Lost Words (10 page)

“How old was Signora Armanda?” asked the seamstress, unremitting in her gall. Mantegazza blew smoke through her nostrils and chewed on her lower lip with an absent look while the gravediggers finished their work. I thought she hadn't heard the question. “It was a secret,” she said after a long pause, staring into space. “Momma was against anyone knowing—but what's the sense of secrets anymore? She was ninety.”

“What a woman!” crowed the seamstress, “to make it all the way to ninety. That I should be so lucky!”

*.

“She was here not even ten minutes ago,” my father remarked, “the Maestra—and what a character! She can't weigh more than eighty pounds.”

The gift-wrapped packages were placed on top of the television set. From their shape you could tell they were books. I could imagine which ones. The biggest package was her Webster's. The second was her copy of
Madame Bovary
, in French. On the title page she had written, “For Luca, Happy New Year!” Her holiday wish for me was a warning, not to lose my bearings amid the myriad false idols I would encounter.

“Can I go upstairs to thank her?” I asked my mother.

“You'll thank her later, she knows you're spending the holidays with your parents . . .”

We had nothing planned for the evening. Gemma and Carmen were going to a pizzeria with their husbands. My mother didn't have the least intention of wasting her money, especially since her own pizza was so good. Nor, for that matter, did she feel like leaving the building unguarded on the last night of the year, with fireworks going off everywhere and a bunch of drunk men on the prowl. “If anything happens, you know who they're going to blame.”

We turned on the television and sat down to eat. The front door kept slamming as people came and went as if it were a regular work day—a constant reminder that everyone was out merrymaking except us. Even the Vignolas were having fun.

We made the dinner last for as long as possible so it would look as if we, too, were celebrating New Year's. The menu was elaborate. My father had requested chicken soup, pig's feet and lentils, an assortment of side-dishes, and gorgonzola with walnuts, one of his favorites. My mother let a few minutes go by between one course and the next, and she asked us to eat slowly. How would we make it to midnight, otherwise?

By ten o'clock, my father was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. My mother was sleepy, too, but she forced herself to stay awake. There was still the dried fruit and the canned peaches. And the coffee . . . to be capped off by a toast, with the bottle of Prosecco the landlord had sent, and the panettone. But my father wanted to eat the panettone right away, and then have a cup of coffee. My mother, following the order she'd established, opened the can of peaches and served them to him. He still wanted panettone, so she dropped a rough wedge onto his plate. She and I would have our servings later.

The feast was over.

My father disappeared into the bedroom. After washing the dishes and helping me to open up the bed, my mother joined him. She set the alarm clock for eleven fifty-five so we could all get up to toast the New Year together. Otherwise our wishes wouldn't come true.

I closed my eyes and pressed Flaubert's novel to my chest. In that position, with a book I still couldn't read, I was finally able to survey the room more serenely: the gas meter, the window, the sliding bolt lock, the key drawer, the intercom, all the knickknacks you wouldn't find in a normal home, and all the protrusions that hindered our movements and freedom. Suddenly they no longer felt oppressive, wrong, and unsightly, but rather provisional, as provisional as the people carousing upstairs and the fireworks going off in the fields.

At midnight we opened the bottle from the landlord and drank a toast to the New Year. My father gave me a kiss on the cheek and drew my mother toward him. She broke away from his embrace impatiently, raising the glass to an audience that only she could see. “Happy New Year!
Auguri!
Happy 1973! The time has finally come for us to buy a house, too! Happy New Year! Viva the new house! Viva 1973!”

My father didn't have the courage to contradict her, so he stroked her hair tenderly. And she continued, rebelliously, “Happy New Year! Viva 1973! Viva the new house!”

*.

After the holidays Miss Lynd also gave us an envelope. We really weren't expecting it, and inside was a ten-thousand-lira note, compensation for all the help my mother had given her. At the sight of the money, my mother was puzzled. The gift cheered her up—it was cash, after all—but she was also a little offended. She would have preferred to keep the Maestra in her debt. “No one's going to buy me,” she said.

