The First True Lie: A Novel (4 page)

I hate Christmas because none of this ever happens. I hate the candied fruit in the panettone, I hate the crooked figurines in the nativity scene in the school lobby, and I hate the fat priest with the sticky hands who wants to bless me.

“Go with God, my son.”

“No, thanks, if you’re coming too.”

It always turns out I get sadder because I’m supposed to be happier. I can’t wait for Christmas to be over so that I don’t have to think about it anymore.

There are presents, of course, but they’re not always enough.

“Aren’t you going to unwrap your gifts? That one with the red bow is from me; the lilac-colored one is from Grandma; that one with the airplane paper is from Giulia. Merry Christmas, my pet.”

Already the day after Christmas is better.

And tomorrow will already be better too. Maybe tomorrow things will be different, my pet. All I have to do is make tomorrow come soon.

I bring the quilt with the clouds onto the sofa, along with Blue and the koala. The alarm clock quietly beams green Martian codes my way. I try to close my eyes.

It’s strange to sleep with the light on, but I don’t feel like turning it off tonight; it’s better this way. On the inside of my eyelids I see swarms of microbes crazily moving about, like when you look into a microscope and spot the ones responsible for who knows what disease; or when you stare at a clear sky when it’s really, really clear, inhabited only by millions of quote marks without words, without explanations, without motives.

At Grandma’s house, where it’s dark even during the day, when the sun comes through the shutters, the dust particles do a dance in the air, glittering like metallic paint. A ray of cosmic dust, penetrating the lazy half light of the afternoon, a sword that shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow and grants special powers, makes me a secret knight of the great disorder’s higher order, a master cherry-stone spitter.

Deep in darkness, there was also the music room, with its armchairs covered with ghost sheets, the coatrack covered in ghosts’ overcoats, and the forgotten instruments that no one used anymore but that absolutely no one was allowed to touch.

“Practice on this,” Grandma would say, handing me a mandoline so that I could slice the hard-boiled eggs.

The piano was opened only for my grandfather’s funeral. Grandma sat down on the upholstered stool, stiffly erect, her eyes bright from crying or from too many toasts in her husband’s honor: “A good man after all.”

She began to play military marches, bobbing her purple hair from side to side, maybe in celebration of finally having become the supreme commander of the whole shebang. My grandmother has purple hair, a detail that has always really made me laugh.

I
hear an ambulance siren, coming closer and closer. It’s here. It’s parked in the living room or under the bed. It’s deafening me. I stick my fingers in my ears, but it’s no use, the noise continues. I wake up in a sweat. The alarm clock bores into my sleep like the drill they used to break up the street down below. I fling a heavy arm out of bed to turn it off. It was only a bad dream. Everything’s all right. Then I remember. Nothing’s all right. Not one single thing. What am I doing here on the sofa?

Mama didn’t get up this morning either.

There’s too much silence now that I’ve turned off the siren and the jackhammer that were hollowing out my head.

Mama’s not getting up anymore.

Now I remember everything.

I sit up to think about my new situation. I look at the living-room furniture; it’s familiar and strange at the same time, like being in a hotel or at someone else’s house. Blue gets his purr motor running.

I have to find some courage.

I don’t have any.

I’m in a daze, sitting on the sofa with my legs and arms open wide, waiting for another pair of arms to pick me up, to pose me like she used to for baby pictures, a naked, confused newborn in the middle of the bed, like the picture of Grandpa when he was young, a chubby little grandfather dressed up in frills, looking nothing like the bony old man I knew.

I tell my feet to shake off this daze, tell my legs to carry me down the hall to see how things are going, tell my head to be a bit more positive. But they’re not listening.

At times like these it’s usually Mama who comes to get me moving.

Now I have to get myself moving. I tell myself I have to get used to it: “You’ve got to get used to it. You’ve got to manage. You can’t be afraid of going down the hall.”

I argue with myself out loud.

“Mama’s never frightened you before; she can’t frighten you now. Can’t you see she can’t even move?”

She is still still.

Extremely still.

Nothing can be done. There’s only one hope—that she’ll be resurrected, like Jesus. After three days. We’ve just begun the second, and who knows if it’s true that Jesus was resurrected. They say he was, but I don’t know if I believe it. Even Grandpa didn’t really believe it was possible to go into and rise back out of graves, and anyway, when he died, he wasn’t resurrected; he just died, and that was that. He wanted a glass of wine on his grave instead of flowers. Mama said he’d been in the war and seen so many dead people that he stopped believing in God and all those religious stories, because in this world there is no religion. Looking at all the people who die for no reason—I’m not just talking about bad people but good ones too—it’s hard to believe that there’s an invisible someone protecting us. I’m not particularly interested in these things, even if now I could really use a God or some such thing to give me a hand. If there was one, this would really be the time to prove it.

He could tell me what to wear to school. It has to be a clean shirt, because Mama would never send me to school with yesterday’s shirt—actually, he could wake up Mama, if he can. I can’t. But God probably has more important things to do.

