Erri De Luca - Me, You

“It did me good to come here, to talk to you. I feel stronger now. Before I came, I was very nervous.”

She looked around, was reassured, took a firm step and laced her arm through mine, not taking my hand this time. Her sandals squeaked of new leather, the north wind blew her hair forward, covering her face. She said nothing more. We adjusted our stride to walk in step, pleased to be on a route of return.

“You’ve been a friend to me today. I’m an elephant and won’t forget it.”

She did not come again. As she walked away, she waved friendly good-byes and gave me toothy smiles.

The days were getting busy, departures imminent, occasions to meet desperately desired. I did not want to count the time, but it was short. And so I began to look for Caia, hoping to find her alone. That’s when the meetings came to pass. She was coming from the sea with her sandals in her hand, her feet all sandy, when she saw me and I made a brusque gesture with my arm the way one hails a bus at a bus stop. It wasn’t a greeting, it was a reflexive jerk, out of place. We were face-to-face; she scrutinized me carefully and spoke to me as though continuing a conversation begun earlier.

“I used to call my father Tateh . In our, language at home, Yiddish, it means papa. You just made a gesture that my father used to make at the school bus that brought me home every day. I would look for him at the window and he was always there waiting for me. It was my first year of school. You made the same gesture and I felt chills go down my spine. See, I have goose bumps. This is not the first time I see something of my father in you.”

I remained immobile, trying to stay still, forcing myself to refrain from any gesture, resisting the urge to make nervous movements that were forcing themselves on me. I did not want to yield to the temptation of blindly imitating unfamiliar gestures. I drew a breath and rubbed the back of my index finger under my nose to scratch it, even though it didn’t itch.

“That was one of my father’s tics when he was nervous. He rubbed his finger as you did and squeezed his eyelids. What are you doing to me?”

“I don’t know, Caia,” I said, making myself pronounce her name in the open, keep my distance, keep from embracing her, and keep myself from crying. The sun was out, I was happy to have found her, I could walk her home, tell her about the fishing trip, ask for her address to send her a letter or two when the summer was over, so why the hell did I want instead to cry, to hug her, to make a scene in the middle of the street?

She saw my confusion, which made me clasp my hands behind my back to keep from gesturing, saw me flounder, and then she smiled and came beside me. She took my arm and spoke with a touch of emotion that made her voice metallic: “Why you? I know there are moments when someone I lost comes close and inhabits an unfamiliar person, just for a moment, to greet me through the body of another person with an unmistakable movement or signal, just a signal, that’s all. I’ve known for a long time that I haven’t been left alone. You can call them fantasies, my need to believe, and you may be right. But I feel protected by this multitude of hardly perceptible signals. Until now, no one has ever brought together so many of them. They come from my father who is no more, but I don’t want to talk about him with anyone, not even with you. They come from my father and you are becoming his puppet, and I feel like asking him to stop it, to leave you alone.”

“No, Chaiele, I don’t want to be left alone. I don’t know what’s been happening to me in this brief period since I got to know you, but it’s a fulfillment. It’s not just the love of a bewildered kid, it’s anger against an evil I don’t know, or know by only a few names, it’s that I see you so alone you need someone to look after you, and that someone is me, an ordinary kid who feels the weight of years just because he happens to be near you. I don’t know how to tell you I love you because the only spot I’d like to kiss is where your forehead begins, under your hair.”

“Do it, do it! There’s no point telling you that’s where he used to kiss me.”

We stopped walking and I placed my palms on her temples and kissed the top of her forehead and I started to cry with a voice not my own, saying without rhyme or reason, “So much time, Chaiele, so much time.” Like an old man at a train, that’s how I cried, quietly, without sobbing, tears falling softly on the window, falling on Caia from my cheekbones, and she said: “It’s me, Tateh , your Chaiele, I know you never left me, I know, don’t cry, you are with me, always, leave this boy, let him have his own age, we’re something else, he can’t know, and yet he offered himself to you and me. I know, that time at the train you let me leave alone, but I didn’t cry then or even now, because I knew that you would find me, and so you did. You appeared behind so many faces, yet I always recognized you.”

Then she spoke in a language I had never heard and it was a cascade of words fit for a lullaby. And so I stopped crying and raised my lips from her forehead and my hands from her temples. I took her by the arm and walked her to the door of her house and watched her climb the stairs, turn to wave good-bye, and add that gesture of hailing a bus. I was left with rinsed eyes, a feeling of calm in the palm of the hand that had touched the pulsing of her veins, and the most absurd tenderness I had ever experienced, just from the sound of that name, Tateh .

She no longer reproached me for having infiltrated her secret. She had entrusted me with a name, a piece of her heritage. I had placed a kiss at the top of her forehead and she accepted it. She did not become angry as she had that evening on the terrace when she thought she had heard me say her secret name, Chaiele. I forgot to ask her address, but it didn’t matter. Even without letters I had a place close to her and a name, Tateh , that came from a time before I was in the world and awaited me on an island to be pronounced. So long as I was near her everything seemed natural, but away from her I did not understand the story of Caia and her father. I was aware only of the good fortune of serving as a bridge to her childhood. I could feel how much she depended on that bridge and on me. And I could feel growing in me a severity that contained both blessings on life and curses on the evil perpetrated against that life, and a serenity coupled with an urge to bang my fist on the table.

That’s why what happened afterward was the inevitable consequence of her childhood and of my precocious aging which had resulted from having met Caia. It had to happen that night in a pizzeria where Daniele’s friends were having a farewell dinner before separating one by one in the departures to follow. And it had to be that I was there too.

It was an evening of repressed high spirits that erupted in bursts, not choral and steadily rising, but nervous, self-indulgent: someone laughed by himself till the tears came, another drank one glass too many, someone else tried to find the right tone to take leave of the island and of the others. Toasts were proposed to all the different kinds of fish. Few other clients were in the pizzeria when a group arrived. The owner seated them on the terrace where we were. They may already have eaten, since they only ordered drinks.

No one paid them any attention except me. They were middle-aged Germans, men and women, about fifteen of them. Our dinner was in full swing and we were making noise. We were deciding where to go afterward and wild proposals were being made that increased the racket. The sound of clinking glasses and a few loud remarks began coming from the Germans’ table. Caia looked distracted and was staring in the direction of the sea. Someone called out to her, asked her how she thought they should spend the rest of the evening, and for a moment she was back among them with an answer. But her thoughts were elsewhere, perhaps on the forthcoming departures, or the interruption of the summer’s friendships by the return home.