Sandra Petrignani
TRANS. BY Shelley Tepperman
Enough
I had perfected a way of appearing to eat when invited to dinner parties. I would serve myself the tiniest portion possible and spread it around my plate to look like more. Then, while the other guests filled their mouths, slicing and slurping with gusto, I’d slowy stroke the food with the tip of my fork, stir it around as if to cool off a mouthful, place a tiny morsel in my mouth and then chew it for an eternity. That way, when it was time for the next course, I’d be relieved to let them take my half-full plate and give me a fresh one. It would seem—or at least I hoped it would—as though I’d enjoyed the dish and had simply had enough.
Back then I was never hungry. The mere sight of food was enough to nauseate me. My stomach would clamp shut and accept only minuscule amounts that had been chewed so long the food was practically digested. But I was probably deluded in thinking that nobody noticed. There was always some woman who would glance at my plate and comment loudly: “Do you always eat so little?” And that would lead to discussions about diets, about being too fat or too thin, about different eating habits. Conversations I found excruciating: I felt all eyes were on me and I yearned to be invisible.
But on this one night attention was focused on another dinner guest, a man as thin as me with as little appetite, who had begun to tell a very disturbing story. The other guests had been talking about the meaning and sense of the tragic, about the fact—if I remember correctly—that today there’s no such thing as genuine tragedy. One of the guests, a man in his forties, said that even the most traumatic events—events that are traumatizing for an individual or society, don’t leave marks—they just happen and that’s it, their failure to link up the way they used to in the chain of causality dulls their dramatic impact, turns life and history into an inscrutable joke and thrusts the suffering individual into total solitude, into utter incomprehension. The thin man who wasn’t eating, who was at least twenty years older, said he disagreed. He said he found the discussion an empty intellectual exercise, a good attention-getting thesis to awe people like a sleight of hand trick, but disconnected from real life experience. I liked this man’s calm seriousness, I liked his hands that were scratching at crumbs on the tablecloth, scraping them into a little pile next to his plate. I should have understood that this obsessive gesture concealed a powerful aggressiveness, a suppressed ferocity. His head regularly jerked in a sort of tic: He would shake his head quickly as though saying “no,” or as if he were shuddering. The man in his forties stuck to his guns. I distracted myself by spreading a mound of sauce into oblivion. I smeared it all over the dish till it completely coated the porcelain bottom. Meanwhile, the older man had lit his pipe. “So . . . enough blather. You can’t understand.” he said peremptorily with a jerk of his head. “I’ve never been the same since I happened to witness a terrible event a few years ago. I assure you that the tragic does exist, and it’s something you can’t dismiss with irony. It’s something that leaves profund traces because it’s a shock even to people who aren’t directly involved but are merely witnesses—a feeling they never get over and that I’d call compassion.
“So what was this event?” someone asked.
The older man took two or three deep drags on his pipe and started to tell the story. I felt like throwing up and wanted to cover my ears, but I restrained myself by pressing my arms against my stomach and I listened.
“I used to live in a building that had a large shared garage. I’d leave every morning around 8:15 and I’d almost always see a woman who left at the same time to drive her seven-year-old son to school. The little boy would wait for his mother to back out of her parking spot, then he’d hop in and off they’d go. Meanwhile, I’d let my engine warm up so that they could leave first. I liked to sit in my car and watch them, recognizing the same gestures and enjoying the same ritual each day, nodding to the young mother, sometimes joking with the little boy when they weren’t in too much of a hurry. If for some reason I didn’t see them, it didn’t feel right, as though the day were starting with a bad omen. I only saw them in the morning, since that was the only time our comings and goings overlapped. And I don’t think we’d ever done much more than exchange pleasantries and the occasional quip about school or the weather. But I was very fond of that harmonious image and felt like I was part of their loving bond. Most people saw me as gruff and bearish, but to them I was a kindly man who sent them out into the world each morning with his blessing.”
Here he paused. His pipe needed attention. He poked at the embers, then tamped down the tobacco and took several deep puffs, cupping his hand over the bowl. Around the table there was total silence: everyone was listening, staring at the white smoke scattered by the brusque “no” of his tic.
“One morning it was raining hard. The inside door to the parking garage was locked so we had to enter from outside and we got drenched. We were all running late. The little boy leaned against the wall as usual, dropped his backpack to the ground and waited calmly. What unfolded next was unimaginable: I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was the combination of circumstances, a hellish confluence of misfortunes. The locked inside door to the garage. The soles of our shoes slippery from the rain. I don’t really know. The mother couldn’t explain it. The investigator surmised that her foot had slid onto the accelerator, or that perhaps in her haste she had tried to do two things at once: start the engine and move the front seat forward—perhaps her husband the day before had pushed it back to give himself more legroom. If only the inside door hadn’t been locked, if only it hadn’t been raining, if only the front seat had been in the right position. If only right at that moment, the moment she started the engine and her foot slid, the little boy hadn’t leaned down to pick up his knapsack. Maybe then the deranged car wouldn’t have crushed his chest and head against the wall, maybe he’d have escaped with a fractured leg or pelvis. Maybe. I was the only witness, the only one who could help. I plucked up my courage and fought the impulse to deny everything I’d seen, exactly like the mother who was frozen behind the wheel. I yelled, “Back up, back up!” my words reverberating horribly. She obeyed. I gathered up the boy, he was breathing but not responding. Pity compelled me to stay put, to protect the mother from the sight of her son. Or should I run and call for help? She was unable to approach, something screamed an unbearable “NO” in that garage but it wasn’t her: it was her voice in my mind, because I knew that that’s what she was screaming inwardly and I could hear it. Those moments seemed to last forever, then she got up her nerve and came over and held her son, talked to him, pleaded with him. At least I think that’s what happened, it’s a bit of a blur. A few day later I went to see her with some pathetic flowers but she sent me away. And I was grateful to her.”
