Sometime in the night Servi awoke to crying. Claudia was next to him snoring lightly. So Servi rose from the couch and entered Paulo’s room. The boy was in a little bed tangled in sheets and blankets. Servi extracted the boy and sat on a chair, cradling him close to his neck. In the dim light cast from the street lamp, Servi could see his tight, closed face, and an expression of wan anticipation evident even in fitful sleep.
When the boy quieted down Servi placed him gently on the bed, straightened the cover and the sheet and seeing that he was quiet, walked gently away.
“Shit, I’m so late,” Claudia hissed, hurriedly dressing. “ Servi watched her from the couch. She kept giving Paulo instructions and the boy grunted in the next room. Servi could hear him rustling about, grunting, stamping his foot, whimpering.
“Can you take him to the day school Servi?” Claudia finally asked. “I’m at my wits end. I can’t get him there and get to work on time.”
“Claudia, Paulo is your son alright?”
“Of course he is,” she snapped in rapid English, so the boy wouldn’t understand. “He wants another mother. Who the fuck doesn’t? He wants another mother who doesn’t have to harass him to get him out the door and go to work. Well too damn bad! We all get the mother we get… the mother we deserve... case closed…” she was so angry, that halfway through she switched from English to rapid Italian.
“Servi,” she continued on a more subdued note. “Can you please take Paulo to school?” Servi nodded and she was gone.
After dinner they kissed again.
“We have to hurry,” Claudia explained, quickly sliding off her dress. “I have to pick up Paulo in a half hour.”
But Servi would not rush. He charily kissed Claudia’s body from her neck to her belly, all the while examining her for stretch marks, or any sign that she had given birth to a child. Claudia stroked his head appreciatively, but then quickly pulled him up.
“You are a sweet boy Aaron,” she said, grasping him and pulling him into her. “But we have to get this show on the road.” She tried to work him in, but Servi did not rise to the task.
“Here,” she said gently, “I am rushing you too much. Poor boy. Lie down,” and she took Servi in her mouth, and after a minute, she stopped and looked at him.
“What the hell is wrong?” she spat.
“I can’t stop thinking about your husband…”
“Jesus Servi,” she spat and pulled her dress over her head. “That was meant to turn you on, not off…”
“I felt as if I walked in on my mother and father…”
“Good Christ,” Claudia turned away. “I have to go get Paulo.”
“I’ll come,” Servi said, rising from the bed.
“Suit yourself, Servi,” Claudia snapped, and then laughed. “Father and Mother did not turn you on… maybe it is Mother and Son.”
Servi watched Paulo the entire evening, but the boy made no reference to his note, or gave any indication to Servi that anything was amiss. Servi even crouched down on the floor to play with him while Claudia cleaned the dishes. They were alone for sometime, but the lad said nothing. He had a tight, fixed expression, and the rigid rules by which he played his games allowed little room for idle talk. All this was inscrutable to Servi, who sat with a train in his hand, looking at this boy and trying to plumb the depths of his secret. Claudia approved of their play.
“What good boys,” she laughed, clapping her hands. “Playing nice while Mama cleans up the kitchen, and Paulo can have a gelato before bed, and Aarone something special from me once Paulo is in dreamland.”
When Claudia put Paulo to bed, she sauntered to Servi on the couch, pleased with her performance, beaming from her satisfied expectations. She placed a hand of Servi’s crotch and whistled appreciatively.
“You are a good boy,” she whispered, and they fell back toward the couch.
In the morning Servi was awoken by a dusty beam of sunlight tickling his face. There was a folded note placed firmly on his chest.
If you wish, the note said in Italian, come by for dinner at 8PM – Claudia.
Servi was alone in the apartment. As he put on his pants, he found a piece of thick, light blue construction paper in his pocket. There was writing on it in a child’s rough hand:
I am not Paulo Sarcedotti. I am Cosmo Ricchetti. Please help me.
