The First True Lie: A Novel Read online

  I have to wash as well. If I was sure Mama was going to be back today, I wouldn’t bother, but since I’m not, I can’t risk them noticing anything strange on account of details, like the ones that betray people in Columbo. Lieutenant Columbo always looks rumpled just so everyone will underestimate him. Obviously, if he was the suspect he’d change his raincoat.

  I put on a striped shirt; it’ll do fine. And a green sweater. I wash my armpits but forget the bidet—who cares, it’s not like anyone’s going to be inspecting my underwear.

  “If you don’t wash below too, you’ll have moss and lichens growing there, like in the taiga and the tundra.”

  Mama always exaggerates.

  Blue licks himself to get clean. I’m so jealous. Blue has eighteen whiskers per side and long hairs like whiskers above his eyes. When I don’t have anything else to do, I count them, to see if there happen to be any more, since Blue is growing up too; no longer a kitten, as the flower woman would say, but becoming quite the little cat.

  “Okay, Blue, time for din-dins.”

  Din-dins is Blue’s favorite word. If you say it to him, he gets all excited and begins to follow you around and won’t stop until you give him something. Blue jumps on the table, slips past the box of cereal, the sugar, and the glass ashtray from Venice that’s a bit chipped on one side, and launches himself at the can of mackerel as if he hasn’t seen food for I don’t know how long. A bit later, in all his enthusiasm, he pushes his bowl under the sideboard and then looks at me in surprise, as if to say: “Help! Where’d my din-dins go?”

  Cats do things like that. They’re really intelligent and sometimes stupid. They understand everything, but when it comes to food they know nothing.

  Blue rubs himself all soft and silky against my legs. I’d like to have a sleeping-bag body like Blue and snuggle down inside myself and pull up the zipper. I’d also like to have a tail and wag it when I’m cross, make it bristle when I meet assfaces, and hold it straight up when I’m happy and feel like walking with my head high.

  Maybe I’d like to be Blue. Who can go back to purring with Mama.

  “Did you feed Blue?”

  Usually, before going out, Mama asks me: “Did you feed Blue?”

  She only asks to bug me, because she knows very well whether I’ve done it or not. If I go back to show her the bowl, she says: “Hurry up.”

  If I hurry, she says: “Get a move on.”

  Before leaving I check up on Mama but without going into her room. I look at her from far away. I’m in a rush.

  I have to run. Whenever I do, the corners of the books in my backpack poke my back. I’ve got to tighten the straps, or else leave the house sooner next time and then walk normally.

  It’s freezing cold; when I breathe I can see my breath. If I can see my breath, it means I’m alive, even if I’m dying of cold.

  It’s the coldest winter since 1900-something and it’s windy too, which it almost never is. The wind helps with the pollution; it reduces the fine particles, the sneakiest ones, the ones that get in everywhere without anyone seeing them and then make you sick.

  Luckily, we don’t live far from school.

  We’re 3,700 steps away, more or less, because every time I count them the number is different.

  I run into Davide at the entrance—just as well—we’ll come in together.

  Inside, along the corridor with all the drawings pinned up, there’s a sign that says NO RUNNING.

  I ask Davide if he believes in God, and he replies: “Are you stupid or what?”

  And we rush to class.

  I realize I’ve asked Davide a pretty odd question, out of the blue and so early in the morning. I’ve got to be careful not to let strange stuff like that slip out.

  “Do you see this? It’s a piece of granite that’s become part of my hand. It’s my rock hand. Touch it.”

  My deskmate has scabs on his hands because yesterday he popped a wheelie on his skateboard and landed in the gravel. He picks at the clotted blood on his knuckle and gets blood on his exercise book. The blood doesn’t stop. It spreads over the page and Mrs. Squarzetti panics, fearing a hemorrhage.

  “Oh my God, a hemorrhage!”

  Rock Hand is taken downstairs to have his war wounds tended to. Later Rock Hand will sport a new Band-Aid.

