While the Shark is Sleeping (8 page)

But in that prison of hers, without water or food, Zia didn’t say, ‘That judge deserves a kick up the arse,’ nor did she ever say it after she got up off the floor. She had truly loved him and had been grateful for those days spent as a wife.

Now that nearly a year has gone by, she often says that it doesn’t take much to be a wife and it’s not true that she’s not cut out for it: ‘You get taken around on the scooter, you cook some pasta sauces, you make love and you get under a nice hot shower with your husband. A lot of people complain about marriage but I thought it was beautiful. The happiest period of my life.’

‘It doesn’t take much to be a mother either. A lot of women complain constantly about their children, look at Nonna. But I never have anything to complain about with you two. Being a mother is beautiful. The happiest period of my life.’

That’s how it happened, Zia didn’t want to get up off the floor and days had gone by and we knew very well that if something didn’t happen she’d never get up again. In desperation I went to Mauro who said he reckoned Zia couldn’t go on as before, she had to get a hold of herself and show some balls, and he was certain she would. He told me to relax, Zia would not die and she would no doubt manage to fall in love again and to imitate the Normandy landing if the kitchen flooded, or General Kutuzov’s tactics walking backwards down the hallway. He didn’t believe in God, but the force of nature was a definite reality and Zia was an equally definite part of that.

I even swallowed my pride and phoned all her ex-boyfriends whose numbers I could find.

‘What’s wrong with my Zia?’

Some got worried and thought I was some kind of vengeful niece. They hung up in fright. Others replied, ‘She’s perfect, but not for me.’

It was my brother who came up with the idea.

‘I need you,’ he told her. ‘Don’t die. Don’t be selfish. I’ve always thought I’d have preferred you as a mother, and as a father, and as a grandmother. And I don’t know what I’d give for a girlfriend as hot as you. Everything, apart from my piano.’

So Zia got up and went to have a cold shower, as she always had before the judge, and then she threw herself on the pot of meatballs Nonna had left for us all.

I got angry with my brother. ‘You shouldn’t have done that to our parents.’

‘It’s not true that I prefer Zia. But nor is it true that the dead can hear us or that people far away can have a sense of what we’re thinking, or other bullshit like that. The dead are empty sacks and Mamma is ashes in an urn and if Papà could hear our thoughts he’d come back. Wouldn’t he?’

The fact is Zia got up off the damn floor.

So Zia said goodbye to Nonna, brought her history books and her low-cut dresses over to our place and started her new life with no boyfriends and no money, because she wanted to maintain the two of us without having to ask Nonna for help and she wanted to buy our house, which we were renting, and give it to us, with the money she’d been saving for her marital home, plus a mortgage.

If we hadn’t been so sad, we’d even have enjoyed ourselves with Zia, because when we were all together, feeling abandoned and defeated, she’d always pull out some tragic historical event and compare it to our situation.

Leaving behind the era of the Bible, my brother said, now was the time for history. We were the Carthaginians at Zama, the Persians at Marathon, Napoleon at Waterloo. We faced the battles of the Somme and Verdun, and capitulated at Caporetto. We suffered the cold of Stalingrad. We were the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Palestinian refugees driven out by the Jews. But Zia said we would pick ourselves up again, just like the Japanese.

She’d often cook something special and invite Mauro De Cortes to come and eat with us. Not wanting to be impolite, he would say, ‘Thank you, but I’ve got something else on, maybe another day.’

Zia would wait for another day and send him funny text messages pretending to be the owner of a restaurant advising him of the menu. Mauro would reply just as nicely, but he’d still never come. When she finally decided to release her specialities, because the only real client was never going to turn up, they were no longer all that special: soft vegetables, watery sauces, dry sweets and stale bread.

And if we screwed up our noses, Zia would say, ‘If they had it in Afghanistan, or Palestine, or Nicaragua, where your father’s no doubt gone! If your Nonno had had it in the concentration camp, or Londoners during the bombings of September 1944!’

‘Zia,’ my brother finally burst out, pushing away his plate, ‘we’re not at war. We’re just waiting for Mauro De Cortes to do us the honour of eating with us.’

We looked at him open-mouthed. How could someone who was always locked away practising, who certainly never inspired anyone to confide in him, have worked everything out? That day Zia closed the restaurant, and from then on, when there were specialities, they were for the Sevilla Mendoza family.

