When we reached the stop I wanted, I was the only person who got off the bus. An elderly bicyclist pedalled toward me rather unsteadily from some distance down the deserted street.
Despite the name of the place – Grado Pineta, the pinewood of Grado – there were really very few pines to be seen, most of them pretty bare-looking and imprisoned in a grid of dilapidated blocks of flats with poetically evocative names: The Sirens, Seahorse, Star of the Sea, Nausicaa.
Over the course of the long winter months, the various little gardens had accumulated all sorts of bottles, waste paper, beer cans, and miscellaneous rubbish blown there by the wind.
In the days of the economic boom, this was a fashionable location for a second home; now the entire neighborhood seemed like a galleon set adrift. For some time, the salinity in the seawater had been busy about its work of corroding plaster and wood, particularly door and window frames. Many shutters hung askew; some rolling blinds had collapsed. A crooked sign, riddled with holes, was posted in front of a crumbling cottage: ‘Villa Luisella’. During the winter, apparently, someone had amused himself by firing bullets at the sign. In the yard, which I could see through the gate, a bicycle with only one rim lay on its side.
I couldn’t imagine how Professor Ancona had wound up in a backwater like this. After a few vain attempts, I finally managed to find the right street and the right address: 18 via del Maestrale. Before me, in silhouette, rose a building no less spectral than all the others, distinguished only by a little portico where it looked as though people set up stalls in the summer (I imagined their wares: inflatable dinghies and soccer balls, sun lotion and beach chairs, lots of little buckets and spades); now, however, the shops were empty, and I could look through the dismal security shutters and see the empty counters, the layer of dust on everything, the newspaper pages scattered across the floor.
Massimo Ancona. It was one of the few names on the intercom panel. I couldn’t hesitate any longer; my doubt was growing with each passing second. And out of that doubt, there arose the overwhelming certainty that it would be better – for my life as well as his – if I were to turn on my heel and plunge back into the darkness from which I had come.
‘Elena,’ I said to the intercom.
‘Fifth floor.’
I pushed the glass door open; as I entered the atrium, I spotted an orange and white life preserver hanging on the wall (in case these flats go under?) and printed with the name of the building: ‘The Naiads’. I took the lift; then a door opened, and I found myself face to face with my father.
8
A CLOSED-UP ODOUR – the smell of cold smoke – and semi-darkness. White furniture in summerhouse-on-the-beach style, doors falling off cabinets and wardrobes, laminated surfaces swollen by humidity. Books everywhere, scattered pages, on the floor an old typewriter under its dust cover, an open laptop – the single light source in the room – newspapers, magazines, a bottle of whisky standing next to a glass so smeared and smudged as to be nearly opaque, and a dirty quilt laid over a child’s bed transformed into a sofa.
And in the middle of the room, him.
Same face as in the snapshot, just a little fuller; black hair, salt-and-pepper beard, burning eyes. His upper body was still slender, but sagging slightly because of his paunch, which pressed so hard against his shirt that the buttons seemed about to burst.
‘What a lovely surprise on an otherwise melancholy afternoon!’
‘I’m Elena, pleased to meet you,’ I said. Then I sat down on the rickety sofa-bed.
After holding forth (and remaining duly vague) for a short while on the subject of myself and my studies, I gave him the floor. Which seemed to be just what he was waiting for. It occurred to me that he must be a very solitary man, his head always full of thoughts, and he leapt at the chance to address an audience.
My anger had given way to curiosity. I tried to see him through my mother’s eyes: what had struck her about him? What emotions had he stirred in her, emotions with the power to determine her fate so tragically?
