My mother and father met the day he tried to jump off the Sisto Bridge in Trastevere. It was a good place to jump - he was a fine swimmer, but once he hit the water, he'd be paralysed, and the Tiber back then was already toxic and green.
My mother always walked like it was raining, head down, shoulders hunched, especially when she was alone, but that day she stopped on the bridge, and saw a boy straddling the parapet wall. She came closer, laid her hand on his shoulder, to pull him back: maybe they scuffled. She persuaded him to calm down, breathe slowly, then they took a walk through the city, got drunk, and wound up at a hotel with stiff sheets that stunk of ammonium. Before dawn, my mother put her clothes on and left. She had to get back to her boarding school and my father seemed so restless; she didn't even shake his shoulder to let him know she was going.
The next day, she stepped outside with her girlfriends and saw him leaning against a car, his arms crossed, and right then, she knew she was doomed. I've always envied her mystical, woeful expression when she speaks of him at that moment; I've always been jealous of that apocalypse.
That day in front of her school, my father wore tapered jeans, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was smoking a Marlboro Red - he smoked two packs a day.
He'd come to pick her up in front of the state institute on Via Nomentana, and that's when their life together began.
'How did he manage to find me?' she'd say. When I was little and she told me this story, she transformed my father into a mysterious wizard who could capture us anytime, anywhere, and I hugged her tight and didn't answer and wondered what it was like to be desired that way by a man.
Then I grew up and started pointing out the obvious: 'There was only one school for people like you in Rome. It couldn't have been all that hard.' She'd nod, then shake her head: he found her because he had too. Though their marriage ended, she never regretted pulling him off that bridge: He was deaf, like her, and their relationship held something closer, something deeper, than love.
