When the Night Read online

  Copyright © 2009 by Cristina Comencini

  Published by arrangement with Susanna Zevi Agenzia Letteraria, Milano

  Originally published in Italian as Quando la Notte

  Translation copyright © 2012 Marina Harss

  Scripture quotation on this page is from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Philip Roth quotation is from Exit Ghost, copyright © 2007 by Philip Roth, published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Comencini, Cristina.

  [Quando la notte. English]

  When the night / by Cristina Comencini; translated by Marina Harss.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-512-9

  1. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 2. Landlords—Fiction. 3. Dolomite Alps (Italy)—Fiction. I. Harss, Marina. II. Title.

  PQ4863.O423Q3613 2012

  853′.914—dc23

  2011047123

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Night Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Return Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  About the Author

  And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

  —Genesis 2:22–25

  There’s the not-so that reveals the so—that’s fiction.

  —Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

  1

  THE STEAK IS in the pan; perhaps I should open a window. The clouds hang low over the Dent du Géant. It’s raining up at the alpine lodge, but tomorrow the weather should be fine. I’ll take the Germans up to the camp near the summit; let’s hope they’re as experienced as they claim. They only have to make it past the first slope and over the ledge; after that the final pass is easy. I’ll know right away if they’re up to it, and then I can always lead them back toward the canyon; they can take pictures of the goats and we’ll stop in the woods for lunch.

  The light is still on upstairs. She’ll switch it off soon; she goes to bed earlier than I do. The baby starts to cry early in the morning. It doesn’t bother me, I’m already up. She pushes the baby carriage up and down the meadow at the foot of the hill. She talks to the boy, recounting everything they do, as if he can’t see it for himself.

  “We’ll go visit the cows, and then we’ll stop at the bakery for some krapfen, how does that sound?”

  The child says nothing. I’ve never heard him speak. One night I heard him crying, for a long time.

  Luna didn’t talk to our children that way. She let them play in the meadow without supervision. And she was right, even if Clara broke her arm once when she was riding her bike and had to wear a cast for three months. If you don’t fall when you’re little, you’ll fall and kill yourself later, up on the mountain for example.

  Damn it! I burned the steak! I’ll eat it anyway; I’m not very hungry; in any case, it tastes better when it’s burned. Tonight, steak and potatoes. They’ve been in the refrigerator for a while and I’d better eat them before I have to throw them out. Luna never left the pan on the fire long enough.

  “It makes too much smoke.”

  So what? You can open the window.

  “It’s cold out.”

  Tomorrow I’ll throw away her clogs. I’m going to get rid of everything she left behind. Little jars, big jars.

  “What do you need all that stuff for? Soap is better.”

  She bought creams and hid them in the refrigerator. And for the kids: markers, pencil cases, toys, clothes.

  You only need one pair of shoes per season. That’s all. We don’t want to be like the tourists who come here in summer to hike and in winter to ski. I guide them up the mountain and all they want is to go up to the lodge and eat. They buy shoes and jackets and it’s hot as hell and every year more ice melts.

  At first Luna agreed with me. The kids went out in shirtsleeves. Each of them owned a single sweater. We used laundry soap for everything, even to wash our hair.

  Tomorrow I’ll throw everything away. I didn’t want to get married; she was the one who insisted. I hesitated at first. She was a city girl, but she was strong. She knew how to walk and she had studied. She didn’t talk when we went out on the mountain. So I gave in. But I was honest: I told her what I was like, that I know nothing about women, and that my mother abandoned us when we were little. Ran off with an American. I never saw her again. I know she remarried and had more kids in America, because our father told us.

  WE WERE DRIVING down to school in the snowcat. Outside, the snow and sky were indistinguishable. When it rains or snows you can’t even see the trees. Albert crashed into a tree on his bobsled once. I watched him as he came hurtling down, like a maniac.

  He’ll get hurt one of these days, I thought.

  Our mother didn’t allow it; she would yell from the window to slow down because he was frightening her. Then she left, and no one was there to be scared, so he crashed into the trees.

  My father was driving in silence, as usual. Suddenly he said: “Your mother remarried and has new children. If anyone bothers you or makes fun of you in the village, you just tell them, My mother is the Snow Queen.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Stefan was little and asked a lot of questions. My father was a patient man. I never saw him angry, except that one time. I don’t know whether I dreamed it or it really happened. He said to Stefan: “The Snow Queen lives in a crevasse. If she finds a man there alone, she thaws, conceives a child with him, and then goes back to her home in the ice.”

  LUNA WAS MY Snow Queen, but now she’s gone, just like my mother. Except that Luna took the kids with her.

