Farewell, Ghosts Read online

  I took the photo out of the album, from the second page, where I’d lifted up the transparent plastic. That other Ida Laquidara stared at me from the past, laughing, and she was laughing at me; she was sixteen and I more than twice that, I would get sick and die while she would keep for herself an immovable age, like my father’s, like the age of all the objects in the house. Eyes closed, I sniffed the scent of the spray that weighed down her dark curly hair, and in my legs, which had remained slender, there was still a memory of those adolescent calves. Here I am, this is me, said the pose: in it the girl challenged the lens, no longer a child and not yet adult, childhood behind her and twenty distant as a Siren. Sitting on the wall of a hotel terrace, legs dangling, feet in loafers, she was touching her hair with a charming gesture and smiling at Sara, who was taking the photo, while behind her Ortygia shone white. At school they made us learn every bit of that Greece from which Sicily was born like a rib, and we liked feeling part of it; the teachers organized our class trips according to when the tragedies were staged and the archaeological sites open, heedless of the climate, the heat, and the humidity.

  “What are you looking at?” My mother entered the room, and came to sit next to me on the bed. The warmth of her arms, her hips, her legs annoyed me and I moved. “What year was that?” she asked, staring at the album.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” I said. “Would you make me a coffee?”

  She nodded and before going out she turned.

  “Yes, but enough of that scuntintizza, that discontent, leave that nonsense to the radio, put it in other people’s mouths.”

  So my mother listened to the program.

  We had never talked about it, and I was surprised to imagine her in the kitchen with her hands in the sink, or lying on the couch paging through an antiques magazine, or on the telephone with one of her friends, the hum of voices in the background and the host, who, reading the stories I had written, imbued my words with tragedy or comedy. I saw clearly what she did during the broadcast, I saw her clench her teeth, tighten her fists, frown, react with her whole self to the traces I was scattering in the plots, attributing them to listeners: stories of daughters without fathers, of separated fathers, of unaffectionate or desperate mothers, stories of loss and dissatisfaction, rage and discoveries, stories of reuniting around death and mourning. Once, at the height of audience success, I had felt secure enough to have a fake Calabrian character utter my favorite proverb: “It’s Christmas here on the Strait: triulu, malanova, e scuntintizza—complaint, bad news, and discontent.” It was the story of a man alone, a widower of around sixty, who had a difficult relationship with his children. Thus I discovered from my mother’s sharp remark that she listened, and not with pride in her daughter’s work but, rather, to record the scuntintizza I poured into the imaginary stories of others—she pointed to the evidence of how wrong I was, and wouldn’t forgive me. She would have liked me to show her that she had been a good mother, the best. I should have reassured her: No, I hadn’t inherited from him the sadness and lack of interest in life, yes, I was outgoing and healthy, normal, like her. My mother would have liked to receive the following message from me: Don’t worry, my father’s disappearance isn’t your fault, it’s no one’s fault. But unlike her I didn’t think that no one was at fault: I thought we all were.

  The young Ida Laquidara went on speaking to me from the photo. That summer she had kissed a boy she didn’t love and felt nothing; they had lingered talking on the beach at sunset, then had walked along the shore to the steps leading to the square where he had parked his motorbike. Along the seafront were two old cannons from the Bourbon artillery, aimed at the Calabrian coast; the boy had turned and clasped her hips with his hands, as if he were following a manual, while the water reflected the last of the daylight and the inexpert Ida Laquidara thought: Sara has already done it. Just before their mouths came together she stopped, a moment, sorry—and spit the chewing gum into her hand. The boy, patient, waited for her. Then he approached again and there were no more excuses, not even a pair of glasses to shift. You ruined the magic moment for some gum, Sara had laughed when she told her, and Ida, bragging: See, I’m the wrong ingredient, the one that makes the mayonnaise curdle.

