The Ridiculous Age E-Book

Margherita Giacobino

• Herausgeber: Dedalus Europe
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

While the radio announcer reports new conflicts and atrocities every day and beggars line the pavements outside her comfortable apartment, the old woman struggles to maintain her grip on life. It is a ridiculous age, she tells an acquaintance. Almost everyone she used to know and love is dead. Only her ancient cat and her best friend Malvina are left, and Malvina is rapidly sliding into senility. But the old woman's real and constant grief is the loss of her lover, Nora, ten years ago. In this disintegrating world, her lifeline is an immigrant worker, Gabriela, the home help. But Gabriela is being hounded for money by her dysfunctional family, which includes the self-styled 'terrorist' Dorin. How far can an elderly and cultivated woman, still feisty if increasingly world-weary and prickly, allow herself to be drawn into the affairs of a young woman she does not entirely trust? A brilliant evocation of the challenges of old age, Margherita Giacobino's caustic and funny novel is a tragi-comedy whose unexpected and dramatic conclusion will leave the reader gasping.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Europe

General Editor: Timothy Lane

THE RIDICULOUS AGE

This work has been translated with the contribution of the Centre for Books and Reading of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited

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ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 28 1

ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 52 6

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First published by Dedalus in 2024

L’età ridicola copyright © Margherita Giacobino 2018

Translation The Ridiculous Age copyright © Graham Anderson 2024

This translation has been made possible thanks to the mediation of r. vivian literary agency-padova-Italy

The right of Margherita Giacobino to be identified as the author & Graham Anderson as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The Author

Margherita Giacobino was born in 1952 and lives in Turin. She is a writer, journalist and translator. Dedalus has published three books by her: Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter (2017), The Price of Dreams (2020) which is a fictionalised account of the life of Patricia Highsmith and The Ridiculous Age (2024).

The film rights of The Ridiculous Age have been sold and filming began in October 2023.

The Translator

Graham Anderson was born in London. After reading French and Italian at Cambridge, he worked on the book pages of City Limits and reviewed fiction for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph.

His translations for Dedalus from Italian are Grazia Deledda’s short story collections The Queen of Darkness and The Christmas Present, and her novel Marianna Sirca. Forthcoming in 2024 is Diego Marani’s The Celestial City.

His own short fiction has won or been shortlisted for three literary prizes. He is married and lives in Oxfordshire.

Author’s Acknowledgements

Thank you to the indispensable Rita Vivian, my agent, who has believed in me for many years and supported my work with great sensitivity, competence and energy. Thank you to Marilena Rossi, who despite being busy with those precious little creatures of her own has found time to take care of my elderly creature as well. Thank you to Barbara Gatti who has kept all the threads of this work together and to Alessandra Maffiolini who has brought a breath of youthful lightness and humour to the doings of my nonagenarian.

Translator’s Note

Three songs which are quoted from or referred to in the novel can all be enjoyed on YouTube:

Page 156: The Pretty Washerwoman is La Bella Lavanderina.

Page 237: What shall we do? is Babbo non vuole.

Page 319: “A song by Vecchioni” is Roberto Vecchioni’s 1977 song, Samarcanda.

Contents

I     Global terror and other senile inconveniences

II    Love in the time of Isis

III   Things are not merely things

IV  No waiting room for Venom

V    Everything around me is real

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I

Global terror and other senile inconveniences

Seven thirty-two in the morning. I am awake because Venom the cat and pains in the arms have woken me, I am tired of grinding through life and being ground down by it, as tired as an elderly earthworm who lives in a cemetery. I have made myself a coffee and returned to bed. I am reading, or trying to. The telephone rings. I always keep it next to me because it might be Malvina and indeed it is her. But she is not ill, she is just excited. She asks if I have heard the news. What news, I say, and she tells me to turn on the radio.

I say that the radio in the bedroom which I turned on a while ago is tuned to Rai 5 which only plays classical music.

Not that one! The one in the kitchen!

Yes, but I’m in bed. Why would I be in the kitchen at this hour of the day? It’s cold. Malvina tells me that Germana has been killed in a terrorist attack. In Birmingham.

In Birmingham? What was she doing there? Don’t her people live in Liverpool?

No, Birmingham! Don’t you remember anything at all?

Well, but Germana’s son-in-law comes from Liverpool, that’s where her daughter went to live, I say, rummaging through my memory in search of old telephone conversations in which Germana spoke of her extremely tedious visits to her daughter’s family. I don’t remember how many grandchildren she has, the last time I asked her she just said: too many.

Malvina ploughs on unstoppably, like a Panzer tank, about the attack, and what if she is right? She says that Germana is not answering her mobile, it’s very strange, she always answers, and this is the morning she was due to arrive in Birmingham, at the airport, where two bombs exploded, maybe three, there’s no clear news yet but Malvina is convinced of the worst, a voice inside is telling her so. My mind’s eye sees Germana lying on a bloodstained floor, strewn with remnants of humanity and its appurtenances, newspapers, plastic cups, a hand still clutching a boarding card. A large, male hand, covered in pale hairs, and finger tips so square and stubby they seem to have been chopped off. Here ends the man, with those stubby fingers that reach for no human skin, or leaves, or animal fur but are self-contained digits that say I, I, I, god, god, god, and I realise that the man I am thinking of is Germana’s son-in-law, an abusive member of the God-squad who has planted himself in her daughter’s life and sold her the ten commandments to the accompaniment of love and domestic violence. It would be highly appropriate if a man like him were reduced to pieces in a collision with the coercive powers of other terrorists. No, I see Germana quite composed, all in one piece, her iron-grey hair barely touched by faint traces of blood, certainly not sprawled on the floor all soiled and sullied. At the most she may have lost a shoe, those awful narrow ladies’ shoes she favours, with fringes on the toes.

