A Little Lumpen Novelita (5 page)

XI

I started to go twice a week to his house on Via Germanico. Sometimes I had to wait a long time outside the door before he let me in. Sometimes we didn’t go straight to the gym, and instead he brought me into the kitchen, a kitchen twice as big as our living room, where Maciste made sandwiches for both of us — his specialty — American sandwiches which, according to him, he had been taught to make by an actress named Dolly Plimpton, from Oregon; she had been in the cast of one of his movies, and her recipe consisted of sandwich bread, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, sliced ham, sliced cheese, and various spreads that he could tell apart by the size and shape of the jars and that, mixed, often made the sandwiches taste strange — strong and strange, like the sandwiches you get in airports, he said, but good.

The kitchen was big and it was dirty. Not because it got much use, which it didn’t, but because it needed someone to come and give it a deep cleaning, to sweep away the dust that had been gathering in the corners for months, maybe years, but Maciste didn’t want to hear it.

The bathroom we used after fucking was the only place in the house that was really clean. The bathtub was huge and
instead of a shower curtain it had glass doors, like the kind you see in some movies, doors that Maciste had gotten specially installed, in addition to handrails on the walls that he didn’t need, since he moved around the house like someone who could see.

Next to the bathtub there was a little stall with a high-pressure cold-water shower that Maciste called a Norwegian shower. It had a glass door too.

While I showered, Maciste sometimes sat on a wooden stool in the bathroom and ate his sandwiches. We talked about all kinds of things. About my parents’ accident and how the loss had affected me (his parents were dead too). About recent movies that I had seen (he’d seen his last movie fifteen years ago). About things that happened next door.

The truth is, I didn’t have much to say to him.

When I opened the glass door and saw him eating, it gave me a funny feeling — it was like he was someone else, and I was someone else too, and I didn’t like it.

Then I would ask him questions, because the silence he was used to was more than I could stand. So I learned his real name, Giovanni Dellacroce, though
real
only stands for a different kind of unreality, a less random, more fleshed-out unreality, and I learned the exact dates, from before I was born, when he had been crowned Mr. Italy and then Mr. Europe and finally Mr. Universe, which was the first time an Italian had won the world bodybuilding championship, at a competition held in Las Vegas, and I also learned that he’d been to all the great cities of Europe and America (the exact dates: year, month, day), and that he’d been the friend of politicians and famous artists, of movie actresses and soccer players on the national team or for Rome, and that he’d worked on lots of movies, among them the three or four (he was precise about the number, but I’ve forgotten it) in which he played Maciste, and that sometimes he’d been the good guy and other times, in the end, the bad guy, because that’s how it goes, he said, in the beginning you’re almost always the good guy and in the end you’re always the bad guy.

Other times I tried to go off on my own in the house.

“I’m going to take a walk around your castle,” I would say, and hurry off, before he could object or say no.

The house had two floors and it was the biggest house I’d ever seen from the inside (it still is). It was so big that it seemed rooted in the earth. On the second floor there were at least four or five empty rooms. On the first floor was the living room, which Maciste used occasionally, mostly to take naps, and the dining room, which had become a kind of passageway or labyrinth where furniture from other rooms was piled up, cots and mattresses, electric heaters, chairs and tables, wardrobes full of cobwebs, and where there were stacks of old sports or movie magazines. Everything was organized in some way that Maciste never explained to me, though it wasn’t hard to figure out that the room’s main purpose was to clear obstacles and hazards from other parts of the house.

Then there was the kitchen, which I’ve already described, and a full bathroom with broken mirrors and a huge gouge in the bathtub. There was also a windowed room that led to the big, crowded foyer, full of useless curtains, and a terrace that led to the back garden and the walls of the neighboring houses. To either side the buildings looked normal, but in back, the houses with entrances on Via degli Scipioni were as silent as Maciste’s, no sound of television or radio or children’s voices or adults calling to children or to each other. Once I heard the chirp of a cell phone, but only once.

On the second floor, besides the empty rooms, was Maciste’s room, big, with its shutters always closed. There was a full-length mirror abandoned in a corner, which Maciste must once have used for daily self-evaluations and possibly also to make love with movie actresses, and a huge bed with a reinforced frame custom-built to support the weight of its owner. Otherwise, the room had a monastic air, of spaciousness and poverty.

Then there were two bathrooms, the big one where I showered and a small one where the last cleaning woman had piled the tools of her trade — a couple of buckets, a mop, several bottles of bleach — before leaving for good, sick of the blind man.

Past the windowed room was the gym where Maciste seemed to spend most of his time, pedaling on a stationary bike or lifting weights, his mind elsewhere, or, more frequently, lying indolently on a long wooden bench in his black robe and sunglasses with a white towel around his neck, thinking about his glory years or maybe — hopefully — thinking about nothing, his mind blank.

