Troubling Love (14 page)

On the other hand she did complain when he stopped making portraits of women for the American sailors and scenes of the bay and began to work on the half-naked dancing Gypsy. I had only a confused memory of that time, based more on Amalia’s stories than on direct experience: I was no more than four. The bedroom walls were crowded with exotic women in bright colors, interspersed with sketches of nudes drawn with a blood-red pastel. Often the poses of the Gypsy were rough copies of some photographs of women that my father kept hidden in a box in the closet and that I peeked at in secret. At other times the shapes of the blood-red nudes appeared in oil paintings.

I had no doubt that the pastel sketches reproduced my mother’s body. I imagined that at night, when they closed the door of their bedroom, Amalia took off her clothes, posed like the naked women in the photographs in the closet, and said: “Draw.” He took a roll of yellow paper, tore off a piece, and drew. What he did best was the hair. He would leave those women without features but above the empty oval of the face he would skillfully draw a majestic construction, unmistakably similar to the beautiful creation that Amalia knew how to make with her long hair. I tossed and turned in the bed, unable to sleep.

When our father finished the Gypsy, I was sure of it and so was Amalia: the Gypsy was her: less beautiful, the proportions wrong, the colors smudged; but her. Caserta saw it and said it was no good, it wouldn’t sell. He seemed annoyed. Amalia intervened, she said she agreed. She and Caserta teamed up against my father. There was a discussion. I heard their voices streaming down the stairs. When Caserta left, my father without warning hit Amalia twice in the face with his right hand, first with the palm and then the back. I remembered that gesture precisely, with its wavelike motion, going and coming: I was seeing it for the first time. She fled to the end of the hall, to the storeroom, and tried to lock herself in. She was dragged out and kicked. One blow struck her in the hip and hurled her against the armoire in the bedroom. Amalia got up and tore all the drawings off the walls. He caught her, grabbed her by the hair, pounded her head against the mirror of the armoire, which broke.

People liked the Gypsy, especially at the country fairs. Forty years had passed and my father was still doing it. In time he had become very quick. He attached the blank canvas to the easel and sketched the outlines with an expert hand. Then the body became bronze with reddish highlights. The belly curved, the breasts swelled, the nipples rose. Meanwhile sparkling eyes emerged, red lips, raven hair, masses of it, combed in Amalia’s style, which over time had become old-fashioned but evocative. In a few hours the canvas was finished. He took out the thumbtacks that held it in place, pinned it to the wall to dry, and arranged another blank canvas on the easel. Then he began again.

During adolescence I saw those figures of a woman leave the house in the hands of strangers who were not sparing with their crude comments. I didn’t understand and perhaps there was nothing to understand. How was it possible that my father could hand over, to vulgar men, bold and seductive versions of that body which if necessary he would defend with a murderous rage? How could he place it in lewd poses when for an immodest smile or look he became a wild beast, without pity? Why did he abandon it on the streets and in the houses of strangers, by the tens and hundreds of copies, when he was so jealous of the original? I looked at Amalia bent over her sewing machine until late at night. I thought that, as she worked like that, silent and preoccupied, she, too, asked herself those questions.

The door of the apartment was half-open. I felt timid and so I entered with such determination that the door hit the wall with a crash. There was no reaction. Only an intense odor of paint and cigarette smoke hit me. I went into the bedroom with the sensation that over the years the rest of the apartment had fallen apart. I was certain, however, that in that room everything remained unchanged: the double bed, the armoire, the dressing table with the rectangular mirror, the easel beside the window, the canvases rolled up in every corner, the stormy seas, the Gypsies, and the country idylls. My father’s back was to me, large and bent, in an undershirt. His sharp skull was bald, spotted with dark patches. A shock of white hair covered his neck.