  It’s easier here without them. I talk to the tourists when I take them up the mountain. They want to hear tragic stories about mountain-climbing accidents, and where to get the best meal. At home I can sit quietly; no one asks me questions, and I don’t have to listen to Luna telling me all the town gossip. No kids’ noise. They are coming to visit at the end of the month. I’ll put away the suitcases she ha
s prepared for them, and pull out their old shoes, T-shirts, trousers. That’s all they’ll need while they’re here. Clara does as I say, but Simon is lazy and hates to walk. But he won’t have a choice.

  TOWARD THE END, Luna was always buying things: pans, plates, tablecloths. But no one ever came over.

  In the early years she was even tougher than I was: only organic food in the house, no one to help her with the housework, plus a teaching job in the city. On her way to work she would drop off the kids at the nursery, then in the afternoon she would come back and clean, cook, go to bed early, make love. Often and well. She was satisfied, and she fell asleep quickly, her muscular legs gripping mine. Sometimes at night I would switch on the light and stare at her large breasts. I couldn’t look at them when we were making love because I was afraid it would make me come; if I touched them I couldn’t control myself. Two perfect round mounds, with pink tips. Our children reached for them with their eyes closed, attached themselves to them, trembling, pulled at them, and fell asleep, pink-cheeked, after sucking them dry. Once it occurred to me to pull one of the babies away from her breast and watch him cry.

  One night she said to me, “You never touch my breasts when we make love.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just noticed that you never do.”

  “Is it a problem?”

  “I can’t talk to you, Manfred.”

  “Certain things are not meant to be discussed; you just do them.”

  Late at night, I graze the tip of her breast with my finger. Her days are long, so she sleeps soundly.

  THE STEAK HAS an unpleasant taste. It’s overdone. I need to find a woman to screw. Maybe the woman who works at the wood shop; she’s not married. She’s ugly but she has big tits and she’s willing. Karl told me they did it once at the sawmill, with the electric saw switched on to drown out the noise. I won’t bring her to my place; I don’t want any women in here.

  Anyway, I wanted kids. Things went the way they were meant to; it’s like the story our father told us in the snowcat. I never saw him look upset because he missed his wife. Except that one time.

  He was a man of steel. He raised us by himself, and gave each of us something: the house in the village for me, the lodge to Albert, and the ski-rental business to Stefan. And now he lives in the city. Who would have thought it was possible? After thirty years of managing the lodge with three kids, now he has a dishwasher and thinks that progress isn’t such a bad thing after all. Stefan says he has a woman, and perhaps that’s why he’s so happy to live in town, but none of us knows who she is. I went to see him last Sunday.

  WE’VE BEEN SITTING in silence for the last ten minutes. I’m holding a beer. His hands, swollen and tough from years of working in the cold, lie on the kitchen table like two empty shells. Mine will look the same one day.

  He asks me, “How are you doing?”

  “Fine, and you?”

  “Fine. Do you miss your wife?”

  “No. You never missed yours.”

  “I had you.”

  “Simon and Clara are coming at the end of the month.”

  “Women don’t know how to raise children.”

  “And yet they’re the ones who usually do it.”

  “Men think it’s women’s work, but they’re wrong. I raised you by myself so I know what I’m talking about. Women don’t love their children.”

  “Everyone says the opposite.”

  “Because they don’t know. How about Albert? How is he doing up at the lodge with his wife? Is she still there?”

  “Yes, Bianca likes it there.”

  “We’ll see.”

  BIANCA IS STRONG, but my father is right. Who knows how long she’ll last? Albert says she’s happy. Don’t be too sure, though; I know something about the happiness of women. It’s not their happiness that matters, but their mood. If they’re overexcited, that’s a bad sign, or if they buy things they don’t need, or have trouble sleeping, or stare out of the window in silence. Or if they are too particular and want to argue about everything.

  The first few years we were married, I wasn’t worried. She didn’t ask me why I didn’t touch her breasts when we made love. At night I screwed her steadily and calmly; I can go for a long time. Her eyes went from brown to green, and then she looked like a little girl. A little girl and a woman. Then I came.

  The last few years, though, she was either too happy or suddenly sad, and when she woke up she had the habit of staring out of the window in silence. She wanted to talk about everything, and no explanation was ever enough. I gave her wine in the evenings, but still it wasn’t the same. The green-eyed girl was gone, and the woman I married no longer interested me. But I would never have left her alone with the children. She knew that, so she left me.

  Tomorrow I’ll give the rest of the potatoes to Bernardo so he can feed them to the pigs. They’re disgusting.

  I DIDN’T WANT to rent the apartment to that woman. But the real estate agent told me there was no one else in July. Luna decorated the apartment when the carpenter who used to live there died.

