Twice Born, page 10
“How much does a hotel maid make?”
“A hundred fifty, two hundred euros.”
I smile. Pietro wrinkles his nose. He’s irked. “What do you want?”
Water drips off gutters, balconies, roofs.
We go by the Latin Bridge, where Franz Ferdinand was killed.
“They removed the commemorative plaque and kept it off for a long time because Princip was a Serb. Now they’ve put it back up for tourists, but they’ve taken away the word hero.”
In the square with the giant chessboard, all the old men carry umbrellas. They play unperturbed beneath the falling water, bending every so often to move the giant horses and pawns over the squares on the pavement. Pietro takes some pictures with his cell phone. He’s amazed by the determination of these old players.
“Most of them are farm folk, people who came afterwards. The city’s become more rural. For years I didn’t recognize a soul.”
We walk a while longer. The rain becomes lighter and then stops. Water runs through the drains. The sky is still laden, but for a moment there’s a break from the downpour. Pietro is soaked. He likes to get wet, likes to get sick, likes to burn with fever for a night and then burst with health again the next day. All this water’s made him thirsty. He stops at a stand and downs an icy Coca-Cola. He looks down and asks about the splotches of red paint on the ground.
They’re Sarajevo roses, a testimony to the dead and the bombs. We walk over the rose that commemorates the first massacre, when people were killed while waiting in a breadline. Gojko looks at me for a moment. I open my mouth and close it again.
We cross the street and round a corner. More roses, more splotches of fading red paint in the bustle of people coming and going at the Markale Market.
“At one point they said we were firing on ourselves to guarantee attention from the television cameras, so we would stay in the public eye.”
The stalls are full of colors and much more orderly than I remembered. The list of dead on a gray stone wall at the back is staggering. It’s a list of people torn from life in a single instant, carried off in the time it took a single devil to bat his wings. I ask myself where that devil has gone. Is he still limping along somewhere near here?
Earlier this morning Gojko made a comment that sent shivers up my spine. “There are a lot of people in Sarajevo who think we’re just living through a pause in an unfinished war.”
We climb the stairs to a little restaurant right above the market. It’s a sort of balcony with tables and wooden benches overlooking the stalls below. It’s like being in a turn-of-the-century train station. I look down at the chalkwhite cheeses in the display cases. Gojko shows me the only stall that still sells pork, way down at the end, separate from the others.
Pietro wants to know why people from Sarajevo don’t like pork. Gojko explains that nowadays most people are Bosniaks—Bosnian Muslims, that is. Muslims don’t eat pork. Pietro says he learned about that when he did a paper on the three monotheistic religions. He laughs and says you can’t tell people here are Muslims. “They’re too white,” he says.
Gojko tells him about how, when he was little, he celebrated Christmas at home like a good Catholic and then went out to collect alms with his friends for the end of Ramadan. “It was completely normal then. Now they teach three different languages in the schools, and when you register a child, you have to declare which ethnic group he or she belongs to.”
We order a Bosnian soup. They bring us a kettle full of dense broth with bits of meat and vegetables floating side by side. Pietro eats pljeskavica, the closest thing to a hamburger.
“What was the reason for the war?”
Gojko laughs wildly and rests a hand on Pietro’s head.
“It would take a great comedian to answer your question, someone mute and desperate. Someone like us. Through it all, we never stopped laughing. It would take someone like Buster Keaton. Have you ever seen Film?”
Pietro shakes his head. He doesn’t like black-and-white movies.
Gojko puts out his cigarette. “What do you want to be when you grow up, Pietro?”
“I don’t know. A musician, maybe.”
Of course he doesn’t dare look at me. Ages ago I rented a piano for him and it rotted for years in the house. Pietro rarely practiced because, he said, he didn’t need to. Then, two years ago, he picked up the guitar, all on his own. He goes to a jazz club to take lessons. Every time he’s felt the slightest pressure from me, he’s done whatever he could do to resist.