She had become jealous. She realized that the Maestra was transforming me. I had stopped watching television and my nose was always in a book. I spoke in a strange way and often used words that to her were unknown, incomprehensible, even foreign . . . She appreciated the change in me, since it came from the time I was spending with an exceptional person, but she also disapproved, since it had made us grow apart. Her problems and dreams no longer interested me. I had stopped participating in her long vigil for the sale of the building, and, sharing her hopes that we would soon be taking over the Vignolas' one-bedroom apartment. I had already found a new home. It was on the fifth floor of the building, not the first. And it was filled with books. And English was the language spoken there.

The money had to be returned. But thinking long and hard about the matter, she decided to keep it, since the purchase of a home remained an absolute priority. On the intercom she thanked the Maestra and said that, to reciprocate, besides the usual weekly cleaning, she would start ironing her linens. The Maestra told her there was no need. She didn't iron anything, much less the linens. Ironing was a waste of time. All one had to do was hang them out properly while they were still wet.

“Thank goodness not everyone thinks like your Maestra,” my mother said, “how in the world would I make a living otherwise!”

The following Sunday, when she went upstairs to clean, the Maestra sent her away. Thank you, she said, but she would no longer be requiring her services.

*.

Once school started, my English lessons would also resume. My mother could no longer use the holidays as an excuse to keep me from going upstairs. I returned to the fifth floor with renewed enthusiasm. Every day I collected dozens of unknown words and definitions, copying them into my notebook, which slowly filled up with my handwriting. At night, before turning out the light, I would reread the words to memorize them, but also in an effort to go beyond the threshold of sleep and beyond the pleasure I had felt in the afternoon.

In a passage from my textbook we came across the word
God
. Having ascertained that I knew the meaning, the Maestra asked me to define it. It was customary for me to give her either a description or a synonym (although, according to the Maestra, there were no true synonyms—were there perfect equivalents for
life, time, air, flower
. . . ?). An example would be even better. But never, ever, should I provide a translation. Dumbfounded, I sat there in silence. Happier than if I'd given her an answer, she took my silence for the indisputable proof that God did not exist.

“
Very good!
One can hardly expect to define such a ridiculous term. Every language has a certain number of such words: meaningless words that belong to the realm of religion. Of course, if you look it up in a bilingual dictionary, you find
Dio
. So what? There are languages in which the concept of divinity is completely absent. In Hebrew—the language of the people of God!—the word exists, but you're not supposed to utter it . . . An old friend of mine considered
God
to be ‘the shortest and ugliest of our mono-syllables.' For me it means something only if you read it backward . . .”

I knew the Maestra was critical of priests, but I overlooked the possibility that she might actually be an atheist. I was used to my mother's form of religion, the religion of women who speak to God with the same candor they use to haggle over the price of vegetables at the market. I was convinced that all the mothers of the world—because, in the end, Miss Lynd was a mother, too—shared the same God, an invisible being, creator of heaven and earth, to whom they turned to pray for help. He was also my God. Every night, since childhood, I would say my prayers to him before falling asleep. For years and years I had asked him to give my mother enough money to buy the Vignolas' apartment, and lately I also thanked him in my prayers for bringing the Maestra into my life.

“
Poor Luca
, you obviously believe in God, right?” she surmised, “and in the poor Blessed Mother . . . the Immaculate Conception . . . the Resurrection of the Son . . .” She shook her head, disconsolate. I didn't know what to say. I knew my mother would be very unhappy if she could see me so unprepared to defend the faith. “It's not your fault,
caro Luca
,
” she persisted. “At school they don't teach you to read the dictionary, but they do teach you that God, with a capital G, is great and good and merciful, that things happen because it is the will of God . . . Your son gets sick and dies, but it is all part of His divine plan. Populations are slaughtered by the millions, yet even this is part of His divine plan. It's so complex! Such
PERFECTION
! Everything fits into His divine plan: wars, fascism, concentration camps, famine, disease, social injustice, unemployment, fratricide, the exploitation of children! Yesterday I went to the young people at the Home for the Disabled to wish them a Happy New Year. Have you ever been there? . . . You should go! It would force you to realize the unimaginable sophistication of the divine plan: bodies without arms, heads with one eye, tongues that are ten inches long, giant skulls, no ears, no legs, no torso! One patient is dragging himself around, another is slithering, and yet another is jumping like a grasshopper. Many of them don't move at all, and only scrunch up their faces. As for words, no one knows how to speak. They make sounds, yes, and they're very good at it! Shrieks, moans, gasps, gurgling, whinnying, hiccupping. What a concert! What a show! The joyous beauty of the
divine plan
! Why not? Let us give thanks to God for all this! Whom else—seeing that there's no one to thank? . . . God is
no one
! When will people wake up and realize this?” Her indignation propelled her from her armchair, back and forth across the small room, which swelled with her spirit, expanded into a cosmic stage. “God is a beautiful fairy tale. God can do everything. For children he's a kind of wizard, a witch doctor! He moves mountains, resuscitates the dead . . . is there anything your God can't do?” She heaved a sigh and her sarcasm gave way to melancholy. “I have never been a believer. I have always been strange, ever since I was little. And unhappy—a very unhappy girl! Was it because I didn't have God in my life? I don't think so. People don't know what to do with someone like me. I've often ended up alone because of my ideas, and I'm not talking about voluntary solitude—that's another matter, which I've allowed to grow inside me like a garden. In Latin there's a good word for it,
secretum
. Did they teach you that in school? . . . I'm talking about another kind of solitude, the kind you don't choose, the kind that threatens to turn your garden into a desert. I'm talking about abandonment . . . And one day you will abandon me, too—won't you, my sweet Luca? If you abandon me, I'll understand . . . I'm crazy!”