I am about to ask Malvina how she has become so intimate with Germana that she knows when she answers her mobile and when she doesn’t, but now that I have loosened my memory, another detail comes to mind.

The radio is filling my bedroom: the Vienna Philharmonic is playing Mahler. Symphony No.6, the ‘Tragic’. The pathos of it overwhelms me. At this time of day they should be broadcasting only Mozart, or maybe the Beatles. Instilling a bit of insensate joy into the dawn of our dusks.

But the coffee is getting cold. I stretch a hand towards the cup on the bedside table, I sip at it listening to Malvina.

At the first break in her agitated outpourings I say: Malvina, listen, Germana wasn’t in Birmingham, even if that should have been Liverpool, because she died three years ago and they held the service for her in the chapel at the cemetery. I didn’t go, but you did.

Malvina takes a moment to reflect. She is wondering whether she should deny it, accuse me of having a wandering mind or change the subject.

Instead she takes another direction, an unexpected one. All right, she says, she won’t have been killed but it could have happened. Think about it, if she was in Birmingham this morning she would definitely have died.

Is there a flash of nonsensical truth in this assertion, or is Malvina moving ever further along the lonely but crowded pathways of dementia? What did Germana die of? I don’t remember, but she had reached the age where family and friends no longer feel the need to justify her passing.

Listen, I say, thank you for the news. If the voice inside you warns you next time beforehand that some disaster is happening, let me know so that maybe I can get there in time. If you’d told me yesterday I’d have taken the aeroplane to Birmingham, and that way you’d now have a valid reason to be upset.

I would be there, stretched out on the lino floor sticky with beer and chips, not composed and in one piece like Germana but flung down like a wet rag, a piece here, a piece there, stick hurled against a wall and hopefully in its trajectory exterminating a wife-beater who would otherwise have got away unhurt, and it wouldn’t matter if I was missing a leg or a few bones no longer needed, with a little luck dying instantly or at least very quickly, before starting to feel any pain or think about health insurance, and it would be not a bad death at all.

At ten to eight, punctual as ever in her early arrival, Gabriela arrives.

Neat, fresh, smiling, tightly encased in her tomato-coloured padded jacket. Little Red Riding Hood who has only this morning escaped from the wolf.

In the old woman who cautiously opens the door, Gabriela inspires, as always, a profound sense of marvel.

It is something to carry on living for, the sense of marvel. Even if it is mixed with diffidence. And between them, those two things form a barrier to love, an arabesque of railings like iron flowers, sharp as blades, beyond which stretch the green and deceptive pastures of the future. They are a mirage, the old woman is aware of it. She never even dreams of opening the barrier, she restricts herself to peering through it, her arthritic hands clutching the cold metallic spirals of wrought iron.

But why do they set off bombs? Gabriela suddenly asks the old woman, who does not wish to be called signora because she has never felt herself to be a signora, and who is listening with one ear to the radio news whilst simultaneously scrolling, with a grimace on her face, through the literary pages of an online daily paper.

There is nothing more stupid and repetitive than bad news.

Now, with Gabriela in the house — that industrious bundle of youthfulness — she is able to bear it, even to laugh it off. Gabriela, a shoulder-shrugging innocent, protects her from the world, the girl is her bastion, the fortified citadel behind which her threadbare good humour can dance again, lifting its multi-coloured and outmoded skirts.

No reply to Gabriela’s question. The old woman reads the literary pages and snorts.

But are we still parroting that same old thing about happy people having no story to tell? she says snappily. It’s a man writing, obviously. Some spoilt husband cossetted in Tolstoyesque fashion by an oppressed wife, who sets the smoking samovar in front of his nose while he, the god of the house, comes up with big ideas to launch on the literary marketplace.

The girl, mindless of her green rubber gloves foaming with detergent, wrings her hands. What drives them to kill people? she asks in her stubborn little voice, preoccupied.

You know what Tolstoy said? That every happy family is happy in the same way, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.

That’s wonderful! Gabriela brightens, holding the gloves to her chest.

It isn’t wonderful at all, it’s a pile of rubbish! Exactly the opposite is true. Happiness comes in many forms, it’s diverse, unaccountable, it can’t be defined or grasped. It is art. It is dangerous, and for that reason little is said about it. It is unhappiness that is always the same (misery death envy hate depression silence and blood) the same ingredients cooked up into sauces that only differ from each other according to fashion.

She interrupts herself because she realises she is talking about evil — that idiotic conviction, as ever, that evil and unhappiness are the same thing, whereas it has been proved that there are people who do evil with pleasure, with joy, with deep satisfaction.