I tuned into his long monologue. ‘You must be surprised,’ he was saying, ‘that I’ve chosen to live in such a shocking place. Perhaps you would have preferred to visit me in Venice, in a renovated loft above what was once a fishmonger’s, with antique furniture and old prints on the walls, but that, you see, would have been too conventional. It would have meant adhering to a pre-established type – the philosophy professor in his natural habitat – and that’s exactly what I don’t want to do: step into a mould. Besides, there’s something about cutting all ties; it’s like setting up outposts in the void. I’m going where no one else would ever have the nerve to go, and do you know why? Because I’m not afraid. That’s all there is to it. Since I don’t live the lie of attachment to anything or anyone, I have no fear. It’s duplicity that makes us fragile. We have to build around us a wall of things, of objects and simulacra, to hold terror at bay, but all this accumulation, instead of providing relief, generates an even greater terror, the terror of loss. The more attachments we have, the more we live in panic; things get lost or break, people die or leave us, and suddenly we find ourselves completely naked. Naked and desperate. Of course, we’ve always been naked, but we pretend not to know it, not to see it, and by the time we realise it, it’s often too late for us to save ourselves. You may be wondering how a person can save himself if he can’t hold on to anything. He saves himself by not acting – or rather by acting in harmony with the void. The void precedes us; the void will close in again after our brief passage. In the void there’s a sort of wisdom, the wisdom of appearing and disappearing, and therefore we must entrust ourselves to the void as to a generous wet-nurse . . . Outposts in the Void is actually the title of the book I’m working on . . .’
Time passed, and I couldn’t manage to step into the flowing river of his sentences. I still had an hour before the last bus. I didn’t know how to approach the object of my visit.
Luckily, after a while he got up to refill his whisky glass, and my eye fell on an extremely beautiful Persian rug, the only antique in the house.
I pointed to it and asked, ‘So where did that come from?’
‘Does it seem like a contradiction to you? It is, in fact. My father was a rug merchant – it’s one of the few I still have.’
‘Is it an heirloom?’
‘No, it’s my strongbox. Something I can sell if I have to . . .’
Instead of returning to his chair, he sat beside me on the sofa-bed. Its springs squeaked under his weight. We stayed like that for a while in silence; not far away, a dog was barking desperately. Then he took one of my hands and began examining it. ‘According to the ancients, a person’s hand contains all the qualities of his soul . . . Here I see intelligence and nobility of thought . . . Your hand is a lot like mine.’
Our hands were resting on my leg, side by side. Mine shook a little.
‘It’s a lot like yours because I’m your daughter,’ I said, in a voice whose calmness amazed me.
The curses of an old man who was trying unsuccessfully to silence the dog overlaid its barking.
The professor sprang away from me. ‘What’s this, a joke?’ he asked, in a voice halfway between alarm and amusement. ‘Or a bit of bad theatre?’
‘Padua, the seventies. One of your students . . .’
He stood up so he could see my face better. ‘Marvellous years. Girls flung themselves into my arms like bees diving into a flower.’
‘Naked-truth-telling.’
A hard light came into his eyes, rendering them opaque and extinguishing their bright flashes. ‘If you’re here to make accusations, let me tell you at once that you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘No accusations.’
‘Then what do you want? Some compensation, some money? If that’s the reason, the most I can give you is a rug.’
‘I don’t need money, and I don’t want a rug.’
‘Then why, assuming that you really are my daughter, have you come a
ll the way out here?’
‘Simple curiosity. I wanted to get to know you.’
‘Human beings can never completely know each other.’
‘But curiosity is an attribute of intelligence.’
‘Touché!’
The bus would be passing very soon. While I was putting on my jacket, he opened the front door and said, ‘Come back whenever you want. I’m always here in the afternoon. I often go out in the morning, so if you’re going to come then it’s best to call first.’
After that first time, I visited him once a week for three months. We often took walks along the beach. In the beginning, the bathing season was still far off, and on sunny days the strong-smelling clumps of algae rotting in the shallows along the shore attracted flocks of herring gulls, which were always on the lookout for food.
The water level varied greatly, in accordance with the tides. Sometimes, the fishermen-pensioners had to wade out almost to the horizon in order to find clams and scallops.