  That’s it, immovable girl? Is that the most you can get out of your static smile? The story of a kiss evidently late chronologically, at the outer limit of the age predicted for you; the obvious complicity between friends; the body that opens up without leaving traces in the logbook?

  The girl in the photo is silent, the house is muggy and quiet. She insists on being sixteen, she wants to stay there inescapably, she doesn’t even suspect that she won’t be that age forever. Someone behind her, beyond the terrace, a ghost in the wind, whispers: Life is ein Augenblick, a blink of the eye, but it’s an echo from German class, that’s where she heard the word. Behind the smile, Ida Laquidara is sure she’ll be like that forever. She thinks, and no one would be able to dissuade her, that everything will happen within the appearance she has now, within the precise force of a single age. Girl stopped in time, listen to me: The woman who today bears your name respects you enough not to call you a child. The sanctimonious compassion of adults is alien to the woman who’s clutching the photo, so you can take a chance, give her a reward.

  Courage.

  Only you can stage that memory. Precisely that one.

  It must have happened a week or two after returning from Ortygia: ten days after the photo and twenty after the kiss on the beach, those are the calculations if I persist in making them, but although the summers seemed very long, time was in fact patched together, insubstantial, the universe shifted in one direction and then another, every change was ein Augenblick, a blink of the eye between one month and the next, long, empty weeks to colonize before the start of school.

  One morning Sara telephoned me: I’m coming to pick you up in an hour, what bathing suit will you wear? Come and pick me up in what, I answered, did you buy a motorbike last night? With Fabio, she said, we’re going to the beach in Calabria, to Scylla. I hung up the telephone stunned, but not so much that I didn’t enjoy the news: they would come in the car, we would take the ferry and spend a day on the opposite coast—what could be more wonderful? Outside the island the rules collapsed: outside the island one could do anything. In a two-piece bathing suit I went into my mother’s room to look in the mirror for my new body, the slender legs, the hips just emerging, the breasts vanishing inside two small triangles of material—the body I would take into the water and along the shore. Yes, let’s cross the sea and get to the other side.

  Since the end of school Sara had been going out with Fabio, if going out means rounding the corner from home and getting in the car of someone who’s waiting for you every day; she loved him, if love means putting your arms around his neck and opening your mouth, offering him your tongue (he’s a really good kisser, she had told me proudly—and I would have liked to ask, How do you know, since you’ve never kissed anyone else? Or have you kissed someone else?); he loved her, if love means tickling her legs under the skirt and, defying everyone, appearing intimate with a girl who until a few days before had belonged not to him but to her parents, to school, and also to me. I put on the expression of someone who has her own things to do, so that no one would think I’d been left with the worst role, the false friend. Fabio was one of us, I repeated to myself, waiting for them in front of the house. I’d kissed the boy I didn’t love at sunset on the beach with the two cannons because he was there, to be closer to my friend in my own twisted way, and it had worked. That day, though, it wouldn’t, but at first I didn’t realize it, dazed by my insistence on happiness, by the intoxication of crossing the Strait. Ein Augenblick: we spend our life blinking our eyes, and then one blink, one alone among many, changes our direction and throws what we are into disarray.

  On the boat we’re still together, we lean out over the parapet and sing, I say: In the sea that goes to Stromboli
you can see dolphins (I think: In the boat with my father heading toward Stromboli one morning at dawn I saw holes in the water and fish tails like leaping tuna—they were dolphins). Sara says: Here at most we’ll see Charybdis (I think: a sea monster who devours everything he finds, boats, men, fish, wreckage, an insatiable monster). Fabio smokes and doesn’t take off his dark glasses, we drink icy beer, eat nothing, I get him to offer a cigarette and then another, I smoke awkwardly but strike a lot of poses; at the first remark implying I’m a mooch I’m embarrassed, and when we get off at Villa San Giovanni I go into a tobacco shop and spend half my money to buy three packs of cigarettes, one for each.

