Farewell, Ghosts Read online

  Cover

  FAREWELL, GHOSTS

  NADIA TERRANOVA

  Translated by

  ANN GOLDSTEIN

  Seven Stories Press

  New York • Oakland

  Copyright © 2018, Einaudi (Addio Fantasmi by Nadia Terranova)

  English translation © 2020, Ann Goldstein

  This edition published in agreement with Nadia Terranova through MalaTesta Literary Agency, Milan.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Terranova, Nadia, author. | Goldstein, Ann, 1949- translator.

  Title: Farewell, ghosts / Nadia Terranova ; translated by Ann Goldstein.

  Other titles: Addio fantasmi. English

  Description: New York, NY : Seven Stories Press, [2020] | Translated into English from Italian.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020017378 (print) | LCCN 2020017379 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644210079 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781644210086 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ4920.E767 A6713 2020 (print) | LCC PQ4920.E767 (ebook) | DDC 853/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017378

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017379

  College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com or send a fax on school letterhead to 212-226-1411.

  For the survivors

  I always had the impression that we were a strange family, neither rich nor poor, much richer than the poor and much poorer than the rich, with a garden that was like a garden for the rich but a dark toilet where fungi grew.

  NATALIA GINZBURG, “Childhood”*

  Natalia Ginzburg, Infanzia, in Un’assenza. Racconti, memorie, cronache. 1933-1988, edited by Domenico Scarpa (Turin: Einaudi, 2016).

  Farewell, Ghosts

  One morning in the middle of September my mother called to tell me that in a few days work would begin on the roof of our house. She said it just like that: “our.” But for some time I’d had another house to take care of, in another city, a house rented by me and another person. The house I would have called ours no longer existed, that label had been removed when I left, and in the following years I had wiped it from my memory with thorough violence. Yes, I knew that the roof was falling down—it had begun to fall down when I was born, and had been crumbling, raining down in the form of dust and flaking plaster, for all the life I had lived there—but I wasn’t in any way responsible, we can’t be blamed for the things we don’t want to inherit and have already disowned. I wrote fake true stories for the radio that had had an unexpected popularity; I had a man, a job, another city, new evenings, and a different time.

  My mother said that she had had to deal with every problem by herself; she was tired now and the house was a burden to her. Redoing the roof, which was flat and tiled and functioned also as a terrace, would be her last act of generosity—because certainly she couldn’t put the house on the market with all that damage—before buying a smaller and more solid place. She said that a contractor would repair the holes caused by bad weather, poor insulation, and the neighbors’ old renovations, while in our house—she repeated: our—under the roof, under the feet and labor of the workmen, she and I would sift through furniture, utensils, and books to begin to empty it: she didn’t want me to be able to reproach her one day for giving away my things, and so I had to return and choose what to let go.

  I thought it would be easy, because, apart from a red iron box kept at the bottom of a drawer, I didn’t care about anything.

  I packed a suitcase with a few clothes and some underwear, and bought a train ticket on the Internet for the next day: I would look out the window for the long stretch of sea beside the Calabrian railroad all the way to Villa San Giovanni; from there I would take the ferry to Messina, bringing my mother the help she’d asked for.

  That night I dreamed I was drowning.

  My husband’s foot, propped against my ankle, warmed the bed, and at some point I began to move from the warmth under the sheet into the water.

  I was walking as if I knew where to go, and the water cooled ankles, calves, knees, and then thighs, hips, belly, breast, and shoulders, and then chin and mouth, until I tried to speak and immediately disappeared, swallowed up by a wave. A moment before, I was walking; a moment after, I was drowning. My sight didn’t dim, and my strength didn’t evaporate, only this thing happened: I entered the sea and in an instant my body no longer existed.

  I woke and sat up. In a whisper, I called to Pietro, my husband, not because I needed him but because I didn’t want to keep from him the fact that I was dying. It seemed important, dying, and I wanted him to witness it. My arms and armpits were sweaty, sweat dripped across my forehead and shoulders, he grabbed me by one elbow and, with an effort, opened his eyes and sat up next to me. There was nothing we could say to each other that would console me, and I felt unable to share either the burden or the fear of my dream.

  Once, more than ten years before, when we’d been together only a few months, I reproached him for having so little interest in my nightmares; when I was a child my paternal grandmother urged me to tell them—if you don’t tell them you won’t be free of them, she said—and now that she was gone, if he didn’t ask I couldn’t tell, and wouldn’t be free of anything. So at night when I woke suddenly, and in the morning before going to work, Pietro had begun to ask how I was: Tell me what you dreamed, he insisted and insisted, and I tried to answer, but it didn’t work. Things never work when they’re transported from one era to another, they’re fine where they are, and there’s always a reason that memories should remain memories and not come to disturb the present. I had been wrong to tell him about my grandmother: in her big bed with its scent of fine old sheets, the account flowed naturally, whereas opening myself to him was an effort. It was the same that night, too, neither of us had a desire for words; it was an agreement we’d made long ago, as long ago as the times when we responded to fear with desire, to nightmares with sex.

