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My friends from Florence came, Bianca and Marta returned, and even Gianni. I said it was drowsiness that had sent me off the road. But I knew very well that drowsiness wasn’t to blame. At the origin was a gesture of mine that made no sense, and which, precisely because it was senseless, I immediately decided not to speak of to anyone. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.
[...] I had wanted Bianca, one wants a child with an animal opacity reinforced by popular beliefs. She had arrived immediately, I was twenty-three, her father and I were right in the midst of a difficult struggle to keep jobs at the university. He made it, I didn’t. A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.
Your life wants to become another’s. Bianca was expelled, expelled herself, but—everyone around us believed it, and we, too, believed it—she couldn’t grow up alone, how sad, she needed a brother, a sister for company. So, right after her, I planned, yes, just as they say, planned, Marta to grow in my belly, too.
I was twenty-five and every other game was over for me. [...]
I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study, I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires. When Marta began to howl in the other room it was almost a liberation. I got up, rudely cutting off Bianca’s game, but I felt innocent, it wasn’t I who was leaving my daughter, it was my second-born who was tearing me away from the first. I have to go to Marta, I’ll be right back, wait. She would begin crying.
I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature. I stood leaning against the railing for I don’t know how long watching the cars that passed over her, mutilating her. Then I realized that Bianca, too, was watching, on her knees, with her forehead pressed against the bars of the railing. I picked her up, she let herself be held, yielding. I kissed her for a long time, I hugged her as if I wanted to take her back into my body. You hurt me Mama, you’re hurting me. I left Elena’s doll on the sofa, lying on her back, belly up.
The storm had moved quickly to land, violently, with blinding lightning and thunder that sounded like cars exploding, full of dynamite. I ran to close the windows in the bedroom before everything got soaked, I turned on the bedside lamp. I lay on the bed, arranged the pillows against the headboard, and began to work with a will, filling pages with notes.
Reading, writing have always been my way of soothing myself.
Yet I began to pay more attention to myself, as if I wanted to keep the body I was accustomed to, put off its departure. When my daughters’ boyfriends came to the house, I tried to make myself more attractive to receive them. I barely saw them, when they entered, when they left, saying goodbye to me in embarrassment, and yet I was very careful about my appearance, my manners. Bianca took them into her room, Marta into hers, I was alone. I wanted my daughters to be loved, I couldn’t bear them not to be, I was terrified of their possible unhappiness; but the gusts of sensuality they exhaled were violent, voracious, and I felt that the force of attraction of their bodies was as if subtracted from mine. So I was content when they told me, laughing, that the boys had found me a young and good-looking mother. It seemed to me for a few minutes that our three organisms had reached a pleasant accord.
But my anxieties didn’t disappear. I observed my daughters when they weren’t paying attention, I felt for them a complicated alternation of sympathy and antipathy. Bianca, I sometimes thought, is unlikable, and I suffered for her. Then I discovered that she was much loved, she had girl and boy friends, and I felt that it was only I, her mother, who found her unlikable, and was remorseful. I didn’t like her dismissive laugh. I didn’t like her eagerness to always claim more than others: at the table, for example, she took more food than everyone else, not to eat it but to be sure of not missing anything, of not being neglected or cheated. I didn’t like her stubborn silence when she felt she was wrong but couldn’t admit her mistake.
You’re like that, too, my husband told me. Maybe it was true, what seemed to me unlikable in Bianca was only the reflection of an antipathy I felt for myself. Or no, it wasn’t so simple, things were more tangled. Even when I recognized in the two girls what I considered my own good qualities I felt that something wasn’t right. I had the impression that they didn’t know how to make good use of those qualities, that the best part of me ended up in their bodies as a mistaken graft, a parody, and I was angry, ashamed.
[...] 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
And I did walk for a long time, my purse over my shoulder, sandals in one hand, feet in the water. I met almost no one, only a few pairs of lovers. In the first year of Marta’s life I discovered that I no longer loved my husband. A hard year, the baby barely slept and wouldn’t let me sleep. Physical tiredness is a magnifying glass. I was too tired to study, to think, to laugh, to cry, to love that man who was too intelligent, too stubbornly involved in his wager with life, too absent. Love requires energy, I had none left. When he began with caresses and kisses, I became anxious, I felt that I was a stimulus abused for his solitary pleasures.
Gianni approached them almost by instinct, he’s a generous man. I said there’s no room, we have the children, how are we going to fit. The two got in, they were English, he graying, in his forties, she surely less than thirty. At first I was hostile, taciturn, it complicated the trip for me, I would have to work even harder to make the children behave. It was mainly my husband who talked, he liked to establish relationships, especially with foreigners. He was cordial, he asked questions without paying much heed to conventions. It came out that the two had abruptly left their jobs (I don’t remember what they did) and, along with their jobs, their families: she a young husband, he a wife and three small children. They had been traveling for several months through Europe with very little money. The man said seriously: the important thing is to be together. She agreed, and at a certain point said something to this effect: we are obliged to do so many stupid things from childhood on, thinking they’re essential; what happened to us is the only thing that has happened to me since I was born that makes sense.
Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation. I didn’t even look for them, those forms, in the past or in a possible future. I had run away like a burn victim who, screaming, tears off the burned skin, believing that she is tearing off the burning itself.