The Days of Abandonment Read online

  This hurt me. Remedy it, stay back from the edge. On the table I saw a metal clip for holding scattered papers together. I took it, I clipped it on the skin of my right arm, it might be useful. Something to hold me.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said to Gianni, and he pulled himself up a little to look at me better.

  “What did you do to your nose?” he asked. “All that cotton’s going to hurt you, take it out. And why did you put that thing on your arm? Stay with me.”

  He had looked at me carefully. But what had he seen. The wadding, the clip. Not a word about my makeup, he hadn’t found me pretty. Males small or big are unable to appreciate true beauty, they think only of their own needs. Later, of course, he would desire his father’s lover. Probably. I went out of the room, went into Mario’s study. I adjusted the metal clip. Was it possible that Otto really had been poisoned, that Carrano was responsible for the poison?

  The dog was still there, under his master’s desk. The smell was unbearable, he had had another bout of diarrhea. But now there was not only him in the room. Behind the desk, on my husband’s swivel chair, in the gray-blue shadows, sat a woman.

  23.

  She was resting her bare feet on Otto’s body, she was greenish in color, she was the abandoned woman of Piazza Mazzini, the poverella, as my mother called her. She smoothed her hair carefully, as if she were combing it with her hands, and adjusted over her bosom her faded dress, which was too low-cut. Her appearance lasted long enough to take away my breath, then she vanished.

  A bad sign. I was frightened, I felt that the hours of the hot day were pushing me where I absolutely should not go. If the woman was really in the room, I reflected, I, in consequence, must be a child of eight. Or worse: if that woman was there, a child of eight, who was by now alien to me, was getting the best of me, who was thirty-eight, and was imposing her time, her world. This child was working to remove the ground from beneath my feet and replace it with her own. And it was only the beginning: if I were to help her, if I were to abandon myself, I felt, then, that day and the very space of the apartment would be open to many different times, to a crowd of environments and persons and things and selves who, simultaneously present, would offer real events, dreams, nightmares, to the point of creating a labyrinth so dense that I would never get out of it.

  I wasn’t naïve, I mustn’t allow this. It was necessary not to forget that the woman behind the desk, although a bad sign, was still a sign. Shake yourself, Olga. No woman of flesh and blood had entered whole into my child’s head; no woman of flesh and blood could now get out of it, whole. The person I had just seen behind Mario’s desk was only an effect of the word “woman,” “woman of Piazza Mazzini,” “the poverella.” Therefore hold on to these notions: the dog is alive, for now; the woman, however, is dead, drowned three decades ago; I stopped being a girl of eight thirty years ago. To remind myself of it I bit my knuckle for a long time, until I felt pain. Then I sank into the sick stench of the dog, I wanted to smell only that.

  I knelt beside Otto. He was racked by uncontrollable spasms, the dog had become a puppet in the hands of suffering. What I had before my eyes. His jaws were locked, the drool thick. Those contractions of his limbs seemed to me finally a hold more solid than the bite on my knuckle, than the clip pinching my arm.

  I have to do something, I thought. Ilaria is right: Otto has been poisoned, it’s my fault, I didn’t watch him carefully.

  But the thought was unable to feint around the usual wrapping of my voice. I felt in my throat, as if I were speaking inside it, a vibration of breath that was like a baby’s, adult and at the same time affectedly girlish, a tone that I have always detested. Carla’s voice was like that, I recalled: at fifteen she had sounded like six, perhaps she still did. How many women can’t give up the pretense of the childish voice. I had given it up immediately, at ten I was already searching for adult tonalities. Not even in moments of love had I ever sounded childish. A woman is a woman.

  “Go to Carrano,” the poverella of Piazza Mazzini advised me in a strong Neapolitan accent, reappearing this time in a corner near the window. “Get him to help you.”

  I couldn’t stop myself, I seemed to complain with the thin voice of a child exposed to danger, innocent when everything is harmful to her:

  “Carrano poisoned Otto. He promised Mario. The most innocuous people are capable of doing terrible things.”

  “But also good things, my child. Go on, he’s the only one in the building, he’s the only one who can help you.”

  What an idiot, I should absolutely not have spoken to her. A dialogue, in fact. As if I were writing my book and had in my head phantom people, characters. But I wasn’t writing, nor was I under my mother’s table telling myself the story of the poverella. I was talking to myself. That’s how it begins, you answer your own words as if they belonged to someone else. What a mistake. I had to anchor myself to things, accept their solidity, believe in their permanence. The woman was present only in my childhood memories. I mustn’t be frightened, but I also mustn’t encourage her. We carry in our head until we die the living and the dead. The essential thing is to impose a balance, for example never speak to your own words. In order to know where I was, who I was, I stuck both hands into Otto’s fur, from which an unbearable heat emanated. As soon as I touched it, as soon as I petted him, he started, raised his head, opened his white eyes wide, spit out at me bits of saliva, growling. I retreated, frightened. The dog didn’t want me in his suffering, he pushed me back into mine as if I didn’t deserve to alleviate his agony.

  The woman said:

  “You haven’t much time. Otto is dying.”

