The Perfect Circle Page 10

  The staff upend the chairs on the tables, wash the floor with water full of ammonia, brush the stairs with water full of ammonia, scrub down the kitchen with water full of ammonia. Mario turns off the music to count the money in the cash and on good nights, he’ll sing. He pours himself one last beer, offers one to Marianne — “Take your medicine” — and sometimes gives in as well to the pleas of the bartender, who isn’t old enough yet. Between three and five every morning, the place is cleaned from top to bottom and a tireless Grazia runs from one employee to another, lavishing advice: “Put more water in your bucket, drag it along the floor if you can’t lift it, come on, hurry up, I’ve got other things to do, quick, bring me the broom, we need it in the kitchen, did you put ammonia in your water? Yes? Then put some more.” Her confidence in ammonia is absolute, it’s true veneration, as if through it she hopes for purification not just of the floor but of the soul as well, as if she herself could be cleansed by ammonia. Because, in a word, she’s sick.

  Marianne picks up the cash purse behind the bar, sits at a table, and divides the tips in six. Each of them gets enough for a coffee. They know that most of the tip money has disappeared, they’ve seen bills passing from tables to cash register, which is locked, but no one brings it up because bringing it up wouldn’t change the distribution but it would put at risk the only job available. Each of them receives the germ of a tip that avarice has set aside — a piddling amount, a sum that doesn’t even show the intelligence that misers often have to conceal their vice.The cook pockets hers with her usual grunt, the pizzaiolo says thanks. The dishwasher cries out pompously: “Marianne, darling, I’ll take you out for supper,” and because he makes her laugh, Grazia warns him about Marco, who’s jealous and has a gun.

  The night is over. It lasted a year, two years, maybe ten, it lasted a century. If they are able not to think about tomorrow night they’re relieved, pleased, ready to sink into sleep where, time and again, full glasses will crash to the floor. At the end of the week, each of them will get his pay — less than half the legal minimum wage — enough for one Da Nerone meal and even then without dessert.

  Coming home from work around four a.m., Marianne, followed by two scrawny dogs, speeds across the main square and her bike, held together by a single bolt, makes a terrible racket on the uneven cobblestones. She drives along the lake, the animals from the travelling circus, and the moonlight trembling on the water’s surface. At night the dark garden is hers, vanished, swallowed up in the heavy floral perfume that the heat preserves, and the spies are all asleep — Luigi, Santa, Giovanni, Alfredo, Illuminata, Fausto, Castissima, the aunt with her cancer and her wig, the great-uncle and his dissolute gaze, dormono tutti. Marianne, invisible, exhausted, empty, sits on the doorstep and slowly lights a cigarette, its orange brand burning a hole in the night.The trees shudder above the sloping roof of the shed, she looks for a long time at the smoke rising up to the stars, and listens to the communal spring running under the cement. In a while she’ll collect what she needs for watering the flowers and the beans. At four a.m., the water pressure is very high, the watering can fills up right away. In the house, she doesn’t turn on any lights. She takes her shower and washes her blouse in preparation for the next day.Then fades away into a deep sleep.

  Should we think of work as a secondary activity?

  No.

  You should work saying yes, more, why not, gladly.To grasp that had taken Marianne several dozen nights of watching the clock whose hand didn’t move; of sensing behind the conciliatory words spoken to herself, the rumble of a mixture of hatred and pity, mulling over in vain the possible economic outcome, all of it leading to the oppressive revolt that’s shared by the proletariat of the entire world.

  Now and then Grazia and Mario have been denounced to the authorities by employees, they’ve paid fines, Mario without a word, Grazia crying scandal. Never, though, have they been subjected to a surprise inspection, most likely because they know personally whomever it may concern.

  The pizzaiolo has two children. He lost his job as a bus driver when the company went bankrupt. Since then, he considers himself lucky to spend seven nights a week covered in flour and sweat for a salary that’s barely enough to keep a dairy cow alive. He’s the only one who smiles all night because, he says, “It beats crying. How about you, Marianne, how’s everything, I’m going to make you a pizza, I’ll hide it, look, on the top shelf, it’s already midnight, and in September, I’ll take you to visit Santa Marinella.” His eyes betray his fatigue and his despair, the vague fear that his sons will turn into anchovies and he himself into an eggplant, and because that admission passes through his smile as if it were the grille of a confessional, he gains at once in both modesty and tragic grandeur.

