Listen to My Voice (4 page)

Three, maybe four. During those months, months of
guerrilla
warfare, I didn’t realise what was going on; I didn’t notice that sometimes your step was uncertain or that your eyes would suddenly look lost for a few moments.

I got the first clue one morning when the bora was blowing hard. I’d gone out to buy bread and milk before the ground froze, and when I came back, you welcomed me with an astonished smile, clapping your hands: ‘I’ve got some news for you; we have aliens in the kitchen!’

‘What are you talking about?’

I didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry.

‘Don’t you believe me? Come see for yourself. I’m not joking.’

We inspected the kitchen from top to bottom. You opened the drawers, the oven, and the refrigerator with steadily mounting anxiety. ‘But they were here a second ago,’ you kept saying. ‘I tell you they were here. Now you’re going to think I was trying to fool you.’

I stared at you in perplexity. ‘Is this some sort of game?’

You seemed insulted. ‘There were seven or eight of them,’ you said. ‘As soon as I lit the stove, they appeared among the hobs. When I turned off the gas, they moved into the sink.’

‘And what were they doing?’

‘Dancing. I didn’t hear any music, but I’m sure they were dancing.’

‘Maybe they escaped through the pipes.’

‘The pipes? Yes, maybe. Maybe they come and go through the taps.’

From that day on, extraterrestrials began to live in the house along with the two of us. I explained, in vain, that aliens are launched from UFOs, that they can be seen only by NASA scientists or by people who have lifted too many glasses, and that it wasn’t really possible for them to be dancing in someone’s kitchen; had they made a landing in the yard, I said, all the neighbours would have noticed it, and the trees would have caught fire.

You listened to me calmly, but I could tell from the look in your eyes that you hadn’t given up.

One day, I said, ‘Rather than aliens, they seem to me to be dybbuks.’ You shrugged your shoulders impatiently at this suggestion, as if to say, ‘Call them whatever you like.’

According to your description, they were bright green – the colour of fresh peas – and they had the consistency of peapods as well; their arms and legs, however, were like the limbs of a gecko standing upright. Their tail was short and hairless, and instead of a nose and a mouth, they had a big trumpet, which they used for speaking, eating, and breathing. They appeared and disappeared at the most unexpected moments; they came down the chimney, swam in the bathtub, and waved their
sticky
little hands at us through the glass window of the washing machine. Sometimes you saw them flying about or scooting up the curtains like little marsupials, and soon they no longer limited themselves to dancing. ‘They’re laughing at me!’ you said angrily, charging about with your hair undone.

You walked constantly, frenetically, all through the house, back and forth in the yard, without interruption, and even at night, which you’d never done before. You walked up and down the stairs, opened and closed drawers. Sometimes I felt as though I had a dancing mouse in the house, one of those mice with a genetic anomaly that causes it to run around incessantly,
click click click, click click click
.

Your steps marched through every one of my nights.

A couple of times, I got out of bed, grabbed you by the shoulders – they were thin and frail – and shook you, saying, ‘What are you looking for?’

You stared at me proudly, almost haughtily. ‘Can’t you see? I’m trying to protect myself.’

At dawn one morning, already dressed and walking with a firm step, you headed for town. At eight o’clock, when the grocer came to open his shop, he found you waiting by the door.

Even before he raised the security shutter, you told him, ‘I want something that’ll work against UFOs.’

The grocer tried in vain to soothe you by suggesting
an
anti-woodworm preparation, which could at least dislodge the creatures, or a liquid drain cleaner strong enough to drive any interlopers out of the plumbing. You slammed your little fist down on the counter, shouted ‘Shame on you!’ and left the shop in a rage.

After that day, when I went to do the shopping in town, people would often come up to me and ask with feigned indifference, ‘So how’s your grandma?’

4

IN AN ABANDONED
house, decay proceeds slowly but inexorably; dust gathers; the walls start absorbing winter cold and summer heat. The unventilated air grows stale, and heat and humidity turn the house into a sauna. The plaster crumbles into powder, and soon chunks of mortar detach themselves from the walls and fall to the floor with increasingly heavy thumps, like snow crashing down from the roofs of houses when the thaw begins. Meanwhile, gusts of wind – or, possibly, bored hoodlums – reduce the windows to fragments. The effects of meteorological changes now become more intense; wind and rain enter freely, and so do the rays of the hot summer sun, heaps of leaves, waste paper, pieces of plastic, and small branches, accompanied by all kinds of insects, birds, bats, and mice. Pigeon colonies nest on the floor, while bumblebees build their nests on ceiling
beams
and other creatures opt for the light fixtures. Accumulated excrement rots what’s left of the floor, and gnawing rodents take care of the rest.

And so, what was once a pretty little house is now a building inhabited only by ghosts. No one would even think about opening
that
door. It’s too dangerous; the continual influxes of water have rotted the joists, and a single step is enough to send you plummeting down to the floor below. Eventually, the floor collapses on its own, dragging with it everything that once made up the life of the house. The furniture falls, piece by piece, then, one by one, the glasses, the flower vases, the dishes, the photo albums, the overcoats, the shoes, the slippers, the books of poetry, the pictures of grandchildren, the travel souvenirs.

