Chapter 8

I t happened so fast. On television we saw Zagreb and Zadar being bombed and then Dubrovnik, where we’d spent the day. Every so often I thought I recognized something—the wall I’d skirted in my flip-flops as I slurped a nauseating banana ice-cream pop. We sat on our new couch with the feeble quiet of Rome outside and an October that was, as always, generous with light. I bit my nails to the quick and remembered our vacation and the things we’d seen in Dubrovnik: the Pile Gate, the long pedestrian boulevard of the Plaça, Onofrio’s Fountain, the clock tower, Orlando’s Column.

Diego hadn’t taken a single photo of the city, just bits of people in motion and café chairs. We saw those very chairs on the news.

That’s how the war began for us, with those overturned chairs in the rubble of a café, the café where we’d been a few months before, where Gojko had pulled out that shapely doll and stuck my photograph in the clip in its neck. Now we telephoned him frequently. He reassured us. He had relatives in Zagreb who’d had to leave their house. “They’re on vacation in Austria.”

I don’t know if it was pride or what, but it had become difficult for Gojko to talk about his country, which was exploding bit by bit like a pan of popcorn.

 

At work, too, I notice that no one wants to pay much attention to this war. After all, we’re putting out a scientific magazine. Viola says, as she chooses a pastry at a café, “The Balkans. No one understands a fucking thing about the Balkans.”

She bites her sandwich and says the bread is stale and the tuna’s old; she should have gotten the one with spinach. “And no one gives a fuck. Rightly so.”

“What do you mean, rightly so ?”

“Come on. Who gives a shit?”

She’s wearing her usual expression, annoyed and good-natured. She shrugs. Then she points to the sandwich press behind the counter and says they’re burning my sandwich. She complains on my behalf.

“How’s the baby?”

“He’s in day care.”

 

The real news is that we see the war on television every night. It’s close to us, just a few miles away by sea, but it’s far away as it hums on the TV screen.

It’s November 18. I know because it’s my father’s birthday. We made a cake and said goodbye at the door the way he says goodbye lately, as if we might not see each other again. He may be a little depressed. Most mornings he comes by the house early. He rings the bell and says he’s coming up with some mangoes. Lately he’s mad about mangoes. He cleans them and slices them. The remains of the cake are on the table. Now, as I listen to the news I run my finger over the silvery paper and lick the bits I’ve gathered. I give Diego a fingerful as well. He presses the remote control.

The voice says, The city of Vukovar has surrendered to the Serbian militia after a siege lasting eighty-six days.

There’s a clip of a man filmed from behind as he runs clutching a child. The cameraman follows his flight. The child has surrendered. His arms are limp like a rag doll’s. Maybe he’s been wounded, and the father is running to the hospital. I notice that a bit of the man’s ass is hanging out of his pants. He isn’t wearing a belt. Maybe he was sleeping and got dressed in a hurry. I look at that detail, his pants falling down and the hand doing its best to hold them up.

The image stays in my mind when we turn off the television and sit staring at the black screen that emanates a last bit of luminescence. The tragedy of this war, to my mind, is encapsulated in that image of a man trying to save his child and keep his ass covered at the same time.

 

We no longer talk about the child from Korčula. We came back home with our sorrow and then it went away, gently. But Ante is still with us. I believe that when you find a child in the world he stays with you no matter what happens. Some people lose their children and go on finding them every day, in photographs, in the wardrobe. That’s how we continued finding Ante—in a painting at the modern art gallery, in a hare that stopped in front of our headlights and watched us for a long time as if it wanted to tell us something. In the nape of Diego’s neck, because that’s where he remains, like a love that had only just started. When I spy Diego sitting on the toilet for too long, his jeans around his ankles, his head leaning against the tiles as if he were sleeping, I ask him what he’s thinking about.

He’s thinking about the boy, about the bumper cars.

 

