The First True Lie: A Novel (10 page)

W
hat an awful night.

As soon as I manage to fall asleep for real, Blue begins to meow like a madman. It sounds more like howls than meows, never ending, the meowing of an animal being tortured. I get up to see what’s going on, terrified by the thought that Blue feels unwell too.

I always sleep with the lights on now. At my home it’s always bright and always cold, like the North Pole.

I drag myself into the hallway. It’s like my eyes are cloudy and my head’s full of rain. I see Blue in front of the door to Mama’s room. He wants to go in; he jumps up and bats the handle, jumps and meows, scratches the door, desperate at not being able to open it. I pick him up and carry him back to the sofa. He doesn’t want to stay. I have to squeeze him so hard I can feel his birdlike skeleton under his skin. As soon as I stop holding him, he goes right back to the hallway. He starts to cry again and jump like a monkey, with a determination you find only in the most ridiculously stubborn cat.

I have to get up early, but I can’t sleep at all, I’m drowning in calm waters, flopping from one shore to the other. The covers are twisted up with my pajamas, trapping me.

I’m the one who tells the alarm it’s time to get up this morning.

“And you thought you were the only one who knew how, huh, Assface?”

At breakfast I explain to Blue that Mama’s room is
off limits
.

“Off limits, verboten, keine Gegestände, no trippen for catten.”

It’s just like the little signs on the windows in trains; there’s no point complaining so much.

I’m in a bad way, my face swollen into a good-little-boy mask that could sag and fall away at any moment, like a decal that comes off in your fingers. I wash myself with both hands, letting the water slap me around. Back in my room I put on my pants, sitting this time, search for two matching socks in the drawer, and go through my sweaters. I put books and notebooks into my backpack and go over in my mind all the operations I have to carry out, like the pilot preparing for takeoff in the poster next to the window, the one with the tape all yellow and shriveled.

I put my second life on over my coat and set off on a special mission.

I’m Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a werewolf, Spiderman or Superman, but my powers aren’t so super. I don’t scale walls. My fur hasn’t grown yet. I don’t transform into anything special. I dress up as a normal little boy, with combed hair and books that aren’t dog-eared and all the details just right.

It’s Monday morning and the stores are still asleep. The town is having trouble leaving the night behind too. All the shutters, like eyelids, are still lowered over the store windows. I walk slowly because I’m early, like old people who have insomnia and shuffle around at dawn trying to stay alive longer; like Grandma, who one day started talking to herself and reintroducing herself every time we saw each other.

“It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’m Ruggero’s wife, and you’re the captain’s son, right?”

Grandma and her obsession with ships.

“Not just any ships, my dear, ocean liners.”

“Yes, Grandma, I know, the ones where the brass gleams like in church.”

“And where the polished floors are swept clean by evening gowns.”

“Yup, those are the ones.”

And always the same old enchanted cruise song.

“Who is this captain, Mama?”

“How should I know? Grandma’s the one who invented all these stories. She’s moved into an opera and shut out everything else.”

Mama tells me to let it go, tapping her finger against her temple and trying not to be seen.

Even the flower woman’s stall is shut up like an abandoned dog kennel. Maybe she’s moved too. Or had an accident.

When adults arrive early somewhere, they stop at a café for an espresso. So I buy myself a piece of focaccia, a teeny-tiny one to save money. There’s a half-eaten strawberry candy stuck to the coin, but luckily the lady behind the counter doesn’t mind if the money is a bit sticky: “If only money would always stick to my fingers.”

Along with the change, she gives me a free lollipop.

“How was your weekend?”

“Fine. You?”

I blah, blah, blah. My classmates’ chattering bores me; they always say the same things. They’re talking, but their voices seem to come from somewhere else, somewhere I used to live not too long ago myself. Now I’ve moved into an apartment one floor up, but I can’t look down on them. I’d like to look the other way, but I mustn’t, I must keep my head up and my tail straight. It’s not so easy. It’s like when you dream about being naked in the middle of a crowd of completely dressed people. You try to pretend it’s nothing, but you know that you’re naked, that you can’t get dressed until the nightmare’s over. I shiver in my coat.

In class the teacher asks us what differentiates
Homo sapiens
from his ancestors.

“The ability to lie,” I want to say, but I’m careful not to.

I get lost imagining my ancestors who rack their brains about how to crack open a coconut, then the ones who learn how to use weapons like bows and arrows and become more and more intelligent. They walk around naked, but everyone is naked, so nobody cares. Then someone makes the first coat out of animal fur, and it’s especially the lady
sapiens
who want it. They call it a fur coat and wear it when they go shopping. They buy shoes that make them wobble and that get stuck in the grating over the metro.

