Lost Words (9 page)

“Clowns!” my father jeered. “I've got a better idea, Chino, let's go eat.”

In addition to us, Gemma had also invited Carmen and her husband. Her boss had granted her the use of the conference room on the ground floor for this special occasion. We occupied only one end of the long table, which was barely covered by the tablecloth.

I wasn't hungry. Instead of eating, I looked through the big picture windows at the falling snow and thought about the Maestra. How much more I wanted to be with her! Although I tried hard not to cry, my cheeks were moist with tears. Luckily no one noticed. My parents and their friends were only paying attention to the food and the conversation. The women complimented each other's recipes and gossiped about the other people in the buildings. The men told dirty jokes freely, as if I couldn't understand.

Once the first course was over, I stood up with the excuse that I had to go to the bathroom. I went to the end of the hall and snuck down the cellar staircase. The lights were off, but from outside, the reflection of the streetlights shone through the high grating. I was terrified, but I had no intention of returning, of sitting back down, of pretending to be cheerful. I curled up between two piles of boxes and, after having a good cry, fell asleep.

I was awoken by music. I didn't know how much time had passed. Maybe an hour. I went back upstairs and into the conference room. The table had been pushed against the wall and the men were in the middle of the room, dressed up like women and dancing. Leaning against the opposite wall, the women were clapping their hands. My father seemed to be enjoying himself the most. He wiggled his ass and the fake breasts, twirling around and around. The other two men aped his movements. What embarrassed me the most, even more than my father's dancing, was my mother's enthusiasm. She pointed at his naked thighs and laughed so hard she had to hold her sides. Gemma and Carmen were also gesturing toward their husbands' hairy legs and almost competing, breathlessly, to see who could laugh the loudest. Roaring with laughter, they threw orange peels and twisted napkins at their husbands' crotches. I thought to myself, “If the Maestra could see us now . . .”

Before midnight we collected our baking dishes because my mother wanted to go to mass. My father protested that he was tired, but eventually he gave in.

In church we had to find room in the back, in the last available spots. After we were seated, we realized that the pew in front of us was occupied by the Rovigos and the Paolinis, and we hadn't spoken to them since the day that Rita had fallen in the fountain. My father was so tense he couldn't listen to a word of the sermon. A second before the Sign of Peace he tried to escape, but my mother held him back by his coattails. “Stay where you are,” she whispered into his ear, “the last thing we need is to feel like we're not even free in the house of the Lord!”

Padre Aldo commanded, “The time has come to exchange a sign of peace,” and the Rovigos and Paolinis shook each others' hands. When they turned around to shake the hand of the persons behind them, they were startled to find themselves facing the doorwoman's family. For a second I thought they would turn back around, but they didn't. Once they got over their surprise, they extended their hands to us. But they did not look us in the face. Nor did they say, “Peace be with you.”

*.

“This year you have to come with me,” my father insisted. My mother didn't want to hear about it. What was wrong with him? He'd always gone by himself. She didn't care for the movies. To spend all that time in the dark, surrounded by strangers . . . she wouldn't dream of it! She would rather stay home, safe and sound, watching television. Why throw money away on the movies?

“I'll take you to see a nice film,
The Scientific Cardplayer
, with Bette Davis and Alberto Sordi. You'll like it, you'll see,” he promised. “Can't I ask you this one small favor? Or is ‘no' the only word in your vocabulary?”

For the first time ever, on December 25, 1972, I saw my parents go out together like a normal couple.

I went upstairs to the fifth floor. Finally I could see the Maestra again. I rapped my knuckles on the door three times. No answer.

I went back home and poured myself a shot of grappa. I took one sip and spat it out. After wetting my lips two or three times, I poured the rest down the sink. I filled our little bathtub to the top with hot water and lowered myself in, hugging my knees and leaning my lower back against the bottom. I felt the hot water grazing my nostrils and I reminisced about the Maestra's lessons. I imagined English words being written in white light on the screen of my lowered eyelids and bleeding out into my memories and thoughts . . . The glass door started to shake.

