Cabaret (7 page)

In the livestock market in the Via Ponderosa all kinds of animals were offered for sale. Goats, cows, pigs, sheep, rabbits, and mules were lined up in pens next to the truck park, and the air was rich with the fug of their warm bodies, and of steaming dung, which local children stole for their mothers to put on their roses. The sound of chomping and snorting vied with the din of the bartering merchants, the hooting of horns, and the drone of diesel engines.

Beyond was a pavilion where more exotic creatures were occasionally displayed, and I’m sure that even at that time trade in many of them must have been illegal.There were gibbons and sometimes even gorillas brought into the docks by sailors, enormous pythons, poisonous tarantulas, iguanas, wild cats baring glistening fangs, as well as brown bears and armadillos.

I made my way through the crowds of hawkers and pick-pockets to the Alley of the Birds. From the sound of squawking, cooing, shrieking, piping, singing, and chattering, you could imagine yourself in a tropical rain forest, rather than a passageway in Roma. Beneath my feet the ground was sticky from the litter of squashed guavas and earthworms, plums and peaches, pine kernels, walnuts, and the remains of the mice fed to the vultures.

Among enclosures containing penguins and peacocks, I found an ornate gilt cage containing a tiny baby parrot with the brightest turquoise feathers. His head was tucked under his wing as though he was hiding from the world, and I knew then I had found the parrot destined for me.

“He doesn’t talk,” said a wise old mynah bird perched on a cash register nearby.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’ll take him anyway.” I paid the mynah bird what he asked for—I couldn’t tell whether he was the proprietor of the stall or whether he was just looking after it for someone else. The price seemed reasonable, and included the cage and a packet of seed. I called the little parrot Pierino, and proudly I carried him back to my apartment. Once released, he began flying around making white dots on my limited furnishings, and squawking with what I like to think was happiness.

After a week Fiamma returned from her honeymoon journey to Sabaudia. In her absence Aunt Ninfa had confidently prepared our old room to receive her, and had tenta-tively inquired of her priest about the process of annulment.

She and my uncle were convinced Fiamma would by now be regretting her mistake, and they would be there to help her pick up the pieces.

Yet to all our surprise, Fiamma returned radiant with happiness, and with a gleam in her eye that was a mystery to me at that time.

The newlyweds appeared at the apartment in the Via Gregorio for the traditional first visit, during which they were unable to restrain themselves and act decently, in fact, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Aunt Ninfa hadn’t predicted this. She had been so sure of a separation that she hadn’t bothered to get anything in for the tea that custom demanded, and there was an embarrassing interlude while she blundered about borrowing the necessary sweetmeats from the neighbors.

“It won’t last,” she brayed when the turtledoves could bear it no longer, and had flown back to their love nest in the Via della Lupa. But in this my aunt was destined to be completely wrong and horribly disappointed.

M
y nineteenth birthday arrived—which, of course, I didn’t celebrate—apart from my usual visit to Mamma’s grave. I told Mamma what little news I had since the previous week, which mainly concerned Pierino (I was as proud as a new mother), and an interesting challenge at work (a case of severe lupus—very difficult to disguise).

Anyway, I arranged the forget-me-nots in a flask of water, and had just dusted off the headstone when the sexton (the cheerful chubby one, not the tall one with the squint), who had been lurking for some time, approached me and asked if I would like to see his birthmark.

Now, I had seen a great many birthmarks in my time, but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for his offer, so I followed him across the cemetery to the little hut where he kept his picks and shovels, some fallen angels, and a large jar of licorice sticks. It transpired he didn’t have a birthmark after all—at least not that I saw.

Still, when he had shown me what he wanted me to see, I thanked him, and we parted on cordial terms: he to ring the vesper bell, and me to eat an ice cream—two scoops of pista-chio and one of lemon.

Shortly after this incident, although I don’t think it was related in any way, I came out in a rash of green spots, and felt an itching deep inside me that I couldn’t scratch.

I showed the spots to Signora Dorotea, worried that I had caught some sort of disease from one of the corpses.The summer was already unusually hot, and many of them had boils and rich varieties of creeping fungus.

