Cabaret (3 page)

“You,” I stuttered, shielding myself with the tattered scraps of the pants still in my hand. “What are you doing here?” What could he be doing there?

Before he could answer, there came the sound of splintering wood.The blade of an ax came up through the floor, chopping the space between us, severing the moment, and stopping the Detective dead in his tracks.

“Whore!” spluttered the rage-filled tones of Signor Tontini. “Her husband is disappeared, and the same night, the very same night, she gets in a replacement. Can you believe it? I ask you. What a whore. What a strumpet…” There followed more blows of the ax and a chasm opened up in the floor, revealing more of Signor Tontini glowering beneath.

I witnessed the Detective’s ardor dwindling. Casting me a glance that contained the slow smoldering heat of his desire, his desperation, his frustration, and his suppressed fury at the interruption, he shielded with his cupped hands the once purple thing that had dulled to a limp pink, and ventured toward the hole that had opened up between our feet.

“Signor,” he addressed Signor Tontini, in a strangulated voice that contained every drop of his pain, “Paulo Balbini of the Roma police department. I have no alternative but to arrest you for possession of an offensive weapon with intent to cause injury. I warn you not to resist arrest. I will be with you shortly.”

The spasm of rage that subsequently erupted from Signor Tontini was enough to convince me that his spleen could not hold out much longer. I knew he would be dead on arrival at the police station.

I was equally convinced the Detective couldn’t wear his own pants.They were in ribbons. Once I had secured my robe around my flesh, which was roasting with embarrassment, I rummaged in the closet and produced one of Alberto’s garish costumes. It was a violent blue sateen with red velvet trim and had been made to measure by the tailor Rinaldi near the Piazza Borghese.

The Detective climbed into the pants willingly enough, but it quickly became apparent that he and Alberto were wildly dissimilar in stature. Still, they had to do: he was not in a position to be particular. Teamed with his own jacket, which was still relatively undamaged, he looked completely ridiculous.

He stepped carefully across the minefield my floor had become, holding the pants up around his middle like a clown.

At the front door he turned and kissed me shamelessly.

“I will be back as soon as I can, my darling,” he murmured passionately, his stubble grazing my cheek, the smell of his hormones deep and indecent. “Wait for me. I will not disappoint you.”

Moments later, through the hole in the floor, I saw Signor Tontini being led away in handcuffs as meekly as a lamb. Perhaps he was pleased someone was finally taking him seriously.

After they had gone, I shunted the bed over the hole. Unfortunately the ax had chopped off the leg that had gone through the floor, but a pile of books restored the balance.

The valise containing Malco, the dummy, had been dented in the skirmish, and I could hear him muttering, “Whore.

Strumpet.Whore. Strumpet.” I gave him a kick to silence him, and in doing so bruised my bare foot. Soon, I knew, I would send him to the junk shop in the Largo Febo. But before that time could come, he would already have disappeared.

I gathered up the scraps of Detective Balbini’s clothing.

They were suffused with his erotic odor. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I shut them up in the bathroom. I drank a long glass of cool water and then lay down, but of course I couldn’t rest. I was a balloon about to burst. Inside I felt a throbbing, a dampness, and that familiar itchiness that had no respite. It was my destiny to suffer always from acute sexual frustration. If only I had married a real man, like the Detective, I believe my life would have been different. But I had married Alberto, and had only myself to blame.

I
t wasn’t difficult to identify exactly when everything had gone wrong. It was June 5, 1965, the worst day of my life, past and future.

I still recall every minuscule detail. It was my sixteenth birthday, and overnight a rash of scarlet spots had picked its way over my face. These pimples persisted until September 17, 1970, a Thursday, by which time I had grown so used to them that I scarcely recognized myself without them.

As a special treat, for breakfast, we had little cakes from the
Pasticceria Sottosanti,
and I opened my presents. Mamma had long since promised that for Christmas I would be given the parrot I had craved since I was seven and, in preparation, for my birthday gave me a book entitled
The Care of Tropical
Birds
. She also gave me a yellow bathing costume, a tiny brooch in the shape of a butterfly, a journal in which to record the interesting details of my life, and a bottle of pink nail polish. Fiamma, presciently, but tactlessly, gave me a tube of boil ointment, which I slathered on, but it didn’t work. From Aunt Ninfa and Uncle Birillo there was a hideous crocheted cardi-gan with matching socks, and from Maria Assunta downstairs, a box of violet-flavored candies.