Later, Servi sat at a café where he frequented on the via Cavour. After drinking some coffee and finishing the paper he called the waiter.
“Yes, Senor Servi, something else?” the man asked, drooping forward with a napkin to snatch at some crumbs.
“Bobbo,” Servi asked, “who is Cosmo Ricchetti?” The waiter listened to the words and rolled on the balls of his feet, his head reclined backward, as if he was searching through a Rolodex in his mind. Then he smiled and snapped his fingers.
“Ah yes, that little boy,” he said, smiling broadly. “About five years ago, no, maybe more, this little boy, Cosmo Ricchetti, two years old vanished without a trace from his parent’s flat. It became a sensation. The police searched every apartment, rooftop, cellar and water conduit in Rome, and even opened the catacombs. His poster was on every wall and streetlamp. They searched and searched but never found him…”
“No clues?” Servi asked. “Just gone without a trace?”
“Yes,” the waiter answered sadly. “They never found a hair from his head.”
The day went on like this: three German groups, two French, a group of Scotswomen in English. The guide did not stop even for lunch. Servi did not get off the bus. The woman changed languages but not the intensity of her presentation and the veracity and firmness in which she projected it: the Vatican, the Pallazo Nova, the Pantheon, the Coliseum, the Circus Maximus, the Forum, a roll call of Roman antiquity in four languages and four gears, with marginalia presented by the bus driver, who grunted and groaned at the woman’s whispered commands. This was the same will which she had used to drop off her reluctant son at the day school. The impulse which Lot’s wife succumbed to, but not this woman.
Then it was all over. Servi was once again alone on the bus but no other group came on. The woman was in front of him, casting him a wan smile, an expression which all at once seemed to inform and confuse him about her motivations and drives. She threw a bag over her shoulder and placed both her hands firmly on her hips.
“Now you have to get off,” she said in English, only to finish in Italian. “The bus goes back to the garage and I must go fetch my son.”
“I can come?” Servi asked.
“To the garage?” the woman answered, raising her eyebrows.
“No, to get your son.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, turning away. So Servi followed her into the street.
Servi did not look out the window. He simply watched the woman speak Hebrew into the microphone. The hail of words were incomprehensible, but occasionally Servi could hear such terms at Vatican City, the Pope, Michelangelo, the Sistine Ceiling, and noticed without intersest that he was in front of such and such a monument to human artistic achievement.
They would get down on the street, and the woman would point and speak, and then they were on the bus again, moving rapidly down the Via Veneto. Scooters surrounded the bus, like sucker fish near a shark, moving ahead and behind, forward and back, of the larger beast. Servi saw this only through the corner of his eye, for he solely watched the woman.
Now, after nearly an hour of surveillance, he thought that perhaps she was not really like his mother at all. Her face was far more theatrically inclined; the lines beneath the eyes gave the woman a certain gravity to her expression which offset her quick step, her fast talking, and the glimmer of her white skin like light kissing the surface of polished marble.
And then it was over. Servi was all alone on the bus, and the woman was no longer at the microphone. All the elderly Israelis were gone, and Servi sat in the seat in front of some second class hotel he did not recognize on some side street he could not name.
The woman was talking to the bus driver in Italian. The man was grunting in response. Then she was in front of Servi. She did not even try to address him in Hebrew, but in English.
“You need to get off,” she said primly. “We have to clean the bus for the next group.”
“How did you know I speak English,” Servi answered in Italian. The woman just flicked her wrist.
“I do this for a living,” she answered in Italian. “I can tell from a glance who is who and where they are from… even someone like you, who tries to hide it with your big beard and shabby clothes. You can’t hide it from me,” she wagged her finger at him, as if he was a naughty child. “It’s in the face, the hands, the walk, America, America, America.” She seemed irritated, but she smiled at Servi. “You have to get off, another group is coming.”
“What language?”
“German,” she explained, placing a hand on her hip. She gazed inscrutably at Servi.