  The cook is sixty-seven years old. She moonlights because neither her pension nor her memories are enough and because she’s a sturdy, hard-working woman, despite her arthritis. Her amazing cynicism appears inevitably when fuses blow, as if her good manners had blown at the same time. One night, before any customers arrived, Marianne catches her crying in the kitchen, already exhausted, suddenly too old to be working in the stifling heat of July and the ovens. Grazia makes her a caffè corretto (molto corretto) with sambuca. The cook doesn’t say thanks, just gulps it down and starts slicing tomatoes. Her back is broad and her legs are swollen.

  Even the village madwoman gets involved. To the great joy of Grazia, she lives across from the restaurant, hasn’t much to do in the daytime, and doesn’t sleep at night. It’s doing her a favour to have her wash the aprons, dishcloths, rags, and fold the napkins. It brings her prestige, all it costs is a pizza now and then, and, it’s true, a certain measure of patience to listen as she unburdens herself of existential concerns shifted onto her trouble with her alarm clock, which is broken, “Quando sarà possible, signore, signora, quando sarà possible farlo riparare, per favore, grazi, signore, grazie signora.” The trouble is, her proximity sometimes manifests itself too noisily in the presence of customers. Luckily, there’s a door that opens onto the hill. Luckily, she likes pizza margherita. Luckily, there are always dirty rags to keep her busy.

  The other waitress is a Scottish victim of an unexpected pregnancy that had confined her to the village ten years earlier. She’s thin, dry, rigid, she’s a grouch. Her smile looks like a grimace. It’s when she curses that you sense she’s in fine form, when she sends customers packing without their even noticing.

  The dishwasher is studying translation at university. He already speaks three languages in which he imitates Grazia to himself, over the dishwater. It’s how he is paying for his studies, a person has to be brave. In the kitchen with the old cook all night long, he applies himself to making her laugh, lavishes on her attention and anecdotes about America, where he’s never been and will never go, but that despite the TV news exerts a tremendous fascination over what people think. He might have a chance to improve his lot, but that’s not certain either, he’s already thirty and has a little belly, for him it’s the moment when you topple into either a better life or into too bad, too late: a person has to be brave.

  Marianne is only passing through Da Nerone. She’s from elsewhere, she’ll move on, she knows that, they all know that. But observing the pizzaiolo, the cook, the madwoman, the dishwasher, and the other waitress trapped here by economic poverty and administrative malfunction, she curses Grazia for the ease with which she profits from the distress of others and still finds a way to complain about the cost of food. When Marianne has gone they’ll still be here, busy growing old between the hot ovens, the burning smell of ammonia, and the sick insults shouted over their shoulders.

  And so, every night and in spite of herself, Marianne imagines ways to spoil the restaurant’s reputation. Insult the best customer, drop a beer down a plunging neckline, sprinkle sand in the salad, steal a third of the forks, take out the coasters that stabilize the tables, refuse a reservation to a group of twenty-five, put water in the red wine, serve a dessert made with cream
that’s gone bad, pour honey all over the knives.The possibilities are endless, she holds back only because of her concern not to deprive the others of their jobs, mediocre though they may be. Because they won’t try to leave, she knows that, the worst thing is that they can’t imagine a better life for themselves.

  VI

  WITHOUT THE WORLD

  One morning, throughout the village, word is getting around that during the night the lake has given up the body of a young Swiss woman. Marianne doesn’t know if the story is true, but she simply can’t go to the lake that day — she is trapped by the cruel notion that, as the first person to swim there every day, she herself might have found the corpse; she is also trapped by the even worse notion that the death could have been intended for her.