I have to wash as well. If I was sure Mama was going to be back today, I wouldn’t bother, but since I’m not, I can’t risk them noticing anything strange on account of details, like the ones that betray people in
Columbo
. Lieutenant Columbo always looks rumpled just so everyone will underestimate him. Obviously, if he was the suspect he’d change his raincoat.

I put on a striped shirt; it’ll do fine. And a green sweater. I wash my armpits but forget the bidet—who cares, it’s not like anyone’s going to be inspecting my underwear.

“If you don’t wash below too, you’ll have moss and lichens growing there, like in the taiga and the tundra.”

Mama always exaggerates.

Blue licks himself to get clean. I’m so jealous. Blue has eighteen whiskers per side and long hairs like whiskers above his eyes. When I don’t have anything else to do, I count them, to see if there happen to be any more, since Blue is growing up too; no longer a kitten, as the flower woman would say, but becoming quite the little cat.

“Okay, Blue, time for din-dins.”

Din-dins
is Blue’s favorite word. If you say it to him, he gets all excited and begins to follow you around and won’t stop until you give him something. Blue jumps on the table, slips past the box of cereal, the sugar, and the glass ashtray from Venice that’s a bit chipped on one side, and launches himself at the can of mackerel as if he hasn’t seen food for I don’t know how long. A bit later, in all his enthusiasm, he pushes his bowl under the sideboard and then looks at me in surprise, as if to say: “Help! Where’d my din-dins go?”

Cats do things like that. They’re really intelligent and sometimes stupid. They understand everything, but when it comes to food they know nothing.

Blue rubs himself all soft and silky against my legs. I’d like to have a sleeping-bag body like Blue and snuggle down inside myself and pull up the zipper. I’d also like to have a tail and wag it when I’m cross, make it bristle when I meet assfaces, and hold it straight up when I’m happy and feel like walking with my head high.

Maybe I’d like to be Blue. Who can go back to purring with Mama.

“Did you feed Blue?”

Usually, before going out, Mama asks me: “Did you feed Blue?”

She only asks to bug me, because she knows very well whether I’ve done it or not. If I go back to show her the bowl, she says: “Hurry up.”

If I hurry, she says: “Get a move on.”

Before leaving I check up on Mama but without going into her room. I look at her from far away. I’m in a rush.

I have to run. Whenever I do, the corners of the books in my backpack poke my back. I’ve got to tighten the straps, or else leave the house sooner next time and then walk normally.

It’s freezing cold; when I breathe I can see my breath. If I can see my breath, it means I’m alive, even if I’m dying of cold.

It’s the coldest winter since 1900-something and it’s windy too, which it almost never is. The wind helps with the pollution; it reduces the fine particles, the sneakiest ones, the ones that get in everywhere without anyone seeing them and then make you sick.

Luckily, we don’t live far from school.

We’re 3,700 steps away, more or less, because every time I count them the number is different.

I run into Davide at the entrance—just as well—we’ll come in together.

Inside, along the corridor with all the drawings pinned up, there’s a sign that says
NO RUNNING
.

I ask Davide if he believes in God, and he replies: “Are you stupid or what?”

And we rush to class.

I realize I’ve asked Davide a pretty odd question, out of the blue and so early in the morning. I’ve got to be careful not to let strange stuff like that slip out.

“Do you see this? It’s a piece of granite that’s become part of my hand. It’s my rock hand. Touch it.”

My deskmate has scabs on his hands because yesterday he popped a wheelie on his skateboard and landed in the gravel. He picks at the clotted blood on his knuckle and gets blood on his exercise book. The blood doesn’t stop. It spreads over the page and Mrs. Squarzetti panics, fearing a hemorrhage.

“Oh my God, a hemorrhage!”

Rock Hand is taken downstairs to have his war wounds tended to. Later Rock Hand will sport a new Band-Aid.

I like Band-Aids a lot. I put them on even when I haven’t hurt myself at all. Sometimes I’ll draw on my skin a little bit to make it look more real. Band-Aids give the impression of an adventurous life, of someone who falls down but doesn’t really hurt himself.

“What’d you do to yourself?”

“It’s nothing, just a little karate chop. I broke seven bricks with a single blow.”

“No way!”

The incident with my deskmate is the most exciting event of the morning.

When Antonella sees blood, her face goes all twisty as if she’s going to pass out. I feel like throwing up because real blood turns my stomach, but I hold out: It’s just the soul of the red Bic pen gushing everywhere because I’ve swallowed the cap again. I think about my heavenly soul that may not even exist. I look at Antonella’s heavenly blue eyes. She gets more beautiful every day and I blush just at the thought that she could be looking at me.

