I
moved, I seemed to myself to be pure air compressed between the poorly connected halves of a single figure. How inconclusive it was to traverse that known house. All its spaces had been transformed into separate platforms, far away from one another. Once, five years earlier, I had known its dimensions minutely, I had measured every corner, I had furnished it with care. Now I didn’t know how far the bathroom was from the living room, the living room from the storage closet, the storage closet from the front hall. I was pulled here and there, as if in a game, I had a sense of vertigo.
“Mamma, watch out,” said Ilaria and grabbed my hand. I staggered, perhaps I was about to fall. At the entrance, I pointed out to her the toolbox.
“Take the hammer,” I said, “and follow me.”
We went back, now she held the hammer proudly in both hands, she seemed finally happy that I was her mother. And I, too, was pleased. Once in the living room I said to her:
“Now sit here and bang on the floor without stopping.”
Ilaria took on an expression of great amusement.
“That’s going to make Signor Carrano angry.”
“Exactly.”
“And if he comes up to complain?”
“Call me and I’ll speak to him.”
The child went to the middle of the room and began to beat the floor, holding the hammer in both hands.
Now, I thought, I must see how Gianni is, I’m forgetting about him, what a careless mother.
I exchanged a final glance of understanding with Ilaria and started to go, but my eyes fell on an object that was lying out of place, at the foot of the bookcase. It was the spray can of insecticide, it should have been in the storage closet, instead it was there on the floor, dented by Otto’s jaws, even the white spray top had come off.
I picked it up, examined it, looked around disoriented, noticed the ants. They ran in a line along the base of the bookcase, they had returned to besiege the house, perhaps they were the only black thread that held it together, that kept it from disintegrating completely. Without their obstinacy, I thought, Ilaria would now be on a splinter of floor much farther away than she seems and the room where Gianni is lying would be harder to reach than a castle whose drawbridge has been raised, and the room of pain where Otto is in agony would be a leper colony, and impenetrable, and my very emotions and thoughts and memories of the past, foreign places and the city of my birth and the table under which I listened to my mother’s stories, would be a speck of dust in the burning light of August. Leave the ants in peace. Maybe they weren’t an enemy, I had been wrong to try to exterminate them. At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion.
This last thought had a loud voice, it echoed, I started, it wasn’t mine. I heard its sound clearly, it had even managed to penetrate the barrier of Ilaria’s diligent blows. I looked up from the spray can I had in my hands to my desk. The papier-mâché body of the poor woman of Naples was sitting there, an artisan’s soldering of my two profiles. She was keeping herself alive with my veins, I saw them red, uncovered, wet, pulsing. Even the throat, the vocal chords, even the breath to make them vibrate belonged to me. After uttering those incongruous words, she went back to writing in my notebook.
Although I stayed where I was, I was able to see what she was writing. Her own notes, in my pages. This room is too big, she wrote in my handwriting, I can’t concentrate, I can’t completely understand where I am, what I’m doing, why. The night is long, it won’t end, therefore my husband left me, he wanted nights that raced, before getting old, dying. In order to write well, I need to go to the heart of every question, of a smaller, safer place. Eliminate the superfluous. Narrow the field. To write truly is to speak from the depths of the maternal womb. Turn the page, Olga, begin again from the beginning.
I didn’t sleep last night, the woman at the desk said to me. But I remembered going to bed. I slept a little, I got up, I went back to sleep. I must have thrown myself on the bed very late, cutting across it diagonally, that’s why, upon waking, I’d found myself in that anomalous position.
Pay attention, though, reorder the facts. Already in the course of the night something inside me had yielded and broken. Reason and memory had flaked off, sorrow that lasts too long is capable of this. I had believed I was going to bed and yet I had not. Or I had and then had got up. Disobedient body. It wrote in my notebooks, wrote pages and pages. It wrote with the left hand, to fight fear, to hold off humiliation. Probably it had happened like that.
I felt the weight of the spray can, maybe I had struggled all night with the ants, in vain. I had sprayed insecticide in every room of the house and that was why Otto was sick, why Gianni had vomited so much. Or maybe not. My opaque sides were inventing culpability that Olga didn’t have. Painting me careless, irresponsible, incompetent, leading me to a self-denigration that would later confuse the real situation and keep me from marking its margins, establish what was, what was not.
