The oranges of Dubai
Chapter 14
Lina Alessi was the best friend of Antonella Marchese. They had grown up together, just like their children, Vito and I, would do some years later. They were each others’ secret diary. For Antonella, only child, after the death of her parents Lina had become more than a long-time friend. She was a real family reference point, because she had little confidence with her relatives, the actual one. They were almost strangers.
The last time I saw her was the day when my family said goodbye to Torre. She was the one who accompanied us to the airport, to nibble on the last crumbs of the company of my mother, who was taking away an important slice of Lina’s world, leaving her in a confused and uncertain reality. A reality twisted by the unstoppable exodus of those who couldn't bear to raise a new flag in their native land, rather resigned to cling to other flags, distant from that shameful reality.
A grey sweater, even darker than her pants, her long curly hair gathered in a limp ponytail, and dark lenses to hide her eyes, swollen for the night-time weeping. This is my last memory of her, but it doesn't do her justice. The best picture is that of a wide-shouldered woman, on which to hold up the weight of a difficult familiar reality, capable of wide smiles even in discouragement, sober and dignified in every situation.
In front of the ribbon that acted as division between companions and leaving passengers, surrounded by other stories of separations and tears, they held each other’s hands, transmitting all the strength that each of them could offer to the other. One to find the courage to leave, the other to stay.
"Come on, we’ll see again soon", they repeated to each other, striving to believe it, both silently conscious that their following meetings, if any, would have the nature of fleeting moments, entirely insufficient to fill the distance.
While I am walking in the quiet roads of Torre, memories resurface effortlessly. The external change of these places doesn't distract me anymore. On the contrary, under the patina of novelty, the tracks of my steps, indelibly engraved in this land in spite of every attempt of forgetting, resurface spontaneously. The continuity of the life in Torre strikes me. Even though on new legs and new faces, even though on young asphalt and fresh plaster, it proceeds with the same relaxed cadence it always had, in a substantial identity without time and without masters. Moving toward the childhood house of Vito is a trip backward in my days. The change of the people worries me more than the architectural variations, that after all are only façades. I am afraid to see the children of the past, now turned into men, and the adults, or even elders. Some I won't even see at all. I try to imagine the old face of Lina, and her older one – new for me – smiling for my wordplay because in reality the old face was young and the new one will be old. I try to guess the bending of her body, the yielding of her skin, the ruined profile. She has had the fortune to see an age that my mother doesn't know. She, sole survivor of that stainless duo.
Teresa is at the sea with our children. She didn’t mind that I left them for this visit. She thinks that it does me good to put the pieces of my past together.
I don't know if I am doing this for myself, for my mother, or just out of politeness towards Vito. I just know that suddenly seeing Lina became a necessity, then an urgency. With irrational relief I have learned that she still lives in her old house, two side streets behind mine. An element of continuity in this country where so many things have changed. Vito didn't seem amazed of this initiative of mine. He probably understood my need even better than me. And neither this surprises me.
He is on a tour with a group of tourists. It will take him the whole day, it seems.
«Did you do your homework, doctor?» he asked me at the phone.
«...»
«The theme of the evening, nostalgia, you don’t want to pay dinner to everyone, do you?»
«I have a few ideas, maybe... And you?»
«I am prepared. Now I have to leave you, see you later.»
On the background of the short conversation, muttering and giggles of his clients, but above all noises of car horns and traffic. The latter return to me the familiar chaos of my old Palermo, as well as of my Paris and of any large city in the world.
The road enjoys a quiet interrupted only by the chatter of two children running after each other around a small fountain. They are happy, their eyes sparkle with innocent euphoria. One of them suddenly stop in front of the uninterrupted stream of water, and sprinkles it on his friend, who kicks the air as if to sweep away the drops raining on him. Without realizing it, I slow down, I stop to look at them some more. I enjoy their innocent game. The word "nostalgia" rings again in my mind, and the images of when I cheerfully raced in those calm little streets start flowing. Now around the fountain there are Vito, Francesco, Enzo and I, the children of Torre. Images of the past perfectly overlap to the present, immortalizing the same unchanged childhood. The difference is that the two children of today are Arabic, but this is only a detail. Two children like many others in a remarkably improved scenery. A scenery that has become cosmopolitan, with an initial forcing that, after thirty years, has become authentic integration.
I lived in the big cities where the mixture is the norm, nobody notices it. Paris is a metropolis for everyone, but nobody is allowed to take it from its legitimate owners. It is still Paris, it is still France. The same happened here. It’s no longer Italy, that’s true, but it is still Sicily. It will always be. And the more the days go by, the more I get its meaning and accept it, even though with the regret of having to call it Siqillya now.
