G
ianni and Ilaria did not improve after that adventure, in fact they continued to make me pay for murky, imagined sins that I had not committed, that were only the black dreams of childhood. Meanwhile, with a twist that was unexpected and difficult to explain, they stopped considering Carrano an enemy—Otto’s murderer, they had called him—and, when we met him on the stairs, greeted him with a sort of camaraderie, as if he were a playmate. He tended to respond with rather pathetic winks or restrained gestures of his hand. It was as if he were afraid to be excessive, obviously he didn’t want to annoy me, but the children claimed more, they weren’t satisfied.
“Hey, Aldo,” Gianni would cry, and he wouldn’t stop until Carrano decided to murmur, head lowered: Hi, Gianni.
Afterward I grabbed my son and said to him:
“What’s all this familiarity? You should be more polite.”
But he ignored me, and started making demands like: I want to have my ear pierced, I want to wear an earring, tomorrow I’m dyeing my hair green.
Sundays—when Mario couldn’t take them, and that was not infrequently—the hours in the house were filled with irritations, reproaches, scenes. Then I took the children to the park and sent them for infinite rides on the merry-go-round, while autumn blew flocks of red and yellow leaves from the trees, tossing them along the pavement of the streets or dumping them on the water of the Po. But at times, especially when the day was damp and foggy, we went to the city center, and they chased each other around the fountains that sprayed white jets from the pavement while I wandered about idly, holding off the buzz of moving images and crowding voices that at moments of weariness still returned to my head. Sometimes if things felt particularly disturbing, I tried to catch southern accents under the Turinese voices, regaining a fragile, deceptive sense of childhood, an impression of the past, of years accumulated, of a proper distance for memories. More often, I sat apart, on the steps behind the monument to Emanuele Filiberto, while Gianni, armed with a noisy science-fiction gun, a gift from his father, gave his sister harsh lessons on the war of 1915-18, getting excited about the number of soldiers killed, the black faces of the bronze combatants, the guns at their feet. Then, looking toward the flower bed, I stared at three tall mysterious chimneys that rose from the grass and seemed to survey the gray castle like periscopes, I felt that nothing, nothing could console me, even if—I thought—I’m here now, my children are alive and playing with each other, the pain is distilled, it hurt me but didn’t break me. With my fingers, sometimes, I touched, above my knee, the scar of the wound that Ilaria had made.
Then something happened that surprised and disturbed me. Right in the middle of the week, at the end of a work day, I found a message from Lea on my cell phone. She invited me to a concert that evening, she said it was really important to her. I listened to her lightly high-pitched voice, with the slight verbosity it assumed when she talked about early music, which she was a great fan of. I didn’t feel like going out, but, as with so many things in my life at that time, I forced myself. Then I was afraid she had secretly organized another encounter with the vet, and I hesitated, I had no desire to feel tense all evening. Finally I decided that, vet or not, the concert would relax me, music is always soothing, it loosens the knots of nerves tied tight around the emotions. So I made a lot of telephone calls to find somewhere for Gianni and Ilaria to stay. When I succeeded, I had to convince them that the friends I had decided to entrust them to were not as hateful as they said. They resigned themselves, in the end, even though Ilaria said pointblank:
“Since you’re never here, why don’t you send us to live with Daddy all the time.”
I didn’t answer. Every temptation to yell at them was balanced by the terror that I would set off again on some dark pathway, losing myself, so I restrained it. I met Lea, I breathed a sigh of relief, she was alone. We went by taxi to a little theatre outside the city, a sort of nutshell, without corners, smooth. In that setting, Lea knew everyone and was known, and I found myself at my ease, enjoying the reflection of her popularity.
For a while the small room was a hubbub of voices calling and responding, of nods of greeting, a cloud of perfumes and breaths. Then we sat down, the room became silent, the lights dimmed, the musicians entered, the singer.
“They’re really good,” Lea whispered in my ear.
I said nothing. Incredulous, I had just recognized Carrano among the musicians. In the spotlights he looked different, even taller. He was thin, elegant, every gesture left a bright wake, his hair shone as if it were made of a precious metal.
When he began to play the cello, he lost every remaining trace of the man who lived in my building. He became an exalting hallucination of the mind, a body full of seductive anomalies that seemed to extract from itself impossible sounds, for the instrument was a part of him, alive, born from his chest, his legs, his arms, his hands, from the ecstasy of his eyes, his mouth.