I placed the spray can on a shelf, backed up toward the door on tiptoe, as if I didn’t want to disturb the outline of the woman at the desk who had started writing again, Ilaria who was continuing to pound methodically. I headed again to the bathroom, fighting the fantasies of guilt. Poor boy, my fragile male child. I looked for the Novalgina in the disarray of the medicine cabinet and when I found it I poured twelve drops (twelve, precise) in a glass of water. Was it possible that I could have been so negligent? Possible that I had sprayed insecticide during the night, using up the contents of the can, with the windows closed?
In the hall I heard Gianni retching. I found him leaning over the side of the bed, his eyes staring, his face flushed, his mouth open, while a force shook him from within, in vain. Luckily I could no longer contain anything, a feeling, an emotion, a suspicion. Again the picture was changing, other facts, other probabilities. I thought of the cannon in front of the Cittadella. What if, climbing inside the old gun, Gianni had breathed in a malady of miseries and distant climes, a sign of the world at the boiling point, everything in flux, borders fluid, the far that becomes near, rumors of subversion, old and new hatreds, wars distant or at the gates? I yielded to all fantasies, all terrors. The universe of good reasons that I had been given after adolescence was narrowing. No matter how much I had tried to be slow, to have thoughtful gestures, that world over the years had nevertheless moved in too great a whirl, and its globelike figure was reduced to a thin round tablet, so thin that, as fragments splintered off, it appeared to be pierced in the middle, soon it would become like a wedding ring, finally it would dissolve.
I sat beside Gianni, I held his head, I encouraged him to throw up. Exhausted, he spit out a greenish saliva, and finally fell back, crying.
“I called you and you didn’t come,” he rebuked me through his tears.
I dried his mouth, his eyes. I had been forced to deal with certain problems, I justified myself, I had to sort them out urgently, I hadn’t heard him.
“Is it true that Otto ate poison?”
“No, it’s not true.”
“Ilaria told me he did.”
“Ilaria is full of nonsense.”
“I hurt here,” he sighed, showing me his neck. “It hurts a lot, but I don’t want to have a suppository.”
“I’m not going to give you one, just take these drops.”
“They’ll make me throw up again.”
“With the drops you won’t throw up.”
He struggled to drink the water, he retched, he fell back on the pillow. I felt his forehead, it was burning. His dry skin seemed to me unbearable, hot as a cake that’s just come out of the oven. Ilaria’s hammering, too, seemed to me unbearable, even at a distance. They were energetic blows, they resounded throughout the house.
“What’s that?” asked Gianni, frightened.
“The neighbor is doing some work.”
“It’s bothering me, tell him to stop.”
“All right,” I reassured him and then I made him hold the thermometer. He agreed only because I hugged him hard with both arms and held him against me.
“My child,” I sang softly, rocking him. “My sick child who’s now getting better.”
In a few minutes, in spite of Ilaria’s persistent hammering, Gianni fell asleep, but his eyelids wouldn’t close completely, there was a rosy edge, a whitish thread between the lashes. I waited a little, anxious about his too heavy breathing and the mobility of the pupils that could be sensed under the eyelids; then I took out the thermometer. The mercury had gone up, to almost a hundred and four.
I placed the thermometer on the night table in disgust, as if it were alive. I laid Gianni on the sheet, on the pillow, staring at the red hole of his mouth, hanging open as if he were dead. Ilaria’s blows hammered in my brain. Return to myself, rectify the misdeed of the night, of the day. They’re my children, I thought, to convince myself, my creatures. Even if Mario had made them with some woman he had imagined; even if I, however, believed that I was Olga making them with him; even if now my husband attributed meaning and value only to a girl named Carla, another blunder of his, and didn’t recognize in me the body, the physiology that he had attributed to me in order to love me, inseminate me; even if I myself had never been that woman or—I now knew—the Olga I had thought I was; even if, oh God, I was only a disjointed composition of sides, a forest of cubist figures unfamiliar even to myself, those creatures were mine, my true creatures born from my body, this body, I was responsible for them.
Therefore, with an effort that cost me a struggle to the limit of the bearable, I got to my feet. I have to take hold of myself, understand. Get back in touch immediately.
W
here had I put the cell phone? The day I had broken it, where had I put the pieces? I went to the bedroom, rummaged through the drawer of my night table, it was there, two purple halves, separated.