I don’t know anything, she mutters in the end, remembering that the girl is waiting for an answer. It’s no good asking me, I’ve never understood the first thing about this world.

The girl can’t have heard because after a minute she persists. Do they hate us? she asks.

The old woman raises her head, looks at her over the top of her spectacles. Certainly, she grumbles, irritated and at the same time relieved to be diverted from thoughts that have nowhere to go. All of them. They even hate you, with your pretty little well-scrubbed face.

But they die as well. Why do they want to die? They’re young.

The old woman is annoyed. She mumbles something about hard drugs, crack, heroin, prayer. The violence triggered by addiction, poverty, ignorance. She ends by telling her to ask one of them, if she ever comes across one.

After some minutes of laborious silence, Gabriela informs her, while continuing to rinse the dishes, that in fact she does know one, one of these foreign fighters, he’s a certain Dorin who has recently announced to her his conversion to Islam and his intention to go to the Middle East.

Gabriela is tiny but strong, with a great capacity for work, like all the women from her country. She has a round face permanently expressing surprise, enormous eyes, Bambi-like. But when her eyelashes flutter over that innocent look of hers, it is not out of malice, it is to signal retreat. At the least sign of danger Gabriela withdraws into herself and erects her defences, the way a porcupine rolls into a ball or a hermit crab retreats into its shell, and in the meantime she might spill tears or wring her hands or offer lavish apologies, but they are only the many ways in which she covers her retreat.

Once she has gained the safety of her own internal space, nothing can reach her any more.

She is just soap and water, even if recently she has taken to painting her lips with geranium-pink lipstick.

She puts it on for herself, for Gabriela. It is for herself that she combs her hair so carefully, and files the little almond-shaped nails at the ends of her tireless little fingers. Gabriela has never had a mother, and so acts as her own mother. She does not have a lover and who knows if she ever will, and so she blushes at the expression in her eyes when she sees herself in the mirror. She is twenty-six and a virgin.

To his improbable revelations about himself, Dorin has seemingly appended an offer of marriage. But she, Gabriela, won’t even consider it. Put a veil over her head, no, thank you. And marry someone who wants to kill people.

The old woman stares at her, frowning. Then: Where did he spring from, this Dorin? she asks, just to make conversation.

I’ve known him for ages, says the girl evasively. He wasn’t always like this.

Like what?

Horrible! she informs her. He bites his nails, he’s too thin. He never laughs. And then men with beards revolt me, she adds, with a shudder which is very pretty to see.

Quite right, the old woman approves. Tell him that if he doesn’t shave it off you won’t even think about it.

The girl appears to ponder this suggestion. The glasses emerge gleaming from the tea towel she is using to dry them. A ray of sunshine falls on her face, an apple newly plucked from the tree, vibrant with freshness.

He is not yet born, the man who will suit Gabriela. A woman perhaps? No, that person has already come and gone, was born and died some time ago. Gabriela arrived in the world as one of twins and lost the other half of herself when she was only six. How it happened depends on the vagaries of her partial and fantastical assertions: a car accident in which her sister was thrown through the windscreen; the drunken father struck her with a bottle; she died of a sudden and unexpected fever. The mother — more an absence than a presence — went away immediately afterwards, removing herself to another of those regions devastated by alcohol and real socialism where she later died from unknown but almost certainly not natural causes. Apart from the fact that there is nothing more natural than violent death, thinks the old woman. The little girl who was left was entrusted to the care of her maternal grandma and somehow, protected by the grandmother or thanks to her own resilience or the whims of chance, she survived cohabitation with an alcoholic father, in a fire-hazard of a house with no running water. Fortune, in the form of a rapidly progressing brain tumour, left her an orphan in her adolescence, before the father could have other ideas. Ten years ago she emigrated to Italy along with her half-sister, daughter of her father’s first marriage.

Perhaps Gabriela would like to pursue the broken conversation, but the old woman is no longer listening, raises a hand to command silence, the radio is discussing the drought, a hundred and forty-two days now since it last rained. The temperature remains mild and incomprehensible, the plants on the windowsill are unwittingly turning green and producing buds notwithstanding the calendar indicating the depths of winter.

I know that Gabriela is a compulsive storyteller, naturally. Or, simply, a liar.

She is intelligent and has been to school, she almost achieved a diploma in something, I have forgotten what, she used to study at night while working by day but she had to stop to act as babysitter to some small niece or other, she is able to work out in her head a simple addition of two numbers and can even do multiplication if provided with pen and paper. She is deliciously old-fashioned, although equipped with the innate know-how of the younger digital generation, she can do anything and everything on her mobile, but hardly ever uses it as a telephone, nor does one ever see her tapping out messages. She has a ramshackle family — a sort of half-sister, a certain number of nephews, nieces and other relatives — but has been living alone for some time, a decision to which I can only give hearty approval.

But what is true in the things that she tells me or hides from me, or in the spiteful gossip purveyed by Ana? Her contradictions, her expression that looks the more dubious the more she intends to appear sincere. Her mysteries, her switches of mood, the sudden transitions between light and dark. Gabriela is not one of those helpers who skim off some of the shopping money for themselves, no, she skims off some of reality. Probably her life would be unliveable if she didn’t make things up.

