7

COULD I CONTINUE to ignore my father the way he’d done me? This was the question I kept asking myself, but I found no reply.

During my teenage years, I’d fantasised a lot about him. I stopped believing your whopper about the Turkish prince (and also in Father Christmas) when I was nine, but I often thought about my father; day after day, I put together my personal mosaic of him. To accomplish this task, I used tesserae of the most extraordinary colours: the fact that he’d never tried to contact me must mean that some obstacle had prevented him from doing so, some impediment so dire that getting in touch with me would threaten his very existence, or maybe even my own.

Why else would a father deliberately choose not to watch his daughter grow up? Increasingly fantastic scenarios succeeded one another in my imagination; their settings extended from the venues of international espionage (only a spy would be unwilling to risk revealing his identity) to the most advanced scientific research laboratories (my father must be a biologist, physicist, or chemist working on projects of extraordinary significance for the future of mankind, and therefore he’s compelled to live some sort of high-security underground existence, far from prying eyes, and to deny himself his daughter’s love).

Children want to be proud of their parents; it’s too bad that parents don’t notice. In the most fortunate cases, a father and mother have an idea of how a child ought to be, and everything they say and do conforms to that idea. In the most unfortunate cases, the parents see nothing outside themselves, and they live their lives without noticing the laser beams constantly pointed at them, their child’s wall-penetrating, distance-overcoming eyes, implacable, parched, hungry, capable of reaching them anywhere on earth, of following them to heaven or hell, ready to risk everything, to lose everything, eyes that have sought but one thing ever since they opened onto the world: an answering look.

Every child is born with a need for wonder; he wants to turn his eyes on something he can admire, to be led to a mountaintop where he can contemplate the splendid view, the changing light, the snow, the reflections on the ice, and the soaring eagle, majestically protecting its young, as human parents ought to do, too.

But instead, the landscape that stretches out before many children, all the way to the horizon, is often nothing but an open-air rubbish dump, where automobile carcasses, broken chairs, boilers, sinks, dead television sets, and plastic bags litter the ground: a single expanse of desolation and disorder. And nevertheless, even in such a situation, a child can manage to find something to admire – a marble, perhaps – and for a fraction of a second, as he holds the little glass sphere, the world contains no more shadows and shines in his hands.

To keep away despair, the child holds on to anything at all – a hint, an inkling – that he hopes may grow and broaden until it transforms the whole scene. There’s not a detective or a scientist who can match the investigative talent of a child bent on finding valid reasons to admire the people who have brought him into the world.

A drunken father (let’s say he’s lying on the floor and you have to step over him on your way to school) isn’t a bad person, not at all; he could have come home in a rage and started kicking you, but instead he chose to go to sleep and leave you in peace. And your mother’s good, too, because after neglecting you for days, she comes home and makes you an omelette; she could have skipped that, she could have shut herself up in her room, especially since she’s not hungry and so what if you are, but no, she takes out some eggs, beats them in a bowl, and maybe even looks you in the eye and asks you if you’ve done your homework, because you’re the most important thing in her life.

For years, I’d enclosed my father in an imaginary bubble that followed me everywhere. The bubble was suspended in mid-air, and there he was inside, surrounded by flower petals, smiling the Buddha’s peaceful smile: sublime, inaccessible. I was convinced that sooner or later, the bubble would burst and he’d finally descend to earth so he could put his arms around me.

The bubble did indeed burst; however, instead of the seraphic, imperturbable Buddha, out stepped Professor Ancona, with his beard, his cigarettes, and his words, reasonable on the surface but underneath as sharp as stilettos.

In those days of complete solitude, I read and reread his only letter to my mother. At first, I thought I might agree with some of what he wrote – about his love of knowledge, for example, or his decision to avoid personal ties in order to give himself over as utterly as possible to self-examination: this is a great mind, I told myself, so of course he has the right to avoid tying himself down, to keep himself free from quotidian concerns. But I was still caught up in the bubble syndrome; I wanted to find in him something that was in me, too.

When I went over the letter again a few days later, it made a very different impression on me. It was as though a chemical reaction had taken place between the lines, and the measured, well-ordered, authoritative words now exuded a greenish, acidic, corrosive substance capable of bringing to light the true nature of the person who’d written them. I could see paternalism, derision, cynicism. My mother was portrayed as a character in some romantic novel, seduced and abandoned at her first encounter. The terms were different, of course, as well as the details, but ‘scratch the surface’ (as he used to say) and the story was always the same: The woman falls in love – and dreams – while the man plays a game and enjoys himself.

I’d fantasised for years about meeting my father for the first time, about our first embrace, but those few pages swept away any tender feeling or admiration from my heart and left behind only anger. I felt humiliated as a woman, as my mother’s daughter (and therefore his, too), the product of degeneration rather than generation, brought into the world by a joke of fate.