  I like Band-Aids a lot. I put them on even when I haven’t hurt myself at all. Sometimes I’ll draw on my skin a little bit to make it look more real. Band-Aids give the impression of an adventurous life, of someone who falls down but doesn’t really hurt himself.

  “What’d you do to yourself?”

  “It’s nothing, just a little karate chop. I broke seven bricks with a single blow.”

  “No way!”

  The incident with my deskmate is the most exciting event of the morning.

  When Antonella sees blood, her face goes all twisty as if she’s going to pass out. I feel like throwing up because real blood turns my stomach, but I hold out: It’s just the soul of the red Bic pen gushing everywhere because I’ve swallowed the cap again. I think about my heavenly soul that may not even exist. I look at Antonella’s heavenly blue eyes. She gets more beautiful every day and I blush just at the thought that she could be looking at me.

  I hold out even though feeling sick makes me think of a memory from nursery school: little spaghetti hoops floating like life preservers in a pool of tomato sauce; a kid who’s honking like an elephant and the next thing he’s up at the blackboard throwing up his cafeteria lunch, and it’s making people laugh but also throw up themselves; the smell of vomit stays in my nose even afterward, even now. I hate pasta with tomato sauce. If there must be sauce, at least let it be on the side, without everything mixed together. With things like that, if you meet with the school psychologist he or she will tell your parents you’ve been traumatized, as if you’ve discovered you’ve only got one parent instead of two, or your mama’s sleeping with someone else’s dad.

  “Childhood trauma.”

  It’s just smaller, when it comes to pasta with tomato sauce.

  In any case I hold out. I don’t want everyone to see what I’ve eaten for breakfast: a bowl of dry cereal that looked exactly like Blue’s cat food. I swallow and it tastes like acid and also like yogurt, even though the yogurt was already gone this morning. I licked the container and tried to reach the bottom with my tongue. I cleaned the tinfoil lid until all I tasted was tinfoil, the kind that shocks your back teeth.

  Outside it’s started raining again, and it’s not the good rain anymore, the impressive kind. It’s a useless kind of rain that makes you sleepy and the outlines of things fuzzy, and makes you think it will never stop.

  It’s raining like that inside me too.

  Usually when I’m bored in class I read under my desk, or draw, or go over Mama’s words in my head, trying to discover their secrets. Nostalgia: tender, burning desire for people, places, and things she’d like to return to. Sciatica: extreme pain in the sciatic nerve that doesn’t let her go skiing. And so on. I invent private exercises, count the holes the woodworms have worm-eaten out of the window frames over the centuries and centuries, amen, so the hours go by faster.

  Sometimes I pay attention with one part of my brain, and with the other I daydream. I imagine that past the roof and the chimneys and the TV antenna, there are the sea and the clear sky and ships with pirates. Pirates don’t hunt whales; they hunt the people who hunt whales. The pooping pigeons on the windowsill are albatrosses perched on the ship’s main yard. I don’t tell anyone I can do it because adults don’t think it’s so easy. They think you have to do one thing at a time, that you can’t talk and eat, put on pants and walk, draw and learn, dream and stay awake. If I think about something totally different, I just have to pay attention to where my eyes wander, otherwise it seems like I’m seeing ghosts, like Mama when she says that Dad vanished into thin air and she stares at the painting with the nasty weather.

  At home, whenever I can’t stand it anymore, I close
myself in the wardrobe that no one ever opens. I sit on top of the drawers in the middle of the clothes that smell like mothballs, herringbone overcoats and the cloth sacks I used to take to nursery school, blue and white checked with my name embroidered on them, still smelling like bread and chocolate. I stay there and think for a bit, with the old overcoats on my face. I might cry if I really have to, and wipe my snot with the sleeve of an old shirt. Then I get over it, and then I don’t want Mama to worry too much.

  Mama. Mama. Mama.

  The memory of Mama explodes again in my head.

  A geyser of fear. I’m so afraid that someone will notice something.

  Do you know what the doctor said to the skeleton who showed up for an appointment? I write it on a piece of paper and I pass it to Davide.

  He shakes his head.