I moved slightly to the right in order to see in the proper light the canvas he was working on. He was painting with his mouth open, glasses on the tip of his nose. In his right hand was the brush that, after touching down among the paints, moved securely over the canvas; between the index and middle fingers of his left hand was a lighted cigarette, half of it ash about to fall to the floor. After a few brushstrokes he drew back and stood motionless for a few seconds; then he emitted a sort of “ah,” a light, sonorous sigh, and began mixing colors again, inhaling on his cigarette. The painting wasn’t at a good point: the bay stagnated in a blue stain; Vesuvius, farther along, sat under a fiery red sky.

“The sea can’t be blue if the sky is that red,” I said.

My father turned and looked at me above his glasses.

“Who are you?” he asked in dialect, hostile in both expression and tone. He had big purple bags under his eyes. The most recent memory I had of him struggled to coincide with that yellowish face, drowning in undigested emotions.

“Delia,” I said.

He stuck the brush in one of the carafes. He got up from the chair with a long guttural groan and turned toward me, legs spread, back bent, rubbing his paint-stained hands on his sagging pants. He looked at me with growing perplexity. Then he said, in sincere astonishment:

“You’ve gotten old.”

I realized that he didn’t know whether to embrace me, kiss me, ask me to sit down, or start shouting and chase me out of the house. He was surprised but not pleasantly: he felt me as a presence out of place, perhaps he wasn’t even certain that I was his oldest daughter. The rare times we had seen each other, after his separation from Amalia, we had quarreled. In his head the real daughter should have been trapped in a petrified adolescence, mute and accommodating. 

“I’ll leave right away,” I reassured him. “I just came by to find out about my mother.”

“She’s dead,” he said. “I was thinking about how she died before me.”

“She killed herself,” I said very clearly, but without emphasis.

My father grimaced and I realized that he was missing his upper incisors. The lower ones had become long and yellow.

“She went swimming at Spaccavento,” he muttered, “at night, like a girl.”

“Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”

“When you’re dead you’re dead.”

“You should have come.”

“Will you come to mine?”

I thought for a moment and answered:

“No.”

The big bags under his eyes darkened.

“You won’t come because I’ll die after you,” he muttered. Then, unexpectedly, he punched me.

His fist hit me in the right shoulder and I had trouble controlling the part of me that was annihilated by that gesture. The physical pain, on the other hand, seemed to me a small thing.

“You’re a whore, like your mother,” he said, his breath coming hard, and meanwhile he grabbed the chair in order not to fall. “You left me here like an animal.”

I sought my voice in my throat and only when I was sure of it did I answer him:

“Why did you go to her house? You tortured her up until the end.”

He tried to hit me again, but this time I was prepared: he missed and became more enraged.

“What did she think about me?” he began to shout. “I never knew what she thought. She was a liar. You were all liars.”

“Why did you go to her house?” I repeated calmly.

He said:

“To kill her. Because she thought she could enjoy her old age, leaving me to rot in this room. Look what I have under here. Look.”

He raised his right arm and showed me his armpit. He had some purplish pustules among the hairs curly with sweat. 

“You won’t die from that,” I said.

He lowered his arm, exhausted by the tension. He tried to straighten his trunk but his spine wouldn’t move more than an inch or so. He remained with his legs planted, one hand wrapped around the chair, a hoarse whisper coming from his chest. Maybe he, too, thought that in the world at that moment there remained only that floor, only the chair he was holding onto.

“I followed them for a week,” he murmured. “He came every night at six, well dressed, jacket and tie: like a fashion plate. Half an hour later they went out. She wore her usual old things but she arranged them in a way that made her seem young. Your mother was a lying woman, with no sense. She walked beside him and they talked. Then they went to a restaurant or a film. They walked arm in arm and she acted the way she did whenever there was a man: the voice so, the hand so, the head, the hips.”

As he talked he waved one flabby hand around his chest, shook his head and batted his eyelashes, stuck out his lips, wiggled his hips contemptuously. He was changing his strategy. First he wanted to frighten me, now he wanted to amuse me by mocking Amalia. But he possessed nothing of her, of any of the Amalias we had invented for ourselves, not even the worst. And he was not amusing. He was just an old man deprived of any humanity by frustration and rage. Maybe he expected some complicity, a hint of a smile. I refused. Instead I concentrated all my energy on repressing disgust. He realized it and was embarrassed. He was facing the canvas he was working on and I suddenly realized that, with that fiery red sky, he was trying to paint an eruption.

