While the Shark is Sleeping (7 page)

I burst out laughing again, because when Mauro’s around everything seems easy and clear and maybe even a bit funny.

‘What about a beautiful love? Wouldn’t you like that?’

‘Sure. But it’s not possible. It hasn’t been possible for anyone in my family.’

‘You could try looking for it. Demanding it, in fact. No more crumbs and torture. Demand a beautiful love.’

And when we return home it’s night-time, I feel all fresh and perfumed and I find Mauro so nice that I even tell him about the colours of the pegs. ‘Why don’t you buy wooden ones?’ he asks me.

‘Because wood is what coffins and Mamma’s urn are made out of.’

And this time it’s Mauro who bursts out laughing and he apologises and says he’s not one to laugh easily, but this time he just couldn’t help it.

‘Don’t throw yourself away, little one, don’t ever sell yourself off like that again, to some dick off the street who everybody knows. You’re precious. We’re all precious. You deserve a love where someone wants to go somewhere with you to see the place, not to torture you. Promise me you’ll look for that and you won’t accept anything else,’ he says, waving goodbye.

And it occurs to me that in life there isn’t only the possibility of being submerged in shit, or submerging others, or dying. There’s also Mauro’s way. And I want to run to Zia and my brother to tell them, to tell them that there’s also this other way.

Mauro De Cortes is the best person I know, but he stays as far away from us as the horizon at sea. Every time we invite him over he replies, ‘Thank you, but I have something on.’ He’d scale a mountain if we were in trouble, but he’d never come over for dinner, or to the movies, or to the beach.

I feel really sorry for Zia, even though she’s a buttery doll of a woman with curls and she’s bursting with health and never comes home at the end of the day without someone having courted her. I feel sorry for her because in her life there are never more than three straight hours with a man, never a night, or a day trip, much less a holiday. She knows certain things exist because she’s seen them in films, or heard about them in songs, or people have told her about them.

Papà was right: when it comes to Zia, God just isn’t willing.

Or else Nonna’s right: Zia’s the one who isn’t willing. Because she’s always been too exuberant, rebellious; at school they’d suspend her and call Nonna and Nonno to tell them their daughter always seemed like she was on the edge of a swimming pool and that she came to class only to entertain the other children with her antics. And maybe Nonna’s right because the fact is Zia tires of everything straight away, especially her lovers.

She tells me, though, that it’s not that she tires of her lovers, it’s that she’s afraid they’ll tire of her, so she tries to give of her best. It’s true that after two or three hours her lovers send her away, but it’s also true that she wouldn’t be able to endure any more simply out of tiredness. Except for that time with Mauro De Cortes when she fell asleep and felt like she was being rocked by the waves.

And yet Zia’s not boring. When she comes over to our house we never want to let her leave, and not just now that our parents are no longer around, but even before. It’s fun when she makes animal sounds, or imitates the sound of the coffee pot boiling or the washing machine on all the different cycles, or the Normandy landing on the flooded floor. Or simply when she laughs at films she thinks are funny and you wonder, ‘Why does she find it so funny?’ and you realise that you’re laughing just because she’s laughing.

When Mamma used to say that Zia was funny, Papà would reply that being funny doesn’t mean making infantile jokes – and always the same ones too – or laughing at other people’s. He preferred Mamma who, with great humility and intellectual honesty, didn’t even try.

Zia clearly has a new suitor. He’s a judge and she thinks he’s Austrian, despite his Sardinian surname, because of something rigid and wintry in his physiognomy and manner, such that she’s not even sure that he is courting her. She met him because she needed something on criminal law for her history studies and people pointed to him as the main expert on the topic.

The judge invited her to come and have a coffee one of these days, ten minutes at that bar under the Torre dell’Elefante, with the beautiful view, and as he invited her he observed her with great interest. It seemed to Zia to be a particular kind of interest, but you can’t be sure.

