An excerpt from The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl From Milan by Domenico Starnone

Between the ages of eight and nine, I set out to find the pit of the dead. At school, in Italian class, I had recently learned about the legend of Orpheus and how he travelled to the underworld to bring back his girlfriend, Eurydice, who, unhappily, had wound up there after getting bitten by a snake. My plan was to do the same for a girl who was not my girlfriend but who might be if I managed to lead her back above ground from below, charming cockroaches, skunks, mice, and shrews along the way. The trick was to never turn around to look at her, which was harder for me than for Orpheus, with whom I believed I had a fair amount in common. I, too, was a poet, but in secret; I composed deeply tragic poems if I didn’t catch sight of the girl at least once a day, which was rare because she lived across the street from me in a brand new, sky-blue building.

It all started one Sunday in March. The windows of our fourth-floor apartment looked out onto the girl’s large third-floor balcony and its stone parapet. I was an unhappy child by nature, the girl was the opposite. The sun never shone in our house, it always seemed to shine at the girl’s. Her balcony was filled with colorful flowers, my windowsill was bare, at the very most a grey rag hung from a metal wire after my grandmother used it to mop the floor. That Sunday I started to notice the balcony, the flowers, and the happiness of the girl, who had pitch black hair like Lilyth, the Indian wife of Tex Willer, a cowboy comic that my uncle and I both liked to read.

It looked like she was pretending to be a wind-up ballerina, hopping here and there with her arms above her head and every so often doing a pirouette. From inside came her mother’s voice, now and then calling out genteel reminders, like, be careful, don’t get sweaty, or, I don’t know, easy does it with the pirouettes or you’ll bump into the glass door and get hurt. The girl always replied delicately, don’t worry, mammina, I’m being careful. Mother and daughter spoke to each other like people in books or on the radio, making me yearn less for the words themselves, which I’ve since forgotten, but for their enchanting sound, which was so different from anything I had heard at home, where we only spoke dialect.

I spent entire mornings at the window, dying to cast off my actual self, transform into a handsome, clean, new person, capable of uttering sweet poetic words straight out of my primer, settle on her balcony, within those sounds and colors, and live forever by her side, asking her every so often and very politely: may I please touch your braids?

At one point, however, she noticed me, and I stepped back in embarrassment. I don’t think she liked that. She stopped dancing, stared directly at my window, and started dancing even more energetically. And because I carefully remained out of sight, she decided to do something that took my breath away. With not a little effort, she climbed onto the stone parapet, stood up, and started dancing like a ballerina up and down the narrow ledge.

How beautiful her little body was against the sunlit windows, her arms above her head, twirling boldly, so exposed to death. I stepped forward so that she could see me, ready to throw myself into the abyss with her if she were to fall.

Seeing how one year before, Mr. Benagosti, my elementary school teacher, had told my mother that I was destined for great things, it seemed that finding the entrance to the pit of the dead, raising its lid, and descending into its depths would be an easy enough task to accomplish. Much of the information I had gathered about the dangerous fosse came from my maternal grandmother, who knew a lot about the hereafter thanks to friends, acquaintances, and relatives who had recently been killed by bombs or in battles either on sea or land—or from frequent conversations with her husband, whose life had been cut short two years after they were married.

What I liked about my grandmother was that I never felt shy around her, mainly because she loved me more than her own children—my mother and uncle—but also because she held no authority within our home. We treated her like a dumb servant, whose only task was to obey our orders and work. As a result, I’d ask her endless questions about whatever subject crossed my mind. I must’ve been very persistent because sometimes she called me petrusinognemenèst, meaning that I was like parsley in soup, chopped parsley, the dark green kind, like the flies that flew around the steamy kitchen in the summer, their wings sometimes growing heavy with moisture, making them fall into the soup pot. Go away, she’d say, what do you want from me? Buzz off, shoo, shoo, shoo. She’d try and brush me off, but then she’d laugh, and I’d start to laugh, too, and occasionally I’d even tickle her so hard she’d say, stop, stop, you’re going to make me wet my pants, scoot, go away. But of course, I never did. I was practically mute back then, always on my own, somber, both at home and school. I only opened up to her, and she was as mute with others as I was. She kept her words deep inside, using them only with me, if at all.