Lina’s house is like I remember it, a low structure with a small courtyard in front, remarkably improved, like everything else. Here too the intense blue of the shutters strongly stands out on the white plaster of the perimeter wall, a brushstroke of sky in an expanse of clouds. Behind an open window, I see the silhouette of an elderly woman who invites me to go in. The door is ajar. I enter with cautious respect, tiptoeing not to invade the space with my unusual presence. The air is dense of heat and dust, the environment looks bigger than I remember, but perhaps is the scarce presence of furniture that alters my memory of its size. From the open window, a light wind gently parts the white flax curtain. Sunk in a blue-and-green velvet armchair, right next to the window, there is the aged copy of Lina. Her shoulders are bent, her bust slightly tilted forward, her skin feeble on her bare arms, the features of her face collapsed unmercifully on themselves. Yet her smile is the same, as well as the fold of her mouth that curls up on one side to smile at me. She reaches out with both arms toward me, and I approach her to welcome her in mine, to stop with my hold her light but incessant trembling.
«Paoletto», she repeats, enchanted. Her hands go along my arms up to my face, tracing its contours.
Time wasn’t generous with Lina, but she tries to face it proudly. She’s wearing a dress of thin black jersey, going down to her feet held in comfortable Scottish slippers. A long amber necklace and an elegant touch of red on her well-cared fingernails give her the appearance of a noblewoman, like the thin grey hair gathered on her nape. A smile widens her shrunken face, her eyes are hidden behind thick and dark eyeglasses that make them infinitely small.
«When Vito informed me of your visit, I got up to open the door... we old decrepit people have rather slow paces.»
She smiles.
«Don't say that, madam», I say, hoping to pronounce those words without letting even a crumb of the sadness I am feeling slip out.
«Some time passed, and I am an old lady, but you can still call me by first name, Paolo. I am still Lina for you, if it pleases you.»
«It makes me happy. And I find you well.»
I hug her sad trembling husk, that smells of old age, of deodorant for clothes and of nostalgia.
«I feel well enough after all, in spite of that», she points at an oxygen tank under the window; the small tube with the nozzle hangs from the back of the armchair, «by now my lungs can’t make it on their own. But it compensates.»
She pauses to bre
ath, then goes on.
«You haven’t changed at all, you had the face of a good boy, who wanted to conquer a beautiful slice of the world. Now you have the face of a man who perfectly succeeded.»
Next to her there is a lopsided chair with a rather threadbare upholstery. I try to sit there.
«No, not here. Take one from the parlour. This one is just to rest my feet by now.»
I walk the room by memory. Once this was my second house. The dark flowery wallpaper has been replaced by white plaster that confers more brightness to the environment. I recognize a dull-coloured still-life hung in the centre of an ancient mahogany chest of drawers, on which, in plain sight, smiling faces of children unknown to me talk about the life that moved on even in this house. Nearby and behind the photos, stacks of medicine boxes and an aerosol device. There is a shopping list written in an unlikely handwriting and with some gross mistakes. I suppose that someone regularly takes care of Lina, judging from the general sense of tidiness and cleanliness. I go to the parlour in which Vito and I used to study, distracted by the smell of homemade food prepared for our afternoon snack. Everything is perfectly tidy, but on the table there are the leftovers from lunch. Lina’s voice reaches me from the other room to apologize for that.
«Selva will be here in one hour.»
Selva is the Peruvian woman who takes care of her, she tells me when I go back to the living room.
She shows me the exact point where to place the chair, so that she can see me well without losing the hold of my hand.
«You have some beautiful surgeon hands. They infuse confidence». She inspects them with her trembling fingers, moving them back and forth on my palms. «I have undergone surgery twice and I would always have liked to touch the hands of the doctor. There is charisma in the hands of a surgeon; it is a mystery for the sick, a strong charm.»
I look at my hands under hers, trying to see them with her eyes, looking for that mystery. I see smooth palms, well-cared fingernails and nothing more, but Lina’s eyes seem to have found what they were looking for.
«I know that you are well-known in your field. I never doubted that you would make it, because you have always been intelligent and very determined.»
Then, as if she knew what I hope to ear her say, she adds, «You did very well when you left.»
Perhaps it’s the first person since I arrived that doesn’t reproach me for having left.
«Tell me everything, please. Talk to me about your children.»
I tell her of my children and of Teresa, she makes my words alive with her facial mimicry. The chain of her glasses waves to the rhythm of her movements. She widens her eyes, she nods, her lips mimic the movements of mine, as if to give strength to my words.
She asks me if I am happy. I smile.