  I grabbed the plastic water bottle from the night table and took long swallows. My husband touched my back with the sort of love we had then, a weary love, made up of hands that, never too intimate, caressed the stomach around the belly button, desperate hands that gripped the edge of a T-shirt, the elastic of underpants, a love that seldom became something else and pushed beyond, spinning in circles of static affection and splitting in two by itself, withdrawing after a brief illusion and letting us return to being two very separate entities. I drank and swallowed and Pietro took my arm, I lay down, and he lay down, too, I turned onto one side and he turned first toward me, spoonlike, and then onto his opposite side, and finally we rubbed against each other, back to back, to rock ourselves and try to go to sleep again. Struggling to follow me, even sleepily, was his way of loving me, the way people can still love each other after ten years. At a certain point our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.

  Sex is a language, and many words had been uttered between Pietro and me in the early days of our relationship, when I was running away from Sicily and from a family that was maimed and full of silences, and he welcome
d me in Rome, becoming companion, parent, brother. So, along with the city, I found a new self, and he was there, always there, and that availability was moving. In those first months we took off our clothes as soon as we could and after having desired each other to exhaustion we were happy, even though one detail might have warned us that it wouldn’t last: we never made love twice, the first time satisfied us, and immediately we began to separate and get dressed. Everything we sought we managed to give each other in a minimum time that never expanded, after which we reestablished our singularity, the separateness that had also been our rule of attraction. But soon—too soon for a romance that claimed to be the romance of a lifetime—that separateness became an enemy. The body stopped being the place of communication. The sweetness was poured out in daily rituals, in dialogues and kindnesses, and even if we fought during the day we never really hurt each other: we lived each in the shadow of the other, each watching over the other with a care I’d never known; after desire ended we had developed a ritual for giving each other pleasure anyway, then, after a time, that exchange, too, became unusable, like an old dictionary.

  The fault, I knew, was mine. It must have been I who closed myself off first, unaccustomed as I was to openness, to sharing.

  But to Pietro, and only to him, I had told the story of my father and he hadn’t raised questions, he had accepted the anomaly. We had known each other for three weeks and neither of us was much over twenty, when on our first real date he showed up with a package: inside was a blue skater’s T-shirt and a diary with a hard cover. At that moment I saw in him the man I was waiting for. He didn’t know that as a girl I had skated for long hours, he didn’t know that I had written a lot about myself in various diaries hidden in drawers. And yet he knew.

  So I confessed to him that my father had disappeared when I was thirteen. Not died, just disappeared into nothing, I continued, waiting for the question I feared: Didn’t you and your mother do anything to keep him?

  But Pietro never asked that question. He asked nothing, listening attentively to the few sentences I was willing to concede: my father, a high school teacher, had left the house one morning and hadn’t returned. And then he changed the subject. He said that the work I was looking for at a secondary school would be wrong for me: the lives of others, of students, parents, and colleagues, would overwhelm me, and I would soon find myself enslaved and unhappy. He didn’t say that lives don’t repeat and that it didn’t make sense to follow my father’s, to become a teacher like him: he had put the emphasis on something else. The crowding in classrooms and halls wouldn’t give me any respite; I should write, instead, and put into my stories the pain that couldn’t go elsewhere.

  Until that moment Pietro and I had always met on happy occasions, and thus I discovered that my eyes exposed that pain, and I was convinced that his capacity to read it was outside the ordinary. On that conviction I had based our life. Day by day I relied on him, his seriousness was a rock and, like all rocks, had walls that could be difficult, hostile, to climb. Sometimes I said to myself that I wouldn’t know how to make an appointment with the dentist by myself and wouldn’t pay bills or taxes if I didn’t know that I would put the receipts in the folders he had organized for the apartment we rented. Being together every day, making every decision together, knowing by heart the smell, the sex, the character of the other: that was marriage. The rest was a stormy, unknown sea, and there was no point in crossing it.

  I felt my husband rubbing against my back for five, ten minutes and then he fell asleep again, while I stayed curled up toward the wall, hoping not to have to confront the water again; the night hid weapons for my defense, but I had already used them up. I was becoming invisible again, while if I drowned, if I died, I would have wanted Pietro to see me.

