One summer night in 2030, in the garden of a nursing home, two old men began remembering.
As a little boy I thought that dried apricots were ears, and I’d wonder who the unlucky soul was who’d had them chopped off. When I was forced to try one, picking it out from a Christmas arrangement of dates and candied fruit, I said to myself: “So this is what ears taste like.”
I, on the other hand, believed in a magic powder that, if dissolved in water and drunk, would protect me from bad dreams—and I used to drink it without ever doubting its effectiveness. After many years, when I finally asked my mother to show it to me, she replied that once the powder was seen in its natural state it lost its power. I never asked about it again.
I had a father who would stick in his eye socket a ceramic sphere that perfectly replicated an eyeball: he’d come to me and he’d pretend to pluck his eye out before placing the sphere back in his pocket. I’d run away shouting: “Not the eye! Not the eye!”
And I had a father who with a slight incision could peel an orange while leaving the skin completely whole. He’d then cut it to look like a monstrous mask and, with all the lights turned off, he’d place a lit candle stub inside it. Looking with dismay at its terrible countenance, I’d hear a cavernous voice saying: “Behold, I am The Face, and I have come for you.”
I had a grandfather who one day told me the story of Henry VIII, who murdered all of his wives. I thought he said “tea ate,” and for many years, every time that I accidentally swallowed the bits of tea leaves at the bottom of my mug of chamomile, I’d wait to feel any symptoms of poisoning.
I also had a grandfather, who one Sunday took me to San Siro to see my first soccer match. During halftime he explained to me that AC Milan wasn’t able to score because Fiorentina had Robotti on their team. I took it to mean “robots,” and I spent the second half trying to notice a mechanical quality in the movements of the purple players. Coming home, it seemed like nothing short of a miracle if the game had ended zero-zero, with us up against indestructible steel!
When I would swim out past the buoy, I always expected to get torn to bits by a shark. Ten years of swimming were ruined like this, until the day I discovered that all I needed to do was go under water and say: “Wherever you are, know that I am a fish like you.”
Meanwhile, whenever I was by the seashore, I’d be terrified that the hook of a distracted fisherman might poke through my eye, or my tongue, or an ear, and tear it right out as bait for the fishes.
My father used to take me to see the Church of San Bernardino alle Ossa, and the Fopponino Chapel full of skulls, with a Latin inscription that translated to mean: “Do not deride us, passer-by, because one day you will be as us.” I would look at them awhile and think: “Not me, no deriding here.”
Mine sent me from Palermo a postcard of the Capuchin Crypt, and from Turin a photograph of a mummy in the Egyptian Museum. Seeing them in my room, my grandmother exclaimed, “Are these things to show to little boys?” And on the inside, I said: “Apparently, they are.”
One of the very first times I made a phone call, I convinced myself that if no one picked up, it maybe meant they were dead. From that moment on, for my whole life, I haven’t been able to get to the third ring without thinking: “Something terrible must have happened.”
As for me, when I had grown up a bit and saw The Exorcist, The Thing, The Evil Dead, Jaws, and Alien, I didn’t see anything that wasn’t already familiar—extremely familiar, going back as far as I could remember.
I was convinced that everything that was visible—people, cars, swallows, power lines, loogies on the sidewalk—was a performance staged around me in order to study my behavior. Feeling observed, I behaved in a way that wouldn’t let on that I’d figured it all out: an aware guinea pig is a useless guinea pig, I’d say, and therefore one that can be eliminated.
Whereas when someone would smile at me too affectionately, I’d get the suspicion that they weren’t real: the Fake Mother, the Fake Uncle, the Fake Stationary Store Owner. And along with terror, I’d feel great pity for the fate of the originals.
Once, I went to the movies with my parents to see Vampyr by Dreyer. At the last second, thinking that it would scare me too much, they opted for Rossellini’s The White Ship instead. I hadn’t realized the switch, and throughout the whole film I waited in vain for the monster to appear. For many days, I couldn’t give myself a break for having failed to recognize him among all those sailors.
