The Days of Abandonment (9 page)

T
hat’s gross,” said Ilaria, and cringed with exaggerated disgust, as I went by with the rag to wash it in the bathroom. I said to myself that if I devoted myself immediately to the usual domestic activities I would be better off. Do the laundry. Separate the white clothes from the dark. Start the washing machine. I had only to quiet the view inside, the thoughts. They got mixed up, they crowded in on one another, shreds of words and images, buzzing frantically, like a swarm of wasps, they gave to my gestures a brute capacity to do harm. I washed the rag carefully, then soaped around the rings, the wedding ring and an aquamarine that had been my mother’s. Very slowly I managed to get them off, but it didn’t do me any good, my body remained obstructed, the knots in the veins didn’t loosen. Mechanically I placed the rings on the edge of the sink.

When I returned to the children’s room, I leaned absently over Gianni to feel his forehead with my lips. He groaned and said:

“My head feels terrible.”

“Get up,” I ordered, unsympathetically, and he, staring at me in wonder because of my scant attention to his complaints, struggled to get up. I stripped the bed with false calm, I remade it, I put the sheets and pillowcases in the dirty-laundry basket. Only then did I remember to say to him:

“Get in bed, I’ll bring the thermometer.”

Ilaria insisted:

“You have to slap him.”

When I began to search for the thermometer without satisfying her request, she punished me with a sudden pinch, observed me closely to see if it hurt.

I didn’t react, it didn’t matter to me, I felt nothing. She persisted, red in the face from effort and concentration. When I found the thermometer, I pushed her away with a slight shove of the elbow and went back to Gianni. I stuck the thermometer under his armpit.

“Tight,” I said, and indicated the clock on the wall. “Take it out in ten minutes.”

“You put it in wrong,” said Ilaria in a provocative tone.

I didn’t pay any attention to her, but Gianni checked and with a look of reproof showed me that I had put the side without the mercury under his armpit. Attention: attention alone could help me. I put it in correctly, Ilaria appeared satisfied, she said: I noticed it. I nodded yes, good, I made a mistake. Why—I thought—must I do a thousand things at once, for almost ten years you’ve been forcing me to live like this, and I’m not completely awake yet, I haven’t had my coffee, I haven’t made breakfast.

I wanted to put the coffee in the pot and get it on the stove, I wanted to warm milk for Ilaria, I wanted to start the washing machine. But suddenly I noticed Otto’s barking again, he hadn’t stopped and was scratching. I had removed those sounds from my ears in order to concentrate on the condition of my son, but now the dog seemed to be producing not sounds but electric shocks.

“I’m coming,” I cried.

The evening before—I realized—I hadn’t taken him out, I had forgotten, and the dog must have been yelping all night, now he was wild, he had his needs to take care of. And I did, too. I was a sack of living flesh, packed with waste, bladder bursting, stomach aching. I thought it without a shadow of self-pity, as a cold statement. The chaotic sounds in my head struck decisive blows on the sack that I was: he vomited, I have a headache, where is the thermometer, bowwowwow, react.

“I’m taking the dog out,” I said loudly to myself.

I put the collar on Otto, I turned the key, I struggled to get it out of the lock. Only on the stairs did I realize that I was in my nightgown and slippers. I realized it as I passed Carrano’s door, I grimaced with a laugh of disgust, surely he was sleeping, recovering from the night’s exertions. What did he matter to me, he had seen me in my true self, my body of a nearly forty-year-old, we were very intimate. As for the other neighbors, they had been on vacation for a while already or had left Friday afternoon for a weekend in the mountains, at the sea. The three of us, too, would have been settled at least a month earlier at some seaside vacation place, as we were every year, if Mario hadn’t left. The lech. Empty building, August was like that. I felt like guffawing at every door, sticking out my tongue, thumbing my nose. I didn’t give a shit about them. Happy little families, good money from professions, comfort constructed by selling at a high price services that should be free. Like Mario, who allowed us to live well by selling his ideas, his intelligence, the persuasive tones of his voice when he taught. Ilaria called to me from the landing:

“I don’t want to stay with the vomit stink.”

When I didn’t answer, she went back inside, I heard the door slam furiously. But good Lord, if someone was pulling me from one side I couldn’t be pulled from the other, too, what’s here isn’t there. In fact, Otto, panting, was dragging me rapidly from one flight of stairs to the next, connecting them, while I tried to hold him back. I didn’t want to run, if I ran I would break, every step left behind disintegrated immediately afterward, even in memory, and the banister, the yellow wall rushed by me fluidly, cascading. I saw only the flights of stairs, with their clear segments, behind me was a gassy wake, I was a comet. Oh what a terrible day, too hot already at seven in the morning, not a car in sight except Carrano’s and mine. Maybe I was too tired to maintain the usual order of the world. I shouldn’t have gone out. What had I done? Had I put the coffeepot on the stove? Had I put in the coffee, filled it with water? Had I screwed it tight so that it wouldn’t explode? And the milk for the child? Were they actions that I had completed or had I only suggested to myself that I complete them? Open the refrigerator, get out the carton of milk, close the refrigerator, fill the pan, don’t leave the carton on the table, put it back in the fridge, light the gas, put the pot on the fire. Had I correctly carried out all those operations?

