Cabaret (12 page)

“And your aunt and I care very deeply about you; you know that.”

I nodded. I knew where all this was leading. Then Aunt Ninfa burst out. She couldn’t help herself, cutting straight through Uncle Birillo’s carefully constructed beginning.

“Don’t do it, Freda,” she shrieked. “Don’t marry that horrible little man. It will end in disaster; I know it will. Raffaello says…”

“For the love of the Madonna,” interrupted Uncle Birillo, banging the table with his fists in exasperation. “Can’t you for once in your life keep your mouth shut?” Whereupon Aunt Ninfa broke into great racking sobs that made the neighbors rush in, fearing the worst.

“As I was trying to say, Freda,” he resumed after shepherd-ing the residents back onto the landing, “it’s only natural, given the trauma you have suffered in your life, that you should long for happiness, stability, the comfort of the special relationship between a man and a woman, but marriage isn’t a step to be taken lightly, believe me. I’m not saying this ventriloquist fellow isn’t right for you…”

“Of course he isn’t right for her,” screamed Aunt Ninfa.

“What are you saying, Birillo?”

Ignoring her, Uncle Birillo continued,

“But you’ve only known him a few days, and under the most dreadful circumstances. Think it over carefully; that’s all I’m asking you to do. Don’t rush into anything, promise me?”

“Promise,” I lied.

As I left I heard Aunt Ninfa raging inside the building.

“Birillo, that man is sinister, I tell you. He’s playing some kind of game with her; you mark my words…” That night, or rather in the early hours of the next morning, I received a mysterious phone call. First someone was talking in Spanish, and I assumed I had got a crossed line.Then there was a degree of graininess and crackling. Then there came a voice I recognized. It was Fiamma. She was calling from Paraguay, where she was holding secret talks with the government. Concerned about the news she had received by telex, Fiamma had interrupted the talks at a crucial stage to come to the phone.

There were several times when I could hear nothing, but Fiamma carried on talking; so our conversation was confused, but I got the general gist of what she was saying.

“Freda, you’re making a massive mistake,” she said at the end.

“You did the same,” I replied.

“That’s different,” she snapped, and the line went dead.

T
he following morning the headlines of
La Repub-lica
made me choke on my coffee:
CRUISE
HORROR: the nightmare continues

The article went on:

A fishing trawler, the
Santa Isolda,
made an unusual dis-covery when it hoisted its nets in the Golfo di Noto at noon yesterday. Along with the sea bream, gilthead, sardines, and assorted crustaceans, the net bulged with what was at first considered a rare Melon-headed whale cabaret

(
Peponocephala
). However, on closer examination it was found to have a thick head of hair encrusted with bar-nacles and baby crabs. The superstitious sailors from Pozzallo (Ragusa Province) believed they had fished up a mermaid and were divided in their opinions as to whether this augured well or ill, when the creature in the net astounded them all by beginning to speak. Although incoherent, the creature, which was later identified as a woman, kept repeating the name of the luxury cruise liner, the
Santa Domenica,
that had sunk in the Malta Channel the previous night under suspicious circumstances. It seems this survivor had swum an astonishing seventy kilometers from the site of the sinking, before becoming enmeshed in the trawler’s nets. Despite receiving the best of care from the ship’s crew, the woman died before reaching hospital at Avola. Her last words were, cryptically, “Tell Freda I love her.” The woman, naked, and weighing 100 kilos, had an unusual mechanical left hand that had suffered corrosion from contact with the seawater. She carried no formal identification but was later named through dental records as one Clodia Strozzi of the San Basilio district of Roma. The cause of death was given by the coroner as exhaustion, exposure, and saltwater inhalation. She is survived by her mother, also Clodia.The Perfect Luxury shipping line that owned the fated vessel expressed its deepest sympathies to Signora Strozzi last night. “Signora Strozzi (junior) was the life and soul of the party on our recent phenomenally successful

‘Magic of the Pharoes’ Cruise. Her fellow passengers will remember fondly her exuberant dancing, her sparkling wit, and her huge capacity for fun. Sadly, her like will not be seen again,” said a spokesman.

So Clodia had survived after all, only to perish. And to think that her last words had been for me. I felt terrible.

