Every Promise

by Andrea Bajani, Alastair McEwen, Alastair McEwen

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When Sarah leaves him - heartbroken by their inability to conceive - Pietro reverts to a younger self, leaving the dishes unwashed, his bed unmade and the post unopened. Soon afterwards, Sarah confesses that she is pregnant, but from a casual encounter. She comes to rely on Pietro's mother for support, leaving all three in a painful limbo, unable to move on or return to the way things were. Into the void falls Olmo, an old man haunted by memories of war. At first he provides a distraction, but when he asks Pietro to travel to Russia on his behalf, to right a wrong from his past, he offers this most troubled of young men the chance of a new beginning.

Release date: June 6, 2013

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 224

Sample

1

WHEN SARA AND I FIRST LIVED TOGETHER, SHE USED TO accompany me to the school every morning to see the children. We had just arrived in the new house, the move had been fairly hasty, and like all moves it had been an audition; the neighbours looking at us from the window while we tried to say and do nothing that might irritate them. All we wanted was to be accepted right away. So, at first, we only put striking flowers on the balcony, we only hung out our best clothes, and we only showed ourselves to be the closest of couples. When we argued we would close the windows so we couldn’t be heard, and blow our rage out indoors. The room would swell with our fury, its walls would curve. It became a cave, every shout another puff, the walls bulging outwards, and the ceiling rising. And we used to think about the signora who lived above us, and her grandson, who would see the floor suddenly swell beneath their feet. Then, when we stopped fighting, and we would open the windows again, our anger would escape in a single, pulsating blast, and the walls and floor would again become straight. And we would go out onto the balcony all smiles, and if we saw someone we would say Good day, how’s it going? On the stairs we used to say hello to everyone, I would introduce myself and shake our neighbours by the hand, and Sara always said We, because saying We was more reassuring. It was romantic, too, it was like getting back together again every time, like choosing ourselves once more. Finally, and above all, that We expressed a hope.

Sara’s We held all the life we would have led together, like a suitcase filled to the brim with so many words that you had to sit on top of it to close it. For that We to exist it was necessary to have children. Because her We was: now there are only two of us, but then there will be three or four, if not five of us, and we’ll fill the house with children who will cry a bit at first, then they’ll go out on the balcony with someone who will teach them how to walk on tiptoe and you can say hello to them if you wish. And then they’ll play on their own on the balcony as they cram their faces with some snack. Then you’ll see them going out the front door holding their mother’s hand to go to school. Then you’ll see them go out on their own, walk a few yards, look round, turn the corner and light up a cigarette. Then you’ll hear us arguing with them and you’ll hear doors slamming, yelling that will spread from room to room. Then you’ll hear us arguing, mother and father, because we won’t agree on the best way to bring them up, and you’ll see one of us coming out onto the balcony for an edgy smoke and going back inside and coming out again. And one of our children will go out every afternoon while another will always stay at home. And down in the courtyard you’ll see them change the way they walk, thrusting their backsides out or scampering along like monkeys – some will straighten their shoulders arrogantly and others, fearfully, will hunch them up. And then they’ll start to bring home boyfriends and girlfriends, and when you get used to one suddenly he or she won’t come anymore. And then they’ll go to university and you’ll see them leave with a big bag on Sunday and come back on Saturday with the same bag, only more crumpled. And then you’ll see them take away what little they possess when they move out, only to come back every so often for Sunday lunch and Easter and Christmas. And then you’ll see us, the mother and the father, suddenly bereft of children, sitting for hours and hours on the balcony without exchanging a word, only to dash into the house when the telephone rings so we have something new to talk about after the call, and then back across the courtyard you’ll see bellies growing as they cross the courtyard together with our sons and everything will begin anew. And again you’ll hear crying in the house as we grow old all at once, in a sudden crash, smiling at each other, contenting ourselves, busy with the children our own children will have given us in exchange for themselves.