Winter marches on, dragging cold days. Exhaust fumes come out of cars to poison the air and attach themselves to the clothes hanging on the balconies of the houses that overlook the highway bypass, which I see on my daily route to work. Bundled up against the cold, I race along on my scooter. It’s cold at work, too. I have a little personal heater and Post-its from my boss, most of them marked URGENT. I unstick the little bits of yellow paper and roll them up and play with them. How can an article on the magnetic effect of a new synthetic fiber that will revolutionize the way we do our household cleaning be urgent? The magazine has become nothing more than a catalogue of advertisements disguised as scientific information. This was supposed to be a temporary job, a few months and then on to something else, but instead I’ve been promoted to assignment editor. I get my coffee from the dispenser at the same time every day. As I wait for the liquid to flow into the little brown cup I think that it’s unlikely I’ll ever leave. I’m good at what I do—and quick. It’s because I’m completely uninterested in my work, and that’s just fine. Passion hobbles me and makes me awkward. I have a hard time living up to the things I hold most dear. I grow anxious and start scratching, as if my blood had suddenly begun to flow too quickly and burn beneath my skin. A few days ago I found the notes from my research thesis. The days when I thought I’d continue studying for the rest of my life seemed like ancient history. I thought of Andrić and the pathological solitude that made him disagreeable and paranoid. In the last interviews he gave, he seemed irritated with the questions and sick of his work, as if he’d revealed too much of himself and then regretted it. And I thought I’d understood something I’d never grasped before: it’s possible, as one grows old, to become suddenly reluctant to give of oneself, unfeeling toward the world, because nothing has ever truly rewarded us.

 

“Who knows what it’s like right now in Sarajevo?”

It’s Diego who’s speaking as he leans up against a balustrade at the Pincio.

We meet up at seven p.m., give each other a kiss and walk arm in arm to the wine bar where we’ve become regulars. It takes us in like a greasy belly. We eat a few pieces of toasted bread covered with spreads and drink little glasses of red wine. There’s a bench, a window with a view onto the street. People rush along on the sidewalk. We watch them pass as if they were figures made of ash.

We rest our hands in each other’s on the table and smile at the boy waiting on us. We don’t bother talking about work. Diego doesn’t want to. He doesn’t bring home his rolls of film anymore. He has an assistant who does everything. And even when he does have time, he doesn’t go out anymore with his camera around his neck to look for puddles. He stays in the apartment and falls asleep on the couch. The piano lid has been closed for months.

It’s not that we’re sad, exactly. We’re like logs floating placidly downstream without giving a damn. We’ve become more indifferent. We hardly see anyone anymore. We come up with excuses. We like to be alone. We love each other more than ever after that strange vacation. It’s a different love. I read recently in the newspaper about a couple who jumped off a highway overpass. The owner of one of those vans that sell sandwiches was the last to see them. They were calm, even happy. They ate roast pork sandwiches and drank a beer. There were clouds piling up behind the hills. The van owner said it looked like it would rain in the afternoon. The two of them glanced up at the sky and smiled. That rain would never get them. Diego and I sit in the wine bar in complete harmony, as if we had nothing left to lose, nothing to ask for. As if we were about to stand up and throw ourselves off an overpass.

Maybe this is love at its peak. Elation, like what a mountain climber feels when he’s made it to the top and then doesn’t know how to go anywhere else because the next place to go is the sky. We look out the window at the rarefied landscape, the world we left behind to begin our climb, the world that now seems so far away. We’ve managed to reach the peak, and we’re alone.

Diego’s hand is on the table. His wrist is white.

He’s seen the herd of refugees, lines of human beings along the dirt roads, the desperate old man in front of a stable full of dead animals, the woman with a single earring in a lone ear, the forty blind children from Vukovar who don’t see the war but feel it with their egg-white eyes. Maybe he’d like to be there, among those people, with his camera and his old hiking boots.

We set our feet to the asphalt, brushing against the walls as we go. The wine has descended to our legs and to our swaying, clasped hands. It’s easier now to return to the collection of rooms and possessions that have spent the day on their own and bear the stench of silence.

 

We turn on the television. We wait for the late-night news, which gives more time to each story. They wait for children to be safe in bed before they show the bluish useless corpses and the men pressing triggers and loading mortars and destroying the work of other men. What kind of thrill can it bring to cause things that it took centuries to build to collapse in moments, to disperse all traces of human goodwill? That’s war, the reduction of everything to the same nothing, a public toilet and a convent in the same heap of rubble, a dead man next to a dead cat.

Every so often the reporter falls silent, the cameraman keeps filming and we hear the voice of war. It’s a recognizable sound, like the clinking of dishes in the sink, a silence broken here and there, a fabric cut by an agitated tailor. The footsteps of someone running away. Deaf rocks sinking into the mud. A burst of gunshot, not even all that bad, like a necklace breaking. Then the hard report of a mortar. The camera shakes. A splash dirties the lens, then the sound of voices talking, like kids in front of a school. A head sticks up out of a burnt car, small and lively like a chick that’s just broken through its shell.

In the meantime we move about the apartment, do our things. I put on face cream. Diego opens the windows and looks out at the street, the orderly nighttime traffic, the opalescent trails of red and white lights.

