The Days of Abandonment

13

I spent the night and the following days in reflection. I felt occupied on two fronts: I had to keep hold of the reality of the facts while sidelining the flow of mental images and thoughts; and meanwhile try to give myself strength by imagining I was like the salamander, which can pass through fire without feeling pain.

Don’t succumb, I goaded myself. Fight. I feared above all my growing incapacity to stick to a thought, to concentrate on a necessary action. The abrupt, uncontrollable twists frightened me. Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He’s gone, you’re still here. You’ll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don’t let yourself break like an ornament, you’re not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.

Meanwhile, I wondered: who came into the house, who took the earrings and nothing else. I answered: him. He took the family earrings. He wants me to understand that I am no longer his blood, he has made me a stranger, he has exiled me from himself for good.

But then I changed my mind, that seemed to me too unbearable. I said to myself: wait. Stick with the thieves. Drug addicts, maybe. Spurred by the urgent need of a fix. Possible, probable. And, afraid of exaggerating this fantasy, I stopped writing, I went to the door of the house, I opened it, I closed it without slamming it. Then I grabbed the handle, pulled it hard, and, yes, the door opened, the lock didn’t hold, the spring was worn, the bolt went in barely a fraction of an inch. The door appeared closed, and yet you had only to pull and it opened. The apartment, my life and that of my children, it was all open, exposed night and day to anyone.

I quickly came to the conclusion that I had to change the lock. If burglars had entered the house, they could return. And if Mario had entered, furtively, what distinguished him from a thief? He was worse, in fact. Entering his own house secretly. Hunting around in known places, perhaps reading my outbursts, my letters. My heart was bursting with rage. No, he would never cross that threshold again, never, the children would agree with me, you don’t speak to a father who sneaks into the house and leaves no trace of himself, not a hello, not a goodbye, not even a how are you.

So, on a wave first of resentment, then of apprehension, I convinced myself that I had to have a new lock on the door. But — the locksmiths I called explained to me — even if locks, with their panels, clamps, plates, latches, and bolts, would properly lock the house door, they could all, if someone wanted to, be unlocked, forced. They therefore advised me, for my peace of mind, to have the door reinforced.

I hesitated for a long time, I couldn’t spend money lightheartedly. It was easy to foresee that with Mario’s desertion my economic future would be worse as well. But in the end I decided to do it, and I began to make the rounds of specialized shops, comparing prices and service, advantages and disadvantages. In the end, after weeks of obsessive investigations and negotiations, I made a decision, and so one morning two workers arrived at the house, one in his thirties, the other in his fifties, both reeking of tobacco.

The children were at school, Otto was lying in a corner completely indifferent to the two strangers, and I immediately began to feel uneasy. This irritated me, every change in my normal behavior irritated me. In the past I had always been nice to anyone who came to the door: workers from the gas company, the electric company, the building administrator, the plumber, the upholsterer, even door-to-door salesmen and real-estate agents looking for apartments to sell. I was a trusting woman, sometimes I exchanged a few words with these strangers, I liked to appear serenely curious about their lives. I was so sure of myself that I would invite them in and close the door, sometimes I asked if they wanted something to drink. On the other hand, my behavior must have been, in general, so courteous and yet so aloof that it would not occur to any visitor to utter a disrespectful word or attempt some double-entendre to see how I would react and evaluate my sexual availability. Those two men, instead, immediately began to exchange allusive remarks, to snicker, to sing suggestively vulgar songs while they worked, lazily. So I had the suspicion that in my body, my gestures, my looks there was something that I no longer had under control. I became agitated. What could they read in me? That I hadn’t slept with a man for almost three months? That I wasn’t sucking cocks, that no one was licking my pussy? That I wasn’t screwing? Was that why those two men kept speaking to me, laughing, of keys, of keyholes, of locks? I should have armored myself, made myself inscrutable. I became more and more nervous. As they hammered energetically and smoked without asking permission and spread through the house a maddening smell of sweat, I didn’t know what to do.

First I retreated to the kitchen, taking Otto with me, closed the door, sat at the table, tried to read the paper. But I was distracted, they made too much noise. So I stopped reading, began to cook. But I wondered why I was behaving like that, why I was hiding in my own house, it made no sense. After a while I returned to the entrance, where the two were busy in the house and on the landing, setting the metal plates on the old door panels.

I brought them some beers and was greeted with ill-contained enthusiasm. The older one in particular started up again with his vulgarly allusive language, maybe he just wanted to be witty, and that was the only form of wit he knew. Almost unconsciously — it was the throat blowing air against the vocal cords — I answered him laughing, with even heavier allusions, and, realizing that I had surprised them both, I didn’t wait for them to reply but piled it on, so foul-mouthed that the two looked at one another, perplexed, gave a slight smile, left the beer half drunk, and began to work more quickly.

Soon only a persistent hammering could be heard. Uneasiness returned, and this time it was unbearable. I felt all the shame of standing there as if waiting for further vulgarities that didn’t come. There was a long interval of embarrassment, perhaps they asked me to hand them some object, a tool, but with exaggerated courtesy, and not even a smile. After a while I picked up bottles and glasses, and went back to the kitchen. What was happening to me. Was I following, literally, the process of self-degradation, had I surrendered, was I no longer trying to find a new measure of myself?

Eventually the men called me. They had finished. They showed me how the lock worked, they gave me the keys. The older one said that if I had trouble I had only to call, and with large dirty fingers handed me his card. It seemed to me that he was looking at me insistently, but I didn’t react. I gave him my attention really only when he slipped the keys into the two keyholes, as bright as suns above the dark panels of the door, and kept insisting on their positions.

“This goes in vertically,” he said, “this horizontally.”

I looked at him in puzzlement and he added:

“Be careful, you can ruin the mechanism.”

With renewed impudence he philosophized:

“Locks become habituated. They have to recognize the hand of their master.”

He tried first one key, then the other, and it seemed to me that even he had to force them a little. I asked to try myself. I locked and then unlocked both locks with a firm motion, easily. The younger man said with exaggerated languor:

“The signora has a nice sure hand.”

I paid them and they left. I closed the door behind them and leaned against it, feeling the long, living vibrations of the panels until they died away and everything was calm again.