Sabenissimo’s Luxury Apartment

by Stefan Andres

translated by Michael Wooff

Once a month Agnello comes to Positano. The rest of the time he lives in Amalfi where he cleans the floors in a hotel and gets to eat leftovers for it and to sleep on a sack filled with straw under a staircase. Short, unkempt, with hair already slightly grey, Agnello looks just like a Shetland pony when he shambles about barefoot. On his way to where he’s going, tunes come into his head from arias he’s picked up in New York, but certainly not from visiting the Metropolitan Opera House.

As he mooches past, he searches in his trouser pockets for something he can’t find. He pulls out the lining, forgets what it is he’s looking for and also forgets to push the lining back in. The empty pockets hang out like flippers, and he sings about the sea in his tenor voice already cracked with age, as if he had a sweetheart far beyond the horizon, one who never comes nearer but never goes away. either.

When he arrives in Positano, Agnello immediately starts to climb the steps that go up to the cemetery. On the way there is the house of Giuseppe Sabenissimo who has an air-conditioned greengrocer’s shop in New York. For many years, Agnello wiped the floors for him the other side of the ocean, and, when he came back to the motherland, he wiped the floors for him here, too, while Giuseppe continued to sell green peas and frozen tomatoes and lettuce in New York.

He always calls first of all on Costanzo, who lives in two rooms and a kitchen blackened with smoke under Sabenissimo’s apartment. Costanzo is by profession a gravedigger and also keeps an eye on Sabenissimo’s apartment for him. He watches it with his wife and his twelve children, his three goats, and his always angry dog that even barks at the priest should he chance to go up to the cemetery.

But Costanzo does not have the key to Sabenissimo’s apartment. Rather it is Agnello who, alone, is allowed to open up and close the premises. He alone is trusted to do so by his friend Giuseppe over the ocean in New York.

But Costanzo always accompanies him. In the bucket for cleaning he has placed a bottle of wine and spread a floor cloth over it. His wife normally insists he have a drink only when he buries someone and needs to console himself. She cannot understand that someone can drink in order to dream with their eyes open. She has no interest in beauty per se.

But Costanzo and Agnello, when they spend all afternoon in Sabenissimo’s apartment, think of nothing else. Costanzo takes his shoes off before he starts to walk around. Agnello puts the boiler on for hot water and wipes the tiles. Costanzo opens the bottle of wine and fetches the blue crystal glass from the sideboard with the golden rim and the coat of arms of Amalfi. Immediately afterwards he fills the red glass on which the Cathedral of Palermo is drawn in lines of gold. And he drinks from all the glasses in the display case.

In and between Agnello comes along, lifts the bottle to his lips and goes back to his bucket. As the water splashes, part of an aria comes to him. He hums and sighs it, makes small talk with his scrubbing brush, with a detachable shelf he cannot put back, with Giuseppe the other side of the ocean or Costanzo, who answers his questions as little as the distant greengrocer.

Costanzo walks around with a glass in his hand, admiring the pictures, one of which shows a Madonna in a gilt frame set among pigeons and a blonde Mary Magdalen who wrings her hands before a cross. And there are containers for vinegar and olive oil in the form of naked Siamese twins that once rewarded Mr Sabenissimo with gifts from their smiling mouths.

Another Madonna stands in a display cabinet. She is wearing a silk dress onto which sequins have been sewn. Costanzo’s favourite object is the broad double bed, the frame of which is made of shiny varnished wood, so Costanzo can see that the people who once lived here had it good. The bed is covered with a rose-red embroidered blanket on which can be read the words: Sleep well. Whenever Costanzo reads this invitation, he thinks of the cemetery where this sentiment frequently appears in gold letters on gravestones. And he immediately thinks of Sabenissimo, who is now over seventy and has prostate problems.

Always, when Costanzo reaches this point in his daydream, he has the same thought: that Giuseppe Sabenissimo might move back to Positano with his sons and, after a few weeks of rest and relaxation, end up dying there. Costanzo can see the funeral in his mind’s eye. And he sees further than that: how one of Sabenissimo’s sons will then marry one of his beautiful daughters. The daughter will inherit this apartment, and Costanzo can see himself sitting on the terrace playing with his grandchildren. His daughter will inherit also all the carpets, rugs and cushions and the colourful glasses and the religious pictures.

Whether it will be Berta, Angela or Lusinella remains to be seen. One of Sabenissimo’s sons has announced he will be coming back to Positano in the not too distant future. He has plans to build a cannery. The apartment is being made ready for him, and he is already inspiring hope, desires and dreams.

* * *

And then, just four weeks before Sabenissimo’s son was expected to arrive, Costanzo’s dream ended. Agnello was scrubbing the tiles with hot, soapy water, and Costanzo had hidden two bottles of wine rather than one under the cloth. He had gone off barefoot with the big blue crystal glass in his hands to inspect all four of the rooms in the apartment and to pause at each station of his great ambitious dream. Just as he was standing in front of the display case and Agnello was stretching with his scrubbing brush, Costanzo slipped and pulled the glass cabinet down with him.

Broken glass lay sharp and gaudy in among the soap suds that now looked like surf. A ship full of happy dreams had run aground there. Agnello knelt down in the wreckage and raised his hands whimpering to heaven, where God and Mr. Sabenissimo merged into a single person.

Costanzo stands there shaking his head. He sees how Agnello picks up the Madonna in the silk-sequinned dress, and then he sheds a tear. The well-dressed doll has put him in mind of his daughter’s imaginary wedding day, a dream now shattered along with the glass on the floor. Sabenissimo Junior will notice how many glasses and other fragile objects are missing. And he will say that Costanzo has sold them and spent the money on getting drunk. And, should Costanzo ever meet the new owner, his reputation as a drinker will precede him, and his daughters be considered children of a drunkard.

But things were destined not to fall out that way. The old vegetable seller in New York trod on a rotten tomato that had rolled under his feet, fell and died of his injuries a few hours later; and the son, who had been intending to come back to Positano, had to take over his father’s business and therefore wrote to say that he would not be coming after all. None of the other Sabenissimo sons appeared, either, and all of them married second-generation Italian women in New York.

Agnello continued to come once a month to Positano, aired Sabenissimo’s rooms and washed the floors, but he no longer permitted Costanzo even to set foot in the apartment, and Costanzo raised no objection to this.

Sometimes, however, when no-one in his immediate family was around, he leaned a ladder against the outside wall and climbed up to the terrace of the apartment that had now not been lived in for decades. And he went to the French window that overlooked the bedroom and gazed through the net curtain at the bed in which one of his daughters — it hardly mattered which! — might have been happy. This beautiful dream would no longer come true. Yet, in the apartment, nothing had changed. His relationship with what was in there was like the one he had with the corpses he buried. They were still present physically, but just not alive any more.

How often though, when Costanzo is lying in bed next to his wife, does he stare at the ceiling and struggle to understand that up there all the rooms are empty and all the fine things in them seemingly belong to no-one, no-one at all, for ever and ever, he murmurs, and walks, again barefoot, all round the apartment in his dream until he stands in front of the glass cabinet. Sometimes then he wakes up abruptly before it falls on top of him...