I hear an ambulance siren, coming closer and closer. It’s here. It’s parked in the living room or under the bed. It’s deafening me. I stick my fingers in my ears, but it’s no use, the noise continues. I wake up in a sweat. The alarm clock bores into my sleep like the drill they used to break up the street down below. I fling a heavy arm out of bed to turn it off. It was only a bad dream. Everything’s all right. Then I remember. Nothing’s all right. Not one single thing. What am I doing here on the sofa?
Mama didn’t get up this morning either.
There’s too much silence now that I’ve turned off the siren and the jackhammer that were hollowing out my head.
Mama’s not getting up anymore.
Now I remember everything.
I sit up to think about my new situation. I look at the living-room furniture; it’s familiar and strange at the same time, like being in a hotel or at someone else’s house. Blue gets his purr motor running.
I have to find some courage.
I don’t have any.
I’m in a daze, sitting on the sofa with my legs and arms open wide, waiting for another pair of arms to pick me up, to pose me like she used to for baby pictures, a naked, confused newborn in the middle of the bed, like the picture of Grandpa when he was young, a chubby little grandfather dressed up in frills, looking nothing like the bony old man I knew.
I tell my feet to shake off this daze, tell my legs to carry me down the hall to see how things are going, tell my head to be a bit more positive. But they’re not listening.
At times like these it’s usually Mama who comes to get me moving.
Now I have to get myself moving. I tell myself I have to get used to it: “You’ve got to get used to it. You’ve got to manage. You can’t be afraid of going down the hall.”
I argue with myself out loud.
“Mama’s never frightened you before; she can’t frighten you now. Can’t you see she can’t even move?”
She is still still.
Extremely still.
Nothing can be done. There’s only one hope—that she’ll be resurrected, like Jesus. After three days. We’ve just begun the second, and who knows if it’s true that Jesus was resurrected. They say he was, but I don’t know if I believe it. Even Grandpa didn’t really believe it was possible to go into and rise back out of graves, and anyway, when he died, he wasn’t resurrected; he just died, and that was that. He wanted a glass of wine on his grave instead of flowers. Mama said he’d been in the war and seen so many dead people that he stopped believing in God and all those religious stories, because in this world there is no religion. Looking at all the people who die for no reason—I’m not just talking about bad people but good ones too—it’s hard to believe that there’s an invisible someone protecting us. I’m not particularly interested in these things, even if now I could really use a God or some such thing to give me a hand. If there was one, this would really be the time to prove it.
He could tell me what to wear to school. It has to be a clean shirt, because Mama would never send me to school with yesterday’s shirt—actually, he could wake up Mama, if he can. I can’t. But God probably has more important things to do.
I have to wash as well. If I was sure Mama was going to be back today, I wouldn’t bother, but since I’m not, I can’t risk them noticing anything strange on account of details, like the ones that betray people in Columbo. Lieutenant Columbo always looks rumpled just so everyone will underestimate him. Obviously, if he was the suspect he’d change his raincoat.
I put on a striped shirt; it’ll do fine. And a green sweater. I wash my armpits but forget the bidet—who cares, it’s not like anyone’s going to be inspecting my underwear.
“If you don’t wash below too, you’ll have moss and lichens growing there, like in the taiga and the tundra.”
Mama always exaggerates.
Blue licks himself to get clean. I’m so jealous. Blue has eighteen whiskers per side and long hairs like whiskers above his eyes. When I don’t have anything else to do, I count them, to see if there happen to be any more, since Blue is growing up too; no longer a kitten, as the flower woman would say, but becoming quite the little cat.
“Okay, Blue, time for din-dins.”
Din-dins is Blue’s favorite word. If you say it to him, he gets all excited and begins to follow you around and won’t stop until you give him something. Blue jumps on the table, slips past the box of cereal, the sugar, and the glass ashtray from Venice that’s a bit chipped on one side, and launches himself at the can of mackerel as if he hasn’t seen food for I don’t know how long. A bit later, in all his enthusiasm, he pushes his bowl under the sideboard and then looks at me in surprise, as if to say: “Help! Where’d my din-dins go?”
