The City and the House (2 page)

Nevertheless, because you said Graziano is mine, I watched him carefully yesterday, whilst I was walking past and they were eating. He was eating a big plate of stew and polenta; he was serious, with his glasses on the end of that freckled nose of his. He was wearing his flannel pyjamas and was as red as a lobster, perhaps because he had just had a bath. That's how I remember him. None of your children are like you; they have freckles and red, puffy cheeks, none of them have your splendid pallor.

Anyway, believe me, none of your children is mine. They are all Piero's. He is an excellent father and they have no need of any other. The only child I have is Alberico. I would have liked someone different. But that certainly goes for him too. Who knows how many times he has thought that he would like to have a different father, someone other than me. When we are together we find it extremely difficult to say the simplest things to each other. I never say much about Alberico. I don't say much about him to anyone. I think my cousin Roberta has talked about him to you. I have a photograph of him hanging on the wall here, Roberta took it when he was five years old and my wife and I were still together. He was a beautiful child. I loved him, it's not difficult to love a child. I loved him but I never wanted to stay with him for very long. He soon bored me. I also have a photograph of my wife on the wall here, a frail girl enveloped in a shawl. She bored me too. All right, I was easily bored. I was very young and I was afraid of boredom. I am no longer so afraid of boredom but I was then. I was bored by my wife too. I found her stupid. I was bored with the child because he was a child, I was bored with her because she was stupid, and this was a particularly wearisome boredom. Before I married her I had not realized that she was so stupid, but then I gradually discovered how immensely stupid she was. She didn't find me stupid, though she did find me boring, and she found that I didn't give her enough of the things she wanted. Not enough love; not enough distractions and acquaintances; not enough money. And so Alberico spent the first years of his life with two people who were bored by each other. We separated. She and Alberico went to live in a flat in Trastevere. She took a lover, a cousin of hers who had been a childhood friend. She spent a lot of time away from the house and she left the child with Aunt Bice, a relation of my mother's. Two years after we separated she became ill during the summer and no one realized what was the matter with her. She had polio. We - Aunt Bice, her childhood friend and I - took her to a clinic. She was dead within a few weeks. Alberico was away at a summer camp and he had to be fetched. I didn't go; Aunt Bice went. Afterwards Aunt Bice always did everything. Alberico went to stay with her for good. My parents didn't want him because they said they were old and tired. My wife's parents were dead. I didn't want him because I just didn't feel up to it. The childhood friend had gone off to live in Venezuela. Alberico was taken to Aunt Bice's flat in via Torricelli, and he stayed there. Then Aunt Bice made her will and left everything she had to Alberico. And Aunt Bice was rich too. She didn't look it, but in fact she was rich. She was a general's widow.

Alberico was ten when he went to live in via Torricelli for good. He was a quiet, biddable, docile child and didn't cause any bother. He studied hard at school and he enjoyed it. Though I thought that all that boredom between my wife and me, which he had breathed in when he was little, must have poisoned him and that one day it would somehow or other burst out. I went to fetch him now and again and took him to the newspaper offices with me. At that time I had a steady job at the newspaper and I spent many hours every day there. Then I used to take him out to eat in a restaurant, and I'd take him to the cinema or to the Villa Borghese. I was bored and unsure of myself. I didn't know what to say to him. I talked about when I was a child. About my brother and me when we were children. About his mother. When I talked about his mother I tried to see her again as I had seen her when we first met, but this was not easy because memories of our later years immediately came to me. Alberico used to listen. He often mentioned Uncle Dé, his mother's cousin, the childhood friend. He seemed to me to be the person he cared most about in the world. When he mentioned him his face lit up. Uncle Dé had given him a stamp collection and a globe of the world. He occasionally sent him stamps from Venezuela. I used to take him home again and leave him at the front door, and go back to the newspaper with light, quick steps and a feeling of relief that I was alone again.

