Lost on Me

My brother dies several times a month. It's always my mother who calls to inform me of his passing. “Your brother isn't answering his phone,” she'll hiss, and for her, the telephone is the sole certifier of our existence on Earth. In the event of an unanswered call, there can be no other explanation than the cessation of vital activity. Sometimes the causes of death are banal: a gas leak, a head-on collision. Other times, the scenarios are more elaborate, like the time he was supposedly kidnapped and tortured in a garage by operatives from the Democratic Party. After each panic, having been assured her son is still alive, my mother is mortified. She contracts with the Lord, imposing little vows upon herself: no sweets, no cinema, no Radio 3. Currently, she is forbidden from watching television, which is why I must turn it on for her while she peeks through her fingers.

Our home was a testament to my father's own peculiar anxieties. He was obsessed with building walls, dividing rooms for no reason at all. Our sixty-square-meter apartment was carved into a labyrinth of three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and two bathrooms, all connected by narrow corridors under a low, suspended ceiling. For a time, my bedroom only existed at night, created by pulling out two accordion doors and folding down a bed from the wall. Later, it became a box built inside my brother's room, with a window sawed in half. It was in this claustrophobic theater that my brother and I grew up. He was the certified genius who learned to read at three; I was the one who, supposedly, “liked to draw.” Lacking any discernible genius of my own, I learned the art of imposture. I stole two paintings - a stormy sea and a snow-covered cabin - from the middle school art room, passed them off as my own, and watched my parents frame them with pride. They still hang in my mother's hallway, a testament to my earliest, most successful lie.

We became writers, my brother and I, thanks to the profound boredom our parents bestowed upon us. My father, a chemist by training, saw the world as a receptacle of noxious agents. After the Chernobyl disaster, he subjected us to a three-year quarantine, forbidding fresh fruit, vegetables, or milk. Our diet consisted of canned goods packaged before April 26, 1986. We spent our childhood locked inside, watching other children play in the courtyard from our tiny window, two silent spies terrified of being invited to join them. We never learned to ride bikes or swim; such activities were fraught with peril. Instead, we sank into the blissful, mucky swamp of reading. It wasn't a pleasure, not at first. Pleasure was an indulgence my family feared more than a toxic cloud. It was simply a coalescence of boredom, my own flesh becoming one with the quiet, stagnant pages.

My first attempt at escape was a disaster orchestrated by my own teenage melodrama. I planned to run away to Paris, but first, I had to say a tragic farewell to my boyfriend, Bra, who was leaving for Ireland. My parents had forbidden me from going to the airport, so I threw my belongings out the sliver of a window in plastic bags, stole a million lire from my father's closet, and announced I was going for ice cream. The airport goodbye was everything I'd dreamed of, full of tears and misunderstood pathos. The plan unraveled when my mother, through her uncanny investigative skills, had my name announced over the airplane's intercom. Bra, escorted off the plane, confessed everything. I spent the rest of that August locked in my room, waiting for a call that never came, staring at the window that was too small to jump from.

My education in the body was a collage of shame, confusion, and strange tenderness. My mother, who only ever slept with my father, saw every man as a “libidinous” threat. This fear was transferred to me, culminating in an agonizing car ride with her colleague - the King of the Libidinous - where I wet myself from sheer terror. In contrast, there was my grandfather Peppino, who would sit with me for hours on the toilet, holding my hands and coaching me through my chronic constipation. “Come on, Scarafona, push,” he'd say, calling me by his affectionate nickname, little cockroach. He was the only man I truly loved, the one I slept beside in his bed until I became too old for it to be proper. He taught me that nothing is as disgusting as the act of feeling disgust itself, a principle I have clung to my entire life.

Over the years, I have lived in roughly seventy different houses, mostly in Berlin, occupying the apartments of friends and strangers while they are away. I love living in other people's lives: discovering their books, their habits, the sound of their neighbors' orgasms. I wear their clothes and look in their mirrors and recognize myself. This constant state of displacement feels more like home than the house where my father built his walls. He is gone now, and I wear his old watch, though I still can't read the hands on an analog clock. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I mentally dial his old number, which I've never forgotten. I imagine telling him that I'm about to turn forty. “Oca,” he would say, using his own nickname for me, “yes, we've reached the paradox.”

We never talk about it, but I know I betrayed my best friend, Cecilia. When we were teenagers, we buried letters for each other under a rock in the park. When she spent a year in Germany, I wrote her a fictionalized account of my life, my first real novel. She was the one who was supposed to be the writer, the one who saw the literary world for the “highly contaminating, tribal cannibalism” it was. I stumbled into it, and in doing so, I think I lost her. I lost something of myself, too. All my memories feel tampered with, either by me or by my family. My mother insists the cameo ring I wear was my grandmother's; I'm almost certain I bought it myself, but now I can no longer remember where.

A few days ago, my brother played me a recording of an interview with Rosa, our father's former colleague and lover. I had built an entire narrative around the letters I supposedly found from her one weekend, letters that proved my parents' marriage was a sham and gave me permission to feel free. Listening to her voice, I realized I couldn't remember a single word from those letters. I couldn't even be sure they ever existed. In my family, we have always manipulated the truth as if it were an exercise in style. Memory is like the game of dice I played with my brother as a child; you just have to decide whether it's useless or rigged. Every moment of my life, I feel as though I'm faced with a blurry, uncertain image of myself, and I can only shrug and say, “Sure, okay, let's just say that's me.”