“You humiliated her as usual,” I said.

My father shook his head in confusion and sat down again with a long groan.

“I went to tell her that I didn’t want to live alone anymore,” he muttered and stared spitefully at the bed beside him.

“You wanted her to come back and live with you?”

He didn’t answer. From the window came an orange light that beat against the glass, reflecting in the mirror of the armoire and spreading through the room, lighting up its disorder and squalor.

“I have a lot of money put aside,” he said. “I told her: I have a lot of money.”

He added some other things that I didn’t hear. While he spoke, I saw obliquely, under the window, the table that I had admired as a girl in the window of the Vossi sisters’ shop. The two shouting women whose profiles almost coincided—hurled from right to left in a mutilated movement of hands, feet, part of the head, as if the table had been unable to contain them or had been bluntly sawed off—had ended up there, in that room, among the stormy seas, the Gypsies, and the pastoral scenes. I let out a long sigh of exhaustion.

“Caserta gave you that,” I said, pointing at the painting. And I realized that I had been wrong: it wasn’t Signora De Riso who had told him about Caserta and Amalia. It was Caserta himself. He had come there, had given him something he had wanted for decades, had talked about himself, had told him that old age is brutal, that his son had thrown him out on the street, that between him and Amalia there had always been a devoted and respectful friendship. And he had believed him. And perhaps my father had told him about himself. And certainly they had found themselves desolate and companions in misery. I felt I was a thing, mysteriously balanced in the center of the room.

My father grew agitated in the chair.

“Amalia was a liar,” he burst out. “She never told me that you hadn’t seen or heard anything.”

“You were dying to beat up Caserta. You wanted to get rid of him, you thought that with the Gypsies you would finally make some money. You suspected that Amalia liked him. When I came to tell you that I had seen them together in the basement of the candy store, you had already imagined more than what I was telling you. What I said served only to give you an excuse.”

He stared at me in surprise.

“You remember that? I don’t remember anything anymore.”

“I remember everything or almost everything. Only the words are missing. But I remember the horror and I feel it again every time someone in this city opens his mouth.”

“I thought you didn’t remember,” he muttered.

“I remembered but I couldn’t tell myself.”

“You were a small child. How could I imagine . . . ”

“You could imagine. You were always able to imagine when it was a matter of hurting her. You went to Amalia to see her suffer. You told her it was Caserta who came to you on purpose to tell you about the two of them. You said that he had told you about me, about how I had lied, forty years ago. You unloaded all the blame on her. And you accused her of having made me a sick little liar.”

My father tried again to get up from his chair.

“You were repulsive even as a child,” he cried. “It was you who pushed your mother to leave me. You used me and then you threw me away.”

“You ruined her life,” I retorted. “You never helped her to be happy.”

“Happy? I was never happy, either.”

“I know.”

“Caserta seemed better than me. You remember the gifts that came for her? She knew perfectly well that Caserta sent them in his own interest, to get revenge: today fruit; tomorrow a book; then a dress; then flowers. She knew that he did it so that I would be suspicious of her and kill her. It would have been enough if she had refused those gifts. But she didn’t. She took the flowers and put them in a vase. She read the book without even hiding it. She put on the dress and went out. Then she let herself be hit till she was bleeding. I couldn’t trust her. I couldn’t understand what she was hiding in her head. I couldn’t understand what she was thinking.”

Pointing to the table behind him, I murmured:

“You aren’t able to resist Caserta’s gifts, either.”

He turned to look at the painting, uneasily.

“I did it,” he said. “It’s not a gift. It’s mine.”

“You wouldn’t be capable of that,” I said.

“I did it as a young man,” he insisted, and I had the impression that he was imploring me to believe him. “I sold it to the Vossi sisters in 1948.”

I sat on the bed without his asking me, next to his chair. I said to him gently: