The Days of Abandonment Read online

  “I want Daddy, call Daddy.”

  I stated angrily:

  “Your father has left us. He’s gone to live in another place with another woman, we’re no use to him anymore.”

  In spite of my horror at any living creature that evokes reptiles, I cautiously opened the door of the children’s room, pushed back Otto, who wanted to go in, and closed the door behind me.

  I had to start from there, I said to myself. No more softness, I was alone. I stuck the broom with fury and disgust under the children’s beds, then under the armoire. A yellowish-green lizard that had somehow gotten up to the fifth floor slid rapidly along the wall looking for a hole, a crack in which to hide. I trapped it in a corner and crushed it, pressing with the weight of my whole body on the broom handle. Afterward, disgusted, I came out with the corpse of the big lizard in the dustpan and said:

  “Everything’s all right, we don’t need Daddy.”

  Ilaria retorted harshly:

  “Daddy wouldn’t have killed it, he would have taken it by the tail and carried it out to the park.”

  Gianni shook his head, came over to me, examined the lizard, and hugged me around the waist. He said:

  “The next time I want to be the one to massacre it.”

  In that extreme word, massacre, I heard all his unhappiness. They were my children, I knew them thoroughly, they were assimilating, without letting it be seen, the news that I had just given them: their father had left, he had chosen, over them, over me, a stranger.

  They didn’t ask me anything, any explanation. They both went back to bed frightened at the idea that an untold number of other beasts from the park had climbed up to our apartment. They had trouble going back to sleep, and when they woke I saw that they were different, as if they had discovered that there was no longer any safe place in the world. It was the same thing I thought, after all.

  6.

  After the episode of the lizard, the nights, nearly sleepless already, became a torment. Where was I coming from, what was I becoming. Already at eighteen I had considered myself a talented young woman, with high hopes. At twenty I was working. At twenty-two I had married Mario, and we had left Italy, living first in Canada, then in Spain and Greece. At twenty-eight I had had Gianni, and during the months of my pregnancy I had written a long story set in Naples and, the following year, had published it easily. At thirty-one I gave birth to Ilaria. Now, at thirty-eight, I was reduced to nothing, I couldn’t even act as I thought I should. No work, no husband, numbed, blunted.

  When the children were at school, I lay on the sofa, got up, sat down again, watched TV. But there was no program that could make me forget myself. At night I wandered through the house, and I soon ended up watching the channels where women, above all women, tossed in their beds like wagtails on the branch of a tree. They simpered indecently behind the superimposed telephone numbers, behind captions that promised lavish pleasures. Or they made coy, teasing remarks in sugary voices as they writhed. I looked at them wondering if Mario’s whore was like that, the dream or nightmare of a pornographer, and if, during the fifteen years we had spent together, he had secretly longed for this, just this, and I hadn’t understood. So I became angry first with myself, then with him, until I started crying, as if the ladies of the television night, continuously, exasperatingly, touching their giant breasts, or licking their own nipples as they wiggled in faked excitement, made a spectacle that could sadden one to tears.

  To calm myself I got into the habit of writing until dawn. In the beginning I tried to work on the book that I had been trying to put together for years, but then I gave it up, disgusted. Night after night I wrote letters to Mario, even though I didn’t know where to send them. I hoped that sooner or later I would have a way of giving them to him, I liked to think that he would read them. I wrote in the silent house, with only the breathing of the children in the other room, and Otto, who wandered through the house growling anxiously. In those long letters, I forced myself to take a judicious, conversational tone. I told him that I was re-examining our relationship in minute detail and that I needed his help to understand where I had gone wrong. The contradictions in the life of a couple are many—I admitted—and I was working on ours in the hope of untangling and resolving them. The essential, the only real claim I would make on him was that he should listen to me, tell me if he intended to collaborate in my labor of self-analysis. I couldn’t bear that he gave no signs of life, he shouldn’t deprive me of an encounter that for me was necessary, he owed me attention, at least; where had he found the courage to leave me alone, overwhelmed, examining through a microscope, year by year, our life together? It wasn’t important—I wrote, lying—that he should come back to live with me and our children. The urgency I felt was different, the urgency was to understand. Why had he so casually thrown away fifteen years of feelings, emotions, love? He had taken for himself time, time, all the time of my life, only to toss it out with the carelessness of a whim. What an unjust, one-sided decision. To blow away the past as if it were a nasty insect that has landed on your hand. My past, not only his, ended up in the trash. I asked him, I begged him to help me understand whether that time had at least had a solidity, and at what point it had begun to dissolve, and if then it really had been a waste of hours, months, years, or if, instead, a secret meaning redeemed it, made of it an experience that could produce new fruit. It was necessary, urgent, for me to know, I concluded. Only if I knew could I recover and survive, even without him. Like this, in the confusion of life at random, I was wasting away, desiccated, I was as dry as an empty shell on a summer beach.

