“Do you have a headache?” she asked me.
“It will pass,” I answered.
“Shall I massage your temples?”
“Yes.”
I sat on the floor while Ilaria carefully rubbed my temples with her fingers. Here I was, giving in again, how much time did I think I had available, Gianni, Otto.
“I’ll make everything go away,” she said. “Do you feel better?”
I nodded yes.
“Why did you put that clip on your arm?”
I roused myself, saw the clip, I had forgotten it. The tiny pain it caused me had become a constitutional part of my flesh. Useless, that is. I took it off, I left it on the floor.
“It helps me remember. Today is a day when everything is slipping my mind, I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Really?”
I got up, took from the desk a metal paper cutter.
“Hold this,” I said to her, “and if you see me getting distracted, poke me.”
The child took the paper cutter and observed me attentively.
“How will I know if you’re distracted?”
“You can tell. A distracted person is a person who no longer smells odors, doesn’t hear words, doesn’t feel anything.”
She showed me the paper cutter.
“And if you don’t even feel this?”
“Prick me until I feel it. Now come on.”
29.
I dragged her behind me to the storage closet. I rooted around everywhere in search of a strong rope, I was sure I had one. Instead I found only a ball of string for tying packages. I went to the entrance hall, I tied one end of the string to the short iron bar that I had left on the floor, in front of the armored door. Followed by Ilaria, I returned to the living room, went out onto the balcony.
I collided with a gust of warm wind that had just bowed the trees, leaving behind an irritating rustle of leaves. I almost lost my breath, the short nightgown stuck to my body, Ilaria was grabbing the hem with her free hand, as if she were afraid of flying away. In the air was a thick smell of wild mint, of dust, of bark burned by the sun.
I leaned over the balcony, I tried to look onto the balcony below, which belonged to Carrano.
“Don’t fall,” Ilaria said to me in alarm, holding on to my nightgown.
The window was closed, the only sound was the song of some birds, the distant rumble of a bus. No human voices. On all five floors, below, to the right, to the left, I couldn’t make out a sign of life. I strained to hear the music from a radio, a song, the chatter of a television show. Nothing, nothing nearby, at least, nothing that was indistinguishable from the periodic roar of leaves stirred by that incongruous burning wind. I shouted over and over, in a weak voice, a voice that, in any case, had never had great power:
“Carrano! Aldo! Is anyone there? Help! Help me.”
Nothing happened, the wind cut the words off my lips as if I were trying to speak while bringing a cup of boiling liquid to my mouth.
Ilaria, now visibly tense, asked:
“Why do we need help?”
I didn’t answer, I didn’t know what to say, I mumbled:
“Don’t worry, we’ll help ourselves.”
I stuck the bar through the railing, I let out the string, dropping the bar until it touched Carrano’s railing. I leaned over to try to see how far it was from the window and immediately Ilaria let go of my nightgown and held tight instead to a bare leg, I felt her breathing against my skin, saying:
“I’ll hold you, mamma.”
I stretched my right arm down as far as possible, I gripped the string tight between thumb and forefinger, then I gave a swinging motion to the bar with rapid, decisive pulses. The bar—I saw—began to move like a pendulum along Carrano’s balcony. In order for the motion to be successful, I leaned my chest out farther and farther, I stared at the bar as if I wanted to hypnotize myself, I watched that dark pointed segment, now flying above the pavement, now coming back to graze my neighbor’s railing. I soon lost the fear of falling, it seemed to me in fact that my balcony was no farther from the street than the length of the string. I wanted to hit Carrano’s windows. I wanted the bar to break them and penetrate his house, the living room where he had received me the night before. I felt like laughing. Surely he was lazing in bed, in a half sleep, a man on the threshold of physical decay, a man of dubious erections, a casual lover unfit for reascending the slope of humiliation. Imagining how he spent the days, I felt an impulse of contempt for him. In the hottest hours of the day he would take a long siesta in the half-light, sweating, his breath heavy, waiting to go and play in some faded orchestra, with no more hope. I recalled his rough tongue, the salty taste of his mouth, and I came to only when I felt the point of Ilaria’s paper cutter against the skin of my right thigh. Good girl: attentive, sensible. That was the tactile signal I needed. I let the string run through my fingers, the bar disappeared at great speed under the floor of my balcony. I heard the sound of broken glass, the string broke, I saw the bar tumble along the tiles of the balcony below, bump the railing, and fall into the void. It fell for a long time, followed by sparkling fragments of glass, hitting from floor to floor the railings of other balconies, all the same, a black bar, smaller and smaller. It landed on the pavement, ricocheting several times with a distant ringing.
I drew back, frightened, the abyss of the fifth floor had regained its depth. I felt Ilaria tight on my leg. I waited for the hoarse voice of the musician, anger at the damage I had caused. There was no reaction. Instead the birds returned, the wave of burning wind that hit me and the child, my daughter, a true invention of my flesh that forced me to reality.
“You did well,” I said.
“If I hadn’t held you, you would have fallen.”
“You don’t hear anything?”
“No.”
