Translated from the Italian by Jeanne Bonner
There’s fog in the courtyard when I go out back. It’s appeared now for three days in Milan. It slows everything down, the fog. It immobilizes things. Even the black row of garbage cans behind the restaurant seems to take on a certain attitude; they have a greater sense of composure.
I look up at the buildings forming the four sides of the courtyard around me. The laundry hangs out to dry, so many colorful squares of cloth in the faded air. And the landings in front of the tenements that line the courtyard, their doors facing outward. So beautiful, I think. Pami is emptying the compost bin. When she’s finished, there’s the sound of tin, the dull thud of the lid as it vibrates.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“I suggest you keep your distance. He’s really pissed off right now. It was a mad house here last night. He had to take over serving for you and people were grumbling because the food was taking forever to come.”
“It was an emergency.”
“He doesn’t give a shit.”
“I’ll explain it. Just where is he?”
I close the door gently after her. As soon as I step inside, I see Ros standing in the middle of the dining room, with his legs spread wide, staring at me. I only manage to open my mouth before he says, “You’re fired.”
I don’t even put up a fight. I line up my heels, my bag pressed tightly to my side, and I’m gone. What’s always screwed me when it comes to men is my insistence that I can get by one way or another without their help. In any event, I have the day off, 600 euros to make it through the month, my resume to copy and the wheel turning again. The city widens before me with each step; I move forward and the city becomes immense. The traffic means nothing to me; I don’t need to rush, I’m not cold and I don’t even have the strength to despair. Along the street there are lots of moving shadows and the trees look as though they are lit on fire by the sun. I have a city at my disposal, but I have no intention of taking advantage of it.
I open the door to my building, take my mail from the mailbox and enter my apartment. Intesa Bank has written to me and there’s a notice from a certain Mr. Gas Company.
The silence of the empty rooms kills me. I turn on the TV, undress and sit in front of the screen in a t-shirt and my underwear. They’re showing a live image of people in boats and the TV announcers are saying these people want to come to Italy, that in Italy everything is better, there’s work. I’m in the mood for something crunchy. I use one hand to open a packet of crackers, chewing them while I turn on the shower with my other hand. I have all Saturday and half of Sunday free; this is Max’s weekend. I can’t even start looking for work. I think I will just take a lot of showers. A lot of showers.
The sensation of my skin being sponged over by the hot steam soothes me. My face has been erased, I feel as though it’s featureless, a fleshy mask without openings. No one can see me anyway. I pad over the tiles, leaving watery footprints with my dripping wet heels, then I stop to pick up from the hallway floor the little blue truck with flames on the sides. I put it on Lori’s desk. His silver cape is balled up on his bed. I fold it in half, then in half again. Lori’s things are waiting for him. Just like me, come to think of it. My bathrobe vibrates. I see a telephone number on my cell that I don’t know.
I pick up. “Pronto?”
“How are you?”
Nice work, I think, never saving anyone’s name in the phone. “Fine,” I say.
“Well, I’m fine, too,” he says.
I have a vague recollection of this guy – he’s hot, a friend of Pami’s, and a complete stranger. I say nothing and wait.
“I’ve heard you’re not working tonight – ”
“Well, that’s a euphemistic way of putting it.”
He goes on. “– and since you’re not working, I was thinking we could grab a beer together.”
“We can celebrate me getting fired.”
I can feel him smile down the phone line. You want to sleep with me? Find someone else, I think.
My towel keeps getting colder so I go in my room. There I undo the towel wrapped around my head like a turban and I rub my hair dry with my left hand. In the other hand, I hold the phone.
“I would but I’ve already made plans. I’m going to see a movie.”
“Oh really. Which one?”
Right – which one. “Il posto delle fragole,” I say.
“Did that just come out?”
Oh sure. It’s brand new, I think to myself. Or it was in 1957. The useless things you learn when you graduate with a degree in Film Studies. There’s a moment of silence on the line, but without any tension. At least not for me. As far as I am concerned, we could sit here in silence forever.
“Well, I guess we’ll just try another time.”
“Yep, another time,” I say, echoing his words.
