Confidently thick, as Mamma’s snow poem put it, love arrived, and anyone could easily have recognised it. There is no definite reason for all this. In a completely casual way, that mysterious force that makes the world go around revealed itself over a cup of coffee.
After that coffee nothing was ever the same for Zia. The other relationships hadn’t changed her life. Now she went often to the judge’s house, who never made her feel it was time to leave. She made pasta sauces and left them in the fridge for him, so that he wouldn’t eat rubbish when he was in a hurry. She called her love by an abbreviated name, like you do with family. She phoned him whenever she felt like it without ever wondering if it would be better not to, and he did the same, and often it was just about some silly little thing that made them laugh. Zia, who had never wanted to ride with me, even bought special trousers for going on the scooter, because the judge said he felt bad if he didn’t start his day on two wheels. He liked Zia’s embrace in the morning, her soft tits and her cheek on his back, her long legs alongside him. If the judge didn’t take Zia to work he said it was a bad start to the day. Zia told me she loved him, and I didn’t want to think about what Papà would have said: ‘What does it take for my sister-in-law to fall in love?’
When Zia went to the judge’s house for the first time, to listen to the original version of ‘American Pie’ that Madonna now does a cover of, he asked her very genuinely to undress. He’d never had such a beautiful woman around the house, and it had never entered his head that it could happen to him. He’d seen women like that in the movies and in magazines, but nothing so real and above all so close. He knew he wouldn’t have a stroke of luck like that a second time in his life.
Zia found the request tender and not at all vulgar, and she unbuttoned her blouse. She showed him her tits and her overwhelming body, then she sat next to him on the sofa and took his hands in hers.
‘Touch me. You can do anything.’
Those were Zia’s happy days. A girlfriend who was loved and in love, she smiled all the time. She was truly beautiful. Not like before: a nicely turned out mixture of meat and bone that was nothing compared to the delicacy that was Mamma. Because Mamma, walking like a beaten dog, like humanity’s poorest, was beautiful to me, and I’m happy that she was for Doctor Salevsky too. Mamma had a love of life. She was indifferent to nothing. A sponge soaking up all the gifts of God. During those days, Zia and the judge were two sponges saturated with everything that is beautiful in the world. With the judge she tasted things she’d never tasted, things that are completely normal for who knows how many people, but for Zia, accustomed to crumbs, this was a feast she had only ever gazed at hungrily through the window. She related to me the splendour of a hot shower together, she had enjoyed herself so much under the water and was terribly happy. And then the judge had said to her, ‘I love you,’ and no one, ever, in the years and years Zia had been having sex, had ever said such a thing. Powerful. Terrible. Marvellous. ‘Love me. I want to make love with every single part of your body. I want to have sex with your brain. I want to have sex with your heart.’
Zia would have liked to die of happiness and not stay to see what happened. All the men in her life had left her, why would this time be any different?
‘Because maybe one time everything is different,’ I said to her, without anything specific to base this on, but quite sure. And I found her so beautiful, as she looked at me, hopeful for this future that her eighteen-year-old niece said was a certainty. But it ended. Simply and suddenly. One day, as Zia was coming home from university, the judge passed on his scooter and on the back, in Zia’s spot, there was another woman embracing him and resting her head against his shoulder.
So Zia went and sat on the stairs of the judge’s house and waited for him for hours, staring at a spot in the air.
‘Why?’ she asked him, bursting into tears. ‘Why?’
The judge didn’t defend himself. He didn’t invite her up. He sat down with her on the steps and begged her to stop crying because he, too, had a lump in his throat. He put an arm around her shoulders. That was the worst part. He’d always given of his best to all the women in his life and had felt himself vanish into nothing like a soap bubble. How many women had left him? He could no longer remember. But all of them, that’s for sure. A pain he never wanted to feel again.
This time, if Zia were to leave him, he would fall on his feet. Because he loved the other woman, too, and thanks to her, Zia saw him as strong and loved him, and thanks to Zia, the other woman saw him as strong and loved him. The world belongs to the strong, as she well knew, having seen her sister die.
‘Stay. I beg you. Accept me, my love. Even this worst aspect. Take me in. You promised. We drank to this.’
But Zia ran off and when she reached our place she began dashing around the house hitting her head against the walls and saying she didn’t want to live any longer and she wanted, once and for all, to crack open her head and her body that were no use to anyone and that no one wanted and no one ever would. Then she threw herself onto the floor and didn’t wash and wouldn’t eat for days and days.
Nonna would come over to our place to see her daughter; gasping from the walk up the stairs, she seemed to get older every day. She would pull up a chair and sit down to look at Zia curled up on the floor and she would list all the good things to eat that she’d brought for her. She said yes, these were terrible times and you couldn’t make sense of anything any more. The hunger she’d experienced back in her day was better than Zia’s hunger now. War was better, because at least then you knew who to blame it on. First the Americans. Then the Germans. Even if the bad guys changed, at least you knew who they were at any given moment. Whereas now, who could you blame? It was obvious that the judge was a poor fool too, immature, just like Zia; after a day they’d thought they were in love, when actually they didn’t even know where love begins or where it ends. Like our father, who knew all about God, love, good and evil and had abandoned his children without a penny. Like Mamma – a frightened rabbit, she, too, was without a conscience. Falling stupidly from the balcony when she knew full well how weak she was and how often she got dizzy spells. Now there were no good guys or bad guys. You didn’t know what to expect, how to live. Even God seemed confused, and she would not be going to church any more, she wasn’t even going to pray. War had saved her fiancé and peace was killing her daughters. Back then they’d fled into the country to survive the hunger, but there was no escape from the hunger of her daughter.
But in that prison of hers, without water or food, Zia didn’t say, ‘That judge deserves a kick up the arse,’ nor did she ever say it after she got up off the floor. She had truly loved him and had been grateful for those days spent as a wife.
Now that nearly a year has gone by, she often says that it doesn’t take much to be a wife and it’s not true that she’s not cut out for it: ‘You get taken around on the scooter, you cook some pasta sauces, you make love and you get under a nice hot shower with your husband. A lot of people complain about marriage but I thought it was beautiful. The happiest period of my life.’