The First True Lie: A Novel (11 page)

T
oday is Mama’s birthday.

I know, not just because I have it memorized but also because I drew a circle with a red pen on the calendar with the famous paintings. To be honest, she was the one who drew the circle because I’ve never been able to reach so high, above the fridge, except with the chair.

“Don’t climb on the chair because you’ll fall. Don’t scribble all over because then we can’t read the dates. Leave it be, I’ll do it.”

On the kitchen door frame you can still see the notches where Mama marked how much I’d grown: two years, three years, six years…She always makes me stand against the same wall and act serious, while she puckers her lips in a stern, professional way.

“Keep your head straight. If you don’t keep straight, there’s no point.”

But even if I try to keep straight or stand on my tiptoes, I still can’t reach above the refrigerator.

The important dates—her birthday, mine, Blue’s—are all marked on the calendar with circles. It doesn’t matter if things have changed, we should celebrate anyway.

I look for a birthday candle in the third drawer in the kitchen. I find ribbons from unwrapped presents, uncorked corks, unrolled rolls of string, and some Chinese chopsticks neither I nor Mama ever figured out how to use.

When we went to the Chinese restaurant, the Chinese waiters all looked alike and they all watched us and laughed at us behind our backs, covering their mouths with their hands. We kept dropping our bites of food back onto the plate or into the little bowl with the bitter black sauce that splashed everywhere, and they laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. Mama shrugged her shoulders as if to say, Who cares?

“Don’t worry about it. Try this spling loll, it’s good.”

And then the lice cloquettes, flied seaweed, steamed laviolis…That night Mama and I only used
L’
s instead of the
R’
s, blinging chopsticks back to our apaltment with us. We brought them home to practice in the face of the Chinese who laughed at us, even though I had a stomachache, maybe because of having too many shlimps.

I find the little sky-blue candles from last year, sink one into a wafer bar, and light it using the lighter with the word
Love
on it. Blue follows the whole operation intensely, mostly because the wafer wrapper sounds like dinner.

I put the wafer with the lit candle on a little saucer; it’s not much of a cake, but it’ll do.

We make our way in a procession, Blue and I, down the hallway.

Blue in his gray outfit and me in my most elegant pajamas stained with pasta sauce walk single file down the hallway, careful not to trip like always on the worn-out Persian rug that runs down the middle, which, before being in our apartment, was in Grandma’s, where everyone tripped over it and swore at it too.

“Stupid rug, we’ve got to get rid of it one day.”

We advance, as serious as can be, and stop in front of Mama’s door with our special cake made of layers of wafer and vanilla cream.

I put the plate down on the floor.

The tiny candle lights the ceremony with a small, shaky glow that looks ready to go out at any moment. I’m small and shaky too. I’m not sure whether I should leave things as they are or blow it out for Mama, who’s out of breath?

I decide to help out because the flame looks like the little lights that flicker in cemeteries and makes strange shadows on the walls. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just me who finds everything gloomy.

“Happy birthday.”

I blow and in the same breath whisper “Happy birthday” again; even with all my practice holding my breath, it feels like I don’t have much air in my lungs. I leave the gift there and walk backward, like shrimps do, so I can leave it without making a sound, without anyone noticing, a little at a time.

O
n Thursday my hair grows.

You can’t stop hair growing; it’s one more of those “inexorable processes” that scientists haven’t yet figured out how to stop.

Hair grows at 0.00000001 miles per hour. I read it in
Strange but True
. I don’t know how much a mile is, really; and all those zeros confuse me. Anyway, a little bit at a time, hair grows miles and miles, even if you’ve got plenty of other stuff on your mind.

Usually Mama takes me to the hairdresser before my bangs reach my eyes. She’s a hairdresser for women, so I find it embarrassing to be there in the middle of all those women getting their highlights done. It’s also embarrassing because the chairs are right by the window, and every so often someone passes by and sees me wearing a cape like Little Red Riding Hood’s next to a madwoman with a plastic cap on her head and hair coming out of the holes while the hairdresser tugs on her goldilocks with a hooked needle.

Sometimes the Bride of Frankenstein turns to me and says: “What a beautiful child. Do you like going to school?”

The word
school
makes me think of Antonella, and I sink lower in the chair just at the thought that she could pass by and see me in this getup. As if that weren’t enough, then the other women butt in, staring at me the whole time like they’ve never seen a male of the species before. They’re curious, they want to know everything, and they’re looking for gossip, always reading magazines full of it.

I hope this torture will be over soon. I imagine that behind the jars of creams and sprays and dyes there’s a magic potion that can make me disappear. Or at least make them disappear.

