I
slept for a long time, deeply.
Starting the next morning I took good care of Ilaria and Gianni. Since I had the impression that they were watching me closely to see if I was again becoming the mother they had always known or if they had to expect new, sudden transformations, I did my best to reassure them. I read books of fairy tales, I played boring games for hours, I exaggerated the thread of lightheartedness with which I kept at bay the reflux of desperation. Neither of the two, perhaps by a common accord, ever mentioned their father, not even to reiterate that they had to report to him about the death of Otto. I became concerned that they avoided it because they were afraid of wounding me and thus pushing me off course again. I began, then, to bring up Mario, recounting old incidents in which he had been very amusing or had shown himself inventive and clever or had undertaken daredevil acts. I don’t know what impression those stories made on them, certainly they listened with absorption, sometimes they smiled in satisfaction. In me they produced only a feeling of annoyance. As I spoke, I noticed that I didn’t like having Mario in my memories.
When the pediatrician returned for another visit, he found Gianni in good shape, perfectly healthy.
“Signor Giovanni,” he said, “you have a good pink color, are you sure you’re not turning into a little pig?”
In the living room, after ascertaining that the children couldn’t hear, I asked him, in order to clarify for myself whether I should feel guilty, if Gianni could have been made sick by an insecticide that I had sprayed throughout the house one night for ants. He ruled it out, noting that Ilaria hadn’t shown any kind of effects.
“But our dog?” I asked, showing him the can, dented and without the nozzle to spray the poison. He examined it but seemed perplexed, he concluded that he was unable to judge. Finally he returned to the children’s room and, with a bow, said goodbye:
“Signorina Illi, Signor Giovanni, it is with true sorrow that I take my leave. I hope that you will soon again be sick, so that I may pay you another visit.”
The children were reassured by that tone. For days we continually bowed to each other, saying Signor Giovanni, Signora Mamma, Signorina Illi. Meanwhile, to consolidate a climate of benevolence, I tried to return to normal activities, like a sick person who has been in the hospital for a long time and, partly to overcome the fear of falling ill again, wants to reanchor himself to the life of the healthy. I started cooking again, forcing myself to entice them with new recipes. I began again to slice, brown, salt. I even tried to make sweets, but for sweets I had no vocation, no ability.
I
was not always equal to the loving and efficient appearance I wished to have. Certain signs alarmed me. It still happened that I left pots on the stove and didn’t even notice the smell of burning. I felt an unfamiliar nausea at the sight of green spots of parsley mixed with the red skins of tomatoes floating on the greasy water of the clogged sink. I was unable to regain the old indifference toward the sticky remains of food that the children left on the tablecloth, on the floor. At times when I was grating cheese the motion became so mechanical, so detached and independent, that the metal cut my nails, the skin of my fingertips. And often I locked myself in the bathroom and—something I had never done—devoted to my body long, detailed, obsessive examinations. I touched my breasts, slid my fingers between the folds of flesh that curled over my belly, I examined my sex in the mirror to see how worn out it was, I checked to see if I was getting a double chin, if there were wrinkles on my upper lip. I was afraid that the effort I had made not to lose myself had aged me. It seemed to me that my hair was thinner, there was more gray, I had to dye it, it felt greasy and I washed it continuously, drying it in a thousand different ways.
But what frightened me above all was the nearly imperceptible images of the mind, the scarce syllables. A thought that I couldn’t fix on sufficed, a simple violet flash of meanings, a green hieroglyphic of the brain, for the bad feeling to reappear and panic to mount. Shadows too dense and damp suddenly returned to certain corners of the house, with their noises, the swift movements of their dark masses. Then I caught myself turning the television on and off mechanically, just to have company, or softly singing a lullaby in the dialect of my childhood, or I felt an unbearable anguish because of Otto’s empty bowl near the refrigerator, or, suddenly sleepy for no reason, I found myself lying on the sofa caressing my arms, scratching them lightly with the edge of my nails.
On the other hand what helped me greatly, in that period, was the discovery that I was again capable of good manners. The obscene language suddenly disappeared, I no longer felt an urge to use it, I was ashamed of having done so. I retreated to a bookish, studied language, somewhat convoluted, which, however, gave me a sense of security and detachment. I controlled the tone of my voice, anger stayed in the background, the words were no longer charged. As a result, relationships with the external world improved. I managed, with the obstinacy of being nice, to get the telephone fixed, and even discovered that the old cell phone could be repaired. A young clerk in a shop that I miraculously found open showed me how easy it was to put it together, I would have been able to do it even by myself.
To emerge from my isolation, I began right away to make a series of phone calls. I wanted to search out acquaintances who had children the age of Gianni and Ilaria and arrange vacations even of a day or two that would make up for those black months. As I made these calls, I realized that I had a great need to release my hardened flesh in smiles, words, cordial gestures. I got in touch again with Lea Farraco and reacted with nonchalance when she came to see me one day with the cautious air of someone who has something urgent and delicate to discuss. She dragged it out, as was her custom, and I didn’t hurry her, showed no anxiety. After making sure that I wouldn’t get into a rage, she advised me to be reasonable, she told me that a relationship can end but nothing can deprive a father of his children or children of their father and other things like that. And she concluded:
“You should settle on some days when Mario can see the children.”
