The Days of Abandonment

12

When I became aware of her reaction I stopped. I looked at the woman, who was almost running along the path, raising the dust, and then I heard Otto whining unhappily, his head between his paws.

I threw away the whip, crouched down beside him, caressed him for a long time. What had I done to him. I had decomposed, as if exposed to an acid, within the perception of a poor disoriented animal. I had struck the brutal blow of what comes randomly. I had upset the stratified structure of experience, and now everything was a capricious flux. Yes, poor Otto, I murmured, over and over again, yes.

We returned home. I opened the door, went in. But the house didn’t feel empty, someone was there.

Otto darted quickly down the hallway, recovering energy and cheerfulness. I ran to the children’s room, they were sitting on their beds, their schoolbags on the floor, with a look of perplexity. I checked the time: it had happened — I had forgotten about them.

“What’s that bad smell?” asked Gianni, pushing away Otto’s greetings.

“Insecticide. We have ants in the house.”

Ilaria complained:

“When do we eat?”

I shook my head. Dimly in my mind was a question, and meanwhile I explained aloud to the children that I hadn’t gone shopping, I hadn’t cooked, I didn’t know what to give them to eat, it was the fault of the ants.

Then I gave a start. The question was:

“How did you get into the house?”

Yes, how had they got in? They didn’t have keys, I hadn’t given them keys, I doubted that they would know how to deal with a lock. And yet there they were in their room, like an apparition. I hugged them with excessive force, embraced them to be sure that it was really them in flesh and blood, that I wasn’t talking to figures made of air.

Gianni answered:

“The door was partly open.”

I went to the door and examined it. I found no sign of forced entry, but that wasn’t surprising, the lock was old and would be easy to open.

“There was no one in the house?” I asked the children, in dismay, and meanwhile I thought: what if the burglars had been surprised by the children and now were hiding somewhere?

I went through the house keeping the children close to me, reassured only by the fact that Otto followed us, dashing around, without showing any sign of alarm. I looked everywhere, no one. Everything was tidy, clean, there was no trace even of the ants.

Ilaria persisted:

“What is there to eat?”

I made a frittata. Gianni and Ilaria devoured it, I nibbled on some bread and cheese. I ate distractedly, distractedly listened to the chatter of the children, what they had done at school, what that friend had said, who had been mean to them.

Meanwhile I thought: burglars root around everywhere, they overturn drawers, if they don’t find anything to steal they take revenge by shitting on the sheets, peeing throughout the house. No sign of this in the apartment. And anyway it wasn’t a rule. I became lost in a memory of an episode of twenty years earlier, when I was still living at home with my parents. It contradicted all reports about the behavior of robbers. Coming home we had found the door forced open, but the house in perfect order. There was no trace of foul vengeance. Only hours later did we discover that the one thing of value we had was missing: a gold clock that my father had given my mother years earlier.

I left the children in the kitchen and went to see if there was money in the place where I usually put it. There was. But I couldn’t find the earrings that had belonged to Mario’s grandmother. They weren’t in their place, in the chest on the bureau, or in any other place in the house.