Enchantments (6 page)

I start sweating. I'm in a panic. I'm so terrified I can't think what to do. So I curl up on the floor in front of the passenger seat and weep.

“What are you doing down there?” my mother asks when they get back. “Come on, get out of there, we're going to start moving soon.” She opens the car door, and I slide out. I'm so paralyzed by terror I don't move easily. I climb into the back and cling to my sister, who tells me to go away, it's too hot.

My father gets into the car and sits at the wheel. He is talking while holding on to the keys, occasionally throwing them in the air, and my heart goes up and down with those keys until he says, “At last, we're moving” and tries to stick the key into the opening. But the key won't go in and my father says, “What the hell is this?” People behind us start honking their horns, and
Papa swears and keeps trying, again and again. Suddenly he turns his head and looks at me.

I confess instantly and as soon as he starts hitting me I feel better, much, much better, because, yes, it hurts, but the fear, the fear of my father, which isn't the same as the fear of his hitting me—that is the more terrible thing.

My sister's face is the first thing I see each morning and the last thing I see at night—and her eyes, big and round as pebbles in a stream, shining even in the dark.

For the composition “My Sister” that the teacher assigned me over the Easter holidays, I manage to write only a few lines: that Clara calls anything she really likes “fantasmagoric” and that since she was a little girl she's been attracted by the moon and by astronauts and that when she's happy she starts bouncing on her bed yelling over and over, “Fantasmagoric! Yuri, Gagarin, Yuri!” I can't write anything more than that, even if I know everything about her, since we're one single being.

With my brothers it's exactly the other
way around. I don't know them, but because of the distance between us, I can describe them very well. I see them as members of a small tribe of savages occupying a territory that borders ours but is quite distinct. I witness their daily rituals, I see them kneeling on chairs for hours, absorbed in newspapers spread out on the dinner table; or patiently lining up row after row of toy soldiers only to mow them down with a single backhand swipe and warlike sound effects. I also see them bouncing and squirming on the bed, alternately laughing and howling like madmen as Papa whips them with the belt of his trousers.

It also happens that we're the objects of their raids. We find our dolls hanged on the drawstrings of the curtains or dangling on the branches of the plane trees out by the street. Until now we've put up with all of it, with their stupid jokes, like pulling away the chair when we're about to sit down at the dinner table, and even the tickling torture when one of them holds our arms down on the bed while the other one runs his fingers up and down our whole body … But the execution of our dolls, no, that we really can't put up with. And when we discover this outrage, this cruelty, this profanation, we fill the house with our screams.

I scream more than Clara, louder and louder, a storm of tears and rage, and I start pulling my hair out. That frightens my sister, who stops crying. She comes over to me, leans her head on my shoulder, and says, “Come on, don't get so upset,” and then I feel even worse because now I'm the only one who's going to make things right, and I throw myself on the ground and tighten my whole body until it's rigid and my face turns purple. I'm gathering all the strength I have in me, and I'm about to go into convulsions, when Papa and Mama rush in and shake me, saying sternly, “That's enough, that's enough now. Get up. Pull yourself together.”

I emerge from this fit exhausted and pained, as if I'd fallen in a deep well. For weeks on end I don't deign to look at my brothers, not a single glance … until they lure me once again with the circus game.

Carlo announces at the top of his voice, “Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Kind public! This evening we have the great honor and pleasure of presenting to you a sensational act! Straight from Russia, the fantastic, the marvelous, the incredible Bukowski Brothers!” and Clara, Pietro, and I burst into the room trumpeting the fanfare.

It's eleven at night. Papa and Mama have gone out, confidently thinking that we're tucked in bed. Not tonight—tonight we're putting on the Bukowski Circus. We'll do somersaults, tumbling, balancing acts. I, under the name of Galina, will succeed in standing (without using my hands) on the bent knees of Ivan-Pietro. Next to us Boris-Carlo will lift Olga-Clara into the air holding her by the calves—a prodigy of strength and talent. Ladies and gentlemen, marvel at the Bukowski Brothers! And for a finale the two boys will perform their celebrated Kiss the Wall of Death. They will climb onto the foot of the bed and let themselves fall stretched out full-length toward the headboard, each time starting a centimeter closer to it, an act that frequently ends up leaving frightening bumps on the foreheads of Ivan and Boris.

Clara and I are having a wonderful time, we're thrilled now that the brothers’ strength, energy, and daring—so often opposed to us—are on our side, almost at our service. It's encouraging us, spurring on the daring that's in us, a fragile bud that has never blossomed. But now everything is possible, and Clara and I are imagining new acts, more and more reckless, because Galina and Olga can levitate, walk on burning
coals, or do a tightrope act on the balcony railing, they can positively fly Then the great moment will arrive and Boris and Ivan will throw wickedly pointed daggers at the sisters backed against the tapestry in the living room with its hundred Moorish domes, and Galina and Olga will stand there—imperturbable, without a tremor, without the slightest movement of their lips or eyebrows, putting themselves into their brothers’ hands with the natural faith that the strong have in the strong.

