Actually I’ve never seen even one of the paintings. Mrs. A. let me see only the paper packaging, all identical, and the one time I dared peek between the edges of a wrapper, she stepped forward to stop me. I didn’t try it again.
“What are you planning to do with them?” I ask her on the day of the visit with Emanuele. It’s an indelicate question that I have not considered properly, yet I feel it’s my duty to warn her about the dissolution of her cherished collection that she has watched over for so long in an apartment that no one would ever suspect housed such treasure. Whoever comes later will not have the slightest regard for it, certainly not what she would expect, because there is no possible comparison with a devotion that’s lasted a lifetime. Mrs. A. still has the luxury of preparing for her death—and to determine the fate of each of those objects exactly as she wishes.
“They’re fine here,” she replies.
The question creates a momentary rift: I realize it when she quickly invites me to leave that hall of memorabilia and move to the living room; she feels cold, she says. I know what she’s thinking, and I can’t blame her. Although I don’t think I had an ulterior motive, still, I must admit that I noticed the painting of the nude woman about to peel peaches, and for a moment I imagined it hanging in Nora’s and my bedroom, something that might seem intimate enough to be up there watching us every night, awake or asleep.
_____
After that Sunday I found myself in Mrs. A.’s apartment one more time. She had been dead for four months. In the end she’d left us two matching pieces of furniture, a table and a credenza from the twenties, both cream-colored; I had to hurry and pick them up before the place was sold. Two pieces of furniture: Babette’s only gift to us and all we have left of her. She had not provided for Emanuele.
Both cousins, Virna and Marcella, were waiting for me. The table and the credenza were the only furnishings remaining, along with a series of cartons containing odds and ends: a pressure cooker, two plastic pitchers and a set of gold-rimmed glasses.
“Those we’ll give to charity,” Virna said.
“A noble intention,” I remarked, without a hint of sarcasm.
Not a trace of the chandeliers, the collection of pocketwatches and the pre-Columbian statues, no sign of the paintings and the grandfather clock in the living room. Even the double panes of the windows were gone. Now the light of day invaded the room aggressively, as it had never been allowed to do before. It’s an apartment that has been plundered, the swift demobilization of an entire lifetime devoted to preservation. Mrs. A. had had plenty of time, months and months, to ensure that those sacred objects be handed down and given some meaning, and she hadn’t done anything. After the diagnosis she had focused on nothing but striving desperately each day to gain a few more futile hours for herself. There was not a sign left of her, or of all that she had watched over for a lifetime.
Poor, foolish Mrs. A.! You let yourself be duped—death tricked you, and the illness before that. Where are the paintings that you kept hidden behind the screen? For years you didn’t even look at them, afraid the dust would damage them. Even the screen has disappeared, probably abandoned in some damp storeroom, wrapped in plastic and raised off the ground by a pallet. We have to consider the future, Mrs. A., always. You often boasted about how smart you were, how you learned everything you knew from experience, but unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be very useful. You would have been better off thinking about it more, because your common sense wasn’t enough to save you or your possessions. The end does not pardon us even the slightest of faults, even the most innocent of failings.
_____
We placed the table in the kitchen. Emanuele recognized it and walked around it, not touching it, as if wondering what spatiotemporal channel had transported it from Mrs. A.’s house, from the past, to here. The first night eating at it was strange; none of us was used to the chill of the marble surface, to its smooth feel as our forearms rested on it. The artificial light glared off the white tabletop into our eyes; the whole room was suddenly more brilliant.
“I’ll have to get a lower-watt bulb,” I said.
“Right,” Nora replied, preoccupied. Then she added, “Don’t you feel like we’re eating with her?”
There was no room for the credenza: too wide, too bulky for our urban kitchen. We put it in the basement, to await a new spot that it is unlikely to be assigned. One morning when I went down to clean it and apply a product to protect it from termites, I noticed some fine wood particles piled up in the corners. Opening the upper doors, I saw that the interior walls were papered with various newspaper articles, each with a date written on it in ballpoint: 1975 or 1976. Those were years when Renato was still alive but already gravely incapacitated. As far as I know, the credenza had come to Mrs. A. from an aunt of his, perhaps on the occasion of their wedding.