We’re back on the street. The rain cleaned the asphalt. The streets glitter like polished iron.
Pietro walks ahead of us with his indolent gait, stomping through the puddles and treading upon the roses marking the bombs as if they were cobblestones in a Roman alley, as if he were indifferent. He’s being boisterous, almost offensive, on purpose. He’s been avoiding me since we arrived. These spiteful little actions are for my benefit because he senses I have an unexpressed goal for this trip. I’d like to grab him and hug him close but I don’t dare go near him. If there’s something for him to understand here, something for him to sniff out like a dog, he’ll have to do it on his own. I can’t help him. In any case, he resembles his father. He’s got a little radar that senses lost frequencies.
“He takes after him, doesn’t he?”
Gojko doesn’t look at Pietro. He looks at me.
“Do you want me to tell you the truth?”
“Yes.”
“He takes after you. He walks like you and smiles like you. He’s moody just like you, too.”
He hugs me tight, enclosing me in his bulk. I feel his breath in my hair.
“You must have gotten under his skin, Gemma. You’ve always had this talent for slipping in beneath other people’s skin and conquering them without even trying. Did I ever tell you how much I was in love with you?”
“No, you never told me.”
“You were so in love with him. The two of you were so in love.”
We step into a courtyard of low Ottoman archways beside the mosque. The photo exhibit will take place in two long rooms with walls of glass punctuated by white metal frames, like big bay windows or a greenhouse. A diaphanous girl with a thick pair of black knit stockings hanging off her otherwise bare legs is making final adjustments to her works, which hang from thin steel wires. She comes over to greet us, punches Gojko on the arm, steals a cigarette from his jacket pocket, smiles and kisses him on the mouth.
I ask him if she’s his wife. She laughs because she understands my question even though she doesn’t speak Italian. She shakes her head. She’s a well-known artist, mad as a hatter and very talented.
I stop to look at her photos, images of men and women who were interned in the Omarska concentration camp, snapshots of elderly people, their skeletal faces hollowed out by hunger and fear, close-ups taken from so near that their hair isn’t even in the picture and all that’s left are the eyes, the tortuous routes of their wrinkles, their worn mouths. Not a single one wears a meek expression. They all seem to be focusing on the same point in some dark zone, as if they were asking the camera lens for some clue to their history as human beings, seeking an answer that no one as yet has been able to provide.
Diego’s photos are in the second room. I sit on a chair to look at them. The show isn’t open to the public yet. A woman is busy arranging food on a table covered with a paper tablecloth. There was no need to come all this way to see these shots I know so well. There aren’t many. They occupy a little wall behind a column. There’s the woman running from the snipers, her hair made ragged by her flight and one leg raised like a broken wing. There’s the bathtub in the rubble, a bottle of shampoo on the edge and a dead body shrouded in a green Muslim cloth inside. There’s the old woman taking down the washing as the snow falls, her arms reaching through a glassless window frame. There’s the cat sleeping on the seat of a burnt bus. There’s the baby carriage full of tanks of water and a smiling Sebina pulling it along.
Pietro wanders about and studies the shots on this wall or that. I wait for him and, gradually, start to feel a sort of peace.
I have scads of Diego’s photos, hidden in the house, in the loft. For a long time they kept me alive. Euphoric and agitated, I would wait for the baby to fall asleep as if I were waiting to get away to my lover. I could go days or months without thinking about them, like sex—for which I’ve always had an on-again, off-again interest, sudden bursts and then nothing. In the late afternoon I’d find myself saddened by the doors in our house, the hall door, the door to the dark living room. There was mud everywhere, things moving, things being dragged along. Giuliano frequently had to work the night shift and I’d be alone. Out of nowhere, the dark of the windows, the depths of the baby’s slumber, thoughts of Diego would come at me with such insistence they’d leave me feeling ill.
I’d close myself in my room and open the boxes. The light would be low enough to erase my surroundings as I scattered the photos over the bed and onto the carpet. I’d weep and smile as I crawled over the path of shiny paper.
