The Days of Abandonment

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?

I pushed my tongue into the mouth of that man with exaggerated eagerness, for a long time, as if I were following something to the bottom of his throat and wished to catch it before it slid into the esophagus. I put my arm around his neck, I pressed him with my body into the corner of the sofa and kissed him for a long time, with my eyes wide open, trying to stare at the objects arranged in one corner of the room, define them, cling to them, because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes I would see Carla’s impudent mouth, she had had that impudence since the age of fifteen, and who could say how much Mario liked it, if he had dreamed of it while he slept beside me, until he woke and kissed me as if he were kissing her and then withdrew and went back to sleep as soon as he recognized my mouth, the usual mouth, the mouth without new tastes, the mouth of the past.

Carrano sensed in my kiss the sign that any skirmishing was over. He put his hand on my neck, he wanted to press me even harder against his lips. Then he left my mouth and planted wet kisses on my cheeks, on my eyes. I thought he must be following a precise exploratory plan, he even kissed my ears, so that the sound echoed annoyingly against my eardrums. Then he moved to my neck, he bathed with his tongue the hair at the nape, and meanwhile he touched my chest with his broad hand.

“My breasts are small,” I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can’t offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age.

“I like them,” he said in a whisper, while he unbuttoned my shirt and with his hand pulled down the edge of the bra and tried to bite my nipples and suck them. But my nipples, too, are small, and the breasts eluded him, falling back into the cups of the bra. I said wait, I pushed him away, I sat up, I took off the shirt, unhooked the bra. I asked stupidly: do you like them, anxiety was growing in me, I wanted him to repeat his approval.

Looking at me he sighed:

“You’re beautiful.”

He took a deep breath, as if he wished to control a strong emotion or nostalgia, and just touched me with his fingertips so that I lay on the sofa with my chest bare and he could gaze at me more easily.

Lying there, I saw him from below, I noted the wrinkles of his aging neck, the beard that needed a shave and showed flecks of white, the deep creases between his eyebrows. Perhaps he was serious, perhaps he really was captivated by my beauty, or perhaps they were only words to ornament a desire for sex. Perhaps I remained beautiful even if my husband had rolled up the sense of my beauty into a ball and thrown it into the wastebasket, like wrapping paper. Yes, I could still make a man passionate, I was a woman able to do this, the flight of Mario to another bed, another flesh, had not ruined me.

Carrano bent over me, licked my nipples, sucked them. I tried to abandon myself, I wanted to eliminate disgust and desperation from my breast. I closed my eyes cautiously, the warmth of his breath, the lips on my skin, I let out a moan of encouragement for me and for him. I hoped to notice in myself some nascent pleasure, even if that man was a stranger, a musician perhaps of little talent, no quality, no capacity for seduction, dull and therefore alone.

Now I felt him kissing my ribs, my stomach, he stopped even on my navel, what he found there I don’t know, he moved his tongue in it, tickling me. Then he got up. I opened my eyes, he was rumpled, his eyes were bright, I seemed to see in his face the expression of a guilty child.

“Tell me again that you like me,” I insisted, short of breath.

“Yes,” he said, but with a little less enthusiasm. He put his hands on my knees, parted them, slid his fingers under my skirt, caressed the insides of my thighs, lightly, as if he were sending a probe into the dark depths of a well.

He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, I would have preferred everything to proceed more quickly. Now I thought of the possibility that the children might wake up or even of the hypothesis that Mario, after our tumultuous encounter, frightened, repentant, had decided to return home that very night. It even seemed to me that I could hear Otto barking joyfully, and I was about to say the dog is barking, but then it seemed to me inappropriate. Carrano had just raised my skirt and now was caressing the crotch of my underpants with the palm of his hand, and then he ran his fingers over the material pressing, pushing it deep into the fold of my sex.

I moaned again, I wanted to help him take off the underpants, he stopped me.

“No,” he said, “wait.”

He moved aside the material, caressed my bare sex with his fingers, entered with his index finger, murmured again:

“You’re really beautiful.”

Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies. Was Mario doing that, with me he had never taken his time. But maybe he, too, now, in the long night, somewhere else, was spreading Carla’s thin legs, letting his gaze rest on her cunt half covered by the underpants, lingering, his heart pounding, on the obscenity of that position, making it more obscene with his fingers. Or, who knows, maybe it was I alone who was obscene now, abandoned to that man who was touching me in secret places, who, in no hurry, was bathing his fingers inside me, with the casual curiosity of one who isn’t in love. Carla, on the other hand — Mario believed this, I was certain that he believed it — was a young woman in love who gives herself to her lover. Not a gesture, not a sigh was vulgar or sordid, not even the coarsest words had any power against the true meaning of their intercourse. I could say cunt and cock and asshole, they were not marked by it. I marked, I disfigured, only my own image on the sofa, what I was at that moment, rumpled, with Carrano’s big fingers rousing in me a fund of muddy pleasure.

Again I felt like crying, I clenched my teeth. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to burst into tears again, I reacted by moving my pelvis, shaking my head, moaning, murmuring:

“You want me, it’s true that you want me, tell me…”

Carrano nodded yes, pushed me onto my side, pulled down my underpants. I have to leave, I thought. Now what I wanted to know I knew. I am still attractive to men. Mario took everything but not me, not my person, not my beautiful charming mask. That’s enough with my ass. He was biting my buttocks, licking me.

