The Days of Abandonment (10 page)

N
ow I felt a need for their voices, but they didn’t answer. I rushed to the door, tried to open it, couldn’t. The key, I remembered, but I turned it to the right, as if to lock it, instead of to the left. I took a deep breath, remembered the gesture, turned the key in the proper direction, went into the hall.

Otto was in front of the door. He was lying on one side, his head resting on the floor. He didn’t move when he saw me, he didn’t even prick up his ears, or wag his tail. I knew that position, he assumed it when he was suffering for some reason, and wanted attention, it was the pose of melancholy and pain, it meant he was looking for understanding. Stupid dog, he, too, wanted to convince me that I was spreading anxieties. Was I dispensing spores of illness throughout the house? Was it possible? For how long, four, five years? Was that why Mario had turned to little Carla? I rested one bare foot on the dog’s stomach, I felt its heat devour my sole, rise to my guts. I saw that a lacework of drool ornamented his jaws.

“Gianni’s sleeping,” Ilaria whispered from the end of the hall. “Come here.”

I climbed over the dog, went into the children’s room.

“How pretty you look,” Ilaria exclaimed with sincere admiration, and pushed me toward Gianni to show me how he was sleeping. The child had on his forehead three coins and in fact he was sleeping, breathing heavily.

“The coins are cool,” Ilaria explained. “They make the headache and fever go away.”

Every so often she removed one and put it in a glass of water, then dried it and placed it again on her brother’s forehead.

“When he wakes up he has to take an aspirin,” I said.

I placed the box on the night table, returned to the hall to occupy myself with something, anything. Get breakfast, yes. But Gianni shouldn’t have any food. The washing machine. Even pat Otto. But I realized that the dog was no longer in front of the bathroom door, he had decided to stop displaying his slobbering melancholy. Just as well. If my noxious existence wasn’t communicating itself to others, to creatures human and animal, then it was the illness of the others that was invading me and making me sick. Therefore—I thought as if it were a decisive act—a doctor was needed. I had to telephone.

I compelled myself to hold onto this thought, I dragged it behind me like a ribbon in the wind, and so went cautiously into the living room. I was struck by the disorder of my desk. The drawers were open, there were books scattered here and there. Even the notebook in which I made notes for my book was open. I leafed through the last pages. I found transcribed there in my tiny handwriting some passages from
Woman Destroyed
and a few lines from
Anna Karenina
. I didn’t remember having done this. Of course, it was a habit of mine to copy passages from books, but not in that notebook, I had a notebook specifically for that. Was it possible that my memory was breaking down? Nor did I remember having drawn firm lines in red ink under the questions that Anna asks herself a little before the train hits her and runs her over: “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” The passages didn’t surprise me, I seemed to know them well, yet I didn’t understand what they were doing in those pages. Did I know them so well because I had transcribed them recently, yesterday, the day before? But then why didn’t I remember having done it? Why were they in that notebook and not the other?

I sat down at the desk. I had to hold on to something, but I could no longer remember what. Nothing was solid, everything was slipping away. I stared at my notebook, the red lines under Anna’s questions like a mooring. I read and reread, but my eyes ran over the questions without understanding. Something in my senses wasn’t working. An interruption of feeling, of feelings. Sometimes I abandoned myself to it, at times I was frightened. Those words, for example: I didn’t know how to find answers to the question marks, every possible answer seemed absurd. I was lost in the where am I, in the what am I doing. I was mute beside the why. This I had become in the course of a night. Maybe, I didn’t know when, after protesting, after resisting for months, I had seen myself in those books and I was in bad shape, definitively broken. A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.

A
t that point I felt a tickle in my nostrils, I thought that my nose was bleeding again. I soon realized that I had taken for a tactile impression what was an olfactory wound. A thick poisonous odor was spreading through the house. I thought that Gianni must be really sick, I pulled myself together, went back to his room. But the child was still sleeping, in spite of his sister’s assiduous changing of the coins on his forehead. Then I moved slowly through the hall, cautiously, toward Mario’s study. The door was half open, I entered.