Mrs. Squarzetti
sapiens
must have gone shopping last weekend too, because today she’s got new shoes, shiny and black like cockroaches. She doesn’t know how to maneuver them so well yet, because after a few steps she turns around and sits down again at her desk. The cockroach-shoes appear and disappear from view. I feel like crushing them with my exercise book.

Sooner or later cockroaches will overrun the planet, advancing on mountains of leftovers with shields shaped like trash-can lids, because cockroaches are resistant to poisons. They don’t die just because they ate a handful of bad medicine.

They’re the most intelligent of all, even if it doesn’t take them seven months to be born.

Chubby Broccolo has fallen asleep at his desk, as he always does on Mondays, having arrived on the sleeper train from Puglia that reaches the station at dawn. The teachers all know about it, so they don’t yell at him much. After all, it’s not his fault if he’s got relatives who live so far away and he stinks like the train.

I’d like to sleep in a train berth myself. I’m also nodding off with sleep. I have relatives far away too.

When Mrs. Squarzetti starts walking between the desks like someone unsure of the ground beneath her feet, I stop gazing at a damp spot that reminds me of a polar bear, a potato chip, Lake Titicaca, and smile—the secret is to do well in all your subjects and smile. Smiling is one of the responsibilities of a good ant, who must do all he can to escape an endless number of plagues of Egypt.

We’re all ants, even if grasshoppers are much cooler.

“Do you know what happened in the end?” I murmur to Davide.

“The end of what?”

“The story of the ant and the grasshopper.”

“No, what?”

“The grasshopper that hadn’t stored up any food for the winter, he ate the ant.”

“That’s not the way it goes!”

“Who cares, Davide, the story’s much better this way.”

I’m glad Davide is my friend.

I
’ve run out of money.

Mama says money always runs out before you expect it to. That’s true. I should have remembered and planned for it. I should have looked for the secret code for the cash machine, but I didn’t. Now I’ve got to open that door one more time. The number must be in the document box in the bottom drawer. I don’t want to, but I must.

One missed detail can ruin everything: a wrecked car in the river, a plastic bag caught in the rocks, a tramp’s shoe, a motor scooter set on fire at the end of a match by supporters of the other team.

In the last few days I’ve stopped being so afraid, as if my second life had begun to rub out my first, like a sheet of tissue paper that makes everything underneath look less clear, as if my life from before is, bit by bit, becoming a childhood memory, a thought that buzzes in your head that you can chase away if you shake your arms.

Mama, on the other hand, is still in there.

I don’t want to see her.

I don’t want to smell the stink.

I don’t have a choice.

I have to break the record for not breathing, I have to hold my breath with all the breath I have, hold it inside, suck myself in all the way to my asshole.

I must turn away. I must hold out. I mustn’t look.

I clench my fists so tightly that my knuckles go white, like hard candy all stuck together in a bag, joining forces to hold out against the enemy attacks.

I have to buy groceries.

The supermarket is full of people.

I like overloaded carts, the kind you can hardly push around. That way, if you run into another cart, people say sorry, because with a cart so full, of course you have the right of way. I like to stop to inspect the shelves, and most of all I like to see if there’s anything new hanging high above them. This usually isn’t stuff to eat; it’s all those things you can never find when you look for them at home: nail clippers, Scotch tape, wrapping paper, all types of plastic baggies, corkscrews, bandages, tweezers, cat toys, fluorescent bulbs. I’d like to be able to buy all the hanging things, just in case. Because you never know.

One time I came to the supermarket with Mama and she brought along the last trial dad, to pretend we were a normal family; it was a real pain in the ass.

“Can I get a new crocodile pencil sharpener?”

“What do you need it for?”

Same with the paper-clip holder and every bit of stationery I wanted.

“What’ll you do with it?”

Same with a toy mouse, one of the ones where if you wind its tail it runs around in circles.

“Blue doesn’t need any fake mice. He’s already enough of a mouse himself, don’t you think?”

As if he didn’t know that not everything that’s worth having is useful.

He wasn’t interested in anything beautiful except Mama; not the towers of food wobbling in the carts, not the collectible family of prehistoric animals. I wondered if that guy had ever been useful for something himself, but probably not, because he fell into oblivion, a deep one, along with the pterodactyls and stegosauruses. One day he disappeared, and no one ever mentioned him again.

I can’t take a cart now; I make do with a yellow basket. I get a box of dry food and cans of wet food for Blue; wafer bars, chips, mini-pizzas, milk, gelato, and bubble gum for me. I get in the line for people with baskets. It’s a special line, different from the one for people with carts—we have less stuff.

