Letter from Casablanca Read Online Free PDF Page A

spent the day repeating to Mama not to send him to the nursing home, for the sake of the young gentleman officer whom he had loved like a son, because at the nursing home they would keep him in bed and make him pee in a urinal. His cousin, whom he had gone to visit on Sunday, had told him this, and he rather preferred to die. He had never married. The last time his mother had seen him naked was when he was fourteen years old, and the idea of a young lady making him pee in a urinal sent him into a panic. Then Mama’s eyes grew shiny. She told him, “Don’t talk nonsense, Tommaso. You’ll die here—this is your home,” and Tommaso would have kissed her hands, butMama drew back and told him to stop complaining, that she had enough sadness already, and he should think instead of pulling up that couch grass thriving under the privet and making the plants die.
    The worst days came at the end of July when a heat wave like nothing that had been felt in years broke out. The morning was quite bearable. I put on my roller skates and got a little exercise on the brick avenue that went from the front door to the boundary wall. Mama was busy with dinner. At times she even kept the radio on, and this was a good sign—but only talk programs like the news or “Our Listeners Write to Us.” And if there were songs, she immediately changed the station. But the hours after dinner were sultry and monotonous, heavy with sadness and silence. Even the faraway drone of the city quieted. It seemed that on the house and on the garden a bell of misted glass descended in which the only surviving living things were the cicadas. Mama sat down in the armchair in the living room with a damp handkerchief over her eyes and leaned her head back. I was at the little desk in my anteroom—from where I could see her if I stretched my neck—trying to imprint on my mind
nix-nivis
and
strix-strigis
in order to take the make-up exam in September. Nena I could hear messing about in her
pied-à-terre
singing “Banana Boat” to herself or else shuffling along the avenue because she was taking her Belafonte for a walk as far as the main gate, poor beast, and she whispered to him, “Let’s go see a bit of the world, dearie,” as if in front of our house there was who knows what? But the avenue at that hour was completely deserted, not that it was much frequented at other times either. From the street there, beyond the clearing where the first villas sprang up, you could see the city immersed in a flickering haze, and on the left the avenue ended in the yellow countryside punctuated by trees and isolated farm houses. Toward five o’clock, but not every day, the little ice cream cart passed, with a large chest made like a gondola on which were paintedthe view of San Marco and the inscription
Venetian Specialities
. There was a little man who pedaled with great difficulty, blew into a brass trumpet to attract attention, shouted at the top of his lungs, “Two cones, fifty francs!’’ And then there remained silence and solitude.
    From the time, after it happened, when Mama had taken to locking the gate so that no one could come in and we could not go out, even to see the ice cream man was better than nothing. My teacher had said that it would have been opportune to have me take private lessons, but Mama had replied that it seemed a bit difficult. We all led a very retiring life, she hoped she understood, and that if it had not been for the tradesmen, she would even have had the telephone cut off. She kept it only for that necessity or if sometime one of us fell sick, and furthermore she kept it off the hook all day because she couldn’t stand its ringing. This was perhaps an excessive precaution, because whoever would have telephoned after Aunt Yvonne moved to Lausanne?
    Nena had taken harder than I did Mama’s new habit of not going out anymore, but she didn’t have my luck of being able to fill the after-dinner hours with the plurals in
ium
. She had