And I wonder what man – even if he is rigid, a judge and possibly Austrian – could resist Zia’s long, long legs, her short, flimsy skirts, her narrow, narrow waist, her big, bulging, buttery tits that are always prominent in her disordered movements, and through badly buttoned blouses and tops that are too thin. Plus when she talks – and she doesn’t do it on purpose because it also happens when she’s with us and with Nonna – Zia leans over, bounces around, and her clothes move. I reckon no man can resist a curvy, buttery doll, with her unkempt curls in her eyes and her firm, soft, white tits and highly sensitive nipples, which as kids we’d always ask to squeeze, or at least touch, fabulous delicacies of marzipan, ice cream and cream. It’s obvious she’s made an impression on the judge.

The ten-minute coffee one of these days, Zia told me, was not ten minutes but many more. Also the judge didn’t arrive at the meeting in an elegant blue car, as she’d expected, but on his scooter, and he told her to get on, handing her the helmet he’d brought specially for her. Zia had often seen couples going around on scooters together, but she’d never got on one and she said it felt like she was on the other side of the world and it was really strange, because it’s true that it was still her, but it was more like a memory of who she was. Also, on a scooter, there’s no need to talk to fill the silences, because all you have to do is keep quiet so as not to distract the person driving, and enjoy the view, with one cheek resting on his shoulder. I’d often offered her a ride on my scooter, and she’d never wanted to get on, but it’s pointless to try and explain it because that’s a completely different story.

Then, outside the café under the Torre dell’Elefante, Zia started explaining to him what she was looking for, holding forth about certain historical events to impress him, but the judge stopped her and told her that his one hobby was reading history books when he has time and he was familiar with that issue. In other words: save your breath because there’s no point.

So she relaxed, listened to what she needed to hear, laughed and made him laugh because he makes sophisticated jokes but luckily he’s easily amused and he doesn’t need such sophistication to be able to laugh.

Between one area of study and the next, a few secrets slipped out, like that the judge has only recently stopped smoking joints and has had countless love affairs that all went to shit and he could never work out why, since he always gave of his best.

So then Zia took a leap and revealed that she, too, had had a hundred relationships that had all gone to shit and she could never work out why either, since she always gave of her best.

Suddenly, she got up from her chair and stood next to him and proposed what Papà would call one of those impossible, infantile ceremonies: that next time they fell in love, they would give of their worst and demand the same of the other person.

She sat back down and started writing the pact on a paper napkin: Love only to those who can endure and if we can endure! They racked their brains trying to think what historical pact this might resemble, but nothing came to mind.

When the judge got her to climb back on the scooter and promised to look into the topic she was studying, it was already dark.

I imagine the snow on the Austrian mountains, a snow that hides the beauty of what will be revealed when it thaws, a beauty I know already exists. I imagine all the animals Zia can imitate; they are asleep up there in the mountains at the moment, but they will make their cries heard when they reawaken. I imagine an enchanted castle where immobility and death reign, but where the coffee pots will begin once more to boil and the washing machines to go through their different cycles. I imagine Zia dancing the first waltz of her life and she will neither tire, nor be tired of.

Confidently thick, as Mamma’s snow poem put it, love arrived, and anyone could easily have recognised it. There is no definite reason for all this. In a completely casual way, that mysterious force that makes the world go around revealed itself over a cup of coffee.

After that coffee nothing was ever the same for Zia. The other relationships hadn’t changed her life. Now she went often to the judge’s house, who never made her feel it was time to leave. She made pasta sauces and left them in the fridge for him, so that he wouldn’t eat rubbish when he was in a hurry. She called her love by an abbreviated name, like you do with family. She phoned him whenever she felt like it without ever wondering if it would be better not to, and he did the same, and often it was just about some silly little thing that made them laugh. Zia, who had never wanted to ride with me, even bought special trousers for going on the scooter, because the judge said he felt bad if he didn’t start his day on two wheels. He liked Zia’s embrace in the morning, her soft tits and her cheek on his back, her long legs alongside him. If the judge didn’t take Zia to work he said it was a bad start to the day. Zia told me she loved him, and I didn’t want to think about what Papà would have said: ‘What does it take for my sister-in-law to fall in love?’

When Zia went to the judge’s house for the first time, to listen to the original version of ‘American Pie’ that Madonna now does a cover of, he asked her very genuinely to undress. He’d never had such a beautiful woman around the house, and it had never entered his head that it could happen to him. He’d seen women like that in the movies and in magazines, but nothing so real and above all so close. He knew he wouldn’t have a stroke of luck like that a second time in his life.

