While the Shark is Sleeping Page 2

  Whereas when Zia was born, the neighbour had finally fallen pregnant; flowers didn’t wither, plates didn’t disappear and neither did storybooks. Plus Nonno was less nervous, the concentration camp was further in the past and at dinner Zia could drop all the forks she wanted without it being the end of the world. Zia’s new boyfriend comes from South America. We were astonished because it was Mamma who introduced him to her.

  He’s a doctor Nonna had heard about. She’d made Mamma go to him for a consultation because she thought she walked bent over because of a problem with her spine. The doctor had begun asking Mamma if she’d had any major illnesses and had also asked her questions about her life.

  She told me that hour was different from any other in all her existence and she’d felt the thrill of having someone truly interested in her, even if it was for a fee.

  Zia said that Doctor Salevsky had travelled a lot and had even been to Cape Horn as a ship’s doctor. So straight away we read some books and learnt that down there the dawn is red and the seals have the sweetest expression and until recently there were hunters that beat them to death for their furs. We know that Zia’s boyfriend goes horse-riding, mountaineering, caving, motorbike racing and deep-sea diving and we can imagine her with her lovely curly hair blowing in the wind on the open plains, or warmly welcomed by our new relatives in Buenos Aires, as only South Americans know how.

  Zia goes tango-dancing now and when she comes to see us she shows us the steps and makes everybody be the man for her, and Papà says she has no personality: if a boyfriend plays tennis, she plays tennis, if he’s a film-buff, she talks only about films. Now how’s she going to go with this boyfriend who can do practically everything?

  She’s Mamma’s younger sister and she’s a truly beautiful woman, the sort that men – and even boys and women – stop in the street to look at. The best thing someone can say to me is that we look even just a little alike – I think in the sense that I’m a bit chubby and she’s curvy. She has an uncontainable bosom that’s on show whether it’s summer or winter because she’s always untidy and her neckline falls open. She has long legs and a narrow little waist, she’s a metre seventy-five tall and her hair is a soft, jet-black cloud that I used to play with for hours when I was little and she’d never complain. So, if we’d been made by a sculptor, it would be like I’d been left halfway through, whereas she’d been given all the finishing touches. And if we were the protagonists of ‘The Ugly Duckling’, of course I’d be the duckling and Zia would be one of those good and beautiful swans that fly over the henhouse; but we’re made of the same material, and I’m proud of that.

  Zia has always let my brother and me do what we like with her and has always given us what we wanted, but she particularly has a soft spot for me. When I was little she would take me with her to her boyfriends’ places and proudly show me off.

  I’d say to her, ‘Why don’t you get married and have children too?’

  Her: ‘God willing.’

  And me: ‘But God is willing!’

  Even though she’s irresistible, Zia has never had a husband, nor children. Sometimes I think she was born to be a mother to everyone and a wife to everyone, which is why she’s never had anything truly of her own. Nothing beats her fritters, or her pizzetta, or the homework she whips up for you in two seconds flat when you’re desperate, or the way she explains all these historical issues to you that in all your life you’d never been able to understand. Zia says that with her, boyfriends have sex, laugh, have important discussions, and then leave. And I wonder what’s missing from love, if you have sex, laugh and talk. Papà says that she doesn’t have a husband or kids because, unlike what I thought when I was little, God isn’t willing! And God operates with crushing logic.

  2

  Doctor Salevsky

  I reckon though that it’ll work out with the South American doctor. He’s started coming to our house and Zia says it’s very important for a man to become fond of his girlfriend’s family. He likes Mamma’s food, flowers, stories and paintings. He wanted to buy one of them but Papà told him that unfortunately he’d already sold them all. But no one thinks that he might like Mamma, so awkwardly wrapped up in all those layers. Not him who, as Zia puts it, has swarms of women buzzing around him and keeps condoms all over the place, in the car, in the dining room, in the bathroom, as well as, obviously, in the bedroom.

