A Little Lumpen Novelita (6 page)

XIV

Still, I kept looking for the safe.

I wandered around the house, peering into corners and behind paintings, as my brother and his friends had instructed me, and the safe never turned up.

Only grime, dust, spiders’ nests, patches of crumbling wall, patches of old wallpaper protected from the passage of time, lighter, closer to their original color, though upon close examination I was left with the thought that these rectangles were actually more damaged, as if their pallor or their newness was a rare and degenerative disease.

During my forays in search of the safe, the whole house seemed alive. Alive in decay, alive in neglect. But alive.

Let me explain: my own apartment was just an apartment to me. Smaller every day, if anything, with the echoes of thousands of hours of television, sometimes the echo of my father’s and mother’s voices, but just an apartment. It was dead.

Not Maciste’s house. Maciste’s house was a promise and a disease, and I spun from promise to disease, feeling on my skin when my body — or the speed impressed on my body — passed from one state to another, the iridescent promise, the disease, an oblique falling or gliding, wandering, touching everything with my fingertips, until I heard Maciste’s voice calling me, asking where I was.

Sometimes I didn’t answer. I covered my mouth with one hand and breathed through my nose, shallowly, since I knew that, even more silent than me, he would come looking for me, gliding along the dark hallways of the house until he found me by my breathing or the heat of my body, I never knew which, and then everything would start over again.

He grew more generous, and the money that he gave me after each visit gradually increased. Sometimes I followed him, since I imagined he got it directly from the safe, but actually he took it from a drawer in the kitchen, and the amount there was always more or less the same, one hundred and fifty euros, enough to pay me and the woman or teenager (I never saw her, since she came during the day and I came at night) who bought provisions for him at a nearby store and sometimes left him plastic containers of food.

I’m ashamed of this now, but one night I told him that I was in love with him and asked him what his feelings were for me.

He didn’t answer. He made me cry out in his gym, but he didn’t answer me. Before I left at five that morning, feeling hurt, I told him that things would probably end soon. I told him this in the foyer, with one hand on the doorknob. When I opened the door and let in the light from a streetlamp on Via Germanico, I realized that I was alone.

For days I could only think of him with hatred. To make him angry, during our next meeting, I asked how he had been left blind.

“It was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?” I asked.

“A car accident. I was with some friends. Two of them didn’t live to tell the story.”

“And who was driving?”

Then Maciste focused his blind eyes on my eyes, as if he were really seeing me, and he said that he didn’t feel like discussing the subject any further.

I watched him get up with some difficulty and head without hesitation for the open door. I was alone for a long time, lying on the wooden bench, my body smeared with liniment, waiting for him and thinking my own thoughts, about the future that was opening up like a mirror of the present or a mirror of the past, but opening up regardless, until I got bored and fell asleep.

Back then I dreamed a lot and almost all my dreams were quickly forgotten. My life itself was like a dream. Sometimes I stared out a window in Maciste’s house and thought about dreams and life, which meant thinking about my own dreams, so quickly forgotten, and my own life, which was like a dream, and I got nowhere, nothing cleared inside my head, but just by doing this, by thinking about dreams and life, a vague weight was lifted from my heart or what I thought of as my heart, the heart of a criminal, of a person without scruples or with scruples so warped that it was hard for me to recognize them as my own.

Then a sigh of relief would escape my throat. I would gasp and smile as if I had just risen from deep waters, out of air, oxygen tanks empty. And immediately I would feel an urge to leave the window and go running in search of a mirror to look at my own face, a face that I knew was smiling and that I also knew I wouldn’t like, a fierce and happy face, but my face in the end, my own face, the best among many other distorted faces, a face that emerged from the death of my parents, from my neighborhood where it was always day, and from Maciste’s house where I was gambling with my fate, but where my fate for the first time was entirely my own.

None of these certainties — none of these sensations — lasted very long. Thank God, because if they had I would have died or lost my mind.

I was flying high, I was hallucinating, but sometimes my feet were planted firmly on the ground. And then I thought about the safe and the money or the jewels that Maciste had hidden away and the life that awaited us, my brother and me (and also in some way his no-good friends), when we at last got our hands on the treasure, a treasure that was useless to Maciste, since as we saw it all his needs were taken care of and anyway he wasn’t young anymore, whereas we had our whole lives ahead of us and we were as poor as rats.

And at moments like these, instead of imagining money, for some reason I imagined gold coins. A safe like Maciste’s intestines, black and fathomless, with the gold coins that he had amassed making gladiator movies shining in their depths. It was an exhausting vision. And a pointless one.

One night, as we were making love, Maciste asked me what color his semen was. I was thinking about the gold coins, and for some reason the question seemed pertinent. I told him to pull out. Then I took off the condom and masturbated him for a few seconds. I ended up with a handful of semen.

“It’s golden,” I said. “Like molten gold.”

Maciste laughed.

“I don’t think you can see in the dark,” he said.

“I can,” I said.

“I think my semen is getting blacker by the day,” he said.

For a while I pondered what he meant by that.

“Don’t worry so much,” I told him.

