4
ON A LATE-SUMMER day, Agostino and the boys in the gang went to the pine grove to hunt for birds and mushrooms. Of their various feats and exploits, this was the one he liked best. They entered the grove and walked for a long time on the soft soil through a natural corridor formed by the red columns of tree trunks, looking toward the sky to see whether high above them, between the towering branches, there was anything moving or stirring between the pines. When there was, Berto, Tortima, or Sandro, the best of the three, would pull back the rubber band of his slingshot and shoot a sharp rock at the spot where he thought he saw movement. Sometimes a sparrow would plummet to the ground, its wing shattered. Fluttering and chirping pitifully, it would hop and flail about until one of the boys grabbed it and crushed its head between his fingers. But the boys usually caught nothing and had to content themselves with long wanderings through the dense grove, their heads tilted back and their eyes staring upward, venturing farther and deeper to where the underbrush between the pine trees started and the soft barren ground of the dried pine needles gave way to a tangle of thornbushes. This was where the mushroom picking began. It had rained for a couple of days, and the underbrush was still damp with resin-coated leaves and marshy green soil. Amid the thickest bushes, there were large yellow mushrooms as well as small clusters of tiny ones, lustrous with mucous and moisture. The boys picked them delicately, poking their arms between the briars, sliding two fingers beneath the caps and pulling up carefully so they would also get the dirt- and moss-covered stems. Then they stuck them one by one on long pointed sticks. As they worked their way from thicket to thicket, they gathered a few pounds — dinner for Tortima who, as the strongest boy, confiscated the day’s haul for himself. The harvest was bountiful, for after a long hike they found a virgin patch, so to speak, where the mushrooms sprouted densely, one beside the other, on a bed of moss. By sundown the patch had still been only half explored, but it was late and, with several skewers of mushrooms and two or three birds, the boys slowly made their way home.
Usually they took a path that led straight to the beach, but that day they chased after a sparrow that kept taunting them, flitting between the lowest branches of the pine trees and constantly fooling them into thinking it would be an easy target. So they ended up crossing the full length of the grove whose easternmost tip encroached on an area almost abutting the houses of the town. It was growing dark by the time they emerged from the last pine trees into the piazza of a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. The immense unpaved piazza was covered with sand, scattered piles of debris, and tufts of thistle and scrub through which rocky, uncertain paths twisted and turned. Stunted oleanders grew here and there in no particular pattern on the edges of the piazza. There were no sidewalks. A handful of houses had dusty gardens alternating with large open spaces enclosed by chain-link fences. The houses looked tiny as they skirted the square, and the gaping sky over the immense rectangle only amplified the sense of abandonment and misery.
The boys crossed the piazza diagonally, walking two by two like monks. The last in line were Agostino and Tortima. Agostino was carrying two long skewers of mushrooms, and Tortima, in his big hands, a pair of sparrows with bleeding dangling heads.
As they reached the far side of the piazza, Tortima poked his elbow into Agostino’s side. Pointing to one of the houses, he remarked cheerily, “Do you see that? Do you know what it is?”
Agostino took a look. It was a house very similar to the others. Maybe a little bigger, three stories high with a pitched roof covered by slate tiles. The front was painted a sad smoky gray with tightly closed white shutters, and it was almost completely hidden by the trees in the overgrown garden. The garden didn’t appear to be very big. The perimeter wall was covered with ivy, and through the gate you could see a short driveway between two rows of bushes. Beneath an old awning was a door with closed shutters. “There’s nobody home,” said Agostino, pausing to get a better look.
“Nobody?” the other boy said, laughing. In a few words he explained to Agostino who exactly did live there. On previous occasions Agostino had heard the boys talking about such houses, inhabited by women who stayed indoors all day and all night, ready and willing to welcome anyone for a price, but this was the first time he had actually seen one. Tortima’s words reawakened in him all the strangeness and astonishment he had felt the first time he had heard them mentioned. Back then he had hardly been able to believe the existence of such a singular community, the generous and indiscriminate dispenser of the love that to him appeared so difficult. Now the same disbelief made him turn his eyes toward that house as if to detect traces in its outside walls of the incredible life they guarded. By contrast to the fantastic image he had of its rooms, each illuminated by a female nude, the house looked singularly old and grim. “Really?” he said, feigning indifference, but his heart had started beating faster.
“Yes,” said Tortima, “it’s the most expensive one in town.” He added the particulars of the prices, the number of women, the people who went there, and the amount of time you could stay. The information almost displeased Agostino, since it substituted mundane details for the vague barbaric image of these forbidden places he had formed earlier. Still, feigning a nonchalant tone of idle curiosity, he asked his companion many questions. Now that his initial surprise and agitation had passed, an idea with a stubborn and singular vitality formed in his mind. Tortima, who seemed well informed, provided all the clarification he wanted. And so, since night had fallen, the group broke apart amid the small talk. Agostino handed the mushrooms over to Tortima and headed home.
The idea had come to him, clear and simple, although its sources were complicated and obscure. That very evening, he would go to the house and know one of those women. It was not a desire or a yearning but rather a firm and almost desperate resolution.
Only in this way, he felt, would he finally succeed in freeing himself from the obsessions that had so tormented him during these summer days. Knowing one of those women, he thought vaguely, would forever discredit the boys’ false accusations, and at the same time, sever once and for all the subtle bond of deviant and murky sensuality that had formed between the mother and himself. He couldn’t admit it, but to feel finally released from that bond seemed the most urgent goal to be achieved. And he persuaded himself of its urgency no later than that same day through a very simple but significant development.
He and the mother had been sleeping in separate rooms, but that night a woman whom she had invited to spend a few weeks with them was supposed to arrive. Since the house was small, it had been decided that the guest would take Agostino’s room while a cot would be set up for him in the mother’s room. That same morning, before his displeased, scornful eyes, his cot had been placed next to the mother’s bed, on which the sheets were heaped, still unmade and smelling of sleep. Along with the cot, his clothes, toiletries, and books had also been moved.
To see his already painful proximity to his mother increased by shared sleep filled Agostino with uncontrollable repulsion. All the things he had barely suspected till then, he thought, would suddenly be irremediably exposed to his eyes by virtue of this new and greater intimacy. As an antidote, he had to quickly, very quickly, insert between himself and his mother the image of another woman toward whom he could direct if not his gaze then at least his thoughts. This image — which would shield him from the mother’s nudity and, in a way, strip her of all femininity, giving her back the motherly significance she had once held — could only be provided by one of the women in that house.