Yet we made love and no child came along. It was our We that fell to the ground every month and broke in two, and by dint of gluing it together again it couldn’t be fixed anymore. The first months had been normal, going down the whole route every time, getting past menstrual cycles without wondering about anything, not even thinking about it, just making love because we couldn’t do anything but search for each other under our clothing as soon as we were a little close. Then that thought of children had come along, a thought that at first was a nice one, the one with which we embraced before sleeping. And so making love had become a way of trying to inflate our We, the two of us trying to make it become three and then four, like a balloon in the form of a rabbit that you blow into hard and nothing happens and then one ear suddenly pops out. In that period Sara often accompanied me to school in the morning, and she would greet the children in my classes as if they were our children. She would take some of them in her arms and ask me, How do I look? Every month it was the same illusion. For a few weeks we believed in it, Sara used to say she could feel it. And we would go around disguised as a family, both of us showing off her belly, seeing the world as if we were three. And there was an immense strength, Sara would say to me I’m afraid of nothing and nobody. When we came across pregnant women, Sara would find a way to approach them, without exchanging a word, just to stand close to them, leaving the bellies to talk to one another. But then every time nothing changed, and the months began to pass, and neither of us wanted to know about medical tests, least of all to share the blame. Sara no longer wanted to come to school. Every morning she would invent a different excuse to stay at home. She would say goodbye on the doorstep. Every time I heard her opening the drawer where she kept her sanitary towels in the bathroom, I knew I would see her come out biting her lip. She would have sat down beside me, without saying a word for hours. Then, in the evening, she would have frantically sought me in bed. We began to make love in a rough way; she would fling herself at me, her feet clenched in anger, her eyes half shut in her frenzy. Then we would remain there, each in our own part of the bed, breathing, eyes open, each with an anguish we couldn’t share, and for which the other could provide no consolation.

2

THERE WAS A LONG PERIOD IN WHICH THERE WAS NO MORE talk of a child. We circled around it warily, as if it were stretched out somewhere in the house, invisible and foetal, and we had to be careful not to trip over it. We moved round the house the way you do at night, your skin tense, your whole body on the alert, first setting down the heel of your foot and then the sole, with your hands outstretched before you. And if we sensed its presence, lying stretched out there invisible, we would step over it, lifting one leg to the other side, then the body would follow, and when the other foot was lifted over we would set off again. Then nothing more would be said and the more those invisible outstretched presences grew in number, the more difficult it became to move around. Little by little, our house filled up with those bodies on the floor; the hall was full of them, as was the bathroom, the living room, and the kitchen. Sometimes it even seemed that we saw them by the front door, from where we would have to shift them bodily or resign ourselves to not going out, sitting there and waiting for them to go away by themselves. So we would sit and wait, looking at the floor, our feet cramped and motionless in the few free spaces left in that cluttered house.

Even when we talked it was as if that child who didn’t exist was always in front of us, as if he had sat down between us and, in order to talk, we had to lean to his left and then to his right, the way you do on a bus. And when we didn’t talk we would look at each other, clinging to each other’s eyes, guilty and reproachful at the same time. Each of us would have liked to enter the other, into the other’s eyes, first to get through and then to throw ourselves down, letting ourselves slip along the ducts of the body until we got to the place where everything was blocked. There, somewhere, we might have known which of the two wasn’t working, which of us had jammed. And above all, from there we might have been able to help ourselves, we might have combed the area, centimetre by centimetre, we might have managed to identify the error, intervene, disentangle the wires, invert the contacts and go back up quickly, come out and finally breathe. But in any case we couldn’t enter each other’s eyes, and all that was left for us was this silent intermittence of blame and pleas for forgiveness. We still made love, but it had become a hesitant replica, like high-jumpers who take the run up and then, at the last moment, don’t make the leap. And Sara had also stopped weeping, only sometimes she would come to me and give me a hug, my chest becoming her pillow, and you could see that she couldn’t stand it any longer. She would stay there for a while and then she would ask me What shall we do? without letting me go. I felt her question warm up a precise point in my chest, as if we were obliged to talk to each other through that hole she was hollowing out with the breath of her words. And in that question, in that What shall we do? there were many things. There was the We that was peeling away, there was her, there was me, there was the house, the name on the intercom, and there were our parents sitting on the balcony.

