The Days of Abandonment
“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.
41.
On 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 m
e 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.
42.
Gianni and Ilaria did not improve after that adventure, in fact they continued to make me pay for murky, imagined sins that I had not committed, that were only the black dreams of childhood. Meanwhile, with a twist that was unexpected and difficult to explain, they stopped considering Carrano an enemy—Otto’s murderer, they had called him—and, when we met him on the stairs, greeted him with a sort of camaraderie, as if he were a playmate. He tended to respond with rather pathetic winks or restrained gestures of his hand. It was as if he were afraid to be excessive, obviously he didn’t want to annoy me, but the children claimed more, they weren’t satisfied.
“Hey, Aldo,” Gianni would cry, and he wouldn’t stop until Carrano decided to murmur, head lowered: Hi, Gianni.
Afterward I grabbed my son and said to him:
“What’s all this familiarity? You should be more polite.”
But he ignored me, and started making demands like: I want to have my ear pierced, I want to wear an earring, tomorrow I’m dyeing my hair green.
Sundays—when Mario couldn’t take them, and that was not infrequently—the hours in the house were filled with irritations, reproaches, scenes. Then I took the children to the park and sent them for infinite rides on the merry-go-round, while autumn blew flocks of red and yellow leaves from the trees, tossing them along the pavement of the streets or dumping them on the water of the Po. But at times, especially when the day was damp and foggy, we went to the city center, and they chased each other around the fountains that sprayed white jets from the pavement while I wandered about idly, holding off the buzz of moving images and crowding voices that at moments of weariness still returned to my head. Sometimes if things felt particularly disturbing, I tried to catch southern accents under the Turinese voices, regaining a fragile, deceptive sense of childhood, an impression of the past, of years accumulated, of a proper distance for memories. More often, I sat apart, on the steps behind the monument to Emanuele Filiberto, while Gianni, armed with a noisy science-fiction gun, a gift from his father, gave his sister harsh lessons on the war of 1915-18, getting excited about the number of soldiers killed, the black faces of the bronze combatants, the guns at their feet. Then, looking toward the flower bed, I stared at three tall mysterious chimneys that rose from the grass and seemed to survey the gray castle like periscopes, I felt that nothing, nothing could console me, even if—I thought—I’m here now, my children are alive and playing with each other, the pain is distilled, it hurt me but didn’t break me. With my fingers, sometimes, I touched, above my knee, the scar of the wound that Ilaria had made.
Then something happened that surprised and disturbed me. Right in the middle of the week, at the end of a work day, I found a message from Lea on my cell phone. She invited me to a concert that evening, she said it was really important to her. I listened to her lightly high-pitched voice, with the slight verbosity it assumed when she talked about early music, which she was a great fan of. I didn’t feel like going out, but, as with so many things in my life at that time, I forced myself. Then I was afraid she had secretly organized another encounter with the vet, and I hesitated, I had no desire to feel tense all evening. Finally I decided that, vet or not, the concert would relax me, music is always soothing, it loosens the knots of nerves tied tight around the emotions. So I made a lot of telephone calls to find somewhere for Gianni and Ilaria to stay. When I succeeded, I had to convince them that the friends I had decided to entrust them to were not as hateful as they said. They resigned themselves, in the end, even though Ilaria said pointblank:
“Since you’re never here, why don’t you send us to live with Daddy all the time.”
I didn’t answer. Every temptation to yell at them was balanced by the terror that I would set off again on some dark pathway, losing myself, so I restrained it. I met Lea, I breathed a sigh of relief, she was alone. We went by taxi to a little theatre outside the city, a sort of nutshell, without corners, smooth. In that setting, Lea knew
everyone and was known, and I found myself at my ease, enjoying the reflection of her popularity.
For a while the small room was a hubbub of voices calling and responding, of nods of greeting, a cloud of perfumes and breaths. Then we sat down, the room became silent, the lights dimmed, the musicians entered, the singer.
“They’re really good,” Lea whispered in my ear.
I said nothing. Incredulous, I had just recognized Carrano among the musicians. In the spotlights he looked different, even taller. He was thin, elegant, every gesture left a bright wake, his hair shone as if it were made of a precious metal.
When he began to play the cello, he lost every remaining trace of the man who lived in my building. He became an exalting hallucination of the mind, a body full of seductive anomalies that seemed to extract from itself impossible sounds, for the instrument was a part of him, alive, born from his chest, his legs, his arms, his hands, from the ecstasy of his eyes, his mouth.
Spurred by the music, I went back, without anxiety, to Carrano’s apartment, the bottle of wine on the table, the glasses now full now empty, the dark cloak of that Friday night, the naked male body, the tongue, the sex. I searched in those images of memory, in the man in the bathrobe, in the man of that night, for this other man who was playing, and couldn’t find him. How absurd, I thought. I’ve been to the extreme of intimacy with this skilled and seductive man, but I didn’t see it. Seeing him now it seems to me that that intimacy doesn’t belong to him, is that of someone who replaced him, perhaps the memory of an adolescent nightmare, perhaps the waking fantasy of a ruined woman. Where am I? Into what world did I sink, into what world did I re-emerge? To what life am I restored? And to what purpose?
“What’s wrong?” Lea asked, perhaps worried by my signs of agitation.
I murmured:
“The cellist is my neighbor.”