  24.

  I got up, I hurried out of the room, closing the door behind me. I would have liked to have giant strides that would not allow me to stop for anything. Olga marches down the hall, through the living room. She is decisive now, she will remedy things, even if the girl she has in her head is speaking to her in sugary tones, says to her: Ilaria has taken your makeup, who knows what she’s up to in the bathroom, your things are no longer really yours, she’s touching everything, go and slap her. Yet I slowed down immediately, I couldn’t tolerate excitement, if the world around me accelerated I decelerated. Olga has a terror of the frenzy of doing, she fears that the need for a prompt reaction—quick steps, quick gestures—will migrate into her brain, she can’t tolerate the inner roar that will assault her, the pounding temples, the nausea, the cold sweat, the craze to be faster and faster, faster and faster. So no hurry, take your time, walk slowly, shuffle, even. Reset the bite of the clip on my arm to get me to abandon that third person, the Olga who wanted to run, and return to the I, I who go to the metal-plated door, I who know who I am, control what I do.

  I have memory, I thought. I’m not one of those people who forget even their name. I remember. I remembered, in fact, the two men who had worked on the door, the older and the younger. Which of the two had said to me: pay attention, signora, pay attention not to force it, pay attention to how you use the keys, the mechanisms “ha ha” are delicate. They both had a sly look. All those allusions, the key in vertically, the key in horizontally, luckily I had always known my job. If after what Mario had done to me, after the outrage of abandonment preceded by that long period of deception, I was still I, persisting in the face of the turmoil of those months, here in the heat of early August, and was resisting, resisting so many disconnected adversities, this meant that what I had feared most since I was a child—to grow up and become like the poverella, that was the fear I had harbored for three decades—had not happened, I was reacting well, very well, I was holding tight around me the parts of my life, compliments, Olga, in spite of everything I wasn’t leaving myself.

  I stood for a while in front of the door, as if I really had been running. All right, I’ll ask Carrano for help, even if he’s the one who poisoned Otto. There’s nothing else to do, I’ll ask him if I can use his telephone. And if he wants to try to fuck me again, to do it in my ass
, I’ll say no, the moment has passed, I’m here only because there’s an emergency in my house, don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll tell him that right away, so that it won’t even occur to him that I’ve come to him for that sort of thing. When you miss your chance, there aren’t any others. Maybe there’s no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second. Since that one time you came by yourself in the condom, you shit.

  But I knew immediately, even before trying, that the door wouldn’t open. And when I held the key and tried to turn it, the thing that I had predicted a minute before happened. The key wouldn’t turn.

  I was gripped by anxiety, precisely the wrong reaction. I applied more pressure, chaotically, I tried to turn the key first to the left, then to the right. No luck. Then I tried to take it out of the lock, but it wouldn’t come out, it remained in the keyhole as if metal had fused to metal. I beat my fists against the panels, I pushed with my shoulder, I tried the key again, suddenly my body woke up, I was consumed by desperation. When I stopped, I discovered that I was covered with sweat. My nightgown was stuck to me, but my teeth were chattering. I felt cold, in spite of the heat of the day.

  I squatted on the floor, I had to reason. The workers, yes, had told me that I had to be careful, the mechanism could break. But they had told me in that tone men have when they exaggerate in order to exaggerate their own indispensability. Sexual indispensability, above all. I remembered the sneer with which the older one had given me his card, in case I should need help. I knew perfectly well what lock he wished to intervene in, certainly not that of the reinforced door. Therefore, I said to myself, I had to eliminate from his words every real piece of information of a technical nature, he had used the jargon of his skills to suggest obscene things to me. Which meant, in practice, that I also had to eliminate from my head the alarming sense of those words, I didn’t have to fear that the mechanism of the door would jam. Good riddance to the words of those two vulgar men, clean up. Relax the tension, re-establish order, plug up the leaks in meaning. The dog, too, for example: why should he have swallowed poison? Eliminate “poison.” I had seen Carrano close up—I felt like laughing at the thought—and he didn’t seem like a person who would prepare dog biscuits with strychnine, maybe Otto had only eaten something rotten. Therefore preserve “rotten,” stare hard at the word. Reconsider every event of that day from the moment of waking. Bring back Otto’s spasms within the limits of probability, give back to the facts a sense of proportion. Give back to me a sense of proportion. What was I? A woman worn out by four months of tension and grief; not, surely, a witch who, out of desperation, secretes a poison that can give a fever to her male child, kill a domestic animal, put a telephone line out of order, ruin the mechanism of a reinforced door lock. And hurry up. The children hadn’t eaten anything. I myself still had to have breakfast, wash. The hours were passing. I had to separate the dark clothes from the white. I had no more clean underwear. The vomit-stained sheets. Run the vacuum. Housecleaning.

  25.

  I stood up taking care not to make any abrupt movements. I stared at the key for a long time, as if it were a mosquito to be squashed, then I reached out my right hand decisively and commanded the fingers to make the rotating movement to the left. The key didn’t move. I tried to pull it toward me, I hoped it would shift just a tiny bit, just enough to find the right position, but I gained not a fraction of an inch. It didn’t seem like a key, it seemed an excrescence of the brass plate, a dark arch in it.

