Daughters, p.9
Daughters, page 9
‘God, what a lonely spot,’ she said. To me it seemed both aloof and needy, like someone who’d been on their own for too long.
I noticed how hard I was finding it to talk in this town, how banal my words seemed as soon as I said them out loud. There was a finality about this place that, despite my having known about it for so long, had thrown me off balance.
Dumb and famished, we sat opposite each other, studying the pictures above our heads of half-naked women and erupting volcanoes. Martha brushed her hand across the checked tablecloth, one of her oldest nervous habits, an attempt to smooth out her inner turmoil.
‘I hope she fries Kurt a steak,’ she said. ‘He likes steak.’
I placed my hand on hers and we brushed across the rough fabric together.
Sergio brought us pizza capriccioso, and it seemed right then like the best thing we’d ever tasted. ‘Mmm,’ Martha said quietly after her first bite. It’s always the same when you’re abroad, especially in the south, where everything has the potential to be a revelation, where you lose all self-restraint, dragging home memories that start to go off during the journey back. Martha examined the label on the wine bottle.
‘It’s from here,’ she said. ‘Cesanese.’
‘Never heard of it,’ I replied. ‘Probably too vile to export and they have to drink it all themselves.’
She responded that this was another of my gross exaggerations and then asked if I’d rather be alone.
‘In general, you mean?’
‘No. In general, you are alone, Betty. I mean here, now?’
I didn’t know.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it might be nice to have some time to myself tomorrow. Just a few hours. This stuff, it’s between …’
‘Between you and him. I get it.’
‘More between me and me, I suspect.’
Talking to someone who left you long ago is something you do by yourself. No matter whether the other person died or dumped you, you end up talking to yourself. The one left behind always wants to talk, but unfortunately, the feeling usually isn’t mutual.
In the bushes outside the window, glow-worms twinkled like laser pointers.
‘Does anyone live here any more?’ Martha asked.
‘Sergio does,’ I said.
‘I mean from his family. Does he still have relatives here?’
‘He never talked about them, hardly ever mentioned the town. I just remember him talking about his dead mother. She used to puff up the curtains in our living room at night. But only when he’d nodded off on the sofa, and only when no one else was around. All the windows were closed, he used to say, it can’t have been the wind. I saw her, he’d tell us in the morning. Superstitious Catholic nonsense, I realise now. Probably just air rising from the radiator. And he was probably drunk. That’s why he would have been sleeping on the sofa in the first place.’
‘There must be someone still here,’ Martha insisted.
‘Someone had him buried here. But I’m not sure I want to meet whoever it was. Not sure I want to find out anything I didn’t know before.’
‘It might be good to find out more about him.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
I suddenly felt the need to defend my image of him. Me at the age of nine standing in the kitchen, pressing my head against his belly; us pushing dough through the pasta machine and then drying the spaghetti on washing lines we’d strung from wall to wall. I’d allowed nothing and no one to sully these memories, and now, for the first time in my life, I was afraid someone might tarnish my image of him, perhaps even demolish it entirely.
‘This isn’t healthy, Betty,’ she said.
‘Don’t start with your “healthy” bollocks. I don’t want to be healthy. I hate healthy. Healthy, sorted, neurosis-free. I’m not interested.’
‘You sound like an eighteen-year-old. You’re not going to die young now, Betty, you’re forty. It’s verging on pathetic at this stage. I mean, the man walked out on you and your mother and never bothered getting in touch again.’
‘Not true,’ I said. ‘He left my mother, so she wouldn’t let him contact her. And out of respect for her, he didn’t get in touch with me either.’
Martha looked out at the glow-worms, at their glittering spectacle.
‘Weird,’ she said. ‘They’re much too early. Their timing’s all off. By two months at least.’
It was demented, the performance going on out in the bushes: dozens of frantically blinking little lights.
‘They’re mating,’ Martha explained. She knew I knew nothing about nature. ‘They’re actually beetles, really ugly things. They look hideous in daylight, but at night, they sparkle.’
‘Just like me.’ I stood up to go out for a smoke. I wanted to get a closer look at my newly found kindred spirits.
When I opened the door, they swarmed towards me and then on towards the light. They seemed disoriented as they alighted on Martha’s forearm. They’d obviously gone mad. Any creature that stops being afraid of human beings has clearly lost its mind.
Martha’s phone lit up as a message arrived, and one of the insects lunged at the flashing display. It was one of the sorriest sights I’d ever seen: a glow-worm trying to fuck an iPhone.
The next morning I stood there, alone.
There were hundreds, thousands of graves. Forty or fifty by each wall. Then there were the family plots: Famiglia Tranquilli, Rocchi, Santese.
In front of every grave, a battery-operated candle and fresh flowers. So many flowers. So many photos, stuck above the names in oval frames. More graves lined up on the ground. I was looking for your name but was afraid of seeing your photo. It had been more than twenty-five years since we’d last seen each other, and there hadn’t been a single photo since, not one letter, one phone call.
I passed freshly dug – or exhumed – graves. In nearly every plot lay a husband and wife. Hardly anyone lay alone. Had you been alone? Was someone with you when you died, would someone follow you? Could I be the one who followed you? I’d like to be.
