The Days of Abandonment

  To emerge from my isolation, I began right away to make a series of phone calls. I wanted to search out acquaintances who had children the age of Gianni and Ilaria and arrange vacations even of a day or two that would make up for those black months. As I made these calls, I realized that I had a great need to release my hardened flesh in smiles, words, cordial gestures. I got in touch again with Lea Farraco and reacted with nonchalance when she came to see me one day with the cautious air of someone who has something urgent and delicate to discuss. She dragged it out, as was her custom, and I didn’t hurry her, showed no anxiety. After making sure that I wouldn’t get into a rage, she advised me to be reasonable, she told me that a relationship can end but nothing can deprive a father of his children or children of their father and other things like that. And she concluded:

  “You should settle on some days when Mario can see the children.”

  “Did he send you?” I asked without hostility.

  Uneasily she admitted it.

  “Tell him that when he wants to see them all he has to do is telephone.”

  I knew I had to find with Mario the right tone for our future relations, if only for the sake of Gianni and Ilaria, but I had no desire to do it, I would have preferred never to see him again. In the evening after that encounter, before going to sleep, I felt that his smell still emanated from the closets, was exhaled by the drawer of his night table, the walls, the shoe rack. In the past months that olfactory signal had provoked nostalgia, desire, rage. Now I associated it with Otto’s death and it no longer moved me. I discovered that it had become like the memory of the odor of an old man who, on a bus, has rubbed off on us the desires of his dying flesh. This fact annoyed me, depressed me. I waited for the man who had been my husband to react to the message I had sent him, but with resignation, not anxiety.

  37.

  For a long time Otto was my torment. I got furious one afternoon when I caught Gianni, who had put the dog’s collar around Ilaria’s neck, shouting at her, while she barked, and pulling on the leash: good, down, I’ll kick you if you don’t stop. I confiscated collar and muzzle, and locked myself in the bathroom, distressed. There, however, with a sudden impulse, as if intending to see how I looked in a late punk ornament, I tried to buckle the collar around my neck. When I realized what I was doing, I began to cry and threw it all in the garbage.

  One morning in September, while the children were in the rocky garden, playing and sometimes quarreling with other children, I thought I saw our dog, our own dog, passing quickly by. I was sitting in the shade of a big oak, not far from a fountain in whose constant spray the pigeons slaked their thirst as the drops of water rebounded off their feathers. I was struggling to write about things, and had only a faint perception of the place, I heard the murmur of the fountain, of its cascade among the rocks, among the aquatic plants. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the long, fluid shadow of a German shepherd crossing the lawn. For a few seconds I was certain that it was Otto, returning from the isle of the dead, and thought that again something was crumbling inside me, and was afraid. In reality—I immediately saw—that dog, a stranger, had no real similarity to our unfortunate dog, he wanted only what Otto often wanted after a long run in the park: to drink. He went to the fountain, put the pigeons to flight, barked at the wasps buzzing around the source of the water, and with his purple tongue broke, avidly, the luminous flow. I closed my notebook and watched him, I was moved. He was a stockier, fatter dog than Otto. He seemed less good-natured, but I felt tender toward him just the same. At a whistle from his master he went off without hesitation. The pigeons returned to play under the stream of water.

  In the afternoon I looked for the number of the vet, named Morelli, to whom Mario had taken Otto when necessary. I had never had occasion to meet him, but my husband had spoken of him enthusiastically, he was the brother of a professor at the Polytechnic, a colleague with whom he was friendly. I telephoned the vet, he sounded nice. He had a deep voice, a kind of performing voice, like that of an actor in a movie. He told me to come to the clinic the next day. I left the children with some friends and went.

  Morelli’s animal clinic was marked by a blue neon sign that was lighted day and night. I descended a long staircase and found myself in a small brightly lit entrance hall with a strong odor, I was greeted by a dark-haired girl who asked me to wait in a side room: the doctor was operating.

  In the waiting room were various people, some with dogs, some with cats, even a woman of around thirty with a black rabbit on her lap whom she caressed continuously with a mechanical movement of her hand. I passed the time studying a notice board that displayed offers for breeding purebred animals interspersed with detailed descriptions of lost dogs or cats. From time to time people arrived wanting news of a beloved animal: one asked about a cat recovering from a test, one about a dog who was having chemotherapy, a woman was in anguish over her French poodle who was dying. In that place pain crossed the fragile threshold of the human and expanded into the vast world of domestic animals. I felt slightly dizzy and was covered in a cold sweat when I recognized in the stagnant smell of the place the smell of Otto’s suffering, the sum of bad things that it now suggested to me. Soon the feeling that I was responsible for the dog’s death was magnified, I felt I had been cruelly careless, my unease increased. Not even the TV in one corner, transmitting the latest harsh news on the deeds of men, could lessen the sense of guilt.

  More than an hour passed before I went in. I don’t know why, but I had imagined I would find myself facing a fat brute with a bloody shirt, hairy hands, a broad cynical face. Instead I was greeted by a tall man of around forty, dry, with a pleasant face, blue eyes and fair hair over a high forehead, clean in every inch of his body and mind, an impression that doctors know how to give, and he also had the manners of a gentleman who cultivates his melancholy soul while the old world collapses around him.