We frequently came across joggers, athletic young men or older, big-bellied fellows, dripping with sweat even in the middle of winter.
Often, during the milder days, we saw lovers sitting on the trunks of trees blown down by sea storms. On one such occasion, my father pointed to a couple locked in an embrace and said, ‘Do you know why lovers love to look at the sea? It’s because they’re convinced that their love is without end, like the horizon. In short, they gaze at an illusory line and superimpose on it an illusory sentiment.’
He missed no opportunity to demonstrate to me the speciousness of the visible world. Maya – the great cosmic illusion, according to Indian Vedic philosophy – imprisons us in its magic net, from which only a select few manage to escape by finally opening their eyes. All the others are compelled to follow shadows.
‘Love can’t be only a shadow,’ I replied.
‘Of course it can. It’s the shadow of partiality. Look, right now I’m glad to be walking with you along this beach, I like talking to you about a great many things, but is this love? No, it’s only the satisfaction of partial knowledge. In you, who claim to be my daughter, I love the reflection of my intelligence; I love what I recognise of myself in you. But if, for example, you had displayed a different genetic trait – maybe something you shared with some dull-witted aunt on your side of the family or mine – if you’d turned out to be a silly girl living for talk shows and the latest style in trousers, I would have shown you the door at once. I’d even have changed my telephone number so you couldn’t get in touch with me again. I’m not much interested in ownership – I much prefer recognition. I like the idea of detecting a sign, a trace, mysteriously passed on from generation to generation. And that’s the reason – my aversion to ownership – why I let you be free. Try to imagine what your life would have been like if you had known from the start that you were Professor Ancona’s daughter. You would have automatically conformed to pre-defined behavioural modules; for example, you might have felt duty-bound to be the first in your class. Or maybe you would have gone the other way and done your best to be as moronic as possible, putting nails through your eyelids and following every sort of repulsive fad like a sheep, just to drive me crazy with rage. But this way, you’re not a product of conditioning, you’ve grown up naturally, and you’ve become what you should be, not a greenhouse plant but a tree, standing majestically alone in the middle of a clearing, and all that’s thanks to me, because I hid myself from you, I withdrew. Don’t think it wasn’t a sacrifice on my part, as well. I had to renounce the innumerable little moments of delight granted only to fathers, but I didn’t want to clip your wings. Do you understand? I preferred to let your genetic inheritance manifest itself on its own, without distortions or conditioning, because in the end that’s our essence. For millennia, our DNA has rolled itself out, carrying in its strands the secret of how long our bodies can survive. You live, you survive, you die; everything’s inscribed there, in that speck of matter.’
The sun was hot that day. We sat on a rowboat that had been hauled up on to the beach and took off our jackets. My father lit a cigarette. My eyes fell on a dead cormorant not far from us; some raptor must have eaten its head, and the flies swarmed around its gaping neck. Had I moved it, I’m sure I’d have found the maggots already at their work.
He’d never asked me anything about my mother, neither who she was – which one out of so many – nor what had become of her. This seemed strange to me.
‘My mother’s dead,’ I said, without looking him in the face.
‘Ah, yes?’
‘She died a long time ago. I was four.’
‘This, too, is a species of good fortune. How did she die?’
‘In a car accident. I don’t know much about it. I think everything had become too much for her, and somehow . . .’
The smoke from his cigarette rose in symmetrical rings and drifted in front of his face. He breathed a deep sigh. ‘Right, that’s how it goes,’ he said. ‘The gene for guilelessness often carries a certain flaw.’
‘What flaw?’
‘A tendency toward self-destruction.’
One day, after our walk, he took me to lunch in the old town. He was probably a regular customer at the restaurant we went to, because the elderly waiter who led us to our table called him ‘Professor’.
As we sat down, he whispered ‘They’re going to think you’re my latest conquest.’
I wanted to say, ‘Since when do you care about what other people think?’ But I kept my mouth shut.