From time to time I allow my mind to wander in futile speculation about the girl. It happens in the night, maybe, when sleep dries up like rivers after months of burning heat, and I remain stranded, my arms behind my head, with the catarrhal breathing of Venom that accompanies my own creating the maddening soundtrack of insomnia. Then I imagine Gabriela’s home, a spick and span two-room apartment facing a strip of parched parkland and a river the colour of waste matter, the realm of voracious seagulls and big brown rats that look alarmingly like otters. But Gabriela’s home sparkles, her small, reddened knuckles are tireless and the gaze of those hazel eyes is sharp beneath a brow creased with the constant preoccupations of daily life. Soaps, detergents, brushes, Gabriela is a fetishist for cleanliness. Dear absurd little child.

In those moments I am happy to be as old as I am, and not to feel anything for her except perhaps an abstract benevolence, yes, the old-fashioned word is exactly right, a well-wishing that is airy and wide like an ancient window blown open by the wind, I wish you every possible good my child, so run my thoughts, I who have never had children. But even benevolence needs to be maintained at arm’s length, the wind blows and passes and I remain, I close the window which no longer, or barely, serves to shield me these days. I do not wish to know too much about your life, which in any case you keep closely guarded like an old love letter that has never been opened. I would not know how, nor would I want, to protect you, and I do not even know — ah blessed ignorance — whether you hate me, tolerate me, feel sorry for me or are fond of me, whether you rob me as well like those who preceded you, whether you study my movements, whether you are planning to betray me… it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.

I have already made a will stating that on my death a certain sum, not too large — I am not rich — goes to the girl. The rest to a charity for the protection of cats, recommended by that muddle-headed Malvina. I hope that Gabriela will not reveal herself to be a little snake, which would oblige me to change my will. Stay strong, Gabriela. I did not even wish to know very much about the charity, I like to imagine it as a sort of free-range haven, a retreat for crazy old cat ladies a little like tramps, and I have no intention of finding out if I am deluded.

What did the old woman do before becoming old?

Does it matter? And anyway, when a person has abandoned it decades ago, a profession tends to fade into oblivion.

But Gabriela is young and curious and gathers pieces of evidence. She is a slow and cautious investigator, but determined. More a secret agent than a Sherlock Holmes. One of those obscure agents who operate alone, to a plan whose reach they do not understand, receiving orders from faceless messengers and not knowing the names of those who come either before or after them.

A sepia photograph hanging in the hallway particularly fascinates her: a lady dressed as a page kneels before another lady in flowing white robes and proffers her a long-stemmed lily.

Do you like it? the old woman asks coming out of the bathroom and finding her lost in contemplation of the photo. She points to the kneeling page and stands in profile to demonstrate the resemblance, which might or might not be there to see.

I was an actress once.

Really? When? exclaims the girl, enthusiastic.

But the old woman makes a gesture as if to say: so many years ago you couldn’t even imagine, and looks at her with those eyes that confuse. The old woman rarely answers direct questions. She seems to be amusing herself at her expense, at times Gabriela has to ask herself if she has misused a word or said something foolish, and blushes. The old woman and her house filled with books prompt in her a certain respect, and also a measure of pride. Sometimes her employer shouts at her, or is impatient; but usually she is kind. She is not malevolent like number two, or wayward like number one, who was always changing her mind and did it on purpose to put her in difficulties.

Gabriela knows she is very lucky: not only does she have a steady job, regularly paid and with her social security contributions included, but in addition she works for a single and self-sufficient lady. Who gets dressed by herself and smells nice. The last one, number three, she had to change four, five times a day, and in the evening she could still smell her pee and poo on her own person, she contracted an allergy from having to wash so often and disinfect her clothes and linen. And the family members were never satisfied, always there hovering over her work, suspecting her of petty theft. When the incontinent old woman died she cried, from sadness and relief.

The girl is constantly walking past the photograph. To her it seems incredibly old, but it is impossible to give it a precise age. The years that came before her own birth all mingle in a nebulous past, a history that does not concern her and which in any case she has never been taught, except in brief outline, in a language almost incomprehensible to her, even though she has been speaking it for years.

Her relationship with the world is for Gabriela an enormous effort of interpretation. What do they mean, the signals that are constantly offered, thrust, whispered or flung in her direction? The things are there, the words are said — it is up to her to interpret them. This is her personal no-man’s-land. Interpretation.

Gabriela is brilliant and diligent. In the places where she has lived, in the schools she has attended, she has studied Russian, English and a bit of German. Italian she has learned in the field, like virtually all the immigrants from her country. The women that is, because language seems to matter less to the men — can that be because they work as bricklayers or lorry drivers or in trades where there is less need to speak, or because they know they can make themselves understood one way or another, obtain whatever it is they want?

As a complete stranger to the languages she uses, and so to the worlds she lives in, painfully uncertain how to take the most obvious things, the girl has the constant feeling that the sense of words escapes her. Their real, deep sense. What they really mean, for other people, in real life, in the world of things that have angles and edges and that can hurt you.

She makes her way gropingly. She forces herself to be calm, to speak slowly. She knows that if she becomes agitated, if she becomes frightened, the words will desert her, or turn on her.

It is her personal handicap, which she must hide if she wants to survive.