During those long, long months, the image of the house in decay was never far from my mind. I visualised a room, and then I saw it collapse, not all at once, but little by little. It was as if the surrounding reality had a different consistency, like quicksand or gelatin. Things fell, but instead of breaking apart, they were swallowed up by a silent void, in which the only movements were made by ghosts; they entered and left through the cracks, as agile as eels.

For years, perhaps for decades, aliens had been dozing in some nook of your brain, probably deposited there
by
a documentary on extraterrestrials. In any case, these creatures – with suckers on their little feet and a combination mouth and nose shaped like a trumpet – had entered your head and lodged there secretly, never giving a sign of life. While you were cooking or talking or driving a car or reading books or listening to music or reciting poetry, that little colony was suspended in a state between sleep and waking, waiting for the hinges to give way, for a gust of wind stronger than the others to set them free.

Yes, the aliens-dybbuks were the bugle call. I should have been alarmed by those first signs and prepared myself for battle; instead, I didn’t even put on my armour. I couldn’t imagine that our domestic skirmishes would change in any way, or that I’d go from being the ambusher to being ambushed myself, and by an invisible enemy who was active on both fronts.

I had to defend myself, and I had to defend you, too. Day after day, your memory sagged a little more, collapsing like the floor joists in the abandoned house.

As your memory collapsed, it was filled with ghosts.

After a certain point, there was a throng between you and me. We lived with that sinister company, and the floor beneath our feet was as sheer and translucent as a sheet of thin pastry.

A few months after the appearance of the UFOs, I called the doctor – for myself, I pretended, so as not to alarm you.

That day, you behaved in an absolutely normal way. You put a table under the pavilion in the garden, spread a lovely tablecloth over it, and after setting out plates and cutlery, you offered the doctor, your old friend, some biscotti and cold tea. He asked you a few questions, nonchalantly, and you answered them happily. Then the two of you started talking about the upcoming holidays, about one of the doctor’s grandchildren, who was coming to stay with him, and about the best way to combat aphids on roses. You’d been told that the cheapest and most effective method was to steep cigarette butts in water and spray the aphids with that.

‘Exactly!’ the doctor cried. ‘If they kill us, they’ll kill aphids, too.’

I looked at you and felt bewildered. What had happened to the unwelcome guests in the kitchen?

At the end of the lawn, a blackbird was insistently laying claim to its territory, and a cloud of midges danced over a particularly moist flowerbed. The light of the setting sun struck their wings, transforming them into flakes of gold. When a stag-beetle made a noisy pass over our table, you stood up and said, ‘I’ll give you a few minutes of privacy – my hydrangeas need watering.’

We silently followed you with our eyes as you picked
up
one end of the hose and walked over to the tap. Buck ran after you, barking at the black rubber tube sliding through the grass. Was he playing a game? Did he really think he was protecting you? Who knows?

Once we were alone, it didn’t take much of an effort for me to convince the doctor that your calm, normal behaviour was more apparent than real. Sufferers from diseases that affect memory and personality retain a semblance of control at first, he explained. They make an unconscious effort to behave as they always have in front of outsiders; it’s as though a kind of extraordinary modesty comes down to protect the sick person.

You’d already had a stroke while I was in the States, the doctor told me – didn’t I know about that? – and there’d probably been some other ischaemic episodes; the blood supply to your brain was steadily decreasing, and the hippocampus was getting wobbly. Initially, days disappeared from your memory, then months, then years, voices, faces, swept away as though by a series of tsunamis: every wave carried off a detail and bore it out into the open sea, into the ocean, to a place from which it was impossible to return. The few things capable of resisting were nonetheless disfigured by the violence of the impact.

You were still watering the flowers. We could see the movements of your silhouette, surrounded by a cloud of gleaming water droplets suspended in light.

‘Is it treatable?’ I asked.

‘Not very. There are tranquillisers that have some effect.’

‘And how long will her condition last?’

‘As long as her heart holds out. It sounds cruel, but that’s the way it is. The head goes away; the heart stands its ground. It can beat for years inside a body that’s become an empty shell.’

When I walked the doctor to the gate, you waved goodbye to him from a distance with an open hand, like a little girl going off on a school trip.

The day ended without surprises. After watering the garden, you went back inside and fixed dinner. The first summer breeze – fragrant, warm, laden with hope – came through the open windows. We talked about books; you wanted to reread
Buddenbrooks
. ‘Isn’t it boring?’ I asked you. ‘Not in the slightest!’ you replied, and you started telling me about the brewer, Permaneder, his wife, and all the other characters, who had remained in your memory all those years.

Before going to bed, we exchanged goodnight kisses. We hadn’t done that for a long time, not since before I’d left for America.

In bed I considered the possibility that you’d been joking; you’d had a good time, you’d pulled a fast one on me, and now the game was over. I fell asleep with that thought.

The following morning, I woke up suddenly. Your enraged face was very close to mine, and you said, ‘You’ve stolen my slippers!’