Anything I have ever invented, ever since I was small, always required a pinch of truth. I needed to see the old photograph of my grandfather and grandmother again, as my memory of it had faded. If I wanted to make a convincing replica of the walking stick I needed to take a look at the real one, and I hoped the weapon was visible in the photo. I started to pester my grandmother, masking my urgency to study the walking stick as a grandson’s affection for his grandfather. She blushed more than usual, hemmed and hawed, and said that I would have to wait. I understood she needed to find just the right moment, and this moment—I intuited—was not only when my father wasn’t home but when she was certain he wouldn’t be back anytime soon.
She didn’t want to be subjected to the sarcastic tone he took with her—which sometimes became downright insulting—when he talked about her distant past as someone’s darling, fiancée, wife. Mother-in-law—he’d say when he was in a good mood—go on, tell us the truth, you don’t even remember what happened, it was so long ago. Were you sleeping? Were you awake? Maybe you were just lying there, and along came this gent, all dressed to the nines, and bam-bam-bam, just like that, two children were born, one that’s beautiful, thank goodness, but the other one ugly and dumb, just like your husband, the mason, may his soul rest in peace. But what can you do? Kids take after their parents, and your son turned out to be such a stingy bastard that he has never, not once, given me a penny to help out with everything you cost me, so if you’re living here, like some fancy lady, it’s all thanks to me and my generosity as a great artist, and that’s just the way things are. Oh stop, stop your crying now, mother-in-law, don’t get angry, you know I’m just teasing, you know I respect you.
More or less that’s what he said, but my grandmother didn’t like that kind of joking around, didn’t like it at all; it offended her deeply and made her angry. She bit her lip, fought back the tears, and hid her feelings and possessions in a dark wooden box under her bed so he couldn’t see them or speak about them any more than he already did.
Since I often hid from my father, too, I understood perfectly. Her box of secrets was not that different from my secretive games and fantasies, which I interrupted or banished from my thoughts entirely when he came home like some black-feathered angel from the land of the dead. So, I pestered her to show me the photo when my father wasn’t around and when I was certain he’d be gone for a few hours. I insisted so much that she finally gave in. She got down on her knees, pulled the box out from the dark recesses under her bed, rustled around in it, found the photo, pushed the box back into the shadows, and got to her feet with a groan.
I need to underscore what a critical moment in my childhood this was, and yet it does not possess a specific space, mood, or light, it is not imbued with the warmth or sound of my grandmother’s breathing. In my memory I see only the photo: a rectangular piece of brownish cardboard, the image marked with several white cracks. Nothing else, not even me. I can only presume that my gaze went directly to my grandfather, the man who would one day fall and shatter all his bones; he stood behind a chair, one elbow resting on it, leaning slightly forward, his shiny dark hair was slicked back, revealing not an excessively wide forehead but not a small one either, heavy and dusky eyebrows, kind eyes, his white shirt contrasting sharply with his dark suit, a short striped tie held in place with a clip made from some precious metal, a breast pocket handkerchief, and finally, there it was, the awe-inspiring walking stick.
He really had it with him, a black wooden walking stick with a handle that could’ve been silver. But he wasn’t leaning on it, which would’ve been the natural thing to do. No, he was holding the cane with two hands in front of his chest on a slight diagonal. He’s holding it like that, I thought to myself, so that if someone like my father says something offensive, he’ll tighten his grip on the sheathe with his left hand and extract the sword with his right. I could already see my grandfather coming back from the dead to stab his son-in-law for being so disrespectful to the woman he had married. It was his duty. The whole world, every single existence, orbited around this cruel battle. In one way or another, we men were forced to live in a constant state of alert, we had to be ready to fight or fight back, to be wronged so that we could get revenge, or to instigate wrongs ourselves and thereby crush all potential avengers. Yes, that was our destiny, and nothing could silence us, not even death. On the contrary. With both elegance and rage, my young grandfather leapt off the cardboard, took out the sword, brandished it over his head, and then pointed it at me, playfully inviting me to a duel.
“He was good looking, wasn’t he?” my grandmother asked me softly, her voice cracking with emotion.
“Yes.”
“What about me?”
Only then, and because of her question, did I realize that she was there, too. I glanced casually back at the photo. There she was, sitting in the chair—or maybe it was the throne of a princess—on which the young man with the walking stick leaned. She was the tremendous surprise. She was draped in jewels, and now owned none: pendant earrings heavy with precious stones, a diamond brooch in the shape of a small shooting star, a golden necklace with a cross, a long shiny chiacchiere chain with a watch attached to it that rested in her lap, a bracelet, and at least three rings—two on one hand, one on the other. She sat enveloped in a long dress that went all the way down to her shoes, with fabric falling loosely over her crossed legs but tight at the waist and on her chest—where it was decorated with buttons, pleats, ruffles and puffy sleeves—the color of the fabric was hard to identify, brown like the photo and scratched with white rivulets. Extending upwards out of the dress was her long, straight neck, at the top of which—to my amazement—was a corolla of hair: masses of soft, dark ringlets and waves, held in place with endless numbers of hairpins and combs. And finally, her face. Oh, how delicate her face was, the shape of her eyes, her cheekbones, the form of her mouth. She was looking straight at me, and I thought: no, it can’t be, and I had some kind of seizure.
“And me?” my grandmother asked again, apprehensively. “What about me?”
“So beautiful,” I replied.
And it was true, she was really beautiful, but for the first time in my life I realized that sometimes words were like those toys with mechanisms inside that suddenly stopped working. What did she want to know? What had I told her? Was she asking about herself now? She had said, And me? but did she mean now? In the photo or out of it? When and for whom? Was she referring to the grandmother who was showing me the photo or to the one in the photo standing next to the dead man with his walking stick? My imagination spun out of control. It occurred to me that if the marvelous lady in the photo was truly my grandmother, she must have died from sorrow along with her husband, the mason, and therefore the horribly ugly grandmother by my side must be some kind of rare species of living grandmother that had, however, died many years earlier; or maybe the beautiful lady had generously descended into the underworld to bring back her husband but then had turned around to look at him, lost him, and returned to the world of the living blighted by that awful experience. It was too bad, really, because if she had stayed the way she was in the photograph, the grandmother of the girl from Milan would’ve been no match for her, I would’ve kept calling her over to the window and showing her off to the girl, and, at the first chance I got, maybe even by the fountain, after she’d had her sip of water, I would’ve said to her, you’re even prettier than my grandmother, who, as you’ve seen, is a whole lot prettier than yours.