Yes, the aliens-dybbuks were the bugle call. I should have been alarmed by those first signs and prepared myself for battle; instead, I didn’t even put on my armour. I couldn’t imagine that our domestic skirmishes would change in any way, or that I’d go from being the ambusher to being ambushed myself, and by an invisible enemy who was active on both fronts.
I had to defend myself, and I had to defend you, too. Day after day, your memory sagged a little more, collapsing like the floor joists in the abandoned house.
As your memory collapsed, it was filled with ghosts.
After a certain point, there was a throng between you and me. We lived with that sinister company, and the floor beneath our feet was as sheer and translucent as a sheet of thin pastry.
A few months after the appearance of the UFOs, I called the doctor – for myself, I pretended, so as not to alarm you.
That day, you behaved in an absolutely normal way. You put a table under the pavilion in the garden, spread a lovely tablecloth over it, and after setting out plates and cutlery, you offered the doctor, your old friend, some biscotti and cold tea. He asked you a few questions, nonchalantly, and you answered them happily. Then the two of you started talking about the upcoming holidays, about one of the doctor’s grandchildren, who was coming to stay with him, and about the best way to combat aphids on roses. You’d been told that the cheapest and most effective method was to steep cigarette butts in water and spray the aphids with that.
‘Exactly!’ the doctor cried. ‘If they kill us, they’ll kill aphids, too.’
I looked at you and felt bewildered. What had happened to the unwelcome guests in the kitchen?
At the end of the lawn, a blackbird was insistently laying claim to its territory, and a cloud of midges danced over a particularly moist flowerbed. The light of the setting sun struck their wings, transforming them into flakes of gold. When a stag-beetle made a noisy pass over our table, you stood up and said, ‘I’ll give you a few minutes of privacy – my hydrangeas need watering.’
We silently followed you with our eyes as you picked up one end of the hose and walked over to the tap. Buck ran after you, barking at the black rubber tube sliding through the grass. Was he playing a game? Did he really think he was protecting you? Who knows?
Once we were alone, it didn’t take much of an effort for me to convince the doctor that your calm, normal behaviour was more apparent than real. Sufferers from diseases that affect memory and personality retain a semblance of control at first, he explained. They make an unconscious effort to behave as they always have in front of outsiders; it’s as though a kind of extraordinary modesty comes down to protect the sick person.
You’d already had a stroke while I was in the States, the doctor told me – didn’t I know about that? – and there’d probably been some other ischaemic episodes; the blood supply to your brain was steadily decreasing, and the hippocampus was getting wobbly. Initially, days disappeared from your memory, then months, then years, voices, faces, swept away as though by a series of tsunamis: every wave carried off a detail and bore it out into the open sea, into the ocean, to a place from which it was impossible to return. The few things capable of resisting were nonetheless disfigured by the violence of the impact.
You were still watering the flowers. We could see the movements of your silhouette, surrounded by a cloud of gleaming water droplets suspended in light.
‘Is it treatable?’ I asked.
‘Not very. There are tranquillisers that have some effect.’
‘And how long will her condition last?’
‘As long as her heart holds out. It sounds cruel, but that’s the way it is. The head goes away; the heart stands its ground. It can beat for years inside a body that’s become an empty shell.’
When I walked the doctor to the gate, you waved goodbye to him from a distance with an open hand, like a little girl going off on a school trip.
The day ended without surprises. After watering the garden, you went back inside and fixed dinner. The first summer breeze – fragrant, warm, laden with hope – came through the open windows. We talked about books; you wanted to reread Buddenbrooks. ‘Isn’t it boring?’ I asked you. ‘Not in the slightest!’ you replied, and you started telling me about the brewer, Permaneder, his wife, and all the other characters, who had remained in your memory all those years.
Before going to bed, we exchanged goodnight kisses. We hadn’t done that for a long time, not since before I’d left for America.
In bed I considered the possibility that you’d been joking; you’d had a good time, you’d pulled a fast one on me, and now the game was over. I fell asleep with that thought.
The following morning, I woke up suddenly. Your enraged face was very close to mine, and you said, ‘You’ve stolen my slippers!’
Over the course of the next few weeks, I found myself cohabiting with a complete stranger. The extraterrestrials had disappeared, but their place had been taken by a persecution complex. Everything and everyone was conspiring against you.
It was a conspiracy made up of malevolent whispers, behind-the-back mockery, constant petty theft: your slippers and your dressing gown disappeared; your handbag and your overcoat vanished into thin air; your keys and your glasses slid into the void for ever. Someone stole the pot you wanted to cook in and the lunch you had just prepared. In the refrigerator, there was no trace of the things you’d bought at the store, and the soap was missing from the bathroom. Given that the UFOs and their occupants were no longer around, the person solely responsible for all this wanton pilfering was me, always and only me. I did it just to spite you, to turn your life into a torment of infernal little searches.
You bought a great many chains and padlocks from the hardware store and used them to bind and lock everything. In order to keep from losing the various keys, you strung them on a long red ribbon, which you wore around your neck. In my memory, the incessant jangling of your keys, coupled with the pitter-patter of your indefatigable footsteps, is the background sound of those months.
