The Days of Abandonment

26

I was about to cry when Ilaria, who evidently had arrived on tiptoe behind me, asked:

“What are you doing?”

It was, of course, not a real question, she only wanted me to turn around and see her. I did, I felt a shudder of loathing. She had dressed in my clothes, she had put on makeup, she was wearing on her head an old blond wig that her father had given her. On her feet was a pair of my high-heeled shoes, on top a blue dress of mine that hampered her movements and made a long train behind her, her face was a painted mask, eye shadow, blush, lipstick. She looked to me like an old dwarf, one of those my mother used to tell of seeing in the funicular at Vomero when she was a girl. They were identical twins, a hundred years old, she said, who got on the cars and without saying a word began to play the mandolin. They had tow-colored hair, heavily shadowed eyes, wrinkled faces with red cheeks, painted lips. When they finished their concert, instead of saying thank you they stuck out their tongues. I had never seen them, but the stories of adults are thick with images, I had the two old dwarves clearly, vividly, in my mind. Now Ilaria was before me and she seemed to have come precisely from those stories of childhood.

When she became aware of the revulsion that must have showed on my face, the child smiled in embarrassment, and, eyes sparkling, said as if to justify herself:

“We’re identical.”

The sentence disturbed me, I shuddered, in a flash I lost that bit of ground I seemed to have gained. What did it mean, we are identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself. I couldn’t, I mustn’t imagine myself as one of the old women of the funicular. At the mere idea I felt a slight dizziness, a veil of nausea. Everything began to break down again. Maybe, I thought, Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria. Maybe she really was one of those minuscule women of The Vomero, who had appeared by surprise, just as, earlier, the poverella who had drowned herself at Capo Miseno had. Or maybe not. Maybe for a long time I had been one of those old mandolin players, and Mario had discovered it and had left me. Without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria was only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me. This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game.

Making an effort, I seized Ilaria by the hand and dragged her along the hall. She protested, but feebly, she lost a shoe, she wriggled free, she lost the wig, she said:

“You’re mean, I can’t stand you.”

I opened the door of the bathroom and, avoiding the mirror, dragged the child over to the bathtub that was full to the brim. With one hand I held Ilaria by the head and immersed her in the water, while with the other I rubbed her face energetically. Reality, reality, without rouge. I needed this, for now, if I wanted to save myself, save my children, the dog. To insist, that is, on assigning myself the job of savior. There, washed. I pulled the child out and she sprayed water in my face, blowing and writhing and gasping for breath and crying:

“You made me drink it, you were drowning me.”

I said to her with sudden tenderness, again I felt like crying:

“I wanted to see how pretty my Ilaria is, I had forgotten how pretty she is.”

I scooped up water in the hollow of my hand and then, as she wriggled and tried to get free, began again to rub her face, her lips, her eyes, mixing the remaining colors, loosening them and pasting them on her skin, until she became a doll with a purple face.

“There you are,” I said, trying to embrace her, “that’s how I like you.”

She pushed me away, she cried:

“Go away! Why can you wear makeup and I can’t?”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t, either.”

I left her and immersed my face, my hair in the cold water. I felt better. When I stood up and rubbed the skin of my face with both hands, I felt under my fingers the wet cotton that I had in one nostril and I took it out cautiously and threw it in the tub. The cotton floated, black with blood.

“Is it better now?”

“We were prettier before.”

“We are pretty if we love each other.”

“You don’t love me, you hurt my wrist.”

“I love you very much.”

“Not me.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Then if you love me, you have to help me.”

“What do I have to do?”

A flash, a throb in the wrists, the abrupt skid of things, I turned uncertainly to the mirror again. I wasn’t in a good state: my hair wet and stuck to my forehead, one nostril encrusted with blood, the makeup faded or reduced to small black clots, the lipstick washed off my lips but smeared around my nose and chin. I reached out a hand to take a cotton ball.

“Well?” Ilaria pressed me, impatiently.

The voice reached me from far away. Just a moment. First take off the makeup for good. Thanks to the side panels of the mirror, I saw the two halves of my face separately, far apart, and I was drawn first by my right profile, then by the left. They were both completely unfamiliar to me, normally I didn’t use the side panels, I recognized myself only in the image reflected by the big mirror. Now I tried to arrange the mirrors so that I could see from the side and from the front. There is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream. Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath. The mirror was summing up my situation. If the frontal image reassured me, saying to me that I was Olga and that perhaps I would arrive at the end of the day successfully, my two profiles warned me that it was not so. They showed me my neck, the ugly living ears, the lightly arched nose that I had never liked, the chin, the high cheekbones and the taut skin of the cheeks, like a white page. I felt that there, over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent. What did she have to do with those images. The worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden. If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about. To Mario, to Mario above all, I thought I had given Olga, the Olga of the central mirror, and now, in reality, I didn’t know which face, which body I had given him. He had assembled me on the basis of those two shifting, disjointed, ephemeral sides, and I don’t know what physiognomy he had attributed to me, what montage of me had made him fall in love, what, on the other hand, had turned out to be repugnant to him, making him fall out of love. For Mario I–I shuddered — had never been Olga. The meanings, the meaning of her life — I suddenly understood — were only a dazzlement of late adolescence, my illusion of stability. Starting now, if I wanted to make it, I had to trust myself to those two profiles, to their strangeness rather than to their familiarity, and moving on from there very slowly restore confidence in myself, make myself adult.

That conclusion seemed to me very true. Especially since, looking hard into my half face on the left, at the changing physiognomy of the secret sides, I recognized the features of the poverella—never would I have imagined that we had so many elements in common. Her profile, when she descended the stairs and interrupted my games and those of my companions to pass by with her absent gaze of suffering, had been huddling in me for years, it was that which I now offered to the mirror. The woman murmured to me from the panel:

“Remember that the dog is dying and Gianni has a nasty intestinal fever.”

“Thank you,” I said without fear, in fact with gratitude.

“Thank you for what?” asked Ilaria, annoyed.

I shook myself.

“Thank you for having promised that you would help me.”

“But you haven’t told me what I have to do!”

I smiled, I said:

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”