The Days of Abandonment (16 page)

I
fretted over the outcome of that encounter. I slept badly, I decided to reduce contacts with my neighbor to the minimum, the few things he said had hurt me. When I ran into him on the stairs, I responded to his greeting with an effort and went on. I felt his offended and depressed gaze on my back and wondered how long I would have to endure that vexation of having to retreat from looks charged with pain, mute requests. And yet I deserved it, with him I had been rash.

But things soon took another turn. From day to day, with vigilant care, Carrano himself avoided every encounter. Instead he manifested his presence with signs of devotion from a distance. Now I found in front of my door a shopping bag that, in a hurry, I had left in the lobby, now the newspaper or the pen I had left on a bench in the park. I avoided even thanking him. Yet I continued to revolve in my mind fragments of our conversation and, in thinking about it, discovered that what had disturbed me particularly was the naked accusation that I was like Mario. I couldn’t get rid of the impression that he had brought up to me an unpleasant truth, more unpleasant than he himself imagined. I pondered that idea for a long time, especially because, with the reopening of school, and the absence of the children, I found myself with more free time.

I spent the warm mornings of early autumn sitting on a bench in the rocky garden, writing. In appearance they were notes for a possible book, at least that’s what I called them. I wanted to cut myself to pieces—I said to myself—I wanted to study myself with precision and cruelty, recount the evil of these terrible months completely. In reality the thoughts revolved around the question that Carrano had suggested to me: was I like Mario? But what did that mean? That we had chosen each other because of affinities and that those affinities had ramified over the years? In what ways did I feel similar to him when I was in love with him? What had I recognized of him in myself, at the beginning of our relationship? How many thoughts, gestures, tones, tastes, sexual habits had he transmitted to me over the years?

In that period I filled pages and pages with questions of this type. Now that Mario had left me, if he no longer loved me, if I in fact no longer loved him, why should I continue to carry in my flesh so many of his attributes? What I had deposited in him had surely been eliminated now by Carla in the secret years of their relationship. But as for me, if all the features that I had assimilated from him had once seemed to me lovable, how, now that they no longer seemed lovable, was I going to tear them out of me? How could I scrape them definitively off of my body, my mind, without finding that I had in the process scraped away myself?

Only at this point—as, during the morning the patches of sun drawn on the lawn among the shadows of the trees slowly shifted, like luminous green clouds in a dark sky—did I return, ashamed, to examine the hostile voice of Carrano. Had Mario really been an aggressive man, certain that he was the master over everything and everyone, and, besides, capable of opportunism, as the vet had suggested? Could the fact that I had never experienced him as a man like that mean that I considered such behavior natural because it resembled mine?

I spent several evenings looking at family photographs. I searched for signs of my autonomy in the body I had had before meeting my future husband. I compared images of me as a girl with those of later years. I wanted to find out how much my gaze had changed since the time when I began seeing him, I wanted to see if over the years it had ended up resembling his. The seed of his flesh had entered mine, had deformed me, spread me, weighted me, I had been pregnant twice. The formulas were: I had carried in my womb his children; I had given him children. Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, that the children were mostly mine, that they had remained within the radius of my body, subject to my care, still I couldn’t avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. Mario would explode suddenly from inside their bones, now, over the days, over the years, in ways that were more and more visible. How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn’t die, it doesn’t want to die.

I took a pair of scissors and, for a whole long silent evening, cut out eyes, ears, legs, noses, hands of mine, of the children, of Mario. I pasted them onto a piece of drawing paper. The result was a single body of monstrous futurist indecipherability, which I immediately threw in the garbage.

W
hen Lea Farraco reappeared a few days later, I immediately realized that Mario had no intention of dealing directly with me, not even by telephone. The messenger isn’t the message, my friend said to me: after that attack on the street, my husband thought that it was better for us to meet as little as possible. But he wanted to see the children, he missed them, he wondered if I would send them to him on the weekend. I said to Lea that I would consult the children and leave the decision up to them. She shook her head, rebuked me:

“Don’t do that, Olga, what do you want them to decide.”

I didn’t pay attention to her, I thought I could handle the question as if we were a trio capable of discussing, confronting, making decisions unanimously or by majority. So as soon as Gianni and Ilaria returned from school, I spoke to them, I said that their father wanted to have them on the weekend, I explained that they should decide whether to go or not, I informed them that they would probably meet their father’s new wife (I actually said wife).

Ilaria immediately asked, straight out:

“What do you want us to do?”

Gianni intervened:

“Stupid, she said we’re supposed to decide.”

They were visibly anxious, they asked if they could consult with each other. They closed themselves in their room and I heard them arguing for a long time. When they came out, Ilaria asked:

“Would you mind if we went?”