The bad smell was coming from there, the air was unbreatheable. Otto was lying on his side, under his master’s desk. When I approached him, he shuddered through his whole body. Saliva dripped from his jaws but his eyes were those of a good dog, even though they looked white, as if bleached. A blackish stain was spreading next to him, dark mud veined with blood.

At first I thought of backing off, leaving the room, closing the door. For a long time I hesitated, taking in that new strange creeping of the illness through my house, what was happening. In the end I decided to stay. The dog was lying mutely, no spasm shook him, his eyelids were lowered now. He seemed to be immobilized in a final contraction, as if he were wound tight, like one of those metal toys of long ago, ready to start up suddenly, as soon as you lowered a little lever with your finger.

Very slowly I got used to the room’s offensive odor, I accepted it to the point where, after a few seconds, its surface was torn in several places and another odor began to seep through, for me even more offensive, the odor that Mario hadn’t taken away and which was stationed there, in his study. How long since I had entered that room? As soon as possible, I thought angrily, I had to make him take everything out of the apartment, clear himself out of every corner. He couldn’t decide to leave me and yet store in the house the perspiration from his pores, the aura of his body, so strong that it broke even the poisonous seal of Otto. Besides—I realized—it was that odor which had given the dog the energy to lower the door handle with his paw and, similarly dissatisfied with me, drag himself under the desk, in that room where the traces of his master were more intense and promised him relief.

I felt humiliated, even more humiliated than I had felt in all these months. A dog without gratitude, I had taken care of him, I had stayed without abandoning him, I had taken him outside for his needs, and he, now that he was becoming a terrain of sores and sweat, went to find comfort among the scents of my husband, the untrustable, the traitor, the deserter. Stay here by yourself, I thought, you deserve it. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, it didn’t even matter to me, he, too, was a flaw in my awakening, an incongruous event in a day that I was unable to put in order. I backed up angrily toward the door, in time to hear Ilaria behind me asking:

“What stinks?”

Then she glimpsed Otto lying under the desk and she asked:

“Is he sick, too? Did he eat poison?”

“What poison?” I asked as I closed the door.

“The poisoned dog biscuits. Daddy always says you have to be careful. The man downstairs who hates dogs puts them in the park.”

She tried to reopen the door, fearful for Otto, but I prevented her.

“He’s fine,” I said. “He just has a little stomachache.”

She looked at me very closely, so that I thought she wanted to figure out if I was telling her the truth. Instead she asked:

“Can I make myself up like you?”

“No. Take care of your brother.”

“You take care of him,” she retorted in irritation and went toward the bathroom.

“Ilaria, don’t touch my makeup.”

She didn’t answer and I let her go, I let her go, that is, beyond the corner of my eye, I didn’t even turn, I went dragging my feet to Gianni’s room. I felt exhausted, even my voice seemed to me more a sound in my mind than a reality. I took Ilaria’s coins off his forehead, I ran my hand over his dry skin. It was burning.

“Gianni,” I called, but he continued to sleep or pretend to sleep. His mouth was half open, his lips inflamed like a fiery red wound in the middle of which shone his teeth. I didn’t know whether to touch him again, kiss his forehead, shake him lightly to try to wake him. I repressed also the question of the gravity of his illness: food poisoning, a summer flu, the effect of a frozen drink, meningitis. Everything seemed possible, or impossible, and yet I had trouble forming hypotheses, I was unable to establish hierarchies, above all I couldn’t get alarmed. Now, instead, thoughts in themselves frightened me, I would have liked not to have any more, I felt they were infected. After seeing Otto’s condition, I was even more afraid of being the channel of every evil, better to avoid contacts, Ilaria, I mustn’t touch her. The best thing was to call the doctor, an old pediatrician, and the vet. Had I already done it? Had I thought of doing it and then forgotten? Call them right away, that was the rule, respect it. Even though it annoyed me to act as Mario had always acted. Hypochondriac. He got worried, he called the doctor for a trifle. Dad knows—the children, besides, had always pointed out to me—he knows that the man downstairs puts poisoned dog biscuits in the park; he knows what to do about a high fever, about a headache, about symptoms of poison; he knows that you need a doctor, he knows you need the vet. If he had been present—I sobbed—he would have called a doctor for me above all. But I immediately removed that idea of solicitude attributed to a man from whom I solicited nothing anymore. I was an obsolete wife, a cast-off body, my illness is only female life that has outlived its usefulness. I headed decisively toward the telephone. Call the vet, call the doctor. I picked up the receiver.

