Echoes

I

At siesta time, I would go to the Berros’s house next door. The mother, Georgina, was French and would play the violin in the afternoon. The girls, Nélida and Amalia, must have been about twenty years old; I was ten. That family really loved me—they’d help me with my homework, and I’d come and go as I pleased.

At the Berros’s, in the courtyard, there was a spiral staircase that led to the sewing room. I went up the stairs. I knocked on the window.

Nélida answered. She said they were sleeping and I should come back later. I heard Amalia tell her sister to let me in. I disliked the idea of having to wait as much as I disliked the idea of leaving. But soon I heard the sound of bare feet and a bolt sliding open.

“Come in,” Amalia said, naked, with a triangle of dark hair beneath her belly and violet-tipped breasts. And then she added: “Take off your clothes and get in the bed.”

Everything happened very fast, like when someone shows you a photograph and hides it in the same movement. Dizzy with danger, all I could do was obey. I took off my clothes and got in the bed.

Nélida pretended to be asleep, allowing a view of her back, her waist, her thighs, her messy hair. Amalia made herself comfortable and the silent torture began. At the foot of the bed, the cretonne quilt was piled up like a mountain range of flowers.

In a corner of the room, there was another womanly shape, also naked, that always made me anxious: a headless mannequin held up by a pole on a tripod.

As the seconds passed, my eyes adjusted to the shadows. A dim light enveloped us all. To my right, Nélida’s back arched at the waist, and her buttocks lay in the shadows, and all the shapes of her pearly skin undulated faintly with her breathing. To my left, Amalia had spilled her breasts toward me, and one of her violet tips was brushing my arm.

I knew nobody slept in that room. Even the mannequin was like a watchful sentry. The sewing machine had a black-and-chrome head that made it resemble an alert dragon.

I lay motionless. The two women radiated a heat that almost burned. And then, all at once, like the roar of a sudden storm, I heard Nélida and Amalia erupt into a laughter that obliterated life itself.

I felt like the spiral staircase would never end.

II

Our parents were quiet people. I think it had something to do with their poverty. I also believe they thought life was a risk that could only be faced by paying a kind of tribute—working—and that it was through work, and only work, that one could conquer the following day, not just in terms of sustenance, but also in metaphysical terms, as though work were the price required to maintain the confusing privilege of existing in the world.

Yes, our parents were quiet, and cautious, and in a way they enclosed us between the walls of their prudence. Vigilant, they kept us within the boundaries of their care.

We, their children, were called to fearlessness. Adventure, however literary or superficial, was the only thing that delighted us. Perhaps that was so we could love them from the other side of reality, opposite to the reserved and private zone they inhabited.

Like me, my best friend lived across the street from Plaza Irlanda. Of the many loopholes we came up with to evade the rigid world of our parents, our outings in the plaza are what I remember best.

We’d make plans to meet at dusk in letters we left under each other’s doors. We’d briefly indicate the time, affirm that this was a meeting of gentlemen, and decide on the exact meeting place via a secret code. Often, the letters were written in lemon juice and had to be read by candlelight.

Like I said, on Sundays, her paisanos would come visit, and they’d praise her cooking fragrant with sage, rosemary, and other herbs we grew in the garden.

By ourselves, at the hour when the paths in the park took on a violet tone, we’d walk while hatching plans beneath the silence of the trees. Ivy poured from the bronze urns, whose almost cubic bases grew gigantic with the shadows.

We’d devise incredibly complex projects and debate which monument would be better for burying, for greatest possible safekeeping, the two iron rings we always kept hanging from our belts. The disks symbolized an absolute secret we’d keep, which in turn represented immense truth and total power.

Once on the ground, we would check the plans we’d drawn to connect the monuments via tunnels, creating an underground network of catacombs where we would safeguard the nameless treasure.

Our pace would slow and our voices would hardly rise above the silence. And the plaza, almost deserted, would begin to resemble a cavern in the creeping darkness.

Afterward, now nourished with mystery, we’d return to the unequivocal world of our parents—a quiet, hard-working world, in which the only adventure was just that: work, silent work.

III

On Sundays, my grandmother’s friends would visit. They were from Lombardy. They’d come from Gardone, from Salò, from Riva—in short, from the towns on the Lombard side of Lake Garda.

My grandmother was still a young widow then. Healthy, strong, clearheaded, her voice a rich contralto. Hardly fifty years old, she had hair the color of copper, very white teeth, and mauve eyes.