Zia found the request tender and not at all vulgar, and she unbuttoned her blouse. She showed him her tits and her overwhelming body, then she sat next to him on the sofa and took his hands in hers.

‘Touch me. You can do anything.’

Those were Zia’s happy days. A girlfriend who was loved and in love, she smiled all the time. She was truly beautiful. Not like before: a nicely turned out mixture of meat and bone that was nothing compared to the delicacy that was Mamma. Because Mamma, walking like a beaten dog, like humanity’s poorest, was beautiful to me, and I’m happy that she was for Doctor Salevsky too. Mamma had a love of life. She was indifferent to nothing. A sponge soaking up all the gifts of God. During those days, Zia and the judge were two sponges saturated with everything that is beautiful in the world. With the judge she tasted things she’d never tasted, things that are completely normal for who knows how many people, but for Zia, accustomed to crumbs, this was a feast she had only ever gazed at hungrily through the window. She related to me the splendour of a hot shower together, she had enjoyed herself so much under the water and was terribly happy. And then the judge had said to her, ‘I love you,’ and no one, ever, in the years and years Zia had been having sex, had ever said such a thing. Powerful. Terrible. Marvellous. ‘Love me. I want to make love with every single part of your body. I want to have sex with your brain. I want to have sex with your heart.’

Zia would have liked to die of happiness and not stay to see what happened. All the men in her life had left her, why would this time be any different?

‘Because maybe one time everything is different,’ I said to her, without anything specific to base this on, but quite sure. And I found her so beautiful, as she looked at me, hopeful for this future that her eighteen-year-old niece said was a certainty. But it ended. Simply and suddenly. One day, as Zia was coming home from university, the judge passed on his scooter and on the back, in Zia’s spot, there was another woman embracing him and resting her head against his shoulder.

So Zia went and sat on the stairs of the judge’s house and waited for him for hours, staring at a spot in the air.

‘Why?’ she asked him, bursting into tears. ‘Why?’

The judge didn’t defend himself. He didn’t invite her up. He sat down with her on the steps and begged her to stop crying because he, too, had a lump in his throat. He put an arm around her shoulders. That was the worst part. He’d always given of his best to all the women in his life and had felt himself vanish into nothing like a soap bubble. How many women had left him? He could no longer remember. But all of them, that’s for sure. A pain he never wanted to feel again.

This time, if Zia were to leave him, he would fall on his feet. Because he loved the other woman, too, and thanks to her, Zia saw him as strong and loved him, and thanks to Zia, the other woman saw him as strong and loved him. The world belongs to the strong, as she well knew, having seen her sister die.

‘Stay. I beg you. Accept me, my love. Even this worst aspect. Take me in. You promised. We drank to this.’

But Zia ran off and when she reached our place she began dashing around the house hitting her head against the walls and saying she didn’t want to live any longer and she wanted, once and for all, to crack open her head and her body that were no use to anyone and that no one wanted and no one ever would. Then she threw herself onto the floor and didn’t wash and wouldn’t eat for days and days.

Nonna would come over to our place to see her daughter; gasping from the walk up the stairs, she seemed to get older every day. She would pull up a chair and sit down to look at Zia curled up on the floor and she would list all the good things to eat that she’d brought for her. She said yes, these were terrible times and you couldn’t make sense of anything any more. The hunger she’d experienced back in her day was better than Zia’s hunger now. War was better, because at least then you knew who to blame it on. First the Americans. Then the Germans. Even if the bad guys changed, at least you knew who they were at any given moment. Whereas now, who could you blame? It was obvious that the judge was a poor fool too, immature, just like Zia; after a day they’d thought they were in love, when actually they didn’t even know where love begins or where it ends. Like our father, who knew all about God, love, good and evil and had abandoned his children without a penny. Like Mamma – a frightened rabbit, she, too, was without a conscience. Falling stupidly from the balcony when she knew full well how weak she was and how often she got dizzy spells. Now there were no good guys or bad guys. You didn’t know what to expect, how to live. Even God seemed confused, and she would not be going to church any more, she wasn’t even going to pray. War had saved her fiancé and peace was killing her daughters. Back then they’d fled into the country to survive the hunger, but there was no escape from the hunger of her daughter.