Spurred by the music, I went back, without anxiety, to Carrano’s apartment, the bottle of wine on the table, the glasses now full now empty, the dark cloak of that Friday night, the naked male body, the tongue, the sex. I searched in those images of memory, in the man in the bathrobe, in the man of that night, for this other man who was playing, and couldn’t find him. How absurd, I thought. I’ve been to the extreme of intimacy with this skilled and seductive man, but I didn’t see it. Seeing him now it seems to me that that intimacy doesn’t belong to him, is that of someone who replaced him, perhaps the memory of an adolescent nightmare, perhaps the waking fantasy of a ruined woman. Where am I? Into what world did I sink, into what world did I re-emerge? To what life am I restored? And to what purpose?
“What’s wrong?” Lea asked, perhaps worried by my signs of agitation.
I murmured:
“The cellist is my neighbor.”
“He’s wonderful, do you know him well?”
“No, I don’t know him at all.”
At the end of the concert the audience applauded and applauded. The musicians left the stage and returned, Carrano’s bow was deep and refined, like the curving of a flame pushed by a gust of wind, and his hair of metal fell toward the floor, and then suddenly, when he arched his back and with a forceful motion pulled up his head, returned to order. They played another piece, the beautiful singer moved us with her passionate voice, we applauded again. The audience didn’t want to leave, and the musicians, on the wave of applause, were first sucked back into the shadow of the wings, then expelled as if by some rigid command. I was stunned, I had the impression that my skin was binding my muscles and bones too tightly. This was Carrano’s true life. Or the false one, which now, however, seemed to me more his than the true one.
I tried to release the euphoric tension I felt, but I couldn’t, it seemed to me that the hall had done a headstand, the stage was on the bottom and I was as if high up, looking out from the edge of a hole. Even when one spectator who evidently wanted to go to sleep yelped ironically, and many people laughed, and the applause slowly died away, and the stage emptied, turning a faded green color, and to me it seemed that the shade of Otto had joyously crossed the scene like a dark vein through bright, living flesh, I wasn’t frightened. The whole future—I thought—will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it won’t be worse than the past.
In the taxi Lea asked me at length about Carrano. I answered with circumspection. Then, incongruously, as if jealous that I was keeping for myself a man of genius, she began to complain about the quality of his playing.
“He seemed out of shape,” she said.
Immediately afterward she added something like: he stayed in the middle of the stream, he was unable to make the leap of quality; a great talent ruined by his own insecurities; an artist diffident through excess of prudence. Just as we reached my house, before saying goodbye, she suddenly started talking about Dr. Morelli. She had brought her cat to him and he had asked insistently about me, if I was well, if I had gotten over the trauma of the separation.
“He told me to tell you,” she called to me as I was entering my building, “that he’s thought about it some more, he’s not sure that Otto’s death was caused by strychnine, the facts you gave him weren’t sufficient, you need to speak to him again in greater detail.”
She laughed maliciously from the window of the taxi, as it started off:
“I feel it’s an excuse, Olga. He wants to see you again.”
Naturally I never went back to the vet, even though he was a pleasant man, with a trustworthy air. I was afraid of rash sexual encounters, they repelled me. But above all I no longer wanted to know if it was strychnine or something else that had killed Otto. The dog had fallen through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect. The essential thing was that the string, the weave that now supported me, should hold.
F
or days after that evening I had to contend with a sharpening of Gianni and Ilaria’s complaints. They reproached me for leaving them with strangers, they reproached me for spending time with strangers. Their accusing voices were hard, without affection, without tenderness.
“You didn’t put my toothbrush in my bag,” Ilaria said.
“I got a cold because they had the radiators turned off,” Gianni protested to me.
“They forced me to eat tuna fish and I threw up,” the girl whined.
Until the weekend arrived, I was the cause of every misadventure. While Gianni stared at me ironically—did that look belong to me? was that why I hated it? was it Mario’s? had he perhaps even copied it from Carla?—practicing grim silences, Ilaria burst into long, piercing cries for no reason, she threw herself on the floor, she bit me, she kicked, taking advantage of small frustrations, a pencil she couldn’t find, a comic book with a slightly torn page, her hair was wavy and she wanted it straight, it was my fault because I had wavy hair, her father had nice hair.
I let them go on, I had experienced worse. Besides, it seemed to me suddenly that ironies, silences, and tantrums were their way, perhaps silently agreed on, for holding off distress and coming up with explanations that might diminish it. I was only afraid that the neighbors would call the police.
One morning we were about to go out, they were late for school, I for work. Ilaria was irritable, unhappy with everything, she was mad at her shoes, the shoes she had been wearing for at least a month and that now suddenly hurt her. In tears she threw herself on the floor of the landing and began kicking the door, which I had just closed. She cried and screamed, she said her feet hurt, she couldn’t go to school in that state. I asked her where they hurt, without interest but patiently; Gianni kept repeating, laughing: cut off your feet, make them smaller, so the shoes will fit; I whispered that’s enough, come on, quiet, let’s go, we’re late.
