Letter from Casablanca (3 page)

Josephine

H
e was on a bicycle,” said Nena. “He wore a knotted handkerchief on his head. I saw him very well. He saw me, too. He wanted something here at home. I understood him. But he went by as if he couldn’t stop. It was exactly two o’clock.”

Nena then wore a metal contraption on her upper teeth, which persisted in growing crooked. She had a reddish cat that she called “My Belafonte” and spent the day singing “Banana Boat” to herself—or preferably whistling it, because thanks to her teeth the whistle turned out very well, better than mine. Mama seemed very annoyed, but usually she didn’t yell at her. She limited herself to saying, “Leave the poor animal in peace.” Or, when you saw that she was very sad and was pretending to rest in the armchair, and Nena ran into the garden under the oleanders, where she had installed her own
pied-à-terre
, Mama would appear at the window pushing back a lock of hair that was stuck to her with perspiration, and wearily, not as if she were scolding but almost as if it were a private lament, a litany, she would say to her, “Stop whistling that nonsense. Does it seem right to you? You know that respectable little girls shouldn’t whistle.”

Nena’s
pied-à-terre
consisted of the blue canvas deck chair
which had been Papa’s favorite and which she had propped against two terra cotta pots of privet to make a wall. On the lawn, which served as the floor, she had arranged all her dolls (her “little friends”), the poor Belafonte tied on a leash, and a red tin telephone, a present which Aunt Yvonne had given me the previous year for my Saint’s Day, and which I had then passed on to Nena. I had never liked it very much anyway. It was a stupid toy and absolutely inadequate for a boy of my age. But you had to have patience and be polite, said Mama. Aunt Yvonne didn’t have any children—not because she hadn’t wanted them, poor thing—and she didn’t have the slightest notion of what toys were suited to a boy. To tell the truth, Aunt Yvonne didn’t have the slightest notion of anything, not even of what to say in certain circumstances. She was so careless that she was always late for appointments, and when she came to our house she always left something on the train. “But even so, there’s no harm done,” said Mama. “It’s a good thing you forgot something, otherwise what would become of us?” And Aunt Yvonne smiled like a guilty little girl, looking very embarrassed at all the luggage that she had deposited in the entry, while in the street the taxi tooted to remind her that she still had to pay.

And so, characteristically, she had committed “an unpardonable gaffe,” as she had said, making the situation worse, while Mama sobbed on the divan. (But then Mama had forgiven her at once.) When she had arrived at our house immediately after the misfortune, she had announced herself by a telephone call which old Tommaso had answered, from which she had taken leave by saying, “Regards to the young gentleman officer.” And that stupid Tommaso had repeated it, crying like a calf. But what would you expect him to do? He was arteriosclerotic, and I had always heard it said that even as a young man he hadn’t been very smart. He had repeated it while Mama talked with the notary in the living room that infernal day in which she had had to think of
everything, “of everything except what I really wanted to think of, alone with my pain.” But the fact was that Aunt Yvonne had repeated that leave-taking for years. It was a joke that went back to 1941, when Papa and Mama were engaged. He was an officer at La Spezia. So that she and Aunt Yvonne could have a vacation, he had rented a little villa in Rapallo, the proprietor of which was a very polite lady who did not miss an opportunity to emphasize her aristocratic origins, however questionable. She loved to make conversation while she watered the garden when Mama and Aunt Yvonne were outside on the terrace and, taking leave, she always said, “Regards to the young gentleman officer,” which made Aunt Yvonne break into giggles, promptly leave the terrace, and laugh herself silly.

