Twice Born, page 43
Calm returns with daylight.
Dad has a book about the first few months. He leafs through it and says that the most desperate crying, when the baby draws in his legs, is due to colic. Pietro eats too quickly. Now, after a feeding, Dad holds him belly-down and gives him a calming massage.
In just a week Armando becomes more of an expert than a seasoned nanny. He smells of formula and spit-up and almond oil. When he’s not with us he’s at the drugstore, studying the shelves with products for newborns. He consults the girls in their uniform white lab coats with gold crosses pinned on the lapels. He’s become friendly with them all and calls them by name. They talk about poo and hiccups and rashes. His eyes are languid, like someone who’s just fallen in love. He’s lost his head.
Bread is depressed, like me. His tongue hangs limp from his mouth. He’s dying of jealousy, like a neglected older brother.
Our first outing is to see the pediatrician.
Dad goes to get the car and parks it on the sidewalk in front of the door to my building. He doesn’t care if he gets a ticket. He’s charged with escorting Pietro, the oracle, the future of humanity. I’m wearing dark glasses and a black overcoat. I’m thin and pale, like a sad princess, mother of the heir to the throne. It’s cold. Dad’s draped a cloth over the car seat. The doorman, a neighbor and the lady from the café come over to see.
There’s no reasoning with Dad. He moves the cloth aside for no more than a second.
The woman from the café smiles at me.
“I didn’t know you were expecting, ma’am.”
“My son-in-law is a photographer. They travel around the world. They’re a modern couple, not house pigeons like you and me. They don’t let anything scare them. They have their children wherever they happen to be.”
The woman compliments me. She lowers her gaze to my stomach and says it doesn’t even look like I’ve been pregnant. She says I’m lucky to have the kind of physique that springs right back into shape.
In the car, Dad’s cross. He keeps checking the rearview mirror. I worry he may be getting senile. He rails against the woman from the café.
“She makes skimpy cappuccinos to save on milk.”
Growling like a guard dog, he turns toward the back and checks the car seat. Now he’s the one who’s scared someone might take away the crab. I’m just scared I won’t make it.
Over time the baby and I get used to each other. I learn to recognize his voices. I know when he’s crying because he wants to be picked up and when he’s crying because he’s hungry or because of colic. There are spit-up stains on the shoulders of all my T-shirts, where he rests his mouth.
I carry him around the house. I’m not so worried anymore that I’ll hurt him. I stand in front of Diego’s photographs and tell the baby about his father. I try to trick him, saying, When Daddy comes back we’ll do this, we’ll do that.
The stump of his umbilical cord fell off. I smelled it. Then I opened the piano and put it in there among the keys.
By now I do just fine with the practical side. I know how to wash the baby, how to change him, how to feed him. The rest, I don’t know. I live in suspension, waiting for news. Even my gestures are suspended. I do everything but it’s as if I were going through the motions, like an efficient babysitter, as if this child had been entrusted to me and all I have to do is take good care of him until it’s time to give him back. I should love him already. It would be normal. But it’s as if all my love had died in Sarajevo, in those passageways through the filthy snow.
When I wake up at night, I don’t know how to leave my heavy sleep and take care of him. When I get up to make his formula, I burn my hands and make a mess in the kitchen. This baby from Sarajevo is hungry all the time, the hunger of his miserable origins.
It’s true, he smells good. I breathe it in through my nose. He’s still part sky and at the same time he’s already lake. But what am I to do with him? His too-good smell hurts. It slides into me like a pain. It could be the same smell his father had when he was born. His father should be here to smell it.
I take care of the baby without any real love, as if he were a car. I put in fuel, keep him clean, park him in the crib. Sometimes I go back to look at him in his sleep but it’s only because I’m looking for his father. Is there any resemblance? This baby will only really become mine when Diego returns and Pietro becomes ours.
I see Diego in my sleep. He’s carrying the baby in a baby carrier. He supports the baby’s head with one hand and holds me tight with the other. We walk along the river, down below, and it’s very peaceful. This peace is tangible in the dream. We’re no longer struggling against ourselves or against the things around us. Destiny is kind to us, almost as if it somehow needed us. It’s the first time we’ve felt useful to the flow. We understand what peace is, the meaning of this motion—this forward motion without hesitation into the world like the river water that pulls itself along its own course toward the culmination of its journey. We walk to the barge that has been waiting for us right where we left it, waiting to see how our story would end. Diego says, Thank you for the baby, because only now does he know what it means. Only now does he know that he’s safe.
For my entire life I’ll think that Diego might have managed to live if he’d held the baby even for just one night, if he’d held the breathing baby near him.
He doesn’t call, and I don’t wait by the phone. My dreams vanish by day. I have the photographs—the puddles, the feet, the wild-eyed faces of the Marassi ultras.
Then he does call, and his voice, tormented by the pain of life, is very far from the peace of the dream.
“What’s going on? Why don’t you come home? Is it because of your passport?”
He doesn’t even seem to remember.
“Oh, yeah. My passport. I found it.”
“Where was it?”
He says it fell out of a torn pocket into his boot.
He doesn’t ask about the baby. I’m the one who brings him up. I tell him Pietro’s doing fine.