I put it down immediately in anger.

Where was I with my head?

Collect myself, take hold of myself.

The receiver gave the usual stormy whistle, no line. I knew it and pretended not to know it. Or I didn’t know it, my memory had lost its ability to grip, I was no longer capable of learning, of retaining what I had learned, and yet I pretended that I was still capable, I pretended and I avoided responsibility for the children, the dog, with the cold pantomime of one who knows and does.

I picked up the receiver, dialed the number of the pediatrician. Nothing, the whistling continued. I got down on my knees, I looked for the plug under the table, I unplugged it, plugged it back in. I tried the telephone again: the whistling. I dialed the number: the whistling. Then I began to blow into the receiver myself, stubbornly, as if with my breath I could chase away that wind that was canceling my line. No success. I gave up on the telephone, returned idly to the hall. Maybe I hadn’t understood, I had to make an effort to concentrate, I had to take in the fact that Gianni was ill, that Otto, too, was ill, I had to find a way of feeling alarm for their condition, grasp what it meant. I counted on the tips of my fingers, diligently. One, there was the telephone not working in the living room; two, there was a child with a high fever and vomiting in his room; three, there was a German shepherd in bad shape in Mario’s study. But without getting agitated, Olga, without rushing. Pay attention, in the excitement you might forget your arm, your voice, a thought. Or tear the floor, permanently separate the living room from the children’s room. I asked Gianni, perhaps shaking him too hard:

“How are you feeling?”

The child opened his eyes.

“Call Daddy.”

Enough of your useless father.

“I’m here, don’t worry.”

“Yes, but call Daddy.”

Daddy wasn’t there, Daddy who knew what to do had left. We had to manage by ourselves. But the telephone didn’t work, disturbance in the line. And maybe I was leaving, too, for an instant I had a clear awareness of it. I was leaving on unknowable pathways, pathways leading me farther astray, not leading me out, the child had understood, and he was worried not so much about his headache, his fever, as about me. About me.

This hurt me. Remedy it, stay back from the edge. On the table I saw a metal clip for holding scattered papers together. I took it, I clipped it on the skin of my right arm, it might be useful. Something to hold me.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Gianni, and he pulled himself up a little to look at me better.

“What did you do to your nose?” he asked. “All that cotton’s going to hurt you, take it out. And why did you put that thing on your arm? Stay with me.”

He had looked at me carefully. But what had he seen. The wadding, the clip. Not a word about my makeup, he hadn’t found me pretty. Males small or big are unable to appreciate true beauty, they think only of their own needs. Later, of course, he would desire his father’s lover. Probably. I went out of the room, went into Mario’s study. I adjusted the metal clip. Was it possible that Otto really had been poisoned, that Carrano was responsible for the poison?

The dog was still there, under his master’s desk. The smell was unbearable, he had had another bout of diarrhea. But now there was not only him in the room. Behind the desk, on my husband’s swivel chair, in the gray-blue shadows, sat a woman.

