The Days of Abandonment

18

When I opened my eyes again, five hours later, at seven o’clock on Saturday August 4th, I had trouble getting my bearings. The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn’t know it yet.

I reached out a hand toward Mario, I was sure he was sleeping beside me, but beside me there was nothing, not even his pillow, or mine, either. It seemed to me that the bed had grown wider and at the same time shorter. Maybe I’ve gotten taller, I said to myself, maybe thinner.

I felt sluggish, as if from a circulatory problem, my fingers were swollen. I saw that I hadn’t taken off my rings before falling asleep, I hadn’t put them on the night table with my habitual gesture. I felt them in the flesh of my ring finger, a chokehold that seemed to me at the origin of the illness in my whole body. With cautious gestures I tried to take them off, I wet my finger with saliva, I couldn’t do it. I seemed to have the taste of gold in my mouth.

I was staring at an unfamiliar portion of the ceiling, in front of me was a white wall, not the big closet that I saw every morning. My feet looked out on a void, there was no headboard behind my head. My senses were dulled, between my eardrums and the world, between fingertips and sheets perhaps there was some padding, felt or velvet.

I tried to gather my strength, I raised myself up on my elbows cautiously, in order not to tear the bed, the room, with the movement, or tear myself, like a label torn from a bottle. With an effort I realized that I must have tossed and turned in my sleep, that I had left my usual corner, that with my absent body I had crawled or rolled through sheets that were wet with sweat. This had never happened before, in general I slept curled up on my side, without changing position. But I couldn’t find any other explanation, there were two pillows on my right side and the closet on my left. I fell back exhausted onto the sheets.

At that moment there was a knock at the door. It was Ilaria, she came in with her dress rumpled and a sleepy look, and said:

“Gianni threw up on my bed.”

I looked at her obliquely, listlessly, without raising my head. I imagined her old, her features deformed, near death or already dead, and yet a piece of me, the apparition of the child I had been, that I would have been, why that “would have been”? I had swift and faded images in my head, entire sentences, but uttered in a hurry, a whisper. I realized that my grammatical tenses weren’t correct, because of that jumbled waking up. Time is a breath, I thought, today it’s my turn, in a moment my daughter’s, it had happened to my mother, to all my forebears, maybe it was even happening to them and me simultaneously, it will happen.

I decided to get up, but there was a kind of suspension of the order: “get up” remained an intention that hovered idly in my ears. Being a child, then a girl, I waited for a man, now I had lost my husband, I will be unhappy until the moment of death, last night I sucked Carrano’s dick out of desperation, to cancel out the insult to my cunt, how much ruined pride.

“I’m coming,” I said without moving.

“Why did you sleep in that position?”

“I don’t know.”

“Gianni put his mouth on my pillow.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He got my bed all dirty and the pillow, too. You have to slap him.”

I pulled myself up with an effort of will, I lifted a weight that I hadn’t enough strength for. I couldn’t seem to take in the fact that it was I myself weighing on me, I weighed more than lead, I had no desire to hold myself up for the whole day. I yawned, I turned my head first to the right and then to the left, I tried again to take off my rings, without success.

“If you don’t punish him, I’ll pinch you,” Ilaria threatened.

I went into the children’s room with deliberately slow movements, preceded by my daughter, who, however, was impatient. Otto barked, whined, I heard him scratching at the door that separated the bedrooms from the living room. Gianni was lying on Ilaria’s bed, dressed exactly as I had seen him the night before, but sweaty and pale, his eyes closed though he was clearly awake. The light blanket was stained, on the floor a yellowish splotch was spreading.

I said nothing to the child, I didn’t need to or feel like it. I went instead to the bathroom, spit in the sink, washed out my mouth. Then I took a rag, I used a cautious gesture, but even that seemed too quick, I had the impression that, against my will, it had made me twist my eyes, pushing them sideways disjointedly, in a sort of forced torsion that threatened to set in motion the wall, the mirror, the chest, everything.

I sighed, a long sigh that was able to fix my pupils on the rag, subduing panic. I returned to the children’s room, I squatted down to clean the floor. The acid odor of vomit recalled to me the days of nursing, of baby food, and sudden regurgitations. As I removed the traces of my son’s illness from the floor, I thought of the woman of Naples with her whining children, silenced by candies. At a certain point, she, the abandoned wife, began getting angry at them. She said that they had left the odor of motherhood on her, and this had ruined her, it was their fault that her husband had left. First they swell your belly, yes, first they make your breasts heavy, and then they have no patience. Words like that, I recalled. My mother repeated them in a low voice so that I wouldn’t hear, gravely agreeing. But I heard them just the same, and now, too, in a sort of double hearing: I was the child of that time playing under the table, stealing sequins, putting them in my mouth, and sucking them; and I was the adult of this morning, here beside Ilaria’s bed, mechanically performing a dirty job and yet sensitive to the sound of the sticky rag sliding over the floor. How had Mario been? Tender, it seemed to me, with no outward signs of impatience or annoyance with my pregnancies. In fact, when I was pregnant he wanted to make love more often, and I did it more willingly. Now I was cleaning, and meanwhile I made mental calculations, numbers without emotion. Ilaria had been a year and a half when Carla appeared in our life, and Gianni less than five. I had had no work, any sort of work, even writing, for at least five years. I lived in a new city, still a new city, I had no relatives to ask for help, and even if I had I wouldn’t have asked, I wasn’t a person who asks for help. I did the shopping, I cooked, I cleaned, I took the two children from place to place, from room to room, exhausted, exasperated. I dealt with deadlines of every sort, I took care of the income taxes, I ran to the bank, ran to the post office. At night I wrote down, in my notebooks, income and expenses, in every detail, as if I were an accountant who had to show the books to the owner of the business. At times I also wrote, between the numbers, how I felt: I was like a lump of food that my children chewed without stopping; a cud made of a living material that continually amalgamated and softened its living substance to allow two greedy bloodsuckers to nourish themselves, leaving on me the odor and taste of their gastric juices. Nursing, how repulsive, an animal function. And then the warm sweetish odor of baby-food breath. No matter how much I washed, that stink of motherhood remained. Sometimes Mario pasted himself against me, took me, holding me as I nearly slept, tired himself after work, without emotions. He did it persisting on my almost absent flesh that tasted of milk, cookies, cereal, with a desperation of his own that overlapped mine without his realizing it. I was the body of incest, I thought, stunned by the odor of Gianni’s vomit, I was the mother to be violated, not a lover. Already he was searching elsewhere for figures more suitable for love, fleeing the sense of guilt, and he became melancholy, sighed. Carla had happened into the house at the right moment, a figment of unsatisfied desire. She was then thirteen years older than Ilaria, ten more than Gianni, seven more than me when I heard my mother speaking of the poverella of Piazza Mazzini. Mario must have imagined her as the future, and yet he desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for. She herself perhaps believed she was giving him the future and had encouraged him to believe it. But we were all confused, especially me. While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would be again as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person. No, I thought, squeezing the rag and struggling to get up: starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.