When the Night (5 page)

Silently, I reflected.

You’re afraid to say it, aren’t you? What a trap you’ve walked into! What kind of woman have you married? Keep your hands off my son. You don’t know anything about us. You’re the outsider here.

The moment passed. Everything passes and is forgotten, luckily for me. It will never happen again, never. Finally, we looked at each other like two human beings again; we were able to move on from that hatred. I’m normal, I know how to take care of your son, don’t worry.

I WALK THROUGH the piazza with the stroller, feeling beautiful and invincible.

My landlord is there, sitting at a table drinking beer with another man. He has cleaned himself up; he’s wearing a checkered shirt, ironed—and the usual trousers. His hair is clean and he looks like a normal human being.

“Good day.”

“Good day.”

Just look at her, dressed up like a fool.

“Stefan, my brother. This is my tenant.”

So this is the younger brother, the one with all the girlfriends.

“Hello, I’m Marina.”

“Stefan.”

They stare at me but don’t ask me to sit down, so I decide to say something.

“What a lovely fair.”

The bumpkin answers without looking up: “It’s always the same.”

What can you expect from a man like that? Better leave him alone. The girl at the bakery was right.

“Well, good-bye then.”

“Good-bye.”

WHAT A NAME, Marina. But she has nice legs. I couldn’t tell before, because she always wears trousers. A little on the thin side, but shapely. She ran away; we scared her. Stefan is staring after her; the women from around here aren’t enough for him. Now he’ll ask me what I think of her, as he always does, ever since he was thirteen.

“So, what do you think?”

“No breasts.”

“Manfred, you’re obsessed! What’s her husband like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t pay attention to the rental, or to who stays there.”

“But you’re happy to take the money … If Luna hadn’t decorated the place, you’d never have been able to rent it. When the carpenter lived there, it was a mess. She wants to make friends.”

“Who?”

“Your tenant. She’s looking around.”

“All women do that. Luna was a champ at scanning her surroundings. She knew how to listen. She knew everybody’s business.”

“Luna was a beautiful woman.”

He’s saying it just to get under my skin.

“You should have married her. You would have left her at the altar. How many girlfriends have you had, Stefan?”

“At least I’m the one who leaves them.”

Ah, brothers. And to think I raised him.

He was the youngest. I washed his behind and his face every morning. I bundled him up before we went out into the snow. He was always cold. In the snowcat, when we drove down into the valley, I used to wipe his nose with the sleeve of my jacket, so the kids wouldn’t call him a snot-nose and tease him because he didn’t have a mother.

Albert sat in the front with our father. He never spoke to Stefan. He hated him, and one night he explained why.

“If he hadn’t been born, she wouldn’t have left.”

I used to draw the mountains and the sun for Stefan on a corner of misted-up glass in the snowcat where Albert and my father couldn’t see. Albert was right, it was his fault. But how can you know that when you’re three?

For three months, he asked for his mother every morning. For three months I didn’t say anything. I tried, but I couldn’t find the words. The night after father burned all the photographs, I said to him, “If you ask me again, I’ll hit you, hard.”

That was the last time.

NOW HE TORMENTS me whenever he can.

“You don’t understand, Stefan. I made her life impossible, that’s why she left.”

“Dad said the same thing about our mother, to try to make himself feel stronger. It’s better to leave them, before they get the chance.”

“Fun game.”

“Why don’t you ask her to dance, Manfred? Maybe she’ll say yes.”

She is sitting in a corner of the piazza, but I refuse to turn around. I don’t want her to think we’re drooling after her.

“I’ve never danced in my whole life, not even at my own wedding. And she’s a complete fool.”

“You’re a bear, Manfred. Luna was right to leave you.”

Stefan turns around again to look at her. “Look at her, she’s dancing by herself.”

This time I turn around.

She’s dancing with her little boy. She squeezes him and he laughs. She holds his head next to hers and sways, turns, and rocks this way and that. The baby is drooling with excitement. People are looking at her; that’s what she wants.

ONE CHRISTMAS, UP at the lodge, my mother picked me up and danced with me. Then she started to sing. Her face, her dark eyes, the smell of her hair. The room and the candles spun around me. My father sat, watching us. She’s mine now, I’ve stolen her from him. Whore. Just like this woman. If a woman is happy, you should worry. When they run in the snow or kiss you and caress you with tears in their eyes, you should run, as fast as you can.

STEFAN WATCHES HER with his mouth open, poor fool. There is some beer foam on his whiskers. He looks like his
mother but he doesn’t know it. He’s never seen her, not even in a photograph.

“What’s wrong, Stefan, are you in a trance?”

“A woman who dances with her baby like that must be a fool.”

“What have I been telling you?”

I
T’S BEEN RAINING for two days. Each morning we go out for a walk and then turn around and come back inside. The baby has a cold; his nose is stuffy and he can’t breathe. The pharmacist gave me some homeopathic drops, but they’re useless. Back in the city, I give him antihistamines at night, even though the pediatrician says I shouldn’t. “The only physiological solution is to give him an extra pillow so he can breathe more easily.”

An extra pillow? That way he wouldn’t sleep at all. These silly mountain folk won’t sell me antihistamines without a prescription. We haven’t slept in two nights. Now the minute I sit down, I start to drift off. I have to pay attention; he’s attracted to light sockets. He also likes to climb onto the wood chest; he knocks over vases, plates, anything and everything. Toys don’t interest him.

“Mamma, go away!”

He’s determined to do as he pleases.

I’m on my third coffee. I have to stay awake until eight, and it’s only five. It’s raining steadily, and there’s no one outside. The shops are closed because it’s Sunday. Nothing to do until evening, not even a bath, because of his cold. And the house isn’t heated. He’s always so happy in the bath, and then I can relax.

