The Days of Abandonment (4 page)

I
turned around. The children had opened the door of their room, but they didn’t dare to cross the threshold. My appearance could not have been reassuring. From there, in terror, they were spying on me.

Their look was such that I thought that, like certain characters in tales of fantasy, they might see more than it was in reality possible to see. Maybe I had beside me, stiff as a sepulchral statue, the abandoned woman of my childhood memories, the
poverella
. She had come from Naples to Turin to grab me by the hem of my skirt, before I flew down from the fifth floor. She knew that I wanted to pour out on my husband tears of cold sweat and blood, cry to him: stay. I recalled that she, the
poverella
, had done that. One evening, she poisoned herself. My mother said in a low voice to her two workers, the one dark, the other fair: “The
poverella
thought her husband would be sorry and rush to her bedside to be forgiven.” But he was far away, prudently, with the other woman whom he now loved. And my mother laughed bitterly at the bitterness of that story and of others she knew, all the same. Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive. She talked like this for hours while she cut out patterns and sewed for the clients who still, in the late sixties, had their clothes made to order. Stories and gossip and sewing: I listened. There, under the table, while I played, I discovered the need to write. The faithless man who fled to Pescara didn’t even come when his wife deliberately put herself between life and death, and an ambulance had to be called, to take her to the hospital. Phrases that remained in my mind forever. To deliberately put oneself between life and death, suspended like a tightrope walker. I heard my mother’s words and, I don’t know why, I imagined that for love of her husband the
poverella
was lying on the edge of a sword, and the blade had cut through her dress, her skin. When I saw that she had returned from the hospital, she seemed to me sadder than before; under her dress she had a dark-red cut. The neighbors avoided her, because they didn’t know how to speak to her, what to say.

I roused myself, resentment returned, I wanted to throw myself on Mario with all my weight, pursue him. The next day I decided to start telephoning old friends, to get back in touch. But the telephone didn’t work, Mario had told the truth about that. As soon as I picked up the receiver there was an unbearable hissing, and the sound of distant voices.

I turned to the cell phone. I methodically called all my acquaintances and, in an artificially gentle voice, let them know that I had calmed down, that I was learning to accept the new reality. With those who seemed willing, I asked cautiously about Mario and about his lover, with the air of someone who already knows everything and just wants to talk a little, unburden herself. Most responded in monosyllables, guessing that I was trying deviously to investigate on my own. But some couldn’t resist, and warily revealed small details: my husband’s lover had a metallic-color Volkswagen; she always wore vulgar red boots; she was a rather pale blonde, of indefinite age. Lea Farraco turned out to be the most willing to chat. She wasn’t malicious, to tell the truth, she confined herself to reporting what she knew. Meet them, no, she had never met them. About the woman she was unable to tell me anything. She knew, however, that they lived together. She didn’t know the address, but the rumor was that it was in the neighborhood of Largo Brescia, yes, in fact there, Largo Brescia. They had taken refuge far away, in a rather unappealing place, because Mario didn’t want to see anyone or be seen, especially by his old friends at the Polytechnic.

I was pressing her to know more, when the phone, which I hadn’t charged for I don’t know how long, went dead. I searched frantically through the house for the charger, but couldn’t find it. The day before, I had tidied every corner of the house for Mario’s visit; surely I had stuck it in a safe place that now, though I searched nervously everywhere, I couldn’t remember. I had one of my outbursts of rage, Otto began to bark, his barking was intolerable, I hurled the phone at a wall to avoid hurling it at the dog.

The instrument broke in two, the pieces fell to the floor with a sharp crack, the dog attacked them, barking as if they were alive. When I calmed down, I went to the regular telephone, picked up the receiver, and heard again that long hiss, the distant voices. But instead of hanging up, I dialed, almost without thinking, and with a habitual movement of my fingers, Lea’s number. The hissing was suddenly cut off, the line returned: mysteries of the telephone.

That second call turned out to be useless. A little time had passed by now, and when my friend answered I found her painfully reticent. Perhaps her husband had reproached her or she herself had regretted helping to complicate an already notoriously complicated situation. She said with affectionate uneasiness that she didn’t know anything else. She hadn’t seen Mario for a while and about the woman she really didn’t know anything, if she was young, if she was old, if she worked. As for where they lived, Largo Brescia was only a general idea: it might be Corso Palermo, Via Teramo, Via Lodi, hard to say, all the streets in that neighborhood had names of cities. And yet it seemed to her rather odd that Mario had ended up there. She advised me to forget about it, time would settle everything.

