“Carruno’s children aren’t like kids,” Rosaria said.
And Nina burst out, the accent of her dialect much stronger than usual: “They did it on purpose—they were egged on by their mother to insult me.”
“Tonino telephoned, the children didn’t take anything.”
“Carruno’s lying.”
“Even if it’s true, you are wrong to say it,” Corrado reproached her. “What would your husband say if he heard you?”
Nina looked at the pavement angrily. Rosaria shook her head, she turned to me in search of understanding.
“My husband is too kind, you don’t know the tears this poor child has shed. She has a fever—we’re furious.”
I got a confused idea that they had attributed to these Carrunos, probably the family in the motorboat, the doll’s disappearance. It was natural for them to think that they had decided to make them suffer by making the little girl suffer.
“The child is having trouble breathing, blow your nose, sweetie,” Rosaria said to Elena, and at the same time asked for Kleenex but wordlessly, with a peremptory gesture of her hand. I was opening the zipper of my purse, but stopped abruptly, halfway, afraid that they might see my purchase, ask questions. Her husband quickly gave her a handkerchief and she cleaned the child’s nose as she wriggled and kicked. I zipped up my purse, made sure it was tightly closed, and looked at the salesgirl with apprehension. Stupid fears, I was angry with myself. I asked Nina:
“Is it a high fever?”
“A few degrees,” she answered. “It’s nothing.” And, as if to show me that Elena was fine, she tried with a forced smile to put her down.
The child refused with great energy. She clung to her mother’s neck as if she were suspended over an abyss, yelling, pushing off the floor at the slightest contact, kicking. Nina remained for a moment in an uncomfortable position, bending forward, with her hands around her daughter’s hips, pulling in the attempt to detach her, but careful also to avoid her kicks. I felt that she was wavering between patience and being fed up, understanding and the wish to start crying. Where was the idyll I had witnessed at the beach. I recognized the vexation of finding oneself under the eyes of strangers in this situation. Evidently she had been trying to calm the child for hours, without success, and was exhausted. Leaving the house, she had tried to clothe her daughter’s rage in a pretty dress, pretty shoes. She herself had put on a nice dress of a wine color that became her, she had pinned up her hair, wore earrings that grazed her pronounced jaw and swung against her long neck. She wanted to resist ugliness, cheer herself up. She had tried to see herself in the mirror as she had been before bringing that organism into the world, before condemning herself forever to adding it on to hers. But to what purpose.
Soon she’ll start yelling, I thought, soon she’ll hit her, trying to break that bond. Instead, the bond will become more twisted, will strengthen in remorse, in the humiliation of having shown herself in public to be an unaffectionate mother, not the mother of church or the Sunday supplements. Elena screams, cries, and holds her legs neurotically rigid, as if the entrance to the toy store were a snake pit. A miniature, made of an illogically animate material. The child didn’t want to stand on her own feet, she wanted to stay on her mother’s. She was apprehensive, she had a presentiment that Nina had had enough, she sensed it from the way she had dressed up to come to town, from the rebellious odor of her youth, from her eager beauty. So she wrapped herself around her. The loss of the doll is an excuse, I said to myself. Elena was afraid, above all, that her mother would flee from her.
Maybe Nina realized it, too, or simply couldn’t stand it anymore. In a suddenly coarse dialect she hissed, Stop it, and resettled her daughter in her arms with a violent jerk, Stop it, I don’t want to hear you anymore, do you understand, I don’t want to hear you anymore, that’s enough of your demands, and she pulled the child’s dress down hard in front, over her knees, in a sharp gesture that she would have liked to aim at her body, not her clothes. Then, confused, she returned to Italian with an expression of self-reproach, and said to me in a forced way:
“Excuse me, I don’t know what to do, she’s torturing me. Her father’s gone and now she’s taking it out on me.”
Then, with a sigh, Rosaria took the child from her arms: come to auntie, she murmured, with emotion. This time Elena, incongruously, put up no resistance; she yielded immediately, throwing her arms around her aunt’s neck. Out of spite for her mother, or out of certainty that this other body—without a child but expecting one, children love the not yet born a lot, the newborn little, or very little—was at this moment welcoming, would hug her between large breasts, having set her on that stomach, like a seat, protecting her against the possible anger of the bad mother, who didn’t know how to take care of her doll, who in fact had lost her. She entrusted herself to Rosaria with a vehement exaggeration of affection, to imply treacherously: Auntie is better than you, Mama, Auntie is kinder; if you go on treating me this way, I’ll stay with her forever and won’t want you anymore.
“There, go on, so I can have a little rest,” Nina said with a frown of disappointment; her upper lip showed a veil of sweat. Then to me: “Sometimes you just can’t cope anymore.”
“I know,” I said, to indicate that I was on her side.
