The Days of Abandonment (11 page)

I
got up, I hurried out of the room, closing the door behind me. I would have liked to have giant strides that would not allow me to stop for anything. Olga marches down the hall, through the living room. She is decisive now, she will remedy things, even if the girl she has in her head is speaking to her in sugary tones, says to her: Ilaria has taken your makeup, who knows what she’s up to in the bathroom, your things are no longer really yours, she’s touching everything, go and slap her. Yet I slowed down immediately, I couldn’t tolerate excitement, if the world around me accelerated I decelerated. Olga has a terror of the frenzy of doing, she fears that the need for a prompt reaction—quick steps, quick gestures—will migrate into her brain, she can’t tolerate the inner roar that will assault her, the pounding temples, the nausea, the cold sweat, the craze to be faster and faster, faster and faster. So no hurry, take your time, walk slowly, shuffle, even. Reset the bite of the clip on my arm to get me to abandon that third person, the Olga who wanted to run, and return to the I, I who go to the metal-plated door, I who know who I am, control what I do.

I have memory, I thought. I’m not one of those people who forget even their name. I remember. I remembered, in fact, the two men who had worked on the door, the older and the younger. Which of the two had said to me: pay attention, signora, pay attention not to force it, pay attention to how you use the keys, the mechanisms “ha ha” are delicate. They both had a sly look. All those allusions, the key in vertically, the key in horizontally, luckily I had always known my job. If after what Mario had done to me, after the outrage of abandonment preceded by that long period of deception, I was still I, persisting in the face of the turmoil of those months, here in the heat of early August, and was resisting, resisting so many disconnected adversities, this meant that what I had feared most since I was a child—to grow up and become like the
poverella
, that was the fear I had harbored for three decades—had not happened, I was reacting well, very well, I was holding tight around me the parts of my life, compliments, Olga, in spite of everything I wasn’t leaving myself.

I stood for a while in front of the door, as if I really had been running. All right, I’ll ask Carrano for help, even if he’s the one who poisoned Otto. There’s nothing else to do, I’ll ask him if I can use his telephone. And if he wants to try to fuck me again, to do it in my ass, I’ll say no, the moment has passed, I’m here only because there’s an emergency in my house, don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll tell him that right away, so that it won’t even occur to him that I’ve come to him for that sort of thing. When you miss your chance, there aren’t any others. Maybe there’s no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second. Since that one time you came by yourself in the condom, you shit.

But I knew immediately, even before trying, that the door wouldn’t open. And when I held the key and tried to turn it, the thing that I had predicted a minute before happened. The key wouldn’t turn.

I was gripped by anxiety, precisely the wrong reaction. I applied more pressure, chaotically, I tried to turn the key first to the left, then to the right. No luck. Then I tried to take it out of the lock, but it wouldn’t come out, it remained in the keyhole as if metal had fused to metal. I beat my fists against the panels, I pushed with my shoulder, I tried the key again, suddenly my body woke up, I was consumed by desperation. When I stopped, I discovered that I was covered with sweat. My nightgown was stuck to me, but my teeth were chattering. I felt cold, in spite of the heat of the day.

I squatted on the floor, I had to reason. The workers, yes, had told me that I had to be careful, the mechanism could break. But they had told me in that tone men have when they exaggerate in order to exaggerate their own indispensability. Sexual indispensability, above all. I remembered the sneer with which the older one had given me his card, in case I should need help. I knew perfectly well what lock he wished to intervene in, certainly not that of the reinforced door. Therefore, I said to myself, I had to eliminate from his words every real piece of information of a technical nature, he had used the jargon of his skills to suggest obscene things to me. Which meant, in practice, that I also had to eliminate from my head the alarming sense of those words, I didn’t have to fear that the mechanism of the door would jam. Good riddance to the words of those two vulgar men, clean up. Relax the tension, re-establish order, plug up the leaks in meaning. The dog, too, for example: why should he have swallowed poison? Eliminate “poison.” I had seen Carrano close up—I felt like laughing at the thought—and he didn’t seem like a person who would prepare dog biscuits with strychnine, maybe Otto had only eaten something rotten. Therefore preserve “rotten,” stare hard at the word. Reconsider every event of that day from the moment of waking. Bring back Otto’s spasms within the limits of probability, give back to the facts a sense of proportion. Give back to me a sense of proportion. What was I? A woman worn out by four months of tension and grief; not, surely, a witch who, out of desperation, secretes a poison that can give a fever to her male child, kill a domestic animal, put a telephone line out of order, ruin the mechanism of a reinforced door lock. And hurry up. The children hadn’t eaten anything. I myself still had to have breakfast, wash. The hours were passing. I had to separate the dark clothes from the white. I had no more clean underwear. The vomit-stained sheets. Run the vacuum. Housecleaning.