  The doctor listened closely to my description of Otto’s agony and death. He interrupted only from time to time to suggest to me the scientific term that to his ear made more reliable my abundant and impressionistic lexicon. Scialorrhea. Dyspnea. Muscular fasciculation. Fecal and urinary incontinence. Epileptoid convulsions and attacks. At the end, he said that it was almost certainly strychnine that had caused Otto’s death. He didn’t completely rule out the insecticide, on which I kept insisting. But he was skeptical. He uttered obscure terms like diazine and carbaryl, then he shook his head, concluded:

  “No, I really would say strychnine.”

  With him, as with the pediatrician, I felt the impulse to talk about the borderline situation I had been in, I had a strong urge to find the right words for that day. He reassured me, listening without any sign of impatience, looking me in the eye with attention. At the end he said to me soothingly:

  “You have no responsibility other than that of being a very sensitive woman.”

  “Excess of sensitivity can also be a fault,” I responded.

  “The real fault is Mario’s insensitivity,” he answered, letting me know by a glance that he could well understand my reasons and considered those of his friend stupid. He also added some gossip on certain opportunistic maneuvers my husband was making to obtain some job or other, things he knew from his brother. I marveled, I didn’t know Mario in that aspect. The doctor smiled, showing his very regular teeth, and added:

  “Oh, but, apart from that, he’s a man with many good qualities.”

  That last phrase, the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. I had something to learn.

  38.

  When I returned home that night with the children, I felt the close, comfortable warmth of the apartment for the first time since the abandonment, and I joked with my children until they were persuaded to wash, to go to bed. I had taken off my makeup and was about to go to sleep when I heard a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole, it was Carrano. br />
  I had run into him rarely after he had taken care of burying Otto, and always with the children, always just to say hello. He had his usual air of an unassuming man, shoulders hunched as if he were ashamed of his height. My first impulse was not to open the door, I felt that he could drive me back into bad feelings. But then I noticed that he had combed his hair differently, without a part, his just washed gray hair, and I thought of the care he had taken with his appearance before deciding to climb the flight of stairs and present himself at the door. I also appreciated that he had knocked, in order not to wake the children with the sound of the bell. I turned the key in the lock.

  Right away, with a hesitant gesture, he showed me a bottle of cold pinot bianco, he pointed out uneasily that it was the same pinot from Buttrio, of 1998, that I had brought when I went to see him. I told him that on that occasion I had chosen a bottle at random, I didn’t mean to indicate any preference. I hated white wine, it gave me a headache.

  He shrugged, stood wordless in the hall with the bottle in his hands, it was already streaked with condensation. I took it almost ungraciously, I pointed to the living room, I went to the kitchen to get the corkscrew. When I returned I found him sitting on the sofa, playing with the dented insecticide can.

  “The dog really battered it,” he commented. “Why don’t you throw it away?”

  They were innocuous words to fill the silence, yet it bothered me to hear him speak of Otto. I poured him a glass and said:

  “Have a glass and go, it’s late, I’m tired.”

  He confined himself to nodding yes awkwardly, but certainly he didn’t think I was serious, he expected that slowly I would become more hospitable, more welcoming. I breathed a long sigh of discontent and said:

  “Today I went to see a vet, he told me that Otto was poisoned by strychnine.”

  He shook his head with a sincere expression of sorrow.

  “People can be really vicious,” he murmured, and for an instant I thought he was alluding, incongruously, to the vet, then I realized that he had in mind those who frequented the park. I looked at him closely.

  “What about you? You threatened my husband, you told him you would poison the dog, the children told me.”

  I saw in his face astonishment and then a genuine distress. I noticed the weary gesture he made in the air as if to distance my words. I heard him murmur, depressed:

  “I meant something else, I wasn’t understood. I had heard the threat to poison the dog around, I warned you, too…”

  But at that point he flared up, took a harsher tone:

  “After all, you know perfectly well that your husband thinks he’s the master of the world.”

  It seemed pointless to say that I didn’t know it at all. About my husband I had had another idea, and after all he was gone, and with him had gone the meaning that for a long time he had given to my life. It had happened suddenly, as in a movie when suddenly you see a hole opening in a plane at a high altitude. I hadn’t had time for even a faint feeling of sympathy.

  “He has the flaws of us all,” I murmured. “A man like so many others. Sometimes we’re good, at times detestable. When I came to you didn’t I do shameful things that I never would have dreamed of doing? They were gestures without love, without even desire, pure ferocity. And yet I’m not an especially bad woman.”

  Carrano seemed to me stricken by those words, alarmed he said:

  “I didn’t matter to you at all?”

  “No.”

  “And I still don’t matter to you now?”

  I shook my head, I tried to smile, a smile that would lead him to take the thing as some sort of accident of life, a loss at cards.

  He put down the glass, he got up.

  “For me that night was very important,” he said, “and even more now than then.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He made a half smile, he shook his head no: according to him I felt no sorrow, according to him it was only a way of cutting him off. He murmured:

  “You are no different from your husband; after all, you were together a long time.”

  He went toward the door, I followed him wearily. On the threshold he handed me the spray can that he had been about to carry away, I took it. I thought he would slam the door when he went out but instead he closed it behind him carefully.

  39.

  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 rem
ained 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.

  40.

  When 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: