After a little I slowed down, turned back. What was happening to me. I was losing touch with those blameless creatures, they were growing distant, as if balanced on a log floating away upon the flow of the current. Get them back, take hold of them again, hug them close: they were mine. I called:
“Gianni! Ilaria!”
I didn’t see them, they were no longer beside the fountain.
Anguish parched my throat as I looked around. I ran through the gardens as if, by means of rapid, chaotic movements, I could bind together flower beds and trees, keep them from splintering into a thousand fragments. I stopped in front of the big sixteenth-century gun from the Turkish artillery, a powerful bronze cylinder behind the flower bed. Again I shouted the children’s names. They answered me from inside the cannon. They were lying there, on a piece of cardboard that had made a bed for some immigrant. The blood rushed back to my veins, I grabbed them by the feet, yanked them out.
“It was him,” Ilaria said, denouncing her brother, “he said we should hide here.”
I grabbed Gianni by the arm, shook him hard, threatened him, consumed by rage:
“Don’t you know you could catch some disease in there? You could get sick and die! Look at me, you little fooclass="underline" do that again and I’ll kill you!”
The child stared at me in disbelief. With the same disbelief I looked at myself. I saw a woman standing beside a flower garden, a few steps from an old instrument of destruction that now hosted for the night human beings from distant worlds, without hope. At that moment I didn’t recognize her. I was frightened because she had taken my heart, which was now beating in her chest.
15
During that period I also had trouble with the bills. I received letters saying that by such and such date the water or light or gas would be cut off because the bills hadn’t been paid. Then I would insist on saying that I had paid, I spent hours searching for the receipts, I wasted a lot of time protesting, arguing, writing, and then giving up in the face of the evidence that I had not in fact paid.
It happened like that with the telephone. Not only were there constant disturbances in the line, as Mario had pointed out to me, but suddenly I couldn’t even make a phone calclass="underline" a voice said to me that I wasn’t qualified for that type of service or something like that.
Since I had broken the cell phone, I went to a public phone and called the telephone company to resolve the problem. I was assured that it would be taken care of as soon as possible. But the days passed, the telephone continued silent. I called again, I became furious, my voice trembled with rage. I explained my situation in a voice so aggressive that the employee was silent for a long time, then after consulting the computer told me that telephone service had been suspended because of unpaid bills.
I was enraged, I swore on my children that I had paid, I insulted them all, from the lowest workers to the chief executives, I spoke of Levantine laziness (I said just that), I emphasized the chronic inefficiency, the small and large corruptions of Italy, I shouted: you make me sick. Then I hung up and checked the receipts, and discovered that it really was true, I had forgotten to pay.
I paid, in fact, the next day, but the situation didn’t improve. A permanent disturbance of communication, like a breath of storm in the microphone, returned to the line, the signal was barely perceptible. I went again to the bar downstairs to telephone, I was told that maybe I would have to get a new instrument. Maybe. I looked at the time, very soon the offices would be closed. I rushed out, I couldn’t contain myself.
I drove through the city, empty in August, in the suffocating heat. I parked, bumping the fenders of the other cars. I walked to Via Meucci, threw a spiteful glance at the headquarters of the telephone company, its grand façade of streaked marble blocks, took the steps two by two. There was a nice man at the entrance, who was not inclined to argue. I told him that I wanted to go to an office for complaints, right away, to protest a lack of service that had been going on for months.
“We haven’t had an office open to the public for at least ten years,” he answered.
“And if I want to complain?”
“You do it by telephone.”
“And if I want to spit in someone’s face?”
He advised me politely to try the office in Via Confienza, a hundred yards farther on. I ran breathlessly, as if reaching Via Confienza were a matter of life and death; the last time I had run like that I was Gianni’s age. But I had no way of letting off steam there, either. I found a glass door, closed and locked. I shook it hard, although it had written on it: “This door is alarmed.” Alarmed, yes, that ridiculous expression, let the alarm sound, let the city be alarmed, the world. From a small window in the wall to my left a man stuck his head out; he was not disposed to chat, and he got rid of me with a few words and disappeared again: there were no offices, let alone open to the public; everything was reduced to aseptic voice, computer screen, e-mail, bank operations; if a person — he said to me coldly — has anger to vent, sorry, there’s no one here to tangle with.
Frustration gave me a stomachache, I went back along the street, I felt as if I were about to lose my breath and sink to the ground. As if it were prehensile, my eye grasped the letters of a plaque on the building opposite. Words so that I wouldn’t fall. From this house entered into life like the shadow of a dream a poet named Guido Gozzano, who from the sadness of nothingness — why is nothingness sad, what’s sad about nothingness — reached God. Words with a claim of art for the art of linking words. I went on with my head lowered, I was afraid I was talking to myself, a man was staring at me, I walked faster. I no longer remembered where I had left the car, it wasn’t important to remember.
I wandered at random, past the Alfieri theatre, ending up in Via Pietro Micca. I looked around disoriented, certainly the car wasn’t there. But in front of a shop window, the window of a jewelry store, I saw Mario and his new woman.
I don’t know if I recognized her right away. All I felt was a fist in the middle of my chest. Maybe I realized first that she was very young, so young that Mario seemed an old man beside her. Or maybe I noticed on her, above all, the blue dress of a light material, in a style out of fashion, the sort of dress that can be bought in stores for expensive second-hand clothes, a style at odds with her youth but soft on her body that was rich in gentle curves, the curve of her long neck, of her breasts, her hips, her ankles. Or maybe what struck me was the blond hair gathered at the nape, rolled and held in place by a comb, a hypnotic stain.
I don’t know exactly.
Certainly I had to make swift eraser strokes over the rounded features of the twenty-year-old before retrieving the sharp, angular, still childish face of Carla, the adolescent who had been at the center of our marital crisis years earlier. And, certainly, only when I had recognized her was I struck by the earrings, the earrings of Mario’s grandmother, my earrings.
They hung from her lobes, elegantly setting off her neck, they made her smile even brighter; while my husband, in front of the window, encircled her waist with the proprietary joy of the gesture, while she rested a bare arm on his shoulder.
Time expanded. I crossed the street with long, determined strides, I felt no desire to cry or scream or ask for explanations, only a black mania for destruction.
Now I knew that he had deceived me for almost five years.