Then I went to shower and when I got back Maciste wasn’t in his room. Without turning on the lights, I went looking for him in the gym. He wasn’t there either. So I went to the porch room and spent a while there looking out at the garden and the shadow of the neighboring walls.

Maciste’s semen wasn’t really golden.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I realized that I would never see the money, that I would never spend Maciste’s treasure on pretty, frivolous things. All I know is that soon after I realized it I closed my eyes and went looking around the rest of the house for Maciste. I found him in the bookless library, sitting under the icon of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles and I climbed astride my lover or my master, it was the same to me, and let him make love to me without saying or feeling a thing.

Before dawn, on my way home in a taxi, I thought I was going to die.

XV

A week without seeing Maciste was like an eternity. But when I tried to imagine an entire life with him I saw nothing: a blank image, the wall of an empty room, amnesia, a lobotomy, my body broken and split into pieces.

At home, meanwhile, things weren’t good. My brother seemed dazed, scattered, too thin, and all his friends talked about was the safe.

One morning I said to my brother:

“You’re looking more and more messed up.”

“Look who’s talking,” was his answer.

Another day I examined his arms, looking for needle tracks or whatever, just as my boss at the salon had done to me, and all I got was his laugh, a hollow laugh, as if the laughter of our dead parents on that forgotten southern highway was issuing from his throat.

Then I started to be afraid.

“Don’t laugh,” I said.

“Then don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

I think we didn’t even have the strength to fight anymore.

I asked him another day: “What are you afraid of?”

He didn’t answer, but his face said that he was scared of everything, of his friends, of them living with us, of a future that seemed to hold little, of his sad life as an orphan and a kid without a job.

Another time I heard him crying, locked in the bathroom, as the Bolognan and the Libyan watched TV and made fun of people. Applause, laughter, the Bolognan’s sarcastic commentary, and my brother crying quietly in the bathroom, like a humiliated animal seized by cold and fear, which (cold and fear) for him were essentially the same thing. When he came out I asked him discreetly what was wrong. He said nothing, but that night he locked himself in the bathroom again and though this time I didn’t hear him crying I sensed that he was on the verge of a breakdown.

But it was hard for me to feel sorry for him, caught as I was between Maciste and the scheming of my brother’s friends, who could think of nothing but the safe in the house on Via Germanico. So I can’t say I was sorry for him. And that’s what I told Maciste, not thinking about what I was saying. I told him that I had found my brother crying and I hadn’t felt anything. We had just made love and when I finished saying what I had to say, Maciste turned his huge white face toward me and once again I had the impression that he was looking at me.

“You’re going crazy,” he said.

I asked him whether he thought that was good or bad. He said it was always bad, except in extreme cases, when going crazy was a way of escaping unbearable pain. And then I told him that maybe I was in unbearable pain, but before he could answer I took it back.

“I’m fine. There’s no such thing as unbearable pain. I haven’t gone crazy.”

One afternoon Maciste got sick and I spent the night taking care of him. He had a fever, but he didn’t want the doctor to come. He ordered me to make him a liter of chamomile tea with lemon, which he drank with big spoonfuls of honey, and he went to bed to sweat it out.

When he fell asleep I realized that I would never have another chance like this to look for the safe. So I went in search of it again, room by room. I can’t remember when I got the idea that the safe was behind the paintings of Maciste or behind the painting of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles. I took them down one by one, my heart racing. Behind the paintings there was nothing, just the wall in varying stages of deterioration. I also looked in the gym and the bathroom of the gym, checking the tiles (to see if there were any that could be pried up), in the kitchen, under the rugs in the living room and the foyer, behind some useless curtains.

The rest of the night I spent in the living room, sitting in an armchair next to one of the few working lamps in the house, reading magazines and dozing off.

At four in the morning I was woken by the sound of a voice. I went into Maciste’s room. He was talking in his sleep. He said something about a street. He said the word trapeze. Then he was quiet again. I felt his forehead. He was sweating. That seemed to be a good sign.

For a while I stood there by the door looking at him, deciding whether to go back to the living room. It was then that I knew for sure that I wasn’t in love with him. Everything seemed as clear as could be and as entertaining as a TV show and still I was close to tears.

I didn’t go back to the living room, but to the gym, where I smoked and stared into the darkness. Then I got up (I was sitting on the floor of the gym) and walked all around the house, room by room, armed with a flashlight, searching in every corner.

By eight that morning, when the flashlight was no longer necessary, I was sure that there was no safe. Maciste’s money, if he had any, was in the bank, not here. That was the end of everything for me.

XVI

Maciste was sick for a week. I took his temperature at night and the fever lingered on endlessly in his massive white body. Once I told him I was going to the pharmacy to buy him aspirin and antibiotics. I asked him to give me the key, because I didn’t want him to get up to open the door for me, but he refused, at first tactfully, trying not to hurt my feelings, and then vehemently, as if I didn’t know who I was talking to. But I knew very well.

“I just need herbal tea,” he said.

I brought him a teapot full of hot water and I left. It was Sunday and there were hardly any people on the train. When I got home, everyone was asleep. I made coffee and then I drank a cup of coffee with milk and I smoked the last cigarette. That night I had a strange dream, though thinking about it now, it wasn’t so strange.