Cats do things like that. They’re really intelligent and sometimes stupid. They understand everything, but when it comes to food they know nothing.
Blue rubs himself all soft and silky against my legs. I’d like to have a sleeping-bag body like Blue and snuggle down inside myself and pull up the zipper. I’d also like to have a tail and wag it when I’m cross, make it bristle when I meet assfaces, and hold it straight up when I’m happy and feel like walking with my head high.
Maybe I’d like to be Blue. Who can go back to purring with Mama.
“Did you feed Blue?”
Usually, before going out, Mama asks me: “Did you feed Blue?”
She only asks to bug me, because she knows very well whether I’ve done it or not. If I go back to show her the bowl, she says: “Hurry up.”
If I hurry, she says: “Get a move on.”
Before leaving I check up on Mama but without going into her room. I look at her from far away. I’m in a rush.
I have to run. Whenever I do, the corners of the books in my backpack poke my back. I’ve got to tighten the straps, or else leave the house sooner next time and then walk normally.
It’s freezing cold; when I breathe I can see my breath. If I can see my breath, it means I’m alive, even if I’m dying of cold.
It’s the coldest winter since 1900-something and it’s windy too, which it almost never is. The wind helps with the pollution; it reduces the fine particles, the sneakiest ones, the ones that get in everywhere without anyone seeing them and then make you sick.
Luckily, we don’t live far from school.
We’re 3,700 steps away, more or less, because every time I count them the number is different.
I run into Davide at the entrance—just as well—we’ll come in together.
Inside, along the corridor with all the drawings pinned up, there’s a sign that says NO RUNNING.
I ask Davide if he believes in God, and he replies: “Are you stupid or what?”
And we rush to class.
I realize I’ve asked Davide a pretty odd question, out of the blue and so early in the morning. I’ve got to be careful not to let strange stuff like that slip out.
“Do you see this? It’s a piece of granite that’s become part of my hand. It’s my rock hand. Touch it.”
My deskmate has scabs on his hands because yesterday he popped a wheelie on his skateboard and landed in the gravel. He picks at the clotted blood on his knuckle and gets blood on his exercise book. The blood doesn’t stop. It spreads over the page and Mrs. Squarzetti panics, fearing a hemorrhage.
“Oh my God, a hemorrhage!”
Rock Hand is taken downstairs to have his war wounds tended to. Later Rock Hand will sport a new Band-Aid.
I like Band-Aids a lot. I put them on even when I haven’t hurt myself at all. Sometimes I’ll draw on my skin a little bit to make it look more real. Band-Aids give the impression of an adventurous life, of someone who falls down but doesn’t really hurt himself.
“What’d you do to yourself?”
“It’s nothing, just a little karate chop. I broke seven bricks with a single blow.”
“No way!”
The incident with my deskmate is the most exciting event of the morning.
When Antonella sees blood, her face goes all twisty as if she’s going to pass out. I feel like throwing up because real blood turns my stomach, but I hold out: It’s just the soul of the red Bic pen gushing everywhere because I’ve swallowed the cap again. I think about my heavenly soul that may not even exist. I look at Antonella’s heavenly blue eyes. She gets more beautiful every day and I blush just at the thought that she could be looking at me.
I hold out even though feeling sick makes me think of a memory from nursery school: little spaghetti hoops floating like life preservers in a pool of tomato sauce; a kid who’s honking like an elephant and the next thing he’s up at the blackboard throwing up his cafeteria lunch, and it’s making people laugh but also throw up themselves; the smell of vomit stays in my nose even afterward, even now. I hate pasta with tomato sauce. If there must be sauce, at least let it be on the side, without everything mixed together. With things like that, if you meet with the school psychologist he or she will tell your parents you’ve been traumatized, as if you’ve discovered you’ve only got one parent instead of two, or your mama’s sleeping with someone else’s dad.