It was not long before a reporter from the scurrilous rag
Dirty Gossip
was sniffing round the reception desk of the funeral parlor asking probing questions.

“Could you comment on the nature of the relationship between Freda Castro, your embalmer, and the deceased woman?” he asked insinuatingly of Signora Dorotea while I hid in the chapel of rest.

“No, I could not,” Signora Dorotea replied, driving him out with the threat of a hypodermic needle in the groin.

As I set off at lunchtime to be introduced to Alberto’s family, I wore dark glasses, just in case the paparazzi were lurking outside.

Signora Dorotea couldn’t resist a final word.

“I tell you, Freda, you’re making a big mistake. It’s a holiday romance; that’s all it is. We’ve all had them, even me. I was young myself once, you know. His name was Siro. In Can-neto it was, one August. I was twelve at the time, or was it thirteen? Just like you thought, full of hormones, no sense.

He had the biggest marble collection I’ve ever seen.”

“I’ll get you a meringue on my way back,” I said, knowing how to divert her.

“Ooh, lovely,” she said. “Yes, please.” I felt quite nervous when I was introduced to Signora Lippi, and to Alberto’s sister, Nunziata, and her brood, which at that time numbered five.

The signora looked at me for a long time without speaking. Then she turned to Alberto and said simply:

“Son, don’t marry her.”

Then Nunziata chipped in and said to her brother:

“I don’t like her.”

Afterward Alberto said:

“I think it went rather well.”

But I’m pretty certain he was lying.

D
espite this opposition, we set the date, and at that time I think we were united by the pre-dominant view that we were a disaster waiting to happen. At least we had this much in common.

On Saturday June 24, 1972, at five PM we were married.

My only satisfaction was knowing that I had fulfilled Mamma’s prophecy.

The wedding ceremony, which took place in the Munici-pio in the Via Giulia, just a few blocks from our old apartment, was a joyless charade. In fact, I have been to funerals that were far more jolly. At the entrance, Polibio, who was wearing a false nose in an ill-advised attempt at humor, handed out paper handkerchiefs to dry the tears of the many guests who were crying. Aunt Ninfa was inconsolable, and her bellows were even louder than when we buried Mamma, and Signora Pucillo.

“I can’t help it, Birillo,” she howled, before my uncle could open his lips to berate her. “When I look at that nasty, ugly, slimy, creepy, little man, I just can’t bear it.”

“Don’t upset yourself, Ninfa,” said Fiamma, trying to be cheerful. “It won’t last, so why worry?” But soon even the Secret Service operatives that surrounded her were sobbing.

The formalities were concluded at a rapid pace, which left me in a blur. I said “Yes” to every question asked of me, without reflecting. I willed my nerve to hold, and focused on externals: the wooden sound of Malco’s teeth gnashing in the row immediately behind; the grunting breathing of Nunziata’s brood, dressed uniformly in black knickerbockers and caps; the gibbering of Signora Lippi; and the overwhelming stag-nant odor of the bridegroom by my side.

The only happy one was Pierino. He stood on Signora Dorotea’s shoulder, flapping his wings, and barking in imita-tion of a dog, which signaled his true and deep delight.

Afterward, there was no reception, no cake, no dancing, no gifts, or confetti. What would be the point? To celebrate would have been hypocritical.

So Alberto hired a pony and trap to drive us to the station from where we would take the train to Fregene to spend our wedding night at the celebrated hotel the Villa Spugnea.

The guests on my side went back to Aunt Ninfa’s to swap dire predictions about our married life (some of which proved remarkably accurate), and at the same time to drown their sorrows in Uncle Birillo’s homemade coffee liqueur.

What Alberto’s family did, I couldn’t say.

I
would prefer to draw a veil over the technical details of our disastrous wedding night. Everything that could go wrong did. Although Alberto had reserved the honeymoon suite, the Villa Spugnea had no record of this, and claimed it was unavailable. In fact, although the hotel was deserted, the receptionist assured us that every room was occupied.

She did suggest the possibility of a broom cupboard, which, if we were prepared to wait long enough, she could have someone show us.We kicked our heels in the empty corridors for an hour, then two, and finally the housekeeper, who had been a Rumanian shot-putter in a previous existence, showed us with little enthusiasm up to the attic floor.