  The beach is very white, and very crowded. Sara and Fabio are in a constant embrace, they laugh with each other, speak to each other in a vocabulary that’s not mine; I pretend to understand—they can’t humiliate me like that. At some point he says: I feel like a martini, and she follows him, turns and smiles at me, disappears, they disappear together. I wonder why they wanted me with them, I hate myself for falling for it and pretend it doesn’t matter. I always pretend it doesn’t matter, always. When it comes to that skill I’m a professional: it’s three years since my father disappeared, at hiding grief I’m the best.

  I get up and go toward the water.

  Invincible, I go into the cold water, my bathing suit loosens, my muscles contract, I come out and return to my towel, my beer is there, planted in the sand. You can’t drink it so warm, it’s disgusting, says a man from a neighboring towel, pointing to my bottle. He must have sat down while I was swimming. It’s the voice of a man my father’s age, but I no longer know my father’s voice. I take a cigarette from my purse as if I’d been smoking all my life, Fabio has the lighter, why didn’t I buy three? I feel the shadow on my arm and an alien warmth, a dark arm that offers me the lighter, I hear the splutter, the flame, and the determination of a body that is sitting next to me. Did you come by yourself? No, with my friends. Nice friends to leave you alone. He’s right: there are no towels, bags, things—nothing. Around me emptiness, meters of pale sand and a few rocks. I seem like a child who’s telling lies. My skin feels tight from the salt.

  How old are you? Eighteen. It’s not true. Eighteen. Is this the first time you’ve come to this beach? I say I’m enrolling in the university, I’m going to study film, I’m going to live in Bologna. I lie without hesitation. I study my toenails: I should have put polish on them. He has dark curly hair and a beard, he wears eyeglasses despite the sun, and behind them are light-brown pupils. He doesn’t have the smell that everyone has at the beach, he doesn’t smell of sunscreen, I recognize the bath foam he washed with, I’ve seen the commercial, sitting at the table with my mother: at lunch, while I divide the morning from the afternoon, in the evening when she falls asleep and I sit, eyes wide on the television screen. I look past him, toward the towel, where there’s a fanny pack and a hardback novel with a yellow cover from which the top of a pen sticks out instead of a bookmark. He teaches at the university, English literature.

  And you? he insists. I’m going to live in Bologna, I insist on lying.

  On the shore two girlfriends laugh and talk with their hands on their hips, in the water up to their knees.

  He asks: Would you like another beer?

  A little girl dragged to the shore by her mother screams, chafed by the sand that’s getting in her flippers; one of the two friends has gone in the water while the other stands still, staring at an undefined point.

  We flick the ashes into the neck of my bottle, there’s warm beer in the bottom. I say: I’ll finish drying off and let’s go.

  I play in the sand with one hand and he says nothing.

  When I pull up my shorts my bathing suit is still wet, but I don’t feel like staying on the beach to get hot, we cross the burning sand, we cross the street we have to cross and reach the car. I have a lot of cassettes, he says. We get in and turn on the stereo, I choose Italian music of decades before my birth, I stretch out my legs and say something wrong, seductive, everything that happens from that moment is unpleasant: sucking, kissing, detaching, the inevitable penetration as irksome as the two-piece bathing suit stuck to my skin. The man for whom what is happening seems inevitable now decides to linger where the skin is pale, under the marks of the bathing suit, he asks if I like it and if it’s the first time I say yes and then no and both things are true: it can’t be my first time, I can’t let it happen like this.

  If it happens to the body it hasn’t really happened.

  No one has passed by the car; in front of the windshield are sharp thorns and small fire-red berries, inedible.

  When I leave, he also gets out. I tell him not to come with me, there’s no need, I’m going to find my friends, in his satisfied eyes I read the mockery, it’s clear to him that my friends don’t exist, that I’m alone, and he says goodbye with an affectionate caress, asks if I want to see him again, he’s sorry he doesn’t have a pen to write his phone number on the palm of my hand, so he tells me, pronouncing the numbers clearly, I repeat one, two, three times, forgetting it as I recite.

