Adam's Rib
Authors: Antonio Manzini
To Uncle Vincenzo
T
hey were March days, days that bring splashes of sunshine and hints of the springtime to come. Shafts of sunlight, warm, not yet hot, and fleeting, but still: light that colored the world and kindled hopes.
But not in Aosta.
It had rained all night long and pellets of watery snow had pelted down on the city until two in the morning. Then the temperature had plunged by many degrees, handing defeat to the rain and victory to the snow, snow that continued to flake down until six, covering streets and sidewalks. At dawn, the sun came up diaphanous and feverish, illuminating a city washed white while the last straggling snowflakes fluttered lazily down, spiraling onto the sidewalks. The mountains were swathed in clouds and the temperature sat several degrees below freezing. Then a malevolent wind sprang up unexpectedly, charging into the city's streets like
a raiding party of drunken Cossacks, rudely slapping people and objects.
On Via Brocherel, the wind had only objects to slap, given the fact that the street was deserted. The
NO PARKING
sign tossed and wobbled while the branches of the small trees planted along the road creaked like the bones of an arthritic old man. The snow, which hadn't yet been packed down, whirled through the air in little wind funnels, and here and there a loose shutter banged repeatedly. Gusts of icy powder swept off apartment building roofs.
As Irina rounded the corner of Via Monte Emilus onto Via Brocherel she was caught by a punch of cold air straight to her face.
Her hair, gathered in a ponytail, swung out behind her; her blue eyes squinted slightly. If you'd taken a close-up of her and knew nothing about the context, you might think she was a madwoman without a helmet riding a motorcycle at 75 miles per hour.
But that sudden icy slap in the face actually felt to her like a gentle caress. She didn't even bother to tug closed the lapels of her gray woolen overcoat. For someone who'd been born and raised in Lida, just a few miles from the Lithuanian border, that blast of wind was nothing more than a mild spring breeze. While it might still be winter in Aosta in March, back home in Belarus they were dealing with ice and temperatures around 15 degrees, well below freezing.
Irina was walking briskly, her feet clad in a pair of knockoff Hogan sneakers that sparkled with every step; as she
walked she sucked on a piece of honey-flavored hard candy she'd bought at the café after enjoying her breakfast. If there was one thing she loved about Italy, it was breakfast at the café. Cappuccino and brioche. The noise of the espresso machine steaming the milk, churning up the frothy white foam that the barista then blended with strong black coffee and finally sprinkled with cocoa powder. And the brioche, hot, crunchy, melt-in-your-mouth sweet. Just the memory of the breakfasts she used to eat in Lida . . . those inedible mushy gruels made of barley and oats, the coffee that tasted like mud. And then, the cucumbersâthat bitter taste first thing in the morning. Her grandfather used to chase them down with a glass of schnapps, while her father used to scoop the butter directly off the butter dish into his mouth as if it were some caramel dessert. When she told Ahmed about that, he'd laughed so hard he'd come dangerously close to vomiting. “Butter? By the spoonful?” he'd asked in disbelief. As he laughed, he displayed the gleaming white teeth Irina so envied. Her teeth were a dull gray. “It's the climate,” Ahmed had told her. “In Egypt the weather is hot and so people's teeth are whiter. The colder it is, the darker the teeth. It's the exact opposite of skin color. It's all because of the sunshine you don't have. Plus, on top of that, if you start eating butter by the spoonful!” and he laughed some more. Irina loved him. She loved the way he smelled when he came home from the market. The scents of apples and new-mown grass floated off him. She loved it when he prayed to Mecca, when he baked apple cakes for her, when they made love. Ahmed
was sweet and considerate and he never got drunk and his breath always smelled of mint. The only drinking he did was a beer every now and then, and even then he would say, “The Prophet wouldn't approve.” But he did like beer. Irina would look at him and think about the men back home, the way they guzzled hard liquor, their foul breath, the stink on their skin. A mix of stale sweat, vodka, and cigarettes. But Ahmed had an explanation for this stark difference too. “In Egypt, we wash more often, because you have to be clean when you pray to Allah. And as hot as it is, we dry off very fast. Where you're from, it's cold, and you never really get dry. This too is because of the sunshine,” he told her. “In any case, we'd never eat butter by the spoonful,” and he was bent over laughing again.
But now her relationship with Ahmed had come to the crossroads. He'd made his declaration.
