The Days of Abandonment

34

Carrano was kind. He wrapped Otto in a plastic sheet that he had in the cellar, put him in his car, and, leaving me his cell phone, went to bury him outside the city.

I immediately telephoned the pediatrician and was fortunate, I found him even though it was August. As I was minutely describing to him the child’s symptoms, I realized that my pulses were throbbing, so hard that I was afraid the doctor would hear the thud through the cell phone. My heart was swelling again in my breast, it was no longer empty.

I spoke to the doctor at length, making an effort to be precise, and meanwhile I wandered through the house, I tasted the connection between the spaces, touched objects, and at every slight contact with a knickknack, a drawer, the computer, the books, the notebooks, the handle of a door, I repeated to myself: the worst is over.

The pediatrician listened to me in silence, he assured me that there was no reason to worry about Gianni, he said that he would come and see him that evening. Then I took a long cold shower, the needles of water pricked my skin, I felt all the darkness of the months, of the past hours. I saw the rings that I had left upon waking on the edge of the sink and I put on my finger the one with the aquamarine, while, without hesitation, I let the wedding ring fall down the drain. I examined the wound that Ilaria had made with the paper cutter, I put antiseptic on it, covered it with a bandage. I also went, calmly, to separate the dark clothes from the white, I started the washing machine. I wanted the flat certainty of normal days, even though I knew all too well that a frenetic movement upward endured in my body, a darting, as if I had seen an ugly poisonous insect at the bottom of a hole and every part of me were still retreating, my arms and hands waving, feet kicking. I have to relearn — I said to myself — the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they’re going and why.

I concentrated, therefore, on the children, I had to tell them that the dog was dead. I chose my words with care, I tried for the proper tone of fables, but Ilaria wept for a long time anyway and Gianni, although he confined himself at first to a stern look, saying, with a fleeting echo of threatening tones, that Mario had to be informed, immediately afterward went back to complaining of a headache, of nausea.

I was still trying to console them when Carrano returned. I let him in but I treated him coldly, even though he had been so helpful. The children did nothing but call to me from the other room. Convinced as they were that it was he who had poisoned the dog, they didn’t want him to set foot in the house, much less have me speak to him.

And I myself had a sensation of repulsion when I smelled on him the odor of dug earth, and to his timidly confidential tone I responded in monosyllables that seemed sporadic drops from a broken faucet.

He tried to tell me about the burial of the dog, but since I didn’t show myself interested either in the location of the hole or in the details of the sad task, as he called it, and in fact every so often interrupted him, calling to Gianni and Ilaria, quiet, I’m coming right away, he became embarrassed, and broke off. To cover the children’s disruptive cries he began talking about his mother, about the problems of dealing with her old age. He went on until I said that children with long-lived mothers have the misfortune of not really knowing what death is and so never being free of it. He was hurt, he said goodbye with obvious ill humor.

In the course of the day he made no other attempts to see me. I let his rose wither in a vase on my desk, a vase painfully empty of flowers since the long-ago time when, on my birthday, Mario would give me a cattleya, in imitation of Swann. In the evening the flower was already black and bent on its stem. I threw it in the trash.

The pediatrician arrived after dinner, an old man, very thin, very endearing to children because, while he was seeing them, he bowed continually and called them Signor Giovanni, Signorina Illi.

“Signor Giovanni,” he said, “show me your tongue immediately.”

He examined the boy thoroughly and attributed the illness to a summer virus that caused intestinal upset. It might well be, however, that Gianni had eaten something bad, an egg, for example, or — he said to me later in the living room, in a low voice — that it was a reaction to a powerful sorrow.

As he sat at the desk and prepared to write a prescription, I told him calmly, as if between us there were a habit of confidences of this type, about the breakup with Mario, about that terrible day that was finally about to end, about the death of Otto. He listened to me with attention and patience, he shook his head disapprovingly and prescribed milk enzymes and tenderness for the children, tisane of normality and repose for me. He promised that he would return in a few days.