Nicola Gardini - Lost Words

“It must be some drunk,” my mother said, “let’s have a look…”

“You’re not going to open the door, are you?!”

“Let me handle it…”

She was already pulling back the bolt. She cautiously opened the door a crack, taking a peek outside, while my father got the longest knife from the table drawer.

“It’s Signor Zarchi!”

“Let me see…”

My father pushed her to one side and opened the door a little wider. The inarticulate howling continued, getting louder and louder. By now the whole building must’ve been awake. You couldn’t understand a word, only the repetition of a sequence of vowels: “ Ooooia, eee… ”

“What the hell is he saying? Is he drunk out of his mind?”

My mother called Signora Zarchi on the intercom.

“Madam, did you hear that noise? Down here, in the lobby, your husband is making a scene. He’s drunk as a skunk. Please come get him before something happens,” she said, removing the knife from my father’s hands and opening the door.

“Hey!” she shouted out, authoritatively, the way you would scold a child.

Startled by that unexpected voice, the enraged hulk of a man quieted down all of a sudden, turned slowly, and made a few shaky steps in my mother’s direction. She quickly closed the door and stood looking at him through the window. The poor man started howling again, but he had been placated, at least in part. He could barely stand. His jacket hung down on one side and his shirt was untucked from his dirty wrinkled trousers. He was gasping for air, and in the effort to speak clearly, he twisted his facial features into horrible grimaces, as if he wanted to convey an important message to my mother — and he was making progress, his utterances becoming clearer: the sounds that were indecipherable earlier, the ooooia ’s and eeee ’s, started to rearrange themselves gradually into two complete words. Whoooo, priiiee … The words coming out of his mouth were distorted, but he was clearly saying Whore… priest. Whore… priest. Whore… priest. Whore… priest. Whore… priest. Whore… priest. Whore… priest. Whore… priest.

“That whore is doing it with the priest!” my father translated, filling in the blanks in the syntax as if he were solving an ancient enigma.

Signora Zarchi arrived in a long pink dressing gown. From the opening of the elevator, she called out timidly to her husband. “Romano…”

He turned around and, recognizing her, lost what little reason he seemed to have regained: “WHORE!” is the word that burst out of his heart, through his lips. This time the word echoed loud and clear. Signora Zarchi retreated to the back of the elevator and, before closing the doors — setting aside her normally seraphic air — she begged my mother to have him taken away before he killed her, the animal. The elevator whooshed upstairs. The only thing the jealous husband could do was bang a fist against the frosted glass, through which you could see the rubber pulleys dangling, like a pair of lowered suspenders.

The tenants, who had been leaning over the railings the whole time, started to murmur. Malfitano’s parrot suddenly appeared in the stairwell, unleashing ear-splitting shrieks and snatches of prayer, until a call from his mistress brought him back to the second floor. The seamstress, Signora Mellone, and Signora Dell’Uomo collapsed in laughter, partly to ease the tension, partly because they were so amused by the bird’s performance. “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, out pops the parrot!” Then, perfectly coordinated, Vezzali and Paolini came down the stairs and immobilized Zarchi. He was so debilitated by alcohol and his outburst that even my mother could’ve tackled him. As soon as the two men took him by the arms, he sagged and ended up on the floor, at the foot of the stairs, as if he had rolled all the way down from the top floor. Signora Mellone suggested they call emergency services. A few minutes later the ambulance arrived. To speed things along, my mother opened the gate, letting the ambulance drive into the courtyard and park by the front stairs. Signora Zarchi came back down, this time with her half-asleep daughter. She had removed her dressing gown and donned a long dark dress. She dispensed her gratitude and apologies to the brood of hens as the emergency workers lifted her husband onto the stretcher. Getting into the ambulance herself, Rita repeated her mother’s words, which echoed into the empty night.

*.

By mid-March the stems of the roses were already as tall as me. If you looked carefully, in the midst of the luxuriant foliage you could also find an occasional rosebud. The air was filled with corpuscles, dust, and pollen, clumping together into fuzzy little balls that stuck to the sidewalk. The mud was drying in the fields and the tree branches were growing and adorning themselves with soft bright-green gems and fresh shoots. The hydrangeas were a halo of buds. The gray cat (my mother, ignoring the manager, had thought twice about getting rid of her) sharpened her claws on the bark of trees and wandered through the flower beds on the prowl for birds. At night she howled in heat, with an almost human lament. The children went back outdoors to shriek to their hearts content and the bigger boys played soccer in the field across the street. At night, behind the little hill, now cloaked in a light emerald fuzz, there were more and more cars parked with foggy windows.

My mother was also feeling the warmth of spring: she kept the window open from dawn to dusk, listening to the song of the blackbirds and the whisper of the breeze between the leaves of the sycamore tree. At the enchanting sound — despite the delay in the long-awaited announcement — she would start to daydream: in the new bedroom she would hang curtains like the ones she had seen in the Dell’Uomo apartment, beige with embroidered hems. She would buy any furniture she needed at the factory outlets in Brianza… There was no need to change the bed and the armoire right away — she could get by with what she had for a little while longer… But a proper sofa-bed was needed for me, one that could be pulled out with a finger or by simply flicking a switch…

Easter Sunday was like summer, and although my father didn’t suffer from the heat like my mother, he put on a short-sleeved shirt. The sunlit air billowed in white tufts. “I’ve never seen a spring like this,” my mother exclaimed as we left the church. “Can you smell it? Can you smell the fragrance?” The spring breathed new life into her dreams. The renewal of nature foretold the renewal of her life. Light and joy emanated from her face, as if something amazing had happened to her, as if she had fallen in love…

The moment had come for me to choose which high school to attend. The Maestra took it for granted that I would enroll at the Classical Lyceum. But my parents felt a technical school that taught bookkeeping would be more suitable. To my mother the Lyceum sounded too abstract; to my father it sounded ridiculous. What the hell was the point of studying Latin and Greek, two languages that hadn’t been spoken for centuries? There was no point whatsoever. It would be a joke, a waste of time and money…

One night, after closing, the Maestra came downstairs to the loge to plead her case for the Classical Lyceum. Bewildered by her unexpected visit, my father was completely disarmed by her arguments. He timidly suggested that we were proletarians who couldn’t afford to waste money and time on a useless education. She replied that the word proletarian was as old as the law of the twelve tables, the most ancient Roman legislation, and she launched into a praise of etymology and dead languages that left my parents tongue-tied.

The next day she helped me fill out the preregistration form.