The broom cupboard proved to be a typical broom cupboard, equipped with a variety of mops, brushes, antiquated sweepers, and dented pails. It was thick with dust, which was responsible for starting an attack of the quick-fire sneezing to which Alberto had been subject ever since he was a boy.

The shot-putter informed us that for an additional twenty thousand lire on top of the room rate, a camp bed could be erected. Enthusiastically—too enthusiastically, I felt—

Alberto agreed.

We waited for this service, and for our luggage to be delivered, and all the while Alberto sneezed with the deafening rapidity of a machine gun.

I wish I could say that during this time my bridegroom and I seethed with a passion for one other’s flesh, but we didn’t.

Instead Alberto sneezed, and I balanced on an upturned bucket, trying to suppress the question that kept forcing itself into my mind: “What am I doing here?” This situation reminded me of that time on the gangplank of the cruise liner, when I had resisted the impulse to run away, and I had been wrong. Should I escape this time, before it was too late?

At that critical moment the shot-putter arrived with our luggage and the camp bed, which she assembled with much muttering and an excess of bad grace. We had to pay her an awful lot of money to go away. Each attempt at satisfying her with a tip failed, and she continued to hold her hand out-stretched, with a menacing look in her eye.

At last we were alone. Well, almost alone. Although Alberto had promised to leave Malco behind at his mother’s, for relations between the puppet and me had deteriorated since our return from the cruise, I had reason to suspect Alberto had smuggled the schoolboy along. True, he had abandoned the replacement black suitcase in which the dummy regularly traveled, but instead there was a red one of similar size and weight, and whose contents he refused to reveal, and wouldn’t explain.

“Just a harmless little secret, my love,” he had murmured before the attack of sneezing rendered him red, wet, and dumb. But already his relationship with the dummy was causing the gentle ringing of an alarm bell in a corner of my brain.

We stood awkwardly in the now crowded broom cupboard, waiting for what would happen next—for love, I suppose, but it didn’t happen.

Alberto couldn’t stop sneezing. It was pointless to try, so he held his nostrils closed with the finger and thumb of one hand and started removing his clothes with the other. I tried to help. It was the least I could do under the circumstances.

We got him out of his jacket, shoes, and pants, his shirt and tie, but stopped at his undershirt and shorts and his socks. It seemed too blatant really, to continue further. I tried not to notice his gray flesh—the color of an unembalmed corpse, and the aroma of wet dog that hung about him.

With a sinking heart, I realized it was now my turn. Reluctantly I removed my funeral suit and blouse with the same embarrassment you have in stripping prior to medical examination.

There was then the problem of what to do with the clothes, which now occupied the camp bed. Together we worked to hang them from the handles of the brooms and mops to keep them out of the dust. We took our time over this task. There was no need to rush.We adjusted things until we were pleased with the results, and felt the satisfaction of a job well done.

I would really have liked to go home then.

At last we knew we had to approach the camp bed.There could be no more prevarication. Taking the lead, Alberto eased himself into it in a way that took me straight back to that deck chair on the
Santa Domenica,
when I had seen him for the first time, and was revolted by him. The springs groaned, and considered giving up. One did, and there was a lurch as the canvas ripped, causing Alberto to bang his head on the floor. Doubtless we would be required to pay for the damage.

With his free hand, he beckoned me to join him. Quite clearly there wasn’t the room, or the strength in the frame, but I lowered myself gingerly until I was on top of him. Then the remaining springs buckled, and the canvas separated from the frame with the motion of a snake shedding its skin. We were now on the floor, with the frame looking down on us from above like a viewing gallery. The sound of sniggering came from the red suitcase.

So much for the preliminaries. It is not surprising that I failed to arouse Alberto’s passion as conclusively as he failed to ignite mine. I don’t honestly believe he had any more of an idea as to what to do than I did.

“Not like that, it won’t work,” he managed to sneeze as I tackled his tiny pink thing in the same way that I had manipulated Ernesto’s purple one the previous summer. So I held his nose for him while he tried, but he was no more successful than I was. It was excruciating.