To calm myself I got into the habit of writing until dawn. In the beginning I tried to work on the book that I had been trying to put together for years, but then I gave it up, disgusted. Night after night I wrote letters to Mario, even though I didn’t know where to send them. I hoped that sooner or later I would have a way of giving them to him, I liked to think that he would read them. I wrote in the silent house, with only the breathing of the children in the other room, and Otto, who wandered through the house growling anxiously. In those long letters, I forced myself to take a judicious, conversational tone. I told him that I was re-examining our relationship in minute detail and that I needed his help to understand where I had gone wrong. The contradictions in the life of a couple are many — I admitted — and I was working on ours in the hope of untangling and resolving them. The essential, the only real claim I would make on him was that he should listen to me, tell me if he intended to collaborate in my labor of self-analysis. I couldn’t bear that he gave no signs of life, he shouldn’t deprive me of an encounter that for me was necessary, he owed me attention, at least; where had he found the courage to leave me alone, overwhelmed, examining through a microscope, year by year, our life together? It wasn’t important — I wrote, lying — that he should come back to live with me and our children. The urgency I felt was different, the urgency was to understand. Why had he so casually thrown away fifteen years of feelings, emotions, love? He had taken for himself time, time, all the time of my life, only to toss it out with the carelessness of a whim. What an unjust, one-sided decision. To blow away the past as if it were a nasty insect that has landed on your hand. My past, not only his, ended up in the trash. I asked him, I begged him to help me understand whether that time had at least had a solidity, and at what point it had begun to dissolve, and if then it really had been a waste of hours, months, years, or if, instead, a secret meaning redeemed it, made of it an experience that could produce new fruit. It was necessary, urgent, for me to know, I concluded. Only if I knew could I recover and survive, even without him. Like this, in the confusion of life at random, I was wasting away, desiccated, I was as dry as an empty shell on a summer beach.
When the pen had cut into my swollen fingers until they hurt, and my eyes became blinded by too many tears, I would go to the window. I heard the wave of wind colliding with the trees in the park, or the mute darkness of the night, barely illuminated by the street lamps, whose luminous crowns were obscured by the foliage. In those long hours I was the sentinel of grief, keeping watch along with a crowd of dead words.
7
During the day, on the other hand, I was frantic, and became more and more careless. I imposed on myself tasks to accomplish, I rushed from one end of the city to the other on errands that were not at all urgent but which I tackled with the energy of emergency. I wanted my movements to seem purposeful, and instead I scarcely had control over my body; behind that activity I lived like a sleepwalker.
Turin seemed to me a great fortress with iron walls, walls of a frozen gray that the spring sun could not warm. On clear days a cold light spread through the streets that made me sweat with unease. If I walked, I knocked into things or people, and often sat down right on the spot to quiet myself. In the car I had nothing but trouble: I forgot I was driving. The street was replaced by the most vivid memories of the past or by bitter fantasies, and often I dented fenders, or braked at the last moment, but angrily, as if reality were inappropriate and had intervened to destroy a conjured world that was the only one that at that moment counted for me.
In those situations I got out of the car in a fury, I quarreled with whoever was driving the car that I had hit, I screamed insults, if it was a man I said I wondered what could have been going through his mind, foul things certainly, a young lover.
I was really frightened only once, when, distractedly, I had let Ilaria sit next to me. I was driving on Corso Massimo D’Azeglio, and had reached Galileo Ferraris. It was drizzling in spite of the sun, and I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe I had turned toward the child to make sure she was wearing her seat belt, maybe not. I know I saw the red signal only at the last second, and the shadow of a lanky man who was crossing the street. The man was looking straight ahead, I thought it was Carrano, our neighbor. Maybe it was, but without the instrument over his shoulders, or lowered head, or gray hair. I stepped on the brake, the car stopped with a long, whining screech a few inches away from him. Ilaria’s forehead banged the windshield, a web of luminous cracks spread across the glass, immediately her skin turned purple.
Shouts, cries, I heard the rattle of the tram on my right, its gray-yellow mass approached across the sidewalk, beyond the railing, passed me by. I remained mute, at the wheel, while Ilaria pounded me furiously with her fists and screamed:
“You hurt me, you stupid, you really hurt me!”
Someone was saying something incomprehensible to me, maybe my neighbor, if it was indeed he. I came to myself, answered something offensive. Then I hugged Ilaria, made sure there was no blood, yelled at the insistent horns, repulsed the annoyingly solicitous passersby, a nebula of shadows and sounds. I abandoned the car, took Ilaria in my arms, went in search of some water. I crossed the tram tracks, walked in a daze toward a gray urinal that bore an old stamp saying “Casa del Fascio.” Then I changed my mind, what was I doing, I went back. I sat on the bench at the tram stop with Ilaria screaming in my arms, repelling with sharp gestures the shadows and voices that crowded around me. Once I calmed the child, I decided to go to the hospital. I remember that I had only one clear, insistent thought: someone will tell Mario that his daughter is injured and then he will appear.
But Ilaria turned out to be in excellent shape. She merely carried for a long time and with a certain pride a violet bump in the middle of her forehead, nothing for anyone to worry about, least of all her father, if anyone had even told him about it. The only nagging memory of that day remained my own thought, a proof of desperate malice, my instinctive desire to use the child to bring Mario home and say to him: Do you see what can happen if you’re not here? Isn’t it clear where you’re pushing me, day after day?
I was ashamed of myself. Yet I couldn’t do anything about it, I couldn’t think of anything except how to get him back. I soon developed an obsession to see him, tell him that I could no longer manage, show him how diminished I was without him. I was sure that, stricken by a kind of blindness, he had lost the capacity to place me and the children in our true situation and imagined that we continued to live as we always had, peacefully. Maybe he even thought we were a little relieved, because finally I didn’t have to worry about him, and the children didn’t have to fear his authority, and so Gianni was no longer reprimanded if he hit Ilaria and Ilaria was no longer reprimanded if she tormented her brother, and we all lived — we on one side, he on the other — happily. It was essential — I said to myself — to open his eyes. I hoped that if he could see us, if he knew about the state of the house, if he could follow for a single day our life as it had become — disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh — if he could read my letters and understand the serious work I was doing to sort out the breakdowns of our relationship, he would immediately be persuaded to return to his family.