A Little Lumpen Novelita (2 page)

III

One evening my brother came home with two men.

They weren’t his friends, though my brother chose to think they were. One was from Bologna, the other from Libya or Morocco. But they looked like twins. Same head, same nose, same eyes. They reminded me of a clay bust I had seen recently in a magazine at the salon. They spent the night.

“But where will they sleep?” I said to my brother, “There’s no room,”

He gave me a haughty look, as if to say he had the situation under control.

“In our parents’ bedroom,” he said.

He was right, there was room. The men slept there.

I went to bed early. I didn’t feel like watching my favorite shows.

I hardly slept a wink. When I got up at six in the morning, the kitchen was clean. The men had washed the pots, the dishes, and the silverware and left it all on the rack to dry. The ashtrays were empty and clean. I think they even swept before they went to bed. I thought about that as I ate breakfast and then I went to work, though it was very early and I spent almost two hours wandering around the neighborhood.

When I got back they were still there. They had made a spinach purée and a spicy tomato sauce. The table was set. In the refrigerator were two big bottles of beer. It was only then, as we ate, that I learned their names. They introduced themselves. But I don’t remember the names anymore and I’d rather not make an effort to remember them. My brother looked nervous and happy. The two men looked relaxed. The Bolognan even pulled out a chair for me.

That night I realized how alike they were, and that night, too, they told me that they weren’t brothers, though many people thought they were. The Libyan said something that at the time I found mysterious. In a way, he said, those people weren’t wrong. Silly as it may seem, people are never wrong. Even if we look down on them, and sometimes rightly so, people are
never
wrong. That’s our curse, he said.

“Are you brothers or not?” I asked.

The Libyan said that they were blood brothers.

“Did you swear a blood oath, did you cut your palms and rub the blood together? Is that what you mean?”

That’s what they meant. My brother thought it was great that there were still people who swore blood oaths. I thought it was childish. The Libyan said he agreed with me, but I think he only agreed to be polite, since if he thought it was childish, why had he done it? Unless they’d known each other since they were children, which they hadn’t.

That night I watched TV with them for a while.

My brother had met them at the gym, where they did some kind of work that was never clear to me. Sometimes I got the impression that they were trainers, a job with a certain prestige, and other times that they were just sweepers and errand boys, like my brother. Either way, they were always talking about the gym, like people who come home and can’t stop going on about work. They talked about the gym — and so did my brother, with a fervor new to me — and about protein diets and meals with names that had the ring of science fiction, like Fuel Tank 3000 or Weider energy bars (all the nutrients you need for the body of a champion!).

This went on until I told them that if they wanted to keep talking they should do it in the kitchen because I couldn’t hear my game show. I liked (I still like) to listen carefully to the questions and answers because that way while I’m being entertained I learn something that probably won’t help me in any way but that seems worth knowing. Sometimes I get an answer right. When that happens I start to think that maybe I could go on TV and be a contestant. But then more questions come and I don’t know any of the answers, which is when I realize that I’m better off here, on this side of the screen, because if I were there, in front of the cameras, I’d probably just make an ass of myself.

The surprising thing, though, was that when I asked them to stop talking, they stopped. And then we were all quiet watching the show, which was at the most exciting part: there were only two contestants left, an older man, maybe forty or fifty, and a girl with little glasses and a face that was too serious, kind of scrunched up. She had incredible hair, shoulder-length and shiny, all silky black. For a minute I imagined her sitting in the salon. Ugly thoughts. I tried to wipe them from my mind.

Then the girl was asked to define the word
nimbus
. And the Bolognan, next to me, said that it was a halo, the circle of light around a saint’s head. And before the girl could open her mouth, he added that it was also a low cloud formation, a cluster of cumulous clouds.

I stared at the Bolognan and I stared at the TV. My brother smiled, as if he knew the answer too, though I knew he didn’t. And time ticked away and the girl lost her turn and it was the older man’s turn and he said that a nimbus was, in fact, a low cloud. And when the host, to give the old guy a hard time, asked “And what else, sir?,” the man was silent and couldn’t think of anything else.

And then came more contestants and more questions and the Bolognan answered almost all of them, some of them wrong, admittedly, but most of them right, and my brother — and even I — said that he should try out for the show, he could make a shitload of money (though I didn’t use that word), and then my brother told me that his friend was always doing crossword puzzles and he actually finished them, unlike the average person, who would start a puzzle and leave it half-done, and it seemed to me that it was one thing to be able to finish crossword puzzles and another thing to be a game-show winner, but I kept my mouth shut, because clearly the Bolognan could win any quiz show he signed up for.

