While the Shark is Sleeping Read online

  And that time it was hard not to tell him at least one of my stories, not to tell him that they’re terribly forbidden when recounted by a girl so young and so well behaved, but that they’re stories of love, so maybe for that reason they don’t displease God.

  But Papà’s always somewhere else anyway and it’s never difficult to hide something from him.

  If you need him to go to a school meeting, if Mamma invites someone over for dinner, or if there’s an exhibition of her paintings – in other words, if it’s necessary to show that a father, or a husband, exists – he says, ‘That’s not what I’m about!’

  And maybe it’s better if Signor Sevilla Mendoza doesn’t show his face – all the women are enchanted by him and it would embarrass me to see my schoolteachers raving, like that one time in fourth year at the ginnasio, or that evening at one of Mamma’s exhibitions, when the ‘enchanted’ woman hung on my father’s lips until everyone else had gone home and she’d bought two paintings without so much as looking at them.

  His garage, too, is always frequented by a lot of women. They’re terribly attracted to this man who, as he fixes your engine, talks to you about God, about good and evil, about distant places where people are dying of hunger and the spiders are this big. And you can tell that those women would go anywhere with him.

  I witnessed this only once when my Vespa had broken down, but I could tell that the scene must have been repeated very often.

  Signor Sevilla Mendoza was bent over the engine. Blessed with miraculous powers, his splendid hands – like my brother’s on the piano – were busily fiddling around the mysterious breakdown. A lady was hanging over him and laughing at all his jokes. Although it’s practically impossible not to laugh at my father’s jokes, I walked back home sadly, leaving my Vespa with him so as not to have to stay there a moment longer.

  I knew full well that after a while he would ask the lady if he could light a cigarette and then he’d go and sit at the table with all his tools and his feet would poke out the other side and when the butts had formed a mountain in the ashtray the lady would think, and perhaps also make clear to him, that with this barbarian, with this man of the desert, she’d be prepared to go anywhere.

  ‘Papà, do you like all those women?’

  Then he explained to me a fascinating thing. He told me that he finds a great number of things in life erotic. A chat, for example. I mustn’t think that he was doing Mamma any wrong.

  ‘It’s a bit like learning to use your left hand. What’s wrong with that? I experiment.’

  Besides, what more do we want from him? He works all day and this allows Mamma not to. He can take any problem and turn it into something funny for you, he makes you laugh. He knows how to tell you stories, how to convince you that God exists.

  ‘So you don’t care about those women. It’s only Mamma that you truly love,’ I concluded that time.

  ‘I’ve already told you, I care about everything. However the woman I’d happily go to South America with has never arrived.’

  6

  The tango

  Zia’s boyfriend even gets Mamma to dance the tango. She moves all the chairs in the dining room but then she tries to get out of it. I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything. I’d have to change my shoes. I don’t have the shoes. I’ve never known how to dance. I don’t know how to dance. I’m fine sitting down. I’ll fall over. You know I’ll fall over. You dance and I’ll watch. I like watching people who are good at it.

  But Zia’s boyfriend says it’s easy and everyone can do it. He’s a doctor specialising in human movement and he says that even the seriously ill can manage to walk, so of course Mamma can manage to dance. She has to rest one hand on his shoulder and put her other hand in his and let herself be carried away. Be light. She doesn’t know where he’ll take her. She has to have faith.

  The tango begins and Mamma gives him her hand, looking at him terrified, and it’s like she’s been dipped in starch but this thing about even the seriously ill managing has convinced her. He smiles at her. He smiles and dances with her as though he knows about the yellow pegs and the dreams of extermination camps. As though he knows about the holidays in autumn and the squared moon. He moves her feet with his feet, her legs with his legs. The basic steps, but getting faster. Faster. Thank you. Thank you. Why are you wasting all this time on me. But Doctor Salevsky truly is a little special and in the end you give in to that desire and nostalgia for life that is the tango.

  And Mamma, too, weaves her steps in and out and in and out in sets of eight and away she goes, off to Cape Horn. To America. To the end of the earth. And it doesn’t matter if she stumbles or falls backwards, it doesn’t matter because Zia’s boyfriend makes you realise that you shouldn’t think happiness is only possible for other people, it can be yours too if you try. What a milonga! What a waltz! When he comes over, it only takes a nod and she’s up moving the chairs and running to take off her slippers. Forget about the cinders, Mamma, this is the King’s hall. Forget about those clothes hanging off you. Bolero!

  Zia says that it’s better dancing in our dining room because when she goes to real bars with her boyfriend she gets the impression that all the women are involved or have been involved or intend to be involved in a relationship with him and so are watching them in a dejected, or nostalgic, or predatory way. They don’t seem to know that she and he are together so bad luck, there’s nothing any other woman can do about it.

  Mamma tells Papà that if he at least learnt the eight basic steps they’d be able to make two couples in the dining room once in a while. Papà makes a kind of mocking gesture with the tip of his thumb on his nose and then tells her seriously that the tango is not one of his things. That he only does his things and not anyone else’s.