It’s still really cold in Sarajevo, he says. Everything is exactly like before. The worst doesn’t even exist anymore because they’ve already experienced it and there’s nothing else, just the monotony of pain, like a lament being repeated over and over again.
The line drops and we’ve already said enough. It’s practically a miracle. But we haven’t given each other anything. There’s been no comfort.
I hang up the phone and smell Sarajevo: nettles, burning shoes, people standing in line to die. You’re not there, Gemma, I tell myself. It’s over. You’re out. I breathe in and choke. Dad brings me a glass of water.
“Drink, darling. Drink.”
But I know why I’m upset. It’s because now I know there’s no reason on earth I would want to be there to face that suffering.
My father will rock the baby tonight. He’ll sleep on the couch beside the piano.
“It’s no bother,” he says.
He sings a lullaby. His voice heals the wounds of the dark. He loves the baby. All he needed to do was look at him to love him. I, on the other hand, have my doubts. Every time I look into his eyes I think of his father’s wounded eyes, which no one is tending. It seems that this newborn is stealing life away in mouthfuls off Diego’s back. This is what I think and cannot say.
Dad doesn’t ask me anything. He’s afraid of my thoughts.
As he sings I think of the sheep’s belly and the look in her eyes as I left. Maybe they’d decided it all in advance. She knew he’d come back to her and her listless gaze concealed a swarm of underground thoughts. She knew she’d won. Maybe Diego convinced her to give me the baby to get rid of me, to send me off with something. They could have other children and I wouldn’t come away empty-handed from that ordeal.
He’d given me what I wanted. The child was the price of his freedom. I didn’t just pay deutschmarks. I exchanged one human being for another. Aska took the flesh of my love.
I start drinking a whole bottle of grappa. Dad says, That’s enough, and I say, I want more. Drinking saves me from hell by taking me back to hell. Back with them. I yell that I don’t want this baby anymore, that a Bosniak whore stole my husband, that she took advantage of my weakness to worm her way into our blood.
The eyes of the blue child come to mind. Why wasn’t he saved, rather than the child of those two wretches?
The baby cries. Dad picks him up and brandishes him like a cross, like an exorcist trying to repel evil.
Because tonight the devil is in our house, in this little Roman apartment with the white piano. I look in the crib and all I see are those two snakes still swallowing each other in the misery of that city. This starving piece of flesh is their brat. I should have left him there. His father and his mother could have taken him for a walk in his baby carrier through that ice-covered fire.
The dog barks. The baby cries like a stuck pig. Dad brutally thrusts him into my arms. Until this moment he’s protected him. Now he’s abandoning him to me.
“He’s your son. Do what you want.”
Why does he risk it? He isn’t usually so brave.
I take a few steps backward and fall onto the couch. I let the baby slide down next to me. If he were a snake he’d bite me and slide away. Instead he stays put, his cries muffled by the pillows. He’s incapable of moving, like a beetle on its back.
I stand up and move away. I go to the bathroom and throw up grappa. Because it now seems to me that there’s no difference between life and death, between motion and silence.
Dad’s gone. He dragged the dog with him. When he slammed the door it was as if the wall would come down, or the whole world. He went away in dismay.
I pick up the baby, raise my arms over my head and hold him suspended in the air. He seems to like the height. He stops crying. Every now and then a sob shakes him. He doesn’t seem to notice, just like when he spits up. For a while we play airplane. When he comes back down to earth he’s calmed down. He stretches his mouth in a way that’s reminiscent of a smile. I don’t put him in the crib. I stretch him out on top of me, belly to belly. It’s the first time I’ve done this. I don’t know which of us falls asleep first. I dream there’s a city resting on my belly. When I open my eyes it’s already daytime. It’s a Monday and Pietro slept the night through. He didn’t even wake up for a bottle.
Chapter 17
Dad was the one who got the call.
The Dubrovnik police found a folded scrap of paper with a few telephone numbers on it in Diego’s wallet and simply dialed the first number on the list. It was my father’s number, next to the word DAD, so they assumed the number belonged to the boy’s father. The official spoke Italian and so it all went relatively smoothly. Dad didn’t ask any questions. Right then he couldn’t have strung two thoughts together. He just said, I understand . . . I understand . . . I understand. Three times, like a robot.
Just what he’d understood he couldn’t have said. Those were the only words that came to mind, and he pronounced them loud and clear in order to deal with the situation with dignity, in order to stanch a hemorrhage that couldn’t be stanched.
My father was a dignified man, reserved, even shy. He wasn’t used to letting go, and so his body reacted to the pain by imprisoning it within.
When he knocked on my door a couple of hours later, his mouth hung crookedly, as if his chin had dragged it down, and one of his eyes was partially closed.
“What happened?”
He hadn’t even noticed his face was paralyzed. The dog came in behind him. I brought Dad to the bathroom mirror. He looked at himself without seeming to see, or at least without any interest. He nodded.
I was scared by his deformed face, his slurred voice, the listlessness of his one open eye. He needed to see a doctor, go for some tests. It might just be an ear infection, but it could be a stroke.
He had a paper bag of loquats with him. He’d been clutching it since he came in.