I scanned the headlines of the clippings, trying to find a selection criterion that seemed to make sense to me:
DEATH PLOT, POLICE OFFICER ARRESTED
PENTAGON AND CIA CAUSED DROUGHT IN CUBA?
ITT CONFIRMS IT FINANCED ANTI-ALLENDE COUP
PUBLIC HOUSING TO BE HEATED BY SOLAR ENERGY
BILLION-DOLLAR SALARY FOR COSMETICS PRESIDENT
SAN GIORIO: FOUL-SMELLING LANDFILL
SHE, 50, HE, 67: “IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT”
At first glance the articles, about forty in all, did not show any logical connection. The only obvious feature was that they were not chosen by Mrs. A. (I doubt she had a clear idea of where Cuba is or that she knew the Pentagon as anything other than a five-sided geometrical figure.) Nevertheless, looking from side to side, from one clipping to the next, I began to see that the articles conveyed several basic themes. I counted, grouping them by subject. Surprisingly, in the final count the majority involved the CIA, the FBI and the troubled relations between the United States and Fidel Castro. Mrs. A. had never mentioned any particular interest Renato might have had in the intrigues of power, not even during our last conversations. The inside of the credenza, however, introduced me to a man fascinated by conspiracy, who by pasting those clippings side by side was perhaps trying to extrapolate an overall picture that might reveal the ruse into which society had drawn him. Maybe it was even more than that: perhaps Renato collaborated with the secret services—Mrs. A. never failed to describe him as an unpredictable man, someone with many lives and therefore extremely interesting—though it is unlikely that an intelligence agent would have pasted articles about the CIA in the kitchen credenza.
A box circled with a marking pen recorded a list of the ten most powerful companies in the world, according to ’73 data. Chrysler was in fifth place. If Renato only knew what’s happened in the meantime—how Chrysler went up in smoke and is now under the leadership of one of his fellow countrymen—he’d think the planet had reversed its rotation around its axis.
If Nora’s and my furniture were to end up at auction one day, or if it were to be found under the ashes of a volcanic eruption, it would hold almost no sign of us, just some furtive scribblings by Emanuele, like cave paintings, dating from the period when every corner of the house was threatened by his markers. The archaeologists of the future would not find any photographs; the few we have reside on the computer’s hard disk, which will have already been useless for many years. We have a strange iconoclastic mania, Nora and me: we don’t save anything, we don’t exchange letters or notes (with the exception of grocery lists), we don’t buy souvenirs when traveling because for the most part they are tacky and the same items can now be found throughout the world; also, since thieves visited the apartment, we don’t keep gold or jewelry—we simply don’t own any. The testimony of our lives together is dependent upon a good memory, ours and that of a silicon motherboard. No, Nora, the two of us don’t consider the future either. We don’t have a wedding album, can you imagine? Yet one day we’ll find ourselves far enough away from that day tha
t we’ll want to relive it, at least in pictures.
The archaeologists who will come and blow away the ashes from our house will unearth only the metal parts of the sophisticated furnishings, and it will take them some time to reconstruct their original beauty; they will find very few objects and almost no embellishments, not even in Emanuele’s room, which from year to year is being emptied of toys and colors, because everything that’s important to him is now found in the circuits of a tablet. I wonder what would suggest to them that a couple and then a family had lived in those rooms and that they were happy together, at least for long stretches of time.
And if through some complicated process of fossilization a few scraps of newspaper were to survive among the papers accumulated in the wastebasket and not yet discarded, then, scanning the headlines as I had with the articles in Mrs. A.’s credenza, they might perhaps think of a second Dark Age, the passage of another dismal, unpromising millennium. Or maybe we’re only impressionable. We view our era as grim and endangered, just as Renato’s seemed grim and endangered to him. Every age contains within itself the arrogant claim of catastrophe.