At a table under the fig tree, during the summer—which is when this all took place—my family would sit with Giacomo, Agnese, Carlo, Eda, Lucio, Silvana, and, at the head of the table, “El Barba.” That’s what his friends called him. He had the face of a king and a reddish beard that was very well kept, and he wore boots that went halfway up his calves, striped shirts, and—I always saw him in the same one—a jacket the color of my grandmother’s eyes.

After lunch, which always received the highest praise, they’d reminisce about friends and relatives who’d stayed in Italy, recall old traditions, and finally submit to the ritual of silence and song.

As is often the case when a group of people spend a lot of time together, a kind of ceremony was established. Each of them sat in their usual place at the table. They discussed certain mandatory topics in a prescribed order. I would say that an unfailing sequence played out until it came time to sing.

This is how it would happen: a long silence would build. They’d serve themselves more wine. The fig tree would allow a golden light to filter through. And if El Barba detected even a momentary lull, it was he who would suddenly start to sing—one or two slow, emphatic lines. Again, a brief silence. Then they would all begin to sing in chorus.

And you’d see their green or pale-blue eyes, their striped shirts, the men’s strong hands, and hear my grandmother’s contralto, Agnese’s soprano, Lucio’s bass, the serene voice of Eda, Silvana’s mirthful tones, and your awe before this group of singers would only cease when their voices rose in a held note that resolved in measured laughter.

Some of them would pour themselves more wine. And then, silence once again. And then, suddenly, Lucio’s thick voice would propose another song. Once more, they’d search their memories for the words. At last, the music would be retrieved, and under the fig tree, through song, the Italians would pretend that time and space were illusory.

IV

Fiorella was born in Italy. She was my age. A low unplastered wall separated the backyards of our houses. Sometimes a few small weeds would sprout from between the bricks.

Since her father was a marble worker, often the broken columns he built would appear like abrupt growths next to the dividing wall, or a stone angel would emerge, or an allegorical figure, and so, for weeks at a time, the back of my house would transform into a cemetery.

The angel Fiorella’s father made was always the same, though sometimes larger and sometimes smaller. The angel’s head always tilted toward his left shoulder, and his body was enveloped in a pair of long feathery wings that reached his feet.

The allegorical figure was always the same as well, even when it changed sizes. It was a harp enveloped in wreaths atop a tall, fluted column.

Most abundant, however, were the broken columns of different diameters and heights.

Fiorella would climb atop some stone blocks, and I, onto a tall bench, and leaning over the wall, each on our own side, we’d talk or stand in silence for a long time, staring at each other with our faces very close, feeling our breath in each other’s mouths, and peering into each other’s eyes.

There was a wall between our bodies. One day we began to play a kissing game. Always standing on the block and the bench. And if at first the kisses were short, before long we came up with a different way to play.

Whoever arrived first would wait. The second to arrive had to place their lips softly on the other’s, and, eyes closed, without separating our mouths, we’d fall into a kind of deep sleep, like two people who’d done a marvelous job and whose bodies were now bent from exhaustion.

V

My home was very feminine. Everything revolved around my grandmother. Three aunts and a female cousin much older than me lived there too. My father was a traveling salesman, and he’d come home once or twice a month, and only for a few days.

So there I lived in a world of women, full of feminine phenomena: chignons, cotton balls, politics (meaning every action had a calculated purpose), a preoccupation with food, starched sheets, gleaming floors, sewing, and knitting.

In addition to being feminine, my home was welcoming. My aunts’ friends were always coming to sleep over. Especially Palmira and Estela, the latter of whom I was in love with.

It wasn’t unusual to hear sentences such as these: “If Palmira is coming tomorrow, we’d better make a rice.” “If Estela is coming on Thursday, we should get all the embroidery ready; she loves to use the sewing machine.”

Like I said, my father was almost always traveling. My mother had died. I slept by myself unless my father was there. We shared the middle of the three bedrooms, and although they were connected by internal doors, in general we only used the ones that opened onto the corridor and courtyard.

So when my aunts’ friends came over, since the only available bed was my father’s, they’d sleep in my room.

This is how I remember things: they’d send me to bed after dinner. I would go. After a little while, I’d hear my aunts and the friend talking and laughing. I was supposed to be sleeping.

Everything would go quiet after the laughter. Then Estela, for example, would appear silently in my bedroom. She would turn on a small lamp on the bedside table and begin to undress. Estela was young and liked to look at herself half-naked in the wardrobe’s oval mirror.

Wearing black stockings, violet garters, and no bra, atop her high-heeled shoes, she’d stand and brush her hair for a long time. Her skin was very white, her hair very black, and she had dark circles under her eyes.

