TE22 Potpourri

Antonella Lattanzi

This Looming Day

That’s what they all called it. The accident .

things to turn our attention to the accident.

It happened in our apartment complex. Our building.

When I was seventeen, I saw my father again after a long time. He let slip what had happened. Maybe he thought my mother had told us. It had been a horrible thing, a frightening thing, but certainly not an accident. There was a cause, someone had done it, done it knowingly. Something so horrible that I understood why it had damaged the place forever. Some people believe that places are inhabited by ghosts. Haunted, they say. I don’t know what I believe. But I’m sure places carry pain with them. And love too. “Whendidyoufindout?” I askedmyfatheroverapizza I couldn’t finish. “Just before signing the lease,” he replied. “A tenant in the courtyard stopped us and told us that, with the accident not yet cleared up, it was too dangerous for two small girls to go and live there. “Find another home,” he said, ‘I’m telling you like I’d tell my brother. You still have time.’” “And you?” I asked my father. “We were out of time,” he replied in a faint voice, almost indistinguishable in the bustle of the pizzeria. “Your mother wasn’t well. She wanted that house at any cost. She was convinced it could save her.” He emphasized that word. What about you, Dad? I wanted to ask him. He took a sip of beer, looked at the glass. “I couldn’t convince her.” So you went away? You left us alone, in that place, with her? I didn’t even remember him abandoning us just then. It seemed to me that it was some time before, right aftermy birth. Maybe that’s what my mother had told me. Did you leave us because we were in 183

I was too young to understand. I was eight months old. My sister was too young as well. She was four years old. But we soon realized that something was wrong there. The parents of all the children in our building, including my mother, never let us go down to the yard alone. We always had to stay within eye- or earshot. And not the eyes and ears of any adult we knew – it had to be someone who lived around the same courtyard, for example, or an old friend of our parents, or a relative. Not even some grandfather or grandmother. I clearly saw that there were wives who didn’t trust leaving their children with their husbands, or husbands who never left their children alone with their wives. I saw it. My sister saw it. We saw everything together at the time. It was impossible not to see it. But my sister and I didn’t wonder why. We were practically born there. School was very close by. Yet none of the children in our neighborhood ever went there alone or with friends, the way everyone does from a certain age up. There was something wrong there, we knew it. But our father left us right before we moved. And my mother wasn’t well, she was never well. My sister and I had to think about too many 182