So we bought a dog. It came into the house like a professional; it took a quick look around, went from one room to another with the look of someone who needs no more than a glance to realize what needs to be done, then it came back to us and curled up on the rug. Sitting on the sofa, we looked like people who say Money is no object, and so the dog remained on the rug, already bored after the first minutes of work. But we hadn’t given him a name, because sitting down at the table and piling up columns of names on a sheet of paper struck us as making the dog play the part of a child. So, the whole time, he wandered around the house like a question mark. The only one who was happy the dog had no name was the baby in the flat above. From the balcony he gave him a different name every day, but you could see that all the dog needed was to be called, and he would wag his tail and half close his eyes when we stroked him. In any event he had understood his job, the first thing he would do in the morning was to go around the house looking for those invisible bodies, those silent presences that made our flat a storehouse of obsessions. One after another, he would use his teeth to take them by a flap of clothing and drag them along delicately, making them slide across the floor and gathering them all in the room at the end of the hall, the one that had been left free in the event of a child coming, and which over time had become the room with the ironing board and things that weren’t to be seen. Then he would go back to being a dog, he would let himself be taken for walks on the lead, run after birds, wear his claws down on the tarmac, chew on slippers and sleep on our bed breathing all his boundless love in our faces.

But in the room at the end of the hall there still slept those presences that we didn’t want anymore. When I used to go for a pee at night I would pass in front of that closed door and it seemed that I could hear them, all that breathing, a draught that froze my feet. Once Sara and I walked past each other in front of the door, and there was no need to say a word. She was wearing my T-shirt, her eyes shut, and I just gave her a kiss on the forehead. Then we found ourselves back in bed, Sara clinging tight to my back, glued to me in an embrace, her body forming a parallel line with mine, her arm thrown like an anchor over my other side. Everything that the dog managed to rid us of would later emerge in dreams we didn’t tell each other about, and we continued to run after him, up and down the town. The dog had become our jailer, his lead the cord that united us. We would watch him chase the pigeons, and every time he disappeared inside a bush, every time he left the park behind another dog, every time he went out of our sight, we hoped that he wouldn’t come back.

3

ON THE LAST MONTH BEFORE SCHOOL BROKE UP WE RECORDED sounds. Using little tape recorders, we would capture every sound, even those we seemed not to hear. The children in my class moved around in groups with their little machines, they ran them along the walls of the janitor’s room, under the teacher’s desk, over their classmates’ schoolbags, inside notebooks, in the wastepaper basket, and rubbed them against the schoolmistresses. Watching them act like this, upending chairs on desks the better to breathe in the sound beneath, it seemed like watching the cleaners at work. The sounds fascinated them, they emerged from where they thought there were none. When they were inside, they didn’t hear them. Before this experiment, they hadn’t noticed the alternation of silences an hour long and the sudden roars of voices, almost immediately swallowed up by another silence and the umpteenth roar, and so on all day. Our primary school struck the hours for everyone. It was the time of the neighbourhood. It was a cuckoo clock from which, at every hour, three hundred children’s faces popped out in unison, opening their mouths wide before disappearing back behind closed windows.

We catalogued all the sounds the children recorded in an archive. There were weekly sessions in which teams of children formed a queue, three or four per group with a representative who held the tape recorder. I would take it, insert a cable into it, connect it to the computer and we would wait for the sounds to be poured from one machine to the other. During the transfer the children didn’t look at either the computer or the tape recorder but at the cable, as if it were there that everything was happening, as if the janitor and the schoolmistresses were really passing through that flex, along with my desk, the wastepaper bin, Caterina, and Matilde’s purple pencil case. They looked at it waiting to see it change shape, like a snake that has swallowed a mouse. Then when the sounds were all in my computer I would unplug the cable and they would heave a sigh of relief. At that point we had to give a name to each of the sounds, to catalogue them without muddling them up. On the computer we had created four sections, four folders entitled People, Places, Objects and Animals. For the children this was a source of lengthy discussions and quite a few arguments, but they didn’t last long. The children would move away from me, gather into a scrum like rugby players, talk intensely for a while, and then return with the name to give to a sound. Then, taking it in turns, they would sit down and type the name on the keyboard, each finger hovering over the letters like a bird of prey. And so at the end of these sessions we would file our recordings in alphabetical order: empty-janitorsroom, Mattiasshoes, redpizza-withanchovies, Silviaslong-nose.

