The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone

Author:Domenico Starnone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2023-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

I returned to my brother’s house around dinner time. At the table we discussed how we’d travel to Positano. The best way, Geppe said, is by car. But he knew I hated driving, all those vehicles on the road, the traffic jams, the aggressive honking. And the insults, I added, the rage, the angry pursuits, everything I had seen on Via Partenope and Via Santa Lucia. “I’m not courageous enough to get behind the wheel,” I said firmly.

The boyfriend of one of my nieces took it upon himself to offer to be our driver. With a daily rate of a hundred thousand, he said playfully. “A little over budget, but I’ll think about it,” I promised, and there and then I liked the idea of a trip down the coast without any worries, going from Portici to Sorrento and Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi, with Vesuvius behind us, as if floating on the horizon. Then, surprising even myself, I announced, “I’m going to stay another day or two.” There were other streets and places in Naples I wanted to see. And I like your house, I added, it’s relaxing.

After dinner, pleasantly exhausted, I observed my brother’s children without him noticing. I was looking for traits passed down from Federico and Rusinè. I found several similarities here and there: eyebrows, eyes, fingers, even a whole hand; their way of moving; they were like apparitions present in their living bodies; phantasmatic details that appeared and then disappeared in beings that were entirely unlike them, that had different builds, different histories. I noticed an ironic look that seemed familiar, a warm greeting, a cocky gaze from an excess of self-esteem. It occurred to me that I should spy on all my siblings, on their children and my own, on relatives both close and distant, and on myself, rather than wander around the city, go to dusty libraries, look through old photos and films, decipher calligraphy, and do some of my own writing, create lasting impressions of people and facts.

When I went back into my bedroom, before turning off the light and falling asleep, I studied my father’s framed drawings on the wall. There was my grandmother, with her head bowed, knitting, wearing a dark dress and apron. There was my mother, sitting with her face in the shadows, reading a magazine, Annabella perhaps, her hair done in an unrecognizable style. There was my father, around fifty years old, the skin on his face hanging from his cheekbones like a stretched-out sweater, looking at me obliquely, the way an artist looks when he does a self-portrait in a mirror.

Pieces of art, traces. He had a strong hand, he definitely had talent. And yet it seemed like there was actually nothing of those once-living and breathing human beings on the paper, under the glass. While my memories of them may have been dull, they were still more intense than what the reliable seismograph of art had been able to register. What point was there to holding

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