Enchantments (11 page)

Still crying, I beg him not to take Eleo-nora away from me. “Without her I can't live, can't you see? She's everything to me, she's like Clara, a sister—even more—she's practically my twin.”

He listens to me intently, raising an eyebrow. Then he tells me a long complicated story about two mermaids who are friends, about how they lose each other and find each other again and again during their voyage from a small sea to the vast ocean—and I can tell that I'm not going to get anywhere with him.

Then I try my father. I ask him for a loan for Eleonora's father. He tells me that things like that aren't done, that they end up offending people, and that anyway it's not so much that Eleonora's father has run out of money but that he likes living in a certain way—now here, now there—and that we have to respect the way other people are.

“Fine,” I blurt out. “I see. It's the same story over and over. I lose my animals, I lose my friends, I lose everything, and somehow I'm supposed to go on being happy.”

We're walking on top of a sea of cars like Jesus on water. My father's holding our hands, and Clara and I climb up and down hoods and roofs, out of breath from excitement, taking care not to slip if someone tries to bar the way.

The sidewalks are thick with people who overflow onto the street and try to make their way between the stopped cars, but there's no room, so a few people—and then more and more—join us on that makeshift route.

It is a hot evening in May. May 1968 in Paris.

The demonstration on the Champ de Mars spills over into the streets that surround the park. Along with the hysteria of automobile horns, there are slogans, songs, shouts, all in a festival atmosphere
that at times overheats and explodes— a shop window breaks into pieces, there's an exchange of insults and shoving, a brawl. I cling to Papa's hand, my buoy in the stormy sea. I'm sweating from the effort of keeping my footing on the high, slippery terrain, on this car roof on which there are now four of us. And now the furious driver gets out of the car and yells at us to get off, get off the roof of his car right away, we're nothing but good-for-nothing vandals. His eyes are bloodshot bulbs just at the height of my feet, and there he is grabbing at my calf. I have a new kind of fear, one I've never felt, strangely pleasant, a light current that runs along the wiring of my skin—since my father is with me, nothing, nothing serious or nasty or irreparable can happen, not even now that the driver's hand is on my leg and pulling, pulling at me to make me get down, to make me fall, while my father is pulling me the other way shouting at him not to touch me, to wait a minute and we'll get down on our own. The hand lets go, and I end up bumping into my father and I laugh. But in his eyes there's a shadow, the first ripple of worry, very likely because my mother didn't want him to take us to see the demonstration.

He helps us get down from the roof, and somehow we make our way to the sidewalk. Then,
walled in by the crowd, our faces jammed against a sweater or a plaid shirt in front of us, we're swept along toward the Champ de Mars.

I don't recognize the open space where Clara and I play every day, I can't find it: the park has become a single living thing, a body that's breathing and pushing toward a platform that's been set up in the middle. On it someone is speaking and the crowd is still pushing, listening with its thousands of ears to that voice ringing from the loudspeaker.

I'm squeezed into the middle of the crowd, shivering each time it responds to the voice either with applause or with a cyclopean roar. But I can't see, I can't see a thing, not even the lady on the stage whom I want to see so badly.

I ask my father to put me up on his shoulders. From up there I see her. She's dressed like Mama in a midlength skirt, a cardigan, and a necklace that seems to be a string of pearls.

“Who is she, Papa, that lady who's talking?”

“Simone de Beauvoir. A writer, a philosopher.”

“And what's she saying?” I keep at him because I don't understand a single word or, to tell the truth, the whole situation.

He says, “It would take too long, I'll tell you when we get home,” and he hushes me.

So at home I try again.

“She was telling all those kids that it's fine to protest for freedom and justice, it's good to do that, but everyone has to take responsibility for his own life, take charge of his own life and basically be himself.”

“Have you done all those things?” I ask, hoping that a concrete example will make it all clear to me.