  I write it on another piece of paper. Couldn’t you have come earlier?

  Out of the corner of my eye I can see him laugh.

  I’m safe.

  Everything’s okay.

  When we get out it’s pouring.

  Needles of freezing rain everywhere. I forgot to bring a hat. To stay out of it I’m forced to pass close to Assface. It’s a chance I have to take because I can’t risk getting sick. I cross my heart and hope to die he doesn’t say it again:

  “Orphan-orphan-orphan.” He repeated it like an evil chant.

  Not too long ago, on Columbus Day, I’ll never forget it; I was with my friends and Assface said: “Orphan-orphan-orphan.”

  And I thought, Now I’m gonna smash that assface of yours.

  “Assface in the first degree.”

  And before I thought, No, maybe better not, I’d punched his nose, right there in the middle of that big ugly crack. I didn’t know how, but my arm had been faster than my thoughts, a solid hit before I’d even realized it myself, as if my body had decided to seek justice on its own.

  Notebooks had gone flying to the ground, shedding pages like trees in autumn, and suddenly I was shedding the old image of myself and speaking openly to Assface, whose eyes goggled like someone who can’t believe his own eyes, his own ears, his own runny nose.

  “You’ll pay for this.”

  “Sure I will. Let this be a lesson to you, Assface.”

  I had muttered it to myself while the others stood by speechless in admiration; suddenly I felt six inches taller.

  But now I can’t react at all; I have to be careful not to draw attention to myself. I speed up. Assface pretends not to see me and yet I pass so close to him that I can count one by one his moles, like pistachios in his nasty mortadella face. I speed up and I’m past him. Almost home.

  Mama’s still sleeping, buried between the pillows.

  Seeing her like that in the big bed, she seems smaller. Still the same expression, it’s just that her face is darker. When I touch her, she seems colder. But it’s cold outside too. I put a coat over her, and two coins fall out of one of the pockets.

  If people are happy, they don’t die like this, just by chance.

  Maybe they die in an accident, but not in their sleep.

  Maybe Mama died of heart problems, because no one could love her enough, not even me. Maybe I wasn’t able to make her stay in my life, to make her live for me, at least. Maybe I’m not worth much at all, not for her, not for anyone.

  I take off my shoes with this new idea spinning in my head. I hurl one shoe here, another one there. Blue is scared. He makes his tail big so that it looks like that contraption for getting rid of spiderwebs. One shoe ends up under the sofa. I’ve got all kinds of titicaca in my socks. I have to accept my responsibilities.

  What are my responsibilities?

  Keep my room clean, check to make sure the cat is okay, change his litter, study, don’t say “fucking shit” all the time, be sure the gas is off if I’ve used the oven. Do what I need to do so there isn’t food between my teeth.

  Don’t be an extra bump in the road when the going gets tough.

  Understand that grown-ups have grown-up problems.

  Adults have no idea how many strategies kids have to come up with to be what they are. Sometimes they tell you to stop acting like a child, other times that it doesn’t matter because you’re just a child…but what a beautiful child! What a little man! I think about the little hanger-men who hold up the clothes in the wardrobe that smells like mothballs. Because I close myself in there I might become a little hanger-man myself, with bony shoulders and a question-mark head. Who knows.

  In any case, even adults don’t always know what they’re saying.

  “I’m drawing a blank.”

  Or:

  “Funeral for the deceased.”

  Who else would it be for?

  I go into my room to look for my slippers, the ones with the moose antlers on them that Mama gave me for Christmas. Blue’s chewed on them, so now one horn is leaking yellow cotton wool, like the stuff they put up your nose when it’s bleeding. Like when I got hit in the face with a soccer ball and they took me to the emergency room. Mama thought it was a concussion and was more upset than I was, but the doctor told her it was nothing.