Gianni gave her a hard shove and said:

“We’ve decided to stay with you.”

I was ashamed of the test of affection I had tried to make them undergo. Friday afternoon I made them wash carefully, I dressed them in their best clothes, I got two backpacks ready with their things, and brought them to Lea.

On the way they continued to maintain that they had no desire to separate themselves from me, they asked a hundred times how I would spend Saturday and Sunday, finally they got into Lea’s car and disappeared with all the intensity of their expectations.

I walked, I went to the movies, I went home, I ate standing up, without setting the table, I watched TV. Lea called me late in the evening, she said the meeting between father and children had been sweet, and touching, she revealed with some unease Mario’s actual address, he lived with Carla in Crocetta, in a very nice house that belonged to the girl’s family. Finally she invited me to dinner the following night, and although I didn’t feel like it, I accepted: the circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

I arrived at the Farracos’ too early. They tried to entertain me and I forced myself to be cordial. At a certain point I glanced at the set table, mechanically I counted the places, the chairs. There were six. I stiffened: two couples, then me, then a sixth person. I understood that Lea had decided to look after me, she had planned a meeting that might lead to an adventure, a temporary relationship, a permanent arrangement, who knows. Confirmation of this came when the Torreris arrived, a couple I had met at a dinner the year before in the role of Mario’s wife, and the vet, Dr. Morelli, whom I had asked about Otto’s death. Morelli, who was a good friend of Lea’s husband, congenial, up to date on the gossip of the Polytechnic, had clearly been invited to keep me amused.

The whole thing depressed me. This is what awaits me, I thought. Evenings like this. Appearing at the house of strangers, marked as a woman waiting to remake her life. At the mercy of other women who, unhappily married, struggle to propose to me men they consider fascinating. Having to accept the game, not to be able to confess that those men arouse only uneasiness in me, for their explicit goal, known to all present, is to seek contact with my cold body, to warm themselves by warming me, and then to crush me with their role of born seducers, men alone like me, like me frightened by strangers, worn out by failures and by empty years, separated, divorced, widowers, abandoned, betrayed.

I was silent all evening, I slipped an invisible sharp ring around myself, at every remark of the vet’s that called for a laugh or a smile I neither laughed nor smiled, once or twice I withdrew my knee from his, I stiffened when he touched my arm and tried to whisper in my ear with unjustified intimacy.

Never again, I thought, never again. Going to the houses of friends who, playing go-between, out of kindness make up occasions for meetings and spy on you to see if things come to a successful conclusion, if he does what he’s supposed to do, if you react the way you’re supposed to. A spectacle for those already coupled, an entertaining subject when the house is empty and only the remains of the meal are left on the table. I thanked Lea, her husband, and left early, abruptly, when they and their guests were sitting down in the living room to drink and talk.

O
n Sunday evening Lea brought the children home, I felt relieved. They were tired, but it was clear that they were well.

“What did you do?” I asked.

Gianni answered:

“Nothing.”

Then it came out that they had been on the merry-go-round, they had gone to Varigotti, to the coast, they had eaten in restaurants for both lunch and dinner. Ilaria spread her arms and said to me:

“I ate an ice cream this big.”

“Did you have a good time?” I asked.

“No,” said Gianni.

“Yes,” said Ilaria.

“Was Carla there?” I said.

“Yes,” said Ilaria.

“No,” said Gianni.

Before going to bed the little girl asked with some anxiety:

“Are you going to make us go again, next weekend?”

Gianni looked at me from his bed, in apprehension. I answered yes.

In the silent house at night, as I tried to write, it occurred to me that the two children would, over the weeks, between them reinforce the presence of their father. They would better assimilate the gestures, the tones, mixing them with mine. Our dissolved couple would in the two of them be further inflected, intertwined, entangled, continuing to exist when now there was no longer any basis or reason for it. Slowly they will make way for Carla, I thought, I wrote. Ilaria would study her secretly to learn the style of her makeup, her walk, her way of laughing, her choice of colors, and, subtracting and adding, would mix her with my features, my tastes, my gestures whether controlled or careless. Gianni would conceive hidden desires for her, dreaming of her from the depths of the amniotic liquid in which he had swum. Into my children Carla’s parents would be introduced, the horde of her forebears would camp with my ancestors, with Mario’s. A half-caste din would swell within them. In this reasoning I seemed to capture all the absurdity of the adjective “my,” “my children.” I stopped writing only when I heard a licking sound, the living shovel of Otto’s tongue against the plastic of the bowl. I got up, I went to see if it was empty, dry. The dog had a faithful and vigilant soul. I went to bed and fell asleep.

The next day I began to look for a job. I didn’t know how to do much, but thanks to Mario’s transfers I had lived abroad for a long time, I knew at least three languages well. With the help of some friends of Lea’s husband I was soon hired by a car-rental agency to take care of international correspondence.

