E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
Vasta Time On My Hands
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28203-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28203-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Giorgio Vasta was born in Palermo in 1970 and now lives and works in Turin. A former editor at the publishing house Einaudi, his stories have been published in various anthologies.Time on my Hands is his first novel.
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I was eleven years old and lived among cats ravaged by rhinotracheitis and mange. They were warped skeletons with a bit of skin on them; infected: if you touched them you could die. Every afternoon String went to feed them at the end of the garden opposite our apartment; sometimes I went with her. They came toward us slowly, their bodies angled askew, and looked at us with eyes that were drops of water and mud. Among the dying I’d grown attached to the worst, the one that sat at the end of the asphalted paths, sunken in the abyss; he heard our footsteps and moved his head slowly, like a blind man following a song, his sooty-black coat reduced to fluff on his flaking skin, one leg hanging loose among the others. He’d been lame ever since he was a kitten; now he was full grown, a natural cripple.
String put the saucepan down on a low wall that formed the base of a pale green railing. While her back was turned, I touched the railing with my tongue to taste the chlorine of the old paint and rust, then turned away and swallowed. I took a spoon and scooped up a little heap of with meat sauce. I carried it over to the cripple, crouched down beside him, and let him smell it. He pushed his scabby face forward, his nose blurring in the steam; then he picked up a lump of black meat between two teeth and started gnawing at it. String gestured to me not to touch him, told me to pour it all out and step back. I made a little volcano with the ; the cripple listened to it with his nose, then went on tenaciously biting the lump, filtering each mouthful through the gaps between his teeth, twisting his head to destroy and swallow, turning nutriment into blood. When he’d finished he lay down with his muzzle on the ground in front of the little wet volcano, the idol to be worshipped. He was no longer hungry; his breath hissed out from the fan of his ribs. I touched him with the tip of the spoon; he didn’t move, but emitted a pigeon-like whirr from his neck. He could still manage a yawn; he opened his mouth and ate air. Then he sank back into a stupor, his head in the midst of a patch of light.
Behind me I heard the last scrapes of ladle against saucepan. For years, at this time of day, down in the gardens, String had ladled food out of her saucepan with a vigorous movement of shoulder, arm, and hand, making little heaps of pasta on the ground. Then she’d click her tongue to call the cats and look around to see if they were happy, if they had enough to eat, as they staggered in toward the food from all directions. Then she’d walk home, encrusted ladle in one hand, saucepan in the other: her sword and shield.
Now she’d finished and had sat down on a bench to rest. I checked that she wasn’t looking, then took a piece of barbed wire out of the pocket of my windbreaker and pressed the spikes into the bare patches on the cripple’s back. Each time the skin dimpled in for a moment, then slowly flattened out again. He never moved, except for a slight twitch of the head. I’d increase the pressure and he’d shudder, have a brief fit of nerves, an outburst of bewildered indignation that lasted a few seconds before fading away, then settle back into his former pensive pose.
“Let’s go,” said String.
I got up, put the barbed wire in my pocket, and walked off. There was a harsh cry behind me. I turned around and saw the cripple standing on all four legs, taking one step, then another. At every movement his head lolled forward, recoiled, and vibrated. He turned a complete circle, then meowed again disgustedly.
“He’s gone mad,” said String behind me. “Cats often do when they go blind.”
I said nothing and watched him walk in ever faster circles. I felt the sun on my cheek.
“He does it every day,” she added, “after he’s eaten.”
The cripple walked blindly on, stiff with cold, inhaling mucous. He turned another circle, meowing harshly; then he stopped, shrank, lay down, and nodded his head again, to say yes, yes, that’s the way it should be.
String set off toward our home—number 130, Via Sciuti. I turned and followed her. The asphalt was metallic in the low sun; at every step, I felt I was sinking.
*
Later I went out on to the balcony and looked for the cripple at the end of the gardens. From that distance he was a dark rock that other cats kept clear of, making wide detours to avoid going anywhere near it.
In the sky the sun had become a dry lung; it coexisted with the moon and the rarefied dusk that was beginning to seep into cracks in the road surface, into pools of oil leaked from car engines, into squiggly skid marks, into saplings supported by broomsticks.
