wearing a long pink cotton nightgown, and she was looking at me with hostility, her face split by the chain that was meant to keep anyone with evil intentions from entering. Certainly she had been there for some time, spying through the peephole and listening.

“What’s going on?” she asked argumentatively. “You’ve been up and down all night.” I was about to answer in an equally argumentative tone, but I remembered that she had mentioned a man my mother was seeing and was in time to realize that I had better control myself, if I wanted to know more. I was now obliged to hope that that hint of gossip which had annoyed me in the afternoon would become detailed talk, conversation, compensation for that lonely old woman who didn’t know how to get through her nights.

“Nothing,” I said, trying to make my breathing normal. “I can’t sleep.” 

She muttered something about how the dead have trouble leaving.

“The first night, they never let you sleep,” she said.

“Did you hear any noise? Did I disturb you?” I asked with false politeness.

“I sleep little and not very well, after a certain time. On top of that there was the lock: you kept opening and closing the door.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m a little nervous. I dreamed that that man you were telling me about was here on the landing.”

The old woman understood that I had changed my tune and was disposed to listen to her gossip, but she wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t reject her again.

“What man?” she asked.

“The one you told me about . . . the one who came here, to visit my mother. I fell asleep thinking about him . . . ”

“He was a respectable man, who put Amalia in a good mood. He brought her
sfogliatelle
and flowers. When he came, I heard them talking and laughing continuously. She, especially, laughed—her laugh was so loud you could hear it from the landing.”

“What were they saying?”

“I don’t know, I wouldn’t stay and listen. I mind my own business.”

I made a gesture of impatience.

“But Amalia never talked about him?”

“Yes,” Signora De Riso admitted. “Once I saw them come out of the house together. She told me that he was someone she had known for fifty years, who was almost like a relative. And if that’s so, you know him, too. He was tall, thin, with white hair. Your mother treated him almost as if he were her brother. As an intimate.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. She never told me. Amalia did as she liked. One day she told me about all her affairs, even if I didn’t want to hear it, and the next day she didn’t even say hello. I know about the
sfogliatelle
because they didn’t eat them all and she gave the rest to me. She also gave me the flowers, because the scent gave her a headache: she always had a headache, in recent months. But invite me in and introduce me, never.”

“Maybe she was afraid of embarrassing you.”

“No, she wanted to mind her own business. I understood and stayed away. But I want to tell you that your mother was not to be trusted.”

“In what sense?”

“She didn’t behave properly. This man I met only the one time. He was a handsome old man, well dressed, and when I met them he made me a slight bow. She, however, turned the other way and said an ugly word to me.”

“Maybe you misunderstood.”

“I understood very well. She had developed a mania for saying the worst words, out loud, even when she was alone. And then she would start laughing. I heard her from here, in my kitchen.”

“My mother never said bad words.”

“She did, she did . . . At a certain age, one should have some restraint.”

“It’s true,” I said. And there returned to my mind the suitcase and purse in the doorway of the apartment. They seemed to me objects that, because of the journey they must have taken, had lost the dignity of things belonging to Amalia. I wanted to try to restore it to them. But the old woman, encouraged by my submissive tones, undid the chain from the door, and stepped into the doorway.

“In any case,” she said, “at this hour I’m not going to go back to sleep.”

I was afraid that she wanted to come into the house and withdrew quickly toward my mother’s apartment.

“I, on the other hand, am going to try to sleep a little,” I said.

Signora De Riso darkened and immediately stopped following me. She put the chain back on the door with contempt.

“Amalia, too, always wanted to come to my house and never asked me into hers,” she muttered. Then she closed the door in my face.

I sat down on the floor and started with the suitcase. I opened it but found nothing that I could recognize as belonging to my mother. Everything was brand-new: a pair of pink slippers, a robe of ivory satin, two dresses that had never been worn, one of a rusty red too tight for her and too youthful, one quieter, blue, but quite short, five pairs of expensive underpants, a brown leather beauty case full of perfumes, deodorants, creams, makeup, cleansers—she had never used makeup in her life.

I went on to the purse. The first thing I took out was a pair of white lace underpants. I was convinced immediately by the three “V”s clearly visible on the right and from the stylish design that they were the companion of the bra that Amalia was wearing when she drowned. I examined them carefully: they had a little tear on the left side, as if they had been put on even though they were clearly a size too small. I felt my stomach contract and I held my breath. Then I rummaged in the purse again, looking first for the house keys. Naturally I didn’t find them. I found instead her reading glasses, nine telephone tokens, and her wallet. In the wallet were two hundred and twenty thousand lire (a sizable amount for her: she lived on the little money that we three sisters sent her every month), the receipt for the electricity bill, her identity card in a plastic case, an old photograph of my sisters and me with our father. The photograph was ruined. Those images of us from so long ago were yellowed, cracked, like the figures of winged demons in certain altarpieces that the faithful have defaced with pointed objects.

I left the photograph on the floor and got up, fighting a growing nausea. I looked through the house for a telephone book and, when I found it, turned quickly to Caserta. I didn’t want to telephone him: I wanted the address. When I discovered that there were three densely printed pages of Casertas I realized that I didn’t even know what his name was: no one, in the course of my childhood, had ever called him anything but Caserta. So I threw the phone book in a corner and went into the bathroom. I couldn’t hold back the retching, and for a few seconds I was afraid that my whole body would be unleashed against me, with a self-destructive fury that as a child I had always feared and, growing up, had tried to control. Then I calmed down. I rinsed out my mouth and washed my face carefully. Seeing it pale and un-made-up in the mirror tilted over the sink I decided to put on makeup.