  As I slipper across the room, Blue tries to grab what’s left of the antler. On TV, the chef is still there, surrounded by dressed-up women being all over-the-top—I zap them. In the kitchen, the table and the floor are covered with dry food; I forgot to put the box away and Blue has scattered them everywhere. The sink is full of dirty dishes. On the windowsill there’s a plant Mama calls a succulent, a gift from someone or other, made up of two kinds of spiny cucumbers, one tall and one short. It survives even without water, like us. We’re succulents too, shut up in the apartment. If you touch it, it stings in self-defense.

  The apartment like this makes me sick.

  It’s not like when you’re alone for a day and you do what you want and what you usually can’t. Now I can do everything and I don’t feel like doing anything. I’m so free my head spins just thinking about it. I’m free and I’m a prisoner at the same time, like hamsters who spin their wheels and stay in the same place. They spin and spin and don’t go anywhere.

  If I stop for a moment, the blank notebook comes back into my head and I can’t even imagine. It’s horrible because it’s thanks to daydreams that I’ve always made it through okay. Teachers say I have a vivid imagination.

  “Imagination is a great resource in times like these. Perhaps you’re unaware of this because you don’t read newspapers, but at times reality is stranger than fantasy. So it becomes necessary to be even more fantastic in order to make it in life.”

  But now I don’t know what to imagine.

  I try to imagine that this is happening to someone else, because it’s a bit like that: I’m inside what’s happening but also outside. I want to disappear but at the same time I don’t. I don’t feel like shutting myself up in the wardrobe anymore because now everything is like a closed wardrobe, but also like an open one—there’s no point in hiding inside the apartment anymore. I can whine and wipe my nose on the tablecloth, the napkins, my pajamas, the curtains in the living room. Everything is old. It all smells like an old wardrobe. Wide open and sealed shut at the same time. I can do everything and I don’t want to do anything—I only want to go back to how it was. I bury my nose in the last piece of toilet paper. I make myself a Nutella sandwich. The bottle of milk is empty. I drink tap water, which tastes like chlorine.

  During the winter the days are short, but today seems to go on forever and ever.

  I don’t even know if I should give up hope or not.

  “Hope is the last to die.”

  Or the second to last?

  Mama seems more and more dead.

  I should study the history of hominids, those slouching, hairy creatures in our textbooks, walking in single file until one straightens up and marches ahead like a soldier, forward march.

  With a hominid around maybe Mama would feel less lonely.

  “Why is it you can’t make up your mind to find a decent man? I
say this for your son’s sake as well, because you can’t do it all alone.”

  “I’m tired of falling in love, tired of falling out of love, tired of fucking. I don’t even remember how to make love anymore.”

  “That’s love! Right now things seem one way to you, but that’s not necessarily the way things are. Look at me, I’ve been falling in and out of love since I was fifteen. Every time, I say never again, may I be struck down if I fall for it again. Then I meet another one and it’s another round, another race. If you find one who knows what he’s about, you’ll see how quickly you’ll change your mind.”

  “No, for me it’s different. To fall in love you need to want it, and I just want to sleep.”

  Mama lights another cigarette and curls a lock of hair around her finger. Giulia just sits there with her nose in the air, contemplating the smoke as it curls around itself, in search of inspiration or else the right moment to slip away.

  Sometimes Giulia invites her out to dinner with friends and Mama invents an excuse, which is usually me.

  “Sorry, this evening I really have to stay home with him. You know how he is…”

  Other times Mama says she suffers from loneliness:

  “Loneliness is a whistling that worms itself into your head. It’s the echo of ships that have already sailed, that you can no longer reach, not even if you swim.”

  She told me:

  “Once a ship or a train departs, there’s nothing else you can do. You’re left gazing after a gleam of light on the horizon, slowly fading into the fog, the way a memory fades into the dull gray of the present.”

  She said:

  “That’s how I feel, like I’m on the shore, or in an empty station, having arrived to life too late.”

  Mama feels lonely even though she’s never alone, because I’m always here with her; but it must not be enough. In order not to feel so lonely she went to talk to a man with a beard who listened to her once a week in a house full of books that were full of complicated ideas. I flipped through a few of them while I was in the waiting room. I wonder, though, what do you get out of paying someone to listen to you, to care for you?