“Ah … I'm not sure. Yes, probably yes … At any rate I've never felt that I was living someone else's life.” My father answers me in such a vague, pensive voice that I'm left more than ever in the dark.

I'm skating on an ice rink that I've been on before. I go around a few times confidently, not hurrying, proud of how well I'm doing, how good my balance is. But then I feel something like a breath on the back of my neck—another breath and then another and then the heavy breathing of a whole crowd behind me. I know who they are, and I don't turn around. I pick up the pace, but imperceptibly, so they won't know I'm scared. But then I realize that it's not me making myself go faster, it's their breath that's pushing me. Every lap is faster and faster, and I feel my skate blades vibrating on the ice, they're about to break or else melt the ice—I know this—and I lose control, I'm going to smash into the railing and the telephone rings and I wake up.

From her room I hear my mother ask, “Is he dead?”

I sit on my bed gasping, trying not to know what I know, but all the lights in the house are on in the middle of the night, my brothers are awake, and Clara is awake beside me and it's the end, what I know has become true.

My father went out at eight to take his new sports car for a test run with a friend.

The parents of our friends come down from the fifth floor in their pajamas. Mama is crying, the mother of our friends is crying, and Clara is holding my hand. The father of our friends goes up to his apartment and comes back down with his overcoat on.

My mother is sitting on the little sofa in the front hall, I'm standing in front of her, my knees against hers, my hands in hers. She swallows once and then again and says to me, “I'm going to the hospital now with your brothers. Papa is there, there's still a thread of hope.” With her look she's imploring me to believe, if I believe then she can too, but in my eyes she sees my father's heavy body hanging by a thread and she begins to sob again.

Clara and I stay at home, along with the
mother of our friends. She comes with us into our bedroom, lets us push our beds together, and sits beside us as we lie down. I promise God that if he saves my father I'll become a nun, but it's a halfhearted vow because I don't believe in that sort of bartering and because I don't really want to become a nun, and then I'm overcome with a fear of God, of a God who demands these things, and I hate him and I hate myself, a Judas traitor. I sit up because I'm having trouble breathing, but there's the hand of our friend that presses me down and stays on my chest as she says, “That's a good girl, sleep. Try to sleep.” Time stays still, broken only by a wave that every so often swells and crests inside me and then breaks and roars in my ears, leaving me stunned and deafened.

At last they come back. Papa is dead. Outside it's dawn, but the city is extinguished. A crowd of people arrives, a swarm of whispers and sobs. Some bankers come. They wish to offer their condolences and to make sure that the widow will honor the debts of the deceased. Some of my father's friends take my brothers aside, remind them of their new responsibilities. No one says anything to my sister and me, and there are
so many people around Mama that we can't get close to her. Maybe she's forgotten about us. Holding hands, we drift invisibly through the rooms, but each of us is alone—a new strange sheet of glass separates us. We go up to one group and then another, and perhaps someone gives us a gentle pat. A friend of Pietro's arrives, he's someone I like, and I come out of my daze, proud of my tragedy, for the first time worthy of his attention, but he gives me a hurried kiss and goes off to find my brother. Then Dame Dame comes, and it's as if we've found our bodies again. She washes our hands and faces and dresses us, she herself is crying the whole time. She closes the door to our bedroom, makes us sit down on the bed, and talks about Papa and how we must pray for his soul. And then I see it, I see it taking off, headed straight for Paradise, my prayers and Clara's are the motors. Then I see it change as it's flying, change into a huge butterfly, velvet brown and violet, or into a golden eagle— and I watch it for a moment without reaching out to hold it back, it's happy to be free in the way Eleonora explained to me. But then right after that I see Persephone, taken from the world of the living, dragged down into the world of the dead, but her mother arranged that she could
come back to spend a little time with her, and then my eyes close and I give in to the darkness. Finally I begin to cry, and in between sobs I say in a whisper, “Oh, Papa, wherever it is you're going, don't forget me.”