For almost five years he had secretly enjoyed that body, had cultivated that passion, had transformed it into love, had slept patiently with me abandoning himself to the memory of her, had waited until she became of age, more than of age, to tell me that he was taking her definitively, that he was leaving me. Vile, cowardly man. To the point of being unable to tell me what had really happened to him. He had added family fiction to marital fiction to sexual fiction to give his cowardice time, to get it under control, to find, slowly, the strength to leave me.
I came up behind them. I struck him like a battering ram with all my weight, I shoved him against the glass, he hit it with his face. Perhaps Carla cried out, but I saw only her open mouth, a black hole in the enclosure of her even, white teeth. Meanwhile I grabbed Mario, who was turning around with frightened eyes, his nose bleeding, and he looked at me full of terror and astonishment at once. Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world. Poor man, poor man. I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him so violently that I tore it off the right shoulder, found it in my hands. He stood bare-chested, he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, he no longer worried about catching cold, about pneumonia, with me he had been consumed by hypochondria. His health had evidently been revitalized, he had a good tan, he was thinner, only a little ridiculous now, because one arm was covered by a whole, nicely ironed sleeve, with part of the shoulder still attached, and the collar, too, at an angle; while otherwise his torso was bare, shreds of the shirt hung from his pants, blood dripped amid the grizzled hairs of his chest.
I hit him again and again, he fell down on the sidewalk. I kicked him, one two three times, but — I don’t know why — he didn’t defend himself, his movements were awkward, with his arms he sheltered his face instead of his ribs, maybe it was shame, hard to say.
When I had had enough I turned toward Carla, who was still open-mouthed. She retreated, I advanced. I tried to grab her and she evaded me. I had no intention of hitting her, she was a stranger, toward her I felt almost calm. I was angry only at Mario, who had given her those earrings, so I hit the air violently, trying to grab them. I wanted to rip them from her lobes, tear the flesh, deny her the role of heir of my husband’s forebears. What did she have to do with it, the dirty whore, what did she have to do with that line of descent. She was flaunting herself like an impudent whore with my things, which would later become the things of my daughter. She opened her thighs, she bathed his prick, and imagined that thus she had baptized him, I baptize you with the holy water of the cunt, I immerse your cock in the moist flesh and I rename it, I call it mine and born to a new life. The bitch. So she thought she had full rights to take my place, to play my part, the fucking whore. Give me those earrings, give me those earrings. I wanted to rip them off her, together with the ear, I wanted to drag along her beautiful face with the eyes the nose the lips the scalp the blond hair, I wanted to drag them with me as if with a hook I’d snagged her garment of flesh, the sacks of her breasts, the belly that wrapped the bowels and spilled out through the asshole, through the deep crack crowned with gold. And leave to her only that which in reality she was, an ugly skull stained with living blood, a skeleton that had just been skinned. Because what is the face, what, finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature. And he had fallen for it, he had been caught. For that face, for that soft garment he had sneaked into my house. He had stolen my earrings for love of that carnival mask. I wanted to rip it all off of her, yes, pull it off with the earrings. Meanwhile I was screaming at Mario:
“Just look, I’ll show you what she really is!”
But he stopped me. No passerby intervened, only a few of the curious — it seems to me — slowed down to look, with amusement. I remember it because for them, for the curious, I uttered fragments of sentences like captions, I wanted it understood what I was doing, what were the motivations of my fury. And it seemed to me that those who stayed to watch wanted to see if I would really do what I was threatening to do. A woman can easily kill on the street, in the middle of a crowd, she can do it more easily than a man. Her violence seems a game, a parody, an improper and slightly ridiculous use of the male intent to do harm. Only because Mario grabbed me by the shoulders did I not rip the earrings from Carla’s earlobes.
He grabbed me and pushed me away as if I were a thing. He had never treated me with such hatred. He threatened me, he was all stained with blood, distraught. But now his image appeared to be that of someone speaking on a television in a shop window. Rather than dangerous, I felt that it was sordid. From that place, from who can say what distance, the distance, perhaps, that separates the false from the true, he pointed at me a malevolent index finger, fixed at the extremity of his single remaining shirtsleeve. I didn’t hear what he said, but I felt like laughing at his artificial imperiousness. The laugh took away every desire to attack, drained me. I let him carry off his woman, with the earrings that hung from her ears. For what could I do, I had lost everything, all of myself, all, irremediably.
16
When the children came home (I had left them with friends), I said that I didn’t feel like cooking; I hadn’t prepared anything, they should fend for themselves. Maybe because of my appearance, or what they heard in my weary tone of voice, they went into the kitchen without protesting. When they reappeared, they stood in silence, almost embarrassed, in a corner of the living room. After a while Ilaria came and laid her hands on my temples and asked:
“Do you have a headache?”
I said no, I said I didn’t want to be bothered. They retreated into their room, offended by my behavior, embittered by my rejection of their affection. At some point I realized that it was dark, I remembered them, I went to see what they were doing. They were asleep, clothed, on the same bed, one beside the other. I left them like that and closed the door.
React. I began to tidy up. When I had finished I began again, a kind of roundup of everything that didn’t appear to be in order. Lucidity, determination, hold on to life. In the bathroom I found the usual mess in the medicine chest. I sat on the floor and began to separate the medicines that had expired from the ones that were still good. When all the unusable drugs had gone into the wastebasket and the medicine chest was in order, I took two packages of sleeping pills and brought them to the living room. I put them on the table, filled a glass to the brim with cognac. With the glass in one hand and in the palm of the other a handful of pills, I went to the window, from which came the damp warm breath of the river, of the trees.
Everything was so random. As a girl, I had fallen in love with Mario, but I could have fallen in love with anyone: a body to which we end up attributing who knows what meanings. A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself. We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself.