The Days of Abandonment

6

After the episode of the lizard, the nights, nearly sleepless already, became a torment. Where was I coming from, what was I becoming. Already at eighteen I had considered myself a talented young woman, with high hopes. At twenty I was working. At twenty-two I had married Mario, and we had left Italy, living first in Canada, then in Spain and Greece. At twenty-eight I had had Gianni, and during the months of my pregnancy I had written a long story set in Naples and, the following year, had published it easily. At thirty-one I gave birth to Ilaria. Now, at thirty-eight, I was reduced to nothing, I couldn’t even act as I thought I should. No work, no husband, numbed, blunted.

When the children were at school, I lay on the sofa, got up, sat down again, watched TV. But there was no program that could make me forget myself. At night I wandered through the house, and I soon ended up watching the channels where women, above all women, tossed in their beds like wagtails on the branch of a tree. They simpered indecently behind the superimposed telephone numbers, behind captions that promised lavish pleasures. Or they made coy, teasing remarks in sugary voices as they writhed. I looked at them wondering if Mario’s whore was like that, the dream or nightmare of a pornographer, and if, during the fifteen years we had spent together, he had secretly longed for this, just this, and I hadn’t understood. So I became angry first with myself, then with him, until I started crying, as if the ladies of the television night, continuously, exasperatingly, touching their giant breasts, or licking their own nipples as they wiggled in faked excitement, made a spectacle that could sadden one to tears.

To calm myself I got into the habit of writing until dawn. In the beginning I tried to work on the book that I had been trying to put together for years, but then I gave it up, disgusted. Night after night I wrote letters to Mario, even though I didn’t know where to send them. I hoped that sooner or later I would have a way of giving them to him, I liked to think that he would read them. I wrote in the silent house, with only the breathing of the children in the other room, and Otto, who wandered through the house growling anxiously. In those long letters, I forced myself to take a judicious, conversational tone. I told him that I was re-examining our relationship in minute detail and that I needed his help to understand where I had gone wrong. The contradictions in the life of a couple are many — I admitted — and I was working on ours in the hope of untangling and resolving them. The essential, the only real claim I would make on him was that he should listen to me, tell me if he intended to collaborate in my labor of self-analysis. I couldn’t bear that he gave no signs of life, he shouldn’t deprive me of an encounter that for me was necessary, he owed me attention, at least; where had he found the courage to leave me alone, overwhelmed, examining through a microscope, year by year, our life together? It wasn’t important — I wrote, lying — that he should come back to live with me and our children. The urgency I felt was different, the urgency was to understand. Why had he so casually thrown away fifteen years of feelings, emotions, love? He had taken for himself time, time, all the time of my life, only to toss it out with the carelessness of a whim. What an unjust, one-sided decision. To blow away the past as if it were a nasty insect that has landed on your hand. My past, not only his, ended up in the trash. I asked him, I begged him to help me understand whether that time had at least had a solidity, and at what point it had begun to dissolve, and if then it really had been a waste of hours, months, years, or if, instead, a secret meaning redeemed it, made of it an experience that could produce new fruit. It was necessary, urgent, for me to know, I concluded. Only if I knew could I recover and survive, even without him. Like this, in the confusion of life at random, I was wasting away, desiccated, I was as dry as an empty shell on a summer beach.

When the pen had cut into my swollen fingers until they hurt, and my eyes became blinded by too many tears, I would go to the window. I heard the wave of wind colliding with the trees in the park, or the mute darkness of the night, barely illuminated by the street lamps, whose luminous crowns were obscured by the foliage. In those long hours I was the sentinel of grief, keeping watch along with a crowd of dead words.