This is not good: I’m in the gym, my Zen temple, where everything is dedication and childhood and lightness and harmony and movement and space and time in perfect balance, and the girls are actually practicing on the beam, both physical location and symbol of balance, and nevertheless I am as unfocused as a—Ooops! Claudia has dismounted with a somersault, but she’s too close to the beam and she grazed it with her head. Gaia, the instructor, pointed it out to her, but very calmly, shaking her head without the least concern—“Farther away!”—as if it had been some ordinary error and Claudia hadn’t risked splitting her head open. But maybe it’s because in reality she hadn’t risked splitting it at all; maybe she was a couple of feet away from the beam; maybe it’s me who, like I was saying, is unable to empty my mind and drive away my thoughts as I usually do. One in particular: I’m not doing enough for Claudia. I’m not doing anything, I feel like saying. Carlo did more in one night than I have in all these weeks. He made her dream, and I don’t make her dream. I’m jealous, to tell the truth. The thought of the two of them on top of a golden cloud at the Chinese restaurant last night demoralizes me: she asking him questions about fashion shows, collections, Hollywood, famous actresses, and he answering with his reassuring calm, already treating her like the girl she will become in a few years and giving her a glimpse into the world that fills her with an emotion she will disclose with the simple sound of the magic word—uncle; the thought demoralizes me. I’m mortified by the closeness between the two of them, who never see each other, and precisely because they never see each other, Carlo ends up becoming, in her eyes, an invaluable asset, while the truth, banal like every truth, is that Carlo thinks of her only on those rare occasions when he sees her, when he sets about playing the part of the magnificent one, uncle as myth, uncle as husband, uncle as the person you can tell everything to, the adult Alpha, a grown-up on the outside and a boy on the inside—and for the rest of the time he doesn’t think about her at all; he stops thinking about her as soon as she shows the first signs of falling asleep, and he immediately goes back to devoting himself to himself—the only true great love of his life—and to his grief, to his drugs. I’m jealous of him, dammit. It pisses me off that day after day, for years, I’ll do all the work, I’ll follow her progress at school, in sports, I’ll accompany her everywhere to comfort her and make her feel as little as possible the emptiness of no longer having a mother, and then her future is something she’ll go looking for to him. The joy, the emotion of feeling grown up, confiding a secret to someone, the hope of doing what most excites her in life, she’s going to go to him looking for it. Not to her father: to her uncle.
He gave her a cell phone, the dog. That’s what was in the package for her he left me this morning, when he came to say good-bye before leaving: a cell phone. He didn’t ask me whether I was okay with it, he simply took for granted that I was—but it just so happens that I am not okay with it and you shouldn’t give cell phones to ten-year-old girls without first asking their parents’ permission. A rich person’s cell phone, with a video camera: just like his is what Claudia said when she opened the package (excited, yes, but not surprised, because evidently they had talked about it at dinner last night, come to an agreement), this way they can see each other even when they’re far apart; just like Enoch’s, I’m saying; and it’s clearly not irrelevant that first I saw Enoch get rid of his in such an exemplary fashion and I kept an eye on the trash bin where he had placed it until, just as he had prophesized, not even a quarter of an hour later, another woman passed by, and this one took it and slipped it into her purse, convinced that today was her lucky day—a woman, that’s what struck me, not a little girl: an ordinary middle-aged woman, neither pretty nor ugly, the perfect representation of all the women and all the men of this city on intimate terms with an object deposited there to represent all the evils of the world; it is clearly not irrelevant, I was saying, that first I witnessed this disappearing act and immediately afterward I saw practically the same cell phone reappear in my daughter’s hands. For the one person who freed himself of it before my eyes there were two people, one of whom was my daughter, who before my eyes had yielded to it and I could do nothing to stop them. So there was the problem: I cannot electrify my daughter like Carlo can by talking to her about fashion and the jet set, and he doesn’t try to buy me off with the latest-model cell phone, but I can’t even protect her from the power these types of things have over her. Which is why I say I do nothing. I’m neither fish nor fowl. What I do for Claudia could be done just fine by a nanny or by a particularly scrupulous grandfather; what Carlo does, on the other hand, those three or four times a year he remembers he has a niece, can be done only by him, the uncle. And I’m jealous, because seeing as I can’t save her from fashion, from glamour, and from cell phones, all the better that I be the one, not him, to make her dream with these things. But the idea of buying her a videophone never even crossed my mind, while Carlo woke up with an opium hangover and with all the naturalness in the world, before getting on a plane that for a few months would make him disappear like a legend—London, Berlin, New York—and he thought about it and he did it. Yes, I’m jealous of him, and I’m ashamed, and I don’t know what the remedy is, because when you’re jealous of your own brother the cause is always the same, obviously, and I’ve run out of time to deal with it, seeing as our mother is dead…
—Claudia has really improved.