I dreamed that Maciste was my boyfriend and we were taking a walk around Campo de’ Fiori. At first I was madly in love with him, but as we walked, he didn’t seem like such an interesting person to me anymore. He was too fat, too old, too clumsy, the two of us walking arm in arm as kids circled the statue of Giordano Bruno or streamed toward Via dei Giubbonari or Piazza Farnese, and the crowds in Campo de’ Fiori were growing thicker regardless. And then I told Maciste that I couldn’t be his girlfriend anymore. And he turned his head toward me and said: all right, all right, so be it, in a whisper that at first seemed to betray a kind of sadness, the faintest hint of despair, but despair nonetheless, which was unusual for him, though later I thought it might have been pride, as if Maciste, deep down, were proud of me.

And then he said goodbye to me. And I was confused, I didn’t know what to do, I was afraid to leave him there, in the middle of the Campo de’ Fiori crowds, alone and blind, and then I walked away, feeling guilty, but I went, and when I had gone about thirty feet I stopped and watched him, and then Maciste set off, wobbling (because he really was very fat and very big), and was lost among the crowds, though because of his height this took a while to happen, and only after a while did I lose sight of his huge round head.

And that was all. Maciste was gone and I was left alone and I saw myself crying as I crossed Garibaldi Bridge, on my way home. By the time I got to Piazza Sonnino, I was thinking that I had to find a place to go, a place to live, a new job, I had to do things and not die.

And then I woke up and that night I talked to my brother’s friends and I told them that Maciste had money but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I talked about the nonexistent safe. I told them that it did exist. I told them that no one except Maciste could open it, and the only way they could make him open it was by torturing him, and even that was no sure thing, because Maciste could stand worse pain than anything they — pathetic petty criminals — had ever known. Maciste
could stand the pain, could live a whole life sunk in pain.

My brother’s friends listened to me in silence, shaken by the path I was revealing to them. Or by the terrible path they could see for themselves.

And then the sun began to come up and I had breakfast, took a shower, and went out. I went walking to Via Germanico. Maciste wasn’t in bed yet. If he was surprised to see me at that time of day, I don’t know. I told him I had come to visit him for the last time. In fact, I hadn’t come to visit, because that in some sense presumed nudity, sex, long hours of silence in the dark house, but to say goodbye, because I didn’t plan to come back ever again.

“Are you going on a trip?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to start a new life.”

He didn’t ask me where I planned to go. He told me to wait for a minute. When he came back he gave me an envelope full of money.

“Thank you,” I said as I left the envelope on a shelf, trying not to make the slightest noise. I knew that Maciste wouldn’t be surprised when he found it there.

Then I went to the salon and, after talking to the boss, I took the day off and wandered around the city. At dusk I went home. The Bolognan and the Libyan were watching TV, but anyone observing them carefully would have realized that they were far away. Not in our living room, but in a bus station or at an airport. Not under our light, but bathed in a red glow that seemed to emanate from another planet.

My brother was watching TV too, sitting in a chair, behind the couch. I made coffee for the four of us and served it to them, then I told them that they had to leave. They acted as if they hadn’t heard. But my brother didn’t argue either and then I knew I had won.

After a while I told them again to leave. They could watch the end of the show and then they had to pack their suitcases and get out.

“Where are we supposed to go?” asked the Bolognan.

I stared at him as if my face was raw flesh and his was raw flesh too.

“To Maciste’s house,” I answered. “Everything is over. As soon as the show ends I want you to go.”

And when the show had ended — I watched it all the way through, not even missing the commercial breaks — I planted myself in the middle of the living room and turned off the TV and they looked at me without getting up from the couch and I said that I was going out for a walk around the neighborhood and that I might pass by the police station, and when I came back I didn’t want to see them here.

And then I told my brother to come with me and surprisingly my brother got up and came. We walked around Trastevere until late into the night.

“Are we going to the police?” asked my brother.

I said that I didn’t think it would be necessary. We went into a bar and ordered sandwiches and coffee. We talked about any old thing.

When we got back home his friends were gone.

“I hope I never see them again in my life,” said my brother, then he shut himself in his room and cried.

That night, for the first time in a long time, night was really night, dark and fragile and edged with fears, and it was the weak and the weary who sat up awake, eager to see the dawn again, the shimmering light of Piazza Sonnino.

For days, though, I was on the alert for bad news. I read the paper (not every day, because we didn’t have enough money to buy the paper every day), I watched TV, I listened to the news on the radio at the salon, afraid of coming across a final shot of Maciste sprawled on the ground, in a pool of blood (his cold blood), and alongside it ID photos of the Bolognan and the Libyan, staring at me nostalgically from the page or from the screen of our TV set (which was really ours now, not our dead parents’), as if these pictures — of killers and victim, killer and victims — were evidence that outside the storm still raged, a storm not located in the skies of Rome, but in the European night or the space between planets, a noiseless, eyeless storm from another world, a world that not even the satellites in orbit around the Earth could capture, a world where there was a place that was my place, a shadow that was my shadow.