“Did he send you?” I asked without hostility.
Uneasily she admitted it.
“Tell him that when he wants to see them all he has to do is telephone.”
I knew I had to find with Mario the right tone for our future relations, if only for the sake of Gianni and Ilaria, but I had no desire to do it, I would have preferred never to see him again. In the evening after that encounter, before going to sleep, I felt that his smell still emanated from the closets, was exhaled by the drawer of his night table, the walls, the shoe rack. In the past months that olfactory signal had provoked nostalgia, desire, rage. Now I associated it with Otto’s death and it no longer moved me. I discovered that it had become like the memory of the odor of an old man who, on a bus, has rubbed off on us the desires of his dying flesh. This fact annoyed me, depressed me. I waited for the man who had been my husband to react to the message I had sent him, but with resignation, not anxiety.
F
or a long time Otto was my torment. I got furious one afternoon when I caught Gianni, who had put the dog’s collar around Ilaria’s neck, shouting at her, while she barked, and pulling on the leash: good, down, I’ll kick you if you don’t stop. I confiscated collar and muzzle, and locked myself in the bathroom, distressed. There, however, with a sudden impulse, as if intending to see how I looked in a late punk ornament, I tried to buckle the collar around my neck. When I realized what I was doing, I began to cry and threw it all in the garbage.
One morning in September, while the children were in the rocky garden, playing and sometimes quarreling with other children, I thought I saw our dog, our own dog, passing quickly by. I was sitting in the shade of a big oak, not far from a fountain in whose constant spray the pigeons slaked their thirst as the drops of water rebounded off their feathers. I was struggling to write about things, and had only a faint perception of the place, I heard the murmur of the fountain, of its cascade among the rocks, among the aquatic plants. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the long, fluid shadow of a German shepherd crossing the lawn. For a few seconds I was certain that it was Otto, returning from the isle of the dead, and thought that again something was crumbling inside me, and was afraid. In reality—I immediately saw—that dog, a stranger, had no real similarity to our unfortunate dog, he wanted only what Otto often wanted after a long run in the park: to drink. He went to the fountain, put the pigeons to flight, barked at the wasps buzzing around the source of the water, and with his purple tongue broke, avidly, the luminous flow. I closed my notebook and watched him, I was moved. He was a stockier, fatter dog than Otto. He seemed less good-natured, but I felt tender toward him just the same. At a whistle from his master he went off without hesitation. The pigeons returned to play under the stream of water.
In the afternoon I looked for the number of the vet, named Morelli, to whom Mario had taken Otto when necessary. I had never had occasion to meet him, but my husband had spoken of him enthusiastically, he was the brother of a professor at the Polytechnic, a colleague with whom he was friendly. I telephoned the vet, he sounded nice. He had a deep voice, a kind of performing voice, like that of an actor in a movie. He told me to come to the clinic the next day. I left the children with some friends and went.
Morelli’s animal clinic was marked by a blue neon sign that was lighted day and night. I descended a long staircase and found myself in a small brightly lit entrance hall with a strong odor, I was greeted by a dark-haired girl who asked me to wait in a side room: the doctor was operating.
In the waiting room were various people, some with dogs, some with cats, even a woman of around thirty with a black rabbit on her lap whom she caressed continuously with a mechanical movement of her hand. I passed the time studying a notice board that displayed offers for breeding purebred animals interspersed with detailed descriptions of lost dogs or cats. From time to time people arrived wanting news of a beloved animal: one asked about a cat recovering from a test, one about a dog who was having chemotherapy, a woman was in anguish over her French poodle who was dying. In that place pain crossed the fragile threshold of the human and expanded into the vast world of domestic animals. I felt slightly dizzy and was covered in a cold sweat when I recognized in the stagnant smell of the place the smell of Otto’s suffering, the sum of bad things that it now suggested to me. Soon the feeling that I was responsible for the dog’s death was magnified, I felt I had been cruelly careless, my unease increased. Not even the TV in one corner, transmitting the latest harsh news on the deeds of men, could lessen the sense of guilt.
More than an hour passed before I went in. I don’t know why, but I had imagined I would find myself facing a fat brute with a bloody shirt, hairy hands, a broad cynical face. Instead I was greeted by a tall man of around forty, dry, with a pleasant face, blue eyes and fair hair over a high forehead, clean in every inch of his body and mind, an impression that doctors know how to give, and he also had the manners of a gentleman who cultivates his melancholy soul while the old world collapses around him.
