Giacobino The Ridiculous Age

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915568-52-6
Verlag: Dedalus Europe
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 336 Seiten

Reihe: Dedalus Europe

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.

Margherita Giacobino, born in 1952, lives in Turin. She is a writer, journalist and translator. She has translated, among others, Emily Bronte, Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Allison and Audre Lorde. She published her first novel Un'Americana a Parigi written under the pseudonym of Elinor Rigby in 1993. Portrait of a Family with a Fat Daughter, published in Italy in 2015, is the first novel by Margherita Giacobino to be translated into English. It was shortlisted for the Italian Prose Award 2019. Dedalus published her next novel, which is a fictionalised account of the life of Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Dreams, in 2020, followed in 2024 by The Ridiculous Age. The film rights of The Ridiculous Age have been sold and it is currently being filmed.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Giacobino, Margherita

Weitere Mitwirkende

Anderson, Graham

Leseproben

II

Love in the time of Isis

When she cannot get to sleep from anxiety, or is afraid and doesn’t even know what she is afraid of, Gabriela watches videos on her mobile, preferably of cats. There are so many of them, each cuter than the last. Tonight she is very tired, she can feel sleep pressing on her hunched little shoulders but every muscle in her body is tense, she ought to take long slow breaths and concentrate on every muscle one at a time, feel it become heavy as if it wanted to sink into the mattress, that’s what the soft-exercise lessons that she watches every so often say, but it doesn’t work. Sleep bears down on her but her thoughts will not let it in, her thoughts are phantasms that frolic at the tops of castle towers, pale girls with bruised arms and dilated pupils, dishevelled curtains of hair, mouths distorted by soundless screams.

A few hours ago she received some photos on WhatsApp, she walked in circles round the phone wringing her hands, she decided to delete them without looking at them but her fingers did not obey her, the photos seemed to open by themselves. In the first there was a man with a gun pointed at another man, tied up. In the second, something was going up in flames, she scrolled past that one very fast, but the third was a corpse thrown on a green blanket with big black stains, a woman’s body, a body without legs, its arms cut off, four stumps on a green blanket, on big black stains. Above a white neck into which a blade had sliced a large bleeding mouth a semi-detached head could be glimpsed.

She cried out, she covered her face, the phone fell to the floor.

Backing away, arms held out behind her, the wall, another cry. A noise, was it the door opening? Or just her heart hammering against her ribs, a bird gone mad in its cage?

Spine pressed against the wall, cheeks running with tears, she screamed without hearing herself, stopped screaming, became aware she had bitten her tongue. Taste of blood. Terror rose like water around her, soon it would be up to her lips, her eyes, it would choke her and blind her. She was saved by the calendar hanging in the kitchen, showing a rose bush in autumn gently swaying its brown leaves and plump red hips under the lacy covering of the first snow. It is last year’s calendar, the signora was throwing it out, she asked if she could have it and she got it, it is too beautiful to throw away, and what does it matter anyway if it is last year’s? Roses are always roses, snow is snow every year. She reaches for the rose bush’s branches, pricks her fingers on them, feels the snow caressing her eyelids. It is the page for November, her favourite, which allows her to calm her breathing, remove her hands from the wall, advance cautiously towards the phone, which has not broken, as luck would have it.

She stabs at the keys, fingers convulsed, forcing herself so hard to picture the red hips that she cannot see anything else. She disconnects the WhatsApp chat, keeping her eyelids half lowered, her teeth clenched, holding her breath.

She does not ask herself where he has found those ‘things’. She knows that Dorin spends his time disinterring corpses on the internet. He collects hangings, executions by firing squad, victims of explosions and torture, images of men with their faces hidden under black balaclavas killing other men or women, showing off severed heads and other souvenirs. He is mad. He is sick in the head and no one takes any notice, no one except her.

The time she complained to Petra, her half-sister started to laugh. They’re only photos, she told her. And you get in a panic! You’re always acting the self-contained, independent woman and you start shrieking over a photo!

He’s mad! He’s not right in the head! He wants to go to Syria! But he doesn’t even know where Syria is! Don’t you hear the things he says?

To you, he says them. He only does it to impress you, Petra replied, turning the sausages over in the pan.

And then: All men are mad, I don’t listen to them any more, and here Petra jumped back, swore and put a hand to her face, where spitting oil had nearly caught her in the eye. Fuck off, you and your stories, she concluded, turning down the gas.

It was her, undoubtedly, who gave Dorin her number. Or one of the girls.