Behind me is a man with a basket full of beer. That’s all he needs, you can see it in his face. In front of me is a girl with tomatoes and mozzarella. She’s superskinny, one of those girls who eat and then stick a finger down their throat so they don’t get fat. Who knows what kind of pleasure she gets out of it. If you pay attention to details, if you look closely into other people’s baskets, you understand all kinds of things. I realize I should have picked up a bottle of shampoo or detergent; anything that Mama buys would do. Even better would be a package of sanitary pads, because at the moment it’s obvious that Mama’s not around. I make up for it with some razors hanging up near the register. It’s Dad who uses the razors, because I don’t have a beard yet, even though I wouldn’t mind having one. A beard is useless—you have one and then you have to shave it off every morning—but it’s useful for dividing the men from the boys. It’s a difference you wear on your face: If you have a beard, you can shop for groceries as you please. If you have a beard, there’s less chance people will worry whether you’re an orphan or whatever.

Luckily, at the supermarket everyone is busy and no one notices the contents of my basket.

When it’s my turn, I try to act casual. The cashier smiles at me, so I smile back.

She has red hair and blue makeup around her eyes that sparkles under the fluorescent lights. Her name is Daniela; I know this because she has a name tag on her shirt. Daniela knows nothing about me, though, and continues to smile—she has a bit of green leaf between her teeth.

“It comes to twenty-two fifty. Do you have that?”

“Sure I do.”

I put my things in a bag, check my change, and lose myself in the crowd. I slip between people carrying heavy bags. And then I’m outside.

Outside it’s an afternoon like every other afternoon. Everyone seems slightly annoyed, as if they were doing things they didn’t want to do, as if something fun was going on somewhere else and they wanted the pain-in-the-ass grocery shopping to be over with as soon as possible. They rush to fight for a parking space.

Only the Moroccans selling lighters on the street seem happy to be doing what they’re doing. If someone stops to buy one, they rub their hands together. Or maybe it’s not because they’re happy but because they’re cold, because they had to take their hands out of their pockets to make the sale. One of them wears half gloves, with his fingers half sticking out. He sticks out his middle finger and tells a woman wearing lots of jewelry to fuck off, then laughs. He’s got a gold tooth himself.

It’s not raining anymore, but the cold nips the end of my nose.

Mama says that my nose looks like someone squashed a little pancake on my face. I try to lick it, but no matter how hard I try, my tongue never reaches it. It’s too bad, Chubby Broccolo can do it, so I always lose the bet. It would be even cooler to have a long tongue like a chameleon’s, and also to camouflage yourself like a chameleon so that no one could see you. You’d become a city gray and blend in with the building, become sidewalk gray and turn into the sidewalk, become sky gray and pray for it to do something beautiful, to open up and bring the good weather back. Opposite the supermarket is the video shop; I think about crossing the street to look in the window. They’ve got a cardboard cutout of Bruce Willis stuck up on the door, but it’s like Bruce is leering at me, so forget it. Who knows, maybe he has a sixth sense too. After the video shop is the sporting-goods store. In the window they have real guns; you have to have a license to buy them.

I wouldn’t kill an animal again. I did it when I was little and didn’t know what I was doing. I did it to lizards, and even now I ask them to forgive me. Maybe everything that is happening to me is the revenge of a lizard that died for no reason, just because of a bad kid.

Then there’s Intimate Secrets, an underwear store.

I wish my secret was small enough to hide under some underwear; instead I’m afraid it’s so big you can see it everywhere, as if it was leaking out of my coat, out of my face and eyes, out of the grocery bag, like when you step on your scarf that’s slipped off without your knowing and you fall to the ground, all because of a stupid scarf.

When someone looks at me, I automatically look down, like shy people do; they’re always staring at the tips of their shoes. The only thing to do is go on, not to look people in the face unless they look at you first, in which case smile, remember to smile.

I walk extra fast. It’s better to get back as soon as possible, even if I’d rather be going back to anywhere else, to someone else’s life.

Everything seems far away. Swept away by the wind and the rain.

The other side of the street is unreachable too, even if all you have to do is cross at the stripes to get to the opposite side.

Crosswalks are also called zebra crossings. I’d love to ride a zebra and roam through the tall grass. The lions would lick my hands like Blue does when he licks cake crumbs off my fingers with his rough tongue.

I hope I don’t meet anyone in the elevator, someone who might take a peek into my grocery bag.

Or a peek inside the apartment.