«You know, it’s unbelievable. When I arrived, some days ago, I believed I felt a sense of extraneousness from everything and everybody. But coming into contact with the people I knew, walking again the places of once, it seemed to me as if my life in Torre were a sort of paused recording, restarted from the exact point of the last interruption. I felt it with Vito, now I feel it with you. I know I can tell you naturally things that I wouldn’t tell to people I associated with much more in the last thirty years.»
She smiles, and she nods also.
«To answer your question», I start talking again, «I feel very satisfied. I have the job that I love, I reached important goals... besides, I have a wonderful family. I don't know if this is happiness or only safety. What I know is that it is a precarious condition, that often leaves room to a great restlessness».
«We all have some disturbances, life is not easy for anyone.»
«I know. I had so many ambitions and I fulfilled them, but at times mistakes weigh on me more than successes. I think I was selfish.»
«You believed in yourself, this is not wrong. I, too, at some point of my life worried more about myself and... today I live better.»
«...»
«It seems strange to you that I say so, because I am an old lady suspended to an oxygen tank, but I assure you that before I lacked air much more than I do now.»
It was not a mystery that Lina’s life had not been easy since when her husband had sunk into a serious form of depression. He was a fragile man, so thin that it took little to break him. But what had shattered his existence hadn’t been little.
Santo managed a small commercial activity, created with a few savings and a lot of efforts. Working on his own was the dream he had been cultivating since he was a boy, when, orphaned, he had had to endure an humiliating life, earning little money working for shady people. But then he had inherited the warehouse of an uncle without either children or other relatives, and that had become the place where to make his dream come true. But in certain realities, you brusquely awake from dreams. You go to bed after a long day of work, and when you get up everything you had has literally went up in smoke because you didn’t accept to pay protection... because you finally wanted to feel free.
Santo never rose again from the ashes of his shop, and with his natural fragility he became the shadow of a man, crushed by a devastating sense of impotence, disheartened about the possibility to start anew.
He shut himself in his house, sinking into depression, and he pulled down with him those who surrounded him as well. With his greyness he made his wife fade. With his torpor he fed the anger of his son, who couldn’t stand that shrunken and incapable father.
«Did Vito tell you the rest?»
«Something, he has been always of few words when it came to his father.»
«It’s not his fault, it’s not easy for a boy to grow with such a mortifying image of his father. He saw the other boys, especially you, and he felt humiliated to the point that he hated him with all his might. Now he’s a man who thinks that life must always be faced head on, without discounts, without wide turns.»
«This is why he criticises so much all those who emigrated from Sicily. He considers us cowards because we chose the easiest way. But it’s not been easy even for us.»
«I know, and I believe he knows too. But he needs to feel heroic for having fought for our civil and cultural survival. This is his ransom from the cowardice of his father, and gives him the certainty to be different from Santo.»
She breaths deeply with her eyes closed. When she opens them again, I ask her whether she needs oxygen, but she declines with a sharp gesture of her hand.
«As for you», she starts again, «you have no reason to nurture any regret. Each of us has only one life, Paolo... there’s no second chance to get even. We gamble all we have in the time we are granted. I loved my husband, but the illness turned him into another man, a man with whom I didn’t fulfil the life I desired. Depression brought his life away, and a large part of mine too. Nobody will give back to me the years I sacrificed for him. I haven’t been so selfish as to desert him, but when he died I didn’t shed a tear, because I had already used them all. At that point, however, I didn't want to waste any more precious time. I immediately did all I could to take back what I deserved, my last chance to think about myself and find again the pleasantries of normality... cinema, trips, new friends. I even had a new affair, short-lived but marvellous.»
Her words are warm and full of passion, they seem spoken by a young woman at the first stages of her adult life.
«They spoke badly of me for this, but I didn’t sacrifice a single minute of the time I had left to gratify gossipers. Would you call this selfishness?»
«But it is a different situation.»
«Not at all. Should you have sacrificed your life just because others thought that your place was here, fighting for your land? Well, here’s news for you. Sicily, my darling, made it even without you. Everyone has a task to fulfil in the world. Being a paladin patriot wasn’t yours.»
She winks at me, and for an instant I see a childish shine in her eyes, in which I read her joy for having broken the rules. It seems to say "we dared to think with our
own heads."
«You, however, didn’t subtract anything to anyone, while I...» I tell her.
«Neither you did.»
«...»
«I know that you’re thinking about your mother. But she was happy. She loved Torre, sure, but she loved you much more. Staying meant forcing you to a too great renouncement.»
«I could have left alone, though. After the years spent in Turin they could have come back to Torre, there was no reason to drag them with me to America.»
«In fact you wouldn’t have done that in a normal situation, and in that case they would have let you go without problems. But we both know well that you wouldn’t have left knowing that they were in a revolting country. You were a tight-knit family, each ready to great sacrifices for the others. Don't feel selfish, your parents did what they thought more right. Your mother spoke well of Boston to me.»