  I examined the panels. They were smooth, without knobs apart from the glittering handle, massive on massive hinges. Useless, there was no way to open the door except by turning that key. I studied the round plates of the two locks, the key was sticking out of the lower one. Each was fixed by four screws of small dimensions. I already knew that to unscrew them wouldn’t get me very far, but I thought that doing it would encourage me not to give up.

  I went to the storage closet to get the tool box, I dragged it to the front door. I dug around in it, but couldn’t find a screwdriver to fit those screws, all too big. So I went to the kitchen, took a knife. I chose a screw at random and stuck the point of the blade in the tiny crossed channel, but the knife jumped away immediately, it got no purchase. I went back to the screwdrivers, I took the smallest, I tried to slide the end under the brass plate of the lower lock, another useless gesture. I gave up after a few attempts and went back to the storage closet. I searched slowly, careful not to lose my concentration, for a strong object to insert under the door, that might serve as a lever to raise one of the panels and pry it off its hinges. I reasoned, I must admit, as if I were telling myself a fable, without in the least believing that I would find the right instrument, or that, if I had found it, I would have the physical strength to do what I had in mind. But I was fortunate, I found a short iron bar that ended in a point. I went back to the entrance and tried to insert the sharp end of the object under the door. There was no room, the panels adhered perfectly to the floor, and besides, even if I had succeeded—I realized—the space at the top would be insufficient to allow the door to come off the hinges. I let the bar fall and it made a loud noise. I didn’t know what else to try, I was an incompetent, a prisoner in my own house. For the first time in the course of the day, I felt tears in my eyes, and I wasn’t sorry.

  26.

  I was about to cry when Ilaria, who evidently had arrived on tiptoe behind me, asked:

  “What are you doing?”

  It was, of course, not a real question, she only wanted me to turn around and see her. I did, I felt a shudder of loathing. She had dressed in my clothes, she had put on makeup, she was wearing on her head an old blond wig that her father had given her. On her feet was a pair of my high-heeled shoes, on top a blue dress of mine that hampered her movements and made a long train behind her, her face was a painted mask, eye shadow, blush, lipstick. She looked to me like an old dwarf, one of those my mother used to tell of seeing in the funicular at Vomero when she was a girl. They were identical twins, a hundred years old, she said, who got on the cars and without saying a word began to play the mandolin. They had tow-colored hair, heavily shadowed eyes, wrinkled faces with red cheeks, painted lips. When they finished their concert, instead of saying thank you they stuck out their tongues. I had never seen them, but the stories of adults are thick with images, I had the two old dwarves clearly, vividly, in my mind. Now Ilaria was before me and she seemed to have come precisely from those stories of childhood.

  When she became aware of the revulsion that must have showed on my face, the child smiled in embarrassment, and, eyes sparkling, said as if to justify herself:

  “We’re identical.”

  The sentence disturbed me, I shuddered, in a flash I lost that bit of ground I seemed to have gained. What did it mean, we are identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself. I couldn’t, I mustn’t imagine myself as one of the old women of the funicular. At the mere idea I felt a slight dizziness, a veil of nausea. Everything began to break down again. Maybe, I thought, Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria. Maybe she really was one of those minuscule women of The Vomero, who had appeared by surprise, just as, earlier, the poverella who had drowned herself at Capo Miseno had. Or maybe not. Maybe for a long time I had been one of those old mandolin players, and Mario had discovered it and had left me. Without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria was only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me. This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game.

  Making an ef
fort, I seized Ilaria by the hand and dragged her along the hall. She protested, but feebly, she lost a shoe, she wriggled free, she lost the wig, she said:

  “You’re mean, I can’t stand you.”

  I opened the door of the bathroom and, avoiding the mirror, dragged the child over to the bathtub that was full to the brim. With one hand I held Ilaria by the head and immersed her in the water, while with the other I rubbed her face energetically. Reality, reality, without rouge. I needed this, for now, if I wanted to save myself, save my children, the dog. To insist, that is, on assigning myself the job of savior. There, washed. I pulled the child out and she sprayed water in my face, blowing and writhing and gasping for breath and crying:

  “You made me drink it, you were drowning me.”

  I said to her with sudden tenderness, again I felt like crying:

  “I wanted to see how pretty my Ilaria is, I had forgotten how pretty she is.”

  I scooped up water in the hollow of my hand and then, as she wriggled and tried to get free, began again to rub her face, her lips, her eyes, mixing the remaining colors, loosening them and pasting them on her skin, until she became a doll with a purple face.

  “There you are,” I said, trying to embrace her, “that’s how I like you.”

  She pushed me away, she cried:

  “Go away! Why can you wear makeup and I can’t?”

  “You’re right, I shouldn’t, either.”

  I left her and immersed my face, my hair in the cold water. I felt better. When I stood up and rubbed the skin of my face with both hands, I felt under my fingers the wet cotton that I had in one nostril and I took it out cautiously and threw it in the tub. The cotton floated, black with blood.