So Mama, those summer hours after dinner, while she lay in an armchair with her eyes covered with a handkerchief, heard Nena whistling “Banana Boat,” sighed, and let it alone. “What do you want her to do, poor treasure?” I had heard Aunt Yvonne say. “If she’s not happy at her age, when do you expect her to be? Let her alone.” And Mama, with her eyes glistening, had nodded, wringing her hands. It was the first of May and Aunt Yvonne had come to say good-bye. She was contrite in her careless way. She said, “My dear, you realize there’s nothing else we can do. What do you expect? Rodolfo can’t stay here any longer. You know they all pounce on him like jackals. A day doesn’t go by that it isn’t in the financial pages. No one can live like this, not even the president of the Bank of Italy. And then you know the job in Switzerland is a prestigious thing. We haven’t had any children, unfortunately. Up to now his only satisfaction has been his career. I certainly can’t interfere with the meaning of his life—it would be
inhumane
. But Lausanne really isn’t the end of the world, is it? We’ll see each other at least once a year. In fact, we’ll surely be here in September, and when you want to come our house is always open.” It was a Sunday morning. Mama had
put on a little black veil because she was already ready for Mass. She stayed motionless on her chair and stared beyond Aunt Yvonne, who was sitting opposite her, beyond the buffet in the living room, which was behind Aunt Yvonne, and slowly nodded her head yes, calmly, with resignation, and with an air of understanding and tenderness.

Sundays had become much sadder without Aunt Yvonne’s visits. At least when she came there was a bit of movement, even confusion, because she descended upon us unexpectedly, and the telephone rang as long as she remained in our house and even afterwards. Furthermore, she wore a kitchen apron that turned out to be very funny over those classy outfits that she wore—long silk skirts, chiffon blouses, a super chic little hat with an organza camellia—and dolled up in that way she declared that she would prepare a French delicacy—Versailles mousse, for example—because the food in our house was “horrifyingly mundane.” Then it happened that at the last minute Mama had to resort to horrifyingly mundane veal scallops with lemon and buttered peas because between one telephone call and another Aunt Yvonne would have finished the mousse at four o’clock in the afternoon, and Nena and I, impatient, were going around the kitchen stealing breadsticks and cubes of cheese. But even so, all that turmoil brought about at least a little bit of happiness, even if later on it fell to Mama to wash six or seven pyrex bowls. But anyway, the mousse kept until the next day and it was truly delicious.

For all of May and part of June the days passed quickly enough. Mama was extremely busy with her azaleas, which that spring were very slow. They seemed reluctant to show themselves, as if they, too, had suffered with all the family. “Flowers are so sensible,” said Mama, working the soil. “They are perfectly aware of what is happening. They’re sensitive.” And I was very much occupied with the third declension, kinds of parisyllabics, and the imparisyllabics. I never succeeded in remembering which took an
um
and
which took an
ium
. The teacher had said, “This boy has done badly since the beginning of the year. He confuses all the declensions, and then what do you expect, dear lady? Latin is a precise language. It’s like mathematics. If one’s not cut out for it, one’s not cut out. He is much better in free composition. In any case, he can make up the work with study.” And so I had spent the whole month of May trying to make up, but evidently I had not made up enough.

June passed fairly well. The azaleas finally flowered, even if not as majestically as in the preceding year. Mama was very busy building them a little greenhouse out of mats, “because the sun bothers them,” it made them wither in the twinkling of an eye, and she placed the pots in the bottom of the garden by the boundary wall, where the sun beat down only after five o’clock.

Poor Tommaso bustled around like mad in spite of the tremor in his hands and the step that was no longer what it once had been. He tried to be as useful as he could. He cut the grass with the sickle, gave egg yolks to the lemon trees in pots on the terrace, even tried to sulphur the pergola of grapes, infested with parasites, in front of the garage door. However, he did more harm than good and realizing this he seemed terrified, although without reason. But it was difficult to make him understand this, and he spent the day repeating to Mama not to send him to the nursing home, for the sake of the young gentleman officer whom he had loved like a son, because at the nursing home they would keep him in bed and make him pee in a urinal. His cousin, whom he had gone to visit on Sunday, had told him this, and he rather preferred to die. He had never married. The last time his mother had seen him naked was when he was fourteen years old, and the idea of a young lady making him pee in a urinal sent him into a panic. Then Mama’s eyes grew shiny. She told him, “Don’t talk nonsense, Tommaso. You’ll die here—this is your home,” and Tommaso would have kissed her hands, but
Mama drew back and told him to stop complaining, that she had enough sadness already, and he should think instead of pulling up that couch grass thriving under the privet and making the plants die.