One morning Giuliano found one of the photos beneath the bedspread. It was crumpled from the night. He tried to flatten it out with his hands and handed it back to me. Here, love. This must be yours. It’s very beautiful.
He was sitting on the bed, his shoulders hunched, his stomach like a little pouch. I moved toward him, took his orphaned hand from the bed and cried into it. After a while he started crying, too, small solitary sobs. It struck me that he was far more alone than I was, that men are always more alone than women no matter what. Crying together, for a couple, is a tiny emblematic event. It’s the other’s breath dying in your throat. It’s the sorrow that you carry inside you for the world and for yourself, useless sack of flesh. Your stomach dances with your tears. Rise up, miserable creature. Move away from there into the depths of the house or throw yourself out the window. If you stay, say something that might console us.
Giuliano said, “I’m so sorry he died. You can’t know how sorry I am.”
I smiled. “You probably would have arrested him. He was the type of guy the police would arrest.”
Pietro moves closer. He’s wary like a mouse approaching a trap, risking its head because it’s hungry.
“Are these his?”
“Yes.”
He quickly scans the photos from top to bottom and then again, two quick parries and that’s it.
“Do you like them?”
“The one with the cat is great. Were you there with him?”
“Not always.”
There are no other chairs, so he slides down the column and sits on his heels like a big bird.
“Where was I?”
“Waiting to be born.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Of what?”
“Wasn’t it scary to be pregnant during a war?”
I nod and sniff and say maybe I’m getting sick. The rain made me cold. My shoes are wet. Pietro glances at my feet and moves away. I see him nibbling at the snacks. In the meantime, people have started arriving in little groups of two or three. Wine glasses in hand, they stop in front of the panels of photos and talk. I’m the only one down here in this corner. I know these photos, but it still feels strange to be seeing them here on this wall.
I study the details—a hand, a bird in the sky, the bumper of a car that’s been hurled by a blast to one side. I look at Sebina, her round button eyes, that funny mouth: delicate at the edges, puffy in the center, red like a tongue.
I smile because I know that expression so well, the leader of the pack, a little neighborhood tyrant.
“Come here for a second, Bijeli Biber.” That’s what I called her, White Pepper.
She’d move toward me with her deep-set eyes and the dimple in her chin, the perfect hiding place for a pearl. I’d hold a candy in my fist so she could guess which hand held it. She always guessed right.
“Bijeli Biber, you need to do well in school, okay?”
She would nod, in a hurry to move away. I told Gojko to keep an eye on her, to make sure she didn’t spend too much time out in the streets.
“What will Sebina do if she doesn’t study?’
Gojko loved his mischievous little sister as if she were a gift. He was enchanted.
“Maybe she’ll be an artist. She knows how to ice-skate and walk on a tightrope. And she’s a great liar.”
Sometimes she acted downright rude, not bothering to say hello, or playing insistently with the noisy little balls Gojko had imported for a while but which had never met with the same success as his yo-yos. No one could figure out where the bad mood came from, but I knew how to get to the bottom of her malaise. It was always some unthinkable little nonsense thing, but I understood. I’d been a crazy perfectionist as a child, exactly like Sebina, defeating myself many times over in the course of a day.
She would become stubborn, even disagreeable as she sat there on the wall in the courtyard sucking her hair and speaking unpleasantly to anyone who came near. Hey, Bijeli Biber, I’d say, and hug her close. It was like hugging an outsized pride, the least attractive part of myself, the obstacle that would forever make it impossible for anyone to love me to the core. Sebina could penetrate my solitude. We were the same, presumptuous and stupid. She threw her arms around my neck, her legs dangling around me as I climbed, and let me carry her back up the stairs to her mother. It was okay now. The darkness had passed. I’ve never been particularly good with children. I’m impatient. I can’t talk in funny little voices. But Sebina was different, a gift from God, a foretaste of love. I can still see the landing where I’d stop to catch my breath between flights of stairs because she was so heavy. The gray of the courtyard came in through the long frosted-glass window as dusk neared and Sebina hung off my neck with her breath and her mystery.