Next to the gym was the reading room or library (that’s what he called it), in which there wasn’t a single book. There were two oil paintings, though. One of them was of Maciste, half-naked, accepting the world bodybuilding championship belt. The other was of Maciste sitting in that very library, behind an oak table that was still there, wearing a suit and tie and with a faint smile on his face, as if he were laughing at the painter and everyone who would ever look at the painting, as if behind everything that surrounded him there was a secret and only he knew it.

Between the two paintings there was a niche holding an icon of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles.

“St. Pietrino of the Seychelles? The Seychelle islands?”

“Yes,” said Maciste.

“He went so far away — who is this St. Pietrino?”

“A saint.”

“Yes, but what kind of saint? I’ve never heard of him. It must be a joke.”

“No, it isn’t a joke,” said Maciste. “He’s a modern-day Roman saint who was born in Santa Loreto, like me, and one day he went to preach in the Seychelles, that’s all.”

Since I didn’t feel like arguing, I let it go and walked around the house some more. There was no safe anywhere to be seen. I looked for it many times, but I could never find it.

XII

Sometimes, while I was looking for the safe and going from room to room, moving things and putting them back again, I would hear — or rather sense — the presence of Maciste, in his black bathrobe or naked, moving through the darkness of the house following the sound of my footsteps, the almost imperceptible noises I made, until suddenly he would grab me from behind, wrapping me in a bear hug, no matter how careful I tried to be, no matter how stealthy my movements.

And then, when I was in his arms and he was bearing me off through the darkness, or when I was under him or next to him, in the bed or in the gym, every inch of my body slathered with lotion, I would give thanks that I hadn’t found the safe, at least not yet.

And sometimes I imagined sleeping there every night, with Maciste, and I imagined hiring a woman to do the cleaning (because in my dreams I didn’t intend to be his slave), and convincing him to go out every once in a while, maybe not to the movies but for a walk, like two normal people or two people who pretend to be normal and by pretending actually are normal or become normal, and I saw myself calling a taxi once a week, on Fridays maybe, to come and pick us up and take us to a nice restaurant where we would have a leisurely dinner, with conversation about all kinds of things, or to take us downtown, where I would buy clothes for him at one of those stores for big men, and then clothes for me, and I even imagined myself going to the movies with Maciste, and describing what was on the screen, the way companions of the blind are supposed to.

But the reality is that I hardly ever slept at his house, and also that after dreaming for a while about our life together I would start to wonder where the hell that safe could be.

Late at night, when I got home and my brother and his friends were half-awake, we argued about it. The Bolognan was getting impatient, he said we’d didn’t have all the time in the world, and sometimes he talked about breaking in, armed with a knife or whatever, but when he said this he trembled, he and the Libyan and my brother, the very idea made them tremble, and it wasn’t hard for me to steer them back to the original plan.

Other times we talked about Maciste’s story, about the movies he’d made that had been such hits. For weeks my brother even looked around the neighborhood video stores and then downtown for the movie called
Maciste vs. the Tartars
, which according to the Bolognan was the best, but he never found it.

I was glad he couldn’t find it because I didn’t like the idea of seeing Maciste as a young man, when he still had his sight and his hair and a perfect body. I didn’t want to see that because I knew what was to come, twenty years later. But once I dreamed about the movie. First, two armies clashed on a dry plain. Then Maciste fought twenty warriors inside a palace and defeated them all. At some point a woman appeared in a tunic of gauzy silk and kissed Maciste. The two of them stood on the edge of a cliff. An abyss yawned at their feet and wisps of smoke rose on the horizon. Then I saw Maciste sleeping in a room with marble walls and a marble floor. And in the dream I thought: this is a movie, he’s not really sleeping, he’s just pretending to sleep, and in fact he’s awake, and only then did I realize that Maciste, making the movie, was in the present, and I, watching the movie or dreaming that I was watching it, was in the future, Maciste’s future, or, in other words, nothingness. Then I woke up.

Anyway, I preferred to see him the way he really was when I went to visit him at his house, twice a week.

At the salon things weren’t good. Though in some ways they were better than they had been. I was usually exhausted when I got there and sometimes I stumbled through the day like a sleepwalker. Once the boss, who was an understanding woman, pulled me into the bathroom and pushed up my sleeves, looking for needle tracks on my arms.

“I’m not doing drugs,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you, Bianca? You’re looking worse and worse.”

“I’m sleeping badly,” I said.

It was true. Sometimes I’d go for weeks getting three or four hours of sleep a night.

Once I was tempted to ask Maciste how he lost his sight. The Bolognan and the Libyan had warned me never to raise the subject. According to them, the last person to show any curiosity about Maciste’s blindness had ended up with a couple of broken ribs. It wasn’t their warning that gave me pause. I knew Maciste would never lift a hand against me. But there was something that stopped me, something else.