The doctor listened closely to my description of Otto’s agony and death. He interrupted only from time to time to suggest to me the scientific term that to his ear made more reliable my abundant and impressionistic lexicon. Scialorrhea. Dyspnea. Muscular fasciculation. Fecal and urinary incontinence. Epileptoid convulsions and attacks. At the end, he said that it was almost certainly strychnine that had caused Otto’s death. He didn’t completely rule out the insecticide, on which I kept insisting. But he was skeptical. He uttered obscure terms like diazine and carbaryl, then he shook his head, concluded:
“No, I really would say strychnine.”
With him, as with the pediatrician, I felt the impulse to talk about the borderline situation I had been in, I had a strong urge to find the right words for that day. He reassured me, listening without any sign of impatience, looking me in the eye with attention. At the end he said to me soothingly:
“You have no responsibility other than that of being a very sensitive woman.”
“Excess of sensitivity can also be a fault,” I responded.
“The real fault is Mario’s insensitivity,” he answered, letting me know by a glance that he could well understand my reasons and considered those of his friend stupid. He also added some gossip on certain opportunistic maneuvers my husband was making to obtain some job or other, things he knew from his brother. I marveled, I didn’t know Mario in that aspect. The doctor smiled, showing his very regular teeth, and added:
“Oh, but, apart from that, he’s a man with many good qualities.”
That last phrase, the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type. I had something to learn.
W
hen I returned home that night with the children, I felt the close, comfortable warmth of the apartment for the first time since the abandonment, and I joked with my children until they were persuaded to wash, to go to bed. I had taken off my makeup and was about to go to sleep when I heard a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole, it was Carrano.
I had run into him rarely after he had taken care of burying Otto, and always with the children, always just to say hello. He had his usual air of an unassuming man, shoulders hunched as if he were ashamed of his height. My first impulse was not to open the door, I felt that he could drive me back into bad feelings. But then I noticed that he had combed his hair differently, without a part, his just washed gray hair, and I thought of the care he had taken with his appearance before deciding to climb the flight of stairs and present himself at the door. I also appreciated that he had knocked, in order not to wake the children with the sound of the bell. I turned the key in the lock.
Right away, with a hesitant gesture, he showed me a bottle of cold pinot bianco, he pointed out uneasily that it was the same pinot from Buttrio, of 1998, that I had brought when I went to see him. I told him that on that occasion I had chosen a bottle at random, I didn’t mean to indicate any preference. I hated white wine, it gave me a headache.
He shrugged, stood wordless in the hall with the bottle in his hands, it was already streaked with condensation. I took it almost ungraciously, I pointed to the living room, I went to the kitchen to get the corkscrew. When I returned I found him sitting on the sofa, playing with the dented insecticide can.
“The dog really battered it,” he commented. “Why don’t you throw it away?”
They were innocuous words to fill the silence, yet it bothered me to hear him speak of Otto. I poured him a glass and said:
“Have a glass and go, it’s late, I’m tired.”
He confined himself to nodding yes awkwardly, but certainly he didn’t think I was serious, he expected that slowly I would become more hospitable, more welcoming. I breathed a long sigh of discontent and said:
“Today I went to see a vet, he told me that Otto was poisoned by strychnine.”
He shook his head with a sincere expression of sorrow.
“People can be really vicious,” he murmured, and for an instant I thought he was alluding, incongruously, to the vet, then I realized that he had in mind those who frequented the park. I looked at him closely.
“What about you? You threatened my husband, you told him you would poison the dog, the children told me.”
I saw in his face astonishment and then a genuine distress. I noticed the weary gesture he made in the air as if to distance my words. I heard him murmur, depressed:
“I meant something else, I wasn’t understood. I had heard the threat to poison the dog around, I warned you, too…”
But at that point he flared up, took a harsher tone:
“After all, you know perfectly well that your husband thinks he’s the master of the world.”
It seemed pointless to say that I didn’t know it at all. About my husband I had had another idea, and after all he was gone, and with him had gone the meaning that for a long time he had given to my life. It had happened suddenly, as in a movie when suddenly you see a hole opening in a plane at a high altitude. I hadn’t had time for even a faint feeling of sympathy.
“He has the flaws of us all,” I murmured. “A man like so many others. Sometimes we’re good, at times detestable. When I came to you didn’t I do shameful things that I never would have dreamed of doing? They were gestures without love, without even desire, pure ferocity. And yet I’m not an especially bad woman.”
Carrano seemed to me stricken by those words, alarmed he said:
“I didn’t matter to you at all?”
“No.”
“And I still don’t matter to you now?”
I shook my head, I tried to smile, a smile that would lead him to take the thing as some sort of accident of life, a loss at cards.
He put down the glass, he got up.
“For me that night was very important,” he said, “and even more now than then.”
“I’m sorry.”
He made a half smile, he shook his head no: according to him I felt no sorrow, according to him it was only a way of cutting him off. He murmured:
“You are no different from your husband; after all, you were together a long time.”
He went toward the door, I followed him wearily. On the threshold he handed me the spray can that he had been about to carry away, I took it. I thought he would slam the door when he went out but instead he closed it behind him carefully.