Benedetta’s mother. Barbara-or-Beatrice. I didn’t see her at school this morning or at the end of the day, and at the beginning of gymnastics class she showed up just in time to deliver the girl to the instructor, dashing off immediately afterward. I had hoped to escape her, but here she was anyway, sitting next to me…
—Yes, I have the same impression.
—Benedetta’s struggling, though. I don’t think she’s cut out for it.
There Benedetta is, in the group of the least talented girls, lining up for the vault. It’s her turn: she does her run-up, pounds her feet down on the springboard, and for better or for worse her vault takes her home, though she falls back on her ass on the mat. The instructor—Giusy is her name, I think, even more acid than Claudia’s instructor—immediately shakes her head.
—That butt,—she crows,—do you want to keep it straight or not?
With her pelvis she makes a vulgar, derisive movement, making the error macroscopic. Benedetta nods and keeps listening, in case Giusy intends to humiliate her a little more; but Giusy limits herself to sending her back to her place with a nod of the head.
—Did you end up going to that meeting in Gorgonzola last night?—Barbara-or-Beatrice asks me.
—No, I wasn’t able to.
—What a shame. If it was because of Claudia, you could have left her with me, like I told you.
—No, it’s that my brother came by to see us, and then…
—Your brother, the one that runs Barrie?
—Yes.
—Well, the next time you see him tell him he’s my idol.
She gets up and with what looks like a can-can step shoves her ass in my face—a solid, sinewy ass, solid and sinewy the way she is all over, for that matter—so I can read the magic logo printed on the back pocket of her jeans: BARRIE.
—See?
And if I were to squeeze that ass right now? With both hands? Who could blame me?
—I see.
She sits back down on the bleachers, satisfied, and shrugs her shoulders.
—Lorenzo teases me, but I ignore him.
Lorenzo is her husband: a little tyrant with an air about him that is tremendously smart-alecky, vain, effeminate, loaded with arrogance and money, who teaches God knows what at the LUISS Guido Carli University and is a consultant to God knows what cosmetics multinational. Last year he was mentioned in Class in an article on Italy’s most important business consultants, and to celebrate it he hosted a dinner to which Lara and I were invited. The invitees included the journalist who had written the article.
—So now you’re a member of the MTV generation, he says, but he’s way off, because I never watch TV. I really like your brother’s clothes, I’m enthusiastic about them, and if Jennifer Lopez wears them, too, there’s nothing I can do about it. Tell him: I’m ready to get a divorce for him.
She’s obviously joking; she laughs, of course, showing off the sharp white teeth you’d never want to be bitten by; but in the meantime she’s said the word, and it’s the first thing that comes to mind when you meet her husband. And then, now that I see her better, dressed—or rather, undressed—like a fifteen-year-old, with her jeans and more by my brother, a low waist with the elastic of her underwear and more peeking out past the belt, skin-tight and faded and torn with the letters LLEVANTA on the thigh and more, but also with a teeny-tiny sleeveless T that comes halfway down her stomach—this is Barrie, too? No, she would have told me, she would have shoved her tits in my face, too—two dozen black rubber bangles on her wrists that actually look like washers for a drain, and purple Converse sneakers on her feet—in other words, if I were her husband I might have a few sarcastic comments to make as well.
—The next time he comes to see us I’ll invite you to dinner, that way you can tell him yourself.
I’m not her husband, and I couldn’t care less how she dresses.
—Really? Do you mean it?
After all, she’s hardly the only woman her age to dress this way, especially in summer—or in this inexplicable return of summer in the midst of fall like the one we’re living now; indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that all the women her age are doing more or less the same thing, even thirty-year-olds like Marta and twenty-five-year-olds like Yolanda, if Barbara-or-Beatrice were an isolated case and the target consumer of Barrie were only girls that watch MTV, no way in hell could Carlo get people to spend €120 or €180 for those jeans and sell as many pairs as he does.
—Of course I mean it.