When I hang up, my feet are freezing, I absolutely have to put on a pair of socks. In the strip of a mirror hanging on the wall, my nude body is cut off. But if I stand in profile, I can see my whole body. I do that and I see my shoulder blades jutting out, too bony, my back and my round, adolescent breasts. In a few years, I won’t still look like this, so I should take advantage while I am still young. I really should force myself to do what all the other women do – imitate them, copy their moves. Actions convey thoughts. That way I would learn the right intentions — I’d move on, without indulging my innate tendency to avoid. That’s how I prefer it.
I don’t know how to act in certain situations. Or maybe I don’t want to know how. I’m like a piece of frozen meat that’s been left in the middle of a glacier. It doesn’t break free and become unstuck – it thickens. Giving the block of meat a kick isn’t a solution. You move it from A to B but you don’t change its nature.
I turn on my other side. If I suck in my stomach, each individual rib sticks out enough that you can count them. I’m a freakin’ little girl. Yep – I look like a girl, I think. I look like a girl – which means I am not one anymore.
While I grab a pair of panties and a t-shirt from my bureau, a message comes in: “Mommy I make you a pikture.” In life, we’re each given one good thing. And mine is Lori. I eat, I have something to drink and I watch TV and more TV and more TV and…When I open my eyes next, I feel pins and needles in my shoulder. My arm is rigid; it just hangs there, numb, as if I’d been shot up with Novocain. I search for the remote control under the couch cushions with my good arm and I turn off the TV. The murmur of voices disappears and visually, I’m plunged once again into a world of static.
I look at my phone and I see the tiny, bright green envelope icon is flashing. I have two messages: “How was the film……?” The ellipsis seems to never end. Maybe if I took all the dot-dot-dots and put them together, I’d get the drawing of the guy fishing who catches an old shoe? Do I delete the message or reply? I open the other message: “Mommy I brushed my tooths. I’ll bring you chestnuts tomorrow. Buonanotte.”
I mitigate the silence in the house by cleaning. The detergent burns my eyes and makes my nostrils flare. Cleaning is therapeutic for me. I feel useful. It gives me a precise focus and a task I can complete. At first, everything is dirty. Then it’s clean. Action, then result. Sensible, necessary activities.
I get hungry at 3 o’clock. Twenty minutes later, I’m already snoozing. I dream I’m in some speed warp dimension and I’m falling through the air. And while I’m falling – right before the impact – I hear the doorbell ring. The sound separates from my nose dive fall and I’m momentarily split in two.
I come to from my sleep, annoyed; it was such a pleasant fall. I open my eyes and go to answer the buzzer.
“It’s me,” she says.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people who show up unannounced. I press the button to let her in then I hear the sound of the large front door of my apartment building clicking open.
“Did something happen?” I ask.
She comes inside and I close the door securely. She moves through the apartment with a blast of caramel scent trailing behind her. She uses those creams that smell like refined sugar. Looking around, her eyes swoop over the walls again and again.
“Wow, this house is as clean as a whistle.”
“Every other Sunday,” I say.
I start to make coffee while she remains standing. She’s wearing killer heels and is dressed as though she is headed out for a night in discoteca. She pulls a chair out from the table so she can hang her jacket.
“So he’s already replaced me,” I reply after she fills me in on everything.
She gets up from the table and places her used coffee cup in the sink, then she leans her lower back against the edge of the table. I automatically scoot backwards to do the same. Her pelvis is right in front of me, as if it were staring at me. Her arms, though, are perched slightly above it, folded.
She nods in the direction of Lori’s door. “And my little boyfriend? Where is he?”
“He’s in the woods, gathering chestnuts with his father.” I used to like those woods, too, I think.
“Good, we can get right to the heart of the matter.”
I say nothing.
“Listen, my friend is good-looking and he does well for himself.”
“Good for him.”
“And he tells me he likes you. You have a certain way about you.”
“What way?”
“A kind of weirdness.”
“I’m not weird. Do you think I’m weird?”
“What does it matter what I think?”
“I mean, if I were weird, would you tell me?”
“Well, I’m not a guy.”
“So I appear weird only to guys? I feel like I’m talking to my son. Boys, girls – as if there were real gender identities.”
“If you say one more thing like ‘gender identity,’ I’m out of here.”
I look over at the window. The weather is non-weather. What season is it? I don’t know. They put up a sheet of plywood behind the glass. A piece of plywood where the horizon should be. I bump into it all the time, hitting my head because I am so insanely tired. Other people avoid it, they ignore it, as if it didn’t exist.