 

It’s easier to get through at night. We dial the area code and then the number and wait through the emptiness, through the leap that goes from nation to nation across kilometers of earth and sea, but our call doesn’t go through. When the call is dropped it’s as if an elastic has broken and bounced back on us. We try again and again until finally we hear a faint, distant ringing sound at the other end. We envision it as a fuse running through the cables as they cut across forests and plains full of poplars and fields of sunflowers and then glide alongside rivers that hurtle over the rocks of mountains named Zelengora, Visočica, Bjelašnica. Finally, the fuse crosses the city of Sarajevo and reaches the pinkish building where the gray, government-issue telephone sits in its place on the sideboard with inlaid mirror glass, beneath the portrait of Tito.

When Gojko answers, his voice sounds so close it’s as if he were in the phone booth on the street below our bathroom window. He yells to his mother to turn down the TV. It’s Diego who speaks with him, holding the receiver. I stand beside him, my head glued to his. Diego wants to know how they are, if there’s anything they need. Gojko says he wouldn’t mind a case of Brunello di Montalcino.

“I’m not kidding. Do you need something? I’ll send it. I’ll bring it.”

“Don’t worry.”

“How’s your mother? How’s Sebina? Maybe it would be best at least for her to leave.”

“The war hasn’t reached us.”

“Will it?”

Gojko says it won’t. No one will touch Sarajevo.

 

I grab a piece of Parmesan and a pear and bring them with me on a plate to Diego. That’s how we eat now, wherever we are when one of us gets hungry, a mouthful for me, a mouthful for him. I put the food in his mouth.

There’s too much stuff in this apartment. We should throw most of it away and keep only the couch or maybe just the piano and then sit leaning against the wall like we used to do a few years ago, when we were young.

Diego’s naked. He’s taking pictures of the television. At night he shoots the blue of the television screen, the war we see in the box. That’s how he takes pictures of the dead of Vukovar, their waxen mouths lacerated by their last breaths.

The apartment is bright around him, our knickknacks and light-colored curtains and car keys, a normalcy drenched in butter and unhappiness. Diego shoots, crouched on the ground. He’s using his wide-angle lens. He shoots diagonally and captures the things in the margins. Afterward he’ll print long oblique blue photographs like cinemascope images of the television floating in that varnished nocturnal space, black stuff all around and only the blue light, the blue that illuminates death.

“Come on. Come to bed.” His ass is skinny, like a dog’s.

We make love. His body is a cloak of skin and bones.

He sweats, collapses beside me, coughs a dark short cough.

He smiles at me, his childlike face creasing into bunches of wrinkles.

He goes back to watch television. A car commercial. Then a girl who’s been hung. She’s wearing a red sweater. Her legs dangle open. She’s thickset like the cows in her stable.

 

It happens at the hairstylist’s, in that hot bubble of hair dryers and the good smells of shampoos and dye. I like going there, like resting my head on the sink coming up out of the wood floor. The girl rubs away the city grime and the dirt of my thoughts and for a moment it seems like maybe everything will go down that drain behind my back. I lift my head. They wrap my wet hair in a little black towel and I walk toward the mirrors in this big salon that’s like a New York loft in the center of Rome. Here there are no down-market ads for conditioner and hairstyles, just big grayish paintings, fleeting sea scenes that speak to a better future when normal people will have perished and only the stylists will be left.

I wait for Vanni, the man in charge of this refuge for hair damaged by smog and other little afflictions. It’s lunchtime. There’s a bit of a crowd, rich hens under the helmets, lawyers and accountants and monumental whores waiting for some politician. Parliament is just around the corner. A boy dressed in black presents me with a pile of magazines. “Would you like something to read?”

I have a book with me, but I don’t feel like concentrating. I feel like floating in this limbo, this glamorous aquarium. I leaf through ads for clothes and lipstick, an article on hymen reconstruction, bra ads, a story about a trip through London flea markets, letters from women who have been disappointed by men. I stop. There’s a photograph of a woman with a baby in her arms. The headline says, in red, “The Stork Comes from Afar.”

I read the interview with this Frenchwoman who became sterile after being treated for cancer. Her sister donated an egg that was fertilized in vitro and then implanted in the uterus of a third woman, a Hungarian girl—the stork in the headline. The technical name for this is surrogate motherhood .

Vanni joins me and plants a hello kiss on my cheek. He’s chewing gum. He’s gay, stocky but athletic. He walks barefoot over the carpet of hair like a yacht owner on his boat. He raises strands of my hair and looks at himself in the mirror as he looks at me. He holds his breath and starts cutting. He touches my hair like an artist with his medium. He rubs my head with his expert hand and the cut materializes.

“Do you like it?”

“I like it.”