«At the beginning they too integrated well. In Boston Dad found an employment at a pharmaceutics multinational, Mom instead taught Italian. They hoped that upon completion of my studies we would come back. But things went otherwise. So many unexpected occasions presented themselves, some that was unthinkable to decline at that point. So years passed, until the definitive move to Paris. I thought they would be fine there. Paris, in short...»
«I have never seen Paris», Lina sighs in an imperceptible breath.
«It’s there that Mom became ill, and I can’t stop thinking that when she realized that we would never come back to Sicily... she laid down her arms, becoming vulnerable to such a devastating disease.»
«This is what you believe, my darling.»
A malicious shine colours her up, makes her eyes bright. She tilts her tired but composed body toward me, with the attitude of someone who is looking for more intimacy to make a great revelation.
«Your mother, Paolo, had been planning for a long time to come back to Torre.»
She leaves her words suspended in mid-air, spreading around us together with the heat. In that suspension she tries to read in me the surprise, she who knows about my mother more than her son who lived next to her until the end.
«She didn't think of following you forever. In Paris you had a very good job and a beautiful family, of which Antonella was happy. There was no reason for her to stay any longer, so she had decided that the moment had come to return here and take her life back.»
«But she never told me.»
«Do you talk about all of your projects with your children?»
«This was an important matter. She would have mentioned something to me. My mother and I always talked easily.»
«Children are all the same. As soon as you grow up you start to exclude us from your thoughts, from your choices, but you believe you have to have full control on us, you accept no omissions from us.»
She closes her eyes and reclines on the headrest, asking for a brief pause with a lifted finger. She sips some water, that waves in the glass to the rhythm of her trembling hand. This time she accepts the oxygen.
«She wanted me to look for a new house for your father and her. She thought of purchasing it. Your mother would have come back to Torre, to grow old and die in her house. It wasn’t you who prevented her to, Paolo. It was cancer. She was happy of every single choice, she didn’t renounce to anything. She couldn’t imagine that at some point her life would be out of her hands.»
I stay suspended from the story of this fable without happy ending, imagining my mother, euphoric, making hidden plans, satisfied for having ended a chapter of her story, ready to write yet another, always beside my father.
Lina narrates like a storyteller, her words play in the air like an intense and vibrating song.
«The day when I told her that I had found a beautiful house, there wasn’t the reaction of joy I was expecting. I don't know why, but that silence immediately spoke to me. I understood even before she said it. I felt death in that uncertainty. Nothing else could have been able to stop her.»
With a firm gesture I grab her wrist, as if to brake the avalanche and prevent her limbs from crumbling like fragile rock. I would like to say something but my voice is as broken as hers and only makes a hoarse sound. The rest of my thoughts dies in my throat.
Then we forfeit words and let looks continue the story. They describe how much we loved her, how much we miss her smile, her warm hand, her delicate voice, details we kept looking for in vain over time. I would like to tell her that sometimes she peers for an instant in the eyes of Giuliana, in the pout of Marco. Maybe she’s coming through me in this moment, to wink to her old friend who is looking at me with the acumen of those who can see beyond the obvious.
The rest of our meeting is marked by all sorts of stories, but also by so many silences dense of words. She talks to me about the Friday evenings in which she regularly meets four time-honoured friends, "more decrepit than me", she says winking. They play poker, they have a good time, they drink the last remnants of life. I talk to her about Paris, the immense avenues of the Champs Elysees with their many shops and restaurants, the Christmas illuminations. We fantasize of meeting in a cafe, to continue our conversation there, to walk arm in arm for hours, two free souls walking in the splendid Paris.
We talk about the present, without any more references to the past, because what counts is here. It’s us, now. I ask her what she thinks about this new Torre, how she lived the change.
«It was like restructuring an old precarious house. The result comments itself. As per the cohabitation with foreigners, the biggest danger to humanity is not to mix, but to get lost. It’s not what happened to us. Ignorance makes us fear the unknown, while the desire to know makes us overcome barriers and prejudices. This, in summary, is what happened to Torre.»
I leave her house feeling different from when I entered it. On the door I walk into Selva, a big all-body woman, with a noisy laughter and a fleshy mouth in her dark face. She smells of freshness in spite of the heat and she tastes of courtesy, of generosity. She gets rid in a hurry of the shopping bags to help Lina rise from the armchair, because she wants to walk me to the door and postpone, this time too, the moment of the separation.
I feel all of the brittleness of her body being lost in my hold. I try to return her with a hug the same trust that once, in the same way, she gave to me.
From the road I look one last time toward that life suspended to a breathe of oxygen. She weakly raises her hand in a last unsteady greeting. We both know that this is our last goodbye.