But Rosaria intervened, and, hugging the child, she murmured: they put us through so much, and she planted noisy kisses on Elena, murmuring repeatedly, in a voice consumed by tenderness: pretty girl, pretty pretty girl. Already she wanted to enter the circle of us mothers. She thought that she had waited too long, but that by now she had learned the part completely. In fact she had decided to show immediately, especially to me, that she could soothe Elena better than her sister-in-law. So, here, she set her down on the ground, be a good girl, let Mama and Signora Leda see how good you are. And the child said nothing; she stood beside her sucking her thumb in desperation, while Rosaria asked me, with an air of satisfaction: what were your daughters like as children, were they like this little treasure? I felt a strong impulse to confuse her, to punish her, throw her off balance.
“I remember very little, nothing really.”
“That can’t be—you don’t forget anything about your children.”
I was silent for a moment, then said calmly:
“I left. I abandoned them when the older was six and the younger four.”
“What do you mean, who did they grow up with?”
“With their father.”
“And you didn’t see them again?”
“Three years later I took them back.”
“What a terrible thing, why.”
I shook my head, I didn’t know why.
“I was very tired,” I said.
Then I turned to Nina, who now looked at me as if she had never seen me: “Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die.”
I smiled at her, I gestured toward Elena:
“Don’t buy her anything—forget it, it won’t help. She’ll find the doll. Goodbye.”
I nodded at Rosaria’s husband, who seemed to me to have assumed his unpleasant mask, and left the store.
15
Now I was really angry with myself. I never spoke of that period of my life, not even to my sisters, not even to myself. The times I had tried to mention it to Bianca and Marta, together or separately, they had listened to me in distracted silence, had said they remembered nothing, had immediately gone on to speak of something else. Only my former husband, before going to work in Canada, had occasionally begun his remonstrances and resentments from that point; but he was an intelligent and sensitive man, ashamed of his meanness, and he quickly moved on, without insisting. All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.
I wandered around t
he square trying to calm down, but the echo of the words I had uttered, Rosaria’s expression and her reproaches, the flash of Nina’s pupils prevented me, in fact intensified a constricted anger. Useless to say it wasn’t important, who were those two women, when would I ever see them again after this vacation. I realized that if that judgment could help me bring perspective to Rosaria it was of no use with Nina. Her gaze had pulled back abruptly, but without losing me: it had only retreated, as if seeking a distant point, in the depths of her pupils, from which to look at me without risk. That urgent need for distance had wounded me.
I walked indifferently among the venders of all sorts of goods, and meanwhile I pictured her the way I had occasionally seen her in those days, watching from behind as with slow, precise movements she spread lotion on her young legs, her arms, her shoulders, and finally her back, tensely twisting around as far as she could get, so that I had had the desire to get up and say here, I’ll do it, let me help you, as, when I was a girl, I had thought of doing with my mother, or as I had done often with my daughters. Suddenly I realized that, day after day, without intending to, I had involved her, from a distance, with alternating and often conflicting feelings, in something that I couldn’t decipher, but that was intensely my own. For this reason, too, perhaps, I was now furious. I had instinctively used against Rosaria an obscure moment of my life and had done it to astonish her, even in a certain sense to frighten her; she was a woman who seemed to me disagreeable, treacherous. But in reality I would have liked to speak of these very things with Nina alone, on a different occasion—cautiously, in order to be understood.
Soon it started raining again and I had to take shelter in the building that housed the market, amid sharp odors of fish, basil, oregano, peppers. There, jostled by adults and children who arrived hurrying, laughing, wet from the rain, I began to feel sick. The odors of the market nauseated me, the place seemed increasingly close, I was blazing hot, sweating, and the breeze that came in waves from the outside chilled the sweat, causing moments of vertigo. I gained a spot at the entrance, hemmed in by people watching the water cascade down and children screaming, joyfully frightened by the lightning and the thunder that followed. I settled myself almost on the threshold, so that I would feel only the cool air, and tried to get my nerves under control.
What had I done that was so terrible, in the end. Years earlier, I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities. Ambition was still burning, fed by a young body, by an imagination full of plans, but I felt that my creative passion was cut off more and more thoroughly by the reality of dealings with the universities and the need to exploit opportunities for a possible career. I seemed to be imprisoned in my own head, without the chance to test myself, and I was frustrated.
There had been small alarming episodes, not normal impulses of depression, not a destructiveness expressed symbolically, but something more. Now these events have no before and after, they return to my mind in an order that is always different. One winter afternoon, for example, I was studying in the kitchen; I had been working for months on an essay that, although short, I couldn’t manage to finish. Nothing fit together, hypotheses were multiplying in my head, I was afraid that the professor who had encouraged me to write it wouldn’t help me publish it, would reject it.
Marta was playing under the table, at my feet. Bianca was sitting next to me, pretending to read and write, imitating my gestures, my frowns. I don’t know what happened. Maybe she had said something to me and I hadn’t responded; maybe she only wanted to start one of her games, which were always a little rough; suddenly, while I was distracted by a search for words that never seemed logical enough, or apt, I felt a slap on the ear.
It wasn’t a hard blow, Bianca was five, she couldn’t really hurt me. But I was startled, I felt a burning pain, it was as if a sharp black line had, with a clean stroke, cut off thoughts that were already hard to maintain—that were very distant from the kitchen where we were sitting, from the sauce for dinner that was bubbling on the stove, from the clock that was advancing, consuming the narrow space of time that I had to devote to my desire for research, invention, approval, position, money of my own to spend. I hit the child without thinking about it, in a flash, not hard, my fingertips barely touching her cheek.