The day before, a boy had gone over to a car that had parked down there. Speaking in dialect, he’d asked the owner for money; the man had refused and told him to go away. The boy had pointed to the car, asked again and stood waiting. When the man had put the key into the door to lock it, the boy had pulled up a broomstick supporting a nearby sapling and smashed the headlights and windows. Then he’d thrown away the broomstick, bent down, and bitten one of the tires, his teeth going right through the tread and puncturing the inner tube. Finally, his face smeared with engine grease, he’d attacked the man and bitten his cheeks and forehead.
I heard the sound of harp music from the living room and went inside to watch . It was intended as a brief respite, a patch to cover the hiatus between programs. I found it hypnotic.
The humpback bridge at Apecchio, the Visso Valley strewn with pale houses. San Ginesio, Gratteri, Pozza di Fassa. The facades of Sutri, the white fountain of Matelica. Ten seconds per picture postcard, then a fade-out and a new picture. The eternal rustic, pastoral Italy built of gray, hand-hewn rocks, stonewalls adorned with ivy and moss, inhabited only by Oscans and Etruscans, a simple, rural world whose dead slept in village graveyards, with graveled paths between tombs, crunching footsteps and a smell of gladioli, cypress berries mingling with the gravel, a clear sky, roses. Ghosts of the landscape, deluders of the national self-image. The picturesque, the local, the premodern, the authentic. A beautiful semiliterate Italy, too honest to need a knowledge of grammar.
Until a year ago we’d had too, an X-ray picture of joy. Now we were left with , a slow merry-go-round of nostalgia, a Nativity scene confected by television.
The news came on. They talked about Rome, an ambush the day before on Via Acca Larentia. Some shots had been fired, two members of the escort had been killed, and a policeman had wounded one of the attackers. The picture showed a body covered with a white sheet. The faces of the dead were young and pale, their features whirls against the light.
On television Rome was an animal. Viewed from above, the shape of the houses and streets was a stone backbone, a mineral animal. It contained the dead and generated them, or perhaps attracted them. At any rate, only in Rome did people die. So I took the Roman dead, picking them up one by one out of Via Acca Larentia and all the other streets, and put them into the nonexistent Italy. I laid one on the pebble beach under the bridge at Apecchio, hung another from the battlements of Caccamo castle, left a third to float in the waters of Civitanova Marche, and lodged another, fittingly, between the rocks of the necropolis at Pantalica. I gave the rest of Italy back its dead.
String came in and told me supper was nearly ready.
“Have I ever been to Rome?” I asked her.
“We went there just after you were born,” she replied.
“Have I ever been there since?”
“No, you haven’t. Neither have I.”
“Can I go there?”
“Why do you want to?”
I didn’t have a clear answer to this, so I said nothing.
“Not on your own,” she said.
“Can go there?” I said, changing tack.
She stared at the television screen, put one finger to her lips, and nibbled at the cuticles.
“Maybe,” she said.
“When?”
“Perhaps at Easter.”
String continued to stare at the screen without turning toward me.
“Have I ever been to Apecchio?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of it. Where is it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Do you want to go there?”
“No.”
“Why do you want to go to Rome?” she asked again.
“Because of the dead,” I said unguardedly.
“What?” she asked, turning to look at me, the tip of her ring finger between her teeth.
“Because I’m curious,” I said.
*
By the time Stone got home, Cotton and I were already in bed—not under the covers, but sitting on top; he in his pajamas, I in my daytime clothes. Our beds stood end to end along one wall of the bedroom, fitting neatly into the space. They were identical; Cotton and I were far from identical: I was fully evolved, he was a microscopic amoeba; I was arbitrary, he was democratic and flexible.
While Stone had his dinner in the kitchen, Cotton and I listened to the radio, poking our fingers through the thick wool bedspread and clenching our fists to feel the plea sure of constriction.
Stone came into the bedroom, his lips still wet with food. He turned off the radio, took a book from the shelf, and sat down between us. It was a big book, with a stiff, smooth, enamel-like cover. The cover illustration showed a thin, fair-haired boy clothed in...
