The House of Gazes by Daniele Mencarelli

Author:Daniele Mencarelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2023-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

At two-fifty, the Lactarium is looking its best, ready to welcome mothers and newborns. We lazily head towards our lift, the service lift. As we descend to the ground floor, Claudio complains about the chicory sandwich his wife has made him—they’re now at each other’s throats by his account—sickeningly stuffed with garlic. To prove his point, he breathes half an inch from Luciano’s mouth. The poor guy doesn’t even have time to recover before he’s met with a second breath from the same distance, this time from Giovanni, flavored with tuna and tomato. The usual scene ensues: Luciano gets pissed off at the shit he has to deal with, then he gets a series of slaps and smacks all over, much to everyone’s amusement.

The lift stops on the second floor. An auxiliary nurse enters with a stretcher, empty at first glance. Then, in the half-light of the lift, one part at a time, a small body emerges from the white sheet. Five men and a dead child in a lift. Just silence, silence, and nothing more. The auxiliary—a man in his sixties—looks at each of us in turn.

“What the fuck have you been eating?”

“It’s these two assholes. They breathed all over me,” Luciano says in his Sardinian-inflected Italian.

“Fuck the lot of you,” the auxiliary replies, addressing the four of us.

Everyone—including me—starts laughing again. Meanwhile, I caress the sheet covering that son, a shroud that’ll be washed and disinfected until it loses every trace of the body it now protects.

My thoughts turn to the young woman who burst out of Pio XII tonight. Who knows, perhaps this child was hers, the one that had grown in her belly.

We reach the ground floor. The auxiliary continues with his cargo towards the little house for dead children. We head the other way, towards our changing room. Far away, before that green door, the girl-turned-Fury appears, coming towards her creature one step at a time, her arms outstretched, no more tears or shrieks.

As my eyes bid farewell to that mother and son for the last time, a flood streams from deep within me, an invisible fire that takes—word by word—the form of a prayer.

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