“Childhood trauma.”
It’s just smaller, when it comes to pasta with tomato sauce.
In any case I hold out. I don’t want everyone to see what I’ve eaten for breakfast: a bowl of dry cereal that looked exactly like Blue’s cat food. I swallow and it tastes like acid and also like yogurt, even though the yogurt was already gone this morning. I licked the container and tried to reach the bottom with my tongue. I cleaned the tinfoil lid until all I tasted was tinfoil, the kind that shocks your back teeth.
Outside it’s started raining again, and it’s not the good rain anymore, the impressive kind. It’s a useless kind of rain that makes you sleepy and the outlines of things fuzzy, and makes you think it will never stop.
It’s raining like that inside me too.
Usually when I’m bored in class I read under my desk, or draw, or go over Mama’s words in my head, trying to discover their secrets. Nostalgia: tender, burning desire for people, places, and things she’d like to return to. Sciatica: extreme pain in the sciatic nerve that doesn’t let her go skiing. And so on. I invent private exercises, count the holes the woodworms have worm-eaten out of the window frames over the centuries and centuries, amen, so the hours go by faster.
Sometimes I pay attention with one part of my brain, and with the other I daydream. I imagine that past the roof and the chimneys and the TV antenna, there are the sea and the clear sky and ships with pirates. Pirates don’t hunt whales; they hunt the people who hunt whales. The pooping pigeons on the windowsill are albatrosses perched on the ship’s main yard. I don’t tell anyone I can do it because adults don’t think it’s so easy. They think you have to do one thing at a time, that you can’t talk and eat, put on pants and walk, draw and learn, dream and stay awake. If I think about something totally different, I just have to pay attention to where my eyes wander, otherwise it seems like I’m seeing ghosts, like Mama when she says that Dad vanished into thin air and she stares at the painting with the nasty weather.
At home, whenever I can’t stand it anymore, I close myself in the wardrobe that no one ever opens. I sit on top of the drawers in the middle of the clothes that smell like mothballs, herringbone overcoats and the cloth sacks I used to take to nursery school, blue and white checked with my name embroidered on them, still smelling like bread and chocolate. I stay there and think for a bit, with the old overcoats on my face. I might cry if I really have to, and wipe my snot with the sleeve of an old shirt. Then I get over it, and then I don’t want Mama to worry too much.
Mama. Mama. Mama.
The memory of Mama explodes again in my head.
A geyser of fear. I’m so afraid that someone will notice something.
Do you know what the doctor said to the skeleton who showed up for an appointment? I write it on a piece of paper and I pass it to Davide.
He shakes his head.
I write it on another piece of paper. Couldn’t you have come earlier?
Out of the corner of my eye I can see him laugh.
I’m safe.
Everything’s okay.
When we get out it’s pouring.
Needles of freezing rain everywhere. I forgot to bring a hat. To stay out of it I’m forced to pass close to Assface. It’s a chance I have to take because I can’t risk getting sick. I cross my heart and hope to die he doesn’t say it again:
“Orphan-orphan-orphan.” He repeated it like an evil chant.
Not too long ago, on Columbus Day, I’ll never forget it; I was with my friends and Assface said: “Orphan-orphan-orphan.”
And I thought, Now I’m gonna smash that assface of yours.
“Assface in the first degree.”
And before I thought, No, maybe better not, I’d punched his nose, right there in the middle of that big ugly crack. I didn’t know how, but my arm had been faster than my thoughts, a solid hit before I’d even realized it myself, as if my body had decided to seek justice on its own.
Notebooks had gone flying to the ground, shedding pages like trees in autumn, and suddenly I was shedding the old image of myself and speaking openly to Assface, whose eyes goggled like someone who can’t believe his own eyes, his own ears, his own runny nose.
