I hit him again and again, he fell down on the sidewalk. I kicked him, one two three times, but—I don’t know why—he didn’t defend himself, his movements were awkward, with his arms he sheltered his face instead of his ribs, maybe it was shame, hard to say.
When I had had enough I turned toward Carla, who was still open-mouthed. She retreated, I advanced. I tried to grab her and she evaded me. I had no intention of hitting her, she was a stranger, toward her I felt almost calm. I was angry only at Mario, who had given her those earrings, so I hit the air violently, trying to grab them. I wanted to rip them from her lobes, tear the flesh, deny her the role of heir of my husband’s forebears. What did she have to do with it, the dirty whore, what did she have to do with that line of descent. She was flaunting herself like an impudent whore with my things, which would later become the things of my daughter. She opened her thighs, she bathed his prick, and imagined that thus she had baptized him, I baptize you with the holy water of the cunt, I immerse your cock in the moist flesh and I rename it, I call it mine and born to a new life. The bitch. So she thought she had full rights to take my place, to play my part, the fucking whore. Give me those earrings, give me those earrings. I wanted to rip them off her, together with the ear, I wanted to drag along her beautiful face with the eyes the nose the lips the scalp the blond hair, I wanted to drag them with me as if with a hook I’d snagged her garment of flesh, the sacks of her breasts, the belly that wrapped the bowels and spilled out through the asshole, through the deep crack crowned with gold. And leave to her only that which in reality she was, an ugly skull stained with living blood, a skeleton that had just been skinned. Because what is the face, what, finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature. And he had fallen for it, he had been caught. For that face, for that soft garment he had sneaked into my house. He had stolen my earrings for love of that carnival mask. I wanted to rip it all off of her, yes, pull it off with the earrings. Meanwhile I was screaming at Mario:
“Just look, I’ll show you what she really is!”
But he stopped me. No passerby intervened, only a few of the curious—it seems to me—slowed down to look, with amusement. I remember it because for them, for the curious, I uttered fragments of sentences like captions, I wanted it understood what I was doing, what were the motivations of my fury. And it seemed to me that those who stayed to watch wanted to see if I would really do what I was threatening to do. A woman can easily kill on the street, in the middle of a crowd, she can do it more easily than a man. Her violence seems a game, a parody, an improper and slightly ridiculous use of the male intent to do harm. Only because Mario grabbed me by the shoulders did I not rip the earrings from Carla’s earlobes.
He grabbed me and pushed me away as if I were a thing. He had never treated me with such hatred. He threatened me, he was all stained with blood, distraught. But now his image appeared to be that of someone speaking on a television in a shop window. Rather than dangerous, I felt that it was sordid. From that place, from who can say what distance, the distance, perhaps, that separates the false from the true, he pointed at me a malevolent index finger, fixed at the extremity of his single remaining shirtsleeve. I didn’t hear what he said, but I felt like laughing at his artificial imperiousness. The laugh took away every desire to attack, drained me. I let him carry off his woman, with the earrings that hung from her ears. For what could I do, I had lost everything, all of myself, all, irremediably.
16.
When the children came home (I had left them with friends), I said that I didn’t feel like cooking; I hadn’t prepared anything, they should fend for themselves. Maybe because of my appearance, or what they heard in my weary tone of voice, they went into the kitchen without protesting. When they reappeared, they stood in silence, almost embarrassed, in a corner of the living room. After a while Ilaria came and laid her hands on my temples and asked:
“Do you have a headache?”
I said no, I said I didn’t want to be bothered. They retreated into their room, offended by my behavior, embittered by my rejection of their affection. At some point I realized that it was dark, I remembered them, I went to see what they were doing. They were asleep, clothed, on the same bed, one beside the other. I left them like that and closed the door.
React. I began to tidy up. When I had finished I began again, a kind of roundup of everything that didn’t appear to be in order. Lucidity, determination, hold on to life. In the bathroom I found the usual mess in the medicine chest. I sat on the floor and began to separate the medicines that had expired from the ones that were still good. When all the unusable drugs had gone into the wastebasket and the medicine chest was in order, I took two packages of sleeping pills and brought them to the living room. I put them on the table, filled a glass to the brim with cognac. With the glass in one hand and in the palm of the other a handful of pills, I went to the window, from which came the damp warm breath of the river, of the trees.
Everything was so random. As a girl, I had fallen in love with Mario, but I could have fallen in love with anyone: a body to which we end up attributing who knows what meanings. A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself. We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself.
