Polledro returned, irritated. I understood that he was late because of his father and maybe because of me.
“What do I do now?” he asked the man at the desk.
“Sit, eat, and when the lunch is over talk to him.”
“You can’t find me a place at his table?”
“You’re a fool,” said the man. And he explained ironically, with the air of one who is saying something well known even to the most dull-witted, that at the table of that Moffa were professors, the rector, the mayor, the commissioner for culture, and their wives. A place at that table was unthinkable.
I looked at my childhood friend: he, too, was soaked and in disarray. I saw that he returned my look with embarrassment. He was agitated; the features of the child I remembered appeared and disappeared from his face. I felt pity for him and didn’t want to. I moved toward the dining room to allow him to quarrel with the man at the desk without having to take account of my presence.
I leaned on the glass partition that looked onto the restaurant, careful not to get in the way of the waiters who were going in and out. The piercing voices and the rattle of silverware seemed to me of an insupportable volume. It was a sort of inaugural lunch, or maybe the conclusion, of some congress or convention. There were at least two hundred people. An evident disparity among the diners struck me. Some were restrained, intent, ill at ease, at times ironic, at times accommodating, in general soberly refined. Others were flushed, moving restlessly between food and talk, their bodies laden with everything that might signify the possibility of expense, of streams of money. It was particularly the women who synthesized the differences between their men. Slender bodies wrapped in clothing of a fine make, nourished with great frugality and discreetly illuminated by courteous smiles, sat beside bodies bursting out of tight dresses as costly as they were loud, sparkling with gold and jewels, peevishly silent or chattering and laughing.
From where I was it was difficult to calculate what advantages, what complicities, what ingenuities had brought people so visibly diverse to the same table. On the other hand it didn’t interest me. It struck me only that the room seemed one of the places to which as a child I had imagined my mother escaping as soon as she left the house. If at that moment Amalia had entered, in her blue suit of decades earlier, the delicately colored scarf and the hat with the veil, on the arm of Caserta in his camelhair overcoat, she would certainly have crossed her legs ostentatiously, and looked happily, eyes shining, to right and to left. It was to feasts of food and laughter like this that I imagined her going when she left the house without me and I was sure she would never return. I pictured her brilliant with gold and silver, eating without restraint. I was sure that she, too, as soon as she left the house, stuck out a long red tongue. I wept in the storeroom, beside the bedroom.
“Now he’ll give you the key,” Polledro said speaking from behind me, without the kindness of before, in fact rudely. “Fix yourself up and join me at that table over there.”
I saw him cross the room, skirting a long table, and addressing a deferential greeting to an old man who was speaking in a loud voice to a well-groomed, dignified woman with blue hair, arranged in an old-fashioned style. The greeting was ignored. Polledro looked away, furious, and went to sit down, with his back to me, at a table where a fat man with a black mustache and a heavily made-up woman, in a tight dress that rode too far above her knees when she sat, were devouring their food in silence, ill at ease.
I didn’t like the way he had spoken to me. It was a tone of voice that gave orders and did not admit replies. I thought of crossing the room and telling my former playmate that I was leaving. But I was restrained by the way I knew I looked and by that formula: playmate. What sort of play? There had been games that I played with him only to see if I knew how to play as I imagined Amalia secretly did. All day my mother pedaled on her Singer like a cyclist in flight. At home she was modest and reserved, hiding her hair, her colored scarves, her dresses. But, just like my father, I suspected that outside the house she laughed differently, breathed differently, orchestrated the movements of her body in such a way as to make people stare. She turned the corner and went into the shop of Antonio’s grandfather. She slipped around the bar, ate pastries and sugared almonds, meandered past counters, machines, and pans without getting dirty. Then Caserta arrived, and opened the iron door, and they went down together to the cellar. Here my mother loosened her long black hair and that abrupt movement filled the dark air smelling of earth and mold with sparks. Then they both lay down on the floor on their stomachs and crawled along, laughing. The cellar in fact extended as a long, low space. One could advance only on all fours, amid bits of wood and iron, crates and crates full of old tomato sauce jars, the breath of bats and the rustling of mice. Caserta and my mother crept along, keeping in sight the white squares of light that opened at fixed intervals on their left. They were vents, with nine bars across them and a fine-mesh screen to keep the mice from getting through. Children, on the outside, stared at the darkness and the wells of light, imprinting noses and foreheads with the grid pattern of the screen. They, on the other hand, looked out from the inside, to be sure of not being seen. Concealed in the darkest areas, they touched each other between the legs. Meanwhile I distracted myself, in order not to cry, and, since Antonio’s grandfather did not make a move to hinder me but hoped to get revenge on Amalia by making me die of indigestion, stuffed myself with candies, with licorice, with cream scraped from the bottom of the bowl it was made in.
“208, on the second floor,” an attendant said. I took the key and declined the elevator. I went slowly up a broad staircase, along which ran a red carpet, held in place by gilded rods.
17
Room 208 was sordid, like a room in a third-rate hotel. It was at the end of a dimly lit dead-end corridor, next to a closet carelessly left open and full of brooms, carts, vacuum cleaners, dirty laundry. The walls were of a yellowish color and above the double bed was a Madonna of Pompeii; a dry olive branch had been inserted between the nail and the triangle of metal that held the image in the frame. The bathroom fixtures, which, given the pretensions of the hotel, should have been sealed, were dirty, as if they had just been used. The wastebasket hadn’t been emptied. Between the bed and the wall was a narrow passage that allowed one to get to the window. I opened it, hoping that it would have a view onto the sea: naturally it faced an internal courtyard. I realized that it was no longer raining.
First I tried to telephone. I sat on the bed, avoiding looking at myself in the mirror opposite. I let the telephone ring for a long time, but Uncle Filippo didn’t respond. Then I rummaged around in the plastic bag where I had stuck the things my mother had in her suitcase, and took out the bathrobe of ivory-colored satin and the short blue dress. The dress, thrown hastily into the bag, was all wrinkled. I laid it out on the bed, smoothing it with my hands. Then I took the bathrobe and went to the bathroom.