This is another reason for those preoccupied creases that pucker her forehead. She is perennially on the alert. Things are not as they seem, it would be nice to be trusting but it is too dangerous.

Months ago the old woman told her that she once had a restaurant of her own and was a celebrated chef. Gabriela believed her, two or three times she has seen the signora cooking refined little dishes, on the occasions when her friend Malvina was invited to dinner.

Then she realised she was joking. Not from malice but just anyway, for the pleasure of inventing things. The trouble is that she is always straight-faced and serious and it is impossible to tell when she is joking and when she isn’t.

At other moments the signora — this is what Gabriela calls her, she would not dream of calling her the old woman, not even in her private thoughts when no one is listening — has declared herself to be a captain of industry, an opera singer, a ballet teacher, a forest ranger, a street girl and other things besides.

A street girl?

Not one normal occupation, teacher, clerk, nurse, shop assistant.

Gabriela keeps to herself. She is watchful, she is on her guard. As always, as everywhere. She tries to ingratiate herself with the old woman, in ways that are not too obvious, because she knows that flattery would produce the opposite effect. She makes every effort. In any case she has understood that here, in the old woman’s house, the range of horrors that could befall her is much narrower than in the world outside. At certain moments she even relaxes. She forgets to be preoccupied.

From time to time, especially when she is ironing, the three small creases fade away and Gabriela’s forehead becomes as smooth as a new-born baby’s. She smiles secretly, an internal smile just for herself.

The old woman watches her and reflects on how opaque human beings are, indecipherable and unpredictable, every human being on earth, but this one in particular. Gabriela. What lies deep in that bunker inside her, where words play no part?

What will become of her, in the rest of her life, which the old woman will not see?

Will she have an honest and limited life, a little ant, holding back from all excesses, including happiness — or will she suddenly throw herself into some foolish love affair or undertaking? Will she follow a guru, devote herself to other people’s children or produce some herself, though they will never completely be her own? Will she be expunged from the scene by chance or by history, or will she survive to a ripe old age? Will she ever learn to know herself and the world?

(If there still is a world, in thirty, fifty years’ time.)

Questions which the old woman has no way of answering.

Gabriela is an enigma, and it could not be otherwise: she is young, she is on her own. She is a woman, she is a foreigner. She is as uncertain as the future.

She has never asked her if she has been married, if she has had children. Initially because she did not dare — the old woman is somewhat formidable, in her responses as in her silences — but then because she realised on reflection that these are exactly the questions that are asked of her, and which irritate her. When I was your age, they tell her, I was married, I had two small children. Not even engaged? What are you waiting for?

Quite, what is she waiting for?

Is it because she doesn’t enjoy going dancing, like her younger but much more lively nieces, and doesn’t spend hours trying on make-up and listening to music and talking about boys or men?

If only these occupations had held any interest for her — but that has never been the case — now Gabriela is too old for that kind of thing. And she was too old even last year, and the one before, and the one before that. That is the way it has always been. From her early childhood Gabriela has been older than her age — perhaps because she was born a few minutes before the other, her twin? Or because when she lost her she aged several years in a single moment, and time has never been the same again?

According to his theory of relativity, Einstein predicted, and his scientific colleagues subsequently confirmed, that time passes more quickly at high altitudes than at low, and that a twin living at sea level will find the twin living in the mountains a little older than himself. In the case of Gabriela, the difference between the twin on high ground swept by the winds of fate and the one who dwells in the bowels of memory is not a matter of a few seconds but of centuries. Living side by side in the girl are a little old lady, wise, diffident, cautious and even miserly — and hidden away in the subsoil and the half-light, a naïve little girl who believes in fairy stories. This is the most precious part of her, the treasure to be protected. Perhaps Gabriela is a privileged person in this respect, for it has been revealed to her from an early age that the truest core of each of us is what we have lost for ever.

It must be thanks to this ‘little old lady’ side of her that Gabriela gets on well with her employer. When — judiciously, prudently — she escorts her in the street, adjusting her pace to the old woman’s as if born to do exactly this, one would think, looking at them from a distance, that they were almost contemporaries.

One might even think, seeing them cross the road together, that there is a resemblance between them — or at least something that unites them despite their being so very different, maybe their distance from the rest of humanity.

Lulled by the hypnotic movement of the iron which slides back and forth over the white blouses, Gabriela allows herself to dream. In her dreams there is no Prince Charming, there is no male, however strong and gallant, there are no girlfriends to laugh with and confide in, there is a house, simple — her dreams are not grandiose — clean, filled with plants and flowers. Around the house is a small meadow, a vegetable garden, behind which one can maybe glimpse a field of corn and rows of tomatoes, but she is not sure about those, there is too much light to make things out properly, a wall of light separates the house from the rest of the world and protects the shady depth of the earth floor over which her feet move, noiselessly. The only other presence besides her in this house is an old woman — her grandmother perhaps, but she resembles more closely her employer, she smells of orange blossom rather than stinks of sweat and alcohol and chicken dung and she speaks without shouting, it is to this old woman that the girl relates, in her fantasies, the trivial events of her day, it is to her that she turns with her questions. The old woman listens patiently, replies, reveals secrets and mysteries. Gabriela listens, tries hard to understand, to remember… and the dream breaks off.

