Bad-Time Dimitri

Illustration by Pedro Gomes

When she wasn’t brandishing it despondently, Mom inspected the cordless phone, twisting it against her sternum as if she were performing hara-kiri. Dad was consoling her: “They haven’t disconnected it yet, it’s just out of batteries.”

“Would you cut it out with the dramatics? It was only a waste of money.” I had spent the last half-hour trying to justify what was a reasonable and necessary action: I had canceled their Telecom plan.

For years I had been aiming to get rid of the landline at my parents’ place, and now that I had succeeded, I had no intention of stopping there. The drawers needed to be emptied too. My mom’s bedroom dresser was impossible to open, exploding with old rolled-up bills squeezed together with rubber bands, warrantees for television sets and ovens and microwaves. From the back poured out a mess of flashlights, chipped scissors, little tubes of glue squeezed down to the last drop.

All of it, I wanted to get rid of all of it. Now was the chance to do so, and it wouldn’t come again. The decision had been made: they would move to another apartment, one that was smaller and more manageable. They were over seventy, already too old to take on a move, but also in an age range that calls for a bit of downsizing. On paper, a flawless and sensible reduction — often pushed for and encouraged by the offspring — but much less so when put into practice.

“What a shame, we had such a fine, beautiful number. And so easy to remember by heart. Think how many friends called you at 8077117 when you were still nice,” Mom said.

In her version of events, I had been still nice until I was eighteen, the same way I had been a good girl, an angel, up to seven and a half, melancholy until nine, before there came, of course, the nice interlude, and so on. My biography was punctuated by these sudden about-faces.

“And how many patients called me at 8077! Why did you discontinue it, couldn’t we have brought it with us?” said my dad, who was a doctor.

“I can’t give even an inch with you two, you’d only take advantage of it. Where’s the key to the safe box? It’s not in the hiding place.”

“It’s in the keyhole,” Mom said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“The one to the safe?”

“At least they won’t rip it from the wall or cause any damage. You don’t know what burglars are like — we do.”

“So then where is the jewelry?”

“In various other hiding places.”

“Various…other….Which ones?”

“They’ll come back to me sooner or later.”

“This is a move, not

There the name was, on the buzzer: Di – space – Mitri. After twenty-five years, I was there, standing in front of an austere building in Rome’s Trieste neighborhood. As soon as I walked through the door, Mom nervously came toward me in the hallway: “Why were you there?”