The Days of Abandonment

21

Now I felt a need for their voices, but they didn’t answer. I rushed to the door, tried to open it, couldn’t. The key, I remembered, but I turned it to the right, as if to lock it, instead of to the left. I took a deep breath, remembered the gesture, turned the key in the proper direction, went into the hall.

Otto was in front of the door. He was lying on one side, his head resting on the floor. He didn’t move when he saw me, he didn’t even prick up his ears, or wag his tail. I knew that position, he assumed it when he was suffering for some reason, and wanted attention, it was the pose of melancholy and pain, it meant he was looking for understanding. Stupid dog, he, too, wanted to convince me that I was spreading anxieties. Was I dispensing spores of illness throughout the house? Was it possible? For how long, four, five years? Was that why Mario had turned to little Carla? I rested one bare foot on the dog’s stomach, I felt its heat devour my sole, rise to my guts. I saw that a lacework of drool ornamented his jaws.

“Gianni’s sleeping,” Ilaria whispered from the end of the hall. “Come here.”

I climbed over the dog, went into the children’s room.

“How pretty you look,” Ilaria exclaimed with sincere admiration, and pushed me toward Gianni to show me how he was sleeping. The child had on his forehead three coins and in fact he was sleeping, breathing heavily.

“The coins are cool,” Ilaria explained. “They make the headache and fever go away.”

Every so often she removed one and put it in a glass of water, then dried it and placed it again on her brother’s forehead.

“When he wakes up he has to take an aspirin,” I said.

I placed the box on the night table, returned to the hall to occupy myself with something, anything. Get breakfast, yes. But Gianni shouldn’t have any food. The washing machine. Even pat Otto. But I realized that the dog was no longer in front of the bathroom door, he had decided to stop displaying his slobbering melancholy. Just as well. If my noxious existence wasn’t communicating itself to others, to creatures human and animal, then it was the illness of the others that was invading me and making me sick. Therefore — I thought as if it were a decisive act — a doctor was needed. I had to telephone.

I compelled myself to hold onto this thought, I dragged it behind me like a ribbon in the wind, and so went cautiously into the living room. I was struck by the disorder of my desk. The drawers were open, there were books scattered here and there. Even the notebook in which I made notes for my book was open. I leafed through the last pages. I found transcribed there in my tiny handwriting some passages from Woman Destroyed and a few lines from Anna Karenina. I didn’t remember having done this. Of course, it was a habit of mine to copy passages from books, but not in that notebook, I had a notebook specifically for that. Was it possible that my memory was breaking down? Nor did I remember having drawn firm lines in red ink under the questions that Anna asks herself a little before the train hits her and runs her over: “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” The passages didn’t surprise me, I seemed to know them well, yet I didn’t understand what they were doing in those pages. Did I know them so well because I had transcribed them recently, yesterday, the day before? But then why didn’t I remember having done it? Why were they in that notebook and not the other?

I sat down at the desk. I had to hold on to something, but I could no longer remember what. Nothing was solid, everything was slipping away. I stared at my notebook, the red lines under Anna’s questions like a mooring. I read and reread, but my eyes ran over the questions without understanding. Something in my senses wasn’t working. An interruption of feeling, of feelings. Sometimes I abandoned myself to it, at times I was frightened. Those words, for example: I didn’t know how to find answers to the question marks, every possible answer seemed absurd. I was lost in the where am I, in the what am I doing. I was mute beside the why. This I had become in the course of a night. Maybe, I didn’t know when, after protesting, after resisting for months, I had seen myself in those books and I was in bad shape, definitively broken. A broken clock that, because its metal heart continued to beat, was now breaking the time of everything else.