One day Alberico ran away from home. We found him a long way away two days later, at the end of Corso Francia. I remember that Uncle Dé, the childhood friend, had lived in that area while he was in Rome. Once or twice I thought to myself that I would write to Uncle Dé and suggest that he be in touch with Alberico as often as he could. But I didn't do it. I knew that Uncle Dé was working in a construction company in Venezuela, and that he was married. I think he soon stopped sending stamps.

Alberico ran away from home many other times, and we had to scour the city for him. Aunt Bice used to call me up and we spent days looking for him, in streets, in the public gardens, in police stations and railway stations. We would come across him sitting calmly in police stations, silent, in his blue anorak, with his little cardboard suitcase on his knees. He was very attached to that little suitcase and when he ran away from home he always took it with him. He kept cards of football players in it. When he was fourteen he still seemed to be a little boy. He had a rosy-pink complexion, with smooth cheeks and angelic curls. Now his curls are those of an old sheep, long, straggling, loose and soft; he always seems tired, and he has a short bristly beard; he is often dressed in black and looks like a hearse. When he laughs you see his marvellously white teeth. But then he doesn't laugh very often. I think all that boredom which he took in from his mother and me when he was little has now come to the surface, as I had expected it to. He started to read Political Science, then he left university and took up photography. But perhaps he would rather be a director - of films, or in the theatre - or an actor. He doesn't know. He's always changing his mind. It's very tiring for me to keep asking him what he wants to do. Actually I have never really known what I wanted to do either and I have spent my life asking myself. If I asked myself this without getting a clear answer, why should I expect a clear answer from him? At first I didn't mind working at the newspaper, then I became thoroughly disgusted with newspapers and now I'm leaving Italy. The difference between him and me is that I have no money, whereas at the moment he has, thanks to Aunt Bice. On the other hand he is already twenty-five. He is a man. According to Roberta I ought to suggest something to him, but I don't know what kind of suggestion I could make. When I see him in front of me, my only concern is to annoy him as little as possible. Bore him as little as possible. I always think of that immense boredom that existed between me and his mother, which he drank in sip after sip, day after day, when he was a child. The last time Alberico turned up was last April. He came from Agropoli. He was travelling with someone called Adelmo, a short, muscular, bandy-legged character. They left two identical rucksacks, stuffed to bursting, in the entrance hall downstairs, then they had a shower and flooded the bathroom which they left strewn with sweatshirts, vests and socks. I called Roberta up, because Roberta feels very sympathetic towards Alberico and makes it easier for me to be with him. I left them in the front room and washed the sweatshirts, vests and socks. Then I made
trenette col pesto
. Whilst we were eating Alberico said that he wanted to sell the flat in via Torricelli, the one that Aunt Bice had left him. Roberta was alarmed. Never sell bricks and mortar, never. You have to hang on to bricks and mortar for dear life. Alberico said that he wanted to move to the country and raise rabbits and chickens. He and Adelmo went off to bed. I had made a bed up in the room at the end of the corridor, the one I call ‘Alberico's room' even though he has hardly ever slept there. Roberta and I were left alone together. She asked me if I knew that Alberico often went to the California Bar. I told her that I didn't know anything, and that I didn't even know where the California Bar was. She said it was in the via Flaminia area and that it was a foul place. I didn't sleep a wink that night. In the morning I sat in the front room making up questions and phrases and repeating them to myself under my breath. But when I saw Alberico in front of me all those questions and phrases stuck in my throat. He and Adelmo were already dressed and ready to leave. I made them coffee and toast. Whilst they were eating they talked quietly about their own affairs. The vests and socks I had washed for them were still wet but they wrapped them in towels and newspapers and stuffed them into their rucksacks anyway. They were off to London they told me. But two weeks later I heard that they had been arrested in the California Bar. The whole California Bar finished up in prison. Alberico was in prison for a month, you know this because I've told you about it. I was waiting for him at the prison gate when he came out. Roberta told me he was coming out, she had heard it from the lawyer we had engaged. I watched him emerge, he was listless and tired, calm, in a thick leather coat with a bundle of clothes under his arm. Adelmo wasn't with him. Instead he had with him a plump, red-haired character dressed in grass-green overalls. I asked him where Adelmo was but he said he didn't know anything about him. I asked him to come back home with me; he said he might come for lunch but at the moment he had things to do. He offered me his hand and I kissed his thin, black, bristly beard. Then I saw them disappear side by side - the green overalls and the leather coat - along the Lungotevere. He didn't come to lunch that day and for a while I heard nothing about him. Then I heard that he had sold the flat in via Torricelli. Roberta told me. He had got a good price for it. He's sly, Roberta said to me, he doesn't look it but he's sly; he loves money and always knows how and where to get hold of it. What makes you think he loves money I asked her, this love of money isn't apparent in the way he lives. You don't know him, Roberta said. It's certainly true that I don't know him. A few days ago he wrote to me from Berlin. He's working on a film. For the moment he doesn't intend to come back to Italy. Perhaps after the winter. The letter had the address of an hotel on it. I phoned him and told him that I was going to live in America. He said it seemed a good idea. I asked him to come and say goodbye to me before I left. He told me that he didn't think he could travel, because of the film. We would see each other in America, in some American city where one day or other he might happen to turn up. The film is a film about Ulysses. He is the assistant director but they have also given him a little part, the part of a shepherd who sits on a rock and plays a pipe.