  “That way we can rent it out to vacationers and make some extra money.”

  “If we rent it to someone in town we’ll have fewer hassles.”

  “I want to decorate it.”

  “That way you can buy all the stuff we have no space for.”

  “What do you care? It makes me happy.”

  We rented the apartment and made more money, and it changed nothing. Now, I never go inside. The agency has it cleaned, finds the tenants, and deposits the money in my account. This is the first time they’ve rented it to a woman on her own, but it’s none of my business. She’s up there, and I’m down here, and it’s only for a month.

  I have no need for the dishwasher and I never use it. I go to bed early. Tomorrow I’ll take two tourists up to the lodge and spend some time with Albert and Bianca. Tonight I’ll sleep on the left side of the bed; if you switch sides you don’t feel lonely.

  2

  I PEER OUT OF the window: black mountains, starless sky, silence; leaves rustling, bird calls in the distance. We’re in the last house in town. It could be the Middle Ages if it weren’t for the landlord’s car parked downstairs. I let the corner of the curtain drop back down.

  If the baby sleeps five or six hours I’ll be all right. Tomorrow I’ll take him out early in the morning; we’ll go to the meadow to watch the cows graze. He likes them, but they also scare him a little bit. It’s cold when we go out. The jagged peaks hide the sun, leaving the valley in the dark. He plays with his toy cars in the grass, vroom vroom. When he’s not moving around, I gaze up at the pink mountain tops and wait for the sun to warm the air. It’s seven in the morning and we’re already outdoors.

  Tomorrow I’ll dress him in his new red woolen jacket and cap, which I bought at the local market. He mustn’t catch cold, or else he won’t sleep. If he gets a fever, I won’t be able to handle it on my own, so far from everyone, without Mario or my mother or anyone else to help me. For now, he’s breathing all right; his nose is not too stuffy. If he could just sleep five or six hours straight, or even four, things would be much better. I brought the baby monitor but I don’t really need it; the apartment is so small and so quiet that I can hear it when he turns over in bed.

  I have to move quietly in the kitchen so as not to wake him. But I’m not hungry, just tired, with an ancient fatigue I’ve been carrying inside me ever since they put him in my arms at the hospital, wrinkled like an old man and covered in my blood.

  AS SOON AS he came out of me, I looked at him and thought, I can’t do it.

  The nurse scolded me. “Don’t squeeze him so hard. Do you want to suffocate him?”

  How could she think that a mother would suffocate her newborn child? She was the first to scold me, followed by the pediatrician, my mother, and Mario. In the days after the birth I wanted my mother, but when I saw her arrive I felt like crying, like a little girl.

&
nbsp; “Why are you crying? Aren’t you happy?”

  Everyone kept talking about happiness. Perhaps I had a rock instead of a heart.

  I’ll never be able to manage, I can’t do it.

  I didn’t tell my mother how I felt, even though I trusted her. Until the problem with the milk began.

  I didn’t have milk; it just wouldn’t come. I’m not a cow. Maybe that’s why the baby likes cows so much; he’s attracted to their swollen udders. Mine were swollen too, and hard as rocks, but only a few measly drops came out. A joke, a tease. At the hospital, the woman in the bed next to mine woke up every morning with her nightgown dripping with milk.

  “I have so much! How will I keep from leaking when I go out?”

  The nurse would glance over at me. “Milk is a blessing.”

  In the morning they brought the babies to us on a cart. I could hear the wheels squeaking down the hall.

  I hope he’ll suck this morning! So hard that the milk will gush out of my useless breasts like a fountain.

  My breasts ached, as if there were stones hidden inside. The nurse would put the baby in my arms; she never let me look at him. She would pick him up brusquely and say, “He has to wake up, he has to eat.”

  Open your eyes, so she’ll stop tormenting you!

  The nurse would take my nipple in her hands and move it like a weather vane in front of his tightly shut lips. He would make a face. He didn’t want the breast; he didn’t like the taste. She would put it in his mouth anyway. The nipple was not part of me, it was something completely separate.

  Come on, latch on, that way she’ll leave us alone.

  I wanted to fall asleep forever next to him.

  Don’t eat if you don’t want to, go back inside, back into the silence and tranquillity, and take me with you.

  He would suck weakly from the deformed nipple, with a look of disgust. Then we were alone again, just me and the woman with all the milk. She would talk on the phone with her mother, telling her how much the baby had grown, how much he weighed. Her baby sucked insistently. Mine didn’t, and fell asleep quickly. Everything was natural for her: breast-feeding, sleeping, eating. Like an animal. My mother would have put it differently. “It’s her maternal instinct. Every woman has it.”