To be honest, Mama hates going to the hairdresser too, because then she has to make conversation, but she says it’s necessary.

“One’s hair should always be tidy.”

Recently she hadn’t been going much herself, but I still never managed to get out of it. It’s another of those strange ideas adults have: If you’re older and you’ve got a bit of a beard already, you can also wear your hair longer; if you don’t have hair on your face, then your hair has to be tidy, like the moronic cut on the head of Assface, who in addition to having an assface also has a dickhead’s hair.

I’d rather go to a men’s barber, one of those that have calendars with pictures of women chained up and with tits as big as soccer balls bursting out of their black leather tops. I’d rather talk about the soccer match or the Grand Prix and listen to the men chatting, but Mama says she doesn’t know any barbers.

“I don’t want to take you to just anyone.”

If I insist, she tells me to cut it out with the same old song and dance about a barber.

Now, in theory, I could do what I want.

The problem is that at school they think about it in the same way as Mama does; they would never believe that all of a sudden she decided to let me have my way. That’s why I have to cut my bangs. If I raise my eyebrows, hair gets in my eyes, which is just as annoying as having a mosquito in your ear; if I pull on my bangs, they hang down almost to the end of my nose. I need to find the scissors and give myself a trim. I can’t find anything better, so I try it with the nail clippers. The curly strands fall into the sink like hairy parentheses. I thin things out here and there like the hairdresser does, more or less. It’s a job well done, I’d say.

M
rs. Squarzetti tells us the story of a box that has all the evils of the world inside. If you open it, they all get out.

When she passes between the rows of desks, she fluffs my hair.

She’s never done that before.

I’m bored. It’s a sneaky kind of boredom, with an aftertaste of orange jam, the kind that seems sweet but then has bitter peels inside.

The box with Mama’s documents, the one where she kept her secret code for the bank machine, is still on the sofa.

Sometimes Mama asks:

“Will you bring me the box with the papers?”

It’s a shoe box with one side slightly crushed in, held shut with an old rubber band.

I want to open it and I don’t want to open it, like when you’re at the movies and you put your hands over your eyes at a scary part, but then you spread your fingers to peek anyway. I found the secret code for the cash machine, but I didn’t search for anything else.

Now I wonder if the box might hold some other secret. I find old bills, letters from the bank, a paper clip that gets under my nail and stabs me, pages full of figures in columns, but nothing to figure out, not even a reason why. Maybe that’s hidden somewhere else.

Sucking my finger, I wonder where.

There’s a little picture of Mama copied four times in a square, one of those taken in a booth at the train station and then stuck onto documents. The picture didn’t come out so well because it’s in black and white and because Mama’s missing a piece of her head; it’s hard to adjust the stool to the right height.

Davide and I also had our picture taken together last year and our heads ended up half outside the frame, in our case from the nose down.

I take it anyway and before falling asleep I put it under my pillow, next to a Madonna album cover. I always put something under my pillow. Usually I choose the things I’d like to dream about.

This time I put Mama times four.

N
early two weeks have gone by and everything just carries on automatically.

I’m having T-shirt problems—I’ve run out of clean ones—and all my socks are dirty and I can’t change underwear every morning anymore. I rotate them, though, so they last longer. They’re underclothes, after all—no one can see if they’re dirty or clean.

I should use the washing machine, but I don’t know how it works. The dresser drawers look like there’s been an earthquake in there, but to avoid worrying about it, all I have to do is close them. My coat is full of cat hair.

The other night I even tried to smoke one of Mama’s cigarettes, just to see how satisfying they really are, if it’s true they soothe anxiety and make people less nervous. It was like saying
Fuck you, God,
nothing special, aside from the bitter taste it left in my mouth.

The apartment, at any rate, seems not to have noticed anything.

Except for the table in the living room: There’s dust on one side and shiny wood on the other, where Blue usually lies down. If dust has been piling up for days, he uses his tail like a feather duster.

As far as everything else goes, there’s no big difference.

Every so often I feel like crying, but I don’t know anymore if I’m crying for me or for Mama. I cry when I think about how I can’t go into her room anymore like I used to when I couldn’t sleep. I’d go to her and plead:

“C’mon, can I stay in here for a while?”

And she’d say to me:

“Okay, but just this once. You’re a big boy now who should sleep in his own room.”

Now that I never, ever want to open her door at the end of the hallway, I feel like crying. I don’t know why—if it’s for me who’s shut out or for her who’s shut in.

I need a place to rest; I’m so tired all the time. I don’t feel like doing anything, just like when I’m recovering from a cold. Sometimes I fall asleep with my head on Blue’s belly. I listen to his breath going in and out. I like hearing his heartbeat despite everything.

