One Sunday morning I tried to improve myself with my mother’s makeup. But when she came into my room she said, laughing: you look like a Carnival mask, you have to do better. I didn’t protest, I didn’t defend myself, I asked her as submissively as I could:
“Will you teach me to put on makeup the way you do it?”
“Every face has its own makeup.”
“I want to be like you.”
She was glad to do it, complimented me, and then made me up very carefully. We spent some really lovely hours, joking, laughing with each other. Usually she was quiet, self-possessed, but with me—only with me—ready to become a child again.
Eventually my father appeared, with his newspapers; he was happy to find us playing like that.
“How pretty the two of you are,” he said.
“Really?” I asked.
“Absolutely, I’ve never seen such gorgeous women.”
And he shut himself in his room; on Sunday he read the papers and then studied. But as soon as my mother and I were alone she asked me, as if that space of a few minutes had been a signal, in a voice that was always a little weary but seemed to know neither irritation nor fear:
“Why did you go looking in the box of pictures?”
Silence. She had noticed, then, that I had been rummaging through her things. She realized that I had tried to scrape off the black of the marker. How long ago? I couldn’t keep from crying, even though I fought back the tears with all my strength. Mamma, I said between my sobs, I wanted, I believed, I thought—but I was unable to say a thing about what I wanted, believed, thought. I gasped, sobbing, but she couldn’t soothe me, and as soon as she said something with a smile of sympathy—there’s no need to cry, you just have to ask me, or Papa, and anyway you can look at the photos when you like, why are you crying, calm down—I sobbed even harder. Finally, she took my hands, and it was she herself who said gently:
“What were you looking for? A picture of Aunt Vittoria?”
8.
I understood at that point that my parents knew that I had heard their conversation. They must have talked about it for a long time, maybe they had even consulted with their friends. Certainly, my father was very sorry and in all likelihood had delegated my mother to convince me that the sentence I’d heard had a meaning different from the one that might have wounded me. Surely that was the case—my mother’s voice was very effective in mending operations. She never had outbursts of rage, or even of annoyance. When, for example, Costanza teased her about all the time she wasted preparing her classes, correcting the proofs of silly stories and sometimes rewriting entire pages, she always responded quietly, with a transparency that had no bitterness. And even when she said, Costanza, you have plenty of money, you can do what you like, but I have to work, she managed to do it in a few soft words, without any evident resentment. So who better than her to remedy the mistake? After I calmed down, she said, in that voice, we love you, and she repeated it once or twice. Then she started on a speech that until then she had never made.
She said that both she and my father had made many sacrifices to become what they were. She said: I’m not complaining, my parents gave me what they could, you know how kind and affectionate they were, this house was bought at the time with their help; but your father’s childhood, adolescence, youth—those for him were truly hard times, because he had nothing at all, he had to climb a mountain with his bare hands, and it’s not over, it’s never over, there is always some storm that knocks you down, back to where you started. So finally she came to Vittoria and revealed to me that, non-metaphorically, the storm that wanted to knock my father down off the mountain was her.
“Her?”
“Yes. Your father’s sister is an envious woman. Not envious the way others might be, but envious in a very terrible way.”
“What did she do?”
“Everything. But above all she refused to accept your father’s success.”
“In what sense?”
“Success in life. How hard he worked at school and university. His intelligence. What he has constructed. His degree. His job, our marriage, the things he studies, the respect that surrounds him, the friends we have, you.”
“Me, too?”
“Yes. There is no thing or person that for Vittoria isn’t a kind of personal insult. But what offends her most is your father’s existence.”
“What kind of work does she do?”
“She’s a maid, what should she do, she left school in fifth grade. Not that there’s anything bad about being a maid, you know how good the woman is who helps Costanza in the house. The problem is that she also blames her brother for this.”
“Why?”
“There’s no why. Especially if you think that your father saved her. She could have ruined herself even further. She was in love with a married man who already had three children, a criminal. Well, your father, as the older brother, intervened. But she put that, too, on the list of things she’s never forgiven him for.”
“Maybe Papa should have minded his own business.”
“No one should mind his own business if a person is in trouble.”
“Yes.”
“But even helping her was always difficult, she repaid us as destructively as possible.”
“Aunt Vittoria wants Papa to die?”
“It’s terrible to say, but it’s true.”
“And there’s no way to make peace?”
“No. To make peace, your father, in Aunt Vittoria’s eyes, would have to become a mediocre man like the ones she knows. But since that’s not possible, she set the family against us. Because of her, after your grandparents died we couldn’t have a real relationship with any of the relatives.”
I didn’t respond in a meaningful way, I merely uttered a few cautious or monosyllabic phrases. But at the same time I thought with revulsion: so I am taking on the features of a person who wants my father dead, my family ruined, and the tears flowed again. Noticing, my mother tried to stop them. She hugged me, murmured: there’s no need to feel bad, is the meaning of what your father said clear now? Eyes lowered, I shook my head energetically. So she explained to me softly, in a tone that was suddenly amused: for us, for a long time, Aunt Vittoria has been not a person but a locution. Sometimes, when your father isn’t nice, I scold him jokingly: be careful, Andrea, you just put on the face of Vittoria. And then she shook me lovingly, repeated: it’s a playful expression.
I muttered darkly:
“I don’t believe it, Mamma, I’ve never heard you talk like that.”