When the list ended, Caserta had been pushed down the stairs and had rolled to the first floor. At the bottom of the stairs he got up and ran up again: who could say whether to boldly confront the avengers or try to reach his house and his family on the fifth floor. The fact is that he got past them and — with one hand running lightly over the banister and then, when his body curved, grasping it, the legs continuously taking the steps three by three — whirled up the stairway to the door of his house, spurred by kicks that missed him and spit that sometimes struck him like a meteor.
My father got to him first and threw him to the floor. He pulled his head up by the hair and smashed it against the banister. The thuds were protracted into an interminable echo. Finally he left him unconscious, in the blood on the floor, on the advice of his brother-in-law, who may have had a gun but was wiser. Filippo took my father by one arm and dragged him away calmly: he did it because otherwise my father would have left Caserta dead on the floor. Caserta’s wife, too, was pulling my father away: she was holding on to his other arm. Of Amalia there remained only her voice, which said: “Don’t kill him, he hasn’t done anything.” Antonio, who had been my playmate, was crying but with his head down, suspended in the stairwell as if he were flying.
I heard Polledro breathing beside me in silence and felt compassion for the child he had been. “I’m going,” I said.
I got up and put on the blue dress quickly to avoid his gaze on my shadow. I felt that the dress fit me perfectly. Then I looked in the plastic bag for a pair of white briefs and put them on, sliding them under the dress. I turned on the light. Polledro had an absent expression. I saw him and no longer could think that he had been Antonio, who resembled Caserta. His heavy body was lying on the bed, naked from the waist down. It was that of a stranger, without obvious connection to my past life or to the present, apart from the wet imprint I had left on his side. But at the same time I was grateful for the small dose of humiliation and pain he had inflicted on me. I went around the bed, sat on the edge beside him, and masturbated him. He let me do it, with his eyes closed. He ejaculated without a moan, as if he were feeling no pleasure.
19
The sea had become a violet paste. The noise of the storm and the noise of the city made a furious commotion. I crossed the street, avoiding cars and puddles. More or less unharmed, I stopped to look at the façades of the great hotels lined up beside the fierce flow of vehicles. Every opening in those structures was spitefully shut against the din of the traffic and the sea.
I took the bus to Piazza Plebiscito. After a pilgrimage through damaged phone booths and bars with broken equipment, I finally found a telephone and dialed Uncle Filippo’s number. There was no answer. I set off on Via Toledo as the shops were pulling up their shutters, the swarm of pedestrians already dense. People stood in little groups at the entrances to the alleys, steep and black under strips of dark sky. Near Piazza Dante I bought some chocolate, just to breathe the sweet air of the shop. In fact I had no wish for anything: I was so distracted that I forgot to put the chocolate in my mouth and it melted in my fingers. I paid little attention to the insistent looks of men.
It was hot, and in Port’Alba there was neither air nor light. Near my mother’s house I was attracted by some fat, shiny cherries. I bought half a kilo, got on the elevator with no feeling of pleasure and went to knock on the door of the widow De Riso.
The woman opened it in her usual circumspect manner. I showed her the cherries, saying I had bought them for her. She widened her eyes. She released the door from the chain and invited me in, visibly pleased by that gift of unhoped-for sociability.
“No,” I said, “come to my house. I’m waiting for a phone call.” Then I added something about ghosts: I was certain — I assured her — that after a few hours they became less and less autonomous. “After a while they start doing and saying only what we order them to do. If we want them to be silent, finally they are silent.”
My proper Italian made Signora De Riso uneasy. To accept the invitation she tried for a formality equal to mine; then she locked the door of her apartment while I opened the door of my mother’s.
It was suffocating inside. I hurried to open the windows and put the cherries in a plastic container. I let the water run, while the old woman, after a suspicious look all around, sat down almost automatically at the kitchen table. She said, in explanation, that my mother always invited her in there.
I put the cherries down in front of her. She waited for me to ask her to take some, and, when I did, brought one to her mouth with a pleasing, childish gesture that I liked: she took it by the stalk and let it go in her mouth, rotating the fruit between tongue and palate without biting it, the green stalk dancing along her pale lips; then she grabbed the stem again with her fingers and pulled it off with a faint plop.
“Very good,” she said and, relaxing, began to praise the dress I was wearing. Then she added emphatically: “I said that this blue would be better for you than the other.”
I looked at the dress and then at her to be sure that she was referring to that dress. She had no doubts, she continued: it was very becoming. When Amalia had showed her the gifts for my birthday, she had immediately felt that that was the right dress for me. My mother, too, seemed certain. Signora De Riso told me that she was euphoric. There in the kitchen, at that very table, she had laid out the lingerie, the dresses, repeating, “They will look very good on her.” And she was very pleased with how she had got them.
“How?” I asked.
“That friend of hers,” said the widow De Riso. He had proposed an exchange: he wanted all her old lingerie in exchange for those new things. It cost him almost nothing, the swap. He was the proprietor of a very expensive shop on the Vomero. Amalia, who had known him since her youth and knew that he was very smart in business matters, suspected that he wanted to take those old underpants and mended slips as a starting point for some sort of new merchandise. But Signora De Riso was experienced in the world. She had said that, gentleman or not, old or young, rich or poor, with men it was always best to be wary. My mother was too happy to pay attention to her.
Noticing her deliberately equivocal tone, I felt like laughing but contained myself. I saw Caserta and Amalia, who, starting with her ancient rags, planned in that house together, night after night, a grand reintroduction of women’s lingerie of the fifties. I invented a persuasive Caserta, a suggestible Amalia, old and alone, both without any money, in that squalid kitchen, a few feet from the sharp ears of the widow, just as old, just as alone. The scene seemed to me plausible. But I said:
“Maybe it wasn’t a real exchange. Maybe her friend wanted to do her a favor and that was all. Don’t you think?”
The widow ate another cherry. She didn’t know what to do with the pits: she spit them into the palm of her hand and left them there.
“Maybe,” she admitted, but dubiously. “He was very respectable. He came almost every night and sometimes they dined together, sometimes they went to the cinema, sometimes for a walk. When I heard them on the landing, he was talking nonstop and your mother was always laughing.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s nice to laugh.”
The old woman hesitated as she chewed her cherries.
“Your father had made me suspicious,” she said.
“My father?”
My father. I suppressed the sensation that he was already there, in the kitchen, and had been for a long time. Signora De Riso explained that he had come secretly to ask her to warn him if she noticed Amalia doing reckless things. It wasn’t the first time he had appeared suddenly with requests of that sort. But on this occasion he had been very insistent.