“You mean if she acts crazy I say nothing?”
“Yes, keep in mind Giovanna’s there.”
“All right.”
“Don’t say all right if you don’t mean it. It’s a small effort. We’re there half an hour and we come home.”
I remember almost nothing of those forays. Noise, heat, distracted kisses on the forehead, dialect voices, a bad smell that we probably all gave off out of fear. That climate had convinced me over the years that my father’s relatives—howling shapes of repulsive unseemliness, especially Aunt Vittoria, the blackest, the most unseemly—constituted a danger, even if it was difficult to understand what the danger was. Was the area where they lived considered risky? Were my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins dangerous, or just Aunt Vittoria? Only my parents seemed to be informed, and now that I felt an urgency to know what my aunt was like, what sort of person she was, I would have to ask them in order to get to the bottom of it. But even if I asked them, what would I find out? Either they would silence me with a phrase of good-humored refusal—you want to see your aunt, you want to visit her, what’s the point?—or they would be alarmed and try not to mention her anymore. So I thought that, at least for a start, I’d have to find a picture of her.
4.
I took advantage of an afternoon when they were both out and went to rummage in a dresser in their bedroom where my mother kept the albums containing, in an orderly arrangement, the photographs of herself, my father, and me. I knew those albums by heart. I had often leafed through them: they mostly documented my parents’ relationship and my almost thirteen years of life. And so I knew that, mysteriously, there were a lot of pictures of my mother’s relatives, very few of my father’s, and, among those few, not a single one of Aunt Vittoria. Still, I remembered that somewhere in that dresser was an old metal box that held random images of my parents before they met. Since I’d hardly ever looked at them, and always with my mother, I hoped to find in there some pictures of my aunt.
I found the box in the bottom of the wardrobe, but first I decided to re-examine conscientiously the albums that showed the two of them as fiancés, the two of them as bride and groom frowning at the center of a small wedding party, the two of them as an always happy couple, and, finally, me, their daughter, photographed an excessive number of times, from birth to now. I lingered in particular on the wedding pictures. My father was wearing a visibly rumpled dark suit and was scowling in every image; my mother, beside him, not in a wedding dress but in a cream-colored suit, with a veil the same shade, had a vaguely excited expression. I already knew that among the thirty or so guests were some friends from the Vomero they still saw and my mother’s relatives, the good grandparents from Museo. But still I looked and looked again, hoping for a figure even in the background that would lead me somehow or other to a woman I had no memory of. Nothing. So I moved on to the box and after many attempts managed to get it open.
I emptied the contents onto the bed: all the pictures were black and white. The ones of my parents’ separate teenage years were in no order: my mother, smiling, with her classmates, with her friends, at the beach, on the street, pretty and well dressed, was mixed in with my father, preoccupied, always by himself, never on vacation, pants bunching at the knees, jackets whose sleeves were too short. The pictures of childhood and early adolescence had instead been put in order in two envelopes, the ones from my mother’s family and those from my father’s. My aunt—I told myself—must inevitably be among the latter, and I went on to look at them one by one. There weren’t more than about twenty, and it struck me immediately that in three or four of those images my father, who in the others appeared as a child, a boy, with his parents, or with relatives I’d never met, could be seen, surprisingly, next to a black rectangle drawn with a felt-tipped pen. I immediately understood that that very precise rectangle was a job that he had done diligently and secretly. I imagined him as, using a ruler that he had on his desk, he enclosed a portion of the photo in that geometric shape and then carefully went over it with the marker, attentive not to go outside the fixed margins. I had no doubts about that painstaking work: the rectangles were deletions and under that black was Aunt Vittoria.
For quite a while I sat there not knowing what to do. Finally, I made up my mind, went to the kitchen and found a knife, and delicately scraped at a tiny section of the part of the photograph that my father had covered. I soon realized that only the white of the paper appeared. I felt anxious and stopped. I knew that I was going against my father’s will, and any action that might further erode his affection frightened me. The anxiety increased when at the back of the envelope I found the only picture in which he wasn’t a child or a teenager but a young man, smiling, as he rarely was in the photos taken before he met my mother. He was in profile, his gaze was happy, his teeth were even and very white. But the smile, the happiness weren’t directed toward anyone. Next to him were two of those precise rectangles, two coffins in which, at a time surely different from the cordial moment of the photo, he had enclosed the bodies of his sister and someone else.
I focused on that image for a long time. My father was on a street and was wearing a checkered shirt with short sleeves; it must have been summer. Behind him was the entrance to a shop, all you could see of the sign was –RIA; there was a display window, but you couldn’t tell what it displayed. Next to the dark patch appeared a bright white lamppost with well-defined outlines. And then there were the shadows, long shadows, one of them cast by an evidently female body. Although my father had assiduously eliminated the people next to him, he had left their trace on the sidewalk.
Again I began to scrape off the ink of the rectangle, very gently, but I stopped as soon as I realized that here, too, only the white appeared. I waited a moment or two and then started again. I worked lightly, hearing my breathing in the silence of the house. I stopped for good only when all I managed to get out of the area where once Vittoria’s head must have been was a spot, and you couldn’t tell if it was the residue of the pen or a trace of her lips.
5.
I put everything back in order and tried to repress the threat that I looked like the sister my father had obliterated. Meanwhile I became more and more distracted, and my aversion for school increased, scaring me. Still, I wanted to go back to being a good girl, the way I’d been until a few months earlier: it was important to my parents, and I thought that if I could get excellent grades again I would be pretty again, too, and good. But I couldn’t; in class my mind wandered, at home I wasted my time in front of the mirror. In fact looking at myself became an obsession. I wanted to know if my aunt really was peeking out through my body, and since I didn’t know what she looked like I searched for her in every detail that marked a change in myself. Thus, features that I hadn’t noticed before became evident: thick eyebrows, eyes that were too small and dull brown, an exaggeratedly high forehead, thin hair—not at all beautiful, or maybe not beautiful anymore—that was pasted to my head, big ears with heavy lobes, a short upper lip with a disgusting dark fuzz, a fat lower lip, teeth that still looked like baby teeth, a pointed chin, and a nose, oh what a nose, how gracelessly it extended toward the mirror, widening, how dark the caverns on the sides. Were these elements of Aunt Vittoria’s face or were they mine and only mine? Should I expect to get better or get worse? Was my body—the long neck that seemed as if it might break like the filament of a spider web, straight bony shoulders, breasts that continued to swell and had dark nipples, thin legs that came up too high, almost to my armpits—me or the advance guard of my aunt, her, in all her horror?