“Insomma, how old are you?
“Can I ask what you want from me this morning, Pami?”
“It’s not morning. Do you see what I mean? Don’t you see what’s happening to you?”
“OK, read my lips. I.Don’t.Have.A.Job.”
“You.Don’t.Have.A.Man.”
Great, let’s get to the bottom of everything right now.
I go over to the bathroom to close the door. Lori’s shoes are in the washer; as they move around inside, they bang rhythmically, creating a steady background noise, a percussion of soles. The same note. Always the same. I’m 33, I think. Maledizione. I’m 33 years old and in a flash, I’ll be 40.
Eventually Pami says she has to go – something about a message she got. She collects her things in a hurry and is gone. It gets dark and I turn on all of the lights in the apartment so I don’t have to see the spooky shadows on the walls when I walk around.
Lori runs past me in the hallway. He says he has to use the bathroom. I follow him with my gaze then I look back at Max’s pained face. I keep my hand on the door knob. He’s not coming in anyway. He readjusts his eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose; it’s a new tic of his. He’s been doing it over and over now for a few months. When we were together, he didn’t do it, this tiny repetitive movement. It could drive you nuts. But maybe he just needs to tighten the screws on the frames.
“How did it go?” I ask.
“Bene.”
“Is there something I need to know?” Is it about Sandra, I wonder? But I don’t say it.
“No,” he says. “Everything is okay. I’m just tired. We’ll talk another time.”
Once upon a time, I think, as I close the door. But it didn’t go that way.
I look at my wrists, where the straps of the plastic bag full of chestnuts are cutting off blood to my hand. Not sure what I am going to do with them.
Lori’s heavy stomping around the house revives me; I’m whole again, I think to myself. I order pizzas, then cut Lori’s into pieces. He grabs slice after slice, completely concentrated on eating. As he’s nibbling on a piece of crust, he informs me quite casually that he hasn’t done his homework.
“Why didn’t you do it on Saturday?”
“Do you know I beat him twice?” he asks triumphantly. “Twice!”
“All you did was play video games?”
“The Wii isn’t a game.”
He’s 37, Max. Thirty seven years old.
“Get the assignment,” I say to Lori.
“I know what I have to do.”
“Get the assignment.”
He gets down from the chair and walks down the hall, dragging himself with a sulky air. A moment later he’s back and he sits down. I move the plates, flip through the assignment quickly and then I look up. He’s spread out under the table like a dead man, bits of his half-eaten dinner around him.
I point my finger squarely at his nose and he goes cross-eyed looking at it. His eyes distort as he stares.
“Listen and listen up good,” I say. “I’m only going to do this because it’s late. But it’s the last time. Promise me that it’s the last time.”
“Va bene, I promise.”
“Don’t forget that you’ve promised.”
“Yup.”
“A promise is serious business.”
“I know.”
I quickly read the exercise we have to do. “You do two, and I’ll do three.”
“But you said you were going to do it!”
“You do two, I’ll do three. Got it?”
He nods, and I have him pass me his pencil case. As I unzip it, each tooth in the zipper makes the “zzz” sound. I look for a pen.
“Mommy?”
“What is it?”
“What if Sandra and Max get married?”
I balance the pen on my middle finger while Lori props himself up by his elbow, his cheek resting in the palm of his hand. That man is becoming more and more of a stranger to me every day. We were always against marriage; it was the cornerstone of our relationship. It’s my fault. I struggle to imagine a life that’s anything other than predictable. I want nothing more than an average existence. A neutral spot without peaks and valleys, without any new development to deal with. I’m not even asking to be happy or whatever – I just want a long enough period of time without any changes.
Marriage. Fantastic. Just what we needed.
“Mommy?”
“That’s their business,” I tell him.
I look at the previous page to get back to what we’re doing. Right: three sentences about autumn.
“Esercizi D’Autunno” – originally published in Granta Italia
Francesca Marzia Esposito is the author of the novel, “La forma minima della felicità,” which was published by Baldini & Castoldi in 2015. She lives in Milan where she teaches dance. She studied film at the Catholic University of Milan. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, GQ and other publications.
Image Credits: Marco
