She tried to reopen the door, fearful for Otto, but I prevented her.
“He’s fine,” I said. “He just has a little stomachache.”
She looked at me very closely, so that I thought she wanted to figure out if I was telling her the truth. Instead she asked:
“Can I make myself up like you?”
“No. Take care of your brother.”
“You take care of him,” she retorted in irritation and went toward the bathroom.
“Ilaria, don’t touch my makeup.”
She didn’t answer and I let her go, I let her go, that is, beyond the corner of my eye, I didn’t even turn, I went dragging my feet to Gianni’s room. I felt exhausted, even my voice seemed to me more a sound in my mind than a reality. I took Ilaria’s coins off his forehead, I ran my hand over his dry skin. It was burning.
“Gianni,” I called, but he continued to sleep or pretend to sleep. His mouth was half open, his lips inflamed like a fiery red wound in the middle of which shone his teeth. I didn’t know whether to touch him again, kiss his forehead, shake him lightly to try to wake him. I repressed also the question of the gravity of his illness: food poisoning, a summer flu, the effect of a frozen drink, meningitis. Everything seemed possible, or impossible, and yet I had trouble forming hypotheses, I was unable to establish hierarchies, above all I couldn’t get alarmed. Now, instead, thoughts in themselves frightened me, I would have liked not to have any more, I felt they were infected. After seeing Otto’s condition, I was even more afraid of being the channel of every evil, better to avoid contacts, Ilaria, I mustn’t touch her. The best thing was to call the doctor, an old pediatrician, and the vet. Had I already done it? Had I thought of doing it and then forgotten? Call them right away, that was the rule, respect it. Even though it annoyed me to act as Mario had always acted. Hypochondriac. He got worried, he called the doctor for a trifle. Dad knows — the children, besides, had always pointed out to me — he knows that the man downstairs puts poisoned dog biscuits in the park; he knows what to do about a high fever, about a headache, about symptoms of poison; he knows that you need a doctor, he knows you need the vet. If he had been present — I sobbed — he would have called a doctor for me above all. But I immediately removed that idea of solicitude attributed to a man from whom I solicited nothing anymore. I was an obsolete wife, a cast-off body, my illness is only female life that has outlived its usefulness. I headed decisively toward the telephone. Call the vet, call the doctor. I picked up the receiver.
I put it down immediately in anger.
Where was I with my head?
Collect myself, take hold of myself.
The receiver gave the usual stormy whistle, no line. I knew it and pretended not to know it. Or I didn’t know it, my memory had lost its ability to grip, I was no longer capable of learning, of retaining what I had learned, and yet I pretended that I was still capable, I pretended and I avoided responsibility for the children, the dog, with the cold pantomime of one who knows and does.
I picked up the receiver, dialed the number of the pediatrician. Nothing, the whistling continued. I got down on my knees, I looked for the plug under the table, I unplugged it, plugged it back in. I tried the telephone again: the whistling. I dialed the number: the whistling. Then I began to blow into the receiver myself, stubbornly, as if with my breath I could chase away that wind that was canceling my line. No success. I gave up on the telephone, returned idly to the hall. Maybe I hadn’t understood, I had to make an effort to concentrate, I had to take in the fact that Gianni was ill, that Otto, too, was ill, I had to find a way of feeling alarm for their condition, grasp what it meant. I counted on the tips of my fingers, diligently. One, there was the telephone not working in the living room; two, there was a child with a high fever and vomiting in his room; three, there was a German shepherd in bad shape in Mario’s study. But without getting agitated, Olga, without rushing. Pay attention, in the excitement you might forget your arm, your voice, a thought. Or tear the floor, permanently separate the living room from the children’s room. I asked Gianni, perhaps shaking him too hard:
“How are you feeling?”
The child opened his eyes.
“Call Daddy.”
Enough of your useless father.
“I’m here, don’t worry.”
“Yes, but call Daddy.”
Daddy wasn’t there, Daddy who knew what to do had left. We had to manage by ourselves. But the telephone didn’t work, disturbance in the line. And maybe I was leaving, too, for an instant I had a clear awareness of it. I was leaving on unknowable pathways, pathways leading me farther astray, not leading me out, the child had understood, and he was worried not so much about his headache, his fever, as about me. About me.
This hurt me. Remedy it, stay back from the edge. On the table I saw a metal clip for holding scattered papers together. I took it, I clipped it on the skin of my right arm, it might be useful. Something to hold me.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to Gianni, and he pulled himself up a little to look at me better.
“What did you do to your nose?” he asked. “All that cotton’s going to hurt you, take it out. And why did you put that thing on your arm? Stay with me.”
He had looked at me carefully. But what had he seen. The wadding, the clip. Not a word about my makeup, he hadn’t found me pretty. Males small or big are unable to appreciate true beauty, they think only of their own needs. Later, of course, he would desire his father’s lover. Probably. I went out of the room, went into Mario’s study. I adjusted the metal clip. Was it possible that Otto really had been poisoned, that Carrano was responsible for the poison?
The dog was still there, under his master’s desk. The smell was unbearable, he had had another bout of diarrhea. But now there was not only him in the room. Behind the desk, on my husband’s swivel chair, in the gray-blue shadows, sat a woman.
23
She was resting her bare feet on Otto’s body, she was greenish in color, she was the abandoned woman of Piazza Mazzini, the poverella, as my mother called her. She smoothed her hair carefully, as if she were combing it with her hands, and adjusted over her bosom her faded dress, which was too low-cut. Her appearance lasted long enough to take away my breath, then she vanished.
A bad sign. I was frightened, I felt that the hours of the hot day were pushing me where I absolutely should not go. If the woman was really in the room, I reflected, I, in consequence, must be a child of eight. Or worse: if that woman was there, a child of eight, who was by now alien to me, was getting the best of me, who was thirty-eight, and was imposing her time, her world. This child was working to remove the ground from beneath my feet and replace it with her own. And it was only the beginning: if I were to help her, if I were to abandon myself, I felt, then, that day and the very space of the apartment would be open to many different times, to a crowd of environments and persons and things and selves who, simultaneously present, would offer real events, dreams, nightmares, to the point of creating a labyrinth so dense that I would never get out of it.
I wasn’t naïve, I mustn’t allow this. It was necessary not to forget that the woman behind the desk, although a bad sign, was still a sign. Shake yourself, Olga. No woman of flesh and blood had entered whole into my child’s head; no woman of flesh and blood could now get out of it, whole. The person I had just seen behind Mario’s desk was only an effect of the word “woman,” “woman of Piazza Mazzini,” “the poverella.” Therefore hold on to these notions: the dog is alive, for now; the woman, however, is dead, drowned three decades ago; I stopped being a girl of eight thirty years ago. To remind myself of it I bit my knuckle for a long time, until I felt pain. Then I sank into the sick stench of the dog, I wanted to smell only that.