She first started telling me the story about the pit of the dead the year before, around Christmas. I was feeling sad and had asked her: how does a person die? While swiftly plucking a recently slaughtered chicken with a look of revulsion on her face, she answered me absent-mindedly: you lie down on the ground and stop breathing forever. Forever? I asked. Forever, she replied. But then she got worried—maybe because she saw me lie down on the freezing cold floor, and while it might not have killed me, it could’ve easily led to catarrhal bronchitis—and she called me over—vienaccàbelloranònna—to where she was standing with the dead chicken half-submerged in boiling water. What’s the matter? What’s going on? Who hurt you? No one. So why do you want to die? I told her I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to spend a little time dead and then get back up. She explained that you can’t be dead just for a little, unless you’re Jesus, who came back to life after three days. The best thing I could do, she suggested, would be to stay alive forever, and not get distracted and end up dead by mistake. Then, to get across just how awful it was down there, she started to tell me about the pit of the dead.

The entrance, she began, has a cover. This cover—I can still remember each and every word she said—is made of marble and has a lock, a chain, and a bolt, because if people don’t close it like they’re supposed to, all the skeletons down there that still have a little flesh on them will try to sneak out, together with the rats that scurry in and out of those dirty yellow sheets they wrap around people when they die. Once you raise the cover, you have to pull it shut behind you right away, then go down some steps, but they don’t lead to a hallway or sitting room with lots of furniture or some ballroom with crystal chandeliers and gents and ladies and damsels, no, but into a stormy cloud of dirt with thunderbolts and lightning and rain that comes down in buckets and stinks like rotting flesh, and a wind—what a wind, Mimí!—that’s so strong it grinds down mountains and fills the air with powdery dust, yellow like tuff. In addition to the moaning wind and the thunder from the endless storms, she went on to say, there’s the constant sound of hammering and chiseling from all the dead people in their tattered shrouds, all men, watched over by boy-angels and girl-angels with red eyes and purple robes, long hair fluttering in the wind, and wings like this chicken, but black like a crow’s, either pulled in tight behind them or spread out wide, depending on what they have to do. The dead men toil at crushing enormous blocks of hard marble and granite into pebbles, boulders that extend all the way out to sea, where huge waves of mud crash over them, spraying rotten foam, just like when you squeeze a rotten orange and worms come out. Ahmaronnamía, so many dead men. And dead women, too, and always in distress. Because everything around them quakes and trembles in that terrible wind—the mountains, the sky with its dirt clouds and the foul sewage-water that rains down sideways across the stormy sea—there’s always something cracking open in the distance, sometimes the whole landscape splits apart, and the clouds come crashing down like tidal waves. And when that happens, the dead women, all wrapped up tight in their shrouds, have to run over there and sew it back up either with needles and thread, or with relatively modern looking sewing machines, patching up the mountains and sky and sea with strips of suede, while the angels, their eyes growing even redder with rage, scream at them: what are you doing? What the hell are you thinking? You idiots, you whores, get back to work, just do your work.

My mind reeled at her stories of those constantly whipping winds and earthquakes and tidal waves, and I listened with my mouth open wide. Later, though, I realized that her story contained quite a few contradictions. My grandmother’s accounts didn’t exactly shine with precision, and I always had to tighten them up a bit. She had left school in second grade, I was already in third and, therefore, I was clearly smarter. When I forced her to go back and clarify a few things, sometimes all she gave me was half a sentence, other times she told me longer and more detailed stories. Then I’d reconfigure all the details inside my head, welding one to the other with my imagination.

