Pushed by his needs, the dog obliged me to run behind him, my stomach pressed by mine. The leash was grazing the palm of my hand, I gave a fierce tug, I bent down to free him. He ran away like pure life, a dark mass charged with urgencies. He watered trees, shit in the grass, chased butterflies, lost himself in the pine grove. When was it that I had lost that stubborn charge of animal energy, with adolescence, perhaps. Now I was wild again, I looked at my ankles, my armpits, when had I last waxed them, when had I shaved? I who until four months ago had been only ambrosia and nectar? From the moment I fell in love with Mario, I began to fear that he would be repelled by me. Wash the body, scent it, eliminate all unpleasant traces of physiology. To levitate. I wanted to detach myself from the earth, I wanted him to see me hovering on high, the way wholly good things do. I never left the bathroom until every bad smell had vanished, I turned on the taps so he wouldn’t hear the rush of urine. I rubbed myself, curried myself, washed my hair every two days. I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness. Or maybe not. It was I who believed that his love needed that obsession of mine. Inappropriate, backward, my mother’s fault, she had trained me in the obsessive bodily attentions of women. I don’t know whether I was repelled or amazed or even entertained, when the young woman, twenty-five at most, who had long been my office mate when I worked for an airline company, one morning farted without embarrassment and, with laughing eyes, gave me a half smile of complicity. Girls now burped in public, farted, in fact — I recalled — one of my school friends did it, she was seventeen, three years younger than Carla. She wanted to be a ballerina and she passed the time practicing ballet positions. She was good. During recess she pirouetted lightly around the classroom, skirting the desks with precision. Then, to scandalize us, or to disfigure the image of elegance that remained in the boys’ doltish eyes, she made bodily noises according to how she felt, with her throat, her ass. The ferocity of women, I had felt it in me since waking, in my flesh. Suddenly I was afraid I would dissolve into liquid, a fear that gripped my stomach, I had to sit down on a bench, hold my breath. Otto had disappeared, perhaps he had no intention of ever returning, I whistled weakly, he was in the thick of nameless trees, which seemed to me more like a watercolor than like reality. The ones beside me, behind me. Poplars? Cedars? Acacias? Locusts? Names at random, what did I know, I didn’t know anything, even the names of the trees outside my house. If I had had to write about them, I would have been unable to. The trunks all seemed to be under a powerful magnifying lens. There was no distance between me and them, whereas the rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed, how much space has been interposed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated. But I felt everything right on top of me, breath against breath. And then it seemed to me that I was wearing not my nightgown but a long mantle on which was painted the vegetation of the Valentino, the paths, the Princess Isabella bridge, the river, the building where I lived, even the dog. That was why I was so heavy and swollen. I got up groaning with embarrassment and stomachache, my bladder full, I couldn’t hold it any longer. I stumbled in a zigzag, clutching the house keys, hitting the ground with the leash. No, I knew nothing of trees. A poplar? A cedar of Lebanon? A pine of Aleppo? What’s the difference between an acacia and a locust? Tricks of words, a swindle, maybe the promised land has no more words to embellish the facts. Smiling scornfully — with scorn for myself — I pulled up my nightgown, I peed and shit behind a trunk. I was tired, tired, tired.
I said it loudly but voices die quickly, they seem alive in the bottom of the throat and yet, if articulated, they are already spent sounds. I heard Ilaria calling from very far away. Her words reached me faintly.
“Mamma, come back, Mamma.”
They were the words of an agitated creature. I couldn’t see her, but I imagined that she had uttered them with her hands clutched tight around the railing of the balcony. I knew that the long platform extending over a void frightened her, she must really need me if she had gotten herself out there. Maybe the milk really was burning on the stove, maybe the coffeepot had exploded, maybe gas was spreading through the house. But why should I hurry? I discovered with remorse that, if the child needed me, I felt no need of her. Nor did Mario, either. That was why he had gone to live with Carla, he didn’t need Ilaria, or Gianni. Desire cuts off. Maybe it only cuts. His desire had been to skate far away from us on an infinite surface; mine, it seemed to me now, was to go to the bottom, abandon myself, sink deaf and mute into my own veins, into my intestine, my bladder. I realized that I was covered in a cold sweat, a frozen patina, even though the morning was already hot. What was happening to me. It was impossible that I would ever find the way home.
But at that point something brushed against my ankle, wetting it. I saw Otto beside me, his ears pricked, his tongue hanging out, the gaze of a good dog. I rose, I tried to put the collar on, again and again, without success, even when he stood still, barely panting, with an odd look, sad, maybe. Finally, with an effort of concentration, I imprisoned his neck. Go, go, I said to him. It seemed to me that if I were behind him, holding tight to the leash, I would feel again the warm air on my face, my skin dry, the ground beneath my feet.
20.
I arrived at the elevator as if I had walked on a wire stretched between the pine grove and the entrance to the building. I leaned against the metal wall while the car slowly rose, I stared at Otto to thank him. He stood with his legs slightly apart, he was panting and a thread of saliva dripped from his jaws, making a squiggle on the floor of the elevator. The car jolted as it came to a stop.
On the landing I found Ilaria, she seemed to me very annoyed, as if she were my mother returned from the kingdom of the dead to remind me of my duties.
“He threw up again,” she said.
She preceded me into the house, followed by Otto, whom I freed from the leash. No smell of burned milk, of coffee. I slowed down to close the door, mechanically I put the keys in the locks, gave the two turns. My hand was used by now to that movement which was to keep anyone from entering my house to search among my things. I had to protect myself from those who would do their utmost to load me with obligations, guilts, and keep me from starting to live again. I was struck by the suspicion that even my children wanted to convince me that their flesh was withering because of me, just from breathing the same air. Gianni’s illness served this purpose. He set the scene, Ilaria flung it eagerly in my face. More vomit, yes, and so? It wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last. Gianni, like his father, had a weak stomach. They both suffered from seasickness, carsickness. A sip of cold water sufficed, a slice of too rich cake, and they felt sick. Who knows what the boy had secretly eaten, to complicate my life, to make the day more arduous for me.