  Papà says that Mamma and the Argentinian doctor have founded a kind of Mutual Aid Society. He’s been far away from his family for years and though he talks to them every day – ‘Mamina! Papino!’, Papà imitates him answering his mobile phone – it’s clear that he misses them terribly.

  Mamma, of course, is trying to recreate his missing family around him.

  The doctor, when he sits down to talk to her, doesn’t notice the passing of time and then later on he might phone her up and I guess he must say funny things because sometimes she laughs and laughs, pulling out her handkerchief, and then she asks him if he’s ever tasted Sardinian fregola cooked this way or that other way, or the fennel and cheese soup Nonna makes, and what with the laughter and the recipes, they stay on the phone forever, because then the doctor explains to Mamma how you make broth from sweet potato, corn and veal. But then, when he finally comes over to taste these dishes, the two of them never eat anything, because otherwise they’d have less time for talking. Their meals are left untouched, they’d be the joy of any restaurant, if they ever went to one together.

  They’ve only ever walked a short way together. Mamma had to pop out so she asked him if he had a problem heading out with her. He almost started shouting and said, ‘Why would I have a problem with that?’ He’d understood that the real question was, ‘Are you embarrassed by me?’

  Mamma got back all excited, because the doctor had got her to accompany him to via Manno to buy clothes and had asked her advice and then they’d gone into the Sant’Antonio church where the doctor had knelt down and prayed, but then he’d confided to Mamma that he wasn’t at all sure that God exists, in fact, he was leaning more towards a no than a yes. And then, in the little piazza at San Sepolcro, beyond the portico of Sant’Antonio, he’d seen all the graffiti on the walls and after making the sign of the cross because he was in front of a sacred place, he’d said that he’d cover that graffiti with the blood of whoever had done it and make them pick up all the litter off the ground with their mouths and then clean it with their tongues. Mamma reckoned the doctor was just saying that and really he wouldn’t hurt a fly and Papà got annoyed and kept saying, ‘Oh, the wise, perceptive lynx has spoken. The eagle, who sees everything and misses nothing, has spoken. If it weren’t for your mother, how would you protect yourselves?’

  My brother wants to know how come everyone in this house, except for him, has this obsession with talking about their own shit. Why didn’t Mamma just keep her walk to herself?

  Zia’s boyfriend seems to love eating if Mamma’s not around, but he’s not fat. In fact he’s very handsome: very tough and very dark. Four generations back his father’s great-grandfather migrated from Russia to Argentina and married an indio girl, that’s why he has such a strange name for a South American: Salevsky. Doctor Salevsky. Mamma says it’s like he has two kinds of physiognomy: that of a savage, and that of a soldier at the court of the Tsar. She says that his eyes are the colour of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans when they do battle at Cape Horn and even though she’s seen none of all that, it’s her favourite blue when she’s painting. Mamma says the reason he’s not fat is that his hunger for food is only homesickness, and it’s a homesickness that not even all the women he’s lived with have been able to take away.

  When Doctor Salevsky arrives for lunch, or for dinner, he clearly doesn’t want to let her down in Society so, knowing how much Mamma loves growing flowers, he brings her dozens of plants from the nursery, in the same colours as the tubes of paint she’d enthusiastically showed him.

  They’re not doing anything wrong and none of us thinks they m
ight like each other, or rather that he might like Mamma, so skinny and scared, with her floral dresses hanging off her in summer and her deportee’s overcoat in winter.

  Mamma must have told the doctor that she’s never travelled. It’s true that Papà’s always off somewhere, but never with her. Papà loves travelling alone like a missionary, even though he’s married, and Mamma understands this.

  One day Zia’s boyfriend arrived with a heavy package tied with a bow as red as Mamma’s face when she saw it. No one ever gives her anything because she says gifts embarrass her and she doesn’t enjoy them. Inside the package was this: Earth from Above: 365 Days, by the photographer Bertrand. With that book, Mamma can visit a different place each day. She was careful not to put it on the bookshelf, where anyone could get at it. If I ask to travel with her for a bit she goes and gets it from a secret place in her bedroom and she strokes its pages with the same love Rosso Malpelo felt, in Verga’s story, when he stroked the trousers that had belonged to his dead father, the only person who had ever loved him. Her gestures, as we turn the pages, remind me of when she used to read fairy tales to my brother and me.