Sometimes I thought it was a good thing that he had gone blind, because that way he would never see me, never see my face, never see the look on my face when I was with him, which wasn’t the look of a prostitute or a thief or a spy, but an expectant look, the look of someone hoping for anything and everything, from a kind word to a life-changing declaration.

There weren’t many kind words, because Maciste didn’t talk much, but there were kind gestures. And there were no life-changing declarations, or at least none I recognized at the time, though since then I’ve come to remember each of Maciste’s words as a key or a dark bridge that surely could have led me elsewhere, as if he were a fortune-telling machine designed exclusively for me, which I know isn’t true, though sometimes I like to think so, not often, because I don’t lie to myself the way I used to, but every once in a while.

XIII

The rest of the time I spent looking for the safe.

It was a safe that began to seem more and more like an invention of my brother’s friends, a safe that existed only in their criminal minds and in their overwrought imaginations — because back then, even if I had a criminal mind too, that didn’t mean I let my imagination run wild after something nonexistent.

I wasn’t overwrought. In fact, what I felt was a strange stillness, as if before arriving at Maciste’s big old house on Via Germanico I had been on the run for months and even years, but from the moment I stepped into his house, from the moment I saw him naked and hulking and white, like a broken refrigerator, everything stopped (or I stopped) and now things were happening at a different speed, an imperceptible speed that was the same as stillness.

Sometimes I looked at them, at my brother and his friends, I looked into their innocent eyes and I was tempted to say:

“The safe exists in only one place — in your fucked-up heads.”

But I think I was afraid of convincing them. I was afraid that they would believe me and then there wouldn’t be any reason, money aside, for my weekly visit to Maciste’s house. Not that anyone would stop me. And the extra money came in handy. But I knew that to keep visiting him with no ulterior motive would destroy me.

Maciste’s eyes — unlike my brother’s eyes and his friends’ eyes — weren’t innocent. He almost always wore sunglasses. But sometimes he would take them off and look at me or pretend to look at me. Then I would shiver and close my eyes and hug him or try to hug him, which was always hard considering his size. One day the Bolognan said to me:

“That bastard is messing with your head. Find the safe and let’s get this over with.”

He wasn’t as dumb as he seemed. And in a way, he was right. The problem was that I couldn’t listen to reason anymore. But he was right.

And another time he said:

“Think of the future, think of all the things we have to look forward to in the future.”

But there he was wrong. Deep down I was always thinking about the future. I thought about it so much that the present had become part of the future, the strangest part. To visit Maciste was to think about the future. To sweat, to venture into pitch-black rooms, was to think about the future, a future that resembled a room in Maciste’s house, but in sharper focus, the furniture covered in old sheets and blankets, as if the owners of the house (a house in the future) had gone away on a trip and didn’t want dust to collect on their things. And that was my future and that was how I thought about it, if you can call it thinking (and if you can call it a future).

But most of the time I preferred not to think about anything. I let my mind wander and I spent a long time at one of the windows that overlooked the back garden, naked, my skin still lubricated, watching the night and the stars, the walls of the neighboring houses.

Sometimes I heard a strange sound that split the darkness like a ray of chalk, and Maciste said it was the cry of a hawk that lived in an abandoned house nearby, though I had never heard of a hawk living in a big city, but these things happen in Rome, strange things that were at the time beyond my comprehension and that I easily accepted in a way that today surprises and even repels me: with a shuddering ease, as if leading a life of crime meant always quivering inside, as if leading a life of crime brought with it mingled sensations of immense guilt and pleasure that made me laugh, for example, for no apparent reason at the least appropriate moments, or that plunged me briefly into sadness, a portable sadness that lasted no longer than five minutes and luckily was easy to hide.

At home, meanwhile, everything was the same.

Sometimes, on the nights that I didn’t visit Maciste, I left the door open for one of my brothers’ friends, with the lights off and my eyes closed, since under no circumstances did I want to know which one of them it was, and I made love mechanically, and sometimes I came many times, which caused me to erupt in fierce, unexpected bursts of rage and to cry bitterly.

Then my brother’s friend would ask me whether something was wrong, whether I was upset, whether I was hurt, and before he could go on, which would have given away his identity, I would tell him to be quiet or say shhh, and he would stop talking and keep fucking without a word, such was the force of conviction or persuasion or dissuasion that my acts had acquired.

It was an almost supernatural power, I sometimes came to think (though immediately I mocked the idea), making normally talkative people like the Bolognan fall silent, or silent people like the Libyan turn entirely mute, a force that wrested every last question from the mouths of the eternally curious, that created a space of artificial silence and darkness where I could cry and writhe in pain because I didn’t like what I was doing, but where I could also come as many times as I wanted and where I could walk (or probe the surface of reality with my fingertips) without false hope, without illusion, not knowing the meaning of it all but knowing the end result, knowing why things are where they are, with a degree of clarity that I haven’t had since, though sometimes I sense that it’s there, curled up inside of me, shrunken and dismembered — luckily for me — but still there.