At that moment, however, from the mass of trees in the little square the violet shadow of Carrano emerged, the instrument case over his shoulder. With an uncertain and unhurried step the musician crossed the whole area, empty of cars—the heat had definitively emptied the city—and disappeared under the hulk of the building. After a while I heard the jerk of the elevator gears, its hum. I suddenly remembered that I still had the man’s license. Otto growled in his sleep.
I went to the kitchen, threw the pills and the cognac into the sink, hunted for Carrano’s license. I found it on the telephone table, almost hidden by the phone. I turned it over in my hands, I looked at the photograph. His hair was still black, the deep creases that marked his face between the nose and the corners of his mouth had not yet appeared. I looked at the date of birth, tried to remember what day it was, and realized that it was the start of his fifty-third birthday.
I was torn. I felt like going down the stairs, knocking on his door, using the license to enter his house at this late hour; but I was also frightened, frightened by the unknown, by the night, by the silence of the whole building, by the damp and suffocating smells that rose from the park, by the cries of nocturnal birds.
I had the idea of telephoning him, I didn’t want to change my mind, I wanted rather to be encouraged. I looked for his number in the book, I found it. I pretended in my mind a cordial conversation: I found your license just this morning, on Viale dei Marinai; I could come down and give it to you, if it’s not too late; and I have to confess that my eye fell on your date of birth; I wanted to wish you happy birthday, happy birthday with all my heart, Signor Carrano, happy birthday, really, it’s just past midnight, I bet I’m the first to congratulate you.
Ridiculous. I had never been able to use a flirtatious tone with men. Kind, cordial, but without the warmth, the coy expressions of sexual availability. I tormented myself throughout adolescence. But I’m
almost forty now, I said to myself, I must have learned something. I picked up the receiver with my heart thumping, and put it down angrily. There was that stormy hissing, no line. I picked it up again, tried to dial the number. The hissing was still there.
I felt the slab of my eyelids lower, there was no hope, the heat of the solitary night would massacre my heart. Then I saw my husband. Now he was no longer holding in his arms an unknown woman. I knew the pretty face, the earrings in the earlobes, the name Carla, the body of youthful shame. They were both naked at that moment, they were fucking without any hurry, they meant to make love all night as certainly they had made love in recent years unbeknownst to me, every spasm of my suffering coincided with a spasm of their pleasure.
I decided, enough pain. To the lips of their nocturnal happiness I would attach those of my revenge. I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.
17.
I chose a bottle of wine, put the house keys in my pocket, and, without even combing my hair, went down to the floor below.
I rang decisively, twice, two long electric rings, at Carrano’s door. There was only silence, anxiety pounded in my throat. Then I heard slow steps, again everything was quiet, Carrano was looking at me through the peephole. The key turned in the lock, he was a man who feared the night, locked himself in like a woman alone. I thought of running home, before the door opened.
He appeared before me in his bathrobe, his ankles thin and bare, on his feet slippers with the name of a hotel, he must have purloined them, along with the soap, during a trip with the orchestra.
“Happy birthday,” I said in a rush, without smiling. “I wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”
In one hand I held out the bottle of wine, in the other the license.
“I found it this morning at the end of the street.”
He looked at me in confusion.
“Not the bottle,” I explained, “the license.”
Only then did he seem to understand, and he said to me in puzzlement:
“Thank you, I didn’t expect to find it. Will you come in?”
“Maybe it’s too late,” I murmured, again seized by panic.
He answered with a small, embarrassed smile:
“It’s late, yes, but… please, it would be a pleasure… and thank you… the house is a little untidy… come in.”
I liked that tone. It was the tone of a timid man who tries to appear worldly, but without conviction. I went in, closed the door behind me.
From that moment, miraculously, I began to feel at my ease. In the living room I saw the big instrument case leaning in a corner and it seemed to me a known presence, like that of a maidservant of fifty years ago, one of those large village women who in cities bring up the children of the well off. The house certainly was a mess (a newspaper on the floor, old cigarette butts of some visitor in the ashtray, a dirty milk glass on the table) but it was the pleasant disorder of a man alone, and then the air smelled of soap, you could still smell the clean steam of the shower.
“Excuse my outfit, but I had just…”
“Of course.”
“I’ll get some glasses, I have some olives, crackers…”
“Really, I just wanted to drink to your health.”
And to mine. And to the sorrow, the sorrow of love and sex that I hoped would come soon to Mario and Carla. I had to get used to saying that, the permanently linked names of a new couple. Before, people said Mario and Olga, now they say Mario and Carla. He ought to feel a terrible pain in his prick, disfigurement of syphilis, a rot throughout his body, the stink of betrayal.