I hold out even though feeling sick makes me think of a memory from nursery school: little spaghetti hoops floating like life preservers in a pool of tomato sauce; a kid who’s honking like an elephant and the next thing he’s up at the blackboard throwing up his cafeteria lunch, and it’s making people laugh but also throw up themselves; the smell of vomit stays in my nose even afterward, even now. I hate pasta with tomato sauce. If there must be sauce, at least let it be on the side, without everything mixed together. With things like that, if you meet with the school psychologist he or she will tell your parents you’ve been traumatized, as if you’ve discovered you’ve only got one parent instead of two, or your mama’s sleeping with someone else’s dad.

“Childhood trauma.”

It’s just smaller, when it comes to pasta with tomato sauce.

In any case I hold out. I don’t want everyone to see what I’ve eaten for breakfast: a bowl of dry cereal that looked exactly like Blue’s cat food. I swallow and it tastes like acid and also like yogurt, even though the yogurt was already gone this morning. I licked the container and tried to reach the bottom with my tongue. I cleaned the tinfoil lid until all I tasted was tinfoil, the kind that shocks your back teeth.

Outside it’s started raining again, and it’s not the good rain anymore, the impressive kind. It’s a useless kind of rain that makes you sleepy and the outlines of things fuzzy, and makes you think it will never stop.

It’s raining like that inside me too.

Usually when I’m bored in class I read under my desk, or draw, or go over Mama’s words in my head, trying to discover their secrets. Nostalgia: tender, burning desire for people, places, and things she’d like to return to. Sciatica: extreme pain in the sciatic nerve that doesn’t let her go skiing. And so on. I invent private exercises, count the holes the woodworms have worm-eaten out of the window frames over the centuries and centuries, amen, so the hours go by faster.

Sometimes I pay attention with one part of my brain, and with the other I daydream. I imagine that past the roof and the chimneys and the TV antenna, there are the sea and the clear sky and ships with pirates. Pirates don’t hunt whales; they hunt the people who hunt whales. The pooping pigeons on the windowsill are albatrosses perched on the ship’s main yard. I don’t tell anyone I can do it because adults don’t think it’s so easy. They think you have to do one thing at a time, that you can’t talk and eat, put on pants and walk, draw and learn, dream and stay awake. If I think about something totally different, I just have to pay attention to where my eyes wander, otherwise it seems like I’m seeing ghosts, like Mama when she says that Dad vanished into thin air and she stares at the painting with the nasty weather.

At home, whenever I can’t stand it anymore, I close myself in the wardrobe that no one ever opens. I sit on top of the drawers in the middle of the clothes that smell like mothballs, herringbone overcoats and the cloth sacks I used to take to nursery school, blue and white checked with my name embroidered on them, still smelling like bread and chocolate. I stay there and think for a bit, with the old overcoats on my face. I might cry if I really have to, and wipe my snot with the sleeve of an old shirt. Then I get over it, and then I don’t want Mama to worry too much.

Mama. Mama. Mama.

The memory of Mama explodes again in my head.

A geyser of fear. I’m so afraid that someone will notice something.

Do you know what the doctor said to the skeleton who showed up for an appointment? I write it on a piece of paper and I pass it to Davide.

He shakes his head.

I write it on another piece of paper. Couldn’t you have come earlier?

Out of the corner of my eye I can see him laugh.

I’m safe.

Everything’s okay.

When we get out it’s pouring.

Needles of freezing rain everywhere. I forgot to bring a hat. To stay out of it I’m forced to pass close to Assface. It’s a chance I have to take because I can’t risk getting sick. I cross my heart and hope to die he doesn’t say it again:

“Orphan-orphan-orphan.” He repeated it like an evil chant.

Not too long ago, on Columbus Day, I’ll never forget it; I was with my friends and Assface said: “Orphan-orphan-orphan.”

And I thought, Now I’m gonna smash that assface of yours.

“Assface in the first degree.”

And before I thought, No, maybe better not, I’d punched his nose, right there in the middle of that big ugly crack. I didn’t know how, but my arm had been faster than my thoughts, a solid hit before I’d even realized it myself, as if my body had decided to seek justice on its own.

Notebooks had gone flying to the ground, shedding pages like trees in autumn, and suddenly I was shedding the old image of myself and speaking openly to Assface, whose eyes goggled like someone who can’t believe his own eyes, his own ears, his own runny nose.

“You’ll pay for this.”

“Sure I will. Let this be a lesson to you, Assface.”

I had muttered it to myself while the others stood by speechless in admiration; suddenly I felt six inches taller.

But now I can’t react at all; I have to be careful not to draw attention to myself. I speed up. Assface pretends not to see me and yet I pass so close to him that I can count one by one his moles, like pistachios in his nasty mortadella face. I speed up and I’m past him. Almost home.

Mama’s still sleeping, buried between the pillows.

Seeing her like that in the big bed, she seems smaller. Still the same expression, it’s just that her face is darker. When I touch her, she seems colder. But it’s cold outside too. I put a coat over her, and two coins fall out of one of the pockets.

If people are happy, they don’t die like this, just by chance.