Otto pulled me along the path, through the tunnel with its obscene graffiti. The park was deserted, the river seemed of blue plastic, the hills on the other bank were of a diluted green, no noise of traffic, only the song of the birds could be heard. I had left the coffee on the stove, and the milk, it would all be burned. The milk, boiling up, would overflow the pot and put out the flame, gas would spread through the house. Still the obsession with gas. I hadn’t opened the windows. Or had I done it automatically, without thinking? Habitual acts, they are performed in the head even when you don’t perform them. Or you perform them in reality, even when the head out of habit has stopped taking account of them. I listed possibilities, distractedly. Better if I had locked myself in the bathroom, my stomach was bursting, I felt a painful pressure. The sun outlined the leaves of the trees minutely, even the needles of the pines, in a maniacal work of the light, I could count them one by one. No, I hadn’t put either the coffee or the milk on the stove. Now I was sure of it. Preserve that certainty. Good, Otto.

Pushed by his needs, the dog obliged me to run behind him, my stomach pressed by mine. The leash was grazing the palm of my hand, I gave a fierce tug, I bent down to free him. He ran away like pure life, a dark mass charged with urgencies. He watered trees, shit in the grass, chased butterflies, lost himself in the pine grove. When was it that I had lost that stubborn charge of animal energy, with adolescence, perhaps. Now I was wild again, I looked at my ankles, my armpits, when had I last waxed them, when had I shaved? I who until four months ago had been only ambrosia and nectar? From the moment I fell in love with Mario, I began to fear that he would be repelled by me. Wash the body, scent it, eliminate all unpleasant traces of physiology. To levitate. I wanted to detach myself from the earth, I wanted him to see me hovering on high, the way wholly good things do. I never left the bathroom until every bad smell had vanished, I turned on the taps so he wouldn’t hear the rush of urine. I rubbed myself, curried myself, washed my hair every two days. I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness. Or maybe not. It was I who believed that his love needed that obsession of mine. Inappropriate, backward, my mother’s fault, she had trained me in the obsessive bodily attentions of women. I don’t know whether I was repelled or amazed or even entertained, when the young woman, twenty-five at most, who had long been my office mate when I worked for an airline company, one morning farted without embarrassment and, with laughing eyes, gave me a half smile of complicity. Girls now burped in public, farted, in fact—I recalled—one of my school friends did it, she was seventeen, three years younger than Carla. She wanted to be a ballerina and she passed the time practicing ballet positions. She was good. During recess she pirouetted lightly around the classroom, skirting the desks with precision. Then, to scandalize us, or to disfigure the image of elegance that remained in the boys’ doltish eyes, she made bodily noises according to how she felt, with her throat, her ass. The ferocity of women, I had felt it in me since waking, in my flesh. Suddenly I was afraid I would dissolve into liquid, a fear that gripped my stomach, I had to sit down on a bench, hold my breath. Otto had disappeared, perhaps he had no intention of ever returning, I whistled weakly, he was in the thick of nameless trees, which seemed to me more like a watercolor than like reality. The ones beside me, behind me. Poplars? Cedars? Acacias? Locusts? Names at random, what did I know, I didn’t know anything, even the names of the trees outside my house. If I had had to write about them, I would have been unable to. The trunks all seemed to be under a powerful magnifying lens. There was no distance between me and them, whereas the rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed, how much space has been interposed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated. But I felt everything right on top of me, breath against breath. And then it seemed to me that I was wearing not my nightgown but a long mantle on which was painted the vegetation of the Valentino, the paths, the Princess Isabella bridge, the river, the building where I lived, even the dog. That was why I was so heavy and swollen. I got up groaning with embarrassment and stomachache, my bladder full, I couldn’t hold it any longer. I stumbled in a zigzag, clutching the house keys, hitting the ground with the leash. No, I knew nothing of trees. A poplar? A cedar of Lebanon? A pine of Aleppo? What’s the difference between an acacia and a locust? Tricks of words, a swindle, maybe the promised land has no more words to embellish the facts. Smiling scornfully—with scorn for myself—I pulled up my nightgown, I peed and shit behind a trunk. I was tired, tired, tired.