I hated that man. As people started to break the silence, someone asked if they’d been able to save the child. “No, he died, on the way to the hospital in the incessant rain.” Someone else asked what became of the mother. The man with the tic drawing on his crackling pipe replied, “I don’t know. I figure she killed herself or went crazy. Maybe she’s dragging herself around in a trance waiting for her existence to cease naturally. The thought of her torments me to this day. The enormity of her guilt and her indisputable innocence. I identified with her because we are all that woman, merely instruments of fate, puppets. Except that, generally speaking, our culpabilityisn’t that huge, the consequences of our existence aren’t as obvious, nor are the outcomes of our actions so tragic. Yet, from this point of view, I mean, if something like what I’ve just described can happen, something so entirely outside of our conscious will, the result of a cursed series of coincidences, and if such an event is possible, even though its unforeseeable, possible precisely because it’s unforeseeable, then we bear responsibility for every act in our lives. History is woven out of our greatest and smallest actions, out of our enormous and in large part unconscious responsibility. Do you see?”
I don’t know what the others said. I was feeling too sick, my stomach was churning, hot flashes left me in a cold sweat. I hated that man whose story had destroyed my self-control. I had kept the dishonorable behaviour of my body at bay, I’d been able to conceal my constant nausea, my aversion toeverything and everyone until he caught me off guard with that story—completely inappropriate to this kind of evening—plunging me into waves of seasickness, of fear, into the tyranny of indigestion. In the bathroom I relieved myself of the little I had eaten and as always I was revolted by the disgusting transformation the food had undergone. My mind was filled with everything I was guilty of—my own personal homicides, my abortions. I saw myself as a mother who had assassinated her children. I remembered the noisy probe that entered me to aspirate a rough sketch of a body, that tore out a voice—I could hear it clearly—an anguished voice, a feeble breath. But I couldn’t allow myself the devastation of a birth since I couldn’t even feed myself and had this fraught relationship with my own flesh. I hated that man and his story, the tic that shook his handsome white head, the clouds of his fragrant smoke, his thinness that was so like mine. And yet for the entire evening I felt drawn to him.
We ended up standing beside each other at one point. “I’m sorry I upset you,” he said. So he’d noticed. “You didn’t upset just me,” I shot back. “Do you think it was wrong of me to tell that story?” I nodded, feeling queasy once again and wanting to end the conversation. While I nodded “yes,” he, at the mercy of the intensifying tic, was shaking his head “no.” I realized how comical we were—that, for example, we wouldn’t have been able to kiss. Because I suddenly felt a strong attraction to him and, had we been alone, I would have offered him my mouth. “I didn’t tell the truth,” he continued. I felt both relieved and betrayed. “So none of it was true?” I asked. He chomped on the stem of his extinguished pipe and, with his hands in his pockets, sized me up intently, gauging my stamina. He was rocking back and forth on his heels. “It didn’t happen exactly the way I described,” he said. I gripped the bookcase in front of me and I too rocked back and forth, dreading an unbearable confession. Why did he have to choose me, the most fragile and flawed person in the room, to reveal the truth to? “I was the one behind the wheel. It was my foot that slid. The boy was my son. That day I was the one driving him to school. My wife couldn’t live with me afterwards. And yet I had saved her from a greater tragedy. She could have been the one in my place.” I was confused, dismayed. “Why are you telling me this?” I choked out. “I haven’t talked about it for a long time but when people are arrogant and coldly make judgments it annoys me, it hurts me. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. But I’m sorry that you’re the only person I really upset; I’m sorry and pleased at the same time. You’re the only person here worth talking to.”
Was it a form of courtship? He asked for my address and phone number. But in the days that followed I waited in vain for him to call. I would at least have liked to thank him. From that night on I miraculously started to eat again, I could chew without feeling my throat clench, I started to appreciate the different flavours, I stopped feeling guilty about the children I didn’t bring into the world, about the blood spattered on the gynecologist’s sheet.
As I handed him my phone number the hostess brought dessert around. I looked at her with terror as she pushed the bowl of Mont Blanc towards me. I hate candied chestnuts, and I especially hate Mont Blanc cake, the sickeningly sweet meringue, but I didn’t dare refuse. My companion watched me with amusement. “Even we will have to eat,” he said, almost laughing. And he told me an ancient story, the one about Niobe whose children were all killed by the gods. She wept for them for nine days; on the tenth day the children were buried and she remembered food “because she was tired of grieving.” He shook his head harder, took a forkful of dessert and put it in my mouth, then he seemed happy and added: “It’s the same with us. We’re tired of grieving too.”
Sandra Petrignani has written novels, short stories, and travel books. Born in Piacenza, Italy, she divides her time between the Umbrian countryside and Rome, the setting of two of her works: E in mezzo il fiume on life in the Trastevere neighborhood, and Addio a Roma about Rome’s post-war artistic and literary society. Her upcoming book is a biography of writer Natalia Ginzburg called La Corsara.
Shelley Tepperman, one of Canada’s pre-eminent play translators, translates from French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Her translations have been produced throughout North America and the United Kingdom. Shelley is also a filmmaker and works in documentary film and television as a writer, director, and story editor.