“We’ll go swimming at the beach. You’ll love it! I’ll buy you an inflatable raft and we’ll row around with Daddy.”

When I say the word “Daddy” he stops and stares. He misses Mario. When Mario calls, he listens and then turns away. He hands me the phone. He doesn’t want to talk.

I talk to him while he plays in the bath, to calm him but also because I think he’s old enough now to understand what I’m saying.

ON THE ISLAND there’s a beach where the sand is so hot you could fry an egg on it. Three black rocks rise out of the water, which is as calm as a lake. I used to go swimming there with my sisters until late in the afternoon. The red, liquid sun would sink into the sea, and then we would scream and yell and dive into the golden ribbons of dying light. The water was like hot ink, and my mother would call out to us, towels in hand.

“Marina, come here! You’re the last one, as usual.”

“I’LL NEVER MAKE you get out of the water unless you want to. You love the water, so you’ll be a good swimmer. But
I can’t give you a bath tonight, because of your cold. No, don’t climb up there, it’s dangerous! You’ll fall.”

“Mamma, no!”

“Stop that! You can’t go there, there are bottles and you’ll hurt yourself. Don’t cry, come on, let’s play a game. Let’s play with blocks. We’ll build a tower and then you can knock it down. I can see you’re not interested … Why do you have to climb up on that? Look, there’s nothing there for you, just two wine bottles, a bottle of oil, the salt and pepper shakers, the sugar bowl, the coffee jar.

It’s good wine. I don’t scrimp on wine. I don’t smoke, I don’t go out, but I like to have a drink in the evenings. Yesterday I drank almost a whole bottle. I mustn’t tell Mario, or he’ll think I have a problem, on top of everything else. Wine helps me relax, it warms me up inside, and I don’t feel so lonely and tired.

“Get down from there! Good boy. Play with your toy cars.”

Vroom vroom
. He calms down for a bit. That way I can think for a few minutes. A minute is already something, sixty seconds, a long time. I have to use my minutes well, but then it’s so difficult to pull myself out of my thoughts. Sit down, Marina, take advantage of this moment, you can clean up later.

My mind wanders. How wonderful it is to think! When you’re young you don’t realize it. On Sunday mornings you can stay in bed and daydream as long as you please. In class, you listen, dream, sleep. How lucky you were, but of course you didn’t enjoy it to the fullest. One should never miss an occasion to think! Ever since the baby was born, you’ve become aware
of how precious time is. At cafés and in the street, people walk, smoke, and converse, carefree and unaware, with no sense of haste. They have all the time in the world. They don’t realize how lucky they are. I push the baby stroller; once I too was like them.

In the fall I’ll go back to work, part-time. I’ll leave him with my mother in the mornings. I’ll have to take him to her because she doesn’t go out early in the morning. Before eight o’clock; it will be cold. How long before he gets sick? When he does, I won’t be able to go to work. If I hire someone, she’ll have to come every morning and it will be too expensive.

Mario doesn’t understand.

“Why don’t you ask for leave until he can go to day care? After all, your salary isn’t very large.”

I’ll never be able to get an important position now, but at least they pay you to think, what a privilege! If I can’t go to work for part of the day, I’ll go crazy. I know that other women don’t feel this way; they suffer when they have to leave their child to go to work. My sister quit her job to be a full-time mother. She said: “It was hell. At home all I could think about was the office, and at the office all I could think about was home. This is the life I want.”

But now she’s always tense and bosses everyone around. Maybe the same will happen to me and I’ll end up wanting to stay home, but now all I can dream about is the office.

In the corner of sky I can make out from my office I can see seagulls and swallows in the spring. I have my own computer, my pens, my paper. There’s a balance sheet to read, a report to
write. Hours of quiet work ahead of me. At one we go for lunch at the café and tell each other stories about our lives. And we laugh, how we laugh …

“WHERE ARE YOU? No, don’t go there! Why do you want to climb up there? Look, here’s your truck! You didn’t know it was there, did you? It was hidden under the table. There, there, that’s a good boy.”

I wonder why boys are drawn to cars, from the very beginning. Now’s he’s in the truck, driving around like a madman down a road full of twists and turns. He’s bold, fearless, and then boom, he crashes into the wall and the truck rolls over, but he’s not afraid. He gets right up and keeps going, driving around like a madman … I love to watch him play.

MY SISTER AND I used to play with dolls, but she was better at it than I was. I didn’t enjoy dressing them up, preparing their food, cleaning the house. She would send me off to do the food shopping. The flowers were vegetables, ivy leaves were steaks, wisteria was grapes, little sticks were knives and forks, bark became plates. She would say, “You’re the husband. You go out and gather food for us.”

I wasn’t happy with that; I wanted a husband too, but there was no arguing with her, she was older and she got to decide.

“You’re too distracted to be a good wife.”

So I played the husband, knowing that one day I would get to play the wife. But she was right; my head is in the clouds, I’ve always been that way.

The teacher used to say to my mother, “Marina is a dreamer.”

I’m not sure it was a compliment. Sometimes it seemed like a good thing. I would meet a boy and he would stare at me and ask, “What are you thinking about?”

“Lots of things,” I would say.

And he would be intrigued because he wanted to know, in detail.

But it made my father angry.

“What are you thinking about?”

He wanted me to pay attention when he tried to explain math problems. I would get distracted and nervous. I lost count of how long he had been talking, and I wondered whether he had asked me a question. What did he want to know? I needed time to think, and I didn’t realize that time had passed and he was beginning to lose patience.

Where is it that my thoughts go? The world stands still, and I wander around, observing people, playing tricks on them. It’s fun, and time passes quickly, but then it turns out your time is up.

“You forgot to buy potatoes,” my sister would say. She never forgot.