Beirut
Without her I don’t feel up to it,” Nora confesses as the first Christmas without Babette approaches. Mrs. A. has decided not to spend Christmas Eve with us but rather with her cousins. She always described them as envious and spiteful and kept away from them even though she was alone, but the cancer seems to have weakened her immune system against her family as well, defenses that she’d spent half a lifetime building up. Or maybe she didn’t expect us to invite her again this year. Maybe she’d said to herself, Now that I’m no longer their housekeeper, there’s no reason they should want me. When I called to tell her she would be welcome as always, she seemed bewildered, almost annoyed. “Oh, please, I can’t even think about sitting down at the table. Seeing all that food. By now I’m too difficult for company.”
I suggested she join us before or after dinner, whether she ate or not—we would be happy to see her just the same.
“Forget about me,” she cut me off. “Enjoy your holiday and don’t worry.”
Nora and I aren’t at all unworried, however. Without Mrs. A. the list of those invited to Christmas Eve dinner looms more threatening than ever: the three of us, Nora’s mother, her second husband, Antonio—a passionate commentator on the economic crisis and an inflammatory, overaged blogger—and his daughter, Marlene, with whom Nora has never bonded, perhaps because of the ten-year age difference or because, as she bitterly maintains, it is wholly unnatural to love a parent’s new child, to form attachments on demand. With Christmas the separation of Nora’s parents intensifies like a storm cloud, and she allows herself to be charged by the electrostatic potential in the air, constantly on the verge of discharging ten thousand volts on anyone who comes within range, in this case Emanuele or me. Not disappointing anyone—my family members, hers and their acquired relations—while at the same time avoiding awkward run-ins—is a game of skill that we can never seem to master.
At least with Mrs. A., an element of stability had been assured. When the serious lack of common topics became evident at the table, along with an equally serious lack of desire to find some, we focused our attention on the dishes she had prepared for us. We praised them, proposed suggestions for the following year, and in that way we dragged on until midnight. Mrs. A. became the center of Christmas, or its victim, but either way she was flattered. On that evening, more than on any other occasion, she seemed like one of the family, even if she really couldn’t bring herself to remain seated in the place we’d assigned her. Moving frenziedly between the dining room and the kitchen, leaving conversations midway, she would start washing the dishes earlier than necessary, changing her role every five minutes: from waitress to guest, then back to waitress. In retrospect it must have been nerve-racking for her. When it came time for dessert, I took the situation in hand and forced her to stay put. “Now, keep your behind glued to that chair,” and she liked the fact that I spoke to her so firmly. She clasped her hands in her lap and enjoyed the evening’s epilogue.
She had no gifts for anyone, but there were always a couple for her, from us and from Nora’s mother. In truth the one from Nora’s mother was pretty paltry—I suspect that it had been recycled more than once. Their relationship had never been entirely accepting. After all, Nora often indelicately revealed her deep fondness for Babette.
There always came a time at the Christmas dinner during which a merciless comparison was made between the roasts, the one prepared by my mother-in-law versus the one made by Mrs. A. The two pans were placed on the table, side by side. The dueling women exchanged a long look, like in a female western. Already stuffed, we all obediently took a bite from each slice in turn, then went on with our praises, more emphatic and more clamorous than before. Despite the fact that we tried to weigh them equally, in the end Mrs. A.’s scored more points, as always.
_____
“We’ll escape. That’s what we’ll do,” Nora suggests. We take advantage of an offer on a Beirut flight departing on December 24. We counter her mother’s protests by saying that the flights were cheaper, much cheaper, knowing that economic considerations have the power to silence her (the vicissitudes of the divorce have compellingly elevated money to the top of her scale of values). As for Emanuele, we assure him that he will receive his gifts just the same—earlier, in fact—and he seems pacified as well.
It’s odd the way certain customs are established: Mrs. A.’s cancer and her untimely demise led Nora and me to make a secret, forbidden pact. Never again would we celebrate Christmas with our parents. From one December to the next, we would always save up enough money to take us far away during those days, away from family tempests and conventions whose value we now doubted.