On the wall behind him, a drunk in an oil painting gave me the eye. There was an empty bottle on his table, his cap sat on his head at a jaunty angle, and two tears were running down his cheeks. In the painting beside it, an enormous orange sun shone down on two horses standing muzzle to muzzle and hoof to hoof, whether for rivalry or love was not clear. After all, my father would have said, they’re the same thing.
‘You should order the brodetto con la polenta,’ he suggested.
‘No, I’d rather have the fried calamari.’
While we waited, they brought us some antipasti and a bottle of white wine. It was the first time I’d ever seen him eat. I figured he’d treat his food, like everything else, with sovereign detachment; to my great surprise, however, he devoured everything greedily, with lowered head and swift fingers, as though he’d been fasting for a while.
Until then, he’d never asked me to tell him anything about myself and my life. Seeing him bent over his plate, I felt a well-grounded suspicion that it would have made no difference if I had been a mannequin or a cardboard cutout; things would have been exactly the same. But I wanted to know some things about him, and so, during our long wait for the main course, I interrogated him on the subject of his family.
His mother came from the island of Rhodes, and his father, Bruno Ancona, was a rug dealer. Actually, he’d graduated from the university with a degree in Business Economics, but then he’d inherited the rug business from his father-in-law. Faced with the choice between working for an insurance company and travelling all over the East, looking for the best pieces, he opted for the rugs. They lived in Venice, where my father was born in 1932.
Shortly before the Racial Laws were enacted in 1938, Bruno Ancona and his family, along with a chest full of rugs, boarded a ship bound for Brazil. Bruno’s wife, Massimo’s mother, had opposed this move with all her might; the meetings of her canasta club were regular and well-attended, all the ladies were still playing, and there was no reason for alarm.
They were Italians. Italians like everyone else.
Throughout the entire crossing, Bruno had to put up with his wife’s complaining. ‘You’ve got too much imagination,’ she kept telling him. ‘Your imagination’s dragging us down to ruin.’
Her torment continued uninterrupted even after they reached São Paolo. Everything was too much for her; the city was too damp, too hot, too dirty, too poor, too full of blacks, and what was worse, there was no one to play canasta with. She held
out for two more years, and then she got sick and died.
‘A stupid woman, on the whole’ was my father’s comment. ‘Very beautiful, with olive skin and eyes like burning coals, but stupid.’
Bruno, on the other hand, wasn’t stupid at all; a year after becoming a widower, he got married again. His new wife was a dark-skinned Brazilian beauty, who produced a string of coloured kids.
After the war, Massimo had asked his father for his inheritance and returned to Europe. He’d never seen nor heard from him again; he didn’t even know whether he was dead or alive.
‘That’s not important, either,’ he concluded, avidly sucking the claw of some crustacean. ‘The past can’t be changed, and the future doesn’t belong to us. What really exists is the present. The moment, and nothing else, is what’s important.’
When I went back to Trieste that evening, the odour of fried food accompanied me all the way home. I was tired and all I wanted to do was sleep, but I had to take a shower first. I was afraid that dreary smell would get inside me somehow and mingle with my sadness.
9
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I didn’t go to visit him.
His speeches had settled on my thoughts like dust on furniture, slipping into the cracks and the empty spaces and making everything dim; it wasn’t the innocent dirt caused by neglect, the kind you can get rid of at once with a cloth or a lungful of air, but a fine, mephitic powder, capable of concealing among its molecules some dangerous metals or metalloids like lead and arsenic, substances which, absorbed in small doses, cause no symptoms at first, but which later, with the passage of time, lead to poisoning and death.
On many occasions, as he talked, I’d found myself agreeing with his words: after all, I shared his scorn for appearances and for sentimental fictions. The obtuseness I caught a glimpse of in many people’s faces irritated and terrorised me at the same time. What life could there be behind those opaque eyes? Such an existence would surely never be mine, but what was the alternative to opacity? Thanks to his temperament (which was also my own), my father had followed a different drummer, but was his life really free?