We were going to spend the day at the beach, and I started preparing the picnic. There were all my favorite things: hot bread, a roast chicken, a whole mozzarella cheese, a honeycomb, wild strawberries, a bottle of cherryade (the sort that tastes like medicine), and a massive bar of chocolate, which I nibbled while I worked (in fact, I had already eaten half of it, but it was my birthday, after all).

I had just finished packing the basket when there came from the street the relentless honking of a horn, like the blast from a ship. It was Fiamma driving Uncle Birillo’s new car. It was American, an Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible, huge and red. He had won it in a contest, and his smiling picture had appeared in the newspapers. In a reckless moment he had agreed to let Fiamma borrow it when she passed her driving test, and now that she had, he could only watch fearfully as she surged down the slope of his garage, and hurtled along the street.

Now Mamma was finally ready. She was so glamorous.

Something I sadly didn’t inherit. In fact, I believe I was born a frumpy dresser. Yes, I never saw Mamma without her false eyelashes on, and her face and fingernails perfectly painted, even when she was washing the dishes, except, of course, for that last time in the hospital, when she lay dying: broken and disfigured. This morning she was wearing a green dress with white polka dots, and a black pillbox hat with a veil that just covered her eyes. Long gloves, high-heeled shoes, and a trail-ing cloud of Donna Misteriosa completed the outfit.

We clattered down the stairs to find a crowd gathered around the car. Small boys sucking lollipops were smearing the paintwork with their sticky fingers. A peddler was trying to interest Fiamma in the contents of his tray: jumping beans, false noses, hair restorer, colored chalks, and sticks of licorice. Passersby were leaning in, probing the red leather upholstery and twiddling the dials on the dashboard.

When Mamma appeared, two young men rushed forward to get her autograph, for she was quite a celebrity in our neighborhood. Signor Frangiosa, who lived opposite, and who had had a crush on her for years, asked if he could take her photograph. Mamma posed on the hood for several shots, one of which was later to appear on the front of
II Messaggero
along with a report containing all the gruesome details. Whoever could have predicted that the picture capturing Mamma on that gay and glorious morning was destined for such use?

So, we packed the picnic basket in the trunk, which was almost as big as our apartment; then I climbed into the back-seat, and Mamma got in beside Fiamma, who thrust her foot down hard on the gas pedal. The mighty engine let out a roar like a rocket, and the Cutlass leapt forward, scattering the schoolboys, and enveloping the crowd in a choking cloud of blue smoke.

“Fiamma, are you sure you can manage to drive something so large?” Mamma asked as she was thrown back in her seat.

“Of course,” Fiamma answered scornfully, but it took a while for her to get the hang of it, and the vast vehicle bit and bucked as she danced on the foot pedals and poked at the controls, which were new to her.

Yet soon enough we had left the city behind and were coasting along smoothly with the sun beaming on our faces and the breeze ruffling our hair. Mamma started to sing “
Io So
Perchè
,” and I joined in. She had such a beautiful voice. She was still singing when the accident happened, when her song turned into the scream that I still hear sometimes in the dead of the night.

The white road shimmered in the heat. Fiamma drove faster and faster. Houses, trees, oncoming traffic, pedestrians, dogs, and chickens, began to flash past and blur together. The dust rose up behind us.The wind whipped wildly by. Mamma held on to her hat.

At the bottom of the hill, still some way ahead of us, the figure of a little old man ran out onto the highway. When he became aware of the mighty Cutlass bearing down on him at an impossible speed, he froze to the spot, and began to scream.

The bubble Fiamma had blown into a big balloon burst, covering her face with exploded gum and obscuring her eyes.

Her foot jabbed blindly for the foot brake but couldn’t find it.

Mamma was screaming. I was screaming. Fiamma was screaming. Seconds from certain death, the old man was screaming.

