While the Shark is Sleeping (2 page)

Sometimes she stands for hours at the window, with her paintbrush in her hand. She says we’re always busy doing something else so we miss the sky, the flocks of birds arriving or migrating. Our house looks out over the roofs and little terraces of the Marina neighbourhood. The terraces are all square, like ours, with flowers and grills for roasting fish on a Sunday and blue tanks because there’s never enough water and lots of people always doing something: waterproofing, adding on verandas or unapproved extensions, repairing window frames, putting up new TV antennas. When Nonna comes to visit, she looks out and observes everything and says, ‘Have you seen what a nice job they’ve done down there?’ and Mamma feels upset because Nonna has never had a word of praise for our house, not even on any of those beautiful days when she’s come by at sunset, when beyond the Marina neighbourhood the sea at the port of Cagliari is watercolour violet and the sky is still and silent and the ship that’s departing seems lit up for a ball.

Mamma feels sad when she sees the ships depart; even though no one inside is saying farewell to her she finds it a painful separation. ‘That’s life,’ she sighs. ‘There’s always someone leaving.’

My father advises her not to watch them anymore, these departing ships – who gives a fuck about violet sunsets and ballroom lights, Mamma should be looking out at the ships coming in. And it’s true that she always smiles, looking out the window of a morning, when the ferries come into the port, which on a calm, clear day seems like a lake because of the way it’s closed in at the horizon by the blue mountains of Capoterra on the other side of the gulf.

Nonna says that my brother has inherited the worst of Mamma and Papà: that is, her unease and his detachment. Papà could do great things for him except that he’s never around. He could talk to him one on one about God, rather than in general when all of us are present. Or about how to shave without cutting yourself, or how to pick up women. Instead, his world consists only of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, who are great, but a long way away from our world, plus you need a copy of the music.

To pick up women you need some little song like those Papà plays on his guitar wherever he happens to be, with all the women around him drooling and singing along together. When he’s at home my brother stays in his room playing and Mamma goes in and out with juice she’s squeezed for him and all these healthy snacks that have the right proportions of carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins. He sends her away, ‘Ma, what a drag!’

Nonna says that Mamma married a strange fellow who was off being a volunteer and saving other people’s children while his own were being born. He didn’t care about that pregnant, terrified girl who would ask the doctors if they thought giving birth was more or less painful than being tortured by the Gestapo, or the KGB, or the CIA. The doctors would reply, ‘It depends what kind of torture, signora, it depends. But you have to remember that since the beginning of time, women have been giving birth. That means it’s possible.’

Strangeness breeds strangeness. There’s no escape. And another thing Nonna can’t stand about my brother is the way his clothes are always hanging off him, same with Mamma. They’re both so beautiful, but you can’t tell because they’re clumsy and awkward and they walk so bent over that they don’t even look tall.

Nonno was tough. At sixteen, the age my brother is now, he had to leave the village for the Continent to do military service. He’d been boasting about it to the other boys. The day before he left a few of them lay in wait for him and beat him up. So many of them against just one. He left all the same and the adventure of war came along and found him there ready, very early.

What we have in common, Mamma and I, is that we cover everything with honey, whereas Zia is brusque and if she wants to say someone sent someone else away she’ll say that ‘he gave him a kick up the arse’. We don’t like Zia’s manner. We like to see the world through a layer of honey and Papà says we’ll get diabetes of the brain. I think Mamma and Zia are so different because of what happened at the beginning. When Nonna was pregnant with Mamma, she and Nonno lived with another couple in order to save money on rent. The other lady couldn’t have children and had taken a dislike to Nonna. She’d pour boiling water on her flowers, she’d pinch the plates from her good dinner set, so it became more and more diminished over time. This business went on for years until Mamma went to primary school, but you couldn’t say anything to Nonno because one time when Nonna had just hinted at the matter, Nonno had gone to confront the neighbour’s husband and was ready to kill him. There was nothing for it but to keep quiet and buy more plates, or grow more flowers, when you could. The last thing they lost was the book
The Thousand and One Nights
, which Nonna always put back in a secret place after reading a bit with her little girl. One day it was nowhere to be found.