That didn’t stop me, that very evening, from waiting until the children were asleep and, at one or two in the morning, going out in the car to drive around, Largo Brescia, Corso Brescia, Corso Palermo. I proceeded slowly. In that area the city’s compactness seemed to me torn, wounded by a broad gash made by the shining tram tracks. Like the implacable base of a piston in motion, the black sky, held back only by a tall, elegant crane, compressed the low buildings and the dim light of the street lamps. White or blue sheets hung across the balconies and, shifted by the breeze, slapped against the gray plates of satellite dishes. I parked, I walked the streets with bitter tenacity. I hoped to meet Mario and his lover. I wished for it. I thought I could surprise them as they got out of her Volkswagen, returning from the movies or a restaurant, happy as he and I had been, at least until the children were born. But there was nothing: empty cars, closed shops, a drunk crouching in a corner. Newly renovated buildings were followed by crumbling structures, animated by foreign voices. I read, in yellow, on the roof tile of a low structure: “Silvano free.” He’s free, we’re free, all of us are free. Disgust at the torments that shackle us, the chains of heavy life. I leaned weakly on the blue-painted wall of a building on Via Alessandria, with letters cut in the stone: “Prince of Naples Nursery.” That’s where I was, accents of the south cried in my head, cities that were far apart became a single vice, the blue surface of the sea and the white of the Alps. Thirty years ago the
poverella
of Piazza Mazzini had been leaning against a wall, a house wall, as I was now, when her breath failed, out of desperation. I couldn’t, like her, give myself the relief of protest, of revenge. Even if Mario and his new woman really were secluded in one of those buildings—in that massive one that looked on a vast courtyard, the legend “Aluminum” over the entrance, the walls studded with balconies, not one without its sheet—they would surely have concealed, behind one of those cloths put up to bar the indiscreet eyes of the neighbors, their happiness at being together, and I could do nothing, nothing, with all my suffering, with all my rage, to tear the screen they were hiding behind and show myself to them and make them unhappy with my unhappiness.

I wandered for a long time through black-violet streets, with the stupid certainty (those certainties without foundation that we call premonitions, the fantastic outlet of our desires) that they were there somewhere, in a doorway, around a corner, behind a window, and perhaps they had even seen me and retreated, like criminals happy with their crimes.

But I got nowhere, I returned home around two, exhausted by disappointment. I parked in the street, I walked up toward the little square, I saw the silhouette of Carrano heading for the door. The instrument case sprouted from his curved shoulders like a stinger.

I had an impulse to call to him, I could no longer bear the solitude, I needed to speak to someone, argue, shout. I hurried to catch up with him, but he had already disappeared behind the door. Even if I had run (and I didn’t have the courage, I was afraid that the asphalt would tear, the park, every tree trunk, even the black surface of the river), I wouldn’t have reached him before he got on the elevator. Still, I was about to when I saw that there was something on the ground, under the double corolla of a lamppost.

I bent over, it was the plastic case of a driver’s license. I opened it, I saw the face of the musician, but much younger: Aldo Carrano; he was born in a town in the south; from the date of birth I saw that he was almost fifty-three, he would be in August. Now I had a plausible excuse to ring his bell.

I put the document in my pocket, got on the elevator, pressed the button for the fourth floor.

The elevator seemed slower than usual, its hum in the absolute silence accelerated the beating of my heart. But when it stopped on the fourth floor I was seized with panic; I didn’t hesitate an instant but pressed the button for five.

Home, home immediately. What if the children had waked, if they had looked for me in the empty rooms? I would give Carrano his license the next day. Why knock at the door of a stranger at two in the morning?

A tangle of resentments, the sense of revenge, the need to test the humiliated power of my body were burning up any residue of good sense.

Yes, home.

T
he next day, with some resistance, Carrano and his license slid into oblivion. The children had just gone to school when I realized that the house had been invaded by ants. It happened every year in this season, as soon as the warmth of summer arrived. In dense multitudes they advanced from the windows, from the balcony, they emerged from under the parquet, hurried to hide again, marched toward the kitchen, the sugar, the bread, the jam. Otto sniffed them, barked, unknowingly dragged them, buried in his coat, into every corner of the house.