I remember the garters had a wavy tulle trim. Vaguely, I know, remember, or think that she smelled of anise when you kissed her.

Finally, Estela would sit on my father’s bed and then, very slowly, take off the garters and black silk stockings.

VI

When things started to go badly, we had to rent out a few of the rooms at the back of the house. Don Juan, a retired meat-packer, and his wife, Casilda, arrived more like visiting relatives than tenants.

I lived alongside those two elderly people for a large part of my childhood. What made them unique was that they were criollos who could share in the world of gringos, which my grandmother interpreted in her own way.

Don Juan and Doña Casilda introduced the custom of drinking maté in the house. I mainly remember him with his drooping mustache, and her in her black housedresses patterned with small white flowers, sitting beside the door of one of their two rooms, beneath the vines, with a blue enamel kettle they heated to brew endless matés.

I should note that, although on summer nights they occasionally took me for ice cream, the old people spoke to me little. To everyone else, however, Don Juan would tell stories of epic deeds, explain the meanings of certain words, and talk about a thousand other things while the others listened in respectful silence.

One night there were whisperings in the house. The lights in the courtyard were kept on. My aunts were like shadows. I fell asleep after stirring up private omens.

Strangely, the next morning they brought breakfast to me in my room. Then, as always, I went to school.

When I got back, they told me Don Juan had died. I received the news as if I already knew. The house was flooded with the nauseating stench of tuberoses and other inexpensive flowers.

From the back courtyard I caught a glimpse of Don Juan laid out in his coffin, a cross, and candles ominously lit during the day. Doña Casilda was in one of the low chairs where they sat to drink maté, her head barely reaching the height of her dead husband.

I went into the bathroom and vomited. They sent me to bed. I woke up at around four in the afternoon. I heard voices, scuffling, weeping, and in the street the noise of horseshoes striking the granite cobblestones. From the courtyard, through the slatted blinds, a light came in that smelled like flowers.

When the silence returned, my grandmother brought me a glass of orangeade and told me there was nothing to worry about.

VII

I’ve described a visit to my neighbors, what I can recall about my aunts’ friends, Sunday lunches with the paisanos from Lombardy, what happened beside the low wall between my house and Fiorella’s, games in the plaza across the street from where I lived, and the death of an old man.

Rereading these pages, I realize our memories must retain an endless accumulation of events and circumstances like the ones I’ve described, which resemble deposits of substances time transforms beneath the earth.

I ask myself how I’ve experienced these things, how I’ve retrieved them, and through what sieves (which also modify them) they’ve passed. I ask myself if, when one speaks of his own childhood, one is speaking of himself or of someone else who has been completely erased at the exact moment in time he has been granted to witness.

I ask myself if imagination doesn’t collude with memory so that some facts always retain their secret truth. I ask myself if the events one has already lived aren’t transformed into others by the burden of new experiences weighing upon them.

And then I think it’s likely nothing happened as I’ve described, and instead, when one day after lunch I went to the Berros’s house and knocked on the window to the sewing room and was told to come back later, perhaps, sitting on the landing of the spiral staircase, I fell asleep.

And maybe the truth is that, in the solitude of my room at night, after listening to the voices and laughter of my aunts and counting the days until my father returned, I imagined or dreamed the presence of a woman whom I confusedly wanted to love.

And perhaps the parties the Italians threw were in truth only echoes of the hazy tales my grandmother told me about a faraway country, which she, too, spoke of as though it were an imaginary land, confused about what she remembered and what she’d forgotten.

And so that dividing wall from which I would look at death in the marble angels and columns could have actually been, for me, as it was for Fiorella, a place from which to glimpse the other edge of an unusual childhood; because when Fiorella leaned toward my house, she did so in order to see our garden and our fig tree, as though the vegetation were her private metaphor for life.

And therefore the plaza I’ve described might be a version compiled from multiple dreams, through which I wanted to re-create monuments whose faces have already been erased by oblivion, by a forgetfulness that turns everything into what is unmistakably the past.

And thus it’s possible that Don Juan never died, but my believing he had was a secret form of my fear and my love for the people who, by their presence alone, have shown us the mystery surrounding love and fear.

But perhaps it matters little what one rescues from reality and what one confuses with fantasy when one is speaking of childhood. Perhaps it matters more to understand its lonesome darkness must remain inviolable, like a secret, which, if its veil were lifted, would reveal only a stubborn silence: the true shape of oblivion.