I shall go to the cemetery before I leave. I haven't been there for quite a while. My parents are there, and Aunt Bice, and in another part away from them, my wife. Aunt Bice is the one I think of most often. She was stupid and full of good will and above all full of an immense faith in herself. This faith filled the rooms, the sideboards and the balconies of her house. She was an optimist and was quite certain that everything she came across, every thing she could see and touch, would turn out well and happily. No one wanted Alberico; she didn't have a moment's hesitation, she immediately took him in. She had sky-blue eyes that were clear as water, a great head of white hair and a radiant smile. When we went wandering through the streets looking for Alberico and we couldn't find him that smile faltered a little, but only a little. When she died Alberico was nineteen. He was doing his military service in Messina. I don't know if Aunt Bice had ever realized that Alberico was a homosexual. I don't think so. There were no homosexuals in her world. She died more or less unexpectedly, of a heart-attack, while visiting a neighbour. But she must have felt ill a few days before because she had contacted her solicitor. Then she had written a letter to Alberico but she hadn't had time to post it, it was in her handbag. She had drawn up a list of every thing she had and left it to him - the flat in via Torricelli, her stocks and shares, three shops in Naples and some gold in a safe deposit. Lastly she asked him to look after her cat. Alberico came for the funeral and immediately went off again. The cat was entrusted to a neighbour. When he had finished his military service Alberico came to fetch it and took it to a flat where he was staying with some friends. He didn't come and live in via Torricelli for the moment. He preferred his friends' flat, a commune where six of them were living. He took the cat in a dome-shaped basket that he had bought specially. But as soon as the cat arrived in the commune it escaped over the roofs and was lost.

Later Alberico went to live in via Torricelli with one of his friends, a Brazilian painter called Enrique. There were photographs everywhere, hanging from strings to dry, and Enrique's paintings of forests and jaguars were everywhere too. Aunt Bice's flat became a den in a
few
days. Now the den has been sold and there is no trace anywhere of Aunt Bice's optimism or of her faith in herself, or of her blue polka-dot aprons and white fat legs and spongy down-at-heel slippers.

Egisto has just phoned me. He will call here and we shall have dinner together somewhere. I shall give this letter to him and he can take it to you on Saturday, because as I have already told you I shall not be coming on Saturday.

Giuseppe

Rome, 25th October

I meant to come to
Le Margherite
today but I shan't because the spark-plugs on my Dauphine are dirty, and anyway I have to finish an article. I tried to phone you but there was no answer. That Sicilian you have now must be deaf. The one you had before, from the Abruzzi, was better.

I have a letter for you from Giuseppe and I will give it to Albina who is coming by train. I will also give her these few lines of mine.