"You were famous for your looks."
"I was," she says, as if only now learning the fact.
"I should get back," Kathleen says, glancing at a message on her BlackBerry. "I didn't bring a jacket."
"In a minute." She takes a corner of Kathleen's shirtsleeve and leads her across the intersection at Piazza Sant'Andrea della Valle, mindless of the red light, sidestepping honking cars. "So you remember when Cosimo was hospitalized in 1994?"
"Of course-it was such a shock."
"Not really a shock. His problems started weeks before I took him in."
"I didn't realize that."
"Oh yes," Ornella says. "The first clue, I think, was when we were supposed to go on vacation and he just canceled at the last minute. I made the best of it, saying we could enjoy doing things here in the city. But he got furious. I didn't know why. Well, he was drinking, and I suppose that had something to do with it. He actually pushed me into the refrigerator!" She laughs. "The fridge door was open-I'd been getting the pitcher of ice water-and I hit into the shelves. It was strange-he kept shoving me like he was trying to stuff me in there. I knocked over all sorts of things. A jar of capers smashed. I thought, Glass inside the fridge. The cleaner will never find it all. Someone will swallow it by mistake. Such a stupid thought. Anyway, he just walked out, left. I was terrified someone would find out that he'd gone. But since we were supposed to be on vacation no one even noticed-I just stayed inside. Had lots of time to clean up the glass in the fridge."
"What a ghastly story. I'm so sorry to hear this," Kathleen says, pausing on the sidewalk. "And I'm impressed that you can share this stuff about Cosimo. But-and please don't take this the wrong way-was there a particular reason you stopped by today? Not that you need a reason. Just that I really should get back."
"It's a fair question. Normally, I don't talk about private things to anyone but my cleaner, Marta."
Kathleen laughs.
"Why is that funny?"
She takes Kathleen's shirtsleeve and leads her onward, farther still from the paper, prolonging this conversation, even if it means dragging the younger woman all the way to Piazza Venezia. "During that period in 1994 when Cosimo was gone," she proceeds, "I got a call from the bank asking about several withdrawals. They told me the amounts, which were staggering-you don't want to know. I still can't understand how he spent that much that fast. Then the police called: a man in his sixties, arrested for cocaine possession. I went to get him and he was talking nonstop. There was an Australian woman he kept mentioning. He'd picked her up during his time away and demanded that we drive around and find her. He had broken a tooth-he'd been in a fight, if you can believe it. Somehow I got us home. He kept talking and talking. He wanted to celebrate. 'Celebrate what?' I said. He poured a full glass of brandy and made me drink it. He wanted to make love. I didn't want to. But we did."
She tugs Kathleen across the tram tracks at Largo Argentina, to the pedestrian island around the Roman ruins. "Then he got angry," Ornella continues. "Said how I was ruining his job prospects. I tried to understand, to follow. He pulled me around the apartment, shouting. He was going to start a painting studio and fuck lots of girls-he told me that, said that to me, his wife. He grabbed me by the bra strap and shoved me, and it ripped. I kept trying to look him in the eyes. When I did, they were blank-it's one of the most awful things I've ever seen. And he choked me that afternoon, April 24, 1994. I remember thinking I was going to die. He choked me so long that I blacked out.
"He wasn't there when I woke up. My throat felt as if it had caved in. I splashed water on my face and tried to cry over the kitchen sink. But I couldn't get full breaths. It was a strange sort of sobbing-lots of swallowing and coughing. Then he was there, laughing at me.
"I'd been holding the handle of the kitchen cupboard to balance myself. He stuck his face close to mine, and I swung the cupboard door into his head as hard as I could. The bang shuddered the door; my hand buzzed; he fell. His hands barely stopped him, and his face hit the floor. His cheek split and blood came out. It dripped on the floor. I remember him putting his finger in the puddle."
"Jesus, this is a horror story," Kathleen interjects. "I didn't know any of this. All I remember was Cosimo being admitted to the psychiatric ward. But Dario told me it was depression."
"Well, there was depression, too. That came later." She lets go of Kathleen's sleeve, her confessional urge suddenly dissipated and replaced by a wash of guilt. "Don't tell any of this to Dario," she says. "Don't mention this if you see him. He doesn't know these details."
They turn back toward the office.
"Actually," Kathleen says, "I remember blood on your kitchen floor that night. Dario and I got there after you'd taken Cosimo to the hospital. We let your maid in. What was her name? Rina? She didn't know what to do. She didn't want to get blood on the mop-she thought you'd be angry-so I wiped it up with a copy of the paper."
"I know," Ornella says. "It's the copy I'm missing. I need you to give me a new one."
"A paper from 1994? I don't know where you'd find one. We threw away our hard-copy archives years ago. It's all digitized now."
"You can't be serious."
The women walk on in silence, arriving outside the office finally.
"Do you remember our conversation at the hospital that night?" Kathleen asks. "When I said I was thinking of going to Washington but that I was undecided. You told me I should. That I should leave Rome, and Dario, and take the job."
"I never said that."
"Yes," Kathleen responds, "you did."
On Tuesday morning, Marta knocks four times and waits. She has keys, so she enters. Ornella appears in her nightgown.
"Oh, sorry," Marta says, bowing her head.
"You left me in a terrible situation Sunday without my paper," Ornella says. "Absolutely unforgivable!" She wants to retract this. Instead, she retreats into her bedroom.
She dresses and returns to the living room, shifting framed photographs as if her outburst had not happened. "If I sit here," she explains to Marta, "I can see Massi when I look up from reading the paper. And if I sit over there, I can see Cosimo. Or should I put Dario here? You know, if you don't move pictures about, you stop noticing them."
Marta, who is brushing rubbish into her dustpan, nods politely.
Without another word, Ornella withdraws to her room.
"You want paper today, Signora Ornella?"
"No," she says through the closed bedroom door. "Thank you."
She hears the front door shut, and so emerges. Marta has left a note, asking for a particular brand of cleaning fluid and more paper towels. "How on earth," Ornella says, "does this girl get through so many paper towels?" She checks for dust under the sofa. While she's bent down there, snooping about, a drop of liquid plops onto the wooden floor. She touches her face; it was a teardrop. With a hard sniff, she gains control of herself. She wipes off the floor with her bare hand, dabs her eyes, stands.
Dario will come if needed, but she won't beg him. Her other son, Filippo, avoids her totally-he picked up his father's intellectual contempt for Ornella. And the grandchildren? They seem to be afraid of her.
She misses Cosimo. Their last decade together consisted of doctors and medicine, moments of hope and months of hopelessness. (She never told Dario and Filippo how their father really died, that he was discovered with a note saying, "Enough." She informed everyone that he had died of heart disease. In a corner of her mind, she knows that her sons know. It is the same corner into which she has secreted all manner of knowledge that she, at once, knows and does not know: about the existence of mobile phones, about the Internet, about what people think of her.)