I
stood up taking care not to make any abrupt movements. I stared at the key for a long time, as if it were a mosquito to be squashed, then I reached out my right hand decisively and commanded the fingers to make the rotating movement to the left. The key didn’t move. I tried to pull it toward me, I hoped it would shift just a tiny bit, just enough to find the right position, but I gained not a fraction of an inch. It didn’t seem like a key, it seemed an excrescence of the brass plate, a dark arch in it.

I examined the panels. They were smooth, without knobs apart from the glittering handle, massive on massive hinges. Useless, there was no way to open the door except by turning that key. I studied the round plates of the two locks, the key was sticking out of the lower one. Each was fixed by four screws of small dimensions. I already knew that to unscrew them wouldn’t get me very far, but I thought that doing it would encourage me not to give up.

I went to the storage closet to get the tool box, I dragged it to the front door. I dug around in it, but couldn’t find a screwdriver to fit those screws, all too big. So I went to the kitchen, took a knife. I chose a screw at random and stuck the point of the blade in the tiny crossed channel, but the knife jumped away immediately, it got no purchase. I went back to the screwdrivers, I took the smallest, I tried to slide the end under the brass plate of the lower lock, another useless gesture. I gave up after a few attempts and went back to the storage closet. I searched slowly, careful not to lose my concentration, for a strong object to insert under the door, that might serve as a lever to raise one of the panels and pry it off its hinges. I reasoned, I must admit, as if I were telling myself a fable, without in the least believing that I would find the right instrument, or that, if I had found it, I would have the physical strength to do what I had in mind. But I was fortunate, I found a short iron bar that ended in a point. I went back to the entrance and tried to insert the sharp end of the object under the door. There was no room, the panels adhered perfectly to the floor, and besides, even if I had succeeded—I realized—the space at the top would be insufficient to allow the door to come off the hinges. I let the bar fall and it made a loud noise. I didn’t know what else to try, I was an incompetent, a prisoner in my own house. For the first time in the course of the day, I felt tears in my eyes, and I wasn’t sorry.

I
was about to cry when Ilaria, who evidently had arrived on tiptoe behind me, asked:

“What are you doing?”

It was, of course, not a real question, she only wanted me to turn around and see her. I did, I felt a shudder of loathing. She had dressed in my clothes, she had put on makeup, she was wearing on her head an old blond wig that her father had given her. On her feet was a pair of my high-heeled shoes, on top a blue dress of mine that hampered her movements and made a long train behind her, her face was a painted mask, eye shadow, blush, lipstick. She looked to me like an old dwarf, one of those my mother used to tell of seeing in the funicular at Vomero when she was a girl. They were identical twins, a hundred years old, she said, who got on the cars and without saying a word began to play the mandolin. They had tow-colored hair, heavily shadowed eyes, wrinkled faces with red cheeks, painted lips. When they finished their concert, instead of saying thank you they stuck out their tongues. I had never seen them, but the stories of adults are thick with images, I had the two old dwarves clearly, vividly, in my mind. Now Ilaria was before me and she seemed to have come precisely from those stories of childhood.

When she became aware of the revulsion that must have showed on my face, the child smiled in embarrassment, and, eyes sparkling, said as if to justify herself:

“We’re identical.”

The sentence disturbed me, I shuddered, in a flash I lost that bit of ground I seemed to have gained. What did it mean, we are identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself. I couldn’t, I mustn’t imagine myself as one of the old women of the funicular. At the mere idea I felt a slight dizziness, a veil of nausea. Everything began to break down again. Maybe, I thought, Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria. Maybe she really was one of those minuscule women of The Vomero, who had appeared by surprise, just as, earlier, the
poverella
who had drowned herself at Capo Miseno had. Or maybe not. Maybe for a long time I had been one of those old mandolin players, and Mario had discovered it and had left me. Without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria was only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me. This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game.