He'd asked her to marry him.
There were a few issues, strictly technical ones. If they were going to get married, either Irina would need to embrace the Muslim religion, or he'd have to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. And that was easier said than done. She could never become a Muslim. Not for any real religious reasons: Irina no more believed in God than she believed in the likelihood of hitting the Powerball jackpot. No, it was the thought of her parents that kept her from converting. Up north in Belarus, her family was Orthodox and faithfulâto them God was “Bog.” Her papa, Alexei, and her mama, Ruslava, her five brothers, her aunts, and most of all, her cousin Fyodor, who had married the daughter of a metropolitan. How could
she tell them: “Hi all! Starting tomorrow I'm going to be referring to Bog as Allah”? For that matter, it wasn't as if Ahmed could call his father down south in Faiyum and say: “You know what, dad? Starting tomorrow, I'm Eastern Orthodox!” Aside from the fact that Ahmed seriously doubted his father even knew what being Orthodox meant: he'd probably think it was some kind of infectious disease. So Irina and Ahmed were considering a civil union. They would grit their teeth and stick to the plan. At least as long as Aosta remained home to them. Then Bog, Allah, or the Lord Almighty would look out for them.
SHE'D REACHED THE APARTMENT BUILDING AT NO. 22
of Via Brocherel. She pulled out her keys and opened the street door. What a fine big building that was! With its marble steps and wooden handrails. Not like her building, with its chipped terra-cotta floor tiles and damp patches on the ceiling. And no elevator, not like here. In her building you had to trudge up the stairs to the fourth floor. And every third step was broken, the next one was loose, and then one would be missing entirely. To say nothing of the heating, with the kerosene stove that hissed and whistled and would operate properly only after you gave a good hard bang on the door. She dreamed of living in an apartment building like this one on Via Brocherel. With Ahmed and his son, Hilmi. Hilmi was already eighteen and he didn't know a word of Arabic. Irina had done her best to show him love, but Hilmi didn't give a damn about her. “You're not my mother! Mind
your own fucking business!” he'd shout at her. And Irina would take it in silence. She'd think of that boy's mother. The woman had gone back to Egypt, to Alexandria, where she was working in a shop run by relatives; she had never wanted to hear from her son or her husband again, as long as she lived. The name Hilmi meant calm and tranquility. Irina smiled at the thought: never had anyone been given a less appropriate name. Hilmi seemed like a flashlight that never turned off. He went out all the time, he didn't even come home to sleep, he was a disaster at school, and at home he bit the hand that fed him.
“You miserable loser!” he would say to his father. “You'll never get me to go sell fruit from a stall like you! I'd rather have sex with old men!”
“Oh really? So what are you going to do instead?” Ahmed would shout back. “Get the Nobel Prize?” It was a sarcastic reminder to his son of how catastrophically bad his grades were. “You'll just be unemployed and homeless, that's what you'll be. And that's not much of a future, you know that?”
“Better than selling apples out on the street or cleaning other people's apartments like this scrubwoman you've taken in,” and he'd point at Irina in distaste. “I'll make plenty of money and I'll come visit you the day they put you in a hospital bed! But don't you worry. I'll pay for a nice big coffin to bury you in.”
Usually those arguments between Ahmed and Hilmi ended with the father taking a swing at his son and his son slamming the door as he stormed out of the apartment, extending further the crack in the plaster wall. By now it
reached practically up to the ceiling. Irina felt certain that the next time they had a fight, both wall and ceiling would collapse, worse than what happened during the Vilnius earthquake of 2004.
The elevator doors swung open and Irina turned left immediately, toward Apartment 11R.
THE LOCK OPENED AFTER JUST ONE TURN OF THE KEY.
Strange, very strange, thought Irina. All the other times, she had to turn the key three full turns. She went to the Baudos' three times a week and never once in the past year had she ever found either of them at home. At ten in the morning, the husband had long ago left for work, though on Fridays he actually left home at dawn to go ride his bike. The signora, on the other hand, only came in after doing her grocery shopping at eleven: Irina could have set her watch by it. Perhaps Signora Esther had caught the intestinal flu that was felling victims in Aosta worse than a plague epidemic in the Dark Ages. Irina walked into the apartment, bringing a gust of snowy cold air with her. “Signora Esther, it's me, Irina! It's nice and cold out . . . are you home, Signora?” she called as she put her keys away in her purse. “Didn't you go grocery shopping?” Her hoarse voice, a result of the twenty-two cigarettes she smoked every day, echoed off the smoked glass of the front door.