  On Tuesdays, the central square disappears beneath the market — fantastic, chaotic, noisy, brooms, tablecloths, soaps tossed into upside-down umbrellas, plastic and aluminum jewels, cheese, fish, clothes on hangers like a throng above the throng, fruit, dishes, yarn, leather purses, mailboxes. A fat butcher.

  Woodworking tools, beach towels, shoes, chestnut honey, prosciutto, nuts, cleaning products, candies, utensils, coffee makers, fish hooks. Fat, garish women, little gypsies, dogs filled with hope. Marianne wishes she could buy it all.

  And then, a month or two later, she realizes that she stays away from the square on Tuesdays, and that when she ends up there by mistake, she only notices the hooks, the empty mailboxes, the young men avoiding their mothers-in-law, the stale food, the swinging purses, the blunt objects, the heat on the honey, the gypsies’ eyes — and that the clothes swaying on hangers look like people who’ve been hanged.

  At the very moment when she walks beneath the unmoving clock on via degli Alberi, a mustachioed man stops her to ask the time. Once she has answered him, he keeps staring at her, then asks the inevitable question.

  “Are you a foreigner?”

  “Yes.”

  “German?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Canadian.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m from Canada.”

  “Ah. How long will you be staying here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re staying at the hotel?”

  “No.”

  “Where?”

  Marianne answers with her usual vague gesture in the direction of her street.

  “There?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re Marco’s girlfriend.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No.”

  “His uncle, the brother of his father, God rest his soul.”

  “Well. Glad to meet you.”

  “Me too, very glad.Tell me, would you by any chance have a friend as charming as you are to introduce me to?”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “All right. See you next time.”

  “Yes. Goodbye.”

  She’s still reluctant to say that she is living in the empty house. She knows that by opening it to her, Marco has exposed himself, and she feels the invisible threads that attach her to the four corners of the village, as if the house were also a castle wall, the altar of the church, the Etruscan lake bottom. Marianne never says that she’s living in the empty house because it would be false: she is a foreigner who sleeps in Marco’s family house, in their village, despite the dead souls drifting in the garden and the live ones that spy on her all day long.

  “I live over there,” she says invariably, finger pointing vaguely to a place that could just as well be Quebec. “In a little house,” she adds for more precision. And if she’s asked which one, she gives the street number: three.

  After supper, when she wants to let Marco know that she’s there, she struggles not to say, “at my place.” She says, “over there,” “in the little house,” then, later, when she realizes that she has nothing to do but wait for Marco, she says quite simply: “You know where to find me.”

  In the village, everyone knows everything — and nothing — about Marianne. They know that she picked flowers in the garden and through the open window, they can see the bouquet sitting on the table. They know she wears brightly coloured pants, abnormal, and a jacket she really should press. They know that she has sunbathed, how many cigarettes she smokes per day and what brand, and how long she lingers over coffee on the terraces of bars. She sometimes cries out in the night, she has pruned the rosemary; she works at the restaurant on a regular basis; she gets letters from far away, and she reads books in English; she drinks the strongest grappa; she walks to the end of the wharf in the evening; she paints on the street; she sobs in the garden; when she speaks she has the unintentionally erotic accent of a TV commercial; she swims on days when the wind blows strong, and emerges from the water dripping seaweed.They know that she’s younger than he is and that he’s been more serene since meeting her. They know that the Jeep is rarely parked on the narrow street in the daytime, they know that, and that Marianne is alone in the empty house, in the golden land, all day and even, sometimes, all night.

  No one ever inquires about Marianne. No one ever talks to her. They talk about her. They know nothing about her. They know nothing about the distress that gnaws like a rodent at her vulnerable psyche. They know nothing about her language, her friends, about boots squeaking on fresh snow after six months of winter, about her struggle with painting, about her financial woes.They know nothing about the sound of her brother’s voice when he phoned to tell her about the birth of his son.

  Certain friends rejected by Marco take advantage of her presence nonetheless to renew the friendship.They shout at her in the street, invite her for a meal or a coffee, try to make her talk.They are the faces Marco has warned her about. “Look at that one, he’s a son of a bitch, if he talks to you, watch out, lying is as natural to him as breathing.” After he’s put up that wall of paranoia, the last of the honest men disappears into his intangible work, while she strolls among the sons of bitches.

