Authors: Nino Ricci
Gelsomina led me to the back of the building toward a room whose walls rose up only part way to the ceiling, its roof forming a loft. An old calendar, 1957, was tacked outside the door, yellowed with its four years’ lingering, a few dates circled in red and cryptic messages written beneath in a foreign hand. Inside the room, a small mullioned window looked out from a dimness that smelt of mould and something else, a faint animal scent like the smell of a stable. A massive wood desk, its surface blotched and pitted, filled most of the space; but on the floor against the inside wall, spread out as far as the foot of the door, was a narrow stretch of straw, a blanket heaped at one end of it. A rawboned cat raised its head from the blanket’s folds as we came in, yellow eyes shining; it stared for an instant, stiffly alert, then sprang up suddenly and disappeared through the doorway into the boiler room’s shadows.
“See,” Gelsomina whispered, jutting her chin toward the straw as if it were the final proof of some argument she’d been making. “That’s why he isn’t coming inside any more.”
I made out now the hollows and contours there – they followed the shape of a human body like a mould, as if the body still lay there, invisible, silently impressing its weight into the straw.
There was an oily bag on the desk. Gelsomina found cheese inside, a half loaf of stale bread, then a half jug of wine on the floor between the desk and the wall.
“I told you,” she said, though to me it seemed that whatever mystery it was we were solving only loomed larger now.
She had begun to try the drawers of the desk. The three on one side were jammed or locked, but the top one on the other opened easily. Inside was a handful of shotgun cartridges, and then, at the back, a pile of old photographs. Gelsomina began to leaf through them.
“God, look how big he was then,” she said. “He looks like an ox in those clothes.”
“You shouldn’t look in there,” I whispered. “We should go.”
But I’d edged closer to her to see the photograph she held – it showed a group of soldiers scattered pell-mell across a hillside as if caught in mid-action. But they were playing a game: one in the forefront had his hand drawn like a pistol while another a few feet away was pretending to die as in a child’s game, his knees buckling and his hands clutched over his heart.
“That was before your father was married,” Gelsomina said. But it took me an instant to realize that he was the man in the centre of the picture, the one pretending to die – it was a kind of shock to think of him like that, playing like a schoolboy, to see the smile urging itself like a ghostly afterthought just beneath his look of mock pain.
That night my father returned from work well before the end of his shift. We heard his truck door slam, his footsteps outside our window; then in the morning there was no lunchbox on the back steps, and no sign of my father in the greenhouses or the fields. Gelsomina went out to the porch once or twice to stare toward the boiler room, then finally went out to the garage to
my father’s truck. She came back with his lunchbox – inside it his sandwiches sat still intact in their folds of wax paper.
The sandwiches seemed an accusation, a final evidence that the fragile normalcy of our household had been shattered. All day we were silent as if awaiting some threat to overtake us, whatever doom it was that had been stalking us since we’d first come to the house. The spring sounds through the window screens, the birds, the rustle of leaves, seemed magnified, unnaturally loud; way off in the distance some neighbour’s tractor churned steadily on, a small quiet hum in the afternoon stillness.
There wasn’t much food left in the house. Ordinarily my father bought groceries once a week, supplemented by the vegetables and preserves Gelsomina’s mother gave us on Sundays; but it had been a long time now since we’d got any new supplies. Gelsomina began to ration out what was left as if preparing for some lengthy dearth – for supper that night we had only an egg apiece and fried onions. Then afterwards she discovered we’d run out of the red tokens she put out every night for the milkman. After rummaging a dozen times through the kitchen drawers she turned finally to where I sat watching her from the kitchen table.
“You’ll have to go get some money from your father,” she said.
But I pretended not to have heard.
“Are you listening to me?” She’d come to stand over me. “You’ll have to go, there’s no other way.”
I didn’t dare look up at her.
“I don’t know where he is,” I said finally.
“Don’t be an idiot, he’s in the boiler room, he’s been there all day.”
“The light wasn’t on when I looked before.”
I caught a flicker of movement and flinched, thinking she was about to strike me; but at the last instant she seemed to check herself.