Now I knew I’d spit on him the moment I saw him. I’d go looking for him, indeed I would, but not out of affection or curiosity, I’d do it only so I could vent the rage I felt rising inside me, so I could get close enough to him to shout into his ears all the things my mother should have said if she’d only had the nerve.

One thing was certain (and I took solace from it): despite his passion for freedom and his lofty opinion of himself, he’d never become what he’d hoped to be; otherwise, I would have read his name somewhere. He must have remained a small or medium-sized fish, shut up for life in the little protected aquarium provided by the university and a few specialised journals. My hunch was confirmed in a bookstore a few days later. On the title page of a book on epistemology translated from English, I read these words: ‘Afterword by Professor Massimo Ancona’.

It wasn’t hard to track him down. I called up his publishing house and asked for his address. They told me most politely that – for reasons of privacy – they weren’t authorised to give out his address, but that I could write him a letter care of the house and they’d be sure to forward it to him.

So I took pen and paper and wrote to him. I presented myself as a philosophy student, young, shy, and filled with admiration for the fascinating complexity of his work.

Could we meet?

The reply wasn’t long in coming. He didn’t live very far from Trieste. He thanked me, fended off my compliments, and added that there was no use in my making an appointment with him, because he was at home every afternoon except on Sundays. All I had to do was ring his bell downstairs and speak my name – Elena – into the intercom, and he’d buzz me in.

The first name I’d chosen for myself was Elena. For my family name, I used your mother’s maiden name. I didn’t want to run the slightest risk of arousing even a tiny suspicion and having our meeting cancelled.

And so the ‘student’ Elena, on a cold day with the bora blowing, took a bus to Grado to meet her father for the first time. She was on her way like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, like Hop o’ my Thumb’s ogre, like all those fairytale creatures capable of biting and causing pain. But she was also going like a child, in naive anticipation, hoping that the story had taken a different turn with the passage of time, because that imaginary embrace was always there, waiting, the arms spread out inside her like the claws of a giant crab.

What was I feeling in the half-empty bus that carried me toward the seacoast, as I prepared myself for this meeting?

Was I fearful? Was I angry? Angry, for sure, but probably more afraid than anything. I watched a landscape of monotonous desolation roll by outside my little window. Soon after passing the cranes rising from the shipyards in Monfalcone, we began to cross over the estuary of the Isonzo River. Every now and then, the slow flight of a heron traversed the sky. Maybe I was more fearful than anything else because – after giving the matter so much thought and devising so many elaborate strategies of attack – I was no longer sure I’d have the nerve to push the button on the intercom or the strength to climb the stairs or the courage to meet his eyes without betraying my emotions, like Ulysses upon his return to Ithaca, shortly before he massacred the Suitors.

When we reached the stop I wanted, I was the only person who got off the bus. An elderly bicyclist pedalled toward me rather unsteadily from some distance down the deserted street.

Despite the name of the place – Grado Pineta, the pinewood of Grado – there were really very few pines to be seen, most of them pretty bare-looking and imprisoned in a grid of dilapidated blocks of flats with poetically evocative names: The Sirens, Seahorse, Star of the Sea, Nausicaa.

Over the course of the long winter months, the various little gardens had accumulated all sorts of bottles, waste paper, beer cans, and miscellaneous rubbish blown there by the wind.

In the days of the economic boom, this was a fashionable location for a second home; now the entire neighborhood seemed like a galleon set adrift. For some time, the salinity in the seawater had been busy about its work of corroding plaster and wood, particularly door and window frames. Many shutters hung askew; some rolling blinds had collapsed. A crooked sign, riddled with holes, was posted in front of a crumbling cottage: ‘Villa Luisella’. During the winter, apparently, someone had amused himself by firing bullets at the sign. In the yard, which I could see through the gate, a bicycle with only one rim lay on its side.

I couldn’t imagine how Professor Ancona had wound up in a backwater like this. After a few vain attempts, I finally managed to find the right street and the right address: 18 via del Maestrale. Before me, in silhouette, rose a building no less spectral than all the others, distinguished only by a little portico where it looked as though people set up stalls in the summer (I imagined their wares: inflatable dinghies and soccer balls, sun lotion and beach chairs, lots of little buckets and spades); now, however, the shops were empty, and I could look through the dismal security shutters and see the empty counters, the layer of dust on everything, the newspaper pages scattered across the floor.

Massimo Ancona. It was one of the few names on the intercom panel. I couldn’t hesitate any longer; my doubt was growing with each passing second. And out of that doubt, there arose the overwhelming certainty that it would be better – for my life as well as his – if I were to turn on my heel and plunge back into the darkness from which I had come.

‘Elena,’ I said to the intercom.

‘Fifth floor.’

I pushed the glass door open; as I entered the atrium, I spotted an orange and white life preserver hanging on the wall (in case these flats go under?) and printed with the name of the building: ‘The Naiads’. I took the lift; then a door opened, and I found myself face to face with my father.