At a certain point there was the click of a lock on the floor below and the voice of Carrano, smudged with sleep, said:
“Can I do anything?”
I flared with shame as if I had been caught doing something disgusting. I put a hand over Ilaria’s mouth and held it there forcefully. With the other I energetically made her get up. She was immediately quiet, amazed by my no longer compliant behavior. Gianni stared at me questioningly, I searched for my voice in my throat, a tone that might sound normal.
“No,” I said, “thanks, excuse us.”
“If there’s something…”
“Everything’s fine, don’t worry, thanks again, for everything.”
Gianni tried to cry:
“Hey, Aldo,” but I hugged his nose, his mouth hard against my coat.
The door closed discreetly, with regret I noticed that Carrano now intimidated me. Although I knew well all that could come to me from him, I no longer believed what I knew. In my eyes the man on the floor below had become the custodian of a mysterious power that he kept hidden, out of modesty, out of courtesy, out of good manners.
I
n the office that morning I couldn’t concentrate. The cleaning woman must have used an excess of some perfumed cleaning fluid because there was an intense odor of soap and cherries made acidic by the hot radiators. I worked on some German correspondence for hours, but I had no fluency, I was continually consulting the dictionary. Suddenly I heard a male voice coming from the room where clients were received. The voice arrived with perfect clarity, a voice that was coldly acrimonious because certain services, which were costly, had, once the client was abroad, turned out to be inadequate. Yet I heard it from far away, as if it were coming not from a distance of a few feet but from a place in my brain. It was Mario’s voice.
I half-opened the door of my room, I looked out. I saw him sitting in front of a desk, in the background a bright-colored poster advertising Barcelona. Carla was with him, sitting beside him, she seemed more graceful, more adult, just slightly plumper, not beautiful. Both appeared to me as if on a television screen, well known actors who were acting out a piece of my life in some soap opera. Mario especially seemed a stranger who by chance had the transient features of a person who had been very familiar to me. He had combed his hair in a way that revealed his broad forehead, framed by thick hair and eyebrows. His face had become thinner, and the prominent lines of the nose, the mouth, the cheekbones formed a design more pleasing than I remembered. He looked ten years younger, the heaviness of his hips, of his chest, of his stomach had disappeared, he even seemed taller.
I felt a sort of light but decisive tap in the middle of my forehead and my hands grew sweaty. But the emotion was surprisingly pleasant, as when a book or a film makes us suffer, not life. I said calmly to the woman behind the desk, who was a friend:
“Is there some trouble?”
Both Carla and Mario turned instantly. Carla leaped to her feet, visibly frightened. Mario stayed seated but he rubbed his nose with thumb and index finger for a few seconds, as he always did when something disturbed him. I said with exaggerated cheerfulness:
“I’m happy to see you.”
I moved toward him, and Carla mechanically reached out a hand to pull him close to her, protect him. My husband rose uncertainly, it was clear that he didn’t know what to expect. I offered him my hand, we kissed on the cheeks.
“You both seem well,” I continued, and shook Carla’s hand, too, though she didn’t return the clasp, but gave me fingers and palm that felt wet, like meat that has just been defrosted.
“You seem well, too,” said Mario, in a tone of perplexity.
“Yes,” I answered proudly. “I’m not upset anymore.”
“I wanted to call you to talk about the children.”
“The number hasn’t changed.”
“We also have to discuss the separation.”
“When you like.”
Not knowing what else to say, he stuck his hands nervously in the pockets of his coat and asked in a casual way if anything was new. I answered:
“Not really. The children must have told you: I was sick, Otto died.”
“Died?” He was startled.
How mysterious children are. They had been silent about it, perhaps in order not to give displeasure, perhaps in the conviction that nothing that belonged to the old life could interest him.
“Poisoned,” I said, and he asked angrily:
“Who did it?”
“You,” I said calmly.
“Me?”
“Yes. I discovered that you’re a rude man. People respond to rudeness with spite.”
He looked at me to see if the friendly atmosphere was about to change, if I intended to start making scenes again. I tried to reassure him, with a tone of detachment:
“Or maybe there was only the need for a scapegoat. And since I wasn’t going to be, it was up to Otto.”
At that point, in a reflexive gesture, I brushed some scales of dandruff from his jacket, it was a habit of years. He drew back, almost jumped, I said sorry, Carla intervened, to complete with greater care the work that I had immediately suspended.
We said goodbye after he assured me that he would call to make a date.
“If you want you can come, too,” I proposed to Carla.
Mario said curtly, without even giving her a glance:
“No.”