Probably just because I knew nothing about the mechanics of a cell phone, I wanted to convince myself that it wasn’t broken at all. I examined the half that had the display and the keypad, I pressed the button that turned it on, nothing happened. Maybe, I said to myself, I only have to stick the two parts together to make it work. I played around for a while, randomly. I put in the battery, which had come out, I tried to make the pieces fit together. I discovered that they slipped apart from each other because the central body was broken, the channel for the joint had splintered. We fabricate objects in a semblance of our bodies, one side joined to the other. Or we design them thinking they’re joined as we are joined to the desired body. Creatures born from a banal fantasy. Mario—it suddenly seemed to me—in spite of success in his work, in spite of his skills and his lively intelligence, was a man of banal fantasy. Maybe for that very reason he would have known how to make the cell phone function again. And so he would have saved the dog, the child. Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision. I didn’t know how to adapt, I didn’t know how to yield completely to Mario’s gaze. I had tried. Obtuse though I was, I pretended to be a right angle, and had managed to choke off even my vocation of moving from fantasy to fantasy. It hadn’t been sufficient, he had withdrawn anyway, he had gone to be joined more solidly elsewhere.
No, stop it. Think of the cell phone. In the drawer I found a green ribbon, I tied the two halves tightly together and tried to press the on button. Nothing. I hoped for a sort of magic, I tried to hear a dial tone. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
I abandoned the instrument on the bed, worn out by Ilaria’s hammering. Then in a flash the computer came to mind. How had I not thought of it. A fault of how I was made, I knew so little, the final proof. I went to the living room, moving as if the hammer blows were a gray curtain, a curtain through which I had to open a way for myself with arms outstretched, hands groping.
I found the child crouching on the floor and banging the hammer, just as she had been. The pounding was insupportable, I counted on its being that way also for Carrano.
“Can I stop?” she asked, all sweaty, red in the face, eyes shining.
“No, it’s important, keep going.”
“You do it, I’m tired.”
“I have something else urgent to do.”
At my desk now there was no one. I sat down, the seat conserved no human warmth. I turned on the computer, I went to the mail icon, I typed to send or receive e-mail. I hoped to succeed in connecting in spite of the disturbance that kept me from telephoning, I hoped that the problem was limited to the instrument, as the person at the telephone company had said. I thought of sending requests for help to all the friends and acquaintances who showed up among my and Mario’s contacts. But the computer tried over and over again without success to make a connection. It searched for the line with prolonged sounds of discomfort, it snorted, it gave up. I clutched the edges of the keyboard, I rotated my gaze over here, over there in order not to feel anxiety, occasionally my eyes fell on the still open notebook, on the sentences underlined in red: “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” Anna’s words, stupidly motivated by the suspicion that her lover is about to betray her, leave her. Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning. For a moment Ilaria’s hammering sliced the anxious thread of sounds emitted by the computer as if an eel had slid through the room and the child were chopping it in pieces. I resisted as long as I could, then I shouted.
“That’s enough! Stop that hammering!”
Ilaria, opening her mouth wide in surprise, stopped.
“I told you I wanted to stop.”
I nodded yes, depressed. I had yielded, Carrano hadn’t. From no corner of the building had a single sign of life been roused. I was acting without a plan, I couldn’t stick with one strategy. The only ally I had in the world was that child of seven and I constantly risked ruining my relations with her.
I looked at the computer screen, nothing. I got up and went to embrace the child, I emitted a long groan.
“Do you have a headache?” she asked me.
“It will pass,” I answered.
“Shall I massage your temples?”
“Yes.”
I sat on the floor while Ilaria carefully rubbed my temples with her fingers. Here I was, giving in again, how much time did I think I had available, Gianni, Otto.
“I’ll make everything go away,” she said. “Do you feel better?”
I nodded yes.
“Why did you put that clip on your arm?”
I roused myself, saw the clip, I had forgotten it. The tiny pain it caused me had become a constitutional part of my flesh. Useless, that is. I took it off, I left it on the floor.
“It helps me remember. Today is a day when everything is slipping my mind, I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Really?”
I got up, took from the desk a metal paper cutter.
“Hold this,” I said to her, “and if you see me getting distracted, poke me.”
The child took the paper cutter and observed me attentively.
“How will I know if you’re distracted?”
“You can tell. A distracted person is a person who no longer smells odors, doesn’t hear words, doesn’t feel anything.”
She showed me the paper cutter.
“And if you don’t even feel this?”
“Prick me until I feel it. Now come on.”