“You’ll pay for this.”
“Sure I will. Let this be a lesson to you, Assface.”
I had muttered it to myself while the others stood by speechless in admiration; suddenly I felt six inches taller.
But now I can’t react at all; I have to be careful not to draw attention to myself. I speed up. Assface pretends not to see me and yet I pass so close to him that I can count one by one his moles, like pistachios in his nasty mortadella face. I speed up and I’m past him. Almost home.
Mama’s still sleeping, buried between the pillows.
Seeing her like that in the big bed, she seems smaller. Still the same expression, it’s just that her face is darker. When I touch her, she seems colder. But it’s cold outside too. I put a coat over her, and two coins fall out of one of the pockets.
If people are happy, they don’t die like this, just by chance.
Maybe they die in an accident, but not in their sleep.
Maybe Mama died of heart problems, because no one could love her enough, not even me. Maybe I wasn’t able to make her stay in my life, to make her live for me, at least. Maybe I’m not worth much at all, not for her, not for anyone.
I take off my shoes with this new idea spinning in my head. I hurl one shoe here, another one there. Blue is scared. He makes his tail big so that it looks like that contraption for getting rid of spiderwebs. One shoe ends up under the sofa. I’ve got all kinds of titicaca in my socks. I have to accept my responsibilities.
What are my responsibilities?
Keep my room clean, check to make sure the cat is okay, change his litter, study, don’t say “fucking shit” all the time, be sure the gas is off if I’ve used the oven. Do what I need to do so there isn’t food between my teeth.
Don’t be an extra bump in the road when the going gets tough.
Understand that grown-ups have grown-up problems.
Adults have no idea how many strategies kids have to come up with to be what they are. Sometimes they tell you to stop acting like a child, other times that it doesn’t matter because you’re just a child…but what a beautiful child! What a little man! I think about the little hanger-men who hold up the clothes in the wardrobe that smells like mothballs. Because I close myself in there I might become a little hanger-man myself, with bony shoulders and a question-mark head. Who knows.
In any case, even adults don’t always know what they’re saying.
“I’m drawing a blank.”
Or:
“Funeral for the deceased.”
Who else would it be for?
I go into my room to look for my slippers, the ones with the moose antlers on them that Mama gave me for Christmas. Blue’s chewed on them, so now one horn is leaking yellow cotton wool, like the stuff they put up your nose when it’s bleeding. Like when I got hit in the face with a soccer ball and they took me to the emergency room. Mama thought it was a concussion and was more upset than I was, but the doctor told her it was nothing.
As I slipper across the room, Blue tries to grab what’s left of the antler. On TV, the chef is still there, surrounded by dressed-up women being all over-the-top—I zap them. In the kitchen, the table and the floor are covered with dry food; I forgot to put the box away and Blue has scattered them everywhere. The sink is full of dirty dishes. On the windowsill there’s a plant Mama calls a succulent, a gift from someone or other, made up of two kinds of spiny cucumbers, one tall and one short. It survives even without water, like us. We’re succulents too, shut up in the apartment. If you touch it, it stings in self-defense.
The apartment like this makes me sick.
It’s not like when you’re alone for a day and you do what you want and what you usually can’t. Now I can do everything and I don’t feel like doing anything. I’m so free my head spins just thinking about it. I’m free and I’m a prisoner at the same time, like hamsters who spin their wheels and stay in the same place. They spin and spin and don’t go anywhere.
If I stop for a moment, the blank notebook comes back into my head and I can’t even imagine. It’s horrible because it’s thanks to daydreams that I’ve always made it through okay. Teachers say I have a vivid imagination.
“Imagination is a great resource in times like these. Perhaps you’re unaware of this because you don’t read newspapers, but at times reality is stranger than fantasy. So it becomes necessary to be even more fantastic in order to make it in life.”
But now I don’t know what to imagine.