The first day, when the signora interviewed her for the job, she offered her coffee and that was a stroke of luck because they naturally went into the kitchen, which is much lighter than the formal and rather dark sitting room, and since it was May Gabriela saw the window framed by jasmine in full flower. A cry of wonder caught in her throat, she was careful not to let it escape but her attention wandered and the signora, noticing where her eyes were turned, repeated her question.

The jasmine was the coup de foudre. All the rest suddenly made sense, sprang to life, coalescing around the jasmine: the iron grille at the window with its spiral bars, the old and solid furniture, the carpets, the white and wrinkled hands. Her desire was so strong it left a bitter taste in her mouth. A little life consummated in an instant: to live and die here, in this house. Never to leave it.

The signora told her she was very young, really very young to be doing this kind of work. Of course she meant very stupid, Gabriela thought, dropping her gaze to her pink canvas shoes.

But at the end, when she got up to go, the signora said to her: Fine, so come tomorrow morning at eight, and Gabriela nodded yes, without even daring to smile.

The old woman is thinking about death. It is normal, at her age. Life is like a tight-rope on which we dance, very proud when young of our gifts of agility and balance, some are so sure of themselves they manage to exchange the rope for a wide and solid road, but there comes a moment when everyone realises that the other end of the rope is near, one seems to catch a glimpse of it, the foot wobbles. Then naturally one’s steps become hesitant. Turning back is impossible, the rope dissolves bit by bit behind our back as we make our way along it, how did we never notice it before? Of what has been, of what we have been, only memory and dreams remain, and neither of these two rivals and lovers can explain to us how we have advanced along a high-wire that does not exist, or only for an instant and is attached to nothing at either end.

The old woman is well aware that the end of her personal rope is coming near, soon her feet will plunge into the great nothingness, her hand will have no hold to hang on to, she knows this, she feels it in her bones and in her thoughts, both of which are thoroughly exhausted. She wonders how it will be, when, at what precise moment. What her final sensations will be.

She thinks of the woman she loved more than her own self, she was called Nora. She died more than ten years ago. She thinks about how it was, what she experienced, Nora, in her final moments.

She ought to know, but she doesn’t. She was there, a few metres away, but asleep. Like the Apostles in the garden of Gethsemane, thinks the old woman, who does not believe in god but believes in stories.

When death entered her house — of all arrivals the greatest, the ultimate visitation — she was sleeping. Which is why, now, she knows nothing about actual death: when, how, where.

It is this total lack of control, the inability to exercise her willpower, that is wearing her out.

Consciousness, consciousness as I know it, she thinks, crumbling the seconds of the night between her withered fingers, is an artificial product, a flower produced in the age-old greenhouse of human thought. Decorative, frequently and deliberately poisonous. Almost always useless, and above all fragile.

Pure and simple nature, blind nature, terrifies it. And rightly so, for nature has the capacity to reduce it to dust in a puff of air.

To save their hides and ward off this terror, the so-called philosophers have for centuries denied that nature exists. Only human thought exists, or the mind, or culture, history, science and its advances — this is what they cry, burying their heads in the sand. And then they croak, exactly like all the others.

But give me a story at least, a meaning, something to manufacture. An illusion. How long has it been since I had any such thing?

If I had one, even death would be bearable.

Perhaps, if I believed in god, she thinks, turning over on her side, the one that hurts less (the arthritis gnaws at her bones, these windy nights).

But god has no appeal for her. The only things she has ever believed in, in her life, were love and work. Too many years have passed since she lost them both.

Nora, says the old woman out loud.

And Nora appears. No, not in the darkness of the room, but in the lightning flashes that criss-cross her mind, Nora reveals herself for a split-second, an obscure disturbance, warm, breathing, terrible, a seismic tremor of love. And instantly disappears. The old woman groans, covers her face with her hands, sucked down, tumbling, into the undertow of loss, of missing someone. Grief has the gift of making you feel things vividly. It rips away the cobwebs of habit. It shatters the worm-eaten beams of survival.

If Nora appears, it is solely to force her to acknowledge that she isn’t here, she isn’t here any more and never will be again. Obedient to the summons — I have evoked you and you have come! — what a wretched triumph of the will, what a risible feat of memory, in reality assisted by technology, for there is not a day goes past when the old woman does not look at some photograph of Nora on the computer. More rarely she allows herself a video or voice recording, when she is seized with panic about forgetting her voice she listens again to a poem, a song, a soliloquy, how fortunate that she compiled that archive for which Nora used to mock her so roundly, or what would she do now?

What would she do, hearing again the voice without which her life is no longer her life, but a dried-up sea? Usually she listens for a few minutes, then suddenly starts to whimper, turns the machine off, makes herself a tisane or, if it is nearly evening, a strong drink. She forces herself to breathe in a regular rhythm. To fix her mind on some object apart, the flight of a fly, the sleeping of Venom.

Grief is a great thing, but it cannot be borne for long. So she drinks something strong, breathes, life resumes. Life, or what is left of it.

If only grief were capable of finishing her off! The old woman curses her sturdy heart. There is something not right about a heart so wretchedly clinging to life.