“Signora?”
She slid the pocket door to one side and walked into the living room.
The place was a mess. On the low table in front of the TV sat a tray with the remains of dinner still on it. Chicken bones, a squeezed lemon, and greenish scraps. Spinach, maybe. Crumpled up on the sofa was an emerald-green blanket and in the ashtray were a dozen cigarette butts. Irina decided that the signora was most likely in her bedroom with a fever, and that last night her husband, Patrizio, had eaten dinner alone and watched the soccer game. Otherwise there would have been two trays, his and Signora Esther's. The pages of the
Corriere dello Sport
were scattered all over the carpet, and a drinking glass had left two distinct rings on the antique blond wood table. Shaking her head, Irina walked over to clear up: one foot kicked an empty wine bottle and it went rolling across the floor. Irina picked up the bottle and set it on the low table. Then she took the ashtray and dumped the butts into the plate with the stale food. “Signora? Are you in there? Are you in bed?”
No answer.
With both hands occupied by the tray and precariously balancing the bottle of merlot, she bumped the kitchen door open with one hip. But she didn't walk through the door. She froze and stood staring. “What on earth . . . ?” she half-muttered to herself.
The pantry doors swung open. The floor was covered with dishes, utensils, and glasses alongside boxes of pasta and cans of tomato paste. Tablecloths, dish towels, silverware, and paper napkins were strewn everywhere. Oranges had rolled to the base of the half-open refrigerator. Chairs were knocked over, the table was shoved almost against the
wall, and the handheld electric mixer that lay shattered on the floor tiles spewed wires and electric gadgets out of its belly.
“What happen here!” Irina shouted. She set down the tray and turned toward the hallway.
“Signora Esther!” she called again. No answer. “Signora Esther, what happen here?”
She hurried into the bedroom, hoping to find the signora there. The bed was unmade. Sheets and duvet heaped in a corner. The armoire thrown wide open. She backed away, cautiously, toward the kitchen. “But what . . . ?” Then her foot hit something on the floor. She looked down. A cell phone, shattered.
“Burglars!” she shouted and, as if someone had placed a cold, menacing blade against her back, she stiffened, turned, and ran. The antique afghan carpet that lay rumpled on the floor tripped her up. Irina sprawled headlong and banged her knee on the floor.
Chunk!
The muffled sound of a kneecap cracking, followed by a stabbing pain penetrating directly into her brain. “Aahh!” she screamed through clenched teeth, and holding her knee with both hands she got to her feet. She aimed straight toward the sliding pocket entrance door, certain that behind her lurked a couple of scary-looking men, their faces concealed by balaclavas, black, and with the sharp teeth of ferocious beasts. She banged her shoulder against the panel of the sliding door, and it quavered, shivering the smoked glass. Now another stab of pain sank its fangs deep into
her clavicle. But this one she felt less. Irina mustered all the adrenaline she had in her body and limped out of the Baudos' apartment. She hastily slid the door shut behind her. She was panting. Now that she was on the landing she felt a little safer. She looked down at her knee. Her stocking was torn and drops of blood stained her pale white flesh. She licked two fingers and ran them over the wound. The pain had shifted from keen to dull and throbbing, but it was now a little easier to take. Then it dawned on her that she was not even remotely safe on the landing. If the burglars were inside the apartment, how hard would it be for them to open the door and slaughter her, to stab her with a knife or beat her to death with a crowbar? She started limping gingerly down the stairs and shouting: “Help! Burglars! Burglars!”
She pounded on the doors facing the third-floor landing, but no one came to answer. “Help! Burglars! Open up! Open up!”
She continued downstairs. Given her preferences, she would have been taking the steps two at a time, but her knee wouldn't let her. She held tight to the handsome wooden handrail and thanked God that she'd put on the counterfeit Hogan sneakers that morning, sneakers that she'd purchased at the flea market near her house: at least they had rubber soles. If she'd been wearing leather soles on those marble steps, she could easily have slid down two or three flights flat on her ass. She tried knocking on the second-floor doors. She pounded with her fists, pushed the doorbells, and even kicked, but there was no one home. No one came to the door. Only from one apartment did she hear the hysterical yapping of some tiny dog answering her knock.