I try to imagine that this is happening to someone else, because it’s a bit like that: I’m inside what’s happening but also outside. I want to disappear but at the same time I don’t. I don’t feel like shutting myself up in the wardrobe anymore because now everything is like a closed wardrobe, but also like an open one—there’s no point in hiding inside the apartment anymore. I can whine and wipe my nose on the tablecloth, the napkins, my pajamas, the curtains in the living room. Everything is old. It all smells like an old wardrobe. Wide open and sealed shut at the same time. I can do everything and I don’t want to do anything—I only want to go back to how it was. I bury my nose in the last piece of toilet paper. I make myself a Nutella sandwich. The bottle of milk is empty. I drink tap water, which tastes like chlorine.
During the winter the days are short, but today seems to go on forever and ever.
I don’t even know if I should give up hope or not.
“Hope is the last to die.”
Or the second to last?
Mama seems more and more dead.
I should study the history of hominids, those slouching, hairy creatures in our textbooks, walking in single file until one straightens up and marches ahead like a soldier, forward march.
With a hominid around maybe Mama would feel less lonely.
“Why is it you can’t make up your mind to find a decent man? I say this for your son’s sake as well, because you can’t do it all alone.”
“I’m tired of falling in love, tired of falling out of love, tired of fucking. I don’t even remember how to make love anymore.”
“That’s love! Right now things seem one way to you, but that’s not necessarily the way things are. Look at me, I’ve been falling in and out of love since I was fifteen. Every time, I say never again, may I be struck down if I fall for it again. Then I meet another one and it’s another round, another race. If you find one who knows what he’s about, you’ll see how quickly you’ll change your mind.”
“No, for me it’s different. To fall in love you need to want it, and I just want to sleep.”
Mama lights another cigarette and curls a lock of hair around her finger. Giulia just sits there with her nose in the air, contemplating the smoke as it curls around itself, in search of inspiration or else the right moment to slip away.
Sometimes Giulia invites her out to dinner with friends and Mama invents an excuse, which is usually me.
“Sorry, this evening I really have to stay home with him. You know how he is…”
Other times Mama says she suffers from loneliness:
“Loneliness is a whistling that worms itself into your head. It’s the echo of ships that have already sailed, that you can no longer reach, not even if you swim.”
She told me:
“Once a ship or a train departs, there’s nothing else you can do. You’re left gazing after a gleam of light on the horizon, slowly fading into the fog, the way a memory fades into the dull gray of the present.”
She said:
“That’s how I feel, like I’m on the shore, or in an empty station, having arrived to life too late.”
Mama feels lonely even though she’s never alone, because I’m always here with her; but it must not be enough. In order not to feel so lonely she went to talk to a man with a beard who listened to her once a week in a house full of books that were full of complicated ideas. I flipped through a few of them while I was in the waiting room. I wonder, though, what do you get out of paying someone to listen to you, to care for you?
I care for her for free, but it must not be enough.
It may be that she doesn’t want to confess her darkest thoughts to me directly. Sometimes she writes them down using tiny, tiny letters, then forgets the pieces of paper on the kitchen table; or else she talks about them to somebody in a low voice. She talks slowly and she moves slowly.
She did it the other night too.
At times Mama moves in slow motion.
When she slows down more than usual she decides not to go to work for a few days.
“One of these days they’ll end up firing me.”
I think one of these days came.
So she took a day or two to sleep.
When normal people don’t work they go on vacation.
Last year even Mama took a week for a real vacation, and we went to Venice.
“Do you know that if you go to Venice with a man before you’re married, then you won’t ever marry him? It happened to me once.”
Or more than once.
More than a city, Venice seems like one of those books with three-dimensional objects that pop out of the pages, suddenly spreading out before your eyes. You turn the corner and you feel as if you’re turning a page, as if you’re falling into another fantastic story. Venice is all hand-drawn. The houses are ancient and every detail seems specially designed by an architect in a wizard’s hat. There are no cars and you can walk everywhere. Gondolas slip by on the water, each one steered by a single sailor with a striped shirt like mine.
