Listen to My Voice (13 page)

‘Love can’t be only a shadow,’ I replied.

‘Of course it can. It’s the shadow of partiality. Look, right now I’m glad to be walking with you along this beach, I like talking to you about a great many things, but is this love? No, it’s only the satisfaction of partial knowledge. In you, who claim to be my daughter, I love the reflection of my intelligence; I love what I recognise of myself in you. But if, for example, you had displayed a different genetic trait – maybe something you shared with some dull-witted aunt on your side of the family or mine – if you’d turned out to be a silly girl living for talk shows and the latest style in trousers, I would have shown you the door at once. I’d even have changed my telephone number so you couldn’t get in touch with me again. I’m not much interested in ownership – I much prefer recognition. I like the idea of detecting a sign, a trace, mysteriously passed on from generation to generation. And that’s the reason – my aversion to ownership – why I let you be free. Try to imagine what your life would have been like if you had known from the start that you were Professor Ancona’s daughter. You would have automatically conformed to pre-defined behavioural modules; for example, you might have felt duty-bound to be the first in your class. Or maybe you would have gone the other way and done your best to be as moronic as possible, putting nails through your eyelids and following every
sort
of repulsive fad like a sheep, just to drive me crazy with rage. But this way, you’re not a product of conditioning, you’ve grown up naturally, and you’ve become what you should be, not a greenhouse plant but a tree, standing majestically alone in the middle of a clearing, and all that’s thanks to me, because I hid myself from you, I withdrew. Don’t think it wasn’t a sacrifice on my part, as well. I had to renounce the innumerable little moments of delight granted only to fathers, but I didn’t want to clip your wings. Do you understand? I preferred to let your genetic inheritance manifest itself on its own, without distortions or conditioning, because in the end that’s our essence. For millennia, our DNA has rolled itself out, carrying in its strands the secret of how long our bodies can survive. You live, you survive, you die; everything’s inscribed there, in that speck of matter.’

The sun was hot that day. We sat on a rowboat that had been hauled up on to the beach and took off our jackets. My father lit a cigarette. My eyes fell on a dead cormorant not far from us; some raptor must have eaten its head, and the flies swarmed around its gaping neck. Had I moved it, I’m sure I’d have found the maggots already at their work.

He’d never asked me anything about my mother, neither who she was – which one out of so many – nor what had become of her. This seemed strange to me.

‘My mother’s dead,’ I said, without looking him in the face.

‘Ah, yes?’

‘She died a long time ago. I was four.’

‘This, too, is a species of good fortune. How did she die?’

‘In a car accident. I don’t know much about it. I think everything had become too much for her, and somehow . . .’

The smoke from his cigarette rose in symmetrical rings and drifted in front of his face. He breathed a deep sigh. ‘Right, that’s how it goes,’ he said. ‘The gene for guilelessness often carries a certain flaw.’

‘What flaw?’

‘A tendency toward self-destruction.’

One day, after our walk, he took me to lunch in the old town. He was probably a regular customer at the restaurant we went to, because the elderly waiter who led us to our table called him ‘Professor’.

As we sat down, he whispered ‘They’re going to think you’re my latest conquest.’

I wanted to say, ‘Since when do you care about what other people think?’ But I kept my mouth shut.

On the wall behind him, a drunk in an oil painting gave me the eye. There was an empty bottle on his table,
his
cap sat on his head at a jaunty angle, and two tears were running down his cheeks. In the painting beside it, an enormous orange sun shone down on two horses standing muzzle to muzzle and hoof to hoof, whether for rivalry or love was not clear. After all, my father would have said, they’re the same thing.

‘You should order the
brodetto con la polenta
,’ he suggested.

‘No, I’d rather have the fried calamari.’

While we waited, they brought us some antipasti and a bottle of white wine. It was the first time I’d ever seen him eat. I figured he’d treat his food, like everything else, with sovereign detachment; to my great surprise, however, he devoured everything greedily, with lowered head and swift fingers, as though he’d been fasting for a while.

Until then, he’d never asked me to tell him anything about myself and my life. Seeing him bent over his plate, I felt a well-grounded suspicion that it would have made no difference if I had been a mannequin or a cardboard cutout; things would have been exactly the same. But I wanted to know some things about him, and so, during our long wait for the main course, I interrogated him on the subject of his family.

His mother came from the island of Rhodes, and his father, Bruno Ancona, was a rug dealer. Actually, he’d
graduated
from the university with a degree in Business Economics, but then he’d inherited the rug business from his father-in-law. Faced with the choice between working for an insurance company and travelling all over the East, looking for the best pieces, he opted for the rugs. They lived in Venice, where my father was born in 1932.

Shortly before the Racial Laws were enacted in 1938, Bruno Ancona and his family, along with a chest full of rugs, boarded a ship bound for Brazil. Bruno’s wife, Massimo’s mother, had opposed this move with all her might; the meetings of her canasta club were regular and well-attended, all the ladies were still playing, and there was no reason for alarm.

They were Italians. Italians like everyone else.

Throughout the entire crossing, Bruno had to put up with his wife’s complaining. ‘You’ve got too much imagination,’ she kept telling him. ‘Your imagination’s dragging us down to ruin.’