The most difficult moment was when Mauro De Cortes, who hadn’t been answering the phone, sent us a postcard from Greece in which he said he’d taken a year’s unpaid leave and bought, with his girlfriend, another sailing boat. He’d headed off and was travelling the deep dark ocean of the postcard, beyond a little white terrace with red and lilac pots of carnations and geraniums under a little Greek-blue window. Next it was a nighttime terrace, the moon illuminating a yellow chair and a little table with an empty glass. He just said that he was well and hoped the same was true of us.

We got the idea that God either doesn’t exist or is unjust, because we never won in any of those ill-fated battles and were always playing the role of the dead.

We didn’t pray and I didn’t write this or any other story. My brother decided to give up school and stay at home alone practising the piano, because he just couldn’t handle his schoolmates any more. Zia decided she was through with men. Definitively. I thought regretfully of him, of those periods when all I’d had to do to be happy was follow orders and take myself off into the world of dreams. And when he phoned me to arrange to see me again and swore to me that he’d tried to carry me away that time at the beach in the postcard but it was like I was made of stone, and he’d waited hours for my phone call, it was hard not to believe it was love. But love had to be something else.

One of those sad days I go down to take out the rubbish and in the big dumpster next to the Capuchin Convent I hear something whining. Having learnt not to be squeamish, I stand on an old brick and look in and I see a litter of puppies of no particular breed, wet, sticky and smelly. I wonder if it’s better to leave them to die. What kind of a life awaits them? One full of suffering. I’m not going to be able to find homes for five dogs and Zia wouldn’t want them at our place. So I call out to the first person that comes by and that looks right, to ask him for help, or his opinion.

‘Excuse me!’

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘There are five puppies in here. I don’t know if it’s better for them to live or die. I can’t keep them.’

‘It’s better for them to live, damn it.’ He comes running up. ‘I’m almost a vet!’

‘A vet?’

So we immediately get the puppies out of the dumpster and place them on the guy’s jacket which he’s laid down on the ground.

‘God is strange,’ I say out loud to myself. ‘He seems uninterested in anything and then suddenly he appears before you to save five puppies. I’m so happy for them. A vet.’

‘And why do you think Jesus Christ’s turning his back on you?’ the guy asks, as he places the last puppy on the jacket.

‘My mother’s dead. My father’s gone off. Zia was sick for a period and wouldn’t get up off the floor. A friend, someone I used to be able to count on, has gone travelling around the Mediterranean in a sailing boat. The man I loved is married. Nonno was really on the ball but he died of an ulcer he’d been carrying around with him from a Nazi concentration camp. My brother’s constantly playing the piano and it’s as though he’s not even there. Plus it’s almost Christmas and there’ll be just the three of us at the table and Nonna will cry and Zia will say, “They deserve a kick up the arse, the lot of them!” My brother will stick around just long enough to gulp something down.’

‘And you’ve got no curtains left in the house!’ His face lights up at his witty remark.

‘Huh?’

‘I mean, you’re a dramatic sort. You know Eleonora Duse, in those scenes where she clings to the curtains, pulling at them, with her arms up in the air and her hair all over her face like you right now?’

I burst out laughing. What an idea.

‘I’ll take the puppies. At my place they’re used to much worse than that. We’ll exchange phone numbers and I’ll keep you informed.’

I run up the stairs and knock at my brother’s door, gasping for air.

‘The strangest thing. I found five puppies in the dumpster and guess who was walking by? A vet. It really is true that God has his strange ways of making you see that he exists. Do you remember that bit of the Gospel that Papà used to read to us when we were losing faith, that part where the women think he’s dead, “And behold, Jesus met them, saying, Greetings!” A vet, can you believe it?’

‘Yes. Now close the door, please. Can’t you see I’m studying?’

So I go into Zia’s room. ‘Zia, it’s a miracle. I found five puppies in the dumpster.’

‘Don’t even think about bringing animals into the house. There’s enough of us already.’

‘I don’t need to bring them home. Guess who was walking past?’

‘Don’t even think about it.’

The vet phones almost immediately. ‘They’re doing fine. And what are you up to, puppy number six?’