There were too many graves, I could see no end to them. Two-storey above-ground graves that looked like houses, rolling aluminium ladders and empty cans of cleaner in front of them. Little passages branched off every couple of metres, dead ends blocked by metal grilles.
I searched and searched, had to sit down for a while, couldn’t make out the names any more; the dead were blurring before my eyes. Eventually I came to a little chapel with four narrow wooden benches inside. The plaster was peeling off and though there was no way the sun ever shone in here, the pictures of Jesus had faded. Three yellow plastic watering cans and an aluminium chair.
I couldn’t find you.
A couple of old women were arguing somewhere, or perhaps just chatting. How would I know the difference? As I got closer, I realised that one of the women was our hotel landlady. She stared at me with surprise but no trace of friendliness, her unblinking eyes following me, piercing me. I continued walking as if there was a knife lodged between my shoulder blades.
Lizards darted across the paths, I saw marble, flowers, golden lettering, but I didn’t see you. After all this time, all this waiting, you had to be here somewhere.
I’d never even got word that you’d died, never got an invitation to your funeral. The only thing I got was the letter I’d sent you, which was returned to sender. It was the first I’d ever written you. By chance I’d eaten in a restaurant whose owner turned out to be an old friend of yours. It took a while for us to place each other. You and I had been regulars in his old place, where we’d never paid for anything.
He hadn’t seen you in a long time, he said. He didn’t explain why, just wrote your address on a napkin and told me to give you his regards. An address in a suburb of Hamburg. The napkin lay on my desk for weeks until I finally found the first tentative words. I wasn’t brave enough to simply visit you. The letter came back with a stamp: No longer at this address. There was no other trace of you until years later, when I learned that you’d died. My mother casually mentioned it after finding out from some old, near-forgotten acquaintances she’d run into at a party.
It took me a while to find your oldest friend, whose surname I remembered because you’d always called him by it. He told me where you were buried. Bellegra. He couldn’t tell me anything else, as you’d disappeared from his life long ago too. All I had was the name of this town and the hope that it would be enough, that I’d come here one day, when I was ready. I never expected it to take me ten years. I had no idea how tenacious grief can be. I didn’t know that it’s not always all-consuming anguish, that it comes in bouts, creeping in and settling beneath what we call skin. A skin that doesn’t get thicker with the years, just swells up slowly from inside.
I trudged past the gravestones, my strength already waning.
How I would have liked to carry your name. First I dreamt of adoption, later of marriage. Your name. And now here it was before my eyes, carved into stone.
Ernesto Carletti
6.11.1946 – 12.4.2007
Second-to-last row, third from the left. I turned away and looked into the valley. It was cold in the shade, where you lay. This plot would always be in the shade. The sun would never find its way here. Who builds something like this, a grave with no light? It wasn’t right. You were the sun, and I don’t care how mawkish that sounds. I was six, and you were a pot-bellied sun. There would never be another like you.
Now you were a name on a slab of marble. No picture like the others. Paths everywhere, fences everywhere, light only on the big graves. The sun was only for those who could afford it. What the hell was going on? What were you doing here?
When you moved in with us, I wasn’t a kid any more, I was a six-year-old girl, and I wanted you to like me as a girl. Later, I fell in love with men who resembled you, I fell in love with the memory of you. The sense of security you gave me never returned. I found it in no one else’s arms. Maybe it was for the best that you left before I grew up. What would have become of us otherwise? And yet I couldn’t help imagining: what might have become of us?
God knows how it took me until my forties to figure it out. Any half-decent therapist could have told me after the first session. They pull out every malady by the roots. You go along for two years and have it talked out of you until you’ve no roots left, until you’re not a vegetable any more, until you’re liberated and capable of intimacy. But instead, here I was standing by your grave, this meaningless root made of ash and stone.
I jumped over the graves, hurried down the hill and wandered the alleys of your childhood. The town you came from and were buried in had nothing to do with us. Your story wasn’t our story. I didn’t exist here, and that hurt. A love that no longer had any ties.
I saw you nowhere and everywhere. You walked towards me, watched me go past. I saw you in the faces of others, sometimes as a memory in the faces of old people but more often in the faces of children who could have been yours, who could be your grandchildren or nephews. You could have been in any one of these faces because I refused to accept the alternative, that you were gone completely. I saw you in all these shadows.
Did you have children after me, your own children? Did you walk down these alleys as a young man? Did you love someone before you came to us? I never asked you, I thought we had time. Back then, I didn’t know that people can vanish. You were there and that was all I needed. I didn’t want to know where you came from, and I definitely didn’t want to know where you were going.
You returned here as a corpse. One of the town’s lost sons. My lost father. What a fuck-up you must have been.
The dead outnumbered the living in this town, and butchers outnumbered hairdressers. Everyone was called ‘ragazzi’ here, bald eighty-year-old women were greeted with a ‘Ciao bella’ and wine was sold in plastic bottles for €1.50 a litre.