“The remedy is simple,” she said. “You need a man, Freda Castro. It’s only natural, and nothing to be ashamed of.” Perhaps she was right, but in my job I didn’t come in contact with many members of the opposite sex, at least not live ones. Still, that same day I was surprised when Cuniberto Moretti (one of the relief pallbearers, who was at other times a vendor of vanilla pods), sidled up to me in the staff room where I was rubbing some balsam into my pustules and asked me out on a date.Thinking about it afterward, I was sure Signora Dorotea must have put him up to it.

I certainly didn’t want to go out with him. I didn’t feel attracted to him in any way. Some girls, I’m sure, would have been drawn to his brown-tinged teeth, and the way clumps of hair sprouted from his neck, but I wasn’t one of them. Still, I felt bad about saying no, so, reluctantly I agreed.

That evening, Cuniberto was loitering in the yard as I returned Signor Giordano to his drawer in cold storage and locked up. He had acquired a bunch of tired-looking daisies, which he thrust at me, blushing.

Together we walked the short distance to Fargo’s, where we shared the empty premises with a sullen waiter who had long given up his struggle with personal hygiene and an ener-getic bluebottle who managed to be everywhere at once. I was grateful to the fly. At least it saved us from the silence there would otherwise have been.

Lemonade was ordered and banged down on the Formica tabletop with a force that ensured much of it was spilled.

What was left we sipped in between stilted attempts at conversation. Really, there was nothing to say. After fifteen minutes that seemed as long as a week I stood up to leave.

Cuniberto seemed surprised.

“Don’t you want those?” he asked, motioning toward the daisies on the counter; they had wilted and were giving off a pungent odor of decay. I shook my head.

Outside he surprised me by lunging at me with his lips, teeth, and tongue in quick succession. I didn’t understand why. Perhaps he thought it was expected of him. I thanked him and set off alone for my apartment.

That night, as I inserted my fingers between those folds of flesh that seemed to harbor the itchiest of the itchy places, I thought, if that was dating, I could do without it.

Y
et despite this inauspicious beginning, between then and the summer of 1971, I did have my share of flirtations. Not on the same scale as Fiamma, of course, because she was as brazen as I was bashful, but I tried to find out about love, and with nobody to guide me, I felt like the one wearing the blindfold in a game of blindman’s bluff.

Signora Dorotea put her faith in sales representatives. She was always making appointments for me to see one or another, even when we had no intention of buying what they were selling. Mostly they were purveyors of rubber gloves, embalming fluids, descalents, powders, waxes, prostheses, cosmetics, wigs, or false teeth. Almost always, of course, they were elderly and liver-spotted, but occasionally a youngish one appeared, struggling beneath the weight of his suitcase of samples. Then Signora Dorotea would nod and wink, and drop the heaviest of hints, which usually had the effect of sending him running to the door.

Another strand of her strategy was to send me on every seminar, training course, and trade show she could find. I became a regular on the circuit, but despite Signora Dorotea’s coaching in small talk, I still found it difficult to overcome my shyness. I just couldn’t think of anything to say to the funeral directors, professional mourners, specialist embalmers, coffin makers, and stone masons I encountered at these events.

Ernesto Porcino was the most promising of the lot, and although Signora Dorotea didn’t consider him good enough for me, she wouldn’t pour scorn on what she regarded as her only, albeit slim, chance of a wedding. We first met at an exposition of false eyeballs, where he was demonstrating a new line he had personally developed: eyes that were actually able to produce their own tears. They caused a sensation. As well as ordering a consignment that would last us for a decade, I accepted when Signor Porcino asked me to accompany him to the after-show party. I had never been to a party before. I was dazzled by the Signor’s verbosity. He did enough talking for both of us, even answering on my behalf the questions he had put to me. For the first time in my dealings with the opposite sex, I didn’t feel handicapped by my conversational inadequacy.

Ernesto (as I shall call him from now on) was more mature than the previous young men I had met. In fact, he was forty-five to my twenty-two, and had the accompanying hairlessness, bunions, sweats, cramps, and obesity, but I wasn’t looking for film-star good looks; I was looking for a ventriloquist.