Mama, who is a Lady of Charity for the Catholic Mission, takes me with her to see an Italian family who live in Nanterre, in the shantytown. We walk along unpaved alleys and one of my shoes gets stuck in the mud, and when I try to pull it free my foot comes out of the shoe and I balance for a second on one leg but then fall over and there I am with my kneesock in the muck halfway up my calf. My mother gets mad. Moving brusquely and grumbling the whole time, she hangs the shopping bag full of food on a fence post, pulls the shoe loose, takes off my sock, turns it inside out, puts it in her overcoat pocket, and puts the shoe back on my bare foot. “There,” she says, “let's go,” and she doesn't say anything until we reach a shack with a sheet-metal roof.

“It's here,” she says, and knocks on the door, which isn't much bigger than the front of a cupboard. A girl a little smaller than me opens the door. She has on a red wool dress that I recognize—it's mine, though by now it's too short even for my sister. Six or seven other children are swarming in the room. From the back there comes a voice from a bed. The bed is pushed against a wall covered with cardboard. “Come in, Signora. Please sit down. Excuse me. I don't feel very well today.”

My mother puts the shopping bag in a corner and goes to the bed, but I don't dare follow her. I stay in the middle of the room with all those children milling around. They laugh, chase one another, joke in an exaggerated way without saying a word to me, but they keep looking at me sideways as if to see if I'm enjoying the show. I, on the other hand, want to hear what my mother and the woman in the bed are saying to each other, and I prick up my ears across the hubbub. I manage to make out my mother saying, “precautions,” though I don't really know what it means. The lady says, “My husband doesn't … “

Then my mother calls me over to introduce me to the lady, who holds out a hand that is callused but weak, so so weak, and even her smile
has no strength, and suddenly I feel a pity I've never felt for a human being, I've felt it only in the countryside for a sick dog or a swallow with a broken wing.

After a while we leave. By now it's dark. I feel the cold mud on my ankle, but I don't say anything. Instead I ask my mother what “precautions” means.

“It means something one does to avoid something happening that's dangerous or unpleasant.”

I press a little. “And that lady has made a precaution?”

“No. That lady has not taken precautions,” she says, correcting me. She's in a bad mood, so I let it drop.

The next day we have a religion lesson. A priest, Father Tonioli, a recent addition to my school, reads us the Gospel. He thunders from the lectern: “‘Verily, verily I say unto you: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.’ “

I'm tremendously impressed, and day after day I hear in my head that sentence of Jesus, and I see the lady in the bed. At home we never talk about religion or anything along those lines, so I go to the priest. But I can't put
together a proper question, I can only tell him about the lady, and then I repeat the sentence about the camel. The priest has a straightforward answer: he explains to me briefly and understandably that the world is, alas, divided into rich and poor and that Jesus definitely prefers the poor.

At home I ask my father if we're rich or poor. “We're poorer than some people and richer than others,” he replies, leaving me straddling that troublesome dividing line. At any rate, I grasp that we're richer than a great many people, and the next day I go back to Father Tonioli with the question “How can Jesus love me if I'm richer than so many other people?” Father Tonioli explains to me that Jesus loves everyone but that he will love me even more if I love the poor, if I will give up my own gratification and defend them and help them, day after day, without boasting about it.

From then on I always ask my mother to let me go with her to visit the family in the shan-tytown. I begin a sort of friendship with the girl who wears my red dress. Some months later another little brother is born, and although she's the one who usually gives him his bottle, she sometimes lets me do it.

I go to Mass every Sunday, by myself, since
my parents apparently aren't interested, nor are my brothers. Sometimes Clara comes with me, but she does it only to be with me. At church, after the Our Father, as the Mass is getting near the end, I look up at the vaulted ceiling, where a multitude of saints flies around among fluffy white clouds like meringues. A wave of happiness and gratitude comes over me at the thought of the meringues with whipped cream that are waiting for me at home at the end of Sunday dinner. But then I'm suddenly alarmed: with that sort of selfish joy I won't set foot in the Kingdom of God. I sadly resolve to save my meringues for my friend in the shantytown.

One day my father comes home with a basket full of oysters, smoked salmon, and a jar of caviar. I don't know why, but he's in a wonderfully contented mood. He says, “Tonight we're celebrating.”

“Why?” I ask him.

“Because we're a nice family, because we're all well. Because Paris is a marvelous city.”

For some time now my father's indifference to the poor, the love of Jesus, and the Kingdom of God has been offending me. So I confront him, but in a roundabout way.

“You know, I'm lucky, because I don't like
oysters or salmon or caviar, or any of those expensive things.”

“Ah, is that right?”

“Yes. And the money that I don't spend buying them I'll give to the poor people.”

“That's nice that you're concerned with the poor,” he says, but he's distracted, intent as he is on opening an oyster with a knife, and I can't bear it, his selfish greedy happiness is grating on my nerves.

So I come up to him and with my mouth close to his ear, pronouncing each word clearly, I say, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” The knife slips in his hand, and he nearly cuts himself. He's furious. He stares at me with a terrifying look, and then he yells, “Get out of here! Christ Almighty—get out of here, you pious little prig!”

And I burst into tears and go shut myself in my room.