“Then let’s call: Carrano, Carrano, help!”
We shouted together, for a long time, but still Carrano gave no sign of life. There answered instead a long feeble bark, it might be from a distant dog, abandoned in the summer on the side of the road, or Otto himself.
30.
Get moving again, right away, think of solutions. Avoid surrendering to the senselessness of the day, hold the fragments of life together as if they still had their allotted place in a design. I nodded to Ilaria to follow me, I smiled at her. Now she was the lady of the sword, she held in her hand the paper cutter, she had taken her task so seriously that her knuckles were white.
Where I had failed, maybe she would succeed, I thought. We went back to the entrance, in front of the door.
“Try to turn the key,” I asked her.
Ilaria switched the paper cutter from her right hand to her left, stretched out her arm, she couldn’t reach the key. So I held her around the waist, lifted her up as high as necessary.
“Do I turn here?” she asked.
“No, on the other side.”
Tender little hand, fingers of vapor. She tried and tried again, but didn’t have the strength. She couldn’t have done it even if the key hadn’t been jammed.
I put her down, she was disappointed that she hadn’t proved herself up to the new task I had entrusted to her. In a sudden shift she became angry with me.
“Why are you making me do something that you should do yourself?” she said reproachfully.
“Because you’re better.”
“You don’t know how to open the door anymore?” She was alarmed.
“No.”
“Like that other time?”
I looked at her uncertainly.
“What time?”
“The time we went to the country.”
I felt a sharp, protracted pain in my chest. How could she remember, she couldn’t have been more than three.
“Sometimes with keys you’re really stupid and it’s embarrassing,” she added, to make it clear to me that she remembered very well.
I shook my head. No, in general with ke
ys I had a good relationship. Usually I opened doors with a natural gesture, I didn’t feel any anxiety that a lock might jam. Sometimes, however, especially with unknown locks—a hotel room, for example—I immediately got confused and although I was embarrassed went back to the reception desk; it could happen especially if the key was electronic. Those magnetic cards made me anxious, a hint of a thought was enough, the sense of a possible difficulty, and the gesture lost naturalness, I was no longer able to open the door.
The hands forgot, the fingers had no memory of the right grip, the correct pressure. Like that other time. How humiliated I had been. Gina, the mother of the little traitor Carla, had given me the keys to their country house so that I could go there with the children. I had left, Mario had things to do, he would join us the following day. In the late afternoon, after a couple of hours in the car, unnerved by the fierce weekend traffic, by the children, who had quarreled continuously, by Otto, still a puppy, whimpering, I had arrived at the house. I had spent the whole trip thinking about how I was stupidly wasting time, I couldn’t read, I was no longer writing, I had no social role that provided encounters, conflicts, sympathies. The woman I as an adolescent had imagined I would be, what had become of her? I envied Gina, who at the time worked with Mario. They always had things to discuss, my husband talked more to her than to me. And already Carla had begun to annoy me, she seemed so certain of her destiny, and at times even ventured some criticism, said I was too devoted to the children, to the house, she praised my first book, she exclaimed: if I were you, I would think above all of my work. Not only was she beautiful but she had been brought up by her mother in the secure prospect of a bright future. It seemed to her natural to interfere in everything, even though she was only fifteen, she often wanted to teach me something and would spout opinions on things she knew nothing about. Her voice alone by then could put me on edge.
I had parked in the courtyard, but was agitated by my thoughts. What was I doing there with two children and a puppy. I had gone to the door and tried to open it. But I hadn’t succeeded, and no matter how I tried and tried again—meanwhile it was growing dark, Gianni and Ilaria, tired and hungry, were whining—I couldn’t do it. Yet I didn’t want to telephone Mario, out of pride, out of arrogance, out of not wanting to make him come to my rescue after a hard day at work. The children and little Otto ate some cookies, they fell asleep in the car. I went back and tried again, I had tried again and again, my fingers worn out, stiff, until I gave up, I had sat on a step and let the weight of the night fall on me.
At ten in the morning Mario arrived. But not alone. With him, unexpectedly, were the owners of the house. What happened, what in the world, why didn’t you telephone. I explained, stammering, furious because my husband, ill at ease, joked about my incompetence, painting me as a woman of great imagination but useless in practical matters, an idiot, in short. There had been—I recall—a long look between me and Carla, which had seemed to me a look of complicity, of understanding, as if she wished to say to me: rebel, say how things are, say that you’re the one who confronts practical life every day, the obligations, the burden of the children. That look had surprised me, but evidently I had not understood its true significance. Or perhaps I had understood it, it was the look of a girl who was wondering how she would have treated that seductive man, if she had been in my place. Gina meanwhile had put the key in the lock and opened the door without any problem.
I shook myself, I felt the point of the paper cutter on the skin of my left arm.
“You’re distracted,” said Ilaria.
“No, I was just thinking that you’re right.”
“Right about what?”
“Right. Why couldn’t I open the door that time?”
“I told you, because sometimes you’re stupid.”
“Yes.”
31.