There was one day, usually a Wednesday, when we would listen to everything we had recorded during the week. We moved the desks against the walls, closed the blinds until the darkness was complete, and we all sat on the floor in a circle. The children would sit motionless in that darkness, invisible at first, and then as we gradually got used to the dark their outlines would begin to emerge. The last things to appear were their eyes, and everyone kept theirs wide open, which was their way of not drowning in the darkness. Like this, we would review the staffroom with the moped below that would not start, Mattia’s shoes that mysteriously made the sound of the sea as if they were shells, the janitor’s room and the sound of coffee percolating. And we would hear the bedlam that was playtime, how the gym in the first hours of the afternoon seemed suspended, and the birds on the tree in front of our classroom (who had ever heard them?) and a pneumatic drill that was breaking up the street and the janitor in the corridor saying Give me back my broom you scamps. After a while the children no longer kept their eyes wide open against the dark. In fact, everyone was looking at a part of their body, some at a foot, some at a finger, others at a knee, and others again sat staring into space, mouths and eyes half open with a film of emptiness above them, and that was the screen on which they projected the sounds they saw.

The day before school broke up, each child made the others listen to the sounds of their house. Each of them, behind the darkness of the closed blinds, presented their homes to the class, describing the street in which their building stood, what floor their home was on, and how many people were in the family. Some children had already been in their classmates’ houses, but most of them hadn’t. I had asked them to do everything on their own, without anyone’s help, in fact, if possible, to record without being seen by their parents, far less by their brothers and sisters. So we entered other people’s houses, even I who had never been to any of their homes. There was Simone’s house, where the neighbours were renovating their flat, or maybe demolishing it with pickaxes. There was Melissa’s place where there was always someone coming in and going out of the room and you could hear the the air moving. Matilde’s home with a T.V. on in every room and nobody watching the same thing. And Silvia with her mum who was singing an old song I hadn’t heard for decades. Giacomo with his sister flirting on the telephone with her fiancé even though you couldn’t hear the words very well. Giulio who had recorded his father snoring because his dad denied that he did so and he now finally had proof. Luca’s, where there was total silence, and when I asked him why he said that it was because he was always alone at home. Beatrice who didn’t hear a thing because to avoid being seen by her parents she had kept the recorder in her trouser pocket. Then there was Michele’s house, his parents yelling terrible things, doors slamming, and I imagined him and his blue glasses wandering around holding his tape recorder while all around the world was falling apart.

4

FROM THE FLOOR ABOVE US EVERY SO OFTEN WE WOULD hear the little boy running, his mum used to leave him with his grandmother in the afternoons. In the evening she would come back to pick him up, they would leave with him carrying his schoolbag over his shoulder. I used to see them cross the courtyard in the dark. Sometimes he would come down to my place. His grandmother would warn me of his arrival from the balcony. I would open the door, hear hers opening upstairs and shortly afterwards I would see him come in. He would sit down on the sofa and switch on the television. I would shout to the grandmother from out the window to say he had arrived, I would close the door and hear hers closing too. This was our agreement with his grandmother; if I was at home she could send him down, he was no bother to me. If I had time, I would stay with him, if I didn’t have time, he was independent and didn’t disturb me. He was six and knew the T.V. remote control and the fridge by heart as they were the two things that really interested him in my house. But more than the fridge he was interested in the freezer, which he would open with an expert gesture after having climbed onto a stool taken specifically for this operation. Then he would slip his hand into the box of ice cream cones, choose one according to the day and his mood, and head for the sofa. Sometimes I would find him standing on the stool studying the boxes of frozen food, with the freezer breathing all its cold on him. And he would stand there, turning in his hands the boxes of peas, the packets of spinach with the photograph. . .