My days became more harried: work, shopping, cooking, cleaning, the children, the wish to start writing again, the list of urgent things to do that I compiled in the evening: get new pots; call the plumber, the sink is leaking; have the blind in the living room fixed; Gianni needs a gym uniform; buy new shoes for Ilaria, her feet have grown.

Now began a continuous frantic rush from Monday to Friday, but without the obsessions of the previous months. I stretched a taut wire that pierced the days and I slid swiftly along it, unthinking, in a false equilibrium with increasing bravura, until I delivered the children to Lea, who in turn delivered them to Mario. Then the void of the weekend opened and I felt as if I were standing, precariously balanced on the rim of a well.

As for the children’s return, on Sunday evening, it became a habitual list of complaints. They got used to that oscillation between my house and Mario’s and soon stopped being vigilant about what might wound me. Gianni began to praise Carla’s cooking, to detest mine. Ilaria told how she took a shower with her father’s new wife, she revealed that her breasts were prettier than mine, she marveled at her blond pubic hair, she described her underwear minutely, she made me swear that as soon as her breasts grew I would buy her the same kind of bras, in the same color. Both children took up a new expression that was certainly not mine: they kept saying “practically.” Ilaria reproached me because I didn’t want to get an expensive cosmetics case that Carla, on the other hand, had made a big show of. One day, during an argument about a jacket that I had bought her and that she didn’t like, she cried: “You’re mean, Carla is nicer than you.”

The moment arrived when I no longer knew if it was better when they were there or when they weren’t. For example, I realized that, although they didn’t care about hurting me when they talked about Carla, they were jealously watchful to make sure that I devoted myself to them and no one else. Once when they didn’t have school, I brought them with me to work. They were unexpectedly well-behaved. When a colleague invited the three of us to lunch, they sat at the table silent, attentive, composed, without quarreling, without exchanging allusive smiles, without throwing around code words, without spilling food on the tablecloth. I later discovered that they had spent the time studying how the man treated me, the attentions he addressed to me, the tone in which I responded, grasping, as children are well able to do, the sexual tension; minimal, a pure lunchtime game, manifested between us.

“Did you notice how he smacked his lips at the end of every sentence?” Gianni asked me with rancorous amusement.

I shook my head, I hadn’t noticed it. To illustrate, he smacked his lips comically, making them stick out so that they were big and red, and produced a
plop
every two words. Ilaria laughed until she cried, after every demonstration she said breathlessly: Again. After a little I began to laugh, too, even though their malicious humor disoriented me.

That night Gianni, coming to my room for his usual good night kiss, embraced me suddenly and kissed me on one cheek, going
plop
and spraying me with saliva; then he and his sister went into their room to laugh. And from that moment they both began to criticize everything I did. In tandem they began to praise Carla openly. They made me listen to riddles that she had taught them to prove that I didn’t know the answers, they emphasized how comfortable Mario’s new house was, while ours was ugly and untidy. Gianni especially soon became unbearable. He shouted for no reason, he broke things, he got into fights with his schoolmates, he hit Ilaria, sometimes he got angry with himself and wanted to bite his own arm, or hand.

One day in November he was coming home from school with his sister, both had bought enormous ice cream cones. I don’t know exactly what happened. Maybe Gianni, having finished his cone, insisted that Ilaria give him hers, he was a glutton, always hungry. The fact was that he pushed her so hard that she ended up almost on top of a boy of sixteen, staining his shirt with vanilla and chocolate.

At first the boy seemed to be worried only about the spots, then suddenly he got mad and started fighting with Ilaria. Gianni hit him right in the face with his backpack, bit his hand, and let go his grip only because the other boy began punching him with his free hand.

When I came home from work, I opened the door with the key and heard the voice of Carrano in my house. He was talking to the children in the living room. At first I was rather cold, I didn’t understand why he was there in my house, as if he had permission to enter. Then, when I saw the state Gianni was in, with a black eye, his lower lip split, I forgot him and full of anxiety threw myself on the child.

Only slowly did I understand that Carrano, on his way home, had seen my children in trouble, had got Gianni away from the fury of the offended boy, had soothed hysterical Ilaria, and had brought them home. Not only that: he had restored their good mood with stories of punches he had given and received as a boy. The children in fact now pushed me aside and urged him to continue his stories.

I thanked him for that and for all his other kindnesses. He seemed content, his only mistake was yet again to say the wrong thing. He took his leave saying:

“Maybe they’re too young to come home alone.”

I retorted:

“Young or not, I can’t do anything else.”

“I could take care of it sometimes,” he ventured.

I thanked him again, more coldly. I said that I could manage on my own, and closed the door.