  When the pen had cut into my swollen fingers until they hurt, and my eyes became blinded by too many tears, I would go to the window. I heard the wave of wind colliding with the trees in the park, or the mute darkness of the night, barely illuminated by the street lamps, whose luminous crowns were obscured by the foliage. In those long hours I was the sentinel of grief, keeping watch along with a crowd of dead words.

  7.

  During the day, on the other hand, I was frantic, and became more and more careless. I imposed on myself tasks to accomplish, I rushed from one end of the city to the other on errands that were not at all urgent but which I tackled with the energy of emergency. I wanted my movements to seem purposeful, and instead I scarcely had control over my body; behind that activity I lived like a sleepwalker.

  Turin seemed to me a great fortress with iron walls, walls of a frozen gray that the spring sun could not warm. On clear days a cold light spread through the streets that made me sweat with unease. If I walked, I knocked into things or people, and often sat down right on the spot to quiet myself. In the car I had nothing but trouble: I forgot I was driving. The street was replaced by the most vivid memories of the past or by bitter fantasies, and often I dented fenders, or braked at the last moment, but angrily, as if reality were inappropriate and had intervened to destroy a conjured world that was the only one that at that moment counted for me.

  In those situations I got out of the car in a fury, I quarreled with whoever was driving the car that I had hit, I screamed insults, if it was a man I said I wondered what could have been going through his mind, foul things certainly, a young lover.

  I was really frightened only once, when, distractedly, I had let Ilaria sit next to me. I was driving on Corso Massimo D’Azeglio, and had reached Galileo Ferraris. It was drizzling in spite of the sun, and I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe I had turned toward the child to make sure she was wearing her seat belt, maybe not. I know I saw the red signal only at the last second, and the shadow of a lanky man who was crossing the street. The man was looking straight ahead, I thought it was Carrano, our neighbor. Maybe it was, but without the instrument over his shoulders, or lowered head, or gray hair. I stepped on the brake, the car stopped with a long, whining screech a few inches away from him. Ilaria’s forehead banged the windshield, a web of luminous cracks spread across the glass, immediately her skin turned purple.

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bsp; Shouts, cries, I heard the rattle of the tram on my right, its gray-yellow mass approached across the sidewalk, beyond the railing, passed me by. I remained mute, at the wheel, while Ilaria pounded me furiously with her fists and screamed:

  “You hurt me, you stupid, you really hurt me!”

  Someone was saying something incomprehensible to me, maybe my neighbor, if it was indeed he. I came to myself, answered something offensive. Then I hugged Ilaria, made sure there was no blood, yelled at the insistent horns, repulsed the annoyingly solicitous passersby, a nebula of shadows and sounds. I abandoned the car, took Ilaria in my arms, went in search of some water. I crossed the tram tracks, walked in a daze toward a gray urinal that bore an old stamp saying “Casa del Fascio.” Then I changed my mind, what was I doing, I went back. I sat on the bench at the tram stop with Ilaria screaming in my arms, repelling with sharp gestures the shadows and voices that crowded around me. Once I calmed the child, I decided to go to the hospital. I remember that I had only one clear, insistent thought: someone will tell Mario that his daughter is injured and then he will appear.

