25
I stood up taking care not to make any abrupt movements. I stared at the key for a long time, as if it were a mosquito to be squashed, then I reached out my right hand decisively and commanded the fingers to make the rotating movement to the left. The key didn’t move. I tried to pull it toward me, I hoped it would shift just a tiny bit, just enough to find the right position, but I gained not a fraction of an inch. It didn’t seem like a key, it seemed an excrescence of the brass plate, a dark arch in it.
I examined the panels. They were smooth, without knobs apart from the glittering handle, massive on massive hinges. Useless, there was no way to open the door except by turning that key. I studied the round plates of the two locks, the key was sticking out of the lower one. Each was fixed by four screws of small dimensions. I already knew that to unscrew them wouldn’t get me very far, but I thought that doing it would encourage me not to give up.
I went to the storage closet to get the tool box, I dragged it to the front door. I dug around in it, but couldn’t find a screwdriver to fit those screws, all too big. So I went to the kitchen, took a knife. I chose a screw at random and stuck the point of the blade in the tiny crossed channel, but the knife jumped away immediately, it got no purchase. I went back to the screwdrivers, I took the smallest, I tried to slide the end under the brass plate of the lower lock, another useless gesture. I gave up after a few attempts and went back to the storage closet. I searched slowly, careful not to lose my concentration, for a strong object to insert under the door, that might serve as a lever to raise one of the panels and pry it off its hinges. I reasoned, I must admit, as if I were telling myself a fable, without in the least believing that I would find the right instrument, or that, if I had found it, I would have the physical strength to do what I had in mind. But I was fortunate, I found a short iron bar that ended in a point. I went back to the entrance and tried to insert the sharp end of the object under the door. There was no room, the panels adhered perfectly to the floor, and besides, even if I had succeeded — I realized — the space at the top would be insufficient to allow the door to come off the hinges. I let the bar fall and it made a loud noise. I didn’t know what else to try, I was an incompetent, a prisoner in my own house. For the first time in the course of the day, I felt tears in my eyes, and I wasn’t sorry.
26
I was about to cry when Ilaria, who evidently had arrived on tiptoe behind me, asked:
“What are you doing?”
It was, of course, not a real question, she only wanted me to turn around and see her. I did, I felt a shudder of loathing. She had dressed in my clothes, she had put on makeup, she was wearing on her head an old blond wig that her father had given her. On her feet was a pair of my high-heeled shoes, on top a blue dress of mine that hampered her movements and made a long train behind her, her face was a painted mask, eye shadow, blush, lipstick. She looked to me like an old dwarf, one of those my mother used to tell of seeing in the funicular at Vomero when she was a girl. They were identical twins, a hundred years old, she said, who got on the cars and without saying a word began to play the mandolin. They had tow-colored hair, heavily shadowed eyes, wrinkled faces with red cheeks, painted lips. When they finished their concert, instead of saying thank you they stuck out their tongues. I had never seen them, but the stories of adults are thick with images, I had the two old dwarves clearly, vividly, in my mind. Now Ilaria was before me and she seemed to have come precisely from those stories of childhood.
When she became aware of the revulsion that must have showed on my face, the child smiled in embarrassment, and, eyes sparkling, said as if to justify herself:
“We’re identical.”
The sentence disturbed me, I shuddered, in a flash I lost that bit of ground I seemed to have gained. What did it mean, we are identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself. I couldn’t, I mustn’t imagine myself as one of the old women of the funicular. At the mere idea I felt a slight dizziness, a veil of nausea. Everything began to break down again. Maybe, I thought, Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria. Maybe she really was one of those minuscule women of The Vomero, who had appeared by surprise, just as, earlier, the poverella who had drowned herself at Capo Miseno had. Or maybe not. Maybe for a long time I had been one of those old mandolin players, and Mario had discovered it and had left me. Without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria was only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me. This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game.
Making an effort, I seized Ilaria by the hand and dragged her along the hall. She protested, but feebly, she lost a shoe, she wriggled free, she lost the wig, she said:
“You’re mean, I can’t stand you.”
I opened the door of the bathroom and, avoiding the mirror, dragged the child over to the bathtub that was full to the brim. With one hand I held Ilaria by the head and immersed her in the water, while with the other I rubbed her face energetically. Reality, reality, without rouge. I needed this, for now, if I wanted to save myself, save my children, the dog. To insist, that is, on assigning myself the job of savior. There, washed. I pulled the child out and she sprayed water in my face, blowing and writhing and gasping for breath and crying:
“You made me drink it, you were drowning me.”
I said to her with sudden tenderness, again I felt like crying:
“I wanted to see how pretty my Ilaria is, I had forgotten how pretty she is.”
I scooped up water in the hollow of my hand and then, as she wriggled and tried to get free, began again to rub her face, her lips, her eyes, mixing the remaining colors, loosening them and pasting them on her skin, until she became a doll with a purple face.
“There you are,” I said, trying to embrace her, “that’s how I like you.”
She pushed me away, she cried:
“Go away! Why can you wear makeup and I can’t?”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t, either.”
I left her and immersed my face, my hair in the cold water. I felt better. When I stood up and rubbed the skin of my face with both hands, I felt under my fingers the wet cotton that I had in one nostril and I took it out cautiously and threw it in the tub. The cotton floated, black with blood.