Even so, I was still full of doubts. Where was this marble cover? Was it in the courtyard of our building or beyond the main entrance, and if so, was it to the left, or right? You had to lift it up—fine, I got that—and go down a bunch of stairs, and then surprise, surprise, you walked into a wide-open space with clouds, rain, wind, thunder, and flashes of lightning, but was there electricity down there? A light switch? And if you needed something, who could you ask? When I pestered my grandmother for details, it was as though she’d forgotten what she’d already told me, and I had to remind her of everything. Once, when filling in the gaps, she went into great detail about the black-feathered angels, who, according to her, were mobsters and spent all their time flapping around in the dust, insulting the hard-working men and women who were busy hammering and sewing. People who work, Mimí, are never bad—she taught me—it’s the people who don’t work, who get fat off the labors of others who are pieces of shit, and there are so many of them out there! People who think they come straight from Abraham’s nuts, who just want to boss people around: do this, do that, do it now. Her husband, my grandfather—who died when he was twenty-two (he was two years younger than she was) and consequently had remained that age forever, making me the only kid in the world to have a twenty-year old grandfather with a heavy black moustache and pitch black hair—never just hung around on scaffolding for fun, never stood there without actually building things. Her husband had learned how to be a fravecatóre at the tender age of eight and went on to become an excellent mason. Then, one afternoon, he fell off a tall building and not because he didn’t know what he was doing but because he was exhausted, because those bums had made him work too hard. He shattered every single bone in his body, including his handsome face, which resembled my own, and blood had come gushing out of his nose and mouth. On a separate occasion, she told me that he also used to tickle her, and he did it up until the day he died, when he went off to toil forever in the hereafter, leaving her all alone on this side, without a penny, with a two-year-old little girl and a baby on the way, destined to become a person who’d never know a moment of peace. But get over here, you scazzamaurié, come over here to your nonna, who loves you so.

She often called me that: scazzamauriéll. I was her naughty but charming devil, a pain in the ass and scallywag, who chased away the nightmares and dark thoughts that overshadowed her worst days. Scazzamaurielli, she said, lived among the dead, in that huge pit; they spent their time running around, jumping off boulders, screaming and laughing and beating each other up. Small but strong, they picked up marble shards and sharp splinters of granite and placed them in big baskets. Then, after choosing the flattest and sharpest ones, they touched them with their thick fingers to make them fiery hot and threw them like darts at the men-ghosts and girl-ghosts that rose up from the cadavers, emanating smoke, their cruel feelings not quite ready to turn entirely to ash. Sometimes—she said quietly one day when she was particularly melancholy—the scazzamurielli made themselves wafer thin and squeezed past the marble cover and out of the pit, and traveled all around Naples, sneaking into the houses of the living. They chased away the crueler ghosts that lived there and brought about general good cheer. They even managed to drive off the phantasms that haunted my grandmother most, the horrifying and disrespectful ones who didn’t care how weary she was, or how she’d spent her whole life sewing thousands of suede gloves for ladies, or how she now had to slave away for her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, when the only person she was ever truly willing to wait on hand and foot was me.

To be honest, I would’ve preferred being a poet-enchanter that could extract girlfriends from the underworld than an elfin nightmare-slayer. But at that point in time, it didn’t really matter. The little ballerina who danced dangerously on the parapet didn’t fall and break every bone in her body, the way my grandfather had, but hopped back down onto the balcony and ran inside, causing my heart not to jump into my throat but to land on my sleeve.

All the same, I started to worry about her. Although she hadn’t fallen then, I was scared that one day she would, and consequently I didn’t have much time to get to know her. So, I waited until she reappeared on the balcony and, when she did, I raised my hand in a wave, but a feeble one, so I wouldn’t feel ashamed if she didn’t wave back.

Which, in fact, she did not, not then and not ever, either because it was objectively hard to see my gesture or because she didn’t want to give me the pleasure. Consequently, I decided to spy on the front door of her building. I hoped she’d come out alone so that I could become friends with her and talk about stuff in proper Italian, and then say: you know that if you fall, you’ll die? That’s how my grandfather died. It felt important to let her know that so she would have all the necessary elements to decide if she wanted to continue to expose herself to the danger or not.

For days on end, I dedicated all my free time after school and before starting my homework—time that I usually spent playing in the street, getting into fights with kids who were rowdier than me, and undertaking all sorts of dangerous challenges like doing flips over iron bars—to that goal. But she never came out, not on her own or with her parents. Clearly her life followed a different schedule, or else I was just unlucky.