I quickly got a rag and washed every room thoroughly. I rubbed lemon peel in the places that seemed to me most at risk. Then I waited, nervously. As soon as the ants reappeared, I took precise note of the places where they gained access to the apartment, the entrances to the innumerable hiding places, the exits, and filled them with talcum powder. When I realized that neither the powder nor the lemon was effective, I decided to move on to an insecticide, although I worried about Otto, who licked anything and everything without distinguishing between what was safe and what was harmful.

I rummaged around in the storage closet and found a can. I read the instructions carefully, shut Otto in the children’s room, and sprayed noxious liquid in every corner of the house. I did it uneasily, feeling that the spray can might well be a living extension of my organism, a nebulizer of the gall I felt in my body. Then I waited, trying not to pay attention to Otto’s whines as he scratched at the door. I went out onto the balcony in order not to breathe the poisoned air of the house.

The balcony extended over the void like a diving board over a pool. The heat weighed on the motionless trees in the park, hugged the blue surface of the Po, the gray or blue boats of the oarsmen, and the arches of the Princess Isabella bridge. Down below I saw Carrano, who was walking along the path, bent over, evidently in search of his license. I shouted to him:

“Signore! Signor Carrano!”

But I’ve always had a low voice, I can’t yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child. I wanted to tell him that I had his license, but he didn’t even turn around. So I stood silently watching him from the fifth floor, thin but broad in the shoulders, his hair gray and thick. I felt an increasing hostility toward him that became more tenacious the more unreasonable I felt it to be. What were his secrets of a man alone, a male obsession with sex, perhaps, the late-life cult of the cock. Certainly he, too, saw no farther than his ever-weaker squirt of sperm, was content only when he could verify that he could still get it up, like the dying leaves of a dried-up plant that’s given water. Rough with the women’s bodies he happened to encounter, hurried, dirty, certainly his only objective was to score points, as in a rifle range, to sink into a red pussy as into a fixed thought surrounded by concentric circles. Better if the patch of hair is young and shiny, ah the virtue of a firm ass. So he thought, such were the thoughts I attributed to him, I was shaken by vivid electric shocks of rage. I came to myself only when, looking down, I realized that the thin figure of Carrano was no longer cutting the path with its dark blade.

I went back inside, the odor of insecticide had faded. I swept away the black remains of dead ants, washed the floors again, vigorously, with concentration, and went to free Otto, who was whining frantically. But I discovered with disgust that now the children’s room had been invaded. From the loose squares of the old parquet they emerged in rows, with determined energy, black squads in desperate flight.

I went back to work, what else could I do, but indifferently now, discouraged by a sense of ineluctability: that swarming became more repellent to me the more it seemed a demand for an active and intense life that knows no obstacle but, rather, at every obstruction, unsheathes a stubborn, cruel will to do as it wishes.

After spraying insecticide in that room, too, I put the leash on Otto and let him pull me panting down the stairs, from flight to flight.

T
he dog advanced along the path, irritated by the restraint I imposed, by the pull of the collar. I passed the green stump of a submarine that Gianni liked, went into the tunnel full of obscene graffiti, came out near the pine grove. At that hour the mothers—compact groups of chatting mothers—stayed in the shade of the trees, enclosed in the circle of carriages like settlers encamped in a Western, or they watched the toddlers shouting as they played ball. Most of them didn’t like dogs off their leashes. They projected their fears onto the beasts, afraid the dogs would bite the children or foul the playing areas.

Otto was unhappy, he wanted to run and play, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I was a bundle of nerves and wanted to avoid any occasion for conflict. Better to hold him back, tugging hard on the leash, than to quarrel.

I went deeper into the pine grove, hoping that there would be no one to cause trouble. The dog was now sniffing the ground agitatedly. I had never paid much attention to him, but I was attached to him. And he loved me, without expecting much. From Mario had come sustenance, play, runs in the park. And now that my husband had vanished, Otto, as a good-natured beast, had adapted to his absence with some melancholy and with yelps of annoyance when I didn’t respect the established routines. For example, Mario would certainly have let him off the leash already, just beyond the tunnel, and meanwhile would have accosted the women on the benches to soothe them and reassure them that the dog was well-behaved, friendly to children. I, on the other hand, even in the woods, wanted to be sure that he wouldn’t bother anyone, and only then did I let him go. He raced around, this way and that, wild with joy.