On the plane I read a book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies. After years of exploring the murky territory at the intersection between hematology and oncology, Mukherjee, an Indian American, wrote a fictionalized “biography” of cancer in six hundred pages, dense with references, and soon won a Pulitzer Prize. Each paragraph holds Mrs. A. up to the light and denies me one more milligram of hope for her. Mukherjee describes an all-out war, one marked by a few prominently featured successes but, in the end, a failed venture.
I pause over the analogy that the Greek physician Galen had drawn between cancer and melancholy, both brought on by an excess of black humor. As I read, it’s as though I can feel the viscous liquid, a stream of tar, clogging my lymphatic system. My dear Mrs. A., according to ancient medicine, we are cut from the same cloth; we are paladins of the black.
I’d like to call my therapist to stem the anxiety that is rapidly taking hold of me, but it’s impossible from here—use one of the pay phones in the plane’s cabin? Do they really work? in any case it’s Christmas Eve, and he wouldn’t answer—so I ask the stewardess for another miniature bottle of French wine. She serves it scornfully after letting me wait for quite a while. She must be a Muslim, or possibly she just finds the spectacle of a father getting drunk while sitting beside his son disgraceful.
I suspect that the stewardess knows nothing about black humor, and for that matter neither does Nora, sweetly asleep against my shoulder. I watch her, not sure whether I’m moved or envious. Her lymph flows freely, limpid and copious in spite of everything. I am convinced that her vitality is inexhaustible, that nothing, not even the ultimate sorrow, not even the gravest loss, would be able to deter it. In the end we are almost never happy or unhappy because of what happens to us; we are one or the other depending on the humor that flows inside us, and hers is molten silver: the whitest of metals, the best conductor and the most merciless reflector. The consolation of knowing that she is so strong mixes with the fear of not being truly indispensable to her, with the suspicion that I might be sucking the life out of her, like a kind of gigantic parasite.
One night we were talking about Mrs. A. and her lif
e marked by sacrifice. Right in the middle of it, just when her body was at its most vital, she had enjoyed five years of perfect happiness with her husband, before his kidneys faltered. Five years that had left no visible traces except in her, five years of marriage plus one of engagement during which she had distanced herself from who she’d been before and accumulated enough memories to endure the sight of Renato dying before her eyes, day after day, inexorably, in hundreds of dialysis sessions that changed his blood and his disposition and his love for her. Five years that had been enough for her to get by for another forty of them.
“Could you do it?” Nora had asked me. “Would you be able to stand it? Would you have the fortitude to stay with me until the end if I got sick?”
“We both swore to it, if I remember correctly.”
“What if the illness lasted as long as Renato’s? Would you stay with me all that time, wasting the best years of your life?”
“Yes, I would.”
I knew I shouldn’t turn the question around, because people whose lymph flows freely are as unstoppable as a rushing stream. But there are some conversations between people in love that, once you cross a certain threshold, inevitably draw you into their dark center.
“And you?”
Nora’s right hand went to the lock of hair that curls behind her ear, a strand that remains hidden except when she gathers her hair back, and that my fingers always go searching for. She started twisting and tugging it. “I don’t know. I think so,” but for a moment she had hesitated. For the rest of the evening, we kept away from each other.
On the plane headed for the temperate latitudes of the Middle East, a few hours after midnight on Christmas Eve, with my family asleep and nothing out there to threaten us at the moment, I feel like I am at a high point in our lives. I wonder how long it will last and how best to savor it fully. Certainly not by trying to dull my senses with more wine, which I didn’t even want. Then, too, Nora and I are always so busy, so distracted, so tired. We live in anticipation, constantly waiting for something that will free us from the burdens of the present, without taking into account new ones that will arise. If these really are our best years, I’m not satisfied with how we’re using them. I’d like to wake her up and tell her that, but I know she wouldn’t take me seriously; she would turn around in her seat, snuggle up even more, lean her head against the darkened window and go on sleeping.