The Days of Abandonment

46

The children, too, suddenly began to change. Although they were still hostile toward each other, ready to come to blows, they slowly stopped getting mad at me.

“Daddy wanted to get us another dog, but Carla didn’t want to,” Gianni said to me one night.

“You’ll get one someday when you live on your own,” I consoled him.

“Did you love Otto?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, “while he was alive, no.”

I was astonished by the frankness and composure with which I now managed to answer all the questions they asked. Will Daddy and Carla make another child? Will Carla leave Daddy and find someone younger? Do you know, when she’s using the bidet he comes in and pees? I argued, I explained, sometimes I even managed to laugh.

Soon I got in the habit of seeing Mario, telephoning him about daily problems, protesting if he was late in putting money in my account. At some point I noticed that his body was changing again. He was getting gray, his cheekbones were swelling, his hips, his stomach, his chest were getting heavy again. Sometimes he tried growing a mustache, sometimes he left his beard long, sometimes he shaved completely with great care.

One evening he appeared at the house without warning, he seemed depressed, he wanted to talk.

“I have something unpleasant to tell you,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“I can’t stand Gianni, Ilaria gets on my nerves.”

“It’s happened to me, too.”

“I only feel good when I’m not around them.”

“Yes, sometimes it’s like that.”

“My relationship with Carla will be ruined if we continue to see them so often.”

“Could be.”

“Are you well?”

“Me, yes.”

“Is it true that you don’t love me anymore?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Because I lied to you? Because I left you? Because I humiliated you?”

“No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together.”

“And then?”

“I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.”

“It was.”

“No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.”

He made a grimace of annoyance, he said to me:

“You have to have the children more. Carla is exhausted, she has exams to take, she can’t take care of them, you’re their mother.”

I looked at him attentively. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.