  Nonna has revealed to us that Nonno, when he was in the Navy, was the best tango dancer in the crew and being in his arms was like flying to the top of the world. But those were other tangos and there were no dejected, or nostalgic, or predatory women. There was only Nonna.

  7

  My mother’s God

  Mamma once confided to me that she’s not actually entirely sure that Jesus is God. Maybe Jesus was a wonderful creature similar to God that we would all love madly. But maybe he was only a man. That’s why she’s always very sad at Easter. And if we ask her why she’s in despair – after all Jesus is God and he rose again – she says she’s not so sure about that. Maybe he just died and that’s it.

  She almost never goes to church. Certainly not, she says, because she thinks God doesn’t exist, or she’s annoyed at him, or she blames him for something. But she thinks that God’s indifferent to her, in the sense that she could be at church or not be at church and for God it would be the same.

  Once I asked my love if he thought God exists.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I hope not for his sake. Otherwise he must be stupid, or worse. A God like he’s shown himself to be doesn’t deserve anything from us.’

  ‘Maybe we’re the ones who don’t deserve anything.’

  ‘All the worse for him, for making us out of piss and shit.’

  ‘What about all the wonderful things and people that exist?’

  ‘You’re the one who sees them that way. I look around and I just see stinking pieces of shit.’

  8

  Our garden

  Mamma’s garden isn’t exactly a garden, it’s the sunny paved area that is the roof of our building. They were going to build another apartment there, but the contractor went bankrupt just after the war, and nothing was done with it. The residents of the building put television antennas up there and in the old days we’d all hang our washing out there. When no one used it for drying any more it became a space where everyone put the things they’d cleared out of their homes, things they no longer needed but didn’t want to throw out. A kind of rubbish tip, except that from up there you can enjoy the view of Palazzo Boyle, the Bastione di San Remy with its palms swaying in the wind, and further up st
ill, the Torre dell’Elefante. To the south, on the other hand, you can see the sea, the ships, and even the mountains of Capoterra, which are our last horizon.

  Day after day Mamma has tried to give it dignity. The things that people had cleared out have taken on new colours and new roles. It took years and years to learn that up there, where the sirocco blows too strongly, myrtle and mastic can grow, and under the bench even violets can survive, and roses might seem fragile but actually they defy the scorching sun and the mistral, provided they have a wall at their back. Years and years of respect for the times of the day and consideration of the phases of the moon. With all Mamma’s sweetness and patience that junk room up there became a paradise of delights. A dream of happiness and beauty that, for all our sakes, she protects from the violence and disorder of the world, and that makes us richer. I’ve noticed that the people who live in the building never fail to take their visitors up there for a look around, to amaze them, to overcome the frustration of living in such a humble place. Even down on the street people sometimes stop with their nose in the air to admire the wisteria that cascades right down to the front door of the building.

  Not that Mamma’s flowers never get sick or die. Many have given in to the domineering wind, or to the boiling hot temperatures, or to the seagull and pigeon poo. Mamma has a cry about it, but then she plants something else in the empty pots. And so it’s been ever since we were little. The days of ivy, the days of dog-roses, those of bougainvillea: the terrace has its history.

  Thin though she is, she goes up the stairs with bags of dirt and the new cuttings or seeds and she works up there for hours and hours and comes down exhausted from all the effort, but that little piece of the world is so naturally beautiful that it seems to have created itself. A gift for everybody.

  Nonna has taken a dislike to that terrace, she gets angry because she reckons it’s pointless Mamma working on it, on something that’s not even hers. If she really worked and there were two salaries in the family we could buy a new house. You bet you can pay off a mortgage with an extra salary.

  Nonna’s right, but how I love going up to look at the ships framed by garlands of perfumed flowers, arriving or departing these waters to the sound of Debussy’s Clair de lune, which my brother’s preparing for his piano exam.

  And how sad it is when you realise a plant is struggling but isn’t going to make it, and Mamma’s dejected and Zia wants to give a kick up the arse to the wisteria, or the jasmine, and to all the plants that want to die on us.

  9

  White women and black women

  ‘Today you have to be really tough, you have to be a black woman. You have to put on this dress made of coarse fabric that I’ve brought for you. See how low-cut it is and how it shows off your tits. I like your heavy tits, they contrast with your childlike torso. You’ll show me your breasts exploding out of the neckline. You’ll pull up your skirt. But my hands will be tied and I won’t be able to touch you. You have to be cruel: only after receiving a hundred lashes will I receive the prize of screwing you.’

  For him the planet is full of shit. ‘That great bastard of a . . .’ ‘That piece of shit . . .’

  But notwithstanding his vision of a completely rotten world, he never makes me sad. He’s special that way. I’m closed up in a room with the door barred and it’s as if I was out in the open air. Maybe because I know that if I follow the instructions, the rules, he won’t leave me. And if one day I’m able to sit down at the table and eat his excrement, then he swears to me he’ll want me even when I’m old. Forever.