The Maestra uttered these last words with a sob and turned her head in the other direction, where there was still a little daylight.

“Luca, I'm sorry! . . . I'm crazy! Do you know the first word written in the first English dictionary? You don't? . . .
Abandon
. . . you will abandon me, Luca. You, too.” Then she called herself an idiot, because her tirade had ruined everything. She laughed desperately, and I laughed with her, because I was fond of her and couldn't stand the idea of losing her.

“You are crazy, too,” she concluded with a comic grin, wiping away a stubborn tear with the tip of her little finger. “Otherwise you would've already stopped coming here. But instead you come to see me every day. A young boy visiting an old lady . . . Unheard of . . . only in fairy tales, like God . . . I must tell your mother . . . Elvira, has Luca seen a doctor? If I were your mother I'd be worried. Why do you come here? You should be running around in the courtyard, playing with children your own age . . .”

She brushed aside the voile curtains and cast an almost cruel gaze across the street, where a group of boys was chasing a soccer ball on the muddy ground, illuminated by the Christmas lights.

“Yes, you are crazy, too, Luca. Life is going to be a journey through the ruins for you, too . . .”

*.

She'd never worked harder in her life, doing people's ironing, cleaning apartments, knitting wool sweaters and trying to sell them. At night, after my father went to bed, she would work on the multi-colored blanket that sat heavily on her lap like a shaggy dog, billowing out in waves onto the floor.

She imagined that Aldrovanti would make the announcement with a very formal telephone call, or maybe in person. The sale of the
establishment
—how she loved saying that word! So much finer than “the building” or “the complex,” because it lent the seal of bureaucracy to her fantasies, conveying both security and durability—
stability
, that was the key, while the other words indicated something vague and confused that didn't suit the long-awaited opportunity of a lifetime. It was hardly an everyday occurrence: Aldrovanti might very well want to speak with her one on one. To prepare for the big event she counted, over and over again, the money she'd managed to set aside. Her bed was covered with financial statements, banknotes, and pieces of paper on which additions and multiplications had been scribbled. Even my birthday savings, tucked away in the tin box, were included in the calculation. I saw her moving her lips silently and raising her eyes to the ceiling in search of a solution. My presence got on her nerves. “Go to the front room!” she would shout, “before some Jehovah's Witness sneaks in. Go on! You're only in my way here!” No matter how many times she counted, she was always a million lira short, but she still hoped that the sale would be announced as early as tomorrow. She was convinced that the missing money would appear out of nowhere, all of a sudden, by magic.
It had to appear
! She had eighty percent of the total, and that was already a lot, a whole lot. From the depths of the armoire she dug out her checkbook and stared at it in disbelief, already savoring the moment when she would tear off the first check to write in the amount of the down payment. The very thought made her dizzy. Would she know how to fill out a check? What if she made a mistake? She'd look like such a fool! Oh, what did it matter. Some saint would rush to her aid. And if she made a mistake writing out the first check, she'd get the second one right . . . she had ten checks total. Plenty to spare!