I said it loudly but voices die quickly, they seem alive in the bottom of the throat and yet, if articulated, they are already spent sounds. I heard Ilaria calling from very far away. Her words reached me faintly.

“Mamma, come back, Mamma.”

They were the words of an agitated creature. I couldn’t see her, but I imagined that she had uttered them with her hands clutched tight around the railing of the balcony. I knew that the long platform extending over a void frightened her, she must really need me if she had gotten herself out there. Maybe the milk really was burning on the stove, maybe the coffeepot had exploded, maybe gas was spreading through the house. But why should I hurry? I discovered with remorse that, if the child needed me, I felt no need of her. Nor did Mario, either. That was why he had gone to live with Carla, he didn’t need Ilaria, or Gianni. Desire cuts off. Maybe it only cuts. His desire had been to skate far away from us on an infinite surface; mine, it seemed to me now, was to go to the bottom, abandon myself, sink deaf and mute into my own veins, into my intestine, my bladder. I realized that I was covered in a cold sweat, a frozen patina, even though the morning was already hot. What was happening to me. It was impossible that I would ever find the way home.

But at that point something brushed against my ankle, wetting it. I saw Otto beside me, his ears pricked, his tongue hanging out, the gaze of a good dog. I rose, I tried to put the collar on, again and again, without success, even when he stood still, barely panting, with an odd look, sad, maybe. Finally, with an effort of concentration, I imprisoned his neck. Go, go, I said to him. It seemed to me that if I were behind him, holding tight to the leash, I would feel again the warm air on my face, my skin dry, the ground beneath my feet.

I
arrived at the elevator as if I had walked on a wire stretched between the pine grove and the entrance to the building. I leaned against the metal wall while the car slowly rose, I stared at Otto to thank him. He stood with his legs slightly apart, he was panting and a thread of saliva dripped from his jaws, making a squiggle on the floor of the elevator. The car jolted as it came to a stop.

On the landing I found Ilaria, she seemed to me very annoyed, as if she were my mother returned from the kingdom of the dead to remind me of my duties.

“He threw up again,” she said.

She preceded me into the house, followed by Otto, whom I freed from the leash. No smell of burned milk, of coffee. I slowed down to close the door, mechanically I put the keys in the locks, gave the two turns. My hand was used by now to that movement which was to keep anyone from entering my house to search among my things. I had to protect myself from those who would do their utmost to load me with obligations, guilts, and keep me from starting to live again. I was struck by the suspicion that even my children wanted to convince me that their flesh was withering because of me, just from breathing the same air. Gianni’s illness served this purpose. He set the scene, Ilaria flung it eagerly in my face. More vomit, yes, and so? It wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last. Gianni, like his father, had a weak stomach. They both suffered from seasickness, carsickness. A sip of cold water sufficed, a slice of too rich cake, and they felt sick. Who knows what the boy had secretly eaten, to complicate my life, to make the day more arduous for me.

The room was again in disarray. Now the dirty sheets were in a corner, like a cloud, and Gianni had gone back to Ilaria’s bed. The child had replaced me. She had behaved the way I had behaved as a girl with my mother: she had tried to do what she had seen me do, she was playing at getting rid of my authority by supplanting me, she wanted to take my place. In general I was accommodating, my mother had not been. Every time I tried to do something like her, she rebuked me, she said I had been bad. Maybe it was she in person who was acting through the child to crush me with the demonstration of my inadequacy. Ilaria explained, as if inviting me to join a game in which she was the queen:

“I put the dirty sheets there and I made him lie on my bed. He didn’t throw up much, he only did like this.”

She staged some retching actions, then spit several times on the floor.

I went to Gianni, he was sweating, he looked at me with hostility.

“Where’s the thermometer?” I asked.

Ilaria took it promptly from the night table and offered it to me, pretending information she didn’t have, she didn’t know how to read it.

“He has a fever,” she said, “but he doesn’t want to take a suppository.”

I looked at the thermometer, I couldn’t concentrate on the degrees indicated by the column of mercury. I don’t know how long I remained with that object in my hand anxiously trying to train my gaze to see. I have to take care of the child, I said to myself, I have to know how high the fever is, but I couldn’t pay attention. Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream, slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, even as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain. Remove the other dirty sheets. Put them in the washing machine. Start it. Stand and watch through the window, the clothes rotating, the water and soap.

“It’s a hundred and one,” said Gianni in a whisper, “and my head feels terrible.”

“He has to take the suppository,” Ilaria insisted.

“I won’t take it.”

“Then I’ll hit you,” the girl threatened.

“You aren’t going to hit anyone,” I intervened.