“Go on,” she said, more gently, leaning closer, “it’ll only take a minute. If you go I’ll give you five cents from the change the milkman gives me.”
But I hunched away from her, inching toward the edge of my chair.
“It’s your fault he’s angry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have looked in his desk.”
“
Ma ’stu stronz
’ –”
She’d raised her hand against me in earnest now, but before she could strike I slipped from my chair and ran toward the bathroom.
“
Scimunit’!
” she shouted, coming after me. I slammed the door against her, fumbling in the dark for the key and turning it hard. Gelsomina began to pound against the door’s thin panels.
“Open the door or I’ll break it!”
And afraid that she would I leaned my back into it, could feel the weight of her fists reverberating down my spine.
“Do you want the baby to die, is that what you want? You’re just a mama’s boy, that’s all you are. But your mother’s dead, don’t you know that? She’s dead!”
The baby, asleep before, had begun to cry. I heard Gelsomina move away from the bathroom door, heard the back door slam, then her footsteps on the driveway beneath the bathroom window. Still in darkness I climbed onto the toilet seat and made out her silhouette moving down the driveway in the evening gloom. At the boiler-room door she stood blankly for a moment as if waiting for someone to answer a knock, then moved toward a high window nearby, gripped her fingers on the sill,
raised herself up to peer inside. But in the end she turned away and started back up the drive. I ducked.
“Don’t think I can’t see you there, idiot.”
I heard her footsteps in the house, kitchen sounds; then finally the baby’s crying died down. When the silence had stretched on for several minutes I reached into the cupboard at the end of the tub where we put our dirty laundry and pulled the laundry onto the floor in a heap, spreading it along the edge of the tub to make a bed and then stretching out there to sleep. For a few minutes I seemed to float in the room’s comforting darkness as in some tiny windowless vessel, invulnerable, lost to the world; but then Gelsomina was at the door.
“Vittorio, you can come out now.”
But I lay perfectly still, thought that if I stayed quiet enough, inconspicuous enough, she would go away.
“Don’t be a fool, you can’t stay there all night. I’m not going to hit you.”
Silence, then a sound of metal against metal. I remembered suddenly that all the keys in the house were the same, Gelsomina forcing out the one on my side now with one of the others. The bolt clicked back and the door swung open, Gelsomina haloed an instant against the kitchen’s light like an apparition.
“Look at you!” she said, laughing. “Like a cat!” And she bent to take me up from my bed, hugging me to her with such force that I burst into tears.
“
Dai
, what’s the matter now, what kind of a little man are you?” But she was crying too.
“He’s angry because we looked at his pictures,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid, he’s angry because of your mother, it’s not our fault. Because she went with another man. You’re too small to understand.”
But in the morning there was no milk on the back steps, only my father’s lunchbox, which Gelsomina had set out as usual the night before, though when we opened it we found the old sandwiches from the previous day still untouched there. Not wanting to waste them Gelsomina had us eat them for breakfast, though by now the bread was stale and the meat had a metallic aftertaste. Afterwards Gelsomina said we shouldn’t have eaten any meat at all because it was Friday. But it didn’t seem like Friday or any day to me, every day the same, with no way to tell one from any other.
Gelsomina made up the last of the milk for the baby’s feeding.
“I’m going to call my father,” she said.
But she seemed unable to get the number right, painstakingly dialling several times but then each time hanging up as soon as a voice came on at the other end.
“Damn him! Doesn’t he know we have to eat? God knows what he’s doing in there, probably picking fleas off the cats.”
Well before midday the baby began to cry. Only a few fingers of milk remained now from her first feeding, Gelsomina mixing what was left with a few cupfuls of boiled sugar water. The baby took to the cloudy liquid without complaint but Gelsomina sat grim-faced during the feeding, holding the baby with a stiff carefulness as if she had become something dangerous.
Gelsomina gathered together what food we had left from the cellar and cupboards. There was sauce but no pasta; for lunch Gelsomina made up a thin soup from it that we dipped stale pieces of bread into. Afterwards Gelsomina retreated into the bathroom to do laundry, her back and shoulders working with a restrained violence as she scrubbed. I followed behind her to hand her clothespins when she went outside to hang it, the clothes billowing on the lines like a strange portrait, each of us
represented in odd fragments. On a back line, behind the cover of sheets, Gelsomina hung a long row of newly white diapers, perfect squares of cloth that slanted and warped in the wind like gliding birds.