  When I’m able to have him over to the house – because Mamma’s going all around town for hours and hours in search of panoramas and then she phones me to go and get her on my Vespa – he even gives me instructions on how to cook. Something I really really like is the idea of fanning out spaghetti in the cooking pot – then you move it towards the centre and that way it doesn’t stick.

  Or sometimes we go to his work. We go down dark corridors with science fiction warning lights and the beeping of robots. We reach his room and lock ourselves in. Complete darkness. ‘Kneel down and take it in your mouth.’

  10

  That’s enough tango

  That’s enough tango. Since Zia’s boyfriend stopped coming, all Mamma does is put his waltzes and milongas on over and over and cry as she does the ironing.

  Zia was left with a look on her face that reminded me of when seals are beaten to death by hunters, down at Cape Horn. I can smell the blood. And the chill.

  You think that if you went to Cape Horn and sat on the edge of a cliff and saw the two oceans doing battle, your life would be completely different. But actually I reckon everything’s the same the world over.

  11

  Nonna’s God

  Nonna says that God exists, the real one. And then there’s another God: my father’s God.

  Papà and Nonna disapprove of each other. Nonna says she could never stand people who don’t take care of their own family and insist on saving the world. Zia, in these situations, defends Papà and tells Nonna that Goebbels was an affectionate father and husband but he was a Nazi criminal, and the same with lots of Mafiosi, whereas we know all about what Gandhi did, yet he abandoned his wife.

  Nonna asks Mamma, ‘Was your husband there?’ and the answer is always no.

  Then she says to Papà, ‘Don’t you ever ask yourself what people think? Your wife, your children, they’re always on their own. People will think you’re invented!’

  ‘What people?’ my father replies. ‘Who are these people? Does anyone ever phone me up and say, “Hello, I’m People, how are you?”’

  With Papà, not even Nonna can help smiling, and she grumbles that he really is good at twisting people’s words.

  Then she goes to my brother and tells him that, if he wanted to, he could change Papà, that lots of sons have managed to turn uninterested, distant men into loving fathers. One boy, the grandson of a friend of hers, got his separated parents to make up. ‘Papà, come back home!’ he’d tearfully implore. So you can imagine what a lad my brother’s age could do, talking to him man to man he’d have all the persuasive power to convince our father to go to meetings, to make an appearance once in a while when we have friends around, to take his family on a trip somewhere nice instead of always going alone to some poor, stinking, godforsaken place.

  The upshot of this is that when Nonna says she’s come to see us to talk about important matters, my brother holes up in his room to play the piano and if we knock he yells, ‘Not now, this is a difficult bit!’

  But when my father is around, you really know he’s around. He plays lively songs on the guitar putting different words to the music, so one time he sang ‘I am easy’, but making up rude lyrics and someone fell off their chair laughing. The guests are entertained and they leave considering him a great friend, but then they come back next time and he’s not there.

  It’s left to the rest of us Sevilla Mendozas to play host. But Mamma says it’s just not the same and if Papà’s not around it’s better not to organise anything at all. And since he’s never around, the choice is always not to organise anything at all.

  12

  Mauro De Cortes is like the sea

  There’s only one man about whom I’ve never heard Zia use expressions like ‘a kick up the arse’ or ‘Who does he think he is?’ – Mauro De Cortes. And I’ve come to see that Mauro is like the sea, and like the sea he’s just there, naturally and simply. Clear and calm, if it’s clear and calm, and – equally simply – stormy if it’s stormy. If you wish to swim, or look from a distance, or if you couldn’t care less, that’s your business. He accepts you, but can just as easily do without you.

  He’s everything we lack: naturalness and inner strength.

  In the world of Mauro De Cortes, it makes sense to grow flowers or learn to make little sweets. And above all, one can hope.

  Leaving aside all the boyfriends, Zia’s life is sad. Sometimes she comes to see us w
ith her defences down. She doesn’t criticise anything Mamma’s cooked and she says, ‘I haven’t eaten since the last time I found someone to eat with. I don’t know how many days it’s been.’

  When she leaves she’s a little bit happier and she says to Mamma, ‘Thank you.’

  But maybe Zia’s new boyfriend is the right one. When we invited him over for lunch, he took her hand at the table and let everyone see that they’re together, whereas Doctor Salevsky never so much as touched her in our presence. He’s nice and he goes running so now Zia goes running too, early in the morning. Because, she says, regardless of what Papà thinks, the logic is that politicians go with politicians, sailors with sailors, dancers with dancers; like on Noah’s Ark, you go in pairs and otherwise she wouldn’t be able to pair up with anybody. None of us has come out and said it, but I’m sure the common feeling is that this time, God is willing. But Papà says it’s obvious that something’s not right with Zia, since she can’t stay with her lovers for more than an hour or two, and after sex, some pleasant chat and some remarks about world events, she feels it’s time to leave, or else they make it clear to her that she can’t stay any longer.

  Every day Mamma says the rosary for her and checks the position of the stars. I’ve learnt that Saturn is the most dangerous, if it’s in opposition all you can do is pray. But I get the impression that Mamma thinks not even God can do anything about this planet, because it, too, is part of Creation and God leaves it to do its own thing.