  As for the other members of Marco’s family, they only welcome Marianne to the extent necessary to let her know that Marco belongs to them. They are at once Marianne’s salvation and her condemnation never to be anything but herself. One day when she’s dozing in the garden, she hears her name and looks up. It’s the skinny aunt with cancer, who is waving a paper bag through her open window. She says, “This is for you, Marianne, can I come down and deliver it?” “Yes, of course.” Naïve, delighted. The bag is overflowing, it’s full of plump, ripe figs, the very opposite of the aunt. Marianne thanks her a thousand times and mentions it at lunch the next day. In unison, Marco and his mother exclaim: “Where are they, did you keep them for yourself?” and exchange a look, aghast. Marianne is Marco’s shadow on the village streets, a voice that’s audible only by standing outside its own discourse, a creature made visible only by her connection to the villagers, and, because of this connection, obliterated all the more.

  Marco’s mother knows nothing about her either. She sees Marianne at her table nearly every day, notices her weakness for tarts. She asks no questions of either Marianne or Marco, but secretly gathers as much information as she can. What she bought at the market, how long she swam, dear God, she’s out of her mind, she’ll come down with a terrible cold, did she get enough sleep, did Marco spend the siesta with her, no, he was working, all right, all is well, but what does she eat when she doesn’t come here? There is at once courage and cowardice in the way she observes Marianne.The courage to respect her son and to tolerate, unflinching, the village gossip. The cowardice that means not trying to understand Marianne’s person and her obvious discomfort. Marianne admires the courage and suffers from the cowardice. But the sloth is shared by the whole village. It’s the habit of evaluating human lives against the benchmark of TV soaps. It’s the corrosive language that eats away at aging minds and makes them narrower every day.

  And that’s why Marianne decides she’s going to
find out how to make the mother laugh. She makes fun of Marco, makes fun of herself.When she laughs, the mother shows her pretty little teeth, her cheeks fill out, and her eyes sparkle through her glasses. Marianne makes her laugh to soften her up, makes her laugh to get closer to her; at the same time giving up on being approached herself — foreigner, thief of sons. She sets herself this modest, trivial goal: at least don’t drive anyone away. But in spite of her secret efforts, she ends up lost at the centre of a periphery, a periphery that’s deserted and gets wider every day.

  If she really thinks about it, each person seems to move about in his own desert.The more she masters the language, the more she can imagine the dullness of these lives that the mysterious depth of their speech had hidden from her. Her neighbour spends all night smoking a joint and playing war games on his computer. When he speaks it’s fast, so fast that you wonder when the voice will break into a sob. Mario has been working in his restaurant for ten years now and says he’s forgotten what makes up the moments of the day.

  A Danish woman, here to look for a man, has been dreaming of leaving for a very long time, she now looks at herself, caught in the web of a couple without a soul and sees clearly that she can no longer move, realizing it while avoiding thinking about it. Uncle Fortunato’s job consists of watching the entrances to public toilets, he spends the summer enveloped in human smells while his wife, the aunt with cancer, walks twenty times around the same square, without sitting, without talking, without observing anything on the route she always follows, like a fish in an aquarium, now and then adopting an abandoned kitten that some kid steals from her the next day. A local farmer, tired of seeing people strolling by who swipe his apples, has decided to poison a few randomly, and, randomly, nearly kills his own son. The greengrocer embarks on endless monologues in which he tries to put his finger on the uneasiness he feels when he thinks about women: “I don’t have any women to talk to,” he says, “sometimes I go to Rome, it’s pointless, it’s too hot in the car, I sell vegetables, it’s what I do, it’s all I know how to do, dear God I wish I could speak another language, but I sell fruit, that’s the way it is, it takes all my time, it doesn’t bring in much money, it means I can’t find a woman to talk to who wants more than oranges in the winter.” The cousin who delivers fish is expecting his first child and imagines it a male, to be brought up by an English-speaking nursemaid, educated in an American school, freed from the village.