The Days of Abandonment

20.

I arrived at the elevator as if I had walked on a wire stretched between the pine grove and the entrance to the building. I leaned against the metal wall while the car slowly rose, I stared at Otto to thank him. He stood with his legs slightly apart, he was panting and a thread of saliva dripped from his jaws, making a squiggle on the floor of the elevator. The car jolted as it came to a stop.

On the landing I found Ilaria, she seemed to me very annoyed, as if she were my mother returned from the kingdom of the dead to remind me of my duties.

“He threw up again,” she said.

She preceded me into the house, followed by Otto, whom I freed from the leash. No smell of burned milk, of coffee. I slowed down to close the door, mechanically I put the keys in the locks, gave the two turns. My hand was used by now to that movement which was to keep anyone from entering my house to search among my things. I had to protect myself from those who would do their utmost to load me with obligations, guilts, and keep me from starting to live again. I was struck by the suspicion that even my children wanted to convince me that their flesh was withering because of me, just from breathing the same air. Gianni’s illness served this purpose. He set the scene, Ilaria flung it eagerly in my face. More vomit, yes, and so? It wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last. Gianni, like his father, had a weak stomach. They both suffered from seasickness, carsickness. A sip of cold water sufficed, a slice of too rich cake, and they felt sick. Who knows what the boy had secretly eaten, to complicate my life, to make the day more arduous for me.

The room was again in disarray. Now the dirty sheets were in a corner, like a cloud, and Gianni had gone back to Ilaria’s bed. The child had replaced me. She had behaved the way I had behaved as a girl with my mother: she had tried to do what she had seen me do, she was playing at getting rid of my authority by supplanting me, she wanted to take my place. In general I was accommodating, my mother had not been. Every time I tried to do something like her, she rebuked me, she said I had been bad. Maybe it was she in person who was acting through the child to crush me with the demonstration of my inadequacy. Ilaria explained, as if inviting me to join a game in which she was the queen:

“I put the dirty sheets there and I made him lie on my bed. He didn’t throw up much, he only did like this.”

She staged some retching actions, then spit several times on the floor.

I went to Gianni, he was sweating, he looked at me with hostility.

“Where’s the thermometer?” I asked.

Ilaria took it promptly from the night table and offered it to me, pretending information she didn’t have, she didn’t know how to read it.

“He has a fever,” she said, “but he doesn’t want to take a suppository.”

I looked at the thermometer, I couldn’t concentrate on the degrees indicated by the column of mercury. I don’t know how long I remained with that object in my hand anxiously trying to train my gaze to see. I have to take care of the child, I said to myself, I have to know how high the fever is, but I couldn’t pay attention. Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream, slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, even as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain. Remove the other dirty sheets. Put them in the washing machine. Start it. Stand and watch through the window, the clothes rotating, the water and soap.

“It’s a hundred and one,” said Gianni in a whisper, “and my head feels terrible.”

“He has to take the suppository,” Ilaria insisted.

“I won’t take it.”

“Then I’ll hit you,” the girl threatened.

“You aren’t going to hit anyone,” I intervened.

“Why do you hit us?”

I didn’t hit them, I had never done it, at most I had threatened to do it. But maybe for children there’s no difference between what one threatens and what one really does. At least — I now remembered — as a child I had been like that, maybe also as an adult. What might happen if I violated a prohibition of my mother’s happened anyway, independent of the violation. The words immediately made the future real, and the wound of the punishment still burned even when I no longer remembered the fault that I would or could have committed. A recurrent expression of my mother’s came to mind. “Stop or I’ll cut off your hands,” she would say when I touched her dressmaking things. And those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools.

“I’ve never hit you,” I said.

“That’s not true.”

“At most I’ve said I would slap you. There’s quite a difference.”

There’s no difference, I thought, however, and hearing that thought in my head scared me. Because if I lost the capacity to perceive a difference, if I lost it definitively, if I ended up in an alluvial flow that eliminated boundaries, what would happen on that hot day?

