3

NOW I KNOW that events can have different shades of meaning; what we see with our limited vision is almost always partial. Maybe you thought her memory would upset me, or maybe your grief was still too strong – barely ten years had passed – for you to be able to bear a photograph of her in the house. Maybe you preferred to keep her gaze and her face closed up in the depths of your heart. It was there that you’d raised an altar to her; it was there, in the darkness and silence, that you commemorated the awful tragedy of losing her.

In those days, however, with the Manichean rage of adolescence, I saw only a part of the reality: the cancellation. You’d lost a daughter, and you didn’t want to remember her; what surer sign of a perverted heart could there be? And that daughter, moreover, was my mother, prematurely dead after a chiaroscuro life.

You’d told me practically nothing about her. Of course, I could have asked questions, and after a bit of awkwardness, you would surely have talked to me about her, and as you relived those moments, the ice around your heart would have melted, I would have given a name to my memories, and you would have been liberated from the burden of some of your own; and in the end we would have hugged each other and stayed like that a long time, our faces damp with tears, while the sun went down behind us and the things around us slipped into shadow.

I could have, but I didn’t. It was a time of conflict, and so conflicts were what we had, in spades: wall against wall, steel against steel, marble, diamond. Whoever had the harder head and the fiercer heart would ultimately be the one to survive. In my obsession with imputing guilt, I was convinced that you’d acted like one of those animals who sometimes steal others’ offspring and raise them as their own. You wanted to stay young, or maybe you envied your daughter, and therefore you’d taken away her daughter, her only joy. In short, I felt that your will had somehow meddled with my mother’s life, with her life and with her death, because even for that – it seemed clear to me – you must have borne some secret responsibility.

Occasionally I think about how wonderful it would be if at a certain point in our childhood someone would take us aside, wave a long wand, and show us, as though on a wall map, the outline of the days to come in our lives. We’d sit there on stools, our heads tilted back, and listen to an older gentleman (I picture him with a white beard and a khaki suit; a geographer or a naturalist or something like that) explaining the surest route to the heart of that mysterious territory.

Why doesn’t anyone ever give us any hints about when we should pay attention? The ice is thinner here and thicker there, go straight ahead, make a detour, back up, stop, avoid. Why must we always haul along behind us the weight of unmade gestures and unspoken sentences? That kiss I didn’t give, that solitude I failed to assuage. Why do we live, from the moment of our birth, swaddled in this incredible obtuseness? Everything seems eternal to us, and our will reigns obstinately over that small, confused statelet called ‘me’, to whom we do homage as to a great sovereign. If we’d only open our eyes for a single second, we’d see that the ruler in question is actually a princeling out of an operetta, fickle, affected, incapable of dominating others or himself, and unable to see the world beyond his own boundaries, which, moreover, are but the mutable, narrow wings of a theatre stage.

How many months had passed since my return?

Three, maybe four. During those months, months of guerrilla warfare, I didn’t realise what was going on; I didn’t notice that sometimes your step was uncertain or that your eyes would suddenly look lost for a few moments.

I got the first clue one morning when the bora was blowing hard. I’d gone out to buy bread and milk before the ground froze, and when I came back, you welcomed me with an astonished smile, clapping your hands: ‘I’ve got some news for you; we have aliens in the kitchen!’

‘What are you talking about?’

I didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry.

‘Don’t you believe me? Come see for yourself. I’m not joking.’

We inspected the kitchen from top to bottom. You opened the drawers, the oven, and the refrigerator with steadily mounting anxiety. ‘But they were here a second ago,’ you kept saying. ‘I tell you they were here. Now you’re going to think I was trying to fool you.’

I stared at you in perplexity. ‘Is this some sort of game?’

You seemed insulted. ‘There were seven or eight of them,’ you said. ‘As soon as I lit the stove, they appeared among the hobs. When I turned off the gas, they moved into the sink.’

‘And what were they doing?’

‘Dancing. I didn’t hear any music, but I’m sure they were dancing.’

‘Maybe they escaped through the pipes.’

‘The pipes? Yes, maybe. Maybe they come and go through the taps.’

From that day on, extraterrestrials began to live in the house along with the two of us. I explained, in vain, that aliens are launched from UFOs, that they can be seen only by NASA scientists or by people who have lifted too many glasses, and that it wasn’t really possible for them to be dancing in someone’s kitchen; had they made a landing in the yard, I said, all the neighbours would have noticed it, and the trees would have caught fire.

You listened to me calmly, but I could tell from the look in your eyes that you hadn’t given up.

One day, I said, ‘Rather than aliens, they seem to me to be dybbuks.’ You shrugged your shoulders impatiently at this suggestion, as if to say, ‘Call them whatever you like.’

According to your description, they were bright green – the colour of fresh peas – and they had the consistency of peapods as well; their arms and legs, however, were like the limbs of a gecko standing upright. Their tail was short and hairless, and instead of a nose and a mouth, they had a big trumpet, which they used for speaking, eating, and breathing. They appeared and disappeared at the most unexpected moments; they came down the chimney, swam in the bathtub, and waved their sticky little hands at us through the glass window of the washing machine. Sometimes you saw them flying about or scooting up the curtains like little marsupials, and soon they no longer limited themselves to dancing. ‘They’re laughing at me!’ you said angrily, charging about with your hair undone.

You walked constantly, frenetically, all through the house, back and forth in the yard, without interruption, and even at night, which you’d never done before. You walked up and down the stairs, opened and closed drawers. Sometimes I felt as though I had a dancing mouse in the house, one of those mice with a genetic anomaly that causes it to run around incessantly, click click click, click click click.

Your steps marched through every one of my nights.

A couple of times, I got out of bed, grabbed you by the shoulders – they were thin and frail – and shook you, saying, ‘What are you looking for?’

You stared at me proudly, almost haughtily. ‘Can’t you see? I’m trying to protect myself.’

At dawn one morning, already dressed and walking with a firm step, you headed for town. At eight o’clock, when the grocer came to open his shop, he found you waiting by the door.

Even before he raised the security shutter, you told him, ‘I want something that’ll work against UFOs.’

The grocer tried in vain to soothe you by suggesting an anti-woodworm preparation, which could at least dislodge the creatures, or a liquid drain cleaner strong enough to drive any interlopers out of the plumbing. You slammed your little fist down on the counter, shouted ‘Shame on you!’ and left the shop in a rage.

After that day, when I went to do the shopping in town, people would often come up to me and ask with feigned indifference, ‘So how’s your grandma?’