Don’t do that, I said in a pseudo pedantic tone, and she, smiling, tried to hit me again, certain that at last a game had begun. But I was first and hit her, a little harder, don’t you dare ever again, Bianca, and she laughed, hoarsely this time, with a faint bewilderment in her eyes, and I hit her again, still with the tips of my outstretched fingers, again and again, you don’t hit Mama, you must never do that, and when, finally, she realized that I wasn’t playing, she began to cry desperately.
I feel the child’s tears under my fingertips, I’m still hitting her. I do it gently, the gesture is under my control but decisive, and the intervals are getting smaller: not a possibly educational act but real violence, contained but real. Out, I tell her without raising my voice, out, Mama has to work, and I take her solidly by the arm, drag her into the hall, she cries, screams, tries again to hit me, and I leave her there and close the door behind me with a firm shove, I don’t want to see you anymore.
The door had a big pane of frosted glass. I don’t know what happened, maybe I pushed it with too much force: it banged shut and the glass shattered. Bianca appeared, wide-eyed, small, beyond the empty rectangle, no longer screaming. I looked at her in terror, how far could I go, I frightened myself. She was motionless, unharmed, the tears continued to flow but silently. I try never to think of that moment, of Marta who was pulling me by the skirt, of the child in the hall staring at me amid the broken glass: thinking of it gives me a cold sweat, takes my breath away. I’m sweating here, too, at the entrance of the market, I’m suffocating, and I can’t control the pounding of my heart.
16
As soon as the rain slackened, I rushed out, covering my head with my purse. I didn’t know where to go, certainly I didn’t want to go home. A vacation at the beach, what does it amount to, in the rain: asphalt and puddles, clothes that are too light, wet feet in shoes that give no protection. In the end it was a gentle rain. I was about to cross the street but I stopped. On the sidewalk opposite I saw Rosaria, Corrado, Nina with the child in her arms covered by a thin scarf. They had just left the toy store and were walking quickly. Rosaria was holding by the waist, like a bundle, a new doll that looked like a real child. They didn’t see me or pretended not to. I followed Nina with my eyes, hoping she would turn.
The sun began to filter through small blue rents in the clouds. I reached my car, started the engine, drove toward the sea. Faces flashed through my mind, and actions: no words. They appeared, disappeared, there wasn’t time to fix anything into a thought. I pressed my fingers against my chest to slow the rapid beating of my heart, and as if to slow the car down as well. I seemed to be going too fast, though in reality I wasn’t even going forty. One never knows where the velocity of bad feeling comes from, how it advances. We were at the beach: Gianni, my husband, a colleague of his named Matteo, and Lucilla, his wife, a very cultured woman. I no longer remember what she did in life, I know only that she often caused trouble for me with the children. In general she was kind, understanding, she didn’t criticize me, she wasn’t mean. But she couldn’t resist the desire to seduce my daughters, to make herself loved by them in an exclusive way, to prove that she had a pure and innocent heart—so she said—that beat in unison with theirs.
Like Rosaria. Differences in culture, in class count for little in these things. Whenever Matteo and Lucilla came to our house, or we took a trip outside the city or—as happened in that case—we went on a vacation together, I lived in a state of anxiety, my unhappiness increased. The two men talked about their work or about soccer or I don’t know what, but Lucilla ne
ver spoke to me, I didn’t interest her. She played with the children instead, monopolizing their attention, inventing games just for them, and joining in as if she were their age.
I saw that she was completely intent on the goal of winning them over. She stopped devoting herself to them only when they had given in completely, eager to spend not an hour or two but their whole life with her. She acted like a child in a way that irritated me. I had brought up my daughters not to use babyish voices or coy manners, whereas Lucilla had many affectations; she was, for example, one of those women who purposely speak in the voice that adults attribute to children. She spoke in artificial tones and induced them to do likewise, drawing them into a form of regression first verbal and then, slowly, in all their behavior. Habits of autonomy, which had been imposed by me with difficulty and were necessary to carve out a little time for myself, on her arrival were swept away in a few moments. She showed up and immediately began to play the sensitive, imaginative, always cheerful, always available mother: the good mother. Damn her. I drove without avoiding the puddles, in fact I hit them on purpose, raising long wings of water.
All the rage of that time was returning to my breast. Easy, I thought. For an hour or two—taking a walk, on a vacation, on a visit—it was simple and pleasant to entertain the children. Lucilla never worried about afterward. She swept away my discipline and then, once the territory that belonged to me was devastated, retreated into hers, devoting herself to her husband, hurrying off to her work, to her successes, of which, among other things, she did nothing but boast in a tone of apparent modesty. In the end I was alone, in permanent service, the bad mother. I remained to tidy up the messy house, to reimpose on the children behavior that they now found intolerable. Aunt Lucilla said, Aunt Lucilla let us do. Damn her, damn her.