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At the table Michele and Riccardo didn’t even notice her absence. Michele was enthusiastically describing the visit to Clara: they hadn’t been able to read the script, because other people had arrived, but Clara had promised to read it soon and would call to make another appointment. Both Michele and Riccardo were satisfied and lively. Michele opened the window: it’s already spring outside, they said, and I was almost sorry I’d stayed in the house all day. I showed Michele the drawers I’d reorganized; he said, “Great, that’s great,” and then resumed talking about Clara and her friends, people known in the world of cinema. He said they all have cars, and one of them had driven him home. Riccardo took advantage of his father’s mood to announce to him that he is engaged, that I know who the girl is, and that he wants to introduce her to him soon. I was afraid that Michele would get angry, and I was irritated with Riccardo, who was spoiling a happy day. But Michele seems to have changed his mind about marrying young. He said to him as well: “Great, that’s great.”
heartbreaking
Michele stared at her, rigid in the black dress, in the tremulous light of the candles. “She was a saint,” he said, and kissed my hands, softened by his grief. “You were always so kind to her.” Maybe it’s true. At a certain point we no longer understand what is kindness and what is ruthlessness in the life of a family.
I liked hearing him say he’s alone, even if he was speaking indifferently, in a slightly cynical tone. Yet, shaking my head, I persisted in saying that he has a great business and the opportunity to have a comfortable, easy life. He replied that that’s not important, either; it’s other things that count, he said, and in a flash Venice passed before my eyes. “At a certain age,” he continued, “everything we’ve done is no longer enough. It was useful only in making us what we are. And just as we are, now that we’re truly ourselves, what we’ve wanted to be or could be, we’d like to start to live again, consciously, according to our current tastes. Instead, we have to continue to live the life we chose when we were someone else. I’ve worked my whole life, I spent thirty years becoming what I am. And now?” He addressed this question into the void bitterly. Then, as if regretting he’d let himself go, he added, laughing, that an age should be established—“forty-five, let’s say”—past which we had the right to be alone in the world, and to choose our life from the beginning. “Besides,” he observed, “no one understands what we do, the effort it costs us, no one, except those who work with us.” I felt that he was criticizing his wife; maybe Michele is similarly critical of me sometimes. I said to myself that I wasn’t asking for anything, I bought only shoes for the children, clothes for the children, food, and no mink coats. But I wondered if there was a difference; and concluded yes, to my disadvantage, because Michele can’t even complain. “Still,” I said with a mischievous smile, remembering what Mirella had said about Barilesi, “if someone invited you to give up the effort that the work requires, would you give it up?” As we were talking, we had stood up and gone to the window. Shadows were falling on the garden below, a melancholy garden of palms and oleanders. “No,” he confessed candidly. We laughed. “But maybe precisely because I have nothing else,” he added in a lower voice.
[...] Some nights ago at dinner, Riccardo claimed that there can’t be friendship between a man and a woman, that men have nothing to say to women, because they have no interests in common, except some precise interests, he added, laughing. Mirella at first maintained the opposite, in a serious tone, bringing up valid arguments, such as the education of the modern woman, her new position in society, but when she heard him laugh that irritating male laugh, she lost control. She said that perhaps those opinions are suggested to him by the type of women he hangs around with. Riccardo turned pale and asked her harshly, “What do you mean?” Mirella shrugged. He got up and repeated, threatening, “What do you mean?” I had to intervene, as when they were children, but, as then, I had the impression that Mirella was the stronger; and for that reason alone I would have liked to hit her.
[...] “I understand,” I retorted, “so if reputation doesn’t count and a woman of forty-three is free to act like a girl in search of a husband, if you yourself approve all this, you mean that I, too, could … ” ‘What do you have to do with it?” he immediately interrupted, in an irritated, reproachful tone. “How can you compare your case with Clara’s, mamma? You have a husband, two grown children … Clara is alone, and we all know the world of the cinema … ” He was lying the way one lies to a child, and suddenly I realized that it wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to me like that. He’s always done it, or at least for so many years that I’ve forgotten any other way he has of speaking. And as I answered him compliantly, admitting that my case is different, I, too, was lying, out of fear of him, of his judgment. He came over to me, caressed me. “You understand, right?” he said, and I nodded. But maybe because of the lie or maybe because in a confused way I sensed that he was right, I felt an uncontrollable sadness rising in me. I’m afraid that because my way of being seems natural to him it no longer has any value in his eyes. Rather, he admires Clara, who is so different from me and with whom I no longer have anything in common, not even our past as young wives, which today, with her present life, she denies, derides. I wondered if for Michele I’m still a living woman or already, like his mother, a portrait on the wall. So I am for my children. Certainly, so my mother is for me. I wished desperately to escape the evil spell of that portrait. “I’m afraid,” I was about to say, but he, ignorant of my thoughts, wouldn’t have understood.
Mirella was sitting on the ottoman in her room. When I entered, she didn’t even lift her head up from her hands. I sat on a chair in the corner and looked at her. Her nightgown was already lying on the ottoman, white, a child’s nightgown. I’ve never understood Mirella, while I always understand Riccardo. Sometimes I think that if she weren’t my daughter, it would be hard for me to love her. She’s not content just to let herself live, to be loved, as I did at her age. Maybe it’s because studies were very different then for girls. I would never have thought of being a lawyer. I studied literature, music, art history. I was taught only what is beautiful and sweet in life. Mirella studies forensic medicine. She knows everything. For me books were a weakness that I had to overcome little by little, over the years; they give her the pitiless force that divides us.