I’m trying to squeeze into the welcoming folds of his voice. I find a way in. And from that opening I can see the city shining beneath my windows. It’s cold but I don’t feel it. It’s almost dinnertime but I can happily skip it and I’m not afraid of the night, nor of the Christmas holidays with all us sad Sevilla Mendozas.

‘I miss you,’ he says. ‘I don’t know you and yet I miss you. Or maybe I should say I was missing you and then I found you. I don’t want you to think I’m crazy but I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

‘Then let’s start all over again from the beginning: in fifteen minutes’ time, in front of the dumpster.’

My hair’s so gross; since I haven’t had him ordering me to clip it back, it looks like some hideous hat pulled down over my eyes. And I’m so fat, why did I eat all those sweets and panini? I’m such a piece of shit, why hadn’t I been preparing for the chance to live? I’ve got so many disguises for faking love – white woman, black woman, dominatrix, victim, whore, innocent girl – but not even a halfway decent rag I can put on for true love, just shapeless bags I wear to school. Plus I’m a strange girl, too strange for anyone to really feel good around me, and I’m sad, so sad that I make people around me melancholy. And I’m afraid. I almost wouldn’t go down to the dumpster if it weren’t for the crazy desire to see him again, even just for an instant. So a quarter of an hour is an unbearably long time, and it’s unthinkable that I wouldn’t go down.

And when I see him coming I run towards him and he runs too and he puts his arms around me and holds me tight and we kiss until we take each other’s breath away and then he unbuttons my woollen coat and my jacket and bends down to bite my tits and he picks me up in his arms and takes me to his car and there we start all over again.

Every so often he stops and moves away as if to get me into focus.

‘My love,’ he says to me. ‘My sixth puppy. Let me look at you. You know you’re beautiful? Your little face, your big melancholy, happy eyes under this tuft of hair, you remind me of someone, a girl I liked when I was little, I think. But I’m talking too much and I can’t go all this time without kissing you.’

When I sit down to dinner, terribly late, Zia’s fritters have nothing to say to me. Completely mute. And Nonna’s ravioli leave me unmoved. Even the sweets in the sideboard, locked away to help me lose weight. ‘At least eat a bit of fruit,’ Zia says, worried. ‘We’ve got bananas. What’s happened, why won’t you eat?’

‘I will never eat again, because my vet is the only thing I want to gorge on,’ I declare, resting my cheek on the table. And in a drunken tone, even though I haven’t touched a drop: ‘My raviolo, my fritter, my chocolate, my tasty banana! How was I able to live like that: without God, without love, without stories to tell?’

One day my brother appears at breakfast and puts his pile of books on the table, quickly drinks down his milky coffee, looking at his watch because the school doors close at twenty-five to nine. At lunchtime he reappears and with an air of satisfaction he says, ‘Bugger my hands. Bugger the piano. Bugger everything. I beat them up and I even got them to say sorry.’

To celebrate the event, Zia starts redecorating the house, painting the tiny balcony, all that we have left now. She paints it white, and plants carnation seeds and geranium cuttings in three little red and lilac pots. She even manages to fit a yellow stool there along with a tiny Greek-blue table, where in summer she’ll be able to place her glass if she wants a drink as she looks at the ships. She defends herself saying she’s not a copycat, it’s just that Mauro De Cortes’s ideas, even in a postcard, are always the best.

My boyfriend only has a few more exams to go before he finishes his degree in Veterinary Science. He studies at Sassari and when he comes back here he doesn’t like being in the city, he prefers to be around where he lives, which is the Capoterra area, which I can see from my windows on clear days. I take an hour to get out there on the Vespa, because I don’t like rushing and missing out on the spectacle that is the Santa Gilla Lagoon, all pink, or purple and gold with the darker violet mountains reflected in the water and the tranquil flamingos lunching or dining. How did I become so happy? The beaches are long and they’re deserted in winter. My vet lives in a house with lots of garden, lots of family and lots of animals. I don’t know his family because I wait for him outside the gate, but I know the animals. They make a fuss over me, wagging tails and miaowing from the other side of the iron fence. Especially Biagio, the oldest dog, who’d be sixty-three if he was a man. He likes me. That’s why my vet often brings him with us to run along the beach and he entrusts the leash to me, or rather, entrusts me to Biagio. And Biagio runs and runs as the waves break over the great rocks on the shore and spray us with salt. And I run too, to the dog’s rhythm.