“Who is it?” I cried out, startled.

A hoarse voice asked for my mother.

“She's not in,” I replied. “She went to the movies with my father . . .” I emphasized the word ‘movies' out of spite. A few seconds of silence followed. I got out of the tub and approached the door, dripping wet. Mantegazza was standing there waiting for me to open, but I didn't move or say a word. “Tell your mother that last night Signora Armanda departed,” she said. I thought to myself, “So what? Who cares? She can go wherever she wants . . .” She realized that I hadn't understood.

“Signora Armanda died last night.”

This was followed by the click of the main door. From the window, through an opening in the curtain, I saw Mantegazza weighted down with trash bags, waddling in her yellow fur coat toward the dumpster. I suddenly felt a desperate longing for the Maestra. For the first time I thought that she, too, might die and abandon me forever. I turned the intercom back on and called her. Still no answer.

When they got home my parents were arguing. “You women are all alike!” my father shouted. “Nothing is ever good enough for you. And whose fault is it? The husband's, of course, who else?”

“Of course,” my mother protested. “Don't tell me you thought that idiot Sordi was right! He was the ruin of that poor woman.”

“Look, if they lost everything, it's because Mangano decided to keep on playing. She still wasn't satisfied after cheating the old lady out of all that money!”

My mother shrugged her shoulders. “Whatever you say. In her place I would have left immediately! She was right to ask for help from Modugno, who is a much better man—one hundred percent better!”

“Modugno lost just as much at cards as Sordi, if not more. You didn't get the meaning of the film. The old lady represents the bosses. You can never beat the bosses. You can never put them in their place. Otherwise you turn into a boss yourself, just like them, and the injustice remains. And you've become the oppressor!”

“Better an oppressor than a beggar! . . . And I'd make a better boss than the old lady. Sometimes I wonder how much of a communist you are. As far as you're concerned, things should never change.”

When I heard them mention the old lady in the film, I remembered the news Mantegazza gave me. “The old lady died!” I hollered. My father turned two questioning eyes on me. “Our old lady!” I clarified. “Signora Armanda! She's dead!”

My mother turned pale. “The old lady died?”

My father burst into laughter, having grasped the misunderstanding. “So, the old lady died,” he repeated to himself. “That old fascist is dead.”

My mother expected us to go upstairs with her. In the event of a tenant's death, she claimed, her professional duties required that we, too, the family of the custodian, had to participate in the expression of condolences.

My father muttered the word “condolences” between gritted teeth, and went straight back home. I stayed behind with my mother. There was no one in the apartment except for the younger Mantegazza, their dog Bella, and the deceased, who had been laid out on the large double bed. Not even death had managed to tame the shrewish expression furrowing the skin between her almost invisible eyebrows. The dog howled from its prone position on the sheepskin rug near the bed.

“Poor Signora Armanda! Did she suffer?” my mother asked.

“Hardly!” said Mantegazza—perfectly coifed and made up—without the least emotion, as if she were reporting a news story she'd heard on TV. “This morning I got up, prepared breakfast, and called out to her. I went in the bedroom to see because she didn't answer. She was already cold. The doctor thinks she died last night, after going to bed. At one point, I heard her gasp for air. That's when she must have died. In my opinion, it was indigestion from the Christmas cake. It's really awful, the panettone they make nowadays . . . when I was a little girl, it had a completely different taste . . .”

“You're right,” my mother agreed, although she had never laid eyes on panettone when she was growing up.

Mantegazza asked her to prepare the body for the priest's visit and started to hand her a ten-thousand-lira bill. “I wouldn't think of it,” my mother protested, taking a step back. “I was really fond of Signora Armanda!”

Mantegazza waved her hands impatiently, in her theatrical manner, as if she was drying the money in the air. “Come on—take the money! I don't want to argue.”

Without wasting a moment, my mother undressed the body and gave it a sponge bath. She noticed there was no hair between the dead woman's legs. Amused, she said that Miss Armanda had reverted to being a little girl. The corpse didn't bother her in the least. She dressed it in nice clothes and painted its sunken cheeks and lips with a little rouge. “We really are nothing but dust,” she commented while arranging the curls over the corpse's gray forehead.