It’s really cold in the apartment, but the cold freezes the stink.

Blue launches sneeze attacks, but it’s no big deal, cats come with their very own little fur coats. I’ve stopped taking off my clothes. Before going to bed I take a fizzy aspirin. I hold the glass close to my ear because as the aspirin dissolves it makes the sound the sea does when the foamy waves sizzle on the rocks.

Once a day I’m frightened, because I hear the alarm clock on Mama’s bedside table go off. Every day the alarm alarms me, as if I’ve never heard it before. Then I remember everything. Then I slam my head down—left, right—to get rid of the thought.

When I see Antonella coming over to me during recess, I think I’m dreaming. It can’t be true that she’s looking at me; she’s never looked at me before. When she looks toward me, what she’s actually doing is looking through me. Her gaze is an astral sword that stabs without wounding, as if I were transparent, made of special invisible ink that she can’t read. Or doesn’t want to.

And yet Antonella is coming over to me. And she appears to be smiling.

“Ciao, Luca, I wanted to give you this.”

Antonella hands me an orange card, orange like the sunset on a school notebook, the sunset with palm trees on a poster for the Maldives.

“What is it?”

It’s the first time the two of us have ever talked face-to-face alone.

It’s the first time I can count the freckles on her nose, cinnamon sprinkles on whipped cream.

I say, “What is it?”

I can’t think of anything better to say.

“It’s for my Carnevale party. You have to come in costume.”

“Oh, great, thanks.”

“Yeah, it’ll be so much fun!”

Now, when you’re playing a videogame, it can happen that you don’t know what to do. There’s a fifty percent chance. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t. The important thing is to choose; otherwise the game can’t go on. And now I can’t choose. Or it’s more that I have to choose not to play. No costume party, no freckle confetti on fresh snow, no Antonella, no nothing.

“I can’t come, sorry.”

“Why?”

“I’m going on a ski vacation that week.”

“Why didn’t you say so before?”

“I forgot about it.”

“Why don’t you do the ski vacation the week after?”

“Because the week after there’ll be no more snow.”

“Wow, you should be a weatherman! How do you know?”

“What do you care?”

“I knew you were kind of an asshole anyway. I only invited you because you’re an orphan.”

There were lots of people on the beach, all happy to be on vacation: waiters carrying trays of cold drinks with little umbrellas in them; big umbrellas protecting the tourists from the sun; kids in the kids’ pool; and palm trees like in the Maldives where Antonella goes on vacation, where Antonella celebrates her Carnevale, where Antonella does what she wants. And then a wave rose up, but nobody noticed: The kids kept splashing in the kids’ pool, holding on to little swan or crocodile life preservers; the mothers protected themselves from the sun; and only someone lifting a hand to his forehead, like a soldier does to peer at the enemy, saw the horizon and the sea behaving so strangely. Then the wave came and everybody died. An angry wave that wiped out everything.

All I say to Antonella is:

“I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t hear me; she’s already gone back to class.

I don’t say anything else.

I stand there imagining the news reports of disaster after disaster, all featuring me, following one after another in my head.

I keep my mouth shut until class is over for the day and I keep it shut as I walk away. I get home, still as silent as a mouse, and enter the lobby, then go up in the elevator. My anger, mixing with saliva, rises from floor to floor, flaring up inside me with every beep of the floor buttons, an enormous, deafening anger impossible to peer at from far away, a silent anger powerful enough to wipe out everything.

I lay my anger down on the sofa, beside my backpack full of un-dog-eared books and my blank, wordless notebook.

“Wait for me here. You too, Blue, wait just a little longer. I have to go to the bathroom.”

With my head in the toilet of my mini-adult’s life, forced to wear masks every day, Carnevale or not, I vomit up a slimy white soul, like snot or the stuff I saw squirted on some whore’s tits in one of Davide’s dad’s porno movies, a stringy soul that looks like slobber, that tastes as bitter as bile, and that sticks to the bowl and to my chin, making snail trails that ping back and then freeze because it’s so cold, streamers of pure grossness. Hugging the toilet bowl, I become big and liquid like a fucking shit.

Mama said she suffered from loneliness, that loneliness was like a whistling in her ear, like ships that set sail long ago, and she’d never reach them, not even if she swam.

Mama said that once all the ships and trains have departed, there’s nothing left to do.

She said that’s how she felt, on the shore, in the empty station, having arrived to life too late.

I can hear a whistling in my ear too.

But it’s not a whistle.

It’s the doorbell.

It rings and rings and won’t stop ringing. Maybe somebody’s stuck some chewing gum on it as a joke.

I don’t know why, but I get up from the toilet bowl and go to open the door.