He glances at the magazine, grabs an ashtray and stands beside me smoking and chewing gum. We talk about the article. He says, “Even the Madonna, when you think about it, loaned her uterus to God.”

 

It’s raining. I watch a drop that’s bigger than the rest as it slides down the window. A long, watery laceration cuts the night in two. The sound of my breathing is like the rhythm of the earth; that drop is a prehistoric tear that divides our world from theirs.

 

This morning Dad brought mandarin oranges. Before he comes to our house he wanders through the market below, taking in the scent of things. It’s the good part of the city , he says, the last place where human beings still mingle. Everywhere else is solitude. He has a dog now, a sort of Italian pointer with ragged hair, a good excuse to go out for a walk. Dad sets the brown paper bag on the table and the fresh smell wafts through the house. Vitamins , he says.

The three of us sit in the kitchen. We peel mandarins. Diego eats the peels, too. He likes them.

Our suitcases lie open on the floor. Diego made a perilous climb up the ladder and pulled his backpack out of the storage cabinet because he’d rather take it than some other bag. He tossed it down to the floor. When he picked it up he sniffed it and recognized the smell of voyages and nights spent in airports, of dreams and wounds.

It’s my old skin , he said.

Dad’s dog prowls around it and sniffs it, too.

“Your dog’s not going to pee on our luggage, is he, Dad?”

“Come here, Bread. Sit.”

“What kind of name is Bread?”

“I was eating a sandwich on the side of the road. I tossed him a piece of bread. That was it. He wouldn’t leave my side.” Dad pats the dog, who moves closer to him and stretches his neck out in a single smooth motion. The mandarins are finished. Dad looks at our suitcases. He hasn’t taken his eyes off them since he got here. “What will the weather be like there? Rainy?”

As he speaks he’s taking the full garbage bag from our garbage can.

“Come on, Dad, you don’t have to bring out our garbage!”

“I don’t mind.”

“Come on!”

He’s stronger than me, more stubborn. He holds the garbage bag with rage. “For Christ’s sake! Let me do something!”

 

He insists on taking us to the airport the next morning. It would be quicker and easier to go by taxi. Instead we’ve got this man, my father, who wakes at dawn and waits for us in his car, too early, like an overzealous chauffeur. Over the intercom he says, “I’m here. Take your time.”

He likes the dawn. He’s so happy it’s as if he were off on a fishing trip. He’s shaved and even put on a tie, like a real chauffeur. He smells of aftershave and of the coffee he got at the café.

I sit behind the familiar gray nape of his neck just like when he used to bring me to school. It bothered me that I wasn’t good at math. Copy someone else. Sit near someone who will let you copy. I’d blush at this advice, which seemed beneath my dignity. You don’t understand, Dad! But the point was, he understood everything. Learn what you enjoy learning, Gemma. Leave the rest to the others. Don’t worry about it so much.

He concentrates as he drives, paying attention to everything, and it’s as if he wanted to send us a message to be careful. There’s never a moment’s hesitation. He knows exactly where to go, which ramp to take in order to leave us in front of the right entrance. It’s as if he’d done a test run. He opens the trunk and runs inside to get a luggage cart. He doesn’t draw out our farewell. He doesn’t want to be a burden. This morning he wants to be a professional, the kind who brings his passengers to their destination and then heads off to other engagements. He doesn’t have anything else to do but he pretends he does. He climbs back into the car and nods, his jaw tense in the mirror. He says just one word: Call .

Maybe he’ll stop in Fiumicino to take a walk on the beach while he waits for lunchtime. He likes fried hake. I imagine him devouring a plateful. He’d get some wine, too, a chilled bottle, and drink it, bringing the color to his cheeks. He’d indulge all by himself. I know him. All his life he’s tried to set a good example for me, though I’ve always been a bit obtuse. I’ll only really understand what a privilege it is to have a father like him when he’s gone, like flies and wind, like everything, always.

There are flies on the bread basket, one of those plastic baskets you get in restaurants at the beach. My father eats and drinks and enjoys the salt and the blue sea view. From where he’s sitting he can see the planes take off and circle around before they find their route.

We’re on one of those planes. He lifts his chin to accompany us with his eyes. Just a few minutes ago we were near him and normal-sized with our bodies and our smells, and now we’re destinies up in the sky. My father watches the distance between nothing and everything, between that fart of white smoke in the middle of the clouds and his love down here, clutched in his aging heart.

“What are you thinking?” Diego asks as the wing of the plane follows the traces of the sun reflected in the window.

“Oh, nothing.”

Daddy’s on the wing.

There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there, Gemma, honey?

What, Dad?

Don’t tell me. It doesn’t matter.