For the rest of the afternoon Gelsomina kept the baby quiet with feedings of sugar water, but toward evening she began to grow restive. The liquid seemed to pass straight through her: by nightfall she had wet her diapers several times, and Gelsomina had begun to replace them with ones still damp from the wash. With the constant wet the baby’s thighs grew chafed and red, as evening wore on her sporadic crying merging into an almost constant wail. Gelsomina left her crying in the bedroom while we ate what remained in the house of the bread and meat normally used for my father’s sandwiches; but afterwards the baby wouldn’t take to its bottle at all.
“Stop it, for the love of Christ!” But the baby only cried louder. One of her fists shot out against the bottle and knocked it from Gelsomina’s hand onto the bed.
“Oh!
Basta!
”
She cracked a hand hard against the baby’s cheek.
In an instant the baby’s wails had grown so intense they were almost soundless, her chest heaving so wildly it seemed she had emptied her lungs with her cries and was unable now to refill them.
“
Addíu
, what have I done,” Gelsomina said, and she had begun to cry as well. She clutched the baby to her and sobbed into her shoulder, her body seeming to melt suddenly, to lose all its straight-backed authority and brazenness. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps she couldn’t take care of us, that she didn’t always know the right thing to do.
“
E niend
’, it’s nothing,” she kept saying, like a chant, “
èniend’, poveretta
.
È niend’
.”
But when we were awakened the next morning by a call from Gelsomina’s father, Gelsomina made it seem as if nothing was wrong.
“Tsi’Mario’s not in the house,” she said. “I think he went out to the boiler room.”
Her father’s voice crackled briefly from the other end.
“He doesn’t go to the factory any more,” Gelsomina said, after a pause. Then her father’s voice again, louder; Gelsomina grew defensive.
“How should I know why? Maybe he has too much work to do on the farm. He’s always in the boiler room.”
Before long Tsi’Alfredo’s truck pulled up in the drive. He stopped first at the boiler room but emerged alone a few minutes later and drove around to the back door, coming into the house red-faced with anger.
“Where is he?”
“Isn’t he in the boiler room?” Gelsomina said.
Tsi’Alfredo struck her hard against the back of her head.
“
Stronza!
Couldn’t you see that his truck is gone?”
Tsi’Alfredo made us get into his truck. The baby had been crying all morning, Tsi’Alfredo grimacing in irritation now as he pulled the truck onto the road.
“Can’t you keep that thing quiet?”
Tsi’Alfredo lived on the town line just beneath the Ridge, a trip of several miles along backroads and highway before the sudden slope his own road dipped into, from the top of it the lake briefly visible in the distance like a mirage. His house, narrow and weathered and tall, was covered in the same false brick as
our boiler room; but his own boiler room was built in concrete, and his greenhouses in frames of metal. Gelsomina had taken me inside them once, the plants there filling the space like a fairy-tale forest with their prickled cucumbers and yellowing flowers, the air alive with the hum of bees and the smell of earth.
Tsia Maria was waiting for us at the back door. I noticed that the fields around the greenhouses had been planted since the last time I had been there, pencil-thin rows of green stretching away toward a distant line of trees.
“And Mario?” Tsia Maria said.
“Ah,
sì
, and Mario. That idiot, your daughter –”
Tsi’Alfredo’s son Gino had come out beside his mother, towering over her in his oversize adolescent mannishness, his face still puffy from sleep and his hair falling in unruly tufts across his forehead. Tsi’Alfredo made him get in the truck when Gelsomina and I were out, then drove off back toward the highway.
Tsia Maria had taken the baby from Gelsomina.
“Why is she crying? Didn’t you feed her?”
We had gone into the kitchen, drabber than the one in my father’s house, the tiles worn away in spots to the wood beneath and the walls yellowed with grime. There was a washtub now in one corner with clothes soaking in it and a pot of sauce cooking on the stove, its smell filling the room.