Whereas when Zia was born, the neighbour had finally fallen pregnant; flowers didn’t wither, plates didn’t disappear and neither did storybooks. Plus Nonno was less nervous, the concentration camp was further in the past and at dinner Zia could drop all the forks she wanted without it being the end of the world. Zia’s new boyfriend comes from South America. We were astonished because it was Mamma who introduced him to her.

He’s a doctor Nonna had heard about. She’d made Mamma go to him for a consultation because she thought she walked bent over because of a problem with her spine. The doctor had begun asking Mamma if she’d had any major illnesses and had also asked her questions about her life.

She told me that hour was different from any other in all her existence and she’d felt the thrill of having someone truly interested in her, even if it was for a fee.

Zia said that Doctor Salevsky had travelled a lot and had even been to Cape Horn as a ship’s doctor. So straight away we read some books and learnt that down there the dawn is red and the seals have the sweetest expression and until recently there were hunters that beat them to death for their furs. We know that Zia’s boyfriend goes horse-riding, mountaineering, caving, motorbike racing and deep-sea diving and we can imagine her with her lovely curly hair blowing in the wind on the open plains, or warmly welcomed by our new relatives in Buenos Aires, as only South Americans know how.

Zia goes tango-dancing now and when she comes to see us she shows us the steps and makes everybody be the man for her, and Papà says she has no personality: if a boyfriend plays tennis, she plays tennis, if he’s a film-buff, she talks only about films. Now how’s she going to go with this boyfriend who can do practically everything?

She’s Mamma’s younger sister and she’s a truly beautiful woman, the sort that men – and even boys and women – stop in the street to look at. The best thing someone can say to me is that we look even just a little alike – I think in the sense that I’m a bit chubby and she’s curvy. She has an uncontainable bosom that’s on show whether it’s summer or winter because she’s always untidy and her neckline falls open. She has long legs and a narrow little waist, she’s a metre seventy-five tall and her hair is a soft, jet-black cloud that I used to play with for hours when I was little and she’d never complain. So, if we’d been made by a sculptor, it would be like I’d been left halfway through, whereas she’d been given all the finishing touches. And if we were the protagonists of ‘The Ugly Duckling’, of course I’d be the duckling and Zia would be one of those good and beautiful swans that fly over the henhouse; but we’re made of the same material, and I’m proud of that.

Zia has always let my brother and me do what we like with her and has always given us what we wanted, but she particularly has a soft spot for me. When I was little she would take me with her to her boyfriends’ places and proudly show me off.

I’d say to her, ‘Why don’t you get married and have children too?’

Her: ‘God willing.’

And me: ‘But God
is
willing!’

Even though she’s irresistible, Zia has never had a husband, nor children. Sometimes I think she was born to be a mother to everyone and a wife to everyone, which is why she’s never had anything truly of her own. Nothing beats her fritters, or her
pizzetta
, or the homework she whips up for you in two seconds flat when you’re desperate, or the way she explains all these historical issues to you that in all your life you’d never been able to understand. Zia says that with her, boyfriends have sex, laugh, have important discussions, and then leave. And I wonder what’s missing from love, if you have sex, laugh and talk. Papà says that she doesn’t have a husband or kids because, unlike what I thought when I was little, God isn’t willing! And God operates with crushing logic.

I reckon though that it’ll work out with the South American doctor. He’s started coming to our house and Zia says it’s very important for a man to become fond of his girlfriend’s family. He likes Mamma’s food, flowers, stories and paintings. He wanted to buy one of them but Papà told him that unfortunately he’d already sold them all. But no one thinks that he might like Mamma, so awkwardly wrapped up in all those layers. Not him who, as Zia puts it, has swarms of women buzzing around him and keeps condoms all over the place, in the car, in the dining room, in the bathroom, as well as, obviously, in the bedroom.

Papà says that Mamma and the Argentinian doctor have founded a kind of Mutual Aid Society. He’s been far away from his family for years and though he talks to them every day – ‘Mamina! Papino!’, Papà imitates him answering his mobile phone – it’s clear that he misses them terribly.