Cynical, critical, more intelligent than empathic. More rational than emotional. Always that tendency to doubt everything, to argue about everything. That look that came to be regarded as pitiless. She loved only Nora and her work. Hard-hearted. Mean. Serves you right.

She has read somewhere (a best-selling paperback?) the story of an oriental sage who died when he made the decision to. He stretched out comfortably on his bed, slowed his breathing down until he made it cease altogether and paf! he was dead.

Sublime bullshit. You can’t die to order.

She has tried.

Slow down the breathing. Empty the head of thoughts (this is the hardest, the mind abhors a vacuum, if it’s not thinking it plays silly games, or worse still falls prey to the werewolves of the daily horror-story, becomes a sounding-box for the evils of the world). Feel oneself floating off into nothingness. Breathe more slowly still, faintly only, very faintly. A mild sense of cloudiness, probably due to the diminished supply of oxygen to the brain, memories of joints smoked in youth, which never did much for her, no affinity with drugs. Breathe in less air, ever less…

Then, without knowing how, she is distracted by something, has begun to breathe normally, and no, she is not dead.

Death does not come when you summon it. At least not here in the West. Summoned by an incorrigible unbeliever, death turns a deaf ear.

Or is it her voice, does it carry insufficient firmness and conviction?

She still has some duties to perform on this earth, she thinks in the extreme weariness of early morning.

Her old cat and her old friend, two scatter-brained creatures who without her would be lost.

As if he had heard, Venom gets up from the corner of the bed where he has been curled up fast asleep — the old woman seems to hear his rheumatic little cat bones creaking — and comes to settle beside her face, his feral breath just under her nose, his whiskers tickling her.

This is what remains to me of love, the old woman thinks, pushing the cat’s nose away from her face. The first tram of the morning passes in the street.

The old woman spends a lot of time observing things, after the second cataract operation and with the expensive new glasses her distance vision is quite good, whereas her close-up vision is more of an effort, which is why in recent times she has been reading less and observing more. She has got into the habit of watching from her windows, now from one, now from another, the apartment is big and has so many of them.

Observing other beings — when there are any, naturally. What is visible of them, what is not hidden by walls and the misty corners of the old woman’s eyes. It may happen that for a whole afternoon there is nothing to observe except the social life of the pigeons on the open gallery of the building opposite. She recognises each of them individually, the one with the feet eaten away as if by leprosy, the domineering male who chases the females away from the food and tries to mount them, the desperate mother calling out, the terrified chick cheeping from a ledge, the winners and losers in the battle for survival. At night she throws them breadcrumbs and grains of rice, some of which land on the neighbours’ balconies, provoking angry comments.

Until a few years ago Venom would also eye them from behind the iron grille at the window, leaning forward and quivering, uttering little trills of anxiety and desire, the call of the wild or in his case more modestly the call of the windowsill, the moans of a frustrated hunting urge. But now he doesn’t bother. It seems he no longer needs distraction, no longer needs to find a remedy from the endless tedium of the hours. He is content to sleep, to eat, to share with her the bed, the armchair, the room, to warm one another’s bones.

Who knows if he too thinks about death, in his own way, the old woman wonders, slowly passing her wrinkled and spotted hand over the mangy fur of the cat, which snores lightly, eyes closed.

In this way, little by little, the moments pass until it is time to go out.

Outside, beneath a section of the porch, a homeless person has recently taken up residence, the umpteenth one, a man who reads all day long with apparent intensity. A good marketing policy: establish a point of difference, don’t just be one of the crowd. The old woman, however, stopped giving him money when she saw what he reads: rubbish. And anyway it is not all that original, other readers are soon springing up everywhere, each armed with a dog-eared bestseller, one of those volumes you can buy for a euro on market stalls, it’s clear this is some kind of franchised begging system, maybe organised by a second-hand bookseller.

Further on is the woman with the dog. She is still young, barely forty, Italian, articulate and correctly dressed; the dog is a white mongrel with a black patch over its left eye, and the old woman felt a small, warm surge of joy when she saw it jump up and snap at the hand she put out. A proper dog, alive. But other customers do not seem to attract its interest and now the animal, quiet, dozes all day long on a blanket, its eyes dull.

Sometimes the old woman has fantasies of buying it. How much do you want for the dog? she would ask the blonde woman smoking a cigarette and examining her nails. Obviously she will not do so, she no longer has the energy to live with a dog. There must be a distribution centre for dogs on the fringes of the city, the applicants queue up in the morning at the counter where the animals are allocated and everyone is assigned a dog in better or worse condition, either on the random principle or maybe according to its colour and whether it tones in with their clothing. The dog, sedated, will lie for hours on a mat or in a padded holdall. From time to time the beggar will scratch its head absent-mindedly or get it to rest its nose on his lap, passers-by like seeing that, the love between man and dog, the responsibility, the dog inspires pity but it is a pity they manage to bear, and at the same time it ennobles the owner, restores to him that humanity from which his profession of beggar tends to detract, in the eyes of the customers. The coins drop into the tin. What happens when the dogs get sick or become unruly? Are they eliminated? (How?) And probably dumped at some illegal rubbish tip outside the city…

And the beggars? When they give up the whole racket because it’s unproductive, where do they end up? On one of those sliding drawers in the morgue that you see at the cinema? With a white cardboard label tied to their big toe, on which no one will ever write a name?