Carrano returned with glasses. He uncorked the bottle, waited a little, poured the wine, and meanwhile said nice things in a gentle voice: I had lovely children, he had often watched me from the windows when I was with them, I knew how to treat them. He didn’t mention the dog, he didn’t mention my husband, I felt that he found both unbearable, but that in that circumstance, out of politeness, it didn’t seem nice to say so.
After the first glass I said so to him. Otto was a good dog, but frankly I would never have had a dog in the house, a big dog suffers in an apartment. It was my husband who had insisted, he had taken responsibility for the animal, and, indeed, many other responsibilities. But in the end he had shown himself to be a contemptible man, incapable of keeping faith with the commitments he had made. We don’t know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.
“I know just as much about my husband as I know about you, there’s no difference,” I exclaimed. The soul is an inconstant wind, Signor Carrano, a vibration of the vocal chords, for pretending to be someone, something. Mario went off—I told him—with a girl of twenty. He had betrayed me with her for five years, in secret, a duplicitous man, two-faced, with two separate streams of words. And now he has disappeared, leaving all the worries to me: his children to take care of, the house to maintain, and the dog, stupid Otto. I was overwhelmed. By the responsibilities alone, nothing else. It didn’t matter about him. The responsibilities that we had shared were all mine now, even the responsibility of having been unable to keep our relationship alive—alive, keep alive: a cliché; why should I be working to keep it alive; I was tired of clichés—and also the responsibility of understanding where we had gone wrong. Because I was forced to do that torturous work of analysis for Mario, too, he didn’t want to get to the bottom, he didn’t want to adjust or renew. He was as if blinded by the blonde, but I had given myself the task of analyzing, point by point, our fifteen years together, I was doing it, I worked at night. I wanted to be ready to re-establish everything, as soon as he became reasonable. If that ever happened.
Carrano sat beside me on the sofa, he covered his ankles as much as he could with the dressing gown, he sipped his wine listening attentively to what I was saying. He never interrupted, but managed to communicate to me such a certainty of listening that I felt not a single word, not an emotion, was wasted, and I wasn’t ashamed when I felt like crying. I burst out crying without hesitation, sure that he understood me, and I felt something move inside me, a jolt of grief so intense that the tears seemed to me fragments of a crystal object stored for a long time in a secret place and now, because of that movement, shattered into a thousand stabbing shards. My eyes felt wounded, and my nose, yet I couldn’t stop. And I was moved even more when I realized that Carrano, too, could not contain himself, his lower lip was trembling, his eyes were wet, he murmured:
“Signora, please…”
His sensitivity touched me, in the midst of my tears I placed the glass on the floor and, as if to console him, I who had need of consolation drew close to him.
He said nothing, but quickly offered me a Kleenex. I whispered some excuse, I was distraught. He wanted to quiet me, he couldn’t bear the sight of grief. I dried my eyes, my nose, my mouth, I huddled beside him, finally relief. I rested my head gently on his chest, let an arm fall across his legs. I would never have thought I could do such a thing with a stranger, and burst into tears again. Carrano cautiously, timidly, put an arm around my shoulders. In the house there was a warm silence, I became calm again. I closed my eyes, I was tired and wanted to sleep.
“May I stay like this for a little?” I asked and the answer came almost imperceptibly, almost a breath.
“Yes,” he answered, his voice slightly hoarse.
Perhaps I fell asleep. For an instant I had the impression of being in Carla and Mario’s room. Above all a strong odor of sex disturbed me. At that hour surely they were still awake, soaking the sheets with sweat, eagerly plunging their tongues into each other’s mouth. I started. Something had grazed my neck, maybe Carrano’s lips. I looked up in confusion
, he kissed me on the mouth.
Today I know what I felt, but then I didn’t understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.
“Shall we begin?” I said with a false cheer.
Carrano gave an uncertain hint of a smile.
“No one is forcing us.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“No…”
He again brought his lips to mine, but I didn’t like the odor of his saliva, I don’t even know if it really was unpleasant, only it seemed to me different from Mario’s. He tried to put his tongue in my mouth, I opened my lips a little, touched his tongue with mine. It was slightly rough, alive, it felt animal, an enormous tongue such as I had seen, disgusted, at the butcher, there was nothing seductively human about it. Did Carla have my tastes, my odors? Or had mine always been repellent to Mario, as now Carrano’s seemed to me, and only in her, after years, had he found the essences right for him?