The Days of Abandonment

23

She was resting her bare feet on Otto’s body, she was greenish in color, she was the abandoned woman of Piazza Mazzini, the poverella, as my mother called her. She smoothed her hair carefully, as if she were combing it with her hands, and adjusted over her bosom her faded dress, which was too low-cut. Her appearance lasted long enough to take away my breath, then she vanished.

A bad sign. I was frightened, I felt that the hours of the hot day were pushing me where I absolutely should not go. If the woman was really in the room, I reflected, I, in consequence, must be a child of eight. Or worse: if that woman was there, a child of eight, who was by now alien to me, was getting the best of me, who was thirty-eight, and was imposing her time, her world. This child was working to remove the ground from beneath my feet and replace it with her own. And it was only the beginning: if I were to help her, if I were to abandon myself, I felt, then, that day and the very space of the apartment would be open to many different times, to a crowd of environments and persons and things and selves who, simultaneously present, would offer real events, dreams, nightmares, to the point of creating a labyrinth so dense that I would never get out of it.

I wasn’t naïve, I mustn’t allow this. It was necessary not to forget that the woman behind the desk, although a bad sign, was still a sign. Shake yourself, Olga. No woman of flesh and blood had entered whole into my child’s head; no woman of flesh and blood could now get out of it, whole. The person I had just seen behind Mario’s desk was only an effect of the word “woman,” “woman of Piazza Mazzini,” “the poverella.” Therefore hold on to these notions: the dog is alive, for now; the woman, however, is dead, drowned three decades ago; I stopped being a girl of eight thirty years ago. To remind myself of it I bit my knuckle for a long time, until I felt pain. Then I sank into the sick stench of the dog, I wanted to smell only that.

I knelt beside Otto. He was racked by uncontrollable spasms, the dog had become a puppet in the hands of suffering. What I had before my eyes. His jaws were locked, the drool thick. Those contractions of his limbs seemed to me finally a hold more solid than the bite on my knuckle, than the clip pinching my arm.

I have to do something, I thought. Ilaria is right: Otto has been poisoned, it’s my fault, I didn’t watch him carefully.

But the thought was unable to feint around the usual wrapping of my voice. I felt in my throat, as if I were speaking inside it, a vibration of breath that was like a baby’s, adult and at the same time affectedly girlish, a tone that I have always detested. Carla’s voice was like that, I recalled: at fifteen she had sounded like six, perhaps she still did. How many women can’t give up the pretense of the childish voice. I had given it up immediately, at ten I was already searching for adult tonalities. Not even in moments of love had I ever sounded childish. A woman is a woman.

“Go to Carrano,” the poverella of Piazza Mazzini advised me in a strong Neapolitan accent, reappearing this time in a corner near the window. “Get him to help you.”

I couldn’t stop myself, I seemed to complain with the thin voice of a child exposed to danger, innocent when everything is harmful to her:

“Carrano poisoned Otto. He promised Mario. The most innocuous people are capable of doing terrible things.”

“But also good things, my child. Go on, he’s the only one in the building, he’s the only one who can help you.”

What an idiot, I should absolutely not have spoken to her. A dialogue, in fact. As if I were writing my book and had in my head phantom people, characters. But I wasn’t writing, nor was I under my mother’s table telling myself the story of the poverella. I was talking to myself. That’s how it begins, you answer your own words as if they belonged to someone else. What a mistake. I had to anchor myself to things, accept their solidity, believe in their permanence. The woman was present only in my childhood memories. I mustn’t be frightened, but I also mustn’t encourage her. We carry in our head until we die the living and the dead. The essential thing is to impose a balance, for example never speak to your own words. In order to know where I was, who I was, I stuck both hands into Otto’s fur, from which an unbearable heat emanated. As soon as I touched it, as soon as I petted him, he started, raised his head, opened his white eyes wide, spit out at me bits of saliva, growling. I retreated, frightened. The dog didn’t want me in his suffering, he pushed me back into mine as if I didn’t deserve to alleviate his agony.

The woman said:

“You haven’t much time. Otto is dying.”