The Days of Abandonment Read Free

when I could no longer bear his lies did I decide to put his back to the wall. I prepared a sauce with meatballs that he really liked, I sliced potatoes to roast in the oven with rosemary. But I took no pleasure in cooking, I was indifferent, I cut myself with the can opener, a bottle of wine slipped out of my hand, glass and wine flew everywhere, even on the yellow walls. Right afterward, with a gesture too abrupt with which I intended to grab a rag, I also knocked over the sugar bowl. For a long fraction of a second the sound of sugar raining first on the marble kitchen countertop, then on the wine-stained floor exploded in my ears. It gave me such a sense of weariness that I left everything in a mess and went to sleep, forgetting about the children, about everything, although it was eleven o’clock in the morning. When I awoke, and my new situation as an abandoned wife returned slowly to my mind, I decided that I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up in a daze, put the kitchen in order, hurried to pick up the children from school, and waited for him to come by out of love for the children.
    He came in the evening, he seemed in a good mood. After the usual greetings, he disappeared into Gianni and Ilaria’s room and stayed with them until they fell asleep. When he reappeared he wanted to slip away, but I forced him to have dinner with me, I held up before him the pot with the sauce I had prepared, the meatballs, the potatoes, and I covered the steaming macaroni with a generous layer of dark-red sauce. I wanted him to see in that plate of pasta everything that, by leaving, he would no longer be able to look at, or touch, or caress, listen to, smell: never again. But I couldn’t wait any longer. He hadn’t even begun to eat when I asked him:
    “Are you in love with another woman?”
    He smiled and then denied it without embarrassment, displaying a casual wonder at that inappropriate question. He didn’t persuade me. I knew him well, he did this only when he was lying, he was usually uneasy in the face of any sort of direct question. I repeated:
    “It’s true, isn’t it? There’s another woman. Who is it, do I know her?”
    Then, for the first time since the whole thing had begun, I raised my voice, I cried that I had a right to know, and I said to him:
    “You can’t leave me here to hope, when in reality you’ve already decided everything.”
    He, looking down, nervously gestured to me to lower my voice. Now he was visibly worried, maybe he didn’t want the children to wake up. I on the other hand heard in my head all the remonstrances that I had kept at bay, all the words that were already on the line beyond which you can no longer ask yourself what is proper to say and what is not.
    “I will not lower my voice,” I hissed, “everybody should know what you’ve done to me.”
    He stared at the plate, then looked me straight in the face and said:
    “Yes, there’s another woman.”
    Then with an incongruous gusto he skewered with his fork a heap of pasta and brought it to his mouth as if to silence himself, to not risk saying more than he had to. But he had finally uttered the essential, he had decided to say it, and now I felt in my breast a protracted pain that was stripping away every feeling. I realized this when I noticed that I had no reaction to what was happening to him.
    He had begun to chew in his usual methodical way, but suddenly something cracked in his mouth. He stopped chewing, his fork fell on the plate, he groaned. Now he was spitting what was in his mouth into the palm of his hand, pasta and sauce and blood, it was really blood, red blood.
    I looked blankly at his stained mouth, as one looks at a slide projection. Immediately, his eyes wide, he wiped off his hand with the napkin, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and pulled out of his palate a splinter of glass.
    He stared at it in horror, then showed it to me, shrieking, beside himself, with a hatred I wouldn’t have thought him capable