And the whole time, the song you used to sing was on repeat in my head. It was horrible. A godawful pop song. You used to sing the worst Italian pop while you were cooking. Why did you do it, all of it?
The village that had brought you forth looked like a painting. You came from a fucking painting, your birthplace was romance itself. Why would someone like you subject himself to German reality?
In the tobacconist’s, grandmothers rubbed out the joy, the very, very small piece of joy they had paid for with what remained of their pensions. They were squashed into the ten-square-metre shop, which sold postcards of Rome and just one of this town, the latter featuring a picture that must have been at least fifteen years old. They hunched over the tobacco in a line stretching from right inside the door to the far wall, bags of courgettes, bread and homemade salami on the floor beside them. Three-wheeled vans drove past stacked with fruit, their deals blasting from megaphones and reverberating through the alleys. From the windows, old women peered down at old men. No one here but old folk and little kids. The young people were in Rome, earning a living. At night you could hear them talking and laughing in the distance, their voices floating up from the bus station and Bar Belvedere. By day, it was a town in its final throes, decrepit people in dilapidated houses. A privy that had been torn down decades ago, the only thing left a rusty cistern hanging on the wall, like a weed growing out of a ruin. Steps going up and steps going down, yet more steps, a glimpse of sky, laundry and pictures of the Virgin Mary. Tiny red spiders scurrying across the paving stones. They looked like measles.
I could understand why you’d left here. There were green shutters on faded buildings here, and white plastic chairs in front of the church. Every colour was watered down, peeling off. There was nothing to do here but hang laundry up outside the windows. In these narrow alleys, the longing to spread your wings was likely to overpower you. It was ready to pounce when you turned the next corner, to dig its claws into you and breathe down your neck. You couldn’t breathe here. In these grey confines, it seemed possible to ossify from the inside.
Did you ever think about how things used to be? The way I did after you left? It was a merciless departure. I refused to get older, did you know that? I was twelve, and sometimes I think I haven’t got any older since then, just harder. I hardened suddenly, as suddenly as I stopped growing. You went, and I stood still, with all the strength I could muster. They say I’d always been a stubborn kid. I have no memories of being a kid. All my memories begin with you.
I stood in front of an estate agent’s window, which was sandwiched between a clothes shop called Mampieri and a delicatessen also called Mampieri. The words Da vendere were stuck to doors all over the town, the specs pasted onto windows that were brown with dirt. Behind them were empty, forgotten apartments where the elderly had stayed until they died, where unwanted furniture silently rotted, where animals found homes for the winter. The flats were going for as little as €20,000.
I’d never been rich, knew nothing about the property market, but even I could see this one had collapsed. A flat with a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room for €20,000 – that wasn’t cheap, it was being thrown away. I briefly considered disappearing here, hiding in this town in the mountains, in a dark, narrow alley with no natural light and a view of weather-beaten steps. The buildings were so close together it wouldn’t matter which direction my flat was facing. Everyone here had to go outside if they wanted a glimpse of the sun.
The town ended on the left: a hillside plunging into a motorway, then nothing. Just mountains. I heard Mass being said somewhere but I couldn’t see a church. No matter where I looked, the view ended with a wall. Everything was crumbling. Wild bushes grew out of windows, pushing their way past the few remaining slivers of glass. And satellites everywhere, the Middle Ages set to receive. Everything was called a ‘piazza’, even the courtyards where the dustbins were kept. The lower depths of the town surrounded me like an open grave.
Dark dots danced like shadows on the ceiling but otherwise the room was completely still. Lying there rigid in the bed, I knew something wasn’t right. Somewhere just after the Italian border, my medication had run out. I’d planned on being back home long ago. Now I was travelling without supplies, a depressive going cold turkey.
I’d been taking a pill every day for the previous two years, slowly increasing the dose until the doctor decided I was ‘perfectly calibrated’. I’d liked how he put it, I liked how he warned me several times that under no circumstances was I to abruptly stop the medication. I was to ‘taper it off ’, he’d said. The same should apply to relationships, I’d thought. People should taper each other off, gradually reducing their doses until they can do without each other entirely.
But now I was stuck in this forlorn corner of Italy without a single tablet. This wasn’t a tapering-off, it was a break-up via text message.
My mouth was full of nails, my saliva tasted metallic, my tongue was numb. Sadness between my teeth, ruining my appetite. It felt as if something inside me had ruptured and was seeping through every pore, leaching into my organs. Maybe it was all the losses I’d experienced. They were getting mixed up, and I could no longer tell where they started and I stopped.
‘Get dressed!’ Martha said. ‘There’s a party going on down in the town.’
She was sitting on the edge of my bed, shaking my arm. I’d no idea how long she’d been there. I’d no idea about anything: what day it was, what time, where I was or why. But I did recognise my friend Martha, who was in high spirits and giving off a strange smell.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re in Italy! There’s a party with wine and bacon and fireworks!’
‘They shouldn’t have,’ I said.
Martha had spent the whole day in Bar Belvedere trying to forget everything, to forget Kurt. Now an embodiment of pure, desperate joie de vivre, she wobbled dangerously at the edge of my bed as she tried to pull me upright.