Despite the fact that he was unable to throw his voice (he did try, but failed miserably), we soon got to the taking-off-our-clothes stage at Ernesto’s instigation. Although it went no further, I was mesmerized by his thing, which was only just visible behind the overhanging bulk of his belly. And on those occasions when he allowed me to cushion it in the palm of my hand, I was delighted at the way it transformed from a pale and unobtrusive pink to a throbbing shaft of angry purple.

Those furtive encounters took place once beneath the um-brella pines in the Valle d’Inferno, and once in the chapel of rest at the funeral parlor when Signora Dorotea and Signor Porzio were visiting with her married sister, Loretta, at Punta Ala.

Delighted as I was by Ernesto’s willy, and feeling that I was on the cusp of some secret and mysterious awakening, I was anxious to do more than merely hold it in my hand.

Ernesto was touched, I could tell, by my youthful ardor, and racked his brains to come up with a solution, but his lodgings, he told me, were in the house of elderly virgins in a perilous state of health, and the presence of a nubile temptress in his apartment would be enough to propel at least one, if not two, or even all three of them, into a tragic decline.

I was thrilled to hear myself described as a nubile temptress, and throwing caution to the wind, I invited him for the assignation to my own rooms in the Via dei Cappellari.

Flushed with expectation and delight, I opened the door to admit him, aware that Signor Tontini was spying on me from the stairs.

Immediately Ernesto rushed to the bathroom—he had been on the road with his samples all day, he said, and was bursting for a pee. Shortly afterward he reemerged, wearing nothing but a long blond wig and brandishing a wand.

This was the moment Pierino had been waiting for. He sliced across the room in a motion that was invisible it was so fast, and set upon, with his sharp beak, the tempting parts of my would-be lover.

Ernesto’s screams rent the air, and his flesh was ripped to pieces before I could persuade Pierino to end his attack, and tempt him back into his cage with the promise of a ripe and juicy fig.

I was sorry the affair had ended in this way, before I had experienced the full fascination of the purple probe, now limp, and bruised, and bleeding; but I knew that if Pierino hated Ernesto, which he clearly did, then there was no way I could allow things to develop further.

Aside from his pain, which must have been agonizing, my false-eye maker was livid. To my surprise, but I must admit also to my satisfaction, it transpired that the three virgin oc-togenarian landladies were a figment of his imagination.What prevented him from allowing me into his home happened to be, in fact, Signora Porcino, and the five Porcini. The signora was possessed of a jealous streak, and this was his very final last chance. How he was going to explain away his injuries, he simply didn’t know.

He dressed quickly, and I pushed him gently out onto the landing and shut the door. With his powers of storytelling I was confident he would be able to think of something.

I experienced no amorous encounters for a while after this and, indeed, was beginning to come to the premature but nonetheless accurate conclusion that sex was more trouble than it was worth, when I won a prize in a contest that changed the course of my life.

I
kept abreast of Ernesto’s progress with his weeping eyes in a trade periodical we received at work,
Mortician’s Monthly
, and felt no small degree of pride when I saw the photographs of him demonstrating them at such far-flung shows as Tel Aviv and Bombay.

Signora Dorotea, to whom I confessed everything, was outraged by his perfidy, and whenever she saw his picture, made dark mutterings about what she would do to him given the chance. But my recollection of what lay beneath the ill-fitting salesman’s suit filled me with nostalgia.

Then, in the March issue of 1972, which bore the enticing headline, “Live Man Buried in Shocking Blunder,” there was a competition for readers to win a luxury cruise to Egypt, to explore the mysteries of the pharaohs, the pyramids, and then the Sphinx. Signora Dorotea became overexcited and insisted that I enter.

“I know you’ll win it,” she said, “and the man of your dreams.”

I can’t even remember what the questions were now, but they were easy enough, and my answers were, “one liter,”

“wax,” “rigor mortis,” and “decomposition.” With the last part I had more difficulty. I had to write a sentence of no more than twelve words explaining why I deserved to win the cruise. I hemmed and hawed over this one. It was the word