But then I stopped to think: when had my brother seen his friend doing crossword puzzles? Because if anything was clear it was that they knew each other from the gym where my brother worked and the Bolognan worked and even the Libyan worked, mopping floors, scrubbing lockers and showers, sweeping the weight room or selling energy drinks, all tasks incompatible with a leisurely activity like solving crossword puzzles, which — as everybody knows — is something that’s done when you have nothing else to do.

That night, when I was in bed and the house was quiet, I imagined — or rather saw — my brother and his two friends at Rome’s Central Station sitting in the cafeteria waiting, my brother and the Libyan doing nothing, watching people come in and out, and the Bolognan working the crossword puzzle from the
L’Osservatore Romano
, a right-wing paper no matter how you look at it, though he claimed it was an anarchist paper, a superfluous and therefore futile explanation or excuse. Once I saw him with
Tutto Calcio
under his arm and I said “That’s what you read,” a simple statement of fact, not meaning anything else by it, and he said yes, I read
Tutto Calcio
, but it isn’t a right-wing paper the way people think it is, it’s an anarchist paper.

As if I cared what newspapers he read or didn’t read.

My father read
Il Messagiero
. My brother and I didn’t read anything (it was a luxury we couldn’t afford). I don’t know which papers are right-wing and which are left-wing. But the Bolognan was always justifying himself. It was part of who he was, and also part of his charm, or so he thought. But as I was saying, I was in bed with the lights out and the covers pulled up to my chin, in the silence of the night, a silence that looked yellow to me, and I saw my brother and his two friends in a bar at Central Station, sitting around a table with three glasses of beer and looking bored, because waiting is terrible and they were waiting for something that wasn’t coming, but was about to come, or at least that was what they were betting on, the three of them, and while they were sitting there the Bolognan had more than enough time to finish a crossword puzzle, from
L’Osservatore Romano
or
La Repubblica
or
Il Messagiero
. And imagining this scene, I was overcome by an infinite sadness. I felt a weight on my chest, a pain in my heart, a sense of anguish. As if a fog were rising from the underground tunnels and swamping the whole of Central Station, and I was the only one who could see it (but I wasn’t there). As if the fog was blurring my brother’s face and coming irrevocably between us. But then I fell asleep and I forgot or dismissed what I had seen — or what I had foreseen, because it really was a premonition.

And so the days went by.

IV

One morning the Bolognan and the Libyan left. I spent an hour, more or less, going through the drawers to see whether they’d stolen anything. Nothing was missing.

Even I couldn’t deny that their conduct had been impeccable for the five days they’d stayed with us. They always washed the dishes, three times they made dinner themselves, and they didn’t try anything with me, which was important. I could sense the interest in their eyes, in the way they moved, and the way they talked to me, but I also noted their self-control and found it flattering.

I’d only had one boyfriend in my life and we had broken up shortly before my parents’ car accident on that terrible southern highway.

My boyfriend lived nearby and was the same age as me, so it wasn’t long before I saw him with another girl, both of them looking happy, near the entrance to a club. I was on my way home from my job at the salon, it was a Saturday, and I was walking in a daze, staring up at the sky, which — as I’ve said — looked stranger every day. My ex-boyfriend was with his new girlfriend, propped on the wall outside the club, and when he saw me go by he said my name. I lowered my eyes and there he was. He was smiling a friendly smile. I smiled at him too. He asked if I had dropped out of school. I didn’t answer. I thought for a second that the logical thing would be to stop and talk to him and his new girlfriend, but instead I kept walking. When I had gone a little way I stared up at the sky again and I had the feeling that I was living on another planet.

So much for that.

You couldn’t say I’d gained much experience with my boyfriend. He was an ordinary guy and I liked him and then one day I stopped liking him. That was all. With the Bolognan (and the Libyan) it was different, because they shared meals with us, slept in my parents’ room, and watched me from up close in a way that no one (except my brother) ever had. What do they
see
? I wondered. What face, what eyes do they see? I didn’t wonder this very often, but once or twice I did. Now I know that there’s no such thing as closeness. One person’s eyes are always shut. The first person sees and the second doesn’t. Or the second person sees and the first doesn’t. Only a mother can be close, but that was unknown territory back then. A blank space. There was only the illusion of closeness.

And the closeness of my brother’s friends, a closeness built on the basis of glances and small gestures, among other things, wasn’t just flattering; I liked it, too. Let me explain: I was no one’s slave; I was the arbiter of them all. I was blind, but I was the yardstick by which they measured their freedom. It sounds stupid, but that’s how it felt and I’m sure they intended it that way. They didn’t swear in front of me, they weren’t like my brother, they took out the garbage, they always raised the toilet seat, unlike even my late father, a silent and considerate man.