Every time she passes that way, the old woman observes the piebald mongrel and sends it a subliminal message: Rebel! Bite! Kill!

The dog doesn’t blink, doesn’t twitch an ear.

Will he be there today or won’t he, the old Moroccan, under the arcade in the market square? Impossible to say. Sitting with his legs drawn up to his chest, he is most often dozing against a pillar like a Bedouin against his dromedary, until his head drops and bumps on the layers of ragged old coats that cover his knees. Then he suddenly jerks upright, opening his eyes towards the passers-by in a gaze of age-old sadness, and returns to his slumbers. Summer and winter he is bundled up in threadbare jackets, shawls and coats, when it is cold he wraps his head in a cloth as well.

They have known each other for forty years, one could say they have grown old together, the old woman thinks, passing before him and dropping a euro on to his greatcoat. At one time, though, he did not sleep so much. And anyway she too needed fewer naps at one time. And she used to walk faster, without a stick. What she likes about this man, about whom she knows nothing, not even his name, is the slow dignity with which he sells his wares, his eyes staring into infinity, and especially his sadness. It is rare, these days, to find an authentic, disinterested sadness. There are moments when she would like to sit down next to him and join him in staring into the void.

Every now and again she wonders what he does when he is not there, in those periods, sometimes for months, when he vanishes: does he go back to Morocco, where perhaps he has a family? With the money from donations and selling cigarette lighters, has he perhaps bought himself a child bride who is even now waiting for him in a village at the edge of the desert? There is no way of knowing. Not a word between them in forty years, apart from some restrained greeting (Good morning, she says, with measured cordiality, Signora, he says with a respectful inclination of the head, years ago he used to call her friend, but with age, the detachment from human intercourse widens, the sadness in the eyes of the Bedouin deepens, it is over-familiar to say ‘friend’ to a passing shadow).

In the square, Malvina is already slumped on the usual bench, assailed by the windy verbosity of her female bodyguard. This is where they see each other, every day if it is not raining, for her hour of taking the air.

Ana is thirty-five, vast backside forcibly crammed into elasticated jeans, broad and hard face, blouse decorated with hearts picked out in rhinestones, cobalt-coloured nails. The old woman loathes her and has no hesitation in holding her responsible for the rapid and progressive regression into childhood of her friend. Malvina, the gentle, confused Malvina half-closes her eyes against the winter sun and turns on the world a vague smile, absorbed ever more frequently in something remote and far away, perhaps the great nothingness which is knocking at her door. In those moments of absence she looks like a blind person, her eyes filmed by an opaque amniotic sack of light, turned in on themselves. At her friend’s approach, however, she wakes up, her face animated by flickers of emotion, relief, joy, even mischief.

She has very few lines and wrinkles, Malvina. Every now and then the old woman thinks she glimpses the girl she has been, sees her emerge beneath the tired and drooping skin, like an actress who has been aged before her time by an expert make-up artist and is waiting patiently to be released from the layers of age to return to her true self.

They walk slowly, arm in arm, the two old women, while the two young ones speed off across the square in the direction of the supermarkets and the stalls, Gabriela almost running to shake Ana off and Ana struggling to follow at her heels, deep into some ghastly feminine saga that she insists on pouring into the other’s reluctant ears.

They say this is a world of old people. They say it to make us feel we are to blame. We are old and we are too many. We ought to turn up spontaneously for a programme of voluntary extermination and die with a smile on our lips.

In fact the means are already provided, but they are not enough. Potholes, uneven surfaces and the thousand pitfalls set there to trip us: inadequate, sufficient only for a fracture of the femur. More effective are cars and motorbikes or worst of all, cyclists who flash past aggressively with earbuds in their ears and who are always in the right, how I dream of stretching a steel wire across the pavements invaded by their arrogant alternative high-mindedness and see them go flying over the old wrecks that are their technological inferiors and smash into a wall! Like a visual gag in a silent film, but seriously, with blood and broken teeth.

This constant feeling of being too slow, too vulnerable, too myopic, of having reflexes not rapid enough, like a decrepit tortoise that has lost its shell and drags its soft and quivering pulp on to a six-lane motorway.

If a cyclist did knock me over however it would be unlikely to kill me. My crumbling bones would be put back together after a fashion in a hospital bed at the expense of the public health service, which is increasingly less healthy and less public. I would not die but my remaining life would be shorter and more painful. Much better a car, but here in the city centre they go so slowly!

The most sneaky and lethal weapon, though, is not aimed at my withered and wavering body, but at my head. My thoughts are slow, fragile and they too are prey to all manner of fears, because in growing older I have lost the illusion of being able to tame the world with the brilliant ideas produced by my lucid and agile brain. In any case, who cares what I think? Who has any desire to listen to an old woman?

An old woman can only have old ideas. Outdated, inadequate and ridiculous. If she claims to have thoughts she is swiftly told, in no uncertain terms, that she is too old to have any. That she is no longer capable of understanding today’s world.

But on my side, who is there that I still want to talk to?

Is there anyone I don’t feel estranged from, anyone who doesn’t get on my nerves or doesn’t utterly weary me?