S
he was resting her bare feet on Otto’s body, she was greenish in color, she was the abandoned woman of Piazza Mazzini, the
poverella
, as my mother called her. She smoothed her hair carefully, as if she were combing it with her hands, and adjusted over her bosom her faded dress, which was too low-cut. Her appearance lasted long enough to take away my breath, then she vanished.

A bad sign. I was frightened, I felt that the hours of the hot day were pushing me where I absolutely should not go. If the woman was really in the room, I reflected, I, in consequence, must be a child of eight. Or worse: if that woman was there, a child of eight, who was by now alien to me, was getting the best of me, who was thirty-eight, and was imposing her time, her world. This child was working to remove the ground from beneath my feet and replace it with her own. And it was only the beginning: if I were to help her, if I were to abandon myself, I felt, then, that day and the very space of the apartment would be open to many different times, to a crowd of environments and persons and things and selves who, simultaneously present, would offer real events, dreams, nightmares, to the point of creating a labyrinth so dense that I would never get out of it.

I wasn’t naïve, I mustn’t allow this. It was necessary not to forget that the woman behind the desk, although a bad sign, was still a sign. Shake yourself, Olga. No woman of flesh and blood had entered whole into my child’s head; no woman of flesh and blood could now get out of it, whole. The person I had just seen behind Mario’s desk was only an effect of the word “woman,” “woman of Piazza Mazzini,” “the
poverella
.” Therefore hold on to these notions: the dog is alive, for now; the woman, however, is dead, drowned three decades ago; I stopped being a girl of eight thirty years ago. To remind myself of it I bit my knuckle for a long time, until I felt pain. Then I sank into the sick stench of the dog, I wanted to smell only that.

I knelt beside Otto. He was racked by uncontrollable spasms, the dog had become a puppet in the hands of suffering. What I had before my eyes. His jaws were locked, the drool thick. Those contractions of his limbs seemed to me finally a hold more solid than the bite on my knuckle, than the clip pinching my arm.

I have to do something, I thought. Ilaria is right: Otto has been poisoned, it’s my fault, I didn’t watch him carefully.

But the thought was unable to feint around the usual wrapping of my voice. I felt in my throat, as if I were speaking inside it, a vibration of breath that was like a baby’s, adult and at the same time affectedly girlish, a tone that I have always detested. Carla’s voice was like that, I recalled: at fifteen she had sounded like six, perhaps she still did. How many women can’t give up the pretense of the childish voice. I had given it up immediately, at ten I was already searching for adult tonalities. Not even in moments of love had I ever sounded childish. A woman is a woman.

“Go to Carrano,” the
poverella
of Piazza Mazzini advised me in a strong Neapolitan accent, reappearing this time in a corner near the window. “Get him to help you.”

I couldn’t stop myself, I seemed to complain with the thin voice of a child exposed to danger, innocent when everything is harmful to her:

“Carrano poisoned Otto. He promised Mario. The most innocuous people are capable of doing terrible things.”

“But also good things, my child. Go on, he’s the only one in the building, he’s the only one who can help you.”

What an idiot, I should absolutely not have spoken to her. A dialogue, in fact. As if I were writing my book and had in my head phantom people, characters. But I wasn’t writing, nor was I under my mother’s table telling myself the story of the
poverella
. I was talking to myself. That’s how it begins, you answer your own words as if they belonged to someone else. What a mistake. I had to anchor myself to things, accept their solidity, believe in their permanence. The woman was present only in my childhood memories. I mustn’t be frightened, but I also mustn’t encourage her. We carry in our head until we die the living and the dead. The essential thing is to impose a balance, for example never speak to your own words. In order to know where I was, who I was, I stuck both hands into Otto’s fur, from which an unbearable heat emanated. As soon as I touched it, as soon as I petted him, he started, raised his head, opened his white eyes wide, spit out at me bits of saliva, growling. I retreated, frightened. The dog didn’t want me in his suffering, he pushed me back into mine as if I didn’t deserve to alleviate his agony.

The woman said:

“You haven’t much time. Otto is dying.”