The worst days came at the end of July when a heat wave like nothing that had been felt in years broke out. The morning was quite bearable. I put on my roller skates and got a little exercise on the brick avenue that went from the front door to the boundary wall. Mama was busy with dinner. At times she even kept the radio on, and this was a good sign—but only talk programs like the news or “Our Listeners Write to Us.” And if there were songs, she immediately changed the station. But the hours after dinner were sultry and monotonous, heavy with sadness and silence. Even the faraway drone of the city quieted. It seemed that on the house and on the garden a bell of misted glass descended in which the only surviving living things were the cicadas. Mama sat down in the armchair in the living room with a damp handkerchief over her eyes and leaned her head back. I was at the little desk in my anteroom—from where I could see her if I stretched my neck—trying to imprint on my mind
nix-nivis
and
strix-strigis
in order to take the make-up exam in September. Nena I could hear messing about in her
pied-à-terre
singing “Banana Boat” to herself or else shuffling along the avenue because she was taking her Belafonte for a walk as far as the main gate, poor beast, and she whispered to him, “Let’s go see a bit of the world, dearie,” as if in front of our house there was who knows what? But the avenue at that hour was completely deserted, not that it was much frequented at other times either. From the street there, beyond the clearing where the first villas sprang up, you could see the city immersed in a flickering haze, and on the left the avenue ended in the yellow countryside punctuated by trees and isolated farm houses. Toward five o’clock, but not every day, the little ice cream cart passed, with a large chest made like a gondola on which were painted
the view of San Marco and the inscription
Venetian Specialities
. There was a little man who pedaled with great difficulty, blew into a brass trumpet to attract attention, shouted at the top of his lungs, “Two cones, fifty francs!’’ And then there remained silence and solitude.

From the time, after it happened, when Mama had taken to locking the gate so that no one could come in and we could not go out, even to see the ice cream man was better than nothing. My teacher had said that it would have been opportune to have me take private lessons, but Mama had replied that it seemed a bit difficult. We all led a very retiring life, she hoped she understood, and that if it had not been for the tradesmen, she would even have had the telephone cut off. She kept it only for that necessity or if sometime one of us fell sick, and furthermore she kept it off the hook all day because she couldn’t stand its ringing. This was perhaps an excessive precaution, because whoever would have telephoned after Aunt Yvonne moved to Lausanne?

Nena had taken harder than I did Mama’s new habit of not going out anymore, but she didn’t have my luck of being able to fill the after-dinner hours with the plurals in
ium
. She had nothing to do, poor little thing. In the elementary school they don’t take make-up exams in September. For a little while she tried to while away the time in her
pied-à-terre
, or she dragged her Belafonte on his leash as far as the gate in order to see a bit of the world. But then she got fed up, she even lost the desire to sing “Banana Boat’’ and she came on tiptoe up to my window and said to me, “I’m bored. Come to my
pied-à-terre
a little while and play 'Visiting.’ I’ll be the lady and you be the architect who comes to court me.” I sent her away in a low voice so as not to disturb Mama, and if she insisted I told her,
strix-strigis strix-strigis
, which was an offense she understood very well, and she went away with a furious look, sticking out her tongue at me.

But Mama wasn’t asleep and I knew it. I was aware that at
times she cried silently with her head bowed. I would see two tears slide down her cheeks under the handkerchief that covered her eyes. And her hands in her lap, apparently motionless, were imperceptibly trembling. Then I would close my Latin grammar for a while, stare lazily at the sepia-colored Minerva on the cover, and then slip out into the garden by the screen door of the back-kitchen and through part of the garage in order not to be involved in Nena’s stupid games in which I would have to be the architect. On that side the grass was rather tall because Tommaso was not able to cut it, and, immersed in the sticky heat, feeling the savoy cabbage brush against my bare legs, I liked to walk there, as far as the metal grating of the low wall that bordered on the open country. I would go to look for lizards, which nested in that part and which sat on the stones motionless in the sun with their heads raised and their eyes pointing at nothing. I even knew how to catch them with a reed snare which a schoolmate had taught me to make, but I preferred to observe those small bodies, uncomprehending and suspicious of the least little noise as if absorbed in an undecipherable prayer.