By the roadside his middle-aged daughter, entrusted with his care, and whose back had been turned for no more than a second, was screaming too.

Time seemed to have stopped. There was just speed, and screaming. Nothing else.

At last, finally, but too late, Fiamma reached the brake. It was a heroic act. She put every last drop of her force and strength into stamping on it. Her whole body followed her foot into the well where the pedals were. She managed to bring the great hulking hungry beast to a halt a whisper short of the old man.

And, at the precise moment that the car stopped, Mamma took flight. I watched her soar up high into the air. Her shoes fell from her feet and flew away. Her hat, snatched up by a current of air, was carried out to sea and never seen again.The skirt of the green dress flared like a parachute, but it couldn’t save her. Her hair escaped from its pins and streamed out behind her. I heard the tiny tinny sound of the pins falling onto the road. And Mamma was still screaming. Screaming.

Screaming. Screaming. All the time I was watching in slow motion. I had been damaged, I felt vaguely, but I had been wearing the seat belt.

Mamma reached the height of her arc, and inevitably began to descend toward the earth. There was a slightly different note now in her scream. The force of gravity, perhaps, pulling it down a semitone. Her eyes were open wide, staring.

They must have seen the ground rushing up to meet her.Trail-ing the washing she had ripped from a clothesline in passing, she was eventually brought to a halt by an enormous palm tree, into which she crashed, and into the rough hairy trunk of which her fine white front teeth sank.

The old man stopped screaming then. He had survived.

But he lay down in the road in front of the car and died anyway, needlessly. His daughter collapsed and began frothing at the mouth. The car engine also gave up and died. Then there was a small but perfectly formed explosion, and licks of flame began to curl up and melt the paintwork.

Fiamma climbed out. She was unscathed, apart from a bloody mark on her forehead above the bridge of her nose. It was then that I closed my eyes and everything went dark.

S
trangely Mamma didn’t die instantly, although it would probably have been better for all of us if she had died there and then, in that fragrant garden, rather than in the hospital, where there was no beauty, no fragrance, no flowers, and no sunlight. Only sterile shades of gray, antiseptic smells, half-light, and silence. For a few hours, but no longer, she lingered on only to speak to us, to warn us perhaps, before she left us, entrusted to the care of her brother, Birillo, and his enormous wife, Ninfa.

I woke up when I felt someone slapping my cheeks. It was Fiamma. She was wearing the same pink T-shirt and shorts that she had been wearing when the accident happened, an eternity ago. She looked incongruous on the ward, like a day on a beach had somehow crept in among the serious business then of death and disease and suffering. The mark on her forehead burned like a brand, and as she loomed in at me, I noticed she still had traces of the gum clogging her eyebrows.

“Freda, Mamma’s calling for you. Come on.” She uncovered me and looked at my battered body, appraising how she was going to move me. I couldn’t feel anything, but my right leg had been broken and was in plaster from the thigh down to the ankle. My neck had suffered trauma from the whiplash and was encased in a brace. My head, which had been beaten repeatedly between the seats, was wrapped in bandages. My skull had been flattened slightly, but thankfully my brain was undamaged, although I was to suffer double vision periodically throughout my life.

“Come on, get up,” said Fiamma without much patience, without any, in fact, and she proceeded to haul me into the wheelchair she had stolen from the adjoining ward of geri-atrics. She ignored my howls of pain and bumped me up and down steps and along corridors until we arrived at the room where Mamma was waiting.

As we hurtled through the door (Fiamma pushed wheelchairs much as she drove, fearlessly and fast), we surprised an elderly priest who had been administering the last rites. He blessed us all with signs of the cross, and then, having given himself a thorough scratching, he limped away.

I couldn’t believe the figure in the bed was my mamma.

She was swathed in bandages like the Invisible Man. There were just slits for her mouth, nostrils, and eyes. Through the slits, she looked at me with love mixed with pain, sadness, pity, and resignation.

“My girls,” she whispered; her voice was as broken as her body.

“You must be brave, and look after one another.” She extended a hand to each of us, and they too were completely wrapped in bandages.