The Statue Salesman

To get to the dining room you had to cross rows of doors facing a narrow and chilly hallway, its walls decorated with green plants framing the bathroom door.

In the dining room there were heavily stained tablecloths and Viennese chairs where many women and fat professors sat.

Madame Renaud, who owned the boardinghouse, ran up and down the hallway clapping her hands and checking on her boarders at mealtime. There was a professor of Greek who stared, for fear of falling, at the center of the table; there was a chess player, a cyclist, also a statue salesman, and a saleswoman of lace embroidery who caressed the lace trim of the tablecloth with the hands of a blind woman. A seven-year-old boy ran from table to table, until he stopped at the statue salesman’s table. He wasn’t a bad boy, but there was a secret hostility between them. For the statue salesman even just a kiss from a boy was trouble: he had the same fear of the boy that he had of clowns and people wearing masks.

In the lumberyard next door the statue salesman had his workshop. Big letters announced on the entrance door: “Octaviano Crivellini. Copies of statues from European gardens, cemeteries and salons”—and there was a battalion of daunting statues that made it a struggle for buyers to choose. He ordered a little room to be built so he could live there comfortably. In the meantime he lived in the boardinghouse next door, and before going to bed he’d surreptitiously say good night to the statues.

At the dining room table Octaviano Grivellini was a man devoured by anxieties. He was sitting before the cold cuts, sad and listlessly repeating: “I don’t have to worry about these things, I don’t have to worry about these things.” The seven-year-old boy lurked behind his chair and, like some perverse juggler, invisibly kicked him, and this scene repeated daily, but that wasn’t all. He would have been able to put up with the invisible kicks at dinner like autumnal mosquito bites, terrible and tolerable because every night one could take refuge under mosquito nets inside with the lights off and screens on the windows. But the various annoyances caused by Tirso, the seven-year-old kid, were constant and relentless. There was nowhere to run where he could get away from him. He probably hadn’t known his mother or had a terrified father whom nobody dared approach.

It had already been a week since that night he had escaped the house, running after him. He must have seen him kissing, as he cleaned them, the plaster heads that moved stiffly in the night like stars. Tirso laughed uncontrollably and rode the back of a lion with its loose, thick mane. The moonlight turned the earth into a lake filled with shadows where cemetery angels—a Venus with empty eyes, a Diana the Huntress running against the wind, and some bust of Socrates—wept. Octaviano, when he saw Tirso mounted on one of his favorite lions, quickly cut short his “good night” wishes and left, overcome with shame and terror. Tirso, thinking that the frozen statue salesman hadn’t seen him, assumed that he had the prodigious power of invisibility and tiptoed back to bed again feeling like he’d witnessed a miracle. From that day on he had followed him to the lumberyard every night and had become familiar with all the statues, with the plaster hands and feet kept in closets, with the white dogs. Octaviano, however, distanced himself from his statues—he cleaned them with very few caresses in front of the boy. Tirso began to grow tired of that gift of invisibility he had enjoyed for a short while. The chess player had spoken to him two or three times. The cyclist had given him a candy. The saleswoman had tried a stitched collar on him, confusing him with a little girl one day when he was wearing an apron, but the statue salesman didn’t speak to him at all.