Then there was a silence, and I was happy in the echo of my name. “What’s happening, Valeria?” he asked, without looking at me, still staring at that initial. I said, “I don’t know,” and looked down. He continued, “Shall we be frank? May I speak?” I would have liked to say no, to put on my coat and go, instead I nodded. “I was afraid,” he confessed. I looked up again, surprised, because I had always thought of him as a strong man. “It began about two months ago, when you told me—you remember?—that your family’s financial situation had improved. I asked you, half in jest, if you would abandon me. You answered seriously, instead, as if you had already reflected on this possibility. You said, I remember it well: ‘Not for now.’ ” Immediately I explained to him that I had said that without intending to, maybe instinctively, considering that, if there was no financial reason to work, at home they wouldn’t accept this, my personal activity; on the contrary … He interrupted me: “Yes, I understand. Besides, I myself didn’t give it any weight at the moment. It was later, that Saturday, when we were alone here in the office by chance. Suddenly, while we were working together, I felt an unknown sensation of sweetness and your words came to mind. From then on I began to be afraid, I imagined coming here every morning and not finding you. Maybe because the others—you saw Marcellini?—work only to get their salary and leave, they work with me the way they’d work with anyone. Or maybe because you know everything about the office, and know how much tenacity, how much effort … Or maybe that’s not why,” he added, lowering his voice. “In other words, I was afraid of being alone again, the way I was when I started. Worse, in fact, because today I no longer have that enthusiasm, that anxiety for achievement that sustained me then. I don’t believe in anything anymore, today. There: I understood that here, without you, I would be alone just as I am at home. First I thought it was a moment of weariness—every so often I like to feel sorry for myself … Instead, as the days passed, I understood better what my life would be without you, Valeria. An overwhelming boredom with work seized me, a boredom with life, in fact, a nausea. Do you understand?” I murmured, “Yes, I understand.” And then, after a pause, “It would be like that for me, too.”
I called Clara and told her I’d like to come see her, and she invited me to lunch, but we didn’t set a day. I said how grateful I was for what she’s doing for us, I repeated, “Let’s hope for the best.” She said that in reality she didn’t have much hope, but that I shouldn’t discourage Michele, because she was still intending to try several paths. “The script has an interesting beginning, don’t you think?” I answered vaguely. I didn’t want to confess that I don’t know anything about it. “Of course,” Clara continued, “it all has to be rewritten, but as it’s been corrected, it might work. The plot, of course, is very dark, very risqué.” I said, “Yes … yes … ” “That’s also its strength, its attraction, I don’t deny it,” she observed. “That man who says he’s a different person to every woman is very successful. And then when he goes to the street with the prostitutes, and the following scene, when he comes home and there’s his wife, who says, ‘I kept dinner warm for you’ … There are wonderful ideas, a great film could be made. But I’m afraid it won’t work, no producer is courageous enough. I advised Michele to lighten it, but he says it’s impossible and ultimately he’s not wrong. Its character is really in that fever, that sexual obsession.” Then she said, “Too bad,” and added that Michele would have had a lot of talent for the cinema, and repeated, “Too bad.”
When Michele came home I didn’t tell him I’d talked to Clara.
oh god
I couldn’t make a decision and she felt it; I was afraid, in fact, that she was betting on that and her calm was due to a calculation. I asked her affectionately, “Do you say that because you think you can’t act otherwise? That you don’t have a choice? There’s always a remedy, at least greater harm can be avoided. You’ve been his lover, right?” I saw her blush violently. “That concerns me alone.” So I lost control again. “Shameless!” I said. “Aren’t you ashamed of speaking like that?” “No,” she answered firmly. “And whatever my response, it wouldn’t change anything. You can impose your will on me, even for a few months; you can shut me in a convent or throw me out of the house. You have full rights, and I will obey you. Those are the relations between you and me. The rest concerns me alone.” Annihilated by that coldness, I replied, “So morality has no importance for you?” She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Oh, I reflect a lot, believe me. I ask myself constantly what’s good and what’s evil. You always accuse me of being cynical, cold, but it’s not so. It’s not true. I’m different from you, that’s all. I’ve said to you many times: you are able to rely on conventional models of good and evil. You’re luckier. Whereas I need to review them according to my judgment before accepting them.” “But what can your judgment be, at twenty?” I exclaimed angrily. “You have to rely on those who have experience, submit.” She smiled. “If things were like that, nothing would ever change, everything would be transmitted intact from generation to generation, without improving, slaves would still be sold in the square, don’t you think? It’s precisely now that I can rebel. At forty, when I’m old, I won’t be able to do much, I’ll want to stay comfortable.” I was about to say that, on the contrary, it’s precisely at forty that one rebels, but I don’t know if it’s true, and then Mirella is so much more educated than I am, she always cites names and books that say I’m wrong. “You’re not religious, Mirella?” I asked her instead.
[...] “Have you thought that you’ll never be able to have a family of your own, children?” I said. “That you’re destroying your future for something that will end soon, you understand, it will end in any case. You’ll never be happy.” “And you, are you happy?” she asked me, harshly. I had tears in my eyes because the conversation had moved me, exhausted me. “Of course,” I said emphatically, “I’m happy, I’ve always been happy, very happy.” She stared at me tenderly with a gaze that made me want to lower mine. “How good you are, mamma!” she exclaimed. She said good night with a quick hug and I followed her along the hall like a beggar. “Why do you want to be so hard, so bitter, Mirella?” I whispered. I heard her close the door, and I went back to the dining room. Shattered, I collapsed onto a chair, rested my head on my arms crossed on the table. I imagined going to the telephone, calling Guido, telling him to come right away. I imagined going to talk to Cantoni. I couldn’t wait for morning so that I could act. It almost seemed to me that if I could stand up morning would come sooner. And yet I had a feeling of nausea, of rejecting every action. Unaware, I fell asleep. When I roused myself, it was dawn.