The Days of Abandonment

45

Two days later he came to the house, loaded with presents. Gianni and Ilaria, contrary to my expectations, greeted him perfunctorily, without enthusiasm, evidently the habit of the weekends had restored to him the normality of father. They immediately started unwrapping the gifts, which pleased them, Mario tried to join in, to play with them, but they didn’t want him. Finally he wandered around the room, touching some objects with his fingertips, looking out the window. I asked:

“Would you like some coffee?”

He accepted immediately, followed me into the kitchen. We talked about the children, I told him that, out of the blue, they were going through a difficult time, he assured me that with him they were good, well behaved. At some point he took pen and paper, he laid out a complex schedule of the days when he would have the children, and those when I would, he said that seeing them automatically every weekend was a mistake.

“I hope the money is enough,” he said.

“Fine,” I said, “you’re generous.”

“I’ll take care of the separation.”

I said, to clarify things:

“If I find out that you leave the children with Carla and go off on your own business without paying attention to them, you won’t see them anymore.”

He looked ill at ease and stared uncertainly at the piece of paper.

“Don’t worry, Carla has a lot of good qualities,” he said.

“I don’t doubt it, but I prefer that Ilaria not learn her childish affectations. And I don’t want Gianni to have the desire to put his hands on her chest the way you do.”

He abandoned the pen on the table, said despairingly:

“I knew it, nothing is over for you.”

I pressed my lips together, hard, then replied:

“Everything is over.”

He looked at the ceiling, the floor, I felt that he was dissatisfied. I leaned back in the chair. His chair seemed to have no space for his shoulders, a chair pasted to the kitchen’s yellow wall. I realized that on his lips was a mute laugh that I had never seen before. It became him, the expression of a sympathetic man who wishes to show that he knows what’s what.

“What do you think of me?” he asked.

“Nothing. Only what I’ve heard about you surprises me.”

“What have you heard?”

“That you’re an opportunist and a traitor.”

He stopped smiling, he said coldly:

“People who talk like that are no more virtuous than I am.”

“I’m not interested in what they are. I only want to know what you are and if you were always like that.”

I didn’t explain to him that I wanted to eliminate him from my body, get rid of even those aspects of him that, out of a sort of positive bias or out of connivance, I hadn’t been able to see. I didn’t say to him that I wanted to escape the pull of his voice, of his verbal expressions, of his habits, of his feeling about the world. I wanted to be me. If that formulation even made sense. Or at least I wanted to see what remained of me, once he was removed.

He answered me with feigned melancholy:

“What I am, what I’m not, how do I know.”

Wearily he pointed at Otto’s bowl that was still sitting in the corner, beside the refrigerator.

“I’d like to get the children another dog.”

I shook my head, Otto moved through the house, I heard the light clicking sound of his nails on the floor. I joined my hands and rubbed them slowly against one another, to eradicate the dampness of bad feeling from the

“I’m not capable of replacements.”

That night, when Mario left, I read again the pages in which Anna Karenina goes toward her death, leafed through the ones about women destroyed. I read and felt that I was safe, I was no longer like those women, they no longer seemed a whirlpool sucking me in. I realized that I had even buried somewhere the abandoned wife of my Neapolitan childhood, my heart no longer beat in her chest, the veins had broken. The poverella had become again an old photograph, the petrified past, without blood.