The Water-Breather. Ben Faccini

       3

      Our car rarely breaks down. ‘It’s a stroke of luck’, say the mechanics. The outside is so dirty it has tiny furrows of green growing along the edges, and tinges of grime on the bonnet that suck up the sliding rain like silent parched mouths. Ama wishes the car would conk out from time to time, simply shudder to a standstill like a wounded car should. Behind her closed eyes, she longs for the sound of the engine spluttering, the slow, burning smell of overheating or the sudden scrape of the exhaust as it finally drops onto the road.

      ‘Cars only break down if they’re left in garages’, that’s how Pado sees it.

      Ama has a big bin at her feet to keep the seats tidy. She’ll take everything except eggshells. They smell and turn grey, so you have to wait for the country lanes and roll down your window to throw them into a bush. Sometimes we miss and Pado tells us it doesn’t matter as eggshells rot fast. Ama is not so sure, she reckons they take years to blend into the earth. That means that there must be eggshell everywhere we’ve been, a thousand jagged fragments dotted around Europe, under bushes, lining puddles in the road.

      The car dashboard has dark rings of wood that project weaving patterns onto the rear window in the sun. From time to time, Ama brings out a dusting cloth and polishes it. She keeps the cloth in the glove compartment next to her music tapes. She has ten tapes in all, stacked into two piles of five. Pado keeps his tapes separate, crammed into the pouch to the side of his seat. Ama’s cassettes are all of Liszt. Pado’s are all Verdi. The agreement is that Liszt is for the gentle drives through open countryside, whilst Verdi is for motorways and driving fast, books fluttering in the wind. At least, that’s how it’s meant to be, but Pado is always in a hurry and Liszt rarely makes it out of the glove compartment. If Ama does manage to get a Liszt cassette, it’s only because Pado knows that, sooner or later, as the curves and bends speed up, we are going to have to have Verdi and nothing else. As Ama’s eyes are beginning to brush the leaves outside, floating to the notes of her Liszt, Pado lowers the volume until the music is inaudible, until Liszt merges with the indicator and the murmuring of the tyres against the hard tarmac. Then he pulls out his Verdi cassette, one hand on the wheel and the other on the tape machine, and plugs in opera music at top volume. Ama might be lost in tree tops, curled around distant twigs, but she sits up immediately.

      ‘Where’s my tape?’ she snaps and stretches for the volume button, her ears ringing with noise.

      Pado stops her, ‘We have to push on.’

      Ama retreats into hostile mutterings, her smothered complaints frothing out of the windows, trickling down the sides of the car.

      Our parents’ struggles last for a while, falling and rising, depending on the traffic ahead or the volume on the tape machine. If Pado is still shouting, ‘It’s bloody Verdi or nothing at all!’, he speeds up to prove his point, chin up against the wheel. His foot pumps the accelerator in an outraged, stamping skip. The car surges forward, shooting ahead like a ball. We bounce over bumps, scrape along walls, hoot people off zebra crossings. Ama stares into her lap, her white hands twitch and fidget with the folds of her dress. She breathes out slowly, at regular intervals, to keep calm. After a few near misses, and as the arrow of the speedometer wrenches at its dial, she hovers her fingers menacingly above the hand brake.

      ‘Stop Gaspare, you’re going far too fast!’ she yells.

      Pado waits to see if she’ll touch the hand brake. Ama turns to her door instead and threatens to open it unless he slows down. Pado drives on, faster and faster. In the back, we watch as Ama opens her door onto the world, widening the gap little by little, the tarmac appearing, swelling into the car until it is running like a frenzied conveyor belt beneath us. The noise of the wheels floods in. Pado won’t take any notice. Duccio tries to convince him. I bow my head, so as not to see. Giulio edges away from the gaping hole, clutching onto his seat. I can feel him pressing his shoulder into me, the way it shakes when he cries. Pado nudges up to the car in front, to the point of touching. Duccio leans over us and pulls in Ama’s door, yanking against the force of the wind and her frozen grasp. Then the car in front skids out of the way, scared by our racing, and we screech to a halt. Ama steps out of the car. She stands silent for a while, in front of us, and then, with spat breath, she turns to Pado: ‘You fucking idiot!’

      Ama walks away, crosses fields, kicks dust at the side of the road. We trail behind her, Pado’s window down.

      ‘Please get back in.’

      She ignores him. She stops to look at flowers, picks up stones, folds her arms or runs her hands through the air. She can cut across whole meadows, her head hung low, and disappear into woods to be alone. When she becomes a little wisp on the horizon, Pado jumps out of the car and rushes off after her. Ama can see him coming and she runs to avoid his apologies and smiles, storming over the road into the fields the other side. Cars overtake and slow down to watch our parents racing to and fro, refusing embraces and finally walking back, arm in arm.

      Pado is explaining fast. ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’

      Ama cries until he has to shout it so loud that all the crows in the trees are thrown up like black seeds sowing the sky with their crops of regret. Then we know it’s time for us to get out of the car and for them to get in. We sit together, hands in our pockets, or in the fields, scratching our fingers in the mud, watching our parents, each on their front seat, trying to sort this out again. We can stay like this for a while, the three of us lined up, a few metres in front of the car, observing the wide windscreen crammed with our parents’ heads. If one of the side-windows is lowered, I creep up close. Snippets of conversation slip out unnoticed. Ama gasps out her splintered words, the rolls of reasons why she can’t carry on with the endless driving, all the conferences and translating. Pado tries to convince her. Ama wraps her refusal around herself and repeats, ‘It’s not a life, Gaspare, it’s not a life.’

      I watch Pado’s reaction. His eyes are twitching with arguments. He too has lists, long lists of valid reasons to carry on, lists like row upon row of microscopic slides and, on each slide, more and more reasons. Ama says she no longer knows what is fixed and what is gone. She listens to Pado, but she can’t see herself any more. The never-ending motion of the car is ploughing through his lists, through the days, on and on.

      We get back in the car, the seats taut with unresolved temper. To calm matters down, Pado puts on one of the story tapes he and Ama have recorded for us. Ama has imitated the pigs from Animal Farm and Pado has taken on The Three Musketeers in a special battling tone. Occasionally, in the middle of a story, Ama and Pado break into hysterical laughter, struggling to put on an accent or pronounce an unpronounceable word. Their recorded, crackling giggles fill the car, pushing back the resentment and anger. In the background of the tapes, you can hear doors banging, a dog barking and Giulio. He always insists on being present when the tapes are made. He’s even managed to get a slot on a cassette to tell us a joke. Every time that tape comes on, he asks to listen to it over and over again, rewinding and rewinding, until one day it gets so