“When I say ‘slap,’ I’m not slapping you,” I explained to her calmly, as if I were before an examiner and wished to make a good showing, presenting myself as cool and rational. “The word ‘slap’ is not this slap.”

And not so much to convince her as to convince me, I slapped myself hard. Then I smiled, not only because that slap suddenly seemed to me objectively comical but also to show that my demonstration was lighthearted, unthreatening. It was no use. Gianni quickly covered his face with the sheet and Ilaria looked at me in amazement, her eyes suddenly full of tears.

“You hurt yourself, Mamma,” she said woefully. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Blood was dripping on my nightgown, and I felt somehow ashamed.

I sniffed, I went into the bathroom, I locked the door to keep the child from following me. All right, concentrate, Gianni has a fever, do something. I stopped the blood by sticking some cotton in one nostril and immediately began digging nervously among the medicines that I had put in order the night before. I wanted to find something for his fever, but meanwhile I thought: I need a tranquilizer, something bad is happening to me, I have to calm down, and I felt at the same time that Gianni, the memory of Gianni feverish in the other room, was slipping away from me, I couldn’t maintain the glimmer of worry about his health, already the child was becoming indifferent to me, it was as if I saw him only out of the corner of my eye, a misty figure, a fraying cloud.

I began to look for pills for myself, but there were none, where had I put them, in the sink the night before, I remembered suddenly, how stupid. Then I thought of having a hot bath to relax, and maybe waxing, a bath would be soothing, I need the weight of water on my skin, I’m losing myself and if I don’t catch hold what will happen to the children?

I didn’t want Carla to touch them, the mere idea gave me shivers of disgust. A girl taking care of my children, she isn’t completely out of adolescence, her hands are smeared with the semen of her lover, the same seed that is in the blood of the children. Keep them far away, therefore, her and Mario. Be self-sufficient, accept nothing from them. I began to fill the tub, sound of the first drops hitting the bottom, hypnotic effect of the stream from the tap.

But I no longer heard the rush of water, now I was getting lost in the mirror that was next to me, I saw myself, I saw myself with an unbearable clarity, the disheveled hair, the eyes without makeup, the swollen nose with its blood-blackened cotton, the entire face clawed by a grimace of concentration, the short, stained nightgown.

I wanted to remedy this. I began to clean my face with a cotton ball, I wished to be beautiful again, I felt an urgent need for it. Beauty brightens things, the children would be glad, Gianni would draw from it a pleasure that would cure him, I myself would be better. Delicate makeup remover for the eyes, gentle cleansing milk, hydrating tonic without alcohol, foundation, makeup. What is a face without colors, to color is to conceal, there is nothing that can hide the surface better than color. Go, go, go. From deep down rose the murmur of voices, Mario’s voice. I slid behind my husband’s words of love, words of years ago. Little bird of a happy and contented life, he said to me, because he was a good reader of the classics and had an enviable memory. And with amusement he made a list: he wanted to be my bra so he could hug my chest, and my underpants and my skirt and the shoe stepped on by my foot, and the water that washed me and the cream that rubbed me and the mirror in which I looked at myself; ironic toward good literature, he was an engineer playing with my mania for beautiful words and at the same time charmed by the gift of so many images ready to give form to the desire he felt for me, for me, the woman in the mirror. A mask of lipstick and blush, nose swollen by cotton, the taste of blood in my throat.

I turned with a gesture of repulsion, in time to realize that the water was overflowing the tub. I turned off the tap. I stuck a hand in, cold water, I hadn’t even checked to see if it was warm. My face slid away from the mirror, it no longer interested me. The sensation of cold restored me to Gianni’s fever, his vomiting, his headache. What was I looking for, locked in the bathroom: the aspirin. I began to search again, I found it, I cried as if for help:

“Ilaria? Gianni?”