  The counterpart of the darkest fear is an unexpected lightness: I wanted to make love as if we could devour each other, as in the early days. I turned and began to caress him impetuously, but from him came a sound that interrupted the rhythm of his breathing, while his body contracted defensively. We could touch each other and cradle each other, but the possibility of making love made us retreat like terrified animals: it would mean having not more intimacy but less, losing that little physical closeness that with difficulty we had gained. We knew each other too well to challenge our reticence to see each other naked, a view that allowed neither of us to let go, not because we didn’t find the body of the other beautiful or attractive but because we would no longer know what to say or how to say it, now that that unused dictionary was sleeping between us.

  I also withdrew, onto my other side, and again turned my back to him. I took his hand and put it on mine near my belly button, brooding with my eyes open. I thought I was grateful to him for that advice ten years earlier. In my fake true stories I put part of my pain and the water that overflowed from the past, and I hoped that writing would be enough to save me, but then came a murmur, a disruptive voice suggesting that gratitude wasn’t enough to keep a marriage from drowning.

  So in the insomnia that had no end, between my sweat, Pietro’s regular breathing, and fear of a shipwreck, I waited for a dawn that would never arrive. But everything arrives, sooner or later, destroying the people we were or think we are: at the first light of the sun I got up silently, kissed him on the lips, and went to the station, leaving him asleep.

  PART I

  The Name

  We Nest Only in Dirty Places

  Driven by the crowd that was disembarking from the belly of the ship, I passed through the Caronte company turnstiles and found my mother. She was wearing a light, short dress, above the knee, and had let her hair grow to her shoulders; her face, in spite of the sixty-eight years that ought to have marked it, was self-conscious, like a girl’s; her slender body was placed between me and the island, forming an entrance to the city. I noticed that in growing up—aging—she had begun to resemble me, as though she were the daughter. She smiled at me with a candor that once had been mine: so I hadn’t lost it, I discovered, only left it as a legacy to her. She asked me how the trip was and why I’d taken the train rather than the plane, but for me it was normal to get on a train in Rome, wait for the sea to be visible from the window, get out at the station in Villa San Giovanni: to cut the Strait in two in the September light, rejoice in the crests of waves stirred by the sirocco, huddle on the bridge among strangers who, smoking, were looking out over the parapet, choose a point between Scylla and Charybdis and hold on to it with my eyes for the whole crossing. The crossing: one reason the return was worthwhile.

  The sun lit up the plastic sign of an abandoned supermarket: “Welcome to Sicily,” lights burned out for a decade, greeted me, and quickly and in silence we left the harbor area. Amid streets dedicated to sea myths, Via Colapesce and Via Fata Morgana, the house awaited us. It was only an ugly extra story added on later to a nineteenth-century building, a plastic crown on a real queen; its decline was recounted in the vestiges of ornaments on the surviving balconies, a lion with undulating, flaking mane, faded and discolored symbols of nobility, dilapidated green-painted wood shutters. We had lived there together for more than twenty years, from my birth to the day I left for Rome; childhood and adolescence had remained to watch over the house like swallows, whose wings I heard beating out of season, while my mother rummaged in her purse for the keys. Every spring they made a nest in the façade of the building across the street; afternoons as a child I spied on that agglomerate of black threads from behind the shutters, and mornings, just leaving for school, I immediately looked for one like it under my balcony. With the fierce instinct of children I felt that spring was the season of death, of earth rotting under the celebration of flowers, but I wished to be part of that deception and its scents, and I prayed that a swallow would choose my house as its personal point of transit. Why don’t the birds stop at our house, I protested, getting in the car, and my mother, distracted, more engaged in putting the car in reverse than in soothing me: It’s bet
ter that way, they nest only in dirty places.

  I turned back to her and she found the keys.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “You remember Dollface?” came to mind, and she laughed.

  That was what we called the neighbor across the street, a man with the round, placid face of a doll who spent afternoons on his balcony, above the nest that the birds were constructing, a nest he knew nothing about. He went through the day ignorant of the animals that were busy under his feet. Thus my mother and I arrived at the house as three: the old complicity of one of our nicknames had placed itself between us, a creature only she and I saw.

  Entering, I smelled the dampness of the walls, mixed with the odor of dust. I thought of my husband and held on to his image: he was still at work, already tired from the day; I should have sent him a message to let him know I’d arrived.

  Suddenly the house summoned me to itself.

  The room where I had slept, played, studied had remained fixed over time; floor and walls were occupied by the magma of objects exiled from the shed on the terrace, which my mother had emptied before my arrival. A dead room, invaded by waves of memories.

  “There was no space in the study or the living room, they’re covered with flaking plaster,” my mother explained, in the imperious tone of people who refuse to be in the wrong.

  In fact, in the other rooms a flood of white plaster dust had been deposited on couches, chairs, and bookshelves. In mine, instead, the life we had accumulated together was poured out onto the furniture and the floor. We nest only in dirty places.

  I sneezed.

  “The dust has always bothered you,” my mother noted.

  “That’s not true, I became allergic when I moved away from the sea.”