Making an effort, I seized Ilaria by the hand and dragged her along the hall. She protested, but feebly, she lost a shoe, she wriggled free, she lost the wig, she said:

“You’re mean, I can’t stand you.”

I opened the door of the bathroom and, avoiding the mirror, dragged the child over to the bathtub that was full to the brim. With one hand I held Ilaria by the head and immersed her in the water, while with the other I rubbed her face energetically. Reality, reality, without rouge. I needed this, for now, if I wanted to save myself, save my children, the dog. To insist, that is, on assigning myself the job of savior. There, washed. I pulled the child out and she sprayed water in my face, blowing and writhing and gasping for breath and crying:

“You made me drink it, you were drowning me.”

I said to her with sudden tenderness, again I felt like crying:

“I wanted to see how pretty my Ilaria is, I had forgotten how pretty she is.”

I scooped up water in the hollow of my hand and then, as she wriggled and tried to get free, began again to rub her face, her lips, her eyes, mixing the remaining colors, loosening them and pasting them on her skin, until she became a doll with a purple face.

“There you are,” I said, trying to embrace her, “that’s how I like you.”

She pushed me away, she cried:

“Go away! Why can you wear makeup and I can’t?”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t, either.”

I left her and immersed my face, my hair in the cold water. I felt better. When I stood up and rubbed the skin of my face with both hands, I felt under my fingers the wet cotton that I had in one nostril and I took it out cautiously and threw it in the tub. The cotton floated, black with blood.

“Is it better now?”

“We were prettier before.”

“We are pretty if we love each other.”

“You don’t love me, you hurt my wrist.”

“I love you very much.”

“Not me.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Then if you love me, you have to help me.”

“What do I have to do?”

A flash, a throb in the wrists, the abrupt skid of things, I turned uncertainly to the mirror again. I wasn’t in a good state: my hair wet and stuck to my forehead, one nostril encrusted with blood, the makeup faded or reduced to small black clots, the lipstick washed off my lips but smeared around my nose and chin. I reached out a hand to take a cotton ball.

“Well?” Ilaria pressed me, impatiently.

The voice reached me from far away. Just a moment. First take off the makeup for good. Thanks to the side panels of the mirror, I saw the two halves of my face separately, far apart, and I was drawn first by my right profile, then by the left. They were both completely unfamiliar to me, normally I didn’t use the side panels, I recognized myself only in the image reflected by the big mirror. Now I tried to arrange the mirrors so that I could see from the side and from the front. There is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream. Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath. The mirror was summing up my situation. If the frontal image reassured me, saying to me that I was Olga and that perhaps I would arrive at the end of the day successfully, my two profiles warned me that it was not so. They showed me my neck, the ugly living ears, the lightly arched nose that I had never liked, the chin, the high cheekbones and the taut skin of the cheeks, like a white page. I felt that there, over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent. What did she have to do with those images. The worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden. If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about. To Mario, to Mario above all, I thought I had given Olga, the Olga of the central mirror, and now, in reality, I didn’t know which face, which body I had given him. He had assembled me on the basis of those two shifting, disjointed, ephemeral sides, and I don’t know what physiognomy he had attributed to me, what montage of me had made him fall in love, what, on the other hand, had turned out to be repugnant to him, making him fall out of love. For Mario I—I shuddered—had never been Olga. The meanings, the meaning of her life—I suddenly understood—were only a dazzlement of late adolescence, my illusion of stability. Starting now, if I wanted to make it, I had to trust myself to those two profiles, to their strangeness rather than to their familiarity, and moving on from there very slowly restore confidence in myself, make myself adult.

That conclusion seemed to me very true. Especially since, looking hard into my half face on the left, at the changing physiognomy of the secret sides, I recognized the features of the
poverella
—never would I have imagined that we had so many elements in common. Her profile, when she descended the stairs and interrupted my games and those of my companions to pass by with her absent gaze of suffering, had been huddling in me for years, it was that which I now offered to the mirror. The woman murmured to me from the panel:

“Remember that the dog is dying and Gianni has a nasty intestinal fever.”

“Thank you,” I said without fear, in fact with gratitude.

“Thank you for what?” asked Ilaria, annoyed.

I shook myself.

“Thank you for having promised that you would help me.”

“But you haven’t told me what I have to do!”

I smiled, I said:

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”