“Well. Did you enjoy yourself in Denmark? Did your lover go with you?”
He shook his head, curled his lip, replied in a low voice:
“If you’re going to act like that, I’ll take my things and leave right now.”
“I’m just asking how the trip was. Can’t I ask?”
“Not in that tone of voice.”
“No? What tone of voice is that? What tone should I have?”
“Of a civilized person.”
“Were you civil with me?”
“I’m in love.”
“I was, too. With you. But you’ve humiliated me and you continue to humiliate me.”
He lowered his gaze, he seemed sincerely distressed, and then I was moved, and suddenly I spoke with affection, I couldn’t help it. I told him that I understood his situation, I told him that I could imagine how confused he was; but I–I murmured with long, painful pauses — however I tried to find order, to understand, to wait patiently for the storm to pass, at times I gave in, at times I couldn’t manage it. Then, to offer proof of my good will, I took out of the drawer of the kitchen table the bundle of letters I had written to him and laid them carefully before him.
“See how hard I’ve worked,” I explained. “In there are my reasons and the effort I’m making to understand yours. Read.”
“Now?”
“If not, when?”
He unfolded the first sheet with a look of discouragement, scanned a few lines, looked at me.
“I’ll read them at home.”
“At whose home?”
“Stop it, Olga. Give me time, please, don’t think it’s easy for me.”
“Certainly it’s more difficult for me.”
“It’s not true. I feel like I’m falling. I’m afraid of the hours, the minutes…”
I don’t know exactly what he said. If I have to be honest, I think that he mentioned only the fact that, when you live with someone, sleep in the same bed, the body of the other becomes like a clock, “a meter,” he said — he used just that expression—“a meter of life, which runs along leaving a wake of anguish.” But I had the impression that he wanted to say something else, certainly I understood more than what he actually said, and with an increasing, calculated vulgarity that first he tried to repress and which then silenced him, I hissed:
“You mean that I brought you anguish? You mean that sleeping with me you felt yourself growing old? You measured death by my ass, by how once it was firm and what it is now? Is that what you mean?”
“The children are there…”
“Here, there… and where am I? Where are you putting me? I want to know! If you feel distress, how do you think I feel distress? Read, read my letters! I can’t get to the bottom of it! I can’t understand what happened to us!”
He looked at the letters with revulsion.
“If you make an obsession of it you’ll never understand.”
“Oh? And how should I behave in order for it not to become an obsession?”
“You should distract yourself.”
I felt an abrupt twisting inside, a mad desire to know if he might at least become jealous, if he still cared about possession of my body, if he could accept the intrusion of someone else.
“Of course I’m distracting myself,” I said, assuming a smug tone. “Don’t think I’m just waiting around here. I’m writing, I’m trying to understand, tormenting myself. But I’m doing it for myself, for the children, certainly not to please you. Hardly. Have you looked around? Have you seen how well the three of us are doing? And have you seen me?”
I stuck out my chest, I made the earrings swing, presenting to him ironically first one profile, then the other.
“You look well,” he said without conviction.
“Well, my ass. I’m extremely well. Ask our neighbor, ask Carrano how I am.”
“The performer?”
“The musician.”
“Are you seeing him?” he asked indifferently.
I laughed, a kind of sob.
“Yes, let’s say I’m seeing him. I’m seeing him exactly the way you’re seeing your lover.”
“Why him? He’s a man I don’t like.”
“I’m the one who has to screw him, not you.”
He brought his hands to his face, rubbed it thoroughly, then murmured:
“Do you do it even in front of the children?”
I smiled.
“Fuck?”
“Speak like that.”
I lost control, and began to shout:
“Speak like what? I don’t give a shit about prissiness. You wounded me, you are destroying me, and I’m supposed to speak like a good, well-brought-up wife? Fuck you! What words am I supposed to use for what you’ve done to me, for what you’re doing to me? What words should I use for what you’re doing with that woman! Let’s talk about it! Do you lick her cunt? Do you stick it in her ass? Do you do all the things you never did with me? Tell me! Because I see you! With these eyes I see everything you do together, I see it a hundred thousand times, I see it night and day, eyes open and eyes closed! However, in order not to disturb the gentleman, not to disturb his children, I’m supposed to use clean language, I’m supposed to be refined, I’m supposed to be elegant! Get out of here! Get out, you shit!”
He got up immediately, hurried into his study, put books and notebooks in a bag, stopped for a moment as if bewitched by his computer, took a case with some diskettes, other stuff from the drawers.
I took a breath, ran after him. I had in mind a million recriminations. I wanted to cry: don’t touch anything; they are things you worked on while I was there, I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking, it’s time that belongs to me in a way, leave everything there. But now I was frightened of the consequences of every word I had uttered, of those that I could utter, I was afraid I had disgusted him, that he would go away for good.
“Mario, I’m sorry, come back, let’s talk…Mario! It’s just that I’m upset…”
He went to the door, pushing me back, he opened it, he said:
“I have to go. But I’ll be back, don’t worry. I’ll be back for the children.”
He was about to go out when he stopped and said:
“Don’t wear those earrings anymore. They don’t suit you.”
Then he disappeared without closing the door.
I pushed the door hard, it was an old door, so loose on its hinges that it hit the jamb and swung back, opening again. So I kicked it furiously until it closed. Then I ran to the balcony while the dog, worried, grumbled beside me. I waited for Mario to appear in the street, I cried desperately:
“Tell me where you live, or at least leave me a phone number! What do I do if I need you, if the children are ill…”
He didn’t even raise his head. I shouted at him, beside myself:
“I want to know the name of that whore, you’ve got to tell me… I want to know if she’s pretty, I want to know how old she is…”
Mario got in the car, started the engine. The car disappeared behind the foliage in the middle of the little square, reappeared, disappeared again.
“Mamma,” Gianni called.
9
I turned around. The children had opened the door of their room, but they didn’t dare to cross the threshold. My appearance could not have been reassuring. From there, in terror, they were spying on me.
Their look was such that I thought that, like certain characters in tales of fantasy, they might see more than it was in reality possible to see. Maybe I had beside me, stiff as a sepulchral statue, the abandoned woman of my childhood memories, the poverella. She had come from Naples to Turin to grab me by the hem of my skirt, before I flew down from the fifth floor. She knew that I wanted to pour out on my husband tears of cold sweat and blood, cry to him: stay. I recalled that she, the poverella, had done that. One evening, she poisoned herself. My mother said in a low voice to her two workers, the one dark, the other fair: “The poverella thought her husband would be sorry and rush to her bedside to be forgiven.” But he was far away, prudently, with the other woman whom he now loved. And my mother laughed bitterly at the bitterness of that story and of others she knew, all the same. Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive. She talked like this for hours while she cut out patterns and sewed for the clients who still, in the late sixties, had their clothes made to order. Stories and gossip and sewing: I listened. There, under the table, while I played, I discovered the need to write. The faithless man who fled to Pescara didn’t even come when his wife deliberately put herself between life and death, and an ambulance had to be called, to take her to the hospital. Phrases that remained in my mind forever. To deliberately put oneself between life and death, suspended like a tightrope walker. I heard my mother’s words and, I don’t know why, I imagined that for love of her husband the poverella was lying on the edge of a sword, and the blade had cut through her dress, her skin. When I saw that she had returned from the hospital, she seemed to me sadder than before; under her dress she had a dark-red cut. The neighbors avoided her, because they didn’t know how to speak to her, what to say.