“I can’t understand German either,” Servi answered.
“Well,” the woman explained, dropping her hand from her hip, “then there is no harm in staying on, I suppose.” She smiled brightly at this idea, but then the smile fell from her face, as if the notion pleased and displeased her in such rapid succession, the sensation was irritating.
Then Servi was once again surrounded by elderly people, and the woman took up the microphone and addressed them in German.
Servi watched the woman as she approached a door surrounded by a phalanx of other women and children. The woman passed off the boy somewhere in the scrum, and walked briskly away, never looking back.
Servi followed her. She trotted down the street in medium sized heels. He watched the long arch of her legs, her sturdy calves as they tensed and flexed as she skipped down the sidewalk, the hint of strong thigh revealed through the tight outline of her skirt. Her upper body was skimpy compared to her lower, as if a creator had meant to fashion a woman out of hardy, peasant stock and ran out of material above the waist. She wore some sort of uniform on her tapered upper half, a vest emblazoned with words which Servi could not read.
Then it all became apparent: she bounded on a tour bus and quickly addressed the driver, who was waving a hand dismissively toward her. She picked up a microphone and was about to address the crowd behind her as Servi moved to take a seat near the front.
For a moment, she looked at the young man keenly, as if she may know him, but then blinked and the expression fell from her face, like a curtain falling from a window and revealing a rainy day. She licked her lips and began to speak. She spoke to two dozen elderly men and women quickly in a language Servi did not recognize. She spoke rapidly but efficiently in this strange tongue, harsh with gutturals and sudden with full stops and brimming with brisk, skipping vowels. Servi thought it was Arabic, but then saw an Israeli newspaper in an old man’s hand and realized it was Hebrew.
The woman began to gesture with her right hand out the window as the bus pulled away from the curb and into a harrowing wall of Roman morning traffic.
Servi’s first real memory floated to the service, like a bubble rising through the taut surface of a heavy liquid: Servi was in the basement of a Roman Catholic Church. Despite his protests in the morning, here he was with other children.
Servi remembered the casual anarchy of the room: work tables and play areas and he was supposed to move from one to the other with the regularity of a tide. But Servi clung with tenacity to one task, not for the joy of doing it, but because of the fear of novel arrangements. Every now and again a Mother-Helper would coax Servi to adjust the horizons of his expectations and move on to another task. Servi continued on because his mother promised him she remained in the parking lot in the car. He realized that she was out there, above ground, waiting for him to complete his circuit of tables; to perform the tasks he was meant to finish for goals which were as inexplicably hidden, as obscure as the knot of life tight and clean he held within him.
One fine day the children were brought into the parking lot to complete a task in the open air, and Servi did not see his mother’s familiar blue car. Servi cried without a thread of consolation. When his mother arrived to pick him up, she explained that she simply went to buy the Newsday. The lie was apparent, but when Servi returned to the Volkswagen he accepted it as a natural truth. It was his first real breach of trust, and it passed by without evident notice or regard, only to be played out later, on a wider screen, in different cities, houses, apartments, with other women.
From then on, the world had a solid surface, but the hot magma beneath could burst at any moment. Servi walked on the eggshells of disharmony; he felt at any moment that the chasm would open between his feet.
He knew the lie was not an unpardonable monument to neglect. It was merely a question of the abuse of fundamentals. It was the carrot offered to a young boy on the end of the maternal stick, the incentive to get him to do what he did not want to do, which is the prerogative of mothers; that this was Servi’s first memory, the anchor by which all his other memories hinged, formed a disagreeably fragile impression of the solid forms of the world. Like a keystone in a bridge, this was the piece which held up the entire edifice of Aaron Servi’s past and present.
And although he laughed at the lie, mocked it, held it up into the sun for casual ridicule or gleeful scorn, even bloodied it with a thorny switch, its power was magisterial. In the arena of Servi’s psyche where matters ran deeply, darkly, it held the paramount position.