Mamma, of course, is trying to recreate his missing family around him.

The doctor, when he sits down to talk to her, doesn’t notice the passing of time and then later on he might phone her up and I guess he must say funny things because sometimes she laughs and laughs, pulling out her handkerchief, and then she asks him if he’s ever tasted Sardinian
fregola
cooked this way or that other way, or the fennel and cheese soup Nonna makes, and what with the laughter and the recipes, they stay on the phone forever, because then the doctor explains to Mamma how you make broth from sweet potato, corn and veal. But then, when he finally comes over to taste these dishes, the two of them never eat anything, because otherwise they’d have less time for talking. Their meals are left untouched, they’d be the joy of any restaurant, if they ever went to one together.

They’ve only ever walked a short way together. Mamma had to pop out so she asked him if he had a problem heading out with her. He almost started shouting and said, ‘Why would I have a problem with that?’ He’d understood that the real question was, ‘Are you embarrassed by me?’

Mamma got back all excited, because the doctor had got her to accompany him to via Manno to buy clothes and had asked her advice and then they’d gone into the Sant’Antonio church where the doctor had knelt down and prayed, but then he’d confided to Mamma that he wasn’t at all sure that God exists, in fact, he was leaning more towards a no than a yes. And then, in the little piazza at San Sepolcro, beyond the portico of Sant’Antonio, he’d seen all the graffiti on the walls and after making the sign of the cross because he was in front of a sacred place, he’d said that he’d cover that graffiti with the blood of whoever had done it and make them pick up all the litter off the ground with their mouths and then clean it with their tongues. Mamma reckoned the doctor was just saying that and really he wouldn’t hurt a fly and Papà got annoyed and kept saying, ‘Oh, the wise, perceptive lynx has spoken. The eagle, who sees everything and misses nothing, has spoken. If it weren’t for your mother, how would you protect yourselves?’

My brother wants to know how come everyone in this house, except for him, has this obsession with talking about their own shit. Why didn’t Mamma just keep her walk to herself?

Zia’s boyfriend seems to love eating if Mamma’s not around, but he’s not fat. In fact he’s very handsome: very tough and very dark. Four generations back his father’s great-grandfather migrated from Russia to Argentina and married an
indio
girl, that’s why he has such a strange name for a South American: Salevsky. Doctor Salevsky. Mamma says it’s like he has two kinds of physiognomy: that of a savage, and that of a soldier at the court of the Tsar. She says that his eyes are the colour of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans when they do battle at Cape Horn and even though she’s seen none of all that, it’s her favourite blue when she’s painting. Mamma says the reason he’s not fat is that his hunger for food is only homesickness, and it’s a homesickness that not even all the women he’s lived with have been able to take away.

When Doctor Salevsky arrives for lunch, or for dinner, he clearly doesn’t want to let her down in Society so, knowing how much Mamma loves growing flowers, he brings her dozens of plants from the nursery, in the same colours as the tubes of paint she’d enthusiastically showed him.

They’re not doing anything wrong and none of us thinks they might like each other, or rather that he might like Mamma, so skinny and scared, with her floral dresses hanging off her in summer and her deportee’s overcoat in winter.

Mamma must have told the doctor that she’s never travelled. It’s true that Papà’s always off somewhere, but never with her. Papà loves travelling alone like a missionary, even though he’s married, and Mamma understands this.

One day Zia’s boyfriend arrived with a heavy package tied with a bow as red as Mamma’s face when she saw it. No one ever gives her anything because she says gifts embarrass her and she doesn’t enjoy them. Inside the package was this:
Earth from Above: 365 Days
, by the photographer Bertrand. With that book, Mamma can visit a different place each day. She was careful not to put it on the bookshelf, where anyone could get at it. If I ask to travel with her for a bit she goes and gets it from a secret place in her bedroom and she strokes its pages with the same love Rosso Malpelo felt, in Verga’s story, when he stroked the trousers that had belonged to his dead father, the only person who had ever loved him. Her gestures, as we turn the pages, remind me of when she used to read fairy tales to my brother and me.