Pietro calls from behind a column. “What about this one, Ma?” He points to a photo I hadn’t noticed beside the exit, above the umbrella stand. “Is it one of Diego’s?”
I tell him I’m not sure.
“There’s his name, underneath.”
It’s grainy and out of focus, maybe a piece of wall with a deep dark stain surrounded by gaping red petals, some sort of rose.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
Pietro likes it. He stands there and looks at it. “It doesn’t mean anything, but it says something.”
He says it looks like a cool CD cover.
I see a tangible sadness in this strange material image. There’s more war in this red image than in all the other war photos.
I reach out to touch that grainy hole in the center and shake my head. “I don’t think it’s your father’s. They must have made a mistake.”
Diego showed up in Rome on his motorcycle at dawn after five hundred kilometers of nighttime highway. With his tiny mosquito body he’d passed truck after truck, headlights by the thousands, without ever stopping. He rang the bell at my parents’ house. In his hand he held a bunch of sunflowers from an all-night florist’s. I went downstairs in my nightgown. Dawn’s first light floated through the dark. The café’s metal shutters were still closed.
“I’ve got everything worked out!”
I take the sunflowers. They hang from my folded arms. I’ve been back from Genoa for less than a day. I haven’t even unpacked my suitcase and he’s already here, his hair flattened by his helmet, his cheeks hollowed out by the cold.
“You can’t stay here. I just separated from my husband a few months ago. I can’t bring another guy to my parents’ house.”
He looks around. “Who’s this other guy?” Then he smiles. “I have a place to stay. It’s all set.” He says it didn’t feel right to leave me alone at such a delicate moment in my life. He’s meek as a lamb. I kick him. He laughs because I end up hurting myself. I’m wearing flip-flops and he’s wearing hard leather shin guards like a real motorcyclist.
He looks up and waves. My father’s leaning against the balcony railing in his pajamas, smoking. Dad waves the hand holding the cigarette.
The way Diego’s waving, his hand will come off.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“It’s me. I’m Diego.”
“I’m Armando, Gemma’s father. How was the trip?”
“It was a smooth ride.”
I nod at my father. He can go back inside now. Instead, he comes down in his pajamas, the ones I gave him for his birthday. He throws his cigarette butt into the dawn and comes toward us. They shake hands. Dad walks around the motorcycle.
“Triumph Bonneville Silver Jubilee. Great choice!”
Later I would learn that they’d spoken on the phone many times during my marriage. They talked about me, about photography, about travel, and they hit it off. You can tell now from their expressions that they like each other. This dawn is giving birth to another great love. Maybe it’s easy because Diego’s father died when he was a child and my father never had a son. All he had was that son-in-law who never fully entered his heart.
Diego asks Dad if he’d like to take a spin on the motorcycle. Dad’s tempted. He’s wearing his overcoat over his pajamas. He starts buttoning it up. I send him a withering glance. He says, Never mind. He’ll do it another time, when he’s properly dressed.
The café is opening. Dad insists on treating us to breakfast. We wait while the coffee machine warms up and the girl arranges the pastries on a tray. Diego eats; he’s hungry. Dad has a coffee and smokes another cigarette. We look out at the street, the day’s first movements. My father says, “It’s so nice.”
“What, Dad?”
“It’s so nice when something is born.”
“So where is it?”
“Down there, beside the river.”
We’re wandering around behind a market. Diego is carrying a crumpled bit of paper and a bunch of keys in an envelope a musician friend gave him. We go down the travertine stone stairs among moss stains and bottles left over from nighttime parties. When we get to the embankment it’s colder and slippery. The yellowish river water wraps itself greedily around the little overgrown islands that rise up from the bottom and catch the trash. The city din is up above us, back near the market. Down here we hear only the noise of the water and, every so often, the rusty shriek of a seagull. I look around. I don’t see anything.