She needs her mobile, so she is compelled to pick it up again, even though it feels to her she is handling one of those bombs full of nails and bolts. It’s not enough to turn off the chat line, she needs to block it.

Tomorrow she’ll change phone cards. Again.

She has switched on all the lights in the apartment, a quick job because there are only two rooms. She has checked the lock, pushed the bolt across, closed and latched the shutters. She has looked everywhere, under the bed and in the cupboards. Diligent and sensible as always, she has put the half-eaten meal back in the fridge.

She has made herself a camomile tea. She has washed the floor and vigorously rubbed down the bathroom tiles. Thinking of the autumnal rose bush and the red rosehips that the early snow is bringing to ripeness. Turning round every few seconds to look behind her, to decipher imaginary noises.

Now she is looking at cat videos on YouTube. Cats doing acrobatic jumps, sleeping in funny attitudes, breaking crockery, dancing on their owners’ heads, licking their paws or doing the bidet thing and cleaning their bottoms. She knows them all from memory, they are one of her standard medicines, she would like to bury her fingers in their fur, look at them for hours, messengers from another world, more beautiful, non-human. If she runs out of cats before she has fallen asleep, she will move on to dogs, beginning with her favourite video, the one with the litter of basset hounds. If by chance between one cat and the next the thing on the green blanket flashes into her mind, she grasps at the branches of the rose bush. She has become very good at this type of operation, for a few moments she can smell the scent of damp autumn earth under the early snow.

But sleep does not come. In fact she is afraid even to let herself fall asleep, what might happen to her while she is lying defenceless, stretched out in bed, offered up to the night? Sleep, primitive people knew this and people who are in danger know it, the persecuted, sleep is the moment of maximum weakness, the moment when murderers reach for their knives, shadowy figures slip from the darkness to set fire to your house. Armed police come to arrest you.

Tomorrow is her free day, she thinks with anguish. She will not be able to take refuge in the large and peaceful apartment and work to the uninterrupted murmuring of the radio, as soothing as the sound of running water. She sits up in bed, pulls the blankets round her, eyes peeled in the gloom of the night light. She hates with all her strength the enemy who is preventing her from feeling safe in her own home. But hating does no good, you need to focus. Think. Act. Escape. Or your heart will explode.

It is nearly one in the morning when she gets up, dresses, prepares her bag as if for a journey: a change of clothes, a blanket, cheese, biscuits, an apple. Before leaving the building she pauses at the door, closes her eyes, presses her lips tightly together, imagines being invisible, weightless. Already dead. If she is already dead no one will be able to harm her. She knows that outside the streets are deserted, the windows dark, there is nothing but the sound of the river and its cold and rotting smell, at most a rustle underneath the dry leaves, a mouse passing slowly by, stopping to look at her, like the last time. If she is lucky she will not meet anyone else.

Courage is born out of fear. The signora told her that during the war her mother had not wanted to go down into the shelter, in the cantina below the house. She would go outside, into the street. She was so afraid of dying that she preferred to meet death head on, look it in the face, in the open air.

She goes out, closing the door noiselessly behind her back.

A few days afterwards Gabriela announces she is prepared to sleep at the old woman’s apartment. She will look after the two signore together, she can do that, they will be fine.

Her employer tries to dissuade her.

What about your relatives, your friends? Do you want to shut yourself away with two old women?

Oh, my friends! Gabriela says with contempt. They hardly count…

But she suddenly breaks off, her big eyes go bright. But I expect I’ll be free to go out in the evenings, or at the weekends. I’d be very quiet, I never come home late, I don’t like to…

The old woman tries to imagine Gabriela in a chattering group of girls who laugh loudly in the noisy bustle of a pizzeria and swap photos jabbing at their mobiles with pointy little fingernails painted in blues and greens. No, this is no place for her, she would be forever withdrawn behind her forced smile, simultaneously placid and anxious, her foreignness wrapped round her like the shabby raincoat of a character in old French films, or the deerskin coat of a Mongolian princess, a mute princess whose tongue was cut out at birth by the forces of the night…

The old woman is wandering, her thoughts scattered by long nights lying awake, while Gabriela — the child inside her playing at houses — toys with the details of her new vision and falls in love with them. The studio is so sweet! I would leave it as it is, we could just put in a small bed by the window. No, why repaint it? It’s clean, it’s pretty! I love that little Indian picture over the writing table!

In any case, the old woman says, if you have to get up in the night...