Confessions (4 page)

Then Carolina Amato appeared. She had come out of her house with her short hair fluttering, crossed the street and gone directly to where Fèlix, who thought he was perfectly camouflaged, was waiting. And when she stood before him she looked at him with a radiant, but silent, smile. He swallowed hard, squeezed the little box in his pocket, opened his mouth and said nothing.

‘Me too,’ she replied. And after many chimes of the bells, ‘Did you like it?’

‘I don’t know if I can accept it.’

‘It’s mine, the gioiello. My Uncle Sandro gave it to me when I was born. He brought it from Egypt himself. Now it’s yours.’

‘What will they say to you, at home?’

‘It’s mine and now it’s yours: they won’t say anything. It’s my pledge.’

And she took his hand. From that moment on, the sky fell to earth and Abelard focused on the touch of Heloise’s skin, which dragged him down an anonymous vicolo, filled with trash but smelling of love’s roses, and into a house that had open doors and no one inside, while the bells chimed and a neighbour lady, from a window, shouted nuntio vobis gaudium magnum, Elisabetta, la guerra è finita! But the two lovers were about to begin an essential battle and couldn’t hear her announcement.

D
on’t look at me like that. I know I make things up: but I’m still telling the truth. For example, my oldest memory in my childhood room, in History and Geography, is trying to make a house under the bed. It wasn’t uncomfortable and it was truly fun because I saw the feet of people coming in and saying Adrià, Son, where are you or Adrià, snacktime. Where’d he go? I know, it was incredible fun. Yes, I was always bored like that, because my house wasn’t designed for children and my family wasn’t a family designed for children. My mother had no say and my father lived only for his buying and his selling, and the jealousy ate away at me when I saw him caress an engraving or a fine porcelain decanter. And Mother … well, Mother had always seemed to me like a woman on guard, alert, her eyes darting here and there; even though Little Lola was looking out for her. Now I realise that my father made her feel like a stranger at home. It was his house and he let her live there. When Father died, she was able to breathe and her expression was no longer uneasy, even though she avoided looking at me. And she changed. I wonder why. I also wonder why my parents married. I don’t think they ever loved each other. There was never love at home. I was a mere circumstantial consequence of their lives.

It’s strange: there are so many things I want to explain to you and yet I keep getting distracted and wasting time with reflections that would make Freud drool. Perhaps it’s because my relationship with my father is to blame for everything. Perhaps because it was my fault he died.

One day, when I was a bit older, when I’d already secretly taken over the space between the back of the sofa and the wall in my father’s study and turned it into a mansion for my cowboys and Indians, Father came in followed by a
familiar voice that I still found somewhere between pleasant and blood-curdling. It was the first time I’d heard Mr Berenguer outside of the shop and he sounded different: and ever since then I didn’t like his voice inside the shop or out of it. I remained stock still and put Sheriff Carson down on the floor. Black Eagle’s brown horse, normally so silent, fell and made a small noise that startled me but the enemy didn’t notice, and Father said I don’t have to give you any explanations.

‘I think you do.’

Mr Berenguer sat on the sofa, which moved a bit closer to the wall, and, heroically, I told myself better squashed than discovered. I heard Mr Berenguer tapping and my father’s icy voice saying no smoking in this house. Then Mr Berenguer said that he demanded an explanation.

‘You work for me.’ My father’s voice was sarcastic. ‘Or am I wrong?’

‘I got ten engravings, I got the people who sold them at a loss not to complain too much. I got the ten engravings across three borders and got them appraised myself and now you tell me that you’ve sold them without even consulting me. One of them was a Rembrandt, you know that?’

‘We buy and sell; that’s how we earn our living in this fucking life.’

That was the first time I’d heard the word fucking and I liked it; Father said it with two fs: ffucking life, I guess because he was angry. I knew that Mr Berenguer was smiling; I already knew how to decipher silences and was sure that Mr Berenguer was smiling.

‘Oh, hello, Mr Berenguer.’ It was Mother’s voice. ‘Fèlix, have you seen the boy?’

‘No.’

Crisis was imminent. How could I get out from behind the sofa and disappear into some other part of the flat, pretending I hadn’t heard a thing? I talked it over with Sheriff Carson and Black Eagle, but they were no help. Meanwhile, the men were in silence, surely waiting for my mother to leave the study and close the door.

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, madam.’ Returning to the bitter tone of their discussion, ‘I feel I’ve been cheated. I deserve a special commission.’ Silence. ‘I demand it.’

