The Combover (9 page)

"To Cingoli where? Not to a healer by any chance?

"I've no idea, she just said she was going to Cingoli."

"But up in the mountains? For heaven's sake, how can you not know?"

She stopped for a moment as she was putting away the shopping and repeated: "I have no idea! She just said she was going to Cingoli with a cousin who's not well, who had to go and see someone, you understand?"

When I heard the word "Cingoli" in my mother-in-law's mouth, all I could think of was the sick and infirm who came to touch my hair, and I felt such a fury that I could have tipped over all the knickknacks with the little angels on the table and everything I could lay my hands on.

"And what about you," I asked my mother-in-law, "what's wrong with you, tell me? What about headaches, or your heart, your arm, your cunt? Come on, answer me? I'll heal you straight away if you've got something wrong." I went up to her, and she tried to draw back without taking her eyes off me (I hated being looked at in that way). "Just touch me here, behind here, on the head, I'll cure you alright . . . it still ought to work with the little hair that's left . . . do as I tell you and don't look at me like that."

She suddenly became defensive: "Go away, what do you want?"

"You don't believe me, eh? Don't you believe I can heal you?" and I grabbed her hand so that she could touch the hair at the back of my head. With some effort I managed to get her to touch it, for a moment.

"Leave me alone," she said, quickly pulling away her hand. "What are you doing?"

"And now touch something with that hand, straight away, for God's sake." I was trying to make her understand she had to do as Giuseppina had said on the mountain, but it was useless. She didn't.

"Leave me alone, what's got into you? Are you mad?"

"Hah, me mad?! So I'm the one who's mad around here. You'd better give me back Spinoza's
Ethics
right now, because otherwise instead of healing you, I'm going to kill you."

"Whose
Ethics
?" she said

"Spinoza's!" I yelled.

Then my mother-in-law, who was called Benedetta, almost like Spinoza, rushed off to my cubbyhole where I studied bibliographic data exchange formats (I ran after her), and as soon as she got to my desk, she said: "Here are your books, don't you see them? Go on, take them," and with a gesture I would never have expected from her, she threw everything to the floor, a dozen or so books which fell in a heap, one on top of the other, including the
Ethics
.

I have always hated it when people throw books on the ground.

"What are you doing, are you crazy?" I said.

Two seconds later, with the same hand that had thrown down the books, she tried to slap me across the face, but I managed to avoid it by ducking away. Then I grabbed her and turned her round, holding both of her hands behind her back. She went wild, and while she was kicking me in the shins, I threw her to the ground using a neat move I had learnt from my judo teacher when I was a child.

"Ah!" she shouted. "You lout, you'll pay for this . . . How dare you?"

"Why don't you just shut up!"

And while she was on the ground, I took her hand again to touch my hair, but she continued refusing with all her might. All I wanted to do was let her see I could heal her if she was hurt.

"Help! Help! Please!"

At that point I stopped, and I left her to shriek there all by herself, without even hitting her, though she deserved a good thrashing. "Enough! What's all this howling? Stop it, you're behaving like an animal."

I took the
Ethics
from the ground and locked the cubbyhole door, with her inside, where she was pretending she had broken some bones.

"Help! Help!" she continued shouting. "This madman's trying to kill me."

I don't know what had been happening in that house while I was up at Cingoli. But one thing was certain, I couldn't stay there any longer, with that old woman banging away on the door of the cubbyhole and screaming as if she was about to be slaughtered. So I took off my dressing gown and put on some clean clothes from the wardrobe. I picked up the rucksack, the two copies of Spinoza's
Ethics
, a fleece, some pullovers, and other things I'd need to protect me from the cold of the North. I said goodbye to Cosino at the front door and told him to think no more of me.

By the time I had reached the downstairs entrance, I could already see myself with my combover grown back, on a sledge pulled by a pack of huskies. My mother-in-law was still calling for help—you could hear her shouts in the courtyard, but it didn't seem as though anyone was going to help her. I took the battered umbrella I had left outside the building. Then I put on my fleece, even though it was really quite hot, and headed off toward the bus stop, rubbing my hands in expectation of the cold that would soon be welcoming me.

. . .

The Combover

Copyright © 2011 by Adrián N. Bravi
Copyright © nottetempo 2011
All rights reserved by and controlled through nottetempo srl
Translation copyright © 2013 by Richard Dixon

First published as
Il riporto
by nottetempo srl in 2011.

ISBN 978-0-9891267-4-8

Frisch & Co. Electronic Books Inc.
1266 Dousman St.
Green Bay, WI 54303
United States of America
frischand.co

Chapter 2 — Dante,
The Divine Comedy
,
Pt. 1 Hell
, Canto VII vv. 46-48, translation by Dorothy L. Sayers, Penguin (1949)
Chapter 6 — Spinoza
Ethics
, Part I, Definition VII and Part II, Axiom 1, translation by R.H.M. Elwes (1951)

v1.0, 20131909