Her torment continued uninterrupted even after they reached São Paolo. Everything was too much for her; the city was too damp, too hot, too dirty, too poor, too full of blacks, and what was worse, there was no one to play canasta with. She held out for two more years, and then she got sick and died.

‘A stupid woman, on the whole’ was my father’s comment. ‘Very beautiful, with olive skin and eyes like burning coals, but stupid.’

Bruno, on the other hand, wasn’t stupid at all; a year after becoming a widower, he got married again. His new wife was a dark-skinned Brazilian beauty, who produced a string of coloured kids.

After the war, Massimo had asked his father for his inheritance and returned to Europe. He’d never seen nor heard from him again; he didn’t even know whether he was dead or alive.

‘That’s not important, either,’ he concluded, avidly sucking the claw of some crustacean. ‘The past can’t be changed, and the future doesn’t belong to us. What really exists is the present. The moment, and nothing else, is what’s important.’

When I went back to Trieste that evening, the odour of fried food accompanied me all the way home. I was tired and all I wanted to do was sleep, but I had to take a shower first. I was afraid that dreary smell would get inside me somehow and mingle with my sadness.

9

THE FOLLOWING WEEK,
I didn’t go to visit him.

His speeches had settled on my thoughts like dust on furniture, slipping into the cracks and the empty spaces and making everything dim; it wasn’t the innocent dirt caused by neglect, the kind you can get rid of at once with a cloth or a lungful of air, but a fine, mephitic powder, capable of concealing among its molecules some dangerous metals or metalloids like lead and arsenic, substances which, absorbed in small doses, cause no symptoms at first, but which later, with the passage of time, lead to poisoning and death.

On many occasions, as he talked, I’d found myself agreeing with his words: after all, I shared his scorn for appearances and for sentimental fictions. The obtuseness I caught a glimpse of in many people’s faces irritated and terrorised me at the same time. What life could
there
be behind those opaque eyes? Such an existence would surely never be mine, but what was the alternative to opacity? Thanks to his temperament (which was also my own), my father had followed a different drummer, but was his life really free?

The image he loved to project, his metaphor for himself, was that of a solitary tree, standing alone in the midst of a clearing, lifting its majestic branches to the sky.

But didn’t his life instead resemble one of those massive plane trees that line urban avenues, heedless of pissing dogs and the waste paper and cigarette butts and tin cans accumulated among its roots, indifferent to the fluorescent spray lovers use to record their names on its trunk, unconcerned by the increasingly vile obscenities carved into its bark?

A tree whose roots can’t breathe, suffocated by asphalt as they are, a tree with greyish leaves and a soot-blackened trunk, a tree exhausted by the vibrations of passing buses, which nevertheless, in spite of everything, maintains its lofty elevation, because like all trees it desires one thing and one thing only: to drink the light. And in order to do so, it must keep growing taller and taller, until it rises past the shadows of the surrounding buildings. Every winter, the Municipal Department of Parks and Recreation cancels out this hard-won victory, polling and pruning until nothing is left of the beautiful
branches
but tiny stumps. Despite such mutilation, however, the plane tree doesn’t give up; every spring, new shoots arise from its amputated arms and then, from those tender twigs, the first leaves.

It hurts the heart to see a tree reduced to such circumstances, especially if you know how much space it can take up in a clearing. Many of those who don’t have any idea gush in admiration all the same: ‘Look how beautiful it is!’ says the grandfather to his grandson. ‘It’s putting out leaves!’

It never occurs to the old fellow that the haggard apparition before him is the result of a death agony protracted over decades, the song of a dying whale riddled with harpoons and sinking into the sea.

When I was with my father, I felt like a rabbit in a python’s coils; the complexity and boldness of his reasoning took my breath away, made my head spin.

But as soon as I was out of his presence, I thought over what he had said, and then my dizziness turned to impatience, and the image of the plane tree kept recurring in my mind. My father had sought the truth with the same force that drives the tree yearning upward towards the light, but in doing so he rejected life, and in the end all he could do was wrap around himself. He was like a wanderer waiting at a bus stop in the desert, unaware of how many years it’s been since that line was in service.

What would have happened, for example, if he’d accepted his share of the responsibility for my mother’s pregnancy instead of washing his hands of the entire affair, if he’d married her, if he’d maintained his relationships with his father and the other members of his family, and if he’d kept his teaching post at the university and dedicated himself with passionate energy to the formation of his students?

In short, what would his life – and the lives of those around him – have been like had he accepted his responsibilities instead of running away from them?

What’s the relationship between truth and life?

That was the crucial question, the one I repeated to myself over and over during the course of those months. I pondered over it for his sake but also for my own.

Nights were the worst.

Alone in that big house, exasperated by the sound of the wind as it banged the shutters, I was certain that with the passage of time my father’s search for the truth had turned into a big screen, like one of those handsome, handmade, artfully embroidered Chinese screens, but always mounted against a background of heavy cloth, a barrier he could hide behind.

When my thoughts turned to my mother, my anger changed into rage. If she was so guileless, so naive, why abandon her to her fate? Didn’t he feel any remorse? Was I really just the result of a biochemical reaction
between
two agents otherwise unconnected to each other? Had the March light, by stimulating the hypothalamus and triggering a hormonal storm, compelled my parents’ coupling, whereupon their fluids mingled and that was that?