  But Ilaria turned out to be in excellent shape. She merely carried for a long time and with a certain pride a violet bump in the middle of her forehead, nothing for anyone to worry about, least of all her father, if anyone had even told him about it. The only nagging memory of that day remained my own thought, a proof of desperate malice, my instinctive desire to use the child to bring Mario home and say to him: Do you see what can happen if you’re not here? Isn’t it clear where you’re pushing me, day after day?

  I was ashamed of myself. Yet I couldn’t do anything about it, I couldn’t think of anything except how to get him back. I soon developed an obsession to see him, tell him that I could no longer manage, show him how diminished I was without him. I was sure that, stricken by a kind of blindness, he had lost the capacity to place me and the children in our true situation and imagined that we continued to live as we always had, peacefully. Maybe he even thought we were a little relieved, because finally I didn’t have to worry about him, and the children didn’t have to fear his authority, and so Gianni was no longer reprimanded if he hit Ilaria and Ilaria was no longer reprimanded if she tormented her brother, and we all lived—we on one side, he on the other—happily. It was essential—I said to myself—to open his eyes. I hoped that if he could see us, if he knew about the state of the house, if he could follow for a single day our life as it had become—disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh—if he could read my letters and understand the serious work I was doing to sort out the breakdowns of our relationship, he would immediately be persuaded to return to his family.

  Never, that is, would he have abandoned us if he had known about our condition. The spring itself, which by now was advanced and perhaps to him, wherever he was, seemed a glorious season, for us was only a backdrop for anxiety and exhaustion. Day and night the park seemed to be pushing itself toward our house, as if with branches and leaves it wanted to devour it. Pollen invaded the building, making Otto wild with energy. Ilaria’s eyelids were swollen, Gianni had a rash around his nostrils and behind his ears. I myself, feeling weary and obtuse, more and more often fell asleep at ten in the morning and woke barely in time to hurry to pick up the children at school, and so, out of fear that I wouldn’t wake up in time from these sudden sleeps, I began to get them used to coming home by themselves.

  On the other hand my sleeping during the day, which before alarmed me as a symptom of illness, now pleased me, I waited for it. Sometimes I was wakened by the faraway sound of the bell. It was the children, I don’t know how long they had been ringing. Once when I opened the door after a long delay, Gianni said to me:

  “I thought you were dead.”

  8.

  In the course of one of these sleep-filled mornings I was wakened suddenly as if by the prick of a needle. I thought it was time for the children, I checked the clock, it was early. I realized that what had pierced me was the sound of the cell phone. I answered angrily, in the peevish voice I now used with everyone. But it was Mario, and I immediately changed my tone. He said that he was calling on the cell phone because something was wrong with the regular phone, that he had tried many times and had heard only hissing sounds, distant conversations of strangers. I was moved by the sound of his voice, by its kindness, by his presence in the world somewhere. The first thing I said to him was:

  “You mustn’t think that I put the glass in the pasta on purpose. It was an accident, I had broken a bottle.”

  “Forget it,” he replied. “I’m the one who reacted badly.”

  He told me that he had had to leave in a hurry on account of work, he had been in Denmark, a good but tiring trip. He asked if he could come in the evening to see the children, to get some books he needed, and especially his notes.

  “Of course,” I said. “This is your house.”

  In a flash, as soon as I hung up, the plan of showing him the precarious state of the apartment, of the children, of me, faded. I cleaned the house from top to bottom, I put it in order. I took a shower, I dried my hair, I washed it again because it hadn’t come out satisfactorily. I put on my makeup with care, I wore a light summer dress that he had given me and liked. I attended to my hands and feet, especially my feet, I was ashamed, they seemed rough. I took care of every detail. I even looked at my calendar, counted, and discovered with disappointment that I was about to get my period. I hoped it would be late.

  When the children came home from school, they were speechless. Ilaria said:

  “It’s all clean, even you. How pretty you look.”