You accused me of the most incredible things, and I didn’t know how to defend myself. The words I tried to say were like an inflammable liquid – just a few drops were enough to make you explode. You’d burst into flames of rage, your jaw clenched, your eyes narrow, your thin hands scratching the air; you’d spend hours spouting unrepeatable curses. You opened and closed all the drawers, furtively carrying off various objects to new and even more secret places. You opened and closed the armoires, the refrigerator, the oven. You went up and down the stairs. You opened and closed the windows, suddenly sticking your head out in order to catch someone in the act of lying in wait for you. You did the same thing with the front door. You were sure you’d seen someone; presences hidden behind the jambs, scrutinising you with malevolent eyes. They had to be fought ruthlessly, implacably. They had to be beaten to the punch.
In an attempt to show some solidarity with you, I helped you organise your various defensive strategies. I bought a whistle and told you it was endowed with magical powers; it could keep malignant entities at a distance. You snatched it out of my hand, wide-eyed with amazement. ‘Really? It works?’ you kept saying, repeating the words with a sort of relieved gratitude.
Indeed, it did work for a certain period of time. A new household sound joined your footfalls and the jangling of your improvised key ring: the piercing shriek of that whistle, instantly accompanied by Buck’s howling – the high frequencies disturbed him. And there I was, roaming about like a ghost in the midst of this diabolical symphony. During the rare periods when you yielded to sleep, I stood beside your bed and studied you. You were coiled up in a defensive position, with clenched fists and tense lips; your facial muscles moved and twitched ceaselessly, and so did your eyes behind the thin veil of your eyelids.
Contemplating your features, I tried to see in them the person who had raised me. What had happened to her? Who was this old woman I was looking at? Where had she come from? How was it possibl
e for a mild, gentle, matronly lady to turn into her opposite? Meanness, rage, suspicion, violence – what was all that? What had caused such an explosion of awfulness? Had it always lain smouldering inside her? Had she simply managed to control it for all those years, and now, having shed the inhibitions of mental health, was she revealing the person she’d always wanted to be? Or had she really been taken over by a dybbuk? Was there a possibility that this dybbuk would invade me, too?
Or do we, right from the start, like creatures in certain science-fiction movies, perhaps contain – hidden between the pia mater and the dura mater – a program coded for self-destruction? Who sets the timer? Who determines the length of the program?
I had never given much thought to whether or not the heavens were inhabited by Someone different from the UFOs and the extraterrestrials that flew in them, but during the course of those long autumn afternoons, pondering this question for the first time, I reached a conclusion: the heavens are empty, or if they’re not, the entity that inhabits them is thoroughly uninterested in what’s going on in the world below. This was a being, I thought, who must have been distracted frequently while creating his little toy. How else to explain the fact that a person could bear such deterioration? That a life full of dignity and intelligence could be brought so low in just a few months? That memory could disappear just like that, as though a sponge had been passed over it? What hypocrites they must be, the people who talked about our dear Heavenly Father! What father would ever want such a fate for his children?
Often, at night – trying to escape the constant clicking of your footsteps, the screech of your whistle, the squealing of unoiled hinges – I took refuge in the farthest corner of the yard.
Seen from outside, the house really did look like a ghost ship. First I’d hear the jangling keys, and then I’d see you appear and disappear like a shadow behind the lighted windows; and all the while, the roar of the heavy goods traffic on the highway mounted to my ears, echoing the lonesome barking of the dogs in the scattered country houses.
On windy nights, the black pines above my head creaked and groaned like the masts on a ship.
I crouched at their feet, and at last, I was able to cry – in anger more than sorrow. From weeping, I passed to kicking; I struck their trunks violently with my feet, and then I punched the bark until blood ran down my wrist. ‘Let me die!’ I screamed into the wind, raising my voice so that my words would be carried high and far. ‘Let her die! Carry her off, destroy her, pulverise her! If you don’t want her, then at least take me! Yes, if You exist, You up there, let me die!’ Then I threw myself on the ground and hugged Buck, who’d been standing terrified at my feet, wagging his tail.
One morning, on waking up from one of those alfresco nights, I was afraid my prayers had been heard. I’d slept later than usual, and when I went back into the house, an unusual stillness reigned. There was no sound of shuffling feet, no whistle, no jangling keys, no cursing. Nothing.
After a few minutes of incredulous waiting, I carefully cracked the door of your room, afraid that I would find your body there. The same fear tugged at me as I searched through every room in the house, but there was no trace of you.
Then, followed by Buck, I went out into the yard, but you weren’t among the geraniums, nor in the woodshed, nor even in the garage. You couldn’t have taken the car, because your keys had gone missing some time ago; therefore, if you’d left, you had to have done so on foot, although your coat was in its usual spot, and so was the handbag you were never without.
I was about to go to the police and report your disappearance when the telephone rang. It was the fruit vendor. He’d stopped you while you were crossing an intersection – barefoot and wearing only your slip – and taken you into his shop.