Padre Aldo arrived close to suppertime. He lit a candle, said a prayer, and blessed the remains. He didn't linger because he was expected back at six o'clock for the Christmas greetings. Mantegazza extended a banknote that quickly disappeared into his outstretched hand. “This is the first time I've blessed a deceased person on Christmas Day,” he observed. And at the door, he asked me, “Why have you stopped going to Mass?”

At Mantegazza's request, my mother also handled the funeral arrangements. She took care of every detail, from the floral wreaths to the vestments to the transportation. Meanwhile the dog sniffed at her feet and, growling, bared its few remaining teeth.

*.

The body remained in the house for almost a week, laid out on the bed just as my mother had arranged it. To get rid of the smell, Mantegazza smoked like a chimney. At night she slept on a sofa in the living room, although she deeply regretted—so she said—leaving her poor mother all alone in that big bed.

Early in the afternoon of the 31st, the coffin was closed and loaded into the hearse. The undertakers had wanted to lay the coffin out on a bier in the lobby, but my mother said absolutely not. The signore would've taken it as a bad omen—on the last day of the year, no less!

Besides the seamstress and her daughter Rosi, only my mother and I went to the church. No one else from the apartment complex came. The minibus that Signora Mantegazza had rented for the tenants was sent back to the garage, unused. Not even her relatives were there, unless you considered the dog a relative. It took up a post right below the head of the coffin, and was a little more vigilant than usual. Next to the coffin were wreaths from the other tenants, from Mantegazza herself, and from the director of the swimming pool where she worked.

The seamstress wore a mangy raccoon coat that we had seen, years earlier, on the old woman. Her gestures and expressions reeked of servility: she was clearly counting on getting a share of the deceased's estate. And while enticing the old lady with cups of coffee, she must have discovered that the coat hadn't been left to us.

During the religious service, Rosi couldn't sit still for a minute. She kept running from one end of the church to the next, throwing the pews into disarray, and snuffing out the candles. My mother watched her, stifling her laughter. Mantegazza, despite her annoyance, tried to pay attention to the words of Padre Aldo, who had the good sense to keep the service down to the essentials. At the moment of benediction, the seamstress faked a sob. Mantegazza did not even deign to look at her. My mother was seized by an uncontrollable euphoria. To avoid bursting into laughter, she had to bend herself in two and groan. Not to be outdone, the seamstress unleashed another torrent of tears. Mantegazza continued to ignore her, while my mother seemed to be overwhelmed with grief.

Outside the church, Mantegazza asked if we wouldn't mind following her to the cemetery. The question, which sounded more like a command, caught both my mother and the seamstress off-guard. For the first time they looked each other in the eye, as if they were both wondering how they could escape this unexpected burden and, calling a momentary truce, came to a mutually beneficial agreement: in the end, without a sound, they both got into the big black Mercedes.

We rode through streets I had never seen, sad and gloomy, impervious to the Christmas lights. Until then I had imagined the city was more beautiful beyond the fields surrounding Via Icaro, beyond the gates enshrouded in fog. I was wrong.

Because of the cold, the priest at the cemetery also limited himself to the essentials. A moment before the gravediggers started to cover the grave, the seamstress told her daughter, “Rosi, take a clump of dirt and throw it on
nonna
.” The little girl, figuring
nonna
was the older woman standing in front of her rather than the one lying in the grave, grabbed a handful of soil and threw it at Mantegazza. “Good God!” the woman shouted, jumping to one side. “Signora Bortolon, a little respect! Don't you realize I'm burying my mother?”

My mother giggled, and I giggled with her. The seamstress gave Rosi a slap across the face. “Apologize to Signorina Mantegazza!” she hollered. The only thing you could hear in the cemetery was her strident voice. The little girl fled through the deserted gravestones, which were dappled with the remaining snow. Handfuls of dirt were scattered onto the casket. Without thinking, Mantegazza, after a long final drag, tossed her cigarette butt into the pit.