I picked up a long, flexible branch and tried it in the air, first idly, then with decision. I liked the whistle, it was a game I had played as a child. Once, I had found a thin branch like that in the courtyard of our building, and I whipped the air, making it cry. It was then that I heard people say that our neighbor, unable to die by poison, had drowned herself near Capo Miseno. The news ran from one window to the next, from floor to floor. My mother immediately called me into the house, she was nervous and often got angry with me for nothing, I had done nothing wrong. Sometimes she gave me the feeling that she didn’t like me, as if she recognized in me something of herself that she hated, a secret evil of her own. On that occasion she forbade me to go down again to the courtyard, or to play on the stairs. I stayed in a dark corner of the house dreaming the story of the
poverella
’
s
waterlogged, lifeless body, a silver anchovy to be preserved in salt. And whenever, later, I played at whipping the air to get it to whine, I thought of her, the woman in salt. I heard the voice of her drowning, as she slid through the water all night, as far as Capo Miseno. Now, just thinking about it, I felt like whipping the air of the pinewood harder and harder, like a child, to evoke the spirits, perhaps to chase them away, and the more energy I put into it, the sharper the whistle became. I burst into laughter, alone, seeing myself like that, a thirty-eight-year-old woman in serious trouble who suddenly returns to her childhood game. Yes, I said to myself, we do, we imagine, even as adults, a lot of silly things, out of joy or exhaustion. And I laughed, waving that long thin branch, and felt more and more like laughing.

I stopped only when I heard shouting. A long cry from a young woman, a girl who had appeared unexpectedly at the end of the path. She was big, but not fat, with strong bones beneath her white skin; her features, too, were pronounced, and her hair was very dark. She was gripping the handle of a baby carriage as she cried out, and the wails of an infant echoed hers. Otto meanwhile was barking at her threateningly, frightened himself by the shouts and cries. I ran toward them, I, too, was yelling something at the dog: down, down. But he continued to bark and the woman shouted at me:

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to keep him on a leash? He’s supposed to have a muzzle!”

Ugly bitch. She was the one who needed a leash. I yelled at her, unable to contain myself:

“Don’t you have any sense? When you start shouting, you frighten the child, the child cries, and you both frighten the dog, which is why he’s barking! Action and reaction, shit, action and reaction! You should put a muzzle on yourself!”

She reacted with equal aggressiveness, growing angry with me, with Otto, who continued to bark. She brought up her husband, she said, threateningly, that he knew what to do, that he would resolve once and for all the outrage of dogs running free in the park, the green spaces were for children, she cried, not for animals. Then she grabbed the infant who was wailing in the stroller and picked him up and hugged him to her breast, murmuring words of reassurance, whether for herself or for him. Finally, wide-eyed, she turned to Otto and hissed:

“Look at him! Listen to him! If my milk dries up, I’ll make you pay!”

Maybe it was that mention of milk, I don’t know, but I felt a sort of tug in my breast, an abrupt awakening of my hearing, my eyes. Suddenly I saw Otto in all his reality of sharp fangs, pricked-up ears, bristling fur, fierce gaze, every muscle ready to spring, the threatening barks. He was truly a frightening spectacle, he seemed outside of himself, as if he were another dog, of great, unpredictable malice. The bad wolf of the fairy tales. By not lying down quietly as I had ordered, and continuing to bark, complicating the situation, he had—I was convinced—committed an intolerable act of disobedience. I yelled at him:

“That’s enough, Otto, stop it!”

When he didn’t stop I raised the branch that I had in my hand menacingly, but even then he wouldn’t be silent. This enraged me, and I hit him hard. I heard the whistling in the air and saw his look of astonishment when the blow struck his ear. Stupid dog, stupid dog, whom Mario had given as a puppy to Gianni and Ilaria, who had grown up in our house, had become an affectionate creature—but really he was a gift from my husband to himself, who had dreamed of a dog like that since he was a child, not something wished for by Gianni and Ilaria, spoiled dog, dog that always got its own way. Now I was shouting at him, beast, bad dog, and I heard myself clearly, I was lashing and lashing and lashing, as he huddled, yelping, his body hugging the ground, ears low, sad and motionless under that incomprehensible hail of blows.

“What are you doing?” the woman murmured.

When I didn’t answer but continued to hit Otto, she hurried away, pushing the carriage with one hand, frightened now not by the dog but by me.