But I don’t want to talk about my father. I want to talk about my brother’s friends and about the evening or night when I went through the drawers to see whether they had taken anything when they left. My brother saw me, I remember, and said with uncharacteristic certainty: “They didn’t take anything. They’re legal. They’re my friends.” But I still inspected the whole house, room by room, even searching the bathroom to see whether anything was gone, a bottle of cologne. Nothing. My brother was right.

Then a week went by and then another and my brother hardly mentioned his friends.

One night, as we were watching TV, he said that they were in Milan at a bodybuilding competition. Mr. Italy. I laughed.

“In Frosinone, maybe,” I said.

My brother looked at me, confused. What was I trying to say? That they might be able to make it in Frosinone, but not Milan? Maybe. I could imagine them anywhere else in Italy — Cosenza or Catanzaro, say — but not in Milan.

After that my brother stopped telling me things about them. I was someone — I realize now — who liked to face things head on, whereas my brother and his friends wandered real and imaginary places with their heads down. But facing things head on meant being consumed. I was being consumed.

I worked, did the shopping, cooked, watched TV, went with my brother to rent videos. Some nights I looked out the window and the night was as bright as day. Sometimes I thought that I was losing my mind, that it couldn’t be normal, such brightness, but deep down I knew I would never lose my mind.

I was waiting for something. A catastrophe. A visit from the police or the social worker. The approach of a meteorite, darkening the sky. My brother rented Tonya Waters movies and I washed heads and nothing happened.

One day they came back.

My brother didn’t mention it, maybe he didn’t know they were coming back either. They were there one night when I got home from work. The three of them were sitting on the couch watching TV. I looked them straight in the face and asked how things had gone in Milan. The Libyan got up and shook my hand. The Bolognan nodded irritably and didn’t get up from the couch. I could tell by their expressions that things hadn’t gone well. So I didn’t ask again. We ate together. We watched TV together. That night, while I was in bed thinking about them (or to be precise, thinking about their battered faces, shiny as if they’d been washed by force, as if a dark hand had dashed a bucket of water at them and then scoured them mercilessly, faces as wet and tired as if they’d returned from Frosinone on foot or in chains), while I was in bed, as I was saying, with the lights out and my eyes open, sure I would never fall asleep, one of them came into the room and made love to me. I think it was the Bolognan.

Then I asked again:

“How was Milan?”

And he said, “Bad, it was bad,” as he put something on his penis and penetrated me. I think it was a condom but I can’t say for sure.

The next morning, before I went to work, I looked for the used condom and couldn’t find it. So maybe it was a condom that he put on and maybe it was something else. But what? I’ll never know and now I don’t care, but back then, that morning, as I was getting dressed and making the bed, I thought about that and about danger and love and all the seemingly strange things that turn up when you least expect them and that are actually pretexts for something different, something else (attainable things, not unattainable things), and then I went to work, the others were sleeping, my brother in his room, his two friends in my parents’ old room, and the streets I walked didn’t look like yesterday’s streets, though I knew they were the same, streets don’t change overnight, maybe in some places they do, but I’ve never been to those places, maybe in Africa, but not here, here I was the one who was changing, but when I got to the salon I realized that I hadn’t changed, that the streets had shifted slightly, to the left or to the right, up or down, but I was still the same.

In my defense I can say — if anything needs to be said, if the notion of defense is pertinent (which it isn’t) — that at no moment did I think that I was falling in love. I saw the shadowy negative of romantic situations. I saw the negative of passionate moments whose point of reference was always a TV series or the whispering of girls now forgotten. Sometimes I saw the negative of a whole life: a bigger house, a different neighborhood, children, a better job, time passing, old age, a grandchild, death in the public hospital or covered with a sheet in my parents’ bed, a bed that I would have liked to hear creak, like an ocean liner as it goes down, but that instead was silent as a tomb.

That night I made love again with one of my brother’s friends and the next night and the night after that too, and every night that week and the week after, until it began to show on my face that I was making love every night or that I wasn’t sleeping much, to the point that my friends at work asked what was wrong, whether I was sick or what.

Then I looked in the mirror and I saw that I had circles under my eyes, that my face was pale, as if the moon, which shone as brightly for me as the sun, was affecting me. And then I decided that I didn’t need to make love every night and I locked my door.

Life, despite what I expected, continued unchanged.