  Today my favourite fairy tale is a little island in the Sulu Archipelago, nameless, because it would be impossible to give names to all 7,100 islands that make up the Philippines. It’s isolated in an immensity of blue and a long way away from all the other islands, which are in turn a long way away from our world. And the photograph’s been taken from up high, so high that it can only be an angelic perspective. Before travelling to other places, Mamma and I always pass by the Sulu Archipelago and caress our idea of happiness.

  3

  Mauro De Cortes

  Ever since she was a girl Zia fancied the brother of one of her friends: Mauro De Cortes. But he was already engaged to a girl that he later married. To console her Mamma would say, ‘How could he be interested in you when he already has a girlfriend?’ Then Mauro got married, had some children, got separated, was sad, went out with Zia a few times and I know they even made love. Mamma would say to her, ‘He’d commit to something serious with you except that he’s so sad!’

  But then Mauro got re-engaged, remarried, had more children and got separated again but he still never really seriously considered Zia.

  History tells us that we Sardinians are no sailors, that we withdrew inland for fear of the Saracens when actually we could have built a fleet and confronted them instead of escaping into the mountains.

  Just look at my mother. Even though my grandfather was a true man of the sea, she’ll only go in as far as she can while still touching the bottom and she flaps around pathetically without getting anywhere. Papà refuses to come to the beach with us. Not even when we were little, when all other fathers do.

  He says, ‘You get too carried away with this business about the Sardinian sea. It’s because you haven’t been anywhere else in the world. I’ll tell you how you go to the beach!’

  ‘And how’s that then?’ He teases us because we go to Poetto beach with the full complement of towels and cream or when it’s crowded. And quoting the Bible he sermonises that he won’t go to Sodom and Gomorrah, with all that human flesh on display in the bars. Then when he’s sure we’re not around, when there’s absolutely nobody around, for instance if the mistral’s blowing at 180 an hour, or it’s raining, or it’s a Monday, then we’ll see him returning with his shoes full of sand and his clothes dripping seawater.

  ‘Were you at the beach?’

  ‘Of course!’ And he looks you up and down with snobbish detachment.

  Mamma says, ‘Maybe he’s right. Maybe today was better than any other day!’

  But nobody will ever know, because nobody was there.

  I don’t go to the beach with him either, but if we decide it’s summer I wait for him stretched out on the bed in my swimsuit, and it doesn’t matter that the role of the sun is played by the heater and the sea is outside the window.

  ‘You have to be the contemplative type,’ he tells me. ‘One of those that just look at the sea and that’s all, and if the water’s not warm they won’t go in.’

  Then I think about how my grandfather, when he was a prisoner, had to go under icy showers, in winter, in Germany, and I say if he could endure it, I can endure it too. So in my swimsuit I run along the corridor in bare feet, jump under the cold water and call out to him, so he can see how tough and strong I am.

  Mauro De Cortes on the other hand is one of those people that are really serious about the sea. He has a sailing boat he shares with his girlfriend, moored at the little port of Su Siccu. One day I ran into them when I was on my way to see Nonna, who lives nearby, and I said I’d like to watch them set sail. All the sea-going types were greeting each other and adding some comment about the wind, or about a problem with the boats, and even though they were all right there, it seemed to me like they were already far off, away into infinity. Mauro’s girlfriend jumped across that ‘dread, immense abyss’, so similar to death, that separates the pier from a boat’s gangplank, she removed the fenders, released the mooring ropes, and stood smiling and serene at the helm, while Mauro said goodbye and said I should try it too some time. Then they sailed further and further away and disappeared. Zia decided to do a sailing course herself, just in case she ever started going out with De Cortes. But the poor thing throws her guts up whenever she’s anywhere near the sea.

  4

  Him

  Sometimes we do it in the car. One of those American liberation army jeeps.

