Age, as it wore him down, rendered him even more venerable. He gained a halting authority all his own, which only increased over time, as one by one, like a veteran of many battles, he lost an eye, then an arm.
Turned upside down, the footstool would become a boat, a pirate ship, or a Vernian craft with its square stem and stern: Angelo Bear sat beside the helmsman, and in front of him, setting a course for adventure in distant lands, were Captain Potato and the Soldiers of Cockaigne, who were more important, because of their size, though also more comical, than their earnest brothers-in-arms, the clay soldiers, who by this time were more disabled than Angelo, several having lost heads or limbs, leaving only wire hooks sticking out of the compressed, friable, and now faded substance of their flesh, like so many Long John Silvers. While that glorious vessel sailed out of the Bedroom Sea, traversed the Hallway Ocean, and made land in the Kitchen Archipelago, Angelo towered above his Lilliputian subjects, but the disproportion, rather than bothering us, merely emphasized his Gulliverian majesty.
Over time-thanks to his generous service, his proclivity for all manner of acrobatics, and Cousin Nuccio’s rage-Angelo Bear lost his second eye, his second arm, and finally his legs. As Ada and I grew, tufts of straw began falling out of his mutilated torso. Our parents somehow got the notion that his mangy body had become a host for bugs, and perhaps bacterial cultures, and so, with the appalling threat to toss him in the garbage while we were at school, they goaded us into getting rid of him.
By this point, for both Ada and myself, our beloved plantigrade was a painful sight: so frail, unable to stand on his own, exposed to that slow disembowelment and that indecorous spillage of internal organs. We had accepted the idea that he had to die-should indeed be considered already deceased-and thus that he should have an honorable burial.
We are up early in the morning, and Papà has just turned on the boiler, the central unit that distributes heat to all the radiators in the house. We have formed a slow, hieratic cortege. Beside the boiler, the ranks of surviving toys, marshaled under the command of Captain Potato. They stand in orderly rows, at attention, to bestow the honors of war, as befits the defeated. I proceed, bearing the cushion on which is laid the nearly departed, followed by each member of my family, including the cleaning woman, all united in mournful veneration.
With ritual compunction I am now introducing Angelo Bear into the maw of that fiery Baal. Angelo, now no more than a sack of straw, goes up in a single burst of flame.
It was a prophetic ceremony, because not long afterward the boiler itself was extinguished. Originally it had fed upon anthracite, and then, when that ran out, upon egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, but as the war went on those were rationed, too, and we had to rehabilitate an old kitchen stove, much like the one we would later use in Solara, that could swallow wood, paper, cardboard, and a type of briquette made of a compressed, wine-colored substance that burned poorly but slowly and gave the appearance of flame.
The death of Angelo Bear does not grieve me, nor does it bring on a surge of nostalgia. Perhaps it did in the years that immediately followed, and perhaps I felt it again, at sixteen, when I began devoting myself to the recovery of the recent past, but not now. Now I do not live in the stream of time. I am, blessedly, in the eternal present. Angelo is before my eyes, the day of his obsequies and also the days of his triumphs. I can move from one memory to the other, and I experience each as the hic et nunc.
If this is eternity, it is splendid-why did I have to wait until I was sixty before deserving it?
And Lila’s face? Now I should be able to see it, but it is as though memories were coming to me of their own accord, one at a time, in an order they have chosen. I simply must wait. I have nothing else to do.
I am sitting in the hall, beside the Telefunken. There is a play on. Papà is following the whole thing, and I am in his lap, thumb in my mouth. I do not understand such things-family tragedies, affairs, redemptions-but those distant voices lead me toward sleep.
When I go to bed I ask that my bedroom door be left open, so that I can see the hall light. I have become enormously shrewd at a tender age, have figured out that the Wise Men’s gifts, on the eve of Epiphany, are bought by our parents. Ada does not believe it, I cannot strip a little girl of her illusions, and on the night of January 5, I try desperately to stay awake to hear what happens out there. I hear them arranging the gifts. The next morning I will feign joy and wonder at the miracle, because I am a manipulative bastard and do not want this game to end.
I am a sharp one, I am. I have figured out that babies are born from their mother’s bellies, but I keep it to myself. Mamma talks about female matters with her friends (so-and-so is in a delicate, ahem, condition, or that one has adhesions there, ahem, on her ovaries), one of them shushes her, warns her there is a child around, and Mamma says it does not matter, because at that age we are so slow on the uptake. I peek from behind the door and penetrate life’s secrets.
From the small circular door of Mamma’s dresser, I have purloined a book: It Isn’t True that Death, by Giovanni Mosca, a well-mannered, ironic elegy on the joys of cemetery life and the pleasures of lying beneath a cozy blanket of earth. I like this invitation to demise, perhaps it is my first encounter with death, before Valente’s green stakes. But one morning, chapter five, sweet Maria, who in a moment of weakness has known a gravedigger, feels a wing-beat in her belly. Up to that point, the author has been quite modest, has merely referred to an unhappy love and a creature yet to come. But now he allows himself a realistic description that terrifies me: “Her belly, from that morning on, came to life with flutters and flaps, like a cageful of sparrows… The baby was moving.”
This, with its unbearable realism, is the first time I have ever read about a pregnancy. I am not surprised by what I learn, which confirms what I have gathered on my own. But I am frightened by the thought that someone might catch me in the act of reading that forbidden text, and learn that I have learned. I feel sinful, because I have violated a prohibition. I place the book back in the dresser, trying to hide every trace of my intrusion. I know a secret, and I feel guilty for knowing it.
This happens long before I kiss the face of the lovely diva on the cover of Novella, and it is part of the revelation of birth, not of sex. Like certain primitive peoples who, they say, never managed to establish a direct correlation between the sexual act and pregnancy (and nine months is a century, as Paola would say), I, too, went a long time before grasping the mysterious link between sex, that adult activity, and babies.
Not even my parents worry that I might feel distressing sensations. It seems their generation felt them late, or else they have forgotten their childhoods. They are leading me and Ada by the hand, they run into an acquaintance, Papà says we are on our way to see Goldene Stadt, and the acquaintance grins mischievously at us little ones and whispers that the movie is “a little saucy.” Papà replies nonchalantly, “I guess we’ll have to wipe their chins.” And me with my heart in my throat watching Kristina Söderbaum’s clinches.
In the hallway at Solara, as I was thinking of the expression “races and peoples of the earth,” a hairy vulva came to mind. Indeed, here I am, with a few friends, around the time of middle school perhaps, in someone’s father’s study, where we are looking at Biasutti’s Races and Peoples of the Earth. We flip the pages quickly until we reach a page with a photo of Kalmyk women, à poil, their sexual organs visible, or rather their fur. Kalmyk women, women who sell by themselves.
I am in the fog again. It reigns supreme in the dark of the blackout, as the city contrives to vanish from the celestial sight of enemy aircraft, and does in any case vanish from my sight as I observe it from the ground. I advance through that fog, like the boy in that picture in my first-grade reader, holding Papà’s hand, and he is wearing the same Borsalino hat as the man in the picture, though his coat is less elegant, shabbier, and slopeshouldered, raglan-style- and mine is even more threadbare, with the buttonholes on the right, a sign that it is made of reversed material from one of Papà’s old overcoats. In his right hand he holds not a walking stick but an electric flashlight, though