Her cell phone rings and a rumba starts: she rummages for it amid the chaos of her Freitag bag made from recycled tarpaulins (I know because Annalisa, my secretary, has the same one), she finds it, looks at the display to see who’s calling, makes an apologetic grimace, answers, stands up, goes off to the side to speak, looks for a corner in which the reception will be better…But Lara wasn’t like that. Lara wasn’t always on the phone, and she would never have taken Enoch’s cell if she’d seen it on top of a trash bin. Lara dressed soberly, and she didn’t buy into Carlo—in fact, there was always something off between them: they were wary of each other, uncomfortable around each other, not close. It was pretty easy for me to be in the middle because I was never ignored, in any circumstance. But Claudia adores him, her uncle, worships him independently of me, and this is harder to accept. My brother, her uncle. The secret she told me a few days after her mother’s death: “Do you know what upset me most in my life? It was when I discovered that my grandmother was also your mother…”
I have to stop thinking, that’s the point. Here I have to look and leave it at that. I have to breathe, relax, empty myself, and pay attention to my daughter, who is practicing on the balance beam. Period. Here she is, practicing her dismount again. She’s motionless, as taut as a slingshot. Her feet at a slight diagonal try to exploit every possible inch of the narrow beam. Her arms pointed upward. Her hands that seem to be hanging from her wrists. Her arched, flexible back, charged with potential energy ready to be unleashed. She’s trying to focus. She has to do something difficult, something few girls in the world are able to do, and she has to do it perfectly, otherwise she’ll be scolded. She’s waiting for the right moment to jump, the split second in which she’ll be in control of all her strength and ability. She concentrates, waits. But she knows that she can wait only a few seconds—four, five, no more—after which she’ll have to jump regardless. I’m up here, and I can’t help her. Or can I? Of course I can, my little sweetheart. I can help you if you hear me. Can you hear me? Do you remember the poster that was in your first-grade classroom? It was about a little boy who is trying to lift a big block in front of his mother. He tries and tries, doggedly, with all his might, but he can’t. So he tells his mother, “Mamma, I can’t,” and his mother tells him, “Use every ounce of energy in your body, and you’ll see that you can.” The little boy tells her he did, he used every last ounce of energy, and his mother answers, “No, honey, you still haven’t given it your all. You still haven’t asked me to help you.” Think of that poster, sweetie, and before you dismount, look at me. For just a moment, without losing your focus. Look at me as if I were part of your routine, and take my energy, too. If I survive in you at the moment in which nothing exists except your body and the movements it has to make, then I can help you, you’ll see. And then your mother will survive together with me, and she can help you, too. Come on, sweetie, look up. Let’s play the romantic game you are never supposed to play in real life (do you remember the time in nursery school when they asked you to define your fathers with an adjective, and all your little friends said, “big,” “good,” “handsome,” “important,” and you surprised the teachers by saying “romantic”? You didn’t even know what it meant. You thought it had something to do with Rome, the city that I was always talking about, where I was born and where I took you for Christmas every year. But what you said about me was that I was “romantic,” and from that day on, the teachers started to look at me differently…). Let’s play the game that Newland plays with Ellen in The Age of Innocence when he sees her from behind, leaning against the rail, underneath the pagoda at the end of the wooden pier, lost in contemplation of Newport Bay at sunset, and a catboat glides slowly in front of her, and Newland prays that Ellen will feel his presence behind her and turn, but Ellen does not turn, and so he says to himself, “If she doesn’t turn before that sailboat crosses the Lime Rock light I’ll go back,” and the sailboat crosses the Lime Rock light and Ellen does not turn and Newland goes back…Let us play this game, too, my sweetheart, let us risk everything right now. If you don’t look up before jumping, you won’t make it. If you don’t look up before jumping, I will always be jealous of your uncle. If you don’t look up before jumping, then it really will be true that I am doing nothing for you. Come on, look up. Look up. Look up…
Ah, she looked at me: a perfect look, if I do say so myself: all eyeball, without the least movement of her head, quick as a flash, intense, and romantic, exactly, which no one else was able to intercept. The pure look that a child gives a parent, still untainted by the creases caused by guilt and incomprehension that sooner or later will appear to damage that look when, for the first time, for some bullshit reason, I will have hurt you or you will have hurt me. But also the unforgettable look that a woman gives a man, fraught with erotic tension, which you will repeat in exactly the same way on the day you lose your virginity under a plaid blanket in the freezing cold of an empty, unknown country house, when, all collected in your own body like today, you will lift your eyes in the same way toward the eyes of the trembling boy who will be entering you, and if you find them closed you will know you were not wrong, and you, too, will close your eyes. But more than anything else a very brave look, because at that point, if you had not found my gaze, if your gaze had come up empty because I was, let us imagine, back there talking on my cell phone like your best friend’s mother, or even sitting down here, yes, but intent on chatting with her rather than looking at you, then you would have lost the energy rather than found it. But instead you found it because you trusted me, and there you go, exploding with a power that doesn’t seem to belong to you—so slender and tiny—and you jump upward and forward like a grasshopper—clearing the end of the balance beam much more than before. Your front flip is huge, abundant, outlined in all of its roundness by the paintbrush of your ponytail, and the landing is perfect, you nailed it to the mat, without wobbles, hops, or hesitations. You did it. You’re on your feet, amazed, and you look at me again. Brava, sweetie, you did it. It came out perfect, and even our game came out perfect, and so will our life. It will be a successful life. Gemma, your older schoolmate, your ideal girl and gymnast, gives you a hug, shares your happiness, even if at first she felt something break inside, the first shadow of a doubt that will start to accompany her from now on, the doubt that in the future her supremacy in the gym will no longer be uncontested, that one day you might surpass her…
Even Gaia, the instructor, seems happy this time. You look at her like a puppy dog, waiting for a well-earned compliment.
“Very good,” she says, “but don’t look at your father before jumping. Look at him after.”