  ‘It’s like flying low in a helicopter,’ he says, ‘but you can look around you, over the roofs of the other cars, at the level of the lamp posts. No one can see you. They don’t think to look up at you, even though you’re flying low, only a little bit above them.’

  Then he gives me instructions. He says if I want no man to be able to resist me, even the man I eventually fall in love with, if I want to become a swan, in other words, I have to be a whore in bed instead of immediately blurting out the story of my life, and above all I have to learn that there’s all sorts of crap in the world and I have to be able to endure the greatest number of things possible. That’s why he wants me to undress – slowly, like a professional – while he’s driving. That’s why he whips me, or gets me to kneel down and give him head and then the next day he makes a point of meeting me and not even saying hello, or he won’t contact me for ages. I also have to be able to endure psychological torture.

  In addition he says that I absolutely must tie back my hair and lose weight, and if at our next meeting I still have hair falling in my eyes and haven’t lost at least one kilo – and he’ll be able to tell from how plump my cheeks and arse are – he’ll send me away without screwing me, or he’ll kick me around or he’ll show me what one hundred strokes of the brush really means.

  But nor should I become soft, I have to learn to give him orders. When we part company he often gives me the instruments of torture we’ve used – a leather band, or a Japanese chopstick, or the flat hairbrush, or the whore’s clothes he’s brought along to get me out of my pinafore dresses. I’m happy and don’t want chocolates, or rings, or stuffed toys. Nothing but this. I lose weight and I always keep my hair tidy and I hide my disguises in the bottom of my drawer, wrapping them in paper so that they retain his smell.

  One day, after making love, he gave me a kiss on the forehead. He stayed like that, without taking his lips away, holding my head tightly in his hands. In silence. And we felt moved.

  We’d each taken a hundred lashes without batting an eyelid and now we were crying.

  Once I slipped over because if we ever go out it’s always pitch black. I hurt my ankle slightly, but really it was nothing. He carried me on his shoulders for the whole of the walk up the hill, immersed in the perfumed darkness, to the sound of crickets.

  I kept saying, ‘It’s nothing. It’s nothing. You’ll break your back.’

  But he didn’t want to know until we’d reached the car. Then he placed me delicately on the s
eat, as though I was made of crystal.

  That was the only kiss. I’ve never received any kisses on the mouth, or hugs, and when I try to kiss or hug him he pulls away at once and says our affair isn’t about that sort of thing. That’s only for boring, slobbering types.

  Whereas I’d really like kisses on the mouth, they’d give me much more satisfaction than on my feet and shoes, which he practically worships.

  5

  My father’s God

  One day I asked my father, who knows everything about the Holy Scriptures, if he reckoned the Sixth Commandment meant that you mustn’t do anything unless you’re married.

  When he realises that you need him to listen to you, he sits at the kitchen table, lights a cigarette and stretches his legs out to the farthest chair and you see his feet poking out the other side of the table because he’s very tall. Tall and lanky. With a shaved head and prickly cheeks because he neglects to shave his beard. And extraordinarily sparkling eyes, dark green like the colour of a grotto. His jumpers, always directly against his skin because he never wears shirts, give him a rough, wild air, like a barbarian, or a man of the desert.

  While you say what you have to say, he smokes at you and the butts in the ashtray pile up into a mountain.

  But I don’t care if my eyes water. With my chin resting on the table, hugging my knees tightly, I never even change position because I’m hanging on his every word, as Nonna puts it, and when we finish these discussions I’m bent double.

  That time with the Sixth Commandment, my father gave an unforgettable ‘tirade’ about love.

  The sexual encounter means truly knowing oneself and being able to do anything, provided the other person does not become an instrument of yours. ‘The sexual act,’ he said, ‘is a kind of apotheotic encounter. It means total acceptance. And this Commandment is extremely poetic. It tells you that sexuality opens the door to a moment of magic. What God advises against is doing it without love. It’s like if he said to you, “Remember that you’re an eagle, why should you peck like a hen? Why are you settling for so little?”’