Listen to My Voice (3 page)

‘Why not try taking your pills?’ you said, and for two or three weeks, I obeyed you.

The weeks of tranquillity.

It was beautiful, during those weeks, to be able to breathe, walk, and look around without always hearing the fuse sizzling behind me; it was comforting to sleep and get up without the fear of exploding.

But like all beautiful things, it didn’t last.

Suddenly, one morning, I opened my eyes, and the tedium of peace oppressed me. That linear, responsible life was no longer mine, and neither was the world of good sense, where actions followed one another as blithely as children playing ring-a-ring o’ roses.

I needed pain in order to feel alive; it had to run through my veins like haemoglobin. It was the only way to a real existence. I knew it was acid, poisonous, a toxic cloud; I saw intuitively that it would corrupt my insides and everything I came into contact with; but I couldn’t give it up. Kindness and rationality didn’t have as much energy. They were limp, monotonous emotions without any real direction.

What was the use of being good? Of living a puppet’s life, an existence like a sack of potatoes, inert victims of a more powerful will?

Besides, goodness, what was that, exactly? An indistinct sequence of innocent actions, the treacle that had to be waded through in order to attain some form of recompense, the odious chatter of afternoon talk shows. What could I do with such shoddy material? Nothing, nothing at all.

From dawn to sunset, I moved about as if I were an ambulatory volcanic cone. There was direct contact between my heart and the molten core, without the relief of meanders or vents or blind alleys; the incandescent magma heaved inside me, rising and falling in an
irregular
rhythm and sometimes spilling over, like water from a brimming container.

When I was ten or eleven or twelve years old, I could still sit beside you on the sofa and read a book, but by the time I was thirteen, my impatience started to show, and at fourteen the only story I really wanted to know anything about was my own.

On one of those very afternoons when we were reading together – it was April, and a cold rain was battering the garden – another person suddenly erupted from inside me. Our text was one of your favourites,
The Arabian Nights
. All at once, I stood up and snorted, ‘I can’t take this bullshit any more!’

Incredulous, you put the book down and said, ‘Is that any way to talk?’

‘I’ll talk however I want,’ I replied. Then I turned and left the room, slamming the door behind me.

Throughout my childhood, while other kids my age were soaking up TV programmes, you filled my life with tales and poems and fantastic stories. You loved books, and you wanted to transfer your passion to me – or maybe you were convinced that being nourished on beautiful things would constitute an antidote to horror.

From my first memory of our life in common there had always been a book between us. That was your way
of
conducting relationships; it was your world, the one you grew up in, the world of the Jewish bourgeoisie, who had abandoned the study of the Torah for the reading of novels. Books help us understand life better, you always said; through literature, we can comprehend emotions in depth.

Was that what I was rebelling against? Against your pretension of understanding things? Despite the great number of immortal personages who trod the territory of my dreams with daily regularity, I was becoming more and more restless, not more and more sensible. Was I rebelling against that? Why, instead of feeling emotions in depth, did I perceive their falsity?

It was as if, as the years passed, the scaffolding of our relationship had been built up by unskilled hands. In the beginning, the framework seemed solid, but then, as it grew taller, its defects began to show; a little wind was enough to make it sway. A great many characters had climbed up the scaffolding with me: Oliver Twist and Michael Strogoff, Aladdin and the Little Prince, the Little Mermaid and the Ugly Duckling, the Golem, and Hansel and Gretel’s witch, White Fang’s dog packs, Martin Eden, Urashima, and the benignly enormous deity Ganesh, who danced a wild dance with dybbuks and made the floor creak ominously. They were all there between you and me, some of them seated, others on their feet; their faces were superimposed on ours, and
their
bodies cast shadows on our story where I wanted light, the light of sincerity, the light of clarity.

The light that would allow me to gaze upon the only faces I really wanted to see: my parents’.

Yes, the period of my great agitation coincided with the reappearance of my mother. Up until then, her presence had remained discreetly in the background. There were only the two of us, you and me, and we were – or thought we were – self-sufficient in our relationship: no disagreements, no indiscreet questions, and the days slipping by like a fogbound train. Everything was muffled, deprived of any real depth; the constraint of the rails assured our peace.