Mama and I took a ride around like the couples do.
“Don’t you think this city’s magical? Isn’t it incredible that places like this still exist in the world?”
We went to visit the churches and the museums with their paintings that are hundreds of years old, where you have to whisper so you don’t disturb the other people; we also discovered a special place under an arch where everyone sticks their gum. We stopped and played under the portico of a palazzo on the canal: If you walk around the base of one of the columns without falling, you get to make a wish. Almost nobody makes it, but it’s fun to try.
“Don’t say it, don’t tell me the wish. If you say it, then it won’t come true.”
We bought a glass ashtray and sat at a little café table with the glittering sea in front of us and to one side a church with a golden ball on top. We wrote postcards: to Giulia, to Grandma, to Davide and Chubby Broccolo, plus I sent Antonella the one with a gondola. I wrote “Greetings from Venice”—I wanted to write “I love you” but was too embarrassed.
We had some really good gelato. It was like a bar of chocolate dipped in whipped cream. The waiter recommended it to us and Mama said: “Sure, let’s try it. We’re on vacation, and it’s always a good idea to try the local specialty.”
It must be wonderful to live in a place like Venice. I wonder how it would have been if my stork had been rerouted and I’d been born in Venice.
“In winter, though, Venice is depressing.”
So no, then, I think it’s better how it is, for us to be where we are.
Mama says that in winter Venice is like a cold: The world outside is even more muffled and far away, and your head pounds for no reason while your nose runs, like those stray cats with heart-shaped noses that nobody has the heart to clean.
But the thing I remember most about Venice is that it’s either extremely noisy or extremely quiet. You’re either walking in the middle of millions of people who are stepping on your feet and getting stuck in the really narrow streets or on the bridges, everyone’s shouting in different languages and the gondoliers are singing and the boats’ motors are roaring, and there’s always someone hammering somewhere or a radio going or people calling out to each other from one place to another; or else you take a random turn and maybe you find an open space with nobody there, and the only thing you can hear is the water in the canals and the echo of your own footsteps and the calls of seagulls chasing one another. It’s like suddenly being in another world, but all this happens by chance, because you don’t really know where you are, you’re just lost again. It’s a happy silence, though, not like the one now.
I’m listening to the silence when suddenly my periaudio picks up a signal: a shuffle of footsteps behind the door. Waves of blood crash in my head, whipping up a storm. I listen some more: There’s someone moving around. I hear a creak like when Mama gets out of bed and scrapes her feet on the ground in search of her slippers, which is like the flapping of a moth caught inside a lampshade.
It can’t be true. I hope so much that it is true. I hope with all my might that it’s Mama, Mama who’s finally decided to get up and return to us. Like the people who remember their entire past life a moment before they die, in a second I see the rest of my life to come, now that we’re about to go back to living. Like when I heard a friendly, cracking voice booming from the apartment next door and hoped it wasn’t our neighbor but someone much nearer, the nearest kind of neighbor, one who sings in the shower or while shaving, sings love songs or opera for Mama but also for me.
I listen again.
The noises become clearer. I make out two voices, voices of people I don’t know. The neighbor who loved opera moved away two years ago.
I pray to Mama for it to be true, but it’s not true.
The noises aren’t coming from Mama’s room. There’s someone muttering behind the front door.
I don’t even have time to think before I hear someone ringing the doorbell.
Once, twice.
Who could it be at this hour? How did they get into the building? How’d they find me out? I’ve been silent as a mouse the whole time.
I hold my breath as I put my eye to the peephole, as slowly as I can, like a burglar in reverse, one who’s afraid of being discovered living in his own apartment.
I see two decrepit old women, all bundled up against the cold. Blue starts to meow.
“We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses. Is anyone home?”
“No, it’s just a cat. Let’s go.”