“Why do you hit us?”

I didn’t hit them, I had never done it, at most I had threatened to do it. But maybe for children there’s no difference between what one threatens and what one really does. At least—I now remembered—as a child I had been like that, maybe also as an adult. What might happen if I violated a prohibition of my mother’s happened anyway, independent of the violation. The words immediately made the future real, and the wound of the punishment still burned even when I no longer remembered the fault that I would or could have committed. A recurrent expression of my mother’s came to mind. “Stop or I’ll cut off your hands,” she would say when I touched her dressmaking things. And those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools.

“I’ve never hit you,” I said.

“That’s not true.”

“At most I’ve said I would slap you. There’s quite a difference.”

There’s no difference, I thought, however, and hearing that thought in my head scared me. Because if I lost the capacity to perceive a difference, if I lost it definitively, if I ended up in an alluvial flow that eliminated boundaries, what would happen on that hot day?

“When I say ‘slap,’ I’m not slapping you,” I explained to her calmly, as if I were before an examiner and wished to make a good showing, presenting myself as cool and rational. “The word ‘slap’ is not this slap.”

And not so much to convince her as to convince me, I slapped myself hard. Then I smiled, not only because that slap suddenly seemed to me objectively comical but also to show that my demonstration was lighthearted, unthreatening. It was no use. Gianni quickly covered his face with the sheet and Ilaria looked at me in amazement, her eyes suddenly full of tears.

“You hurt yourself, Mamma,” she said woefully. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Blood was dripping on my nightgown, and I felt somehow ashamed.

I sniffed, I went into the bathroom, I locked the door to keep the child from following me. All right, concentrate, Gianni has a fever, do something. I stopped the blood by sticking some cotton in one nostril and immediately began digging nervously among the medicines that I had put in order the night before. I wanted to find something for his fever, but meanwhile I thought: I need a tranquilizer, something bad is happening to me, I have to calm down, and I felt at the same time that Gianni, the memory of Gianni feverish in the other room, was slipping away from me, I couldn’t maintain the glimmer of worry about his health, already the child was becoming indifferent to me, it was as if I saw him only out of the corner of my eye, a misty figure, a fraying cloud.

I began to look for pills for myself, but there were none, where had I put them, in the sink the night before, I remembered suddenly, how stupid. Then I thought of having a hot bath to relax, and maybe waxing, a bath would be soothing, I need the weight of water on my skin, I’m losing myself and if I don’t catch hold what will happen to the children?

I didn’t want Carla to touch them, the mere idea gave me shivers of disgust. A girl taking care of my children, she isn’t completely out of adolescence, her hands are smeared with the semen of her lover, the same seed that is in the blood of the children. Keep them far away, therefore, her and Mario. Be self-sufficient, accept nothing from them. I began to fill the tub, sound of the first drops hitting the bottom, hypnotic effect of the stream from the tap.

But I no longer heard the rush of water, now I was getting lost in the mirror that was next to me, I saw myself, I saw myself with an unbearable clarity, the disheveled hair, the eyes without makeup, the swollen nose with its blood-blackened cotton, the entire face clawed by a grimace of concentration, the short, stained nightgown.

I wanted to remedy this. I began to clean my face with a cotton ball, I wished to be beautiful again, I felt an urgent need for it. Beauty brightens things, the children would be glad, Gianni would draw from it a pleasure that would cure him, I myself would be better. Delicate makeup remover for the eyes, gentle cleansing milk, hydrating tonic without alcohol, foundation, makeup. What is a face without colors, to color is to conceal, there is nothing that can hide the surface better than color. Go, go, go. From deep down rose the murmur of voices, Mario’s voice. I slid behind my husband’s words of love, words of years ago. Little bird of a happy and contented life, he said to me, because he was a good reader of the classics and had an enviable memory. And with amusement he made a list: he wanted to be my bra so he could hug my chest, and my underpants and my skirt and the shoe stepped on by my foot, and the water that washed me and the cream that rubbed me and the mirror in which I looked at myself; ironic toward good literature, he was an engineer playing with my mania for beautiful words and at the same time charmed by the gift of so many images ready to give form to the desire he felt for me, for me, the woman in the mirror. A mask of lipstick and blush, nose swollen by cotton, the taste of blood in my throat.

I turned with a gesture of repulsion, in time to realize that the water was overflowing the tub. I turned off the tap. I stuck a hand in, cold water, I hadn’t even checked to see if it was warm. My face slid away from the mirror, it no longer interested me. The sensation of cold restored me to Gianni’s fever, his vomiting, his headache. What was I looking for, locked in the bathroom: the aspirin. I began to search again, I found it, I cried as if for help:

“Ilaria? Gianni?”