I couldn’t care less about the commission. To stay calm, I translated the conversation into French in my head; so I must have been seven years old. Sometimes I did that to keep myself from worrying; when I was anxious I couldn’t control my fidgeting and, in the silence of the study, if I moved around they would have heard me. Moi, j’exige ma commission. C’est mon droit. Vous travaillez pour moi, monsieur Berenguer. Oui, bien sûr, mais j’ai de la dignité, moi!

In the background, Mother, shouting Adrià, boy! Little Lola, have you seen him? Dieu sait où est mon petit Hadrien!

I don’t remember too well, but I believe Mr Berenguer left even angrier than he’d arrived and that Father got rid of him with a through thick and thin, monsieur Berenguer, which I didn’t know how to translate. How I wish Mother had even once called me mon petit Hadrien!

So I was able leave my hidey hole. The time it took my father to walk his visitor to the door was enough for me to erase my tracks. I had acquired great skill for camouflage and near ubiquity, in that life of a partisan I led at home.

‘Here!’ Mother had appeared on the balcony where I was watching the cars whose lights had just started to flick on, because life in that period, as I remember it, was endless dusk. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’

‘What?’ With the sheriff and the brown horse in one hand, I pretended I’d had my head in the clouds.

‘You need to try on your school smock. How is it possible that you didn’t hear me calling you?’

‘Smock?’

‘Mrs Angeleta let down the sleeves.’ And with an authoritative gesture, ‘Come on!’

In the sewing room, Mrs Angeleta, with a pin between her lips, looked at the hang of the new sleeves with a professional air.

‘You grow too fast, lad.’

Mother had gone to say goodbye to Mr Berenguer and
Little Lola went into the ironing room to look for clean shirts while I put on the smock without sleeves, as I had done so many other times throughout my childhood.

‘And you wear out the elbows too fast,’ hammered home Mrs Angeleta, who was already a thousand years old, give or take.

The door to the flat closed. Father’s footsteps headed off towards his study and Mrs Angeleta shook her snow-covered head.

‘You have a lot of visitors lately.’

Little Lola was silent and acted as if she hadn’t heard. Mrs Angeleta, as she pinned the sleeve to the smock, went on anyway.

‘Sometimes I hear shouts.’

Little Lola grabbed the shirts and said nothing. Mrs Angeleta continued to prod. ‘Lord knows what you talk about …’

‘About ffucking life,’ I said without thinking.

Little Lola’s shirts fell to the floor, Mrs Angeleta pricked my arm and Black Eagle turned and surveyed the parched horizon with his eyes almost closed. He noticed the cloud of dust before anyone else. Even before Swift Rabbit.

‘Three riders are approaching,’ he said. No one made any comment. That cave-like room offered some respite from the harsh summer heat; but no one, no squaw, no child, no one had the energy to care about visitors or their intentions. Black Eagle made an imperceptible motion with his eyes. Three warriors started to walk towards their horses. He followed them closely while keeping one eye on the dust cloud. They were coming straight to the cave, without the slightest subterfuge. Like a bird distracting a predator and diverting it away from its nest with various techniques, he and his three men shifted to the west to distract the visitors. The two groups met close to the five holm oaks; the visitors were three white men, one with very blond hair and the other two with dark skin. One of them, the one with the theatrical moustache, nimbly got down from his saddle with his hands away from his body and smiled.

‘You are Black Eagle,’ he declared, keeping his hands away from his body in a sign of submission.

The great Arapaho chief of the Lands to the South of Yellow Fish’s Shore of the Washita gave an imperceptible nod from up on his horse, without moving a hair, and then he asked whom he had the honour of receiving, and the man with the black moustache smiled again, made a jocular half bow and said I’m Sheriff Carson, from Rockland, a two-day ride from your lands.

‘I know where you established your town, Rockland,’ the legendary chief responded curtly. ‘In Pawnee territory.’ And he spat on the ground to show his contempt.

‘These are my deputies,’ – not entirely sure who the gob of spit was directed at. ‘We are looking for a criminal on the lam.’ And he, in turn, spat and found it wasn’t half bad.

‘What has he done to be treated as a criminal?’ The Arapaho chief.

‘Do you know him? Have you seen him?’

‘I asked you what he did to be treated as a criminal.’

‘He killed a mare.’

‘And dishonoured two women,’ added the blond.

‘Yes, of course, that too,’ accepted Sheriff Carson.

‘And why are you looking for him here?’

‘He’s an Arapaho.’

