Arnon Grunberg

Amalfi / Stockholm / New York

She had a beard and wore yellow slippers. Her white hair was cropped short and watching her walk you had the feeling she was enjoying crushing small insects. Everything she did betrayed a deep aversion to life, but her aversion to customers was greater still.
First she gave a family with two small children a good talking to, next she targeted her ire at a trio of German tourists, lastly she shouted at a young man who called her ‘mother’: ‘I’m not your mother!’ She ruled her premises as God rules the world: arbitrarily, devoid of all logic and with an indomitable rage at the injustice done to her.
Several people had been turned away, supposedly because the place was shut; others were let in twenty minutes later. From an elderly man, in a rare charitable moment, she bought five music cassettes. Apparently lacking anything else to do, she stood at the window and snorted, as if she considered the view a personal insult.
She displayed great contempt for money, as for almost everything else. Anyone wanting to pay was directed to a small desk at the back. She wrote the price on a scrap of paper. Whether or not there was any connection between the amount she wrote down and what you’d eaten was far from clear. Once when I asked her where the remarkable sum of 54,650 lire came from that she’d written on a scrap torn from a paper bag, she crossed it out and wrote 60,000 lire underneath. After that, I stopped asking questions. The way some believers take it as an affront if you ask questions of God, she seemed to regard requests for itemized bills as evil. As we know, evil can take myriad forms, so why shouldn’t it take the guise now and then of an itemized bill? The money received she swept with an angry gesture into a drawer, in which lay a pair of scissors, a roll of tape and an old-fashioned alarm clock.
Every day at about half past one I went there for a frugal lunch. Not out of masochism; it was the best place to eat in the village. I did what I had seen others do, and surrendered to her as to a natural disaster.
The young man who’d been reprimanded for calling her ‘mother’ raced back and forth like a mad dog, without doing much that was particularly useful.
One lunchtime he started dusting two paintings (hilly landscapes with the occasional bird). The woman who’d been called ‘mother’ watched approvingly.
Perhaps she’d been a landscape painter once, one whose career had been nipped in the bud. In her youth she had gone into the mountains to paint them, but the world remained indifferent to her and her mountains. In the end she’d opened this lunchroom and hired a young man who, for arcane reasons, called her ‘mother’.
Perhaps she locked him up in a cage every evening. It is often the little disappointments that drive people to sadism. She also seemed to take pleasure in swiping meals people hadn’t yet finished from under their noses. Some shook their heads in astonishment, others laughed uneasily, as if at a good joke they only barely understood. But no one protested. Protest was pointless.
This woman even directed the traffic outside. I’d once seen her standing out front at half past nine in the morning, waving her arms irascibly. At first I didn’t understand what was going on, until I got closer and saw she was directing traffic. Nor could I help noticing that she was very friendly towards two toothless men who always ordered bean soup. The toothless found favour with her.
‘Where’s your family?’ I heard a man with a mobile phone ask on a rainy Sunday. He seemed in need of conversation.
She glanced at him. Then she said: ‘I am my family.’ I had to make a mental note of that answer. I am my family. You are your family. We are all our own family. I was the last to leave at half past three, and the young man was standing at the door. As always, he had a pencil stuck behind his right ear.
I decided to walk around the graveyard for a while. Simply because the graveyard had until then remained unobserved.
Later that day I ran into the young man in the graveyard, still with the pencil behind his ear. He had flowers with him and he was eating strawberries out of a little cardboard box. Everywhere along the side of the road, men were selling strawberries. The young man didn’t seem to recognize me. He was completely absorbed in his strawberries.
I walked back to the hotel.
In the piano bar in the evenings, people with too much money sat eyeballing each other. On the wall was a large photo of the Clintons, who had stayed there once.
Everyone waited for the piano bar to close, so they could go to sleep confidently, knowing that they hadn’t missed anything. It reminded me of what Beckett wrote: ‘Perhaps my best years are gone. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now.’