My grandfather used to make hundreds of little nude women out of clay, basing their proportions on the Canon of Polykleitos. However, since he had written down one of Polykleitos’s measurements incorrectly, all of the women ended up with their legs too short and their butts too close to the ground. Looking at those butts, he’d sigh dejectedly, and if my father or my uncle suggested he sculpt them a bit higher up, he’d reply, “You all think you know more than Polykleitos, do you?” I understood, then, that Polykleitos must have been an old enemy of my grandfather’s.
My father—once when I was too reticent to talk about a certain topic—said to me, “You know that everything that you’re living through now, I already lived when I was your age, and so there’s nothing in your mind that I don’t know.” From that day on, I felt so obvious in his eyes that every comment or confession became useless. In this way, my reticence became total.
And once, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I got out of bed and secretly went to listen by the door to the room where the adults were chatting. I heard them say names I didn’t know, I heard new tones of voice. I understood that my life and theirs were separate things, and it was only by chance that one would encounter the other during the daytime.
I, back in middle school, would often go to the library to take out books. One day the school librarian made a mistake, and instead of Troy and Its Remains by Heinrich Schliemann, he accidentally gave me a little volume titled Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes. There’s no sum in the world that could ever compensate me for that mix-up.
I had a nanny who would sleep in my bedroom at our house in the country. After we had been in the dark for a little bit, I’d ask, “Dirce, are you there?” and I’d hear in response: “No, I’m not here.” Perplexed, I would point out, “But that was your voice”—to which she’d reply, merciless and poetic at the same time: “I’m not Dirce, I’m a little voice far, far away that’s coming from the woods . . .” And, knowing and not knowing, believing and not believing, I’d then have to face the night like that, as if it were a test.
My father knew an electrician who had lost his thumb in the hatch of an airplane. When he came to our house for lunch and noticed the effort I was making not to stare, he showed me his intact hand with his thumb hidden behind the other fingers; then he made it suddenly pop back out. He didn’t understand that precisely in that way, by leading me to believe that he could do the same with the other hand, he truly became monstrous to me.
When my mother explained to me that “monster” in ancient times meant an omen, or even a miracle, for a second I felt put at ease, as though I were living in a better world.
The fundamental book of my upbringing was Slovenly Peter, and since I used to suck my thumb, my greatest nightmare was the Tailor:
The door opens, the tailor has come
Leaping toward him to cut those thumbs.
He slices through them just like a shirt,
The boy cries out: “Oh no, that hurts!”
Slovenly Peter was also my favorite book, and even if I ate a lot, I felt awful for poor Kaspar, who died of consumption, because he kept saying, I don’t want it, I said no way, I won’t eat any soup today, and on whose grave they laid a soup bowl.
But now, before we go back inside, why don’t we talk about something pleasant.
Okay. When he was in a good mood, my father would say to me, “Hey piggy,” or “Hey piglet,” or “Hey little porker.” Left on my own, I’d say to myself, “Yes, I am piggy,” and I would laugh.
When making a snack, I used to fill a bowl of milk with little pieces of bread until the spoon could stay standing all on its own. If my father came into the kitchen, he’d say to me, “What a nice mishmash!”—and he’d steal some from my bowl.
There wasn’t much else, in life.
No, it’s almost all down there.
Michele Mari (Milan, 1955) is one of Italy’s most renowned contemporary writers and the recipient of literary awards including the Mondello Prize, the Bagutta Prize, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize. He has translated into Italian novels by John Steinbeck, H.G. Wells, Jack London, George Orwell, and other classic authors. His short story collection You, Bleeding Childhood, in which the story “Down There” appears, and his novel Verdigris (both translated by Brian Robert Moore) are forthcoming in 2023 from And Other Stories.
Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator whose published and forthcoming translations from the Italian include novels by Goliarda Sapienza and Lalla Romano. He received the 2021 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature and a 2022 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His translations of Verdigris and You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari are forthcoming from And Other Stories.