“Not my ass,” I said, moving his fingers away. He touched my anus again, I moved him away again. Enough. I drew back, I stretched out a hand toward his bathrobe.

“Let’s get it over with,” I exclaimed. “Do you have a condom?”

Carrano nodded yes but didn’t move. He took his hands off my body, showing a sudden sadness, and leaned his head on the back of the sofa, stared at the ceiling.

“I don’t feel anything,” he murmured.

“What don’t you feel?”

“An erection.”

“Never?”

“No, now.”

“Since we started?”

“Yes.”

I felt myself flare up with shame. He had kissed me, embraced me, touched me, but he hadn’t gotten hard, I hadn’t been able to make his blood burn, he had roused my flesh without rousing his, ugly shit.

I opened his bathrobe, now I couldn’t leave, between the fourth floor and the fifth there were no longer stairs, if I left I would find the abyss.

I looked at his small pallid sex, lost in the black forest of hairs, between the heavy testicles.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “you’re upset.”

I jumped up, I took off the skirt that I was still wearing, I was naked, but he didn’t even realize it, he continued to look at the ceiling.

“Now you lie down,” I ordered him with false calm. “Relax.”

I pushed him down on the sofa, supine, in the position in which until that moment I had been.

“Where are the condoms?”

He gave a melancholy smile.

“It’s useless at this point,” and yet he pointed to a chest of drawers with a gesture of discouragement.

I went to the chest, opened one drawer after another, found the condoms.

“But I was attractive to you…” Again I insisted.

He hit his forehead lightly with the back of his hand.

“Yes, in my mind.”

I laughed angrily, I said:

“You have to like me everywhere,” and I sat on his chest, turning my back to him. I began to caress his stomach, going slowly lower and lower along the black track of hairs to where they were thick around his sex. Carla was fucking my husband and I couldn’t fuck this man, a man alone, without opportunities, a depressed musician for whom I was to be the happy surprise of his fifty-third birthday. She ruled Mario’s cock as if it belonged to her, she made him put it in her pussy, in her ass, which he had never done with me, and I, I could only chill that gray flesh. I grabbed his penis, I pulled down the skin to make sure there were no lesions and put it in my mouth. After a while Carrano began to moan, it sounded like braying. Soon his flesh swelled against my palate, this is what the shit wanted, this is what he was waiting for. Finally his prick emerged strong from his belly, a prick to fuck me with, to make my stomach ache for days, as Mario had never fucked me. My husband didn’t know what to do with real women: he dared only with whores of twenty, without intelligence, without experience, without teasing words.

Now Carrano was agitated, he told me to wait: wait, wait. I moved backward until I was pressing my sex against his mouth, I left his penis and turned with the most disdainful look I was capable of. “Kiss it,” I said, and he kissed me literally, with devotion, I felt the shock of the kiss on my pussy, old fool, the metaphoric language I used with Mario evidently wasn’t his, he misunderstood, he didn’t realize what I was really ordering him to do, I don’t know if Carla was able to decipher my husband’s suggestions, I don’t know. With my teeth I tore open the condom wrapper, I put it on his prick, come on, get up, I said to him, you like the asshole, deflower me, I never did that with my husband, I want to tell him about it in every detail, put it in my ass.

The musician struggled out from under me, I remained on all fours. I laughed to myself, I couldn’t contain myself thinking of Mario’s face when I told him. I stopped laughing only when I felt Carrano pushing forcefully against me. I was suddenly afraid, I held my breath. A bestial position, animal liquids and a perfidy utterly human. I turned to look at him, perhaps to beg him not to obey me, to let it go. Our glances met. I don’t know what he saw, I saw a man no longer young, with his white bathrobe open, his face shiny with sweat, lips pressed in concentration. I murmured something to him, I don’t know what. He unclenched his lips, opened his mouth, closed his eyes. Then he sank down behind me. I supported myself on one side. I saw the whitish stain of semen against the wall of the condom.

“Never mind,” I said with a dry explosion of laughter in my throat, and I tore the rubber off his already limp penis, threw it away, it stained the floor with a viscid yellow stripe. “You missed the target.”

I put on my clothes, went to the door, he followed me, pulling his bathrobe tight around him. I was disgusted with myself. I murmured before I left:

“It’s my fault, I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m the one…”

I shook my head, forced a smile, falsely conciliating:

“Putting my ass in your face so boldly: Mario’s lover certainly doesn’t do that.”

I went up the stairs slowly. Crouching in a corner, beside the banister, I saw the poverella of so long ago, who said to me in a weary but very serious tone: “I am clean I am true I play with my cards on the table.”

In front of the door with its metal plates I kept getting the order of the keys wrong, it was a while before I opened it. When I went inside, I wasted more time locking it. Otto ran up to me cheerfully, I paid no attention, I went to take a shower. I deserved everything that had happened to me, even the harsh words with which I mentally insulted myself, rigid under the spray of the water. I managed to calm myself only by saying aloud: “I love my husband and so all this has meaning.” I looked at the clock, it was ten after two, I went to bed and turned out the light. I fell asleep immediately, unexpectedly. I slept with that sentence in my head.