Now he was trying to excuse his father. Sometimes — he was saying to me — he bothered people a little, but you just had to have patience: without patience, living in that city was difficult. Especially since the old man didn’t do any great harm. The greater harm was not what he did to his neighbor; it was the damage he did at the shop when he bothered the clients. Then it made him see red, and if the old man had fallen into his hands it would have been easy to forget that he was his father. He asked if he had bothered me. Was it possible that he himself hadn’t realized I was Amalia’s daughter? It had taken him a few moments, the time to collect his thoughts: I couldn’t know what a pleasure it was to see me again. He had run after me but I had already disappeared. He had seen his father, instead, and this had enraged him. No, I couldn’t understand. He was risking present and future with the Vossi shop. Would I believe him if he told me that he didn’t have a moment’s respite? But his father didn’t realize the economic and emotional investment he had made in that enterprise. No, he didn’t realize it. He tormented him with continuous requests for money, threatened him night and day on the telephone, and annoyed the clients on purpose. On the other hand I shouldn’t think that he was always the way I had seen him in the funicular. If necessary the old man knew how to behave, a real gentleman, so that women listened to him. Then, when he changed his tune, there was trouble. He was losing money because of his father, but what could he do? Murder him?
I said to him dully: yes, of course, no, really. I was uneasy. My dress was soaked. I had glimpsed myself in the rearview mirror of the taxi and realized that the rain had dissolved the mask of makeup. My skin was like a grainy and faded fabric, striped by blue-black rivulets of mascara. I was cold. I would have preferred to return to my uncle’s house, find out what had happened to him, reassure myself, take a hot bath, lie down. But that massive body beside me, bursting with food, with drink, with worries and resentment, who carried deep within himself a child smelling of cloves, of millefiori liqueur, and of nutmeg, with whom I had played secretly as a child, interested me more than the words he was saying. I assumed that he couldn’t tell me things that I hadn’t already told myself. I didn’t count on that. But to see those enormous hands, broad and thick, and recall those of Antonio the child, and to feel that they were the same even though they displayed no sign of that time, kept me even from asking where we were going. Beside him I felt miniaturized, with a look and a size that I hadn’t had for years. I skirted the painted desert of the counter of the bar-coloniali, I pushed aside a black curtain and entered another place, where Polledro’s words couldn’t penetrate. Here was his grandfather, Caserta’s father, who was the color of bronze, bald, his skull dark, eyes whose whites were red, a long face, an almost toothless mouth. Various mysterious machines were ranged around him. One, which was sky-blue, and elongated, with a shiny bar across it, was used for making gelati. Another consisted of a bowl with a rotating mechanical arm, in which he whipped yellow cream. In the back there was an electric oven with three compartments, the peepholes dark when it was turned off, the handles black. And behind a marble counter Antonio’s grandfather, grim and wordless, skillfully squeezed a cloth funnel from whose serrated mouth cream emerged. The cream extended over pastries and cakes in a beautiful wavy line. He ignored me as he worked. I felt pleasantly invisible. I stuck a finger in the bowl of cream, I ate a pastry, I took a candied fruit, stole some silver sugared almonds. He didn’t bat an eyelid. Until Antonio appeared and gestured to me and opened, behind his grandfather, the door to the cellar. From there, from that place of spiders and mold, emerged, a hundred times in a row and in a few seconds, Caserta in a camelhair coat and Amalia in her dark suit, sometimes with hat and veil, sometimes without. I saw them and tried to close my eyes.
“My father has been well only in the last year,” Polledro said in the tone of one who is preparing to exaggerate in order to take advantage of the benevolence of his listener. “Amalia showed toward him a gentleness, an understanding, that I would never have expected.”
It was true — he went on, now changing his tone — that the old man had stolen a lot of money in order to dress fashionably and impress my mother. But Polledro wasn’t complaining about that money. His father had gotten into something worse. And he was afraid that soon he would get himself into bigger trouble. No, it had been a real misfortune: Amalia shouldn’t have done what she did. Drown herself. Why? What a shame, what a shame. Her death was a terrible thing.
At that point Polledro seemed overwhelmed by the memory of my mother and began to apologize for not coming to the funeral, for not having offered his condolences.
“She was an exceptional woman,” he said again and again, even if they had probably never spoken to each other. And then he asked: “Did you know that she and my father were seeing each other?”
I said yes, looking out the window. They were seeing each other. And I saw myself on my mother’s bed, as in astonishment I examined my vagina with a mirror. Seeing each other: Amalia had looked at me, uncertain, and then had slowly closed the bedroom door.
Now the taxi was hugging the gray and busy shoreline: the traffic was heavy and fast-moving, beaten by rain and wind. Tall waves rose from the sea. I had rarely as a girl seen such an impressive storm in the bay. It was like the naïve painted exaggerations of my father. The waves surged darkly, with white crests, easily overflowing the barrier of the rocks, sometimes coming up so far that they sprayed the pavement. The spectacle had attracted groups of the curious who, under forests of umbrellas, pointed with a shout to the highest crests as they hurtled in a million fragments over the seawall.
“Yes, I knew it,” I repeated, with greater conviction.
He was silent for a moment, surprised. Then he began digressing about his own life: a harsh existence, his marriage in shreds, three children he hadn’t seen for a year, difficulty of making a living. Only now was he climbing back up. And he was doing well. I? Was I married? Did I have children? Why not? Did I prefer to live free and independent? Lucky me. Now I would straighten myself up and we would have lunch together. He had to see some friends but, if I didn’t mind, I could go with him. He didn’t have time to spare, however, with a business it was like that. If I could be patient, then we could talk a little.
“Is that all right with you?” he finally remembered to ask.
I smiled, forgetting what I looked like, and followed him out of the taxi, blinded by the water and the wind, forced to move quickly by his hand that was holding me by the arm. He opened a door and pushed me through in front of him, like a hostage, without loosening his grip. I found myself in the lobby of a hotel of neglected splendor, of dusty and moth-eaten opulence. In spite of the precious wood and red velvet, the place seemed miserable: lights too dim for a gray day, an intense murmur of voices in dialect, the clatter of plates and silverware coming from a large room on my left, a strong odor of food, a rushing to and fro of waiters who exchanged rude remarks with each other.
“Is Moffa there?” Polledro asked in dialect of a man at the reception desk. He answered with a nod of irritation that meant: he certainly is, and he’s been here for a while. Polledro left me and hurried to the entrance of the room, where a banquet was in progress. The man at the desk took advantage of this to give me a glance of disgust. I saw myself in a large tall mirror in a gilded frame. The light dress was pasted to my body. I seemed thinner and at the same time more muscular. My hair was stuck to my skull, so that it seemed painted on. My face was as if disfigured by an ugly skin disease, dark with mascara around the eyes and flaking or in patches on my cheekbones and cheeks. In one hand I carried the plastic bag in which I had put all the things I had found in my mother’s suitcase.