‘We’re in the tunnel,’ you kept saying. ‘Papa, Mamma, we’re in the tunnel. We made it!’
For some time, you’d been obsessed with shelling, and with Germans beating on the door. When you saw me, you turned hostile, but you gave no sign of recognition. ‘What do you want from me?’ you asked. Only when I whispered in your ear that I was the person in charge of air defence did you give me your hand and follow me back to the house, as docile as a weary child.
From that morning on, all our domestic emergencies involved your flights from the house and your heedless gestures. You washed your hands over the gas burner; if you felt like eating some marmalade, you didn’t open the jar, you broke it, and then you necessarily swallowed bits of glass, too; if you locked yourself in a room for protection, you shouted that we had to run to the shelter, because the alarm had already sounded; when Buck appeared at the door, you yelled, ‘The Gestapo are coming!’ – perhaps because of his extremely distant resemblance to an Alsatian – and then you’d run and hide, your face wet with tears.
As far as you were concerned, I stopped being a hostile person and became a complete stranger; you never knew who I was. During those months, in order to survive and to help you to survive, I turned myself (like one of your favourite characters, Aladdin’s genie) into a multitude of different people.
The game ended one windy December morning. Coming back from shopping, I found you on the ground in the yard, still wearing your nightgown. Your bare feet were covered with dirt, and Buck was whining by your side. Pursued by one of your ghosts, you’d run out of the house, probably tripped over some root, and struck your head against a tree. You were lying supine and smiling, one arm flung out over your head, as though doing the backstroke through the grass. A thin stream of blood marked your forehead, and beneath your eyelids, your eyes were finally at rest.
5
NOT THAT MORNING, but three days later, you died in a ward of the hospital.
Before dawn, while I was tossing and turning on my bed at home, the angel of death, armed with his fiery sword, swooped down on you. Buck must have sensed his passage, because when I got up, he wasn’t waiting for me, as usual, by the back door. Since he often disappeared, I wasn’t all that alarmed, but then, in the afternoon, someone called and said he’d read the phone number on Buck’s collar. A car had run him down not far from the hospital. Maybe he was on his way there to visit you, or maybe he thought you two should depart for the next world together. They told me his body had already been taken to the incinerator.
Only about five people came to your burial, the neighbours and a couple of old friends, ancient ladies still capable of locomotion. The priest spoke like the owner of a car dealership, using conventional, slightly tired language to extol the excellence of his wares.
The year was a few days from its end; as we left the cemetery, we were greeted by a burst of fireworks.
A noisy group of kids was on the bus. They must have had a lot to drink already; one of them was wearing a Santa hat, and another was masked like a skull with living eyes.
Once I was home, I did nothing but sleep. For three or four days, I slept heavily, dreamlessly. The house was cold, and the sudden gusts of wind made the shutters bang violently against the walls. Every now and then, that sharp, violent sound – it was like a gunshot – jolted me out of sleep.
After I started moving around again, the great absence I felt every day wasn’t yours, but Buck’s. I still talked to him, went looking for him, put leftovers aside for him. I was strongly tempted to go to the dog pound and choose a replacement, but then I became submerged under the infinite amount of paperwork required by the conclusion of a life.
I still couldn’t feel any grief at your not being there. The rooms were empty, immersed in silence like a theatre after the performance: no more shuffling, no more footsteps, no more coughing fits.
The part of me that should have abandoned itself to mourning had been prematurely used up, burned away by exasperation and by your brutally abrupt decline. I’d welcomed your passing with a feeling of relief, grateful that your sufferings were finally over.
Only the passage of time allowed your image to re-emerge in my memory, so that I could again see the person who had been
so important in my life.
Once all the bureaucratic requirements had been dealt with, I didn’t know what to do. Your illness had drained away all my energy; I could feel no grief, just immense dismay.
Who are you? I asked myself. What will you be when you grow up?
I didn’t have the slightest idea.
The bora blew with extraordinary intensity all January long. It snowed a few times as well – the deer even invaded the garden, looking for shoots to eat.
I stayed curled up in the armchair in front of the fire, beside the table with our books (by then covered with dust), and I could hear your voice telling me the story of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. ‘“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in,” the wolf bellowed though the door.’
‘No wolf can get in here,’ you’d say to reassure me. ‘This is a solid brick house, built not on sand but on the hard rock of the Carso.’
Then you’d add that foundations and roots are in a way the same thing, because they both make it possible to stand firm and not yield to the violence of the wind. In order to give a house stability, you have to dig deep foundations, down and down, just the way the roots of a tree do, year after year, in the darkness of the earth. In America, however – you went on – they set houses directly on the ground, like tents, and that was why a wolf’s huffing and puffing would be enough to eradicate entire cities over there.
Alone in the silence of the house, I wasn’t so sure about your words any more. I had the impression that the wind was hissing through fissures in the window frame, repeating It’s over, it’s ooooover, like when I was a little girl and the spinning washing machine would whisper, Everything’s useless, everything’s doomed.