  But the signs of satisfaction ended there. They had grown used to living in disorder and the sudden return of the old order alarmed them. It was a long battle to persuade them to take a shower, to wash as if for a holiday. I said:

  “Your father is coming tonight. We have to do everything we can so that he won’t go away again.”

  Ilaria announced as if it were a threat:

  “Then I’ll tell him about the bump.”

  “Tell him whatever you like.”

  Gianni said, with great emotion:

  “I’ll tell him that since he’s been gone my homework has been full of mistakes and I’m doing badly in school.”

  “Yes,” I said approvingly, “tell him everything. Tell him you need him, tell him that he has to choose between you and this new woman he has.”

  In the evening I washed again and redid my makeup, but I was nervous, I kept yelling from the bathroom at the children who were playing and making a mess. I was more and more apprehensive, I thought: look, I have pimples on my chin and forehead, I’ve never been lucky in my life.

  Then I had the idea of putting on a pair of earrings that had belonged to Mario’s grandmother, which were very dear to him; his mother, too, had worn them all her life. They were valuable; in fifteen years he had let me wear them only once, for his brother’s wedding, and even then he had been difficult. He was jealous of them not out of fear that I would lose them or that they would be stolen or because he considered them his exclusive property. I think, rather, he was afraid that seeing them on me would spoil some memories or fantasies of childhood and adolescence.

  I decided to show him once and for all that I was the only possible incarnation of those fantasies. I gazed in the mirror and, though I seemed thin, and there were shadows around my eyes, and my complexion had a yellowish tint that blush couldn’t hide, I thought I looked beautiful or, to be more exact, I wanted at any cost to appear beautiful. I needed confidence. My skin was still smooth. It didn’t show my thirty-eight years. If I could conceal from myself the impression that the life had been drained out of me like blood and saliva and mucus from a patient during an operation, maybe I could deceive Mario as well.

  But immediately I felt depressed. My eyelids were heavy, my back ached, I wanted to cry. I looked at my underpants, they were stained with blood. I pronounced an ugly obscenity in my dialect, and with such an
angry snap in my voice that I was afraid the children had heard me. I washed again, changed. Finally the doorbell rang.

  Right away I was annoyed, the master was acting like a stranger, he wasn’t using the keys to his own house, he wanted to underline the fact that he was only visiting. Otto, first of all, hurtled down the hall, leaping madly, sniffing breathlessly, barking enthusiastically in recognition. Then Gianni arrived. He opened the door and turned to stone as if at attention. Then, close to her brother, almost hiding behind him, but smiling, eyes bright, came Ilaria. I stood at the end of the hall, near the kitchen door.

  Mario entered loaded with packages. I hadn’t seen him for exactly thirty-four days. He seemed younger, better cared for in his appearance, even more rested, and my stomach contracted so painfully that I felt I was about to faint. In his body, in his face, there was no trace of our absence. While I bore—as soon as his startled gaze touched me I was certain of it—all the signs of suffering, he could not hide those of well-being, perhaps of happiness.

  “Children, leave your father alone,” I said in a falsely cheerful voice, when Ilaria and Gianni had stopped unwrapping the gifts and jumping on his neck and kissing him and fighting to get his attention. But they didn’t listen. I stayed in a corner, vexed, while Ilaria, primping, tried on the dress her father had brought her, and Gianni sent a remote-control car speeding down the hall while Otto followed, barking. Time seemed to be boiling over, flowing in sticky waves out of a pot onto the flame. I had to tolerate Ilaria telling in dark colors the story of the bump, and my failings, while Mario kissed her forehead, assuring her it was nothing, and Gianni exaggerating his school misadventures and reading aloud a theme that the teacher hadn’t appreciated to the father who praised him and soothed him. What a pathetic picture. Finally I couldn’t take it any longer. I more or less pushed the children rudely into their room, closed the door, threatening to punish them if they came out, and, after a big effort to regain a pleasing voice, an effort that failed miserably, exclaimed: