The Days of Abandonment

38

When I returned home that night with the children, I felt the close, comfortable warmth of the apartment for the first time since the abandonment, and I joked with my children until they were persuaded to wash, to go to bed. I had taken off my makeup and was about to go to sleep when I heard a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole, it was Carrano.

I had run into him rarely after he had taken care of burying Otto, and always with the children, always just to say hello. He had his usual air of an unassuming man, shoulders hunched as if he were ashamed of his height. My first impulse was not to open the door, I felt that he could drive me back into bad feelings. But then I noticed that he had combed his hair differently, without a part, his just washed gray hair, and I thought of the care he had taken with his appearance before deciding to climb the flight of stairs and present himself at the door. I also appreciated that he had knocked, in order not to wake the children with the sound of the bell. I turned the key in the lock.

Right away, with a hesitant gesture, he showed me a bottle of cold pinot bianco, he pointed out uneasily that it was the same pinot from Buttrio, of 1998, that I had brought when I went to see him. I told him that on that occasion I had chosen a bottle at random, I didn’t mean to indicate any preference. I hated white wine, it gave me a headache.

He shrugged, stood wordless in the hall with the bottle in his hands, it was already streaked with condensation. I took it almost ungraciously, I pointed to the living room, I went to the kitchen to get the corkscrew. When I returned I found him sitting on the sofa, playing with the dented insecticide can.

“The dog really battered it,” he commented. “Why don’t you throw it away?”

They were innocuous words to fill the silence, yet it bothered me to hear him speak of Otto. I poured him a glass and said:

“Have a glass and go, it’s late, I’m tired.”

He confined himself to nodding yes awkwardly, but certainly he didn’t think I was serious, he expected that slowly I would become more hospitable, more welcoming. I breathed a long sigh of discontent and said:

“Today I went to see a vet, he told me that Otto was poisoned by strychnine.”

He shook his head with a sincere expression of sorrow.

“People can be really vicious,” he murmured, and for an instant I thought he was alluding, incongruously, to the vet, then I realized that he had in mind those who frequented the park. I looked at him closely.

“What about you? You threatened my husband, you told him you would poison the dog, the children told me.”

I saw in his face astonishment and then a genuine distress. I noticed the weary gesture he made in the air as if to distance my words. I heard him murmur, depressed:

“I meant something else, I wasn’t understood. I had heard the threat to poison the dog around, I warned you, too…”

But at that point he flared up, took a harsher tone:

“After all, you know perfectly well that your husband thinks he’s the master of the world.”

It seemed pointless to say that I didn’t know it at all. About my husband I had had another idea, and after all he was gone, and with him had gone the meaning that for a long time he had given to my life. It had happened suddenly, as in a movie when suddenly you see a hole opening in a plane at a high altitude. I hadn’t had time for even a faint feeling of sympathy.

“He has the flaws of us all,” I murmured. “A man like so many others. Sometimes we’re good, at times detestable. When I came to you didn’t I do shameful things that I never would have dreamed of doing? They were gestures without love, without even desire, pure ferocity. And yet I’m not an especially bad woman.”

Carrano seemed to me stricken by those words, alarmed he said:

“I didn’t matter to you at all?”

“No.”

“And I still don’t matter to you now?”

I shook my head, I tried to smile, a smile that would lead him to take the thing as some sort of accident of life, a loss at cards.

He put down the glass, he got up.

“For me that night was very important,” he said, “and even more now than then.”

“I’m sorry.”

He made a half smile, he shook his head no: according to him I felt no sorrow, according to him it was only a way of cutting him off. He murmured:

“You are no different from your husband; after all, you were together a long time.”

He went toward the door, I followed him wearily. On the threshold he handed me the spray can that he had been about to carry away, I took it. I thought he would slam the door when he went out but instead he closed it behind him carefully.