On the other hand she did complain when he stopped making portraits of women for the American sailors and scenes of the bay and began to work on the half-naked dancing Gypsy. I had only a confused memory of that time, based more on Amalia’s stories than on direct experience: I was no more than four. The bedroom walls were crowded with exotic women in bright colors, interspersed with sketches of nudes drawn with a blood-red pastel. Often the poses of the Gypsy were rough copies of some photographs of women that my father kept hidden in a box in the closet and that I peeked at in secret. At other times the shapes of the blood-red nudes appeared in oil paintings.
I had no doubt that the pastel sketches reproduced my mother’s body. I imagined that at night, when they closed the door of their bedroom, Amalia took off her clothes, posed like the naked women in the photographs in the closet, and said: “Draw.” He took a roll of yellow paper, tore off a piece, and drew. What he did best was the hair. He would leave those women without features but above the empty oval of the face he would skillfully draw a majestic construction, unmistakably similar to the beautiful creation that Amalia knew how to make with her long hair. I tossed and turned in the bed, unable to sleep.
When our father finished the Gypsy, I was sure of it and so was Amalia: the Gypsy was her: less beautiful, the proportions wrong, the colors smudged; but her. Caserta saw it and said it was no good, it wouldn’t sell. He seemed annoyed. Amalia intervened, she said she agreed. She and Caserta teamed up against my father. There was a discussion. I heard their voices streaming down the stairs. When Caserta left, my father without warning hit Amalia twice in the face with his right hand, first with the palm and then the back. I remembered that gesture precisely, with its wavelike motion, going and coming: I was seeing it for the first time. She fled to the end of the hall, to the storeroom, and tried to lock herself in. She was dragged out and kicked. One blow struck her in the hip and hurled her against the armoire in the bedroom. Amalia got up and tore all the drawings off the walls. He caught her, grabbed her by the hair, pounded her head against the mirror of the armoire, which broke.
People liked the Gypsy, especially at the country fairs. Forty years had passed and my father was still doing it. In time he had become very quick. He attached the blank canvas to the easel and sketched the outlines with an expert hand. Then the body became bronze with reddish highlights. The belly curved, the breasts swelled, the nipples rose. Meanwhile sparkling eyes emerged, red lips, raven hair, masses of it, combed in Amalia’s style, which over time had become old-fashioned but evocative. In a few hours the canvas was finished. He took out the thumbtacks that held it in place, pinned it to the wall to dry, and arranged another blank canvas on the easel. Then he began again.
During adolescence I saw those figures of a woman leave the house in the hands of strangers who were not sparing with their crude comments. I didn’t understand and perhaps there was nothing to understand. How was it possible that my father could hand over, to vulgar men, bold and seductive versions of that body which if necessary he would defend with a murderous rage? How could he place it in lewd poses when for an immodest smile or look he became a wild beast, without pity? Why did he abandon it on the streets and in the houses of strangers, by the tens and hundreds of copies, when he was so jealous of the original? I looked at Amalia bent over her sewing machine until late at night. I thought that, as she worked like that, silent and preoccupied, she, too, asked herself those questions.
21
The door of the apartment was half-open. I felt timid and so I entered with such determination that the door hit the wall with a crash. There was no reaction. Only an intense odor of paint and cigarette smoke hit me. I went into the bedroom with the sensation that over the years the rest of the apartment had fallen apart. I was certain, however, that in that room everything remained unchanged: the double bed, the armoire, the dressing table with the rectangular mirror, the easel beside the window, the canvases rolled up in every corner, the stormy seas, the Gypsies, and the country idylls. My father’s back was to me, large and bent, in an undershirt. His sharp skull was bald, spotted with dark patches. A shock of white hair covered his neck.
I moved slightly to the right in order to see in the proper light the canvas he was working on. He was painting with his mouth open, glasses on the tip of his nose. In his right hand was the brush that, after touching down among the paints, moved securely over the canvas; between the index and middle fingers of his left hand was a lighted cigarette, half of it ash about to fall to the floor. After a few brushstrokes he drew back and stood motionless for a few seconds; then he emitted a sort of “ah,” a light, sonorous sigh, and began mixing colors again, inhaling on his cigarette. The painting wasn’t at a good point: the bay stagnated in a blue stain; Vesuvius, farther along, sat under a fiery red sky.
“The sea can’t be blue if the sky is that red,” I said.
My father turned and looked at me above his glasses.
“Who are you?” he asked in dialect, hostile in both expression and tone. He had big purple bags under his eyes. The most recent memory I had of him struggled to coincide with that yellowish face, drowning in undigested emotions.
“Delia,” I said.
He stuck the brush in one of the carafes. He got up from the chair with a long guttural groan and turned toward me, legs spread, back bent, rubbing his paint-stained hands on his sagging pants. He looked at me with growing perplexity. Then he said, in sincere astonishment:
“You’ve gotten old.”
I realized that he didn’t know whether to embrace me, kiss me, ask me to sit down, or start shouting and chase me out of the house. He was surprised but not pleasantly: he felt me as a presence out of place, perhaps he wasn’t even certain that I was his oldest daughter. The rare times we had seen each other, after his separation from Amalia, we had quarreled. In his head the real daughter should have been trapped in a petrified adolescence, mute and accommodating.
“I’ll leave right away,” I reassured him. “I just came by to find out about my mother.”
“She’s dead,” he said. “I was thinking about how she died before me.”
“She killed herself,” I said very clearly, but without emphasis.
My father grimaced and I realized that he was missing his upper incisors. The lower ones had become long and yellow.
“She went swimming at Spaccavento,” he muttered, “at night, like a girl.”
“Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”
“When you’re dead you’re dead.”
“You should have come.”
“Will you come to mine?”
I thought for a moment and answered:
“No.”
The big bags under his eyes darkened.
“You won’t come because I’ll die after you,” he muttered. Then, unexpectedly, he punched me.