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that she was saying: “Good.”
    I didn’t know how she managed to be in two different spaces at the same time, in the soap barrel in the cellar, in her blue slip, the straps falling off her shoulders and down her arms; and meanwhile abandoning herself to the water in our kitchen, which was giving her hair a liquid sheen. Certainly I had dreamed it that way countless times with my eyes open, as I did now yet again, and yet again felt a painful embarrassment. 
    The fat man in fact was not content with standing and watching. In summer he dragged the barrel outside. He was bare-chested, bronzed by the sun, and wore a white handkerchief tied tight around his forehead. He poked around in the container with a long stick and, sweating, twisted the shining mass of Amalia’s hair. Meanwhile, down the street, a steamroller crackled, advancing slowly with its big cylinder of gray stone. Another man drove it, thickset and muscular, also bare-chested, the hair in his armpits curly with sweat. He wore a type of khaki trousers unbuttoned in such a way as to show, at the level of his stomach, a frightening hollow, and, settled on the seat of the machine, he surveyed the dense and shiny tar of Amalia’s hair as it slid out from the tilted drum and extended over the crushed stone, steaming, and rippling the air. My mother’s hair was pitch and it spread out into a luxuriant down that thickened in the prohibited places of the body. Prohibited to me: she wouldn’t let me touch her. She hid her face, tossing the curtain of hair over it, and offered her neck to the sun to dry.
    When the telephone rang, she pulled her head up suddenly, so that the wet hair flew from the floor through the air, grazing the ceiling and falling on her back with a slap that woke me completely. I turned on the light. I couldn’t remember where the telephone was, and meanwhile it kept ringing. I found it in the hall, an old telephone of the sixties that I knew well, attached to the wall. When I answered a male voice called me Amalia.
    “I’m not Amalia,” I said. “Who is it?”
    I had the impression that the man on the telephone struggled to repress a laugh. He repeated, “I’m not Amalia,” in falsetto, and then resumed, in the purest dialect: “Leave the bag with the dirty clothes on the top floor. You promised it to me. And look carefully: you’ll find the suitcase with your things. I put it there for you.”
    “Amalia is dead,” I said in a calm voice. “Who are you?”
    “Caserta,” said the man.
    The name sounded like the name of the bogeyman in a fable.
    “I’m Delia,” I answered. “What is on the top floor? What do you have of hers?”
    “I, nothing. It’s you who have something of mine,” the man said, again in falsetto, distorting my Italian in an affected manner.
    “You come here,” I said to him in a persuasive tone. “We can talk about it and you can take what you need.”
    There was a long silence. I waited for an answer but there was none. The man had not hung up: he had simply let go of the receiver and walked away.
    I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water; the water was dense and had a terrible smell. Then I returned to the telephone and dialed Uncle Filippo’s number. He answered after five rings and before I could even say hello, began shouting into the telephone insults of every sort.
    “It’s Delia,” I said harshly. I felt that he was having trouble identifying me. When he remembered me, he began to mutter excuses, calling me “my child,” and asking again and again if I was all right, where I was, what had happened.
    “Caserta called me,” I said. Then, before he could start again on the rosary of curses, I ordered him, “Calm down.”

6.
    Afterward I went back to the bathroom. With one foot I kicked my dirty underpants behind the bidet, and then picked up Amalia’s lingerie, which I had scattered over the floor, and put it back in the garbage bag. Then I went out to the landing. I was no longer