Yes, I was stupid. The channels of my senses were blocked, how long had it been since life flowed in them. What a mistake it had been to close off the meaning of my existence in the rites that Mario offered with cautious conjugal rapture. What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him. Where was his skin under my fingers, for example, where was the heat of his mouth. If I were to interrogate myself deeply—and I had always avoided doing it—I would have to admit that my body, in recent years, had been truly receptive, truly welcoming, only on obscure occasions, pure chance: the pleasure of seeing, and seeing again, a casual acquaintance who had paid attention to me, had praised my intelligence, my talent, had touched my hand with admiration; a tremor of happiness at an unexpected encounter in the street, with someone I had worked with in the past; the verbal fencing, or silences, with a friend of Mario’s who had let me understand that he would like to be my friend in particular, the enjoyment in certain attentions of ambiguous meaning addressed to me at various times, maybe yes maybe no, more yes than no if only I had been willing, if I had dialed a telephone number with the right excuse at the right moment, it happens it doesn’t happen, the palpitation of events with unpredictable outcomes.
Maybe I should have started there, at the point when Mario told me that he wanted to leave me. I should have moved from the fact that the captivating figure of a man who was practically a stranger, a random man—a “perhaps” that had to be untangled but would in the end be rewarding—was capable of giving meaning, let’s say, to a fleeting odor of gasoline, the gray trunk of a city plane tree, and to fix forever in that chance place of meeting an intense feeling of joy, an expectation; while nothing, nothing of Mario possessed the same earthquake-like movement anymore, and every gesture had only the power to be put in the right place, in the same secure net, without deviations, without excesses. If I were to start from there, from those secret emotions, perhaps I would understand better why he had gone and why I, who had always set against the occasional emotional confusion the stable order of our affections, now felt so violently the bitterness of loss, an intolerable grief, the anxiety of falling out of the web of certainties and having to relearn life without the security of knowing how to do it.
Relearning how to turn a key, for example. Was it possible that Mario, leaving, had taken from my hands that ability? Was it possible that he had begun already, that morning in the country, when his happy abandonment of himself to two strangers had lacerated me inside, to rip from my fingers their ability to grip? Was it possible that the imbalance and the pain had begun then, while he tested, right before my eyes, the happiness of seduction, and I recognized in his face a pleasure that I had often touched but had always suspended for fear of destroying the guarantees of our relationship?
Punctually Ilaria pricked me, several times, I think, painfully, for I reacted with a start and she drew back exclaiming:
“You told me to do it!”
I nodded yes, I reassured her with a gesture, with the other hand I rubbed the ankle where she had struck me. I tried again to open the door, I couldn’t do it. I leaned over, I examined the key closely. Finding the imprint of the old gestures was a mistake. I had to disengage them. Under the stupefied gaze of Ilaria, I brought my mouth to the key, tasted it with my lips, smelled its odor of plastic and metal. Then I grabbed it solidly between my teeth and tried to make it turn. I did it with a sudden jerk, as if I wished to surprise the object, impose a new statute, a different dispensation. Now we’ll see who wins, I thought, while a pasty, salty taste invaded my mouth. But I produced no effect, except the impression that, because the rotating movement of my teeth on the key wasn’t working, it was finding an outlet in my face, tearing it like a can opener, and my teeth were moving, were being unhinged from the foundation of my face, taking with them the nasal septum, an eyebrow, an eye, and revealing the viscid interior of head and throat.
I immediately pulled my mouth awa
y from the key, it seemed to me that my face was hanging to one side like the coiled skin of an orange after the knife has begun to peel it. What is there still to try. Lie on my back, feel the cold floor against it. Stretch my bare legs against the panels of the door, clasp the soles of my feet around the key, fit its hostile beak between my heels to try again to capture the necessary movement. Yes, no, yes. For a while I let myself sink into desperation, which would mold me thoroughly, make me metal, door panel, mechanism, like an artist who works directly on his body. Then I noticed on my left thigh, above the knee, a painful gash. A cry escaped me, I realized that Ilaria had made a deep wound.
32.
I saw her back off in fear with the paper cutter in her right hand.
“Are you crazy?” I said, turning on her fiercely.
“You aren’t listening to me,” Ilaria cried. “I’m calling you and you can’t hear me, you’re doing terrible things, your eyes are all twisted, I’m going to tell daddy.”
I looked at the cut above my knee, the strip of blood. I tore the paper cutter away from her. I threw it toward the open door of the storage closet.
“That’s enough of that game,” I said to her. “You don’t know how to play. Now stay here and be good, don’t move. We’re locked in, we’re prisoners, and your father will never come to save us. Look what you’ve done to me.”
“You deserve worse,” she retorted, her eyes bright with tears.
I tried to calm myself, I took a deep breath.
“Now don’t start crying, don’t you dare start crying…”
I didn’t know what to say, what else to do, at that point. It seemed to me that I had tried everything, there was nothing left to do but restore clear outlines to the situation and accept it.
Displaying a false capacity to give orders, I said:
“We have two patients, Gianni and Otto. Now you, without crying, go and see how your brother is, I will go and see how Otto is.”