Polledro’s voice arrived like a jolt against that grief. The station of forty years earlier gave a shudder. The figures turned out to be of colored dust and dissolved. After many years, clothing and poses of that sort had disappeared from the world. The couple had been removed, along with their dog, as if, after waiting in vain, they had grown annoyed and had decided to return to their castle of somewhere or other. I had trouble keeping Amalia standing in front of that void. Furthermore, a moment before Polledro stopped speaking, I had realized that I was confused, that the dark suit of the cardboard woman and her scarf had been not hers but my mother’s. It was Amalia who dressed in that elegant fashion, so long ago. As if for an appointment that was important to her. Now with her mouth half-open, teeth lightly veined by the lipstick, she was staring not at the figures but at him, the man in the camelhair coat. And the man spoke to her, and she answered, and he spoke to her again, but I didn’t understand what they were saying.
Polledro spoke to me ingratiatingly to force me to listen to him. I looked at him, mesmerized, but I couldn’t manage to pay attention. Under the well-fed features he had the face of his father as a young man, and he was helping me, without wanting to, tell myself about Caserta, who was meeting my mother in the damaged station of Chiaia. I shook my head and Polledro must have thought that I didn’t believe him. In fact it was in myself that I had no faith. He repeated: “It’s me, Antonio, the son of Caserta.” I was realizing that all I really preserved of those figures of wood and cardboard was an impression of foreign lands and unkept promises. They gleamed like newly polished shoes, but without details. They could just as easily have been advertising figures of two men, or two women; there might have been no dog; they could have had a lawn under their feet or a sidewalk; and I couldn’t even remember what they were advertising. I no longer knew. The details that I had unburied — now I was sure of it — did not belong to them: they were merely the result of a chaotic assemblage of clothing and gestures. The only clear thing now was that handsome young face, olive-skinned, with black hair, the features of Polledro the son superimposed on a shadow that had been Polledro the father. Caserta spoke gently to Amalia, holding his son Antonio by the hand, who was just my age; and my mother held me, certainly without being aware of my hand in hers. I recognized Caserta’s mouth, moving quickly, and I saw his red tongue: the frenulum that anchored it kept it from darting toward Amalia more than it already was. I realized that, in my head, the cardboard man of the funicular had worn Caserta’s clothes and that his companion had worn my mother’s. The hat with feathers and veil had traveled far, from some wedding celebration or other, before coming to rest there. I didn’t know the fate of the scarf except that it had remained for years around the neck and shoulders of my mother. As for the suit, it — sewed, taken apart, turned — was the same one that Amalia had worn when she took the train to Rome to celebrate my birthday. How many things pass through time randomly detached from the bodies and voices of persons. My mother knew the art of making clothes last forever.
Finally I said to Polledro, surprising him by the sociable tone that he didn’t expect, after so much silent resistance:
“I remember very well. You’re Antonio. How in the world did I not recognize you right away? You have the same eyes as before.”
I smiled to show that I wasn’t hostile but also to find out if he felt hostile toward me. He stared at me in bewilderment. I saw him ready to lean over and kiss me on the cheeks but then he decided not to, as if something about me repelled him.
“What’s the matter?” I asked the man from the Vossi sisters’, who, now that the tension of approaching me had vanished, looked at me with a kind of irony. “Don’t you like my dress anymore?”
After a moment of uncertainty Polledro decided. He smiled and said to me:
“You’re a bit of a mess. Have you seen yourself? Come, you can’t go around like that.”
16
He pushed me toward the exit and then, quickly, toward the taxi stand. People who had been surprised by the rain were crowding under the roof of the subway entrance. The sky was black and the wind was blowing hard, driving on a diagonal a curtain of fine dense drops. Polledro got me into a taxi reeking of smoke. He spoke with speed and assurance, without leaving me space, as if he were convinced that I must feel great interest in what he was saying. But I was hardly listening; I couldn’t concentrate. I had the impression that he lacked a precise plan, that he was talking with a frantic display of self-possession that served only to contain his anxiety. I didn’t want it to infect me.
With a certain solemnity he begged my pardon in the name of his father. He said he didn’t know what to do: old age had utterly ruined his brain. But he assured me immediately that the old man wasn’t dangerous, and that he wasn’t bad. He was uncontrollable, yes: he had a strong, healthy body, he was always out and about, it was impossible to restrain him. When he managed to steal enough money from him, he disappeared for months. Abruptly he began to list for me the cashiers he had had to let go because they had been corrupted or taken in by his father.
While Polledro spoke, I noticed his smelclass="underline" not his true smell, which was overpowered by the stench of sweat and tobacco that pervaded the taxi, but an odor invented by starting from that of the shop selling sweets and spices where we had often played together. The shop belonged to his grandfather and was a few blocks from where my parents lived. The sign was of wood, painted blue, and next to the legend “Coloniali” there was a palm tree and a black woman with very red lips. That sign my father had painted at the age of twenty. He had also painted the counter in the shop. He had used a color called burnt sienna to make a desert, and in the desert he had put a lot of palm trees, two camels, a man in a bush jacket and boots, cascades of coffee, African dancers, an ultramarine-blue sky, and a quarter moon. It was easy to reach that landscape. Children lived out on the street, without supervision: I would leave the courtyard of our building, turn the corner, and push open the wooden door, which had a window in the upper half and a diagonal metal bar across it. Immediately a bell rang. Then I went in and the door closed behind me. The edge was padded with fabric, or perhaps covered with rubber, to keep it from slamming. The air smelled of cinnamon and cream. On the threshold were two sacks with rolled-down edges, full of coffee beans. Above, on the marble counter, containers of cut glass, with designs in relief, displayed white, blue, and red sugared almonds, caramels, multicolored candies that melted in your mouth, releasing onto your tongue a sweet liquid, black licorice in sticks, in coiled or loose laces, in the shape of fish or boats. While the taxi battled the wind, the rain, the flooded streets, the traffic, I couldn’t reconcile disgust for Caserta’s red tongue, for the scary games played with the child Antonio, for the violence and blood that derived from them, with the faint odor that Polledro preserved in his breath.