The Days of Abandonment Read Free Page A

of:
    “What’s this? Is this what you want to do to me? This?”
    He jumped up, overturned the chair, picked it up, slammed it again and again on the floor as if he hoped to make it stick to the tiles definitively. He said that I was an unreasonable woman, incapable of understanding him. Never, ever had I truly understood him, and only his patience, or perhaps his inadequacy, had kept us together for so long. But he had had enough. He shouted that I frightened him, putting glass in his pasta, how could I, I was mad. He slammed the door as he left, without a thought for the sleeping children.

3.
    I remained sitting for a while, all I could think was that he had someone else, he was in love with another woman, he had admitted it. Then I got up and began to clear the table. On the tablecloth I saw the splinter of glass, ringed by a halo of blood; I fished around in the sauce with my fingers and pulled out two more fragments of the bottle that had fallen from my hand that morning. I could no longer contain myself and burst into tears. When I calmed down, I threw the sauce in the garbage, then Otto came in, whining at my side. I took the leash and we went out.
    The little square was deserted at that hour, the light of the street lamps was imprisoned within the foliage, there were black shadows that brought back childish fears. Usually it was Mario who took the dog out, between eleven and midnight, but since he had left that job, too, had become mine. The children, the dog, shopping, lunch and dinner, money. Everything pointed out to me the practical consequences of abandonment. My husband had removed his thoughts and desires from me and transferred them elsewhere. From now on it would be like this, responsibilities that had belonged to us both would now be mine alone.
    I had to react, had to take charge of myself.
    Don’t give in, I said to myself, don’t crash headlong.
    If he loves another woman, no matter what you do will be of no use, will slide off him without leaving a trace. Compress pain, eliminate the possibility of the strident gesture, the strident voice. Take note: he has changed his thoughts, changed rooms, run to bury himself in another flesh. Don’t act like the poverella , don’t be consumed by tears. Don’t be like the women destroyed in a famous book of your adolescence.
    I saw the cover again in every detail. My French teacher had assigned it when I had told her too impetuously, with ingenuous passion, that I wanted to be a writer. It was 1978, more than twenty years earlier. “Read this,” she had said to me, and diligently I had read it. But when I gave her back the volume, I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knickknacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts. I was young, I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno. I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly. She, too, must have lost someone, something. And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me. I was losing Mario, perhaps I had already lost him. I walked tensely behind Otto’s impatience, I felt the damp breath of the river, the cold of the asphalt through the soles of my shoes.
    I couldn’t calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning? It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become