Then, one May morning, I woke up and realised for the first time that there wasn’t a single photograph of her in the whole house: not in the living room, not in the kitchen, no trace of her in your room, and you hadn’t even had the good taste to put a picture of her in mine. To remind me of what she looked like, all I had was my memory, but I was little then, and as the years passed, her features started to fade like a drawing too long exposed to the light. They merged with other people’s faces, other fragments of stories.

Who was my mother?

I knew only two things about her: she died after
crashing
her car, and she attended the university in Padua but never got a degree.

That morning, I burst into the kitchen. You’d already heated the milk, and you were turning off the hob.

‘We don’t have any pictures of her!’ I exclaimed.

‘Pictures of whom?’

I heard a noise inside me that sounded like ice cracking underfoot. My throat trembled for an instant before I managed to say, ‘Of Mamma.’

Two days later, a small picture frame appeared on my night table, and inside it there was a black-and-white photograph of a child dressed in a pretty little waffle-weave dress. She was sitting on a seesaw, the same seesaw with the red handles that was still standing outside in the yard. I picked up the picture and went to find you in the garden.

‘I don’t want your daughter,’ I told you. ‘I want my mother.’

Before I tore up the photograph, I had the time to read what was written on the back:
Ilaria, 11 yrs. old
.

After that, a Polaroid snapshot in uncertain colours appeared in my room. It showed a young woman in a smoke-filled nightclub. She was supporting her chin with one hand and seemed to be listening to someone.

3

NOW I KNOW
that events can have different shades of meaning; what we see with our limited vision is almost always partial. Maybe you thought her memory would upset me, or maybe your grief was still too strong – barely ten years had passed – for you to be able to bear a photograph of her in the house. Maybe you preferred to keep her gaze and her face closed up in the depths of your heart. It was there that you’d raised an altar to her; it was there, in the darkness and silence, that you commemorated the awful tragedy of losing her.

In those days, however, with the Manichean rage of adolescence, I saw only a part of the reality: the cancellation. You’d lost a daughter, and you didn’t want to remember her; what surer sign of a perverted heart could there be? And that daughter, moreover, was my mother, prematurely dead after a chiaroscuro life.

You’d told me practically nothing about her. Of course, I could have asked questions, and after a bit of awkwardness, you would surely have talked to me about her, and as you relived those moments, the ice around your heart would have melted, I would have given a name to my memories, and you would have been liberated from the burden of some of your own; and in the end we would have hugged each other and stayed like that a long time, our faces damp with tears, while the sun went down behind us and the things around us slipped into shadow.

I could have, but I didn’t. It was a time of conflict, and so conflicts were what we had, in spades: wall against wall, steel against steel, marble, diamond. Whoever had the harder head and the fiercer heart would ultimately be the one to survive. In my obsession with imputing guilt, I was convinced that you’d acted like one of those animals who sometimes steal others’ offspring and raise them as their own. You wanted to stay young, or maybe you envied your daughter, and therefore you’d taken away
her
daughter, her only joy. In short, I felt that your will had somehow meddled with my mother’s life, with her life and with her death, because even for that – it seemed clear to me – you must have borne some secret responsibility.

Occasionally I think about how wonderful it would be if at a certain point in our childhood someone would
take
us aside, wave a long wand, and show us, as though on a wall map, the outline of the days to come in our lives. We’d sit there on stools, our heads tilted back, and listen to an older gentleman (I picture him with a white beard and a khaki suit; a geographer or a naturalist or something like that) explaining the surest route to the heart of that mysterious territory.

Why doesn’t anyone ever give us any hints about when we should pay attention? The ice is thinner here and thicker there, go straight ahead, make a detour, back up, stop, avoid. Why must we always haul along behind us the weight of unmade gestures and unspoken sentences? That kiss I didn’t give, that solitude I failed to assuage. Why do we live, from the moment of our birth, swaddled in this incredible obtuseness? Everything seems eternal to us, and our will reigns obstinately over that small, confused statelet called ‘me’, to whom we do homage as to a great sovereign. If we’d only open our eyes for a single second, we’d see that the ruler in question is actually a princeling out of an operetta, fickle, affected, incapable of dominating others or himself, and unable to see the world beyond his own boundaries, which, moreover, are but the mutable, narrow wings of a theatre stage.

How many months had passed since my return?