It was very early for loquats. Spring had just begun.
We went into the kitchen and sat at the table.
“Pietro?”
“He’s sleeping.”
Usually he ran to see the baby the minute he came into the house.
He washes the loquats. He takes one and polishes it with a kitchen towel, then removes the stem. I look at his hands for other symptoms. His gestures are very slow, but he seems to be moving all his fingers.
Dad breaks open the loquat and slowly extracts the shiny pit, which is divided into two parts.
He offers me half of the fruit. I bite into it and look at him. He’s brought the grainy orange flesh to his mouth but he can’t get it past his paralyzed lip.
Dad has a thick head of hair, a gentle face with clean lines, a classic nose. He’d be described as a handsome man. Every so often, though, he can look stupid, for example when he opens his round eyes a bit too wide and raises his eyebrows or when he wriggles his ears and nose on purpose—things he only does occasionally, to entertain children. There’s something austere about his face, so it’s surprising to discover it’s so mobile. When I was little my friends were crazy about my father’s eyebrows and ears.
This morning there’s that same stupid look on his off-kilter face, which appears to be frozen in a grimace that could be one of his party tricks except that it doesn’t go away.
Dad can’t swallow his loquat.
Tears well up in his open eye. One spills out and runs down his cheek.
I think it must be because of the paralysis. It seems ridiculous to be sitting here eating loquats when we should be racing to the hospital.
I stand and tell him I’m going to get the car keys.
He says, “Sit down, darling.”
The weak chirp that comes out of his mouth is as alarming as his maimed face.
He breaks open another loquat and offers it to me.
“Here. Eat this.”
I can’t swallow it. It sticks in my throat. This all seems so absurd, so implausible. Because now I realize that there’s a terrible secret concealed behind his miserably crooked face. It’s as if it were stuck in a scream suspended over a river, like in Munch’s painting.
I drop the loquat and remove the unswallowed pieces from my mouth.
I look at Dad’s one open weeping eye.
“Dad? Do you know something I don’t know?”
Now I remember that loquats are Diego’s favorite fruit. Dad always brought them for him.
“What’s going on?”
And I don’t understand why Dad decided to bring them today, when he probably had to go all the way to the city center to find them, seeing as they’re not in season yet, seeing as I don’t like them all that much, as he well knows.
There were a thousand ways he could have told me, or maybe just this one. He’s brought me the flavor of Diego when he was alive and that’s already something. It’s all we’ll have from now on.
Silently, we’ll eat loquats in memory of the photographer from Genoa, who scribbled Armando’s number next to the word that represented what he’d missed most. Dad.
Now I’m ready. The old memory is inside me, the refrain I learned in Sarajevo.
You have to let the sand pass through, let it slide down into the depths of your body. That’s the thing that keeps us on our feet no matter what, like the cement base of a deck umbrella.
“He’s dead. Am I right?”
Dad sits looking at me. Now I understand that his lopsided face has its origins in a place that’s as far away as the scream in the painting.
He doesn’t nod. He keeps staring at me out of the one open eye and the crack of the other. His head bobs like an inmate’s in a mental asylum.
He lets out a soft lament. Oh ... oh ... oh. Three times.
I wait for the collapse, my eyes on his distraught face.
Then, slowly, he nods, but ever so slightly, as if he weren’t really convinced. He sits there with his crooked chin, hesitating as if he were asking me—or those stupid loquats—to tell him that there’s been a mistake, that the dead man they found was not Diego but someone else.
I wait for his face to regain its composure, to rewind. But I know that can’t happen.
I lower my eyes and look away from this face devoid of itself, devoid of its sweetness. A face without peace. It feels like a last farewell from Sarajevo. My entire future is captive within it. From now on my life will contain nothing but this lopsided expression, this terrorized grimace.
Maybe my face, too, will be locked into a voiceless scream. My father and I will be a pair of cripples.
I fear for the old man. I’m afraid he’ll die, too. Now, in my kitchen. That he’ll collapse on the table among the loquats.
He looks at me to see if I’m losing it.
He’s scared. I smell his fear. It comes off his agitated hands as they fiddle with the fruits.
“Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
I’m not going to lose it. I’ve already learned everything I need to know. The lesson was part of the trip, part of the package. Everything was included in the deal.
I’ve already lived through this moment. In the Koševo morgue, between Jovan and the blue child, there was a naked metal stretcher. It was empty.
Now the stretcher—which I saw and forgot—has returned. Now I know that it was waiting for a third body between the old man and the child. Like a crucifixion scene awaiting completion. The boy from Genoa, the boy I married, had long ago announced to me his destiny. The rest of it—the passport that fell into his boot, Aska herself—they were just events. Everything had been foretold. We don’t decide on life and death. In between we can embark on a more difficult route, challenge destiny, but all we’re doing is teasing it.
I’m a widow.
I know I should react. Instead, I look at the loquats on the table. Even as I stand still I know I shouldn’t, because later it will hurt. I know I should cry, break down. It’s dangerous to retain your balance while everything collapses around you, to stay exactly where you are without moving an inch. It’s a pointless sort of heroism, as pointless as dignity.