‘My people extend several days toward the west, toward the east and toward the cold and the heat. Why have you come to this spot?’

‘You know who he is. We want you to deliver him to justice.’

‘You are mistaken, Sheriff Carson. Your murderer is not an Arapaho.’

‘Oh, no? And how do you know that?’

‘An Arapaho would never kill a mare.’

Then the light turned on and Little Lola waved him off with one hand, ordering him out of the larder. In front of Adrià, Mother, with war paint on her face, without looking at him, without spitting on the ground, said Lola, have him wash his mouth out well. With soap and water. And if necessary, add a few drops of bleach.

Black Eagle withstood the torture bravely, without a single groan. When Little Lola had finished, as he dried himself
with a towel, he looked her in the eyes and said Little Lola, do you know what dishonouring a woman means exactly?

W
hen I was seven or eight years old I made some decisions about my life. One was very wise: leaving my education in my mother’s hands. But it seems that things didn’t go that way. And I found out because, that night, I wanted to know how my father would react to my slip and so I set up my espionage device in the dining room. It wasn’t particularly complicated because my room shared a partition wall with the dining room. Officially, I had gone to sleep early, so my father, when he came home, wouldn’t find me awake. It was the best way to save myself the sermon that would have been filled with pitfalls because if I told him, in self-defence, that the whole ffucking life thing was something I’d heard him say, then the topic of the conversation would have shifted from you’ve got a very dirty mouth that I’ll now scrub with Lagarto soap to how the fuck do you know I said that about ffucking life, you bald-faced liar? Huh? Huh? Were you spying on me? And there was no way I was going to reveal my espionage cards, because over time, without even really trying, I was the only one in the house who controlled every corner, every conversation, the arguments and the inexplicable weeping, like that week Little Lola spent crying. When she emerged from her room, she had very skilfully hidden her pain, which much have been immense. It was years before I knew why she was crying, but at the time I learned that there was pain that could last a week and life scared me a little bit.

So I was able to listen in on the conversation between my parents by putting my ear to the bottom of a glass placed against the partition wall. Since Father’s voice was weary, Mother summed up the matter by saying that I was very trying. Father didn’t want to know the details and said it’s already been decided.

‘What’s been decided?’ Mother’s frightened voice.

‘I’ve enrolled him at the Jesuit school on Casp Street.’

‘But, Fèlix … If …’

That day I learned that Father was the only one in charge.
And I mentally made note that I had to look up what Jesuits were in the
Britannica
. Father held Mother’s gaze in silence and she made up her mind to press on, ‘Why the Jesuits? You aren’t a believer and …’

‘Quality education. We have to be efficient; we only have one child and we can’t make a cock-up of it.’

Let’s see: yes, they only had one child. Or no; but that wasn’t the point anyway. So Father brought up the idea of the languages, which I’ll admit I liked.

‘What did you say?’

‘Ten languages.’

‘Our son isn’t a monster.’

‘But he can learn them.’

‘And why ten?’

‘Because Pater Levinski at the Gregorian knew nine. Our son has to do him one better.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he called me inept in front of the other students. Inept because my Aramaic was not progressing after an entire year with Faluba.’

‘Don’t make jokes: we are talking about our son’s education.’

‘I’m not joking: I am talking about my son’s education.’

I know that it bothered my mother a lot that my father referred to me as
his
son in front of her. But Mother was thinking of other things because she started to say that she didn’t want to turn me into a monster; and, with a skill I didn’t know she had in her, she said do you hear me? I don’t want
my
son to end up being a carnival monster who has to do Pater Luwowski one better.

‘Levinski.’

‘Levinski the monster.’

‘A great theologian and Biblicist. A monster of erudition.’

‘No: we have to discuss it calmly.’

I didn’t understand that. That was exactly what they were doing: discussing my future calmly. And I was pleased because ffucking life hadn’t come up at all.

‘Catalan, Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and Russian.’

‘What are you listing?’

‘The ten languages he has to know. He already knows the first three.’

‘No, he just makes up the French.’

‘But he does a pretty good job, he makes himself understood. My son can do anything he sets out to. And he has a particular talent for languages. He will learn ten.’

‘He also needs time to play.’

‘He’s already big. But when it’s time to go to university he has to know them.’ And with a weary sigh, ‘We’ll talk about it some other time, OK?’

‘He’s seven years old, for the love of God!’

‘I’m not demanding he learn Aramaic right now.’ He drummed his fingers on the table with a conclusive gesture, ‘He’ll start with German.’