But I didn’t give up. I was extremely restless at that age, my head was filled with words and fantasies, all of which concerned the girl. There was no coherence to them—coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up. I remember wanting several things all at once. I wanted, purely by chance, to find myself standing in front of their apartment door. I would ring the bell and say to her father or mother—preferably her mother, as fathers scared me then and still do— in the language of the books that I was reading thanks to Mr. Benagosti, who lent them to me: Signora, your beloved and beautiful daughter dances so exquisitely on the parapet that I can’t sleep; I am deeply concerned that she will fall to the sidewalk below, that blood will come gushing from her mouth and nose, just as it did to my grandfather, the mason. But, at the same time, I also wanted to stand at my window and wait for the girl to come back and play on her balcony so that I could show her that I wasn’t afraid of risking my life either, that I could wriggle out the bathroom window, creep along the wall, and climb back in through the kitchen window, without ever looking down. I had done it twice already—it actually wasn’t that hard because the two windows were connected by a narrow sill—and with a nod from her I’d happily do it a third time. If I ever did manage to talk to her, I would also tell her—because one word always leads to another—that I was in love with her beautiful soul, that my love was eternal, and that, if she really wanted to dance on the ledge and risk falling to her death, she could count on me to bring her back from the underworld, that I wouldn’t stupidly turn around and look at her. Spying on her, dying in some bold act for her, or rescuing her from deep underground weren’t conflicting thoughts but separate moments in a single event where, one way or another, I always came out looking good.

In the meantime, not only was I unsuccessful in making contact with her, but a long rainy spell prevented me from even watching her play on her balcony. Instead, I devoted all my energy, between one rain shower and the next, to searching for the entrance to the underworld so I wouldn’t be caught unprepared in case tragedy struck. Actually, as soon as my grandmother told me about it, I started my search but without wasting too much time on it. Because of Mr. Benagosti’s books, the comics my mother bought me, and the movies I saw at Cinema Stadio, I had been so busy acting out countless roles—cowboy, orphan, deck hand, shipwreck survivor, game hunter, explorer, knight errant, Hector, Ulysses, and the entire tribune of the plebes, to name just a few—that looking for the entrance to the land of the dead had become secondary. But with the girl’s intrusion into my life of adventure, I redoubled my efforts and got lucky.

One afternoon when I wasn’t allowed to go far from home because of the rain—mo chiuvéva, mo schiuvéva, mo schizziàva soltanto my grandmother crabbily said—and only down to the puddle-filled courtyard with Lello, my friend who lived in Staircase B, I discovered, just beyond the patch of grass where the palm tree stood, a rectangular slab of stone longer than I was tall, complete with a heavy chain that glistened in the rain. I froze when I saw it and not just from the cold and damp but out of fear.

“What’s the matter?” my friend asked in alarm. I liked Lello because when there were no other kids around, he spoke in an Italian that sounded a little bit like the books I read.

“Quiet!”

“Why?”

“The dead will hear you.”

“What dead?”

“All of them.”

“Cut it out . . . ”

“No, really. They’re down there. If we can unlock the chain and lift up the rock, all the ghosts will come out.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Touch the chain, see what happens.”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“Touch it.”

Lello walked over to it while I kept my distance. He knelt down and in the very moment that he cautiously touched the chain, a blindingly bright bolt of lightning exploded in the sky, followed by heavy thunder. I fled, with Lello right behind me, ashen with fear.

“See?” I said out of breath.

“Yeah.”

“Would you go down there with me?”

“No.”

“What kind of friend are you?”

“There’s a chain.”

“We can break the chain.”

“You can’t break chains.”

“You’re just chicken. If you don’t want to, I’ll ask friend of mine. She’s not afraid of anything.”

And then something utterly mind-boggling happened.

“You mean the girl from Milan?” Lello asked with a wicked smile.

That’s when I found out that the girl of my dreams had a nickname, and that I wasn’t the only one who had noticed her. But there was more. Apparently, it was a well-known fact that when it was sunny, I either stood at my window ogling her or loitered outside the front door to her building. Admit it!

I retreated into my usual silence, but not before saying vafanculostrunznunmeromperpcàzz, the magic formula I used when no one understood just how special I was and what great things I’d go on to accomplish one day.