  I walk from the parking lot to the beach. I’m powerful, bold, I take off my clothes without even stopping, I go into the sea and swim with my head underwater and then above, freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, then underwater again, until I hear a muffled, familiar voice. I take my head out, Sara’s shouting, euphoric, from the shore, they’re calling me, it’s late.

  I don’t think about anything anymore.

  On the way back we sing beside the parapet, we talk again about dolphins, we open more cold beers, we finish our packs of cigarettes; I buy mint gum and rub it on my fingers to take away the smell of smoke. The mind obliterates before you take a shower, and more completely: I’m convinced that it’s so, and from then on I will repeat that fiction whenever I need it. It’s a scene in present time, a dream. It’s a scene I can forget in the morning.

  If it happens to the body it doesn’t count, if it happens to the body it didn’t really happen.

  “You wanted it and then you didn’t drink it.”

  My mother pointed to the cup of coffee that had been hot and was now tepid. I hadn’t realized she’d brought it to me, I hadn’t even thought of it again, after asking for it, asking her to make it. I closed the album I was holding open on my lap, I said farewell to the sixteen-year-old Ida, and from the pile I took another right away.

  “You’re like that all day, what’s the sense.”

  “Like what.”

  “You promised you’d help me.”

  “Sorry, I was tired when I got here. I was working on the program’s summer series.”

  “Take a walk. A swim in the sea.” She glanced contemptuously at the images of the past. “Go out, they’re just photos.”

  “You remember when I rubbed ice on my pillow to sleep?”

  “What did you do?”

  “But that winter, do you at least remember that?”

  I pointed to a Polaroid of her and my father under an ochre blanket, in the bed in their room. Sunday atmosphere, my mother disheveled, barely awake; she was laughing, looking in one direction, my father edging away, he was saying something, admiring her, adoring. She in a blue cotton T-shirt, he bare-chested. Under the blanket their legs were entwined, they were holding hands. I had taken the picture.

  “Did you love each other?”

  “Have I ever asked you anything about your husband?”

  My mother’s voice had turned dark and intimidating. My husband and I didn’t have photos of the two of us, and she had never presumed to understand my marriage. He was shy, I considered photos of couples vulgar: two human beings who pass some time together, usually after emerging from another couple, two people who find themselves sharing some of their days, who claim to show the world a happiness that is bound to age badly, and is ousted by a new happiness that will be just as transient.

 
“My husband didn’t get up one morning and decide to disappear.”

  “You don’t know anything, Ida. No one knows what’s in a marriage, except the husband and wife. Sometimes not even them.”

  “But I can talk about my father. And all the afternoons when you weren’t there, and the mornings when you went out early to go to work, I was with him, even the morning he left—where were you?”

  “You were a child, what do children know?”

  “You left him to me every day. I don’t even know if you really suffered.”

  “You were always like that, someone who doesn’t listen, who invents other people’s characters, the way you invent those stories you write for the radio. Where I was you know. At the museum, that morning as always. Your father no longer had a job: must I remind you that you ate thanks to me? Do you remember or not, that without your mother you wouldn’t have had food on the table?”

  “It would be better if children were brought up by the entire community, not by two parents, if they belonged to a town, a village, not to a biology. So maybe that terrible sense of property wouldn’t exist.”

  “What are you saying? What are you saying to your mother?”

  She jumped up suddenly; the high sun coming through the window focused her in a small cone of brightness, so that she resembled a ballerina on a stage, quick-tempered and light. At sixty-eight my mother was still beautiful, even more so than in the album on my lap.

  “Aren’t you ashamed, you should be ashamed of thoughts like that. And then you came here to do what? At least you could help me with the workers. You’re here or you’re not here, it doesn’t change anything. I’m always alone. You ask me if I suffered?”