The Days of Abandonment

28

Where had I put the cell phone? The day I had broken it, where had I put the pieces? I went to the bedroom, rummaged through the drawer of my night table, it was there, two purple halves, separated.

Probably just because I knew nothing about the mechanics of a cell phone, I wanted to convince myself that it wasn’t broken at all. I examined the half that had the display and the keypad, I pressed the button that turned it on, nothing happened. Maybe, I said to myself, I only have to stick the two parts together to make it work. I played around for a while, randomly. I put in the battery, which had come out, I tried to make the pieces fit together. I discovered that they slipped apart from each other because the central body was broken, the channel for the joint had splintered. We fabricate objects in a semblance of our bodies, one side joined to the other. Or we design them thinking they’re joined as we are joined to the desired body. Creatures born from a banal fantasy. Mario — it suddenly seemed to me — in spite of success in his work, in spite of his skills and his lively intelligence, was a man of banal fantasy. Maybe for that very reason he would have known how to make the cell phone function again. And so he would have saved the dog, the child. Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision. I didn’t know how to adapt, I didn’t know how to yield completely to Mario’s gaze. I had tried. Obtuse though I was, I pretended to be a right angle, and had managed to choke off even my vocation of moving from fantasy to fantasy. It hadn’t been sufficient, he had withdrawn anyway, he had gone to be joined more solidly elsewhere.

No, stop it. Think of the cell phone. In the drawer I found a green ribbon, I tied the two halves tightly together and tried to press the on button. Nothing. I hoped for a sort of magic, I tried to hear a dial tone. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

I abandoned the instrument on the bed, worn out by Ilaria’s hammering. Then in a flash the computer came to mind. How had I not thought of it. A fault of how I was made, I knew so little, the final proof. I went to the living room, moving as if the hammer blows were a gray curtain, a curtain through which I had to open a way for myself with arms outstretched, hands groping.

I found the child crouching on the floor and banging the hammer, just as she had been. The pounding was insupportable, I counted on its being that way also for Carrano.

“Can I stop?” she asked, all sweaty, red in the face, eyes shining.

“No, it’s important, keep going.”

“You do it, I’m tired.”

“I have something else urgent to do.”

At my desk now there was no one. I sat down, the seat conserved no human warmth. I turned on the computer, I went to the mail icon, I typed to send or receive e-mail. I hoped to succeed in connecting in spite of the disturbance that kept me from telephoning, I hoped that the problem was limited to the instrument, as the person at the telephone company had said. I thought of sending requests for help to all the friends and acquaintances who showed up among my and Mario’s contacts. But the computer tried over and over again without success to make a connection. It searched for the line with prolonged sounds of discomfort, it snorted, it gave up. I clutched the edges of the keyboard, I rotated my gaze over here, over there in order not to feel anxiety, occasionally my eyes fell on the still open notebook, on the sentences underlined in red: “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” Anna’s words, stupidly motivated by the suspicion that her lover is about to betray her, leave her. Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning. For a moment Ilaria’s hammering sliced the anxious thread of sounds emitted by the computer as if an eel had slid through the room and the child were chopping it in pieces. I resisted as long as I could, then I shouted.

“That’s enough! Stop that hammering!”

Ilaria, opening her mouth wide in surprise, stopped.

“I told you I wanted to stop.”

I nodded yes, depressed. I had yielded, Carrano hadn’t. From no corner of the building had a single sign of life been roused. I was acting without a plan, I couldn’t stick with one strategy. The only ally I had in the world was that child of seven and I constantly risked ruining my relations with her.

I looked at the computer screen, nothing. I got up and went to embrace the child, I emitted a long groan.

“Do you have a headache?” she asked me.

“It will pass,” I answered.

“Shall I massage your temples?”

“Yes.”

I sat on the floor while Ilaria carefully rubbed my temples with her fingers. Here I was, giving in again, how much time did I think I had available, Gianni, Otto.

“I’ll make everything go away,” she said. “Do you feel better?”

I nodded yes.

“Why did you put that clip on your arm?”

I roused myself, saw the clip, I had forgotten it. The tiny pain it caused me had become a constitutional part of my flesh. Useless, that is. I took it off, I left it on the floor.

“It helps me remember. Today is a day when everything is slipping my mind, I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll help you.”

“Really?”

I got up, took from the desk a metal paper cutter.

“Hold this,” I said to her, “and if you see me getting distracted, poke me.”

The child took the paper cutter and observed me attentively.

“How will I know if you’re distracted?”

“You can tell. A distracted person is a person who no longer smells odors, doesn’t hear words, doesn’t feel anything.”

She showed me the paper cutter.

“And if you don’t even feel this?”

“Prick me until I feel it. Now come on.”