At that moment, however, from the mass of trees in the little square the violet shadow of Carrano emerged, the instrument case over his shoulder. With an uncertain and unhurried step the musician crossed the whole area, empty of cars — the heat had definitively emptied the city — and disappeared under the hulk of the building. After a while I heard the jerk of the elevator gears, its hum. I suddenly remembered that I still had the man’s license. Otto growled in his sleep.
I went to the kitchen, threw the pills and the cognac into the sink, hunted for Carrano’s license. I found it on the telephone table, almost hidden by the phone. I turned it over in my hands, I looked at the photograph. His hair was still black, the deep creases that marked his face between the nose and the corners of his mouth had not yet appeared. I looked at the date of birth, tried to remember what day it was, and realized that it was the start of his fifty-third birthday.
I was torn. I felt like going down the stairs, knocking on his door, using the license to enter his house at this late hour; but I was also frightened, frightened by the unknown, by the night, by the silence of the whole building, by the damp and suffocating smells that rose from the park, by the cries of nocturnal birds.
I had the idea of telephoning him, I didn’t want to change my mind, I wanted rather to be encouraged. I looked for his number in the book, I found it. I pretended in my mind a cordial conversation: I found your license just this morning, on Viale dei Marinai; I could come down and give it to you, if it’s not too late; and I have to confess that my eye fell on your date of birth; I wanted to wish you happy birthday, happy birthday with all my heart, Signor Carrano, happy birthday, really, it’s just past midnight, I bet I’m the first to congratulate you.
Ridiculous. I had never been able to use a flirtatious tone with men. Kind, cordial, but without the warmth, the coy expressions of sexual availability. I tormented myself throughout adolescence. But I’m almost forty now, I said to myself, I must have learned something. I picked up the receiver with my heart thumping, and put it down angrily. There was that stormy hissing, no line. I picked it up again, tried to dial the number. The hissing was still there.
I felt the slab of my eyelids lower, there was no hope, the heat of the solitary night would massacre my heart. Then I saw my husband. Now he was no longer holding in his arms an unknown woman. I knew the pretty face, the earrings in the earlobes, the name Carla, the body of youthful shame. They were both naked at that moment, they were fucking without any hurry, they meant to make love all night as certainly they had made love in recent years unbeknownst to me, every spasm of my suffering coincided with a spasm of their pleasure.
I decided, enough pain. To the lips of their nocturnal happiness I would attach those of my revenge. I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.
17
I chose a bottle of wine, put the house keys in my pocket, and, without even combing my hair, went down to the floor below.
I rang decisively, twice, two long electric rings, at Carrano’s door. There was only silence, anxiety pounded in my throat. Then I heard slow steps, again everything was quiet, Carrano was looking at me through the peephole. The key turned in the lock, he was a man who feared the night, locked himself in like a woman alone. I thought of running home, before the door opened.
He appeared before me in his bathrobe, his ankles thin and bare, on his feet slippers with the name of a hotel, he must have purloined them, along with the soap, during a trip with the orchestra.
“Happy birthday,” I said in a rush, without smiling. “I wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”
In one hand I held out the bottle of wine, in the other the license.
“I found it this morning at the end of the street.”
He looked at me in confusion.
“Not the bottle,” I explained, “the license.”
Only then did he seem to understand, and he said to me in puzzlement:
“Thank you, I didn’t expect to find it. Will you come in?”
“Maybe it’s too late,” I murmured, again seized by panic.
He answered with a small, embarrassed smile:
“It’s late, yes, but… please, it would be a pleasure… and thank you… the house is a little untidy… come in.”
I liked that tone. It was the tone of a timid man who tries to appear worldly, but without conviction. I went in, closed the door behind me.
From that moment, miraculously, I began to feel at my ease. In the living room I saw the big instrument case leaning in a corner and it seemed to me a known presence, like that of a maidservant of fifty years ago, one of those large village women who in cities bring up the children of the well off. The house certainly was a mess (a newspaper on the floor, old cigarette butts of some visitor in the ashtray, a dirty milk glass on the table) but it was the pleasant disorder of a man alone, and then the air smelled of soap, you could still smell the clean steam of the shower.
“Excuse my outfit, but I had just…”
“Of course.”
“I’ll get some glasses, I have some olives, crackers…”
“Really, I just wanted to drink to your health.”
And to mine. And to the sorrow, the sorrow of love and sex that I hoped would come soon to Mario and Carla. I had to get used to saying that, the permanently linked names of a new couple. Before, people said Mario and Olga, now they say Mario and Carla. He ought to feel a terrible pain in his prick, disfigurement of syphilis, a rot throughout his body, the stink of betrayal.
Carrano returned with glasses. He uncorked the bottle, waited a little, poured the wine, and meanwhile said nice things in a gentle voice: I had lovely children, he had often watched me from the windows when I was with them, I knew how to treat them. He didn’t mention the dog, he didn’t mention my husband, I felt that he found both unbearable, but that in that circumstance, out of politeness, it didn’t seem nice to say so.
After the first glass I said so to him. Otto was a good dog, but frankly I would never have had a dog in the house, a big dog suffers in an apartment. It was my husband who had insisted, he had taken responsibility for the animal, and, indeed, many other responsibilities. But in the end he had shown himself to be a contemptible man, incapable of keeping faith with the commitments he had made. We don’t know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.
“I know just as much about my husband as I know about you, there’s no difference,” I exclaimed. The soul is an inconstant wind, Signor Carrano, a vibration of the vocal chords, for pretending to be someone, something. Mario went off — I told him — with a girl of twenty. He had betrayed me with her for five years, in secret, a duplicitous man, two-faced, with two separate streams of words. And now he has disappeared, leaving all the worries to me: his children to take care of, the house to maintain, and the dog, stupid Otto. I was overwhelmed. By the responsibilities alone, nothing else. It didn’t matter about him. The responsibilities that we had shared were all mine now, even the responsibility of having been unable to keep our relationship alive — alive, keep alive: a cliché; why should I be working to keep it alive; I was tired of clichés — and also the responsibility of understanding where we had gone wrong. Because I was forced to do that torturous work of analysis for Mario, too, he didn’t want to get to the bottom, he didn’t want to adjust or renew. He was as if blinded by the blonde, but I had given myself the task of analyzing, point by point, our fifteen years together, I was doing it, I worked at night. I wanted to be ready to re-establish everything, as soon as he became reasonable. If that ever happened.