Nicola Gardini - Lost Words

“Give me back my clothes,” Rita shouted. “Chino, help me!”

Matteo dared me, “Go get them, if you can…”

He rolled her clothes into a ball and threw them as high as he could up into the skeletal branches of the magnolia tree.

Rita didn’t know what to do. She covered her breasts with her arms while Matteo squeezed her around the waist, restraining her and egging on his buddy, who fondled her however he pleased, just to humiliate her, without showing any display of pleasure. She begged them to stop with a tiny voice.

“Leave me alone! Please!”

While I was struggling to recover her clothes, climbing from branch to branch, the two boys were dragging her away.

By the time I reached them, Matteo was already bending Rita over the fountain. A few locks of her hair — which had come loose from her headband — floated in the water like algae above the dormant fish. But she resisted with a passive energy that would have been unimaginable only a few minutes earlier, while pressing her hands against the edge of the pool.

“Pietro, goddammit, help me out here!” Matteo shouted.

I grabbed him by his belt and tried unsuccessfully to pull him away.

Pietro, who at that point was standing back enjoying the show with his arms crossed, came over and punched Rita’s neck. Her feet slipped on the gravel and in a second she sank into the fountain, head, torso, legs. From the look of surprise that humanized their features for a brief moment, not even her assailants had expected her to fall all the way into the water. The second she resurfaced, blue and dazed, they fled as fast as they could, as if a sea monster were emerging from the pool.

“I’m cold…” she sobbed, “I’m cold…”

I handed her clothes back to her.

To keep my mother from seeing her, I made her crawl past the window on all fours. Luckily the lobby was deserted. I withdrew to the bedroom and started counting. How long would it take Signora Zarchi to call on the intercom?

Mantegazza still hadn’t left. She was energetically singing Giovinezza giovinezza while cradling a portrait of Mussolini. Once she had finished the fascist anthem, she started up with a Milanese folk song. My mother sang along with her, in a broken imitation of the local dialect. “What does the song mean?” she asked.

“Eh,” Mantegazza replied, “the southerners are always going on and on about how great Naples is. But look at them here, lazy good-for-nothings, stealing our jobs.”

The intercom rang, interrupting the song.

*.

The priest opened the door. Without uttering a word, he accompanied me to the kitchen, where Signora Zarchi and her daughter were waiting. Against all my expectations, Signora Zarchi welcomed me with a benevolent smile. She didn’t seem at all angry or threatening. Her clothes — quite colorful, as usual — conveyed an air of cheerfulness. She wore a purple tunic and around her neck she had tied an orange silk kerchief. Her blond hair was gathered behind her neck and held in place by a rose-shaped pin. An assortment of strangely-shaped brooches, crosses, long necklaces, giant rings, jingling bracelets, and anklets adorned every part of her body. Her feet were bare and her toenails were painted black, as were her fingernails.

Rita was sitting with a cup of hot milk, neatly dressed, and happy as a clam, in front of a wall-sized poster of snow-capped mountains — she could not have looked more different from her mother.

The priest opened a cupboard door, as if he were in his own home, took out a bottle of Johnny Walker, and poured himself a glass. Signora Zarchi invited me to have a seat. Then she withdrew to a corner of the kitchen. Padre Aldo suddenly raised his bald head and glared at me with two accusatory eyes. I quickly told him I had nothing to do with it — he should be talking to the other two boys. They were the ones to blame…

“I’ll take care of them later,” he interrupted. “For now I want to speak with you. You were there, right? When Matteo and Pietro threw Rita into the fountain…”

“Yes.”

“So why didn’t you do anything to stop them?”

I explained that I had gone to retrieve her clothes from the magnolia tree. I begged Rita to back me up, to tell him that I didn’t want to play their game and that I had defended her as best I could… if I had done any more they would have beaten me up!

Padre Aldo silenced me with a solemn gesture of his hand, to the delight of Signora Zarchi, who was hanging on his every word. He tossed down a gulp of whiskey and resumed his inquisition.

“The only reason we called you here was for you to apologize to Rita. The good Lord knows everything, it is beyond our powers to understand how and why. What is clear is that an innocent creature has been the victim of injustice. I imagine you must feel deeply ashamed about what happened, whatever did, in fact, happen…”

I repeated that I had climbed the tree to retrieve her clothes, but my explanation mattered little to the priest. He said I had allowed myself to be an accomplice to a deplorable act, which tarnished my name and the good name of my family.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” thundered Padre Aldo, lifting his glass.

He came so close to my face that I inhaled the whiskey on his breath and, for a second, I saw myself reflected in his glaring eyes.

“Taking advantage of a defenseless creature! Flaunting your physical superiority!.. Like an animal! God gave us reason — it’s our duty to use it, starting in childhood. There are no excuses! Violence is even worse when it is exercised over the weak, over a representative of the fair sex… Don’t you know that women are the most fragile creatures in the entire universe? All it takes is a single episode to ruin her… Women are delicate flowers, the most delicate…”

He cast a knowing glance at Rita’s mother, who was observing him dreamily.

“Any attack on a woman is an attack on life. By offending little Rita in that manner, you have offended yourself, you have profaned the most beautiful gift that has been given to you — the gift of being here, of being on this earth, of breathing this air. By the act you committed, you have become unworthy of this gift. Come now, ask for forgiveness! And with sincerity, with total love, otherwise it doesn’t count! Rita, good girl that she is, might even find it within herself to forgive you. But it is far more difficult to receive forgiveness from the Almighty, who can look into your heart and recognize a lie…”

I could feel myself suffocating. I gave a supplicating gaze to Signora Zarchi: exhausted, drunker than the priest, I begged for forgiveness. The Signora emerged from her corner, as light as a butterfly. She grabbed the glass of whiskey from Padre Aldo’s hand and took a sip.

“I forgive you,” she said to me. And to him, sweetly, “Aldo, that’s enough. It’s obvious that Chino is sorry.”

The priest ordered me to apologize directly to Rita. She was the offended one. But rather than offended, Rita seemed amused: for her the whole scene had been nothing more than another game. I bowed my head and told her I was sorry. She repeated the same formula her mother had used. “I forgive you.” The tension immediately eased up. The priest smiled at Signora Zarchi and she smiled back. Rita smiled, too. I was the only one to maintain a grave look on my face, which Signora Zarchi tried to erase by offering me a nice cup of milk. I mumbled that I had to go home to finish my homework. Rita insisted I stay. She dragged me to her bedroom and showed me her new television. A gift from Padre Aldo. It was a Telefunken, she explained, the best brand, as light as a feather. Even she could lift it and carry it around the apartment. Sometimes she even took it with her into the bathroom.