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Suddenly, I thought that I, too, hide a notebook, and that Mirella, looking for a hiding place for hers, might find it. If she read it, she would discover that I am different from what she thinks. She would know all my secrets, would know about the director, also of the appointment I agreed to for Saturday, of the apprehension with which I ask myself if he is in love with me. The thought of him, the fear of the notebook being discovered, and the impression that a dense mystery envelops each of us give me no peace. I see Mirella who leaves home with her diary in her purse, Michele who returns to the bank on Saturday to write his script in peace, Riccardo who has put up the photograph of the Argentine mountains on his bedroom wall, and it seems to me that, although we love each other so much, we protect ourselves from each other like enemies.
I went to the kitchen and started frying the potatoes, then the eggs. I think Mirella was lying, and in any case, if she destroyed the diary, she did it after meeting Cantoni. Soon she joined me and asked if I needed help. She rarely offers, so I looked at her with amazement. She’s really a pretty girl, her hair cut so short is very becoming. The joy of the money earned made her more ardent, and yet unusually sweet. She smiled: “Mamma, why can’t you admit that I’m happy in my way?” I told her that happiness, at least as she imagines it, doesn’t exist, I know through experience. She objected: “But you have the experience of one life alone, yours. Why don’t you want to leave me at least the hope?” I told her to go ahead and hope, it costs nothing. Then I handed her a plate with the fried eggs and asked her to bring it to her brother. She asked me why he couldn’t come get it himself. “I’ll call him,” she said. I turned to her harshly: “Take it,” I commanded. “Riccardo is tired, he studied all day.” “And didn’t you work all day?” she said brusquely. “And didn’t I work all day?” Yet she brought it to him. When she returned, she said, “That is what disgusts me, mamma. You think you’re obliged to serve everyone, starting with me. So, little by little, the others end up believing it. You think that for a woman to have some personal satisfaction, besides those of the house and the kitchen, is a fault, that her job is to serve. I don’t want that, you understand? I don’t want that.” I felt a shiver run down my spine, a cold shiver that I can’t get rid of. Yet I pretended indifference to what she said. I asked her ironically if she wanted to start being a lawyer in her own home.
It’s very difficult to talk to Riccardo about Mirella: when they’re together they’re like enemies. Maybe it’s always been that way, but until now I thought it was petty sibling spite. Now I’m afraid there’s some other reason, more profound, that I can’t define, and that grieves me deeply. I don’t want to think that Riccardo doesn’t love his sister; rather, it’s as if he poured out on her an animosity directed toward himself. Today he said that women take advantage of working to do as they like. I reminded him that I, too, work and that it was helpful for our family, including him. He replied that I do it only out of necessity, and therefore my work is a proof of solidarity with my husband, basically a proof of submission. He added that, if I could, I would do without it, and I don’t know what restraint, maybe the Saturday appointment, kept me from contradicting him.
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.”